My headline is mild, the crime is not. As Malkin points out, of course the NY Times and other liberal media outlets are not spending any time on this.....but momentum is growing...
http://michellemalkin.com/archives/003593.htm
Hehehe...don't see Limbaugh trolling for bucks, do we?
http://radioequalizer.blogspot.com/2005/09/air-americas-odd-pledge-drive.html
The Real Story Behind My Reasons for Leaving Microsoft
“The horror….the horror….”
Colonel Kurtz, Apocalypse Now
My first 2 – 2 ½ years as a Fox tester with the company went well after I joined in June of 2001. I was consistently leading in most test production statistics and had engineered some substantial procedural changes that had greatly streamlined the daily test process. Mike Stewart was the Test Lead for my first 18 months there and then stepped down for personal reasons.
Shortly thereafter, the Fox Team was merged with the VS Data team and I was asked to assume many of the lead functions; albeit without the actual title of “Lead”. This meant that for about half of the VFP 8 product cycle and all of the VFP 9 product cycle, I was responsible for contractor management, budgeting, resource planning, and served, with Calvin as Lead Developer and Randy as Lead Program Manager, in a sort of triumvirate making the day-to-day decisions about the product. I was the test project manager, but the Test Manager in charge of the full-time personnel remained unchanged.
The structure of the test organization was pretty simple: There was a Test Manager, a Test Lead, and then we test folks. After Mike stepped down, there was no Test Lead.
The work sounds fun, and in many cases was, but it was also very difficult. Since the company was trying to reduce contractor budgets and VFP was not exactly the star of the stage, I kept having to squeeze more and more out of the limited resources I had. There were many times when it was suggested that I work with Randy and Calvin to cut major product features, but I was unwilling to do that unless absolutely necessary. Fortunately, Randy had excess contractor budget on the books which he lent to me and we were able to get along without major feature cuts.
Starting not very long after I joined the company, I began to suffer mood swings and bouts of insomnia. These grew worse as the stress of getting a good product out the door mounted. Sometimes I would be late to work and other days I would leave early, exhausted. Management took note of this and it was often cited as a “minus” when my work performance was discussed.
In 2002 and mid-2003, my performance reviews were above average. My arrival and departure issues were noted but weren’t considered a serious detriment to my overall performance. On top of that, my individual contributor statistics still ranked at or above those my peers in spite of my additional roles as project and contractor manager.
Starting in the summer of 2003, the wheels started to come off. My wife traditionally spends every summer with the kids at her relatives in Miami and the summer of 2003 was no exception. However, her return was postponed over and over and it became apparent that she was prepared to sacrifice our marriage rather than return. She hated the Seattle area, had no friends, and did not like the person I was becoming as the stress mounted.
And that summer, our contractor lab manager was summarily dismissed for gross violations of company policy and we had to scramble to assume control of our own lab operations – which we did with some heroic hard-work by our contract personnel.
Also, in September, I suffered a freak ulnar nerve accident (the funny bone nerve) that left me with only partial use of my right arm for some time. I had to wear; at least I was supposed to, a cast that kept my arm out at an 80 degree angle. Thank goodness, after a few months, my arm seemed to be healing on its own (I was given a slim prognosis that this might occur so I was lucky) and I discarded the cast.
In February 2004 I was served with divorce papers. At that point, I knew I had to go down to Miami and straighten things out. It took every day of vacation I had plus all of my personal days, but I was down there for three weeks and we resolved our issues. She promised to return in the summer with the kids and try to make a go of it here again.
This is about the time when the budget strings were drawn tighter and I was constantly reshuffling responsibilities. It was a very stressful environment – I suppose it would have been easy to jettison VFP 9 features but all of us in the “triumvirate” wanted very much to avoid doing that. We felt that the cool new features were worth possible cutting a few test cycles and getting as creative as possible to spread limited test resources around.
Things were starting to look decent when, in June 1 2004, while in the middle of a “leads meeting”, I received a call that my father had unexpectedly passed away. Obviously, I dropped everything and rushed to fly to my parent’s home in Ft Lauderdale since I’m the eldest child and am expected to be in the lead when tragedy strikes (my great aunt and uncle has passed away within the prior three weeks, unbelievably).
I’ll never forget as I rushed down the hall to leave Microsoft that afternoon, my manager stopped me in the hall to remind me that I only had 4 days of bereavement leave .“5”, I told him, “with travel”, having just read the policies. This was just the typical warm, people-friendly response one could expect.
By the time mid-June rolled around, I felt that I was once again on top of things. The test milestones were being met and I felt that the team was humming along well, albeit with some escalating morale issues.
One problem that we all had on the test team was that we felt we were more or less adrift and that management didn’t seem to care or pay attention to what we were doing. When attention was paid, it was to “stop the presses” and some task was thrown at us that would completely stop VFP 9 testing dead. Don’t get me wrong; sometimes these were valid assignments but they pinched our already limited resources.
I fielded complaint after complaint in our weekly meetings, which management attended perhaps 25-50% of the time. I detected a growing “don’t give a crap” attitude and I didn’t know what to do about it: I was simply the project manager and not the employee manager – it wasn’t my job nor likely would it have been appreciated if I addressed career or morale issues.
There was a growing concern amongst the three of us that neither of us had been told of any career path after the shipment of VFP 9. Management either had no plan or hadn’t mapped it out well enough to divulge it to us.
In late June, I saw that we needed to play to our individual strengths and re-engineered test specifications and testing into a factory process and our productivity started to rise. It was simply a matter of having folks doing what they did best. The productivity breakthrough this achieved was, in large part, ignored by management. It’s hard to get kudos for work like this when lingering under a preconception that you’re dirt.
In July or August came utter disaster. All three of us full-time employees were told we were performing barely adequately and all three of us received poor to lukewarm reviews. We were told our metrics were poor (with no basis for justification), and were all compared unfavorably to our brethren on the VS Data side of the team….to be fair to them, they had nothing to do with this slight.
Each of us was told our bug statistics were deficient. This was due to many factors: The tools we were now employing caught many more bugs before they became issues and reduced the number of bugs we were likely to find in ad-hoc testing. Each of us had many more responsibilities than we had during the previous product cycle and, therefore, had less time to spend spelunking for bugs randomly. Finally, I and my fellow testers were pretty convinced that the product was just that much more stable and there were fewer bugs to be found as easily as before.
Of course, we were not supposed to know that each of us was dinged this way, but as in all organizations we shared information like this privately. It was pretty amazing the uniformity of the criticism we all had received.
In many ways, and not unusually for corporations, Microsoft’s review process is highly subjective. If a manager wants to make you look good, he’ll find ways. If he wants to make you look bad, he’ll find ways for that, too. I’ll leave it to the reader and simple logic which way management was predisposed to the Fox testers.
We all reacted differently. I have to admit that I simply “lost it” and ranted and raved to the point that I was reprimanded by Human Resources. Except for the time management issues I have previously discussed and an inability on my part to be consistent with status reports, I believed – and do to this day – that I had overcome immense hurdles to keep VFP 9 on track with as many features as we were planning to roll out. I also believed, strongly, that one of the other full-time testers had performed above-and-beyond average and I could not believe the outcome of his review as well, although my ability to intervene on his behalf was essentially nil since I was not his manager and I had my own injustices to deal with.
I believe at least one of the other two testers filed complaints with Human Resources, although I’m not certain about that and it wouldn’t be fair to divulge who.
In August, I began to have panic attacks. Not knowing what they were, I was hospitalized twice before it was accurately diagnosed. My doctor ran some tests and determined that I had acute Bipolar Disorder. It probably explained the earlier insomnia and fatigue to a degree but had been brought out into full latency – likely due to the extreme personal and professional stress I had suffered recently.
Starting in September, I went on a pretty nasty pill regimen. Funny – the first day at the company I made the mistake of taking all of my pills at once, after lunch. Fifteen minutes later I had to be driven home…I have never felt so stoned in my life!
I knew that the pills were going to become an issue. I tried getting some informal recognition from my management of possible disabilities but they wanted no part of any informal deal. Human Resources wanted to know the exact terms of accommodation I might need. I couldn’t give them exact terms because my condition and the pills caused my daily moods and energy levels to swing dramatically. One day I’d be a saint and the next writing the most ripping, snarling emails to management. The constant, often senseless interactions between HR, management, me, and my doctor was a joke and nothing was ever done to allot for my issues besides putting a burden on me that I couldn’t fulfill.
During all this time I was very open to management as to where I was in my treatment and what my current issues were. I communicated every word of doctors advice or insight I could offer on my ongoing treatment and prognosis.
Around this time, management started to require that I “clock in/clock out” and notify them by email of my comings and goings – to the point where I had to use sick or vacation time for doctor’s appointments. This is, as far as I know, unheard of there.
The pill regimen really started to get to me. I remember a meeting with my manager in which he asked me if I had kicked off a previously scheduled event that day (a “bug bash”) and I could nothing but stare at him. I had completely forgotten and it took me a bit just to remember what he was talking about.
And that was the nut of my problem from then on – I was being watched over and threatened with poor performance reports for issues that I didn’t have complete control over. It was almost as if they wanted me to fail and made life as difficult as they could – although perhaps that’s paranoia which is not one of my symptoms.
I grew increasingly desperate over my career as the VFP 9 product cycle was coming to a close. I could not, and still do not, understand how we testers could all be considered mediocre and yet we were maintaining a very high quality bar for what is one of the most feature-laden versions of Visual FoxPro ever. It seemed that everyone – peers, other Team members, and customers - thought we were doing a great job except for our immediate management. It’s like, “Well, John, things are looking good for VFP but you were ½ hour late today and we just can’t have that, can we?”
I made the mistake in late October of going off my medications completely to try to get a grip on things and get rid of the fogginess. The problem with psychotropic drugs is that when they’re titrated right and the mood swings are more-or-less handled, you tend to convince yourself that you don’t really need them. Also, a key element to my particular form of BPD is what is known as “hypomania” in which you are, essentially, judgment-impaired when it’s in full force and all ideas sound like good ideas including going off of one’s medications.
As an aside, if you want to read about a fascinating mental illness, look up “hypomania” on the web. In mild cases, it’s the only actually beneficial mental disorder.
By early November, my lack of keeping up with my drugs caught up to me and I suffered what I can only term a mild nervous breakdown. I was out of work for 3 weeks and probably returned before I should have just because it was a critical time in the product cycle. Believe it or not, in my next formal performance review, I was dinged for having left at this time and forcing the manager to, God forbid, actually manage for a time. Yes, this was in writing in my mid-year review; it seems so unbelievable.
I think around the time of the full July review Mike Stewart just stopped caring. I didn’t recognize it at the time although if I had been his manager perhaps I would have seen it. From that point on, I believe Mike was just waiting to be let go or to be given an excuse to make his own exit – which eventually happened in February 2005. Mike has already returned to the company as a vendor and is rapidly rising through the ranks of responsibility.
My other compatriot, Chandra, simply resolved at that point to get out as soon as he could. He managed to do so in November, 2004, and was hired as a developer in the Windows Division. He recently received his first review in this role and it was outstanding. It’s a private joke of ours that he’s well appreciated as a developer in a critical area of the company yet was kicked around as a tester on the relatively unimportant VFP product.
So, in early 2005, I was the “last man standing”. My contractor budget had run out at the end of 2004 and, so, there were no contractors. Mike had gone; Chandra moved to greener pastures. I tried to make light of it, in fact putting a sign on my office door reading “VFP World Test Headquarters”.
Around that time I began to make noise about being promoted to the formal title of “Lead”. It wasn’t a money issue; I just wanted some recognition of the responsibilities I had in what ultimately was a very successful product launch. Essentially, I was reminded that I was a piece of crap and then divested of VFP testing responsibilities. Another team tester came in to learn VFP and VFP testing.
For my last few months with the company, I busted butt to learn how to be a VS Data tester and the VB .Net automation tools and procedures. To their credit, management paid for whatever training or materials I requested. I never fully got into it, though, as there were just too many pre-existing VFP responsibilities I had that I couldn’t yet hand over to my replacement.
Don’t get me wrong – the tester who replaced me is exceptionally sharp and will do a great job in the long term and enjoys my utmost confidence.
In June, my wife became ill and was hospitalized. I needed to stay out of work to help take care of the kids – her parents came to help but they don’t speak English – and to taxi the family to visit her at her hospital daily, which was 40 miles away in heavy traffic.
Around the beginning of July I realized that I was in a lose-lose situation. My wife’s long-term prognosis was unclear and I hadn’t yet caught up to my peers in terms of VB testing. The track record was that, of course, I would be slammed in my next full review for not only the issues I’d already been hit with, but likely my output versus the other testers in VS Data since I was still battling a learning curve as well as vestigial VFP responsibilities.
So I tendered my resignation. I could not guarantee 100% participation in the future with my illness and now my wife’s illness, so the fair thing seemed to be to resign and free up the headcount for someone who could come to the team with skills more rooted in .Net.
On one of my last days there, when discussing all of the unpaid leave I had to take with my wife’s illness, my manager told me that if it was some consolation, I was going to receive a performance bonus since I had remained employed beyond the end of the fiscal year (June 30).
A day before the bonuses were to be paid, I received an email that I would not be receiving one. When I asked for further information, I was informed that they had told me only that I was eligible for one (ahem – my memory serves different) and that my performance and behavior made me ineligible. I have asked for details and specifics of where my performance did not meet my personal goals but no information has been received.
They’re nothing if not consistent, I guess.
So what is the complete truth? This is my side of the story, with omissions due to confidentiality agreements, and they’ll have their side of the story – which I doubt will ever see the light of day. Sometimes, when my mood swings downward, I begin to doubt my contributions and my role for the last few years.
But then I think of the hundreds and hundreds of good comments I have personally received on the stability and richness of VFP 9. I think of the confidence I enjoyed from my peers; Randy, Calvin, Ken, Richard, and Aleksey. In the weekly leads meeting I was Mr. Quality Assurance and I believed – and it was true – that I was personally responsible for the quality every single change for VFP 9.
I also believe that something over there began to go deeply wrong around two years ago. If I was sitting here writing this as the odd-man out maybe I’d feel differently – but not a single one of us remains from early 2004 to now. That should be telling.
Management would never say it, but VFP 9 owes a lot, if the face of an increasingly hostile environment, to Chandra, Mike, and to our primary contractors the last year: David Anderson, Garrett Fitzgerald, and Jay Jones (who is now an employee).
These folks pulled it off in spite of what it was costing them just because they happened to be where they were and doing what they were doing. All of us; all of us were (and most of us remain) passionate about the product and our customers. I personally participated with gusto in every community event or initiative I could: The team blog, MVP summits, code competitions, minority student events, and others. I single-handedly found and filed 200+ documentation bugs in my first few months with the company and led an initiative with the documentation manager (since departed) to create good code samples for language elements that didn’t have them or were outdated.
Naturally, my efforts in these areas were denigrated at the time of evaluation and not considered germane to my assessments. Sigh; so much for supporting company and departmental initiatives – no direct management support whatsoever. Community activities were sneered at; documentation bugs were not “real” bugs.
Of the three employee testers, all of us skilled, knowledgeable, and extremely enthusiastic as of January 2004….by a little more than 12 months later, one was (perhaps) fired, one left in disgust, and I believed resignation was my only sane (no pun intended) option.
To be as fair as I can, I know that I was a very difficult person to deal with considering all of my “issues”. But I met virtually all of my strategic goals.
I am left with no alternative than to consider that the ultimate destruction of the Fox test team was engineered for reasons that I don’t know and hesitate to speculate on. I could surmise it has to do with the high visibility of the VS Data side of operations versus the continual irritation of VFP, but it would be crass to think that we would have all been maligned simply for working with a less strategic product, wouldn’t it?
What is the effect on Visual FoxPro and what is the future for Fox? I can’t say. There are things I know and things I don’t know, but I swore confidentiality and these are issues I cannot and will not discuss. I also will not name names when it comes to management and who did what…it would not be fair. In some cases I’m not sure whose hand was holding the hilt of the knife in my back.
Not long after I joined Microsoft, there was a customer event. I was chaperoning a group of our customers around and two turned to me and said (I’m paraphrasing), “We appreciate you being here. We consider you one of us and not one of them and we know you’ll protect our interests.”
It brought tears to my eyes. Well, now I’m back to being one of “you” after a few years in hell. And I’m happy to be back.
Drew and his son, Brent, somehow tumbled 200 ft off a bridge in Yellowstone Park on Friday and have both passed away.
Drew was a fixture at developers conferences and his son, who I used to affectionately call "Mini-D", was always hammering at his laptop - wearing the same glasses and expressions as Drew and hence my nickname for him.
I last saw Drew in May in Las Vegas and "Mini-D" was there too, although I didn't have much chance to talk with either of them.
The loss of our community is great, but pales in comparison to the loss the rest of his family must be feeling.
More details may be found at the Fox Wiki and the Universal Thread.
Yeah, even being a rightie, she draws a bead on this guy....here's the story:
http://michellemalkin.com/archives/003548.htm
Any of you been following this? The claim that the Pentagon knew that Mohammed Atta was a terrorist in 1999 and then had the documents destroyed in a, perhaps, coverup?
Fascinating reading:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9342936/
Some background:
As most of you know, I am sort of an amateur historian. I haven't quite gotten to the point yet where I'm writing articles for American Heritage, but it's one of my goals at some point.
Anyway, for the past several months I have been trying to document the American political and social mindset in the early 20th century. My theory is that the U.S. was actually a lot closer to becoming a neo-fascist state by the 1930's than most folks realize.
I'm not going to bore you with the minutae of my research (but email me at jskoziol@msn.com if you're interested), but heree the shocker:
Did you know in the early 20th century, in many states, it was perfectly legal to sterilize the mentally handicapped and institutionalized???
And that some state bills advocating euthanasia for the mentally ill and handicapped narrowlly avoided passing in many legislatures (Illinois comes to mind)?
Pretty scary stuff, huh?
Kerry Requests Silver Star After Piloting Swift Boat Through New Orleans
http://jerhad.typepad.com/jerhad/2005/09/kerry_requests_.html
....it must be that way, because y'all revel in it so much.
Does anyone of you take the time to do any historical or institutional research before posting crap from some stupid-ass liberal-biased website or hyperventilating lib pundit? Do you have any fucking idea what you're blabbing about half the time? Seems to me you're just forwarding some other idiots goop without a shred of common sense or modest research.
It took me all of 30 seconds to find historical underpinnings on enemy combatants, blowing away dta's post of some pissant Amnesty Int'l hysteria. It wasn't that hard, Dave. It's called "open mind" and "research"....try it sometime. And my link came from the Spectator, not exactly a conservative thinktank.
Suze's continual hysteria with Halliburton cracks me up. It's as if this evil, billion-dollar multinational corporation oozed out of the slime shortly before Bush took office and now acts as the operational Renfro to his Master. Did you know it was one of the 4 companies that merged to form Halliburton who built the Johnson Space Center and devised the emergency CO2 filter that saved the lives of the Apollo 13 astronauts? And that Halliburton had a much larger corporate presence, percentage-wise, in Bosnia under Clinton than it now has in Iraq?
Oh, sorry. Facts. Gosh-durn it they can be a pain, huh?
And that's the problem you folks have now and why the Democratic party is eroding. The 10% of important observations you may have is fogged out by the 90% of childish prattle you waste everyone's time on.
I was watching another news show challenging the Bush administration's response to Katrina and it suddenly hit me what this guy Bush has had to deal with:
Fuck! I can't think of a Commander-In-Chief who has had as much on their plate since Truman. Certainly not Clinton; that dude was "Goodtime Charlie" and reaped the benefits of a great economy and a stable world.
So next time you want to heap partisan envective on Mr. Bush, pause to consider the cards he's been dealt....and give a little prayer for the man himself. And then pile on
From Brooks's September 11 appearance on NBC's The Chris Matthews Show:
MATTHEWS: Do you think there's a problem with this? I remember when the president wrote in his diary -- his father, President Bush senior -- "you know, I picked [former Vice President Dan] Quayle the first time around, and I wish I hadn't. But I'm stuck with him, and I can't admit it." Is there a problem with this president simply admitting, "I put the wrong people at certain jobs, I didn't get back fast enough to the White House, I wasn't calling the orders fast enough?"
BROOKS: From Day One, they had decided that our public relations is not going to be honest. Privately, they admit mistakes all the time. Publicly -- and I've had this debate with them since Day One; I always say admit a mistake, people will give you credit --
MATTHEWS: Who do you debate this with?
BROOKS: With people who work in the White House.
MATTHEWS: I thought you were talking about with the president in the back room.
[laughter]
BROOKS: Not with him, but they represent what he believes, which is, if you admit a mistake, you get no credit from your enemies, and then you open up another week's story, because the admission of a little mistake leads to the admission of big mistakes and another week's story. It's totally tactical and totally insincere.
Statement of Curt Goering
Senior Deputy Executive Director, Amnesty International USA
On Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals Decision
In Padilla vs. Hanft
Today’s decision stating that the president can label a U.S. citizen arrested on U.S. soil an “enemy combatant” and hold him indefinitely without charge is appalling, chilling and contrary to international law.
The Court’s ruling shows an extraordinary and damaging deference to the executive branch’s asserted ability to detain individuals arbitrarily and indefinitely in the broad and ambiguously defined “global war on terror.” Today’s decision has rubber-stamped the president’s specious assertion that these detentions are not bound by the rule of law.
All governments should take seriously their responsibility to protect their citizens from violent attacks. But an indefinite regime of “preventative detention” flies in the face of the fundamental principles on which the U.S. justice system was founded. Suspicion and innuendo cannot be used to deny anyone due process and a fair trial as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and international human rights law.
link
Figured I would recount my own adventures in the aftermath of Andrew, since that was the most devastating hurricane of all before Katrina.
August 23rd, 1992 - late evening: Had just gotten back from a working cruise to Jamaica; at that time I had a major client who ran cruise ship gift shops. Stepped off the boat with a friend from Belgium and drove home - about a 35 mile drive from the Port of Ft. Lauderdale to extreme South Dade County.
Got home early in the afternoon. Lots of neighbors putting up plywood. I didn't have any precut window covers so I didn't worry about it ("what the hell - I got insurance"). Another client called me early afternoon and insisted that I get his Novell network running immediately, since he had recieved the final hardware needed while I was on my ship. So I drive there and, while putting his network together, he has a staff member run my car out to get the gas tank filled.
Meanwhile, my wife's family is pressing her to retreat with my 1 year old son to their house in western Dade. My wife is also 5 months pregnant at this time. I try to convince her to go to my grandmother's house, which was built by my grandfather - is all CBS construction with steel window blinds and could likely withstand a close nuclear strike - but her family is insistant and I don't fight it; I know she'll feel better being with her family. However, I do send off my 6 year old daughter from a previous marriage to hang out with my grandmother, mother, and aunt. As the crow files, her house is 8 miles or so north-northwest of me in a suburb named "Kendall".
I'm done with the network installation and home by 7PM. My wife leaves for her folks and I'm alone in the house. I watch news briefs and hear about Andrew's effect on the Bahamas. The meteorologists main concern seems to be storm surge. At this time, the storm's track put it on a course for the Dade-Broward county lines which was about 30-35 miles north of my house. So my line of thinking is that my main concern will be flooding but it will be minor as my house is 14 feet abouve sea level.
My house was also only a mile or so from the sea itself. And close enough to Homestead Air Force Base, south of me, that I could see what planes took off and landed daily with a simple pair of binoculars.
I call my father periodically on my cell phone. His house is about a mile and a half northwest of mine in a development built in the 1970's. He's like me - doesn't panic and figures that he can do the most good onsite as the flooding situation develops. My mom has rejected that idea and gone to my grandmothers house and is not very happy with my dad.
I continue to watch the news. A weatherman named Bryan Norcross on channel 4 seems to be the most histrionic about the whole thing and that makes him entertaining to watch. Funny enough, much later, he would be called a hero for being - shall we say - less than reserved before the storm...making him, I guess, some sort of visionary.
Later in the evening, about 9 or 10 o'clock, the weatherfolks change the predicted landfall to south Dade county(!). Yulp! Worse, the draw a line from the sea right to SW 152nd Street as ground zero. This is less than a couple of miles away from me. The winds, by the way, are now swishing back and forth with no real consistant direction.
For perspective: I'm sitting in my living room with curtains open. My house faces roughly north-to-south, meaning the driveway and small front yard are on the north. I have large windows facing north. My house sits on the south side of a cul-de-sac. This is a single-family home development with zero lot lines, very similar to what's called high-density housing in other areas. I'm at the bottom of the "U" in the cul-de-sac but the arms of the "U" stretch no more than 70-80 feet from me and in the center of the "U" is 6 parking slots and a street lamp.
The light of the street lamp is what lets me see what the wind is doing. The fronds from the couple of medium-aged palms in the center of the cul swish back and forth. Still nothing steady in direction or speed of the wind.
My dad calls me on my cell phone. He's decided that with the new landfall estimates and his house's below-sealevel depth, prudence dictates that he relocate with my mother and others to my grandmother's house. He urges me to reconsider not staying. I counter with the fact that I'm somewhat above sealevel and that if I feel in danger, I can always leave. He wishes me luck.
My family room, where all my computer gear was, was in the southwest corner of the house - directly opposed from my living room. I go there and log into AOL (this was pre-'Net, folks) and chat with a few folks about what was going on.
During this time my brother Kevin, who lives in Gainesville, Florida, starts to call. His tone is mixed betweeen concern and awe when I talk about how the wind is picking up and things are getting eerie.
I am also constantly calling my wife at her folks house, and my mother at my grandmothers house, to assure them that everything is fine and not to worry.
At some time after 11 PM, while at the computer in the family room, I notice a green flash. "What the hell?", I think and look through the sliding glass door that looks south onto my small back lawn which is completely covered by a wooden fence. Another green flash.
I start to open the sliding door and notice, for the first time, that it's bulging a bit. When I crack it open, it stops bulging but a gust of wind gets into the house and all my work papers on tables throughout the family room go flying. Oh, well.
I head into my backyard and notice that the wind is now heading from the north at about 50-70 MPH. My house is now a windblock and it's kinda strange to be standing in a dead zone while the wind howls above and to each side. Another green flash to the west, and as I turn to it, I see the brightest one yet only a few hundred yards away and see that it's an electrical transformer exploding with sparks and wires flying. The mystery of the green flashes is solved.
As the wind steadily increases, I call my brother from my cell and tell him about what I see and hear. I hold the phone around the edge of the house so that the wind blows directly into it so that he can hear it. Haha, are we having fun tonight!
Later, large debris starts to fly over my roof and it looks like my backyard is not such a great place to be even if the wind is being largely blocked. So I head back inside and message a few buddies on AOL, after fighting to get the sliding glass door closed. A few minutes later I turn and look and it is seriously bent in. So I crack it a bit, with much effort, and this seems to help.
I head back into the living room and the channel 4 staff is now broadcasting from a storage room, saying that their studio was under threat from a large crane that was tipping towards them. Hmm. Still doesn't seem that bad here; maybe they were wrong on the landfall?
Flicker. Then another flicker and my lights fail. Expected. I had expected this and already had what I called "the world's greatest portable radio" ready in the family room. This radio was a Sony and about the size of a paperback book. It ran forever on 6 AA-batteries and could receive 17-bands. What was really cool about it was that it had a little switch hidden in the battery case where you could change from the US 10-cycle AM bands to Europes 9-cycle bands. This made it a must-carry on my many trips to Europe.
This radio was my 1st anniversary present in 1991 and worked faithfully until it died for no apparent reason in late 2004.
Back to the story: I tune in 610 WIOD AM on my radio. I'm listening to a news guy, named "Chuck" who's been pressed into duty as a talk-show host trying to get a feel from his listeners about what's going on out there in local radioland. I regret that I don't remember Chuck's last name.
Chuck mentions that they've had no callers from south of Cutler Ridge. Well, hell, I'm just south of Cutler Ridge so I call. Apparently there are no call screeners tonight because I get right on with Chuck. He asks me what I see and I start to tell him about the wind and increasing debris flying by when the signal dies.
Doggone! I try to call back and nothing happens. No signal. Phone shows almost no signal strength. Strange. So I decide to get to higher ground, so to speak, and try again. I leave the family room and head upstairs to the master bedroom. At that point my phone rings and it's my brother from Gainesville (I label my brothers because I have 3 and it's how I keep track of 'em in my head).
He asks me how I'm doing. Honestly, things have gotten a lot scarier in the past few minutes and I tell him so. The wind is really howling now. He starts to say something but I lose the signal once again.
At that moment, like a bad kung-fu movie, time actually slows down for me. I'm standing at the foot of my bed. Above the headboard is a window looking south over the backlawn. Three feet to the north of me is the door to the master bathroom. To the west of that is a sliding door to the walk-in closet. To my left (east) is a dresser where sits my radio, stiff drink, and my cigarettes which I all grabbed when I tromped upstairs.
Back to the kung-fu movie: I hear a crash of glass downstairs. I turn and start to move towards the bedroom door. And then I feel a terrific punch to the top of my head and I go down like a collection of ropes. This all took place in a few seconds.
So I find myself lying at the foot of the bed. I grab at the bedcovers and pull them over me from the bed. I notice as I arrange them that there's a lot of blood all over the place and it's mine.
I felt woozy; I reached up and touched the top of my head and there's a huge crease running diagonally and it's seeping blood. I looked over to my feet and see my bathroom door with a goodly part of the supporting wall attached lying there. I figured that it's what hit me; and would later establish that for fact. I also know now that I was unconscious for at least a few minutes but have no way of knowing for how long.
The length and depth of the crease in my head convinced me that I might die. It was a very weird feeling and one hard to put words around. But during this time the wind had gotten through my bedroom window and a 150+ MPH wind was swirling debris through the room and dropping some of it on me.
I grabbed the bottom of the mattress on the bed and pulled it loose from the bed and over me. Now I had shelter, even if bleeding like a stuck pig and concerned about my overall health.
After several minutes, the bleeding stopped but I was aware of voices in the room. After a minute of confusion, I realized that the voices were from the radio - still on the dresser and still working, despite debris being plastered all over the side facing the bedroom window.
The wind had shifted enough to eliminate the use of my bedroom as a windtunnel, so I scurried out crab-like from my mattress fortress and managed to retrieve the radio. I waited a second and then also grabbed my drink and cigarettes.
I lit a cigarette and waited and it seemed as if the wind had died down, except for some swishing sounds. It hit me that this was the eye of the storm and that I had a few minutes of safety before the backside hit.
What to do? Traditionally the backside of a hurricane has worse winds than the front and so I was pretty worried about that. Also, without knowing the storm speed, eyewall size, now precise landfall point - there was no way of knowing how long I had before the winds came back.
I decided that discretion was the better point of valor and quickly made a shelter of my walk-in closet using the mattress I had already copiously bled into as a front shield. No sooner had I made myself comfortable than the winds returned with a vengeance.
Since I was "fortified" I was able to pay more attention to my environment sans immediate survival. The sounds of the wind were incredible. Pucker your lips and put your tongue on the roof of your mouth and blow as hard as you can. That was the prevalent wind sound. Now, repeat with your mouth curved into a smile - this was the sound of those weird gust moments when the whole house would shake and I thought it might all come apart.
(Part Two)
So there I was listening to the sounds of the house and, probably, the neighborhood being torn apart. It wasn't until about 6 in the morning that I felt it was safe to venture out...still a bit groggy and bloody from the bop on the head hours before.
I picked my way out of the bedroom and towards the stairs. Holy crap - the stairs were covered with the contents from my daughter's bedroom, which abutted the stairs. The wind had gotten into her room and torn the back wall off, dumping the contents of her closet on to the stairs. I picked my way down carefully, bleeding and cursing the whole while.
So now I'm back in my living room. Almost every piece of furniture has been pushed against the stairs. Under the stairs was a small 1/2 bathroom, which has been crushed. Ironically, this is the "interior room" that my relatives had urged me all night to seek shelter in. Heh.
I look out of the front door: The entire cul-de-sac is covered by pieces of Spanish barrel tile, which was the roofing material of choice in the area. Not good. I make my way around the inside of the house to the garage.....which seems to be OK. My car, however, looks like it was machinegunned by tile pieces. All the tires are blown and all but one of the windows are blown out. How did this happen? Easy enough to see: My garage door has been peppered by tile pieces that came through and hit the car at 150+ MPH. Ugh.
Heck, the car starts so I lift the garage door and back it out into the cul. Not too worried about the tile because the tires are already blown and I really don't care about the rims at that point. I stoppped in my driveway, because I suddenly remembered that a few of my neighbors hadn't told me what they were going to do during the storm and thought I should check on them.
There was an older lady who lived in a small 1-story house behind my neighbor's house on my immediate right. My neighbor's house - also 1-story - had an east-west facing and took the brunt of the wind and therefore looked like an empty aircraft hanger with a few beams marring the complete open of the interior.
So I clambered through his house and through his backyard to the lady's house, which looked from the rear to be remarkably well-preserved. I knocked on her glass door (intact) and got no answer, so I opened the door and stepped inside. Her family room was completely intact! She had a bunch of porcelain knick-knacks throughout the room and I couldn't see any damage to any of them. I turned to my left and went into her kitchen which was also in good shape. From there, a hallway turned to my left towards the front of the house. Very dark and cluttered...I looked down as I picked my way and came upon a pair of legs sticking out of the clutter.
She was dead. I didn't even try to move the debris off of her and just left the way I'd come. Days later, I figured out that what had happened was that the house across the street from her lost it's second story, which flew over and crushed her and the front of her house - creating the windbreak that had preserved so much of her house.
Directly across from my cul-de-sac was another, with the end point about 100 yards from my house. I don't know why I went to the house directly opposite from mine, but I did. It had a similar layout to mine but the first floor had taken a whacking and there were no stairs left and a lot of glass and rubble. I heard crying upstairs.
I climbed up what was left of the stair railing and got upstairs. Hiding in a closet were a woman and her two young kids. I vaguely knew her to be Turkish and a nice person overall. She was in the closet crying and just wearing panties - it's as if she was totally caught off-guard by what happened and ended up in her closet. Her kids were actually more composed. I convinced them that they had to leave. None of them had shoes and none of them could find any in the wreakage. So I rigged a blanket from the top of the stairs to climb down on. The kids climbed down fine, but the woman was still hysterical and I had to fireman's carry her down the makeshift rope. Once down, I sent the woman's daughter back up to find a shirt for her. After she returned, I led them all carefully to their garage where their Toyota coupe sat undamaged. I got them into the car and the lady's head had cleared enough for them to drive off towards....I dunno where. I never saw them again.
So I traipsed back to my car and decided to drive to my grandmother's house. As I left my neighborhood I passed a police car, moderately damaged, with a dazed looking policeman driving slowly down the avenue.
I got a few blocks down the main road and then the road became unpassable. Upside-down cars, trees, junk, and other crap blocked the road. I went a few more blocks - mainly through people's yards with my already-blown tires, before I realized that the best way forward was down U.S.1, which lay several blocks to the west.
It took me about an hour to navigate my way to the highway. Unless you've been in this situation, it's hard to describe but it's very easy to get lost in areas you've known for years because most landmarks have been twisted or destroyed. So I get to the highway and turn towards the north. A block down the road I pass a Circuit City. The entire front of the store has been torn away and there are TVs and stereos and whatever in boxes strewn across the parking lot and highway.
As I slow to make my way through these boxes, a young black guy flags me down. He needs to get to his sister in Dadeland Lakes - an apartment block not too far from my grandmothers. So I tell him to hop in but there's broken glass all over the passenger's seat so he rips a panel from one of the Circuit City boxes and puts it in the seat and sits on that.
We drive slowly down US 1. I don't remember if he told me his name or not but I do remember that neither of us said anything much. I got to S.W. 112th Street and turned off the highway. I dropped off my passenger who had a few more miles still to walk but he was grateful for the ride, I think. As he got out of the car, he grabbed my arm and said, "you're good folk" and then walked away.
I navigated the 4 or so remaining blocks to my grandmothers. I think the drive took about an hour and a half - normally it would have taken 10-15 minutes. It's now about 9AM.
I knock on the door - no electricity, no doorbells - my father answers and grabs me while chuckling. My mother swoons or otherwise semi-faints. Later, she tells me that from the preliminary reports from the area that she was sure I was dead. My father, of course, always being Mr. Macho figures that no kid of his is going to get killed by a damn storm and acts nonchalant...to this day I don't know if he really felt that way or was relieved and hiding it.
Meanwhile it seems that my parents neighbors and best friends Dave and Barbara also ended up at my grandmothers house. My mother, having recovered, insisted that I go to the hospital for my head injury but I figured it had stopped bleeding and there were folks worse off than me. Now Dave and my father confer and ask me to drive them back to the neghborhood. What the heck, I do and we get there around 11 AM or so. Both of their houses have been inundated with water during the surge and all contents are destroyed.
We slowly make our way back to my grandmothers house - after convincing a guy with a shotgun that we were not in the area to loot.
A (now) comic note. My wife had her brother drive her from her parents house to our house to look for me - all phones were out. She got into the house and saw, in the stairway debris, the head of a giant Iggy doll that was covered with blood (from me, while trying find my way down). She thought it was me buried there and fainted. She eventually recovered (lol).
Later that day I ended up at my in-laws house. There was no electricity and it was sweltering. The houses in South Florida are not built to catch breezes - they're concrete blocks meant to be air-conditioned. Take away the power and they become 100+ degree torture chambers.
With the influx of other family, my wife and I were relegated to sharing a small sofa for the night. I slept fitfully, because of the heat, but slept about 15 hours.
The next two days were spent scavenging. I scavenged a network-sized UPS from my house that allowed my inlaws to have a working lamp and a coffee-maker. I drove with my friend Mike to Boca Raton (70 miles) to buy groceries and candles. We had lunch at a TGI Friday's off of I-95 in Boca and it was the first time I was in air-conditioning, relaxed, and felt normal.
Overall, it wasn't pleasent but we managed to survive; after the 4th or 5th day we got power back and some of the family left to return home so I was able to sleep in a bed!
About a week after the storm, they were saying on TV that all survivors should register with FEMA and the Red Cross at this field off of Kendall Drive. I knew the field; I had worked as a volunteer with disabled kids at the youth center there when I was 16. So I go there and there are several hundred, perhaps thousands, of folks in a multitude of lines.
I get in one line and after an hour was facing a pretty beat-up Red Cross volunteer. She takes down my name and address and where I'm staying now. She offers me a bag full of various food and drink items. I decline. Apparently, she's not used to this response and angrily tries to force me to take the bag! I tell her that I have a car, money, and am handling things OK...she looks at me doubtfully. I then tell her that it's best if she gives that bag to someone who really needs it and that seems to convince her. No thanks, no goodbyes, and I leave the line.
I start to leave but I first ask a guy who looks like some sort of guard or expediter if I should. He asks me if I've been to the FEMA line. Nope. He suggests I go there. I ask why. He says that the government needs to know where folks are and some other stuff. OK....I get in the FEMA line.
Another hour in the grueling So.Fla. heat and I find myself at the FEMA table. They ask me the same questions that the Red Cross did and I answer the same. The FEMA guy then tells me that he's prepared to give me $500 on the spot and put me in for a $10,000 low interest loan. I say "no". He double-takes and asks why. I tell him that I have already been in contact with my insurers and I have no way of knowing now if I'd need FEMA help but I'd rather err on the side of not assuming unnecessary debt. Could I have a name and number just in case? He's really not prepared for this response and doesn't have a name or number. His advice is to just come back through the same lines if I want help in the future. Heh. Begin to think that they could use my database expertise around here.
I will save you from the angst and gruel of 18 months of dealing with insurance companies (our flood carrier went belly-up!) and construction companies. In summary - did we get back everything? Wellll....mostly. To this day, in 2005, there are times I'll go poking about in the garage looking for something and then realizing that I last saw it before Andrew which immediately means it's lost forever.
My wife and I were scrupulously honest on our insurance claims. Occasionally we'd get a bit pissed when the insurer would say we wouldn't get reimbursed for something until we had a receipt (well, then, how do we pay for the replacement!). But, overall, I have to say that the insurers I dealt with definitely put the problems and suffering of their customers before any other consideration.
We get back to our rebuilt home in July, 1993. We have electricity. We don't get gas back until September and don't get cable TV until early 1994. I still remember having my folks over for Thanksgiving, 1993, and wiring up a Rube Goldberg TV antenna so that my Dad and I wouldn't miss the Dolphins-Cowboys game.
Meanwhile.....my neighbors were less than honest on their claims. My neighbor to my right, who's house I traipsed through to find the dead lady, claimed all sorts of artwork lost and a missing grand piano(!). Since the interior of their house was wiped almost clean, they got away with it.
But here's kharma for you: My neighbor bought a very sophisticated satellite TV system. After a few months, the reconstituted homeowners association forced him to take it down. He spent thousands on attorney's fees fighting them, and then ended up selling his equipment for pennies on the dollar. Their other large investment, so to speak, was the ... ummm.... decollatage of the female of the house. Breast enhancement. I guess that boost of confidence was what she needed because she started coming home late and got a biker boyfriend, and their marriage ended in divorce within a couple of years. Sadly, their daughter (who was best friends with my eldest), died in a crash at the age of 17. Ironically, this brought them back together and I think they're remarried at this time.
When all was said and done, my family recovered without a single penny from the government, although the IRS did allow some unavoidable tax write-offs. This is my moral foundation for criticism of the way the Katrina crisis is handled. I think it's a strong one, and one not too many of you can challenge.
WTF?
On the evening of August 10, Hannah Shaffer of Glen Mills, Pennsylvania, decided to go to the nearby Barnes & Noble outside of Wilmington. She wanted to see Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, who was promoting his book, “It Takes a Family.”
The event was billed as a “book signing and discussion,” Shaffer says.
But discussion was the last thing that the Senator’s people wanted.
Shaffer, her friends, and two other young women were booted out of the store and threatened with imprisonment even before they had a chance to say a word to Santorum, as Al Mascitti first noted in the Delaware News Journal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/opinion/11brooks.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print
September 11, 2005
The Best-Laid Plan: Too Bad It Flopped
By DAVID BROOKS
Among the many achievements of the human race - Chartres Cathedral, the Mona Lisa - surely the New Orleans emergency preparedness plan must rank among the greatest, and the fact that this plan turned out to be irrelevant to reality should not detract from its stature as a masterpiece of bureaucratic thinking.
The plan (which is viewable online at www.cityofno.com/portal.aspx?portal=46&tabid=26) begins with the insight: Be prepared. Or as the plan puts it, "Individuals with assigned tasks must receive preparatory training to maximize operations."
The plan lays out a course of action so that all personnel will know exactly what to do in case of a hurricane. The Office of Emergency Preparedness will coordinate with the Louisiana Office of Emergency Preparedness in conjunction with the Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan by taking full advantage of the courses offered by the Louisiana Emergency Preparedness Association and other agencies "as well as conferences, seminars and workshops that may from time to time be available, most notably state hurricane conferences and workshops and the National Hurricane Conference."
In addition, the plan continues, the administrative and training officer of the Office of Emergency Preparedness will maintain close communication with the state training officer of the L.O.E.P., making sure workshops are conducted at the Emergency Support Function level, reviewing Emergency Operating Center/E.S.F. standard operating procedures and undertaking more "intensive work sessions with elements of the emergency response organizations in order to enhance unified disaster planning."
One can imagine the PowerPoint presentations! The millions of cascading bullet points! The infinity of hours spent planning a hurricane response that would make a Prussian officer gasp with reverence!
Furthermore, the plan instructs the O.E.P. director to execute Mass Casualty Incidents scenarios; work with the Association of Contingency Planners and other groups to coordinate disaster organization responses; coordinate, facilitate and encourage other agencies to conduct emergency self-assessments; engage in assessment processes in preparation for the Agency Disaster Report; and produce after-action reports with the O.E.P. shelter coordinator in conjunction with the Louisiana Statewide Hurricane Exercise.
The paper flow must have been magnificent! The quality of the facilitating must have been surpassed only by the magnificence of the interfacing!
The New Orleans emergency preparedness plan offers a precise communications strategy, so all city residents will know exactly where to go in times of crisis. It recommends that two traffic control officers be placed at each key intersection. It recommends busing the thousands of residents unable to evacuate themselves to staging areas prestocked with food.
In short, the plan was so beautiful, it's too bad reality destroyed it. The plan's authors were not stupid or venal. They are doubtless good public servants who worked in agencies set up to prepare for this storm. And yet their elaborate plan crumbled under the weight of the actual disaster.
But of course this illustrates the paradox at the heart of the Katrina disaster, which is that we really need government in times like this, but government is extremely limited in what it can effectively do.
Katrina was the most anticipated natural disaster in American history, and still government managed to fail at every level.
For the brutal fact is, government tends toward bureaucracy, which means elaborate paper flow but ineffective action. Government depends on planning, but planners can never really anticipate the inevitable complexity of events. And American government is inevitably divided and power is inevitably devolved.
For example, the Army Corps of Engineers had plenty of money (Louisiana received more than any other state), but that spending was carved up into little pork barrel projects. There were ample troops nearby to maintain order, but they were divided between federal and state authorities and constrained by regulations.
This preparedness plan is government as it really is. It reminds us that canning Michael Brown or appointing some tough response czar will not change the endemic failures at the heart of this institutional collapse.
So of course we need limited but energetic government. But liberals who think this disaster is going to set off a progressive revival need to explain how a comprehensive governmental failure is going to restore America's faith in big government.
E-mail: dabrooks@nytimes.com
Sigh.
Here we go. The Bush-bashers have another horse to climb on; that is, the difference in Federal funding and state requests for funding on the levee system in New Orleans. Apparently, funding from the Feds was only about 50% of desired in the last few years. Sooo...of course the Angry Left sees this as another Bush-bashing opportunity, hoping the intelligent and thoughtful reader won't look too deeply into the truth.
This cartoon by Horsey of the P.I. epitomizes what I'm referring to: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/horsey/viewbydate.asp?id=1257
The truth is that the Feds have given La. less than they asked for for decades due to a variety of issues, including the inability of the state to match funds which is a requirement for that sort of funding. And, it appears, the parts of the levee that broke, ironically, are those that have been shored up most recently.
If that's not enough, the Left also insinuates that the Bush Administration is slow-acting because the majority of affected citizens are black (!) and Jesse Jackson has criticized the lack of minorities in the relief effort (overlooking the fact that the head of the military relief effort in the 3 states is black).
Conclusions:
I share the feeling on the part of most folks that the whole relief effort has been a clusterfuck. It has been so disorganized and chaotic that it's hard not to criticize the leadership for the ineptness. Words cannot describe the situation at the N.O. convention center.
OTOH, being the survivor of a major hurricane myself, I know how these things work. To me, it seems that the structural failures started at the city and parish level. There was no clean-cut evacuation plan and apparently no surefire shelter plan. The Superdome as a shelter was a quickly made decision with no pre-planning and I don't know what the hell happened with the convention center.
The city was unprepared and relied (relies, actually), on the Feds to come in and bail them out. The Feds have the resources but don't have the local intelligence to do it efficiently. The locals cry "where are they!" for the Feds but the Feds don't have the local emergency planning documents to go where they are needed they would have if the local officials had planned accordingly.
The individuals involved are working their guts out but the big picture was mishandled, and not - primarily - by the Federal government.
Blame Bush? Hah! No, blame the New Orleans and Louisiana emergency planners who never dreamed this could happen and didn't know what to tell folks when it did. FEMA is trying to help and gaining control of the situation little by little. But it would have been much faster if there had been a plan.
I'm now in the position of working at home and am able to keep the TV on while working. 95% of what was on the news channels was, of course, the aftermath of the disaster in the Gulf States.
It's disturbing how three different media outlets can look at completely different aspects of the same story and insinuate or otherwise draw conclusions on the goods (few) and bads of the situation. As I switched through CNN. MSNBC, and FNC, I drew conclusions on the slants. Please comment:
FNC: Good coverage; pushed the people side. Shepard Smith actually broadcast from I-10 with a dead body behind him (!). Showed rescue efforts and reported on chaos in the Superdome and elsewhere. Had an interview with Franklin Graham that was worthless, but also had some good interviews, such as with Michael Baden, world-famous forenics expert, who explained the health hazards. Downside was constant referral to the affected folks as "refugees", which was clearly an irritant.
MSNBC: Exceptional coverage. Was the only news organization AFAIK that had the guts to put cameras into the NO Convention Centre, which is collapsing into absolute chaos. Unfortunately, noone there put a lid on the comment shows. On his show, Keith Olbermann went out of his way to say that the affected were primarily black and poor and then had Al Sharpton on who ranted that the government wasn't helping because of the socioeconomic status of the victims. Extremely poor taste.
CNN: OK coverage, but like MSNBC, kept playing the race card. To be honest, I didn't watch as much as it as the other two.
So there you have it.
