Old Soul is buying Weatherstone’s.

Let’s hear it for SNAGs, yuppie coffee, local art, and cafe society tout court.

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So a friend of mine from Texas sent me an e-mail announcement regarding a debate, entitled “Is Gay Marriage Conservative,” hosted by the South Texas College of Law.
First thought: OMG, does this mean that the ACT-UP/Queer Nation debates of the late 1980s have finally arrived in Houston?

Second thought: Wait, I thought Houston was in East Texas?
Third thought: Exsqueeze me? The panel members appear to include David Frum, Charles Murray, and (drum roll please for the man that brought us the emasculation of the 4th Amendment, the destruction of the separation of constitutional powers AND wholesale torture of prisoners foreign and domestic) John Yoo.

Three words: what. the. f**k?

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So yesterday I had to write a personal e-mail of apology to the manager in charge of processing my travel expense claims, for the crime of not getting pre-approval.

I so wish I were making this up.

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So today’s Bee revealed something that I had heard rumored about for the past two days:

Kevin Johnson is exploring a run for Mayor.

Leaving aside the merits of the KJ’s case for a moment, I’d like to say a few words about the column (http://www.sacbee.com/breton/story/661002.html) in which this little apercu appeared.  This column almost gets the points right — so close to almost, in fact, that it might even be deliberate — but in a way that is thoroughly sickening.
The central claim made in the column is (and I quote): “Johnson would transform the city’s political dynamic if he entered the mayoral fray. He has the potential to generate a level of interest and involvement uncommon in local politics, akin to what Arnold Schwarzenegger did on a statewide level. California’s governor proved that celebrity is a valuable currency in election campaigns.”

Ummm, maybe.  But you say that as if it were a good thing.  Which it is manifestly not.  Electing people on the basis of celebrity is base demagoguery, and bad, bad, bad for democracy.   J. Leonard Padilla had name recognition.  And while I’ll grant that his participation in the races for mayor had its charms, they didn’t precisely “transform” local politics.
The columnist compounds the error by making a subsequent claim: “Even on the local level, name recognition is key: Fargo has been running unopposed so far not because she’s a strong leader, but because she has stronger name recognition than other local elected officials. This is largely what’s kept potential challengers such as Councilman Rob Fong on the sidelines.”

Umm, what?  “Name recognition” and “incumbency” are two quite separate things.  And I’d like to see on the basis of what evidence he claims that Heather Fargo has a stronger name recognition than, oh, Doris Matsui.  Or Darryl Steinberg.  Do you have a poll to back that up, buddy?

Then there’s the casual sideswipe at the record of our current incumbent.  Heather Fargo may or may not be a “strong leader”; I happen to think that since the streets get swept regularly, the garbage gets picked up, the sewers work fine, the cops and the fire fighters both seem to be relatively happy and both appear to be doing their jobs well — gee, that adds up to a whole lot of she’s doing her job.  And whatever my disagreements with her on the railyard deal, she hasn’t actually (yet) given the candy store away to the cracker gigolo that’s currently trying to fuck the city.  Leaving all that aside — meaning leaving aside her merits as mayor, which last time I checked my political theory was kind of the fucking point — there’s the simple fact that, frankly, once you get elected to public office in this county, it’s pretty much yours for the keeping unless you actually get caught got text-messaging underage boys for sex.

This is something Rob Fong (and Dave Jones, and Darryl Steinberg, and Roger Dickinson, and all the other candidates waiting in the wings) understands.  If you want to be mayor of Sacto., you contribute to the team and act like a team player.  That’s what gets you anointed as a successor in what (admittedly) is a pretty non-competitive system.  This may be a machine with one central cog named Richie Ross in the center, but at least it’s a functional machine, a clean machine, a machine where the streets get swept without corruption, a machine better than a hell of a lot of others at making all of our lives pretty decent.

And I won’t even start with the whole bit about Tsakapoulos.  Would a developer really be dumb enough to challenge the establishment which regulates land use decisions?  If so, what the hell would he get in exchange?  Hmmm?

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So, in my further adventures as a drone working for “a large public agency” I have drawn a few preliminary, but personally quite compelling, conclusions about some of the implications of working in bureaucracy:

Observation #1: when one’s boss says, in so many words, “we really, really want to hire you permanently. In order to do that, would you please go apply for jobs somewhere else?” this does not fill one with joy and the Christmas spirit.

Observation #2: when one goes out and apply for said other jobs, and gets one’s application kicked back for being “unqualified,” (this from a different branch of the same bureaucracy that told me, not 6 months ago, to put my Ph.D. at the bottom of my resume because “being really smart is threatening to people in state government”) one is, in a word, nonplussed.

Observation #3: when one then calls a second “large public agency” to apply for a job – this one ostensibly charged with, ahem, keeping us safe from malefactors and other sorts of evildoers – and gets the run-around from a fucking voice mailbox, one is, in a word, discouraged. To wit:

Call #1: “This is the selection service branch of [blank] agency. If you want to apply for a job with [blank] agency, please submit an application to the following address… The following job openings are available… [and then the line goes dead as I’m disconnected].

Call #2 (because really I’m a masochist): Same voicemail, but instead of being disconnected, I find that the message – the number for which was listed on the state personnel board’s website – hasn’t been updated since 1996. I hang up in disgust.

Call #3 (figuring, what the hell, I might as well call back, put this shit on speaker phone and listen to the whole thing): Same voice mail, at the end of which a second voice mail clicks over to say “you have not made a selection.” (WTF?) At which point I get disconnected, again.

Call #4 (hey, what the hell, I’m not getting paid anyway – see the next observation – I might as well spend my time calling the voice mailbox from hell to see what kind of krazy krap I get today): same voice mail, same “you have not made a selection,” only this time the first voice mail repeats itself, at the end of which I get (no whammies, no whammies, please let me hit the numbah!) those best of all hoped-for words “please stay on the line, and someone will assist you in a moment.” And then?

A busy signal.

Call #5: (because at this point it really is like playing Kafka lotto): “the number you have dialed [and then 7 digits that bear absolutely no relationship to those which I had punched in] has been disconnected and is no longer in service.”

In craps, we would call this snake-eyes.

Observation #4: when your co-workers reply to your story of getting royally fucked by HR with stories of their own, this is not a sign of sympathy. This is in fact a sign of a deeply dysfunctional organization.

Some background: I technically work for two “large public agencies” inasmuch as I teach one class a semester (assuming they renew my contract) at the local state university. It turns out that these two agencies have very different rules when it comes to direct deposit: one has a simple, and rather short, time bar (6 weeks, I think it was), while the other requires that you accrue – and more to the point of this story, maintain – a certain specified number of vacation and sick leave hours. Howevuh, both paychecks ultimately come from the same place (your friend and mine, Mr. John Chiang, who is IMHO doing a fabulous job as Controller). That means that when I applied for direct deposit at the university, some nice person (or computer program, I suppose) must have looked at my records and said “gee, as long we’re sending this fellow two checks, why don’t we make sure they go to the same place?” and I automatically got direct deposit for my “regular” job as well.

Now, seeing as I am not only “on probation” for my regular job, I haven’t even taken the blessed civil service exam, I have no, repeat, no vacation time. That means that for the winter vacation (Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve, which this year fell on Mondays and are not, in fact, designated as paid holidays) I had to take unpaid “dock” days. My supervisor and I filled out the requisite paperwork well in advance (i.e., the 1st of December) since it seemed to make sense to get that in early this time of year. No harm, no foul, right? Wrong.

Along about the 3rd week of December, the folks in my office learn that der Gubernator decreed that state staff could, in fact, take four hours of paid time for either Christmas or New Years. This being a sort of “take it while you can, folks, ‘cause next year’s budget is looking ugly” gift. In practice what this meant for me is that the admin person in my office had to submit an “amendment” to my time card, giving me those four extra hours.

This then meant that someone down in HR had to go back and take a second look at my time card. This was a mistake. A rather big fucking mistake, it turned out. Because when the person in HR who is designated to take care of my files – and she shall remain nameless, that fucking accursed incompetent bitch whose name happens to be, oh, something approaching the Latin for “heaven” and who, when I am thinking more clearly, am forced to admit probably has an asswipe of a job and so really deserves my sympathy more than anything else – when this FAIB looked at my file, the very first thing she noticed was that I was had direct deposit.

And this, apparently, is verboten. So the first thing Miss FAIB did was yank my ass, making sure to send me both an e-mail AND a paper copy informing me that my pathetic self had not maintained the required minimum number of sick leave and vacation hours necessary to keep the privilege of direct deposit.

Then, I gather, she figured that her work on my file was done. Yes, that’s right. She “forgot,” or something, to submit the paperwork for my paycheck.

So first the admin tells me my paycheck is going to be two days “late” because of the amendment. Two days go by, and no check.

Then the lady from HR says that she’s re-submitted (re? WTF is this “re?” What happened the first time, bitch?) the paperwork, which means that my paycheck will be a 7 days late.

At this point my supervisor gets involved, and he calls her supervisor, and we begin the real merry-go-round — and I ain’t even called the union on your asses, motherfuckers — the end result of which (sick from both the endless spinning and the glockenspiel music), my paycheck is 6 days late, and it’s technically an “advance,” for the privilege of which the state either withholds (or keeps, it’s not clear) $50.

Mind you, this is nothing compared to the stories told by others: getting their direct deposit yanked when they went on maternity leave; “lost paperwork” regarding a promotion that involved a rather significant pay raise; someone who first got paid too much, then was told to pay it back in installments, then was told a year later that HR had fucked up the calculations and that they would have to give back, in effect, the equivalent of 2/3 of a paycheck all at once.

Like I said, if in response to the question, “so, have you heard how I got fucked by HR today?” you respond with “oh, but wait, there’s more!” this is not sympathy. It’s rather akin to saying “oh, you have cholera? Well I have TB, and ain’t that a bitch?” What we need is not tea and crumpets and kind words, what we need is to fire some sumbitches, re-scale the job so we can actually hire some competent people, and then make furdemn sure that people FUCKING GET PAID ON TIME. Is that really so much to ask?

Observation #5: When you patiently try to explain to someone that limiting a test for visual impairments to people that speak English implies no substantial bias to the empirical outcomes, and they say “but Black people have hypertension,” it’s really really hard to keep a patronizing tone out of one’s voice when one replies “gee, last time I checked, Black people spoke English.”

The situation is not helped when the respondent fires back, “well what about Punjabis? They don’t speak English.”  Though I do think I win points for not saying some version of “hunh. And when did Punjabis become Black, exactly? ‘Cause you know, I’m a fucking sociologist, and I didn’t get the memo from the goddamned Census Bureau on that one.”

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