Job Chat
D Anger
More Trumpet Thoughts
I was reading today the newest Philadelphia Trumpet (March/April 2001) and there’s an article about the book of Revelation entitled “Deceived about the Royal Book of Revelation.” To begin with, the title reads into it a lot of stuff that I’m not really sure is actually there. I’m not sure it has to do with rulership and such, but of course since it’s written by Gerald Flurry then there’s no questioning it. Interesting, the point about the article that I wanted to discuss explains why there’s no questioning. He writes,
“Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein: for the time is at hand” (Rev. 1:13). Notice it is “he that reads” and “they that hear.” God uses one-man leadership. He reveals to one man. Then “they” who follow this man keep the truth that God reveals (26).
A few interesting things about this quote. First he quotes the Authorized version and includes the archaic third person singular form, but when he explains it and quotes again, he changes “readeth” to “reads.” This was a common practice in the WCG, as was the practice of re-translating in mid-quote, changing “Lord” to “the Eternal.”
Second, the authoritarian nature of this interpretation of this passage is not difficult to miss. He is all but saying, “I am the only one through whom God now speaks.”
Third, this exclusive access to God’s truth radiates out from Flurry—while he is the most chosen, others (i.e., the PCG members) are among the elect. Sociological analysis of cults will describe them as having a mentality in which they see themselves as the only right people on earth and that everyone else is blind, but it’s still somewhat surprising when a church says this about itself:
Anybody who wants to understand the Bible and world events must come to God’s faithful remnant! There is understanding no place else on this planet! It is the only way you can really comprehend the fate of your own nation, or even your own life.
This is a difficult truth to accept, but God works through His very elect and nobody else. Everybody else is blind. It is that way now, it has been in the past, and shall be in the future! (26)
The anthropomorphic elements continue, of course. “Imagine what it was like when the royal Father allowed His beloved Son to become a martyr for sinning men” (26). Of course this places God very squarely in time.
Flurry’s personal this month is revealing as well, for it shows how he is moving closer and closer to David Koresh-type leadership. He is, in a word, beginning to prophecy outright. Writing about the Supreme Court appeal of the Mystery of the Ages case, he says, “I prophesy to you that, one way or the other, God will provide a way for us to mail that book again” (1). I would dearly love to see what happens five years hence if this indeed does not happen.
More Drifting
Training
Yesterday we had our MS Project training downtown. It was actually rather well done, I thought. I know I learned a lot of things and I’m fairly sure everyone else did too. I think that since most of the project managers had been playing with Project before, they were familiar with some of the basics but I think yesterday’s class probably helped make some of their basic knowledge a little more grounded. I don’t know even if that makes any sense . . .
The truly interesting part of the day, though, came at the end when most all of us (excluding Mitch, the new religion project manager, and Teresa, the new American History project manager) went for drinks. The conversation turned, among other things, to Kali and how everyone felt when they found out she was leaving. Sonny said, “I was thrilled. Matt [Maslin] and I started dancing.” It turns out that Kali was quite disliked (or even hated) by a several of the project managers, including Armando. Sonny said that she was very harsh on all of the editors, especially Matt — and that she was even getting Matt set up to be fired. And that before Kali announced that she was leaving, Matt told Sonny, “After this upload, I’m out of here.” And that Sonny had interviewed at two other places and even had a job offer because she was sick of dealing with Kali. In Sonny’s opinion, Kali was an awful editor, a terrible manager, just generally power-hungry, and so on. She especially took exception to Kali’s tendency to re-write whole chunks of chapters. And I think Sonny was probably a little annoyed with how Kali would make CD’s sit down with her and help her as she re-wrote their stuff.
I believe Rob and I were the only ones who really had anything positive to say about her. He pointed out how she had stood up to Adam during the W-Civ1 upload a few months back concerning broadening the scope of things. And I said that I never really had any problems with her and that I felt as an editor she looked out for my interests. To which everyone responded, “Well, you were one of her favorites.” I guess I always knew that — she was always calling me over to fix her computer and such, but I never really thought of me being a favorite. I’ve never really been anyone’s “favorite,” at least not to my knowledge. I guess I don’t know what the signs of favoritism are when I’m the object of it.
The real surprise was to hear Sonny talk about how Matt was catching so much hell with Kali. According to Sonny, when he was called over to Kali’s cube he referred to it as his “bi-weekly dressing down.” I never really heard what was being said in those “meetings” but she had them with a lot of editors and I think that’s what she was referring to as “training.” She wanted everyone to be like her as far as editing goes.
Work Thoughts
Yesterday was as stressful a day as I have ever experienced. It started out fine — I knew what I had to do and I really didn’t expect I would have much trouble doing it. A simple task really: add email functionality to the new professor demo account pages. Simple. In fact, I looked in some of Allan’s ASP books and they all basically said, “In ASP it’s a snap to send email!” All you have to do is have a function SMTP1 site. Fine.
I went onto the live server and, lo and behold, there’s an SMTP site set up. So I made a little ASP page the consisted of nothing but an attempted email. I got a permissions-related error. I did a search on Google for this error and found it. The first hit was to Microsoft’s support page, and it even included instructions for a fix. Simple enough — just change a few settings on some folders in the “mailroot” directory and it should be fine and dandy. I talked to Luis before fiddling with this on the live site (the staging server doesn’t have SMTP). He said the proposed changes would have no security problems, so I made them. With great anticipation I re-uploaded my little “testemail.asp” file and loaded it. Same error. I double checked the folder permissions and found that some of the changes didn’t take. Odd. So I made them again, re-uploaded yet again, tested again, received the same error message again, and muttered, “Fuck” again.
Before any of this happened, though, I talked to Kevin about it. He told me there should be no SMTP configuring necessary, and that I should throw it on the staging server. “If it doesn’t work there, it doesn’t work. I don’t want to spend a lot of time and resources on this.” He said something about using Kiki’s mailto functionality and asked how that was going. I told him I didn’t really know but that I thought she had it working more or less. “Is the mail getting sent to sales reps?” Potential trick question. I should have simply said, “I don’t know.” I should have lied in other words. Well, no — that’s not a lie. I don’t really know whether or not sales reps are getting it, but I don’t think they are. At any rate, I told him that she was and that she had set up her Exchange account to route the stuff to them. Stupid thing to say — he called Kiki and told her he didn’t want it done that way. So now she’s working on that same damn mailto functionality problem that Kevin seems to think would be a snap. In fact it should be a snap if SMTP were working, but it’s not.
I really don’t like my job now simply because I don’t feel comfortable going to anyone for help. Kiki either is not there or has her own stuff to do, and I almost always feel I’m intruding — that my questions are an annoyance to her. I can’t go to Kevin because he’ll just tell me to go out to such and such site and grab some script and throw it in.
If Peter were still the CTO, he’d have been there yesterday helping me with this damn SMTP problem. He would have called his dad; he would have talked to Microsoft (or give me the ability to do so). I see now what Brian meant when he said Peter seemed much more knowledgeable about the actual technical minutiae than Kevin. With Peter I could ask, “How do I do this?” With Kevin I feel uncomfortable even saying, “I can’t do this.” And that’s really quite ridiculous. I have no formal technical training whatsoever, and I’ve been working with ASP stuff for just a few weeks now. I’ve done everything I could to get this stupid thing working, but I just can’t get this function to work, no matter how easy Kevin tells me it should be.
I was walking home last night — terrible night not to have a ride because it was freezing. In the morning it was warm enough that I took off my hat and muff on the way to work; by the time I left at 7:30 last night, it was frigid. Anyway, I was walking home thinking about this and I realized one of the reasons I loved my job in Lipnica: it’s the only job I’ve ever had in which I was 100% confident in my ability to fulfill my responsibilities. Nothing about my job there intimidated me. I never woke up thinking about what I had to accomplish that day and thinking, “God, I hope I can figure out how to do that.” The closest I came was the first time I was in charge of the Strasbourg trip, but that wasn’t really work-related. It had nothing to do with my ability as a teacher — it was a test of my resourcefulness as a person, of course.
1 I’ve been tossing that acronym around all week now and I don’t even know what it means.
Drifting Apart
Hard-Coded
My current project at work is rather large in scope: I’m creating a series of new ASP pages for professors so they can get a two-week demo without having to talk to a sales rep beforehand. I ended up creating four pages for the job, including one that is entirely in VBScript, run at the server, which then dynamically creates the HTML page. In other words, all HTML is done with “response.write(“<B>Blah</b>”).”
I had an interesting discussion with Kevin Friday. Some dolt had given out the office username and password for the live site (both of which were “proftext”) and Kevin sent me an email about it, asking me to disable that user name and create a new one for office use. Later I was filling him in on the situation, explaining it was a fairly simple task but it took a little while longer because I had to look for some stuff in the code.
“Tell me this isn’t hard coded in,” he said, shaking his head.1
“Well, yeah, it is,” I responded, somewhat hesitantly at first.
He went off on a little tangent about the stupidity of such coding practices, then paused to say, “I’m not criticizing you, of course — just giving some advice for the future. If DLI folds up and you end up slinging code somewhere else, don’t do that — it’s poor coding practice.”
“I honesty doubt that I’ll be doing this for any indefinite time,” I said. “I’m just learning all this stuff while I have the opportunity, but it’s not my first love. I just find — well, I wouldn’t say that I’m gifted at it, but I find that it’s very easy for me to understand. It’s very logical.” To which Kevin responded, somewhat surprisingly, “I think you’re fairly gifted at it.” A nice, affirming moment.
1 All of this, of course, is a very rough paraphrase of what we actually said to each other.
Reading the Trumpet
I received the most recent Trumpet yesterday and there is a long article about the PCG’s new Imperial College of Edmond. Even in this article, written by Stephen Flurry, evidence of Armstrongian anthropomorphism abounds. Writing about the Tower of Babel (which they believe was an actual event), the Babylonians began building the tower, and “This got God’s attention.”1 It sounds as if God was watching television or something — chillin’ with the Son — and therefore completely oblivious to what was going on down on earth. Then suddenly he noticed it.
Later, after bemoaning the evil of modern education, he tries to explain that God is not anti-education: “God is balanced (Phil. 4:5). He expected mankind to use their minds to discover and create new things . . .”2 God wasn’t sure, in other words, whether humanity would progress cognitively, but that’s certainly what he expected.
Of course he didn’t know because he chose not to know. Yet if this is the case, how did he inspire prophecy to be written? He seems to think just like us, according to the Flurrys: “The Bible is like a magnificent summary of the way our Creator thinks.”3 He thinks in a linear, temporal fashion, then.
The story of the Tower of Babel is interesting from a non-Armstrongian perspective too, for it is an example in the Bible of strongly anthropomorphic imagery. When you read the account in Genesis, it sounds as if God was a little nervous about the whole thing. “Now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.”4 God seems to have been a little nervous at this point.
These people are so stupid. And there’s no arguing with them, either. They have the perfect clincher to any argument: I, as a critic, am not called out; I am deceived by Satan (or by God, if I was in the WCG and allowed this “strong delusion” to come over me) and therefore nothing I say is of any value.
1 Flurry, Stephen. “Education with Vision.” The Philadelphia Trumpet, February 2001, 2.
2 Ibid, 3.
3 Ibid
4 Genesis 11.6 (using the King James version, in keeping with the PCG).
To Return?
I’ve reached a critical point in this whole nonsense about going back to Lipnica. I told Jasiu that I’d write back to him with dodatkowy informacje przed konicu styczyn. All I meant was that I’d share with him my thoughts — how I’d want things to be, basically. (Teaching class IV, a guarantee of a certain number of hours, as well as explaining that I wouldn’t have to have Fridays off and so on.) It’s now well past konicu styczyn and I still haven’t even written him a note to say, “Sorry, I still haven’t decided.”
The troubling thing is that I really haven’t decided and I’m starting to wonder how the hell I could decide. [...]
One question nags, though — do I really want to go back? At times, when I think about it and imagine myself back in Lipnica, I say to myself, “God, that would be awful.” I think of the problems I had there, especially with communication, and I want never to go back. But I know that in the end, most of those problems are surmountable. I simply have to work my tail off and actually learn Polish. I think the motivation might be greater this time around because I would know I was going back there to see if that’s where I wanted to live. The first time around I knew I wouldn’t be living there permanently and so I just learned enough Polish to get by. This time, though, it might be different.
The question is whether I would be happier there than I would be anywhere else. And I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to figure that out is to go back for an extended stay. I just am nervous (poor choice of words) about what would happen if I got there and realized that I wouldn’t be happier there than anywhere else.
End of Month Thoughts
Firings and a Letter
28
I am now twenty-eight years old. Two years to thirty; twelve years to forty. I guess it’s not a big deal, but still — I’m not where I thought I’d be at this point in my life.
So last night was my birthday party — a lot of people came, but several were absent: Vidiya (sp?) and her friend weren’t here; Beth didn’t come; Charles and his date were no-shows, as were Kiki and Jason. But lots did come: Steve (the first to arrive), Marlon, Leesha, and (Uncle) Bob, Matt, Armando, Tiffany and Dave, Adam and Rob. I enjoyed myself, I must admit. And I got some cool presents — Marlon gave me a meerschaum cigar holder and an Arturo Fuente to smoke in it; Dave and Tiffany gave me a slinky; Matt brought me a coffee table book about — guess — coffee, and some chocolate-covered espresso beans. And Chhavi’s friend from school Sheena and her boyfriend Bill gave me a big box of about six rolls of film.
I also got some really cool cards. Tiffany and Dave’s reads, “A big expensive gift is what I wanted to get you for your birthday,” and then you open it to read, “But I work at the same place you do, remember?” Steve’s card had a nun on the front saying, “Celebrate your birthday however you like!” and it continues on the inside, “You’re going to burn in hell anyway,” to which Steve added, “Tell us something we don’t know, sister!” And in his card Armando wrote, “You’re still a long way from 40 . . . but it’s turning 30 that’s scary!”
It was, in general, a really good evening. A lot of people showed up later than I was expecting, but enough people did eventually show up that it wasn’t an uncomfortably small party. That was something of a concern for me at first, as it was at Chhav’s party.
The food was a big hit. Marlon of course ate a ton of the bigos — I’d fixed it for him once before when Chhav was out of town and we watched Natural Born Killers that evening, so I knew he’d like it. Uncle Bob, though, was all over that. He had about five helpings, I think. Armando said the bigos actually reminded him of certain kinds of French cuisine.
Job Changes
Yesterday I attended my first last editors’ meeting — at least my last one as an editor. Natalie is going to do the paperwork Monday to make my move to IT official.
So after a year of basically knowing what I was doing and how to do it, I’m more or less in the dark. I have to admit that Tuesday, before I left work, I was more than a little anxious about my lack of technical background. I was working on getting links to public Outlook folders and I was, for a moment, terribly afraid that I had to know XML to get the job done. I was looking at the Outlook Today page’s code and thinking, “I might as well be trying to translate German.” But yesterday Kevin showed me where in the Programming Outlook and Exchange book I could find how to do it. It’s simple — and somewhat impressive. All I have to do is this: <A HREF = Outlook:Inbox>. Or something like that. I can’t remember the details about the slashes and such. (I never remember whether it’s / or until I do it a thousand times.) Anyway, I’m feeling much better about it now.
I’m finding, though, that as a supervisor Kevin will not be quite as laid back as Natalie would be. I’ve already received two emails (addressed to all IT folks) about issues such as hours.1 I’m not worried about it — but still, it was a little disconcerting to read an email that began, “I thought I made myself clear in last week’s meeting, but just to reiterate . . .”
I finally responded to Jasiu’s email of last week. I wrote a terse note in crappy Polish saying that I was terribly busy at the moment and didn’t have time to write a proper letter but that I would send him the pertinent information by the end of the month. I dread writing such a letter in Polish — trying to leave myself as much wiggle room as possible in a language I haven’t used much in eighteen months. Won’t that be fun.
Even more entertaining will be trying to decide whether or not I actually want to return. I’m surprised, though, that I’ve managed to keep my mouth shut with people at work. No one has the slightest clue (at least as far as I know) that I might not be working at DLI this time next year. I’ve managed successfully to keep it to myself.
1 We’re expected to be in the office by 8:30 and stay until at least 5:30.