Rick’s Rants and Raves

A recent phenomenon I’ve seen at work is the proliferation of rolling laptop briefcases. These are 20-something to 50-something, upper middle income employees, walking maybe 300 feet from their cars to their desks. My corporate issue laptop, in my corporate issue bag, with power supply, Altoids, note pad, pen, USB cable, and assorted other crap, weighs in at 9 pounds. That’s a gallon of milk, and a box of Little Debbies. Granted, some people may be carrying around additional documents, but unless they are carrying a file cabinet, that can’t be more than a pound or two (a ream of paper, 500 sheets, is approximately 6 pounds).

These people, with their rolling laptop bags, have, by any objective standard, the easiest lives that working people have ever had. Yet they have bought briefcases with wheels to minimize their effort.

I understand using wheeled bags when traveling–luggage can easily reach 50 pounds, and that’s a weight most people are not accustomed to carrying around. But 10 pounds, that you work with every day? Do these people buy milk in half-gallon jugs just so they don’t have all that extra weight going from their fridge to their counter top? How easy does life have to be?

I followed a guy out to the parking lot today who was maybe 35, appeared reasonably trim, and was towing a rolling laptop bag that sounded empty from the sound of the wheels on the concrete. I don’t know, maybe he has back problems. Maybe his deltoids are severly injured. Or maybe its just one more labor saving device so that we don’t ever have to really put forth any physical effort.

My next invention: briefcase lifts for cars (like this one for wheelchairs) so that no one has to lift that 10 pound bag themselves.

I’ve been in Atlanta for technical training for the past 5 days. My time here has been an interesting contrast in recalling old memories, and making new ones.

• My hotel and training are in neighborhoods where Anne and I lived circa 1993-1995. In fact, my hotel was walking distance to our old appartment complex.
• If you clicked on the link to our old address, the current Google satellite view shows bare earth. In fact, the complex we lived in, and a condo complex, and a number of private homes were all razed to make way for brand new mixed use mid-rise  and high-rise buildings. We drove through that area in 2003, and saw our old apartment.  Now, its all gone, replaced by so called “progress”. (I’m kidding, I’m not really upset by it at all).
• After I checked into my hotel, I had to go to an old favorite restaurant, New York Pizza Exchange. I ordered an old favorite pizza, the Joe Boli, on Sicilian crust. As I sat in the restaurant, I kept imagining that I’d be joined by Anne and friends any minute. While I was enjoying the pizza, another lone diner sitting near me made a comment to the waitress about how good my pizza looked. I was sure I couldn’t finish the whole thing, so I offered him a slice. This was my first single-serving friend of the trip, though nearly a week later, I don’t recall his name. Sorry dude.
• After dinner, I had a wonderful conversation with an old friend, Alice. We went to graduate school together, and she had introduced Anne and me to NY Pizza Exchange. She no longer lives in Atlanta, but since I’d been thinking of that friendship-of-yore, I decided to give her a call. We caught up on families and jobs and relationships. We promised to continue more frequent contact, and I hope we’re able to.
• The training started Monday morning and was, of course, to gain new knowledge. In general it was OK, but I think most of my issues had to do with the trainer. She had extensive training experience, but not terribly extensive real world experience with the product. And she had this very annoying habit of frequently back tracking in her presentation slides to point out subtle yet meaningless differences in screens. “In version five, the install screen has a ‘repair’ option, but in version four [goes back 20+ slides] that option was called ‘restore’. See? [goes forward 20+ slides to where she left off]“
• For dinner Monday, I went to another long-time favorite restaurant, Houston’s. I ate at the bar, where I met more single-serving friends, Larry and his wife (whose name escapes me). The food and service were excellent. Larry’s wife, after seeing my steak, decided that was what she had to have too.
• Class let out early on Tuesday, so I went back to the hotel to do a little exercising. I just recently started a new program, and one of the routines is a bunch of body-weight exercises, requiring no equipment. I figured that was perfect for a hotel-room workout. The program calls for 10 reps of each of the 8 exercises with no rest in between, 6 times. So, for example, that would have been a total of 60 clap push ups in the end. Yeah. Right. I’m in reasonable shape, but I could only complete the circuit of exercises 3 times, and I was completely crushed, in only 13 minutes. And I cheated a bit, and rested for a minute between the circuits. Wow.
• After I caught my breath and showered, I decided to try a new-to-me pub near the hotel, Meehan’s Public House. The decor was classic Irish pub (I’ve never been to a real Irish pub), right down to the aged men having a pint to avoid going home to their wives. There I met my next single-serving friend, Pete. He was affable, and I quickly learned that he had played football at Ohio State in 1974 with Archie Griffin, under the guidance of Woody Hayes. We talked about kids and families and staying active and making the best of situations.
• After dinner, I went to visit old friends. Ellen and her kids were a trip to hang out with. Their lives are so chaotic and full of drama (a leaking water heater that turned into an $80k basement redo, complete with asbestos remediation) that it makes me feel like I’ve got way too much free time. The best part of the evening, trying on Alex’s armor.
• On Wednesday, I went to see Sal and his friend Eve. Sal’s a fabulous artist and continues to do interesting and challenging work. He gave me a tour of some of Eve’s property, and told me about his current projects. I’m really looking forward to the one that has the working title “After the animals learned all they could from the humans, they went to war”–it will be a sculpture made out of animal skulls wearing turtle shells as helmets. Like I said, powerful. My proudest moment that evening was when Eve pointed out one of Sal’s paintings over her couch, which I’d never seen before, and could tell the approximate year he’d done it because of the style. One of the projects Sal and Eve are working on together is a book of paintings and narratives from a breast-cancer project Sal did several years ago in association with the Komen foundation. If they can afford to publish it, and get it into the right hands, it could be really amazing for them both.
• Thursday found me back at NY Pizza Exchange for dinner, and another Joe Boli, only this time with their white sauce. During dinner, a thunderstorm rolled in, dropping dime sized hail. I had walked from the hotel, and there was hockey on one of the TVs (Not the Blue Jackets, unfortunately), so I was in no hurry to leave.
• But leave I did at one of the period breaks, because I was curious to see if I would run into Pete at Meehan’s again. The place was packed, I didn’t see Pete, and finding someplace to park my butt was looking unlikely. After I ordered a pint, I noticed a guy sitting alone at a table near the bar, watching the hockey game on the TV. “Ah Ha! A kindred spirit” I thought. I asked if I could join him, and Josh became my Thursday single-serving friend. As it turns out, he was watching the game because he was bored, but he was interested to learn various aspects of the game (”Are thee any rules about hitting? What’s a power play?”). When I informed him that I was from Columbus, he told me that he was the nephew of Joe Daniels, a coach for the Ohio State Football team. Oh, and he gets to hang out with Tressel. Oh, and he gets tickets to the games in the 2nd or 3rd row. So in between gasps of shocked amazement, I tried to pay attention to the hockey game so that I could see updates of the Blue Jackets game, where Anne and the kids were.
• Friday was the last day of class, but our instructor, Liz, wasn’t there. Then we learned that she was stuck in traffic and would be there soon. Then we learned that she had been in a car accident. Then we learned that she was going to the hospital to get checked out. Last we learned, she was fine, but because the airbag deployed, she was going for observation. Instead, Ted became our instructor for the morning, and I suddenly learned just how much of my frustration in the class was due to Liz’s personality and style, rather than the content of the course. In previous days, the students were subdued, not engaged, and down right bored. When Ted was teaching, he was engaging, and we were having a great time learning the last couple of chapters. The class was completely different for those last few hours.

So, it was an interesting week, making reconnections with old friends and family, and stomping around neighborhoods I once knew. And, as typically happens during travel, there were a number of fun single-serving friends along the way.

A couple of years ago, while visiting a facility for work, I came across a “Pop-tops for Charity” donation bucket. I don’t recall the particular details, but it was pretty vague… “Put your pop-tops here to benefit a local charity”. I read up on the Snopes article, and decided to put a note on the bucket before I left with the URL to the Snopes article.

This week, I’m in a training class, and the training coordinator made a plug for their “Pop-tabs for Ronald McDonald House” collection in the break room. I remembered the previous experience, but I didn’t remember that the Snopes article specifically called out Ronald McDonald house:

in 1987 McDonald’s found it a good idea to get into the act. Their Pop Tab Collection program is a response to pull tab mania, and it at least provides folks with a place to dump the tabs they’ve been hoarding over the years

I even found a page on the Atlanta Ronald McDonald House website where they seem to promote the idea. I was shocked! This seemed to be a legit way to raise money for a charity!
In fact, it is legitimate, but is it worth while? According to the Atlanta RMH, in 2008 they recycled 13,647 pounds of tabs, and received $8,188 for the effort. That’s about $0.60 per pound. How many pop-tops does it take to make a pound? Their own website tells us: 1280. So, each pop-top has a cash value of $0.60 / 1280 = $0.0005. Put another way, twenty pop-tops are worth a penny.

Part of me mocks this–people honestly feel like they are doing some good for the charity by putting their pop-top in a bucket. But they would do WAY MORE good by dropping a single penny in the bucket.  Why not call it ‘Pennies for Patients’? Most people view pennies as just as worthless as pop-tops. How often do you see someone bend over to pick up a penny in the street? But the difference is like the difference between feeding a homeless person a meal, and feeding him for the whole week.

Another part of me can view this as “micro-donations”, that, for RMH, is essentially free money. Volunteers gather the pop-tabs, take them to the houses, where they are then delivered to recycling centers. The resulting check is then popped into RMH accounts. But is it even worth the volunteer time (not to mention all the individual pop-top contributors) to handle the recycling? If the average volunteer manages to collect one 9 pound bucket per year, and deliver it to a house, that’s $3.60 for their efforts. Getting to one of the houses in Atlanta could cost that much in automotive wear and tear, gas, parking, etc. If another volunteer delivers 100 pounds to the recycling center at a time, that’s $60 for a couple hours of work, more gas, wear, tear, etc. Yes, again its all “free” volunteer time, but why not have volunteers go dumpster diving to retrieve whole aluminum cans? Why not have volunteers scour the streets for dropped pennies? Again, I guess it is the micro-efforts of a lot of people that, in aggregate, have some very small, but measurable benefit.

I’m actually surprised RMH even cares to promote it–according to their Form 990, they got $3.5 Million in direct public support in 2008. The recycling program was 0.2% of that total. Can you say “waste of volunteer time?”

On this bucket I think I’ll put a note “Cash Value of each pop-top: 1/20th of a cent. Thanks for your support.” My guess is that the irony would be lost on most.

Today, we went to the Zoo, which was quite busy, where we saw some animals, and the weather was beautiful.

The best part? We were there for about six hours, and between the four of us, we took about 400 pictures (over 700MB!). I’m looking forward to making a couple of mosaics of subjects that we all shot.

OK, actually, that isn’t the best part. The best part is that we had a great time, and the kids were fabulous. And it started in the parking lot on the way to the front gate. There were two overweight women walking in front of us with their kids in tow. Both women had seriously over-tight pants (”Do these pants make me look desperate?”) with dunlop’s disease, and in quick succession, both bent over to tend to their kids, revealing ample crack. I quickly suggested that we move to the other side of the walk-way. After we were out of ear-shot, my son exclaimed “Oh My God, I saw her butt” in the most disgusted tone he could muster. I laughed, and explained that was why we moved. We spent much of the rest of the day marveling at the supreme wonderfulness of our kids.