EthicalDative

Mother Pensive With Huge Glasses, JMN, photo. (C) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.

As I’ve been traveling more, again, I’ve gotten so tired of seeing dead animals on the road. It’s begun to sicken me. Everywhere you go you see little carcasses and mauled remains. Some are not so little; I’ve seen several good sized dead dogs. The other day on the way to work I saw two dead cats on Rio Grande no more than 50 yards apart. It’s especially saddening to see baby animals, such as kittens, and to realize how terribly brief their existence was….

I was thinking these thoughts driving home from Devine Thursday morning, and was on a stretch of road between Pleasanton and Floresville that goes through the John Connally property called the San José Cattle Company. Flocks of birds were flying up off the road and I hit one. It produced a noticeable thump, and I cursed and thought how ironic. I stopped in Goliad for coffee and the poor thing was lodged in my grille. Of all the things you don’t expect to hit, it’s a bird.

Someone said at the office the other day that a scientist, as an experiment, recently placed a rubber turtle and a rubber snake on a road and recorded motorists’ behavior. Everyone tried to hit the snake, and 50% of the passersby tried to hit the turtle. I wonder what this reveals.
[Correspondence, 1987. Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.]

I’m keeping a fairly close record on my office computer of how I spend my time at work. I feel overworked in the sense that I’m letting myself be subjected to more demands than I can reasonably satisfy, as well as allowing my own ambition to be greater than I can achieve. The recording of projects scheduled, projects finished and unfinished, dates and time spent, and for whom the project was carried out is helping me bring this into focus. Late yesterday as I was looking at the record I experienced a moment of dejection over the growing mountain of February work still undone. I realized there were some programming projects to do, and that I hadn’t done any programming for about a month. Then I thought that perhaps I should jettison this particular capability from the bag of tricks that I’m expected to perform. Programming is something that you have to do all the time to do well. True programmers do little or nothing else but program. My personal ambition has been to master the art, but it brings me into conflict with the duties I perform from day to day to make money for the company and earn my pay. I expect to talk this over with Dan on Monday.

[Correspondence, 1987. Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.]