Nuria's Job

Nuria, my domestic partner, has been organizing our home, which is a polite way of saying "making my stuff disappear." But that's okay, I like being able to see the top of my desk. She also has put Halloween decorations on the front of our house. She's really "into" these holiday things. And speaking of "holiday things"...

She's also decided that she wants a job, so she applied for employment with the local Macy's store. But I'm starting at the end of the story.

First, Nuria had to get permission to have a job from US Customs and Immigration Service, because her permanent resident card hasn't been issued yet. She applied for permission to work in January, 2023. She received permission from USCIS two weeks ago in late September, 2023.

Nuria wants a temporary job for the holiday season. She does have an impressive resume, and she took three letters of recommendation to her job interview, which impressed the interviewer, who told her no one brings letters of recommendation anymore.

Her resume impressed me, too, and my own resume includes designing missile guidance systems as well as electronics for self-navigating mobile robots.

Here is a portion of Nuria's resume or, as she titled it, her CURRICULUM VITAE (a document that is usually used for applying for positions in academia, but why not call it that?)

STUDIES:

PRIMARY: 6TH GRADE. / 1958-1964

SECONDARY: 11TH GRADE (HIGH SCHOOL CERTIFICATE) /1965-1970

AMERICAN BUSINESS ACADEMY: BILINGUAL SECRETARY/1971-1973

INGLEWOOD ADULT SCHOOL: HIGH SCHOOL DIPLOMA /1974-1976 ( L. A. , USA)

ADDITIONAL COURSES:

MUTUAL ALAJUELA: HUMAN RELATIONS AND COMMUNICATION/1976

LEOPOLDO BARRIONUEVO: THE SECRETARY AND HER SUPPORT/1989

LEOPOLDO BARRIONUEVO: THE PROFESSIONAL MODERN SECRETARY/1990

INSTITUTO LATINOAMERICANO DE IDIOMAS: GENERAL INTERNET, EXCEL FOR WINDOWS, AMBIENTE WINDOWS, WORD FOR WINDOWS/1996

INSTITUTO UNIVERSAL DE IDIOMAS: DELTA AIRLINES ADVANCED ENGLISH COURSE/2000

GALILEO UNIVERSITY: BASIC GALILEO PROGRAM, FLIGHT RESERVATION FARES/2001

PATRICK HENRY HIGH SCHOOL: ESL CLASS/2002-2003 (ROANOKE, VA, USA)

ROANOKE CITY PUBLIC SCHOOLS: READING AND WRITING ESL COURSES/2003 (ROANOKE, VA, USA) 2002-2003

BB&T UNIVERSITY: CERTIFIED TELLER COURSE/2008

TIME WARNER CABLE: CUSTOMER CARE/2010  

WORK EXPERIENCE:

• I WORKED AS BILINGUAL SECRETARY AT THE JUAN SANTAMARIA AIRPORT FOR ONE YEAR. COSTA RICA
• I WORKED WITH MUTUAL ALAJUELA, FINANCIAL INSTITUTION FOR 25 YEARS AS SECRETARY, CREDIT AGENT, COLLECTION AGENT, MORTGAGE AGENT, TELLER. COSTA RICA
• I WORKED WITH INDUSTRIAS DE CONFECCION POLIANDY, AN APPAREL COMPANY, AS BILINGUAL ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT FOR 5 YEARS. COSTA RICA
• I WORKED WITH TIME’S SQUARE TRAVEL AGENCY AS ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT FOR 2 YEARS. COSTA RICA
• I MOVED TO ROANOKE, VA AND I WORKED CLEANING AND ORGANIZING HOUSES, ALSO HELPING ELDERS WITH DOCTOR APPOINTMENTS, GROCERY SHOPPING AND BABY SITTER. USA
• I WORKED AS SENIOR TELLER AND CLIENT SERVICE WITH BB&T BANK. I WAS ALSO IN CHARGE OF THE CASH VAULT AND BALANCING BRANCH LOG BOOKS FOR 3 YEARS. USA
• I MOVED BACK TO COSTA RICA WHERE I WORKED WITH CONVERGY’S FOR TIME WARNER CABLE FOR ONE YEAR.
• I WORKED FOR FISCHEL A PHARMACY FOR ALMOST 3 YEARS AS CLIENT SERVICE AND SALES.
• I WORKED FOR OPTICAS ALVAREZ, OPTICAL SHOP, SETTING APPOINTMENTS, CUSTOMER SERVICE, SALES, MARKETING, VISITING COMPANIES AND SIGNING CONTRACTS FOR 5 YEARS.

AWARDS:

• LITERACY VOLUNTEERS OF AMERICA - ROANOKE VA/VOLUNTEER OF THE YEAR/2003, ROANOKE, VA
• LITERACY VOLUNTEERS OF AMERICA - ROANOKE VA/ SARAH RUBUSH AWARD/2004, ROANOKE, VA ENGLISH WRITING AWARD/REFLECTIONS WRITING CONTEST/2003, ROANOKE, VA

Nuria was offered a job at the interview. She starts October 13th.  Macy's pays a starting salary of $16/hour. 

If I decide to get a job, any kind of job, I'm going to let Nuria write my resume.

Nuria Part 1

My partner Nuria will be home soon. She worked today.

Nuria doesn't have to work, she just likes working. She has a job with Macy's. She is always among the top three or four sales people at her store and the managers there like her. Even though her job is part-time and she usually works 25 to 30 hours per week, she sells more product and opens more credit cards than most of the Macy's sales clerks. 

One time, she was the administrative assistant to the Vice President of Manufacturing for an American clothing company. She had a lot of responsibility including arranging trips for her boss to various places, including some Central American countries.

She's taken over my house. She cleans it, cooks meals, washes dishes, does the laundry, and in general runs the house like she's managing a business. I just try to stay out of her way.

I take meds twice a day. If I'm still in bed when it's time for my morning meds, she brings them to me with a little cup of water. In the evening, she reminds me or she might just bring them to me, along with water. 

She just pulled up. Gotta go. Talk at you later.

... later ...

Sorry for the long delay after the last sentence, but Nuria was giving me a briefing on her day. She sold something that the computer said they should have five in stock, and they had none — because of shoplifting, which goes on constantly. And their security guard quit. The shoplifting is overwhelming, and everything at Macy's is good quality. The store is set to close in about a year, and the closing is probably due to losses that result from the ever-present shoplifting. Do people not realize that nothing you steal is free? You can pay cash now, or you can pay with your soul later, but you're going to pay.

Windows Update Hell

I have a little notebook/tablet computer with Windows 10 installed on it. It came from the store with factory-installed Windows 10. Which is to point out that Windows 10 was not an upgrade over an older operating system, which is something that can cause problems.

The pc auto-updates itself, but I can also manually check for updates. I hadn’t turned on the pc for about a week, so I decided to turn it on and run the “Check for Updates” service. It ran and said a cumulative update was available. The update had a long name: “2017-10 Cumulative Update for Windows 10 version 1607 for x86-based Systems (KB4041691)”.

As an update was available, I decided to start the update process. Then the problems began. The update package refused to download. The progress bar stayed at 0%, no matter how long the pc was left on. Restarting the pc did not help. The progress indicator was stuck firmly at 0%.

Using my Desktop pc, I started hunting for answers. I saw that I was not alone with my Windows 10 update problem. Lots of people seemed to have the same problem. A user pointed me to a Microsoft web page where I could download a script that would fix the problem. When I tried to run the script, I received an error message, which I’ve already forgotten. But whatever, it didn’t fix the problem with Update.

A second person posted a procedure for fixing Update. I was supposed to begin the procedure by opening a command prompt window in administrative mode and then typing net stop wuauserv followed by net stop bits to stop the Update process. I did that but no luck – it reported the Update process could not be stopped.

A third person suggested running chkdsk. You can’t run chkdsk on a drive that is mounted and being used, such as the system drive. So I told the pc to run chkdsk the next time it was started, and it did. Chkdsk found no problems.

Next I found a tool on the Microsoft website that was supposed to find and fix problems with Windows Update. I downloaded it and ran the installer. The installer reported that some files it needed couldn’t be found and gave up.

At this point it occurred to me that the Control Panel might be helpful. Under “System and Security” there was a troubleshooting section and in that was an option called “Fix Problems with Windows Update.” I ran that and it said “Detecting problems” and I got a little bar that looked like a progress bar but wasn’t. It had a moving green band that moved left to right over and over and, I suspect, was only there to give the user something to look at.

Next I got a window that said, “Repair Windows Update Database Corruption” and I clicked on “Apply this fix.” Then it said “Resolving problems.” It never got any further than that. Eventually I closed the Find & Fix tool and re-opened it and ran it again. When it got to “Apply this fix” I chose the alternate button, which was “Skip this fix (and keep looking for problems)”. That didn’t help, either.

Then someone suggested running the system file checker: “sfc /scannow”, which is a command prompt file. It took a while to check the files, but finally sfc reported that it found no problems – or, as sfc put it, no “integrity violations.” I was in the windows/system32 folder so I moved up to the windows folder and looked around. I found a folder called SoftwareDistribution. Moving around in the command prompt window was awkward, so I closed it and opened File Explorer. I went to the Windows folder and there was the SoftwareDistribution folder. For a minute I pondered deleting it. I suspected it held temporary files and if deleted, Windows would just recreate it. But deleting a Windows system folder is a rather big step so I decided to hold that as a last chance fix.

I went back to Control Panel and ran the “Fix Update” tool one more time. I got the window that said, “Repair Windows Update Database Corruption” and I clicked on “Apply this fix.” It said “Resolving problems.” Finally it said all problems were fixed and told me to try whatever I was doing before. I went back to the Update window and lo and behold, it began downloading the update. Then it installed the update. Hallelujah.

I find it telling that Windows comes with a tool that lets you fix problems with Windows Update. Wouldn’t it be easier on their customers to fix the issues with Windows Update? Perhaps Windows Update is so buggy and complex, and possible errors are so obscure, that Microsoft coders don’t know where to start fixing it, so they devised a tool that would cover all bases.

I have to wonder, how do people who don’t know much about computers handle problems like this? Probably, some of them use their pc and never know it can’t be updated. Some of them don’t care. Some of them are paranoid about not being able to install security updates, and they stick the pc in a closet, or give it to some kid on their street who knows how to fix it.

I’m not a computer geek. I do have years of experience with Windows, going back to Windows 3.1. But the main thing I have going for me is persistence. I won’t give up as long as there is one more thing I can try. Sometimes it pays off.

Macy's

It's New Year's Day plus One.

Nuria left the house at 9:15 this morning, off to her job at Macy's. She loves working there and she's very good at what she does, which is to sell products and sign up customers for credit cards. She is a natural-born salesperson. She could sell snow to Eskimos. For example, while the young salesgirls in her store stay behind the counter and chat with each other, Nuria is out on the floor asking customers how she can help them. When she sells a product, she asks the customer if they have a credit card, and if they don't she asks if they would like to apply for a credit card, and she'll sign them up for that. She hustles. Nuria once worked for a clothing manufacturer. She was Administrative Assistant to the Vice President of Manufacturing. She has an impressive resume, which I blogged about two years ago here.

Nuria wants to see snow. I like snow, too, as long as I don't have to shovel it off my front walk, or clear a path from my back door to my garage. I used to live in Roanoke, Virginia, and sometimes we got a good snowfall. In fact, there were times when I couldn't drive my car out of the parking lot of my apartment complex because the snow was above my car's bumper. Even though my vehicle had 4-wheel drive, there are limits – you can't drive when the snow is above your car's bumper. That car was a Subaru. My current vehicle is a Jeep Grand Cherokee and it has higher ground clearance. It, too, has 4WD (of course). It would take a lot of snow to stop it. But today, central Virginia is sunny with an occasional cloud on the western horizon. In other words, it's a beautiful day. 

Nuria is supposed to be getting off work at 4PM. Often, her manager will ask her to work until 5PM or later. She always says "Yes" to that request. She loves working at Macy's. It's a shame the store will be closing in three months. Nuria tells me about all the shoplifting that she witnesses in the store. The store apparently is losing money despite selling a lot of high-end products. I think the store is being shoplifted into oblivion. As I said, it's a shame.

Add Cart

Every two months I receive a utility bill from the City. It’s itemized: refuse, sewer, water, storm (storm water disposal), and something called “add cart”. I just look at the bill and pay it. I never knew what “add cart” meant, but it’s always $4.20. I figured it’s a fee that the City adds. Like my cell phone bill. I have a monthly charge, a tiered overage charge, a Federal Universal Service Assess Non-LD surcharge, a Virginia State Gross Receipts surcharge, a Virginia State Special Revenue surcharge, an Administrative charge, a Regulatory charge, a Virginia State 911 Tax, and a Virginia State Sales Tax. So when I see “Add Cart: $4.20”, I just pay it.

Today I got curious about it and called the Utility Department. They told me I was being billed for an additional trash can. I found out they’ve been billing me for two trash cans since 2008.

I’ve never had more than one trash can. The lady at the Utility Department told me that the number of trash cans at my house has been verified every six months. I told her that the person or persons who have been verifying two cans every six months for three years might not be doing their job. After a little wrangling, the lady said she would remove the $4.20 charge from this month’s bill and future bills.

“What about all the previous charges going back to 2008?” I asked her.

She said she couldn’t refund those charges because I had never complained about them. Seriously, that’s what she said.

I changed out of my shorts and t-shirt into more serious looking clothing, put on my Naval Special Warfare Command ball cap and drove to City Hall. I went to the Utility billing office so I could talk to the lady.

I was nice, of course. I asked her under what theory of law can the City make a mistake and overcharge someone and then get to keep the money because the person being overcharged doesn’t immediately spot the error. After all, if the bank makes a mistake and puts too much money into your account, you can’t keep the money. If the government accidentally makes your tax refund check too large, you can’t keep the money. How does the City make a mistake and call it my fault because I didn’t tell them about it?

I left City Hall with all the erroneous charges credited to my bill: one small victory for a taxpayer at City Hall.

Nuria Part 2

My last post was about my partner, Nuria. There is a little bit more to know about her, so kindly allow me to expand upon my previous post.

In addition to running my home like a business, Nuria is currently on the Board of Directors of a Costa Rican corporation. She is the Treasurer of the corporation. She is also an interpreter and she facilitates communication between the English-speaking owners of the corporation and the Spanish-speaking lawyers and bureaucrats in Costa Rica. 

I often find her on the phone speaking in Spanish and then I know she is doing her corporate job. I took a nap today and when I awoke and came out to the living room, Nuria was in the den with the door closed, speaking in Spanish. She closed the door because she didn't want to awaken me. She's very thoughtful that way; when I'm in bed, she walks around the inside of the house so quietly that it's like she has cat paws. 

Side note: how does Nuria speak with people in Costa Rica? She has two cell phones: one phone has a USA number and the other phone has a Costa Rican number. She uses the phone that is appropriate for the call she is making. (I have three phone numbers, but that's a longer story.)

While living in Costa Rica, Nuria worked as an Administrative Assistant to the Vice President of Manufacturing for a multi-national corporation. When he (the Vice President) had to make a trip to a Central American country to scout and facilitate building a manufacturing plant, Nuria would organize the trip and arrange for necessities such as airline and hotel reservations.

How this talented woman ended up living in my house and sleeping in my bed still amazes me. She has many activities: she recently went on a tour of Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina. She goes to the local Senior Center four times a week for exercise and other activities. And as I mentioned, she took a job at Macy's just to prevent herself from becoming bored. She should be running Macy's. If she were running Macy's, maybe they wouldn't be on the verge of closing a bunch of their stores. She has a sharp eye and she knows where Macy's is falling short.

To sum up Nuria, I would call her a go-getter, a doer, a dynamo, a hustler, a self-starter, and a workhorse. But maybe I'm a little bit biased.

One more thing: she's a very good cook.

The Hole Thing

Once upon a time, there was one phone company in the U.S. It’s name was AT&T, which stood for American Telephone and Telegraph. Telegraph! You’ve seen films about the Old West: the telegraph operator going tap-tap-tap, tap-tap, tap tap on a telegraph key. That tells you how long AT&T has been around.

AT&T’s manufacturing arm was a company called Western Electric. If Western Electric had fingers they would have been in a lot of pies. One thing the company did was make telephones and telephone switching equipment for AT&T. Therefore, as you should be able to deduce, Western Electric made all the telephones used in the U.S. They made all the switching equipment. They didn’t buy parts to make equipment; they made the parts. They manufactured telephone cable – both the kind that hangs on telephone poles and the kind that lies on the bottom of the ocean connecting continents. They made transistors and integrated circuits. They made sound equipment for Hollywood movies. They made missile guidance systems. That’s where I worked for them: in their Defense Activities Division, or D-A-D as it was usually called. I was a young engineer with a new degree in electrical engineering, and all the engineers in my department were older than me; some were nearing retirement.

One day I was talking with one of the senior engineers. He wanted to give me career advice. He told me that the position I should aim for was senior staff engineer, which was the highest level an engineer could hope to achieve in the company. Then he told me about a senior staff engineer he knew.

Back in the day, telephones had dials: you’d stick your finger in a hole in the dial and spin it around. When you removed your finger from the dial, a spring returned the dial to its starting position, and as it did, the number you dialed went out over the phone line as a string of electrical pulses. What I was told was that there was a senior staff engineer whose job was to control the design of that hole. He specified its exact size and shape. It amazed me that a senior staff engineer would be in charge of the shape of a hole. But somebody had to be.

Years later, I worked for a tiny mobile robot company. We had two electrical engineers. One was the president of the company. The other was me. The president performed administrative tasks, but also a lot of technical tasks. He got involved with trouble-shooting equipment at customer sites and sometimes on the factory floor. He helped in marketing, in working with the government, in solving technical issues, in concept design and sometimes in nuts-and-bolts design. He worked with the money side of the business: getting investors, negotiating lines of credit, and so on. When it came to the electronics, that was my job. The president was more experienced with analog design than I, so sometimes he got involved with a tricky analog circuit, but usually he just explained what he wanted and I would go to my computer-aided design (CAD) system and enter a schematic and then lay out the printed circuit board (PCB). CAD was a great idea. Before CAD, our PCBs were laid out on Mylar sheets using drafting tape and an X-Acto knife. Those were the days! Let’s not go back to them.

My PCBs began with a schematic. A schematic is a symbolic representation of what you are going to make. On a schematic, real parts are represented by symbols, and they are connected by lines. The symbols and lines on a schematic are translated into a PCB with components connected by copper lines called traces. Here’s an example of what a printed circuit board looked like in my CAD system. This board has multiple layers which are connected at various points. It measures 4.4 x 12.95 inches (11.176 x 32.893 centimeters).

Let’s zoom in a bit. Here is the top left corner of the board.

Let’s zoom in a bit more (below). The CAD program uses layers which can be turned on and off. Here’s what you are looking at: horizontal copper traces on the component side (top of the board) are red. Vertical copper traces on the solder side (bottom of the board) are cyan. The silk-screen layer is the pukey yellow-green color, don’t ask me to name it. Round, dark-blue circles are holes where components are inserted into the board.

Let’s zoom in one last time (below). There are nine layers in this CAD drawing. You are looking at (and through) 6 layers: silk screen, component side copper, internal power plane, internal ground plane, solder side copper, and solder mask. Most importantly, you’re looking at two components and their copper connections. One component, the rectangle, is an integrated circuit with 14 pins. It’s designated U25. The other component, C41, is a small capacitor with 2 pins. The square copper pad denotes pin 1 on the integrated circuit. Directly above the square pad is a round pad with a yellow “X” on it. The component pin that fits that hole will connect to an inner power plane layer. The “X” is where copper connects the pin to the internal plane; it’s called a “thermal-relief” pad. The slightly-smaller dark blue holes are called vias, and their purpose is to carry a circuit from one layer of the board to another layer.

If this seems complicated, believe me when I say I’ve barely scratched the surface.

Electronic design wasn’t my only job at that small company. At times I was required to travel to a symposium to give a presentation. When our Windows programmer left the company, the president took over his programming tasks, while I took over the tasks of keeping the computers working, keeping the network running, and keeping files on the server and workstations backed up. I created and maintained the company’s website as well as an internal website (called an intranet) for engineering documents. Electronics problems on the factory floor often required my attention as trouble-shooter. For a long time I was also Buyer for all the electronic components, and we used hundreds of different parts from scores of suppliers. There was documentation to be created and maintained: assembly instructions with drawings, engineering change notices, user manuals, and so on. Sometimes I coded assembly language for an on-board microprocessor – which might be a simple microcontroller, or a complex multiprotocol communications processor, or a programmable logic array. That is how it is when you’re an engineer at a tiny company. Everyone wears a lot of hats. It keeps things interesting.

Although it was a higher-paying job, I was really okay with not being in charge of the hole in the telephone dial.