The management of superordinates

What is a superordinate?

It is somebody to whom, in terms of pay and stuff, you are lower down the pecking order.  It is a person who is in no way, shape or form, your superior.  If you have people like that, there's a lesson here, that I am publishing now under the 30-year rule. This is how to make your superordinate an unlucky bunny, like the one on the right.*

I spent many years working in hierarchies where I came up against superordinates. In the old days, one would say that an OBE (Officer of the British Empire) actually meant "Other Bloke's Efforts".  I came across it when my father, and Education Department official, was visited in hospital, in my presence, by a man with a lot of questions. My father stone-walled him, and after the fellow had gone, I asked who he was.

"That was Jack Buggie," he said, then he pointed at himself. "He'll get an OBE one day, but not from this bloke's efforts."

A year or so later, my father was dying of cancer, and my mother got an odd letter from Dr Harold Wyndham, then the Director-General, saying how he, personally, would never forget my father's work on something called "the wall of pins", which was a planning solution.

She asked my father what it meant, so he reached over and handed her a newspaper clipping, from the 'Daily Telegraph', as I recall. It showed a photo of Jack Buggie in front of his invention, the "wall of pins".

"He's got his OBE," I said, and my father nodded.  He wrote a masterly squelch, and my mother created multiple copies which went all over the Department, but Jack later made it to Director-General.

So when I became a Departmental official myself, I determined that no superordinate would pick my brains, steal my credit.  Jack was still DG, but while the lowly folk knew whose son I was, I avoided him.

I was bright, not concerned about a career as much as I cared about doing useful stuff. Most of the OBE types waited for somebody else to do stuff, and then jumped in to claim it, but I made sure that my authorship was known, in advance.  I also out-played them, and spent their budgets — I don't play office politics, but I don't waste my time on drones, either.

Enter Brent C**ish (yes, I blanked a couple of letters to make lawsuits harder).  He was, I think, a woodwork teacher, but he was inserted as my superordinate and he came around to find out what people were doing. Read: what he could purloin.

In all innocence, I let him see an idea of mine in mock-up form, a collection of school reports. I had written to my contact list, explaining that I wanted to assemble a set of school report forms, and I wanted them to fill them in one of their school's forms for a non-existent person. Many of them, knowing me, slipped jokes into the comments, and I assembled a 100-page booklet of the samples called 'Sorts of Report'.  I had sent if off for printing.

I told Brent that I was going to present it at a conference.  He promptly disappeared and came back soon after to say that the director had decided he, Brent, should go in my place.  The bloke knew sweet FA about reporting, while I had a master's degree in stuff like that, but I knew who would be claiming the credit for "something I had one of my staff run up."

I could have argued,  but that's not how I operate. The only operation I do is amputation — though  I don't regard the deployment of tactical nukes or the strategic use of socks filled with sea urchins as operations within the meaning of the Act.

Thieves are mugs.  "Sure thing," I said, and I slipped out to talk to my friend, the printer.  I always make friends with the service people.  I asked the printer to lose the print masters for a week, and told him why I needed this done.

"Bastard!" he said. I agreed, and he told me it would be better if he sent the masters to another office, and this is what he did, so when Brent went off to the conference, he went empty-handed. Not before, let me add, he went up to the printers and abused them — which made them even more helpful to me.  I bought the boss printer a beer, anyhow.

Note: none of this was about my career. I was too busy being useful to be worried about my career, but I could not, in all conscience, help the career of an OBE-expert. My idea was a practical solution to a problem lots of people had. The solution was only possible because my networks knew I did useful practical stuff, so they collaborated. If a scrote pinched my credit, I lost some of my ability to get solutions in place.

By the time Brent got back from the conference, the copies had arrived (well if the truth be known, they actually arrived the day before he left) and the clerical assistant, another mate, had packed and addressed them in a store room and dispatched them all, accompanied by my 'With Compliments' slips.  Once they were gone and Brent was out of the building, I went and left a copy on his desk.

The next day, he came steaming in, clutching his copy, and I told him how I had really chased the printers, and the copies had arrived at 10 am.

"Where are they now?" he asked, and by this time, the steam was really rising.

"In the post," I said.  "All gone."

Well, he moved on, not long after, but he kept rising of course. That sort always do.  But at least I wasn't to blame for his rise, though I think my presence may have worried him a bit, because while he was around, he never asked again about what I was doing.

The moral: don't get mad, get even, and given that you are superior to your superordinates, getting even will be no challenge at all.

--------------------------------------

* Rabbit's feet are lucky, right?

Brent Corish

About spider web

Yes, I have been remiss, but I am about three days from completing the first draft of a two-volume work that will be ~255,000 words.  That takes time.

So here's something I drafted a while back,

When I was younger, I ran with my children in the early morning, on the rough trails around Dobroyd Head. I used to lead, and often collected a face full of spider web from orb weaver and St Andrew’s Cross spider webs that spread across the track.

I quite like spiders, and I have done, ever since I saw the facial resemblance between my Latin teacher and a salticid or jumping spider like this one on the right. Still, an early-morning face-full of web was a wake-up. I tried sending the children ahead, but they were shorter than me, and went under the web, leaving it standing.

Then, with a Scots heritage, I discovered the St Andrew's Cross spider, which is pretty neat, with the saltire in its web.

Now I am older, and walk along trails. I still get the occasional face full of web, but I never dismiss web as useless, because two of my recent temporary obsessions are quack remedies and the winning of gold.

On the quack side, there was a real Dr Muffet (the father of a Miss Muffet) who proposed giving people "a spider hidden inside a raisin" as a cure for malaria. John Wesley, better known as a churchman, recommended spider web to cure the same thing, though he called it ague:

Or make six middling Pills of Cobwebs. Take one a little before the cold Fit, two a little before the next Fit, (suppose the next day,) the other three, if need be, a little before the third Fit. This seldom fails.

— John Wesley, Primitive Physic, 1785, 22.

Elias Ashmole used spiders for ague in 1681, writing in his diary: — "I took, early in the morning, a good dose of elixir, and hung three spiders about my neck, and they drove my ague away — Deo gratias [thanks to God]."

Between 1576 and 1578, there was a fraudulent gold mine near Hudson’s Bay, based on salted samples and a report of spiders on Kodlunarn Island. Martin Frobisher claimed that spiders were "… signs of great store of gold".

This puzzled me, but Lynne Kelly, a friend who is the author of an excellent book on Australian spiders, explained it. She said: "Golden orb weavers (Nephila spp.) are all over the world … and their webs shine gold in the sun—like very finely spun gold thread. I suspect this spider is the link to the myth."

You can see the goldness here in this side shot that I took, mainly to illustrate the way these spiders hang from the underside of a sloping web.

Next time you run into a web, remember: there may be gold at the end of that web: either real gold (improbable) or a cure that you can get the gullible to shell out gold for (highly probable).

The redback on the dunny seat

Yes, I've been a bit quiet again, mainly because I have been busy on a book that will probably be called Settlers. This will contain some 250,000 words of originally researched Australian social history, mainly in the colonial period, although, as I make very clear, Australian history is a great deal older than that. Australian history did not start when the English invaded Australia, any more than English history started when the Normans invaded England.

This blog entry is derived from part of that work-in-progress.  If and when I have a definite go-ahead from my publisher, I will add a note here, but it will probably come out in 2017.  About 60% of the text is now complete, all written since I floated the idea four months ago as Colonial Concerns.The following is a taster from that.

The Australian redback spider, Latrodectus mactans hasselti, is a close relative of the black widow spider. Its bite can be extremely painful, but it is not usually lethal. Over the years, legends have grown up about redbacks on dunny seats biting people on their nether regions, and I decided to look into it.

First up, the dunny seat is Australian vernacular for a toilet seat, the word 'dunny' probably coming from Scots dialect. The spider shown on the right is a huntsman, or as they called it in colonial times, a triantelope.

They are harmless, but people thought they were tarantulas (hence the name, a corruption of 'tarantula'), and when you look at them closely (left), you can see why people were and still are terrified of them. It is, however, a misplaced fear.

On the right, you can see a genuine Amazonian  tarantula that I came across a year or two back while blatting around the headwaters of the Amazon River. I am fairly sure that it was a pet that our guide had planted there for me to find, but I won't tell if he won't :-)

Back in Australia and the 19th century, settlers and colonists were well aware of the existence of poisonous spiders in other parts of the world, so they regarded Australian spiders with suspicion, even the harmless huntsman, as Louisa Ann Meredith knew in the 1840s: 

The tarantula is not quite so great a favourite with me, as I have strong suspicions of its bite being venomous. At first I understood them to be harmless, although servants and ignorant people hold them in great abhorrence, and, unless too frightened to approach, always kill them when discovered. Certainly the appearance of a full-sized tarantula is by no means prepossessing…

When disturbed they scramble along at a rapid rate, and are very frequent residents behind pictures or furniture against the wall, often causing terrific screams from one’s housemaid, which are somewhat alarming, until, on inquiry, the dreadful words “A Triantelope, Ma’am!” are gasped out, and the tragedy ends in the death, or, as I usually arrange it, the careful expulsion of the intruder…

Several persons of education and intelligence have assured me of their dangerous nature, but I have never yet witnessed an instance of it, and they are such patient and industrious fly-catchers, that so long as they confine their perambulations to the ceiling, or the upper portion of the walls of a room, I never disturb them.

— Louisa Ann Meredith (Mrs Charles Meredith), Notes and Sketches of New South Wales. 1844, 147 – 8.

Given these fears, I thought there must be some basis for it, so I started looking for early reports of spider bites occasioning death. I found plenty of deaths and escapes from snake bite, but none from spider, but then I found three in a row, and I am still not sure why it happened this way.

The first victim was a Bendigo chemist named Phillips was bitten while in “…the closet at the rear of his present residence”. You can read the full news report here:  The Age, 27 December 1862, 7, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/154966880

By chance, a doctor named King was in the house and he hurried out with a candle to find a small black spider on the seat. It had a flat body, with a red mark on its back, making it, without a doubt, a redback spider.

Phillips’ symptoms included strong pains in the abdomen, the bowels, pain in the spine and muscles, spasms, convulsions, delirium, shivering and sleeplessness. He was treated with cloths dipped in turpentine and applications of liquid ammonia before being calmed with ether, opium and brandy, and he later recovered.

The next two cases happened at Talbot, about 80 km south-west of the Bendigo and just a few months later. Carr’s first spider seems to match a redback in form, if not in colour.

The discrepancy in colour from the standard textbook redback may indicate that his specimen was a juvenile, or possibly the spider was preserved in some fluid that bleached it. The spider on the left above is a juvenile, the one on the right is more mature: notice the differences in colour. The coin in each case is an Australian 50 cents, 37 mm across.

Anyhow, here is the story, as distilled from a news report in The Age (Melbourne), 17 April 1863, 5, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/154965599:

Bites by Venomous Spiders. — In the current number of the Australian Medical Journal, Mr Robert Carr, of Talbot, details two cases in which most severe and constitutional disturbance was caused by the bites of venomous spiders. The tarantula is the only class of spider generally supposed to be poisonous; but it would appear that there is a brown spider, with a yellow streak down the back, the head being of a similar color, which produces, under certain circumstances or in particular constitutions, alarming symptoms, proving the absorption of a most virulent poison by those who happen to be so bitten.

His first of Carr's two cases was a miner named O’Connor, bitten on the scrotum at 6 am on 16 February 1863 “while sitting in a water-closet”. He felt the sting and complained of a tingling sensation, and only called for medical assistance at noon, when Carr found him in agony.

The scrotum, where stung, was red and indurated, but not much swollen, the penis was much enlarged, the prepuce œdematous containing a large quantity of white serous fluid, the organ presenting the appearance in fact of one affected with virulent gonorrhœa…

O’Connor had problems breathing, he was dizzy and he suffered loss of sight. Worse, he could not sleep, so he was dosed with opiates, camphor, ginger and laxatives. These, or the passing of time finally improved his situation.

This class of remedies I resorted to from having used them under like circumstances successfully in India, where all kinds of venomous insects abound. In two hours the breathing was relieved, and having persevered in the remedies for twenty-four hours, the patient finally recovered, and all bad symptoms disappeared by six p.m. the following evening. The legs, however, continued very weak, and there was a painful tingling sensation in both feet…

Carr's second case was a Mrs Lithgow, whom he called “very corpulent”. She was bitten under similar circumstances at 5 pm on 23 February, just 400 metres from the O’Connor residence. Bitten close to the groin on the inner right thigh, she had similar symptoms, and was in a critical condition by 11 pm.

I prescribed similar remedies to those stated in the first case, with like results. She sweated profusely. The breathing was relieved in four hours, the irregularity of the heart in eight hours. She dozed a good deal, but never slept till the evening of the second day, after which she quite recovered, the feet, as in the other case, being the last parts affected.”

So if you were wondering, yes, redbacks do sometimes lurk on dunny seats, and yes they can bite you, and yes, you may well wish you were dead, but no, you probably won't die, not unless you are weakened by some other medical condition.

PS: after some digging, redbacks apparently came from South Australia's arid zone, but they are intrepid stow-aways: I think they spread in drays an carts going to and from the goldfields.

A tale of lattice

A trellis is usually taken to be a light framework of wooden or timber bars, fastened where they cross, producing a screenwork of square or diamond-shaped gaps, generally filling a window or door space, and it gets its name from the trilicium, a Latin term for a warp thread made of three separate threads. Variant forms of this word are found in Middle English and Old French, but these days, people are more likely to speak of a lattice.

This is much the same thing as a trellis, but made from a thin wooden strap, a lath. This comes from the Old English lætte, through the Middle English laþþe, a word that was still in use in Shakespeare's time, when Falstaff declares to Prince Hal that he will "beat thee out of thy kingdom with a dagger of lath" in Henry IV Part 1, and it is a word which may still be heard in the expression 'lath and plaster'.

There is a similar word in German, laden, meaning a counter or shop, probably derived from the sense of lath as a plank, used to make a counter in a market place, but ladders were never made from lath, and even though ladders were often used in a barn, they have nothing to do with what Chaucer called variously a lath and a lathe, meaning a barn.This name comes from the Old Norse word hlaða, which is also seen in the rare verb 'lade', meaning load, and still seen in the past participle, 'laden'.

In times gone by, Kent was divided into a number of lathes, each with a lathe reeve, a bit like the shire reeve who gave us our modern sheriff, but what of the lathe that we use to turn wood and metal? The standard explanation ties this to the hlaða and 'lade', on the basis that this is similar to the Danish 'lad', a stand, seen in compounds such as savelad, a saw-bench, and væverlad, a loom (think /weaver-stand' to get the feel for this one).

Along this line of reasoning, the 'lad' is a pile built up in a regular way to make a stand, and so the lathe was a turning-lathe or turning-stand, and so became just a lathe. The fact that this is a little improbable has been happily ignored by etymologists in the past. It is just possible, though, that etymologists are less interested in technology than in words, and may have missed another possibility.

While we now use electric power, and before that, people used steam or even water-power to drive a lathe, in the middle ages, a lathe used a long and whippy arm over the bench, a treadle below, and a strap that went around the timber being worked. As the treadle went down, bending the boom, the strap made the timber piece turn.

Then when the treadle was released, the strap spun the timber in the opposite direction. Now the bending part of an arbalest or crossbow is called a lath, and it is just possible that our modern lathe was once a turning-lath, instead, or maybe the two ideas got mixed up.

One major use of lattice in the past was to make chancels, screens used to separate officiating clergy from the masses, or a court from the general public. The chancel, and what lay beyond, would be guarded by a chancellor, who was basically just an usher at the bars (chancelli) of a court.

But while constables were coming down in the world, the fortune of chancellors was on the rise, and soon they were Lord Chancellors, lording it over just about everybody, controlling whole universities, and even having courts of their own, the Chancery courts that Dickens depicts so lovingly in Bleak House.

These courts were every bit as awful in their behaviour as Dickens describes them, so that pugilists used the expression 'in chancery' to describe a fighter who had his opponent in a headlock, while beating him in the face with his spare fist. It would be enough to get you in a lather, but that, it seems, is an unrelated word.

Why Crooked Mick's dog seems stupid

For some reason, people seem a little puzzled about Crooked Mick's dog.  I keep having to point out that it wasn't really what you might call a clever dog, in fact it was generally regarded as the silliest dog on the Speewah, especially when you consider its size.  And it was lazy, too.

More than one New Chum had to be advised against trying to saddle Crooked Mick's dog after some wag had asked them to do just that.  Not that anybody cared about the New Chums all that much, but people of sensitivity could see how appallingly embarrassed the dog became, since all the saddles were too small for it.  Excepting for Mick's horse's saddle, but no New Chum could even lift that, and the dog wouldn't've helped them either.  Too embarrassed, you see . . .

The dog's main intellectual limitation was, as I've mentioned before, in its total inability to light a fire unless you gave it matches, and they had to be safety matches at that.  But in spite of that, I'm inclined to think Mick's dog was brighter than people thought.

I came to this conclusion after one occasion on which I saw the dog sit, wag its tail for a bit in an odd way, get up, turn round, look at the ground, turn back, wag again, and so on.  Curious, I wandered over to have a look.  There in the dust was a textbook example of the diagram that always illustrates Pythagoras' theorem.  Well, almost textbook: I'd say that the right angle was about 3 degrees off, but the squares on the three sides were all very good indeed.

The dog spent about half an hour fiddling with it, but it never seemed to get that right angle any closer, and in the end it mooched off.  So I think that all the time people were laughing at the dog for being stupid, it was just being absent-minded.

Which is no excuse, really, because a working dog has to keep its mind on the task in hand, and that was where Crooked Mick's dog fell down.  I mean, take the time it had to boil the billy for Mick out on the edge of the Grassy Paddock on the Speewah.  There were no trees for miles, not even little shrubs, so the standard method was to light a grass fire, and run along holding the billy over the flames.

Well Mick's dog had the matches that day, so it got the water, started the fire without any problems, and ran along until the billy was boiled, but like I say, it was absent-minded.  When the billy boiled, the dog was five miles away, but it had gone and left the tea behind!

Maybe the dog had its mind on Fermat's Last Theorem or maybe it was dreaming of something new to do with Napier's bones, or perhaps it was the four-colour map theorem, which the dog solved, many years ago, by rounding up a number of geographers and eating all their coloured pencils, but that's another story.  And in any case, who needs a dog that can do original mathematics?

* * * * *

Note: there is a whole book of these stories, which I am currently pitching to publishers, but they will probably appear in an e-book.

There will be quite a number of these on the blog, all with the tags Speewah and Crooked Mick.

Some more unusual rocks

This past week, I have had a bit of a break, in between taking an 83 kword file and another 5.5 kword addenda file and hacking them down into a 77k file that I hope will be volume 1 (or 2 or 3) under the title Colonial Concerns.  This is Australian social history that I hope will prove acceptable to my publisher.

I still hope to write Not Your Usual Rocks, so we went off looking for petrified trees. There were two lots that I had read about, around Lake Macquarie, and I managed to find both sites. The Blackall Park one, however, was hard, and the area is so pillaged that I won't say how to get there: if you have a special need, contact me with an email address for a reply with how-to-get-there details.

This item on the left was in the area:  I suspect some joker was playing games. It is NOT what we were seeking.

On the right, you can see the real thing, as viewed at high tide.

And here is the same thing, seen at low tide. When the Reverend W. B. Clarke recorded these in the 1840s, there were 500, while in the 1970s, there were said to be 30 (the rest had been "souvenired").

We found just two. This is not a Good Thing.

I found Clarke's description of the area, which he calls by its local name of Kurrur-kurran, in the The Sydney Morning Herald, 4 August 1845, p. 2, which you can jump to from this link. In that same article, he mentions another site, at what is now Swansea Heads, and I will explain how to get to that one.

First up, choose a time of low tide. We went back on our last day to see what was visible of the "petrified trees", and it was nearly all under water.

Like this picture at the right.

But at low tide, there are some marvellous remnants to be seen.  In the shots that follow, there is an Australian 50-cent coin for scale: this is 37 mm (1.5 inches in primitive countries) .

To get there, drive towards Swansea, take a left towards Caves Beach, but pick up Northcote Avenue, then Lambton Parade and park at the end in the Reid's Reserve car park.  Find a track through the dune to a beach on the east (it's very sheltered by a reef, so often has lots of children and dogs). Go to the water's edge, swing right and head around, out onto the rock platform.

Then look for these:

Well, if that doesn't ring your bell, forget it, but there's something else to look for, liesegang markings.

The cliff at the back of the platform is part of the Reid's Mistake Formation. This is a tuffaceous sandstone with pronounced jointing and amazing folding.

Over the millennia, water has seeped through the joints, and soaked into the rock, producing these patterns. First, here is a ranging shot to show you where to go: from this part of the cliff, turn left and go along the concrete (there's some sort of drain there), until you get to here:

Now move in and look for things like this:

The first one (above) is rock covered by water. The second one (below) is dry.

 The last two are also dry, but I have loaded these as hi-res. Try clicking on them.

And please, enjoy!

Notes
I have just found a few useful side bits in Wikipedia under

* Lake Macquarie Petrified Forest, and

* Fennell Bay, New South Wales.

There are probably other leads as well, if you search on "Kurrur Kurran", but the first of these links tells us what happened to some of the missing material.

January 3, 2016: I am working on this title. I don't like it much at the moment, but that usually happens with my books.  I fix the  unlikable bits before anybody else sees them. It needs a new chapter 1.