So What’s Wrong With City Employees Anyway?

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A few days ago, I mentioned that I’ve been working on a post about city of Houston employees, and how we differ from the general work force. It’s been through several reworkings, as it’s one of the more difficult I have had to write. After all, this is an analysis that will probably upset many of my co-workers, not to mention I expect most readers will disagree with part or all of it. That’s actually of less concern than is the fundamental problem with the article: I am the author. I’m part of the equation; I’m a city employee trying to diagnose from the inside. For the purpose of this article, I’m trying to step outside of who and what I am, and look at the “big picture.” I’m honest enough to know I may not have succeeded. I’ve spent time in the private sector, and all my social time is spent among non-city employees — but that still doesn’t mean my observations are the gospel–but I don’t see how anyone from the outside could even begin to write this article; they can barely scratch the surface. So reader beware: this may be more insightful than an article in the local newspaper (well, that’s a given!), but it doesn’t mean I’m 100% right.

First off, let me point out that in any work force of 20,000 people, there are going to be all types. There will be gung-ho employees, average workers, people who are pure poison, outstanding employees, and people just punching the clock for a paycheck. You may have heard of the concept of “the five percenter.” That’s the people at the very top and bottom of the quality scale; they are the rudders and anchors of the business ship; when anchors run rampant and aren’t jettisoned, the whole ship gets dragged down. When the rudders don’t do their job, the ship becomes directionless, and less gets accomplished. The vast majority (90%+) of the people in any organization are average workers, or just punching the clock. The city is not really any different from a private business in that regard. The problem comes in with the forces that act to motivate and reward all three groups.
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Those Who Hunt Abuse

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In the future, I’m going to hold my reviews until I have had time to think about a show and work through it in my mind. A couple of weeks ago, I posted three snap reviews, and in the end, I was only comfortable with one and a half of them. I need to spend more time mulling over my opinion and choosing my words. Also, I find that my opinion often changes around 48-72 hours after I’ve seen something, as the “refrigerator factor” kicks in: i.e.: that odd realization you have after the show on the way to the refrigerator. Ok, so I’m slow. I already posted the re-written Nuku Nuku Dash, and now I’m re-writing Those Who Hunt Elves for this post. However, this is going to be a much briefer review than the original. (Oh, stop thanking me. Grrr. :-[ )

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Windows Still Sucks – MAJOR EXPLOIT ALERT!

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Well, guess what? A new vulnerability in Windows, and this time, it’s a doozy. All you have to do is visit the wrong website and you’re screwed. At least you’re screwed if you have Windows XP or Server 2003. Us 2k stick-in-the muds are laughing. Win 2k is vulnerable too. Sorry, should have deleted that line after finding out.

Steven Den Beste drew everyone’s attention to a new exploit out there that will compromise your system the instant a specially malformed .wmf (Windows Media File) hits your system. The version of player you have is irrelevant, thus far.

Larry Seltzer says, on E-week:

Adware sites appear to be going hog-wild with this attack. According to Sunbelt Software, over a thousand sites are spreading more than 50 variants of it, thanks to an underground adware infection network that acts something like the DoubleClick of adware.

I’m told that there is a debate going on in Microsoft over whether to disable WMF file support in Internet Explorer. The fact that there’s a debate probably means that Microsoft has customers relying on this behavior, and that’s worth considering. To me the answer is clear: Leave it in and disable it by default. Create group and local policies to turn it back on so that larger customers and ISVs can re-enable it easily. This behavior should be extended to any, or at least most, nonstandard formats for IE.

I’m hesitant at this point to go into details until there is a patch, but my own research confirms that the potential for spreading this attack far and wide is immense and that easier vectors than Web pages exist. Microsoft has already posted the workaround, but unless a real patch is imminent, the company needs to make a registry-based workaround and publish it through the Automatic Updates system so that users are quickly protected.

Some people laugh when I tell them I won’t move from one version of Windows to the next until I’m forced to. (I’m still on Win2k, and only changed from ’98 in 2002). Others pooh-pooh and say I’m paranoid when I refuse to install things like Google Desktop or WeatherBug. It’s not my fault they’re suckers for the latest, greatest, and least secure. (Yes, I’m insufferably smug towards them when this happens.) There is a reason I haven’t had any virus infections on my system in three years (only two in the last six, and few spyware infestations). Actually there’s five reasons: Norton Anti-Virus, Lavasoft Ad-Aware, Zone-Alarm, my router, and common sense. I’m not ultimately hacker-proof, but if you get in, you earned it.

Unfortunately this exploit would earn it in a heartbeat if I hit any site with it–I’m not immune . It may be that no Windows system is, not even ’95. (Well, ok, Win 3.1, but that doesn’t count!)

Win XP users need to go to Start > Run and type in: regsvr32 -u %windir%\system32\shimgvw.dll

2k users type in: REGSVR32 /U SHIMGVW.DLL

More information here.

Reliant: Up to No Good?

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Earlier this week, I consulted with my brother over an offer from Reliant to “lock in” a 5% discount against the fuel adjustment fee, now that the 14% discount they were offering was about to expire. The reason they were giving was that natural gas prices hadn’t dropped like they had predicted, and so this offer would allow the customer to continue getting at least some discount.

After researching various rate offers on the net, we were disinclined to accept the offer; the billing structure is not that confusing, but the way they talked about the discount seemed designed to confuse the reader. It was a definite that if we signed up, our rate would be locked, and I had a bad feeling about that. Nobody in business is going to do you a favor; at best they might make a decent offer to beat out competition. At worst, you, the customer, might be tempted with a “great offer” that was anything but. I felt this was such a case; if they were trying to lock the current rate in, they were betting on lower natural gas prices in the near future.

I was spot on. Except that it’s already happening.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me not at all… “Nyah! Nyah! Nyah!”

H/T to Tom Kirkendall

Not ANOTHER One?!

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Tropical storm Zeta has formed in the Eastern Atalantic. Good grief.
PajamasMedia story here.
Weather.com is on it.
NOAA has the details and real story. (Very, very little chance of it making hurricane strength: about 5% in the next day, then down to 2%, and oddly, rising back to 5% if it’s still together after the 2nd day. It’s 25% that it will dissipate entirely within 24 hours).

Kibbitzing Today’s Stories

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I decided to hang out over at the Houston Bozonicle website and check a few of the articles out. I didn’t need those brain cells, and I was feeling a bit snarky anyway. So, snarking away…

Grandma and a waste of taxpayer money: Bottom line: this is just another way to transfer our tax money into developers’ pockets. How about we just stop allowing construction in such areas, or require the homes to be built well above grade? That would be much more sensible.

Leave it to the professionals, please: Disturbing story about what happened amid the confusion and chaos of an apartment fire. First the tenants tried the “help” the gate open faster — which caused it to become jammed shut. (Hello… security systems?) Then when they didn’t think the firemen were moving fast enough, they started yanking tools off the fire truck themselves. Have to wonder if they all were accounted for afterwards. One other thing that bothers me: why was the special camera left on the truck? The department says it’s because of the necessity of detailing a crew to it and necessary set-up time. In other words, it sounds like my suspicions were correct: it’s a gee-whiz techno toy that is useless in the real world.

Follow the link for more snark:

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Pole-Vaulting the Shark

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Captain’s Quarters alerts us to the fact that the NY Times, the AP, the Guardian, and CNN have all just made themselves the laughingstocks of the entire technical world. Hell, they’ve just made themselves out to be jokes to millions of people not in the technical world; anyone with the slightest bit of internet savvy. You see they all just carried a Very Important Story on the sinister spying being done by the NSA who have “accidentally” (on purpose of course…) begun using a tool to invade the privacy of computer users everywhere and track their moves by . . .

. . . wait for it . . .

. . . wait . . .

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Wish I Could Do that

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I need to learn how to write short reviews with fewer spoilers, like Steven Den Beste. He reviews the first of the three Nuku Nuku series here. He also includes more pictures. 🙂 I was planning on doing a pictoral comparison of the T-74 in Those Who Hunt Elves with the actual Mitsubishi Heavy Industries T-74 (looks like they did a fantasticly accurate job drawing it), but ended up dealing with wireless router issues and decided to finish the “What’s Wrong” article (which still needs polishing, so it won’t appear today) and the Top Ten Worst Americans list.

Edit: Re-reading the above and seeing the abrupt train-of-thought change, it occurs to me that no one should have much trouble believing that I suffer from AD/HD.

Top 10 Worst Americans: the List

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Well, here is my 10 Worst Americans in History, in no particular order. To make this list, I used 3 criteria.

1. The person must have been personally influential and powerful, not merely notorious. Thus the various Mansons, Oswalds, and Jim Jones’ of history are disqualified.

2. His/her actions should have had a decisive and long-term effect on the nation, not merely be the reflection or embodiment of the times. Thus the Jane Fondas and John Kerrys are eliminated.

3. In the absence of item #2, a certain level of evil or wrongness qualifies, but it has to have a reach beyond the merely personal.

Without further ado, the list:
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Top 10 Worst Americans

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All Things Beautiful has challenged the blogsphere to produce a list of the Top 10 Worst Americans of all time. This is going to take some thought, because I am not sure most people’s kneejerk inclusions are correct. Appearing in many lists are:

Alger Hiss
The Rosenbergs
Nixon
Carter
Jane Fonda
Arron Burr

Not sure about some of those…. Bad, yes. Top 10 material? Hmmmm. I’m going to have to think about this.

Hat tip to the Captain.

Nuku Nuku Dash, or Why You Shouldn’t Mix Plots

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Edit: 12/28/05: This is a very long review I wrote over two days, and it contains a ton of spoilers, even before the spoiler warning below. My original review here was based on having seen only the first four episodes and then revised after thinking about it overnight. This one is based on the full 12-episode series, and goes into a lot of detail about what’s wrong with the series. If it’s more than you feel like reading, don’t say I didn’t warn you. 🙂 I’ll summarize for the brief-of-attention-span: It sucked. The writers tried to milk the Nuku Nuku franchise by changing it to a serious drama with a romance sub-plot, while keeping a lot of the whacky elements of the original two series. Ultimately, this doomed the story to mediocrity at best. However, a pair of twists the writers threw in during the last two minutes of the last episode left me furious at having my chain yanked. I thought that they’d actually done something daring with the romance sub-plot and was giving them high marks for it when, in the last ten seconds, they chickened out and went for the traditional happy ending.

All Purpose Cultural Catgirl Nuku Nuku Dash:

This review is far different from the original one I wrote, as the original was based solely on the first DVD and how my thoughts developed after watching it. Unfortunately, after watching the last two, my opinion on this anime flipped straight into the “trash and never bother watching again” category. Oh, I might watch it–if and when I feel like screaming at the writers again.

There were 3 Nuku Nuku series, of which this one is the third. The first was an OVA (Original Video Animation, or as we call it, straight-to-video/DVD), the second was a TV series based on the OVA, and this third effort is an OVA — and a mess.

I was tempted to say it was a disaster, but that’s overboard; it wasn’t horrible, it was just a series of bad mistakes. The biggest was that the writers couldn’t make up their mind what story they were telling. The first two Nuku Nuku’s were comedy/farce. This OVA was serious romance/drama. Unfortunately, they chose not to make a clean sweep of characters and start over with a different setting. I am cynically inclined to think that was so they could milk the Nuku Nuku franchise, but for the purpose of this review, I am going to treat it as an artistic decision, not marketing.

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Minor Update — and Some Anime, of Course.

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Still working on the “What’s wrong with City Employees?” post. It’s a lot more complicated, detailed, and difficult to lay this out for non-employees than I expected. I may have to break it in two, but hope to have it out before New Year’s, either way.

In personal notes, I just got word that another aunt has died. Not blood kin, she was wife to my namesake uncle (who passed from Alzheimer’s a decade ago). And Mother’s doctors are dragging their feet; I don’t know if the problem is the insurance or if they just think cancer takes a holiday too. She finally demanded and got an appointment with the oncologist… for after New Year’s. They still haven’t decided on a treatment, dammit; the oncologist was talking about getting a second opinion on surgery. Hey, no problem, I’m sure those cancer cells aren’t going anywhere while you jack around. Assholes.

It’s beginning to look like 20 years ago, when I lost a slew of relatives over a two year span, finally stopping with my father’s death, just seven months before I graduated high school. My older brother noticed that too.

Enough of that crap, it’s time to make this post utterly schizoid.

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New York MTA Strike — Lessons for Houston?

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I can’t help but read the comments formerly posted to the unofficial blog of the NY transit strike, and see a theme that appears here in Houston also. It’s the same old equation: Public sector union greed + public indifference = collision. No one wins.

Thanks to Dartblog, the comments have been saved, even though the original blog tried to sanitize them. As I read through the first dozen or so comments, all of them fell into the expected molds:

Public: “You’re greedy bastards! And don’t you realize that Public Servant = Public Slave? Now get back to work; you’re making things inconvenient for me!”
Workers: “You just don’t understand what we go through! Waaaaahhhhh!”

Or in their own words:

“when you self righteous people have to go to your jobs and endure people spitting at you,assaulting you, cursing at you and simply hating you for having enough sense to take the test to get our jobs than you have aright to your misguided opinions.oh yeah how about when you go to work, is there anybody taking a piss a few feet from you or maybe some pervert playing with himself. how about your bosses do they write you up for wearing scarves in the winter time or maybe take you off the job because your top button on your shirt is not buttoned? you opinion filled people have no idea what we go through on a daily basis. at least firemen,teachers, cops and even sanitation are respected for what they do.”

and on the flip side, three quotes.

“I think you all probably deserve the raise but this is no way to get it! When you pledge to be a public servant you do so above your own personal needs.

Who are you to take well-paying jobs (for your education levels) serving millions of people and then hold us hostage by striking?

Which part of PUBLIC SERVANT did you not understand?

These serve to counterpoint–and prove– the single best of the early comments (sorry, but I’m not reading all 722 to pull out the gems!):

A question to all who condemn the strike should be: would you take this job, at their pay and conditions? If not, why not?

I think we all know the real answer is of class superiority, disparity and complete apathy towards laborers who clearly are not by any means wealthy or close to it. To condemn these people wanting a fair shake for both new and current members is a shameful day in which the next strategy of the government would presumably be to privatize it.
(Emphasis added–ubu)

Now take that question, and apply it to the wages I posted for jobs in the City of Houston yesterday. Add to that, the recent moves by the SEIU to aggressively organize city workers (after years of benign neglect by the current union AFSCME) and their, er, overly enthusiastic support for Sue Lovall, successful candidate for City Council. Is Houston headed for a New York/California-style collision of the public sector with the public interest? Maybe . The elements are there or assembling themselves. Very disgruntled employees; low pay, cuts in benefits, no future, no respect. An apathetic/blind public, uncaring about the situation of the public sector employees. A powerful and determined union, albeit without the general support of the employees — so far.

I won’t cut the public any slack for it’s attitude towards public sector employees. Too many times, people equate “Public Sector” with “Public Slave.” And there is a strong attitude towards city/government employees as the products of job programs; i.e.: they couldn’t hold a real job so they got hired by the government. I know when I tried to break out several years ago, it was damn near hopeless. You could watch the interviewer reading down the resume for the first time,* and asking questions; then they would reach the part about current employement.

Boom. You could see it in their posture, and often their face, and tenor of their questions–rarely did they bother to conceal it. “What the hell did they send me a city employee for? Nobody is going to hire someone who’s been with the city that long!” Sometimes, they weren’t that restrained.

Nor is the general public much better. I’ve had people break off conversations and walk away upon finding out I’m a public sector employee. I’ve had women remark to their friends (right in front of my face!) “Oh, honey, you wouldn’t be interested in him, he works for the city–he doesn’t have any money!” I mean damn. That’s just harsh.

It’s also true, but I made that point already, yesterday.

On the flip side, I’m not going to cut the employees or the unions any slack either. The last thing this city needs is to end up like New York or California, with powerful public sector unions dictating a fiscally suicidal policy to the employer. I might be the only employee in all of Houston to hold this view, but I don’t believe in public sector unions. I supported Reagan when he fired the PATCO strikers and broke that union over 20 years ago, and my opinion hasn’t changed on that matter since, even if I am a government employee now: Government employees have got no business belonging to unions as they exist today. A public sector union should be no more than a method of streamlining feedback & communication from employees to the politicians who ultimately run the system. That job cannot be left to the managers and directors, because it provides for too much insulation and the top bureaucrats end up with all the power, because without an alternative channel, they control the flow of information from the rank and file to the politicians. (Information flow is power. Just ask CBS.)

After almost 20 years with the city, I have reached the conclusion that there’s really two areas that the mythical “average city employee” lacks, compared to a private sector counterpart. However, I’m going to save that for a related post that I’ve been tinkering with for some time now. Look for it some time after Christmas, entitled, “What’s Wrong With City Employees?”

In the meantime, you might want to tune to KTRH AM 740 at 10 am–noon today, as councilmember Michael Berry will be discussing unions, the MTA strike, and what it means to Houston. Listen here.

Retiring on 90% of WHAT?

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A lot has been made of the fact that city employees get to retire on 90% of their pay, with donations of only 4% (now 5%) of their pay. What the press never got around to reporting last year during the pension mess, was that employee pay stinks. It stinks like the stuff the Solid Waste department or Republic Waste and Overbilling Services hauls off. Well ok, maybe not like the taxpayer money the latter hauled off recently, but then it sort of had its own stink.

In a recent article about the Controller’s audit into Republic, I mentioned in passing that we had problems hiring qualified applicants at $18k per year to haul garbage off. This probably has a lot to do with why we privatized. Wait, let’s rephrase that. It probably has a lot to do with the justification used to push the privatization. I have a hard time believing that a private company could get more and better people to do the same crappy work without paying them a whole lot more. (Which makes one wonder if what Republic was really doing was overbilling the city to pay for the higher wages it had to pay. No way to know, and I can’t even confirm what it pays employees — oddly, their website lacks a “Careers with Republic” link. . . (Heh.)

But I can show what the city pays. For a Solid Waste Driver “Salary Range – Pay Grade 6 $617 – $810 Biweekly $16,042-21,060 Annually” But hey, who cares, it’s garbage! Nobody’s going to pay a lot to have it hauled off. But don’t you just love the part where it says “WORKING CONDITIONS: There are occasional exposures to extreme levels of temperature, air pollution, noise, chemical gasses and substances and/or contagious diseases or physical trauma conditions of a short-term nature, such as broken bones or temporary loss of sight or hearing.”

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The World According to Harry

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“We’ve become like the House of Commons. Whoever has the most votes wins. It hasn’t worked that way in 216 years.” — Harry Reid, House Minority (Democratic) Leader.

Yes, he actually had the nerve to say those words, though whether it was before or after he used a parliamentary trick to shut the Senate down again, I don’t know. You know how it is. Those pesky voters put people in office that they want to pass laws, but God the higher being of your choice / none of the above forbid they be allowed to do their job if they are in the majority.

The mindset of the Democrats has been exposed for all to see. Democrat != Democracy. That != is programmer for “is not equal to.” But in this case, “in opposition to” is more accurate. Anyone know what the symbol is for that one?

The mask is off; vote for a Democrat at your peril.