Category Archives: Finances

The Ethics Of Contact Lists

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So far it has happened to me twice. I have received contact from people who are very much no longer with organizations that I have a relationship with. The first contact was from a telecommunications technology company, obviously remaining nameless with the offender also remaining nameless. I had recognized the name from a previous connection when I was working with a current telecommunications company that is related to my workplace. The messaging was catered to create a fear response and panic move on my behalf to drum up business for the account executives commission. They had my name and my email address, they worked at a new company, and there is no reason why they should contact me as there was no prior contact with their new company for any purpose where I should expect contact. Essentially they copied their customer list in one company, and then when they went to another position elsewhere just uncorked the list and hit up all the contacts, in a targeted fashion. The first time was remarkable, but I thought it was a situational outlier.

Today, after I got the mail out of my home mailbox, I found another card from a previous contact with which I had made a few financial arrangements with the person, they were no longer with the financial institution that I do business with on personal terms, but a wholly new company, whom I had never had contact before. Again, the person copied their customer list from one company and carried it with them to another company.

I find all this to be wrong. It could even be regarded as corporate espionage. Right now it’s a simple matter of just tossing all these cold contacts suddenly warm again right in the secure recycling bin. There is no way that I’m going to contact any of them, but because I regard this as wholly inappropriate use of privileged information, each time I spot it, the relationship is dead on arrival. I don’t want to talk to these people, and doing this underhanded thing is worth exactly what I’m willing to pay for it, which is to throw it all away and not even give it a single thought. You stole the list, you are attempting to be clever and sneaky. I will not be a party to it.

I, of course, won’t identify companies or name individuals, but I find this to be utterly reprehensible, and as a practice, I’m calling it out. If you quit a job where customer lists are handy, you leave those lists behind, and you find a more wholesome and honest way to approach customers. So, off the offending mail goes, off to the recycling bin!

Car Insurance

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Noticed with USPS Informed Delivery that the car insurance was going to be in the mail today. Due on April 11th, leverage credit, pay at the end of the month. I won’t even notice the cost.

I laughed heartily at that.

Speed vs. Accuracy

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On Friday I ordered four new beard balms. An extra Reuzel 1.3oz tin, a Viking Revolution Citrus, a Viking Revolution Sandalwood, and a Rocky Mountain Barber Cedarwood. I tracked the shipment with Amazon, it was listed as arriving on Monday, prime promised it on Sunday, but hey! It arrived on Sunday after all.

So I opened the box, and out came the Rocky Mountain and the Viking Revolution tins like I expected, but the Reuzel was wrong. Very wrong. What I expected was a 1.3oz tin of their Beard Balm, smallish, with a pirate on the label. If you have seen it, the label is very distinctive. What I got instead was Reuzel Blue Pomade. It’s still top-notch stuff, but pomade, not balm. I have no use for pomade. The canister is factory wrapped, but Amazon doesn’t want it back. I did the return, they declined to ship it back, because it is classified as a personal use product, to just throw it away. I can’t throw a perfectly good, unopened, factory wrapped tin of anything away! Even the sticker on the back is wrong. The scan sticker says Reuzel Beard Balm 1.3oz. and if you look on the label of the actual product, you know something isn’t right, because the product clearly states 4oz tin. It’s HUGE in comparison!

So I reached out to Junior’s Barber Shop. If he has customers who might buy it, I asked him if I could just give it to him. But he’s on vacation until March 20th, so it’ll all have to wait, unless a gentle reader out there in Blog-land has a use for Reuzel Blue Pomade. If so, please let me know! I would hate to have to chuck it in the bin.

The First Purge

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The First Purge was an ok movie, kind of blunt and chunky. The plot was a ice-cream truck, you could hear its sing-song tune from miles away.
 
Pretty spot on themes, like ripped from the headline themes. America post Nero the Pigfucker, circling the drain, and what comes of that. Funny how they got a doughy-faced actor who bears an uncanny resemblance to Tucker Carlson to play the role of the political slimeball.
 
There is a bit of a conversation piece to the movie as well, a showcase for what could be a natural consequence/sink for trickle-down economics. Beyond all the gunplay and stabbing, it ties off trickle-down economics with a possible solution, especially trickle-down with the current seasoning of kleptocracy that we have now.
 
Reverse Robin Hood, steal from the poor, give to the rich, while the discontent grows in the poor class, they are too uneducated and dim to understand where their anger should be directed, so it just floats about like an aimless fog. Then you have the premise of Purge Culture thrown on top, an ignition and a tacit approval of lawlessness for one night. It’s almost downright poetic, after trickle-down economics strangles the economy and creates an immense sea of angry poor people, the 99%, encourage them to kill each other in one night of Purge.
 
The movie franchise itself doesn’t really stab at this, it only hints at it. Much like a lot of other things in our world, folk don’t really think it is that bad, because how could it? That’s not what America is. Until you trip and fall off the edge and catch glimpses that not only is it as bad as you feared, but it is much worse and much more pervasive and inescapable. In some ways, we are actually already past the drain-hole and heading down the pipe, we just don’t really get it yet.
 
With these movies, the culture is expressing this novelty, so it is a part of our common cultural discourse now. The media plays for us like a magic mirror, showing us aspects of ourselves in many different ways. You can see it in movies, like this franchise, as well as in popular news media with the monomaniacal passion for equal time and balance. There is good and bad in every story, good and bad with everyone, and a heaping pile of bad requires at least lip-service to something good, even  if it must be ginned up to get it over the hurdle.
I don’t really think we’ll ever have a purge culture, but it is fascinating to watch the magic mirror play this out for us as it does.

Network Monitoring

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I’m in the middle of a rather protracted evaluation of network infrastructure monitoring software. I’ve started looking at Paessler’s PRTG, also SolarWinds Orion product and in January I’ll be looking at Ipswitch’s products.

I also started looking at Nagios and Cacti. That’s where the fun-house mirrors start. The first big hurdle is no cost vs. cost. The commercial products mentioned before are rather pricey while Nagios and Cacti are GPL, and open sourced, principally available for no cost.

With PRTG, it was an engaging evaluation however I ran into one of the first catch-22’s with network monitoring software, that Symantec Endpoint Protection considers network scanning to be provocative, and so the uneducated SEP client blocks the poller because it believes it to be a network scanner. I ran into a bit of a headache with PRTG as the web client didn’t register changes as I expected. One of the things that I have come to understand about the cost-model network products is that each one of them appears to have a custom approach to licensing. Each company approaches it differently. PRTG is based on individual sensor, Orion is based on buckets, and I can’t readily recall Ipswitches design, but I think it was based on nodes.

Many of these products seem to throw darts at the wall when it comes to their products, sometimes hit and sometimes miss. PRTG was okay, it created a bumper crop of useless alarms, Solarwinds Orion has an exceptionally annoying network discovery routine, and I haven’t uncorked Ipswitch’s product yet.

I don’t know if I want to pay for this sort of product. Also, it seems that this is one of those arrangements that if I bite on a particular product, I’ll be on a per-year budget cost treadmill for as long as I use the product unless I try the no-cost options.

This project may launch a new blog series, or not, depending on how things turn out. Looking online didn’t pan out very much. There is somewhat of a religious holy war surrounding these products. Some people champion the GPL products; other people push the solution they went with when they first decided on a product. It’s funny but now that I care about the network, I’m coming to the party rather late. At least, I don’t have to worry about the hot slag of “alpha revision software” and much of the provider space seems quite mature.

I really would like anyone who works in the IT industry to please comment with your thoughts and feelings about this category if you have any recommendations or experiences. I’m keenly aware of what I call “show-stopper” issues.

Apple Watch

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On September 9th, 2014 Apple unveiled their iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, Apple Pay and Apple Watch to the world. It was a really poorly kept secret that Apple was working on a wristwatch, so nobody was really surprised when Apple came out with their new designs. All we didn’t know what to what extent Apple was going to go with the technology.

They released more details on Apple Watch. The more I learned about the device the less I found myself thinking it was a good idea. There are so many places where this new watch is a problem.

Humans Have Limited Attention

We haven’t learned how to properly cope with the iPhone and now Apple is going to release an even more disruptive and attention-stealing device on the population. I’ve heard stories of crackdowns in Chicago where the police were pulling over people who were using their mobile devices while they should be driving their motor vehicles, and then learn that on the heels of the crackdown that the police recorded nearly everyone was breaking the law. Pulling over those people would have effectively shut down the entire highway! We just do not have the proper respect for all the technology in our lives, we cannot cope with these bright shiny attention-stealing devices while we are in command of an even larger device that requires our undivided attention at all times. So now Apple is going to put something even brighter and shinier on our wrists and we’re going to have what little attention that is left between our vehicles and our mobile devices divided again by this cleverness strapped to our wrists.

The tight integration between iPhones and Apple Watch will make our addictions to these devices even more challenging to master as well. Many people I know have a very hard time disconnecting from their devices anyways, now that there is an intimate extension of that device that we wear? I can only see this getting worse for those people who want others attention when we are all physically together. I’ve heard anecdotal stories where entire families sit in one room but nobody talks to anyone else because they are all besotted with their technology. What will this mean when the technology is always with us and on our wrists?

Haptics

The Apple Watch, a wearable device includes technology that includes haptics, or the sense of motion or vibration, both in the user interface with the light tap versus the deep press and the vibrating device buried deep into the watch itself. This will only worsen our abilities to control our attention and in itself is a place where we are going to have trouble. The watch can be paired to another watch and send heartbeats across the network, it’s Apple’s romantic notion of intimate communication. I can foresee a paired watch between a married couple and the husband feels his wifes pulse quicken, he worries that she’s having a stroke or a heart attack and rushes home to find a strange car in his driveway and a strange man in his bed. Cheating spouses is just the tip of the iceberg, this watch could be used to cheat in so many other places – cheat at the Casino with a complicated card-counting or odds-calculating routine piped into the players Apple Watch, or exam cheating by looking at the watch and seeing the letters for the answers appear as drawings on the Apple Watches screen.

How will these situations play out? For cheating spouses, there are the courts, so that’s rather a dull thing, but for the others I could see a new no-watch policy being extended to driving vehicles, entry into a casino, and standardized testing events like the SAT.

Nothing for the Sinister

The one thing that I noticed after discussing the Apple Watch with someone I know who is left-handed, that the device completely abandons functionality for the left-handed amongst us. It’s a hard choice Apple has made. Either you build a right-handed watch and a left-handed watch, or include handedness configurability in your design. It’s obvious after looking at the demo pieces that Apple has nothing set aside for the left-handed of us and have left a significant part of the population out in the cold. They could still use the device, but it will be much more awkward for them to actually use the device. I can see the detraction of non-handedness to be a compelling reason to not go ahead and purchase an Apple Watch.

Another Power Hungry Device

The Apple Watch is power hungry. It needs to charge nightly in order to continue to function. I find myself looking at the function of my wristwatch, a Seiko 5 Analog Automatic and immediately find what I have on the end of my arm, this watch, to be much more useful and compelling than this Apple Watch. My Seiko, if I care for it properly will never need winding as the mechanical automatic winder will never wear down or degrade or stop working. My motions feed the watch, and as long as I wear it every day, just living my life means that my watch will continue to count out seconds and sweep out the minutes and hours. My Seiko cannot do all the things that the Apple Watch can, but it can do the one thing a wristwatch should do very well and that is keep track of time. So far my Seiko has retained proper time for the few months I’ve had it. There is no technology in there that is synchronizing it to atomic time, and there is no need for that precision in my life. A watch that is bound to the power grid seems to be a risk to me, and since the most recent power outage, which for me was last night, the idea that my fancy Apple Watch could run down and just be a chunk of expensive metal and glass really concerns me.

Welcome to the Apple Silo, Penthouse Level

The Apple Watch creates an entire new floor to the Apple lifestyle silo. People are usually drawn in with a consumer device, like an iPod Nano or an iPhone, and then they are buying Macs and now the Apple Watch. I have to admit that Apple has a very good compelling company story, and they are leveraging this story magnificently well. They know that one Apple device usually turns into another, and before you know it you are knee-deep in the Apple Digital Lifestyle. The watch requires the iPhone to function, this is a very bold and possibly hazardous step for Apple to take. All the rest of their devices are independent devices, but this one, this Watch, is utterly dependent on an iPhone to function. I think this is the first fundamental break with the legacy of Steve Jobs and represents a really dangerous case for Apple. They are betting sales on pre-existing devices. That is either very ballsy or really stupid. This will only reinforce the cultural divide between people who flaunt this luxury versus people who do not. If you have an Apple Watch, then you necessarily have an iPhone. I can see this becoming a new and really upsetting hazard in big cities. Before it was a mystery what was plugged into a pair of headphones, it could have been anything from a cheap transistor radio, to a cassette Walkman to an iPod or iPhone. Now it’s really something quite different. If you see someone with an Apple Watch, you know that their iPhone isn’t far away. You are advertising that you have an iPhone to everyone who notices your watch. In small communities where theft and robbery isn’t a problem this won’t even show up on the map, but I foresee in bigger cities like Chicago and New York, that this will take on a new life all its own. A new spate of “Apple Watch” theft events. People getting mugged because of what they have on their wrists marks them out as being ripe for the plucking.

Price

The Apple Watch comes in three editions. There is the plain edition, the sports edition, and the luxury edition. The different editions put an embarrassing irony to the features that the phones are sold around, the replaceable wristbands most specifically. Why couldn’t it have just been one watch with different bands for different editions? Make the initial purchase for the core device and then let people swap out wristbands for the luxury components of the deal, if you want a canvas strap, a rubber one or a gold one, let those be options. Instead of that, there are three distinct Apple Watch varieties.

Then there is the price. $349 for the Apple Watch! In our society, what middle-class person would dangle such an expensive bit of technology on their wrists? Again I’m drawn back to my Seiko 5. The comparison of prices for what I need in a watch is all the reason enough to turn my back on the Apple Watch. My Seiko 5 cost me $70, that’s five times cheaper than the Apple Watch for a device that will never run out of power for as long as I don’t run out of power! It blew my mind, when I saw the price tag on the Apple Watch. I figured this could have been a jubilee celebration from Apple, they have billions of dollars buried in their company treasury, they could have made the Apple Watch a loss-leader for their iPhones, priced it at $70 and it would fly out the doors. Apple would lose money on each unit, but they’d make it up on the back side with all the cultural silo’ing that comes with using a device like an Apple Watch which necessitates an iPhone to go along with it.

Apple is betting that their Apple Watch will play as much as their iPads and iPhones did, selling millions of units. It may sell, and it very well may sell well, but I don’t think that $349 is worth this sort of technology. If it could do more, or if it was independent of the iPhone that might have helped, but it’s expensive, hazardous, and risky. I can’t see it really shining in sales numbers like the other devices did. Apple should have set it’s very lofty estimates for sales of the Apple Watch much lower. It’ll likely have the same sales numbers as the iPod Touch or iPod Nano.

I won’t be buying the Apple Watch. I have everything that I need already. The iPhone I have is enough, and my Seiko 5 does a magnificent job and you can’t beat the features or the price. I can’t imagine anyone I know actually going ahead and buying this thing, but we will see how that all pans out next year when it’s available for sale. This is going to be a hurdle that Apple doesn’t jump over gracefully.

Comixology

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Just updated my Comixology app on my iPad and overhauled my password so I could login. I knew I wasn’t going to find the same app I remember, and I had issues with that one as well. So in we go, talk about a chop-job. I found all the comics I bought, 252 of them, yah, and then on a lark I went looking on how to buy a new comic book. No store that I could find, just a search panel. Searched for Marvel and found all of that, went looking for DC and couldn’t find them. Searched for New 52 and found some titles. So, no more shelf-appeal or browsing titles. Okay.

Then there is the lack of in-app purchasing. Yeah, they are. Owned by Amazon now, so no more of that. Have to go on Amazon to buy the comics. Nope. I don’t like Amazon and it’s a matter of monopoly aversion in my consumer psyche. I do not like Amazon any longer. They are too big, too invasive, and too damaging to people in general. How Amazon treats their workforce is a lot like how Walmart treats theirs. Once Costco opens up here in Kalamazoo, we won’t ever be going back to Sams Club. I won’t ever be going back to Amazon or Comixology.

So, online comics are back to the Stone Age. I’m glad that there are long boxes downstairs with copies of all the comics now lost to me on Comixology. When I have money again, it’s back to the Comic Book Store with me. Comixology’s sell-out was the kiss of death. Amazon won’t be and can’t be controlled. They need to be shunned. If not by everyone, at least this household. There are more considerations on where you buy something beyond the “low price leader”, especially if that leader is a morally and ethically bankrupt monopolistic ravening monster.

The Graveyard of Good Ideas

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Earlier today I wrote an email to one of my recruiters who is helping me find gainful employment as best as he can. During this composition it occurred to me that there is definite value in some of these “Really Big Ideas” that I have from time to time. I’ve written about this subject before, but this time I started to consider if there was any way to sell this skill that I have, and that it would be a good thing to write about it and perhaps doing so would ‘seed the clouds’ and maybe help me somehow in the future.

It’s an odd skill with an elusive name. What could it be called? It was something that I only started to understand myself late last year after my 38th birthday. There are a lot of things that go into this particular knack, there is brainstorming, mind-mapping, and extensive applications of imagination. I love the notion of a “Thought Palace” which I picked up from reading a lot of Sherlock Holmes stories and for me, it’s not as structural as it might have been for the protagonist of those stories but the metaphor really rings true for me. It all starts with a problem statement. As I look back on my life I find that this pattern has been with me for a very long time and it’s only recently that I’ve been able to put a finger on it and approach the task of devising what it actually is all about. These problems sometimes are very deep, and sometimes not; sometimes they are filled with deep personal importance and sometimes not. The procedure, if there could be something procedural to it tends to follow the same overall pattern, brainstorming leads to a froth of ideas, images, opening up like a sea of possibilities before me. My mental landscape is littered with all of this material, laying about in boxes and just resting on the metaphorical mental ground. This seems to work even if I don’t brainstorm first, but it seems to hasten the entire operation if I do. The key for me is to quite literally sleep on it. I keep the problem firmly in mind, I’ve got a field of mental raw material littered about my consciousness and then I turn my back on all of it. In a few days, and as oddly as it seems, during a relaxing hot shower or bath usually, the end product arrives in my mind. It is an unusual sensation, just standing under the flow of water and a tightly coiled spring appears in my mind and then uncoils. The problem stands solved before me, and all I have to do is write it all down. I know it will work, and there are indelible certainties that any rough spots couldn’t possibly be show-stoppers.

Examples of these great ideas then get written down. And here is the rub for me personally, that I’ve got what amounts to a rather full suburban graveyard filled with these marvelous and certain to be successful ideas. I have to write them out, and then bury them alive because they are too valuable to actually share. It comes down to idea ownership, to actually make good on all this work that I’ve done for people who never asked me to do the work in the first place. These ideas could be very lucrative to me personally and in my current stage of life, having any of these ideas get stolen and benefitting someone else chills me right to the core.

Some of these ideas I can characterize without having to expose them, because without copyright to protect all this work, I would be exposed, and I can’t stand that risk. The first one was the most elegant and most important to me personally. It took elements that I had picked up in the non-profit philanthropic space that I have been orbiting for the last fifteen years and synthesized a complete plan that could be put into action by any institution of higher learning which would have the effect of integrating admissions, student retention, development and advancement, and also directly harness young alumni engagement. During my time speaking to people in that sphere of influence in Austin Texas last November, I was asked many times especially about young alumni engagement, and it was all I could do to resist not sharing my great design. I can’t trust that my work would benefit me, so the only people I could share it with are my blood kin, who are the only people who would never betray me for greedy purposes. Once I did share my grand design with my kin, the response was very gratifying. It could be a really great way to “have your cake and eat it too” when it came to encouraging and keeping students in higher education and quite possibly also address the giant mountain of student debt that these students are accruing during their time studying in these institutions. The idea that a student could possibly walk away from their Bachelors of Arts and only have to pay $125 for the entire experience was something that took my breath away. The ability to start your life without being chained to a giant millstone of educational debt keeps this particular idea alive, deep underground in a coffin, but alive still.

Then most recently I had the opportunity to interview for a local “hypermarket” style company that has business throughout the region. Quite by accident while reading the background material I had assembled for this interview experience I accidentally began “priming the machine” and the day before my interview with the company I had another one of these spring-loaded epiphanies strike me square in the head. Again it came during a hot shower, and I found myself speed-talking through the entire package of work, as I find that sometimes self-talk helps me retain all the details, sometimes these ideas can evaporate like the memories of dreams. I discovered that I had everything, mental images of whiteboards, hardware lists, procedure binders, business plans, project visions, even so far as to create marketing and a jingle. It would have led the “Point Of Sale” experience to it’s most extreme limit in terms of speed and convenience. It could have been a Holy Grail for this particular company. Alas, the company did not want me for my baser skills and so the idea was boxed up and buried.

The humor of all of this is not lost on me. What a foolish thing, to be struck with amazing work that was totally unbidden, unexpected, and not-asked-for. I seriously doubt there are ways to even approach unveiling these ideas because they come from so far afield that it’s doubtful they are even standing in the same ballpark. What sort of communication channel exists where you can chat up a company and lay all this out on them all at once? It’s impossible without sounding like you are a lunatic crank. Nobody volunteers such work out of the blue, it just isn’t done. It’s a small bit of entertainment imagining a world where this sort of thing is if not expected not ruled out before it can begin. What would such a world look like? People like me who have what amounts to having accidental revelations just wandering in off the street and changing entire market segments and entire industries, blowing up higher education affordability problems and revolutionizing POS systems willy-nilly.

So that leads to the graveyard of good ideas. I wonder how many other people are out there who have similar experiences. How many other life-changing, utterly disruptive epiphanies are buried in shallow graves? Then I get to wondering if all of this is a flash in the pan or if it is like I suspect, a new talent of mine that will be with me for the rest of my life. How many more holes will I have to dig?

Money makes the world go ’round

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While reading “The Great Gatsby” one of the characters makes reference to money spent. The book is set in the jazz age of flappers and the well-heeled, say 1927 or so. Before the crash that sent many of these rich men and women tumbling from buildings. So the reference was how much a character ate after being hungry and expressed in dollars. 1927 dollars. Different than 2013 dollars. So I found a site: http://www.dollartimes.com/calculators/inflation.htm which you can calculate the power of the dollar from one time region to another. This points out the unique trap an author can get themselves in when they pin facts down in their fictional narrative.

New Kicks

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I recently broke down and bought myself new shoes to replace the old Sketchers that I thought I could gamely patch with hot-glue. That patch did do the trick, but then other parts of the shoe started to fail, splitting apart so much that I could see my socks peeking out when I walked. Thankfully I have not had to ford a lot of slush this past winter or deal with any ponding water now that spring is here, but now that spring is here, it was only going to be a matter of time before I would be truly sorry, with soggy feet.

While out shopping for shoes for Scott we ended up stopping at a Famous Footwear shop in the local mall. As Scott is so fond of saying, I apparently have a thing about shoe shopping. He says it’s a thing, I notice a little bit but perhaps it’s more than just a little to an outside observer. That day Scott didn’t find any shoes to replace his sorry kicks but I did. I always have issues with buying shoes because I have big wide feet and so a lot of popular shoe manufacturers are just out of the question. UnderArmour, Nike, Adidas, the sportier brands just can’t cut it. They cater to little precious narrow little baby-man feet, not these clod-hoppers at the end of my ankles. I was just buzzing around, not really seriously looking for anything in particular but came across a nice pair of leather shoes and I spotted the soles, which bore the distinctive characteristics of Dr. Marten. So, what about English shoes that are made in Vietnam? Well, the english bits are pure marketing hokum, but we don’t pay any attention that they were shipped here on a slow boat from Asia. Anyhow, these new shoes fit surprisingly well and were very easy on my feet. As usual new shoes radically correct the pronation in my feet and so my balance is shot for a few days while I re-acclimate to a proper foot geometry. These particular ones bear the model name of “Sussex” and the more I wear them, the more I like them. Apparently, and I don’t know if this is a real kind of shoe or just some goofy name that the Dr. Marten’s company has invented for these shoes, but they apparently are “chukkas” and they are not as low as sneakers, not as high as high-tops, have very few eyelets for the laces, but have a very comfortable footpad which makes walking quite enjoyable on my feet. They are made of a really nice leather and I was reading around on how to best care for them so they don’t crack and wear-out faster than they should and every pointer suggested cleaning and sealing the leather with baby oil. Frankly that idea worked out tremendously well. It darkened the leather just a little bit, but it also waterproofed the leather which is kind of nice to see when you accidentally tromp through a puddle and your shoes resist every single drop. Anyhow, ever since I bought them and wore them I’ve been very happy with them. My shoes no longer squeak, leak, or look like they’ve been run over by a lawnmower.

So if you’re looking for shoes, I can heartily recommend these. I’ve just about had enough with Sketchers as they don’t really last as long as I think they should and how they fall apart is kind of pitiful. I’ve kept them because while they aren’t really good shoes any longer, they’ll do quite nicely when I have to mow the lawn or do gardening. It will be very interesting to see just how long these Doc Martens last. I’m rough on shoes, my pronation is rather, and it’ll be a real challenge to see if I warp and wear these shoes down or if they are as durable as the marketing staff at Doc Martens says they are. We shall see. Due to a pricetag goofup at the shoe store I got these for about $60, when the list is $90. Even still, I think these shoes would have been a steal at market prices even, but I am glad for the accidental deep discount.