Corporate “Responsibility”

I had a good weekend with Mrs__B, Mini__B, and the grandparent Bs, but it started with me in a bad mood Friday night. I spent the day Friday dealing with two projects where nonclient business want me to do idiotic things. The first is a contractor who wants me to sign an affidavit saying that I supervised his work and know that it is all correct, neither half of which is true. The second is a prefab building manufacturer who wants me to take responsibility for his design but refuses to give me enough information to analyze it properly. In both cases, what’s going on is a simple exercise in blame-shifting, and apparently it’s rude for me to say so. Right now, I’m on a train upstate to deal with the first.

If, as a wealthy and famous asshole recently said, corporations are people, then they are sociopaths who will cheat, lie, and bully in any way possible to get what they want.

Remind me, why do people think that politicians with business experience are to be trusted with the protecting and managing the public sphere? Why is private better than public?

Voyeurism

Shortly after we moved to the former Chez__B, in the winter of 2007-2008, we were invited to join the condo’s google group. At that time, there were maybe 25 occupied apartments, as the conversion of the building to residential use was still in progress. The group was supposed to be for informal communication, but since the building management never got the formal system running worth a damn, the group was, as of our leaving a few weeks ago, the main intra-building place for conversation.

It is also, in my experience with conversation both in real life and on the net, the place with the stupidest fucking discussions I’ve ever seen. The one example I posted here is far from the worst; it’s actually easy to get depressed reading thread after thread composed of the whining of privileged assholes who, in addition to being put out that they aren’t rich enough to buy their dream pads in Manhattan, think the whole world should kiss their asses because they live in a “luxury” building. I posted only twice in over four years’ residence, both technical responses to technical questions and both near the beginning of that period of time.

So we’re gone, and renting in Manhattan. And no one has removed my group access, because no one is in charge of doing so. I have the option of continuing to read the endless stream of idiocy with the emotional distance of no longer being directly affected by it…and part of me wants to, as a way of converting the depression into cheap laughs. This is unhealthy, but it’s too late in the day to play with Mini__B and be mentally healthy.

Unpacking

In addition to the furniture and luggage, we had 112 boxes of stuff.

Fuck me with a chainsaw.

Entitled Morons

Park Slope is full of 1%ers and 2%ers who think they’re middle class, and who will fight (verbally) to the death over who is more socially conscious. I can barely walk past them on the sidewalk without thinking homicidal thoughts* but they are impossible to ignore because they never shut up. The latest outrage: ice cream is for sale in Prospect Park. And precious little Hoboken and Jerseycitia want to eat some and Mommy and Daddy don’t want to say no and be the bad guys. The solution, of course, is to ban ice cream sales so that these passive-agressive shitbags can continue lying to themselves that they are their children’s friends and not their parents.

One possible solution, from the EV Grieve and passed on by Copyranter:

Another that I saw today, but am less enamored of:

*Mr. Bierce nails it again: “There are four kinds of homocide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy…”

Written

The paper is done and emailed to the conference chair in Poland.  I had thought this paper, piggybacking on an earlier one, would be easy to write. The old paper was a social history of a famous and long-since demolished building;this one was a structural analysis of it. It turned out to be basically all new material that took a long time to put together, even though the analysis and drawings were done last week.

Having finished the part that required thought, getting it to match the conference format took another five hours. There is no hell hot enough for the programmers who created Word.

Size Envy

One of the stupider concerns that it’s possible to have: is the new 1WTC too small?

Fucking size queens.

Context Is Everything

I’m mining HABS again today, and maybe for the next few days.

Apparently Montana is short on interesting buildings, as this is actually an entry: The Ryan-to-Rainbow 100 kV Transmission Line of the Ryan Hydroelectric Facility, West bank of Missouri River, northeast of Great Falls, Great Falls vicinity, Cascade, MT

But wait! There’s more:

How the 0.01% Live

The Stanhope (Fifth Avenue, opposite the Metropolitan Museum) used to be a high-end hotel. Now it’s a condo, with one unit left for sale. Asking $30,000,000.

I used to own a studio co-op in Manhattan that measured 250 square feet. Smaller than the “library,” roughly the same size as the 2nd bedroom. The master bedroom suite – everything to the right and down the screen from the service elevator – is roughly the size of the apartment I grew up in and which was the entire living area for four people.

Good news, though! This shit isn’t a sign of post-modern 2012 excess. In 1929 (pre-October, one must assume), Fifth Avenue penthouses might go for $300,000, to be bought by the wealthy. Those dastards.

More News From The 1%

For the record, NYC Taxi & Limousine Commission rules posted in every cab, state that the meter shows the fee on all trips but that for out-of-town trips the cabbie and passenger may agree to a different fee. So, putting aside Mr. Banker’s criminal assault, he was wrong on the basic fact.

There’s also the fact that his employers have an account with at least one limo service that he could have used.

Where I Am

The flight  from Indy to Charlotte was delayed to the point I’d miss my connection. All of US Air was fucked up. So I’m at Union Station in DC waiting for my 3:15AM train home.

The 1% Are Better Than You

I’m currently in Indianapolis but let’s discuss my last meet meeting yesterday. An architect and I met with our client, a lawyer about to spend a few million gutting his Fifth Avenue duplex. We were going over the design – which is complete and filed – and he kept making suggestions for “improvement”. The fact that nearly everything he said wouldn’t work for one reason or another – the building code, acceptable limits on vibration, gravity – didn’t bother me much. His attitude, that he had to explain the obvious to a couple of idiots, did.

Let’s see how much contempt we can find in one conversation:

1. I spent four years studying and another four working just to qualify to take the exam for my engineering license. Apparently, this was all unnecessary, as a lawyer knows just as much about structural analysis and design. The training required for a law degree and license is, of course, irreplaceable.
2. Since my supposed expertise is meaningless, there’s no legitimate justification for my fee. I am therefore a whore who should be willing to do anything if paid.
3. Despite numerous client/architect/engineer discussions during the design phase, our filed plans aren’t what he wants. We are therefore incompetent whores.

The most depressing part is that our quitting wouldn’t even dent his sense of self righteousness.

Open Letter To A Man In An Airport

Buddy, you don’t know me and you never will. But here’s some free advice:

1. If you’re in an extended phone conversation about the fact that you think she lied to you and is cheating on you and she thinks you lied to her and is cheating on her, it’s over. Muster up some dignity and end the conversation; give some serious thought to ending the relationship…because it’s now a zombie relationship, wandering around mindlessly eating things.
2. If you’re sensitive to eavesdroppers, don’t yell into your cell in a public place. I managed to only look when you wandered directly in front of me, but it was just stupid of you to give dirty looks to the other people who were looking to see what the yelling was about.
3. People hate the process of flying (some like flying itself and/or travel, but no one likes airport waiting) and are to some degree on edge. Having someone yelling threats, even into a phone, does not make them less on edge. Think about it.

In addition to the advice, an observation: if, as you said, you’ve known for months that she’s cheating and saved up this fact to throw in her face when it was convenient for you, you’re a douchebag.

Get A Long Little Doggie…I Mean Dachshund

For the 600th post, time for a search-term round-up. Actual search terms from today are bulleted.*

• st paul building new york

I’ve mentioned this building – long since demolished, and where my father had an office circa 1955-1960 – a few times.

• nazi zombie ss tower

What the fuckity fuck are you talking about?

• street photography new york

Interestingly, I’ve linked to such pictures (and included a few of my own pix) but I don’t think I’ve ever used this phrase.

• freaky statue

Must be a Lady Gaga fan.

• brooklyn water towers sunset

I had, and have managed to lose, an actual tie from the 50s with “sunrise over Miami Beach” hand-painted on it.

• lenticular truss

Hey, someone actually reads what I write.

• chicago building looks like a screw

There is better internet porn than this, buddy. Even better, wash up and maybe you can find a woman/man/donkey willing to throw a leg over you in real life.

• deco skyscraper big city

Yoda: “Streamlined your building is.”

• wrought iron bracket bridge

Nice try, but the March Madness assigning of brackets for competitive bridge is still a month off.

• non ductile concrete buildings

Hey, someone actually reads what I write.

• polar bear peeking over top

Uh…my avatar is not “peeking.” She…I mean he…I mean she…is presenting.

• flat paper buildings

Watch out for the lines!

• train coming out of subway tunnel

Paging Doctor Freud! Paging Doctor Freud!

• island layout cartoon

That’s not a nice way to treat the urban planners.

• 1904 irt subway map

Hey, someone actually reads what I write.

• straight lines architecture

Someone objects to the use of faggy french curves.

• non-ductile concrete buildings in christchurch

(A) Hey, someone actually reads what I write. (B) You’ve already asked about that.

• foggy city street

So, so romantic.

• bow bridge

Hey, someone actually reads what I write.

• the core of city new york

Don’t let the tour guides fool you. It’s Maspeth.

• famous modern structure between 1900

Between what? I’m not a fucking mind-reader.

____________

*The violence! I must clutch my pearls!

Bad Technology x2

In a moment of weakness three years ago, I bought a Bluray player to replace our DVD player. The movies look good, but it’s been a pain in my ass from day one. At first it would randomly lock up (maybe once a month) to the point where the only solution was to pull the plug. So I went through some now-forgotten contortions, had Sony mail me a firmware upgrade in CD, and it got mostly better. The last year or so, we’ve had a problem when playing Blurays with fancy menus: they won’t play. We sat down yesterday to finally watch season 1 of Boardwalk Empire and we couldn’t even get the menu to show. Since I didn’t want to wait on Sony again, I decided to download the new firmware upgrade, burn it to CD and try again. Sony, in its infinite corporate-is-a-people-too wisdom, only provides the firmware in a Windows format. We’re a Mac house, but Mrs__B’s new job gave her a Dell laptop, so I got on that, grabbed the file, burned the CD, ran the upgrade, and we just watched the first episode.

1. Fuck Sony and everyone connected with Bluray. A player is nothing more than a computer dedicated to a single purpose, and the fact that it can be crashed by a badly-written Java menu applet tells me that it’s a poorly designed computer. Fuck the morons who think that I pay extra for a fancy menu rather than for the better picture and sound. Fuck the morons who misprogrammed the menu.

2. I haven’t used Windows regularly since 2002, and holy shit it sucks. The Dell took – and I timed it – three minutes to boot up. Every single control from XP has been moved or changed in Win 7, so my old and pretty damned thorough knowledge of how to get Win to actually do something is now meaningless. It’s not better, it doesn’t (to my eyes) look better, it’s just different. Fuck Microsoft and their need to churn upgrades for revenue, Fuck Dell and its shitty hardware. Fuck Apple for the “coolness” that has become a selling point rather than useability.

The “Luxury” Mentality

“Luxury,” as an adjective, is effectively meaningless. What makes a Cadillac a luxury car? Their ads say it is, so it is. Meaningless words do not, in themselves, annoy me much although they do provide fodder for endless meaningless chatter. Since I try to avoid listening to such chatter, my response is a resounding “meh.”

The problem is that some people – If I’m being honest, I’d say I believe that the topic at hand is “stupid people” – think that their asses deserve kissing because they bought something labelled “luxury.”

Chez__B was originally an office building constructed as a money-making venture by the bank that occupied the large first-floor space. The grand entrance off the street leads to the bank hall, with a smaller entrance down the block leading to the elevators for the other floors. As part of the residential conversion, a vestibule was installed at the elevator entrance (now the residential lobby) with a door at the street wall and a door about seven feet inwards at the interior lobby wall. (The seven feet is obviously not solid wall, but is where one of the emergency stairs is located.) During the four years we’ve lived in the building (we were among the first residents after the conversion was complete), the interior door of the vestibule has almost never been closed. It is propped open, effectively permanently. Two other physical facts of note: the concierge desk is immediately adjacent to the inner door and it is equipped with a closed-circuit TV that shows the sidewalk outside the outer door. The TV allows the concierges to see if they have to go to the door and help someone.

The other thread of this story comes via Google Groups. The residents established a group before we moved in for general building discussion. I joined and lurk. I don’t participate because reading the comments there quickly convinced me that my fellow tenants are largely a bunch of entitled, whiney yuppies and hipsters. A common refrain is “Why is such-and-such true IN A LUXURY BUILDING?!?” A recent thread discussed spending somewhere in the high five figures to reconfigure the lobby because the concierge desk was very cold during the winter.

Yesterday, I asked one of the concierges why he didn’t close the inner door, since treating the vestibule as an actual vestibule would do a great deal towards stopping cold drafts at his desk. His response was that people had complained of difficulties with baby carriages or shopping carts when the door was closed. In other words, the extra couple of seconds it takes the concierge to help an encumbered person when both doors are closed had spawned enough complaints that he was sitting there in the cold. Because IN A LUXURY BUILDING twelve seconds to get through the door is unacceptable when ten seconds is possible.

The core of my profession, the core of engineering design is making tradeoffs between various goals. Less expensive up front means more maintenance. More functionality means more complex controls. Better looking means more expensive. And so on. The people in my building believe that their sense of luxury outweighs the human comfort of a half-dozen men – their employees – who they see every day. I wish I could say it’s just this building, but judging by the people I meet in my work and what I see of national politics, it’s not. Fuck them all and fuck their luxury.

Not To Mention The Spitting

So, a bunch of assholes have decided to send missionaries to NYC. This is not the first time and won’t be the last, but there are a few points worth mentioning:

• Get used to hearing the words “Fuck you, asshole.” You’re planning on going up to strangers and telling them you know more about them than they do – this is the nature of missionary work – and unlike people where you’re from, New Yorkers are not taught as children to be polite to salesmen.
• Be honest about your goals. NYC is not without religion, it is without a dominant religion. Your main goal is not to convert heathens but to steal people from other Christian sects. In short, you’re playing the same role as Walmart.
• Your sect only exists because your ancestors were so strongly pro-slavery that they needed to break off from their church and found one that catered to their prejudices. Don’t be surprised that people haven’t forgotten this.
• Other groups have tried. The Mormons have a church on Lincoln Square and they apparently still haven’t figured out why their 20-year-old missionaries wearing nametags that say “Elder” are figures of fun on the streets. Operation Rescue has tried here several times and caused less disruption than the average weekend of sports. One of the noisier groups, the Westboro Baptist* Church found themselves a repeated punchline in Brooklyn.
• Maybe instead of worrying about whether or New Yorkers attend a church you approve of, you should worry about yourselves.

*There’s that word again.

The Picture Doesn’t Match

First, Monday’s fog, click to engorge:

Now that you’re in a good mood, let’s discuss assholes. Amazingly, the Supreme Court got this one right (by doing nothing) and NYC’s decision to not allow religious use of public schools has been upheld. Context: there are something like 1100 public school buildings in the city, almost all with auditoriums and (obviously) all with classrooms that can be used as meeting rooms. To the lawyer for the church who got all butthurt that the schools are rented on the weekends for other, secular uses: those uses don’t exclude any kids. When your church uses a school and advertises that fact around the neighborhood, every kid who does not belong to your sect is told that he or she is an outsider in their own school. They are not excluded by Law & Order filming there, or AA having a meeting there.

To put it another way, churches are already given huge (and, IMO, unfair) tax advantages. If you can’t manage to rent a space without public help, maybe your god is a fucking loser.

Unrealistically Neat

We’re trying to sell our place so we can move and cut down Mrs__B’s commute. The realtor is having an open house today and we’ve been cleaning. Who are the people who live here? Their baby makes no mess, they reshelve their books as compulsively as in a library, they cook without utensils in reach, and apparently they never use the toilets.

On The Tip Of My Tongue

I spent all day in an airless, overcrowded meeting room in an otherwise beautiful museum in the center of Paris. People contributed, snoozed, bloviated, accomplished – I did all four- to varying degrees. However… There’s a man on the committee who I truly despise, for exactly one reason: at these semi-annual meetings he will not shut up.

He wants to present at every meeting, whether or not he has anything to say. He monopolizes Q&A time when other people present. (I once counted him asking six consecutive questions; today he managed four twice.) He interrupts people. (Last year, during a coffee break, he walked over and stood between me and the fellow I was conversing with, and when I tried to continue our conversation he told me I was being rude.)

I used to think there was something organically wrong with his brain, but today I had an epiphany. This is what real-life trolling looks like. How did I not see this earlier?

Off for some duck…BRB

Two Intertwined Throughts

First, I’m spending the entire weekend straightening up the apartment for the realtor’s photographer and the open house. Not cleaning, because we keep it clean, but rather eliminating what the realtor called “clutter.” Clutter represents any evidence that actual people, and not RealDolls, live here.

Second, a ridiculous question from the Times. Short answer: yes. Just read any 17th-19th century account of visitors coming to NYC and you will read complaint after complaint, whine after whine about how the nasty natives were rude to the innocent pilgrims.

The connection: fuck you all. The entire human race, fuck you. I’m breaking my back so some ass will not be put off by poorly-stored summer clothing? Some visitor gets his thong in a twist because someone didn’t say “thank you” effusively enough? Fuck you all.

This sentiment has been brought to you by an extended period of excessive sobriety.