Blog of Josh Hall

People’s willingness to pay a price defines market price, and that line is always being tested.

This is probably more of an obvious one, but the social implications are severe, in my opinion.  There are two evils at play here.  The first, a common negotiation strategy is to ask for twice of what you really want.  If I say I want $10 for this shirt, but I only need $5 to make a profit, the buyer can put in work to cut the original $10 price tag in half, feel like they’ve got a huge deal, and as the seller, I’m still happy.  Sellers will always push the boundary of what a consumer will pay, and as long as people keep dishing out the cash, prices will continue to grow with greed.  Think of the auction houses or even antique road show.  They just come out and say, this is worth $10,000 at auction, but they’re really just setting the standard for something that may not even exist.  As long as someone is willing to pay that, it will sell.

The other problem is more of a social norm issue.  The longer prices go unquestioned, the less of an issue it is perceived to be.  We all don’t like paying $5 a gallon for gas, but what can we do to stop it?  There’s enough political power in play that companies like Exxon are posting their largest profits ever, but the price at the pump continues to grow.  Investors are making a killing in the stock market because people keep seeing other people make huge amounts of money driving up the cost of oil.  Gas might be too big of a topic to be a good example, but even with the other side of of consumerism there are examples.  Everyone is fine paying $1.40 for a burger, until McDonald’s comes up with a dollar menu.  Now all the fast food joints are making dollar menus to stay competitive, because people are slowly seeing they can get something cheaper than what they’ve been paying.

How do you feel about thank you cards?  We’ve certainly started to use technology in a lot of new ways, but thank you cards are still the same old tradition that our grandmother’s did when they were our age.  Is that a good thing?

There is a big difference between cost and worth and they should never be confused.

Just because a shirt costs $990 does not mean it is worth $990, or anything near that!  There are so many examples of materialism where people pay so much more than the practical value of an item.  Even if you ignore the extreme situations and markups, look at how much time people spend shopping around for ANYTHING.  The fact that a bottle of medicine at costco is 70x cheaper than the same drug elsewhere, or a HDMI cable is $60 at Best Buy but $4 on amazon is ridiculous.

Whenever I have a job interview and they ask me if I have ever been fired from a job, I can’t help but laugh.  I can’t lie, but I can’t really say “yes” without giving the story.  The truth is, I’ve been fired from the same job twice.

During the summer of 2001, I had a job doing tech support for iOmega products at a big call center called CallTech.  It was a great job, it had great pay, and I learned a lot about technology and customer service.  I was taking summer classes to finish up my associate’s degree before I started at Pitt for my bachelor’s degree.  I enjoyed my job so much that I wanted to keep working their over the weekends when I moved to Pitt.  Towards the end of July, I put in a request to change my work hours, and it was approved.  I also either used some time off in August to finish up my degree, get all my stuff packed up and and moved to Pitt, and get a little acquainted with life on campus.  I think I had planned to start working on the weekends again sometime in early September.

Fast forward a few weeks, I’m at Pitt, and my mom calls to tell me that there were some voicemails for me at home from Calltech.  As luck would have it, just as I getting started at Pitt, CallTech put an abrupt end to their weekend support hours.  They sent an internal email employees that they would be scheduled for weekday hours and that employees were to make necessary changes to meet those new hours.  I had no clue.  The first voicemail on the machine was a supervisor [note: I had no 1 direct supervisor] asking if I was alright since I didn’t show up for work that day.  The second voicemail was the same thing, only with a warning that a third occurrence would result in a termination.  The third voicemail was that supervisor calling me that third day saying I had been terminated.

I mean, I can’t blame my mom for not being my secretary, certainly when the root of the problem exists with the company and the internal communications.  I ended up going in on a day I didn’t have class and asked what the heck happened.  Only then did I find out they stopped weekend hours.  After they admitted it was their fault, but that I couldn’t work for them during their hours, I did tell them I wanted to come back the following summer, so they simply changed my employee status to “on hold” or something.

Fast forward a few months, I’m back home for the summer and want to go back to CallTech.  I go in, talk to an old boss, and he is happy to get me back, but they’re just rearranging schedules so he’s not sure when I’ll work.  I forget whether I said I had a weird availability, or if it was just him wanting to get me started, but the verbal agreement we had was that I’d just come in when I wanted.  I’m sure there was something more official, like Tuesday and Thursday from 10 until 6 or something, but, there was definitely a level of uncertainty as well.  It was basically, come in when you can.  so anyway, I did.  Sometimes I put in 4 hours.  Sometimes I put in 8, and sometimes, I didn’t come in at all.  I mean, I needed money, so it wasn’t like I was just blowing it off, but no one was really giving me any direction other than we’re glad to have you.  This went on for a month or more.  FINALLY, the boss said, “hey, we’re going to go ahead and put you on this team, and your hours will be blah blah blah.”  I was happy to have a schedule.  So, I show up for my first officially scheduled shift, and I think I’m there for like an hour or more, when a supervisor pulls me aside.  He asks why I’m there.  I figured he just didn’t know that I had been given a new set schedule.  He told me I was fired.  …dead air…what?  Why?  Apparently, when they “put me into the group” that had a scheduled shift, it made it a retro-active shift.  All those “custom” work hours that didn’t fall into my new schedule flagged me as a no call no show.  I was sent home.

By this time, I had a 2 week vacation planned, then a week before having to go back to Pitt.  I couldn’t live with being fired again though, so I had to go back to CallTech, explain the situation to them, have them admit their faulty ways, and change my employee status from terminated to quit.  It really makes me wonder if any of the places I’ve applied for a job have ever called CallTech and asked them if I was employed there and if they had any issues with me.  I guess Calltech never really had to change anything in “my file” if they just wanted to get rid of me anyway.  I should call them and see what they have on file for me someday…

Our Church, The Open Door, hosts a stations of the cross art exhibit every year, and this year I volunteered to create a piece out of LEGO bricks.  I definitely hesitated until the last minute to speak up, but it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a couple years now, just never had the courage or ambition to take it on.  The station that was open was Jesus being denied by Peter.  I pulled up the related verses, Matthew 26:31-35 –

Jesus Predicts Peter’s Denial

³¹ Then Jesus told them, “This very night you will all fall away on account of me, for it is written:

“‘I will strike the shepherd,
and the sheep of the flock will be scattered.’^[a]

³² But after I have risen, I will go ahead of you into Galilee.”

³³ Peter replied, “Even if all fall away on account of you, I never will.”

³⁴ “Truly I tell you,” Jesus answered, “this very night, before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times.”

³⁵ But Peter declared, “Even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you.” And all the other disciples said the same.

Once I read that, I had a clear vision of the rooster in my mind.  I knew I couldn’t just sculpt a rooster and call it meaningful though.  I wanted the text “I will never disown you” incorporated in it somewhere.  Over the next few days I stirred up ideas of what to do with the text.  I had toyed with the idea of creating something like a 3 sided platform for the rooster, and on the 3 sides would be three different quotes of peter denying he knew Jesus, but the quotes would be too long to fit, and triangles are harder than anything in LEGO bricks.  I settled on a wall around the rooster.

I set off developing the head of the rooster first.  As luck would have it, I didn’t have to buy a single piece for this project!  That’s a first.  I had just bought 9 of the same Toy Story Pizza Planet Truck Rescue set for a class I taught that had the red bionicle 1×3 tooth that I had thought would prove to be useless in the future, but actually was PERFECT for the rooster’s crown!  The first time around on the rooster didn’t work out well for structural integrity reasons, so I scrapped that design mid way and started from scratch with a strict enforcement of adhering to ratios and spacing.  Simple is structurally sound I kept telling myself.

All told, it probably took 15 hours of work.  As far as pieces, there’s about 4,000 with all the bricks in the wall, all the technic connectors, and then all the plates for the rooster.  It’s 20″ wide, by 20″ long, and about another 20 some inches tall.

Honestly, this was one of the most rewarding, but also easy builds I’ve done to date.  Sure, there are a bunch of things I’d change, like trying to fill in all the holes in the exterior of the rooster, but some people said they really enjoyed seeing into it to appreciate the engineering work and how it all went together.  I was really nervous about 2 things before the exhibit.  First, I wondered how a LEGO work would be received by the community.  It’s not the oil on canvas or interactive piece that, I think, has become the norm.  Second, I worried about it being destroyed.  I had a 27 year old friend come over to my house, and when I showed him it, he immediately touched it and broke a piece off.  The same was done (and more so expected) when I showed it to my 2 nephews under 5.  I just envisioned people touching the piece throughout the day and rendering it a pile of indiscernible plastic, just waiting for me to come back and put it back together.  Not only did it hold up throughout the entire show, but they even moved it across the room from where I had set it up!  Brave souls who did that deed!  I had put effort in for originally planning to have the rooster balance solely on his 2 feet, which were purposely not rigid to display the horizontal details between bricks, but I decided against it in case someone decided to push it over.  Not to mention the uneven floor of the gallery space.

Here’s the “artistic statement” that went along with the sculpture:

Jesus had many supporters when he walked the earth, but he had to die on the cross alone.  I can only imagine what Jesus must have felt hearing Peter’s words but knowing full well that Peter would still disown him.  Christ not only forgives us when we fall short, but loves us without pause.  Even when his own disciples fall short after being in direct contact with Jesus, Christ still suffers and sacrifices for us;  God’s children.

Even though our words can build up confidence and pass off as strong wall against denial of our faith, our walls can still be shattered with just the slightest adverse push or pull; much like this delicate piece in front of you.

On that Good Friday, the rooster was pictured on the home page of the Post-Gazette, with a link to this story – http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/local/region/stations-of-the-cross-artists-create-their-own-interpretations-at-union-project-630228/

i just learned that diaper changing is warfare.  I thought it was merely routine maintenance before.  I took off her diaper, cleaned her up, bent down to toss the dirty diaper, leaving her exposed to the elements, but I didn’t realize I was exposing myself to the line of fire.  BOOM.  orange solids and liquids shot out of her anus in a stream that seemed destined for my being.  she got it all over the changing table, dresser, diaper bin, and carpet, and I escaped.  This time.  Seeing her attempt had failed, she let off the self destruct device; her bladder.  Urine covered her body and what was left of the changing pad.

You win this time, Juliette.  Your father will be more prepared in the future.