Gossip

First, let me apologize for not posting yesterday. After the long week-end, yesterday was a very busy day, and, even though I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to post here, I never did do it. Sorry. Of course, I would feel much worse if I had gotten E-mail, or angry comments...

Anyway, today I am going to talk about gossip. I think a lot of people have got the wrong idea about gossip. Most people seem to understand that, in general, gossip is a bad thing, but each of us seems to develop our own rationale about why it's only bad when other people do it.
One justification that I have heard is that it's not 'gossip' if it's true. I can't agree with that. First of all, how do you know if it is true? Did you actually see it? Or did somebody tell you that they saw it? Or (more likely), did somebody tell you that somebody else saw it? Even if you are talking about something that you actually saw happen, those stories tend to take on a life of their own after three or four retellings. Why start that?
Some people seem to think that it's okay if you're spreading 'celebrity gossip'--talking about people that you've never actually met, or are likely to ever meet. I had a guy tell me a while back that DC Talk had gotten busted for drugs. He said that was why there was such a long delay getting their 'Free At Last' album out. I asked him how he knew this, and he told me it had been in a magazine article. I asked to borrow the magazine, and he told me it wasn't his, but he gave me the name of a mutual friend who had a copy of the magazine. It occurred to me to ask if that was the copy that he had read; he replied that he hadn't actually read the article himself, he just heard about it. Oh, so the guy that owns the magazine told you about this article? Well, no, I heard about it from... At this point I had the distinct impression that there was an odor of flounder in the room. I went and talked to the guy that owned the magazine. His response? "That's the first I've heard of it." Why would you even spread something like that?
Some people seem to think that it's okay as long as you're not talking about somebody in the church. What if the person that you're backbiting starts coming to church? What if they quit coming to church because it gets back to them what you said? Where does that leave you?
At the same time, there are times when you feel the need to share a personal experience. Generally, anything that happens to me involves other people, so, when I'm talking about me, I'm also talking about others. What to do? Not mentioning names is a good plan (of course, not mentioning a person name, but including personal details ["Not mentioning any names, but a certain person who is six-foot three, with red hair, glasses, and a mustache..."]
defeats the purpose of not mentioning names). What you want to share is what happened to you, how it affected you, and what changes have resulted from it. That is very different than talking about what someone else did to you.
I will be honest about it, I have a hard time sharing personal experiences, because when I try to share, I feel like I'm either gossipping about other people have done or boasting about what I have done (or both).
Next time we'll talk about boasting...

Man, did I get behind! My apologies to the two or three people that read my blog (as if it were that many) for not posting yesterday or the day before. I got really busy. Very unusual for me, since my job is *so* demanding (is using asterisks to indicate sarcasm acceptable?). Anyway, The video stuff is looking good--I was able to synch up the audio from the one DVD to the video from the other. I've tried to synch stuff up before without much success, but it all depends on the medium that the audio was captured on. CD's tend to be slightly faster, even though they are 'real time' (or maybe DVD's are slightly slower? Not sure). Anyway, these were both DVD's, so it's okay. It worked out. Meantime, three day week-end coming up. We're going to be doing 'spring cleaning' at the church. This also includes touching up the paint, deep-cleaning carpets, etc. Not looking forward to the work, but I am looking forward to how much better the building is going to look.
By the way, it occurs to me that the Ford Motor Company should make a car called the "Prefect" with terry-cloth upholstery, so that the driver of a Ford Prefect would always have a towel handy. Just a thought.

Well, the good news is, the problem with one of the DVD burners on Sunday was that the video out connection came loose, so it did record the entire service, including audio. The bad news is that the other burner didn't record anything. Fortunately, we did capture the video of the entire service...(If you don't know what I'm talking about, read yesterday's post)
Today I am going to vent about personal peeves:
1) People who abuse their power (not to suggest that I've never done that).
2) People who hear a little of something here, and a little something else there, and draw their own conclusion, and then spread that around as fact (wish I could say I haven't been guilty of that).
3) People who push their own agenda, without regard to what's actually best for the organization/business/club/whatever (um, yeah, I'm three for three).
I think I'll stop venting about pet peeves now; it's hitting a little too close to home. Of course, for every example, I can think of at least one person who has done it more blatantly than I did, or more consistently than I did. Of course, I can't think of one person who's been more guilty of all three than me. I guess that's part of what gets under one's skin, though, isn't it? When you see somebody doing something that reminds you of a part of yourself that you don't like. Possibly even more aggravating is when you see somebody doing something that you really want to do, but you don't think you could get away with. Of course, then we tell ourselves that at least we didn't actually do it, we only thought about it. Of course, if the only reason we didn't do it is because of fear of retribution, how are we better than that other person?

What a week-end--and what a week it's going to be!

I am back, after a good week-end. I wish I had gotten more sleep, but that's a pretty normal Monday morning feeling. In some ways it's good to be back at work. MY work 'to-do' list is much shorter than my home 'to-do' list, and, once again, I got a lot less done over the week-end than I thought I would. I also came to realize that there is a lot more that I need to do.
We have been videotaping our Sunday morning services for about 17 years now. About a year and a half ago we moved up to DVD. Even more recently we got two stand-alone DVD burners. So, I hooked the two burners in-line with the two cameras, to get back-up footage. This way, if we need to edit the video of Sunday morning service, we have the video from both cameras available. It seemed to work fairly well on the 6th, the first Sunday we tried it (fairly well meaning that we got no audio on one DVD--which is okay, because we really wanted the video--and only three minutes of video on the other--we got all the audio {turns out the video connector came loose--replaced the connector during the week}). Now the pastor wants to put everything on DVD, which makes sense, it takes up a lot less space. So Saturday I went in and hooked up the two stand-alone DVD burners to VHS decks, and dug out some VHS tapes from 1990 (might as well start at the beginning, right?), and started duping them. For some reason, on the first pass, we got no video on one of the DVD's. On the second pass, we got no video on the other one. Apparently, in trying to correct the problem from the first pass, I created a new problem. So then, I said, forget it, let's hook these back up for Sunday morning. So, after a considerable amount of time finagling with wiring, I thought I had everything hooked up right. Unfortunately, something went way wrong, because the master capture device (which I did not mess with on Saturday) got no audio, and the other two got no video. At all. I am now hoping that the audio from one of the two video-less DVD's will synch up well with the video from the audio-less DVD, so that we will at least be able to create one good 'master.' If not, we also taped the service, using an S-VHS deck, so hopefully we can recapture...
In any case, we have too many cables spread out over too much acreage and I need to sit down this week and label and organize cables. I am not looking forward to it, but it has to be done. I can't keep messing up DVD's like this.
I think this is my longest post yet...

Wow, I almost forgot to post a blog today! What would all the people do who are actually bored enough to read my blog? (Is there anybody reading my blog?) I don't actually have any idea if anyone has discovered my blog. If there's a way to check numbers (hits), I haven't learned how to do it. That's okay, this is mostly just a place for me to vent. That could be why I almost forgot to post anything today: Nothing really to vent about.

Here I am again, posting to my blog ("How very interesting (yawn)"). Yeah, I know. There's something to be said for just being able to rant or vent when you need to, but, right now, I don't really feel the need. I could complain about my job, but, quite frankly, I like getting a paycheck. If you read my previous post, then you already know that I get paid fairly well for relatively little work. I like that arrangement. I also happen to like what I do, I just don't like some of the things that go on where I work. To be honest, even if I ran my own business, I still wouldn't like some of the things that would go on in my own business. Think about it: You've got a hot project that you promised the customer would be done tomorrow, unforeseen delays have prevented the completion of the project, but there is little or no money in the budget to pay your employees overtime to stay tonight and finish the project. What do you do? Either you stay the night and finish the project yourself, or you apologize profusely to the client and ask for an extension (and hope and pray that they not only grant you the extension, but continue to do business with you, AND not tell any potential clients that you missed your deadline). If your company is established and has a reputation for doing good work on time, the apology might be enough, but if your company is new and has no established reputation, guess what? you just established your rep. It takes a long time to overcome that sort of set-back. Some companies never do. One more reason why I don't run my own business.
Not that I would know what to do if I had my own business, anyway. I've tried MLM's (for the uninitiated, MLM stands for Multi-Level Marketing). That's hard to get started--it takes a lot of perseverance. Plus, there are a lot of bad MLM companies out there. Not naming any names, but one major player in the MLM field got a reputation some years ago for running a pyramid scheme. From what I understand, that wasn't even (entirely) their fault--some distributors discovered a hole in their payment plan that allowed a pyramid type scheme to be used. That flaw has been corrected, and they have changes their name, but the old name still usually comes up whenever you try to talk to somebody about MLM. Personally, I generally don't like their products anyway. Some of them are good, but most of the ones that I've tried, weren't. Anyway, I think that's enough rambling for today.

May 15th, 2007

This is my blog ("Why, how very interesting{yawn}," I can hear someone say). Okay, well, this may be a little slow getting started. The idea is that I am just going to write about whatever is on my mind (that is the idea of a blog, isn't it?). I'm sure that there will be many daze when this space is not updated, because there are many daze when there is nothing on my mind. Although money seems to always be on my mind. I never seem to have enough of it. This, of course, makes me part of the financial majority. I can't really complain about what I get paid. I get paid very well for relatively little work. I just always seem to *need* more than I have. I don't think I'm alone in that. We had a financial planning seminar at our church Friday night. I learned a few things, but, to be honest, I don't think any of that is really going to change my life any. I did learn that most people don't carry enough life insurance to take care of their family if something happens to them. I carry enough to pay off the house (if anybody in my family actually wants it), and pay for my funeral, and take care of pretty much anything else, but I don't owe that much on my house. Apparently most people carry less than I do, and should carry more than I do. I know a lot of people look at insurance as something that doesn't help *now*, so it's an unnecessary expense. If you stop to think about it, though, any one of us could get hit by a bus (or a drunk driver) at any time, and then what happens to your dependents? Sorry to get so morbid (I promise I didn't start out writing with the plan of talking about death), but, like I said, it's just whatever is on my mind. Still, if you check it out, I think you will find that 'single mother' is probably the toughest job out there. Single father's not that easy either. But if your spouse has to work a job (or two) to make ends meet and raise your kids without you, when an insurance policy would definitely make a huge difference. Hopefully by now you understand my use of the term ramblings. I know how I get.