Where I'll Be In October 2012

I've always paid attention to the news.  It's a habit I learned from my father, whose interest in current events in 1939 helped save his life.  He read the news in the US for much the same reason that he read it in Poland.  It was his view that your standing in the world could change in a heartbeat.  You had to be informed and ready to move fast.  It's why he insisted on all of us having current passports.  It's why he had gold coins stashed away.  Unlike my father, I don't consider my place in the US to be tenuous, but I still read the news every day.

Stability is something I expect from the US.  In fact, I never really cared that much who was president.  It seemed like a figurehead position mostly.  There are so many checks in the US system that a president's power is limited.  Even someone completely incompetent can't really screw up the country too badly or so I thought.  Then W. came along.  I had to rethink my position on the importance of the presidency.

Bush made me realize that a president can truly create chaos in every way imaginable.  I'd never seen such a thing.  The presidency was a critical position after all.  I decided to get proactive in 2004.  I'd had enough of massive deficits created by irresponsible tax breaks and two wars, destruction of basic things that government is designed to do like emergency disaster services (this problem would come to the fore in Bush's second term), and faith-based baloney.  I didn't like Kerry much, but anything was better than the incompetence of Bush.  I donated money to Kerry.  I made phone calls.

By 2008, Bush had created even more disasters.  I quickly signed up to work on Clinton's campaign.  The staff consisted of me and thousands of women of a certain age.  The campaign had no energy and joy.  It was dominated by grimness and determination, but it was competent and well funded.  In the end, misogyny - the language used by the pundits and the press to describe Clinton was consistently laced with nastiness - triumphed over racism and Obama won the nomination.  I didn't skip a beat and signed on to Obama's campaign for the final election.

There was joy in Obama's troupe.  There was beaucoup enthusiasm.  But there was also a ridiculous level of naivete.  The people on that campaign were convinced that Obama was a liberal who would bring back the 1960s emphasis on social services, get us out of both of our wars, and make miracles.  I didn't understand where this sentiment came from.  Pundits went gaga over Obama as well and threw around the word "transformative".  I'd look at the man and his policy statements - he wanted 27,000 more people in our military forces and wanted to double down on Afghanistan; his golfing buddy was a bigwig on Wall Street - and I thought this guy with his middle of the road values and his emphasis on being a good dad was a modern (and richer) version of Ward Cleever.

There would be no transformation with Obama.  We'd stay a center-right nation.  If we were lucky, he'd be a quick learner - the man had no real administrative experience and didn't seem to have any real back room political ability - and prove himself to be as competent as Clinton.  If we were unlucky, he'd fumble along.

It's now 2011.  How has Obama done?  He certainly hasn't been transformative.  I didn't expect or want a new wave of liberalism so I'm not disappointed.  Overall, I'd give Obama a C+ (and that's including grade inflation).  On the minus side, it's clear that Obama doesn't have Bill Clinton's competence and ability to work with others.  Obama has shown no leadership in getting Congress to move.  He's shown no negotiating prowess.  He's wasted time on a quixotic quest to achieve peace in the Middle East and has shown much naivete in the process.  He doubled down on Afghanistan, wasting money and losing lives.

Obama is a middle-of-the-roader who is fabulous at giving speeches in an arena and uninspiring one on one.  He is conflict averse and not at all creative.  He really is a modern day Ward Cleever, kind of boring and sincere (with the big exception that he really is a wonderful orator).

Still, Obama has done some things reasonably well.  The health care law is messy and flawed, but necessary (even if it took too long to pass).  He is slowly but surely getting us out of Iraq.  Obama has brought back competence to basic necessary functions like emergency disaster services.  The EPA is no longer being dismantled.  We have a sort of sane energy policy that places some value in energy conservation.  I'm getting a little less competence with Obama than I hoped for, but I'm getting about what I expected policy-wise.

The one thing that I didn't expect was that the Republican Party would be taken over by lilly-white,  right-wing extremists while Obama was in office.   I thought that the Republicans would actually move a bit more to the center in anticipation of 2012.  They needed another five or ten percent of the vote to win and I guessed that they would spend their time trying to go after a portion of the Hispanic vote.  It would have been a good play for 2012 and for the future.

Boy was I wrong.  Instead of leaning toward the center and trying to appeal to America's broadening multi-cultural base, they decided to double down on whiteness and attract the kookie Ruby Ridge fringe.  It was a crazy strategy.  It worked in 2010, but I can't imagine it will have any positive impact in 2012.  It's going to take the Republicans a good half-dozen years to recover from this misstep.

Presidential elections are truly important.  It took me decades to figure that out.  Call me a slow learner.  Come 2012, the Republicans will have to nominate someone who appeals to its lunatic right wing fringe.  I don't know who it's going to be, but there doesn't look to be a whole lot of competence out there in the Republican field.  On the other hand, the Democrats will have the devil I know, Obama.  Actually, I wouldn't call Obama a devil.  He's a perfectly decent man with not very good political skills.

I'm sure liberals won't be on the phones and going door to door for Obama in 2012 in quite the same numbers as in 2008.  They had unrealistic expectations about what Obama would accomplish and don't seem to understand that the American people just aren't interested in liberal 60's policies updated for the present day.  But I'll be there.  I'll be knocking on doors.  I'll be backing Obama with words and with money.  I'll have the same level of enthusiasm as I had before.  Just like in 2008, Obama won't be anyone I can get excited about.  He's just not my kind of man; he has just a little too much deer in the headlights earnestness mixed with a lack of panache for my taste.  But given the alternatives, I view Obama as the most attractive candidate by far.

The Good, Bad, and Sketchy of Customer Service

I grew up in a time when conspicuous consumption was viewed as gauche. People who were rich tried not to show it. Displays of money were crude and if you went into clothing stores, the cash register was not infrequently hidden in a back room. You talked to the sales clerk, picked your items with his or her advice, provided your cash or check and he or she would go to that back room to wrap up your item and get your receipt.

During that time, there were ridiculous warranties on some items. For example, there was this brand of jeans, Billy the Kid's, that my mom used to buy.

If your jeans wore out at any time within two years, you could return them and get a new pair, no questions asked. As a kid, I'd go through jeans in about six months. My mom would buy them a little big so she could get the same size for free six months later. Then they fit perfectly. Six months after that she'd get another free pair and they'd be a little tight, but wearable for another few months.

Sears did this too with their jeans into the 1980s. I became aware of this policy when I was working at a Denver Sears in 1978 during the Christmas shopping season and a drunk derelict came into the store, took off his jeans, stood at the cash register in his underwear, and said to me, "These are worn out. I need a new pair."

The jeans were filthy and down to the threads with holes in quite a few places. "How long have you worn them?"

"I dunno, about a year and half I guess."

"You wear them every day?"

"Yeah, ever day."

"These were good jeans then."

"Yeah, but they're worn out. Sears gives me a new pair every time."

"Every year and a half?"

"Yeah."

"Let me talk to the manager." I walked upstairs and was told that indeed this man was fully deserving of a new pair of jeans. I walked back to the cash register, the derelict still standing there in his briefs and told him to go pick out a new pair.

In the 1980s all that ended. Money and conspicuous consumption became a national obsession. We now live in a cruder and shallower society. I can't say I like the crudeness. Somehow with our new love of the crude and rude, interest in satisfying the customer was abandoned at run of the mill stores like Sears (although they still guarantee their Craftsman tools - which cost a pretty penny - for life). It became something that was only present at places where wealthy people shopped. That's been true for decades now.

I was reminded of the fact that we only believe in customer support for the upper class this past month when I had to deal with two problems: my laptop video card went haywire after two and a half years; my cell phone keyboard went dead after three months.

The laptop problem was an easy fix. It's an Apple. You pay a premium for an Apple laptop, about 30 percent more than the equivalent generic PC. It's worth it. Laptops are complicated pieces of machinery. Apples, I've found, are so well built that I can get years out of them. The longest a name brand IBM or clone laptop has lasted for me is 20 months. Plus the Apple operating system is far slicker. Then there is the subject of customer service.

Let's look at the case of my video card problem. With any other company, I would have had to talk to a customer service agent from some place like Bangalore, be put on hold for who knows how long, be probably be told I was S.O.L., and finally be told to "have a nice day and thank you for calling HewlettLenDellShiba".

But with Apple, I had my choice of two Apple stores within two miles of my house. I made an appointment at one of them. I walked in. They looked at the laptop promptly. A guy brought it into a back room. I waited five minutes. The guy came back and said, "Well your laptop is out of warranty, but the video card - and you may know this from looking around the web - is defective so we'll replace it for free."

"Free?"

"Yes, free. Just sign the paperwork and we'll have it done in a done in a day or two."

I signed the paperwork. Eight hours later, I got a call that my laptop was ready to be picked up. You really do get what you pay for.

This brings me to my other electronics problem in April. I had a cheap cell phone provider, Virgin. For $25 a month, I was promised unlimited messaging and internet plus 300 minutes of call time. I bought a phone from them in November. In early March, the physical keyboard on the phone started to act up.

The phone was under warranty so I sent Virgin an email. Three and a half weeks later Virgin sent me a refurb replacement. The refurb couldn't do internet except through wifi. I called Virgin - someone answered from the Philippines, I think - about 4 times about this. They had me do this, that and the other thing with the phone and kept telling me "wait four hours everything will work properly". It never did work properly.

I was polite with my conversations each time. Then out of the blue, my phone service was disconnected and Virgin dropped my phone number completely. They didn't know if they could get it back, but said they would try and gave me a temp number. It took a week before they reinstated my phone number, which meant people who had my business card and tried to call were out of luck for a week.

Virgin also sent me another new refurb phone. Again I had the same absence of internet. Again I kept calling customer service. Sometimes I'd talk to someone in the Philippines. Other times it was someone in Mexico. Again they had me do this, that and the other thing with the phone and kept telling me "wait four hours everything will work properly". It didn't. Finally, they sent me a third refurb phone and told me that this time they were sending me a "Class A refurb". I asked them what they had sent me in the past. The answer? Class B. They were sending me defective phones.

Thirty two days after I received my first refurb phone, I finally had a cell phone that worked completely. I probably spent close to 10 hours total dealing with Virgin over that time. I don't consider Virgin all that unusual in its atrocious customer service. I'd actually say it was par for the course although I have changed to a new cell phone provider in the hope that I'm wrong.

What's the take home message from this? America has definitely become a rougher and tougher place. We are less trusting. We are more money conscious. Customer service is a dicey thing. I note that yesterday I went in to have a couple of funny moles on my face biopsied. As I left the dermatologist's office, the receptionist shouted, "Wait!"

"Do I need to fill out some paperwork?"

"No, you need to pay."

"Huh?"

"We don't bill you. And we've already checked and found out you haven't met your deductible."

"You want me to pay for the visit?"

"Yeah, and the biopsy, too."

I sighed. "You haven't even done the cultures yet and I have to pay in advance?"

"Yes."

"Oh dear. American Express?"

"Visa or Master Card only." I handed her my card. I signed the little piece of paper and I thought of my mother, the careful shopper, buying Billy the Kid's jeans for me in a little store in Milwaukee, Wisconsin called the Squire Shop where they hid the cash register in a back room.

In Praise of Obscure Government Research Labs

In graduate school, I studied the esoteric of the esoteric, flow through porous media with application to understanding earthquakes. Hardly anyone else was doing this kind of work and hardly anyone else was doing the “broader” work that it was based on, groundwater hydrology. The research from my dissertation has been cited in the literature about 150 times; that’s not exactly an indication of overwhelming impact, but in groundwater hydrology it’s hitting a homerun research-wise. There are maybe 300 groundwater researchers in the world of any note and about 10,000 who work on very applied problems – water supply, water contamination and whatnot – in the field.

Why did I study something so esoteric? I liked it! Plus unlike math, it was a field with reasonable employment prospects in research. If I could manage to get accepted into a highly regarded school and do well dissertation-wise, I knew I would have a reasonable shot at a real research job or academic position. That’s exactly what happened. I took a job with an obscure government agency that offered a tremendous amount of research freedom, the US Geological Survey (USGS), well before I received my Ph.D. In fact, that agency funded my Ph.D. research.

At the time, the USGS was a research powerhouse in geology and geophysics. There were some incredible people there, smart and enthusiastic. The quality of research was, on the whole, better than you’d find in any academic institution. Some of the senior researchers were members of the National Academy of Sciences. But it was clear that the heyday of academic research in the government was coming to a close in all but the health sciences. I felt that I was a member of the last group of Ph.D. research-grade hires that would be made in the agency.

It was a plum job in a lot of ways. There was one big problem, though: with every senior researcher who retired, the place got emptier and emptier. It got to be sad just how cavernous the office was getting. In my section of the building, I walked in to turn on the lights every morning. At the end of the day, I was also the one who turned them off. I started to get the feeling that if I died behind my desk, I wouldn’t be discovered for a week.

I’m a recluse by nature, but this was too isolating an environment even for me. I took an academic position at Duke after two years at the USGS even though from a research standpoint I knew I was taking a bit of a step down.

Most of the group of hires of which I was a part stayed. They are in their 50s now. All of them could have done what I did, taken an academic job at a good to great school, but they tend to be even quieter and more reclusive than me. In fact, I was considered the outgoing and outlandish one of the bunch. It’s all relative, I guess. I’m eccentric as hell and not at all shy, but outgoing and extroverted? Um, no.

I was right in my assessment that no new hires would be made. Those 50 year old men and women that were hired with me are still the “young people”. In another fifteen years, they will collectively turn out the lights of the place.

Will anything be lost with the demise of the USGS? Its employees are doing esoteric research in an organization known by almost no one. At face value, the answer to my question is a definite no. But that surface-based assessment is undoubtedly wrong. Here is an example why.

Last year as everyone knows, a BP well exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. At first the engineers at BP tried to get a handle on plugging the hole on their own. They didn’t know what the f*ck they were doing. The government intervened. Who did they bring in as experts? People who knew about drilling wells and about flow in porous media. In fact, they brought in friends of mine from the USGS, those obscure researchers from an obscure research agency.

One of my friends got a call from Houston while he was on his way to Nome, Alaska to do research. “We need you here to stand up to these jerks from BP,” he was told.

My friend declined. “Well hydraulics isn’t really my area of expertise,” he said. “You need Dr X.”

“But Dr. X won’t be able to stand up to those assholes. Sure he knows his stuff, but he’s too quiet and shy. They’ll never listen to him.”

“He knows more about that field that anyone. If they don’t listen to him, they’re idiots.”

“Are you sure, you can’t come?”

“Yeah, call Dr. X.”

“If this doesn’t work out, we’re calling you back and flying you down here.”

The end result was that the government people from Houston, with great hesitation, flew Dr. X in. Dr. X really does, in fact, understand well hydraulics as well or better than anyone in the world. He is quiet, it’s true. But he is also very smart, very articulate, and works like a demon. He sat at the table with all those jerks from BP and even they seemed to realize that this man knew what he was talking about and knew far more than they did.

A critical juncture in the BP disaster occurred when a temporary cap was put on the well. Pressures in the well did not recover as expected. This was horrible news. It meant that at face value, the well was still unstable. It could potentially explode again; if it did there was zero chance that the gusher could ever be plugged permanently.

Dr. X was back in Menlo Park, CA at the time. The situation in Houston was extremely tense. The experts had to make a decision about what to do with the temporary cap. The evidence they had suggested that the cap should be removed. The night before the decision was made, Dr. X decided to do something highly unusual. He went back to his office, took a computer model written for groundwater flow and modified it for oil. Then he stayed up all night and used that model to simulate oil production in the oil reservoir tapped by the BP well.

Dr. X wasn't allowed access to BP data to check his model results with real world numbers, but someone essentially stole what was needed by taking a picture of some data with a cell phone camera. With those data, Dr. X could feel confident about what he had done. His results indicated that the pressures were low in the well because the reservoir had already been partly depleted by prior pumping from other wells.

In his opinion, the temporary well cap was doing its job. The BP well was stable. The cap could stay until a permanent one was fabricated.

Without Dr. X’s work, the temporary cap would have been removed and oil would have gushed out of the BP well for I don’t know how many more weeks. There would also have been doubts that a permanent cap could be effective. Dr. X’s all-nighter of computer modeling saved the day.

Take away that obscure researcher from an obscure government agency, and I know the outcome would have been far worse. Suppose, in fact, there had been no USGS at the time of the BP spill. The government likely would have had to bring in an academic to counter the cowboys of BP. They would have brought in someone like me. Would I have done what Dr. X did? Would even my friend working in Nome, Alaska done what Dr. X did? The answer is undoubtedly no.

It’s not just a matter of expertise. It’s also a matter of mood and attitude. I know what would have happened had I been in Houston. I would have gotten caught up in the emotion of battling those cowboys from BP. I would have been steaming too much to go into reflective mode, sit in my office, be creative, and just do the work necessary to show what was really happening in the well. You needed someone quiet and calm for that job, someone relatively egoless. People in academia, including me, just aren’t like that.

Dr. X’s real name is Paul Hsieh. I’ve known him for decades. My hat is off to him. And when they shut down research at the USGS in another fifteen years or so, this nation definitely will be poorer for it.