We had a brief warm break in the weather; that explains the sunny outdoor shot. In fact, the cold has been wicked, and from the northwest with a wind, meaning the ocean can’t keep us in the comfort zone. The move monopolizes everything, since it turns out the people that were to make storage arrangements for Theresa may not have been certain about that. I have not gone in to the shoe shop for the entire week. Rain slows things down, and cold means no business at all. Plus, like many of Florida’s older malls, the premises is air-conditioned only, there is no heater. Nor is a shoe repair facility the place to put any type of exposed heat at all, being full of every manner of fine, dusty particles.
Today’s trivia comes from the Middle Ages. During the Crusades, all manner of knights went over to the Holy Land. They obeyed the orders of whatever leader they had sworn loyalty to. If the leader was killed, or sent them packing, knights got on their horses and headed back to Europe. The problem became one of employment, they had to hire themselves out to whoever would pay. They became “free lances”.
That last trivia fact also is cheating on time, as it comes from a booklet Theresa brought me to read, and I won’t get it until tomorrow. I won’t quote the source, as the topic and the trivia it contains were already known to me for years. It was a book about the job loss years of the 80s and 90s, a subject I have given much treatment myself. It points out items like it takes Mazda only 5 employees to do what Ford requires 400 to accomplish. Written in 1994, and contains too many concepts I already classified as obsolete by then, however, it is interesting [to me] how well [today’s] facts matched my own predictions.
Too many books of that era go on about the lives of people after they’ve lost their traditional “jobs”. My sharp distinction between management and labor continues to this date. Too many books don’t seem to notice they are focused on what happened to canned managers who started successful “consulting” firms. Hourly workers are not much mentioned. But don’t get me wrong, most of the workers I’ve ever know deserve all the hardships they are getting. As I said to my co-workers in 1991 when the trouble began [at my company], “I didn’t see you sitting next to me in evening school over the past five years.”
In a very deliberate design, I used my entire “job” life to fund the classes I needed to become self-employed. I admit it. I’ve always been dismayed by how much money was being paid for unionized garbage men, truck drivers and construction workers. I knew it was not going to last; that the generation before me were the last to get away with it. Keep in mind that foresight is not wisdom, for I late in the game discovered I did not like the career I had chosen. But goddam, I make one good business planner and cost accountant.
And that is probably why such booklets keep me reading. I laugh how they go into detail about how “future” employees will have to take a congruent vision of the business, how they must take active steps to ensure the overall success of the operation. I say the opposite—if you can do anything like that, quit and never work for somebody else again. The moment the management expects extra duty without extra pay, all “jobs” are a rip-off to the skilled worker, a free ride to the lazy. The only business I will knock myself out for is my own.
Now let me look at that flyer again. . . .
