Contracting

The Contractor

Contracting and contractors are a favorite topic amongst the lunch bunch. There are two facets to it. One is working as a contractor as an alternative to working at a steady job as an employee. The other is hiring contractors to get things done around the house.

Contracting instead of being an employee can be financially rewarding. Employers are often willing to pay a premium to get skilled help on a temporary basis. On the other hand, there is very little security with contract employment. If things go bad for the business, you are going to be the first to get let go. The employer may fail to pay you. Of course there is not that much security with regular employers these days.

Contracting is likely to be a short term arrangement, meaning you are going to be looking for another gig in short order. I was talking to a couple of remodeling contractors at my house one day, and one of them mentioned that he really had to devote 20% of his time to looking for new work. His jobs lasted no more than two or three days. He could have a fistful of job orders in his hand one week, but if he didn't keep looking, in a couple of weeks he would be out of work completely. This is really bad if you have a crew working for you. No work and they are liable to run off and start working for someone else.

Half of contracting is simply doing what you promised to do, like show up on time. When we were looking for contractors to work on our basement, we had one guy come out who was highly recommended, but he could not deliver his estimate on the appointed day. In fact he was like a week late. If he cannot deliver his estimate in a timely manner, what is going to happen when it is time to get the actual work done? He may have been a better choice, but screwing up this apparently simple matter really put us off.

Money can sometimes be a secondary consideration. When we were trying to get a small attic finished, we had several guys come look at it, but only one even gave us a bid. It was a small complicated job, but we wanted it done. He charged what I considered reasonable, but some people might have blanched.

Rebuilding the Indian by Fred Haefele

I remember reading a book (picture) about a guy rebuilding an old Indian motorcycle. He worked as a tree trimmer in a small town somewhere in Wyoming or Montana or someplace like that. He told one story about how he went to look at one job and for some reason he was not in the mood to do the work, so he doubled his bid, hoping the guy would find someone else. No such luck, he was hired anyway, but the money made it worthwhile.

Sometimes it does go the other way. I try and get three bids for any work I want to get done. I have had tree trimmers come out a couple of times and their bids are all over the map. One guy did want more than three times what the guy I hired wanted.

On the other side of coin, all of my experience in working as a contractor comes from the high tech arena, where giant corporations hire people who supposedly have the skills necessary for the development of complex electronic whoser-whats-its. These contracts tend to be longer term, measured in months if not years, though the IRS has cracked down on what were essentially permanent contract employees. This business goes through boom and bust cycles. In the boom times being a warm body can qualify you for a gig. When the bust happens, nobody has a job. In this line of work, you need to make hay while the sun shines, and sock it away because the bust is coming and you are going to need that hay.

I remember when it looked like the boom was going to go on forever, and then one day the bottom just fell out. Stock prices dived, projects were canceled, people laid off. I am not quite sure where we are now with high tech. The war in Iraq has really siphoned a lot of money (hundreds of billions) from the American economy. I wonder where it went, I mean it went somewhere. Where did it all go?

Many contracting jobs go through agencies, and most of those agencies are pretty opaque. They keep their rates confidential, that is both the rate they pay to the person who does the work and rate they collect from the employer who hires them. By keeping everyone in the dark they hope to maximize their profit margin. I suspect that most (opaque) contracting agencies pay the worker bee about 50% of what they charge the employer, and the person who actually handles the deal may get half of that, or 25%, which leaves 25% for the agency.

Of course there are some unscrupulous agencies that will try to pay people as little as 15 or 20% of what they are charging the employer, meaning the worker is getting $20 an hour for a job they are charging the employer $100 or even $125 an hour.

Now as a worker, I would have trouble with getting only 15 or 20 percent of the deal, but with these confidential arrangements, I will never know. 50% I can live with. 60% would be better, but let's not put the cart before the horse.

Agents have a skill set I do not, so if they can keep me employed and pay me enough, I don't have a problem with them making a ton of money for doing what is apparently nothing. Because it is not nothing. You have to keep up a relentlessly positive attitude and present it to people continuously for the off chance of getting a reward. The rewards can seem to be based entirely on luck, so you would have to be a bit of a gambler. Contracts may be few and far between. You many only land one or two contracts a year. I could not do that.

About The Lead Photo

This was one of the first pictures to pop up when I Googled images of contractors and I just couldn't resist using it. I saw the movie and it was pretty good. There was another movie with a similar premise, if not a similar title, out at the same time, starring Morgan Freeman. Another example of the twin movie thing. Snipes was recently convicted of tax evasion or some such, but you can read about that anywhere. Lena Headey is the girl in the background. She also played the Queen in 300.

Update December 2016 replaced missing picture, fixed broken link.

Cadillac Dream #2

I am at some kind of public gathering place and it's time to go. A friend of mine and I are moving to the right across the edge of some open area, inside or outside I'm not sure. The place seems to be emptying out. We are a little concerned that we won't be able to spot the rest of our group because there are a bunch of people here. It looks like about 50, but it is not a problem, we spot the rest of our group right away.

We make a left turn on a walkway of some sort (sidewalk across a lawn, colored run in the carpet, painted area on the floor? It's all slipping away ... ). We come to another intersection where we have to make another left turn, but we miss it. We go right by, like in a cartoon or a slapstick movie, and have to struggle to get back to the turn off. But we make it before the following horde descends on us. Now it's straight shot into the little building. There are two or three steps at the entrance. We go down a short hall to the front lobby, which is kind of like an old, small movie theatre. The walls are painted a solid green. That is solid as in solid, not wimpy or weird. There are three or four employee's there and one scoots over to unlock the front door. I have to stop, but the door is open by the time my friend gets there and we run outside.

The rest of our gang has just pulled up in an old, whitish Cadillac. The two doors on the passenger side open and one person gets out from each door. Everyone is wearing colorful clothes, like jockey silks. I pile in the front with two other people and the rest pile in the back. There are seven of us all told.

The guy behind the wheel is big and fat. He takes off driving across something like a construction site or a junk pile. We are bouncing over stuff and banging into the dirt. The car is really old and beat so if it gets destroyed it's no big loss.

Now we are on the road and we are going really fast. We go through a big corner at high speed. I lean my head to the right and hang on to keep from sliding across the seat. The driver blows through a stop sign. It doesn't worry me too much because visibility is good in all directions and he wouldn't do that if he saw another car around. Now we are approaching a Chevrolet dealership. I tell the driver it's an anomaly, it's the only one here by this section of Northbound freeway. All the other dealerships are gathered together over on another street. We are in Austin, Texas.

We blow through a red light. This is a little more concerning but we are approaching a residential district. There are a bunch of upscale three story condos, so I figure he has to slow down now. The condos are burnt orange. He goes by one car. Now we see a motorcycle approaching from the other direction and heading straight for us because we are on the wrong side of the road. Someone is saying, or thinking "don't do this", hoping that something will happen (not quite sure just what), but nothing does, and we end up with a motorcycle stuck to the grill. The driver is a girl. Her boyfriend shows up (I don't know where he came from, we are still going pretty fast) and takes over the controls. The motorcycle is still stuck nose to nose with our Caddy. The guy on the bike conducts some eyeball negotiations with the driver. Now I get a view from the bikers viewpoint and I see our driver put away his revolver, so they have evidently reached some agreement.

P.S. I know the car in the picture isn't a Cadillac, but it has the closest look that I could find.

Google & YouTube

yet another google-based timesuck

I have been having trouble playing some videos on my computer. The trouble comes in two flavors. One is the little glitches in playback: a moments' hesitation when the playback catches up with the download. If the download speed were slower than the playback speed, that would be one thing, but it's not. Sometimes if I click on pause the entire rest of the video will load in couple of seconds and I can continue the playback without running into anymore of those annoying little hesitations. Sometimes that does not work. I click on pause, and everything stops, the video pauses and the download also pauses. I click play and then every few seconds there is another glitch. Stupid computers.

The other problem shows up when a video is about halfway done and then it starts spazzing out. The red play line keeps jumping to the end and then back to the middle and playback stops. Pausing accomplishes nothing. No more is loaded, and no more is played. The red line does stop jumping around though.

I wrote to Google and complained about this and the next day the video that was embedded in my blog started working correctly. No message from Google, so there is no telling whether they actually fixed something, or whether it was just a fluke. The weird part is that even though the video in my blog would not play, the same video would play on the YouTube website. I think we may have to outlaw porn just so the internet is not totally clogged.

I got the graph from another website. It saved me having to muck about with mspaint to make my own, but it is not as big as the original. Click on the caption to see the original blog. You can generate your own on http://www.google.com/trends

Update December 2016 replaced missing graph.

Gun Nuts

I have been poking around on the internet, reading some blogs. Most of the ones I read are by right wing gun nuts. I am not quite sure why that is. I believe in the 2nd amendment, but I don't know that I support it more than any of the others. Some of the blogs I run across are rabid and shrill. They tend to put me off. Some of them also cover other aspects of life besides guns and ammo, and some of them are well written and thoughtful. The gun nuts tend to stick together.

They post links to each others blogs, so by just following these links, I am not going to stray far from gun nut territory. But I look at a lot of other web pages besides the gun nut pages, but I haven't found too many blogs that I like that are not written by gun nuts. So I am beginning to suspect that either I am more of a gun nut than I think, or there is something about the way their minds work that attracts me.

As for the 2nd amendment, I think we were screwed when the first firearms law was passed back in 1936, the one that required machineguns to be registered.

One of the slogans that was being passed around not too long ago was "anyone who is willing to give up a little freedom for a little more security deserves neither freedom nor security". Well, that's a very nice slogan, but we all gave up a whole lot of freedom for a little security a long time ago. The last time there was complete freedom on this continent (North America) was several hundred years ago, before the white man showed up with his books and his laws.

There are several facets to the weapons issue. On the personal level there is self defense. There are people who will try to take advantage or dominate other people, and resisting them sometimes comes down to physical force. A handgun can be a great equalizer in situations like this.

Then there is the fear of a police state where the police can come and take anyone away at any time without having to answer to anyone but their lord and master. This is what happened in Germany before and during WWII. I believe most people would agree that this was a bad thing, and if the Jews had had weapons they may not have been slaughtered.

Then there is civil war. This country had one, and by all accounts it was a really bad thing. Bloodiest war this country has ever fought.

Finally there is war with other countries. The 20th century was really bad for this. The revolutionary war was fought with militias raised by the individual states. The U.S. fought WWII with a great national army. The Federal government ran the entire show, the states had little to say about it. I can understand this. In order to mobilise a large enough force to counter the Axis powers in a reasonable amount time, things had to be done quickly. Leaving it up to the individual states to decide what, if anything, should be done, could have taken years, and our world would likely be very different today.

So, just what kind of rights do we want?

I am in favor of individuals owning all of the weapons and military equipment. I don't think the federal government should own anything. If we are going to fight foreign wars, the federal government needs an agreement with each of the individual states as to how much and what kind of a militia they are willing to provide. A small state (population-wise) like Oregon might be required to provide a thousand infantry men, a squad of tanks and maybe a couple of fighter aircraft along with all the support and transportation they would need. I doubt an idea like this will ever make any progress. There are too many states to reach any kind of agreement on doing anything in any kind of timely manner.

What do you do about the jack-booted thugs of a police state? Some people think we are living in a police state now. We have the largest percentage of people locked up in jail of any country in the world. Rumor has it that most of those people are in jail for drug offenses. Look it here, dope dealers, if you don't want to go to jail, you need to do two things: 1) keep a low profile, which can be hard to do if you are stoned all the time, and 2) maintain your standing with the local "family". They are only ones who can protect you. It's a social thing.

On the other hand, law enforcement is getting more money and more firepower and more authority. When are we going to say enough is enough? We may have reached that tipping point already with President Bush. This might be contributing to his extremely low approval ratings.

But what if the tide does not turn? When are you within your rights to fight back against the police? And what would be the most effective way to do that? Waiting till the SWAT team is knocking on your door is probably not a good idea. Maybe being part of an organized militia is your only real defense.

Update December 2016 replaced missing picture.

Cowboys & Indians

Cowboy [3]: one having qualities (as recklessness, aggressiveness, or independence) popularly associated with cowboys.

I am looking for a job. I got a phone message last week that was darn near incomprehensible. It probably isn't anything important, but there is a slim chance that it could be, so I thought I better try and unscramble it. After playing it back three or four times I was finally able to decipher the phone number. When I called, it turned out to be a head-hunting company. I told them about the message and they said "that was probably Bill, let me get him for you". Bill. Right. Bill gets on the phone and in his thickly accented English tells me that the position that he had for me has been filled. Oh, really? Well, okay, fine. It wasn't anything important after all.

Still, it left me a little puzzled. Why would a head hunting company hire someone whose English is so bad? And how did a position get filled in the four or five hours between when Bill called me and when I called back? Well head hunting is entirely a commission business, and maybe Bill is the only guy they could find who was willing to give it a go. And the position could have been filled in between the two phone calls. It's not likely, these positions are often open for months before the powers that be finally make up their minds to hire someone. It's not likely, but it's possible. Maybe Bill got in on the tail end of the deal and didn't know they were close to filling it. Or maybe he tried to talk to the customer and the customer got fed up trying to understand Bill and canceled the order. Who knows?

I was talking to Jack at lunch today about this odd little episode and we came up with a couple of pretty good conspiracy theories. I am pretty sure Bill's accent is Indian, so I am thinking Everest hired him because he would be better able to communicate with all the Indians who are over here looking for work. (These are Indians from the Indian subcontinent, South of the Himalaya mountains in Asia, not the Native American Indians). It wouldn't be because he could speak the same Indian language, given that there are a gazillion different languages in India, but because he speaks the same flavor of English that they all do. What sounds heavily accented to me may sound perfectly normal to most Indians.

Jack's theory is that they were trying to get work permits (H1B cards) for Indians. They put Bill on the phone and give him a list of a couple hundred people to call. No one calls back because they cannot understand him, so the employer can say that they tried to find someone, we hired an agency and they called hundreds of people and could not find anyone, so Immigration Service will give them an H1B card for their favorite Indian.

Now that I think about it, I can make it sound even worse. They are using Bill to locate Indians. Only Indians would be able to understand Bill well enough to decipher the message and call back. The agency wants Indians because they can pay them $20 an hour for the job that they are charging the employer $100 an hour for, which means they are making three thousand dollars a week off each person they manage to place.

While I am at it, let me just say that some contracting companies have gotten grief from mother Intel because they were paying the workers too large a percentage of the pay that Intel was shelling out.

Update December 2016 replaced missing picture.

Opinion Central

Opinion Central

So I am looking through "The Week" news magazine this morning, and I find a blurb about motorcycle deaths that I don't like, so I pull up their web page to complain and I get a pop-up asking me to take a survey. I've got a couple of minutes to kill and I am always curious as to just what angle these survey people are on, so I take their poll. They want to know about the military, and once you get to the heart of the survey, which is only a few questions in, all of their questions involved picking one of the four main U.S. military forces: Army, Air Force, Navy or Marines. No Coast Guard, no none-of-the-above or all-of-the-above, and no skipping the question. You have to pick one of the four to get to the next question. What's worse, is I basically have no opinion on any of the matters they wanted me to consider. For example: "What is the most technologically advanced service?" or something like that. I have no idea, and I don't really care. Or which service would you recommend to a young person? Can't say as I would recommend one. So I just picked the first one on the list. To give them a smidgen of credit, they did rotate the selection, so "Army" did not come up first every time. So what was this all about?

All I can think is that it was a ploy to get young people to think about the military, and to think of it as their only option.

Update December 2016 replaced missing picture.

Friday - Trip to Eugene

Dreams

I woke my son John up around 20 till eight this morning. He finally comes downstairs around eight. He tells me he had three dreams since I first woke him up 20 minutes ago but it had seemed like two hours to him.

I also had a dream this morning. I had colorfully printed sheet of paper about the size of a place mat. It seemed to have some ads for cars on it. It had a thin strip of plastic stuck to the back about eight inches long, and a half of an inch wide, and one sixteenth of an inch thick. There were several cars listed in the ad. I copied one of the car names into a blank on the sheet and then pressed a spot over the plastic strip. The plastic strip was a cell phone, which made a call, got the information about the specified car, and then displayed it on this same sheet of paper.

I was astounded that the strip was a cell phone that worked. I tried to tell my wife about it. She was sitting at a table talking to two middle aged women. At first she brushed me off as she is wont to do when I start talking technical stuff, and besides I was interrupting her conversation. I persisted and she relented and listened to my story.

Serendipity

I drove to Eugene this morning. I took my daughter and her friend to "Duck Days" at the University of Oregon. The girls are trying to make up their minds what school they want to attend next fall. Right now it seems to be between the University of Washington in Seattle and U of O in Eugene.

The University had sent us a parking pass that was supposedly good for lot 34, but when we got there the lot was completely full. I stopped at a gate house and explained our dilemma. The man there gave us a map and pointed out where there were some long term parking meters where we might be able to find a spot. I asked the girls for ten to twenty quarters and daughter gave me a handfull. I dropped the girls at the union and drove to the recommended spot. There were a whole bunch of spaces there and the meters were good for five hours. It was 11 AM, so five hours would take us to 4 PM, which should be good enough. So how much is this going to cost? 25 cents buys you 20 minutes, so I start shoving quarters in. I run out just as the meter reaches five hours. Bizarre.

Science Demo

As part of the "Duck Days" tour, we attended a lecture given by three professors from the college of Natural Science. One of the presentations was about interesting work being done by current students, and one the students mentioned was Ben Scholl, who is a friend of my oldest son. Pretty cool.

One of the professors gave us a little science demo. He had an aluminum pipe about six feet long with an inside diameter of a little more than half an inch . He had two slugs that fit easily inside the pipe. Holding the pipe vertically, he dropped one slug in the top of the pipe. It immediately fell out the bottom. Then he dropped the second slug into the top of the pipe. We waited several seconds for something to happen and then it too fell out of the bottom of the pipe.



The way I understand what happened was that the second slug was a magnet. Falling through the tube generated electrical currents in the tube, which generated a magentic field, which interfered with the magetic field of the slug, and so restrained its' fall.

The same thing could be done with a copper tube and a magnet. It took a long time to find a decent video of this demo. It seems most science types have a hard time making a decent movie. Many provided no context. A demo like this needs a "nothing up sleeves" introduction that few provide. There is the "SuperMagnetMan", but, well, that's another issue.

Driving

Eugene is about 100 miles due South of Portland on Interstate 5. It is three lanes each way till somewhere South of Salem, and then it turns into two lanes. Traffic flows pretty well but is given to clogs that can slow you down and last for 15 miles. Going down to Eugene was not too bad. The farther you get from Portland, the more the traffic thins out and the more consistant the drivers are.

Coming back to Portland is much worse. I am sure that part of it is that I am tired, it is at the end of the day. I think a bigger part is that the traffic gets more jammed up the closer you get to Portland, so it feels like the pressure is building. The picture is from an ODOT (Oregon Department of Transportation) camera. I pulled it Saturday morning when traffic is much lighter.

The speed limit for most of the road is 65 MPH, and on the way South most drivers who are in a hurry are content to drive at 75 MPH. People keep a respectable distance and there is not much pushing or shoving. Occasionally a slow poke from the right lane will pull out to pass an even slower slowpoke and you will have to slow down until they have meandered on past the obstacle and moved back over to the right lane. Generally speaking they do that fairly promptly, which lets the hurry up gang resume their zooming pace.

Northbound is something else. The time of day may have had something to do with it. It was almost 5:30 PM when we left Eugene so we have people going home from work, and being as it is Friday, they may be going somewhere for the weekend. So we have more traffic, more people not paying complete attention, more dawdlers, and more speeders (people who are going 80 MPH and more). It is not possible to just set the cruise control and go. The speed of the traffic is constantly changing. You may be stuck going 60 MPH until a slowpoke pulls over and then the fast lane picks up to 65 MPH for a mile or two, and then it changes again. No more just set the cruise control and leave it.

Sometimes I am tempted to just move over to the right lane and mosey along at whatever speed the trucks are going. That is often 55 MPH, which would add 45 minutes to the trip, each way. And there is no guarantee that you would be undisturbed at that speed. You are very liable to come up behind some pleasant individual mosing along at 50 or even 45 MPH. Or you are liable to find yourself holding up a hole line of Kenworths who are all breathing down your neck wondering why you are such a slowpoke.

I need to find a less stressful way to operate on this route.

Update September 2016 replaced missing pictures.