Monthly Archives: May 2009

Rowland Hall-St Marks Had A Marketing Problem

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The problem was the “saint” in the name, as Utah is the state of the Saints. The Salt Lake private school has changed its name so that it will seem less parochial sounding and easier to market to local families looking for an educational alternative.
Rolly: A sign of the times? – Salt Lake Tribune

Rowland Hall-St. Mark’s School has been a prominent fixture in Utah education for about 130 years. Founded by the Episcopal Church, the school has proudly boasted on uniforms, school communications and signs its motto: “Nihil Longus Deo” Never Far from God.

Until now.

The school began this year to put a little distance between it and God.

A recent letter sent to the Rowland Hall-St. Mark’s community from marketing and publications director Susan Koles noted the new logo, sans the Latin motto, and said that on public displays and official communications, the school will be referred to as Rowland Hall, dropping the St. Mark’s part.

Apparently it’s the “St.” that’s the sticky part.

Koles told me that while school officials will always be proud of its Episcopal tradition St. Mark’s was founded in 1867, Rowland Hall in 1880, and they later merged, it has been independent of the church “for a long time, although we still have an Episcopal chaplain and the school teaches world religions and ethics.”

A marketing firm hired to assess the school’s image found that because of the “St. Mark’s” part of the school name, many people believed it was a parochial school, which it is not. Hence, the move to a more secular public image.

The school’s official name still is Rowland Hall-St. Mark’s, and it will appear that way on diplomas. It just won’t be publicized.

It’s too bad, really. My niece Raeanne graduated from there, and a relative by marriage got married there in their beautiful, English style chapel. My pre-teen encounter with a full-on High Church marriage service is one of the experiences that led me to become an Episcopalian.

When In Rome

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San Clemente Church in Rome must be the real-life model of the church from Ngaio Marsh’s mystery novel, “When In Rome.” Although it’s one of her later books, and not the best of them all, it’s got its points, and the mystery takes place in the Mithraic temple 2 levels below the church.
Underground Fun: European Edition – Boing Boing

What makes San Clemente special is what lies beneath. Take the stairs down from the 12th century church, and you’ll find yourself in a previous incarnation of the Basilica that dates to the 4th century. The light is bad down there, but below you can see a crappy, but passable, picture I took from that level of the church.

But you know what’s even cooler than an old church with an older church underneath it? An even older building underneath that. You can actually go further down, and further back in time, to the ruins of 1st century AD Roman buildings, which were likely the location of a temple to Mithras, a sun god whose mystery cult some scholars think may have heavily influenced early Christian ritual and belief. It’s pretty badass. Unfortunately, the lighting really sucks down there. I’ve got no photos from that level and I wasn’t able to come up with creative commons shots from other sources, either. Although the church’s official Web site has some neat renderings and a few pics that you can see. I didn’t get a guided tour of the Basilica, so I know less about its history. But it’s definitely worth a peek if you’re in Rome and love old, underground things.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | A session with Seeger

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BBC NEWS | Entertainment | A session with Seeger

Dropping yet more sugar into his cafe mocha, Pete Seeger laments the withering of his singing voice: “At my age the banjo-playing is shot too”.

In fact musician Seeger often seems 20 years younger than he is – although these days what excites him is less his music and more the well-being of the US environment.

But this weekend he will quit the Hudson Valley for his native Manhattan and a big concert to celebrate his 90th birthday.

On the bill are Bruce Springsteen, Baez and more than 30 other names.

Affection for Pete was not always so widespread.

In the 1950s he was blacklisted for his former membership of the Communist Party, and his performing career seemed all but over.

Typically, he refused to go away. In 1955 he declined to co-operate with the Un-American Activities Committee which was investigating radical activities of public figures.

…

Vincent Dowd presents Archive on 4: Pete Seeger at 90 on Saturday 2 May at 2000 BST on Radio Four (the programme will be repeated at 1500 on Monday 4 May).

I heard an interview with Seeger on the Beeb this morning (my local public radio station WBEZ has it on between 7am and 8am Sunday mornings) and wanted to find some links for my friend Father Paul, who is a major Seeger fan.

The BBC Radio 4 show is available to listen online for 6 days or so:

Pete Seeger at 90 (requires Real Player)

Vincent Dowd celebrates the life and work of American folk singer and activist Pete Seeger, as he turns 90. Drawing on BBC archives and new interviews, Vincent explores Seeger’s continuing efforts to improve the world through the power of song.

He hears Seeger’s views on a range of issues and his hopes for the future under the leadership of Barack Obama, at whose inauguration he performed.

Featuring some of the musicians who have interpreted Seeger’s songs, including Marlene Dietrich, Joan Baez and Bruce Springsteen, and an unplugged version of This Land is Your Land by Seeger himself.

Thank God It’s Saturday

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I’m not sure how much I should say, or how much I can safely say, about yesterday. So I’ll ease into it by catching up on the entire week.

Last week this time, I was dropping David off at O’Hare, because he was getting ready to go to a technical conference, at which he was making a couple of presentations. He’d worked hard on his slides, and I’d helped him edit them and streamline them generally. At last year’s conference, he was nervous about being up for an award, and he called me in a panic demanding to know if I’d packed his dress pants, which devolved into a conversation we like to call “WHERE ARE MY PANTS???!!1!?”

He found the pants, he wore the suit, he was photographed wearing pants, all was well. So this year, he knew he’d be nervous before his first presentation, so we rehearsed his lines a little when he called after he arrived.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/V-WFgoS_7b0" width="425" height="344" wmode="transparent" /]

So the first part of the week went along pretty smoothly – I watched the Chuck finale and got all Twittery about it and looked at a lot of “Save CHUCK”-themed websites, and then I ordered an official Jeffster T-shirt, apparently. As in, I didn’t know for sure if the NBC.com website had actually registered the sale, because it froze up, but I received an email shipping notice. I watched a lot of clips online, I went to Hulu and watched an episode I’d missed, I was pretty much “all Chuck, all the time” on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. There are a lot of people putting together clever campaigns to get the word out, and there have been some fun (even awesome) fan videos. Here’s a really good one from the www.nbcsavechuck.com website:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/bSMoRE1RqUs" width="425" height="344" wmode="transparent" /]

I really hope it gets renewed – there’s some hope that it might, but do we really need yet another copdrama??

Here’s a better quality video that shows series star Zachary Levi making sandwiches at a Birmingham UK Subway shop, after leading the hungry nerd-horde over from an SF convention. Yes, he washed up and donned the funky plastic-bag gloves. You can see he’s actually working his ass off trying not to slow down the production line, while cracking jokes and keeping the mood going. Fun guy.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/uDtePZ1MFT0" width="425" height="344" wmode="transparent" /]

So that got me to Wednesday, which was choir practice. We had a new person with us, and now we have 2 Cindys. We pulled out some music we played around with last year that never got used for a service, a very “la-la-la-la” arrangement of “How Can I Keep From Singing” that consists of very minimalist, monotone runs that shift around the same few notes, in harmony, at a very fast pace. It was maddening trying to learn it last year, and gratifying to pick it up and not have completely lost the memory of it. When done right, it sounds like closely tuned windchimes, especially at the end.

Thursday, I had a fun day at work, very productive. And also, I got poked on Facebook by an old friend, who had realized that we both knew each other slightly on Second Life. And in fact, we’ve attended at least a few of the same events as part of the General‘s Cafe Wellstone/Donkey Club group. I mean, this is someone who came to my wedding in Boulder, who I’ve known as long as I’ve known David, and who I used to hang out with in the ancient-of-days AOL chat rooms. So of course Thursday night we got together online to tour each other’s “homes” (mine’s a rented room, hers is an entire, frickin’ beautiful sim). As she noted, it’s a small virtual world.

baconflu

I’ll pass on commentary for the week’s news – there was so much going on that I pretty much covered piecemeal via Twitter already. I’ve been following the baconflu story, of course. As it develops, it seems odd that so many people died in Mexico from what seems to be a fairly mild late-season flu, but it may be that the authorities were over-reporting pneumonia cases. Which begs the question, why were the people in that area so vulnerable to respiratory disease?

So that brings us to yesterday, Friday. David was scheduled to return that afternoon, and the original plan was to try to get out early so I could pick him up. For a while there, I thought I was going to get out REAL early, as in, permanently.

About an hour after log-in time, the team leaders started sitting down in the midst of the teams to pass along most unpleasant news: there was to be a “force reduction” that day, and the way it was going to work was they would go to each person, take them to a conference room, and advise them what was happening.

!!!

So all day, everyone was watching everyone else, between calls. Of course, the call volume was massive, because many companies were curtailing travel due to the baconflu, and there were a lot of changes and cancellations. Every time a team leader left his or her desk, all eyes would watch to see if they went to tap someone on the shoulder. It was nerve-wracking in the extreme, as it wasn’t seniority-based. You weren’t necessarily “safe” if you were on any kind of counseling for phone stats or attendance or customer service issues. Now and then, someone would be walked back to the conference room, but I never actually witnessed anyone getting tapped, only the aftermath when people came out to say good-bye to friends.

Every now and then, our team leader would walk into the row to talk to people about stuff totally unrelated to the reduction. At one point, she came to my desk to drop off an amended call-stat form and about gave me a heart attack. “I’m not touching you! Not touching! Don’t worry!” There was a lot of nervous laughter.

In the end, my TL only had to give bad news to one person on the other half of my team, as our half is staffed at a level our client sets. We’d already had a kind of reduction earlier by not replacing a member who transferred to another team. But several people I know were tapped, and came over to say good-bye.

In one case, I was not all that shocked or surprised, although I did feel sad for a former teammate who was always cheerful and kind-hearted, if not all that detail-oriented. I was shocked that someone I didn’t know as well as I should was let go, who had almost 2 decades of service with the company. I mean, that second one really made my mouth dry up, because I realized that nobody was really all that “safe.” I started going over stuff, like a tardy that I got marked up on recently, and a debit memo I’d picked up on an exchange, and a rash of accuracy errors (really minor ones, that I’d reduced significantly). I was also worried that I’d been racking up too much overtime, owing to being a “closer,” and wondered if they’d wait until the end of the shift only to be handed “the packet.”

Everyone was feeling the stress – some of my current teammates mentioned repeatedly that they couldn’t focus on what they were doing, and had repeatedly made the same entries and re-checked the same things multiple times. My stomach hurt (muscle tension) all day, and still hurts a little today.

Finally, the phone lines became so busy that we could forget to worry – we were much too busy to stop and be told we didn’t have a job anymore. At some point, the tension lightened and a rumor went around that the last person in the reduction had been informed, and the nightmare was over for the rest of us (although in this economy, it was just beginning for “the reduced”).

At the end of the day, there were a series of conferences with our local VP for a wrap-up, so that people could ask questions, get answers that were a little more definitive than the rumors that had been sweeping through the cube-rows, and decompress a little. The sense of survivor’s guilt/relief was palpable; everyone laughed a little too loudly or smiled a little too brightly at the friendly small-talk made by our exec and another company person who was there for the day’s unhappy event. When I logged off for the day, I’d taken 25 calls… another teammate took 27… and an agent who used to be my TL on a previous team took a whopping 58 calls. She must have caught all the short, quick, “I have to cancel my trip” calls that we got, as a lot of meetings next week had been pushed back. I got stuck with a fair number of fix-it calls, changes, and unprofiled people making arrangements for training or interviews. All of which take more time on the phone, because they’re not cut-and-dried reservations along the lines of “I need to go from [city] to [city] on [date] at [time] via [airline], with specific car and hotel, then return on [date] at [time].”

I had several hairy things to change on Southwest, for example, that took half an hour start to finish because of the peculiarities of their interface with our reservation system. As in, a phone call is required, and it’s necessary to sit through their jokey and annoying “in-call hold entertainment.” It was a ten-minute hold: I wasn’t ready to dig my eyeballs out with a spork by the end, but I was eyeing the available cutlery. Once that was done, I had a number of “smooth” calls, with no “I’m a VIP stuck at the airline counter, what the hell are you going to do about it right now?” calls.

David had let me know he’d grabbed a cab with our favorite guy and would await me at home. It was such a relief to have him back, after all the baconflu crap earlier in the week and after Friday’s horror show.

After catching up with each other, we went out for sushi (yay! sushi!) and had a quiet evening “in” after that – I was online, celebrating May Day with great tunes, and David was discussing the conference and his presentations with his listie contacts.

Although today was gorgeous, we had to drop David’s car off for scheduled maintainance, so after lunch and book-buying we’re hanging out, just being “at home.” About when I might like to take a refreshing nap, it’ll be time to go back and ferry David to his car, and get groceries. At least I got all the crap and garbage and junk cleaned out of my own car – I even vacuumed it! And part of the garage! Woo-hoo! Saturday chores are neato!

I just thank God it’s Saturday, because it’s not Friday anymore.