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Idle essays

Beloved Yard Dude Gone

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Gerardo the Yard Dude Extraordinaire has disappeared from the scene. He’s not answering phone calls, and that’s not like him. So La Maya (another of his clients) and I are worried something’s happened to him.

Of late, he’s had a hard time getting good workers, partly because many migrants are staying in Mexico for lack of work here, and partly because the rabid Sheriff Joe’s publicity racist anti-undocumented worker campaign has resulted in so much harassment for Latinos that people who jump through all the immigration hoops to enter the country go to friendlier locales. Gerardo himself is very smart and very good at what he does. But some of the characters he’s hired lately have been annoying. He does a lot of the work himself, and so he’s not riding herd on these guys—and they’re guys who need to be watched every minute. The result is not always ideal.

Meanwhile, speaking of rabid, the dratted palm trees around the pool have gone into a reproductive frenzy. Why people plant palms around swimming pools (or anywhere, for that matter) beats me. They’re one of the messiest trees around. They grow out of the top, sprouting a new topknot of fronds each spring. The previous year’s growth then dies, creating an ideal nest for cockroaches. At the same time, the plant springs a crop of long flowering wands, which drop millions of tiny, crisply sharp blossoms all over the ground and into the pool. The things are too small to be caught by most pump pot and skimmer baskets, and so they get sucked into your pump. Not good. Worse: the fertilized flowers produce BB-sized seeds. These rock-hard little fellows also drop into the pool, where the pool cleaner picks them up and chokes on them, resulting in a nice repair bill.

So, once a year you have to get a guy to come round and trim the palm trees, at rates ranging from $25 to $45 apiece. Some people have them taken out, but in a yard like mine, where the pool is built within a couple feet of the wall, removing the stumps would pose quite a challenge. Besides, in such a confined area there’s not much else you can plant that will cast even a modicum of shade.

Gerardo was doing the job for $25, very cheap. So I cringed at the thought of having to track down someone else to do the palms and, BTW, the monthly yard work.

At this time of year, dozens of itinerant workers roam the neighborhoods looking for palm tree work. They litter your front door with cards. So I picked one whose name I vaguely remembered from last year: Joel G.

I’m impressed:

1. He’s Mexican. Several amazing experiences have left me strongly preferring Mexican over Anglo landscape workers.

2. He showed up promptly to provide an estimate. He must live nearby, because he was here 15 minutes after I called.

3. He looks substantial and honest. OK, I know you can’t tell a book by its (etc.), but gut instinct goes a long way toward assessing character. He’s clean-cut, neatly dressed, and has a frank, straightforward manner. At first inspection, I’m guessing this is probably a decent man.

4. His English is excellent. That helps a lot, because my Spanish leaves a lot to be desired. Like…oh, say, Spanish.

5. He charges a reasonable price, only $5 a tree more than Gerardo.

6. He also advertises a number of other skills, the very skills M’hijito and I have need of: he can install watering systems and lay gravel. If his price is right there, too, we may hire him to do the landscaping at the downtown house.

And he’s hired. We’ll see how good a job he does on the palms. If that works out, maybe we can get him going on the two houses, and that would be a great help in our lives.

I hope Gerardo is OK. Palm tree work is very dangerous—every year men are injured or killed wrestling with these nasty plants. Worse even than falling off an 80-foot-high stem is getting trapped under one of the heavy fronds: if you can’t get out quickly, you suffocate. It’s such a gruesome way to die that just about every incident hits the newspapers, and so if anything like that had happened to him, La Maya would have picked up on it, since she still gets the Arizona Republic. But other injuries and car wrecks are so commonplace no one even notices. We’re both assuming he’s met with some accident…but who knows? Maybe he took a salaried job.

Image by Ginobovara, Wikipedia Commons

More on journalism’s Cheshire cat

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Reading the paper, 1863

As we noted yesterday, journalism—even its most prominent avatars—is fading away like the Cheshire cat. Money Beagle left a winsome comment to that post, in which he remarks, 

I guess great blogs like yours and mine will eventually have to save the day. 🙂

Can’t let that one lay! It’s a broad concept that raises all sorts of questions and issues. I was about to respond in the comments field but found myself going on at post length. So:

@ Money Beagle: Eventually, something vaguely like that is about what will happen. It’s not a good development, because…

First, there’s no organized way to get whatever news or newsoid we produce to a coherent audience. Audience is ultimately what matters.

Second, we have no editors! Reporters need editors for a variety of reasons, all of which apply to bloggers. In the absence of editorial guidance, discipline, and help, we’re not really doing journalism.

Third, we have no real, widely accepted code of journalistic or bloggerish ethics. While reporters often stray from the SPJ code, we have no code at all. At least journalists try.

Fourth, bloggers do not have funds for investigative journalism, the single most important function of the Fourth Estate.

Money, of course, is at the root of print journalism’s troubles. What I’d like to see is a combination of public and nonprofit funding similar to what supports PBS and NPR, only modified for the needs of print magazines and newspapers. Publications would continue to run as many ads as they could get, but advertising revenue would be supplemented by foundations. 

Donations to journalistic foundations would be tax-deductible, whether or not the groups were government or, strictly speaking, charitable entities. This policy would be put in place because of the crucial importance of the Fourth Estate to the continuing education of voters, to the health and safety of the public, and to the survival of a free society. As a more or less democratic republic, we can’t afford to lose high-quality journalistic enterprises. Just as donations to schools are deductible, so support of journalism would be deductible, for much the same reasons.

For bloggers to morph into true journalists—not Play-Nooz yappers but real journalists of the sort you find at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the New Yorker—we would have to organize into networks that incorporate the best organizational features of large print publications and adapt those features to a diffuse online operating model. We would need training to understand the principles of investigative journalism, political and science writing, community journalism, and basic ethics. We would need a centralized set of editors who could establish an overall mission and keep the enterprise moving coherently according to that mission, assign bloggers to “beats,” assign specific stories and projects, and oversee accuracy, quality, and integrity. We would need a master site with a layout that would effectively direct readers to content. And we would need a lot of money, which means we would need ad agents and a system of advertising that generates serious revenue. Each blogger’s site or contribution to the larger site would have to earn enough for her or him to make a living.

Few of us earn enough from blogging to live, even modestly. Those individuals who do are, by and large, not journalists. Whatever it is you can say they’re doing, it isn’t journalism.

Most of the heavy-hitting journalists in this country today are products of heavy-hitting schools—many have degrees from the Ivy Leagues. Although some highly educated and sophisticated writers reside in the blogosphere, they’re not organized and few earn enough from blogging to justify the cost of that sort of training. In a word, they have paying day jobs. If blogging is to replace print journalism, it will have to generate enough money to support more than just a few writers—full-time, not as hobbyists.

Image:
Henry Louis Stephens, “Black Man Reading Newspaper by Candlelight”
The painting is said to represent a man reading the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation in the paper
Public domain, U.S. Library of Congress 
From Wikipedia Commons 

The long, slow death of journalism

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This may not be visible to those of you who view the New York Times Magazine online, but today the Times downsized the magazine’s print version in a big and ominous way. They’ve cut the trim size (the issue’s physical height and width) and, to accommodate the smaller pages, have switched to an eye-straining smaller font with display type that at one heading level looks weirdly smaller than the body type. The effect is…well, depressing. It’s another symptom of the demise of print journalism, a development that does not bode well for a healthy democracy.

They’ve also upgraded to a “brighter and more contemporary color palette.” {gasp!} I woke up this morning with the remnants of a migraine that started two days ago and is only just clearing. Today’s brighter and more contemporary cover consists of a stomach-flipping, brilliant, sulfuric ochre that bleeds off all four margins, with black type against a window of Day-Glo magenta: eyeball-grating! At first glance, it actually caused physical pain. No exaggeration: I still can’t look at it without making my head hurt more. In fact, as we scribble, I’m ripping off the cover, folding it so I can’t see it, and hiding it in the trash.

When a magazine starts out with a large trim size, shrinking it to the dimensions of an ordinary newsstand publication doesn’t sound, on the face of it, like a big deal. But lemme tell you: a publication like the Times Magazine builds much of its appeal through its visual presence and its tactile effect on readers. The magazine was physically pleasing to read and to handle, and that is why one is willing to pay to have such a thing delivered to one’s home. This fact is not understood by management, particularly when management has no comprehension of journalism or graphic design and is interested primarily—one might say solely—in the bottom line. These bozos fail to grasp the idea that when you diminish the magazine, you may save money on production costs, but you lose readers. When you’re already hemorrhaging readers, you can’t afford strategies that drive away those who have stuck with you through good times and bad.

While I was working for Arizona Highways, the publisher decided to save dollars by cutting the trim size and, worse, by going to a cheaper, thinner paper stock. Save money? Yup. Stupid move? Oh, yeah!

Highways was the pre-eminent regional magazine in the country. It also was one of the premier photography publications in the world. For a certain type of landscape photographer—the sort who hauls a hundred pounds of large-format gear 15 or 20 miles into the bush, eschews Photoshop, and rarely if ever does a set-up shot—it was a go-to market that could make a career. For readers around the world, it was a window to the American Southwest and a nice little dream factory. For the state of Arizona, it was the mother lode of tourism.

Cutting the trim size meant they had to cut the size of the photo reproduction. A spectacular scenic looks a whole lot less scenic when you shrink it a quarter-inch or so all the way around—surprisingly so. Cheesying down the paper quality meant ink on one side of a sheet would show through to the other side. This annoyed the photographers, so much so that the real heavy hitters, who did not need Arizona Highways to make or break their businesses, quit submitting their work.

Overall the magazine’s quality dropped markedly: markedly enough to be noticeable to readers. Circulation, which at one time reached every country on the earth but one, went into free-fall. It had been dropping; now it plummeted.

Two editors in a row walked or were fired. The second, who pretty clearly was hired to ride the publication into the ground, fled before it could crash. Highways is still being printed, but no one understands why. Its days may be numbered in the single digits. They were numbered in the first place, but the numbers were surely reduced when management decided to cut production quality.

Hey, guys. Give us NEWS! Give us QUALITY! Real readers don’t want infotainment. We don’t want Play-Nooz. And we’re not gunna pay for junked-up products. If journalism were still journalism, maybe it would survive a little longer.

Mormons to the rescue!

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Thank heavens! Just as SDXB is about to leave town, abandoning his feckless daughter (let’s call her Pauline, as in “Perils of…”) to deal alone with AHCCCS (Arizona’s ungenerous answer to Medicaid), the Department of Economic Security, the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, another pending eviction, the usual array of angry creditors, and several flying phalanxes of lawyers, an angel has stepped in to pick up the reins while he’s gone.

Somewhere along the line, incredibly, Pauline managed to make friends with a nice Mormon girl, who has taken an interest in the current flurry of perils. She has accompanied Pauline to DES and otherwise helped out. Even more incredible: this lady has galvanized the LDS Aid Society to come to Pauline’s rescue! They are on their way to her house as we speak to pack her up and get her out of there, and not only that, they’ve found a place for her to stay! 

Do you realize what a miracle this is? Pauline has no, zero, zip credit. She has been evicted from three houses for nonpayment of rent, one of which had its garage door busted down by the Repo Man, who wished to drive her car back to its rightful owner, the lender. She can’t even get a checking account: SDXB had to get her a savings account at his credit union, and to do that he had to sign on it. Only a saint would even think of renting to this woman. 

And…well, I can tell you for sure: a nice Mormon girl is about as unlikely a friend for Pauline as you can imagine.

For SDXB, this is the best news that’s come along in weeks. Make that months. Since there seemed to be no way to get her into another house, he was about to look into trying to get her and the kids into a homeless shelter (although he expected the rabid, possibly homicidal ex-husband would use the opportunity to nail permanent custody of the brats), where she would have to camp until he could get back from Texas and waypoints.

Let’s hope these women do some serious proselytizing and maybe even convert Pauline. LDS provides exactly the kind of social network that a feckless, generally abused soul like Pauline needs. And they promulgate a highly functional way of thinking that Pauline has failed to imbibe during her forty-two years. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that the shock of her injury and total financial and social collapse has finally gotten her attention. Maybe she’ll be open to learning a new way to structure her life…something that will work for her and for her children.

Personally, LDS is not my cup of tea. But for some folks, it has a great deal to recommend it: solid values, clean living, a powerful social network, and an ethic that fosters steadiness and responsibility. IMHO, Pauline would benefit enormously from the influence of this group.

Image  by Philipp Spinnler: 
Statue of the Angel Moroni, Berne Temple, Switzerland
Wikipedia Commons 

The attack of the midnight skulkers

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Augh! What a day! 

One of several low points has been an ant invasion. They’ve established a beachhead in the kitchen, and now they’re strategizing ways to take over the whole house.

This morning while I was cooking up an entire package of Costco sausages, the better to have a frozen stash of cooked food, I opened the dishwasher to grab a pair of tongs, and yipe! the washer was alive with ants! Since I hadn’t run the washer the night before, they thought they’d found their own Ant Costco. 

Heh. Gives new meaning to “big box store,” doesn’t it?

This, on its own, was not difficult to deal with: turned on the dishwasher, tracked the little troops to an opening under the kitchen door, sprinkled the threshold and the area around their entry with boric acid, and mopped the floor with vinegar and laundry detergent. I thought that would bring a stop to that.

Wrong!

This evening I fall asleep in front of House, M.D., wake up around quarter to ten, stumble into the kitchen to let the dog out, and yipe again! My feet get bitten. The floor is swarming with more ants than I have ever seen in my entire freaking life!

This time they’re not in the dishwasher, but they’re just about everyplace else. They’ve packed themselves into the dog dish, which the dog had licked clean hours earlier. They’re lapping up invisible stuff from the floor, which I thought I’d scrubbed clean in the morning. And most interestingly, they’re not marching in the usual antsy line but are wandering all…over…the…floor. They’ve strolled right in over the boric acid, and they’ve spread out over the kitchen floor in an even living blanket. 

And they’re not brooking any interference.

They’re only in the kitchen. They’re only on the floor. The garbage is in the garage, but they haven’t found that. 

I hate bug spray. And I especially hate bug spray inside my house. But pushed to the wall by an army of marauders, I locked up the dog in the back room, threw open the doors and windows, turned the fans to “high,” grabbed the Raid, and applied it as lightly as I could manage to the writhing floor.

Yuch, what a stink! Nauseating.

Ants in retreat, then I got to mop the floor. Five times. Three times with detergent; twice more with Simple Green. 

That got up most of the stink. It’s still pretty gross in there, though. Of course I can’t leave the doors and windows open all night—this is the big city, after all. 

We’ve got worse home invaders than a tribe of ants. This afternoon—another high point of the day—two workmen showed up to hang the gutters on M’hijito’s house. God, what refrigerator do these characters climb out from under? They both sported a fine array of combined prison and professional tattoos. Neither was a guy you’d want to meet in a dark alley (or even a brightly lit alley), but one of them was a very creepy-looking dude. And in the course of climbing around the back of the house, they got a good eyeful of the kid’s elaborate computer equipment, clearly visible behind a set of eminently vulnerable French doors.

Damn!

Well, fortunately the roommate’s car was parked in the driveway, he and the girlfriend having absented themselves to Singapore. I remarked to the men that I was expecting the roommate and his girl at any time, and in fact was surprised they hadn’t come home from their college classes yet. And as they were leaving I indicated I was going to wait around for the young people.

Paranoid? Mebbe. SDXB’s house was burglarized by just such gents, employees of a moving company who overheard that he was going to stay at my house the night of the move-in. Never put an NRA sticker on your vehicle: it advertises that you have guns in the house. Fortunately, he’d left his armaments at his mother’s place, but they stole a beautiful old zebrawood bow and his collection of machetes picked up on various military assignments around Latin America. It was clear they were after weapons—except for his wallet, which he’d left on the kitchen counter, that was all they took. They must have been surprised to find all the Goodwill and yard sale junk he’s accrued over the years.

Then there was the landscaper’s laborer who stole a bicycle out of my garage. He came back the next night but couldn’t get the second one, which was locked, out the door, so he just removed the front wheel and made off with that. And the yard cleanup guys who took advantage of an open garage door to steal my tools. And…well, one could go on and on. 

Image: Meating-eating ant lapping honey, by Fir0002/Flagstaffotos 
whose website and galleries are not to be missed.
Reproduced under the GFDL free documentation license  

How to keep the customers coming back

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Awesome customer service! That’s how a small business keeps customers coming back in the door, year after year. And it’s the way a specialized hardware store beats the big boxes.

• A human being answers the phone.
• Employees treat customers as they would like to be treated themselves.
• Skilled workers really are skilled.
• People go above and beyond the call of duty.

Doors in progress
Doors in progress

While we were renovating the downtown house, I stumbled across an amazing windfall: in my neighborhood, a great old house on horse property was being demolished to make way for a cluster of McMansions. The guy who was pulling it down had salvaged the doors: two sets of huge solid mahogany French doors, a matching single back door, and a solid mahogany front door. I grabbed the entire lot, including all the hardware, for $300. 

These magnificent pieces of workmanship now reside at the little house downtown, where they have transformed the place. 

The hardware, as it develops, was all made by Baldwin, one of the most expensive lockmakers on the planet. All of it except the front door’s lockset was in perfect working order. The hardware on the front door never worked right, and the level handle on the interior flopped down like a broken paw. And, as it also develops, Baldwin locks are very hard to repair: not just any locksmith can work on them. To complicate matters further, the hardware dates back to about 1950.

A couple of months ago, the deadbolt broke. I called a locksmith whose name I lifted from Angie’s List while the Phoenix-area list was still free. He came by, looked at it, and said it was beyond his ken. He referred me to an outfit called Anderson Lock and Safe, and said if anyone could fix it, they could. 

Amazingly, these folks will send a locksmith within an hour or two after you call. Even more amazingly, they have a whole crew of locksmiths who seem to know what they’re doing. Soon we had learned that the deadbolt was broken because Eric the Fly-by-Night Contractor had installed the strikeplate wrong, so the bolt was hitting metal; eventually that’s what broke the lock. As for the handle: that was a challenge. A spring on the inside had worn out, and Baldwin no longer made such a spring.

One of the men took the lockset apart and showed me the complicated interior. It was fashioned, he said, like a Swiss clock. All the interior parts were hand-milled. Today, even Baldwin uses mass-produced parts, to keep costs down. Although a Baldwin lock sells for upwards of $300, no one makes anything like the lockset we had. He estimated its value at around $400; his boss thought it was worth more like $700.

This guy repaired the deadbolt, fixed the strikeplate, and got the handle to sit horizontally, but without the spring it had to be manually placed in position. It didn’t really work: it just looked like it sorta worked.

Then along came Bila the Painter. He needed to remove the lockset so he could sand and refinish the outside of the door. He couldn’t figure out how to get it off, so I paid to have Anderson come over and remove it and then paid again to have them come back and reinstall it.

In the course of this project, the handle ended up flopped back down again. Pretty quick, Anderson sent over Bill the Locksmith. This guy, who seems to have the best time in the world playing with locks, took everything apart, did some more repair work on the thing, but said he couldn’t fix the handle without a spring.

I said, well, the other guys had said that spring is no longer being made.

True, said he, but he figured there had to be something like it somewhere. He promised to keep an eye out. He went off. M’hijito and I gave up.

So yesterday the phone rang out of the blue, and there was Bill the Locksmith! He had found a spring he thought would work in the lock. So I threw on some clean clothes and raced down to meet him at the house. 

Half an hour or forty minutes later, lo! The lock worked, the handle stood cheerfully at attention, and the entire assembly operated like new!

Not only that, but he planed down part of the door frame that Eric the F-b-N Contractor had left crooked and sprinkled powdered graphite on the ill-fitting weatherstrip that Greg the Handyman installed. So, when M’hijito got home from work last night, he found a front door, deadbolt, and fancy lockset that actually work!

Says he, by e-mail:

This is most incredibly fantastic.

 

I am sitting here and I am very, very pleased.  It’s probably hard for someone else to understand the degree of my pleasedness.

Yeah. Absolutely. So that’s two people who will tell all their friends to use Anderson Locksmiths. One of them will broadcast that message to the population of the world. And that’s how small businesses can fight big box chains.

🙂