"You say, 'Good-bye' and I say, 'Hello'"
- The Beatles

"May you live in interesting times. "
- Chinese saying

"Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."
- JFK

November 10th, 2008

"May you live in interesting times."

This was an expression that was birthed by the Chinese. The term 'interesting times' is neither good nor bad so this is neither a blessing nor a curse. And it's funny because it's where I think we are now at 'interesting times'. Although, this to me is an afterthought, we've elected our first African American president. I put my vote in for who I thought was the most competent leader. Whether he was black, white, red, yellow, or orange had no bearing on my descision. I was just sick of hearing the voice of a moron be our head of state.

In this regard, we are now ahead of the game.

We are also undergoing the worst financial crisis since the great depression. While the stock market has not crashed, it certainly can be looked at as a locked car that is out of control. The tree is in the distance, the brakes have failed and the passengers have their safety belts on. Yet the only reaction we can have in all of this is to brace ourselves for the impact or just look heavenward and say, "Really? Are you kidding me?"

As a result of this collapse, I am now one of the 250,000 new jobless (or 6.5% of the workforce that's unemployed) for the month of October. My former company, which has made the news quite frequently due to its financial woes, decided that they were going to start getting rid of their "assets". Assets are many things, they are business units, equipment, buildings, and - the not mentioned nearly enough - people. Actually, from a ledger point of view workers are listed as a liability or overhead. However, I prefer to use the Madison Avenue definition of the worker being a company's best asset. It gives me a nice warm glow to think that I'm not just a cog in whatever machine I happen to be contributing to.

As I was speaking about our new president, this is his new priority of getting the economy going again and in the spirit of FDR, his plan will be to put work into the people and not just into the corporate bail outs. Don't get me wrong, I do believe that the corporate bail outs of the stock market were truly the only solution. The consequences of allowing another corporate giant go bankrupt would have had an explosive domino effect on our economy that I think would have resulted in our looking at our rich Mexican neighbors as the lucky ones. But I think now is the time we need leadership that will try to think outside of the box. We are going to need to start thinking differently and to change behavior. We are going to have to work to make things work better on less. This goes for our fuel consumption and it will also go on how we are spending our monies on food and consumer goods.

But that's just me saying this and, well, what do I know? I'm just an out of work IT guy. I'm sure that I'll have plenty of company in the not too distant future. And, incidentally, that will be the question that we're all going to be asking outselves a lot.

"What do I know?"

Yeah, I know it sounds stupid. But this goes to many different levels of our own psyche. "What do I know?" What are my skills? What are my beliefs? What is really going on? What assessments can I make? What can I offer? When we can answer these questions, we are better able to deal with whatever situation life gives us. We need to know the lay of the land. We need to know our resources. We need to know our own specific skillsets. Let's look at our own confidences. Do I know I can do this task? Do I know my finances will help me weather this time period. Do I know where I stand with my spouse? WHAT DO I KNOW?

I was thinking about this concept a few days ago when I was at our local convenience store (This isn't really a convenience store. It's the store attached to the local gas station. However, for some unknown reason, it always has what I need at any given moment. So, to me, it's a store that is quite convenient.) I was getting a cup of coffee and a pack of cigarettes before driving up to Jersey City and I overheard a mason contractor talk about not expecting to work this morning but since the job was worth $350K for work on a client's driveway, he got his stuff together to get to work. At that very moment, I knew I was in the wrong profession. The mason, who I took to be about 50 years old, was going to work on a job that was going to be more than 4 times my annual salary. Granted, a lot of this was going to stones, truck rentals, taxes, and the fact that he has to brave the November weather elements. On the other hand, that was one job out of how many in a year?

When was the last time you heard a stone mason say, "I have to learn brick laying 2.0?" Masonry 1.1 has been around since the neolithic age. It's what he knows, though. I can't do it. I don't know how. It's good honest work. Hey, how about plumbers? How much has plumbing changed in its fundementals since ancient Rome? Yet, plumbers have an honest trade that not really require the constant study of the computer sciences. And so long as people use their toilets or run water from a faucet, these guys have a steady job. This is not something that will be shipped out to India or Singapore. The plumber still has to come to your house in order to earn his paycheck.

Joe the Plumber would do a lot better in life if he was, in fact, a licenced plumber.

I'm more concerned with the plight of Joe the IT Guy. Joe the IT Guy has had to spend thousands of dollars in learning his trade and has to keep up on all of the new technologies and languages in order to remain marketable. Let's also remember all of the other intangible skills that an IT guy has to master like "being corporate", playing office politics, coming up with solutions that are not necessarily going to work, coming up with solutions that have to also be cost effective, and the eventual training of your own cheaper replacement. It never ends. It is rare than a person in the Information Technologies field isn't busy.

18 years ago, there wasn't a better field to go in than the computer telecommunications industry. The marriage of computer networks and telecommunications built the infrastructure that we use now in our daily life to more effectively communicate. The evolution of this industry has been nothing short of remarkable. Where would we be now without e-mail or the world wide web, or 3G cell phones. With all of this progress comes the retiring of neighborhood staples like the public library, payphones, and typewriters. We've also had to say good bye to knowledge of basic math and spelling skills. When was the last time you had to rely on your own knowledge of tip calculations without a calculator or write a letter or a document without spellcheck? You have to take the good with the bad. If I told you in 1988 that I would eventually have a device about the size of a wallet that was more powerful than an IBM PC and it would allow me to make calls from anywhere on the planet, play my entire music library and allow me to play games that were better than any video arcade, you'd think that I was smoking from my hydroponic stock. This is the progress made by scientists in the telecommunications and IT fields.

This is what we know.

So now we have the same opportunities that we had during the time of FDR and JFK. We have an economic crisis. We have an infrastructure that desperately needs repair and development. We have a need to make the planet better. We face global warming and energy problems. We have a broken health system. We also now need to repair the damage made to this country's reputation as it has been destroyed over the last eight years. Many of these situations have never been faced before. We need the guys that think outside the box. We need different solutions that will not only rely on the new technologies we created recently but to make use of the cutting edge technologies that require no energy at all. Things like wind energy, solar energy, using the motion of the tides to generate electricity. It's new. It's exciting.

And it's interesting.

That's the potential we, as a people, have to live up to. I think we can do that especially if there's an opportunity to make money and keep food on the table. And considering where we are at the moment, the sooner the better. I'm now in the not enviable position of searching for a job in a bad economy. I've had to cash some of my retirement stocks to get through this. Given that I'm 42 as of this writing, I will be looking for opportunites to keep my head above water. The last job I had I wanted to be the last job I'd need to interview for. After all, when you hook up with the fifth largest corporation in the world, you figured the position is pretty stable. As I said to my wife, "I had taken everything into account when we bought this house except the end of the financial world as we know it." Who knew?

It will not be easy. I've been trying to sell a condo in a bad housing market. My spirit is not optimistic despite the well wishes and faith that others have in me. I know that I've been the spit up cat toy of a roman catholic god. And, trust me, if I were still catholic I'd be making a deal with the devil.

What's that? Sign on the dotted line? In blood? Oh, my blood. Sure, let me roll up my sleeve. By the way, if you ever get to see your counterpart upstairs, can you do me a favor? Really, this isn't part of the deal and it's working with you. Can you give him the finger for me? Yes, you know which one. Because He's the real SOB. Anyone who has the ability to do anything and allows the savages that He made kill his "only" son is a real sadist.

Let me tell you this, I will personally slap the next old lady that says,"The Lord never gives any one person more than they can't handle." They obviously are not looking very hard. I understand the insane asylums are bursting at the seams with people that have had "more than they can't handle".

For those of you who think that the last 3 paragraphs have been a tad harsh and angry, let me remind you that the name of this site is Vikar's RANT not Vikar's Well-Thought-Out-Dissertation-On-How-This-World-Is-Full-Of-Rainbows,-Sunshine,-and-Puppies. If for some reason, you thought it was, you may wish to scroll down on the rants list for the REALLY PISSED section. Please make no mistake about this. I'm not happy right now. When I got let go, I was upset. I did not yell or scream, but I did get a bit misty eyed and my voice broke more than once. Over the last year or so, I made some really good friends, and the first round of layoffs got some of them. The second round of layoffs got me. I will most likely not get to see these guys again. I was close to my boss, my boss's boss, and my peers. I loved who I worked for and I worked hard. I did everything right. I arrived early and I stayed late. And despite having a salary on the "higher end", the company got more than their money's worth from me.

When I said good-bye to my co-workers, it was not unlike attending my own wake. We told funny stories about times we had, we laughed, and we cried. And like going to a wake, you give messages to the deceased and say that we should keep in touch. That once on the outside we'll keep an eye out for the other guy and see what we can do just in case.

By the time I left, I had drank 5 pints of Guiness in an hour and 15 minutes. I took the bus home, changed into some sweats, and settled down with my wife. The next day, the washing machine broke.

It broke. It BROKE!. IT F#@$%KING BROKE!!!! This truly was the last straw that broke the camel's back. The washing machine broke in such a way that when it buzzed it caused a power overload in the basement that caused a blackout in the room. I know because I was here writing this rant and it killed my PC at the same time. And I thought that it was just dandy for this to happen because I really wanted to go into more debt in buying a new washing machine and that the Lord in making me a better person knows that there is nothing closer to happiness than financial ruin. These are the times where I almost forget that I'm no longer catholic, look up, and say, "Very funny, you freaking bastard!"

This is why I turned to Buddhism. This is why I mock Christianity as well as the televangelists. I do this not only to take some delight in the fact that what they preach is complete bull hockey pucks but also to delight that they have one less sheep to exploit.

At least with Buddhism it teaches me that all of these things are not permanent and that things will change. That how I react to a situation is what I can control. That this is what interesting times are and that they begin and that they eventually end until the next one begins.

And I know that's an interesting time.