Shades of gray

Today at work, half of the office was locked, so the customer service department is sharing the call center cubicle space. One of their coworkers called in because she’s having a baby in a couple weeks and isn’t feeling well today; this started a discussion amongst them about babies in general. A German woman told them all about how in Germany they’ll pay you 150 euros for each German child you produce, and give you 3 years’ maternity leave with complete job assurance for both mother and father. From there the customer service employees began praising Germany for being so “cool” and talking about how they all want to move to Germany to find a spouse. Jarom remarked to the call center employees on our side of the divider that Germany is not the only country to provide incentives for having children, and many countries – including the U.S. – will cover much of the cost of child-bearing for poor families.

Our fellow call center representative remarked that this is a mistake, because it produces a whole new generation of couch potatoes.

I have quite a few disagreements with her statement. First is the assumption that poor people intentionally have children in order to get government assistance. Of course I can’t argue that no one does that; I’m sure there are some people who do. But research has proven that many families who receive financial aid are more likely to work hard in order to raise their standard of living and get off welfare. When provided with some degree of hope, the poor take the opportunities presented to them and try to improve their circumstances. In one of my classes last semester the teacher mentioned that specific types of welfare have been shown to decrease the average number of children per family.

Disagreement #2 is that poor people in general are lazy. I think this is part of the idea that the poor are suffering from their own bad choices and lack of work ethic. And it always comes back to Mosiah 4:17-19.

“Perhaps thou shalt say: The man has brought upon himself his misery; therefore I will stay my hand, and will not give unto him of my food, nor impart unto him of my substance that he may not suffer, for his punishments are just— But I say unto you, O man, whosoever doeth this the same hath great cause to repent; and except he repenteth of that which he hath done he perisheth forever, and hath no interest in the kingdom of God. For behold, are we not all beggars? Do we not all depend upon the same Being, even God, for all the substance which we have, for both food and raiment, and for gold, and for silver, and for all the riches which we have of every kind?”

Whether or not the poor are there because of their own mistakes is not for us to decide. We have a responsibility to help them no matter what. I do think that we’re also obligated to carefully plan and carry out effective ways of helping, and maybe that’s the big argument against welfare in America. But it still seems foolish to me to believe that everyone successful has succeeded solely by their own merits, and everyone poor has failed solely by their own lack of merits. It’s too black and white.

I guess that’s the end of my disagreement list, but it certainly got me riled up. It’s disappointing to find that people are so critical and disdainful of those who are less fortunate and who need our compassion, not our contempt.

Comments welcome. (As always.) I’m not very good at arguing my point, so feel free to bring up inconsistencies, things you disagree with, and so on.

morning commute

We usually take the Provo Center St. onramp to Orem Center St. offramp (on I-15) to get to work in the mornings. Today, however, we got on the freeway and were surprised to see a sign saying that it would be closed down to 1 lane. Now, I can understand that Utah weather does bad things to the roads. I can understand needing to repave the freeway. What I can’t understand is why anyone would close a freeway down to one lane right near the only major on- and offramp for all of Provo and Orem (the left lanes were already closed by the time we made it to University Parkway), and why there wouldn’t be signs all over Provo and Orem letting people know that their morning is going to be miserable. Really, who does that?

Actually, I am just altogether in a bad mood, and the stand-still traffic didn’t help. We got mildly chastised last week for clocking in at 6:03am instead of 6:00am, which is really due more to the slow computers than whether we’re on time or not, but today we did in fact leave our apartment in plenty of time to get here. It didn’t go quite the way we’d hoped. Besides that, I still have some vague dislike for working at a company that has a few….questionable practices, such as the salesmen (no no – my mistake, they are just representatives) telling the homeowners that “the corporate office likes to have basic information, like name, address, phone number, Social Security Number,” when in fact we run a credit check on every potential customer. Is it legal to do that without telling the person? I’m not sure.

Anyway, managment here puts a lot of emphasis on motivating us call center employees through the use of contests. Each shift supervisor comes up with a two-week contest to try getting us to answer our phones more quickly or be more thorough in verifying information. I truly have nothing against contests and winning and getting prizes, but it really seems kind of juvenile when I think about it. Like handing out candy in Sunday School for giving the right answer. It seems like a good idea – everyone likes free candy – but it isn’t quite the right reason for answering a question. One of the things I got out of No Contest was that when you create an extrinsic motivation for an activity, that becomes the reason for doing the activity. Example: a fourth grader may love jump-roping just because it’s fun, but as soon as there is a reward for doing better than other fourth graders, she’ll jump-rope for the reward – not because she enjoys jump-roping. The more extrinsic motivations are used, the harder it is to ever return to intrinsic motivations (trying your best just to do your best, or jump-roping just for the pleasure of it).

Really I think I’m just looking for things to be irritable about this morning, and I should just eat some banana bread while I read Time Traveler’s Wife. Maybe that’s what I’ll do now.

Sorry for complaining.

repentance

Ok, so I really thought so more – seriously, there is nothing to do here at work – and I decided that it isn’t that big of a deal if I can’t finish eliminating wedding photos right now. Mostly I got to thinking about how Jarom and I made a lot of new (but reasonable) goals yesterday, and while Keeping Perspective was not one of them, I should probably work on it a lot.

When it comes down to it, I am incredibly happy to have married my best friend in the temple, and anything else is just bonus. I got to have a fabulous dress and everyone paid attention to me and there were flowers, and presents, and cake, plus a photographer that took amazing pictures which all have to be paid for individually. I can deal with this. Life is still good.

Just wanted you to know. : )