When one trend masks another
Time to apply a little imagery to the current economic conditions. First of all, for those of us who have had our incomes fixed by decree, the average day is grey, with hints of rain. There’s little change in view, so we take our delight in the details. Consider the trend in the price of gas.
Recently, the changing index at the local gas bar makes me think of leaves falling. No wind, so they’re dropping slowly, with some side to side movement. Like a big maple leaf, I guess. As of this morning, the big plastic numbers are set to $1.08/litre, which is the lowest things have been in a long time. I’m not complaining, but I am confused, because our loonie has also been diving over the last week. Shouldn’t a downward trend for one force an equal and opposite upward trend for the other? I don’t buy very much gas, so the loonie worries me more.
I spent today repairing a schoolwide network. An unplanned incident (someone hitting delete at the wrong time while doing system maintenance) had removed all the machines in the building from the “active directory”. The result was that nobody could log in; let’s rename the whole thing to “inactive directory”. The remedy was to sytematically remove each machine from the domain, reenter the machine, reboot and move along. If only these were newer machines; a Pentium III can take a LONG time to go through that little dance, so the whole day was spent moving from one room to another. Hardly worked up a sweat, but there’s one more day with no measurable productivity.
