Thinking it would be a nice change of scenery from the late autumn gloom and leaflessness of late October in Vermont, I signed up for a tour of Vietnam. Indeed it was a change of scenery, sure enough. I might go so far as to suggest culture shock.
We arrived in Hanoi 12 days ago, and I can't actually explain why I thought it would be pleasantly cool and bugless, especially after I groped around Google and found some weather information which all agreed that Very Hot would be the norm for October, but there we were after 30 hours of air travel, groggy and stumbling, with our glasses fogged over in the 100% humidity of the middle of the night, being met by our tour guide and dragged off to our beds in a barely living condition.
As it happens, Hanoi has embraced air conditioning with a convert's fervor and our room was refrigerated to Arctic. Which was just as well, since the beds were equipped with down comforters suitable for use in polar conditions. This trend continued as we made our way from Hanoi south through Danang and points south, hitting, along the way, all the temples and ruins and sites of war and mayhem from the tenth century to the present. All of these are discussed in considerable detail in great numbers of guidebooks, so I will skip over all that and just mention the things that they don't tell you in the guidebooks.
The first thing to overwhelm the unsuspecting tourist is the numbers of motor scooters everywhere, countrywide. In Hanoi they go everywhere, sidewalks, alleys, in any direction on the roadways. They emerge from peoples' houses and shops and interstices between street vendors. Most houses have a ramp out to the sidewalk so that the family scooter can be brought in at night and parked in the livingroom.
They are used for all forms of transport – cargo, family outings, commuting. Occasionally a mobile haystack may appear on the highway with driver barely visible under the load. Other cargo might be many sacks of grain, or stacks of boxes, or lumber or crated chickens. Anything you can get a bungee cord around. In terms of family outings, the largest number of people I saw on a single scooter was Mom, Dad and the 3 kids. Typically riders sit side-saddle and are perfectly relaxed, chatting on their phones or buffing their nails. At rush hour the rippling flow of scooters is like the mighty Mekong in flood.
Many of the riders, especially the girls, wear masks that cover, at a bare minimum, their faces from their eyes down. Some cover their foreheads and necks as well, and very often a cotton jacket with a neck up to the earlobes and specially constructed sleeves that extend to cover their hands. This is to prevent the sun from getting at them and sullying the perfect whiteness of their tender young flesh in a similar stab at maidenly beauty as those sleek young coeds who poach themselves on the beach so they can dazzle the viewing public with their golden tan.
The second thing to catch the eye, after the scooter swarms, is the overhead wires. In certain areas of the city, any city, but especially Hanoi, wires are strung in swags from pole to pole, and on certain poles there are one to many coils of spare wire so that it would be possible to add to one swag or another. It was never made clear what the nature of these wires was, whether telephone, electric, or merely bizarre ornamentation, but I would guess that if ever Vietnam ran into an embarrassing shortage of copper, they could easily harvest a year or two's worth from the streets of Hanoi alone.
Then there are the vendors who are everywhere selling anything from scooter tires to chicken parts, but those of us who are clearly tourists most commonly attract those offering Buddha statues, jewelry made in China, clever little carved pigs, fans, post cards, straw hats, flyblown fruit, faux-silk scarfs, spoons made from buffalo horns, chop sticks made from bamboo, and in very upscale areas bags of coffee made from weasel manure.
There are several popular vending techniques: First, as soon as you spot a creature that looks like it might be American, you snatch up the first object that comes to hand and thrust it in the face of the mark, shouting “Madame! Madame!” When the mark moves on politely shaking their head and murmuring “No thank you,” you repeat the attempt, perhaps with the same item in a different color. Continue this until the mark has moved off into the territory of the next vendor.
Technique No. 2 cuts in when the the hook is set and the victim has actually bought something, 2 scarves, say. So they have handed over the money and picked up their treasures and are about to leave when the vendor blocks the exit with a flamboyant display of more scarves. It is not clear whether they imagine that every passing tourist aspires to own more scarves than Imelda Marcos has shoes, or if we look so much alike to them they think this is a new person in need of neckwear.
The third technique is popular when there are great numbers of vendors hawking the identical line of junk. In this case, if the tourist manages to fight their way past the first one or two vendors and finds something at the third, the owners of the first two will stand at the elbow of the thoughtless purchaser, tears gathered at the corners of their eyes, pathetically offering whatever it was that had just been bought from the triumphant number 3.
In the more upscale establishments, those prosperous merchants with an actual roof, and doors, the potential buyer is closely followed around by a helpful employee who will try to guilt you into buying stuff by unfolding everything in the place, taking things down from the top shelf, pulling stuff out of drawers and so forth whether or not the customer has shown the slightest interest in any of it.
To add interest to the shopping experience, the local currency, the Dong, is worth about 20,000 to the US dollar. The main problem with this is getting the order of magnitude right. If you offer a 10,000 note for something worth 100,000, it is a sure bet that the shop keeper will point out your error. If your error is in the other direction, however, it may go undetected. Of course, US currency is always welcome and there is almost nothing in the country that cannot be had for One Dolla. It would seem that the vending public imagines that all white tourists arrive in Vietnam with a large suitcase full of small US bills. In any case, keeping track of all those extraneous zeros is monstrously difficult and is responsible for much of the widespread “I can't think what I spent that $100 on” anxiety.
In case I failed to mention it, it is very hot in Saigon. Pay no mind to the residents who will tell you that it is cool and pleasant. 90 degrees is not cool and pleasant.
Further observations anon...
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
Emergency Measures
When I hear terms like “crisis management” or “emergency measures,” images leap to mind of miserable, huddled people clustered around sagging tents, surrounded by mud or backlit by the lurid orange light of their house in flames; volcanoes, tidal waves, cities crushed by earthquakes; dislocated throngs living in sports facilities, fleeing murderous paramilitaries, starving while their crops die from drought and their women are raped by armed gangs from the next village over.
For this reason it gives me a jolt when I receive cautionary notes including these terms from organizations responsible for dealing with widespread misfortune. My first panicky thought is that these highly placed functionaries know something that they are not telling us about. That they know that there is a hurricane bearing down on us, a lava dome forming under our feet, a fleet of bombers approaching over the pole, with their sights set on Rutland.
Happily, we have been spared most of these assaults on our placid lives, however, it appears that our ever vigilant watchdogs are leaving nothing to chance as I have been getting more than the average number of messages recently from well-meaning persons and organizations who, having my health and welfare at the forefront of their minds, want to make sure that I do not suffer some horrible fate in the event of catastrophe. Since the sort of dislocation that constitutes a catastrophe seems to cover a larger and more varied list of misfortunes with each passing year, I am not sure whether they mean nuclear strike or road washed out again. Not that it matters much since the measures we are enjoined to take are the same in either case:
1. Make sure there is a lot of tinned food about the place
2. Keep some water handy since your well will not provide when the power is out.
3. Get lots of things that use batteries, like flashlights and stuff. Maybe a radio.
4. A few candles couldn't hurt. Don't leave your toddlers alone with them.
One official went so far as to suggest that sufficient emergency provisions should be laid in for 72 hours. That's 3 days. Presumably after that arduous period spent loafing around the house without even a TV, unless you've got a generator, helicopters would be provided to replenish the victims' dwindling stock of Cheetos. Maybe they could strafe the affected area with frozen chickens which could then be cooked on sticks over a fire on the patio made by breaking up their furniture.
I was disappointed to note that none of these sources of comfort and good sense cautioned the inexperienced not to remain in the house if the toddler managed to get a crackling blaze going in the couch. No mention was made in any of the notices I received of fire extinguishers, so one can only imagine that the average householder would not have one, or know how to use it if they did.
It is not clear what is driving this drift toward trivializing the idea of what constitutes an Official Disaster. It is tempting to imagine that the legal industry plays a starring role. I understand the Corps of Engineers is still coping with lawsuits relating to the Katrina disaster, and the National Weather Service is clearly the target of choice when your house is unexpectedly washed out to sea owing to their failure to predict a 10-inch rainfall. However, it is hard to see how canned goods would improve the aftermath of either of these events.
This is a fundamental evolution of the National Character and may go far to explain why we, as a nation, steadfastly refuse to do anything that might mitigate the environmental apocalypse to which we have so generously contributed. With so many examples of the often rapid progress from the introduction of a good idea to a preposterously extreme application of it, it is understandable that people would be anxious about any reduction in, say, fuel consumption or the use of plastic bottles. The extrapolation of these benign measures would inevitably, in the anxious public mind, result in all of us riding bicycles or carrying water in our hats.
And then how could we live with ourselves?
Happily, we have been spared most of these assaults on our placid lives, however, it appears that our ever vigilant watchdogs are leaving nothing to chance as I have been getting more than the average number of messages recently from well-meaning persons and organizations who, having my health and welfare at the forefront of their minds, want to make sure that I do not suffer some horrible fate in the event of catastrophe. Since the sort of dislocation that constitutes a catastrophe seems to cover a larger and more varied list of misfortunes with each passing year, I am not sure whether they mean nuclear strike or road washed out again. Not that it matters much since the measures we are enjoined to take are the same in either case:
1. Make sure there is a lot of tinned food about the place
2. Keep some water handy since your well will not provide when the power is out.
3. Get lots of things that use batteries, like flashlights and stuff. Maybe a radio.
4. A few candles couldn't hurt. Don't leave your toddlers alone with them.
One official went so far as to suggest that sufficient emergency provisions should be laid in for 72 hours. That's 3 days. Presumably after that arduous period spent loafing around the house without even a TV, unless you've got a generator, helicopters would be provided to replenish the victims' dwindling stock of Cheetos. Maybe they could strafe the affected area with frozen chickens which could then be cooked on sticks over a fire on the patio made by breaking up their furniture.
I was disappointed to note that none of these sources of comfort and good sense cautioned the inexperienced not to remain in the house if the toddler managed to get a crackling blaze going in the couch. No mention was made in any of the notices I received of fire extinguishers, so one can only imagine that the average householder would not have one, or know how to use it if they did.
It is not clear what is driving this drift toward trivializing the idea of what constitutes an Official Disaster. It is tempting to imagine that the legal industry plays a starring role. I understand the Corps of Engineers is still coping with lawsuits relating to the Katrina disaster, and the National Weather Service is clearly the target of choice when your house is unexpectedly washed out to sea owing to their failure to predict a 10-inch rainfall. However, it is hard to see how canned goods would improve the aftermath of either of these events.
This is a fundamental evolution of the National Character and may go far to explain why we, as a nation, steadfastly refuse to do anything that might mitigate the environmental apocalypse to which we have so generously contributed. With so many examples of the often rapid progress from the introduction of a good idea to a preposterously extreme application of it, it is understandable that people would be anxious about any reduction in, say, fuel consumption or the use of plastic bottles. The extrapolation of these benign measures would inevitably, in the anxious public mind, result in all of us riding bicycles or carrying water in our hats.
And then how could we live with ourselves?
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Should We Expect Privacy in the Workplace?
There was a report on public radio the other day about something to do with the workplace. I don't remember what, but at some point the reporter remarked that an employee of the large company under discussion was outraged that the employer dared to read his emails which contained private information that the employer had *no* business looking at. His numerous emails that had been written and sent on company time using the company's computer running the company's software.
I find this mystifying. Not that the company's goods had been used for private purposes – I am guessing that anybody with access to a computer at work will have used it to send personal messages at one time or another. Will, in fact have made private phone calls, filched ball point pens, taken an extra ten minutes for lunch, and taken any of a long and varied list of liberties that the employer might not, strictly speaking, approve of, although it would be naive indeed if the company were truly unaware that such tiny felonies were a daily affair.
What was the eye-opener was that the employee who, having been caught red-handed and asked to spend more time on his actual work, for which he was paid, and less on his private conversations, instead of saying, demurely, “Oh, yes, sir, it won't happen again, sir, I'll get right on that report, sir” and then scurrying off to look busy for a week, tops, before figuring out a way to continue his malfeasance so as not to get caught a second time. Instead of taking this very sensible and mollifying course, this quarter-wit threatened to sue the company for reading the rubbish that he shouldn't have been writing on company time to begin with.
What was he thinking?
This is another example of Our Society's failure to expose the young to reality. Somebody had failed to sit down with this young imbecile and explain what it means to get and, more importantly, to keep a job. Maybe some respectable institution should issue plastic cards to be read to prospective new hires and then given to them to study at their leisure. The card should say something like:
“OK we will hire you. Here's the deal: We are buying from you 40 hours of your time each week excluding holidays. These are our hours and we will do what we like with them. This will not include taking your dog to the vet, picking up furniture from Walmart using the company's truck, or slipping out for a long lunch with your college roommate.
The computer on your desk is not provided so that you can while away an idle morning playing solitaire or forwarding pictures of kittens to your mother.
When your supervisor gives you a task with a deadline of, say, Friday, what is meant is that the task should be completed before Saturday. This Saturday.
Any items under this roof that you did not, yourself, bring here are not yours. The stationary cupboard is not your source for household supplies; those felt-tip markers belong to us, not to you, along with the staplers, post-it notes, and printer paper stacked nearby.
If we catch you stealing our stuff, malingering, texting your friends on our time, using our materiel for purposes unrelated to our needs, we reserve the right to kick your butt.
Do you understand?”
I am reminded of a young man at one of my previous places of employment. This place generated a lot of data and generated endless reports which took up huge chunks of space on the in-house servers. These were very large servers, but every now and then they would approach capacity and the Keepers of the Data would scan through them to find who was taking up the space. Then they would natter at the responsible parties to purge, archive, or move it.
The young man in question was one of these quiet introverted people who never made eye contact and who spent his days alone in a dark windowless room full of computers doing something with data files, so it was not a surprise that his account on the servers very nearly outstripped those of all other users. What was a surprise was that much of the space was taken up with photographs, which he did not work with. This excited the curiosity of one of the Keepers of the Data, who was having a dull day anyway, so he opened one to see what sort of maps or micrographs or field trip records our young man might have accumulated. What he found was hundreds and hundreds of high-resolution pornographic pictures.
What happened next was that probably the most extensive collection of porn in all New England vanished without a trace, and Our Boy got his butt kicked. It could be argued that he was not the brightest star in the firmament, but even so, it is significant that the young ninny did not threaten legal action for invasion of his private fantasy life on company time.
It could be that as jobs become hard to get and good jobs nearly non-existent, the idea that the workplace is merely an extension of our home life will gradually fade as both employer and employee come to understand what each owes the other. However, in the fine American tradition of “Anything worth doing is worth overdoing” there are disquieting symptoms of a movement toward the workplace moving into the home. It is already fairly common for companies to demand that its employees not smoke at all, anywhere. I understand that some are moving toward prohibiting all alcohol use. Next up, what? Overeating? Trampoline use? Using the Lord's name in vain?
I realize that moderation is not a notable feature of the national character, but I dream of a time when our time at work is time for work and then we can go home and forget the buggers.
I find this mystifying. Not that the company's goods had been used for private purposes – I am guessing that anybody with access to a computer at work will have used it to send personal messages at one time or another. Will, in fact have made private phone calls, filched ball point pens, taken an extra ten minutes for lunch, and taken any of a long and varied list of liberties that the employer might not, strictly speaking, approve of, although it would be naive indeed if the company were truly unaware that such tiny felonies were a daily affair.
What was the eye-opener was that the employee who, having been caught red-handed and asked to spend more time on his actual work, for which he was paid, and less on his private conversations, instead of saying, demurely, “Oh, yes, sir, it won't happen again, sir, I'll get right on that report, sir” and then scurrying off to look busy for a week, tops, before figuring out a way to continue his malfeasance so as not to get caught a second time. Instead of taking this very sensible and mollifying course, this quarter-wit threatened to sue the company for reading the rubbish that he shouldn't have been writing on company time to begin with.
What was he thinking?
This is another example of Our Society's failure to expose the young to reality. Somebody had failed to sit down with this young imbecile and explain what it means to get and, more importantly, to keep a job. Maybe some respectable institution should issue plastic cards to be read to prospective new hires and then given to them to study at their leisure. The card should say something like:
“OK we will hire you. Here's the deal: We are buying from you 40 hours of your time each week excluding holidays. These are our hours and we will do what we like with them. This will not include taking your dog to the vet, picking up furniture from Walmart using the company's truck, or slipping out for a long lunch with your college roommate.
The computer on your desk is not provided so that you can while away an idle morning playing solitaire or forwarding pictures of kittens to your mother.
When your supervisor gives you a task with a deadline of, say, Friday, what is meant is that the task should be completed before Saturday. This Saturday.
Any items under this roof that you did not, yourself, bring here are not yours. The stationary cupboard is not your source for household supplies; those felt-tip markers belong to us, not to you, along with the staplers, post-it notes, and printer paper stacked nearby.
If we catch you stealing our stuff, malingering, texting your friends on our time, using our materiel for purposes unrelated to our needs, we reserve the right to kick your butt.
Do you understand?”
I am reminded of a young man at one of my previous places of employment. This place generated a lot of data and generated endless reports which took up huge chunks of space on the in-house servers. These were very large servers, but every now and then they would approach capacity and the Keepers of the Data would scan through them to find who was taking up the space. Then they would natter at the responsible parties to purge, archive, or move it.
The young man in question was one of these quiet introverted people who never made eye contact and who spent his days alone in a dark windowless room full of computers doing something with data files, so it was not a surprise that his account on the servers very nearly outstripped those of all other users. What was a surprise was that much of the space was taken up with photographs, which he did not work with. This excited the curiosity of one of the Keepers of the Data, who was having a dull day anyway, so he opened one to see what sort of maps or micrographs or field trip records our young man might have accumulated. What he found was hundreds and hundreds of high-resolution pornographic pictures.
What happened next was that probably the most extensive collection of porn in all New England vanished without a trace, and Our Boy got his butt kicked. It could be argued that he was not the brightest star in the firmament, but even so, it is significant that the young ninny did not threaten legal action for invasion of his private fantasy life on company time.
It could be that as jobs become hard to get and good jobs nearly non-existent, the idea that the workplace is merely an extension of our home life will gradually fade as both employer and employee come to understand what each owes the other. However, in the fine American tradition of “Anything worth doing is worth overdoing” there are disquieting symptoms of a movement toward the workplace moving into the home. It is already fairly common for companies to demand that its employees not smoke at all, anywhere. I understand that some are moving toward prohibiting all alcohol use. Next up, what? Overeating? Trampoline use? Using the Lord's name in vain?
I realize that moderation is not a notable feature of the national character, but I dream of a time when our time at work is time for work and then we can go home and forget the buggers.
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