Where is that Basketball when you need it?

So the big rap was always that we are being watched. That GPS tracks our every move and that we have satellites that can zoom down and find you playing basketball and could even tell you what kind of basketball you are playing with. Big Brother is everywhere. Just look at Google maps where the picture of your destination flares up in your phone. Wow. We really have mapped every inch of the planet. Just don't misplace your plane.

Now a Boeing 777 is not small. We can not fit it in our garage or our backyard. Maybe a football field. Yet we have misplaced our jet. You know the  jet that disappeared and everyone thought fell into the ocean and now it turns out it continued flying for seven hours but no one saw it. And no one knows where it went. So while you and I can find Jacks Dairy Queen in the middle of Wisconsin and even see what Jacks Dairy Queen looks like nobody can seem to find a plane with 239 people on board.

So what we are saying that even with  a satellite above at 25,000 miles that the best we can do is transfix a ping. But GPS or radar or the vaunted Google Big Brother Eye...ah no. Nope. Sorry we just don't know where that big mother went. So where is the GPS? Sorry switched off. Oh ok. And after that it's just anyones' guess. I don't know about you but I am going to shoot hoops now feeling much more secure that me and my basketball are anonymous once more.

Oh...it's a Wilson by the way.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher...sometimes a dream is all you have

One Milllion Gigabytes

A  million gigs is what the human brain has. And yet we give ourselves over to these paltry computers with their one  hundred gigs or even worse some GPS that is barely functioning with the slowed time of civilian map questing. It is amazing that we always assume computers know better when many times they steer us wrong. How many times have you ended up in some cornfield looking for that festival that was supposed to be right there but the computer mixed up Canal Street with Canal Avenue. It happens.

Or just in our day to day. My son spilled some paint and I told him he had to clean it up. He googled how to clean paint off a cement floor thinking the answer lay there. When the answer didn't come he looked at me and I said well how would you clean it up. The blank stare. Making it up as you go is not a logarithm he is familiar with. Finally though some experimentation with shovels and drop cloths and gasoline he cleaned it up.

But we give ourselves over too easily to the plastic machine. I saw a man whose job was to hold up a placard saying five dollar special to join a health club. He had his sign under his arm and his phone up looking for that next text or email to bail him out of the fact he was working for less than minimum wage by the highway. Sadly, he should know his salvation is not in the little device in his hand that a million other people hold looking for the same answers.

It is in his head. In that million gigabytes God gave him. The only real super computer.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The PItcher...Sometimes a Dream is all you have

Corralling the Yahoos

Ok the new CEO of Yahoo Marissa Mayer is pulling in the troops. No more sleeping in. No more late night movies and working in your underwear. She wants them back in station to interface, cross pollinate, bond, and solve the problems of Yahoo in person. I get it in a way. You do learn more by bumping into people and yakking and passing ideas. But you also tend to goof off a lot too. Which is the inverse of her logic.

The truth is power is not static. Our CEOS are mini despots. Our companies are dictatorships. Ask anyone who works for a company if they are free. They are not. One wrong word, wrong tweet, wrong anything and it is game over. You are fired. There is no recourse in the Corporate world. The implied and stated fact is that you are replaceable and you may be replaced anyway by a robot or your job outsourced or eliminated. So you better tow the line.

And the first order of business is to get everyone back in the office where they can be watched. It galls CEOs to think that people are at home beyond their reach. They are getting paid for being at home? Yes they are. And are they really working?  Yes they are. In fact people work harder at home than at the office because the office is a prison day and part of it is spent killing time. The work is shoved into bursts between surfing and gabbing with co workers or lunch.

But at home one tends to have less of these distractions. There is the home environment but the home office generally solves the problem. So the theory that bringing the Yahoos back will solve multiple problems is probably fallacious. If only because the yahoos have tasted the good life and now they will be the slugs who are under the thumb of management. They will not be able to capitalize on their own work rhythms and will have to re orientate to the nine to five.

Like slaves before the Civil War who have been North they will not reconcile themselves to their bondage. They will have to be sold South. Or fired.

Rocket Man...the Catcher in the Rye of the Great Recession



 

The Black Ice of Tech

You know what I am talking about. That black ice that looks back at us from our latest bit of tech: our Ipad, out Kindle Fire, our smart phone, our Ultra book. It is a polished granite of black ice that mirrors the world in heartless black and white. We see a strange irony in the very device we are using to transport us to points distant reflects back to us our very terrestrial existence. We see our face and it is not something we want to see. For the black ice gives us who we are at that moment and the years as they have gone by.

And we have become like Rushmore. Craggy chiseled visages staring out from the black onyx as we frown at our keyboards or dab our Ipads with smudgy fingers. The tech is just fine, it is the human behind it we care not to see. And it is a distraction this face staring back at us on the plane train or in the car or in the coffee house. It is peering around our work in progress or appearing magically as the screen goes dead. And there we are. That person who we spend so much time avoiding.

And mostly we just close the lap top or put away the Ipad. But occasionally we stare and see that human. So un tech. So flesh and blood. Tech rolls on while we roll under. And the human face has no chance against that sleek black marble. We are there grimacing, frowning, grunting, groaning, trying to get across our point. And we feel a great relief when that screen flares back up and takes us way from ourselves. And we all know what is going to happen.

The hope I die before I get old generation will demand a screen that does not reflect back those years. There will be a filler, the screen saver that will save us from that awful image under the black ice. Our mortal soul.

www.billhazelgrove.com