Good morning. Hello. How are you? #755
Bureaucratic tyrants, conspiracies in the sock industry, Lego bags,
Good morning! Hello there, how are you? All well I hope? Good, good. I have a bit of a headache. Mild headache from the single tiny wine I had last night. How the mighty have fallen.
Felt kinda uneasy and bad about yesterday’s entry. I don’t like to speak ill of people and my disappointment with Papa Nick is hitting hard. Emily Haines: “They were right when they said you should never meet your heroes.” I finished the book, though, so we are free for a while. His weird obsession with porcelin figurines is pretty great, though, I have to say. They played that for comedy a bit in This Much I Know to Be True, but he is committed and he went deep. Kinda nuts.
My friend Ingo rightfully pointed out that I have been ranting about my exhaustion with narrative in television yet here I am complaining about Nick’s anti-narrative turn in music. And I think that is a very fair point. It got me thinking about a narrative “spectrum.” The “opposite” of “narrative” goes in two directions: into the poetical and into the mundane. When I speak of my desire to abandon narrative I am thinking of the abandonment of structure and symbolism, symmetry and story. When Nick speaks of his abandonment of narrative, he is leaning deeper into symbolism and symmetry. It is hard to explain.
And in any case, I think two different things are going on with me and Nick (oh god, I’ll stop, I’m sorry I’m sorry): I don’t like his music as much these days, partially because of the “abandonment” of narrative (though as I pointed out yesterday, I don’t think he’s really abandoning it. He goes on and on about his abandonment of narrative, as an explanation, or at least a symptom, of other changes. That’s one thing. But that’s not so bad, some of the new music is beautiful, and I’m profoundly impressed with his continued artistic commitment.
What I don’t like is his journey toward fundamental conservatism, his disdain for the liberal, his muddled mess of a philosophy on empathy, his both sidesing of the political spectrum.
I don’t think the two are are related, but who knows, who knows.
Anyway. I’m done with the book. Trying to figure out what to read next. Am I really going to read the new Cormac McCarthy? Am I crazy?
Got one of thouse routine requests you get as “the HR person” in a small company. One of those forms you gotta fill out cuz one of your employees is getting a mortgage and they need verification of salary from their employer. No problem, I get these all the time, do these all the time. This particular one starts with a weird message about how they’ve been trying to reach me for weeks at many different numbers when a) this is the first I’ve heard of it, and b) the employee only mentioned this form yesterday and c) there aren’t many different numbers to try, but whatever. Let’s fill out the form!
Sometimes they just ask for it in prose, sometimes they send some sort of form. This woman from this particular mortgage company sent a form. How I was gonna fill out the form over the phone is not clear, but, again, whatever. Let’s do it! It had the sections I needed to fill out circled. Some were not applicable as my employees do not make hourly wages. I fill it all out and send it back.
Almost immediately I get an email reply. “This is not right. I need for all of the income for 2022 year to date, 2021 & 2020 to be completed and broken out by type of income received.”
She has now aggressively scribbled with the yellow highlighter tool over a whole new section of the form that was not circuled before.
All right. Well, I am a bit annoyed at her tone. But I’m such a mature, cool, adult I delete the snippy line “Oh cool maybe you should have circled that section as well” when I send back the revised form. I fill out the income for each year as requested.
Within seconds:
This is still not accurate. The figures need to be year to date for 2022 through 10/25-or the last pay period, not projected income. The income for the previous years are a little off and don’t match the w2s that we have. We require this to be broken out by base, bonus, ot. If there is someone else in payroll or HR that can complete this I can send to them as well.
Okay. Man that last line really set me off. This company has 30 people there is not a separate “someone else” in payroll or HR. But, you know, I guess this is reasonable. I mean, never mind that every other one of these requests I have done in twenty-plus years of ops is cool with just knowing the salary level and dates of their raises and projected future raise amount, which they now have. They want to be exact.
Except! They already have the W2s. Why the hell am I doing this anyway, then? They know the numbers! If it’s just a verification just ask me if the W2s are accurate!
But once again, all of this annoyance aside, I tell myself to calm down, just do it. The thing about this, of course, is that I can’t tell this person I’m annoyed, and how they should learn to say please and thank you, because I am doing this all on behalf of an employee, who needs this mortgage, so I can hardly, you know, torpedo it.
I start weaving a narrative in my head that this woman, Annie, knows this. That she routinely abuses the people she requests these forms from because they can’t do anything about it, because it would be dickish to torpedo a mortgage. This is probably faulty logic on her part since, well, employers gonna be evil, but you know, historically, up till now, there was such crazy demand for houses she could maybe get away with it anyway. I mean, I suspect there’s a smidge more competition for mortgages than there was six months ago, what with the interest rates being six-plus percent, but none of this is any of my business I just need to send this form. Something like that anyway. I haven’t figured the whole thing out but I suspect this woman is in this job precisely because it enables such tyranny.
But I persevere. I go into Justworks, our PEO, and fun fact! There’s only one way to get this information: The W2s! Other than that, the only option is to look at a payment log for the individual employee, which is just a big long list on a web page of every payment you’ve ever made for them. It is not exportable to Excel or CSV. It is not filterable by year. It does not have totals.
So I write this very polite email explaining this: We use Justworks as our PEO, and Justworks is the only source of truth on these numbers. These numbers can be obtained in Justworks in just (ha) two ways: as a text list, or as a W2, which you already have. Here is the text list. I send a PDF.
Within seconds:
I need for all of the income for 2022 year to date, 2021 & 2020 to be completed and broken out by type of income received.
Yes, yes, Annie, I know what you “need.” I just explained what I have, and you now have it.
I’m pretty broken by this at this point, so I just say that. I let my irritation show. Feel kinda bad about it: “You now have what I have. There is no other record. They are a salaried employee, the only bonus is the holiday off-cycle payment. You can do the math as well as I.”
(I’m convinced at this point Annie has realized what she’s getting, and that if she really wants to match these numbers, she’s gonna have to do a bunch of math from a PDF, and desperately doesn’t want to, even though it’s probably her job, and so she writes that last email as a hail mary hoping against hope that the busy executive at the other end will consent to do the math for her but, lol, nope.)
I was 100% convinced that this would not end it, that this person would immediately write back and tell me to do more for her, without a please, without a thank you. But it does seem to have ended it.
Am I right to be annoyed? Was this as annoying sounding to you as it felt to me? Or am I just a sensitive soul these days?
My socks are all dying. It is October. Checks out. How is it that socks are perfectly engineered to last a year? So that as Christmas approaches, I really want more socks. I mean, I probably own… twenty? twenty-five pairs of socks? Each pair has probably only been worn twenty, thirty times since last year when I… drumroll… got them for Christmas. How are socks so poorly made?
The whole thing reminds me of the light bulb industry conspiracy, where “they” made incandescent bulbs such that they wore out, burned out, even though they posessed the ability to make them essentially last forever. Oh also as an aside have you noticed they are working their damndest to extend that lightbulb conspiracy into the LED era? You buy some cheap LEDs off of Amazon, they’re supposed to last forever, they… most assuredly do not. Is there a single economist of any influence who has made an economic model that incorporates the fact that companies have an incentive under capitalism to make products less good? Nah.
(If I were Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller I would write a section here about “directions for further research” laying out how other economists really should study this. And I bet they would!)
After two years of waiting, Lego has released its first set that replaces the plastic bags inside the box with paper bags. It’s part of their verrrry slow, but progressing, journey toward a more sustainable company. They’re trying to ditch virgin plastic in their bricks, but it is slow going. Wouldn’t shock me if it was another decade. I was something of a lego addict for a while there, but eventually the absurdity of just buying a ton of industrial byproducts of fossil fuels was too depressing and I had to stop.
(There should be another picture here because this is a topic change but that one was short and it looks funny).
When we were at the Halloween party last weekend, I was having this great chat with this woman but I overheard two dudes talking next to us and one guy was saying that “The MCU has become totally lightweight and boring. Every film is the same.” My ears pricked up because I have a weird fascination with the MCU and its place in our culture. I didn’t disagree with this guy and kinda wanted to chat about it with him. But then what he said next gave me pause: “I’m way more into the DCEU now, because it’s dark. It needs to be dark.” He used the world “Dark” as a good thing like four times. It really was something! I knew these people existed but I had never seen one in the wild. I had chatted with him earlier and he seemed like a totally normal person. But he likes the DCEU because it’s “Dark!” Phenomenal.
At any rate, this guy is probably going to be bummed because yesterday Warner Brothers had found their creative head of the DCEU and it is… James Gunn. Well, James Gunn and his production partner on Peacemaker, Peter Safran. And James Gunn… well, he can be gritty, he can be violent, he can be brutal, but I don’t know that I’d characterize him as “dark.” Guardians of the Galaxy was not dark. Even the over-the-top violence on Peacemaker was not dark. Will this guy at the party be upset? Or Psyched? I am inclined to suspect the latter, because James Gunn has a pretty awesome creative vision and point of view, but who knows? He likes it dark!
Maybe this is the guy Leonard Cohen was talking to.
Club mix for you today. I 100% don’t remember listening to any of these. Well, except Bjork. And DC Gore because his name is great. Oh and the Carly Ray that is very new I just listened to that yesterday it is really good. Man. My mind is a blank.
Until tomorrow!
i'm very sorry to pass on this knowledge, given that you've sworn off new legos, but yesterday i learned that lego advent calendars are a thing! https://www.lego.com/en-us/search?q=advent+calendar
(as an alternative, one could make one's own with already existing pieces.)
A hack I've found for those forms is to look up the last pay stub from that year. It will also include the YTD figures that should match the W2.