Hypocritic Oaths

We as a society place little value in a single person quietly working away for six months that will cut the amount of noxious greenhouse gases that delivery trucks emit in to the atmosphere from a few thousand tonnes per year to just a few hundred tonnes thereby saving the lungs of countless children.

It explains why so much of society are destined to be employees rather than employers.

You cannot demand equality of me in all safe harbours of life when society considers my life disposable on the dangerous open seas of adversity.

People tend to get upset when they realise they don’t get a say in some important decision.

But I have noticed that people tend to get positively outraged when they realise they don’t get a say in an important decision that has nothing to do with them.

Today I was belittled for “reading too many books.”

I have been informed by a loud group of people that I, as the only white male present, need to apologise for my white male privilege.

I have been loudly berated that I have nothing to be proud of, either by accident of birth or by any deeds I have done or actions I have performed.

My counter argument is that if society doesn’t permit me to feel proud for the accidents that dictated where I was born, what my gender is, what colour I am, or my social and economic circumstances, I don’t see why I should feel guilty about them either.

And no apology would ever be forthcoming.

That… went down like a lead balloon.

The mass media repeatedly tells me not to believe any information I get from the internet.

Why do you think that might be?

 

You want to know what the ultimate privilege is?

The one espoused by anyone who says “I will never vote for X because of Y…”

There are millions of people in this country (the USA) that have had the right to vote stripped from them, or are disenfranchised for other societal reasons or due to economics.

Those people don’t have the privilege of not voting for a candidate they don’t believe in because they don’t have the right (illegitimately removed from them) to vote.

So yeah, standing and pontificating that you won’t vote for a candidate because they are female or black or Jewish is the ultimate abuse of your privilege.

So the company I was doing some contracting for last week had a mandatory off-site retreat for the employees on Friday and Saturday. The company is a regular 10-to-6, Monday-through-Friday routine.

Which required the employees to use two personal vacation days to attend.

Don’t ask me why they needed to use vacation days, least of all a vacation day to attend on a Saturday.

They stated that it was mandatory that I attend, but as I was a contractor, I would have to pay my own way to attend.

I would have to pay for the hotel (fancy place at $450/night), food ($250/pre-catered) and the $1,600 course fees for whatever bullshit they had cooked up from an outside motivational speaker. A total of $2,750 to attend their mandatory retreat.

But the icing on the cake is, because I am a contractor and not actually working those two days because I will be at the mandatory retreat, I wouldn’t get paid for my time.

After confirming that they were serious, I quit.

The line they used on me after I stated that I was no longer interested in continuing the contract?

“This just shows you aren’t a team player and are not committed to our company vision.”

Anxiety prone dogs have a tendency to lash out and bite at anyone that approaches.

I often witness the same lashing out behaviour with anxious clients.

A desire for too much communication that contains too little information.

A questioning of every hour spent on a task

Demanding of concrete deadlines when there are too many unknown variables.

A request to reduce an invoice after green-lighting the work.

A desire to control every aspect, even though I was hired to work autonomously.

And on-and-on with pointless micromanagement.

If a dog is going to bite me, it only ever gets to bite me once.

I hold the same policy for clients I work with.

You only ever get to bite me once.

Imagine you picked up a book and skimmed very quickly a single chapter.

And then you had to make a critical evaluation about all of the people and their circumstances in the book based on just that one chapter you briefly glanced over.

Now why are you judging someone’s life story by that single lone chapter you just read?

Or even the few words you picked up.

 

You know why I became an engineer instead of a doctor?

Because people don’t get offended after you have shipped their software and they declare “It’s a miracle! Thank God!” and you respond “You’re welcome.”

Also, just like that colleague who is never around when there’s “roll up your sleeves and do the dirty work” work to be done, that other guy doesn’t get credit for all my years of studying and hard work.

Make them worry about losing what they have.

Make them worry about what someone else has.

Make them worry about missing out.

Make them worry about what they will become.

Modern advertising and marketing in a nutshell.

There is no greater kind of ignorant bigotry that you will ever meet than the one masquerading as education.

Who you are should never make you afraid.

Who you are should make everyone else afraid.

The reason that you are afraid of who you are, or who you might be, is because other people are afraid of that, and so they go to great lengths to point out, that because they are afraid, you should be afraid too.

Though they never say “I am afraid of who you will become, because you will be different, and I don’t want you to be different to me.”

Those other people will couch their fear in phrases that sound like they are caring.

Going to church doesn’t make me a good man.

Going to church just makes me realize how many bad men there are in this world who profess to be good.

Bigotry is a disease.

And nobody ever cured disease by spreading it to the rest of the population.

It is not sexist, racist or whatever-ist to point out that you’re bloody crap at your job and worse than useless.

How I point out you are bad can be.

But when I say “You’re playing stinks and I believe they made a terrible mistake in letting you perform with us” your gender, skin colour and lifestyle preference has nothing to do with it.

And the moment you raise any of those physical traits as a reason of why you are being singled out, you have immediately invalidated any defense you might have used to dissuade me otherwise.

I might have delivered the blow badly, but at no time did I ever level the complaint against you based on some physical trait.

Plain and simple, sometimes you just suck.

Most people are only loyal to the need of you, but are not actually loyal too you.

Think about this: If you were to overhear someone exclaim loudly “ohmygod! He’s practicing unlicensed <profession> and somebody could get seriously injured” and you insert whatever profession you can think of, and it sounds patently ridiculous then it very definitely is ridiculous.

There are only two reasons for licensing a profession – someone could get seriously injured and someone wants to protect their income.

And if your profession does not involve life threatening injury but requires licensing and certification, I can only conclude that the entire profession falls in to the protectionism category.

I always find it interesting talking to people who “have religion.”

They are not only convinced they “know”, but they want you to “know” too.

Through browbeating and coercion they might be able to persuade me to agree with them, but then we’d both be wrong.

Just because someone didn’t vote the way you wanted them too, you don’t get to do it all over again hoping for a different outcome.

The USA is like that kid at college you hated.

Didn’t want to get involved in the class project then showed up during the presentation so that he could claim he did all the work.

People only want democracy when they think you will vote the same way they will.

I voted.

Conservative.

And then I was down at the student’s union having a pint of cider with some acquaintances.

Who thought I was the scum of the Earth because I “voted the wrong way.”

They were unanimous in the belief that “It is people like me” (the ones exercising their democratic right to vote for whoever they choose too) “that is what is wrong with this country. If we had our way, (in a proper democracy) you wouldn’t be allowed to vote for the wrong candidate.”

That isn’t how democracy works you arseholes!

The biggest irony is that more than half of the people I spoke to (about 30 people), when I questioned them, said they hadn’t voted.

With the reasons given being about evenly split between “It’s not worth it, it won’t make a difference” and “I couldn’t be bothered.”

Fuck this country and fuck my generation for being so complacent.

Don’t blame the student for cheating on your exam.

Blame yourself for demanding and valuing good grades from your students rather than demanding and valuing good learning from them instead.

P.S. I wasn’t talking about me. 🙂

Had a deep and meaningful discussion with my girlfriend about gender equality.

She won’t budge on the idea that she doesn’t want a man babysitting her (hypothetical) child because men don’t make good babysitters and she wouldn’t trust a strange man around her child.

I am offended by this.

“Get over it” I am told “it’s not sexist, it’s just reality. Men aren’t trustworthy.”

Uh… what?

Just because you’re protesting against it, doesn’t mean you’re right.

I do not agree with any profession requiring certification unless it is a moral necessity.

Being offended by what someone else thinks is like being offended because a fish lives in water.

In any engineering profession there are many ways to skin a cat.

And all of them involve trade-offs.

In a medical profession there are many ways to fix the cat that has been skinned.

And all of them involve trade-offs.

In piloting a plane there are many ways…

okay, this is where my analogy breaks down.

But it is the same principle.

But the point is, there might be many ways to do something with a cat.

And they all involve trade-offs.

A formal education and training will bring you up to speed on those ways and means and the trade-offs involved.

If however your entire profession is based on nothing more than “how you feel” (not how someone else feels because we call that psychology) or “what I reckon” that is the metaphorical equivalent of a few guys gathered around a bar having a talk over a few beers, then I am adamant that you do not need a formal education in whatever it is.

And anybody demanding you have a formal education in whatever it is, is either trying to sell you that education at an inflated price, or they are taking the easy (protectionist) option of demanding a credential that somehow is supposed to validate “how you feel.”

Beware the person who exclaims “I am absolved of all responsibility of the professional misdeeds of this employee because I verified they had the required certificate/credential.”

Don’t expect my loyalty if you are not offering yours in return.

Good motto to live by when it comes to working for a company.

My friends say “I’ve tried getting in to programming but I just fail at it.”

They ask “How come you are so good with computers? How come you make so much money? Can you teach me?”

And I reply “Because I persist. Because I sit at my desk hour after hour, day after day until I understand. And that is what makes money”

“I don’t have time for that. I’d rather go drinking.” they say.

“And that is why you fail.”

Expecting someone to understand how a computer works without ever putting their hands on a computer is a bit like expecting a boy to understand how sex works without ever touching a girl.

I have noticed that society at large frequently mistakes the opinions of a large group of people for the factual truth.

I think it has been this way forever.

And I think that it will be this way forever.

Or maybe I am just channelling Alexis de Tocqueville since reading On Democracy in America last year and a few of his other books at the beginning of this year.

Apparently keeping your job is the new raise.

Just because it was legal to do doesn’t mean it was right to do.

Slavery was legal.

Certain laws are as much about our morality at the time they are written.

I wonder what someone in the late 21-st century (a hundred years from now) will make of our laws today?