The Art of a Good Salad

I was reading the news yesterday and today, wondering if in years to come, people will stop naming their baby boys, "George" just like they stopped naming them Adolf since the 40's. That aside, I was concerned about how the quest for power and a single political unity is not limited to nations who don't speak English as their national language, if you catch my drift. I hate the idea of a single world polity/culture. It would be like eating an iceberg lettuce "salad."

There's an art to a good salad, and when it works, man there's nothing better! Every good salad has a base, preferably with a bit of variety. I'll use the salad I made for dinner tonight as my example. The base was a big handful of mesclun salad which included a bit of iceberg some chicory, arugula, bibb etc. Next I added shaved carrots. I like to shave the carrot partially because I like the way the dressing clings to it and really spreads it around when I toss the mixture at the end. I work off the "a little bit of dressing and a whole lot of tossing" method. It takes a bit of attention and work to make sure that everyone gets their share of the goodies.

After that, I needed a bit of zip, so I added rings of baby red and yellow capsicum. They were sweet with just the barest edge of warmth. Next I added some chopped spring onion, a bit of arrogance, but not an overwhelming amount. Just enough, say, to assert itself without being aggressive. Call it a "British" portion. And what would a salad be without juicy red bits? I added a few plump, vine-ripened, baby tomatoes cut into quarters. The last flourish was a soupcon of chopped celery ('cause a little goes a long way), followed by cucumber quarters. A bit of shaved Kapiti parmesano, and some Baltic, er... balsamic vinaigrette, and I was ready for the protein. In this case, it was about two ounces of sundried tomato and garlic tuna.

Now you have to make salad in a bowl that looks way too big. That's because you have to have room to toss things around without losing any of the mixture. You must toss the ingredients. Stirring damages the delicate vegetables. They have to be gently lifted and mixed, so that that end result is; that every mouthful contains a variety of textures and a blend of flavours which wouldn't be nearly as good all by themselves.

I'll leave my Fruit Salad posting for another day.

From the Tomb into the Fire

I'm not bored at work anymore. I'm not even slightly unhappy with my job. How about that? How many people get to write those words and mean it? This is my one lifelong bonus, that I never have to stay bored in a job for long. Someone always figures out that I should be doing better things with my time and their money. When I was hiring people, I was the kind of person that made my day. The one that we'd call "a live one." Being a live one means that you never have to worry about being employed, and never have to be bored to death for more than six months in any job. It also means that sometimes, you get promoted into a job where you have to not only hit the ground running, but keep running and running and running. This is one of those jobs.

I was never a Contracts Manager before this, but it suits me. I started college as a pre-law major before shifting to something different at my father's suggestion. Back then, I wanted to be a criminal defence attorney. This, is nice. No one's life hangs in the balance, but millions of dollars do. So, there's enough pressure to keep me on my toes, but not enough to make me break out in psoriasis from scalp to ankles.

It suits my personality as well. For the most part, I get to be nice and cooperative and helpful. I consider my clients to be the programme managers who ask me what our contractual obligations are, and who rely on me to smooth the path for distribution of our product around the world. That's 85% of the work, really, just making sure all the "i's" are dotted and "t's" crossed, so that nothing is slowed down. The other 15% suits me as well. That's when I get to be a bitch, and no one would even consider putting me down for it. When I am advocating a position for the company, I am absolutely cold hearted. It's the letter of the contract, not the spirit. If I think that we're right, I will never give up. If I think that the other party is trying to screw us, I will become a junkyard dog. I love the taste of blood first thing in the morning!

What's been fun for me, is to see just the slightest change in attitude around the place. Instead of feeling like we're battling to stay even, I see a sense that we as a group, might be feeling like we're kicking ass. The other day, one of the programme managers came to my desk to have me check something and when I was done, he declared that he wasn't going to back down when it came to protesting some invoices that he doesn't think we should have to pay. I swear six weeks ago, he never would have done this. I said, "The taste of blood is a little addictive, ain't it, Bubba?" He just grinned at me. Who'd have ever thought that a middle-aged woman would be empowering managerial males?

Just before he left the company, one of the beanies that I really liked said, "Don't let them get you down...don't lose your smile." I said, "That'll never happen, Dude. I don't stop smiling, others start. I drive the bus, and everyone else gets on board."

Pretty soon I expect to have them all dancing in the fire, along with me.

Ugly Americans

Dear D,
You never realise (even after reading Lederer and Burdick) just how ugly Americans can be until you leave America for a few years. A few months won't do it. You actually have to bond with the new place, see it through local eyes before the scales fall from your eyes.

I work for a medium sized company in NZ. We were so good at beating out our American competition in our field that they bought us. Don't blame us, blame the shortsighted Kiwi bloke who sold out for big $$. That being the situtation, means that now, our head office is thousands of miles away. Now, in America, if you're in say, California, and the head office is in Phoenix, that's no big deal. Everyone treats each other like collegues and even though there may be some bitching in the branches about high-handedness, it's nothing like what happens when a US company buys a company in another country.

Honest to Dobbs, I think these guys back in the States have a mental picture of us running around barefooted in grass skirts and coconut bras...or maybe they think all of us have moku and a human flesh sandwich in our lunchbag. Whatever it is, it pisses me off. Stop with the condescention mutherfuckers, it's not pretty. I've spent the last week to and fro-ing with one of the most arrogant assholes I've had to deal with in a long time. He's about to get his comeuppance again.

The first time was earlier in the week when he wrote me another nasty e-mail demanding something that he claimed to have ordered from us, but which I know wasn't. See...I'm in charge of that area as well as the sending out of quotations, and the signing and control of all our contracts. So, when this guy starts bitching to me about a quote being too high, and demanding parts as of yesterday. I grabbed him by the short hairs and shook. He pulled that antique crapola about "What is the price in US dollars, we don't pay in NZ dollars..." I said, "Per the directive of ________(CEO) you DO pay in NZ dollars." What I should have added was, "Don't they give you idiots calculators so that you can figure out an exchange rate? Hell, we do it all the time here, with about ten different rates." The thing is, he wasn't being stupid, he was being ethnocentric...he never even thought of figuring out the exchange rate on his own, because in his mind, any currency aside from US currency is not really money. That's where the ugly lies.

Now, I'm about to get ugly. This guy is supposed to be a "senior technical purchaser" but didn't even realise that he'd confused three different parts. He's probably never even seen the product that they are a part of . Unfortunately for him, he thought he wanted a part that was going to cost US$7. ea., but now that we know what he really wants, he's going to discover, that what he really needs is going to cost him around US$84. ea. I can almost feel his pain from here...but not quite.

So, here I sit, a savage native, typing away at 100 wpm between drags on my fine Cuban cigar (totally legal here) in my architecturally designed home, meters away from the South Pacific Ocean that surrounds my wee island. I'm so angry that I may be forced to visit the local village, and have one of our native beverages; cappucino, or maybe I'll just fire up the smoke signal device on my cellphone and have them delivered.