June 6, 1990
Dear Everyone:
Just when you thought it was safe to go to your
mailbox… ELECTION TIME!
Things in my neighborhood were particularly hairy
as we had not one, but two Propositions about garbage (this is going to
be the “hot” issue of the ‘90’s).
It seems that the local board of supervisors looked into the
“landfill” problem, considered all the options, discussed the matter at
length and, finally, voted on the Marsh Creek Site.
WELL!
That didn’t sit too well with 2 other companies who had wanted their
sites chosen, so they garnered enough signatures to get their sites
added to the ballot so the voters could decide.
Naturally, the voters, with little or no information or
inclination to do months of studies on the subject, could do a better
job of making the decision than those silly supervisors who, after all,
are only paid to do just that.
With this, the race was on:
Who could spend more money blitzing the poor voters with
“information” about the garbage dumps.
Proposition B spent more money, including sending every
registered voter a free video tape to “explain” the situation; but Prop.
C won. Only the voters lost.
You should have heard some of the “logic” employed.
It ran along the lines of:
“Vote for Proposition (fill in the blank) or garbage trucks will
run over your school children in the street!”
No, the free video tape isn’t reusable:
It’s only 10 minutes long.
Don’t ask me who or what I voted for.
I can’t remember. For
the last 3 weeks, I’ve been carrying my Voters Pamphlet around, thinking
I’d get a few free moments at lunch, or riding home on the van, when I
could study the issues. But
I’ve been so busy lately that any free time is spent trying to catch my
breath. Last night, I go
home around 6:00, made a careful, if cursory, consideration of all the
facts and decided to amend my usual rule (Vote Yes on Odd and No on
Even) and just vote No on everything, with a few exceptions.
For all I know, I may have voted for “No” for
Governor. Probably wouldn’t
have hurt if I had.
Honestly, I do realize that democracy is a
wonderful thing (just look at China) and we’re lucky to have it.
And we’re lucky that we don’t have to go to the polls wondering
if it’s the Democrats or the Republicans that are most likely to gun us
down in the street for performing our civic duties.
But it is a fact that power corrupts and absolute power turns
people silly. Look at
Watergate, Irangate and the Teapot Dome.
I’ve been taking classes all this week in
“BUSINESS”plus, which is one reason my mind keeps going
boggle-boggle-boggle. That’s
not a typo: The name of the
class IS “BUSINESS” (all caps) “plus” (all lowercase).
In fact, “plus” is supposed to be in italics, but VM can’t handle
italics. Even my WordPerfect
won’t do italics until I get the time to figure out how to teach it to
do it.
“BUSINESS”plus is the newest version of “BUSINESS”,
the text management software system that forms the “BUSiness” (sorry
about the pun) for our Integrated Document Handling System (“IDHS”).
“IDHS” uses “BUSINESS” Release K.
“BUSINESS”plus uses Release L.
So I’m in the position of knowing how to do things that “IDHS”
can’t do yet while I still don’t quite know how to do the things that
Release K can do.
Anyway, in order to teach us how to use this new
system that we can’t use at work yet, the “YYY” people who own
“BUSINESS” made up a special database for classes to use.
It’s called TOUR. (We
made up a pretend database for “IDHS” called DEMO1.
But it’s just a random dump of what “Company Reference &
Techiness Co” had in their database.
TOUR is a database to be used by an imaginary Travel Agency.
In TOUR you can call up data about anyone who works
for the Agency, or anything about anyone who has used the Agency, or
anything about anywhere in the world the Agency might send someone, or
all of that and a whole lot more.
(Personally, I might have a problem with a database that lets
anyone in the company call up a report of all employees and lists things
like salaries and commissions, but it’s all made up data.
Real databases have things called “restricted access”.)
It became clear that this is a made up database
when you start accessing the “Client” file.
I ran a list of client names and the companies that they worked
for and got things like “Jim Nasium” (works for Body Double); Chris
Peabacon (The Breakfast Club); Art Sandcrafts (Creative Concepts);
Justin Case (Eel Legal Services); Noah Fence; Cher Holder; Jacqueline
Hyde and (my personal favorite) Ron Amuk.
So then I went into Schedule (not to be confused
with Records Management’s “Schedule” which is confused enough) and
looked up Mr. Ron Amuk. In
the Schedule file, a travel agent can add notes about a particular
itinerary, which the other agents can access to find out what’s going on
with, for instance, Mr. Amuk.
It seems Mr. Amuk wanted to book a trip to a seminar, but
couldn’t remember what city it was going to be in.
Then there was Mr. Albert Tross, of the Avian
Company, an avid bird watcher until he was arrested in Florida for a
Peeping Tom when someone caught him leaning out of his hotel window with
binoculars. He has since
switched to fish watching.
This is also the place where an agent can note that
Mr. Linus Scrimmage has special medical needs and wants to know what
pharmacy is close to his hotel.
Obviously, someone had fun setting up this database. But it does illustrate just how useful this kind of system can be. So far, we’ve spent 2½ days learning about retrieval and storage. Tomorrow and Friday, we’ll learn about report writing. Boggle, boggle, boggle.
Love, as always,
Pete
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