Flunktionaries

Functionary: A person employed in a bureaucracy who carries out simple functions and has little or no authority

Flunky: An assistant who does menial work; a toady

Flunktionary: A low-level employee in a business or government agency with minimal authority and an over-inflated sense of self-importance

Your company is doing a multi-million dollar project and you have submitted an invoice. Also required are a variety of waivers, affidavits, and forms. In many cases, the first stop for your paperwork is the desk of someone whose job it is to sort through and make sure everything is there, perhaps also distributing parts to various other people or departments. 

On one of the forms, you neglected to put in the date of the invoice or the title of the person who signed it or perhaps the zip code. Logic would dictate that the person who notices it fills it in, perhaps sending you a note saying, "Hey, just a heads up that you forgot to do this."

Flunktionaries do not do that. 
Flunktionaries call or email you and say that you have to redo the forms and resubmit them. (If you try to ignore them, they will bombard you with emails and voice-mail messages asking where the resubmitted forms are.)
Flunktionaries advise you that your invoice will not be processed until the "error" is corrected.
Flunktionaries believe that he or she has every right to do this because they have complete authority over you, the work your company does, and whether or not you will be paid at all. In fact, they have none.

Some people are actually cowed by flunktionaries and do whatever is demanded, further enabling this behavior. 
Others just don't want to be bothered dealing with them, so they redo whatever is necessary, regardless of the waste of time and expense. 
A few will actually confront the flunktionaries and threaten to go to their superiors. This will sometimes get the flunktionary to renege, but there are also times you actually do have to call their boss. But if you are going to call the boss, do it quickly because you can bet the flunktionary will be running down the hall to let the boss know that you are overreacting and that your paperwork really, really, really is incorrect.

Occasionally, you can be successful in your dealings with flunktionaries. More often than not, however, you will just be frustrated by them. Often, you will wish there was some way to send a zap charge through the phone.

Unfortunately, flunktionaries never seem to get fired.
In fact, sometimes they get promoted.
And then you're really flunktioned!

Slice of Life

  A man asked me yesterday if I wanted to buy a power drill.
  I was sitting in my car, waiting outside a supermarket for Laurie and Chuck, when he walked over and asked if I needed one. Last weekend we actually did, as Chuck's got misplaced in the move and he had to buy a new one. Not so any more.
  He walked over to a few others who were also sitting in their cars, but found no buyers.
  Having exhausted his pool of potential purchasers, he came back to me and asked, "Are you sure you don't need a drill?"
  When I assured him that I was, he asked, "Want me to wash your car?"
  This struck me as an odd idea, since there was nothing he could use to do it anywhere that I could see. I smiled and told him no, thanks.

  He told me he'd been down on his luck. That he'd had a job at a nearby condo community for eight and a half years, but when he took ten vacation days off to visit his ailing mother out of state, he came back to find out that a new supervisor had taken over who told him he was no longer needed.
   He said that he was successful in a suit for unlawful termination, but it got him a cash settlement rather than his job back. That money has since run out and his quest for new employment has been fruitless. "My wife is a good woman," he said, "but it's tough. And," he confessed, "I've been drinking, probably too much sometimes."
  And so, here he was, in a supermarket parking lot, trying to sell his drill and offering to do any odd job (like wash my car) to make some money.

  I wish I had the power to create work for people who want jobs but can't get find one, like this man seemed to. Life shouldn't be so tough here in the greatest country in the world. But it is...
  I gave him a couple of dollars and wished him luck. He thanked me and walked off in search of someone who needed a drill.

San Diego Comic-Con (or Comi-Con)

  USA Weekend has an article titled "The Best of Summer" and it includes the "10 Best Reasons to Go to Comic-Con." Directly under the title, it says "Comi-Con [sic] is July 24-27 in San Diego." We'll ignore the lack of proofreading along with the fact that there are plenty more comic book conventions around the country.
  Among their reasons to attend are the chance to see movie trailers and TV pilots as well as buy exclusive collectibles featuring Star Wars and My Little Pony. Also, you can wear whatever you want (including your homemade superhero costume) and take Instagram-postable pictures of others in costumes. They advise that it is generally okay to say hello to any celebrities you come across, either on the convention floor or at the hotel bar and that even if you don't have tickets to the actual con, there are free events and nightly parties that you can attend. (That last one is important because, if you don't already have tickets, you aren't getting in; they have been sold out for months.)
   Oh, and in case you were wondering, "Frame-worthy art awaits. Pack a sketchbook and visit Artists' Alley, where many folks are happy to draw whatever your heart desires." Hmm, seems to me that most, if not all, of those "many folks" are comic book artists. And comic books are what give Comic-Con its raison d'etre. Or, at least, they did once upon a time.
   These days you would never know. You might think Comic-Con got its name because Don Rickles, Jerry Seinfeld and Joan Rivers used to hang out there. Trying out their new nightclub routines, showing trailers of their new movies and sneak peeks at their TV shows.

Alex Comes for a Stay

Chuck and Rebecca are moving into their new home this weekend, so Alex is staying with us for as couple of days. This evening, he showed "Gappa" how to do a couple of puzzles...

Thoughts About Another CTY Summer

  With my twenty-first summer at CTY about to begin, it is interesting to note that I will have a Teaching Assistant this year who was not even born the first time Laurie and I taught the class. In all those years, there has only been one TA who came back for a second year; she also came back for a third and a fourth and a fifth and eventually started teaching the other section of the class. In fact, this year will be the first that she is not with us.
   As for the rest, some of them went on to teach the class at other sites and some went on to teach other CTY courses. And some, well, I don't know where they went.

  Hundreds of boys and girls have sat in my classroom and written a myriad of poems, short stories, and essays. They've solved the mystery of the glowing green kids, designed packages for the Wonderful Weebil, and acted out radio plays starring a group of high school students living on Long Island in 1969.
  Some of these students had a flair for writing and a way with words. Some of the them had lots of ideas but couldn't figure out how to get them out of their heads and down on the paper. And a few of them were there only because their parents decided that their writing was horrible and they needed to make it better.

  What do the students take away? Each year, I tell my classes that I don't expect them to be able to write a best-selling novel or an Oscar-winning screenplay at the end of the three weeks. We experiment with all types of writing and all I ask is that they do their best with each assignment.  I am hopeful that they all leave with some skill they didn't have when they arrived. One lad answered the question about the most important thing he learned by simply saying, "You must try."

   I also start each session by telling them that writing is not a punishment or a waste of time, despite how some teachers might make it seem. I had a math teacher in high school who assigned, as homework over the Christmas vacation, a report on non-Euclidean geometry. It had to be ten or more typewritten pages. He did this every year, apparently. But he never graded them and never gave them back; we doubted that he even read them. Why, then, give such an assignment? Did he have a grudge against the English and Social Studies teachers, whose job it was to give us writing assignments? Surely, no English teacher ever assigned 1,000 math calculations as vacation homework.
   Yes, they will have to write reports and those dreaded five-paragraph essays throughout their educational careers. but if they start out with a positive attitude about writing, they'll do much better jobs.

   The first class arrives in ten days. And we begin anew...