Tag: work

Categories
culture life

Insurance Racket

I had to deal with changing health insurance today with the business office at the womens clinic that Laura goes to in preparation for our new baby. That gave me the opportunity to review prices for their services. I discovered something very disappointing. In the last year, with insurance through my work, I have paid as much in premiums (not counting what the company was supposedly paying toward the premiums) as the clinic would charge an insurance company. The only money I saved by having insurance, even with the large medical expense of having a baby, is that I am not being charged the higher prices that they charge those who don’t have insurance. I don’t quite understand that policy. Why should they charge more to those people who can’t afford insurance? Isn’t that like kicking a person while they’re down?

Anyway, that’s the insurance racket. My portion of the price of insurance every year is enough to pay for a major medical procedure, like 9 months of prenatal care plus delivery and a hospital stay.If we weren’t having kids I’d be throwing away a new car every year in insurance premiums – and that’s when the company is paying the bulk of the costs. If I were to pay for that insurance myself for three years I would have paid for a major injury – like being seriously hit by a car. If I put that money into my house instead of my insurance I would have the house paid off in 11 years from the time I bought it.

Categories
culture

Theoretics

Thanks to J. Max Wilson for helping me discover this commentary on academia by Orson Scott Card.

I have personally encountered theoretics in my education, especially my graduate education, and was sadly able to understand the entire course description he posted. I enjoyed Card’s illumination of the cause and effects of theoretics in academia (I also enjoyed the words of Lee Smolin which Card quoted extensively). One thing that was not discussed was the facet of theoretics which makes it so hard to detect and dislodge in a timely manner – it is as hard to prove any theoretics-cloaked groupthink right or wrong as it is to prove that String Theory is right or wrong. Like String Theory, we tend to assume that the groupthink is right in the absence of conclusive evidence to the contrary (this is the benefit of doubt).

In my studies the groupthink was about concepts such as constructivism, learning objects, and simulations. Like String Theory, all of them have proven to be ethereal, and like String Theory none have managed to be the grand unifying theory that their original proponents seemed to hope.

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life

Reprise

I have been thinking about the comments I got from my personality posts I have to admit that I did not understand at first what Jason meant when he said:

“The trick, for me at least, is to find reasons to love whatever job you have. I’ve enjoyed forklift operating, fruit picking, yard work, construction, mail sorting and inventory control. None were exciting, none were interesting, and none made any real difference in the world. But I learned to love the work”

My initial reaction was to disagree with the idea that few people get to make a difference through their employment. After stewing on the comments I had received, I found the flaw in my thinking. I had been wanting to have meaning in every aspect of my life. I wanted to have meaning in my work, my family, my religion, my community, and any hobbies I might choose. When I said I have no personality it is because I had allowed those parts of my life that were not fraught with meaning to sap the meaning from the other areas of my life. I had abandoned hobbies unnecessarily and shut my eyes to other meaningful aspects of my life.

With renewed perspective I now recognize that I need to have meaning to my life as a whole and allow that purpose and drive, those goals that I am pursuing, to invigorate me and infuse meaning into the more mundane things which are necessary whether or not I find intrinsic value in them. That is what I understand Jason to have meant when he said he learned to love the work he had rather than moaning that he was not doing the work he might have chosen for its own value.

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life

Clarification

Thanks to the astute observations of a friend, I have refined my perspective on my current frustration. I do have a personality. The one he described sounds very familiar to me. The fact that my personality may easily go unnoticed in crowded situations does not bother me. I’m glad to know that it could be noticed in individual interactions. The problem I face is that I have become buried by the minutia of my own life. I seem to have forgotten how to be myself and see the strengths of my personality. Perhaps it is a touch of insecurity at the annoyance of not finding a job as fast as I had hoped. That insecurity is magnified by the fact that the vast majority of job descriptions I find are looking for “6 to 8 years experience with increasing responsibilities” etc. Unfortunately some of us do not have that many years experience, but we still have to feed our families.

Regardless of how buried I had become there is also the fact that I have been undergoing an internal transformation over the last year and I am still trying to make sense of the implications of the changes I have chosen to make. I hope that the end result will be a greater sense of focus and direction in all areas of my life.

As for the job – I have to be clear if this is the impression my previous posts had left:

I hope I’m wrong, but reading between the lines it sounds as though you feel that having a high profile or highly paid or publicly perceived as “important” job is more substantial than simply doing your best to be honest and dutiful at whatever you do.

I do not care about the wages (so long as I can support my family) or how onlookers might view the job I hold. I mean only that I cannot be content doing a job where I have nothing unique to contribute. If every other person at the company can do the job that I have been given, then why am I there? If I am in a company where I am allowed to give my input, rather than just follow the prescribed process and churn out the desired product, then I consider that substantial. I have had (and enjoyed) jobs delivering dry cleaning and spraying pesticides where I had the opportunity to do more than just “the job.” I just want to find another opportunity where I can feel that I am making a useful contribution rather than just being an interchangeable cog in the mechanisms of the company commerce.

Categories
life politics

Personality II

Ever since I recognized my lack of personality I have been thinking about how that came to be. My first thought was that being highly introverted plays a part in it. I was thinking of a way to say that without implying that introverts lack personality generally but then I talked to Laura about it and she convinced me that it is possible for extroverts to lack personality as well – so my introversion is not a cause.

There is a difference between an extrovert without personality and an introvert without personality. An extrovert without personality is a chameleon matching the social climate around them. An introvert without personality is like the invisible man – going undetected in social settings. I have also begin to think of it as being something of an emotional albino – lacking any pigment of personality.

The question I am trying to resolve in my mind is, have I always been without personality or have I shed my personality. If I shed it – why? when? and how? If I have always been without it, why? Personally I lean towards having shed my innate personality. I have no hobbies, or substantial aspirations. My current goal is to get a job because I have to. That probably sounds really pathetic, but the truth is that I doubt my ability to be hired to do anything that will hold my interest. Everything that might set me apart from other people and make me interesting has been labeled (by me) unimportant.

Perhaps I have found something. I do have desires, but they seem to be so far outside the reach of my opportunities. I would like to make a difference in how we approach and manage education in this country, especially among our youth. I would like to make a difference in my community by making my voice heard about ways that we can make it an even better place to live than it is already. How can I do these things when nobody would listen to me.

Even if people would listen to me I am so caught up in trying to survive that I have no energy left after working full-time (back when I was) to expend the time and energy trying to make my ideas heard. The only way I could see to do both would be to get a job where I could work on some of those things as part of my work. Who would hire me to do that? Getting elected to an appropriate position is the only other way (besides being hired) to spend my time doing those things. I think it is patently obvious that getting a socially invisible person elected to any office is as likely as getting a squirrel to win the Kentucky Derby.

That is enough for now. I expect this is a theme I will follow while I try to unravel this mystery.

Categories
culture life

Each Little Bit Helps

I spent most of today (8:00 am to 3:00 pm) helping my brother-in-law move. I have done this kind of thing quite often in my life and I have noticed something worth mentioning. When there are lots of people around to help the moves go much easier. (This would be a good time for every reader to say “duh!”)

In the evening I went to the priesthood session of general conference at a local church building. When the session was over there were hundreds of folding chairs that needed to be put away. It occurred to me that if ever person in attendance folded one chair the work would be done in 30 seconds. Some might argue that only the people on the folding chairs should have to help. If that were the case it would be two chairs per person and the work would be done in less than one minute. Reality is that 75% or more of those in attendance leave without thinking about the chairs and many only pick up one or two chairs so those who try to clean up all the chairs have to take 6 or 8 chairs each and the work takes 5 minutes.

I am not trying to complain about those who do not pick up chairs. As I have shown, it is a small job even with most of the people not participating. What struck me was that there is another attitude which could make a long task out of cleaning up the chairs. If the chair cleanup were assigned to a group of perhaps 5 people, instead of a large-scale volunteer effort, the chair cleanup would require each person to pick up at least 40 chairs and the cleanup would likely take half an hour to accomplish.

As I watched the chairs disappear almost magically this evening I began to contemplate how much of the work in our lives really works best if each person would just contribute a small effort rather than having each major job assigned to a small group of specialists.

Categories
life

Need to Work

I have been busy trying to land a job this week. I’ve had interviews and lunch meetings. I’ve had phone calls and applications. I just have not had work yet. I had been hoping something would happen and I could post it, but not so far.

Today I just had to work. I have been working at helping my brother-in-law move. He and his family are going to New Zealand so they have to get rid of almost everything. They gave us almost all of their food storage. When we brought it to our house on Wednesday night we just stacked it without organizing it. Steve said he expected that it would just stay there for two years – untouched. What he didn’t count on was that I have lots of time on my hands right now. What he couldn’t have counted on was that I would get a bug today to do some serious work.

I organized all the boxes, labeled all the cans and moved everything around the garage so that we could store as much as possible (which was only 2/3 of what they had to give us – we have to give the rest to another sibling). By the time I was done today I felt tired, but much better. I realized that people have more reasons to work than just to earn money – it also helps them to avoid going crazy. Now I just need to find a job to keep me gainfully employed so that I don’t have to make up my own work around the house.

Categories
life

My Interviewing Weakness

As I face the task of finding a new job, I have been thinking about the process and thinking about how I do in that process. I have come to some conclusions which are not surprising, but which have been enlightening as I approach this.

Because of my personality I have an uncanny knack for escaping the notice of other people. I know this “skill” would be bothersome for many people but it works for me. I have no internal need to be noticed by others. While I was talking to Laura about the process of getting a job she articulated the problem I face by going unnoticed when looking for a job. When it comes time to interview I am apt to leave no impression on the people who interview me.

The problem is that an interview can only give a very small snapshot of a person. It also happens to be a time when every potential candidate is trying to show themselves at their best. I’m like every other candidate in that regard, but I seem to be unable to put on a face that leaves a noticeable impression.

Those people who have the chance to get to know me are able to see that I am capable and dependable etc. (Many of the same things that a potential employer would like to know.) Unfortunately, an interview seems completely insufficient to let an employer see that I do posses the qualities they would like to have in an employee. Instead they are likely to barely remember that they did, in fact, interview a “David Miller” for the position. They will not remember me for having made a bad impression, but they will not remember a good impression either. After the interview they are left with the same impression of me that they had before the interview, which impression is based entirely upon a resume which has only one year of experience outside of work I did as a student.

Functionally, the problem of leaving no impression during an interview translates into me having little chance of landing anything better than a mediocre job. As I said when I posted what I wanted, I am looking for a job that challenges me and gives me the chance to make a positive impact. I doubt that any mediocre job would offer that kind of a situation.

Categories
culture life politics

Undoing Past Progress

I read two articles today in the New York Times today that got me thinking about how we are undoing the benefits that first made our country the place it was when I was growing up. The first article was about the increase in people in my age group without health insurance. I understand firsthand what they were talking about – not because I do not have health insurance, but because I had to spend more than 10% of my pretax paycheck to pay my portion of the company sponsored health plan. To put that in perspective – I was making something close to the national median income (if I remember correctly what that figure was).

The second article was about why college educations are no longer affordable and what changes have caused that problem. I have long had strong feelings about this problem. I think that the fundamental problem here is that we have lost sight, as a society, of what we were trying to accomplish with tuition assistance and other forms of federal education assistance in the first place. From the article:

By subsidizing public universities to keep tuition low, and providing federal tuition aid to poor and working-class students, this country vaulted tens of millions of people into the middle class while building the best-educated work force in the world.

Another article at CNN elaborated on this by saying the following:

“There’s been a sea change in the last decade-and-a-half over how (colleges) spend their money,” said National Center president Patrick Callan. “It used to be about giving students opportunities they wouldn’t otherwise have. Now it’s about giving them money to go to one college instead of another.”

At first these programs were designed so that there would be money for students to go to college, now the money is being used for students to go to “the right college.” We seem to have lost sight of the fact that the goal was to educate large volumes of people, not to make education one more field for competition in our society.

Some startling statistics to back this up from the CNN article:

The report card finds colleges awarded grants to 36 percent of their students from families earning $20,000 per year or less. Those grants averaged $4,700. But wealthier students received comparable attention.

The colleges gave grant aid to 29 percent from families earning $100,000 or more. And those grants were even higher on average: $6,200.

Let me make that clear – slightly over 1/3 of students from families living in poverty (or very close depending on where the poverty line falls) are getting under $5000 a year to help them go to school. Almost 2/3 of students from those poverty situations are going to school without grant money. At the same time nearly 1/3 of students from families among the top 5% of wage earners are getting over $6000 a year – we can assume this is to lure them to “better” schools.

I do not mean to argue that all schools are equal, but we would probably be better off as a nation if we thought of them that way.

If my experience and the experience of other people I know is any indicator, there is another problem that also plagues our nation with regards to higher education. The degrees that we are paying so dearly to get are often being underused once we graduate and try to use them. Many jobs I have seen require a degree for work that could easily be done without a degree. What is worse, many jobs in which a degree is useful are more interested in experience than in the degree. I have known many people who choose to work and gain experience rather than finish a degree and they end up with better jobs because they have more experience.

If experience is the best teacher – and I believe that it generally is – then our college degrees should be designed to provide marketable experience. If they did, perhaps companies could eliminate the requirement to have a degree as a prerequisite for jobs that do not actually require the training that comes with a degree.

Categories
life

Wanted: A Chance to Make an Impact

If I were taking out an advertisement seeking my ideal job it would have a title similar to this. I have often thought about how to articulate what I am seeking in a job and I thought I would make some attempt here. Let’s see how this works.

I am looking for a job where I can make a positive impact. This would require that I be in a position to share ideas, because if I have learned anything about myself over the course of my life it is that I will have ideas to share about how to improve something. It may be an improvement in a product, it may be an improvement in the way we approach a problem, or it may be an improvement in the world around us that we as a company are able to make. If I am in a job where I am expected to do – while others do the thinking – I will not be comfortable. If I am in a position where I am allowed/expected/required to think but only within certain predefined domains then I will likely start to feel constrained.

If I were asked to put that more concisely I would say that “I need a job where I work with the company, not for the company.” That probably does not sound right without explanation, but it is the best I can do right now at stating my position succinctly.