Dealing with Yard Sign Theft

MorningGlory was a regular blogging friend of mine a few years ago when I blogged previously. I am delighted to see that she is still blogging, still conservative and doing well.

http://morningglory2.wordpress.com/2008/10/15/touche/

Welcome (back) to the BlogRoll MorningGlory.

Sick Days

Sick days are funny things in Corporate America. Being sick generally isn't funny, but the games that companies play with their HR policies to try to prevent rampant abuse by a few unscrupulous characters is borderline hilarious.

Back in the old days (or at least at places where I have previously worked) salaried staff just took sick days as needed. If you were sick enough to go to the doctor, you got a note and presented it to your boss when you dragged yourself back in. Abuse was pretty low, because only salaried staff could do this and back then managers would actually watch your sick days and make honest judgement calls as to whether you were really just having a bad flu season or that you were "swinging the lead". This seemed to work pretty well.

Then came the concept of the timebank and logic seemed to rapidly leave the building. The timebank feels like a devious way to try and get more work out of the employee. By taking the old-fashioned concept of vacation time and adding a few days to it and calling it a timebank or the trendy acronym PTO (Paid Time Off) the companies now penalize sick employees by forcing them to use valuable vacation time for reasons other than rest and recreation.

Naturally, this concept has backfired and as could be easily foreseen, the fact that it has is completely lost on the HR folks. In the same way that being forced to work extended overtime causes people to compensate by taking longer lunch breaks to allow them to run their errands, the lack of real sick days causes otherwise sensible employees to drag themselves into work when they are sick.

This is a problem because sick employees are less productive in terms of real work and there is a huge chance of them infecting their co-workers. It only takes a few of these "heroes" to drag themselves to work during a round of sickness to seriously affect the productivity of a team or even an entire office.

The irony is that most management equate seeing you with knowing that your working. This is obviously not true, but it is their primary metric for deciding whether you are a slacker or not. So, even though you're running to the bathroom every half an hour and getting through tissues like they were going out of fashion, you are seen in the office, so you must be a good employee. No account is made that you are likely less productive at your work, and highly productive at infecting those around you so that they can be less productive for the next few days or week as well.

If companies would bring back the old-fashioned sick days, they would greatly reduce the amount of sick time that they currently endure by allowing sick employees to stay home and recover and not infect co-workers. Obviously sick days would have to be watched to prevent abuse, but adapting the advice to "let sleeping dogs lie", it's time to "let sick employees stay home"!

(Yes, I went to work today even though I was sick! Thanks for asking. :-)

An Hour On Sundays

Pastoring is many things and it's very hard to describe to people what it is. It really is something that has to be seen up close or lived through to understand. But I find when I'm trying to describe what a pastor's life is like, it's easier to describe what it isn't ... it isn't an hour on Sundays.

Let me tell you about last week. Even though we're just a small congregation, we handed out two sets of groceries to those in need on Sunday morning. I went for breakfast with one of the men of the church on Saturday morning to discuss various matters and play catch up because he and I hadn't had any time to get together for a couple of months now. Then I zoomed over to our local farmer's market to help my wife with the church stall we had there. That took up the entire rest of the morning, leaving me with only the afternoon and evening to prepare my lesson for the following morning. Naturally, the Thursday and Friday evenings had been spent preparing for the farmer's market; we made peanut brittle on Thursday evening and I printed and matted some photography on Friday night to sell. And I think I forgot to mention that on Wednesday nights one of the ladies in the church has my wife watch her daughter after school and then usually stays for dinner with us before we head off to service. And then Sunday evening, I updated the district news website. Phew. Good job this pastoring stuff only takes an hour!

We are constantly on the move and I'd be lying if I said it wasn't very draining. So draining, that I'm exploring available options so that I can give the church all the time it needs even at this early stage in its growth. Naturally, I have also been seeking the Lord's help to get through this difficult time. As I observed to a friend of mine yesterday, the congregation don't contact us in proportion to the time we have available for them. They have needs and call their pastor regardless of the time or convenience for us. My wife fields as many calls as she can, but even then she often needs to escalate the issues to me.

On one level this is obviously me feeling sorry for myself, but it is also to let people know that if their pastor isn't just coasting through, then they are one of the busiest people you know. As a bi-vocational pastor, I work a day job, but even the full-time pastors I know pull down a quantity of hours per week that would make a lesser man cry.

Allow me to leave you with this thought. Think of your pastor as a swan: quiet and graceful to see, but paddling like crazy underneath to make progress.

Still alive and kicking

Maybe only just alive and kicking, but I have a pulse and can sit up and take nourishment.

I have apparently finally overdone everything. I knew that working in corporate america was tiring, and that pastoring was tiring, but I hoped that I could keep them both going. I'm seriously questioning that thought now. I managed to get myself burnt out many years ago with too many months of sixteen hour days followed by a couple of years of straight twelves. I crashed hard back then and I feel the same thing coming on now.

I realize that I have a very small readership (hello both of you) and that's by design, so that I can just blog when I want to and have time to, but please either pray for me or think some positive thoughts if that's more your style.

Thanks.

My all-time favorite Ron Jeffries quote

From the NeverIsNeverNever page on the C2 wiki:

I know that if you agree NEVER to let the unit tests drop below 100%, you'll only do it that one time when you just couldn't figure out an incremental way to change all the deductions from negative to positive. If you agree NEVER to keep a task open for two weeks, you have a better chance of finding the way to do it incrementally, and that one time you'll make sure you've sucked every idea out of the universe before giving in.

When I say something should never be done, it should mean that you'll never do it unless you really have to.

And if you really have to, you'll ask everyone you know first so you still won't have to.

And if you still have to, you'll be looking over your shoulder scared to death that I'm going to materialize there and say "why didn't you just ..." and be RIGHT, and EVERYONE will know you're an idiot.

When you're sure that you'll be able to say "because X" and I'll quietly lower my eyes and say "oh" and de-rez back to wherever I come from ... then break the rule.

Then do one more thing. When it's over, and you've suffered - as you will - for breaking the rule, think back and figure out what you could have done, and learn the deeper meaning of NEVER.

No, no and thrice no!

Over at Coding Horror, Jeff Atwood has run off the rails and gone over to the dark side. He has uttered words that are indistinguishable from those that come forth from the majority of Corporate America Information Technology management. Don't believe it? Check it out for yourselves. I'll be waiting for you when you've read it.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001160.html

Not being one to beat about the bush, let me offer this comment to Jeff's idea.

No, no and thrice no!

Since pastors aren't supposed to say naughty words, I am left with little alternative but to fire up some sarcasm and get to it.

There are so many things wrong with this perspective that it's almost impossible to know where to start debunking this foolish notion. After all, if quantity was all that mattered, then the Microsoft Vista operating system would be the best thing since sliced bread, the bee's knees and the cream of the crop all mixed in together and served with a cherry on top. Last I heard, it was seven shades of dreadful. (Or at least that's what I hear, I use Mac's at home and my employer hasn't moved past Windows XP yet.)

I've mentioned this before in this blog, but the system that I and my co-workers are trying to fix, is an eight year accretion of code. If quantity trumps quality then how come I can't find any in the system? There isn't any. I've looked. My co-workers have looked. And then because we hoped there was something of merit in there, we ran some automated code quality tests on the codebase and some of the modules on their own break the email system when the error logs are emailed internally. That's quite a lot of errors and not a lot of quality.

If quantity trumps quality, then how come the twelve line blank templated JavaDoc before each of the methods don't give me the warm fuzzies? It should. I mean, what's not to like about fifty percent of the source code in any randomly selected Java source file being empty JavaDoc? And broken JavaDoc with invalid JavaDoc tags at that. Goodness, I bet Jeff would love them. There's so many of them, I might ship him a few as we have so many of them to spare.

Now, don't get me wrong here, I think that the best way to learn to write code is to read a little theory and write a lot of code and throw it away. Then repeat. Read a little more theory and then write a bunch more code and throw it away again. Keep repeating this, as I have for about twenty eight years, and you'll be a fairly good programmer. It's not quantity of practice code that I object to, it's the inference that any code base can attain quality by just churning out code with no regard to quality.

Sorry. Ain't gonna happen!

You see, the ceramics example that Jeff gives us just proves that practice does help. There were items made by the "bulk" half of the class that were excellent, because the quest for quantity effectively forced the students to practice their craft. But the admission that not everything was of high quality shows the problem.

Any programming project is the sum of all the code that gets written for it.

By seeking quantity and taking a "quality be damned" approach, you may eventually have the quality that comes from practice, but that quality code will be on top of the early dross and a diamond in the mud, while still a diamond is still muddy and hard to appreciate.

So, may I suggest, as I have learned from experience, that quality comes from caring and practice and not as an accidental discovery within bulk code.

Men are just happier people

As I get ready to head off to our district's Men's Camp, allow me to leave you with another classic Internet funny. Enjoy!

NICKNAMES
If Laura, Kate and Sarah go out for lunch, they will call each other Laura, Kate and Sarah.
If Mike, Dave and John go out, they will affectionately refer to each other as Fat Boy, Godzilla and Four-eyes.

EATING OUT
When the bill arrives, Mike, Dave and John will each throw in $20, even though it's only for $32.50. None of them will have anything smaller and none will actually admit they want change back.
When the girls get their bill, out come the pocket calculators.

MONEY
A man will pay $2 for a $1 item he needs.
A woman will pay $1 for a $2 item that she doesn't need but it's on sale.

BATHROOMS
A man has six items in his bathroom: toothbrush and toothpaste, shaving cream, razor, a bar of soap, and a towel from M&S.
The average number of items in the typical woman's bathroom is 337. A man would not be able to identify more than 20 of these items.

ARGUMENTS
A woman has the last word in any argument.
Anything a man says after that is the beginning of a new argument.

CATS
Women love cats.
Men say they love cats, but when women aren't looking, men kick cats.

FUTURE
A woman worries about the future until she gets a husband.
A man never worries about the future until he gets a wife.

SUCCESS
A successful man is one who makes more money than his wife can spend.
A successful woman is one who can find such a man.

MARRIAGE
A woman marries a man expecting he will change, but he doesn't.
A man marries a woman expecting that she won't change, but she does.

DRESSING UP
A woman will dress up to go shopping, water the plants, empty the bins, answer the phone, read a book, and get the mail.
A man will dress up for weddings and funerals.

NATURAL
Men wake up as good-looking as they went to bed.
Women somehow deteriorate during the night.

OFFSPRING
Ah, children. A woman knows all about her children. She knows about dentist appointments and romances, best friends, favorite foods, secret fears and hopes and dreams.
A man is vaguely aware of some short people living in the house.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
A married man should forget his mistakes.
There's no use in two people remembering the same thing.