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Surprisingly positive response to yesterday's overlong entry. bunj actually called to thank me for scoring him Chinese food. Seems his wife read my loving description of xiao li and was left drooling for it.

(Rest assured that "Mr Vain" will remember this next time he gets any flak for maintaining a weblog.)

I made myself so hungry that, on the way home, I picked up some of Man's Most Perfect Meat and stir-fried it with lots of fresh ginger and Szechwan pepper-salt. The GWO, for his part, is probably going to hit New Chinatown today to stock up on ingredients. He's indicated that he wants to try cooking cha siu pork at home, which of course only makes me faint in admiration for him all the more

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This was one effective vacation. Today, a co-worker wasted several minutes of my time with a so-called problem, and I found myself more amused than annoyed.

He's a conscientious employee, but he suffers from a flaw that's simply endemic in my field (and, I presume, every technical one): Narrowness of vision. My step-brother and I discussed this out in Utah. (One of the unanticipated pleasures of the vacation was spending a fair bit of time with my step-brother and my brother-and-law, both of whom are very cool guys that I don't see very often and then only in the company of a lot of other people.) He had broken the acquistion of vision in a work setting into four stages:

1. You understand the functions of your job.
   
2. You understand how your job fits into the work of the department.
   
3. You understand how your work fits into the operation of the company.
   
4. You understand how your work fits into the industry as a whole.
   

He was lucky enough to have a boss at Stage 4 who had helped him to an understanding of Stage 3; he hopes to retain him as a mentor long enough to reach Stage 4 himself. (I envy him; as I told him, a good mentoring relationship is harder to find than a good salary, good location, or good perks.)

GWO calls Stage 2 "the worm's-eye view" and, sadly, it's where most people in our business seem to be mired. He himself is probably Stage 4, having authored national-level documentation, and he--as well as my former boss, who trained under him--have helped drag me up to Stage 3, more or less. Whatever I do, I try to keep in mind the utility to the end-user, the cost-effectiveness for the company (a common bugbear: It's often more efficient to let a few errors slip by and correct them later if necessary than to strive for perfection the first time around), and other such considerations.

This hierarchy might seem reminiscent of Kohberg's stages of moral development, but it's a bad fit. Many Stage 2ers are thorns in the side of management, because they insist upon doing what they deem "correct", whether or not it agrees with local standards and policies or (inter)national ones. In fact, they often appeal to the latter to justify violating the former, but when you quiz them, you find that they're often quite ignorant of these "universal" guidelines.

So here I was, arguing at Stage 4 (about how, from the standpoint of the philosophy of the discipline, there was no single "right" way to do the work) or Stage 3 (how spending too much time on a single item was not in the interests of institution, with its huge backlog of materials to be processed), watching the guy get more and more bent out of shape as he insisted that anyone could see why the way this item was processed was simply wrong. How could I get mad? It was more pitiable than anything else.

How do you spell "Utah"?

For some reason, I went on a total spelling-snob tear in Utah. I'm not sure why. I've always agreed with the Times correspondent who said that having bad spelling is "no better or worse than having egg-stains on one's tie." I hate spelling flames, because they're always the least interesting response to a bad post. I hate when people leap to judgement about the mental capacity of an individual based solely on whether they have an "a" or an "e" in an unstressed syllable.

But bad spelling just seemed to be everywhere there. It first struck me near our hotel, where we saw signs for "Bellé" and "Chenéz". (Don't tell me that foreign words don't count. If you don't know French, then what the cordon bleu are you doing using it to name your business?) Then we took a hike down the main drag to read menus and window-shop and, by the time we reached "Cisero's" (an Italian restaurant, if you can believe it), I'd had my fill of "pablanos", "andonilee" sausage, and wines from "Chili".

I think what offended me about these instances was that they represented, in essence, tacky decor. You spend $100,000 designing a dining space to give a luxurious, upscale feel and then you can't pay an editor $10 to make sure your menus don't embarrass you? It's as bad as, I dunno, sending out your waiters with egg-stains on their ties. Why not neglect to wash the floors while you're at it?

Things finally reached a pinnacle on the road to the city where we saw a lighted sign announcing "EXIT CLOCED". It was around this time that I considered jotting a Utah Spelling Hall of Shame in my notebook. I even thought about going through the menu reader in our room, searching out all the mistakes, and presenting them out of context as a quiz for readers of this forum. But that represented a level of obsessiveness I wasn't prepared to reach.

[Note: Since this a spelling rant, it's guaranteed by the laws of fate to have at least a half-dozen typos in it. Pointing them out will not score you cleverness points, so do it only if you can't stop yourself. Yes, I know there's a spellchecker available; I don't get along with 'em. They always want to "correct" perfectly legit spelling choices like "humour", "I'd've" and "chorizo".]