January 8, 1998
Dear Everyone:
Survived another Christmas Holiday and my first
ever “9/80” Day Off. 9/80 is
a “compressed work week” in which you work nine hours per day for nine
days in a two-week period; then you get the tenth day off.
What usually happens is you work nine hours each day from Monday
to Thursday. On Friday you
only work eight hours. Then
you have the weekend. During
the second week, you work nine hours each day, Monday to Thursday, at
which point you’ve worked a full 80 hours and take that Friday off.
Thus you get a 3-day weekend every other week.
A 3-day weekend every other week is very appealing.
And since I moved to San Ramon, I could work nine-hour days and
still get home by 6:00. I’d
basically be working the extra hour that it used to take me to get home.
When I said the time I would save in commute time added up to a
full day, I wasn’t just whistling
Dixie.
However, there is a bit of a catch.
They used to have 9/80 schedules in “Livermore” when I first
started working there about three years ago.
At the time, I passed on signing up for the compressed work week
because my schedule, shuttling back and forth between “Livermore” and
San Francisco,
was already too confused to try and remember which day of the week it
was. Also, I noticed that
both the supervisors, “Murray” and “Brad”, almost always showed up at
work on their Off Day because there was one little thing or another that
they just had to take care of.
It seems that, if your last day is Thursday, and you’re going to
be gone for three whole days (never mind that two of them are the
weekend), you just can’t seem to get out the door with everything taken
care of. Coming in on your
Off Day was becoming something of a tradition at Company.
But then I found out that you can make your Off Day
a Monday rather than a Friday.
In fact, they prefer it that way because it spreads people out
more evenly over the week.
And people that I spoke with who have Mondays off said it’s much easier
to leave things not quite finished, or stay a little later, on Friday,
knowing that you have three whole days to recuperate.
Having every other Monday
off was too tempting to resist.
And, as it happened, the way the alternating
schedules operate, I started out the new year with a 3-day weekend,
sleeping in on Monday. Of
course, in the fine Company tradition, I sneaked into the office for a
half-day on Sunday to clean up my files and try to get my cubicle a
little better organized; part of my never-ending quest to have
everything at my fingertips and nothing in my way.
OK, enough about work.
Movies:
Titantic,
James Cameron’s
shining tribute to NAFTA (the
North American Free Trade Agreement).
If you want to know where $200 million went, just read the
closing credits. Every third
person from
Baja,
Mexico to San Diego
to Marin
County to
British Columbia seems to have been involved.
Literally thousands of names are listed, only there are so many
that they separated them with commas instead of the standard columns.
The story is told in flashback, which allows
modern-day characters to occasionally explain what went wrong and how
the ship cracked in two as she went down.
Seems everything the captain and helmsman had learned with
previous ships worked against them with the
Titanic.
When they spotted the iceberg,
they should have just rammed it.
Instead they tried to veer off, which you could probably do with
a smaller ship. It was
rather like someone who always drove a small sports car suddenly behind
the wheel of a limousine or bus.
Their reflexes got in the way.
Of course, it takes two hours before the iceberg
gets to make its debut.
First we have to get through a love story involving a poor, little rich
girl and a scrappy artist who won tickets for the trip in a last-minute
poker game (lucky guy). He
gets to see her world, full of stuffy rich people in evening dress; and
she gets to visit his world, full of happy poor people who dance in
their bare feet.
Just as the two are about to get their comeuppance,
that pesky ice cube gets in the way.
And then Cameron pulls out all the stops.
His action scenes are very convincing and use a lot of water.
You watch state rooms slowly tilt until everything starts falling
off the shelves and then even the shelves start to slide.
Many, many stunt people jump, fall or are pushed into the water.
You will believe that a ship that big can sink that fast.
As for the young lovers, it’s a little hard to
really care about them since they’re plastic to begin with.
Starsky
and Hutch had more chemistry than these two.
The people who really affect you are the bit parts, which Cameron
wisely filled with veteran character actors.
It takes real actors with plenty of experience to show you the
despair in the eyes of the captain and the architect who built the ship
as they realize that their hubris and arrogance will cost so many
innocent people their lives.
Or the Irish woman, trapped in steerage, telling bedtime stories to her
young children as she waits for the inevitable.
The last hour makes the first two worth it.
Take plenty of
Kleenex.
Tomorrow
Never Dies. Silly
title, a reference to a
USA Today-type newspaper printed in multiple languages with the
title of Tomorrow (in multiple languages).
Like all
Bond films,
it starts out with an elaborate action sequence, ending with a typical
Bond offhanded remark.
Unlike most Bond films, it actually has a fathomable plot.
In the usual Bond film, during a spectacularly choreographed
action scene, you find yourself wondering, “Um, why is he battling with
a Samurai warrior in a Viennese Crystal factory?
How did we get here?”
Of course the advantage to the
Byzantine story line is that you can watch the movie over and over
and still not know what’s going on.
In this film, you know exactly what’s going on because the
villain goes to great trouble to explain it all up front.
Another difference is that the “Bond
girl” is a martial arts expert in her own right, capable of kicking
people in the head with the best of them.
Straightforward plot, adequate action sequences,
the usual gadgets and gimmicks that come into play at just the right
moment. An enjoyable two
hours. Or you could wait for
the video to come out. Or
you can wait a little longer for it to show up on a
TBS
marathon.
Love, as always,
Pete
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