I work in another field and I'm an hourly employee (highly skilled and all of that stuff but still hourly). I, too, am often expected to respond to emergency situations.
What I see on the NPR report isn't a guy who was just checking his crackberry rather than responding to an emergency that required his presence by phone or in person. At least the story itself doesn't indicate a pattern of emergency responses.
My way of dealing with it is to tell my boss (and I've had more than my share of ignorant boneheads since beloved employer decided that my boss doesn't need to actually know what I do to be my boss) that it damned well better be an emergency and what the definition of that is. (No, it's not the phone in the janitors closest doesn't work or one out of a hundred phones don't work.) It's defined in my business as a threat to public health and safety first then as a threat to personal health and safety second. It's a catch all that works for the most part. (Police, Fire, Ambulance, Hospital, Ferry and ATC, STC are automatic.)
I've yet to respond to a real emergency that is actually fixable (there's been a couple that haven't been fixable) and get things going again. Including helping out IT guys when communications fail. (Telecom is all computers these days anyway.)
At the same time I recognize my own limitations in terms of how long I can work efficiently and productively on a problem and when it becomes pointless to continue because I'm either not going to solve it or I'm just gonna make things worse. Or, worse, damage the customer's business or injure myself both distinct possibilities the more tired I become.
As for changing me from wages to salaried or exempt, forget it. One of the few real hold backs to my being abused when I'm off work is that both the customer and beloved employer know it's gonna cost them to call me out off hours so they make sure they're sure.
For projects I'll do a shift change should I have to work nights for a night or two because that is what I've found what works best for me and, by extension, everyone else. That it's less expensive for the company and customer is a nice secondary effect. :-)
Overtime is, no matter, what, routinely abused, people are expected to work it to respond to crackberries, emergencies that aren't emergencies and other issues at any hour of the day or night.
Then I keep remembering the old saying "no one ever died wishing they'd spent too little time in the office" as well as the fact that people who get overstressed live shorter, more miserable lives and thank fate, God and anyone else that I can, and do, manage my own workload.
Oh, as far as I know, I've yet to lose my employer a customer. Gained them a few. Never lost one yet.
Read the NPR report. His union isn't representing him in this. He's gone private. As I say below it's likely it's because he's been told it can't be won and he's decided he's too greedy or has a point to make.
Thing is we have limited information on why this has happened though, on the surface, I agree with you. It does look like he was stockpiling his 10 or 15 minutes a day till he had enough to sue on.
If he's represented by a union, and there's a good possibility he is, he's either bypassed them because they told him there was less than a snowball's chance in hell of a grievance being successful in this (far less as I read it) or they took it up and it failed so they've done their duty by him. The presence of a private lawyer is the hint there as is the issue he's fighting on.
Satan will have a fully equipped hockey rink and be playing for the Black Hawks in hell before this guy wins this thing.
Exhaustion when it's constant and lengthy, meal allowances that just might pay for McDonalds if I'm lucky, the government gets more than half my damned overtime pay before I see it, I slip up a tax bracket so the income tax goes up, I get cranky and don't think or execute at all well and the odds of seriously injuring myself goes up exponentially after 12 hours of constant work. (Even in an office environment, by the way.) Not to mention damaging my real life relationships like my partner, friends and so on.
Oh yeah, this union member and rep just loves overtime, endless overtime and the more the better. Sure I do. And the union itself gets less than a penny an hour more in dues for it so it just adores it too not to mention the extra book keeping.
In a pig's eye I love overtime. It's necessary sometimes and I'll gladly do it, it's part of the job.
In the meantime, how about getting a life? A real one. Not some idiot fantasy about unions and their members.
As well they should. Usually the reason the employer is trying to move people from hourly to salary has nothing to do with a change in duties but everything to do with actually reducing the take home of the employee while increasing the hours of work.
A union's only job, by law, is to represent and bargain for their membership. If they routinely agreed to such things I can guarantee you they'd be out of business very soon.
There are legitimate and varied reasons for the change and unions, and their membership, mostly agree to an employers request for those changes. The only thing, however, the public ever hears about are those rare times when they don't.
Most times these sort of claims come from sheer frustration by the employee at what they consider a massive abuse of "the rules", such as they are, by the employer. It's called "you want this, pay me!" and it's the final frustrated shot at the boss for massive abuse of the system.
Somehow, I don't see a cop doing this on a whim. Actually, I don't see anyone doing this on a whim.
Still, I've been sent to the back of beyond to work and there are two things I can practically guarantee in any town over 4000 residents and that's at least 1 gas station and 1 pizza place. The pizza in those places ranges from crud to out of this world. I guess the latter is more common because you can't really get away with crud in a small place where everyone knows you even when you're off work.
I've been in smaller places where there's nothing much to see or do and you'll often find someone making pizza. On Indian reserves in the back of the back of beyond where you'll find, guess what?, pizza! Interesting toppings, mind, with such things a moose and deer and other meats that big city folks would turn their noses up at and veg you've never heard of before cause it's all local stuff that often doesn't grow anywhere else.
Of course I live in British Columbia so, outside of Vancouver, to most Americans the rest of the place is the back of beyond but I'm really talking back of back of back of beyond here! ;-)
And I won't contribute to the debate into what's the best pizza except to say it's thin crust done in a brick oven with fresh tomato sauce (not canned), fresh local veg and meat from a local butcher who knows how to make sausage rather than the stuff you find on sale in Safeway or Wal-Mart. Each pizza made from scratch by order. ;-)
Fogerty has always been high energy, even back with CCR. At one time Mellencamp was too.
I agree about acts that are all about technical accuracy and if they have great energetic music they get away with that. Otherwise they're as boring as watching paint dry.
There's the middle too. Jethro Tull is quite high energy as well as technically accurate and proficient and like Fogerty put on one hell of a show.
Then again, Tull, like Mellencamp is about telling stories set to music and not just 3 min silly love songs to they'd better connect for it to work. Mellencamp is an example of why and when it doesn't work.
A lot of this reminds me of the truism that Generals are always getting ready to fight the last war.
These "researchers", I'm not going to call them academics cause their solution disproves that claim, come up with a something that might have worked in the days before telegraph and news agencies but only just might. It certainly doesn't work now.
OK, make it the war before the last, then.
Copy has always been rewritten to one extent or the other even by the sainted NYT.
And wouldn't Google News maybe send readers to The Colorado Backwoods Faller instead of take away from it?
Re: Still a little hope that the FCC has enough integrity
The secret meetings are alarming enough in their own right. And I see no problem with cablecos becoming common carriers as long as they want to be telcos and deliver dial tone. Level playing field remember?
Welcome to the slow, long death of public culture marked by the longer, slower death of commercial/private culture as a result of the cult of "permission".
After all, everything is either patented or copyright or both these days, right?
While Mellancamp's longing for the good old days has some validity (not much, just some) he's mixing up the fact that if anything hit his career it's his crabbiness at concerts (thanks for reminding me of that lavi d) and that he doesn't understand what's going on around him any more than the record companies do. (He's right about the Wall St aspect of the recording industry, mind. But that has zero to do with the Internet.)
It may have been much easier back-in-the-day when he was on a major label and they set it all up for him but if his essay on HuffPo is any indication he didn't like it much.
Actually, it seems what he's complaining about is the lack of a "United Artists" label like the one he talked over with Don Henley. Perhaps one with reps on it's board like the indies that have and are making it (Arcade Fire comes to mind cause I'm listening to them right now) while mainstream pop continues to stagnate and not sell. One that has something more than a cursory familiarity with the Internet, Web and other ways of popularizing, promoting and organizing music in ways that will sell to the masses. Of course, he and they would have to work at it while he'd rather complain.
Sad really, when you consider that the older John Fogarty can take a stage and just wind up an audience, which requires that they see him having as much fun as they are while Mellencamp would rather made snide remarks that Fogerty seemed to be more popular.
I have a backup camera in my pickup and I can see approximately a half to quarter block down the road with it.
Like most (all?) it's a fish eye lens so what it's really good for is detecting motion and approximate size rather than seeing license plates or anything like that and the closer you get to the edges of the camera field the more distorted everything becomes. I also have sensors in the rear to back up the camera which are often more useful than the camera is.
So for seeing someone undressing in the middle of the road all I'd likely see is skin tones rather than a person and if they're in sensor field the truck will start beeping like crazy in the cab to tell me some idiot, potential Darwin Award prize winner, is behind me.
For all the nit picking between apps and ring tones there's one basic fact that Techdirt has right. Neither are saviors of content companies, Wired's dreams of world domination to the contrary.
I'm already drowning in a world where every third web site has a Facebook app, a Twitter app, a Flickr app and the God's of computers know how many other apps small and large. Mostly just simple repackaging of RSS and calling it an app.
The funny thing is that while smart phones have lots of good features the app promoters keep forgetting that the damned things are still phones not fully powered desktops or even lightly powered netbooks. Both of those examples an order of magnitude more powerful than a phone with a crappy speaker or two or an equally crappy set of ear buds or headsets.
As the article says sooner, rather than later, open standards will appear that allow people to use the same app on any computing platform, anywhere, removing the smart phone, desktop, netbook tether completely and there goes the walled garden and dreams of getting rich on the next-big-thing in apps.
And at some point all apps need Internet connectivity, promoters to the contrary. Not necessarily Web connectivity but the Web and the Internet are not two different things.
For an app to be truly useful it needs to compatible any time, anywhere, on any of the major platforms mobile or not. Until then they're toys.
And one other thing about ring tones seems to be that people just got tired of them and went back to some kind of standard ring if what I'm hearing around me is any indication. A lot (most) of the apps will suffer the same fate.
So if I put a dish out for my cats (the noted free thinkers of the animal world) and they bury it in the litter box I should avoid at all costs, I guess.
(Actually it would be worth exploring, wouldn't it? ;-) Got me thinking now, you have, about who and what to cook next.)
On the post: Does Checking Your Email On Your BlackBerry Count As Overtime?
Re: Re:
What I see on the NPR report isn't a guy who was just checking his crackberry rather than responding to an emergency that required his presence by phone or in person. At least the story itself doesn't indicate a pattern of emergency responses.
My way of dealing with it is to tell my boss (and I've had more than my share of ignorant boneheads since beloved employer decided that my boss doesn't need to actually know what I do to be my boss) that it damned well better be an emergency and what the definition of that is. (No, it's not the phone in the janitors closest doesn't work or one out of a hundred phones don't work.) It's defined in my business as a threat to public health and safety first then as a threat to personal health and safety second. It's a catch all that works for the most part. (Police, Fire, Ambulance, Hospital, Ferry and ATC, STC are automatic.)
I've yet to respond to a real emergency that is actually fixable (there's been a couple that haven't been fixable) and get things going again. Including helping out IT guys when communications fail. (Telecom is all computers these days anyway.)
At the same time I recognize my own limitations in terms of how long I can work efficiently and productively on a problem and when it becomes pointless to continue because I'm either not going to solve it or I'm just gonna make things worse. Or, worse, damage the customer's business or injure myself both distinct possibilities the more tired I become.
As for changing me from wages to salaried or exempt, forget it. One of the few real hold backs to my being abused when I'm off work is that both the customer and beloved employer know it's gonna cost them to call me out off hours so they make sure they're sure.
For projects I'll do a shift change should I have to work nights for a night or two because that is what I've found what works best for me and, by extension, everyone else. That it's less expensive for the company and customer is a nice secondary effect. :-)
Overtime is, no matter, what, routinely abused, people are expected to work it to respond to crackberries, emergencies that aren't emergencies and other issues at any hour of the day or night.
Then I keep remembering the old saying "no one ever died wishing they'd spent too little time in the office" as well as the fact that people who get overstressed live shorter, more miserable lives and thank fate, God and anyone else that I can, and do, manage my own workload.
Oh, as far as I know, I've yet to lose my employer a customer. Gained them a few. Never lost one yet.
On the post: Does Checking Your Email On Your BlackBerry Count As Overtime?
Re: Unionized (another thing)
Odds are he's a gonna lose.
On the post: Does Checking Your Email On Your BlackBerry Count As Overtime?
Re: Eh...
If he's represented by a union, and there's a good possibility he is, he's either bypassed them because they told him there was less than a snowball's chance in hell of a grievance being successful in this (far less as I read it) or they took it up and it failed so they've done their duty by him. The presence of a private lawyer is the hint there as is the issue he's fighting on.
Satan will have a fully equipped hockey rink and be playing for the Black Hawks in hell before this guy wins this thing.
On the post: Does Checking Your Email On Your BlackBerry Count As Overtime?
Re: Unionized
Exhaustion when it's constant and lengthy, meal allowances that just might pay for McDonalds if I'm lucky, the government gets more than half my damned overtime pay before I see it, I slip up a tax bracket so the income tax goes up, I get cranky and don't think or execute at all well and the odds of seriously injuring myself goes up exponentially after 12 hours of constant work. (Even in an office environment, by the way.) Not to mention damaging my real life relationships like my partner, friends and so on.
Oh yeah, this union member and rep just loves overtime, endless overtime and the more the better. Sure I do. And the union itself gets less than a penny an hour more in dues for it so it just adores it too not to mention the extra book keeping.
In a pig's eye I love overtime. It's necessary sometimes and I'll gladly do it, it's part of the job.
In the meantime, how about getting a life? A real one. Not some idiot fantasy about unions and their members.
On the post: Does Checking Your Email On Your BlackBerry Count As Overtime?
Re: Re: Unionized
A union's only job, by law, is to represent and bargain for their membership. If they routinely agreed to such things I can guarantee you they'd be out of business very soon.
There are legitimate and varied reasons for the change and unions, and their membership, mostly agree to an employers request for those changes. The only thing, however, the public ever hears about are those rare times when they don't.
On the post: Does Checking Your Email On Your BlackBerry Count As Overtime?
Re: Thank You for your support.
Somehow, I don't see a cop doing this on a whim. Actually, I don't see anyone doing this on a whim.
On the post: Little Ceasar's Says Pizza Pizza Pizza Menu Offering Infringes On Its Pizza Pizza Slogan
Re: Jesus...
Still, I've been sent to the back of beyond to work and there are two things I can practically guarantee in any town over 4000 residents and that's at least 1 gas station and 1 pizza place. The pizza in those places ranges from crud to out of this world. I guess the latter is more common because you can't really get away with crud in a small place where everyone knows you even when you're off work.
I've been in smaller places where there's nothing much to see or do and you'll often find someone making pizza. On Indian reserves in the back of the back of beyond where you'll find, guess what?, pizza! Interesting toppings, mind, with such things a moose and deer and other meats that big city folks would turn their noses up at and veg you've never heard of before cause it's all local stuff that often doesn't grow anywhere else.
Of course I live in British Columbia so, outside of Vancouver, to most Americans the rest of the place is the back of beyond but I'm really talking back of back of back of beyond here! ;-)
And I won't contribute to the debate into what's the best pizza except to say it's thin crust done in a brick oven with fresh tomato sauce (not canned), fresh local veg and meat from a local butcher who knows how to make sausage rather than the stuff you find on sale in Safeway or Wal-Mart. Each pizza made from scratch by order. ;-)
On the post: Little Ceasar's Says Pizza Pizza Pizza Menu Offering Infringes On Its Pizza Pizza Slogan
Re:
On the post: John Mellencamp: The Internet Is An Atomic Bomb For Music
Re: Re: Not an A-Bomb just an expired career
I agree about acts that are all about technical accuracy and if they have great energetic music they get away with that. Otherwise they're as boring as watching paint dry.
There's the middle too. Jethro Tull is quite high energy as well as technically accurate and proficient and like Fogerty put on one hell of a show.
Then again, Tull, like Mellencamp is about telling stories set to music and not just 3 min silly love songs to they'd better connect for it to work. Mellencamp is an example of why and when it doesn't work.
On the post: Professor Says News Should Get Special 24 Hour Protections So No Aggregator Can Link To It
Fighting the last war
These "researchers", I'm not going to call them academics cause their solution disproves that claim, come up with a something that might have worked in the days before telegraph and news agencies but only just might. It certainly doesn't work now.
OK, make it the war before the last, then.
Copy has always been rewritten to one extent or the other even by the sainted NYT.
And wouldn't Google News maybe send readers to The Colorado Backwoods Faller instead of take away from it?
Just asking.
On the post: Industry Groups Back To 'Negotiating' Net Neutrality
Re: Still a little hope that the FCC has enough integrity
On the post: Industry Groups Back To 'Negotiating' Net Neutrality
Re: Re: Still a little hope that the FCC has enough integrity
On the post: Court Tells Mall That It Cannot Ban Customers From Talking To Strangers
Re: Re: Nice sentence
On the post: Chair Designer Sues Disney Over Chair Used In Alice In Wonderland Movie
Copyright protects culture, eh?
After all, everything is either patented or copyright or both these days, right?
On the post: John Mellencamp: The Internet Is An Atomic Bomb For Music
Not an A-Bomb just an expired career
It may have been much easier back-in-the-day when he was on a major label and they set it all up for him but if his essay on HuffPo is any indication he didn't like it much.
Actually, it seems what he's complaining about is the lack of a "United Artists" label like the one he talked over with Don Henley. Perhaps one with reps on it's board like the indies that have and are making it (Arcade Fire comes to mind cause I'm listening to them right now) while mainstream pop continues to stagnate and not sell. One that has something more than a cursory familiarity with the Internet, Web and other ways of popularizing, promoting and organizing music in ways that will sell to the masses. Of course, he and they would have to work at it while he'd rather complain.
Sad really, when you consider that the older John Fogarty can take a stage and just wind up an audience, which requires that they see him having as much fun as they are while Mellencamp would rather made snide remarks that Fogerty seemed to be more popular.
On the post: Feds Won't Bring Charges Against School District Officials In Webcam Spying
Re:
On the post: Feds Won't Bring Charges Against School District Officials In Webcam Spying
Re: Re:
Like most (all?) it's a fish eye lens so what it's really good for is detecting motion and approximate size rather than seeing license plates or anything like that and the closer you get to the edges of the camera field the more distorted everything becomes. I also have sensors in the rear to back up the camera which are often more useful than the camera is.
So for seeing someone undressing in the middle of the road all I'd likely see is skin tones rather than a person and if they're in sensor field the truck will start beeping like crazy in the cab to tell me some idiot, potential Darwin Award prize winner, is behind me.
On the post: Feds Won't Bring Charges Against School District Officials In Webcam Spying
New rules?
Such as don't turn the tracking crud ON until the laptop is reported as stolen?
Oh, common sense. That's surgically removed from bureaucrats at birth. Sorry.
On the post: Now That The Ringtone Market Is Collapsing, Are There Lessons For Those Who Are Jumping On The App Bandwagon?
Re: Key difference between ringtone and App
I'm already drowning in a world where every third web site has a Facebook app, a Twitter app, a Flickr app and the God's of computers know how many other apps small and large. Mostly just simple repackaging of RSS and calling it an app.
The funny thing is that while smart phones have lots of good features the app promoters keep forgetting that the damned things are still phones not fully powered desktops or even lightly powered netbooks. Both of those examples an order of magnitude more powerful than a phone with a crappy speaker or two or an equally crappy set of ear buds or headsets.
As the article says sooner, rather than later, open standards will appear that allow people to use the same app on any computing platform, anywhere, removing the smart phone, desktop, netbook tether completely and there goes the walled garden and dreams of getting rich on the next-big-thing in apps.
And at some point all apps need Internet connectivity, promoters to the contrary. Not necessarily Web connectivity but the Web and the Internet are not two different things.
For an app to be truly useful it needs to compatible any time, anywhere, on any of the major platforms mobile or not. Until then they're toys.
And one other thing about ring tones seems to be that people just got tired of them and went back to some kind of standard ring if what I'm hearing around me is any indication. A lot (most) of the apps will suffer the same fate.
On the post: Las Vegas Review-Journal Thinks Suing Sites Over Copyright Will Mean More People Link To It
Re: Re: Re: Re: stupid
(Actually it would be worth exploring, wouldn't it? ;-) Got me thinking now, you have, about who and what to cook next.)
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