I Got the Job

I’ll let Homer do the talking.

And follow it up with a caveat: I now enter that nebulous world where I likely have to wait -- months or more – before anything here is officially official. This is government, after all. Move too fast and you’re going to snap your ankle tripping over some red tape. They say two weeks for the background check. I have my doubts, but whatever.

No idea what I’m talking about? Go here.

Too lazy to go there? I sum up:

Background: I work, of course, at the Radioactive Waste Management Complex. Have done for the past 10 ½ years. But I’ve done so as a subcontractor. Fluor Idaho LLC (the main contractor) is looking for two tech writers to replace retiring writers, so I applied for one of the job. Essentially, it would be (if all went well) a move from company to company, not into a new position.

It did go down like this:

Last Thursday, I got a call late in the day, from the big boss over the technical writers.

Him: So I understand you applied for one of my jobs.

Me: Indeed I did.

Him: Well, consider this phone call your interview. You passed. [Name] from HR will be forwarding you some paperwork to fill out. I’m intrigued by your qualifications.

Email box: [ding] [Voila paperwork].

Lots of questions unanswered as of yet, including what will the pay be like? Hugely inflated from where I’m at now? And insurance? I hear grumblings about it. But is that regular insurance grumbling, or actual justified grumbling? It’s hard to tell.

So far, the most irksome thing is the $4.50 I had to pay for an official transcript from Utah State. That much for the labor and delivery on an electronic PDF. I guess I should be grateful I’m not in the fax machine era. They offer that option. For $20.

All of this comes, of course, after more than a decade working in what was supposed to be a temporary job. The past ten years have been wonderful, and have opened up doors not only to better providing for my family, but also to finding the time to earn a Masters degree, watching my wife earn the same degree, writing the first drafts on three novels (and getting one of them close to being finished) and part-time teaching duties as well. That all makes me a happy man.

Wait until they see the rest of me:

 

Arsenic and Old Lace: A Metaphor for the new BYU-Idaho English Course

Mortimer: Aunt Abby, how can I believe you? There are twelve men down in the cellar and you admit you poisoned them.

Aunt Abby: Yes, I did. But you don't think I'd stoop to telling a fib.

I kind of feel like Aunt Abby, fourteen weeks into teaching BYU-Idaho’s newest Foundations English 1010 iteration. As the last week closes, I can’t help but to think of the bodies I’ve had Teddy bury in his locks in the basement.

Some of those bodies represent students. Some of those bodies represent what skill I thought I had as an English instructor.

But I won’t stoop to tell a fib.

Part of the reason I’ve struggled so much this semester is because I didn’t try hard enough to keep ahead on the new curriculum. But part of the reason I struggled to keep ahead on the new curriculum is that Online Learning did not take advantage of the seven-week break between summer and fall semesters to help me metaphorically stock up on non-poisoned elderberry wine.

The bulk of that seven-week lull was filled with teaching us the new learning environment – Ilearn 3. And that was valuable time, well spent, getting to know how to navigate our new environment. But if I’m allowed to continue the Arsenic and Old Lace metaphor, not having time as well to go over the new curriculum before we had to present it in class left me, well, overcome by events.

And just like ol’ dumb Mortimer, I should have seen it coming. I could have looked over my shoulder to see Jonathan coming with the rope, I could have listened to the warnings from Dr. Einstein to get out of the house before it was too late. But like Mortimer, I was trapped in a playlet, partly by my own doing.

At the beginning of the semester, I had a goal: Become familiar with what my students were going to be called on to do the next week as I’m helping them through the current week. It seemed like a simple goal: Setting aside a few hours a week to read articles, navigate the course, prepare instructor notes, etc. It became an unfortunate reality, however, that learning the course I was teaching slipped down the priority list as I tried to keep up with events.

And what events: Lots of reading, to begin with. On-again and off-again, random discussion boards, sometimes as a group, more often in smaller groups, where my presence had to be felt in quintuplicate. And the course fixes. Each week, more fixes for what was supposed to have been a beta-tested course. And grading. Lots more grading. And lots of student questions. And that’s just the class stuff – forget about working full-time, serving as Scoutmaster and being a husband and father.

It sounds like excuses. And I won’t stoop to a fib: Sometimes they were excuses. But sometimes after a ten-hour work day, grading, dinner, emails and other efforts, finding that time to stay ahead in the curriculum didn’t happen. Sometimes it did. Sometimes, the time came and I needed a break from life’s demands, so I took it. See? No fibbing.

But I still felt like that dumb cluck when he sees he’s bound and gagged, just like he predicted he would be. And I still had to function, trussed up like a moron.

My students, bless them, didn’t see the window cords nor the gag. Well, maybe they did at times when I was slow to respond to their queries. I have to console myself that student attrition in the new course wasn’t any worse than in the old one.

But I know I could have done them better.

So maybe this semester is the baptism of fire. When I found that insanity did more than run in my life – it galloped.

Next semester – well, it’s bound to be better, right?

It’s going to be better because I’m going to work it to be better. Having gone through the class once at least gives me a foundation, so I know what to anticipate the next time around. Having had that foundation laid before class started in the fall would have been better, but water under the bridge, you know. Or at least locks dug in the basement. The insanity of this semester won’t get the better of me next semester. Because I’m not a cab driver, I’m a coffee pot.

Swiss Cheese, Anyone?

I fall for fake phishing attempts all the time.

I post this confession not to jeopardize my job, but to demonstrate that I’m as dumb as many of the people in this New York Times story – people who are supposedly a lot smarter than I am.

I have yet – I think – to fall for a real phishing attempt, though falling for the fake ones the IT department puts out at work is embarrassing enough. I’m trying to become more computer savvy.

I don’t want the next article about computer morons to be about me.

Reading this New York Times telling of alleged Russian cyberattacks against the Democratic National Committee is chilling. Not because I believe they swung the election; there were many factors that led to Hillary Clinton’s defeat by Donald Trump aside from the hacking that revealed DNC schadenfreude. But because this is a precursor to what could be a more devastating attack against, say, financial networks, or communication networks, or electricity grids – attacks that will have a direct effect and be limited in variable only to the fact that somewhere, some dumb cluck like me clicked on the wrong email.

So why call this blog post Swiss Cheese?

Because in the error precursor training we get at work, such cheese is used as a metaphor to explain how dumb things happen. We can have six or seven or eight layers of security, from administrative controls to engineering controls to what have you , meant to protect us from making mistakes – but if the holes line up in those layers like the holes in Swiss cheese, well, accidents will happen.

This is where Sneakers comes in – that invaluable 1992 sleeper film that keeps on proving eerie prescience about our modern world.

In reading this NYT article, the holes in the cheese are clear.

The DNC’s rent-a-cops, to use that line from Sneakers, seemed a tad undertrained. And it boggles the mind – boggles it, mind you – that no one from the FBI thought paying the DNC a visit rather than making a phone call that got routed to a computer help desk would be a better follow-up than continuing to contact the same dude who kept on keeping on by doing nothing.

Then they’re the typo defense. (As a technical writer, I ALWAYS hone in on the typo defense. Because they NEVER work.)

Will Oremus at Slate, by the way, talked to the typo guy, raising the same misgivings I had on the typo when I read the NYT story. Like Oremus, I think I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt that this was an innocent mistake.

Oremus points out, however, that the guy compounded the typo by not being explicit about not clicking on any link in the original email. That additional bit of information would have made the recipient that much more cautious, and likely would have influenced whether or not the recipient used the link to the legitimate password change page, rather than the one provided in the phishing email.

This is also part of trying to avoid such scams – and is my Achilles heel: slowing down. Just slowing down enough because the message in the email is important enough, it’s got to be explicitly clear, not implicitly clear. Had the guy been explicit in his warning, the typo would not have mattered. Since he was not explicit and did not take the thirty seconds necessary to review his message, the typo was a compounding factor.  Per the NYT:

Hundreds of similar phishing emails were being sent to American political targets, including an identical email sent on March 19 to Mr. Podesta, chairman of the Clinton campaign. Given how many emails Mr. Podesta received through this personal email account, several aides also had access to it, and one of them noticed the warning email, sending it to a computer technician to make sure it was legitimate before anyone clicked on the “change password” button.

“This is a legitimate email,” Charles Delavan, a Clinton campaign aide, replied to another of Mr. Podesta’s aides, who had noticed the alert. “John needs to change his password immediately.”

With another click, a decade of emails that Mr. Podesta maintained in his Gmail account — a total of about 60,000 — were unlocked for the Russian hackers. Mr. Delavan, in an interview, said that his bad advice was a result of a typo: He knew this was a phishing attack, as the campaign was getting dozens of them. He said he had meant to type that it was an “illegitimate” email, an error that he said has plagued him ever since.

Why do I fell for these attempts myself (at least, so far, knock on wood, the fake ones? ?Psychology, as Foxy Loxy would say. “Lessee. Who looks nice and stupid?”

I’m schooling myself.

If I get an email saying my password needs to be changed, I go to the offending website or app itself, rather than doing the change via the email.

If I get an email with a weird attachment, or from someone I’m not expecting, I try – and I mean I try – not to open it.

Still, I need heightened vigilance against further attacks.

An aside on this article, tying in with what I wrote earlier about the Russians and Myrna Minkoff: Though the DNC and others fell victim to cyberattacks and subsequently had their dirty laundry aired on WikiLeaks and then the press, this information still should have been reported. And I sincerely believe had it been the RNC with the egg on their faces, the DNC would not sit idly by and say, oh, this should not have been in the papers since the Russians were involved. Anyone who believes that, please stand on your head.

"Yes . . . But it is Very Neat"

If nobody has done this yet, it should be done:

A cross-reference of books written by and about Richard Milhous Nixon, also tied in with official records, transcripts, notes on the bathroom wall, etc., indicating which claims in the various sources are true, false, in dispute, or otherwise occupied. Throw in films and documentaries, oral histories, etc. Everything Richard Milhous Nixon.

Creating such a database would be a massive undertaking. I’m not near smart enough to accomplish such a thing.

But it would be neat.

Why is this coming up now? Because of a number of factors:

1.      I’m a rather naïve soul who typically believes anything he is told or reads. I’d like some help filtering the truth from the truthiness. 
2.      I’m reading L. Patrick Gray II’s “In Nixon’s Web” right now, and he takes Woodward, Bernstein, Jack Anderson, and TIME magazine to task for their inaccuracies (he’s yet to mention Seymour Hirsch* of the New York Times). 
3.      Mark Felt, aka “Deep Throat” comes out not as a hero, but as a skunk who tried to sink Gray for his own purposes. Don’t know whether that’s factual or not, but it’s certainly interesting to read. 
4.      Who trusts the CIA on ANYTHING? Not me, after reading this book. 
5.      It would be neat.

      I could also keep track of the players, and how each source brings new dimension to their character. (Pat Gray’s book certainly adds to the deflowering, for example, of John Dean, and certainly to a diminution of my opinion of AP columnist Jack Anderson and Mark "Deep Throat" Felt.)

If anyone out there is aware of something like this, please point me in its direction. I’d love to see it.

Thinking about this also makes me want to finish editing Doleful Creatures so I can get back to The Hermit of Iapetus, which features Nixon as a hallucinatory character.

*Gray never does mention Hirsch. Whether that means he was correct all along or Gray had bigger axes to grind with other characters involved isn’t clear.