More on the Vanilla Sex Magazine Article

Anais writes in a comment:

I want to know why a magazine has to "sell" vanilla sex to anyone. I'd be interested in reading the article just because I can't imagine what it says that could possibly interest me in participating in more vanilla sex and less kinky sex. I mean, yes, vanilla sex can be VERY hot -- but I would never voluntarily damp down the kinkiness factor in my sex life and I doubt any article will convince me to try it.

(Actually, I know a little about magazine titles, and of course this is just one more way to get the word "sex" on the cover, to make people want to buy the magazine.)

I think the question she raises at the beginning of her comment expresses what I was thinking when I first saw the cover. To me, the line "Vanilla Sex: Why It's So Great" register as "Settle for less. It's more than you think." Try recasting that statement in terms of something other than sex, and you can easily create statements of profound absurdity.

I did check the magazine's website to see if I could find the article in question. The only thing on their carousel about sex was this article:

Better Sex Now

but it's more about spicing things up in a moderately non-threatening way. I also Googled the headline as a quoted phrase and turned up another article for a Canadian magazine of a similar title that is cited as having been published in Oct. 2008.

Vanilla sex: The best you've ever had?

I wondered if the magazines might have a common publisher. If you look at the "favicon" (that little image that appears adjacent to the site's address on most browsers), you'll see the silhouette of Pegasus, which is a trademark held by the publishers of Reader's Digest[1].

If you click on the Subscribe link on the Canadian magazine, you'll find that it takes you to a server hosted on the readersdigest.ca domain. I think this gives us good reason to believe that the article is being repurposed in a sister publication in the US.

I read through the article and have mixed opinions. On one hand, he is right about the overemphasis on techniques when it comes to advice. Sexuality has mental and spiritual dimensions that make it more satisfying. But on the other hand, the article has a subtext that good sex requires the abolition of the unusual or the anxiety provoking. Indeed, it sounds as if he is cheerleading for Scharff's notion of "good enough sex".

Then there is this passage toward the end:

Now that I’m married, sex has assumed its proper place in my life. It generally happens at a preordained time. Sometimes circumstances prevent it; other times there’s a bonus. It’s pretty basic, stripped of all its bells and whistles. Afterwards, one of us might casually say, “That was fun.” Then we roll over and fall into a delicious sleep. Or we might get up and go about the rest of our business, of which—with three boys and two careers —there’s plenty.

He seems so... contentedly suburban, which is anything but what I am. Maybe that's why I found it so irksome?

For an alternative perspective, refer to "White Collar Holler", recorded originally by Stan Rogers and covered here by the Rambling Sailors.



I remember hearing Rogers' version of this for the first time on an episode of Dr. Dimento way back in 1984 and laughing my @$$ off.

[1] -- One of my casual Aspie interests is being able to recognize trademarks and know the formal names of companies.

Says Who?

Saw this magazine cover at the drug store near work. I'm sure quite a few of my readers would call into question that headline in the left column. If you need a higher resolution image, you can click on it.

Schnarch Rebranding

Longtime readers of this site will be well aware of my affinity for the writings of David Schnarch. I'm still on his therapy site's mailing list and got an announcement from them a couple of days ago. The key excerpt is quoted below:

We have two completely new web sites on the Internet.

The Marriage & Family Health Center is no longer located at PassionateMarriage.com. Our new home is www.CrucibleTherapy.com. Check us out!

PassionateMarriage.com is now exclusively devoted to our international best-selling book Passionate Marriage

I have updated the link to their site in the sidebar accordingly.

Also of note is that a new edition of Passionate Marriage is out with a new foreword and a key concepts guide.

Given the weightiness of that book, I think the addition should make the text more accessible to newcomers. I wish them the best of luck.

Where Did the Week Go?

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Edited at 9:20 am on 8/16 for polishing and corrections. The original revision was written in the wee hours of Sunday morning as I was nodding off to sleep.

It's widely accepted that the passage of time seems to accelerate as we age. Minutes don't seem to take as long as they did in the past. I don't know if I crossed some sort of threshold when I turned 40 back in February, but it seems as if things have been really flying since I accepted the promotion a little over a month ago. I'm still trying to piece together what happened to my week.

I had high hopes starting. On Monday, I got up extra early and drove over to STBX's so that I could see my older daughter head off to her first day of first grade. As for work, I was going to be working on stuff that would be key development project items, taking over from some foundational work done by my ex-boss the week after he left the company. But the fates would have nothing to do with that.

On Monday evening, a flurry of system alerts about the site being down sporadically kept the systems engineer and I on edge up through the evening, and the cause was something that was entirely avoidable. One of the database servers had run out of disk space because the engineer had set the database up to write to a smaller disk partition rather than a much larger one which had been created just for that purpose.

Tuesday was chock full of meetings, and the night my time with the kids.

The weekly release was problem free, but my system engineer had been up so late rebuilding our test environment that he overslept. I called him six minutes after we were supposed to start pushing to production, and he answered saying that he had just woke up. We started the release with him talking our IT support guy through the process over the phone.

The other two developers were out of the office. One had arranged to work from home because his son started kindergarten that day, and the other e-mailed in that he was going to work from home because his car battery was dead. Given some other things that indicate his motivation may be less than up-to-snuff, I was skeptical about his claim.

On Wednesday night, I wound up writing a test script that would be used to judge the quality of the new approach we were taking on this development project. While auditing the stats, I found that the numbers did not agree with what I saw in production and tracked it down to an issue with the database again. This time, it was a secondary server that was used to create the snapshots.

Thursday night, I spent re-running the numbers that I was hoping to have done on Wednesday and trying to figure out how we would implement a new web service in production across multiple data centers. The application didn't have build in replication, so we would have to roll our own.

I time shifted my work schedule on Friday, going in over two hours early, so that I could take off early to pick up the girls while STBX worked a concession stand at the overpriced taxpayer financed athletic facility, which earns her tuition offsets for the kids dance classes.

Friday night and Saturday were spent rewriting major portions of code I had written in May 2008. It was core stuff that related to how content was fetched, and this new algorithm would break major portions of it. I managed to get it working for all but a couple of edge cases and one bug in a display widget. I checked all of that code in a couple hours ago, just prior to when our IT support engineer was taking that system down for some much needed maintenance.

A big event going on in the Circle City this weekend is a downtown convention that is aimed primarily toward gamers, but it has grown into a cultural event above and beyond the original audience.

Contrary to what you might expect from someone in my line of work, the event is not something I would be interested in. It does make for amusing people watching at lunch time, though. I would go so far as to say that you could make a drinking game out of it... sip of beer for someone dressed in all black, two drinks if they have dyed hair, a shot whiskey for cosplay, two shots if they are wielding weapons. I could go on and on, but as someone with a low tolerance for alcohol, I'd pass out before this paragraph was completed.

In the midst of the people watching on Friday, an awareness came to mind... While the demographics are strongly skewed toward the male side, the crowds do include some females. Some appear to be just as into the goings on. Others are just part of a couple. Some are both.

Going by appearances, most of the couples appeared to be in their 20s. Seeing them brought forth some unanticipated and painful emotions inside of me.

I've written in the past about how I struggle with this feeling that I am so unusual, at least for this area, that there is no one with whom I have enough in common for form a every close bond. In private conversations with others, I have described this state as "unknowability," a gut feeling that no one would find me worth the time of wanting to know and understand me.

As I watched these couples, I felt envy. It wasn't because I found myself attracted to the women in the couples[1]. It was because these men had found acceptance in the eyes of someone else so early in their lives, in spite of the fact that their alienation from society at large

That got me thinking about the subculture upon which the convention is based as well as other cliques that permeate our society. With the aid of social networks which draw people together who would have otherwise never known about each other, people manage to form associations and groups with those who have similar interests. Sooner or later, people find the tribe they call home, even the geeks.

I just happen to have niche interests that are so orthogonal to one another that it's hard for me to find a tribe of my own. My mind, arguably vexed with Asperger Syndrome, has left me with a clutter of knowledge of arcane areas such as railroads, math, radio station history, MGM cartoons of the 40s - 60s, musical genres of many tastes, software engineering, and erotic explorations, economics, existentialism, and non-traditional relationships. I am all over the place, so dispersed that it is as if I am nowhere... and I live in a metro area that is about as non-cerebral as you can get.

Despite all of this talk about being yourself and pursuing your dreams, most of society aligns itself with a set of life scripts. This allows different interests to accumulate size and form a community. The inability to connect on this level can lead to feelings of alienation, which ultimately leads to depression. Perhaps we are wired to do this because being a part of a sustainable group enhanced the likelihood of survival. Perhaps this is the basis of the envy and grief I felt.

The voice of Schnarch appears in my head to protest the sadness. Self validation, I picture him saying, means that you don't need the acceptance of a significant other to believe that you are good. Differentiation, first and foremost, is the ability to stand on one's own emotional two feet, and pining for a steady stream of acceptance isn't going to be a guarantee that everything will be OK. It's a crutch. Maybe this is just loneliness anxiety by any other name. I just know it was there in a big way, and I don't want it to engulf me.

[1] -- Although on Friday afternoon I did see a girl walking down the street, decked out in an outfit that included a short skirt and suspenders that gave her an arousing kick@$$ bad girl. She was not part of a couple, though.

Should I Start to Worry Myself If I See Myself in T-Rex?

Despite the fact that it uses the same d@mned panels for every strip, I find Dinosaur Comics to be hilarious. Today's strip, especially panel (3), for some reason reminds me of some of my more off-the-deep-end anayltic posts in this space.

Late Night Listening XXX -- Wanderin' in the Rain

It's been a long, long time since I lost myself.
Put my pride down on the table, put my fear on the shelf.
So I bought myself a throne to reside and let myself go.
But I've traveled much too far, where I've gone, I'll never know.

What a long, long time...
Long, long time.
It's been a little old while since I felt so fine.
Wanderin' in the rain...
Losing my mind.
What a long, long time.
What a long, long time.

-- O.A.R. "King of the Thing", 34th And 8th

Heard a live version of this song being played on the Groove Show last weekend. I fell in love with the refrain, and it speaks to how I've been feeling lately.

Last Sunday, a post appeared on I Am Doing the Best I Can that struck a chord in me. I'll pull the relevant paragraphs and quote them here:

When you drop off the entire Bloggy planet and don't read any of your friends, even though you Love them...but participating in the bloggy world become just too much to bear because that means, well INTERACTING and shit...

When you decide after two years, which, lets face - is antediluvian in the time epochs of the internets - to wander back and try to find all of your peeps, your homies, your original Phi Delta Badass...

They ain't all there.

In recent weeks, my life seems to be filtering down to something. Wheels turning. Pulp falling to bottom of glass. I twist and squirm in my skin, trying to figure out what it is that I seem to be morphing into, but it still has no recognizable shape or form. I can only tell you is that it is Different.

I feel like I walked back into a playground that was waiting for me to arrive...but there is no one left on the swings. No one on the slides. No one over there by the fence telling ghostly tales and urban myths to each other.

...

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry I withdrew so deeply into myself that I locked the door to the yard and refused to go out. I'm sorry I missed babies being born, babies being lost and the million other joys and sorrows that happened in your lives. Marriages. Divorces. The terrible. The frightening, the sublime. I didn't mean to abandon you."

And I wait here in the edge of the yard...just on the edge of the dark peering out waiting for a noise. A whisper. Anything. I pick up a small stone and throw it up into the air and watch the bats dive and turn towards it.

I can wait.

It's bad enough that the third anniversary of this blog came and went without so much of a post on my behalf. Adding insult to the injury is the fact that I have been equally as bad about keeping pace with the many blogs I read on a regular basis and left comments regularly over the course of 2006 - 07.

Looking back, I see a similar pattern that happened over time with real-life friends. My dissatisfaction with my marriage and job some four or so years ago resulted in me pulling away from them. Not keeping in touch. Not answering e-mails. I just didn't think I could share this struggle with them. I built a cocoon, with the blogosphere as a lifeline to the outside.

With the change of jobs, I found myself swept up deeply in my work, which was good in to an extent because it helped me jump start a stagnating professional life, and it took my mind off of having to live under the same roof with an estranged spouse.

When STBX moved out, I had hopes of starting up a new circle of friends. I put up profiles on a couple of sites and I started to have some conversations, one of which led to an adventurous beneficial friendship with someone else who was in a similar situation. She has since moved on, but we keep in touch every now and then.

The e-mail nastygram from STBX in early December throttled my socializing. The addition of STBX to the ranks of the unemployed didn't help much either.

It was at that time that I really lost momentum for filing the divorce proceedings. For one thing, it seemed downright cold to have STBX served with a summons after having lost a job. Second, I wasn't sure how the courts would look upon the child support figures that STBX and I had agreed on back when she moved out, since they were based on her weekly gross earnings at the time. Third, the costly van repair at the beginning of the year made be fearful of my own finances, and the cost of paying the fees associated with the divorce seemed like a luxury.

The past eight months have gone by quickly. Up to and beyond the firing of the underperforming co-worker, I have increasingly allowed my life to be consumed by two things... work and my kids. Although I have put in some crazy hours at the office (and from my home), I have never backed out of a commitment to spend time with my kids. I spend time with them doing things when they are in my custody, and I show up for their performances.

Over this time, I regrettably started to neglect this blog and the relationships with those whom through this blog I had become acquainted. The cocoon was sealing, leaving room for only a few friends I had made over the past few months plus intermittent IM pings and e-mails with a few long time readers. In retrospect, this has not been a Good Thing.

Over the past month, several big changes have come down the line that are threatening to shake up the status quo.

Let's look at the home front. First of all, STBX's desire to get the divorce done has increased. A couple weeks ago, she said she'd like to get it filed sooner rather than later so that it isn't hanging over everyone's head during the holidays. Second, she is verging on running out of unemployment benefits, with no job in sight. She actually had an interview for an instructional aide position with our daughter's school system, but she didn't get the job.

On the work front, a month ago, my boss announced to our team that he had turned in his resignation to upper management and would be leaving the company at the end of the month to go work for "So You Think You Can Search".

The announcement caught us all off guard because we thought he was in it for the long haul and that he wouldn't ever think of hiring on at the search startup because of its non-existent progress over the past three years and its notoriously dysfunctional managerial environment.

He cited two reasons for the decision:

• The work he had done to stabilize and solidify the source code and create a team to develop it was mostly accomplished, and he believed we could pick up from where he left off. He needed a more chaotic environment.


• The role he was in, VP of Product, was transitioning to more of a business development role, and that wasn't his forte.

He said that his departure shouldn't be construed as a vote of no-confidence against the company. In fact, he said, he was purchasing the options he had accumulated over the years so that he would have a stake in the company's future success.

After the big announcement, he called me into his office to discuss something in private. He said that they were going to try to find someone outside the company to fill the business development role, but he didn't see the company finding someone to do that in the time he had remaining with the company.

He also brought up our past conversations on how he saw in me the potential to take on more of a leadership role. Upper management also agreed that I would be a good candidate to take over leadership of the Product team under the role Director of Engineering.

He added that there was a chance that the Product Support team, which was merged into our group in October of last year, might be moved out of our department and placed under the control of the new VP of Client Success.

I was given an offer letter on the spot, with a 12 % increase in salary and lots more options. He said he knew I would need time to think about it, but they would really want me to make a decision by the company meeting, which would take place on the afternoon of the next day. The offer didn't surprise me given the circumstances, but the increase in pay was more than I had anticipated.

I weighed what I would be throwing myself into. I would be trading off relatively long days of coding solitude for lots more meeting commitments. I would be responsible for managing things outside the scope of my expertise, like the systems engineering and IT guys. I would more than likely have to be on call 24/7 for server outage alerts. It would be the first time that I would have people reporting to me on a regular basis. I also knew that I would be the only server-side developer left on the team.

On the other hand, here I was at the age of 40 and really in need of experience with leadership. I recalled Drunken Housewife's remark from April where she suggested that I needed to accumulate some management experience. The department would have a leadership vacuum in our boss' absence, and they needed someone to help maintain the positive progress we had made over the past year and a half.

In an act of self-validation, I turned in a signed acceptance of the offer the next day. When the news was announced to the team, there was a collective sigh of relief on my coworkers' faces, which was reassuring. I know that I am looked upon as a reliable resource of information, but being viewed as a leader is a totally different thing.

The remaining days in July were a whirlwind. My life became so full of meetings that I felt like I was working for a completely different company.

As my boss predicted, there was a restructuring that put the Product Support folks under Client Success, which was a bummer for the Product Support team, but it did reduce the amount of fires I had to fight.

Then a week into the job, we closed a very big deal with a client wherein it became clear to our team that they wanted to use the applications in ways that would push parts of our server and user interface code to its limits, if not breaking them. So the focus of our work the next couple of months will be on making it so our app will be able to handle these demands. It will keep us very busy.

With the promotion, I revisited the child support calculation that I did a year ago and updated the numbers with current wages and insurance, turning in the new form on Monday this week I priced STBX's numbers as 40 hours at minimum wage. She got a boost of about 40 or so dollars per week, and I adjusted my direct deposit numbers accordingly.

The next day, after she had interviewed for the instructional aide position, she IMed me at work saying this:

1:18:03 PM STBX: well i just called daycare/preschools for (younger daughter) in case i get the job. it will be anywhere from $600-$800/month for (younger daughter) to go all day. i will probably need your help with this if it happens

As we found out earlier in this post, she didn't get the job.

But nonetheless, that maxed out my stress level for the day. On Thursday night, one of the nights when I had the kids, I was giving them a bath at her place while she was at our older daughter's PTO meeting. I noticed that she left out a notebook where she had taken notes when calling child care places. The three she had listed indeed ranged in the values she said, but all of them were also high end places, which confirmed my suspicion.

If she continues to push this issue, this may transition from an uncontested divorce to a contested one. This week, I will be scoping out divorce attorneys to be ready.

Finally, it should be worth mentioning that I have made a new friend via one of my profiles. She was shy about approaching me, but I'm glad she made the move. We have some commonality of experiences, musical tastes, thought processes, and desires which leads us to enjoy each others' company very much. She has been a source of peace in the malestrom that has been my July and August. I have added her to my blogroll, for those who may be interested in her story.

For the Recovering Pr0n Users , a Lighter Look at the Habit

For those of us who may have struggled with compulsive pr0n consumption at one time or another, the comic strip xkcd offers up a dose of laughter.

When Bereft of Blog Post Ideas...

... blog about why other people gave up blogging.

But seriously, the New York Times ran an article a few days ago about why people give up blogging. It's definitely worth the peek if you're looking for some good reading material.

The story mentions the following as possible reasons that blogs go quiet or die:

• Disappointment over the failure to build a large, loyal audience.


• Increasing difficulty in maintaining anonymity with the rise of social networks.


• Decreasing availability of free time.


• Migration to other forms/media, like Twitter.


• Depletion of ideas.

This topic is of interest to me on two fronts.

First of all, the decline of activity in my own blog has been rehashed over the past year. For me, free time and ideas shortages have been the biggest drains on blogging output. While I still take a peek at the Sitemeter and Google Analytics stats for this blog, I've never had the illusion that I'd build up a huge audience. I don't think this site ever saw more than 100 visits a day, even when the storyline was at its peak level of tension.

Comments always have been welcome. Accumulating a large quantity of them never was a hope, but along the way I accumulated a blogroll and network of friends with whom I could share the parts of my life that I wasn't ready to discuss with others. These days I look upon this blog not so much part of a real-time conversation as an archive of one person's experiences with a series of trying times at the end of the 30s. It's a story far too obscure to be worth a movie, but it's also worth sharing.

And then there's the other front... I've noticed over the past year that activity of most of the blogs on my RSS reader waned. Some have moved on because their blogs outlived their usefulness. Others have disappeared with vague references to anonymity breaches. A few others have gone private, with invitation-only.

A couple of years ago, if I didn't make an effort to read new content on my feeds, after a few days, the backlog would get so large that I would have to "declare bankruptcy" and hit "mark all as read". Now I can go a full week without touching the feed reader, and I can still keep reasonable pace.

I've blogged about the notion of a social graph before. It's the representation of relationships between people, expressed as a mathematical abstraction that's used extensively in computer science. The blogosphere, both via blogrolls and RSS feed subscriptions, give evidence to pieces of the social graph. Some are hubs, with lots of incoming and outbound links. Others are less connected.

Visualized, the set of nodes to which my blog belongs is looking very much like a the seed head of a dandelion. With the passage of time, the seeds drift away from the flower. And so, the nodes fade on this cluster of the graph. For now, I am reluctant to let loose into the free and open blue that is the sky... not while there are still other posts to read and conversations to be had.

So now I'm goin' back again,
I got to get to her somehow.
All the people we used to know
They're an illusion to me now.
Some are mathematicians
Some are carpenter's wives.
Don't know how it all got started,
I don't know what they're doin' with their lives.
But me, I'm still on the road
Headin' for another joint
We always did feel the same,
We just saw it from a different point of view,
Tangled up in blue.

-- Bob Dylan, "Tangled up in Blue", Blood on the Tracks

Cue that harmonica coda.

All Kids, All the Time

(sitting down on the couch with a glass of Fünf Riesling, listening to the grown up radio station's Saturday night mix of funk, reggae, and jam bands)

Work commitments haven't been as insane of late, but they have kept me busy nonetheless. Lately, the big thing has been kid commitments. Not that there's anything wrong with that. :-)

For both of my kids, the school year wrapped up just before Memorial Day weekend. I took off the Friday morning prior to that weekend so that I could see the end-of-the year presentation put on by my older daughter's kindergarten class.

I had them for the full holiday weekend, from Friday afternoon all the way through Monday evening. We did quite a bit, playing miniature golf (older daughter loved it, younger daughter was good for nine holes), grilling out, and going to see the (cringe) Hannah Montana movie.

Our younger daughter has been having a more difficult time doing without me of late. A lot of evenings, STBX says, the daughter will say that she wants to go stay with me for the night. A couple of times, she has put the younger daughter on the phone as she cries about missing me. According to STBX, the crying doesn't happen after she's gotten into trouble with STBX, so she didn't think it was manipulation of any kind.

Normally, last weekend would have been kid-free, but the fates had other plans. The grown up radio station in town has contests. I sign up for them on their website. Usually, the contests are for free tickets, ranging from private concerts locally to big events like Bonnaroo.

I wound up winning a prize in early May, but it was for the two free tickets to the not-so-far-away theme park where the soft drinks and sunscreen are in abundance and free of cost. The catch was that they were good only up through the end of May, so I made plans with STBX to take her and them on the final Saturday.

We wound up changing plans when the day's forecast showed showers. In light of my younger daughter's desire to see more of me, I picked them up for a few hours that day and took them out to lunch and miniature golf. Although my younger daughter said she wouldn't give up this time around, she lost interest around the ninth hole again.

So we decided to go the next day, which turned out to be a good move because the weather was perfect. Although the park had a good size attendance, lines on the rides subsided after the first couple of hours as people made their way over to the water park.

We went over to the park after eating lunch as well, and the kids seemed to have a better time with sliding down the water slides ad infinitum than they did with the rides, so I'm glad we packed our swim suits.

This trip was the longest I had been around STBX since I had to stay over at her place on Christmas Eve. We managed to stay civil, although at times she seemed edgy with me. I drove us down and back in the same day, so we were able to sidestep the expense and thorny issue of overnight accommodations.

This weekend is the girls' dance school recital, so they are not staying with me. STBX booked them in a lot of classes this year, so both kids will be making a lot of appearances. The younger daughter had two routines, one tumbling and one dance act. The older daugther has three performances -- a tap routine, her competition act, and another hip hop routine that all of the competition team members are performing. Both of them have parts in the finale.

The school is celebrating its 15th anniversary, and it's doing so by making its already grueling recital even longer. Normally the number of acts is somewhere in the low-to-mid 40s. This year, they have 52 of them.

This will be the third year that I will be working one of the follow spotlights they use on solo and duet acts, so I had to be there for the dress rehearsal today. I was there just before 9 am and didn't get out until 5:30 pm. We'll have to be there around 1 pm on Sunday, and between routines and the post show presentation of awards, we probably will be there past 5 again.

Come Monday, evening, I'll have to take off work and get the kids from STBX because she has a preschool co-op meeting around 5:30 pm, so the kids will get some more daddy time. I have the kids next weekend, too.

Although I enjoy being a daddy, I don't feel like I've had much in the way of time to myself away from either work or kids, so I'll be glad to get some quiet time in a couple of weeks. I think the motivation to finish off the divorce paper work will be pretty high by then.

Have I Mentioned that I love xkcd?

My wild speculation is that a good chunk of my readership have at one time had a conversation that resembles the first panel of this strip.



If you've got a spare few moments, click on the comic to view some of the other fine creations of this cartoonist.

The Word from the Salt Mine

It's been a week and a half since we wrapped up the project that has consumed so much of my mental energy, and my mind still doesn't feel like it's fully recovered from the experience. Don't get me wrong, I'm proud of the work that my coworkers and I put in to make things ready for prime time. We just operated on a level that is not long-term sustainable.

So, what were we working on? We were busy replacing two user interfaces that were used to approve and decline content. These were old-style web pages that were state of the art, say 10 years ago.

One interface was a confusing list of pending content items that employed radio buttons, and the other was a slow-loading form of checkboxes that showed all content, both pending and moderated.

We ripped both of them out and put into place a design that was modeled more after a web-based e-mail application, where you have a folder list, a message list, and a preview pane.

The new page was AJAX-style, so changes to the page did not require navigation from the page or wholesale refreshes. The problem was that we hand to build a big chunk of server side-support for these AJAX calls from the ground up.

On the front end, we built the user interface using some new approaches that made it possible for us to partition the labor of creating the components, meaning much of it could be done in parallel. While getting some of the interface behaviors to work in a way that people would be most familiar, getting the pieces to talk to one another worked way better than all of us could have imagined.

Emerging from this development cycle, I can certainly say that I am way better at programming in JavaScript than I was a year ago. This project pushed me to my limits in that area and then some.

As far as the rest of my life is concerned, there isn't a whole lot new to report. STBX is still job hunting, at least as much as she needs to to qualify for her unemployment benefits. I know that she actually took a skills test for a temporary agency a couple weeks ago.

My older daughter finished her first year of kindergarten last week and will be heading off to first grade. We're still waiting on the final report card, but I'm pretty sure it will show that she made good progress.

She's become a lot more self-disciplined over the year. When we first would sit down to work with her homework, it was very hard for her to focus on the task. By the end of the year, she was really enjoying it. She's getting more confident in sounding out words, and she's been interested in doing arithmetic.

We've also had some chances to break out my Schoolhouse Rock DVD to learn about things like adjectives and verbs because those things have been brought up in her homeworks. Her favorite of the SR canon is "Interjection."

My younger daughter wrapped up her second-to-last year of preschool and has taken an intense interest in art. She loves coloring, both in coloring books and creating new pictures. I keep an ample stockpile of both crayons and paper so that she can keep occupied.

She did have one bad moment about a month ago. One Monday night, I got a call from STBX shortly after 9 pm, telling me that I needed to come over and speak to my daughter right away because she was running out of patience with her.

Over the prior week, the younger daughter had become increasingly resistant to going to bed, and she had gone over the top in her defiance. She was crying, hitting her mother and throwing toys around. STBX had collected most of her toys and put them in a tote. I had a talk with our daughter and sent her off to bed. I then agreed to take the totes so that the younger daughter would be without toys for a week. It suffices to say that she started going to bed without any more hassle.

Both daughters are also wrapping up their third year at dance school. The recital will be next Sunday. The older daughter was on the competition team this year, and they've participated in four meets locally. They have gotten a lot of recognition for the routine, and in the last week of June, they will be going up a national competition up in Wisconsin.

Moving on to a reader comment, John over at Dad's Life writes:

As a long time follower, I'm becoming a bit puzzled/disappointed. After doing so much hard work in your marriage and leaving, after doing all the Schnarch work, now what? Is this really consistent with Schnarch's principle's? I don't mean to be harsh; as someone who used Schnarch himself, I often wondered what he would have us do if our marriage is not salvageable. I seem to have salvaged mine, and I'm thankful for that. But I could just have easily taken your path and so I follow and wonder: what now

It's a question worth pondering and it's one I don't have a complete answer to it. One of Schnarch's key concepts is the notion of development cycles, where one moves from comfort to growth and back. Over the course of this blog, I believe that I have been through five separate cycles.

1. Self confrontation over my intimate relationship.


2. Self confrontation over the direction of my career.


3. Self confrontation over my technical skills.


4. Self confrontation over my leadership skills.


5. Self confrontation over my spiritual foundation.

This blog started at a time in my life where the first cycle was just about to begin. I knew that something was not right in my marriage, but I couldn't quite bring myself to destabilize it.

After about three or four months of blogging, the second growth cycle began to shift into motion. I was facing the possibility of losing a job and fearful that I might not be able to find one.

Once I found a new job, a new challenge lay before me -- thoroughly retooling my skills. I knew I had a lot to learn coming into the job, and I rose to the challenge, but I still had a lot of moments where I didn't trust my judgment because I didn't feel like I had adequate experience to make the call.

My boss, who is 10 years younger than me but very much a confident leader, picked up on this and made it a priority for us to work on me becoming more of a leader within the group. These two crucibles have been a big part of why I have sunk so many hours into my labors. While it's true that I've had a lot on my plate, that sheer volume and the stress it's put me under is part and parcel the "pain for growth" that Schnarch talks about.

I can say one thing for certain from all of this. Had I had half as much motivation as I do now some 18 years ago, I would not have lost my way in graduate school. By that yardstick, I have grown immensely in this job.

Finally, there is the spiritual crucible, and it's one I haven't put a much energy into as I probably should. The changes I have been through over the past three years have been disorienting, causing me to call into question a lot of core beliefs. Every once in a while I go there, and I wind up writing something like "Fall on Me[1]", but I don't stay there too long.

Over time, I have come to realize that some of the central issues brought up in Schnarch tie into Existentialism. How do we deal with the realization that it's up to ourselves to perform the ultimate act of self-validation and give our lives meaning in a universe where we are at a distance seemingly insignificant.

Indeed, in his larger treatise, Constructing the Sexual Crucible, Schnarch draws upon Kierkegaard, one of the pillars of Existentialism, and his concept of Teleological Suspension of the Ethical to take on the poorly differentiated approach to sexual recovery.

I'm still trying to sift out where my beliefs lie. I have moved past loneliness anxiety for the most part, but I am vexed by fears of the future and the loss of autonomy. My father's accident and hospitalization a couple months ago have weighed heavily on me. I don't want to be in that situation in my latter years, for to me the loss is worse than that of death. Life is a gift, to be sure. Yet, I don't want the cost of a prolonged subexistence to be carried by my family.

In the meantime, I plunge myself into the act of creation, be that in writing code or the raising of my daughters. For when I am creating, I feel less aware of these fears, and I feel integrated with the pulse of the universe. Things may be quiet, but I am by no means adrift.

What Have I Been Up To?

Well, this isn't the only thing, but it is a big chunk of it...



The graph you see above depict the lines of source code attributed to each developer within the company. The dark blue line is my boss. The light blue line is me. That red line that has an abrupt halt in mid-March is the co-worker that got the axe a couple months ago. This graph doesn't tell the full story, because I have another 14,935 lines checked in on a separate web service source repository. The bulk of that code was written in the first half of 2008.

For the month of April, my code count was 8,163. That marked a new record for me. Prior to that, my highest throughput was 3,815, recorded March of this year. If things don't slow down, I will be on pace to shatter the April's total because I've checked in a net of 3,740 lines.

While it feels good to be productive, I am pretty sure this rate is not sustainable.

46,664

For those of you keeping track, that's a total of 17,616 lines of source code and documentation committed thus far this year. That doesn't include a hefty amount of wiki documentation and research writing as well.

Late Night Listening XXIX: Visiting Billalble Therapist Hours Unto the Third and Fourth Generation

The Drunken Housewife has a heckuva post about her blog's impact on her kids and the attention it has drawn. I won't spoil it here, so go read it and follow the link.

As I increase with years, I have come to realize one thing certain of the parent-child relationship. There is not one among the living or dead who has raised offspring in such proper and effective manner that the child is deprived of issues which require subsequent resolution in adulthood.

There is no path so wise that would shelter a child from all forms of trauma. It is part of being human. For inasmuch as I try to avoid repeating the mistakes of my parents and grandparents, the uniqueness of my situation will inevitably bring forth misunderstandings and missteps in my own actions as parent.

I can only hope that my daughters' path might be a short durations of weekly visits and rather than a lifetime of self-destructive behaviors. Sometimes conscientious parents are too hard on themselves, focusing so heavily on the damage, and ignoring how they foster resilience in children.

With that in mind, let's put on a copy of that great modern folk paean to self-discovery, "Closer to Fine" by the Indigo Girls.

Official Sony BMG Video of "Closer to Fine", not embedded because they don't allow it for this clip

Hard to believe it's been 20 years since that track was released, no?

The Uncertainty of the Things that are Certain

And I dream of Michelangelo when I’m lying in my bed
I see god upon the ceiling I see angels overhead
And he seems so close as he reaches out his hand
But we are never quite as close as we are led to understand
-- Counting Crows, "When I Dream of Michelangelo", Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings

No, your RSS readers don't deceive you. I have returned to my blog to tap out an update of my life's progress. It is not with a pall resignation that I come to visit. I am not ready to declare an end to 2am. But I would be a liar if I said that I haven't been weary over the six weeks since my last post.

As the title of my post suggests, I'm going to open with some discussion of death and taxes, because both themes have been at the forefront of my consciousness.

I almost lost my father on March 20. Since November 2001, he has been disabled by a stroke. It took a pretty heavy toll on him both physically and psychologically. He lost a lot of functionality on the left side of his body, and he is left-handed. He has been fortunate to have good retirement health coverage, so he has been able to get plenty of physical therapy, but there will be a lot of things that he will never be able to do again.

Since his stroke, he has accumulated a sizable number of prescriptions for things like cholesterol, pain, and depression. Earlier that week, his family doctor had placed him on another medication to help him with his anxiety and spasticity. Over the course of that week, he had several falls, and the one he had on the morning of the 20th while getting out of bed was a doozy. A trip to the Small Town ER led to the discovery that he had bleeding on the brain and a decision to send him via helicopter to the neurocritical care unit at a major hospital in the Circle City.

I received word sometime around 11:30 am that day from STBX, who had been phoned by my stepmom because she had neither my cell phone nor my work phone numbers. I notified my coworkers that I was heading out, and I jumped on the earliest bus that I could get that went to the hospital. I arrived just minutes after they had unloaded him, and it would be another hour before my stepmom and her son arrived. It wasn't until after 2 pm that we were allowed to go see him in the ER.

We learned from the doctor and the paramedic that he had become unresponsive on the flight, so they intubated him and then gave him a pretty powerful sedative. The bleeding was in an area near the location where his stroke occurred. They didn't think that there would be much of a problem with that. A bigger problem was the presence of a slight fracture in one of his vertebrae, but they envisioned that being treatable with a back brace. Their biggest concern was what was making him fall. They suspected it might be an adverse drug interaction.

By Saturday morning, he had regained the ability to breathe on his own while sleeping, so they extubated him. He remained in the hospital up through Tuesday. He was transferred to a rehabilitation hospital for inpatient physical therapy. His stay there was not pleasant. The girls and I paid several visits while he was there, and he was constantly complaining about the care he was getting and was convinced he would do better with outpatient therapy because he would be more comfortable.

They released him yesterday. While he had made progress during his stay there, I suspect his release had more to do with him griping about wanting out than it did with any objective metric of physical capability.

The whole experience brought forth a huge mix of emotions, some of which I am not proud to admit. When I heard he had been sent on the helicopter, I had a flashback to early October 1988, when my grandmother had to be sent via the same route for a bad fall down the stairs to the basement. She survived and continued to live for another 16 years, but she was confined to a bed and the last three or four years were especially difficult because of dementia.

I know that my dad had not been in good spirits the past several months. Out of a fear that he was on the verge of dying, earlier this year, he had sought to reestablish contact with his sister, with whom he has had a hostile relationship over many years, but it had taken a really nasty turn in 2004, after their mother had passed away. Because of that state of mind, I can't help but wonder if his will to live is slipping critically toward the brink.

I've also been thinking a lot about my own death. Granted, I hope I have several years to go, but my tolerance for being disabled has dwindled to almost nil. Having seen my STBX's dad confined to a bed in a nursing home since May 2005 and the slow deterioration of my father after the stroke, I can't see myself wanting to live through something similar. I'm not a fan of the notion of physician assisted suicide, but I believe that I will have a do not resuscitate order. I don't want to be a burden on my children, and I don't want to have to deal with the loss of dignity that sometimes comes with it.

I've also wrestled with lingering resentment toward my parents. As much as it should be the right thing to do, I couldn't see myself wanting to step forward to care for them if they were disabled. I hate feeling that way because that's not what forgiveness is supposed to be about, and for years I have worked to let go of the fact that they essentially dumped the responsibility of raising my brother and my on my paternal grandparents. The strength of these feelings is stark enough to convince me that I have not been able to fully come to terms with it.

On a less severe note, but certainly a grim topic nonetheless, one of the developers in my group was fired just a couple of days before my dad was sent to the hospital. I had seen it coming.

His performance over the year that he had been with us was lackluster. He was not thorough in his work, and it showed with lots of bugs and emergency fixes. He did a poor job of documenting his work, oftentimes leaving flippant remarks in his comments rather than useful information.

In February, there was a week where, in addition to doing my own work, I was finding, and sometimes fixing, one bug per day in his code. His departure was jarring for the other two guys in my group, leaving them with fears that they might be the next to go.

Work consumes a huge amount of my bandwidth these days. We've had two very busy development cycles that saw me writing tons of code and documentation. The total line count since my start date is 41,413, and there will be tons more to come.

One of the things I worked on during the sprint was JavaScript autosave manager that would routinely save draft versions of content every often, provided enough changes had happened to the content since the last save operation. My boss was impressed enough with my work in the waning days of that release that he sent me a personal note and gave me some extra paid time off.

I see myself starting to fall more naturally into the lead developer role, which is something my boss has been encouraging me to do. Indeed the last couple of quarterly reviews have listed as improvement areas the need to stop being so reluctant at assuming leadership.

I'm feeling more confident in my design decisions I'm starting to feel more creative in my work. For the first time in all of my career, I feel like I am in a really good groove and the growth just keeps coming. While I still have much to learn, I definitely feel more comfortable in considering the more challenging development roles that I was shy to interview for some two years ago.

The downside of all that work has been that I have been remiss in housework. While it's true that the kids do quite a number on the household entropy, I make a sizable contribution to the clutter. I am slow about getting dishes washed. I get books out and don't put them away. I let junk mail and bills pile up on the kitchen table to the point I have to bulldoze them off for the kids to have a place to eat or play with Play Doh. I spent this morning and afternoon putting a dent in the housework backlog, and the house looks a lot better now.

Another thing that I have been avoiding is tax returns. I had a suspicion that with the sale of some investments to pay off debt from the separation, we'd wind up owing on taxes. Although they withheld federal taxes on the money, they did not do so with state and county. So I kept putting off doing the returns, probably to the irritation of STBX, but I just couldn't bring myself to work on them.

I finally got around to doing the returns this weekend, and it was a mixed bag. It turned out we had plenty withheld for federal, so we got a couple grand, but the state/county bill was just north of $700, which was a couple hundred more than what I expected. Fortunately, I have replenished my savings so that I can cover that number easily.

My daughters are doing well. My older had her first dance team competition a couple weeks ago, and they did great, getting a very high score. I attended the performance and was amazed at how well they did with a pretty complicated routine. She's also enjoying being a Daisy Girl Scout. We spent one Saturday afternoon helping to sell the last batches of surplus cookies at the entrance of a grocery.

My younger daughter is an aspiring artist, going through the crayons, coloring books, and drawing paper like they're going out of style. I had to restructure my refrigerator front because she had tacked so many pictures to the doors with magnets that I couldn't open the doors without one falling to the floor.

I've taken a couple days off to spend extra time with them. One Friday, I took off to take my younger daughter to preschool and then pick up my older daughter from kindergarten because STBX was buried with commitments for a PTO fundraiser. This past Friday, I kept them for the night because they were on spring break and I took them to see Monsters vs. Aliens at the really big screen movie theater. My older daughter had a blast, but my younger was not a fan of the special 3-D glasses.

Tonight, I'm taking it easy. The indie rock station in town has a great show lineup on Sunday evenings, which includes a syndicated show called eTown, which airs at 9 pm. Tonight it's Bruce Cockburn and Joan Osborne, which should be awesome. And on that news, I'll close out with a clip of Cockburn singing "Wondering Where the Lions Are", the lyrics of which I interpret as a positive coming to terms with one's own mortality, which is something that seems oh so difficult a grasp at the moment.

A Programmer Looks at 40

(wipes dust from the screen)

(looks at post-it notes left by Have the T-Shirt and Anais)

Yeah, it's been a while since I published something here. It's not that I haven't tried writing something. There have been two or three abortive attempts at writing posts, but I ran out of steam or realized I hadn't hashed out all of the ideas. But now a month has passed, and it's getting to a point where I'm going to forget information or just wind up letting the blog atrophy irreparably. Let the inertia subside...

I turned 40 last weekend. As much as I tell myself that one shouldn't obsess about birthdays at the decades' fringes, I found myself having those feelings of angst and loss that I have struggled to transcend over the past two and a half years.

The birthday proved to be a low key occasion, visiting with family and delivering their Girl Scout Cookie orders. I picked up my daughters from STBX late morning on Saturday the 14th and headed up to the northeast side to eat lunch with my mom at this neighborhood pub that she and her friends like to frequent on Saturday evenings.

After that, the girls and I headed back south, going to The Small Town to visit with my dad and stepmom. En route, I stopped by STBX's to pick up a peanut butter bundt cake with chocolate icing for me to take with me. My dad set up an awkward situation by inviting his sister (my aunt) over without giving me a head's up. From what I gather, he has been making overtures to her about resolving some of their past disagreements. The kids had fun seeing their grandparents and eating cake. STBX had asked my stepmom to make sure that the cake have 40 candles on it.



When I brought the girls back to STBX's, she had the girls bring out their gift to me, a couple of pairs of khakis for work, which I certainly needed, and some hand drawn birthday cards, which were really cute. As I left, she started to break out into tears. I didn't press the question over why she was crying. The next day, I got an IM from her saying that:

11:48:20 AM STBX: fyi my crying last night was not over you. i was just being emotional. i hope you had a good 40th birthday.

I didn't feel very good about my emotional state, which seemed very self-absorbed. I didn't feel much like being sociable. I put it this way in an IM conversation with my brother the day after my birthday...

7:14:34 PM Me: I feel like I should have gotten drunk this weekend, but lacked the ambition.

There is a certain darkness in my prevailing moods that has me worried. Aside from the time I spend with my daughters, I don't seem to have motivation for much anything else than work, and I've put a lot of hours into that.

On a couple weekends, I've gone so far as to pull old to-do items off the shelf and implement them on development branches so that they can be incorporated into releases when they are ready for them. I've also managed to investigate and resolve some bugs that have perplexed others in the development group and have vexed our product support team.

The efforts have paid off in terms of improvement to the software and the compensation. In late January, my boss recommended and got a 6 % pay raise for my efforts the past year. With the company routinely busting sales goals, they can afford to do it, which is a stark contrast to my former employer, who gave me zero raises over the two years I worked for them.

I think I can pinpoint the sources of the this funk I've been in. The cost of the minivan repair in early January jarred my growing sense of financial security and stability. Adding to that is STBX's unemployment. While her check pipeline from the state has finally started, she has not been motivated to seek jobs. She puts in her token three job searches as part of weekly reporting for continued benefits, but that's about it. Here is an IM transcript from 2/19 that pretty much sums up her attitude:

8:52:50 PM STBX: well i got invited to a employment open house with (Big Postage Meter Company).
8:53:05 PM Me: That's a Good Thing, no?
8:53:53 PM STBX: i guess. it is part time and in (a town west of the Circle City) and part of me doesn't want a job yet just want to have it waiting when i get done with unemployemnt.
8:54:00 PM STBX: is that really too much to ask for
8:54:37 PM Me: It comes down to whether you think the job market will have something you want when the benefits expire.
8:54:57 PM STBX: i guess i need to get offered a job first
8:55:01 PM STBX: True.

There's a part of me that feels weird about filing for divorce while she is unemployed. When I worked out the child support to put into her account by direct deposit in August, it was based on her wages at her old job. I wonder whether the court would accept that figure with her current situation. As a result, I have been procrastinating finishing off the paperwork. She reminded me tonight, as I dropped off the kids, that we needed to get that process started, so maybe she's ready to move on and I shouldn't worry.

I also haven't been that motivated to work on my taxes. There are a couple of items on income that have me worried that we might wind up owing money, and that's not a place I want to be as I get ready to file a legal proceeding.

We had some heavy snowfall not quite a month ago, which made boarding my bus at my normal location an unsafe proposition at best, which threw my routine off. I wound up staying home on Jan. 28th. Here was the view from my front door that morning.



I drove to work several times while the snow remained, and on the morning of Feb. 3, this is what my commute looked like:



The person whom I said a couple months ago might be a potential recurring FWB situation has faded into the background. She's had some recurring drama with her own marital dissolution, and she's decided that she is looking for something more emotionally involved. We still exchange e-mails and texts, but that's about it.

Combine all of this, and there is this general feeling of a lack of control over my destiny. I've noticed that it's hard for me to find pleasure in much of anything. At some moments, I wonder if I suffer from Even going out to lunch at work seems to be excessive. Work is the one place that I still feel like I have a say in my destiny.

The state of disorder in my house reflects the lack of motivation. I skipped doing laundry over the weekend of my birthday and didn't do laundry until later in the week, when I needed clean clothes for work. Today, I am caught up again.

I finally forced myself to do dishes today, when I didn't have anything for the kids or me to eat off of. Normally I'm pretty good about doing dishes because I have a dishwasher, but it has been making intermittent funny noises, and it's performance has been spotty the last few times, I so figure that I'm going to have to shell out some money to have that fixed.

The house is in its post kids weekend tornadic state. That's nothing new. What is new is that the mess is on top of the mess from when they were here two weeks ago, which I never got around to picking up.

OK, that's the bleak stuff. And in all fairness, it hasn't been all doom and gloom. On the 7th, I took my older daughter to her first Girl Scout Father/Daughter dance. They had two dances, broken down according to age groups. The group that included Daisy Girl Scouts ran from 6 - 7:30. We spent about 1/3 of it waiting in line waiting to buy a corsage and get our picture taken, but she had a really good time. This picture of the corsage should give you an idea of how cute her dress was.



The DJ played a mix of 80s and contemporary pop, the stuff that's all the rage on Radio Disney (or as my daughters call it -- "Disney Music"). It was fun afterwards pulling up video clips of songs like "Mickey" and "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" on YouTube and watching them with Bella.

On the 10th, my younger daughter finally followed through on her desire to paint my nails. To my cringe, she picked out a pink polish, but I braved my way through it. The photographic evidence is given below.



Our department has a couple of quirky customs that result in the accumulation of cash for our department. The first is a cover charge that is assessed for arriving late to a daily status meeting. It costs a buck to get in. The second is a friendly wager system for silly outcomes. Over time, the cash has overflown the cup used originally to house the booty, so I suggested we get a bank with an equally quirky personality. My boss bought into the idea and got it. Here is another person's video of the bank.



It has a pretty large repertoire of phrases, and it usually burps after you have fed it money.

I stayed late after work on the 13th to celebrate the passage of 1234567890 on the UNIX epoch clock, which transpired at 6:31:30 pm our time. We played cards, drank beer, and cheered the clock on to mark the occasion.

Finally, on weekend of the 7th and 8th, got an IM from an old friend who no longer lives here. She was passing through the area and asked if I was interested in meeting up the night before she had to leave. It wound up being a fun time, and we wound up with smiles on our faces.

That's about all the stuff I can think of for now. I'll try to do a better job of keeping in touch. A month (plus a few days) is way too long to go with dropping a line.

Sunday Morning Sing-a-Long: Sentimental Edition

I heard a wonderful cover of Bob Welch's "Sentimental Lady" on the radio this morning. Some Googling makes me think it was recorded by a couple of Wilco members under the alias of The Autumn Defense. I found a video clip that captured a performance, but sound quality leaves a lot to be desired.



Let's get caught up on the continuing storylines:

Minivan Meltdown

The STBX's minivan, which broke down on Christmas Eve, got fixed finally, with work being wrapped up on January 6. The PCM arrived and was installed. After some additional testing, they found out that some wiring needed repair, which would require some additional work. The final total: $1079.97.

If the cost and waiting for the repair was bad enough, what really left me angry was the location of the wiring issue. It was in the vicinity of the transmission mount. It turns out that in 2006, we had to have the transmission rebuilt at another Dodge dealership, which has since gone out of business, so it wouldn't surprise me if that the wiring issue was a holdover from that repair job.

I made arrangements with STBX to ride up to the north side to pay for and pick up the van. I tried talking with the service manager about my experiences and how a combination of bad past experiences and the delay in getting a part had all but convinced me to never buy a Chrysler product for the rest of my life. Moreover with STBX out of a job and no bailout for her, I asked if he could look over the work order and see if he could find some way to come down on the price. He said he couldn't.

I paid at the cashier desk, having no other recourse but to register my protest in the check's memo line.



... but that wouldn't be the end of my story. I helped STBX load the kids up in the van and then headed out. I turned onto the street that fronts the dealership and then within seconds I got a call from STBX on my cell phone. She said that there was something wrong with the dashboard, with the most noticeable issue being that the gear selector display was a solid orange line, with no way to tell whether it was in drive, reverse, or park.

I doubled back and went into the service area, getting the attention of the service rep, giving him a stern look, and telling him, "IT'S NOT DONE." I then explained the situation, and they quickly got the van back in the garage. After another 20 minutes of waiting, it turned out that the problem was a fuse.

Upon leaving the second time, STBX had a false alarm, complaining that she couldn't get the heat to work, but that was just because the push button that toggles the blower had been switched off, most likely by me back on Christmas Eve, when I was trying to diagnose why the van wouldn't start.

At this point I could care less whether Kokomo, IN, has to close down, Chrysler as a company needs to die so that the valuable parts can be sold off to the highest bidders. I don't want any more of my tax dollars being spent to bail out a bad financial decision by a private equity group.

Health Insurance Bait-and-Switch

I work for a small company which has outsourced its payroll and benefits to a company that specializes in this stuff. As you might recall from my Christmas post, I had been rushed to complete the paperwork for my health plan because they were no longer going to be offering the plan I was on.

On New Year's Eve, I got a memo from our office manager:

I just got a call from (the guy at the HR services company). He told me that if you signed up for (new plan) you are going back to (old plan). They met negotiations with (old plan) and are continuing their coverage. If you have any questions, please feel free to give him a call at XXX-XXX-XXXX.

The premium listing was attached, and it turned out that my montly premiums were about to increase from $577.10 to $720.00 for the same coverage.

I was not amused, and neither was the President of our company. She got back with the HR services company to figure out what was going on. It turned out that because so few people signed up for the new plan, the new plan backed out, forcing the HR services company to offer the old plan, with its elevated rates.

They gave me the option to either switch to the other plan or stay with the old plan but change deductibles. Because my kids couldn't stay with their pediatrician on the other plan, I bit the bullet and stayed with the old plan but downgraded to a high deductible.

Personal Finances

Between those two things, I was not in a good space for the new year. I have made some adjustments to my spending habits to really cut back so that I can replenish my savings from the hit of the repair work. Being without a car forced me to plan ahead more for groceries, and I've been dining in both for myself and when I have the kids. I've also started cooking dishses that will leave me leftovers to take with me to work.

STBX applied for unemployment benefits after losing her job last month and this week started stressing out because she hasn't received a check yet. Given the horror stories about the state's agency responsible for this stuff, I'm not surprised.

She has been filling out her weekly reports with the agency, which requires her to list three jobs she has applied for. Based on what she's told me, she usually has to scramble toward the end of the weekly deadline to file the applications. Here is what she wrote in an IM to me on January 3.

6:10:03 PM STBX: i really just want people to give me money for taking care of my kids for the next 2 years but i really don't have anyone lining up to do that so i am back to reality

Yesterday, she said she was looking into signing up for WIC.

Work

Work has served as a refuge from the money setbacks. Over the past couple of weeks, I have been taking some initiative on getting some long-standing code issues straightened out. I've been doing these on the weekends mostly, after I've completed my existing coding tasks. Some of the benefits realized:

• A user statistics reporting job that has better code structure and runs about twice as fast as the older script.


• An improvement to a text processing algorithm that resulted in more accurate analysis and ran about twice as fast.


• A reorganization of our RSS feed generation code that stripped out a major inefficiency and reduced the load on our servers.

My boss has been happy with the results along with the cumulative efforts I put in the past year. During my annual compensation review last week, he said that I was being given a raise at the higher end of the scale, which made my day.

An Open Letter to Bob Nardelli, CEO of Chrysler LLC

Dear Mr. Nardelli:

The Associated Press is reporting that on Friday, your company received a $4 billion bridge loan from the U.S. Treasury Dept.

This loan was hardly a surprise, given all the press that has been devoted to the worsening situation of the three big domestic car manufacturers. And I know that your company was especially thrilled about the coming bailout because earlier this week, your company spent money on web ads, like the one I saw in my Gmail account earlier this week (click image for full size):



The ad linked to a page at Chrysler's website, which contained a personal message from you thanking us, the American taxpayers, for investing in your company, and supposedly by extension, the U.S. in general.

Despite this expression of gratitude on behalf of your company, I cannot, based on my experiences as a Dodge owner, believe that this money is being well spent. Moreover, I have decided to actively oppose any efforts for your organization to secure additional funding at taxpayers expense.

Allow me to share my story with you...

My Introduction to Dodge

I am a 39 year-old software engineer, currenly separated, with my estranged spouse in possession of a currently non-operational 2003 Dodge Caravan. She is currently unemployed, having lost her job in the middle of December.

Back in early 2005, my wife and I were expecting our second child. At the time, we had a 2000 Saturn L Series 4-door sedan and a 1991 Chevrolet Cavalier, which was on its last legs. She wanted a minivan badly, but we were in no financial situation to buy a new vehicle because we had already taken on a large amount of debt for an adoption two and a half years prior.

Around that time she noticed that someone down the street was selling a Caravan for a little over $7,000. Because the minivan had been a leased vehicle, it had racked up a lot of miles, close to 70,000, if I recall correctly.

I was suspicious that that the seller might be engaging in a curbstoning scam, so I purchased a CARFAX report to do some due diligence. The history of the vehicle matched the seller's account, and it had not incurred any adverse events. We also had a mechanic take a look at, who said the one of the tires questionable, so the seller had them replaced. After that, we bit the bullet but hedged our bet by purchasing an extended warranty from the credit union where we got the loan.

A History of Issues

Over the past four years, the car has racked up around 30,000 miles. Over that time the following adverse events have happened:

• The blower for the heating and air conditioning failed at an expense of $400.


• The transmission failed, requiring a rebuild. Fortunately it was covered by the warranty, but the dealership took over two weeks to get it fixed.


• The hood release lever broke, twice, over the last two years. The plastic latch failed in the same location each time.


• A resistor for the blower failed, at an another expense of $400.


• Repair of a broken wire in the ignition.


• A power steering pump failed, costing about $400 to fix.

Over the past year, we also got new brakes and tires for the vehicle, which was to be expected.

However, the cumulative experience itemized above pales in comparison to the experiences I have been through in the last week and a half.

The Big Breakdown

On Christmas Eve, I took the minivan to have lunch with my mother and my kids. After finishing lunch, about 3 in the afternoon, I attempted to start the minivan, only to find that the dashboard lights would come on and nothing else. A jumpstart did no good.

I had the vehicle towed to a mechanic, who looked at it on the 26th. They said that there was a short in the ignition circuit, but they couldn't be certain where the problem was because their wiring schematics didn't have enough detail. They also noted that the fuse for the circuit was rated for a larger current than what it should have been. They recommended that I take it to the nearest Dodge dealership, which was about 4 miles away.

Taking it to a Dealership: Customer Relationship Mismanagement

On the 28th, I visited the dealership's website to find contact information for service. The dealership is owned by a company which has three such dealerships in the metro area. All three share a common entry webpage, but you select which dealership's website will be displayed from a row of icons on the page. I clicked on the link for the dealership in question, and then used a link on the site's navigation bar to complete a web form that would file a service request.

The next day, Monday, I got a call from one of the other two dealerships, which informed me that they had received my service request, and judging from the location information on the form, I probably wanted to get in touch with one of the other dealerships.

I acknowledged that he was correct, but rather than offering to forward my request to the other dealership or even transfer the call, he instead asked me to take down a number to call and which menu option to select when I got there. Rather than taking ownership of the problem, he simply offloaded it back on me. This is not good customer relationship management, in my opinion.

So I got in touch with the dealer and asked if they could make arrangements to have the vehicle towed from the mechanic to their dealership, assuming they had a towing service they preferred to work with. Instead he off-rolled the issue back to me, giving the phone number of a towing service so that I could make arrangements.

To the best of my knowledge, the vehicle was on the dealership's premises by early afternoon of the 29th. By late next morning, I got a call from the dealership's service representative, indicating that they had taken a look at the van, and they weren't sure what was causing the problem because they couldn't communicate with the Powertrain Control Module (PCM). They said they thought that component was fried and needed replacing. Moreover, it was going to take at least a week to get the part, and they estimated that this would cost $810.57.

This was communicated to me very matter-of-factly, with no apologies with regards to the expense, the delay in getting the part, or the uncertainty over what was needed to fix the problem. What's worse, the service representative tried to apply pressure on me to make an immediate decision because they needed to get the order for the part in by 3 pm.

Recalling that we had earlier problems about a year ago with the broken wire in the ignition, and that repair work was done at another Dodge dealer within the past year, I brought up the possibility that area they needed to work on may still be under warranty.

I gave him the name and the number of the other Dodge dealership. He expressed an unwillingness to talk to them, so I said I call them and try to put them in touch with him. He then told me that if I was going to try to invoke the warranty, it was a better idea for me to have the car towed to the other dealership, which didn't make much sense since it would be the third time I would be towing the vehicle, and it would have been a 31.6-mile haul.

Talking to Another Dealership: a Pattern Emerges

I called the other dealership to see if they could dig up the service record of what had been done and whether there was any warranty coverage relevant to my present situation. The representative was uncooperative, and only on my repeated insistence did he retrieve the records.

He said that provided that no more than a certain number of miles had been accumulated on the car since the work was done, the warranty should still be in effect. I asked him what the record showed for work performed. Only a vague reference to a fix of a wire, he said.

I explained to him the current situation with the ignition and asked if that might be any chance that it would pertain to the work they did. He said he doubted it, because if it were, it would have surely failed by now.

I asked him whether that meant that the dealership's warranties weren't really for the full duration that they said on paper. He hemmed and hawed, but I eventually got him to call the other dealership. About an hour later, I got a voice mail from the dealership which had the minivan, saying that the work they did had nothing to do with the problem I was currently having.

I called my mom, who had worked a decade and a half with the service departments of many dealerships and knew how things worked. She said to try to make them cover some of the costs if the diagnosis proved to be wrong, and if all else failed, escalate the case with the car manufacturer itself because dealerships were very conscientious about remaining in good standing with the brands they represent. She also said to make sure they ran a check on any service bulletins issued for my vehicle to find out whether this was a known issue. I did some searching on the net myself and found that there are plenty of others who have run into this issue.

Biting the Bullet

I called the dealer who had the minivan and told them that I was dissatisfied with the situation. The delay in getting a part and the expense of replacing it required a substantial commitment in time, money, and hardship on my end. Yet, they were up to this point unwilling to make any commitments on their end. I enumerated all the things that had needed repair over the past few years and that the failure of a computer component with so many of these models over a period of five or six years reflected badly on the workmanship of their products.

I asked him why I should do business with them at all. He kept telling me that there was nothing else they could do but say that this "was a start" toward getting the van fixed. Realizing that we needed to do something about the van, I gave him the authorization to order the part and get the work done, but in addition I was going to file a complaint with Chrysler regarding the way that both his dealership and the other had treated me.

What Chrysler Thinks of Its Customers

Later that afternoon, I visited your website to find a number to call so that I could lodge a complaint. Using the number listed on the U.S. contact information page, I placed a call. After listening to the options provided by the auto attendant, none of which applied to my situation, I hit zero and was put on hold.

The line was answered by someone with an accent which sounded Indian. I told the agent that I wanted to file a complaint about my interactions with a Dodge dealership. I gave him a brief synopsis of the problem, to which he could provide only the following solutions:

• A list of other "Five Star" Dodge dealerships in the metro area.


• A mailing address to which I could file a report for possible reimbursement from Chrysler, should this component be the subject of a manufacturer recall.

At the end of my conversation, I verified that the agent's call center was indeed located in India.

In your thank-you note, you mention how the U.S. is home to 74 % of its employees. What you don't mention is that some of the 26 % who aren't are tasked with giving customers unsatisfactory service.

Where I Stand

I am extremely dissatisfied with the quality of Chrysler and Dodge as a brand for two main reasons:

• Several critical components of the Dodge Caravan have shown to have poor durability, at much expense to us.


• Your dealerships have been at times indifferent and downright unhelpful in dealing with our problems.

Regarding each of these points:

In your thank you note, you say that Chrysler is committed to "Providing cars and trucks you want to buy, enjoy driving, and will want to buy again." Implicit in that statement is that in the past, your company fell short of this goal, and that getting a taxpayer financed lifeline will help you mend your ways.

Personally, I don't think that simply saying, "OK, we'll promise to do better from now on is enough." I think it's also important for Chrysler as a company to own up to its past history of making inferior products and lessen the burden of the true costs of ownership of its products.

Think about it this way... there are a lot of people out there who, like myself, have been burned by purchasing your products, and will never consider Chrysler in the future automobile purchases. They paid once at the dealership, twice at the service department, and now a third time by backing loans to you. By reaching out to correct past mistakes, you are dealing with the well your company poisoned in the past.

Now onto the issue of customer/dealer relations. The dealership that currently is working on my car boasts on its website a "Five Star Dealership" status. On that page, I read:

Five Star dealerships are required to follow a strict set of training, facility and process requirements - all designed to put you, the customer, first. In fact, Chrysler LLC only grants this status to dealerships that consistently meet Five Star score standards on Customer Surveys. And these standards are rigorously monitored and maintained. Chrysler LLC personnel validate dealership compliance annually. Maintaining Five Star status is a continual process that requires self-evaluation and ongoing reviews by Chrysler LLC. If a dealership is not compliant, the de-certification process begins and status is revoked.

At no point in my interaction with the either Dodge dealership have I felt that they take the the credo of "putting the customer first" seriously. And the fact that you entrusted an offshore call center to handle customer complaints reinforces the idea that Chrysler really doesn't care.

Unlike your employees, who will keep their jobs because of tax dollars, my estranged spouse lost her job with no taxpayer financed bailout. Also given that most of your stock is held by a wealthy private equity firm looking to avoid losses, it's really hard for me to be sympathetic to your plight.

Why this Letter Appears in a Blog

The rise of the net has changed the way businesses relate to the public. At one time, a slick ad campaign and a resourceful public relations firm were all that a large corporation needed to help protect its brand. Word of mouth could hurt, but an individual's complaints were limited to just friends and neighbors. A company could stand to ignore its disgruntled customers.

Now there are websites that aggregate customer complaints so that one can get a glimpse of the frequency of product defects. Bloggers, like me, can detail their experiences in posts. Those posts get picked up by search engines, which tend to be fonder of blogs than corporate press releases. The net gives a platform for others to file a rebuttal against the public relations narratives.

Given that I have all but exhausted my options for dealing with Chrysler, I have decided to make my case with this open letter, so that others may know my story. To those who have encountered similar problems, they will know that they are not alone. And I will encourage the readers of this post to write their legislators to let them know that they don't want one more dime spent bailing out your company.

Sincerely,


2amsomewhere