Karma Waits Decades for an Opportunity

After ten years as a homeowner I finally got around to cleaning out the shed yesterday.  Some of the junk I pulled out of the shed belonged to the previous owner of the house.  I put these items - a barbecue grill and an office chair - on the curb for the metal scavengers who troll the neighborhood.  I also set out my son's old tricycle.

My wife woke me at a quarter of six this morning to tell me that the items I had put on the curb were in the middle of the street.  I went outside to put them back.  The barbecue grill had been tipped over and pieces of charcoal were in the street.  I ran over some of them when I moved my car to block the items.  I wanted to make it harder for the vandals to do it again.

When I got back inside my wife told me that she had been in the bathroom and could hear something being dragged and a girl laughing.  My wife shook her head and wondered why anyone would do something like that.

"It's Karma."  I told her.

"Oh God, John.  What did you do?"  She asked.

I told her about my visit to my uncle's dairy farm in Wisconsin in the late summer of 1976 or 1977.  I was about fifteen or sixteen.  My cousin, my uncle's oldest son, was a month younger than I.  One night my cousin and I went out after dark.  The corn in the field was getting tall.  We uprooted several stalks of corn and stood them up in a line across the county road that ran along the cornfield.  We saw the headlights of a car when we had the cornstalks lined up across one lane.

We headed for the ditch and waited.  The car came to a stop and the driver started yelling and cursing in case whoever pulled the prank was still within earshot.  We stayed quiet as long as we could, but when the guy continued to yell and curse we both broke out laughing and had to run through the cornfield for the house.

That was one of the biggest laughs of my laugh.  It took almost 40 years for me to pay for it.  Karma takes its own sweet time.

Heading for Higher Ground

Several months after the tsunami of 2004 I read about a man who survived it.  He remembered that his elders told him that if he ever saw the tide go out much farther than he had ever seen, to head to high ground.  He yelled "Run!" and got everyone in his village to safety.

The man was a leader of some of the hunter-gatherer people on the Andoman islands off the coast of Thailand.  They live what most of us would consider a primitive lifestyle.  Yet, this man and his people survived the tsunami while people with cell phones and instant access to weather information perished under the waves.

Since I read the article about the man who survived the tsunami I have often been unimpressed with news about advances in technology.  I read another article before that about how farmers who could recite the most weather proverbs are the most successful farmers.  I am not saying that we should get rid of our cell phones, but sometimes our own memories may be more helpful to our survival than gadgets.

One machine that we would be better off without is the automobile.  We built a dangerous transportation system on the need for everyone to have their own car.  Our need for powerful and impressive-looking automobiles and our juvenile desire to drive them at high speeds has led us into an addiction to oil that has made us warlike.  Humans die so that people in the United States can pretend that interstate highways are NASCAR courses.  We constantly put toxic gases into the air.

TV ads for CSX Railroad claim that they haul a ton of freight almost 500 miles on one gallon of fuel.  Why do we waste so much fuel hauling passengers and freight in cars and trucks?  Because of our ridiculous car culture and snobbery.  We think of ourselves as failures if we do not own a car, and we do not want to have to associate with lowlifes found on buses and trains.  The cost of this car culture is immense.

Telecommuting may someday relieve our need for expensive gasoline, but we need to stop thinking of our automobiles as extensions of ourselves or a form of self expression.  Trains and bicycles make more sense than cars.  Our need for exercise and socialization may help us to survive better than cars.

Pimpin' Ain't Easy

 
To Zach Johnson, who would have wanted me to record my street life adventures.

I do not drink like I used to. It just does not fit with being a responsible parent. However, I do occasionally permit myself the luxury of stopping at the local tavern for Happy Hour on Friday after work. That is what I did today.

It started out as an ordinary visit. I sat down at the bar and started schmoozing with one of the regulars. After I drank half of my first beer, I went out to the patio to smoke a cigarette. Two women were sitting at a table near the door. It was the only table I saw that had an ashtray, so I asked the women if I could sit with them. They told me to go ahead.

Just after I lit my cigarette, a man walked up to the patio from the parking lot. He was quite angry and asked one of the women "What the fuck is you doin'?" He jumped over the rail of the fence that went around the patio. The man pointed at me and asked the woman "Is this him?" The woman told him no, so he asked "Is he in there?" He opened the door to the bar and told the woman to tell him where to find the other man before he made a scene. She told him that the other man had already left. The man then ordered the woman to come with him and get in the car.

After they left, the woman's friend, Sara, explained what had just happened. She said that her friend had met up with an old boyfriend there at the bar. She had meant to send a text message to Sara explaining that the man she was talking to at the bar was an old boyfriend and that her current boyfriend, Anton, would flip if he knew she was talking to an old boyfriend. Instead, she accidentally sent the text message to Anton, prompting him to come back to the bar. Anton had dropped his girlfriend at the bar, telling her not to flirt with any guys.

I told Sara that this story reminded me of a passage in The Bonfire of the Vanities, in which the main character left his fancy Manhattan apartment to call his new mistress on a pay phone and ended up calling his own wife. Sara laughed at this and said "Yes, the universe directs us." Shortly after this Pauline, the bartender and a few other people came out on the patio and asked what was going on. Sara explained it to them. Sara told Pauline that she would take care of her friend's tab. Pauline expressed astonishment that the woman would continue to date such a man and volunteered to text her to see if she was okay.

After some conversation and video trivia and another beer, I went back outside to smoke another cigarette. On my way out I told Grant, Pauline's husband, about how Anton had asked his girlfriend if I was the other man. "Ha! Skinny old white guy, huh?" Grant laughed. Another guy at the bar commented "Hey, pimpin' ain't easy."
A little later Anderson told me that they would start calling me SWG, for Skinny White Guy. I told him that should be OSWG, for Old Skinny White Guy. Grant told me that if I wanted to sit with the old guys, I would have to be at least 60. I told him that I will be 52 in a couple of weeks.

I got a little adrenaline rush when Anton asked "Is this him?" It has been many years since anyone thought me capable of stealing his woman.

Yeah, right.

Some things happened today that made me give some thought to how we appear to others.

My son and I went to the park to play basketball.  I made that one-in-a-million shot that got the ball wedged between the rim and the backboard.  We could not reach it, even with David on my shoulder, and I am proof that white guys can't jump. 

I remembered that I had an ax in the trunk of the car.  Now, the reason it was there was that the handle and the ax head had become separated from each other while I was doing some work to clean up the back yard after the June 29 storm.  I tried to put the ax head on a new handle, but could not get it on all the way because I lack the proper equipment.   I have been meaning to take it to the hardware store to ask them to finish the job.  A man riding his bike past the basketball court saw me with David carrying the ax.  You should have seen the look on his face.  I think he was going to say something, but I believe he saw the basketball wedged between the backboard and the rim.

I got the ball down and we continued playing.  We also had a frisbee and a baseball, so we played with those after we stopped playing with the basketball.  We played catch with the baseball.  I threw the ball to David once, and it bounced off his hand and hit him in the nose.  Honest, it was a very soft underhand toss.  I want him to learn how to catch a baseball barehanded before I get him a baseball glove.  Anyway, his nose started bleeding and we decided it was time to go home.

We pulled into the driveway just in time to see a man bleeding from the head onto our neighbor's lawn.  He was with three other people working on a tree in the neighbor's yard that had broken limbs hanging from it.  I don't know what happened, but he had a nasty gash on his eyebrow.  I told him it would need stitches.  One of the man's coworkers got a first aid kit from their truck, and the guy asked me for a glass of water.

After I gave the man some water, I got a collapsible chair out of my car and told him to sit.  He went back to work after he got bandaged up.  I went in the house to do some chores.  My collapsible chair was gone after the tree crew left.  Oh well, I didn't do as much as the orignial Good Samaritan, and got off cheap.

Letter to President Obama

My Dear Mr. President;

The news that your re-election campaign filed suit against Ohio government officials disappointed me.  The attorney for your campaign filed suit against our secretary of state, Jon Husted, and our attorney general, Mike DeWine.  The suit demands that they remove an exception in Ohio election law that allows members of the armed services and other citizens overseas to cast early ballots. 

Currently, Ohio law allows early voting in the weeks before election day, with a cut-off of 6:00 PM on the Friday before election day.  The law is intended to make the availability of early voting consistent throughout all of Ohio's counties while giving some consideration to service members and others traveling overseas.  Early voting now makes voting quite convenient here in Ohio.

The argument that excluding service members and travelers from the restriction creates two classes of voters may pass a constitutional test, but it does not pass the "So What?" test.  If your campaign’s suit is successful, it may actually make voting less convenient for many Ohio residents as just six Ohio counties were able to offer early voting on weekends before the current law was enacted.

The argument that current Ohio voting regulations suppress the vote of members of racial and ethnic minority groups supports the point that former President George W. Bush made about "the soft bigotry of low expectations."  It is bigotry to believe that members of minority groups need to have the voting process made more convenient for them in order for them to be able to vote.  I believe that voter apathy is a much greater obstacle to participation in elections than voter suppression.

I respectfully request that you direct your campaign to withdraw the lawsuit against my state.  I regard it as a frivolous lawsuit.  Our state government does not need the legal expenses.  The suit makes you seem to be scrounging for every possible vote rather than serving the public interest or the interest of justice.

Very truly yours,

John C. Stevens

John Henry and Poptarts

When I first started to learn about Big Data, I worried that I would become the John Henry of data collection.  I am a supervisor and interviewer for a market research and public opinion research firm.  I have conducted tens of thousands of telephone interviews on a wide variety of topics.  I am able to get people to spill information because I have a pleasant voice and know how to ask sensitive questions without sounding shocked or judgmental.  I have learned how to probe for clarification of vague answers without irritating survey participants.

Vast amounts of data now exist about our opinions, beliefs, tastes and preferences from Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+.  The software and hardware used to collect and analyze this data is becoming more sophisticated and robust.  It makes me wonder whether clients will be willing to pay for telephone surveys and focus groups if they believe they can acquire the information they need more cost-effectively by dipping into the river of information that flows through the Internet every second.

Walmart learned several years ago how to make use of their own records to run their stores more efficiently and profitably.  They learned from looking at sales records that they had better have plenty of Strawberry Poptarts in stock when a hurricane is moving toward the coast because that is what their customers want to stock up on when they are preparing for a hurricane.  More recently, investors have started to monitor Twitter and Facebook feeds to gauge attitudes about particular stocks.  As the field becomes more sophisticated, I can imagine many ways that analysis of Big Data could make telephone polling and focus groups obsolete – but not completely.  Some questions can be answered only by getting a representative sample of a population on the telephone and asking them specific questions.

One of the things I learned while researching Big Data is that those who expect to use Big Data to make business decisions expect a shortage of “data engineers,” or people who can figure out where to find relevant information and draw conclusions about it once it has been gathered.  Working in market research and public opinion research should be good preparation for a career as a data engineer.  Conducting interviews requires critical thinking skills in order to obtain information that clients can use to make decisions.  An interviewer has to determine whether a response actually answers a question, whether it is clear, and whether it is complete.  If not, the interviewer needs to ask appropriate follow up questions such as:

Ø      Why?

Ø      How so?

Ø      What do you mean by that?

Ø      Why is that important to you?

Ø      What can you tell me about that?

Ø      Such as?

Learning how to ask these questions in the appropriate context should be good training for anyone who wants to gather information from social media.  A business collects information because they need it to make decisions.  Understanding what kinds of decisions need to be made and where to find accurate information to make those decisions will require the same kinds of critical thinking skills required for conducting telephone interviews.

I can help anyone in Columbus, Ohio who would like to acquire the ability to ask appropriate questions in a real world setting.  Call or email me:

John C. Stevens

Saperstein Associates

(614) 261-0065

jstevens@sapersteinassociates.com

Literally

The severe storms of late June and early July of 2012 reminded me to be grateful for many things. Right now, I am grateful that our household regained Internet access today.

The whole adventure renewed my appreciation for the depth and richness of the English language. Many of us who spend a great deal of time online use phrases and clichés without thinking about what they mean or how they made their way into our language. Dealing with the aftermath of the storms exposed me to a few literal examples of some old phrases.

My son and I were grocery shopping when the first storm hit. We had to deal with some non-operating traffic lights getting home. When we got to our block we encountered felled trees blocking the streets. Our neighbor's tree had knocked down the line going to our house and our electrical mast. The top of the big spruce in our front yard had blown into our other neighbor's yard.

Several of the neighbors were already working on clearing the streets. I wanted to help my neighbors and make it easier for electric company trucks to have access to my street, so I grabbed my ax and my hand ax and pitched in. The next day I chopped up the top of the spruce that had blown into the neighbor's yard. I piled the branches at the base of the spruce. A few days later I chopped up the part of the trunk that had detached from the spruce and set the logs at the curb, hoping that one of the city crews would pick them up.

My next plan for my axes was to use them to chop up the tree in the back yard. I realized that I would need to have the blades sharpened, so I went to the hardware store down the street from my office. When I walked into the hardware store, I literally "had an ax to grind." All of the activity had weakened the handle of my long ax. Shortly after I got started chopping up the tree in the back yard, the ax head literally "went flying off the handle." I was able to finish what I had to do, but I had to keep putting the ax head back on the handle.

Today I noticed that the spruce branches I had piled up in the front yard were getting brown and dry. I know that evergreens can be quite flammable, especially when they are dried out. I decided to water down the branches. I have a garden hose, but rarely water my lawn. I consider doing so a waste of water. In order to use the hose to wet the spruce branches I had to untangle it and I had to literally "work out the kinks."

Axing downed trees has given me a deeper understanding of the clichés I mentioned. The experience should give me a deeper understanding of other clichés when I read them or use them.