Smart Data Solutions: one of my last emails. Actually 2

 

Jane Hoffman <englishcrush@yahoo.com>	Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 12:06 AM
to me

I worked at a company for 19 months called Smart Data Solutions which is medical data entry processing.  On Sept 30, 2002, I asked the corporate office in Eagan, MN why we could not have a raise because wages were low.   I also told Corporate that I asked for a 50 cents raise but the manager of my office in Superior, WI would not give me a raise because he would not train me in 2 other cues out of the 4 cues.  I asked for 4 months straight.  In early Sept. 2022, Tim Moder, my boss, said I was not fast enough to learn other cues.  My percentage had gone from 45% to 74% production in 6 months.  Right after I contacted corporate about the wages, the company treated me different.  They told me I could no longer work Saturdays.  My immediate boss, Tim, calculated all the days I wrote I was coming in and what times and tried to measure that against the times I actually worked.  I put in my notice and then reneged it.  They tried to put me on probation for productivity and attendance.  I was told by Tim, "this would have never happened, if you did not contact corporate."  I have diabetes type II and I work 3 jobs.  I went to the bathroom 1x an hour and I punched out to do so, to not lower my productivity.  They complained I punched out too much but I had to use the bathroom once an hour.  I asked to meet with the manager, Darren Strong, 5x in the last month.  He never made time to meet with me.  Tim was out with Covid and when he came back he tried to put me on probation at 7 p.m. at night on Friday.  The conditions of probation he put me under for not resigning is that I already got a warning for attendance and productivity.  This is not how he presented it originally.  Other people who performed under 80% were allowed to work there and on Saturdays.  Tim forced me into resigning, saying I could come back next summer.  I put in a two week notice for Nov. 4, 2022.  They all of sudden waivered my notice a week later and told me I was release early and could not work until Nov. 4.  They did not give me a reason.  Ever since I asked corporate for a 1.00 raise from 11.00 to 12.00 they were hostile to me.  Four days after I asked, there was a company wide 1.00 raise for each person.  All I know, I was treated differently, the managers were hostile and gave me conflicting messages.

Jane Hoffman

M.A. Political Science

Jane Hoffman <politicsofdissent@gmail.com>	Thu, Oct 27, 2022, 11:29 PM
to Clare

I began working at SDS March 7, 2021.  I had a good boss, Logan.  I world in Data entry a long time, almost one year.  In February, I transferred to Kofax per Tim's request.  I found this methodical but direct and easy.  I went from 45% to 67 % to 74% over several months.  Some days I hit 99 to 111%.and did very well.  I was strapped with 2 other jobs almost the whole time I was there.  On Sept. 12, I had the urge to go back into public schools.  I was called within 2 hours of applying at Duluth schools to work at Ordean East.  I would go from assisted living job from 10 pm to 6 a.m to school job 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and nap 2 hours and work at SDS.  Tim suggested I quit and maybe come back another time.  At first, I resisted but then after one week, realized how difficult it was becoming.  I felt I was going to die one week, working 15 to 17 hours a day with 2 hours of sleep inbetween.  I did put my notice in via text for Oct 14 because Tim had covid and was out 2 weeks.  He has been out at least 5 weeks this year with exposure to Covid and health concerns.  I "changed my mind." He told me when he got back I would probably go on probation for attendance and productivity.  I hit 99% Sept 30 and 80-85% between Oct 6 and 10.  He told me on the phone I would go on probation and reports would be reviewed 1x per week and that if I failed, I would get a warning.  He said that I would start probation on a certain day.  On October 21, he came in late at 6 p.m. and the documents for probation were already written as 1 warning or strike meaning I only had once chance to improve.  He recommended I resign and come back in the summer.  I did put a notice in.  This week, I opted to change one day due to going to Tim's poetry reading he invited all the staff, too.  I am a poet, novelist, playwright and screenwriter.  I had a play produced on cable TV and I was 2nd in a national poetry contest.  I have a screenplay published on Amazon.  Tim and I had a background in being knowledgeable about writing and I felt like this is the one chance I had to see his work before I resigned.  

When, I came into work today - my door pass worked and I was locked out of my computer.  I waited 3 weeks to talk to Darren between asking you for a 1.00 raise and recently.  They would not allow me to work Saturdays anymore because my overall record was under 90%.  This put a damper on my make up hours.  In August, they offered me $25 to come in one Saturday when the were behind.  I have been treated quite differently since I asked for 1.00 raise.  Tim tabulated all my hours worked and productivity for over 4 months for Darren.  I was being retaliated against in the sense they were trying to prove me unworthy to go from 11.00 to 12.00.  What they were really doing is challenging me.  I work hard, I try hard and I did spend more time on documents than my co worker Paige who is on her phone 24/7, texting and watching movies all day but somehow manages to produce 156% as a high schooler.  I have been there 19 months and come 4 to 5 days a week for a long time.  I don't consider myself a "boat rocker" or radical.  When I worked at LA Times from 1987 to 1989 I was making $11 per hour.  I stayed because SDS was a calm job.  I could listen to audio Bible, documentaries and socialize while working.  My job did not come into jeopardy until I challenged the hourly wages.  I am not  a slouch, I had a tough schedule but always did make up hours.  It may have not been feasible to stay, but I was given basically no explanation as to why I could not finish my two weeks.  SDS has a bad reputation in Twin Ports, even before I began.  People believe there are felons and criminals working there.  Darren Strong assaulted my best friend as a teenager when my male friend was a young adult watching his infant daughter.  He has a prison record.  My friend's name is Steve Deming.  I do not hold Darren's trouble past against him, I worked in drug treatment centers one year.  I do think you should rethink your policy on how you treat long term employees, even people like me who are struggling with decisions.  I did go to work tired and exhausted but I have an overdeveloped sense of commitment also translated to a word called workaholism.  I am sorry my multiple commitments were perceived by management as not reaching my maximum potential but in recent weeks, I was trying new methods to speed up, review less pages and condense what I was doing.  Your company has left a stain on my heart.  I know for a fact there people working there at less than 80%, but they are allowed to stay because they did not seek an answer to why wages were so low.

--

Jane Hoffman

M.A. Political Science

Allegory of the Cave - Plato published in Duluth Reader

 

The Republic by Plato - Plato's Allegory of the Cave and Modern Man's Perception

In a world void of forms and limited materialism, self-awareness and enlightenment may be easier to achieve. In Plato’s “allegory of the cave,” true belief is like a moving statue that can change forms through elevated perception. The allegory of the cave is an eternal conflict of appearance versus reality.  It sets out to find the nature of truth to define the ultimate state of man’s existence. In the game of shadows where mirages of forms appear across our media and television, modern man has cultivated these forms tailored to his own desire and longing-ness.  When Plato imagined his allegory of the cave on the basis of being visually and mentally chained, he strove for a higher interpretation of existence that would create an idealized society.  

The Republic begins with Socrates explaining his claim that the just man is the happy man. Socrates argues that in order to have a happy and good life, man must first have an idea of the ends of human existence.  Plato clung to an ideology in which he groped for a transcendent, supreme being who authored the idea of perfect forms that could translate common forms or objects into a divine realm of being, where they could exist at their highest perfection. However, Plato was discriminatory and believed that only few were capable of drawing this knowledge outside of their selves. He believed that knowledge was innate—it existed within and had to be cultured and refined through perception. There were three states: being, becoming, and non-being. The existence of being was eternal or fixed.  The essence of becoming was a non-static state of changing particles in which forms participated in the nature of existence to provide some type of quality or value.  What divided man’s perceptions or striving toward a better purpose or existence?  It was simply his ability to conceive and perceive.  

In the allegory of the cave, there is a group of people chained to a structure. They cannot move their head or limbs and are forced to stare at a wall.  Behind them is a well-lit, continuous fire and a catwalk that objects move across. These objects can be animals or man-made things like vases or swords. Plato doesn’t define the regulation of these objects.  He only notes that the people chained to the floor can only see the shadows created by the fire behind them as these objects move across the catwalk. The chained individuals start believing that the shadows are the actual forms, that the objects do not exist in material form. People begin naming these objects.  If they hear echoes from outside the cave, they may attribute sounds to particular objects.   
There are also stairs leading outside the cave, where one comes into the light of the sun. In Plato’s world, the sun is the perpetuation of enlightenment.  The closer to the sun one becomes, the closer to the truth. The sun provides light but is not the light.  The sun is the cause of sight itself.  Man must will himself out of the cave by expanding his innate knowledge to conceive of more perfect forms. It is not necessarily contingent on a material world of objects but can include ideas like justice, ethics, and civil matters.
Is it in fact possible that all of our knowledge comes from within?  St. Augustine believed in divine illumination, in which God imparts certain key knowledge to man. We live in a world now of standardized, text-driven education where thoughts and ideas are organized in a constructed formula, issued within a relative time frame of periodic intervals in which a student digests material and then regurgitates it.  Plato lived in an age prior to the recognition of holy books like the Talmud or Bible.  His conceptions were based on his own observations. Like many cultures around the world, he could conceive of a higher being who ordered and shaped the universe, but he did not ascribe it to a certain named deity.   
I find that Plato’s flaw even in his allegory is that he perceives that man starts out chained with sketchy knowledge. Some people are born content and digest the world around them in a literal or abstract way but are not at odds with their environment.   Nowadays, people construct their world not through distorted perceptions of discourse but by linear modules of television and social media through the tool of a sun-like source known as the internet.  We define our beauty, our ambition, our careers through shared values that are exalted. In the U.S., the development of a career and the ultimate contributions to society we make are measured through our self-perceived gifts or ability to master certain subjects in school.  We can also develop a sense of being by things we are drawn to, such as likes.  
Plato’s inevitable distinction was that higher forms such as justice, ethics, and the organization of society could only be envisioned by a polished philosopher king who weighed these matters through discourse.  As the sun is in the visible realm, the form of good is in the intelligible realm. It is “what gives truth to the things known and the power to know to the knower.” Whatever knowledge we attain of the Forms must be seen through the mind’s eye, while ideas derived from the concrete world of flux are ultimately unsatisfactory and uncertain. Plato maintains that degree of skepticism that denies all permanent authority to the evidence of sense. In essence, Plato suggests that justice, truth, equality, beauty, and many other things ultimately derive from the Form of the Good.  However, in the modern world, people’s perception of beauty and value, such as whom they love, is individualized.  Congress continually has disputes over social value aiming at individual preferences of what government should provide or approve.  
Thrasymachus argued that the unjust man demonstrates his superior intelligence in appearing to be just. Thrasymachus attempts to demonstrate that this type of individual always gets his way through the affronted appearance of justice. If man is smart enough to duplicate justice, he can deceive and put on false airs, according to Thrasymachus.  
In conclusion, there is, as Plato says, a part of the world that lives in self-sustaining ignorance.  In my perception, it is people who are chained to their own desires who cannot sacrifice for their own survival or for the common good.  Yet there is no law or restriction in America for serving one’s own desires, as long as it is within the law.   Plato left a permanent mark through his ability to imagine a higher existence and social entity, yet it is only through individual trial and error that we can gain wisdom.  We live in an age when many of our physical needs are met, which may stymie urges of exploration to wander and discover.  The definitive is everywhere and an imposition to place value on our lives.  The struggle to interpret our higher thoughts as we are exposed to them or find them is within our realm.

Duluth Reader Archives: Louise Erdrich critique

 

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Finding the Bidwell Ghost

Thursday May. 15th, 2014

Jane Hoffman

Louise Erdrich’s words and imagination are large enough to freefall, swimming into the oceans of our minds, blend and awaken memories and hope for new life as well as qualify for three contemporary poetic categories – autobiographical, confessional, and multi-ethnic/women empowerment.   Anyone who has reviewed her, can’t discount her, let alone detract from her cluster of language meant to liberate an elementally powerful emotional response, says Peter Stitt in the Georgia Review. Language, a streamline of a volcanic narrative of her being both past and present, melts its tapestry into the complacency of the North Dakota frontier into a conjuring of mythic images meant to overtake situation and soul. In a review of Jacklight, her first poetic work, Stitt states that Erdrich “arrives at an understanding of the modern world discovering patterns within the experience she studies--mythic patterns derived from her own Native American background “  The poems are narrative in structure, benefiting from a strong sense of both her land, of place and character.
 The poem “Train,” expresses the sense of self which determines the speaker’s progress through the world.  Many authors say Louise Erdrich is presenting images of empowerment of woman but she is really translating life.  She is transforming in that perfect, written moment present tense, and becoming things she may not know she might become.  In “Before,” she says, “It happened to me first, the stain on the linen, the ceremonial seal which was Eve’s fault in the church of Assisi.  I prayed, I listen to my Brother Francis and I took his vow.”  In this poem, receiving her period was a loss of innocence and perhaps an oath of chastity.  In this autobiographical poem, she goes back to the time of St. Francis of Assisi to fully embody what receiving her menstrual cycle meant.  Both holy and stained, she continues, “The girdle of green silk, the gift from my father slithered from me like a vine so I was something else that grew from air and I was light, the skeins of my hair…..my mother divided with a comb of ivory were cut from my head and parceled to the nesting birds.”  This passage if filled with Christian symbols, a fortitude of meanings that is often integrated with Native American imagery.  Girdle of green silk could symbolize the earth and life, “slithered from me like a vine” is an image of Satan as a snake in the garden; hair parceled to birds could be the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus on the cross as those near the Cross bartered for his garments.  In  “My Life as a Saint” the poem states: “I saw the house wrens gather, dark filaments from air then the cup was made fast to the body of the tree bound with silver excrescence of the spider…..  We have the least mercy on the one who created us. Who introduced us to the hunger.”  The house wrens gather is close to a biblical prophecy in Matthew 24:28 which says, “wherever there is a carcass, the vultures will gather.”  Also, the passage of the cup was made fast to the body of the tree is a symbolic sentence of communion.   In the New Testament, Jesus’ body is representative of the tree, the vine.  In a review of the poem “Bidwell Ghost” by Laura Kryhoski, Ms. Kryhoski states “In folklore, the tree is symbolic of the feminine nature.  Erdrich’s work relies heavily on the image of the psychic tree to create movement in the poem, movement set in motion by milestones in a woman’s experience during a reproductive lifetime.”  
Erdrich, like Terri Witek, draws up some connections with past figures.  In her book, Baptism of Desire, she gives an introduction to a poem by describing how Saint Clare left her parents in 1212 to go live at a Benedictine Convent.  I feel this is a historical person Erdrich could relate to, who gave up her mortal life for a higher spiritual sacrifice.  In King of Owls, she writes a poem based on a French King, who was bored with life so his inside court created cards to entertain him.
The male voices in Love Medicine, her novel, are very strong and legitimate. The book ends with a male voice.
“Yes. I don’t know why that is, but they just seem to be. You don’t choose this. It just comes and grabs and you have to follow it.”  In another interview I read she says her characters choose her, she doesn’t choose them.
In the poem “Whooping Cranes,” legend-time and modern times come together, when an abandoned boy turns into a whooping crane. There’s a sort of cross-fertilization of past and present in legend.
The cranes cross over the Turtle Mountains on their way down to Arkansas, Texas. We always used to hear how they’d see the cranes pass over. No more, though. I don’t know if they still fly that way or not. Another theme I see strongly in Jacklight, and in all of your writing, is the theme of strong women who become more than what they seem to be. Transformations take place--in some cases, mythic transformations.
That is true of women I have known. We are taught to present a demure face to the world and yet there is a kind of wild energy behind it in many women that is transformational energy, and not only transforming to them but to other people. When, in some of the poems, it takes the form of becoming an animal, that I feel is a symbolic transformation, the moment when a woman allows herself to act out of her own power. The one I’m thinking of is the bear poem.
I feel in some ways, even though Ercrich emerged about ten years after the end of the Confessionalist movement, she is a confessionalist because she takes her past and creates character and depictions of herself regenerating, through native and religious strength.
A shift away from an assumption that traditional forms, ideas, and history can provide meaning and continuity to human life has occurred in the contemporary literary imagination throughout many parts of the world, including the United States. Events since World War II have produced a sense of history as discontinuous: Each act, emotion, and moment is seen as unique. Style and form now seem provisional, makeshift, reflexive of the process of composition and the writer’s self-awareness. Familiar categories of expression are suspect; originality is becoming a new tradition.
In “Family Reunion” (1984), a drunken, abusive uncle returns from years in the city. As he suffers from a heart disease, the abused niece, who is the speaker, remembers how this uncle had killed a large turtle years before by stuffing it with a firecracker. The end of the poen links Uncle Ray with the turtle he has victimized:

Somehow we find our way back,
Uncle Ray sings an old song to the
body that pulls him toward home.
The gray fins that his hands have
become screw their bones in the
dashboard. His face has the odd,
calm patience of a child who has
always let bad wounds alone, or
a creature that has lived for a long
time underwater. And the angels
come lowering their slings
and litters.

My new Twitter handle

  www.twitter.com/Iamabot1960

When Nietzsche wept

 My article from Duluth Reader

If you are Janis Joplin in disguise or a tortured theorist who cannot reconcile the world, you will naturally gravitate to the mind of Friedrich Nietzsche or the swirling pontoon boat that spins into the Vienna Circle of genius.  I recently watched a movie called “When Nietzsche Wept.”  It’s obvious this philosopher does not initially have all the answers to mankind’s dilemma.  He says there is no God but is tormented by headaches, unrequited love, and a fear of humans so great he can’t even trust a respected doctor.  His female archangel Lou Andreas-Salome, played by the stunning Katheryn Winnich, compels a doctor who developed a new talking theory to cure Nietzsche before he attempts suicide.  
Nietzsche is not a character the audience can gain sympathy for until he blossoms in compassion.  The doctor chosen to treat Nietzsche is Josef Breuer, who is best friends with a more passively played Sigmund Freud, who was in his pre-fame status during this time in history.  Between Nietzsche’s rationally driven benign lectures of mankind’s fate, his lack of trust, and his demands for love, I did not develop any sense of empathy for a writer tormented by his own demons.  However, the movie transitions halfway through when an agreement is made between Josef Breuer, his physical doctor, who bids Nietzsche to help solve his unresolved conflict in exchange for Nietzsche receiving services to cure his physical ailments. Breuer and Nietzsche are leaders in their field, but behind the curtain they suffer innumerable torments that may only come with advanced, complex knowledge.  Breuer had a love affair with a patient in which he betrayed his wife.  The patient had delusional outbursts and blurted out their affair in front of his wife.  Bertha Pappenheim, the lover played by Michal Yannai, is a curvy redhead who spills out her emotions visually, creating an image of lust and desire even a female voyeur can’t ignore.  
Two tormented souls engage in a contract at this point to provide aspects of curing their demonic ailments.  Breuer, who begins as the sane one, has a series of Freudian-type dreams that exaggerate his fears. He drops through tunnels, he erotically rapes his patient who resists then concedes, he saves patients who later falter—the dream cycle of Breuer compares to the movie “The Science of Sleep,” where illusion becomes the daily reality.   In dream cycles, the most powerful dreams pervade our awake consciousness. The movie merges into an acquiesced paradigm of peace when Breuer (played by Ben Cross) and Nietzsche (Armand Assante) are paddle boating on a lake within a giant plastic Swan while the famous “Swan Lake” ballad is playing.  Two great minds parallel into joint healing in laughter and awe while their feet move in symmetry.   
This becomes the great task of two disjointed figures in humanity who are flanked by Sigmund Freud and Vienna elites.  Two people who are self-loathing and unable to conquer their past find a solution for their lives only through experimentation and a growing mutual respect.  Breuer discovers well into his treatment, as he observes the elderly failing around him, that time is the enemy and he must free himself from obligation.  He sees himself as only an extension of his father’s and society’s expectations.  He cuts his beard, leaves town, and becomes a waiter.  Yet it is only part of the dream cycle.  When Sigmund Freud spots him waiting tables, Breuer runs in the woods and jumps in a lake and almost drowns.  Freud must exert all his strength to save him.  Then he wakes up.  The conscious state severs the delusion of escape.  
For Nietzsche, the average person does not take dares to claim they are greater than God or that God does not exist while suffering in their own self-loathing.  Even Jim Morrison understood the fate of his human condition.  He accentuated his brutal conflict with poetry and music.  He compared filmgoers to voyeurs or carnivorous vampires.  “Film spectators are quiet vampires.”  He said, “Love cannot save you from your own fate.”  Jim Morrison, as opposed to Nietzsche, knew himself.  He embraced his flaws.  
Why did Nietzsche weep?  It was not because Breuer could not find a cure.  It was because in his mortality, he could not arise from himself.  After bashing his head in a mirror after being massaged by a prostitute, he broke free from his pain.  He was ready for help.  Morrison said, “Dying is not painful, only living.”  The main character, Nietzsche, who could utter great articles of philosophical premise, had to learn the simple lesson of how painful life can be.  Nietzsche’s character redeemed himself through patience and goodwill toward Breuer.  He rescued Breuer from the dream cycle back into a high level of love toward his wife and children.  Nietzsche himself learned that he may never find female kinship, but in acceptance learned to love himself.  
When one can savor the good moments and warm compliments of a loved one, it makes the pain of life disappear.  Then we can all take the ride in the plastic swan towards oblivion and the belief that what torments us with stone will turn to gold.  The highlights of “When Nietzsche Wept” include period-piece clothing and the Bulgarian backdrop of ancient buildings and cobblestone streets.  It was written and directed by Pinchas Perry and based on the book by Irvin Yalom.  Pinchas Perry is a friend of one of my closest friends in Los Angeles who took on the project earnestly.  “When Nietzsche Wept” was a monumental task of taking the nuances of two great men and blending them into dialogue that made their realizations profound.  At length, despair is what leads a man to scale new heights.  The flesh and blood struggle of this film sheds light on the development of psychoanalysis, treatment, and two prodigies at work.

Corporate policies that are inept and cause employee departure.

I am presenting a forum in Amazon format of a non fiction book about a company who mishandled their employees in Superior, Wisconsin.  I will not finish this publication until Feb. 1 as I am completing my autobiographical novel, "Birth of Strangers."

* Central Meat Packing, Chesapeake, VA

* SOS, Los Angeles, CA

* The Reader, Duluth, MN

*Thunderbird, Duluth, MN

* SDS, Superior, WI

Daily blog

After I have been awake awhile from night shift, I am able to adjust my mental focus to what the scope of my day will look like.  Sometimes, I just follow old habits of either running errands with Steve or meeting Scott for coffee.  It was determined a LONG TIME ago, that Scott and I are not compatible but I was willing to keep him as a friend.  He doesn't have all the right stuff and he's basically gone his whole life with bad teeth.  Teeth are important.  Nowadays, you can buy veneers for about $300 and place them over your teeth so your smile looks good.  Certain things cannot be let go.  Because I am a Virgo, I am nit picky.  I won't settle for a man without a car or who is not fine.  Scott has a good job but he lacks in other categories.  I dropped him today in a break sense and unfriended him on FB.  He is also blocked on my snapchat.

to be continued