Corporate Ameri-DUHHHHH

Ladies and gentlemen, it's time to put the kids to bed and make sure your parents hearing aids are turned down, because I am about to go off!  Believe it or not, this blog thing is not how I make my living.  No, I get to deal with a Fortune 500 company on a daily basis by supplying a service to them.  For many years it was a great relationship.  We took care of them at a very reasonable price and they paid in a timely manner.  All that has changed as of late and really it's just a microcosm of Corporate America.  A bunch of people sit in a room staring at numbers decide that they are paying everyone too much.  Everybody from the executive assistant all the way down to the janitor.  Of course you notice that it does not continue on up the food chain to include the people that really should have some of their fat cut.  No, the executives all make sure they get theirs.  Afterall, they are the ones that figured out how to screw everyone and ended up with piles of money that they do not know what to do with.  May as well divvy it out amongst themselves in bonus form.

Yes, it's been interesting watching this particular company slash their own throats in the name of short term gains.  They continue to cut payroll budgets so that there is no one in their store to wait on their customers.  They shortened their store hours in some cases so you go there to make a late night run to pick up something you need and find out the store is closed.  You ask to talk to a manager and you get some pimply faced kid that doesn't have a clue about anything that is not related to the video games he plays in his mother's basement, yet he acts like he knows it all.

The company does this all so it can increase it's earnings, not looking at any of the long term consequences of their actions.  It does not matter, because whoever is running the company today will most likely be working for a completely different company once the consequences come to fruition.  They will have moved on to the next company to rape and pillage after having made their millions and boosted their career by "turning around" a beleaguered Fortune 500 company.  When the poo hits the turbine it will not look like it was their fault, it was whoever was manning the helm when the poo went "WHOP!!".  That is the way Corporate America operates.  CEOs, CFOs, COOs and the like move from one gig to another trying to drum up short term earnings so they can cash their million dollar checks.  They continue to screw over all the hard working people that actually do the work that makes the company it's money.  In my mind Corporate America is trying to reinstitute slavery in America.  Now, I am sure that NAACP just gasped, but hear me out.  I am not saying that what corporations are doing today is as bad as what African Americans had to endure.  Not by a long shot.  But what made a lot of people rich back in the infancy of the United States is the fact that they had relatively free labor.  Yes they had to house and feed their slaves, but that was way cheaper that having to actually pay someone to do their work.  That's how Thomas Jefferson made his fortune and there were hundreds if not thousands of others that did the same thing and got rich doing it.  Today, Corporate America has made sure that nobody is able to make a comfortable living, except for the company big wigs of course.  To me, this is a form of slavery.  This time though, it isn't a race of people being used as slaves, it's a class of people, but hey, it's just business, it's nothing personal.  That's what they tell themselves so they can sleep at night.

So, getting back to my story, at one time this was a great company to be involved with.  But a bunch of people in suits staring at numbers saw a number they did not like.  Without doing any research and figuring out if it was a reasonable number or not, they just made a decision that the number had to be lowered.  Keep in mind this is a number that the local stores have been trying to get lowered for years, but they took bid after bid after bid and could never find anything lower.  Or at least a lower bid from people with all their teeth and without a criminal record.  However, the suits, they knew better, there had to be a way to force their hand.  So, they just said, this is how much we will pay you, take it or leave it.  This was several years ago when everyone was wondering if the bottom was going to fall out of the financial system, so work was hard to come by.  We chose to stick with it and try to figure out a way to make it work.  Now that our contract is almost up, we are hearing that once again they are going to try and make us take another pay cut.  Let's just say I've been exfoliating my backside and applying ample amounts of moisturizer to said area in anticipation of the lips that will soon be puckering up to kiss my fat, hairy, soft and supple A**!!!!

Pucker up buttercup!

How Did the Holocaust Come to Be?

Well, I learned me sumpin today!  Who says Netflix is a time waster?  Lately I have been doing research on the Nazis and Adolf Hitler.  I wanted to know where all that hate for people that were not acceptable in the eyes of the Nazi came from.  That led me to a few documentaries about World War II, Auschwitz, Hitler and the Nazi party.  How the extermination of Jews, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses and homosexuals became synonymous with Hitler and the Nazi part is actually a very interesting subject.  A subject that had beginnings that were not unlike the United States and many other "thinking" and "developed" countries. 

Now, before you fly off the handle and label me as a hater of the United States, please read on.  In the early 1900's (1920-1940), a school of thought surfaced among "thinking" and "developed" nations.  At the time, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution had really taken hold.  Of course, Darwin's theory of natural selection was a prime part of his theory of evolution.  Darwin believed that the strong would survive and pass along their positive qualities to the next generation, and the weak, would slowly die off and take their bad qualities with them.  Therefore, Darwin concluded, mankind would eventually reach perfection.  As a result, "thinking" people wondered, "Well, what if we helped that natural selection along and helped weed out the weak, sick, disabled, mentally retarded and dumb!?" 

It was in the 1920's and 30's that sterilization became a popular way to keep the undesirables from reproducing.  The idea being to rid the undesirable people, "help" the natural selection process along and speed up the process.  In fact by the middle of the 1930's, more than half the states in the United Sates had passed laws that authorized the sterilization of "inmates of mental institutions, persons convicted more than once of sex crimes, those doomed to be feeble-minded by 10 tests, 'moral degenerate persons,' and epileptics."

Then, there was the Buck v. Bell case, brought before the United States Supreme Court, (1927), a ruling that upheld a statute instituting compulsory sterilization of the unfit, including the mentally retarded, "for the protection and health of the state." It was largely seen as an endorsement of negative eugenics—the attempt to improve the human race by eliminating "defectives" from the gene pool. 

This ruling was actually used by the Nazi party to make the relatively small leap to the idea of eugenic killings in Nazi Germany.  But to me, it is amazing to think that the United States really had the same mind set as Nazi Germany.  Obviously the United States snapped back to reality once another country dared to kill in the name of eventual human perfection.  Who knows where we would be now had that genocide been allowed to continue here in our home. 

To me, it just shows the dangers that are involved in the theory of evolution.  If we evolved, why not just "help" out the natural selection process and speed up our eventual arrival at perfection?  If we evolved, there really is no such thing as morals or conscience, so why not just do what is believed to be a foregone conclusion anyway?  Fortunately, Adolf Hitler answered these questions for us.  We do have a conscience, unlike other primates.  We are guided by morals, unlike other primates.  So, really, the conclusion of the matter should be quite evident. 

Getting Older

I am sure I will get little sympathy from those of you that are older than myself, but I think I have started down that downward path known as getting older.  By this time next year, I will be well into my 40th year on this planet.  Which makes me think of a line from the movie, "On Golden Pond".   Dabney Coleman's character asks Henry Fonda's character, "So, how does it feel to turn 80?", and without skipping a beat, Henry Fonda says, "Twice as bad as turning 40!"  I have waited nearly 30 years to start to understand how bad it feels to turn 40 just so I could get some perspective on what Fonda was getting at.  To be honest though, it really isn't that bad, or at least not as bad as I perceived it would be back when I thought 40 was ancient.  I certainly don't feel that bad.  Sure, I have started to collect prescription vial like I used to collect baseball cards, but all in all, I don't feel that bad (Sounds like I am trying to convince myself, doesn't it?)

Granted, I have had four shoulder surgeries, my neck is suffering the effects of whiplash from a car accident and from football collisions, my cholesterol is high, my blood pressure is high, and I could drop a good 30 pounds and it would be considered a good start.  However, I don't think that I have started to play the part of the "old fart" as of yet.  I still know how to have fun (as long as it includes a nap before and/or after said fun), and I still have the same immature sense of humor I always have.  Partly, I think that is why many younger people like me or at least tolerate me.  I can joke around and have fun with them.  Plus, there is an advantage to having an overnight job.  They usually run out of gas before I do, so then they figure the "old guy" is a party animal...even if I do have to sleep for an entire day to recover from trying to party like a rockstar. 

That being said, I believe I have started to not be able to identify with the "cool" younger folks.  I have started to sound like my parents sounded when I was young and cool.  For instance, I don't get music today.  To me, it all is pretty dreadful and for the most part all sounds exactly the same.  Sure, I can tell the difference between Daughtry and Gym Class Heros, but to me one sounds about as unoriginal as the other.  Which is precisely what my parents used to say about the music I listened to back in the 80's.  They used to belittle the cover songs that ended up being popular in the 80's and 90's.  Well guess what, I do the same thing today when it comes to the songs of my youth being covered.  As an example, Miley Cyrus has been covering 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' on her current tour.  I am sorry, but, NO!  To me this is sacrilege.  She may as well be up there wiping her butt with an American flag in front of a bunch of NRA members.  You DO NOT cover a song from a band like Nirvana unless you can just rip it up and make it your own.  Needless to say, Miley didn't do that by any stretch of the imagination. 

I think the worst thing, by far, about getting older is watching people you have known your whole life make really bad decisions and it ruins their life on many levels.  It's a very helpless feeling.  Then in the same vein is watching people that you thought were old when you were a kid actually turn old.  I've lost both of my grandfathers to death.  Growing up, though I thought they were old, they were always very active and vibrant.  To watch them slowly fade away was difficult. 

Of course, getting older has it's advantages.  When you talk, people will actually listen to what you have to say.  You know how to do things on your own, like build a garage or fix an electrical outlet, both without being severely injured.  You can go to your mechanic and tell them exactly what you need done on your car without having to try to explain the weird noise it was making by demonstrating those noises for them.  You finally have enough connections that you can get Husker tickets to virtually any game you would like to see. 

Hopefully there are things coming as I continue down the other side of the hill that will make getting old a pleasant surprise.  I never imagined I would be this old, but now that I AM this old, I may as well embrace it and enjoy the ride down the long and winding road.