BookWoman56

Lordonia, I don't know that I would formally write up any of the group, but you might give them advice. I'm not familiar with the specific meeting software you mentioned, but the one we use at work has a feature where you can set it to do not disturb, preventing any email or IM pop-ups from appearing on your screen. I suspect that feature exists in large part to prevent the scenario you described. You might suggest to them that if they are doing a presentation, they need to make sure they have that kind of feature turned on, or else save their snark for after the presentation is over. Fortunately, I've never had that specific issue, in large part because I move my email and IM to a secondary screen when sharing my screen for a presentation, and make sure I limit the screen sharing to only my primary screen. I have, though, made the mistake of having two different IM conversations going on at once, one with a colleague who knew what she was doing and one with a colleague who got hired because he knew the boss, and who was completely clueless about stuff. He messaged me that he was about to do ABC, which would have been a disaster. Thinking I was replying to the IM from the good colleague, I typed in "WTH does he think he's doing? ABC is a completely stupid idea." And then realized, a minute or two later, that I had in fact sent that message to the clueless colleague. I was mortified, but sucked it up and followed that IM with another one in which I apologized for the rant but explained to him the extent to which his proposed actions would screw up our project. Since that time, I have been very careful not to repeat that kind of mistake. However, the good colleague and I regularly snarked via IM on our manager, who was a sexist, racist idiot. I have since moved to a different position within the organization, so he is no longer my manager, but I feel certain if he had ever seen a fraction of the comments that we made about him, we would both have been shown the door. (The comments were all accurate, but unflattering and contained info that might have damaged him, such as noting that we had seen an email from him to another colleague, in which he made overtly racist comments.) Even though I routinely deleted all my IM history at the end of the day, in theory he could have requested that the IT security people restore that history if he had ever wanted to check it. I just made sure I never gave him a reason to think of doing so. In the case of the people who were involved in the group call, I would coach them to use it as a learning experience: If you are going to talk trash about someone via IM or email, make sure only your intended audience sees the trash talk. ETA: Thanks for the clarification. I think firing the support supervisor was overkill, if that was the only incident of that kind. But I have often found that some managers are much less concerned with who is productive and more concerned with what I would consider fairly trivial stuff. Your HR department making you take a course on managing difficult employees makes no damn sense whatsoever. The support supervisor wasn't difficult; she was just expressing her opinion, admittedly in a less than tactful way, of the presentation. I can see that the person doing the presentation might have been embarrassed by the snarky comments, but when you have people mocking your presentation, you might want to get a clue and make the presentation better. So, it sounds like the result of that incident was that your company slapped the wrist of one employee, fired a supervisor who was actually very productive, and retained someone with poor presentation skills. Another day in corporate America.

I thought it was also very typical of Morgan to get confrontational with the team at the crime scene, demanding to know what evidence they had found and coming across as angry that they did not have any additional evidence. He behaved as if he thought if he wasn't in their face, that they would just slack off and go out for drinks or something. And while I am not a fan of Hotch, either, Hotch made the right decision that Morgan shouldn't be working on his own case. That's kind of a no-brainer; as Reid said, to handle a case requires a dispassionate point of view, and Morgan certainly did not have that in this situation. Also, why was he so stupid as to go after the unsub by himself? He paid lip service to the idea of not wanting to put anybody else in danger, but his actions made it seem instead as if he didn't trust the team to catch the shooter. He could easily have been killed (and realistically should have been; that scene with the unsub playing a variation of Russian roulette with him was just stupid), leaving behind a widow and a son who would never know him. I thought Matthew did what he could directing to make this episode not quite as horrible as it might have been otherwise. But Shemar did not have the acting chops to pull off some of the more emotional scenes, and they felt very clunky. Throughout all the drawn-out goodbye scenes, I kept looking at the time and thinking, Morgan, how can people miss you if you don't ever actually leave? I do have a little more respect for Shemar after reading his comments in an interview about leaving the show, when he made it clear that he's not expecting to break into movies or whatever, but instead has simply decided he is ready to settle down and needs to find someone with whom to do so and start a family. While I did wonder why he was leaving when the show can't have that many seasons left, I can understand that he wants to focus on his personal life for a while instead of just staying until the show completely loses steam and is cancelled.

Forumfish, you're in Austin? I am in San Antonio and experiencing the same thing. It sucks. I had two rounds of eye surgery in the past couple of weeks, and now my eyes itch and burn, and I can't tell if it's the cedar fever or they're irritated from the surgery. Or both. Damn those juniper trees/bushes.

I've seen the same arrogance in just about all fields, from auto mechanics who can't believe you don't know what auto part ABC does, to IT people, to doctors and lawyers. So I think it's less about which type of skill the person has and more about certain people just having a high asshat quotient. It may well be, though, that some professions attract more people who are arrogant jerks than others. I will admit it frustrates me at times when people I work with can't write a grammatically correct sentence for anything, and ask me for help because I'm a tech writer. That frustration, though, is because putting together a subject and a verb correctly should be, at least IMO, a fairly basic skill, and in addition, when I have to spend hours correcting grammar mistakes, it gives me less time to review and rewrite the content so it flows well and makes sense. But I would never be rude to someone who asked me for help if he/she genuinely did not know how to write a sentence correctly. Bang my head against my desk at the confusion of there/their/they're, yes; be rude to the person, no. I figure if the person is asking for help, at least he/she is trying to learn how to do it correctly.

It's been a while since I used these, but when I did it was at the break room at work, with microwaves that did not have an easy way to adjust the power setting. What worked for me was reducing the cook time by 15-20 seconds, so that the soup got hot enough to eat, but not boiling hot so it would bubble over. I suspect the reason they don't make the container larger is that then people would bitch that they were getting ripped off because the container wasn't full. FWIW, I often use the same strategy on anything that needs to be microwaved. With microwave popcorn, it is important to me that it not get scorched, because when I have migraines, my first clue one is about to start is smelling burnt popcorn. So, the smell of real burnt popcorn evokes unpleasant associations and makes me paranoid that a migraine is impending, even though I tell myself that no, you're smelling burnt popcorn because there is in fact burnt popcorn. Anyway, I use the popcorn setting on the microwave, but turn the microwave off when there is 30 seconds left on the timer. Yes, a few kernels will be unpopped, but no burnt popcorn smell.

I just finished The Drowning Game by LS Hawker, and I'll admit what made me buy it was the title and it had fairly good reviews on Amazon. It wasn't horrible, but I loathe books where a character does all sorts of horrible things and then at the end, those things are just waved away as being at least somewhat justified because the character was trying to "protect" someone. In this book, the main character is trying to figure out why her recently deceased father kept her essentially a prisoner all of her life. So after spending most of the book believing her father did all these things because he was BSC, she more or less forgives him because he was trying to protect her. And I cannot escape the conclusion that his attempts to protect her left her instead much more vulnerable to danger than if he had told her the truth. So in many ways this is more a book that made me angry at the stupidity than a book that disappointed.

I finally got around to watching this, and was seriously underwhelmed. The story arc around the unsub was not original in any way, but could have been salvaged by better acting and directing choices. I like Joe fine as an actor and he seems like a nice guy, but as a director, he needs help. So many of the camera angles/shots were just cheesy, starting with the shot of Morgan's shoes as he is walking into the BAU, finally pulling back to reveal that it is indeed Morgan. There were a lot of shots that seemed odd, such as a few where the camera angle made the actor's face seem to loom over the scene, and then the shot of the talk between Reid and Morgan, which would have worked better IMO as more of a closeup, but instead it seemed as if the focus of the shot was not them but the room, which pretty much seemed devoid of any interesting features. And the shots from the perspective of the first female victim looked like something out of a high school film project. As noted, the actress playing the local LEO was stiff, but I could fanwank that to be that she was a little intimidated by having the profilers there. However, that poker scene was truly self-indulgent and frankly seemed ripped off from The Sopranos, which did a similar scene years ago of a celebrity poker game, to much better effect. Not a fan of stunt-casting like that. As for the Morgan-in-peril arc, the show has gone to that well way too many times for me to care about what happens. It is just unbelievable at this point that so many profilers and their families have been the target of individual unsubs or mysterious groups of unsubs. I used to joke that the reason Reid wasn't in a relationship was that anyone rational would run the other way when he described his colleagues: Hotch, whose ex-wife was killed by a vengeful unsub; Gideon, whose girlfriend was killed by a vengeful unsub and then later killed himself; Garcia, who was wounded by an unsub who targeted her; and the list goes on. Presumably he will have to add Morgan to that list, as being first kidnapped and tortured, and then either him or his wife being shot by an unsub. What makes these unbelievable is that these were not deaths or injuries that occurred in the field, so to speak. They didn't happen because of exchanging fire with an unsub while in the act of pursuing and apprehending the unsub; no, these are all instances of some unsub deciding to go after a profiler and the profiler's family, apparently without the recognition that doing so is the one thing most likely to make that profiler and his/her colleagues hunt down the unsub. So in this case, I just can't bring myself to care if it was Morgan or Savannah who got shot, and what the fallout will be. Maybe Morgan will decide he doesn't want his family at risk because of his career. Maybe Morgan or Savannah dies and the other is left to be a single parent. No matter how this arc is resolved, it makes zero impact on me emotionally as a viewer, because it's been done too often.

The acting in this carried me past a few narrative disconnects. John Goodman, in particular, was incredible. The movie did a great job in building tension toward the resolution of whether Howard is right, Howard is BSC, or all of the above. That said, there were a few things that bothered me, starting with why Michelle and Emmett felt compelled to try to escape almost as soon as Michelle figured out that Howard had probably kidnapped and murdered the girl a couple of years previously. I get that it's scary that he's a kidnapper/murderer, but it's even scarier that there is some major attack that has occurred and the chemical or biological weapons are still apparently killing people. What's wrong with the idea of playing dumb, getting as much practical knowledge as you can out of Howard on how to survive in the bunker, and then just killing him in his sleep so that you have the safety of the bunker while you figure out what's going on in the rest of the world? (Or incapacitating him somehow and keeping him chained up if you don't want to actually kill him?) Why not suggest to Howard that it might be a good idea to build a makeshift hazmat suit in case something goes wrong with the ventilation system or whatever that can't be fixed on the inside and requires going outside, instead of doing it in secret in a room into which Howard routinely barges with minimal warning and where you have nowhere to hide it effectively? Finally, the movie violated one of my personal rules for surviving an alien invasion: When you have just seen one alien spaceship and managed to destroy it by the tried-and-true method of throwing a Molotov cocktail into it, do not stupidly assume that all the other spaceships are nowhere around and it's safe to drive with your freaking headlights on in the middle of the night. Because that won't turn you into an immediate and easy target, no, not at all. Despite those issues with it, overall the movie was very compelling and one that I would see again without hesitation. I've liked John Goodman for years, and I think this may be the best performance he's ever done.

Lordonia, this is why I refuse to have a business relationship with a family member. If this were not your sister, you would feel absolutely justified in demanding a reduction in rent and that she quit coming into the rental property when you are not there and dumping stuff. Given that it is your sister, maybe you should tell her she needs to either reduce your rent by what she would pay for a storage place for her extra crap, or else move her extra crap into a storage place. Also, she needs to consider whether maybe she has a shopping addiction/compulsion. When you fill up your own place but then continue to buy more stuff to the extent you have to store it elsewhere, there's a problem. Stewedsquash, I have no problem with waiting for someone to make sure the cashier is ringing things up correctly, bagging stuff as preferred, and putting the debit card/checkbook back into place. But I do have an issue with someone who goes into the checkout line and decides that he or she is not really finished shopping, so that the cashier can't close out the sale on the register. To me there's a big difference between realizing while you are still in line that you forgot item A, and sending your kid to sprint across the store for item A and get back in time before checkout is completed, versus going through checkout only to decide that you need to halt the entire process and go buy more stuff. If the shopper who did that with the gift card had simply decided to finish being checked out, and then gone back for round 2 and round 3 of shopping, it wouldn't have held up anybody else. On top of that, this was in the express checkout line, supposedly limited to 15 items. She started out a few items over the count, but by the time she did her second round of adding items so she could use the entire gift card balance, she was easily up to 40 or 50 items. I just can't understand the thinking there; it's not like the gift card was going to expire if she didn't spend it all on one trip. This is a grocery chain with locations throughout the state, so it's again not like a one-time opportunity. The bottom line is we weren't waiting in line for her to get her stuff rung up; we were waiting in line for her to finish her shopping and then get rung up.

To the shopper ahead of me and one other person in line at the grocery store checkout: Look, it's great that someone gave you a gift card for grocery shopping. What's not so great is your apparent inability or unwillingness to keep up with your running total of items you want to purchase using that gift card. So, this business of having the clerk ring up your total and then deciding not once but twice, that hey, as long as you still have some money left on that gift card, you need to go back and buy more crap, leaving those of us in line behind you waiting on you: not cool at all. I will say the poor sales clerk eventually did the right thing and got another clerk to come take the carts from the person in front of me and me, open up another line, and get us checked out. Seriously, though, WTF is wrong with people? Standing in line to check out at the store is bad enough without this kind of nonsense.

During a job interview a few years ago, I got one of those generic "Describe a situation in which you had to adapt your personal workstyle to work effectively with someone with a very different workstyle" questions. My response was that in a previous position, we had clients who were very touch-feely and liked to hug when they came for their occasional site visit. We had mutual respect and a good working relationship, and I had to train myself not to cringe/flinch when they would hug me. It was very important to the company to keep this client happy, but if I had ever gotten a sense of the hugs being an excuse for random touching or a lack of respect on their part, I would have found a way to opt out. Agreed. I don't want to have to express my affection, either by touch or in words, for someone 14 times a day. I sure as hell don't want someone hanging on to me every minute. When I want physical intimacy, I want the other person to be focused on that intimacy, not having physical touch be there as more or less background noise on an ongoing basis.

It's not that the hugging was an everyday type of thing. My former manager lived on the other side of the country and would visit here maybe twice a year, so at the end of his visit, he wanted to hug everyone. With other colleagues, it's usually been in the context of going-away lunches, or that sort of thing. Still, though, I dislike it and almost everybody was fine with that.

I will generally tolerate hugs only in very specific situations: it is at work, the potential hugger is a client, and it's important to keep the client happy. Yet another reason I'm glad I telecommute 100% now; no need to endure the random hug. The people who can figure out you don't want to be hugged but do it anyway need to FOAD. They're just enjoying making you uncomfortable. I don't encounter that much anymore because I send out a certain "Do not fuck with me" vibe and use the "Touch me and you will regret it" glare. My former boss once asked me if he could hug me, fully expecting me to feel intimidated enough by his position to agree to it, and he was a bit taken aback when I politely but firmly said, "No, I really dislike being touched." Most of my colleagues, though, are fine with my lack of hugging and will joke about it with me.

I am now paranoid because I did major in English and am a tech writer, so grammar and spelling are important to me, but I hope that I have not switched "too" for "to" or even "two." I generally don't correct people's typos in this sort of forum because I get paid to do that at work and don't want to do it here as well. However, I will occasionally use the strategy of repeating back a phrase and using the correct spelling or word. But I am somewhat amused by the word "misspelled" being misspelled in a post complaining about misspellings. My basic attitude is that sooner or later, everyone is going to have a typo or lapse where even though you know the correct word, you type the wrong word. What bugs is when the post is filled with mistake after mistake and it's obvious the person didn't make a typo; the poster clearly does not know the correct word/spelling. New peeve: people using the word "ask" as a noun. Yeah, I know there is a history of it being used as a noun in a very specific context. However, I have now sat through too many meetings where someone says, "So, what's the ask here?" and I have no idea if the person is asking what the question is or what the request is. This needs to stop. Now.

My former manager was one of those, and part of his official policy was that if you were going to be gone for 2 hours or more, you had to have both the email auto-reply and a voice mail response explaining that you were gone and when you would return, etc. My standard auto-reply simply states the date(s) I will be out of the office, the point of contact in my absence, and a note that I will follow up as needed when I return. My colleagues in general do not need to know anything other than that. I did let a few colleagues know last week that I would be out this week for 3 days because of my eye surgery, but that was primarily as a heads up that if there were complications, I could be out longer than expected, and to let a couple of colleagues know that although I had agreed to work on some items for them over the weekend prior to the surgery, since they did not get those items to me on time, I would not be able to get to them until after the surgery because, you know, if I can't see their documents, I can't review them. My manager has known for a couple of months about this round of surgery and the next one for next week, and she's really the only one who needed the details. On top of the emails that tell the entire world why you are out of the office and the fascinating details of where you will be, I hate the emails that then are sent giving a blow-by-blow account of someone's vacation, with multiple embedded photos, and the expectation that everyone on the team needs to ooooh and aaaah over them. A simple note that you're back from vacation and a link to photos if someone is interested is way more than sufficient. I work with you; you're not family or friends for whom I have some sort of grudging obligation to view your vacation photos and refrain from making snarky comments. If you mention you went to location ABC and I want to see your photos or know the details of your trip, then I will ask you. Otherwise, assume I'm not interested.

I never got the impression that Haley used Hotch as a sperm donor at all. It was very clear they loved each other at the time Jack was born, so it's not like she was just looking for some random person to be a baby daddy. Nor do I think she regarded Hotch as toxic to Jack; for him to be toxic, he would have had to actually be around. There were a few hints dropped that Hotch's father had been a toxic parent, but when Hotch actually did interact with Jack, he didn't seem toxic. Absentee parent, yes. But any relationship is going to be dynamic, rather than static and remaining exactly the same as it was in the beginning. People change; relationships change; sometimes they change in the same direction and sometimes they diverge. Exactly. I'm not a fan of traditional marriage and am instead a proponent of polyamory. But for polyamorous relationships to work, you have to make each person feel valued and of more or less equal priority. Hotch was essentially married to his job, and so his job became in effect his spouse, but he failed to make his other spouse feel that she was valued at the same level. It seems as if Haley and Hotch started with a traditional marriage that evolved into a three-way, with Haley being relegated to a secondary role. It's that sort of dynamic that causes many marriages in this type of career to crash and burn, because many people don't want to feel undervalued or under-appreciated, or that they take second place to a job. I don't think the end of the marriage means that either of them was a bad person, just that their needs and wants changed over time and the marriage was no longer meeting those needs/wants.

I understand the dislike of the trope, but there's also the argument that it's easy when you are young and in love/infatuation to believe that you can tolerate and accept a way of living that years down the road, you realize you can no longer accept. With the Hotch/Haley marriage, there's a huge difference between marrying someone who plans on being a lawyer and someone who plans to be a profiler who is called away across country on a very regular basis. My take on the situation is that no, Haley did not sign up to be married to a profiler who made it increasingly clear that his job had a higher priority than she or Jack did. And while I obviously agree that what Hotch does is important, if he knew he was so committed to the job that he was going to be an absentee father, then why did he even bother to become a parent? Hotch's commitment to his job, although admirable in terms of the needs of society to catch serial killers, etc., meant that on a personal level, he was asking Haley to be both parents to Jack. So while it may have been unfair for Haley to want him to be less committed to his job, it was equally unfair for Hotch to expect Haley to be happy with their marriage and his lack of active parenting. From my perspective, I saw the beginning of the end of their marriage in the episode when Haley shows up at the office with the package from an unsub that was delivered to their house. It was the first time in the show that the line was crossed with having a case actually transition from the office into their home. That package could just as easily have been a person who killed her or Jack, or both, and that would have been a harsh realization for her. It was no longer just Hotch putting himself in danger; the nature of his job meant that she and Jack were being put in danger. And while I know the show is removed from reality in that typically the families of profilers and other LEOs are not targets of unsubs, in the universe of the show, she had every reason to feel endangered because of Hotch's profession. Ultimately, of course, even though she divorced Hotch, she still was targeted and killed because of his profession. So I can't fault her for deciding that she wanted out of the marriage, and I don't really think it was a sudden change on her part so much as a gradual realization that the marriage she had envisioned with Hotch was nonexistent and he wasn't going to change, so if she wanted things to be different, she would have to effect a change. It still bugs me that after her death. all of a sudden Hotch is able to become much more actively involved as a parent. To me, the inevitable conclusion is that yes, he could have made Jack more of a priority before Haley's death but simply chose not to.

In my experience, people who come to work sick fall into one of two categories: (1) they are not in a position to take time off (no sick pay, asshat manager, etc.) or (2) they have a serious case of inflated ego (the entire universe will crumble if I am not in the office). I suspect your boss falls into category 2. One of the many reasons I am thrilled to be telecommuting full-time is that I no longer have to be exposed to the germs of those people who come to work when sick. My company has a fairly reasonable policy on sick days. All of our paid time off (PTO) is lumped together with no differentiation between sick days or vacation days, etc. They do have certain guidelines in place about the amount of unplanned PTO versus planned PTO, but it's reasonable. They understandably want to discourage people from calling in sick on an ongoing basis, especially if there is a pattern to the sick days, such as mostly Mondays or right before/after holidays, when other people have already planned to be out of the office and things might be short-staffed. However, the manager has some discretion. I don't get sick often, but about once or twice a year I will have an upper respiratory infection that knocks me out for two or three days at a time. When that happens, the first day of being out is classified as unplanned PTO, but I can go into the system and put in a request for the next day or two, and so that is counted as planned PTO. In addition, they strongly discourage people from coming to work sick with anything that might be contagious. So, I have seen a manager tell someone who is visibly ill (lots of coughing/sneezing, looking feverish, etc.) to go home so the illness doesn't spread.

I would be way more likely to start watching regularly again if Morgan leaves/dies. I have disliked him since the first season and still think SM is the show's weak link in terms of acting. However, it won't bother me if Lewis replaces him. I don't want to see some random person brought in who takes on Morgan's role of kicking down doors. Lewis seems at least more cerebral than Morgan.

Why not? If I were in a restaurant or other setting where some parent was letting kids be disruptive, I would not hesitate to give the parent a reality check. Politely, of course. Maybe things have changed in the restaurant industry, but at the time my ex-husband was encountering the issue, TPTB flatly said that in that sort of situation, you have to choose between possibly hacking off one family or hacking off an entire dining room full of customers, and the choice was a no-brainer. I wish more restaurants would follow the model of Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, a local theater chain that has a zero-tolerance policy for people using cell phones or talking loudly while the movie is playing. There's bound to be a market for customers who want to enjoy a nice meal without listening to people talking too loudly or enduring kids running around the room.

While the servers may have been hesitant to confront the parents, that's the point at which the manager or assistant manager, whichever one happens to be in charge at that time, needs to earn his or her pay. Roughly a gazillion years ago, my first husband managed a pizza place to put himself through college. It was part of a large national chain and was family-friendly, so it was very common to have kids. On more than one occasion, he had to go tell parents that they had to keep their child with them at their table, because if the kid managed to get into the kitchen area (quite easy to do because of the layout, which had an opening for servers to go in and out of where the pizza ovens were), it would be very easy for the kid to have a pizza coming out of a very hot oven dropped on his or her head, or to cause a similar accident to one of the cooks or wait staff. He was polite but firm about it, and made it clear that if the parents would not keep the kid under control, they would have to leave. I cannot fathom why parents would bring kids to an upscale restaurant and then let them run wild. When my daughter was young, I would occasionally take her to such a place, but she was well-behaved and quiet, and if for some bizarre reason she had started running around like crazy, I would have made her sit down or left the restaurant. If you want to go to that kind of establishment and you have a kid or kids, either make sure they know how to behave in public or find a babysitter. Of course, I also feel the same way about people who have loud arguments or conversations in public places such as restaurants. If I'm four or five tables away from you and can still hear every word you are saying, you are way the hell too loud.

Amelia and Kellie – Not a fan of country music in general, but this was fine. Kory and Haley - I hated when Haley performed Bennie and the Jets on her run, and hated this as well. Not helping was that Haley hogged the lyrics, leaving little room for Kory to impress. Lee and Chris – It was adequate without being anything special. Lee has an okay voice, but not distinctive. If I heard him on the radio, I would have no idea if it was him or any other blandly good singer. CJ and David - This paled in comparison to Cook’s original performance of it, which is one of my favorites. This song requires you to be completely invested in the lyrics to pull it off, and CJ wasn’t. OTOH, first performance of the night where the contestant was allowed to be the lead singer instead of functioning more or less as a backup singer. Manny and Jordin – Something about Manny just bugs, and while Jordin was okay, nothing about this song appealed to me. Jenn and Constantine – This sounded wretched to me and again, paled in comparison to Constantine’s original performance of it. I was shocked that the judges didn’t rip it apart. Tristan and Kellie – Completely meh. By the end of the show, I could barely remember the performance. Olivia and David - I wasn’t sure Olivia could pull this off, but she did surprising well. They both sounded good and neither overshadowed the other, so it was a good balance. Adam and Haley – Still not a fan of Haley. She essentially took over the song, and Adam just faded into the background. Her dress was gorgeous, but designed to draw attention to her rather than the contestant whose performance was being judged. Dalton and Chris – This is one of the few Stevie Wonder songs I really don’t care for. Dalton did fine on it, as did Chris. Dalton looks way more comfortable on stage than most of the contestants, but I don’t find his voice particularly appealing. I don’t hate his voice, so I’d be willing to listen to him sing something else just to see if my bias on the song choice was affecting my judgment of his voice. Trent and Jordin – Good job on the duet, although the song itself does nothing for me. Trent has a decent voice but needs to improve his performance skills. Shelbie and Constantine – Bad song choice. Some songs work okay when they are cut down to 90 seconds or whatever, and some just don’t. The performance just did not build in a cohesive way and felt disjointed.

I've been fortunate in most of my years in the corporate world to have managers who knew better than to concentrate only on pleasing the client without making sure that the client's requests were both possible to fulfill and relatively sane. Several years ago, though, a client was trying to figure ways to cut costs on process A, and came up with a different method that was so stupid it raised stupidity to an art level. My manager figured the only way to shut this down was to agree to explore the proposed method. She got me to do the research and write a feasibility report, after which the client shut the hell up about his idea as it would have been more expensive than the original Process A and more prone to major errors. That said, I will never forget an internal meeting at which we were going over the client's requirements along with their requested timeline. It wasn't so much the requirements being impossible as the crazy timeline, and this was our first time to see the proposed schedule. A colleague quickly reviewed the overall timeline, and said, "Whatever drugs these people are on, I want some." We would have been able to pull off the schedule only by putting in a lot of overtime, which would have exceeded the project's budget. Although it's been a while since I worked for that organization, one wall poster there stuck with me: You can have it good.* You can have it fast.* You can have it cheap.* * Choose any two. Clients unfortunately tend to want all three.

I was satisfied with most of the resolution for this season. I wasn't surprised Joe was found not guilty, because of two things: first, his defense attorney was taking the spaghetti approach of throwing various theories of a different killer out there and seeing if one of them would stick with the jury enough to raise doubts; and second, entirely too many people failed to give Jocelyn the complete truth about their own actions. She missed some opportunities for follow-up questions that might have mitigated some of the damage done by various witnesses, but it seemed as if she had been able to counter most of the damaging testimony until Mark admitted that he had been so close to the murder scene. I think that was the tipping point for the jury; it wasn't necessarily that single event but the combination of all the oddities (Joe getting beaten up, Ellie seemingly bribing her sister to give a statement, etc.) that made them have second thoughts about Joe's guilt. As noted elsewhere, Ellie should just have flatly stated that she periodically had to give her sister money, and so that particular instance wasn't necessarily a bribe but just life as usual. The one thing I cannot fathom is why in the hell Beth is still with Mark. Sure, I wanted Beth to STFU when she was blaming Ellie for things that Ellie had no control over. But Mark was a piece of work. During the trial, it's come out that he had sex with another woman, planned to end the marriage by writing a letter to Beth (seriously, was he planning on just walking out the next morning and leaving the letter for her to read?), and had secret meetings with the son of the accused murderer. How could Beth ever trust him or his judgment again? And why would she want to? I understand, new baby and all that, but Mark did nothing but whinge about how tough this was for him, all the while withholding critical information from Jocelyn, which if she'd had prior to the day of his testimony, she could have developed a strategy to deal with it. I was happy to see Hardy interact with his ex-wife in a productive way and be on good terms with his daughter. That resolution felt completely right, after he had endured so much. For the record, though, Nige creeps me out. I kept waiting for some big reveal about him that never happened. I could easily see him as a serial killer who simply happened not to have killed this particular kid.

I had binge-watched Broadchurch over a few days and then was curious enough to watch Gracepoint as well. Broadchurch intrigued me even though I found many of the characters infuriating at times. Gracepoint, OTOH, just fell flat to me, and while some of the flatness was watching the same scenes with much of the same dialogue, but played by different actors, a lot of my being meh on it was the acting. I didn't really have a problem with Anna Gunn, although Ellie in Broadchurch seemed more down to earth but also possessing a sense of humor. However, Michael Pena as Danny's father just did not work. In the first episode, particularly, he did not pull off grieving, horrified father at all. It was very much watching an actor struggle to pretend to be grieving and horrified. I've liked Pena in other roles, but his performance was just not convincing in any way here. The young newspaper apprentice character also seemed miscast; he did not seem energetic or determined enough to care about getting a scoop on the identity of the victim. It's hard to articulate, but IMO the characters in Gracepoint lacked the intensity and charm of the Broadchurch originals, so that I couldn't get invested enough in them to care one way or another how it ended.