Approaching the 10-Year Blogiversary
We're less than 2 months away from the tenth year anniversary of this blog; I think with this post I've officially published at least one post daily on average over that period, which is incredible since I had no clear objective or intent at the time. I have evolved from more of a pragmatic conservative to a principled minarchist libertarian-conservative. You will find occasional small gaps in daily publishing given Internet outages, travel, moving, etc. To be honest, I wish my readership was larger; my Twitter followers are more numerous and I recently observed my fifth anniversary there. But this is still a method for me to flesh out political opinions.A Postscript To My "Joke" Post
This doesn't really relate to Trump per se but a tragic autobiographical story (most of which remains untold) where I showed you can find humorous moments under dark experience. With few exceptions (I wrote an autobiographical post on my academic experience early in the blog), I rarely reveal specifics including names of clients, employers, etc.I really don't discuss my IT professional career, and I've faced more than my fair share of adverse circumstances. Almost all of my stories remain untold. Sometimes you are asked to do something unethical or you witness something unethical. For instance, I used to work for Oracle Consulting; I loved working for Oracle, and under the right circumstances I would do it again, but you have to put up with a lot of travel. My longest gig was for six months on a City of Oracle project, a so-called platinum project because it was high-profile (I think an Oracle VP sat on the committee). I knew I was transitioning off as tech lead (probably due to expenses in traveling from Chicago); this was a weird transition because it wasn't a case where my practice manager said, "OK, Ron, this is your next assignment which starts .... in ..." He wanted me to go to some internal job assignment board and apply for relevant gigs. I ended up getting accepted as a lead at some GE site in Indiana, only to find out my boss used this as leverage to land me on some big Chicago City project. I wasn't happy and asked him why? "I don't have to pay expenses, because you're considered local [in the far southwest suburbs]." In the interim, I was sent to an auto parts supplier south of Atlanta. This was an ERP installation, but when I got there, I found no software waiting for me (this was well before software distribution over the Internet), and the best I could do is to have Oracle overnight the CD's. Only someone didn't get the disks to Fed Ex or whoever in time, so I end up losing 2-3 days when it used to take maybe a full week on Windows to install. My boss refused to extend me (against my protests). [Oracle promised to send a replacement, never did, and the client eventually ended up scrapping the initiative.]
So when I finally go on site, I find Oracle has about 27 consultants on the project, 6 of them DBA's. The client doesn't even have their production hardware. So what is it I've been pulled to do? Paperwork--not technical work but paperwork. Not technical paperwork, but paperwork with deadlines. In my case I was being told to come up with numbers literally out the thin air showing how much money Chicago was going to save using our software. I have little to no information on Chicago operations or personnel. I was searching for anything; I remember thinking, "Well, maybe I can argue they can close their (annual) books faster." I finally get authorization to talk to someone in the City and ask her how long it takes them to close their books. "Good question; we've never closed our books. That's why you guys are here" And everyday I'm getting nagged over my tardy deliverable. It's unethical and I went to my boss to say I wanted off the project. That's not exactly how you get ahead in business, but I was not going to file what I regarded as a fraudulent deliverable for the sake of my job. This was not why I signed a job offer to work for Oracle. I then got sent to my last project for Oracle in Oklahoma City, which I've partially discussed in earlier posts. (The client had 3 senior predecessors walked off in the first 2 weeks; what the hell was I walking into?) I basically single-handedly turned around the project, only to find myself laid off.
It really wasn't my life's dream to resurface at another troubled City of Chicago enterprise, the scenario for the incident described in this week's post. This was a nasty time following the Nasdaq bust and the 9/11 tragedy; I think I heard someone said 150 computer/consulting companies went belly-up; projects dried up, and other companies. if they weren't cutting headcount themselves, weren't looking to hire anyone who they saw as likely to jump ship as soon as the economy recovered. Consulting companies, if they were hiring and lucky enough to be locked into long-term contracts, would only hire you as billable from day 1 and were likely to lay you off if they couldn't dovetail your project completion with another project elsewhere.
All of this is necessary to explain how Unisys Consulting had misled the client on how they were staffing the project. They were presenting to the city that they were staffing the project with Unisys perm employees, but in fact almost everyone I met on the project staff was subcontracting to Unisys. I'm not complaining (the operations group I subcontracted to was in a different business unit), but I took a 40% cut on former rates I charged just a couple of years earlier (which themselves were deep discounts from what consulting companies were charging for my services) and I had no benefits to speak of. However, I thought what Unisys was doing was wrong; I knew about it, but if I said anything, I would likely be terminated, and I didn't have a follow-up gig.
My First Trip to an Aldi's Supermarket
I had seen their inserts in my weekly mail circulars; I was vaguely aware they were owned by a German family business dynasty. I recently learned a few things while surfing the click-bait Internet the other day. There is an infamous family dynasty schism, and they go under two names in the US: Aldi's and, yes, Trader Joe's. I've written many posts, probably particularly in my nutrition blog, on Trader Joe's. I first visited a Trader Joe's during that Oakland project I discussed earlier in the post. Trader Joe's is sort of a private-label fusion of a supermarket and health food store. They carry a few national brands (e.g., one of my favorites: Food For Life's Ezekiel bread (at the best prices I've seen anywhere) It's difficult to explain what I might buy: in the earlier visits, they often had a barrel of cellophane-wrapped dark chocolate, they had a vast selection of nuts, seeds, nut butters; they carried buffalo and venison, which I rarely saw in other supermarkets.Well, the click-bait presentation mentioned some Aldi quirks that had me initially confused, like a mechanism that requires you deposit (say, 25 cents) to access a cart (which you get back when you return the cart. They also explained that the chain operates on a small headcount, you might end up picking up packages from boxes vs. employees unloading items from cartons, that sort of thing. And apparently Aldi's is very price competitive to Walmart's on similar items.
So I made my first trip today. I was initially confused by the cart thing but someone abandoned an empty cart so I grabbed it. The first thing I noticed is that it's the cleanest and most orderly store I've seen since my grandfather's mom-and-pop grocery. It's not that other stores are dirty and messy, but it's like this story was ready for inspection, not a hair out of place. A significant percentage of organic, non-gluten, items. The prices are very good. You have some variety but Bernie Sanders won't have to choose among 23 brands of deodorant. I bought some things I haven't noticed elsewhere like strawberry-rhubarb bars, Margherita pizza, Indian simmering sauces, black bean chips, srirachi mustard, sprouted grain (e.g., Ezekiel bread) wraps. Their Romaine lettuce is not sourced from Yuma. I didn't see anything under the Trader Joe's brand, but I could easily see Trader Joe's stocking anything Aldi's sells (I'm not saying they will or would, but you have the same high-quality, low-price private label concept at play).
In summary, you aren't going to find the kind of variety and name brands, or extent of products (e.g., I wanted to buy plums but I didn't see them; Walmart always has them)
The last quirk I noticed was they don't bag your purchases; you can buy bags to pack them yourselves after the registers. I didn't notice because I was too busy unloading my goods and the checkout guy was scanning items as fast into another cart. It wasn't until after I paid that I realized they weren't bagged. (That's okay: I had Trader Joe's paper bags in my car.)
Final analysis: I'm still going to do a lot of shopping at Walmart because they have a wider variety of grass-fed beyond ground beef and in other categories. But this won't be my last visit, and I'm less likely to drive 25 miles to Trader Joe's
