Just got back from having lunch with my wife. As always, it was fun, though the joy flickered for a few moments when she mentioned that there's a rumour of more layoffs at EDS come the beginning of December. Not sure exactly what we'd do if she got laid off. Not a lot of Christmas shopping, for starters, which hardly makes us unique. When will this insanity end? And why do you never hear the people who boast of creating jobs ever take responsibility when they eliminate them?
It looks like Barack's decided somebody has to be President right now, and since George is still mumbling and fumbling, he'd better step up and provide some issue leadership. I like that. I was a little queasy about it initially -- uh, Barack? Didn't you say you wouldn't want to give conflicting messages? -- but I'm okay with it now.
It'd be nice if Blogger recognized Barack as a real word. Obama, too. How come there's no PC-level customizable dictionary for this jewel?
We finally decided to replace four of our thermostats -- three of which are twenty-five plus years old. We've had two electricians comment that 'this house is wired funny', and we had a bad experience when we tried to replace a thermostat once ourselves (it ought to be easy, but, you know, this house is wired funny), so we're going to order them through the local utility company and then hire an electrician to put them in. We're getting TH115-A-240D's, which is to say a Honeywell programmable 7 day interval model. Its got a big LCD screen, which we like more, these days, plus a power backup (my mother's thermostat is electronic but if we lose power, or she turns it off, it forgets the old setting), and an 'early-start' feature, so that we can say we want it to be a given temperature at a given time. I'm looking forward to this. Honeywell's web site could use some work, though. Course, I guess that's true across the board for technology at the user level -- I pointed out to the clerk at the drugstore that their cute little 'swipe your credit card' device was positioned perfectly to reflect the light behind me, and she said 'oh, it turns -- yeah, but then I can't see it anymore. Not to mention, they need your little key fob to identify you as a member of their cash-back program, but they need the credit card to charge for the purchase. And these two technologies can't come together - why? At least, at the bank, after asking each time 'what language do you want to use' at the ATM, they finally set it up to remember it, showing the selection and letting you change it if you want. Yeah, I used English last time, but this time, let's try, oh, Greek!
2 comments:
The cabling in this house is hysterical. At least it reduces me to hysterics... :-)
I got a fancy thermostat for the breakfast room - 5+2 day programming, about 5 adjustments for each day, and I think it'll take out the garbage if you ask it nice. I have yet to figure out how to program the thing, so it's stuck at 69F "Hold". Oh well.
I hope the layoffs don't arrive. There's no such thing as "corporate loyalty", these days. If anything, these companies seem to pick the people who have been there longest to get rid of! Someone has to make way for the CEO's golden parachute, I guess... (One client of my wife's just got rid of its CEO; she walked out, after turning the company from profitable to a $1M loss, with a rumored $5M severance. In the meantime, nobody in the company got any pay rises last year... At least they're telling the Mrs she's still got her work; although how long that's going to last, we have no idea. If she makes it to the end of the year, I'll consider us lucky.)
Such uncertainty is everywhere!
Good luck,
Carolyn Ann
I think you got the kind of thermostat we did (or will). We'd been thinking about it, and when we found out that our power company is planning a significant - on the order of 40% - price hike in about a year, we thought 'better take this seriously'. Since our thermostat only controls heating (baseboard heat), it'll only be good for half the year, but still: better than nothing.
Corporate loyalty has been dead for years. And your observation about length of service is exactly right. The people who do the cutting don't look at skill, and don't care about contributions (past, present, or future). They care only about cost. My opinion of how they work can be found in an earlier post, here. Corporations will pay the price for this callous behavior... years after the employees do.
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