Geek On The Mountain

A friend of Milenka’s recently had her daughter taken away by Child Protective Services. Okay, that happens. There’s obviously some sort of a problem somewhere in some way. Only Laura doesn’t know why they took her daughter away. Nor will anyone tell her. And according to another friend, who is a social worker, CPS isn’t required to actually give out ANY information at all. Apparently this is to protect the identity of anonymous tipsters. I’d even go so far as to say that there are 5th amendment issues with that kind of situation, even though there technically aren’t any (I think) because no one has been arrested. I can understand the need for anonymity but that doesn’t mean the parent(s) should be left in the dark.

So what’s a parent to do? The only thing that can be done: hire a lawyer. Of course that costs money. Laura is taking donations to help cover costs…see the link above.

This just uncovers a bit of a flaw in our legal system….the whole lawyer thing. Actually, the problem is so much with lawyers per se as it is in that lawyers are expensive. Then again, since that’s pretty much always true, it makes lawyers the issue. To summarize, a child is taken from it’s parent(s) without any information being offered in any way. The parent(s) can’t even mount a defense on their own. Mind you, this is the way the system is supposed to work. It’s designed to work that way if need be. Seeing as though you aren’t willing to just forget about the kid, all you can do is hire a lawyer.

Sound familiar? Maybe? Ever heard of the RIAA filesharing lawsuits? The gist of that situation (they’ve sued like 3,000 people now, btw) is that they file a lawsuit for potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages against people who have allegedly been sharing music on filesharing networks. They then offer to settle for amounts ranging from maybe $2,000 up to $30,000 or more, depending on what the person can afford. (Mind you that the lower end tends to apply for some of their younger targets…they’ve hit a couple of 12 year olds with lawsuits and emptied their college funds.) It’s likely that many of the people targeted would lose if the case actually went to court. It’s also likely that at least some would win. The trouble is, most people can’t afford to fight it. The RIAA’s lawyers can create such a hassle for the defendant that it’s actually probably cheaper for them to take the settlement than it is to hire a lawyer and wade through it all.

Now I’m not trying to downplay the “daughter taken from mother without explanation” side of this when compared to the “RIAA files lawsuits against filesharers” side. Similarly, I’d hope that CPS is a tad more… moral (not exactly the right word for the situation….my morals aren’t your morals aren’t somebody else’s morals, and I’m not preaching to anyone here)… than the RIAA. Nonetheless, there is a common thread here. Something’s clearly not totally right with our legal system when spending huge amounts of dough on lawyer is our only alternative.

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Naturally, I’ve mentioned this before, but I hate college students. They’re like a swarm of locusts (I guess anyways…. never actually seen that come to think of it..). They’re like a pack of dogs. They’re like…..tourists. They clog up the stores and roadways and it impossible to get around.

Mind you, I don’t have nothing against any particular student, or 2, or 3, or 20 even. It’s the 20,000 that’s the problem. I don’t know how many exactly stay around all year, but I’m guessing at least 75% are of the mirgrational type. When they show up in town, the population roughly doubles. On the up side, they don’t all have cars, but then on the down side, on those certain roads that lead to hundreds of apartment units, traffic will be up closer to 500%. Unfortunately, I work down one of those roads. There’s a little bridge over some railroad tracks that they tore out in the spring and it’s taking them a full year to replace (this I don’t get…they had the old bridge gone in the first few days the road was closed….why does it take 12 months to build a 20 foot bridge?) that would be one of the main routes for what amounts to about 500 apartments to get into town. Now, they’re taking the shorter of the two remaining routes which just so happens to be where my work is located. When I got out last night at 11:30 you wouldn’t have known it. Traffic was as bad or worse than you’d expect it to be in the middle of the day.

And the stores…The students swarm through the stores, once again making them several times more busy than they would be otherwise. Seeing as though I don’t particularly like people that much, this is extra annoying. Of course, they buy everything as well, so shelves tend to run on the empty side. These items are primarily a problem of the last couple of days and will last through this next week. You see, they all show back up and start buying things for their dorms/apartments and clear everyone out. I remember last year we were out on the weekend before classes started and we saw about 50 cars waiting at a light to turn towards walmart and target. Normally there would be closer to 10 or 15.

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We’ve recently been required to have a picture ID visible on our bodies at all time where I work. This is a fairly logical security measure, although it seems kind of silly since there’s only a few hundred people who work there and I’m pretty sure everyone knows everyone else, at least by site. It’s mostly just a pain to deal with.

Why are we doing this? Apparently by doing so, it means that we’re a secure building now, and we can therefore get a higher priority for our stuff coming through customs. It makes sense from the company’s standpoint at least as probably around half of our goods go through customs at some point or another. Now customs knows that we don’t have any terrorists sneaking around the building. Or rather, we’ll have a picture of any terrorist.

Or not. The really funny thing is that the building is set up stupidly to implement this kind of thing and no one seems to care. There is a lobby that anyone can walk into and a receptionist must unlock a door for anyone to get any further into the building. This is a “safe” zone where no one needs ID because it’s isolated. This is only in operation during the day though, and even then no employees ever really go up there. Everyone who works there comes in through a door that leads to a hallway that goes to the main floor in one direction and the break room in the other. And that’s the problem. Anyone who so much as comes into the break room as access to the whole building, meaning they’re supposed to have ID. So if you’re delivering a pizza, and you come to the door (on 2nd or 3rd shift sine they can go to the lobby during 1st) no one is supposed to let you inside. They’re supposed to go get a supervisor who can then come and escort the person into the building and issue them a temporary ID. I haven’t seen this happen yet. Someone just lets them in, they wait for someone to show up and pay them, and then they leave. It’s only been a few weeks though. Maybe by winter we’ll have it down so they stand outside in the snow for a while.

The whole photo ID thing is a nice idea and all, I just don’t think it’s worth much. I was once at a rather large company where several thousand employees worked. They were all required to wear ID and show it to security guards stationed at each entrance. Of course, being so many people, they pretty much just walked in, flashed their badge, and were waved through. So even in a place so big that everyone doesn’t know everyone else, the method can become pretty ineffective. I suppose it’s better to have ID than not to have ID, but it probably shouldn’t count for much either.

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The company I work for is working on putting a “no smoking” policy in place. By no smoking, I mean no smoking on their property.

Right now, people are only allowed to smoke outside. There’s a room built right outside the break room that just as benches and ash tray things just for this purpose. In a couple of weeks, they’re doing away with that though. People will only be allowed to smoke in their cars. One year after that, people won’t be allowed to do even that. I foresee people just walking across the street to an open field…

They had previously talked about making separate insurance rates for smokers and non-smokers to help offset costs. As the company VP put it, they’ve decided to take a more “proactive” approach. This translates to me paying more for my insurance than I might otherwise have to seeing as though I don’t smoke. But then, it really bugs me how they’re trying to intrude into people’s lives as well. Sure people are probably better off to not smoke, but that’s their own choice and the it’s really not the company’s place to try to tell people what to do in that manner. The only way it effects the company is in that smokers tend to have more health problems and therefore cost more to insure, but of course, we already covered the solution to that problem..

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The last couple of days I’ve had an upset stomache. I’m not too bad at home where it’s cool. At work, however, it’s not at all. I think the heat agrivates things and my stomache will occationally feel like it’s trying to invert itself. This was especially bad for the first couple of hours yesterday, but then it quit and it did eventually cool off a little.

Part of the trouble here is that it’s been 90+ degrees for a while now. The other part is a crappy and broken AC system. We have 3 chillers that do the bulk of our cooling. 2.5 of those are broken. That is to say, 1 and 2 have been broken for a whiel now and we’ve been running off of just the third one, which tends to break down and even when it’s not, it still lacks the capacity needed to keep us cool when it’s hot out. Fortuneately, we have some ceiling mounted units that provide some amount of cooling so it never gets terribly hot, but 85 with a lot of humidity is still a touch uncomfortable when you’re moving around a lot. There are days where you just sweat profusely unles you’re standing in front of a fan.

This has been an issue since, like, June, when it started getting really warm out. Their solution? Start spraying water over the chiller. It actually helped quite a bit, although it by no means made it cool. The fun part though is that the water all drains off into the parking lot and being perpertual warm water, algae grows all over the place. A couple of weeks ago, there was someone powerwashing the algae when I was walking in for the day. I later found out there was a slip and fall and I couldn’t help but laugh.

They’ve finally done at least something to address the problem and they’ve rented a chiller. It’s actually a semi-truck trailer only it’s a chiller and not for storing things. The bundle of power lines going to this thing is about a foot in diameter…. I don’t even want o know how much power this thing uses. They actually had it on Monday, but when I got there yesterday it still wasn’t running, and it was hot. By the time I went to break it was going though, and it actually managed to drop below 80 by the time we left (I think our building is around 250,000 square feet (I could be totally off here though) and it takes forever for the temperature to change).

Hopefully they’ll put repairing/replacing those chillers into next year’s budget….

And hopefully as well it’s a reasonable temperature when I go in today and I don’t get sick. I think I’m feeling better, heat or not, but I’ll take the not..

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