CSotD: Tuesday Short Takes
Skip to comments
xkcd couldn't have hit me with this one at a better time.
My inbox management is bad enough, but after two back-to-back road trips, it's totally out of control and, while I don't quite feel a need to craft a long, sincere response to everything in it, I do suffer from "I'll take a look at that later" syndrome.
That's compounded when I'm on the road, because I add "when I get back home," and then, when I get back home, I'm kind of overwhelmed by the glut, which stretches "later" to the horizon.
Doesn't help that I have four addresses — a purely personal one, a general business one and two dedicated to specific clients.
As for the details of his response, I had one source of email tips on upcoming events who I thought had maybe gone out of business because I hadn't seen anything from her in several months.
Then one day, I was on the verge of deleting everything in my trash folder and saw something from her.
Turns out she had her LinkedIn address in her sig file and I had a filter set up to send any email containing the word "LinkedIn" straight to the trash.
So I killed that filter and now I get all her emails.
Not one of them has tipped me off to anything worth assigning a reporter to cover.
Meanwhile, over at Non Sequitur, Miriam is missing a golden chance to get rich on-line, where telling people you've never met what they've been doing wrong is big business.
Miriam also waits until she sees you actually do something before she tells you you're doing it wrong, which, apparently, is also doing it wrong.
In the on-line world, I've been boiling eggs wrong, I've been cutting up onions wrong, I've been tucking in my shirt wrong, I've been doing everything wrong, but thank God, there's always a "life hack" to make me one of the cool kids.
Facebook should offer a filter to delete anything that tells you what an incompetent putz you are.
No regrets
Real Life Adventures reminds me that I do not miss working in an office.
I only earn about half what I made showing up every morning at the job, but, then again, I had kids and credit card companies to support back then and, fact is, my disposable income today is about what it always was and maybe a little higher.
The best thing working in an office did for me was to provide a supply of horror stories. A GF who got to hear them night after night suggested I write a comic novel, though she admitted I'd have to tone everything down to make it credible, even as humor.
One of the standard incentives is the Five Year Award. At one place, it was a clunky beer stein made out of some kind of pewter-like metal that I was afraid to drink from. It was good as a pencil holder, however, though I only needed one.
Which worked out, since a sensible person would only be there long enough to get one, by which time you should have wised up.
One beer stein is for building your resume.
The second is the Slow Learner Award.
Next place I worked, the five-year award was one of those $5 wooden plaques with a Lucite cover over a piece of paper saying you'd been there five years. Whoop-de-freakin'-do.
When the newsroom began crowing over their latest Swell Journalism Awards — mostly signaling that we were one of three papers in the state in our circulation category — I unscrewed the Lucite, printed out my own award and presented the repurposed plaque to my boss, who was delighted but smart enough to take it home rather than hang it over his desk.
The Goldilocks Investigation
Meanwhile, out in the real world, here are three different takes on Robert Mueller, whose operations have recently been ginned up by the (rumored) empanelling of a grand jury and the Senate's unexpected show of spine in supporting both Sessions and Mueller:
Matt Davies says "This Process is Too Slow!"
Glenn McCoy says, "This Process is Too Partisan!"
And I'm not sure Bob Gorrell is saying "This Process is Just Right," but he's certainly giving Mueller more credit than the other two. However, the fact that Trump has his "agenda" in hand suggests some ambivalence, depending on what you think of Trump's agenda. Including believing it exists.
There's time for speculation on this. The wheels of justice can turn slowly and sometimes slowly enough that you have to chalk them to be sure they're moving at all, particularly if you have a personal interest in the case.
That murder case in which I had my notes subpoenaed seemed positively glacial, in part because I had a period of thinking I would be in jail long before the perp.
There was that period of my own peril, which passed, and then an announcement some months later of a reward for information, and then some time after that, somebody told me the person-of-interest had moved, and I mentioned it to a trooper who chuckled and said, "Oh, don't worry. We're keeping a close eye on Mr. LaGasse."
But some three years passed before he pled guilty to the murder, which I suspect means that he slapped his girlfriend around and she finally dropped a dime on him for the killing.
I don't think Mueller is waiting for Trump to make that kind of cataclysmicly stupid move, but I do think he's savvy enough to get everything lined up before he shows his cards.
Which is good, except for the damage that can happen in the meantime, which brings us to:
Lio, who metaphorically encapsulates the interface of the Trump administration and Science.
This non-metaphorical analysis is long but critical to understanding our situation and, I promise, will scare the living bejeezus out of you.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
Comments
Comments are closed.