Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

River Birch Animal Farm & Washington Birthplace

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Following our Saturday day-trip to Tangier, we returned to the Northern Neck town of Kilmarnock, Virginia, for a good night’s sleep.

On Sunday morning we went to Mass at the cozy St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church. There are not very many Catholics on the Northern Neck of Virginia; it is overwhelmingly Baptist and Methodist. Although the Mass was fairly small by Northern Virginia standards (maybe 150 people), the boundary of St. Francis Parish and its St. Paul Mission in Hague, Virginia, is not measured by streets and intersections, but by entire counties: “Comprising all of Northumberland, Lancaster and Richmond Counties, and that portion of Westmoreland County that lies to the east of a northeast/southwest line drawn through the town of Montross.”

After Mass we returned to the hotel to change, and then embarked toward Locust Hill, which is on the Middle Peninsula (south of the Northern Neck and accessible via the Route 3 bridge over the Rappahannock River). We had a good meal at Debbie’s Family Restaurant, including some delicious corn nuggets, and then visited the River Birch Animal Farm—a sort of mini-zoo. Afterwards we returned to Kilmarnock, watched some TV, and went out for ice cream.

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Tangier Island

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For this Memorial Day, Pentecost, and anniversary weekend, Melissa and I made our way out to the Northern Neck of Virginia. We left early Saturday morning, and arrived at the small fishing town of Reedville around 9:30 a.m. From there, we boarded the Tangier Island ferry for an hour-and-a-half trip to the island.

Tangier, VA is a tiny town located on an island in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay. It is sustained entirely by the fishing industry (specifically soft-shell crab) and tourism. It is a really fascinating place. For most of its history it was somewhat isolated from the rest of the United States, so many residents have their own English dialect that isn’t found anywhere else—it kind of sounds like old British English mixed with southern American English. There are very few cars on the island, and people get around primarily by walking, bicycling, riding scooters, and (most predominantly) with golf carts. The streets are tiny, and many of the houses have miniature driveways to accommodate the carts.

We had a nice lunch as soon as we arrived—I had a crab cake and soft-shell crab combo, both locally sourced—and then we rented a golf cart and cruised around the island. We were only afforded two hours on the island before we had to return to the ferry, which I had thought might be too short . . . but it turns out that even after killing a half hour for lunch, we still ended up running out of places to explore. It’s really that tiny a place. It definitely has a lot of character though.

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And Then There Was One

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The Bee Gees (courtesy WikiMedia Commons)

I am man enough to admit, publicly, that I am a big Bee Gees fan. And when I say I’m a big fan, I mean that I have every Bee Gees studio album, every live album, most of the solo albums, and even a couple of unreleased bootlegs.

They got pigeonholed as a disco group in the late 1970’s, but they were much more than that. Their musical career spanned five decades and produced 22 studio albums. Besides their contributions to the Saturday Night Fever film soundtrack, only two of those albums are really disco albums: ‘Children of the World’ and ‘Spirits Having Flown.’ Even those have a healthy melange of other styles mixed in—pop, soft rock, funk, and a bit of country and R&B. Many also count ‘Main Course’ as a disco album, but I think that’s a bit of a stretch . . . three (arguably four) disco songs on a ten-track album doesn’t really make it a disco album.

The Bee Gees were a trio composed of brothers—twins Maurice and Robin Gibb along with elder brother Barry—born to English parents in the Isle of Man but raised in Australia. The group’s name derives from ‘The Brothers Gibb.’ Their first international success came in the late 1960’s, just around the time that The Beatles were disintegrating. While not wholly dissimilar from other ‘British invasion’ acts at the time, the Bee Gees’ music had a unique vocal harmony and an unusual, sometimes-haunting kind of melancholy behind them.

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Strange Voicemail

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So, I was out of the office for a couple of days with a bad cold. When I got back in this morning, I had a voicemail on my office phone—a fairly rare occurrence, since phones are now about fifth in the office order of communication priority (after email, IM, face-to-face, and carrier pigeon). Usually when I get voicemails at work, they are nothing but a couple seconds of silence, or a recorded spiel for some product I don’t want.

Today, however, I got a mostly-unintelligible message from somebody who identified himself as ‘Christopher Pasquale.’ He called from a California area code at 2:58am ET on Thursday, and slurred something about how “I don’t know what to do with these crazy white people,” and that he didn’t know “where you are in DC, or Arlington, or Langley.”

Anyway . . . here’s the recording (MP3 link). Maybe you can make more sense of it than I did. Note that I have redacted the phone number by changing area code to 555; the original recording contained the actual area code. This guy seems to have enough problems without a bunch of Off on a Tangent readers calling him. That’s the only edit I made, other than snipping out some silence from our voicemail system.

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Posted in: Humor, Life

TSA Agents: Just Following Orders?

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I usually have some sympathy for people who are required by their employers to do distasteful things. I doubt, for example, that the customer service representatives at Cox Cable really enjoy wasting half an hour telling you to reboot your computer and router when they (and you) already know they are having a service outage. I doubt that credit card company operators really enjoy trying to up-sell some kind of useless debt protection service to everybody who calls. I try to give these folks the benefit of the doubt.

In these cases and others like them, I place most of the blame on the company that implemented the bad policies and procedures, not the individuals who dutifully perform the task they’ve been assigned. But this benefit of the doubt only goes so far; once you pass into illegal or immoral activity, ‘just following orders’ no longer passes as a valid excuse. Every individual has a personal responsibility to do the right thing in their dealings with others, even when their superiors order them to do the opposite. Maybe you risk being fired for making a moral stand. So be it. It is better to be unemployed with your honor intact than to debase yourself to keep a job.

I know taking this kind of a stand isn’t always easy. It seems like most people, when faced with these situations, take the path of least resistance and simply comply with the unjust orders. Understandably, they don’t want to deal with the loss of income, the hassle of finding a new job, and so on. I’ve seen it countless times. At one of my previous employers, questionable employment and contracting practices were commonplace. All up and down the chain of command, most people just shrugged their shoulders and did as they were told. Their willing compliance made them just as guilty as those at the top who issued the questionable orders in the first place.

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Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.