As to the good: the new IKEA store in Stoughton, about an hour away from the Cape.
The IKEA experience begins on the main access road, which features signage like you’d see at an airport: large overhead panels on huge overhangs, with arrows pointing you to the correct lane.
Pulling up to the store itself, you are directed to the enormous ground floor garage by parking attendants holding flashlights similar to those used by airport ground crews when they guide planes to the gates.
The store has two floors, the first dedicated to home accessories, a warehouse and the cashiers, and the second to furniture and a large restaurant.
It took me over an hour just to walk through the entire store. I wouldn’t be surprised if actual shopping required a good half a day, especially if you took advantage of the “planning centers” for serious home improvements.
The store carries virtually everything you’d need to furnish a home and home office, including appliances, furniture, rugs, linens, storage devices, kitchen and bath equipment, even a small section of Swedish groceries.
The Bad: almost anything connected with looking for an IT job.
I’ve been doing a serious search for less than a month, and with two exceptions (you know who you are), it’s as unpalatable this time around as it’s been in the past: cretinous recruiters, ridiculous “everything but the kitchen sink” job requirements and the worse, IT managers.
For reasons that mystify me, those who hire and promote IT people to supervisory jobs think it’s a young person’s game.
This defies logic and common sense, but there it is.
No disrespect to my son and his peers, but in the United States, people age 35 and under are hell on wheels to work for. All of them. And IT is littered with people in supervisory positions who simply don’t deserve to be there.
They may be perfectly lovely people at cocktail parties and PTA meetings, they may be superb spouses and wonderful parents, but as bosses, they suck.
To be fair, when I was in my thirties and even forties, I was a total monster as well. It’s not anyone’s fault, it’s developmental, we all outgrow it and become human beings some day. It’s just that I don’t want my professional destiny controlled by people whose souls haven’t evolved beyond the third chakra.
The Ugly: education. A blog entry is inadequate to describe the full horror of it, at least public school education. Over the last six months, I’ve seen it from a new perspective, that of someone working with teachers and administrators to start and run an after-school program.
The whole system is dismal, hopeless, and it should be totally destroyed and replaced with – anything – home schools, family farms, apprenticeships, web-based learning, occupational therapy, training in the black arts.
The reason? Imagine a group of people with egos the size of Alaska. Imagine that these people are represented by powerful unions that reward mediocrity by resisting merit pay and denying the ability to fire for non-performance.
Imagine further that the longer these people stay in their jobs, the greater likelihood they have of being promoted. A friend of mine says this phenomenon has its own acronym: FUMU: F* Up, Move Up.
Imagine as a logical consequence that the best and the brightest either never make it into the system in the first place, or get driven out by the petty, the mean, the bureaucratic and the smug.
Imagine a total absence of accountability for quality of product and service. Imagine a great, infinite black hole for the deposit of public funds in the billions.
That’s only the beginning, and I haven’t the stomach to go on, or for that matter, the time: in about 2 hours, members of my family will be doing battle with these creatures and their cohorts, and I’m needed to help get my youngest grandchild on his vehicle to heck: a school bus.
Good people, it’s enough to make your eyeballs rupture.