Mr. Sound Bite

We are having a few meetings about our office move. At the very best I expect it to be an unmitigated disaster. It of course occurred to me that for the annual lease for the building, we could dump our CEO for one who only earns ten times our salary and us the savings to get another comparable lease. Somehow I think placing people in sub-standard cubes will be viewed as the more desirable option. After all, those harvesting the company want to reap all they can before jumping ship. I've been getting a bit cynical about what was once the best place I'd ever worked. It is still at the top, but the upper management's greed, arbitrary nature, and lack of candor is having a systemic affect. I'm still willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, but aside from unfulfilled promises it has not been encouraging yet.

Pisser. Most of us believe when things really suck that they will get better, it's just a matter of time and how bad it will get first. At least that's what we tell ourselves, and generally a low point is reached and you start to feel better along with your circumstances. Sadly, the reciprocal is true. If things are terrific, well they can't get better forever. It's nice when they plateau on top for a while. From the inner the-glass-is-half-empty guy, it does seem like we spend more time on lower plateaus.

As we were discussing things the meeting moderator was writing things down, and at one point commented I was creating a lot of quotables he wanted to use for his reports going up the chain. There was one line of thought where they were talking of the move to cubes as an equity thing, where the real estate and expenses per employee were being leveled across all companies. It was immediately pointed out that we weren't hired by Hotels.com or another subsidiary, so our expectations were for the company that hired use. I pointed out even the military realizes that is a ridiculous concept as the cost of living and cost of business varies greatly with geography, even within the US. I said rather than make me feel any better these kind of inane justifications make me feel "commoditized instead of valued."

Somehow that reminds me how my creativity has been promulgated in the past. I was stationed in Key West in the late 80's, when the AIDS paranoia was at it's apex. Believe it or not, but I didn't find that there was a higher degree of homophobia in the Navy, but it was there. Some guys were going on how you were taking your life in your hands when you drove down White Street. Pretty ridiculous stuff, so I thought I'd inject more fear into those who were that idiotic. "You're in more danger here. If you want to be safe you'd best hang around the gay areas. You know, like steering into the point of contact in a car accident is the best way of avoiding getting in the pile up." This drew blank stares as I expected. "Well, there's always a breeze here, so your big danger is being downwind where infected mosquitoes will bite you, but instead of malaria..."

Totally ridiculous if you know anything about malaria. It's a step in the life cycle of the parasite, and it causes the mosquitoes to upchuck while feeding, which is what infects you. That is grossly oversimplified to leave out some boring details and additional grossness. The point being, mosquitoes are not a vector for HIV. Ignorant cowards of course will believe anything (I expect bill o'reilly thinks it's true). I had my fun and forgot about it. About a month later there were announcements on the local radio stations that mosquitoes could not carry AIDS. Of course I'm probably not the only one who came up with that misinformation, but I like to take credit for scaring people who should know better. And who knows, maybe I did start that one.