Making Ripples: post-corporate adventures in Floyd County Virginia

Nepotism again...

A reader asks about the positives and negatives of nepotism in a school setting.

His comment read:

Regarding nepotism and ethics, what about a situation where a teaching staff where the principal has a practice of hiring married couples? Approximately 25% of our staff is comprised of married couples. He is very open about the practice saying it's like a family, but I argue that it could turn into a dysfunctional family. .... What are the positive and negatives of such a practice in a school setting?

I'm not sure I would consider hiring married couples nepotism. I have worked for many companies where several members of a family were employed. Usually, the company did not allow these people to work in the same department or for each other.

I consider nepotism to be the favoring of a relative or a friend over other employees. When family or personal connections interfere with the orderly management of a company, it is a recipe for disaster.

When workers or managers are productive and do the job that people expect of them, nobody cares who they are related to.

When employees or managers are incompetent and are protected because they are friends with or related to someone else in the company, the company has a hidden chain of command and hard working people resent it. Good people will leave as soon as they spot this occurring because it is unfair and unprofessional. Timid employees will remain and moan about their lot.

Are the incompetent people in your company being protected by someone?

Floyd Community Health Center, excellent home town health care

We welcome the recent opening of the community-owned Floyd Community Health Center on the Jacksonville Center campus, because it is a long drive to the Tri-Area Health Clinic in Laurel Fork, VA.

The team at this new center provides excellent service under the direction of Dr. Lorrie French. I have already used them for my periodic lab procedure and for minor surgery. Lorrie and her staff make you feel well cared for and they treat you more like family than as a patient. It was one of the best patient experiences I have had in years.

This is one of three federally qualified community health centers operated by the Laurel Fork Health Commission. It provides affordable comprehensive primary healthcare to the residents of Floyd and Patrick Counties. Discounts are available based on income through their sliding fee program.

They will be operating at the Jacksonville Center campus location while they construct a permanent Health Center in the area. You can reach then at 540-745-9290

If you currently do not have healthcare, this is definitely worth checking out.

I feel we are fortunate to have such choices in this remote community.

The Floyd County wave, a sign you are among friends

There are still a few parts of the country where people wave as you drive by. Floyd County, Virginia, is one of them.

As newcomers who had spent many years in California and in southern Florida, it was a startling experience to drive down the country roads of Floyd County for the first time and see other drivers waving at us. After a short period of readjustment, we began waving back. It was a marvelous feeling.

This waving is not confined to folks sitting on their front porches. You get a wave from truck drivers hauling cargo and from soccer moms with kids in the car. It gives you a feeling that you are in the right place at last.

These are not waves with a full sweep of the arm. In fact, you have to be alert to see that the oncoming driver has raised a finger or two from the wheel and has given you a friendly signal while negotiating a tricky curve or avoiding fresh roadkill.

If you are extremely observant, you may even notice a pinky wave from a hand holding a cellphone as the oncoming driver passes by.

As this area grows, many newcomers arrive who are more familiar with road rage than with friendly greetings. It is imperative that we wave at them until they learn to wave back.

When the world is full of places where defensive driving means a gun in the glove compartment and doors locked to prevent carjacking, it is a matter of local concern to show that Floyd Countians cares about each other and are willing to show friendship with a simple wave.

It is a custom that deserves support.

Floyd blogger Rose Bowen is concerned that this may become another vanishing local tradition and has written an appealing article, "Bring Back the Wave, Floyd!".

Do people wave in your part of the world?

Deprogramming a Vista Machine - Part 2

It has been 13 days since I converted my laptop from Vista to Windows XP. The process was more involved than I expected, but for me the end result justified the effort. Your mileage may vary.

In a head to head competition with an identical Compaq Presario laptop running Vista, the converted XP machine is observably faster starting up and is less prone to those annoying blackouts which occur when you ask the Vista system to do something it is not ready to do.

The downside to this adventure is that you have to learn a lot more than you ever cared to know about driver software and the idiosyncrasies of machines that were designed to run Vista and are not really supported by XP.

I no longer relish looking under the hood of my cars or inside the guts of my computers. I have learned the hard way that cutting edge refinements require constant upkeep and are not compatible with standard upgrades.

When you modify a mass-produced system in any significant way, it no longer is part of the mainstream repair and service network. You are on your own, so to speak, and you had better be satisfied with the help of Internet forums.

The bright spot in all of this is that customers are using the Internet to work around problems and the forums are full of useful information on converting Vista machines to XP machines and advice on handling arcane problems involving Conexant High Definition Audio Systems, whatever they are.

I have been installing new drivers on the XP laptop while I am writing this and the laptop now recognizes some of the hardware that was previously hidden from it.

A few more steps and the laptop now has a fully operational sound system. What a relief!

If I had it to do over again, I would go to my local PC expert and if he had done Vista to XP conversions successfully, I would get him to do the conversion. Proper division of labor, you know. Give the work to the person who does it professionally.

If you are already in the midst of doing this conversion for yourself, here is a link that may help you with audio problems: http://forum.driverpacks.net/viewtopic.php?pid=8558#p8558

Life in the slow lane is a mirage...

This is a cautionary tale for those seeking rest and quiet after "retirement".

You are feeling burnt out by years on the road or in meetings and you want to settle down

You find a suitably remote village with enough modern conveniences to make life comfortable, a mix of interesting people who treat strangers kindly, and enough community spirit to show that life is good and can get better and you think you have found heaven on earth...

Hah! You have no idea what is waiting for you!

You spend the first months or even a year puttering around town drinking coffee in the mornings at the local gathering spots. You attend potluck dinners, house concerts, and other local events. Perhaps you find a church you like and join that.

You get to know people who have as much or more talent than you do and you start to understand the things that are needed and wanted to make the community an even better place to live in.

You volunteer and help out in some area where your expertise can really make a difference and you are pleasantly surprised by the favorable reaction you get. You volunteer on another project or two and you find that there are a core of dedicated people who have been working long and hard to make the community what it is today.

You realize that these are the people whose opinions matter to you and you volunteer for a few more projects because you really enjoy working with people who have positive goals and who are dedicated as any professional in the business world you came from.

You find more of these dedicated people and join them in worthwhile projects. You feel good about your contributions and feel a growing sense of purpose because you are working shoulder to shoulder with people who you respect and can rely on.

You eventually discover a few nay-sayers who criticise everything you do, but the dedicated movers and shakers on the local scene let you know that these grumblers have been voicing the same garbage since long before you arrived. This puts the criticism into proper perspective and you keep on doing what seems right.

You learn more about the community and its needs and you find yourself involved in supporting more worthwhile activities than you can imagine.

Your personal activities like blogging, or painting, or generating income start to get pushed out of the picture while you work to meet community-oriented deadlines that you have signed up for.

You don't even have time for morning coffee at the local gathering spots!

If you are experiencing this, take another look at your purposes in life before your friends and family have to intervene. A 24 x 7 workload is not good for living things, whether in the city or out in the country.

This situation is very real to me, as I am in the midst of gently extricating myself from some of this community-related activity. The activity is all worthwhile, but I need to find a better balance between personal needs and external needs. It's not easy.

Do you know where your drinking water has been?

If you live in Floyd County, your water probably comes out of a well. What you and your neighbors are doing can have long-term effects on your health. Find out about Floyd county water and what is being done to preserve the quality and quantity of your future drinking water.

Find out what YOU can do to make sure you and your children will continue to have good drinking water in the future.

Come to the Floyd Earth Day 2008 event at Floyd County High School on Saturday, April 19th.

If you provide services or products related to conserving and purifying water, you should visit the Floyd County Earth Day website and sign up for booth space. http://www.floydearthday.com/

You can read more about this important event in my earlier article and on Fragments from Floyd and on Blue Ridge Muse.   

Deprogramming a Vista machine - part 1

One of our shiny new Compaq laptop is no longer a Vista machine. The benefits of better graphics and more sophisticated software were frequently offset by disturbing hang-ups and interminable screen blackouts. It also seemed that the machine ran slower as more updates were added. Vista  was a painful reminder of the early Window operating systems that were sold to run on PCs with 128K 256K memories!

With those first version of Windows, the allure of a graphic interface was severely dimmed by the fact that it took forever to boot and longer to execute. Die-hard DOS fans snickered while we pioneers waited and waited for screens to update.

History repeats itself, of course, and so 25 years later I have Vista machines that offer lots of promise but are not really ready to deliver the goods.

It finally got to the point where I spent more time waiting than working

I have work to do and software which runs just fine on Windows XP, so I chose to lobotomize one of our laptops and gave it a new and more stable personality.

I reformatted the hard drive and installed a full installation copy of Windows XP with Service Pack 2. 

The other laptop will be a control subject and will remain a Vista machine. We will watch its performance and see when it starts performing faster than its "deprogrammed" twin. If it takes more than 6 months, it too may become an XP machine.

I was able to make the change from Vista to XP in a day All it took was a little research on the Internet.

Now I am installing all of the special drivers that are needed to get the most out of this new laptop hardware

I am using PC Doc Pro and Driver Genius to make the task as easy as possible.

I'll let you know how I fare.

Eats only one kibble a day...

Ponder the implications of this tidbit from the lolcat universe with your morning coffee.

Forenzc kitteh chekx ur printes

(Photoshop makes anything possible)

Technical Support that raises my hackles

Occasionally, I get in surreal exchanges with Technical Support people and it is all I can do to keep my composure. The images accompanying this article have nothing to do with the companies I spoke to, but they illustrate ways in which hard work does not serve customer needs.

There seem to be two main problem areas in dealing with Technical Support:

One is where the rep is on full automatic. You state the problem concisely and he responds, "So, what is the problem?"

Every piece of data you give him goes through some sort of filter and comes out meaningless to him so he paraphrases what you say.

Using short words and very simple sentences, you can eventually coax the rep to give you useful information, but the experience is not one you wish to repeat.

You usually end up regaling friends with the more absurd parts of the conversation until they are sick of it.

The other area is far more frustrating. You engage in conversation with a customer service rep who seems fairly knowledgeable and you describe your problem in detail and he says,  "I’m having a hard time seeing what the problem is.  Is there something specific you would like me to look at?"

The problem here is that the rep is thinking like a designer, not like a customer.

The problem I was dealing with today was that a company's software creates images that are all the same outside dimensions, even if the actual objects are vastly different in size. I have to resize the images I send clients to show how different choices affect the appearance of the final product.

The technical rep could not see why this was necessary. He could not adopt a customer''s viewpoint.

Can you image an auto manufacturer showing product image comparisons where their sport cars were the same size as their heavy duty trucks? That's what this software package is currently doing. It needs to be modified to convey a better idea of what it is producing.

Designers making life easier for designers is not the way to win customer loyalty. Understanding customer needs is critical to survival in a competitive marketplace.

The dark side of modern technology

Technology allows us to do more in less time than ever before, but there is a price to pay, especially when we try to upgrade a working system to another level of capability. That's when we have to look under the hood and our complacency is often shattered.

I spent the last two days installing a secure wireless network in my home and my workplace. This was not bleeding edge technology because I deliberately chose a two year old model in hopes that the product would be properly sorted out.

I Googled for evidence of problems and found plenty, but most of the complaints were several years old. Recent installations seemed to have gone well, so I chose a TRENDnet wireless router and hoped for the best.

I knew I was in trouble when the Network Wizard software that was shipped with the router failed to recognize the router. This "Network Wizard" was supposed to handle all of the messy details of the installation and couldn't even start. The installation went downhill from there.

I have had root canal procedures that were easier to experience...

I would have much preferred to follow the example of this cat and spend the time snoozing.

Instead, I subjected myself to another "learning experience" which resulted in me working furiously to get a system working instead of having a pleasant weekend with friends and family.

Those of you who are considering adding wireless capability to your home computer network might be interested in what happened. Continue reading after the jump.