G21 TRIO: A Series of Voices
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The ZEITGEIST Edition:
 DUELING TRIOs:
ROBIN MILLER on "The Year 1999 Bug"
THOMAS HART says we've all gone Postal: "Good Enough for Government Work"  PLANETARY MADNESS: Jennifer Blue looks at your upcoming week in the stars.
You tell us what for again! VOX POPULI is undated.  (formerly known as POLICY MATTERS): ADAM J. SMITH predicts the Final Battle in the War on Drugs. U.S. Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, seems to agree!
 LONDON CALLING! FELICITY USSHER looks toward a future Zeitgeist.
 POWERSBOOKS: BOB POWERS talks with Carrie Brown, author of "ROSE'S GARDEN."
HOUSE OF CARDS has a brand new Joke of the Day. TRIO: RADIO RAHEEM sees "THE SEASON OF THE WOLF: The Triumph of Cynicism," when he looks at the Zeitgeist.
HOT LINKS(Not From Louisiana) gives a new G21 SILVER SURF AWARD, and debuts a new Link Partner!  BARE KNUCKLES: Part 2 of JEFF WINBUSH's "Search For Spike."
DON'T READ ME FIRST! Our Publisher talks about the Spirit of Our Times and this Edition.  BarnesandNoble SEARCH: If you're like us, you like good writing. Use the Barnes and Noble Search Engine page to find great savings on good books, delivered right to your home or office!
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I don't mean that we're all reaching for the AK-47's, just yet, but that we have decided that "Thank God it wasn't me," in reference to some schmoe who wanted to produce the best product we could and got sacked, is our credo. Too many people, on too many levels, from CEO's on down, have decided that substandard work and slacking is the way to go. "What's in it for me?" has an all new meaning. I don't know one damned person who thinks producing a quality product is more important than keeping their jobs so that they can make their car payments, the mortgage, and buy their kids the latest tennis shoes.
So being in the software development industry makes people curl their lip at me.
They hear what I do for a living and think about Windows 95, et alia, and think I'll send them something that's incomplete, with bad code, just to meet the deadline for when my company said we'd have it on the market --- whether it works or not. I had some woman at a cocktail party up in Fort Worth the other day say to me: "Oh! You're one of the people responsible for my machine crashing all the guldern time!"
What am I supposed to say to this? "Hey, listen, lady, I don't work for Microsoft, I work for Company X."
Or what if I tried, "Naw, I'm one of the fools who works 60 hours a week to make your life easier, and your job faster."
She would laugh in my face. A big horse laugh. And I just might deserve it, sometimes, `cause I've been part of project teams that shipped software I knew was unreliable. I've gone Postal.
But so has your danged cable company, your telephone company, the folks you bought your last motor vehicle from, everybody in your municipal and state government. Why single me out?The IRS is up before the U.S. Congress because of the slipshod way they do business, and you want to pick on little me for cutting corners and keeping my office? I don't think so!
Tell me something, Pilgrim: How proper and correct is the job you are doing? Is everybody in your company dead-bang committed to doing QUALITY work, day in and day out?
I didn't think so. Back off. Like I said, we've all gone Postal.
And now you probably expect me to come up with some pat, and seemingly seamless explanation for why this is. After all, writing here at the GENERATOR 21, whether most people reading the web magazine agree with all my opinions or not(which we know from Vox Populi you don't) I'm expected to have a rejoinder. I'm expected to carry this argument to the next level.
One of my neighbors here in BubbaLand, this guy named Wilkey, says to me: "You know what happens when you do good work, don't you? They just pile more on."
"Is that right?" I said.
"You just gottah understand who you are dealing with, these bosses. Then you understand the facts."
"The facts, as you see them."
"What was that?"
"You were about to share the facts with me, Will."
"Don't start turnin' wiseass on me," Wilkey cautioned.
I shrugged.
"The fact," Wilkey continued. "Is that all these damned foreigners and so-called refugees we let flood into this country have dragged us down into the Third World along with them. Your president, Limp Willie, created a superhighway for companies to move across the border called NAFTA. And the only thing wrong with this country that armchair quarterbacks like you can see is wrong with this country is Reggie White."
"Reggie White? Not me."
"Birds of a feather. I read that webzine you write for. Leftists and whiners; people like you don't know when to come in out of the rain.
"The facts,"Wilkey emphasized, "are right in front of your noses and you refuse to see them, mister. What it's about today is getting whatever you got to the public, fast you as you can for as much as you can, and then high-tailing it. I don't see Oprah, or Bill Gates, or anybody with half a brain moaning about `good enough' being just fine! I don't see any lynch mobs forming outside of Nike headquarters `cause their president jokes to Michael Moore that one of those Indonesians people like you are whining about could end up being `your landlord.'"
"Lynch mobs?"
"This used to be America, Tom! This used to be the kindah country where folks got exercised over a tax increase! Now you got stuff like Waco going on, damned surveillance cameras at your stoplights and everywhere else..."
"Black helicopters."
"I already warned you once, Smart Boy."
"Sorry."
"All I'm saying is, half the damned people in this country never knew what freedom was, so they got no idea what's being taken away from them. The damned government counts on that. We are losing our soul as a country, Tom, and somebody oughtah start worrying about that, instead of where Limp stuck his Willie, or if Jerry Springer pays folks to throw chairs."
Wilkey did have a point in there somewhere, if you stirred around in the cowpie long enough. And he was using that point, like so many of us do, to rationalize away his first assertion, that he was quite content to do shoddy work. He has gone Postal, too.
A rationalization, the cathedral of excuses, is a mighty handy thing. It doesn't challenge your beliefs or prejudices; rather, and on the contrary, it forms the buttress upon which they can coalesce. A rationalization provides a superstructure for all the things you hold more dear and true, and allows you to have someone, or something, else to blame for your own shortcomings. My neighbor Wilkey has always been the masterbuilder of rationalizations.
You, Gentle Reader, could be, too, for all I know about you. Or maybe you're a wiseacre like me, think we should challenge our rationalizations instead of going Postal.
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