On Mortality.

On average, 146,357 die every day.

It can be considered a sizable, staggering number. Until one considers that there are literally a few billion people on the planet. Living, breathing, surviving. And in the end, all those billions of drops in the overall sea of humanity have but one common trait in common. Sooner or later, we're all going to die.

Billions of people, all waiting in line for their turn to die.

I've found myself thinking about it fairly recently. I think I'm thinking about death in the usual manner that people do, assuming they think about it. That is, are they afraid of it, wondering how and when it will happen, and things they'd like to do before time runs out.

I suppose I'm like everyone else in having a list of things I'd want to do before I die, if at all possible. Just that is a long list of things that I can't do, no matter how many improbable events occur in my favor. Some of these items aren't so much things I'd want to do before impending death as they are goals, tasks I'd like to accomplish at some point. Though, I suppose, there are a few items that are the sort of thing only someone with the assurance that he's dying soon (and thus be relatively safe from the consequences) would do.

Timing doesn't seem to be much of an issue for me, either. I could probably die now and not particularly mind. I guess this comes from the grim acceptance that I'm going to die sometime, and have no say in that matter. Neither do I have any real say in when I'm going to die, so no point really bickering about that, either. Death is the great inevitable, and pondering about when the inevitable happens is kind of pointless to me. Certainly, I'd prefer it be not quite as painful as it could be, but when the end comes, I think we all have to accept it with the stoic dignity that comes with knowing you won't have another chance to be dignified.

What I'm not so sure of, though, is whether or not I actually feel anything concerning death. I'm sure I'm going to die, and I'm sure I'll have next to no control over it. But what do I feel about the fact that I, like everyone else, am mortal? Strangely, all indications point to me not really caring. Perhaps I've come to terms with death even though, statistically speaking, I'm not exactly going to keel over and die the next day. It will happen when it does and how it does, and I find it difficult to muster the will to care about it. Granted, I probably will care when its happening, but now? Not so much.

Death is inevitable, and I accept that. I don't embrace it, but I'm not going to fight it. Not that I believe in much of an afterlife, either. I'm not entirely sure what prompted me to start considering, pondering mortality and the prospect of death, but I've come to find it rather fascinating.

Is it strange, I wonder, to enjoy thinking about death, yet not entirely care about the death itself? Still, many would consider this acceptance to be an alien concept, something that goes against the natural preservation instinct of the human animal. I'm not sure why I've come to accept it, maybe even embrace the idea of dying. Perhaps I'll figure this oddity out, perhaps not.

Tempus mortis.

From Crime Library: Deborah Gardner

The Case.

I occasionally browse through the Crime Library, read up on some articles and cases. It helps me put things in perspective somehow, and reminds me that the world isn't as pretty as tourist ads would like to present them to be. There are some ugly things out there, but reading through it, this one case struck me the most.

Not because it was the most heinous. Not because it was the most compelling mystery. Not because it remains unsolved -- though, technically, it does. I find it compelling because the Peace Corp and the US government let a man get away with murder, all because of the potential damage to the organization's reputation.

This is a clear and present travesty of justice, but I guess I should expect nothing less of the US. Her killer deserves to be punished, and justice needs to be done. This whole thing is just...there's no real way to describe it. I mean...all the evidence points at him, the victim even managed to mention him by name before dying, and the Peace Corp and the US government orchestrates his being allowed to get away scot-free?

If I were in charge, that man would be hanged by the neck until dead.

There is no justice in the world. None at all.

Very Impressive.

The above is a cake, believe it or not. An actual cake.
These guys are amazing.

Grievances

The nature of the world is such that, one way or another, someone has to complain about their job. This is natural and to be expected. No matter how nice of an employer you are or how good you are as a manager, sooner or later, someone is going to complain about something. It could be something small and insignificant, a matter that will blow over given some time and maybe a nice paycheck. Others are more genuine and concrete, and will brew for prolonged periods under the surface, simmering until some undefined point when it becomes absolutely intolerable.

This post is dedicated to one particular aspect of the daily workload, known as blog commenting/research. Basically, it requires one shift to find 40 blogs a day that fit certain parameters, while the other shift takes those lists and finds 6 of them a day to place comments on. There are other aspects of the task, but these details are not required to know.

There are, naturally, a few guidelines. First, they have to be of a specific rank. This one is easy enough, just time-consuming because of the nature of the tool used to determine it. It takes so damn long, especially if the blog has a lot of javascript or flash running. The second is that it has to be open for comments. As of now, we are hidebound to the research half of the task, and we've been getting some annoying messages about it. The worst of which would be that there can be no duplications not only within the "40 per day" but from the very start. The second is that if the blog requires registration, then there should already be one. And finally, if links do end up duplicated, we have to provide replacements.

To an extent, I understand the insistence that no duplicates be made. This is perfectly understandable, as excessive duplication of the output just speaks volumes of laziness. However, given the nature of what needs to be done, I find it completely unreasonable to expect a complete lack of duplication entirely. We cannot be expected to have a master list of our output that we can all access for comparison to the output for the day. Do you have any idea how long it would take to countercheck all 40 of them with the hundreds that get compiled onto said master list idea? It'd take all day, so unless the boss wants us to sacrifice everything else for this specific task, then expect duplicates to crop up every so often.

Then there's the issue of active accounts on the sites we seek out. This one I have two issues with. First, we got a lot of those sites when we were on the receiving end, rather than the research end. I can personally say that at least half of the ones I got required a registered account to place comments. However, while we all got it, we didn't complain. We simply skipped over them and used the ones that didn't require registration. And he wants us to not only find these sites, determine if they need registration, then confirm said registration? Does he have any inkling, any concept at all of how long that would take? Waiting for a registration to be confirmed could take days, and we already do quite a bit of registration daily -- just not of this nature.

The second issue regarding registrations is this: we skipped past them during the last rotation, why can't the night shift people? It isn't like there aren't a whole of other options available on hand in case one is unusable, and it isn't as if everything we list down actually gets used. When the blogs are sent in at 40 a day from 4 different researchers and the comments required of the other shift comes down to only 6 per day per commenter, that's a lot of leftover stuff. Even if a few require registration and need to be skipped over, there's very little chance they'd actually run out of sites on any given day.

Finally, I absolutely refuse to provide replacements for duplicates. Duplicated links will be inevitable given this task, and we already do what we reasonably can to minimize them. The whole process is time-consuming, especially given the piece of shit Internet connection (my home wireless connection is faster, honestly) and the fact that my PC seems required to crash at least twice a day at the most inopportune times.

Thinking about it, I have another issue I need to let out. Whenever I meet with the night shift people, I don't hear any complaints. We send in our required number of blogs, and if there were any problems, I figure I'd hear about it from them on those instances when I arrive before they head home. It has happened a few times, and not one complaint. So why is it that the division head seems like he's got nothing better to do than to dig through our lists and look for duplicates or other things to complain about? If the people who use the lists don't see any problem with what we provide, then why should he?

We encountered these same problems in the last rotation, when we were doing the commenting and the night shift did the research. We certainly didn't make a big deal if one or two blogs were the same, or if some of them required us to have to sign up for an account on the site. We got the ones we could use, did our jobs, and paid the rest of them no mind. We'd appreciate it if the favor was returned.