June 10, 1999
Dear Everyone:
This week, we are seeing the first of three “retirements”
in the month of June. These
are people who have volunteered to be involuntarily terminated in return
for a generous Special Involuntary Termination Enhancement (SITE)
package. In other words, the
Company wanted to encourage a lot of people to retire early by offering
this special package. But
they didn’t want everybody and their dog to retire, so (having learned
from past mistakes) they threw in a catch.
You can’t just retire and take
the package.
Your management has to determine that you are no
longer “needed” or can be spared if they can find someone who doesn’t
want to “retire” early to replace you.
This (hopefully) works out for everyone.
I’ve heard of a file room in “Pleasant Hill” where something like
six out of eight people volunteered to retire.
The file room can’t survive with 75% of its workforce gone.
But, assuming the Powers That Be decide to outsource the mail
operations, some of the people from the mail room, who aren’t ready to
“retire”, might be moved into the file room.
This way, the ones who want to leave get to go; and the ones who
can’t afford to leave get to stay employed, at least for a while longer.
Officially, I didn’t volunteer to be involuntarily
terminated, and management has decided that I’m “needed” and cannot be
spared, at least for the time being.
In the meantime, we are starting to move forward on
converting from
Versatile to
extempore’.
Strictly first gear so far. We
still don’t have a contract or the software, but we’ve started
“extracting” data from Versatile in preparation for sending it to “Special” Technologies,
Inc. (STI). This looks
remarkably similar to running a report only sending it to a file instead
of to a printer. Frankly, we
do this all the time.
I suggested that we could just send STI a “sample”
of our data, maybe a few thousand records.
But they insist that they need the whole kit and caboodle.
As they put it, “We can’t do a proper autopsy without the whole
body.” So they’re going to
get the entire 656,000+ record database, even if it takes me a month the
extract all the data. Then
they will study how we use
Versatile (what fields are used and how) and produce a “data
conversion document”, which will serve as a “road map” to the
conversion.
This is all well and good, but I hope they
understand that this initial “data dump” that we’re producing will be
worthless by the time we’re ready to do the actual conversion.
With nearly 200 active users, plus our friends in “Hobby” who
like to change the locations on boxes they don’t even have, there are a
lot of fingers in the pie.
Boxes are constantly being added, changed, requested, checked out,
checked in, and moved. This
presents what we call a “moving target”.
It will be interesting to see how STI plans to address the issue.
Meanwhile, at the movies…
Buffy and I went to see
Notting
Hill last Saturday, followed by some more trimming of Big White
Kitty’s fur.
Notting Hill is billed as a
romantic comedy.
Hugh Grant and
Julia Roberts
are a match made in heaven.
Unfortunately, they live here on Earth.
He runs a book store that sells only travel books, a niche so
small that it’s a wonder he makes any money at all.
She plays a famous movie star who wanders into the
store for no apparent reason.
Both actors excel at what they do best.
Roberts is dewy-eyed and Grant is diffident.
They say the sort of clever things to each other that the rest of
us would be staring at the ceiling at 3:00 AM, thinking, “Yeah.
That’s what I should
have said then.”
However, for a comedy, it’s not particularly funny.
And for a romance, there’s little, if any, chemistry between to
two characters. Since they
have nothing in common, without chemistry, why do they keep coming
together? Because it’s in
the script, that’s why. They
get together, split up, misunderstand, get together, etc., etc., etc.
All the while surrounded by “wacky” friends and family.
Ultimately, the ending is “happy”, but rather
dissatisfying. Better you
should go back and see
Star Wars
again. Which is what I did
on Sunday. (Hey!
It’s a ten minute walk away.)
Love, as always,
Pete
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