In her efforts to better understand the totalitarian aspects of her work environment, Alonso studied military culture and found many similarities to the culture at American Missile. The similarities were not accidental. She realized that the company deliberately sought out supervisors with military backgrounds.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/09/20/34529/
-------
Worth a quick read. It pretty much captures how I worked at various places supposedly delivering repair services for power wheelchairs.
So today I turned in the scale shop plans done up on my Mutoh with all the old fashioned drawing tools. I had to re-learn a lot, practice my writing for dimensions and labels, ink it in by hand with my old Mars 700s pen set, find eraser inserts for my electric Koh-I-Noor, etc. A real trip down memory lane. Thankfully the same place Inkstone was still there with a new group of down and out art students who preferred graffiti to architural drawing, but they were selling supplies and doing reproductions... Nice job, talked with the young woman behind the counter. It was a hot boring day to be at work. She was a printmaking major after her first litho class... I asked if any current architecture student work was done by hand. She stuggled to remember and then said no. That's a bad sign.
My plan was a poor job, since the dimensions were off for the enclosed area, which made everything else off by some amount. I kept getting different measurements to the official measures. Somewhere a foot disappeared. Fuck it, it still works for moving tools, desks, shelving and work areas around.
Then the battle started. The upper management is concerned with security and want a counter to limit access to the work area. They want to call it a community workshop and they want to call the users, participants. How does that work if the participants are not allowed access? I could get all ADA on them, with my interpretation of `programmatic access'. God damn would I like to. Instead I put in a call to a fellow old timer advocate who used to run the legal project. Get some advice on how to handle this.
Programmatic access is really a political problem with the whole non-profit and NGO system, witness Haiti and East Africa.
Ever since their glory days of yore, they have developed a terrible internal political culture of winning grants and doing nothing but funding the next grant writing wave... If you want services in the main office of the ORG you go down, make an appointment with a know-nothing receptionist (because they are all temps), get an official okay, proof of disability, even if it is apparent at first glance. On the big day you arrive on time or within fifteen minutes or forfeit the time slot. The person you want to see, comes out to the lobby through a card key locked door and escorts you to the intersanctum where you fill out a form and they look into it for you. Fucking pathetic.
I was down at the big house at Reception a couple of months ago advocating for my paycheck, when a black blind woman and her escort arrived to see a `housing' counselor. The receptionist played dumb. What did you want to see a housing counselor about? she asked. I couldn't help myself. I busted out laughing. The blind woman turned to me and laughed back, `Yeah honey, you know!' I explained, they want to see somebody about housing, because they have none.
In my mind, I was fuming mad. What are you idiots going to do, make the woman humiliate herself and beg? Show some respect. Have honor. Be a welcome hand. People do not come here, unless they are desparate.
Ah the perils of service delivery in the era of negative expectations...
CG