[00:00:00] Foreign.
[00:00:05] You're listening to casual talk radio where common sense is still the norm whether you're a new or long time listener. We appreciate you joining us today. Visit
[email protected] and now here's your host, Ler. A very merry Christmas for those that celebrate that holiday. Of course, we're at Christmas Eve today and Christmas is upon us tomorrow. Snows out on the ground. It's a bit chilly. Not every place gets snow, but a lot have snow and they're enjoying what we have. And of course, depending on your religious beliefs, you celebrate in different ways. So I'm not going to presume that you are any one religion. I don't think it matters. That's why I say if you celebrate, because some may not. But I do think it's a time because you get time off work. Everybody does. I do think it's an opportunity for you to reflect, think about what went well and what didn't go well in the year. And I'm not just talking about in your personal, I'm talking about in the larger grand scheme. Right. We, we know that we have a new president elect coming in office in 2025. That election wrapped up, it wrapped up in a blowout, effectively. We know that the big picture of the country is that everybody's financially struggling. This is what we do know. And we know about the shootings that are happening. We know that we're not out of the woods yet. We know stuff's still too expensive. There's a lot that we understand. Is it better? No.
[00:01:35] It's certainly not as bad as 2021 and 2022. So I want to be clear, especially 2021. I would argue 2021 was terrible for everybody. And I'm, I'm not going to sit and say that it's better than what it was, but not by long. Because although 2021 had these spikes of just absolute unacceptable treatment of people and although people had to make hard decisions at that time that you probably don't have to do now, the job market still screwed up. And I'll be talking about one aspect that has been impacted by some of these decisions in today's episode. And it's worse. It's bad news and I'll tell you why in a second.
[00:02:15] But the price of food is still skyrocketing. We're seeing a lot of recalls of food which is not good. We're seeing that there's a darth D E a R T h of accessibility throughout.
[00:02:29] So I'm gonna, I'm gonna make the statement that it's not better than 2021. You would have to have made significantly more money. That assumes that the companies are coming out of pocket to increase your pay. Most companies are not doing that. I don't know if you read or heard about Kaiser and those workers going on strike. It's mostly some of the mental health care on strike. And the. One of the gals made a really good case.
[00:02:56] She said, during COVID we were treated as essential personnel. Essential was a designation by the government for those companies to justify them staying open and forcing workers to come in. Obviously, if you're in the medical field, you kind of have to do that. What the essential worker moniker really was designed to do was to open the door for companies like Kaiser and others to get access to money, the PPP loans and other types of loans, as well as grants and everything else. But bottom line, it was so that you could, you could justify staying open. You could justify forcing your people to come into the office. So a lot of different. Like there was a joke around about stadiums for pro wrestling down in Florida being designated as essential so that the wrestlers. We're talking fake, right? Scripted, not fake. Scripted. Wrestling was designated essential because of the idea that entertainment is how we're gonna deal with.
[00:03:56] So that's what the strike that. The justification she was saying. It's like, how can you say we were essential during COVID but now you're not saying we're essential for what we really need to do, which is to increase how much money we make and, you know, have access to these benefits and all these things. It's like, if we're essential, should you not be willing to do these things? And apparently Kaiser pushed back and said, we'll offer this and that's our final. And so the strike's still going on as I record this. But it doesn't surprise me as I've. I've been negative about Kaiser, I've been negative about bank of America, I've been negative about a lot of different organizations that seem Wells Fargo over time. So it didn't, it didn't surprise me that they did. It's big business, you know, they're. They're trying to push and say, this is what we want to do, what we want to do. Now, just to put some framework around that before I go to my next topic, the strike. There was a strike last year, October. And in that strike, they got a 21% raise. It's 20, 23. Look that up, 21% raise. It staggered over four years. The one that I'm referring to, though, is a more recent strike that was going on. And a lot of the. Again, mental health was the target this time. Different than what was before.
[00:05:14] What I was surprised at was there are still negotiations as. Like today. As of today, there's still apparently going to be. Continue the negotiations and everything else. And there's. There were. Some patients came out. This surprised me. Some patients came out. They said Kaiser did offer us a different provider, but we don't want a different provider. We want our provider, but our provider. We try to reach out and they say, I can't, I can't. I can't do it. In some cases, though, the provider said, I gotta cross the line and go back to work. Because I don't know. I'm not confident I can stay on the picket line this long. We don't know how long it's gonna take. So there's an anxiety aspect going on to the point the state of California started getting involved, saying, look, you need to start negotiating here and accept this proposal. Like California now, California, as radical as they are, they're pushing to get Kaiser to accept the proposal. Because they understand the impact of this strike going so long. But they also understand that what's being asked for is not unreasonable. What they're asking for is if we're essential personnel, you should be willing to take care of us. And what we're asking for is not unreasonable because you give it. Apparently they give it to others that are not in the mental health space. So why is it they're okay getting it? They called out janitors. They said, yeah, janitors get those benefits. I think pension was part of it. Janitors get it, but we don't. Why does that make any sense? And trust me, I'm right there with them. Because if it's true that janitorial staff on deck is getting these benefits, you're not giving it to your mental health people. You got your priorities jacked up. And chances are, what likely happened. I'm speculating, spitballing what likely happened is at some point in the past, somebody thought it was a good idea to explicitly list certain types of roles that would be eligible for this benefit and did not call this mental health role out. And it didn't fully exist as a defined role at the time. That's speculation. I have no way to know for sure. Ultimately, though, the bottom line is that the state of California being on their side, saying, this is something you need to get on board and take this offer because it's A fair offer. I thought that was. That was surprising because California, they're nuts over there.
[00:07:19] So that's out there. So that's why I say, I don't say that we're better off than what 2021 was doing. I certainly think we made progress, but we're not better than what we were 2021, I don't think by a long shot. We got a long way to go, and I don't know how quick we're gonna get there. Meanwhile, Donald Trump's talking about stuff he's gonna do in the New year. You know, he's talking about restarting the Keystone pipeline. He's talking about ending the war in Ukraine and Russia. He's talking about buying Greenland. And there's a whole backstory on that one I won't bore you with. But suffice to say that they see value in owning Greenland. He's talked about having Canada be one of the United States. He's talking all sorts of radical stuff. And mind you, he's just talking a lot of this stuff's not going to come true. But the point is, is that there's kind of this anticipation to see what's going to happen under his regime. Certainly with Joe Biden and all the stuff he's doing. He's pardoning murderers and all kinds of crazy stuff. He's not helping the case. The guy's not helping the case. He's going to go down. I'm saying he's going to go down in history as one of the worst presidents we had because of the stuff he's doing and the stuff he did. Remember this is a guy went up on the air and threatened you because you didn't do what he wanted you to do, which was not ethical in what he wanted you to do, caused you to lose your job in some cases. There were people that got fired. We're talking military people, we're talking private sector. People got fired because they chose, you know, my body, my choice. They made a choice of their own, and people are getting fired over this, or they refused to hire them or they refused to let them in the building. That was the reality of that whole regime. That's why I said 2021 was so bad. The reason I say it's not very much better is because Joe Biden's still in charge. And the whole debt deal, we almost shut down the government. They were able to settle on a lesser bill, but we now have the debt ceiling conversation. So it's going to get. My point is it's going to get worse in the short term until and unless Donald Trump can do something about it. So I don't say that we're better off financially. I think the economy is in a very bad spot. It's going to be hard for him to course correct and get things back on track.
[00:09:17] So as part of this Doge, right. This Department of Government Efficiency led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, as they're looking for different opportunities to save money, one thing that came up was the inordinate amount of people working from home in the federal government. Now, I want to speak to this because I have direct experience from government, not federal, but government as well as working from home.
[00:09:38] Working from home is not for everybody. For main. The point is it's not for everybody. The main thing, if you have a job that does not necessitate you being in an office, if you're being forced to go to an office, you're just wasting money. And if it's the federal government, that's your taxpayer money that being burned. The counter was, well, we have all these empty buildings. This goes to common sense. And what they're trying to do is they're trying to okie dokie. Because realize they don't need to keep the building. They can let the building go and that would let go of that money being spent. The fact that it's empty is because you're keeping it, because you're hoping to ram them back in the office. But people don't seem to understand the downstream impact of having everybody cramming into an office, especially when those offices are always in urban core. Downtown. You're talking smog. So we talk about all this climate change that we want to try to solve and yet we want to increase the amount of smog back to the levels it was because that will spike the smog. Because having so many people work from home minimizes how much they're sitting in traffic. Traffic is not being solved, especially because they're not adding more roads. The roads that we do have are falling in disrepair. That's happening because of how much traffic is going all over those roads on a regular basis.
[00:10:50] Traffic itself in of itself causes an impact on emergency services. They can't get to the patient or the person because they're jammed up in traffic and there may not be a way around it.
[00:11:01] You take that, you take the fuel, the dependence on fossil fuels. Some people come back and say, well, get an EV. You don't understand because the EVs are starting. I stress starting at $40,000. That's not sustainable in a world where many people are struggling to make ends meet as it is. There's. There was another article, talked about renters. People who still rent are more likely to fall behind on credit card bills. Why? Because you have to prioritize if you're paying. But, but if you're paying rent, that's not benefiting you other than a roof over your head. It's not like you're building equity on that. So then you have to choose right. Your rent's going to go up, they're going to bump it whenever they feel like it, because that's what they do. Your credit card bill, now you have to float. You may not. You may be living check to check. There's all sorts of reasons why that's happening. The point is they, they can't sustain adding more debt to their existing situation. So this narrative of just get an EV makes no damn sense. It doesn't make any sense and it's the wrong answer. So eliminate evs. They don't exist. We jumped, skipped straight over hybrids, which is a bad decision because that's where we should be right now is hybrids should be dominating the road. Less reliance on fossil fuels, increase towards green without going extreme. We didn't do it. We leapfrogged over it. We leaped to SUVs and all this crap that people can't afford. That started $50,000. They can't afford these things, so they're going to keep driving their beater until the wheels fall off. And in some cases they'll still drive it when the wheels off the thing. That's the reality. So you're asking to keep smog all over the place. You're asking to keep bad traffic conditions, you're asking to keep clunkers on the road. You're asking to continue blocking emergency services. And the people who are squawking about it, many of those people are, once their boss is forcing them to come into the office and sit in a cubicle and eat. And one and a half hour commute, one Direction won't let them work from home. And so they're jealous about it. They're pissed off that their boss won't do it. So how come you get to do it? I had one person talk about, you know, you should be forced to take a shower too, just for the deep, deep, deep. As if people who work from home literally are just bums that don't do anything. As if we don't go to the stores, as if we don't Take the kids to the whatever. As if we don't go out in the evenings. As if we don't date. So we don't do anything. We don't do anything, right? We just stay and we don't shower, we don't bathe, we don't cook, we don't clean, we don't do anything. Let me level set. If you're here at home, right? Let's say you're a couple and you have one kid. If you're here at home, your kid most likely is at school, right? So while your kid's at school, if one of you is working from home, the other one does not. Okay? That means one person's at the house, one person's not. There's security benefits to that.
[00:13:45] Chances are you're not working or engaged eight hours a day. It doesn't matter if you're at home or in the office, you're not engaged eight perfect hours a day. Zero. The eight hours is the fallacy. That's the problem.
[00:13:59] Every company goes off the narrative of an eight hour workday. But as I've stressed multiple times as a manager myself repeatedly, nobody is engaged a full eight hours. You just aren't. Every company fails or they're afraid, I should say, to simply focus on task based management. A task based management structure simply says there are tasks that need to be done. Each task has a deadline and I'm going to measure to make sure you hit that deadline. Where does the deadline come from? It either is mandated by the end client or the customer, whoever is dictating it, or you base it on the level of skill for the person you put on it. So as an example, I have a person who I manage their work. I don't manage them as a person, I manage their work and I try to give them things that help them learn, but they're extremely slow at what they do. There's nothing I could do about that. They're not on my level, right? I'm over 20 years in the business, this person's brand new, effectively only have less than a year of development experience. So I have to understand they're going to take inordinately longer than I do. The problem is they take even longer than my extreme estimate. So I already know they're slacking off. It doesn't matter if they're working from home or not because I've been in structures where we're in the office and I've got the same slackers, people that sit and browse Facebook, people to sit and browse TikTok and Instagram and all that. It doesn't matter if you're in the office or your home. Slackers are slackers. When you have a task based structure, there's a task, there's a deadline and you measure it. If they meet and it doesn't matter about eight hours versus three, it's task deadline. Did you meet it? Period. No company wants to do that. Do you know why? Because in there with the salary flsa, right? FLSA standard says you. We can't. This was the lobby. We can't track time. So we have to have this salaried tier. We can't track the hours. It's not sustainable for a computer worker. Let's say it's not sustainable. So we have to have flexibility. They still make you do a timesheet though. And in many cases they force you to fill it out as eight hours. They do that because if they were audited by the government, they're going to get punished because they know nobody works a full eight hours. It's a scam. It's all a scam. We know it's a scam since it's a scam. My point is it doesn't matter if you work from home or you work at the office. It means nothing if you're meeting with clients because you have to. Let's say you're a car dealer, right? Even car dealers don't necessarily have to work in the thing. It just, it just benefits them, right? Put a face on it, quick walk, paperwork, sure. But even they don't necessarily need to. The point is if there's benefit in you doing so absolute fragolutely. But if you don't need to, you don't need to. If you do task based, more would get done with less people and less hours, less tracking you have to do. If you get the job done, you got the job done. If you don't get the job done, you get disciplined until you do it. And if you never do it, you get fired. It's simple and that's how it used to be. And then when the FLSA started to really hit a fever pitch and salaried really became a thing and that was the, that was the one thing I hate about being working in technology is that they're all treated as salaried because they can. When I was working hourly, I was in the call center for years. I was working hourly. I loved it because I controlled the time. I chose to work the eight. I could, I could have left at six. I just wouldn't get paid. And they didn't flack at it. They said, hey, look, as long as you clock in and clock out, we don't really care. It's up to you. If you don't work eight, you just won't get paid eight. Okay, that's cool if you work overtime, which sometimes they restricted. But if you work overtime, cool, we'll pay the overtime pay because it would help us out. We process more apps or whatever it is in salary. It's a scam. They can call you at 1am in the morning talking about something's down, wake you up. This is why I don't, by the way. That's one of the many reasons I choose not to do a cell phone because I was not going to allow them to wake me up. I do have a phone connected for the client to be able to call and there have been times that I would, you know, I get called, but I said I'm not going to be monitoring it 24 7. If I don't answer it, leave a message and I'll get back to you. That's the understanding. And I can count on one hand the times they've needed to do that. But that's why I don't do cell phones. I actually had a. During this is during the pandemic. Now I'd applied to a company down in Nevada. You might have heard of it. The MGM grand applied. It's all good. They said, yeah, we'll. We'll get you set up. Okay. Sounded they presented as one thing, said we're not doing contract, we're doing full time. Okay, no problem. I'll work full time. I don't really care as long as I work from home. Yes, it's from home. Okay, cool.
[00:18:34] We're starting to the setup paperwork. They're talking about the i9. And if you don't know, the i9 process has changed. It used to be for decades. It used to be a person had to look at the piece of paper, look at your driver's license, look at your social card, physically look at them. And then you fill out a form. But every company, you had to look at it because it never was modernized for a remote work era. So I'm telling them that it had changed for the pandemic. I'm telling them the standards change. DHS specifically said you could do the i9 remotely. You just need to make sure you see it over camera. And it's fine. We just need to make sure you see it. And then later, after we open things up, you can choose to do physical. We still don't care. As long as you saw it over a video and you document it, it's fine. We just want to make sure that you have eyes on it. But it doesn't need to be a physical piece of paper. So I'm telling them, okay, let's go ahead and do this, and I'll, you know, schedule up with the HR person. We'll do the. No, it needs to come into office. What are you talking about, come to the office? You don't need to do that. It's right here. It says you can do digital E verifies, and I'm E verify setup. Like, if I go E verify, it'll automatically pass every time. So you could do E verify. And it says if you do E verify, you don't have to do this physical review step at all. You fill out the form, but you don't have to do the physical review step at all. They wouldn't do it. They just fought me, fought me, fought me. And then we finally got that figured out. One of the HR people worked with me, and we got it figured out. And then they wanted me to do fingerprints. I'm like, what are you talking about, fingerprints? And it's because. For the workers that are. Because it's a casino, right? For the workers that are going to be in the. On the casino floor, near the casino floor, the cage, anywhere near money, you have to do this criminal background check. And it's fingerprinted to do that. I'm like, I'm working in back office. It's. It. I would never even touch the Florida. Well, you might work a solution for the cage. No, that's. The software has nothing to do with that. It's a. It's. It's finance and accounting. I'm in back office. I'm not even in the same building. What are you talking about? But they forced everybody to go through it just in case. That is what a lot of companies do. They do all sorts of stuff they don't need to do just in case of a doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. That's why there's such a push to get people back in the office. Because, well, it's just easier. We keep the. We have the office building. Let's just cram in the office. It's easier to do meetings. Of course, the meeting's a waste of time because it's a meeting to have a meeting to talk about another meeting. Waste. Have a bunch of cubicles, which is a waste. You're spending money on the cubicles, you're spending money on the utilities, you're increasing the climate impact. You're doing everything negative on this. But that's what they're used to. They're not used to the remote world. And so they're not willing to adapt how they manage tasks to adopt the remote work and save money. They're not willing to take that chance. That's the flaw. The other piece of this is keeping all that real estate allows them to get access to funding and financing and aid and they want to keep that money stream. Deductibles, Right? They can deduct a lot of stuff from the taxes. That's what they don't want to lose. They don't get that if you don't spend it, you don't have to worry about deducting in the first place. It doesn't really matter. You can get a freaking charity if you have to. There's ways to still deduct if that's your big concern. None of the businesses are willing to adapt, to really embrace remote work. So when I saw the DOGE talking about cramming it back in the office, then I saw, I think it was Oklahoma said all right, as a February, all back in the office. And I swear, if I were advising any of those workers, I say, quit, bro, Quit. Straight quit. Be like, no, you will not do that. I will not. Because it's a bait and switch. If you agree to certain terms at a certain time and that was the conditions of the employment you accept in that role and they change it, I'll be like, screw you. That's exactly what I did for mg. That's exactly what. There was a different company during the pandemic. It was a different company. It was a call center and everything is fine. I went to the training, onboarding was call center. And I'm used to call center. There's tools sucked, biting carrots, whatever. We get like a week out from going on the floor. They send out a notice that says, okay, we're going to start requiring you show proof of your vax status. And I'm like, screw you, bro. That's none of your business whether I am or am not. And I'm not going to show it because I did not accept this role for that condition at all. It was not in the initial offer letter. It was, it was never stated it was going to show up because if it had, I would have never applied in the first place. So I was able to get away from the normal term that says, you know, if you quit a job, you don't get unemployment. Here I was able to override that because it's changing the job terms at the last minute. You can't just, that's what I'm telling people. You can't just change the terms of work at the last minute and be cool with it. But a lot of workers have gotten in this groove of thinking that the employer can do whatever the f they want. They can't. If they change the nature of the terms of the employment after you've already accepted a role and none of that was stated of this could change that. We might change the da. Da they didn't call it out. You might have a case. And I would say, no, screw you, I'm not doing that. So I have said not every role is good for a remote. And that's because some roles, you need to have the face to face contact. But if you're just doing regular development work, software development work, no, it's not going to benefit you to be remote. I would argue that the, the kind of person that really needs to be remote is the kind of person where they can't think for themselves. And there are a lot of people that can't think for themselves. I just had an interaction and this numb nut couldn't understand the concept of a screenshot. I'm sorry. If you're that inept, you probably should be in an office where somebody can walk up to your desk and tell you what to do and basic things of how to develop web and how to develop software. How does that. I knew he was taught in college, but he's feigning ignorance. And he's feigning ignorance because he's working from home. And he knows that he has that excuse because he's a, he's a critical worker. So. But on my side, no, I'm nose to the grind. I'm delivering for the client and the client loves me. And if I leave, everything's going to get screwed up again and that person's going to be very pissed off. And then the person I report up to is going to have a hard time. The only reason I stay is because I like the client. But one of the terms of my condition of working was it is fully remote. Okay? So if that changes, if they decide to do the same thing, say, you know, okay, we're going to do this remote like Oklahoma. No, it's like deuces. We're not staying. We're not doing that. And you owe me another 40,000 bucks that you haven't paid me yet. So I'll just wait for that check to just keep flowing. And in the meantime, I'll go and, you know, do something else because I'm not going to work back in a cubicle. I refuse. I don't mind working in an office where I truly have my own office with a door and hole nine. And as long as the place is in, you know, suburbia, parking's free. So I'm not doing that paid parking crap where I'm an employee and I gotta pay for park. I'm not doing that anymore. There's things that I will not agree to anymore because I'm sorry, I am an asset. I'm not just one of your slaves. I'm an asset. And as an asset, I know my worth. As I know my worth, there's things I will not agree to because I don't have to, right? So I do minus a niche platform. So it's difficult to staff for. So I've got some, I got some swag I can push back on stupid terms. And a lot of them have stupid terms. I don't want to do that. I would rather, I would love to. If anybody's a business owner, I would love to find a company. Like I don't want to be a business owner forever. You know, at some point I want to kind of settle down and get back into the full to get the benefits. But what I'd love is a company that wants to master the art of task based management. They're trying to get away from the whole forced eight hours. They're trying to get away from the forced time sheets. They want to get to task based management. They want to actually get stuff done. It's not about how long you're sitting in the chair, it's about what you do when you're there. They want to get to effective people. They want to be agile and nimble in how they deliver to the customer. They want customers that love their workers. They want people who are go getters. They're. We're not dealing with a bunch of people who just get offended when you call them out on their bs. They want somebody who's a note, no nonsense, let's get it done. I'd love to find a company that's like that. I just don't think I ever will. And that's why I started my own business, because I knew nobody knows how to do this stuff. So I'll just do my own stuff. Stack chips, buy a place, stack more chips. And then it's something maybe someday I'll find what I want. Because again, I would love to go back to full, but it's got to be right. It is. I. I don't even have to be home all the time, but I'll choose when I come in the office and it's based on me dictating. I need to for some reason. Maybe I need to meet with a client. It's better whiteboard and that. Sure. And I'm calling shots on it. Sure. I choose when I come to meetings, it's not just because somebody feels like doing it because they like meetings. It is. We need to meet because we need to, you know, sit around a table and plan or strategize a project or something. Sure. You need to be in suburbia. Why? Because I'm not going to be fighting traffic down to your urban core. I'm not doing that anymore. One and a half hour one way in Seattle, Washington. I'm not doing that again. In Oregon, taking an hour to go six miles. I'm not doing that again. In Colorado, taking 45 minutes one way and it's seven miles. I'm not doing that again. Like, I'm not doing it again because there was no reason to continue doing this. It's stupid. You're. You're damaging the environment. If you really believe in the climate crisis, you're damaging the environment by supporting that crap, you're increasing reliance on fossil fuels. And no, the answer is not EVs. We need to have a middle ground, which is if your job does not require you being in office, stop forcing them in an office. Change the, Change the game, change the paradigm. We don't need to have meetings all over the damn place. If you do, there's teams, there's slack, there's all sorts of. That's another thing, right? Don't try to force me to stay on Slack 8 hours just so you can prove that I'm working. Because A, it doesn't prove I'm working and B, I'm not going to be micromanaged. The call center, one, they sent a camera and you had to have the camera set up trained on you for eight hours because they didn't believe you're sitting in the chair. We're not doing this. No. That's what we're not doing. That's. That kind of micromanagement is a lack of understanding about what does productivity mean. Because it doesn't matter if you're in the office or you're sitting at home. It's about tasks. If we're a call center okay. It's about the calls you take. That's all monitored in the phone system. So it doesn't matter if I'm sitting in the chair. I should be able to walk around my house with a wireless phone and handle the customer's call. What's the problem? They don't understand that. Let me show you. I can be just as effective and then change the game. None of them are willing to do that. If so, if one ever does, I'm all game. So for the feds and everybody else trying to and these other states trying to cram people back in the office, no, it's the wrong answer. It's not going to solve anything. It's certainly not going to save any money. You're going to see the price of stuff go up more because you're going to have to spend money for those buildings. You're going to have an impact on traffic, you're going to have an impact on climate. You're impacting everything when you do that instead of embracing it and understanding when and why. It's the best answer for certain types of roles. So I am, you know, I'm not trying to tell people what's right or wrong about for them, for their unique situation. So again, some people are not suited for remote. I've worked with many who should not be remote. But that leads to the final problem, which is managers that want to try to say, you know, like the whole teachers in school, okay, if one kid screws up, then everybody's got to stay up to class. No, you tell that kid to stay after class. If you got one screw up, force that dude to come to the office every day until he shows you or she shows you that you're, you're getting better, you're adapting, you're improving, you're doing something better. Force them to go in the office. Anybody who's doing their work, leave them alone.
[00:30:02] And then that's because they do that because, well, it's not fair. What are you talking about? It's not fair? What's not fair is telling people who are effective where they are to do something contrary to that simply because somebody else is a blatant screw up. You're punishing everybody for the inactions of this slacker over here. That's unfair. We should not try to treat everybody the same. We should cater to the people who are your top performers. Could you imagine on some football team and I don't watch the sport, but on some football team you got somebody who is your star quarterback, they're your Star player. Everybody's talking about them. The news is all over them. They're the absolute. They're perfect in every single way. And then you got this one slacker off over here. Can't show Harley up. Keeps dropping, keeps missing. And so since that happens, you take your star quarterback and you say, we're going to dock everybody's pay. That quarterback's gonna leave.
[00:30:55] Okay, that's what we should do. If you are the star quarterback, you have power. And yes, there's risk to that because you have to. If you don't have another role lined up, you may have to take that. That gap in, you know, and pay that you receive. Like, in my situation, I'm kind of fortunate because they're behind in paying me, ironically. So since they're behind, and I'm pretty sure at this point it's probably about, you know, $30,000. I think I said 40, but I think it's about $30,000 because there's another check coming, presumably this week. But, you know, so let's say $30,000. Well, $30,000. Geez, at that rate, I could sustain my current spend level for at least a year. So I wouldn't even need it. Like, if I stopped right now. If I stopped right now, I wouldn't even need to work for another year. I wouldn't. I would not have to. I would want to. I wouldn't have to. Now at that point, I would probably consider doing something else in the interim. Like, I would probably, you know, going to the crypto side or something else to bridge it. But I would just take a Gap break. You know, just relax and say, okay, let's just do this over here. I thought about getting into retail. I thought about getting into some. Back into retail. I should say to do something else, Invent some product, do something else that generates money and get away from the grind. Because I'm. I just said I'm not going to do the grind if you're not going to play by the rules and adapt with the times. And that's, you know, for me, it's funny, people tell me I'm anti tech because I don't have a smartphone. No, I'm not anti tech at all. I've got tech all around me. I have. I'll. I'll just break down the stories I close. I just bought a bunch of power generator guys. You know, I've got one. Let's see, one, two, three, four. Four of them. That's four. One of them. That. That does my phone system. The phone system is VoIP. And so it's tied to the phone jack but it's voip based. And there's two of those phone services. One that's for the business contact, one that's for my personal contact, that's my means of phone period. And then I've got a digital, I've got two digital services that do, you know, one can do or they both can do text messages, one can do fax. So I've got, I've got phone, phone, phone, phone, phone, phone and one power thing, type that. Then I got one that I just bought. He takes care of my Internet wireless. And I had to get a dedicated unit because of how much that uses. I have two different primary Internet providers and one backup data 5G. So two Internet providers, one's cable, one fiber and then the 5G. Right. And then wireless hotspots, networks, they're all separate networks and I think I got five of those right now. Why do I have five? Because there's one for the primary, one for the customer, one for smart devices. Ha ha ha.
[00:33:33] Let's see. So X20 smart devices deco is for business, fiber is for, you know, personal.
[00:33:42] Let's see, X20 Deco Fiber, Area 51 is a VPN based network.
[00:33:53] Yeah and then.
[00:33:55] Yeah and then spider, and then spider is the mothership network. So I have tons of networks. I have a NAS, it's got I think 13 terabytes of, of storage at NAS. I've got you know, discs and drives and all sorts of stuff. I got a, the sound, I'm staying right at sound bar. Two different computer towers, six different laptops, personal laptops, a work laptop. I've got two TVs now I had four. So I've downsized this TV. He's I think he's 75 inch. And then I got a 55 Bravia. I just put a weather station in off the wall that I wired myself. I've got, I'm wiring a jack, a phone jack into the great room and ethernet wiring.
[00:34:40] Then I've got another of these power dudes down on the sump pump. So the sump pump is completely off grid. Essentially these, or I should say off peak priced. So the power dude does the sump during the day that's 600 watts as it runs. It runs when it rains all the time. But the power guy takes all that one. And then overnight during off peak pricing it charges itself back up, same as this main one that covers all my base guys.
[00:35:07] The point is anybody talk about anti tech? No, I'm not anti tech. I'm smart about tech. The tech should serve me, not the other way around. I don't do tech that tries to control me. That's why I don't do smartphones, because smartphones control you. I do tech that allows me to control and dictate and as a result I have a lot of it. Because I'm not going to like, you know, cameras. I have a regular digital camera. It's supposed to be a vlog camera, but I use this radio digital camera. I don't use phones or tablets or any of that stuff for photos. And people are like, why not? Because you're, you're an idiot if you do that. Because you're sending your stuff up to the cloud and who knows what happens to it On a camera. There's no Internet, it's offline. I control the photo, I control where it goes. Not that I take anything scandalous, but the point is I don't want things going out of my control. The, the tech should not serve, the text should not control you. The text should serve you. That's how I implement tech. My TV is not. It's a smart tv, but it's not connected to the Internet. Absolutely not. I have an antenna. The antenna is sitting up in the window and it ties and I can get TV signal if I need to, but it does not need Internet. I don't do the streaming unless if it's like a fight on prime tv. I am very studious about technology implementation, but I'm not anti tech. I'm smart about tech because I work tech for a living. I told that story because a lot of people don't get. When you're somebody like myself that just. I use tech for. It needs to serve me. That's why it works better for me to work remotely because it means that I can support the customer. I don't have to. I'm never distracted on my phone. I'm never distracted streaming. I don't do TikTok. I don't do social media. I don't do these things. Those people who, whether they're at home or in the office, those people, they're so, they're zombies, right? They're so slaves to their tech, they lose productivity. And then when you ask them to do basic, simple things, they, they suck at it. They're not on my level. They're not on my level, not because I'm smarter than them, but because I will not let tech control me as they do, as everybody else does. Which is why the conversation around remote is silly because it has nothing to do with where you sit. It has everything to do with the fact that we are surrounded in an era before cell phones. We didn't have this productivity question happen. You didn't have. You might have the whole water cooler stuff, but you didn't have people because there was no Internet, not like we have now, no web. We didn't have people browsing and scrolling and all that. It was just a very simple time, you know, and people got stuff done and it was easy for them to comprehend basic tasks to get done. And it was a better time. We're not there. And so now people are talking about going away from remotes because they think that you're more productive when you're not. It's not about where you sit. It's about people are zombies to the tech and the tech controls them to the point they're not productive because they're slaves to the tech, whatever that tech is. It doesn't matter where you are with the tech. If you love all things Amazon, you know, you have an Amazon DoD and an Amazon Echo show, and you have all these smart devices and, you know your smart doorbell ring. And you have all these smart things, right, that control you. They control you. They constantly are monitoring, watching you. You're like, okay, don't you have a security system? Yeah, not in the home. It's on the perimeter. It's outside. It should not be. The camera should not be trained on me. I'm not the criminal. It should be perimeter, outside doors, access points, windows. Absolutely not in the home.
[00:38:36] Who cares? By the time you're in the home, it's already too late. Who cares if I film you? I want to see that you're on approach and you're about to do something or you're at the door trying to do something. That's how you catch people in the act and then do something about it. If I were not working from home, guess what happens? I have to trust that that's happening. Okay? I filmed them. They get inside the home, they take whatever they're gonna do, they're long gone. I'm stuck here in this cubicle simply because some manager has to have somebody seen. See somebody's head over the cubicle wall. That's the reality, right? So we're at a different time, right? Crime is spiking. Everything's spiking. So I'm sounding tinfoil, But I'm telling you the breakdown of why it's stupid to force people to go in the office that don't need to be right. I've been in situations where this happened. In Oregon, I went to the office and I had cameras set up inside because I had to go to the office. So I, I watch and there's like, okay, the renting. Why say it's a scam? Yeah, we got to come do an inspection and we're doing this repair work or whatever the f. Okay. So now I'm watching these guys and they're going places they're not supposed to go. And I don't know if they're taking something. And that's no, because you now are a slave. You're a slave to the tech, you're a slave to the property owner, you're a slave to everybody else. You have no control over anything. I said I need to take back control. And I will take back control by saying I have a skill that's in high demand. Because I have a skill that's in high demand. I'm happy to, you know, you can pay me and I'll give you that skill. But we do it on my terms. And my term is I need to work from home because there's no value in having me in the office. I'm more productive just nose to the grind, getting stuffed up.
[00:40:09] At some point I'm going to get sick of doing the work just because it's not that I don't like it. It's, nobody likes work, but I'm going to get sick of doing it. And when I do that, I got to find something else that tickles my fancy. You know, I'd love to get back to reading. I got a bunch of nostalgia based stuff. I want to get back to reading and get back to relaxing and not have to worry about these things.
[00:40:28] But anybody listening out who works from home, you're probably thinking the same thing I was thinking, which is, if you don't need to be in the office, why be in the office?
[00:40:40] If you like being in the office, then be in the office. There's nothing wrong with certain people being in the office. Certain people not. But we should not coddle those people who just like to see heads in meeting rooms and all that nonsense. We shouldn't coddle because there's certain people that are overly sensitive or overly skeptical about people's productivity. We should simply say, some people are better working from home, some people are better working in the office. And that's fine. Live with that and be okay with that. If we are serious about the climate, we should not want more cars on the road. If we're serious about the damage of traffic. We should not want more cars on the road. If we really want to make a difference, we need to change. We can't see a difference if we don't change. And we have to be willing to adapt to the new world. And the new world is simply whatever works for that worker to be effective at the work.
[00:41:26] It's that simple. But it also takes management, being brave enough to learn how to manage people differently than they do.
