Michigan State Flower, the Orange Barrel…and another theory

Having had the opportunity to travel most major thoroughfares in Michigan over the past few years, many of which are under “construction”, I have decided that the orange barrels are not a deliberate warning of construction zones, but rather wild growing mutant plants that coincidentally thrive in construction zones. I have on many days fallen in line in the one lane that is open on a [by design] 4 lane thruway, blocked by orange barrels with not a single [constriction] worker or vehicle in sight…ANYWHERE! These mysterious plants thrive on concrete, asphalt, and seem not to need any care. Apparently, the state department in charge of highway maintenance has not budgeted any funds to harvest the plants so that we can take full advantage of all lanes on the road. Perhaps we can band together as citizens to harvest these plants and start a coop farmer’s market to sell them to the public…perhaps rent space at Eastern Market’s Flower Day in the spring. A Second Theory: The state of Michigan with optimistic plans to repair highways having gotten a REALLY good deal on orange barrels…over-purchased. Now, with limited storage available, they have decided to use our highway system as storage for the barrels. That would explain why you have to share one lane in drive-time traffic while there is no construction in sight. I propose 2 possible solutions! 1. The federal government is talking to a prison in Standish Michigan about accepting Guantanamo Bay prisoners when it closes. We should establish an exchange program whereby we get to use Gitmo as a storage facility for our surplus of barrels. 2. Make the barrels with biodegradable materials, perhaps something that will naturally patch pot holes on the roadways. The long term benefits of this are incredible. We solve the problem of unnecessary congestion, and the road crews can spend more off season time in Florida collecting unemployment. The caveat to this is with more space to drive, people will drive more, wearing out their vehicles sooner, causing them to buy new vehicles more often, up righting the auto industry, improving the economy…ok, you get it. Well, give it some thought.

Fly in the Ointment…Rain on the Parade… I Don’t Care, I have Questions!

This is a trilogy. First and most recently I saw a television advertisement by Nestle that portended that their new revolutionary snack drink “Juicy Juice Smart Drink” would make your child smarter simply by consuming it. Marketing? Duh! Nestle, who’s history dates back 143 years is summed up with the production of caffeinated stimulants aimed at children including cereals, candy, chocolate drink additives, and an endless number of products aimed at sales and [addiction] to promote further sales. The point is two-fold. One, Nestle’s has never attempted to cure an evil, a hunger, or a legitimate cause beyond their own survival. God bless the free market, and don’t hold it against Nestles. They are simply trying to make your child smarter! The “DMH, or DLH”, or whatever other stupid non-descript acronym they used for the secret compound that makes Juicy Juice the academic salvation of our children is just another example of how far we will go to make a buck and sleep at night knowing we bull-shitted the right demographic enough to keep up the boat payments. The larger point is that the marketing people at Nestles need a sound beating! If in fact Juicy Juice makes people smarter by drinking it: 1. Why isn’t it a vaccine at birth? 2. Why isn’t Congress mandated to ingest it every day before their obligatory nap time? Second , The Chevy Volt! Gm [Government Motors] announced today the the Chevy Volt {Chevrolet, the now bastard child of what is left of GM), Chevrolet [not Cadillac…not Buick] Chevrolet Volt will expect 231 miles to the gallon of gas in city driving. Ok, where the hell were you before the bankruptcy? Where the hell were you say…ever? Ok, so this is a good thing. We are moving to alternative energy to get away from our dependency on oil…I get it. But wait…the caveats! 231 miles to the gallon in the city? With unlimited miles per gallon on the battery, and 25 miles per gallon on the gas engine, how does that formula work? I took my shoes and socks off to do the math. You spend 40+K on a vehicle that you drive no more than 42 miles a day, plug in at night to recharge, and there you go! What the…wouldn’t a bicycle be a cheaper and healthier alternative? So let’s look at the health risks. The energy used to create a lithium battery system for this car is [by the way] largely powered by coal burning utility companies, and at the end of the day…you have a radio-active energy source. Oh, yes, lithium is a radio-active isotope. So, when your [Fermi] vehicle gets in an accident, who is first on the scene? Paramedics or Hazmat crews? How do you dispose of the battery when the vehicle is done? Will we see a new rash [no pun intended] of golf courses and outdoor music venues built on the landfills of lithium battery disposals? I think it is great that we are looking at alternative energy sources to cast the shackles of fossil fuels and live greener, but this isn’t it! We are discovering new ways to harness wind, solar, and hydro-turbine power and we should fix the infrastructure first and along the way we may discover a sound long-term answer to the rest of it, transportation included. Keep trying. Third, Health Care!?! I am a small business owner who struggles to pay for health care. I want to. I know it is important, but it’s so damn expensive…and why? I hear medical professionals and health insurance executives ramble on about how expensive medical care and administrating health insurance is…and again, why? I am a small contract to my carrier [fewer than 5 employees], and this “Not-For-Profit” carrier has blatantly stated publicly that small businesses like mine are a nuisance to them and they want to [quite intentionally] price us out of health care so they don’t have to cover us with decent benefits. They claim it is more expensive to cash my checks {provide service} than it is for larger companies. Every claim has to be processed [both ethically and legally] on an individual basis. I won’t rant on about this except to say the [expletive delete] insurance companies do it because they can and logic doesn’t matter. My premiums have effectively doubled in the past four years. My benefits have reduced. My premiums have doubled! I don’t get twice as many pills in a prescription, I don’t get attention twice as fast in the emergency room, the staff is not twice as nice to me at the clinic, I am certainly not going to live twice as long, and the technology that I get charged through the nose for is not twice as good as it was four years ago, but my premiums have doubled! Oh yeah, the salary, bonuses and benefits of the CEO of my carrier have doubled in the past four years. I want his job…no I don’t…I want him to have a conscience surgically implanted, and I want him to have to pay cash for it. Pfizer, who is now the largest pharmaceutical company on the planet has in the past half decade closed virtually all of their research facilities [sans] 2.5 square mile campus in Ann Arbor to take the posture of a global patent holding company. They won’t create the next blockbuster drug, but they will buy whoever does to own the patent (bigger profits, low overhead). They did it with Lipitor (Park Davis) and they did it with Warner-Lambert and Pharmacia (who bought out Upjohn). This nearly 50 billion dollar [annually] company has become nothing more than a street corner pusher. Ok, if there is a point, I guess it is that we have to think, organize, and affect realistic change. Can Congress do this? Yeah, right! They are little more than a bunch of infighting bitchy schoolgirls who have not accomplished anything of value since the civil rights movement of the 60’s, and oh yeah, that happened because we thought and organized and affected change. I don’t want to lose my health care coverage, and I don’t want to have to live in a refrigerator box to pay for it. Enough is enough and let’s get smart people [ok, pay them lots of money] to fix the problem for us and for government [not by government]. Every month when I write the check for my health insurance, next to the contract number on the Memo line, I write "Shame On You!".

What Will Become of Al Franken?

I like Al Franken! I always have. Ever since seeing his work on Saturday Night Live starting in 1975, I have found Mr. Franken to be a brilliant satirist and an understated ironist. His unabashed take on so many topics up to and including biting the hand that fed him (Fred Silverman, CEO of NBC “Limo for a Lamo”), showed me that sometimes making a point can be more important than the consequences (it is easier to ask forgiveness than to ask permission). Al Franken spent a total of 10 years as a writer for SNL and published 6 books before turning his interest to active national politics which eventually got him elected as a junior Senator from Minnesota. The election itself included something over 2.9 million voters and Al’s margin in the end was 312 votes. It took seven months to finalize the election, to the tune of millions of dollars in litigation, but a win is a win! Wars have been won by single offensives, successful space missions can be measured in seconds and millimeters, and sporting events are won by one point (White Sox V. Brewers, 1984, 25 innings…Sox 7, Brewers 6). Again, the point is a victory is a victory. Before Al Franken entered the hallowed halls of the US Senate as a member, he spoke openly about politics, its hypocrisies, and lent a grass roots opinion as to possible solutions (however satirical). I enjoyed reading and listening to him. To back up a second…the fact that Mr. Franken won by fewer than 500 votes out of 2.9 million only tells me that very nearly half of the voters in Minnesota simply don’t have a sense of humor. Now that Mr. Franken has joined the ranks of the Senate, we hear less from or about him. This concerns me and leads me to an obscure, but possible analogy. Conspiracy theories be damned…I wonder. My father worked in manufacturing for more than two decades in middle management with global responsibilities, and the ulcers that it caused led to his early retirement. The rank and file staff at his company was protected by [what was at the time] a very strong and powerful union. This is not an opinion about organized labor…just a story. It was virtually impossible to fire a union member for any reason. Chronic tardiness, poor quality control, or any other behavioral issues. This fact cost the company millions per year in overhead costs beyond their control. The answer eventually was to beat them by co-joining them. If an employee had a damaging employment history and couldn’t be fired under the union agreement, the solution was to promote them to a middle management salary position whereby they would have to resend union membership. Once they were on salary, they were fired within a respectable amount of time. I won’t defend either side completely, but under the circumstances, this tactic was the lesser of two evils. Back to Al Franken. I like Al Franken! I always have. He has written 6 books, the sales of which exceed the total population of the state he represents in the Senate. Ergo the point of my analogy. Before the senate race, Al took pundants [of an alternative point of view] like O’Rielly, Limbaugh, Coulter, etc. to task and gained international attention in the process. Since entering congress, we have heard much less from or about Mr. Franken. If politics couldn’t shut Franken up, get him involved so we can limit him to the innocuous vapor we call government, and dissolve him into the machine, unheard or noticed. Can Al Franken champion change on any topic? I hope so. For him or anyone else who realizes we live [and have lived for decades] in a very short sited democracy that will implode [further] with the status quo. I believe Al Franken, and pragmatic souls like him can devise long term solutions to many issues and it should be a collective and dedicated process. In the short term only the constituency suffers and if we [the people] have to get cut off at the knees, so should government. Let’s make it a fair fight and we will all think clearer. So you go Al! Make a good noise for the right reasons.

God Bless Technology…sort of

I love technology. I love toys. I love the fact that I can conduct business in a virtual world, around the world from my desktop.

Tweeting, Facebooking, Youtubing, e-mails, virtual faxing, online virtual meetings…all very cool stuff…when it works.

I woke up this morning with a plan! A couple of cups of coffee, a look at the sunrise on the deck collecting thoughts and waking up, and then off to work…on Saturday. It’s not unusual for me to put in a day at work on Saturday. I don’t mind. I like what I do. I don’t work at home, I live at work.

We [Agilis Marketing] have evolved into a lean green marketing machine. We use very little paper annually with the use of digital design software, virtual faxing, VOIP communications, digital file exchanges, email and more. We can communicate effectively, efficiently and in real time with clients across the country with little or no foot print from travel or hard copy communications. It is an amazing age through technology, and when all eight [virtual cylinders] are firing, it’s a beautiful thing.

I had my coffee, watched the sunrise, and headed up to take on the day, energized and ready to tackle my agenda. I booted up, fired up my email browser, and waited to get the latest batch of communications.

Wait a minute…”login to incoming server failed. Please verify user name and password.” Hmmmmm? I double checked the login. Yep, it’s right. Try again…same error. Hmmmmmmmm? So I went online to the web based mailbox, manually typed the login information, and…”Invalid login. Please verify user name and password.” Again, hmmmmmmmmm. Did I accidently reset my password? Is the mail server down? So I went to the provider site to look at the server status report. The mail server on the system was in full operation with no conflicts. I went to my web browser and typed in our domain address. “404 error, this page does not exist.” What the…is my internet connection down? No! Every site I type in but mine comes up.

We purchased our account through an IT company that in turn leases server space from another company on the east coast.

In a last ditch effort, I went to the hosting control panel to see if I could find out what the problem was. Login attempt…”This account has been suspended.” WHAT? WHY? I called the server company to find out why our account had been suspended. After several redirect options, and 20 minutes on hold, the person on the other end of the line said, “Our billing department suspended the account.” WHAT? WHY? We are paid through January 2011!

I immediately put in a 911 text message, email, and phone call to the cell number of our IT guy! The response…4 hours later was [by way of Blackberry while on Hawaii] “Oops, forgot to pay the bill.” WHAT?

Well, by now, and strongly influenced by a second pot of coffee, I shot a response back to our IT guy, “Expletive…expletive…fix this…NOW…expletive!”

Now, slightly more than 24 hours later, we are back online. I lost a day, not because of a fire, a blackout, or an act of God, but simply because our [expletive] IT guy didn’t pay his freaking [expletive] bill!

So, at the end of this post I still embrace technology…and God bless technology…however, God…if you have time, a burning bush on the front lawn of our IT guy’s home would be a nice touch…and thanks!