Having worked for about a dozen organizations in my 40-year tech career, I’ve experienced a wide range of colleagues and bosses. Some were fantastic, and some still remain friends. Others… not so much.
Continue reading Toxic Bosses I Have KnownAs y’all may have noticed, students all over the US are protesting the Israeli genocide in Gaza. The protest has now arrived at my own alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin. The University police and Texas state troopers arrived in force to arrest them.
I had my own encounter with the UT police back around 1983-84 when I was a student. I had been elected to the student council of the Liberal Arts department. One of our privileges was a few rooms that we could use as a lounge and offices, various of us would hang out there between classes. (Aside: That was where I got my hands on a Macintosh computer for the first time.)
Sometime during that period, I was summoned to the offices of the University police department. A young woman cop was investigating the theft of cash from the purse of one of my Liberal Arts Council colleagues in that shared area – the student had left her purse unattended in one of the offices, about $400 (that she needed to pay rent) disappeared from her wallet. Someone said they had seen me in that office.
I was very likely in the office, but I certainly hadn’t stolen and money and would never dream of doing so. I told the cop that. She probed and pushed and told me repeatedly that she wouldn’t come down on me too hard if I only confessed. I pushed right back and said I wasn’t about to confess to a crime I hadn’t committed. She reduced me to tears, but there was no way I was going to do that. Finally she dismissed me and said we would talk again.
She called me back a few days later, did the same performance all over again, and demanded that I take a polygraph (lie detector) test. I said I’d be fine with that. She kept pushing for a confession.
I returned to her office a few days later expecting to be polygraphed. She said: “You’re too agitated, the result wouldn’t be reliable.” I don’t know if she ever seriously meant to do it. At some point during the conversation, she said something like: “I’m just as good as any other cop, you know.” Seems like she had a chip on her shoulder about not being a “real” police person. After that she finally gave up and as far as I know nothing ever went on my university record. I was left shaken and furious for a long time, and that memory still enrages me. I don’t think they ever did find out who took the money.
My conclusion from this is that university police are dangerous, precisely because they don’t think anyone takes them as seriously as other cops. Students beware.
Back in the 70s, there seems to have been a genre of songs, both pop and disco, which featured endlessly repeated inane lyrics. Somehow they were popular, perhaps because they were so easily learned by international audiences. One such, Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep, was a big enough hit to get all the way to Thailand before we left there in 1971.
I didn’t have much exposure to what was current on any radio at the time, but I suppose it got airplay on Thai stations. Our housemaids, Wandee and Uthai, knew the song, and gleefully sang it to my infant brother (who was then too young to understand the lyrics). I found the song profoundly creepy. “Where’s your mama gone, little baby son?” “Far, far away.” Did they wish for or foresee my mother’s absence?
I was already jealous of their doting on my brother. I didn’t get much attention from my mother, so there wasn’t much to envy there. But I was frightened by the implication that one’s mother could simply disappear: “Woke up this morning and my mamma was gone.”
Not long after that, she was indeed gone from my life.
The Australian Financial Review, like its US counterpart the Wall Street Journal, tends to take the side of unfettered capitalism in every matter. Last week they published an opinion piece by Nick Coatsworth (“Nine’s Network Medical Expert and is completing a doctoral thesis on the first seventy days of Australia’s COVID 19 crisis response. He is the former Deputy Chief Health Office of Australia.”) titled Why WFH is likely to be bad for your health with the subhead “Instead of offering a holy grail of flexibility and work-life balance, what if WFH [work from home] might lead us to an early grave by actually increasing stress and decreasing our fitness?”
Oh dear oh dear oh dear.
I wrote to the AFR’s editors and opinions editors, so far have not heard back from them. So I’ll use my own tiny platform here to publish my response:
Continue reading Yet Another “Reason” to Return to the OfficeAll schools in Australia, public and private, require students to wear uniforms. For boys, this is a collared shirt in white or a light color with the school crest embroidered on the chest, worn with trousers or shorts in the school colors or gray. Socks are white or gray, or white banded with the school colors. There are jackets and jumpers (translation for Americans: sweatshirts, also called Sloppy Joes in Australia – ?!?) for when the weather’s cooler.
Primary school students are required to wear hats outdoors, which may be baseball caps or cricket hats. Primary schools are very strict about this: “No hat, no play.” It’s to get the kids early into the habit of avoiding exposure to Australia’s fierce sun. High school students can buy hats, but getting teenagers to wear them is no longer the teachers’ responsibility.
