USA all the way!

Pompotous is going to speak of love today, the love of country, the love of the good ol' battered and backsliding U.S. of freakin' A. and how much I wish I was living there and not in Mississippi.

For the last decade Pompotous dealt with Asian-Pacific cultures that are sometimes called "high context" cultures, particularly with an R&D department the Fortune 500 company I worked for opened in Cebu.

In R&D in America, if you said you were going to do something you did it. If there were problems or obstacles you related them clearly and assessed them as well as you could. Rational, truthful, low-context communication is vital to development processes. Because, the artistic elements aside, you can't do development well without using the scientific method, and you can't do the frickin' scientific method if you rely on high context communication!

So when someone in the Philippines said they understood (when they didn't), it drove us nuts. When someone in the Philippines said that their code was complete, when it wouldn't even compile, it drove us nuts. When someone in the Philippines would stall by, after receiving a directive in e-mail, replying, "When you said 'A' did you mean that we should do 'A'? Or did you want us to do 'B'?" it drove us nuts.

The evidence so far seems to indicate that Mississippi and the lands where we outsource jobs to the cheapest labor (it MUST be a good deal to get a software engineer for $16 a day, right?) have something in common.

The first thing Pompotous noticed was that the house my family and I moved into was quite dirty. The carpet had been vacuumed, the hardwood and tiles swept, the counters wiped, but that was it. We'd specified that the house was to be professionally cleaned before we moved in. Apparently it was, to the tune of $650. And what did this $650 get? Well, not scrubbing the tile shower. Not cleaning the dog hair off of the baseboards. Not cleaning the ceiling fan blades in almost every room. Not mopping the tile or hardwood. Not cleaning the blinds or the windows. Not cleaning inside the cabinets. Not wiping down the walls.

I remember my days in basic training -- there is apparently a spot in Mississippi open for a cleaning team run by a drill instructor, because based on the team that cleaned my house the definition of "clean" is a bit fuzzy for folks in Mississippi.

My wife and I opened a local checking account. As part of that, of course, we placed an initial order for checks. Well, we did. The woman at the bank who set up our account didn't. Which my wife found out 3 weeks later when calling, asking where our checks were. My wife then asked me to handle it -- a new woman at the bank (the previous helper having left or been fired) said that she'd mail new counter checks to us and put in our order for the checks we'd ordered three weeks before.

Today she called and left a message said that our counter checks were in and I could come pick them up when I liked. What happened to mailing them?

I ran over a screw and had to get new tires. On the way to the mechanics my brakes began acting funny. I ordered two new tires and asked for my brakes to be checked. Four hours later I got a call saying that my car was ready. I asked what had been wrong with the brakes. The mechanic replied, "What about the brakes?" I was told that he'd look at them prior to closing and I could pick up the car the next day.

The next day I called in the morning, starting when they opened, to ask about the brakes. I left a message at the first call, being unable to get someone to answer the phone. The next 5 calls, over the course of an hour, were also unanswered. Eventually, I went in. After I showed up they said they would take a look at the brakes. More hilarity ensued when they ordered up a master cylinder for an ABS equipped car and received on for a car without ABS. I was told that the part would be in the next day. I was told that the mechanic would call me when it got in so that I could bring my car back. That was 4 days ago, I do believe I'll be going to a different mechanic.

We found a daycare for our daughter, the best of the lot reasonably available. There were two possible start dates, we were told that they would call us the Friday before the Monday they were able to fit her in. When my wife called to make sure they'd have space on the later date, she was informed that the daycare assumed our little girl was going to be there on the earlier date, she'd been told to just come ahead then. Which wasn't true, of course, but like so many conversations I've had with people in the Philippines, in her head it was the truth, even if that truth bore not the slightest resemblance to verifiable reality.

The Mississippi web site for registering a car listed four things necessary for transfer of title (plus the fee, of course). In practice we needed only 1 of those 4 things, plus 1 additional item not listed on the Mississippi web site.

Recycling is picked up once every two weeks -- except that the garbage men ignore the recycling container, even on recycling days.

A pest control person that comes into the house, sits at the dining room table uninvited and proceeds to hold forth at length on the complexities of pest control and the accuracy of television shows on pest control.

There are more instances in the list -- insurance people, more state car regulations, additional cleaning people, on and on.

It is distressing, but the institutions and workers that I've come into contact with in Mississippi clearly share habits and attitudes with the $16/day software engineers in the Philippines: whatever you do is enough. Whatever you say shouldn't be taken seriously, because it might or might not be the truth. Your just saying what needs to be said for the sake of saying the right thing, it has nothing to do with actually doing anything. If there is a problem, someone else will deal with it.

For me, America is an attitude, a set of laws and expectations about behavior that bind us together. I used to live in America. Now I live in Mississippi, not too far from the Philippines.

Pompotous speaks, and says it is time to cull the herd and annex Mississippi into the United States of America.