ABKachina Installed

It took about 10 days of fiddling, starting from here, but I seem to have "finished" the Airplane Barbie Kachina:

And now maybe (part of the name) makes more sense:

The rest of the name can be traced to my friend Brian's vision of the result of my move to New Mexico: Giant Barbie Kachina. So it's kinda too bad that I had to place it just out of the site lines for my uphill neighbor to be able to truly appreciate it.

There are three layers which each move or spin independently. The bottom hair rotates clockwise in the breeze. The middle power-unit spins counter-clockwise with added propellers. And the top plane-hy-bird (with feeder) tacks in the breeze and flaps its wings -- this was the original idea that morphed slightly when Michael and Melody gave me a squirrel-proof bird-feeder partway through my "design" "process".

I would like to point out that exactly zero (0) new materials were purchased in the making of this monstrosity. Much of the metal is recycled or left-over, a few hardware bits and bobs are new-old-stock, and I used about a metric-S.L. of MIG welding wire sticking the bobs to the bits -- especially when kludging the thin galvanized fence posts to the top plate to make the tripod. I also need to add special thanks to Kaahl in the Attic for remembering that I had all those copper-float half-balls left over from The Eightfold Path.

The wind has been going like gang busters all week.Wednesday it blew the thing over and then tore up the plane-hy-bird on re-entry. But it seems to have held up since then...

Failure to Manage

Among my many horrible failings is the fact that I can neither produce nor consume Management. I have only the usual problems with giving or following -- with the exception of RTFMing --  instructions that make sense (to me), but I am just not able to participate in motivational gymnastics. I have no Command Presence and react negatively to Team Building Exercises.

This has repeatedly impacted my ability to work and play well with others. Every tech-company for which I worked claimed to have "dual track career ladders" such that one could rise to an equivalent prestige and salary in either Engineering or Management. But that was HR Theory 101. In Reality 2 one had to be a "team leader" or some other such nonsense and eventually became mired in playing corporate politics. Given my Command and Team failings this invariably led to my experiencing the one-true-emotion: Frustration.

Even now, self-exiled from that corporate world, I suffer from being Differently Managed and generally have to keep to myself. It has taken some years for me to come to understand a key fact about that world which explains quite a bit of my misery: I was working from a completely different business plan than that of upper management. I thought that we were all there to make products that would make our customers lives, or at least their businesses, work better. However we were just necessary cogs in the real plan, which was to make The Company look valuable so it could be sold (or IPOed, or cashed out somehow) thus profiting the original investors. This small, startling, detail explains so many seemingly stupid decisions made during my tenure in that other world that it is almost unfathomable that it took me so long to grasp the thread. It also -- to my simplistic mind -- explains much about the American Economy as it stands today.

Anyway, before I got the big picture I wrote a novella about my End Days which insomniacs may find useful: The Company.