Well, today LowKey Daddy is having his roof reshingled with the administrative help of HighStrungMum. Events like this cause LowKeyDaddy to get a bit High Strung himself. I really can't stand dealing with contractors no matter how nice they may be simply because I have no idea whether or not they've done a good job. I'll stand out there and survey the work and try to look like I know exactly what they're doing, like any red-blooded American male should. Walking outside in my basketball shorts and unkempt hair I watch over the work with a slight nod of approval after giving a firm handshake to one of the contractors. Clearly this LowKey Daddy knows what he's doing when it comes to construction. After all, with the amount of hours I put in as a child sitting on a computer or playing basketball while my dad fixed the car and my grandpa built my desk I should have no problem spotting shoddy carpentry or mechanical mixups.
Being grownup is not much different from being a kid, you just have to learn to pretend that you're more knowledgeable than you are at all sorts of things.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Monday, June 4, 2007
Livin' for a workin'
I have no ideas. I am currently listening to some rambling in the background which happens to be a conference call. I sometimes wonder why people get paid to attend meetings that accomplish nothing. At this moment I think there are 10 people on this conference call, all talking about dates and when this dumb project is supposed to get done. Who cares?!
I think most jobs and careers are man-made obstacles to create more problems which require more meetings and more people with college educations to feel good about hearing themselves talk. Kind of like blogging, only you get paid for it. I get very tired of hearing how smart people are because they know how to make problems get bigger. Why not create more meetings?
Since you probably don't know, I work in Information Technology... which you would think would be full of people finding ways to do things more efficiently... but no. IT is nothing more than a field where people add as many obstacles as possible to make life even MORE difficult. To me, the addition of all the servers and operating systems and software out there that is designed to make life easier has in fact made life harder. I'm on call one week a month for 24 hours a day, and technically I'm on call every day. For some reason, the servers that I work on must be as important as a human life, because only doctors and dentists work these same hours.
This can all be summed up in a theory I learned in my Women's Studies course I took in college (yes I learned all about The History of Women in Science and Technology, which is why I landed my beautiful wife).
I call it The Washing Machine theory.
Here's the deal. Washing machines were invented with the premise of giving women more time in their lives to spend with their kids, etc. (this was back in the day when women usually stayed home with the kids). Advertisements from the washing machine companies centered around this showing moms with all sorts of time on their hands. So what happened?
Well, the men of the time would usually only wear one shirt, one pair of pants, etc. per day. So, the wives only had to clean that one shirt, one pair of pants, etc. per day. It took some time to do the hand washing no doubt, but once the washer and dryer became a fixture in the American household another phenomenon took place. Because you could clean clothes faster, you could buy more clothes! So now, men were buying multiple outfits to look spiffy and the loads of laundry were once again building up. Hence, laundry was taking just about the same amount of time as it was taking previously.
So... now that we live in an age of networks, PDA's, pagers, and cell phones, we can fix things at a moments notice AND because things are running 24X7 companies and people expect things to get fixed 24X7.
What have we done? (sobbing on my keyboard as I get back to work)
I think most jobs and careers are man-made obstacles to create more problems which require more meetings and more people with college educations to feel good about hearing themselves talk. Kind of like blogging, only you get paid for it. I get very tired of hearing how smart people are because they know how to make problems get bigger. Why not create more meetings?
Since you probably don't know, I work in Information Technology... which you would think would be full of people finding ways to do things more efficiently... but no. IT is nothing more than a field where people add as many obstacles as possible to make life even MORE difficult. To me, the addition of all the servers and operating systems and software out there that is designed to make life easier has in fact made life harder. I'm on call one week a month for 24 hours a day, and technically I'm on call every day. For some reason, the servers that I work on must be as important as a human life, because only doctors and dentists work these same hours.
This can all be summed up in a theory I learned in my Women's Studies course I took in college (yes I learned all about The History of Women in Science and Technology, which is why I landed my beautiful wife).
I call it The Washing Machine theory.
Here's the deal. Washing machines were invented with the premise of giving women more time in their lives to spend with their kids, etc. (this was back in the day when women usually stayed home with the kids). Advertisements from the washing machine companies centered around this showing moms with all sorts of time on their hands. So what happened?
Well, the men of the time would usually only wear one shirt, one pair of pants, etc. per day. So, the wives only had to clean that one shirt, one pair of pants, etc. per day. It took some time to do the hand washing no doubt, but once the washer and dryer became a fixture in the American household another phenomenon took place. Because you could clean clothes faster, you could buy more clothes! So now, men were buying multiple outfits to look spiffy and the loads of laundry were once again building up. Hence, laundry was taking just about the same amount of time as it was taking previously.
So... now that we live in an age of networks, PDA's, pagers, and cell phones, we can fix things at a moments notice AND because things are running 24X7 companies and people expect things to get fixed 24X7.
What have we done? (sobbing on my keyboard as I get back to work)
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