The Long Haul

The employment situation in Key West is bleak and in my job we are as understaffed as anyone. We have three dispatchers for day shift where we are supposed to have at least six and at night we will shortly be down to two. Even though we have police officers, former dispatchers, assigned to help, the situation is critical until the latest batch of trainees finish training this Fall.

The net result will be three weeks scheduled without a day off which is my way of saying I will run out of pictures and words before long, probably even before I run out of brain cells. So if this page gets stuck don't be surprised. I hope that by mid August I will get a day off or two and normal certainty will be resumed.

Rusty will get his walks though I expect my wife will be picking up the slack there a bit. I try to vary the photographs between town and country but that may not be in the cards. I shall post what I have, but whatever shortcomings appear on this page has everything to do with too much work and nothing to do with anything else. I enjoy walking Rusty and taking pictures. It is my stress release.

I am not surprised when I walk into Circle K to get some milk for my tea and find the place filled with half empty boxes. There aren't enough people to staff the checkout and unload the new stock. Hotels are desperate for staff and are trying to find ways to automate processes we have become used to being carried out by humans. Even to schedule a colonoscopy (getting stuff done while I have work insurance which covers every cost!) I had to fill out a giant questionare on line. No more sitting in a waiting room scribbling on a clip board. Understaffing is the new normal in every line of work and apparently not just in the Keys.

Finding people in this employment climate who want a job that requires sitting still for twelve hours and needs the ability to stay calm in crisis after crisis after crisis is no easy matter. It takes six to nine months to train someone suitable and the process isn't made easier with understaffing already taking a bite out of the energy required to train new people. 

I had a conversation with someone half my age who advised me the old work parameters no longer apply. A job is an anchor for a couple of years, working from home is preferred and commitment is limited and not terribly important. I think that was what he was saying and I liked none of it.

I guess my old fuddy duddy pleasure at having a secure job with benefits while doing something useful is out of date. I can actually see why retirement is so important. Things change, generations change and I feel horribly out of date in this work place of new attitudes. It is time I disappeared.

But not until some replacements are trained and seated. Someone needs to be ready in 260 days because I will be ready to slide on out.

Meanwhile I will keep on keeping on and under these circumstances my life shrinks down to sleeping, walking Rusty and showing up at my desk. Playing with words will be a secondary concern for a couple of weeks I fear. I don't like living like this but it is temporary I hope, though as we have seen life intervenes sometimes spectacularly and without warning.

I am ready to expect the unexpected, I know plans can unravel or be unraveled by twists of fate, but you have to keep planning. The plan is to get through our worker shortage with my mind intact. 

A camera, a walk, a surprise along the way.

Looking for the beauty in unlikely places.

August promises to be brutal around here! Enjoy yours and take a vacation while you can. I will rest later.

 

Shades of Downtown

I was not in the mood to go out into the noonday sun but I went anyway as the alternative was to sit on the couch and space out or worse, take a nap. The trouble is I like naps but it was a bright sunny day and I wanted adventure.

As adventures go it wasn't anywhere close to my definition, "an undertaking with an uncertain outcome" as I was pretty sure I'd end up back at my desk an hour later.

So I fiddled with the settings on the camera and chose square format in back and white to make me work.  With the red filter deployed the sky turned a satisfying shade of dark. The beauty of digital photography is the filters are all in the camera electronically. Press a button whoosh you can have red yellow or green at will.

It was a s hot as it looks actually. Downtown surrounded by buildings the cooling breeze is not like it is in the mangroves. 

I choose to walk on the shady side of the street in summer. It's like they say about a good parking spot for a Floridian, that's always the parking space in the shade.

People seem to enjoy walking up and down Duval Street and I keep hoping I shall enjoy ti more but really I don't. 

She didn't seem to mind sitting there with a bull in her lap:

Three bars in one building:

I made my way off Duval Street and walked into Truman Annex for some peace and greenery. "Coming in hot" the scooter rider shouted so I stepped off the sidewalk(!) into the grass. 

The Presidential Gate on Caroline at Whitehead. They are traditionally only opened for US Presidents in town. President Truman used to stay in Truman Annex when it was a Navy Base and his car would trundle in and out of here. There's a replica you can rent apparently somewhere in town. The car I mean, not the President.

Like I said, find your spot of shade and stick to it.

Everyone was hunting for shade.  I once had a memorable encounter with someone at this very corner, a stranger who accosted me as I walked back to the car late one night after a movie at the Tropic. He tried to ask for directions but before he could finish, or start really, he vomited copiously very near my shoes so as I leapt back to avoid splatter (successfully) he pirouetted in a  drunken faint clutching the wall and sliding to the ground nicely mopping up his own mess. Late night movies haven't held the same attraction since.

Back to Saint Paul's shining like a beacon of sanity on an insane street.

Into my car with ten minutes to get back to work. The journey was not aided by those foul golf carts holding up traffic and crawling like oversized tortoises in the middle of the road.

I still got back in time. 
 

Duval Street At Four

I went to Publix yesterday and bought half a dozen items my wife had forgotten she wanted. Now that she is retired she has decided, in order that I may be encouraged to work a little while longer, that she will do the housekeeping. Our family has become a facsimile of a 1950s stereotype. I lack the tie and briefcase and she does not greet me at the door with a  whisky and soda but I work and she is the stay at home housewife and it is slightly weird.

Consequently I am not as familiar with the interior of a grocery store as I used to be. I remember when the height of tough political questioning on the campaign trail was when reporters (remember them?) asked Presidential candidates the price of milk to see if they were in touch with the common people. I don't think any of them were and now I too am in that exalted Presidential state.

Imagine my surprise when I was confronted by not a single check out cashier and the only way out was through a group of self service machines. I have tried these tools of Satan at other stores, notably Winn Dixie on Big Pine and I loathe them. Invariably I end up screwing up something and I have to wait for the overseer to come along and whip the artificial intelligence into shape. The machines are always screaming at me to put my items in the bag, or screaming that I put something I shouldn't in the bag. They remind me of the the misery of my teenage years, a new boy in school getting yelled at by everyone for not knowing the protocols. "Excuse me" I shout. "The machine is accusing me of stealing from Publix," I say in an effort to shame the managers of these unruly beasts. And don't forget we are all under surveillance:

The fact is every business in the Keys would like to be hiring people. I hear it is the same story across the country and it's certainly true in dispatch where we have seven dispatchers covering 15 paid positions, so I suppose it makes sense to hire artificial intelligence where people won't work for the paltry wages.

I feel my grip on the customs of daily life slipping away from me gradually. I guess it is the process of aging. I liked to try different things and take long vacations as a youngster but I came home and got a job. It was as matter of  course as calling AT and T to install a phone line in my new apartment.  I worked until I got bored and then I took off for a while. Then I came home and worked some more. I just looked for a job and eventually got one. I had as much desire for a career as I had to start a family. But I worked.

I can't tell if it's the virus that's changed everything or the Internet or ray guns from outer space but I don't feel part of it any more. Perhaps the change is within me and things move ahead as they always have. Perhaps people earn money buy selling stuff on eBay like my wife as she gradually empties our home of superfluous possessions. Perhaps manual laborers are making a living on YouTube or working from home in some manner I can't imagine. I am so used to commuting and sitting at a desk I can't think of how else I'd like to work. No benefits? No union? No contract? How 19th century my work life feels to me now. 

Perhaps it's just Key West and outside this bubble things are back to where they were.  I see lots of businesses closed, surviving stores are looking for employees and the latest numbers show Florida is heading back to a world of high numbers of infected people, busy hospitals and low rates of vaccination. I completed my vaccination on February 16th and have suffered no side effects since except staying healthy enough to show up for work every shift since.

Other than being vaccinated it's like the last year is starting all over again. I was indeed very wrong last year when I thought the pandemic would last maybe six months, because now a year and a half later the Canadian border is still closed, travel in South America is banned and Key West is a never ending circus of people looking for relief from the stress of being stuck at home. The city is packed with tourists if not snowbirds. And we can't staff supermarket check outs. May we live in interesting times.

Cruising

The city commission in Key West is pondering how to reduce cruise ship passengers from landing in vast numbers in the city. The battle which seemed to be over when the Governor signed a state law overriding local initiatives to limit cruise ship passenger numbers.

It's a frantic business as newspapers are reporting an advocate of cruise ships gave the Governor a million dollars to sign the law under the usual embarrassing guise of "no quid pro quo" lobbying.

Meanwhile the opponents of massive  seabed churning cruise ships argue the city can pass a local law limiting the number of passengers a cruise ship can land. It's an interesting debate to me as the local control loving Republicans in Tallahassee stomp on the local law preferred by Key West Democrats. 

This isn't directly about partisan politics, its all about local politics and playing to your audience. Cruise ship passengers don't bother me one way or the other. if there are a ton of marked cruise ship passengers swarming three blocks of Lower Duval I have plenty of the city to enjoy where they have no clue how to find me. 

I have seen a  ton of business tore fronts go out of business and these are hardly the kind of businesses locals need, though some are restaurants others are branches of chains devoted to tourist knick knacks.

The question is really one of economics. If you need three jobs to survive is the city commission doing you any favors by depriving you of places to seek employment?  Supporters of cruise ships make the point they are opposed by Weather people whose income is not dependent on mass tourism. 

Its just one more  step down the long gentrification path that Key West has been trying to deal with. In the end money talks and I'm betting cruise ships of any size and in any number will end up docking in Key West and I don't suppose they will make pirate town any the more interesting or exciting or eccentric. 

 

Duval and Eaton

Were you planning to bring a dog to the United States from any one of a hundred countries the  journey  must be completed today because tomorrow they are banned. The CDC has imposed a ban on importing dogs "for the time being," unless they are form a handful of countries.

The temporary (I hope) ban is in response to the demand for pedigree dogs during the pandemic when rescuing a mutt is not suitable for the fashion conscious and those in pursuit of precocious status symbols.

What happened was unscrupulous breeders and puppy mills abroad took to faking vet certificates which were hard to obtain thanks to Covid restrictions and they shoved off their pedigree dogs to the US unprotected against rabies. For fear of an outbreak of the disease the CDC imposed the ban. Supposedly it will be lifted once the Centers for Disease Control figure out what to do.

Western (not Eastern) Europe is exempt from the ban as are Mexico, Canada and Australia and New Zealand. Dogs must have lived in those countries for six months to be eligible to enter the US. Everywhere else is closed as of tomorrow.

Rusty will not be affected as any decision to go beyond Mexico will not be a short term trip, though I find this idea of a blanket ban by an agency touting the value of vaccinations to be weird. I got my second Covid shot on February 16th and very glad I was too. I believe in the value of vaccinations as they have saved me from disease over the decades. Why incoming dogs from suspect countries  can't be vaccinated at our border I don't know. May be that will become the policy who knows.

The dogs facing issues right now are rescue dogs in Third World countries who have found homes in the US but will be banned from travel. Personally I don't think any dog should be a stray and why people insist on buying dogs when 2.4 million abandoned dogs are killed each year in this country baffles me. Rusty is just one more proof its the owners not the dogs that are the problem.

I guess the reason this story struck me was the notion that Covid is wrecking so much in so many ways and in so many places. Unemployment, underemployment, travel restrictions, extra poverty, all on top of death and disruption. Now stray dogs are getting screwed. Does it ever end?

A stray no longer.

Reflections

It occurred to me on  a road trip that I am lucky to have space to be alone, and who would have thought I'd find that space in the Keys?

I suppose the solitude is a product of the lack of social value in the places I walk. These are no kind of shady forest glen, obviously I am alone far from beaches and bikinis.

I think many people fear the mangroves and the ghastly reptiles they harbor and all the poisonous snakes and ravenous crocodiles and spiders the size of your fist. We mustn't forget the human element where contrary  to real life the imagination fills the woods with sex traffickers rapists and robbers.   

Or me, lumbering around with camera  and dog dressed in rubber shoes to cope with high tides and flooding.

For me the mangroves paint pictures, always varying with the light and the weather, always the same for want of topographical features.

You could walk for hours here and the scenery won't change much. Hammocks of high ground produce taller trees but not by much. A pile of rubble produced by digging anti- mosquito gambusia trenches allows a short person to see over the mangroves slightly: they don't vary.

I came across  a death struggle- bird versus caterpillar and the hungry bully won. It's what happens while you aren't looking, lives get destroyed and you travel on none the wiser. 

I drive home after work and lives were changed in the preceding twelve hours, hospitalization, arrest, death, from the banal to the awful and no one around me knows or notices or cares.

I watched the worm curl up in an attempt to defend itself from the beak but the bird was having none of it. Hairy caterpillar was on the menu. I was God and declined to intervene so I suppose the caterpillar had cause to deny me my majesty.

I took a photograph instead of a puddle with a reflection. Life goes on.