COVID-19 Shutdown Diary
I had to pick up a prescription yesterday at Walmart. I arrived just to find the pharmacy to be caged/closed in the 1 PM hour. I had gotten an email notification my prescription was ready; I double-checked store hours. So what the devil is going on? I saw one employee leave through a door and it looked like there were lights on in the cage, I finally managed to catch the attention of an employee in the cage; she finally briefly opened the door they were off for lunch and to come back at 2 PM. Dude! Don't you guys think you might post that for customers? The operating hours listed outside the cage doesn't specify a lunch hour/closure. Maybe my expectations have been influenced by dealing with apartment offices, which often close when showing apartments to prospective tenants and usually try to give a time they'll be back.
The store was filled with fellow masked desperados. Walmart had a posted notice at the entrance reminding them of Hogan's face mask mandate. Some women were simply wearing scarves pulled up over over their noses. I saw one lady not wearing a mask, but no one was around her shopping clothes. I was mortified when I innocently coughed (once, not a coughing fit). I didn't want anyone thinking I was symptomatic. But no one even raised an eye to me. One new observation for me in terms of stock issues is frozen veggies. I sometimes buy frozen pepper and onion strips for making omelets, and I noticed their veggie shelves were all but wiped out. On the paper goods front, I did see some bath issue multi-packs available, maybe up to a dozen or so, trivial compared to normal but still. Plenty of paper towels, but again a mere fraction of normal. Fresh meat and especially chicken were in limited supply, but they had a good supply, e.g., of grass-fed ground beef, and I picked up a couple of pounds, mostly because of potential meat shortages in the news lately.
One interesting thing I noticed when I manually reordered my prescription this week (I'll skip my usability analysis (e.g., I had to go through a pharmacy link in my account menu)) was a reorder items option, and I was astonished to see literally dozens of items from past shopping trips listed. I'm not sure how they linked purchases to my online account unless they linked it by my credit card. So this is linked to my online order pickup/deliver service. It's curious they had that data, say, to point out certain sales based on my purchase history; Sam's Club does send out more personalized email notifications, but it's more like, running low on these past purchase items (not like, we have promotional sales on these items you might like)? I haven't used the pickup/delivery option, primarily because I get some exercise roaming the aisles. I came close during some outpatient procedures when I couldn't drive for a few days.
A job search during the COVID-19 crisis is not fun. It seems that, at least for some IT professional gigs, employers are willing to discuss remote work starts. Theoretically, as a database administrator, usually everything can be done remotely, but usually there are security policies for being on site. I worked for an ERP software publisher in the university market back in 2008; usually travel expenses are charged to the client, so if clients were willing to let us connect remotely, they could save up to $2000 or so depending on logistics.
I worked with a private college in Kansas one of my nephews attended that way; the client DBA was a pain in the ass to deal with (e.g., she was supposed to have a new database up and running for the start of the week-long engagement; I could, of course, create one for the client. She didn't have one set up plus wanted to fine-tune layout with a volume manager, so she caused a 2-day delay while I basically had to sit on my hands. Then I needed to do a 15-minute setup on a web server, but she refused to give me access, felt that she could do it all on her own given her prior acquired "expertise" with web servers, ignoring the detailed instructions I provided and of course fucked things up.)
Others, like a community college on Long Island, insisted on my being on site. That was also "fun"; I had to train a key client DBA with narcolepsy; now as a former professor, I had to deal with students napping or otherwise not paying attention, but this was ridiculous. Not to mention he left during the sessions, interrupted by whatever work "emergencies". When a functional colleague visited campus a few weeks later, he complained I never created an account for him; this was a lie. That's what he was using for training. There were other issues, like the college was never expiring students, so if you took a course in basketweaving in 1982, our software continued to generate records for every subsequent semester, which basically dramatically increased the size of the database. Then I had to deal with the retarded state/contractor DBA's saying the actual size of the database exceeded the space constraints for their backup procedures, and so I would have to "shrink" the database for their Procrustean procedures. Now I'm not sure why my employers hadn't designed the product for these idiosyncratic client policies, but this is not the kind of change you can get development to do in the short term. I think the client ended up expiring a lot of old student records. But I was a high-profile target, the unwanted bearer of bad news on both fronts. Welcome to my world. All of this is highly political, and you don't last long if you have petty clients bitching about you. My last client with this employer was a nonstandard gig which the company's support staff hadn't resolved a performance issue over 6 months where database refreshes to a database clone were taking several times longer than a usual hour. The Asian-American IT manager was furious I hadn't fixed it my first day on site (keep in mind, I was not a support engineer) and wanted my company to roll me off the gig. I eventually discovered the problem; the client insisted they had implemented a performance patch, but I found they had renamed a key dll file, essentially backing out the patch. I took a red-eye home back to the East Coast later that week to find my boss had scheduled me for an exit interview; I was fired.
There were a lot of nuances to the handling of expenses. You often had to deal with the client's preferred vendors (e.g., hotels), New York had per diem (meal caps, not disbursements) policies for meals (including non-coverage for alcohol, but for all practical purposes, I'm a teetotaler). I had to eat certain meals (say, lunch) in campus dining halls (so I couldn't expense, say, lunch at McDonald's); that actually wasn't that bad. Campus dining options were much improved from the time I had boarded at OLL and Texas (Austin). But I've always been a tightwad spending other people's money. I would often book the lowest auto rental available, like a subcompact. Same thing with hotels. When I was training for a large defense contractor on the Florida panhandle, I could have booked a room at a hotel with window views on the Gulf Coast through the company's travel website; instead I booked an interior hotel maybe charging $40-50/night less. Depending on the gig, I might simply pick up something at a supermarket vs. go out to dinner; I remember on the Long Island gig, I went to Boston Market for a $12 meal, when I think per diem would have allowed me to spend triple that. It sometimes pissed off my colleagues, who said (on the Florida hotel), "Why should you care? It's not your money." I remember one colleague during a week of training in Malvern, PA ate the most expensive item on the sports bar menu, a ribeye steak, each night. I could never do that. It was like one of my UWM senior/tenured professor colleagues who claimed and pocketed per diem while eating at $3 buffets in Vegas. That's basically a form of theft. But UWM had its own petty cost controls; they initially rejected a $3 buffet receipt for reimbursement because they counted a snack on the return flight home as my meal. When I countered, "Okay, dude! I want to collect per diem for my trip", they sheepishly countered, "We can't do that; we've seen your receipts!" They eventually reimbursed the $3; it wasn't do much the money as the principle.
Getting back to the current job search, so some recruiters are discussing out-of-state opportunities, but wanting short-term commitments for relocation, and I don't even know, e.g., if I can book a UHaul or mover helpers during this crisis. At least
some states consider moving an "essential business". Some vendors recommend waiting past the current period to book moving activities. Still, the familiar reader knows I have issues with Indian recruiters; there's usually a sinkhole of time and too many contacts dealing with them. Typically you start up with a staff recruiter who goes into tedious detail about your background, rate/compensation, etc. There's a certain script (set of procedures) they go by, and they will try to push you on turnarounds of paperwork, like rate confirmations. But usually, the real recruiter who actually submits you to the client will insist on a conversation over ground already covered. For instance, I recently had to deal with a recruiter who wanted to confirm I would relocate to Richmond, VA for a contract for hire. (Usually I'm reluctant to move, typically at my expense, for less than a perm offer, although employment for IT is typically at will, meaning the employer can fire you for any or no reason.) I'm like "Dude! Since 2013, I've moved from Maryland to West Virginia to South Carolina to Arizona and then back to Maryland again for job-related reasons. Why are we even having this conversation? I knew from the get-go I would need to eventually locate to Virginia."
There are other time vampire recruiters as well. For instance, I get job listings all the time for SAP Basis administrators, although my last related gig was in 1996 and the position write-up wants 10 recent years of exposure. Some will cold-call and promise to send a follow-up email with contact information that never happens; that's just unethical. I will get listings for SQL Server DBA positions, even though I don't hold Microsoft certifications or SQL Server experience; in fact I was laid off my last temp gig because Army managers decided they didn't want to pay for Oracle licensing/support on their Microsoft Azure cloud platform. (It probably didn't help Oracle suing over losing its bid on the cloud computing contract.) Another recruiter tried to interest me in a networking post, even though I had told him I didn't have Cisco certifications, etc. I'll get COBOL listings, even though I never programmed using it professionally, just teaching it for a few years in academia (which most recruiters don't see as real world experience). It's like, look I have 25 years of fulltime Oracle DBA experience. That's likely the skill set most appealing to employers.
It might surprise the reader to know even an MIS PhD can run into various PC issues to sort out that I have encountered at home during the crisis. For example, one vexing issue was the rechargeable keyboard/mouse wireless combo stopped working one day. I tried recharging both devices, resetting the USB reconnection (including other USB ports). Long story short, this set came with a USB extension cord for the wireless receiver; the problem was with the cable; I could plug the receiver into the USB port directly and functionality returned. Another example is that I was using the ROBOCOPY utility to back up one of my USB flash drives to an external drive directory. I suddenly realized one day I couldn't see the backup folder in Windows Explorer. I looked at my Explorer settings for viewing hidden files, etc. I could see the backup directory in an administrative command prompt. I suspected and subsequently confirmed that this was an artifact of ATTRIB file settings flipped on in the default ROBOCOPY command. Finally, during a recent iTunes update, I no longer could see video podcasts, e.g., Fox News Sunday. So in the interim I had set video files to run off VLC software and accessed the iTunes podcast folder directly to watch the podcast in question.
Twitter Statistics
Well, I essentially predicted while I reached near a new high in followers, I've usually seen a rollback of several. Some will follow me after hashtag games and probably figure "what the hell" with the contrarian serious tweets. Who knows? I sometimes purposefully will use colorful language to make a point. So I had gained 4 new followers earlier this month and have lost the equivalent, so likely will be unchanged this month.
Old Days
It's been a long time since my undergraduate days at OLL; I physically haven't been on campus since graduation in my late teens as a double major in math and philosophy. There are some reasons for that that are beyond the scope of this post (I was not happy with certain administrators). Now I have quite good memories of many former teachers and professors, including various details most people wouldn't remember. So a recent OLL email referenced former OLL President Sister Jane Ann Slater. An immediate bell rang in my memory--isn't that my former chemistry professor? Yup, although I last took a class from her as a 17-year-old. I initially had intended to major in secondary education as a high school math teacher, and I probably would have used science as a second teaching area. But I became hooked on philosophy in my same freshman year and reset my teaching ambitions to the college level.
What particularly I remember from Dr. Slater's classes was one heavily weighted lab exercise where we were given a limited unknown solution sample and had to run tests to identify what was in the solution. It was like writing a crossword puzzle in ink; you couldn't afford to waste the solution rerunning tests. I succeeded without using all my sample. Pretty fun but stressful process.
I don't know where I placed along the timeline of her dozen years or so of teaching on the university level; I think she started out teaching K-12 and then picked up her PhD at Colorado. I think she eventually became OLL President about a decade back and then a few years later the San Antonio bishop recruited her to become the first female chancellor of the diocese. I'm not sure of the specifics, but I think it involves work with diocese archive records, among other things.
Cable TV Commercials
Yes, I remember when Joe Namath played pro football; he led the first AFL victory in the Super Bowl before the merger with the NFL. I wasn't even in high school yet. I think he retired after his last season with a different team in 1977.
So I don't know why in watching cable TV, I'm being buried under literally dozens of Medicare Advantage commercials daily; I'm not even age-eligible for Medicare. And who is that spokesman for most of these heavily rotated spots? Namath. I think I see him more now than when he was still playing. Now I feel like throwing a shoe at the TV when he comes on.
