Place to Call My Own?

Good news (but long story). Over the past through years Ceil has been trying to renovate our house, slowly but surely. New siding and gutters, a new front walk, new garage doors, new windows and French doors. Next up is a “built in” cabinets in our living room, and then a new back deck. Yesterday C had an old design coworker over to discuss the projects…

…Right now there’s no space for me to have as an “office”. No basement or bonus room. We’d like to keep the two upstairs bedrooms as guest bedrooms, if we can clean out all junk. When I work from home I work at the kitchen table or in the dining room. Not a good long term solution. Ceil uses the “extra bedroom” downstairs as an “art studio”. In typical Ceil fashion, every wall in the small room is crammed: three tall bookcases, a short bookcase, chest of drawers, and a desk. Two rolling carts, a cart for her sewing machine, plus the window.

But the good news is that Ceil MIGHT let me have the room as an “office”. She really doesn’t like to work in there. We’ll see how it plays out. I won’t hold my breath. Would be nice to have a place to pay the bills.

Sometimes when you listen to corporate bigwigs talk, they sound a lot like a politician on the campaign trail. They use a bunch of big words, but when you stop to think about what they are saying, its hard to understand how all these lofty words translate into the real world of entering orders and pulling and shipping the product. In a “down market” we have to “cut costs” while at the same time “improving on time delivery”. But how? If the head count of the people who actually pull and package the orders is reduced, then machines can’t run to capacity and orders don’t ship. If purchasing can’t place orders for more stock material, there’s no way sales can do anything but drop. I’ve heard this called the “death spiral”. Things just get worse and worse.

Seems like during the last downturn some used an opposite approach: shelves were stocked to be ready to fill any orders that came along. An upward spiral, if you will. The downturn was survived in glorious fashion.  But hey, I’m no business wiz. Get me another beer.

What’s frustrating is when you have to do one task over and over to get it done. Seems like so maybe people aren’t sure what to do, and you have to prod them along. The corporations have teams of people set up to do various tasks (that have little idea of how coworkers dealing with customers and working orders are pushed for time), but require you to jump through their hoops to get what you need. When you work for a team that does things differently than everyone else, others may forget that you are stuck doing twice as much work then you used to do.  

I don’t consider myself racist, at least in the traditional sense of the word. Am I? I have lived and worked around people all many various ethnicities for most of my life. Black. Hispanic. Gay. Straight. The people I have a hard time with are lazy people, people who try to get out of work, people who think they are more important or more special or think they deserve better treatment than others. Drivers who cut others off in traffic. People who don’t use the cross walks to cross the street. Sure some people didn’t grow up in this country and weren’t taught these things growing up. I like free things as much as the next person, but I don’t think that I am entitled to a life paid for by the government. I am fine with working for a living. Things may be tougher these days, but that’s not excuse to be lazy.