|
|
|
no more prison work for Gretchen
Thursday, May 1 2025
There was a period of time at work today when I was tempted to just get up and walk out of the workplace, never to return. There's something wrong with a technology if it makes someone with decades of experience want to do that, but that's how it is with the relational database system known as Oracle. Maybe I've been spoiled by other database systems that don't make things so needlessly difficult, and maybe some day I will will find something to like about Oracle, but that has yet to happen. My workplace tech environment is kind of a perfect storm of hostile technologies: Windows 11, a Javascript fronted based on Angular, and the kind of problems that large language models are hopeless at answering. By comparison, the C# backend is relatively benign, though it's easy to have problems when working with it that will make a grown man cry. Couple with these underlying miseries, I'm still new to the codebase, so I don't know where anything is. Topping everything off, this particular software shop is still kind of scrappy and ad hoc, and is lacking things like documentation or suites of tools. Much of its business knowledge is still unwritten and thus impossible to obtain without laborious conversations or chats.
Still, by the end of the day, I'd broken through on a number of fronts and was seeing data flowing almost miraculously from Oracle procedures I'd written into Angular modules I'd modified.
Meanwhile, Gretchen was finally busted for her pattern of fraternizing with current and former prisoners she'd met years ago in the Bard Prison Initiative. Though "volunteer" teachers in the prisons are forbidden from communicating with any prisoners in the NY State prison system, Gretchen had carried on snail-mail correspondences with numerous former students. Indeed, this was how she came to learn that Powerful, the former inmate who lived for a time in our basement, needed a place to live upon release. Gretchen had masked such communications by writing the letters as if they were coming from me, and the prisoners would write to me in response. This had gone on for many years, and apparently Gretchen got lazy and started bitching about details in the various prisons she'd worked, information that was not to be shared with prisoners. Someone in a prison mail room opened one of the letters Gretchen had sent to one of the prisoners at Woodbourne and quickly figured out that it was Gretchen doing the communication. So today she received an email telling her that her participation as a volunteer in the NY State prison system has been indefinitely suspended pending an investigation, one that will likely make the suspension permanent. It's all kind of embarrassing and mortifying, at least from my perspective. For Gretchen, the main problem is that she has let down the arts organization that had hired her to teach a course in Woodbourne this semester, something she hasn't actually been able to do due to a huge Department of Corrections labor dispute and its aftermath. She sent an apology letter to that organization this afternoon, and they ended up being less upset with her than either of us expected. In truth, Gretchen had grown weary of her prison work, and that might explain why she'd gotten lazy about what she was putting in her letters to prisoners. Her heart these days is in fighting for abortion rights. Now that she will probably never again be allowed to volunteer in a NY prison, it's likely her involvement in prison education issues will disappear entirely.
Back at the house, Gretchen was hanging out on the east deck with the dogs enjoying the good weather. Charlotte was being a good girl and not barking even though one of Crazy Dave's dogs was barking incessantly. Gretchen said that occasionally Charlotte would bark, but she'd immediately stop whenever told to. Charlotte would not end up going with me on a walk down the Stick Trail when Gretchen headed off to pilates; this was mostly due to a peanut butter jar with traces of peanut butter in it that she'd found; I'd brought back from my workplace after making numerous peanut butter sandwiches.
Later this evening I showed Gretchen some extremely Hispanic tostadas I'd bought at MyTown in Stone Ridge. Reading the ingredients, I found they contained three different food colorings. I joked that they would make me autistic, and she took the opportunity to go right back into our argument some weeks ago about facilitated communication. Now she was claiming that Eli, the profoundly autistic son of our sister-in-law's sister, uses a letter board supposedly to communicate independently. "Does he use a keyboard?" she asked. "They're working on it," Gretchen replied. She also claimed that it turned out that Eli has a rich inner life that had been revealed by FC. It sounded like crap to me, especially related an anecdote of an anecdote. I now know from experience that Gretchen gives absurd credence to shoddy claims of autistic communication, and the "game of telephone" from our sister-in-law's sister to our sister-in-law to Gretchen provided all sorts of opportunities for the claims to be inflated along the way. The fact that Eli doesn't yet use a keyboard, though, seemed to be most salient bit of information. In Eli actually had a rich inner life, he would immediately take to a keyboard to communicate that life at whatever speed he was capable of. That he needs someone there with a letterboard, even if they are not holding it, suggest there is something huge missing, and that missing thing is probably any ability to actually communicate. But it makes sense that a culture of facilitated communication would grow up around him. He and his sister, who is only slightly less autistic, are all his parents have, so they are understandably desperate to communicate with them.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?250501 feedback
previous | next |
