Robert A. Black, Mathematical Storyteller

What a week it's been. People in day-job land have been checking on me and fretting about me, ever since the surprise news on Monday that I'm being replaced as Quality Manager and moved to the position of Senior Quality Engineer. Taking over the manager job will be the quality engineer from the Mexicali plant who's been coming up here periodically to help us out. I've actually been trying to get him relocated here permanently for the past year. As you might imagine, though, the way he's being moved here isn't what I expected. I was surprised, but I'm not really all that upset. Back in 2009, I got half my department taken away was saddled with writing instruction manuals after they laid off the technical writer - that upset me a lot more. This time, I'm taking it a lot better than some of the other people I've heard from. As I said, I've been wanting this guy to move here, so I think it's a good thing for the company to do it. Many...

If you hear loud, panicked screams coming from the direction of Ventura County over the next couple of months, it's probably me. Over the next ten weeks, my life will be dominated by two major endeavors, neither of which I'm really sure how I'm going to pull off. Over the next ten weeks in day-job land, I have to get the company ready for the big transition audit to the latest version of the ISO9001 quality standard. That would be a challenge under normal circumstances, but these days we've got a new General Manager we're all still adjusting to, projects that are behind schedule and other things happening that I won't go into details about. The bottom line is that everyone is already busy and would just prefer that I get the company through the audit for them. But quality systems don't work that way any more, so I've got to find a way to hand-hold everyone through the process. Meanwhile, my publisher Royal Fireworks has started an Online Learning...

My first five months in my current day-job, back in 2003, were a baptism of fire. I had to get the company through two major certification audits in that brief span of time. There was a retired Engineering VP who had stayed on as a consultant, and he kept telling me to be sure I scheduled one of the audits quickly, before "Manny" retired. "Be sure you get Manny," he kept telling me. "Manny will help us." It turned out that "Manny" was a guy in the state's inspection office, and the way he helped us was by schmoozing with the national inspector, taking him out for dinner and making sure he was in a good mood. The "audit" would then consist of Manny and the national inspector and a couple of company guys basically shooting the breeze for a while and making some changes to our paperwork so it would look like they'd done something. I didn't realize that, and wouldn't have played that game anyway - and as a result, we...

Friday afternoon, I found out what kids today mean when they talk about wanting a "safe space." There I was, trying to finish up my work week, when I heard one of the lab technicians talking very loudly with the engineers about what a great thing it was that we'd bombed Syria, how the current administration was getting tough and not taking any nonsense, and what a great job they'd been doing so far. It took me half the evening to get myself back into the right headspace. If you've followed my posts over on LiveJournal since the election, you know that I was pretty devastated by it. Not just by Trump and his minions themselves, but by the people who elected him. " My people," mostly - white, nominally Christian and "Midwestern" in attitude if not in point of origin. We have such people even here in California, although not enough to cause much mischief in the voting booth. Every time I hear this Trumpian nonsense spew out of them, it le...