My Dad came from a different time than I.  He worked in a corporate world where women mostly served coffee, and “casual Friday” meant you could hang your suit jacket on your chair while you worked.  He held down two jobs my entire life, even though he probably could have gotten by on one.  He sold collectible comics in an era when that was a specialized field.  There was no eBay, and you made your catalogs on a typewriter instead of on a computer.  He would routinely send a customer a $5,000 comic book with the understanding that if it didn’t match the description they would send it back, and if it did they would send a check.  Today you don’t even send someone gum without a paypal payment sitting in your account.

Dad was a classy guy, in his own geeky way.  He never used profanity, even when I sure as hell would have.  He believed that people didn’t need weapons to settle arguments, and a smart man could always out-think a bullet.  And when someone in high office did something he disagreed with, he would pull out his pen and write a sternly worded letter to the editor to get results.

He taught me that in business, everything was negotiable, and in religion only some things were.  When we bought my first car, I was  embarrassed at how ratty my Dad was dressed, then impressed as it dawned on me he had done it on purpose so the car dealer would think us poor.  Then when he had the terms arranged the way he wanted them, he whipped out his checkbook and bought the car outright, saving a fortune on interest and causing the dealer to almost stroke out right there in the showroom.

My Dad taught me that it was okay to like science fiction, that reading was well worth the effort, and even if no one ever looked at your novel it was fine to write it just the way you wanted to.  He was the Spock to my Mom’s McCoy.  He showed me that the British had some good television shows even if they talked funny, and Star Trek was worth watching no matter how many times you’d seen it (and it was okay to cry when Spock died, as long as you were sitting in the dark).

He had his faults, as we all do, but he was a big part of what I am today, good and bad.  He was a good father, a good friend, an outstanding geek, and he will always be the guy I think of when I get in a jam.

As Douglas Adams wrote when the dolphins finally decided to leave earth, “So long, and thanks for all the fish.”

Rest in peace Dad.  You’ve earned it.

hristmas was different when I was a kid.  The main elements were the same, of course.  We put up a Christmas tree that would always fall over and break shit.  We’d increase our power bill by roughly sixty percent running all those enormous bulbs on the outside of our houses, the type that got hot enough to cook on and that made a satisfying pop when some neighbor hoodlums broke them with rocks.  Not like these led pansy-lights we have now.  You could kill a man in a bar fight with a broken Christmas light in those days.  We made fruit cake that sat for decades to be eaten after the Russians started World War III.  Santa Claus brought gifts to all the good boys and girls who had parents with jobs, based on the socio-economic status of those jobs.  Traditional stuff.

We also had far less difficulty with the flexible reality needed to believe in such things as Santa Claus and flying reindeer.  Back in the day, a ten year old kid had no trouble believing in an all-powerful fat guy who sees everything and could transport gifts across the planet in a single night.  Shoot, I believed it until I was in sixth grade, which was way too old to believe in anything like that (Jesus doesn’t count.  He’s not  fat).  I remember arguing with some snotty-nosed heathen about the existence of the Great and Powerful Claus.  I had worked it all out.  He used an FTL Drive similar to those used in Star Wars, plus a combination of string theory and immortal elves to get the packages delivered.  This doofus said it was his parents, and he once found the toys in his closet.

Obviously, that didn’t make sense.  Why would his parent’s buy me Christmas gifts?  He was clearly delusional.

On Christmas morning, bright and early around 5:00 a.m., we’d wake our parents and run downstairs.  There would be miles and miles of presents[1] that we would tear into with the reckless abandon of a starving wolf on a sugar high.  My Dad would then begin The Filming.  He had this super-8 camera that he’d hold in one hand, and an enormous light bar in the other.  The light bar was about six incredibly powerful spotlights that created enough light for everything to show up on film.  It also created enough light to increase the room’s temperature by twenty degrees, ignite the drapes, and bee seen from the moon.  These days we just point our iPhone at the kids and occasionally mumble, “Oh, look at that!”  With all that going on, and my Dad wearing his freshly ironed pajamas, flannel robe, and slippers, we never reached the point that he felt like drop kicking us through the wall.  I often reach that point with my kids about twenty minutes into the thing.

But I’m certainly not my Dad.[2]

There were always Christmas specials on TV, and no one ever complained about diversity or the separation of church and entertainment.  A few were good, like those animatronic things about Rudolph, Frosty the Snowman, or how a skinny ginger boy named Kris Kringle became a fat immortal guy named Santa Claus.  I still love to sing the “Heat Miser” song and dance around in jerky motions.

As a kid, the hierarchy of important people went like this:

1. God (he made everything and could send you to Hell)
2. Santa Claus (he wasn’t related to you and still he gave you shit!)
3. Jesus (related to God, and he really got a raw deal a few thousand years ago.  Sort of a sympathy listing, since the Jews hate Him)
4. Easter Bunny (candy)
5. Tooth Fairy (money)
6. Parents (everything else)

How was I to know that at least four of those were the exact same people?  And only some Jews hated Jesus?

When I was a kid, there didn’t seem to be many people around other than people like me.  There was always one Jewish kid, and one black kid, but everyone else was pretty much white bread, enriched with valuable nutrients and vitamins.  I always felt bad for the Jewish kid around Christmas.  He had to go to school during most of his Cannakuah Hannakuah Hanukkah thing.  And he only got eight presents, no matter how well of his parents were doing or how good he was.  It seemed so unfair that he would get screwed every year.

One year I invited him to my birthday, which was two days after Christmas, and the poor bastard couldn’t make it.  He had some sort of holiday trip he had to take to Hawaii, or something.

Although not at all related, the black kid at our school kept telling us she wasn’t black, she was American Indian.  My Mom told me once in a soft voice that she said that because she was adopted and her parents were white.  After thirty years, I still only partially understand what she meant.

oplar Springs Hospital was divided into three main sections.  The adult acute unit, where the seriously fucked up people eighteen years and older went, the children’s acute unit, where kids with a varying degree of problems stayed for thirty days or less, and the residential unit, where teenagers stayed for longer than thirty days.

When I first started, Poplar Springs was desperate to make a name for itself, so it took anyone with insurance.  That meant the residential unit was often about eighty percent gang kids who knew the system well enough to get their stay moved from detention, where you were likely to get a serious ass invasion, to Poplar Spring where ass invasions were down almost thirty percent.  All a kid had to do was announce that they felt depressed and suicidal, and bam!  They were in Poplar Springs.  It wasn’t the greatest place to spend your summer vacation, but it sure as hell beat juvie hall.

The downside to this business model is that some seriously crazy teens are mixed in with some seriously violent teens.  Teenagers are annoying at the best of times, but homicidal teenagers who hear voices telling them to eat the people around them are a whole different level of annoying.  And I was a red haired skinny fuck who used big words, told jokes no one understood, and managed to eat lunch in a sarcastic manner.  Until I proved myself, I was a clown in stupid t-shirts.  I had seen enough prison movies to know that until I offed someone with a shiv made from molded butter, or ate my own pubic hair in the cafeteria,  I was anyone’s b*tch.

The way I actually earned my stripes took everyone by surprise, especially me.

I was working on the boy’s residential unit, minding my own business doing rounds (you carry a clipboard and put a mark next to a patient’s name when you have observed them present and account for.  Usually you only have to pretend to do this every thirty minutes, but some of the more difficult patients require you to pretend to do it every fifteen minutes).  I’d like to say my spidie-sense started tingling, or that I noticed a subtle change in my environment or the force, or something.  But I’m trying to be honest here.  I had no idea that four guys were following me, one behind, one in front, and one on each side.  I also didn’t notice that I was walking from the rec room to a hallway where no one had a direct line of sight. But suddenly I was all alone.  And then the little bastards jumped me.

I’d taken karate as a kid, judo in college, and a little aikido here and there.  But what made me particularly dangerous that evening was that they scared the shit out of me.  The biggest guy, about sixteen and bigger than I was, grabbed me from behind in a bear hug.  The smallest kid, maybe ten or eleven, grabbed one of my legs as the two remaining teens converged on me.  Someone said, “Get his key, f*ck him up!”  As I started to lose my balance I remembered what they had said in training.  Never let them get you down on the floor or they’ll seriously mess you up.  The week before I was hired they had a nice little riot that involved calling the police in to end it.  One of the mental health workers had been kicked in the face while he was down by a guy wearing steel-toed boots (why not let the patients carry swords and explosives while you’re at it?).  Spread his nose all over his face.  Not a pretty sight.

So there I was losing my balance with four crazy people on top of me.  And I have no memory of what happened next.  If I try really hard I get a blur of panic and flailing arms, and I think I might actually have done a forward roll at some point.  But all I have to go on is the end of the fight and what extremely unreliable witnesses told me (psychiatric patients and a nurse only half watching a video screen as I came partially into view).  It seems I elbowed the big guy in the temple as hard as I could, and he collapse like someone had suddenly pulled out his batteries.  The smallest kid I kicked across the room hard enough for him to crack the drywall on the other side of the hallway.  There was a punch to some kid’s neck and a kick that sent someone’s testicles into orbit, and it was done.  I was standing in a slight crouch, with teenagers writhing around on the floor around me, like some kung fu explosion.

I heard a “Code Green, boy’s residential unit!” announced over the intercom, and distantly realized that was where I was.  “Code Green” meant that any available staff needed to go to the specified unit for some head-busting.  I found out later that they called the code not only because I was attacked, but also because they were worried that the result might set off a larger riot.  It had happened before.  Crazy people and teenagers sometimes reacted to blood like sharks and movie critics.

They quickly separated me from the rest of the patients, partly to get my story of what happened, and partly to calm the situation down.  They knew I was full of adrenalin, and I guess they didn’t want me doing anything to make the situation more of a hassle.  The head Mental Health Work sat me down and looked me right in the eye.  He was an enormous black guy (See?  Always enormous) with a scar on the side of his head and the ability to silence a room just by entering it.  I had once seen him pick up a guy by the scruff of the neck and carry him to the “Time Out” room.  His hand went all the way around the guy’s neck.  I was worried I might get killed, or worse, fired.  But instead he high-fived me.

“Good job!  You really f*cked them up.  Especially Rabbit Testicles (I’m not going to use his real name due to various legal and moral restrictions.  But he was the guy I elbowed).  I know he deserved it.  He’s a real f*cknut whackjob.”

He really was, when you get right down to it.  Everyone knew I had kicked the shit out of some of the local badasses, even though Rabbit Testicles told everyone that he got that bruised head from playing football.  I kept his secret, but made sure to point out to him that he would lose some serious street cred if word got out that he got his butt handed to him by Opie the Clown.  He got the point. Sometimes, if you applied the right pressure, some of those little sh*t heads could be downright reasonable.

My job was to keep an eye on patients and make sure they stayed out of trouble.  If needed I would also take vital signs, change adult diapers, talk violent patients down, wrestle them to the floor if they couldn’t be talked down, change adult diapers, make sure no one killed themselves, make behavioral notes in patient’s medical records, and change adult diapers.  It was both the most rewarding job I had ever had, as well as the most horrible job I had ever had.  I saved several lives while working there, made an impact on many troubled youths, and became so emotionally scared from the whole experience that I can still get upset if I think about certain events.  And if anyone mentions how crazy someone is, I’ll go into a thirty minute monologue about crazy.  I used to joke that the main difference between the staff and the patients was that staff had a key.  It’s not that much of a joke, really.

Poplar Springs was a single story facility surrounded by peaceful trees.  Some might even have been Poplar Trees.  It would have been an amazing coincidence.  Looking at the outside you wouldn’t necessarily think it was a psychiatric hospital, but you would definitely knew it was some institutionalized animal.  It just screamed public functionality and cafeterias with floor tiles from the sixties.

Once you entered the lobby you would get a better idea what was going on.  Every door had a key lock with one of those red-green lights that let you know if it was unlocked or not.  Most of the larger doors also had a camera over them so someone could either buzz you in, or ignore you ruthlessly.  The carpeting was that tight, poodle colored stuff that was easy to clean bodily fluids out of yet hard to rip out with your teeth.  Although you wouldn’t have known, some of the walls had a reinforced Kevlar-like material built in to make it harder to kick through.  Paintings in the lobby were bolted to the walls[1].

The floor plan was a bit confusing, as it was designed to be opened up or closed off to change the size of the units – what older hospitals would have called “wards” – depending on demand.  If you were out sick for an extended period of time, you could find yourself walking onto the adult unit when you thought you were still on the children’s residential unit.  In fact, one escape attempt from the boy’s residential unit, using the drop ceiling as a passage over the locked doors, dropped the little scamps into the part of the adult unit where we were keeping some real loonies, instead of the open hallway the kid’s had expected.  Scared them so badly the kid’s never tried again, and were the model of good behavior the rest of their stay.

Escape attempts were usually pretty entertaining. Once a group of girls dug a hole in their bathroom wall and tunneled through the building’s crawlspace until they made it out.  It took them a while so they kept a nightstand in front of the hole while they were working on it.  It really only worked because of the high level of staff apathy.  In hindsight everyone wondered why they didn’t think it odd that the girls had put a piece of bedroom furniture in the bathroom.  I guess the staff at the time just figured that crazy kids will do any sort of crazy kid sh*t.

When they discovered the girl’s missing, they had a bunch of staff pile into one of the hospital van’s and go hunt them down.  It wasn’t that hard, since they were teenagers who had been stuck in a psychiatric hospital for months.  They bee-lined for the closest McDonalds where those with no money attempted to trade sexual favors for a Big Mac combo meal.  The capture was something out of the movies, or possibly a Wal-Mart.  The staff members came in from each door, a couple actually dressed like you would expect with white pants and white shirts (it wasn’t a uniform or anything, a couple guys just seemed to like dressing that way).  The rest were fairly casual in cheap polo shirts and slacks[2].    They surrounded the four girls, aging from fourteen to seventeen and wearing what were essentially pajamas, and asked them if they would quietly.  With all the adrenaline pumping through everyone, there was probably little chance of anything going quietly.

One of the teenagers, an adopted Korean girl who’s parents were rich white folks and classed her joining a local gang as a mental illness (I can see their point, actually), shouted, “Rape gang!  Help!”  And all hell broke loose.

The staff fell on the girls like hungry wolves with aikido training.  Meanwhile an old woman carrying an umbrella when it wasn’t raining began yelling at the staff to let those poor girls go, with a chorus of, “Rapers!  Dial 911!  Rapers!”

There was scuffling and grunting as the girls were dragged off, pajama pants – never proper attire for a fight – sliding completely off one girl and getting pushed so high another that it looked like she was wearing a sumo diaper.  A staff member ended up with a torn t-shirt, like always seems to happen to Captain Kirk whenever there’s anything close to a fight, and one of the nurses had a nasty bite mark on her forearm.  Human bites take forever to heal.  We have such nasty mouths.  There are more germs in the human mouth than in a dog’s mouth, and they lick their butts for recreation.

Luckily this was America, where no one really gives a f*ck about anything not happening to themselves, or else things could have really gotten out of hand.

In December 1967, smack dab in the middle of what would later be called “The Dark Ages,” not a lot was going on. The next year on the 27th you would get the Apollo 8 returning to Earth and those wily Chinese performing a nuclear test at Lop Nor PRC, whatever the hell that is. But on December 27th, 1967 the only item of interest was Dutch keyboardist Niels Meijer being born. And I don’t have to tell you what impact he had on the world.

The other item of interest, primarily to my parents, was my own birth. I don’t remember a lot about it, as I was very young at the time, ha-ha.

1967 was a strange time, from what I hear. Technically it was still the ‘60’s and all that came with it, but it was also the time when everyone was packing up and getting ready for the ‘70’s, like those people who leave a football game early so they can beat the traffic. The movie “In Like Flint (which didn’t have a lot going for it other than being Austin Powers’ favorite movie)” was released, Ernesto “Che” Guevara was put to death – with mixed emotions from t-shirt makers – and the first “Rolling Stone” magazine was published. A few places had a few wars and violent not-wars, Lyndon Johnson was President (and my mom hated him), and people rioted over a variety of things that I knew nothing about, although Niels Meijer may have known. Gas cost thirty-three cents a gallon and a movie ticket cost about a buck twenty-five.

The country had lost its collective mind a few years earlier when we entered Vietnam, and – to date – has never regained its sanity. These things, as I said, were completely lost on me for a very long time. Partly because I was a kid growing up without the Internet, and partly because, like everyone else, I was a complete moron.

My world was far simpler than the one that adults were forced to deal with, as is always the case. Adults had Vietnam, oil shortages, and the Cold War. I had cleaning my room, acne, and the Solid Gold Dancers. The toughest hurdle for a long time was being able to get up at midnight to watch Star Trek reruns with my dad. It was many years before the luxery of cable brought Star Trek at any hour of the day or night. Don’t take that for granted, kids. There was once a time when you had only four channels of shit to choose from, instead of four hundred channels of shit.

I can’t imagine what life was like for my parents. They both lived through the Great Depression, where people were eating ketchup sandwiches and glad to have them, as oppossed to the Great Recession we’re going through now, where people are able to protest economic hardships in thousand dollar tents and five hundred dollar coats. My mom was one of thirteen kids, but by the time she was married only four were still alive. Most died in childhood before they were old enough to complain about not being able to watch Star Trek. Shit was serious back then.

Even holidays were a whole different experience. Today as an adult the biggest problem with cooking a turkey is where to put leftovers. When I was a kid I remember my mom thawing an enormous carcus in the sink (just a chicken breast? Sure, find me a turkey that only grew a breast, Mr. Man of Tomorrow), then the endearing pleasure of plucking the little downy feathers out of its skin. I thought that was fun at the time. But when I got bored after plucking for about two minutes, my mom still had to pluck if for another half hour.

And that was even better than when she was a kid. They would bring a live turkey home, possibly one with a bad eye or a peg leg, and take it to the bac yard where grandad would lop its head off. Then he’d sit down and watch it run around the yard with no head, too stupid to realize it was dead. Eventually it would run out of steam and die, and he would toss it off to grandma to clean. Which, given my mom’s truly hosed up family at the time, meant grandma would have my mom clean it. And there was nothing clean about it. She would pull out the gross and smelly parts from inside, then pull all the feathers off. And this was before turkeys had been genetically engineered with zippers, kids of the future.

As a teenager I would get frustrated when it took a full minute to microwave a hotdog. Just shows you that, even as deprived as I was growing up, I was an asshat.

*sigh*

My wife’s comment: “What you really need is Rogaine.”

My 9 year old daughter’s comment: “Does it make you skinny?”

Can’t you just feel the love in the room?

First a little history. In 1997 the Commonwealth awarded Virginia Interactive, a subsidiary of NIC Inc (called the National Information Consortium at the time), the contract to maintain the state portal and enhance citizen’s access to government information. The business model was new and creative, involving no new tax dollars be spent. It was a revenue sharing model pioneered by NIC where Virginia Interactive (called VIPNet in the day, and later VI) would create enhanced access to DMV motor vehicle records, and take a portion of the revenue created by that enhancement. For every $3 record sold, VI received $1, and in exchange for that money they would maintain Virginia.gov, create Web applications for the state, and design Web sites. It made VI around $6 million a year, but costs the state no money other than revenue it wouldn’t have really gotten in the first place.

I worked for Virginia Interactive from the early creation of the company through 2005. Fair disclosure, VI management and I are not on good terms. They hate me and anyone who knows me, and I’m not fond of them either.

So what’s the story with the RFPs? Well, VI has had the contract renewed since it began. Sometimes there was an open bid for the RFP, but it was a formality. No one could really compete with VI, and no one really expected them to. But over the life of the last contract extension, VITA seems to have had issue with something. Word on the street, often wholly unreliable, was that the state was annoyed with VI’s lack of customer service. That, coupled with budget cuts and the amount of money the state could make up by taking away VI’s revenue share, and they decided that when the current VI contract expired, they would split up the services into three RFPs, and let the dogs fight over the scraps.

I can see the reasons for these feelings. VI’s management came into the gig in its heyday. It was a cash cow requiring very little effort. $6 million plus a year, just for maintaining the status quo. They’ve never had to sing for their supper, they just had to show up and eat. And $70 million over the life of the contract is a lot of money to exchange for bad service and an air of entitlement. It didn’t help that while agencies were slashing budgets, VI was hosting lavish parties.

The new RFPs appear to be trying to get the same services or better, for less. Revenue sharing – although technically still allowed – look to be taken off the table in any effective way. VITA wants to switch from a partnership to a vendor relationship.

Seriously?

The revenue sharing model is still a great idea, especially in government. It’s really the only way to ensure innovation and success. The Time and Materials method just doesn’t work. Without the revenue sharing model, more than half of the Web services available in Virginia today wouldn’t exist. Even the enhanced access to DMV records wouldn’t be around, or at least not in 1998. Possibly five years later and at a much higher cost. Possibly.

Revenue sharing is what created the entrepreneurial and inventive approach that allowed Scott Fowler, the Director of development at the time for VI, to come up with a solution that worked with Virginia’s unique data situation. Without the carrot, it just wouldn’t have happened. And if people didn’t use it, VI wouldn’t have made any money. And if VI made money, so would the state. That was the foundation of the model. In order for VI to make money, the customer had to make money. Time and Materials models just don’t work that way. A vendor may bill for a lot of time, but once the finished product is turned over, they don’t care how well it works. They certainly don’t help market it. Under the revenue sharing model, the partner needs for it to work, work well, and be used often. Otherwise they don’t make up their loses, much less a profit. And the state doesn’t have to have cash hanging around to get online services, they just need to have the promise of money.

In addition, the RFPs aren’t terribly competitive. VI still maintains an unfair advantage, even though they have less reason to want to win. The applications VI has written for the Commonwealth remain the intellectual property of NIC Inc. Even though Virginia can continue to use them as they want, they will remain hosted on VI’s servers. The occasional free hosting that VI provided will be gone, and agencies will be paying a vendor (or VITA) directly for hosting. So whoever wins the Hosting contract will only be hosting content that agencies feel like having them host. The application contract won’t involve creating new applications, migrating old applications, or any coding. And the portal maintenance contract will be a typical vendor relationship instead of a partnership, and revenue sharing is off the table.

So why would anyone do any of it? VI might, since their parent company NIC Inc doesn’t want to “lose” a state. But it will require stripping down to bare bones and doing only the least they can get away with, like most vendors. Say goodbye to innovation and hello to the parasitic vendor relationship. The Commonwealth will be able to take back that DMV revenue that they crave, which will be a short-term win for them, but what about the citizens? A few million for a portal that no one can use. A few million for a licensing application that no one knows exists. Websites that set the state of e-government back to the early nineties. Thanks, but I’ve seen that movie.

Now, I’m not saying that we should continue business as usual. VI clearly has been smoking too much of their hype and ego. Maybe if they hadn’t been such obtuse blowhards for years, VITA wouldn’t be knocking the legs out from under them. But abandoning a business model that works doesn’t make any sense. If the Commonwealth is tired of VI, then put a real RFP out on the streets, not these watered down wastes of everyone’s time.

I’m collecting some of the more depressing things I run across at a new blog: Everything Still Sucks

Take a peek if you’re not looking for any sort of warm fuzzies.

Times change, I suppose.  In the midst of hurricane Irene, the Commonwealth’s information portal looked like this:

We made it back, and no one died. But it wasn’t all roses.

At the Contemporary Resort I found myself of arguing a position I didn’t really agree with. I was in the closest bathroom, referred to by a cast member, and it turned out it was a single person bathroom that was wheelchair accessible. It was also two rooms deep. A few minutes into my business some old guy started banging on the locked outer door with his cane. He was banging away and yelling at the door for about five minutes. When I finished, I apologized for taking so long. The old fart then said, “It’s for the handicapped.”

Well, that galled me, so I said, “What, did I forget to wear the badge?”

I mean, how did he know whether or not I was handicapped? Is there a team meeting or something? I’m morbidly obese, my feet were covered in blisters, I have arthritis in my left foot and asthma. All he had was a cane. I kinda think, at least at Disney, I was probably more handicapped than HE was.

Anyway, I fit in all the rides I wanted to ride. The car almost exploded on the drive home, and the dogs did about $2,000 worth of damage to the house. Great fun.