Anna's Philosophy

I read an article on FB and I was stunned that anyone would believe the hype. The header was “How ICE lied” (or something like that; I don’t have it in front of me and I’m not going to quote). Essentially, the writer complained about officers shooting an unarmed illegal alien. Not sure if he was killed – I didn’t read that far. So this is what I got from that article – mind you, it’s all supposed to be lies, so you’ll have to look past that the hoopla to the bones underneath. The ‘lie’ is that a cop got injured conducting a traffic stop; apparently the driver tried to run him down and he was badly injured, therefore the other cops fired on him – I have no idea if he survived or if he was killed. The bones of that story is, this driver decided to throw his car at a cop. I don’t pretend to know how much a car weighs, but suffice it to say that if he hadn’t been stopped, he would have killed someone – EASILY – with that car, and then what? Would he just stop there? Probably not. He’d have gone through the next cop, and maybe the next. If he would try for one cop, he’d keep going as long as there were cops in front of him, and as long as there were cops behind him, he’d keep going still. What if there were kids behind those cops? What if your mother happened to be behind those cops? What if your sister’s car was just then passing by? So this guy threw tonnage of automobile at a cop and they threw a few ounces of lead back at him. I say there was no choice. So take your rose-colored glasses off and stand behind these men and women. They really are risking their lives FOR YOU. It doesn’t matter if they lied about how badly injured the cop was or wasn’t. It doesn’t matter if the driver was a US citizen or an illegal. You don’t attack a peace officer – in any way. You are due to get arrested even if you only spit on one let alone touch or shove one. They have to protect themselves too.

Employee #1 (M-40something), came to work. he said he was from Florida. I figured this would be an interesting experience for him here in Alaska. As far as his work went, I think he did okay. I heard later comments that were less than glowing. His girlfriend was supposed to come too, but she was from Jamaica and there were some non-citizen requirements pertaining to her hire. I don’t know what they were; I just know that they were complicated. When she (F-23 I think) finally arrived, the dynamic between them was most annoying. To begin with, I think he must have been incredibly jealous of her; it was like he couldn’t stand for her to be out of his sight. Her first mistake – day 2 – was believing that she worked his hours. He and another person working their job alternated AM shift and PM shift. She was supposed to be in early, take several breaks during the day, between her chores, and stay, at least moderately late. Needless to say, the boss wasn’t too happy that she wasn’t there to do morning chores.

Another day, she started to follow me so she could learn my job – I’m supposed to train her and then I could stay home, but then her boyfriend called her back in to eat breakfast. This was at like 9:30. I couldn’t wait around for her to eat, so showing her what I did could ‘t happen. I tried showing her on the next cabin, but it wasn’t much.

Another time, my boss asked me to show her some of the inside chores she was supposed to be responsible for. Her boyfriend again interrupted saying she needed to take a break now; it was a requirement of her hire. He wouldn’t hear it that this wasn’t some union job where after two or three hours of work, a break was required. Her job would require like an hour or so of morning chores, an hour or so of my chores, and then a break until lunch chores. After lunch, she would have an hour or so of afternoon chores and then all afternoon to take a nap and be back around 5 or 6. Then dinner chores. You get the picture. But I couldn’t teach her what to do with him interrupting. These chores are kinda time sensitive. She took her break while I moved on and did her work. Very frustrating.

Another thing they did that really bugged me – he insisted on showering with her in the girl’s bathroom. Now, understand, there is no room in one of those showers for both of them. No, since I cleaned the bathhouse, I had to clean 2 shower stalls every day. When I told her not to let him do that, nothing changed. When I told him, he lied to me. When the manager got on him about it, they, the two of them, used the guys’ bathroom. Like I said, it was like he couldn’t stand for her to be out of his sight. Her excuse, “I can’t tell him what to do.” Really? Are you not an adult? What would your mother say? Their relationship was really creepy. I wish her well, but she really needs to stand up for herself.

Anyway, the race card came into play come payday. The boss does payroll online. He gets banking information and does auto deposit. Three days after payday, this guy comes storming into the lodge riling at the boss saying crazy things like he wasn’t being paid because he was black. Really? You jump straight to that? No troubleshooting? So my boss goes to see and he had an email from that bank – no account belonging to that number. So this guy must have given the wrong number, or whatever. But no, it was because he was black. He quit on the spot and he and his girlfriend were gone by the next morning.

Because of that drama, I ended up working all summer. I like the job, but I’m almost 70 now. I am happy to train the person who will be doing my job, and if they have to go home early, I’ll come and see them through close up. So much for that plan this year.

Better luck next summer.

My son said an amazing thing today, and I thought I’d share it with you. He was talking to his brother on the phone. He said, “When they handed me my son, (his first kid) I thought, oh God I would die for this little guy. I would take a bullet for him. When they handed me my daughter (she’s almost a year old now), I thought OMG I would kill for this little bit of life (she was tiny too). I became a mass murderer overnight. I would still die for my son, but I would kill for this.”

There was an article on FB yesterday showing a video of a cop arresting a six year old girl, putting her in zip-ties and taking her off to the station, and apparently I’m the only one on this guy’s side in this,

I read the article. According to the article this little girl ‘assaulted’ three adults in the school. I’m going to make a guess and say it was her teacher, the principal and probably another person in the principal’s office. I’m just guessing there though. I was later told that she was throwing a temper tantrum by kicking and screaming. She’s six years old and not a brute of a child, just your average little girl. But she’s been throwing temper tantrums for this long, and they have always worked. I’m willing to bet, when her tantrum wasn’t working as well as she expected, she progressed from screaming, to kicking whoever laid hands on her, to biting and scratching as well.

Now, I’m also told that she was calm by the time the cop got there, but I’m getting ahead of myself here. So, you have this violent child who can’t be controlled by three adults. She scares them enough that they – probably the principal – call the cops. They shoulda called her parents, and maybe they tried, it’s not said, and maybe they should have called the nuthouse at the hospital and had her taken out in a straightjacket rather than zip-ties. In the end, all we have is what they did do – they called the cops.

I’ve watched enough police shows (dramatized I’m sure), and I’ve read enough books where police were involved (also dramatized some I’m sure), and I really like watching those forensic shows where they interview people as they work their way through whatever the crime is to who was ultimately found guilty. I find it interesting, and while writing in that genre is not my cup of tea, I do have a book where a cop plays a prominent background character, so I have done a little research, which included research on how a young person is arrested.

A POLICE OFFICER CANNOT PUT A PERSON IN THE BACK SEAT (unless they’re a ride-along) WHO IS NOT IN HANDCUFFS. That is both to protect the prisoner as well as to protect the arresting officer. I know some, if not most, police cars have a sturdy cage behind the driver’s seat, but there is no mention that this car had that. That doesn’t matter. A prisoner, with their hands free, just might start hurting themselves – scratching their face or pulling their hair out – something a girl might think of doing. She might be inclined to throw herself around the back seat if they had their hands free. I think police officers are required to buckle seatbelts, also for their prisoner’s safety. With free hands, the seatbelt can just go away, and if there didn’t happen to be a cage, little finger could possibly go after the driver’s face and hair causing a wreck. Many scary scenarios come to mind as I picture this drive.

The video shows the girl crying and begging, but still the adults in the school didn’t do anything to stop the arrest. They could have. That officer could have walked in the door, and the principal could have told him, “It’s okay, Officer. We have this under control now.” But they didn’t. In my opinion – my non-cop opinion – this cop didn’t have a choice. He HAD to cuff that child and take her to the station.

One person I argued with said he hoped I didn’t have any kids. I do. I have two boys, and they grew up to be fine, responsible men. I have three grandkids, one is a teenager, and one just starting school. NONE of them were allowed to get away with that kind of temper tantrum, and that’s not to say they didn’t try. They did. I spanked mine and my daughter-in-laws spanked theirs. The temper tantrums stopped long before they went to school.  The person then said he hoped, when my kids or grand kids get arrested, they get hauled away in handcuffs too. I told him, I would expect no less. And then let me get my hands on that kid after the cops were done with her or him. This little girl needed to learn this lesson. Temper tantrums might work with mom and dad, but out in the world, they will only get you into trouble. I’m willing to bet she never throws another one.

I’m told this cop lost his job. That’s too bad. I hope he contests the issue, and maybe he should go for a transfer. If a police chief can fire a man for doing the only thing he could do, he’s not a good chief. Of course, if mom and dad are rich, well, I guess you can buy anything you want, even a cop’s livelihood.

Is he a good man? How am I supposed to know? I don’t know the man. Is he a good president? Never in all of my life, that where I paid any attention to politics and what the government does, never have I seen a president accomplish so much in so little time. Always in the past, it took months, if not years, to see any accomplishments. This country was, as I saw it, a leviathan ship, that took eons to make a slight alteration to its course. I had come to accept that distinction. After all, this is a very large country compared to all the other countries on this world. Suddenly, that isn’t so. In mere months, Trump has managed to convince companies to build here again, or return, as the case may be. He’s managed (somehow) to convince one of our most dangerous dictators to settle down and behave himself; I know I was getting tired of him rattling his sabers all over the place. Best of all, he’s cut taxes, which put more money back in our pockets. And now, most recently, he’s vowed to protect our borders, with force if necessary. I’m all for that. You can’t have open borders if it costs residents both money and safety. We have enough criminals; we don’t need any more. And handing them all welfare of any and all forms costs us LOTS of money. I mean really, NOTHING is free. SOMEONE pays for it, and we have enough people in this country who actually need it.

Now this caravan that is trying to breach our border in force is the latest topic. I had a conversation with an FB friend last night. She was insisting that these people were here to escape the dangers of their home. I think, safety, for them, was much closer to home. They’re not interested in safety, though I’m sure it is on their list. As soon as they crossed out of their country (using force to do that too) they were safe. They were even safer after like a hundred miles. What they never did is stop to settle down and carve a new home for themselves. What they did do is accept the handouts of food and water, and probably new clothes (which came from somewhere, paid for by someone) and continued their march. Once force and threat has been so richly rewarded, why not continue? Of course, their goal had always been the US. I mean, we hand this stuff out all the time, right? Just ask any healthy young woman with ten kids. Everything is free, even their TV and phone.

Now if they revamped all this stuff, making it concrete that only US citizens could have access to all the government handouts, open borders would be much less expensive. Need I say that this also goes for voting (I wish they could stop the dead from voting too)?

That leaves only safety. So tell me, why do you lock your doors at night? Can you not see that locking our borders is the very same concept? Every high end hotel has a doorman (or am I being outdated?). Every gated community has at the very least a security code to punch in at a gate (or am I wrong there too? I honestly don’t know). It’s all the same. People stand at our borders to check to make sure people coming in have a right to, or to take their names and whatever other identification in order to make sure their visit is just that, a visit, not to vanish into the shadows and take up residence. They’re also there to make sure those who’ve been deported STAY deported. These people can’t do their job efficiently if there are no walls. If anyone can just walk across the border, only those coming here legally will cross through these points where our gate guards are located. The rest have something to hide.

What could they possibly have to hide? How hungry they are? How poor they are? No. They are hiding how much drugs they’re hauling with them. They’re hiding any other nefarious purpose they have in mind. They are hiding who they are. And if they have these things to hide, we don’t want anything to do with them.

Enough of a rant. Get a grip, people. Reality is really rather logical.

So what do you think of a person who lies frequently? No, I’m not talking about our illustrious leader who is becoming increasingly more famous for the habit. No, I’m talking about your average Joe or Jane, be he/she among the rich, the middle class, or the poor. Do you know such a person? I am happy to say that I have been successful in avoiding such creatures most of my life, or at least avoiding them enough to where I’ve never been caught up in their lies.

Lets back up here a bit. I’m getting ahead of myself. In my opinion there are several levels of a lie. The most innocent being the little white lie told to protect someone’s fragile ego. In my opinion the worst is the lie you tell with the sole intent of covering your own ass at the expense of someone else.

The kind of lie I have been having to deal with falls somewhere in the middle. Most of them are the kind told to make the person hearing it happy only to go to the next person, the person lied about to the first person, and say something entirely different. Yeah, that happened to me and a coworker.

The most harmful lie in the workplace is the lie that costs the company money. Telling a guest that a portion of the business is closed, when in reality nothing is closed as long as someone is awake, is a pure sign of laziness. Of course, that laziness is most visible when the boss sleeps most of every afternoon. Another form of this is competing with your guests, selfishly no less. Fishing was kinda hard this summer, but when he wasn’t sleeping he was taking his wife fishing, at least most of the time. He’d come back with fish and he’d show them off to his guests who maybe weren’t so lucky. Talk about rude.

Telling your employees that he must depend on the income from the lodge for living expenses for the rest of the year, is a very colorful half-truth. Of course, if daddy has cut him off, that might be more true than false. However, he uses that excuse to avoid hiring more help, which would be nice, and my first choice personally, or giving pay raises, which would also be nice since the cost of living out here keeps going up every year, especially the cost of gas. Of course, I’ve been living off a summer’s wages for many years now. If he has problems living off of the profits from the business, he needs to make a few luxury cuts and get a mite more realistic. I’m not sure he understands that though.

Last summer was year number three of five daddy gave the apple of his eye to make a go of his first real business venture, and after watching more than half of the guests go away actually angry, and three quarters of the rest of them go away less than happy makes me wonder if the business will survive another two years under his leadership. Take a guy who has never had to work for a living in his life, buy him a business, well established with a full complement of established guests, and just say, “Here you go,” is like the worst thing you can do to that business. Years one and two were under the guidance of the previous owner, but did he make any effort to learn anything? No! At the end of last year, he found out he had to bill all his guests again because he never mailed in any of the credit card receipts (or whatever those papers are called), and that was his second year. This year was his first year to open the lodge on his own, complete with three out of four brand new staff. If it wasn’t for the chef being something of an old hand, we would have had a lot more problems than we did have, and those were trouble enough.

Ah but I’m getting away from the purpose of this post – lying

Lying hurts. It hurts you and it hurts those around you, and it hurts anything you try to do. I prefer not to lie, though I can’t claim to be perfect. Most of the time, I’ll keep my mouth shut, but if you ask me my opinion, I’ll give it as diplomatically but as honestly as I can. It is not my intention to hurt anyone’s feelings, but it is also my belief that you can’t get better if you can’t face the truth. I learned this being a writer. Tell me what is wrong with what I write, so I can learn not to make that mistake anymore. Tell the truth to your employees so they can better work as a team. And for God’s sake, hire a people person to run the lodge.

Things you do and don’t do if you’re trying to run a fishing lodge.

Fishermen are a pretty patient bunch of people as a whole. I mean, you get the kind who are high maintenance, and some who are kind of hard to keep track of, but that’s just the name of the game. As the ‘owner’ or ‘manager’ that’s what you do. You cater to the high maintenance people and try to keep track of the rest of them. Finding a lame excuse for not doing that is just lame. Charging your guests for just about everything is also kind of lame, but he could claim that it’s expensive getting things out here, and it is.

Charging for water, even bottled water, is something he and I don’t see eye to eye on, but I don’t say anything because I’m not paying for this stuff, nor am I paying for bringing things out here. I just think that water is the most basic item of survival and it should be made freely available to everyone. Wine, beer, soda – that’s a different thing; if you want to put all that crap in your body, you are welcome to pay me for the privilege of letting you do it.

Fishing tackle, shirts, and jackets are also available for sale here, and I know the jackets were imported, so the price tag on those is right up there. This kind of thing is all normal, but when you charge a guest for a stretch of line – no knots, no hook, no nothing, just about six feet of line – you’re going to piss off your guest. He did that, and that guest was VERY pissed. I don’t care if you charge 5c, that is just SO wrong.

Another guest asked him face-to-face if he could buy something from the tackle shop, but since they were outside (right out front) and since it was somewhere around 11 in the evening. “The tackle shop is closed,” he said. What??? Closed??? He’s awake talking to the man. Take him into the building and let him buy his lures, but he didn’t want to.

Another thing you DON’T do is forget to book the flight of a departing guest. He gets all packed up, comes in early for breakfast, and learns that there’s no room on the flight for him so he’ll be leaving in the evening. What if he missed an important flight because of that? These people all come here from Switzerland or France or wherever over there, Germany, Austria etc. missing a flight is a very big deal.

Going fishing in a boat while your guests walk is also another bad thing, unless you go somewhere else. Coming back with more fish than your guests is – at least here – considered bad manners. But the ‘owner’ also has an export business so he has to catch fish to take home (he goes home to Switzerland too). This looks very much like his guest are competition for the fish – a very bad deal.

He is also highly reluctant to make any improvements here around the lodge. Now I can understand needing to work within a budget, and the recommendations I make… Well, I try to consider the cheapest way to go about it, but making your guests feel like sardines that are only worth the dollars in their pocket is the wrong way to look at them.

When this lodge was built (I have no idea how long ago that was), the cabins were set up as do-it-yourself houses. They are well-built little houses with a tiny kitchenette, a few shelves, and room to sleep two or three people. When I first came out here over 20 years ago now, those little kitchens were not in use anymore. Now, in some of the cabins, beds have been added, and in a couple especially, they have been added right in front of the little cook stove (remember, these are never used). Everyone understands why the beds were added – most fishing parties now consist of 2 to 4 people, so putting them in one cabin is desirable. Removing the useless kitchen counters etc should have been done a long time ago.

I brought this up last fall. I explained the need for room and how it really looks bad to have a bed stuck in front of the kitchen. His excuse for not fixing at least one was not lack of time, or too expensive, or any other good excuse. At the time, we had the lumber (still do) and we had the time – we could have done at least one. His excuse was that the wood would be a different color that what was on the rest of the walls. He went on to say that the people come there and all they want is a place to sleep; they don’t care what it looks like.

That is true, as far as it goes. A cabin is a place to sleep, but when it looks like you are only in that cabin because they want to squeeze a few more dollars out of that cabin, you are subconsciously made to feel less welcome to stay, but it is what it has been for years, so no biggie, just me wanting to make things better – make the effort at least

As if that’s not bad enough. Like I said, most parties are 2 to 4 people, but when you DON’T put more than one party in a cabin. For a stretch of 2 days, he had 3 parties in one cabin. That only added up to 4 people, but if that doesn’t make a guest feel like a sardine, I don’t know what does.

Enough about the cabins, lets talk about the food. He refuses to pay for a plane to get supplies out here. Now the flying service is pretty good about bringing stuff for whoever if there’s space on a flight coming out, and most of the time that works just fine, but once in a while, we need stuff and there’s just no room. This happened two or three times this summer. The cook puts in an order, and then a week later he puts in another order and the guests are wondering why there isn’t any of this or that. We very nearly ran out of coffee, no less. A plane costs what one guest pays to stay here – he could have bought a flight to get his supplies out here.

Another thing that is happening is the guests are using up more bait than we are bringing in and we have already had to buy bait for them to use. This cost was also about what one person pays to stay here, but he won’t pay for more bait – “they can just use lures,” he says. – So we have a guy here who has been coming for 20 years now. For his 20th anniversary, I guess he paid nothing to stay. I’m sure that wasn’t my boss’s decision. Anyway, so we’re running out of bait, this guy tells my boss that he’ll pay for the bait. My boss is going to let him pay for the bait!!! He’s letting an old time guest pay for bait for the whole lodge full the people. Who does that sort of thing?

My boss is SO concerned with his profit margin, he’s not seeing the big picture. Unhappy guests don’t return. Unhappy guests tell their friends how unhappy they were. AND as I understand it, all these guys are big fishing club guys back home so these clubs get the word and this place will sink pretty quick. Right now it’s floating on the momentum of past success.

Tips is one indication of things going sour. They have been incredibly slim this year. A guest asked me yesterday how the tips work here, making it very clear that he wanted to tip us but not my boss.

There is another man here – a friend of my boss’s father and fellow investor, I think. Guests have been complaining to him – it’s all in Swiss or whatever language so I don’t understand more than a word or two here and there, but enough to understand how unhappy they are. Something about how many fish a guest caught or didn’t catch or what he wanted to do with it, I’m not sure. And the thing about the fishing line was a big deal.

Don’t get me wrong, my boss is a nice guy, but him running this lodge is a very bad business decision. I hope the other man, and the other investors see this and do something about it.

They (my boss and the lodge assistant) were joking the other day and I tuned in to hear, “…well okay, I quit,” from the lodge assistant. My boss laughs and say, “Okay, I quit too.” You know what came out of my mouth a second later. “Does that mean I inherit?” I have no clue how to run a business. I’ve never done it before, but I’m certain I could do a better job in a heartbeat.

My future looks bleak – wish me luck.