This from Casey Rea over at Seven Days:

At Euro Gourmet, there’s Inner Fire District, a Gypsy-klezmer-Eastern European-styled act headed up by accordionist extraordinaire David Symons. Don’t expect any Gaelic lyrics at this St. Paddy’s party, however. “There will be no Irish music,” Symons writes in an email about the event.

I wandered in and was captivated. It has been a long time since I’ve heard a claranet singing like that, and, well … David’s work on the acccordian was breathtaking. Klezmer is intricate, but earthy, a combination hard to come by in any art.

The Euro Gourmet seems to be a happening place these days. Everything from gypsy music to poetry readings to Bloggers Bristro. Baruth gives a better description of the decor and apthmosphere than I could, but I can speak from personal experience that the expersso and pastries are very good.

Fitting venu for the Inner Fire District, hope to hear more of them.

I found the Official Vermont (Area 70) AA website . Pretty much what you would expect - the Official AA websites tend to be pretty, well … they look like what you would expect if you had put together a web-site in 1935. I guess I am used to this presentation, even have a fondness for it.

Reading the Big Book, you run into this quite a bit, the old language, references, slang. I get a kick out of it, enjoy it, as this book, this program is as much a product of the times as it is the result of anything else. But then again, I’ve read a lot of Sinclair Lewis, and so have a context, even if it is perhaps distorted picture of the time, as novels can be.

And possibly not quite the right time. Babbitt came out in 1922, and was a contemporary novel. But, you can hear that good old boosterism coming through in some of the language of the Big Book. And you can hear, from a different perspective, Lewis’s critique of society at the time, of the attitude that success in business had a virtue to it. You can see this critique in Wilson’s writing as well, though it is focused, necessarily on the alcoholic, the fact that we are drunks suckers for this attitude, and the fatal limitations to this attitude as the basis for a sober and contented life.

It is easy to imagine George Babbitt living in the same town as Dr. Bob. In fact, they probably would have run in much the same circles. And, for both, a solely material basis for living proved disastrous. Babbitts struggle did not involve a descent into the hell of active alcoholism, but it did involve a struggle and a death of sorts. I wonder what the conversation would have been had the two met, and Dr. Bob tried to give George the ’spiritual toolkit’ that he and Bill W. stumbled upon as a way out. I can only imagine, but the language, well, the language would have been straight out of the Big Book.

So “QC” has been the big thing around the shop for a while now. There have been problems, and management is looking for a fix. Too much bad data going out the door, clients upset, and the local VPs get really tired of apologizing, especially when they feel like they are apologizing for the geeks.

We call them project managers, but they are as much sales as anything else. You can tell cause we don’t have a sales force, and their they get judged on the amount of business they bring in. They make promises and the geeks deliver.

There is the usual culture clash, and to everyone’s credit, we have been doing a lot of work around ‘understanding’ each other - How to work together, how not to blame each other, how to improve communication when we speak different languages. The whole “Men are from Mars …” thing. This was good but it did not go far enough, and we have been asked to come up with a “Plan” to “Make Sure this Doesn’t Happen Again.”

And somewhere one of the VPs remembered hearing “Total Quality” or ISO 9000 or something, so the plan has been dubbed a “Quality Control Plan.”

Some very smart people spent a great deal of time on this plan, which pays homage to Deming’s “PDAC” cycle. It talks a lot about specifications, which is good, and a first in our shop.

So far so good, but something started to seem a little off when most of the specifications are written in terms of what to do, not what is to be produced. Then it really fell apart when it turns out that most of the quality checks started with the word “Ensure … ”

This type of check sets up for blame, for a failure on an “Ensure” item can only be attributed on one thing - the person that was supposed to do something did not do it. This completely masks the process, or any underlying causes of process failure, and personalizes the situation.

And, we are to demonstrate that we performed the “QC Check” by checking a box on a form. Guess how many of us are ever NOT going to check that box … especially when “the director will take appropriate action” is part of the remedy for any error listed.

Deming’s philosophy of quality control, or “system of profound knowledge”, rested on fourteen points, the third of which is

“Cease dependence on inspection to achieve Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.”

I don’t get that is what is going on here. Nor do I find this plan following point number eight

“Drive Out Fear”