Tales from the Shark Tank

You know, it’s amazing how enamored our society seems to be with complexity. The company near my house, formerly known simply as “Best Locks” is now “Best Entry Control Systems”. And the opening in my box of chai is labelled “access portal”.

Whatever happened to “spout”? Did it fall out of the dictionary or something?

I got off the phone a few minutes ago with an attorney in the north part of the state. The end of the conversation came with her sudden exclamation of “What are you doing? Stop printing! Stop! My G-d, this thing is putting out paper like it took Ex-lax!”

Theoretically, I’m at work today. I have gotten darned little that could be so construed done so far today, though, and this at the start of what promises to be a horribly busy week.

Instead, this has been my morning for fielding calls from people who have a crisis in their lives. Some want advice; some merely an acknowledging ear. One woman’s mother has been conclusively diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. This is happening just as she’s trying to move to another state, because she’s gotten into a good relationship for the first time since she was widowed eight years ago. (She’s younger than I am.) A man I’ve been friends with since high school is beyond depressed, because his elder son has been back from college for a week, and has yet to call. (My friend and the kid’s mother are divorced, but on pretty good terms. The kid is at his mom’s.) There are some fences that are pretty badly in need of mending there, because my friend attempted suicide about a year and a half ago. A third friend has just figured out that her husband is going to jail, probably for several years. He richly deserves it; he hit his 13 year old disabled step-son — but his wife doesn’t know how she’s going to survive financially. The fourth one just found out that an attempt at invitro fertilization didn’t take, and is trying to figure out if she has the strength to face the possibility of another failure. I know that last one far too well; I’ve been answering the question on medical forms about type of birthcontrol used with “infertility” for too many years.

I’m turning off the ringer on my phone for the rest of the day. Anyone who wants me can leave voicemail, and I’ll call back — as long as it isn’t another personal crisis. Mother Confessor is out!

My husband and I were in the SCA for years. We left about 14 years ago because we were being dragged into Society politics and didn’t want to go, but we’d been quite active for a long while by that point; long enough to color our attitudes even yet. If I ask my husband to hand me my pink Norman jumper, he knows exactly which dress to get out of the closet.

So this morning I was getting dressed. I pulled out a white linen tunic, mid-thigh length or a bit longer, with very full long sleeves gathered to cuffs and a mandarin collar. It is not at all a peasant blouse; more of a Cossack shirt style. I put it on over black linen slacks. My husband was kind of hemming and hawing over the outfit, not sure it looked “right”, but unable to put his finger on what was wrong.

Finally, though, he did. He said that it looked like an SCA undertunic (it does) and that his first reaction was that I was wearing my underwear out in public.

Well, from that perspective, I suppose I am. Underwear long enough to be a minidress, but underwear nonetheless.

My job is changing dramatically, and I couldn’t be more pleased. I’ve been handling a lot of little stuff. It’s necessary, it takes time, but it’s rather tedious, and generally could be done by someone fresh out of law school.

The new projects are: reviewing and rewriting a whole bunch of administrative rules and statutes, and writing a grant proposal to get Indiana a share of the money the federal government allocated to help the states with the cost of implementing Patriot Act provisions. I’ve been pointing out statutory inconsistencies and places where technology has gotten way ahead of the rules for as long as I’ve been here. Now, it seems, someone has concluded that if I can spot it, I should get the job of trying to fix it. So now I get to write, and write, and write some more. This is the fun stuff!

I have just been forcibly reminded how much I prefer a wordprocessor to an old-fashioned typewriter.

A week and a half ago, I filed a bankruptcy for a client. I did it as a hollow petition (bring everything to a screeching halt, but no details) and now have to finish all the schedules.

All the forms for a bankruptcy are available on line, courtesy of the United States Court website. But they are in a format that only allows them to be printed; I can’t download them and then use the computer to fill them in. That would be far too easy. So I downloaded them, printed them at my in-law’s house (Wick having run off with the printer for a chess tournament), left my son to play with his grandparents, and started typing on the typewriter I bought when I was half past college in 1978.

Rolling in the paper. Making sure it’s in straight. Lining things up. Whiting out errors because backspace doesn’t eliminate them. Hitting caplock and getting not only capital letters, but all the weird symbols above the numbers. Rattle and thump and noise and vibration and clatter.

I did all my papers and exams for grad school and law school on that thing. Now I wonder how.

Dorothea spoke about losing one of her prejudices when she met someone whose very existence was incompatible with the prejudice. I have had that experience from the other side. It was quite a shock when I learned of it.

I have a long-standing practice of finding and mentoring people who, for one reason or another, need it. One of my friends nicknamed these folks collectively my “fledglings”, and the name has stuck. One of my first fledglings was (at the time he came under my wings) a college freshman. He was dealing with all sorts of things: his mother’s death from cancer, a bout of malignant melanoma on his own back that darn near killed him, and his father’s remarriage to a woman who didn’t want to deal with him or his brother.

He had been raised in a very conservative fundamentalist protestant sect, and taught, among other things, that Jews were damned and a great source of evil in the world. He’d never, to his knowledge, met anyone who was Jewish, and he did not question the teachings.

And then he met me. I am Jewish breath and bone; it colors my outlook and actions in darn near everything. I took him in, held him when he needed to grieve, listened to him at 2:00 a.m. many nights, affirmed that he was a good and generous soul (which he is, decidedly) who had done nothing to deserve the things that had happened to him. I gave him permission to be angry at his father by being angry on his behalf, saying that no, his father should not have left him and his brother to live alone in their father’s house while he moved into his new wife’s home.

Some ten or fifteen years later, apropos his letting me know that he had become Pagan, I asked him what had brought him to leave the religion in which he had been raised. The answer shocked me. It was me. He said that he could not reconcile the woman who had mentored him and been his friend with what he had been taught about Jews, and that it led him to question everything else he had been taught. It wasn’t anything I ever said, he told me, but just what I am. I am still stunned and awed by that.

Well, as previously commented, I am engaged in answering a discrimination complaint. The complaint itself is one paragraph long. The Position Statement turned out to be 3 pages. Now I’m answering the questionaire that the Civil Rights Commission requires be answered if you’re not going to just roll over and admit the disrimination. I’m on page 6 of what will probably be 10, and the supporting documents run to several hundred pages. Some of the questions are things like “why did you decide not to hire Complainant, and when was the decision made?” The underlying assumption in that phraseology is that you actively decided not to hire the person complaining, rather than that you (gasp) actively decided to hire someone else. Most of the rest of the questions are like that.

Maybe I’m still a hopeless idealist, but whatever happened to the concept of being innocent until proven guilty?

Our son Joseph seems to come climb into our bed a majority of nights, usually around 2:30 a.m. We’ve decided to allow it because if we do, he sleeps at least an hour later in the morning and the day is much more peaceful.

Now, our bed is not a king. There is not really room for three bodies even when one of them is small, particularly when that small body tends to wriggle. So a certain amount of musical beds often ensues; one parent or the other (usually me, because I sleep more lightly to begin with) will move to either Joseph’s bed or the guest bed, both of which are twin sized.

And so it was last night. Joseph came in. Mommy cuddled him out of the nightmare, and he fell back to sleep sandwiched between me and Wick. When he wriggled far enough that I was trying to sleep on 6 inches of mattress, it woke me up again and I shifted beds. No problem; he could share with his daddy for the rest of the night.

Joseph had other ideas, and apparently mommy was the parent du noir. So about a quarter hour after I moved, he followed me to the guest room. I was on my side, and he curled up in a small warm ball of boyness in the space behind my knees. I woke up enough to register presence, determine that he couldn’t fall out with my legs on one side and the wall on the other, and went back to sleep. I used to have a cat (before allergies went into overdrive) whose preferred sleeping place was the space behind my knees. The feeling was really remarkably similar.

You know, the discrimination card seems to be really fashionable right now. At least I’m seeing it played a lot. Usually, the person laying it down thinks it’s an ace. Usually, it’s a two at best. More often it’s a joker.

Case in point is the current complaint I’m answering. One of the employees in my agency is claiming she was denied promotion because she is of one race and the director of her division another. Trouble is, a few basic things seem to have escaped her attention - like, say, qualifications.

Required for the job: supervisory, management, and union relations experience, understanding of personnel policy and administrative rule promulgation, and two years of college.

In her resume: None of the above. Not one. The person offered the job hasn’t been with the agency as long, it’s true. And she is of another race than the complainer. But she’s been at the management level for eight years and has done all the things in the job description. (Add to that the fact that the complainant has the personality of a chainsaw with PMS, which is my own personal observation. I certainly wouldn’t promote her to a supervisory job!)

But no. She is certain there is no valid reason for denying her the promotion. It must be discrimination. Mustn’t it?