Month: May 2023

by Travis Mateer

Last November, it was all smiles and congratulatory handshakes from the important people surrounding Tom Stergios as the new digs for Cognizant’s new company, ATG, opened in the Sawmill District.

That’s right, a Tech-Greg was in attendance (Governor Gianforte), along with tech-incubator enthusiast, Seth Bodnar (University of Montana President). What an achievement for humble Tom Stergios who worked so hard to do such great things for the Missoula community, like employ by Dad, Tech-Tom Mateer.

Before getting to THAT Tech-Tom, who had to learn the hard way about corporate loyalty with Sprint, let’s take a look at how Cognizant decided to give Tom Stergios and two other men the boot (emphasis mine):

Multiple sources have confirmed that Tom Stergios, the senior vice president of strategy at Cognizant ATG in Missoula, is no longer with the company as of this week.

At least two other high-level executives are also out at the tech company, which has a new office in the Old Sawmill District. It’s unclear the extent of the job losses or why the decision was made. A request for comment from Cognizant was not immediately returned.

If Cognizant isn’t keen to discuss this, but there’s a story in the Missoulian anyway, then clearly some drama is afoot behind-the-scenes of this BIG corporation Tom Stergios was so proud to sell-out to; a corporation I just wrote about in March. Here’s how the article ends:

In 2022, Cognizant ATG hosted a grand opening for its new Customer Success Campus in the Old Sawmill District, which includes two new buildings.

“Today we are more than 300 employees strong in Missoula and excited to expand into our new state-of-the art facility in the Old Sawmill District,” Stergios said at the time. “It’s incredibly satisfying to see the positive local impacts we’re making, the tech careers we’re fostering, the personal connections being forged, and the way our contributions overall are helping to keep the community vibrant.”

Multiple sources told the Missoulian that Stergios was a well-liked leader at the company, and it appears that his ouster was a Cognizant decision.

Corporations like Cognizant, and the telecommunications company my Dad worked for, Sprint, don’t give a shit about local communities. Nope, the bottomline is the bottomline, something my Dad had to figure out the hard way.

And guess what I just figured out while waiting for a sandwich outside the fancy sandwich shop expanding to another location inside the Cognizant building? I found out that many years ago, just as I was leaving home to attend my first year of college, my Dad and a business journal were using the phone I was “gifted” to make business media content. Or, to put it more crassly, my “gift” was exploited to sell some fucking cell phones. From the link (emphasis mine):

Perhaps it is not surprising that Tom Mateer, Sprint PCS’ Kansas City area vice president, sent his son off to college at the University of Kansas this year with a PCS telephone, and without money to install a phone in his dorm room.

Since I’m not a subscriber, that’s all I could get, but it’s certainly enough to remind me of what was happening around the time I was entering the adult world where you fuck people over or get fucked in order to succeed. Isn’t that about right?

Sprint’s optimism that it could be victorious in the war for digital customers looked much different five years later. Then, after that, T-Mobile swooped in a major merger, leading to the eventual sale of the immense campus built during the 1990’s in the suburbs of Kansas City:

From the link (the image is from a different article):

Wireless carrier Sprint PCS plans to close five of its customer service centers, putting an estimated 3,000 people out of work, the company announced Friday.

The cuts represent about 9 percent of PCS’ work force and follow the layoffs of 6,000 employees and 1,500 contract workers in recent months. Sprint will keep eight PCS call centers open.

Centers in Atlanta, Tallahassee, Fla., and Jacksonville, Fla., will be closed April 16. The center in Lawrence, Kan., will be closed May 31 and a center in Irvine, Calif., will close June 28. About 500 people work at the plant in Lawrence.

Sprint officials sent a written notice to Lawrence Mayor Mike Rundle Friday that operations at the center will be discontinued.

If you think my sour grapes has no potential for larger take aways, you might ALSO think telecommunication technology has been a net positive for society. But has it?

Not to end on an esoteric note, but I’m beginning to have serious spiritual suspicions about the possible ramifications lurking behind the ease in which someone’s thoughts can be electronically sent through the ether in the form of texts and phone calls.

Maybe this observation is just a result of my own inability to manage personal relationships right now, but I’m having a hard time shaking the idea that humans aren’t built to communicate this way, and that by doing so we are allowing other things to have influence.

Instead of ending there, how about some speculation about what these three executives leaving the Cognizant/ATG campus will mean for the tech-sector so desperately sought by the biz-pimps promoting public/private incubator programs, like the one established by Stergios. This comes from the first link in the post:

Not only did Cognizant need more space in which to grow, it also needed a solid pipeline of employees skilled in the world of today’s technology. That proved challenging in the beginning when the company recognized its potential for growth in Missoula but couldn’t find the workers skilled in the field.

To solve the problem, Stergios and University of Montana President Seth Bodnar worked to create a new program that would provide students the skills they needed to succeed at Cognizant. The resulting Aim Higher program has since graduated seven classes and is set to kick off another round.

“One might expect that a university and a business could do something like this, and in three years you might have a program up and running,” Bodnar said. “Well, it was three months later that the Aim Higher program launched. Fast forward to today and we have seven cohorts through that program and more than 150 members of our community working in exciting, high-tech jobs here in Missoula. It’s incredible progress.”

Because of this relationship with the University of Montana, I suspect Stergios or one of the other two executives could land a nice gig somewhere within the University system. Or maybe they could consider investing in NEW MEDIA!

It’s unlikely, but on the off chance, here’s the link to Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF), and a link to my about page where the donation button can be found. I’m sure the digital infrastructure could handle a nice five figure donation 😉

Thanks for reading!

by Travis Mateer

While it might be the SMART thing to simply NOT attend tomorrow’s City Council meeting, and risk ruffling more feathers, it appears I may HAVE TO attend in order to correct the minutes from last week’s meeting. Why? Because the minutes, like Martin Kidston’s reporting, do not reflect reality. Here’s a screenshot with my emphasis added so you can see what I’m talking about:

Did I say this? No, I did not. This inaccurately recorded comment actually came from a different frustrated citizen, Kevin Hunt. Here is a portion of Hunt’s comment on the post I wrote to correct Kidston’s inaccurate record:

Where does MY frustration come from? Lots of places, like stumbling across the active death scene of Glen Harley Stephens on Saturday at 5:30pm in downtown Missoula, right in front of the doors our County Commissioners enter and exit to access their offices.

This was the scene yesterday from my vantage point to the right of these doors, closer to the Missoula County Courthouse:

For more context on where Harley passed away yesterday, here’s the shot across the street from the doors Harley died in front of. This is the building where City Council and the Missoula Redevelopment Agency do their business:

I’ll go deeper into my frustration by citing the barrage of “reporting” the Missoulian has been doing under the series title NO WHERE TO GO! Here’s the most recent narrative control effort from our “local” media. After Mayoral candidate, Andrea Davis, gets some ink to promote the Trinity housing project, we get some more NO MONEY complaining from our placeholder Mayor, Jordan Hess. From the link (emphasis mine):

At a press conference in April to discuss the rise in urban camping and the city’s response, Mayor Jordan Hess said the city currently doesn’t have enough money to fund all the services that are necessary to alleviate homelessness.

“What I can say is that we have a structural funding problem in the city of Missoula,” he said. “This is a structural revenue issue, where our property taxes are capped at the state level at one half the rate of inflation.”

There are simply things that won’t get funded, he said, and that will “have an impact on our community that people will see, and it will have an impact in the community that is outside the values of our community as well.”

When asked if there have been discussions about the prospects of putting an affordable housing bond on the ballot at some point in the future, Hess said it’s a possibility.

“I think that some sort of voter-approved solution is going to be necessary at this point,” he said.

He noted that a proposed Crisis Services Levy, which was voted down last November, was favored by a majority of city residents, even though the measure failed in the county overall.

“And so I think it remains a priority of city of Missoula residents,” Hess said. “What we will do is, we’ll work within the constraints that we have on the short term. And like I said, in the medium- and long-term, we need solutions at all levels of government. We need funding from the state, we need funding and assistance from the federal government and will likely need some funding at the local level.”

What is going on here? A city that fought like hell to preserve its TIF slush fund is bitching about a property tax cap and threatening the remaining Missoulians who haven’t been forced out of this valley with a affordable housing bond. How many ways can we say FUCK NO? But it obviously doesn’t matter what the voters say, because Hess and his cabal are so fucking deluded, he can actually say A MAJORITY OF CITY RESIDENTS FAVORED THE LEVY. Huh? I mean, I don’t even know what to say, and speechlessness is not a thing that happens to me too often.

It’s not just exhausting LIVING in Double-Standard Town, it can even be difficult to THINK clearly in this updside down place I thought I knew after 23 years.

For example, instead of being able to reflect on Harley’s death this morning, and the kindness of someone placing purple flowers in a vase near where he died (look at the picture), I had to deal with a panhandler who HAS housing and HAS disability income, but she pesters people for money anyway to fund unhealthy habits.

Here’s what Lorenna acts like when she is told to stop bugging people trying to get money out of a downtown ATM machine. I started recording because Lorenna was following me, screaming, and the camera is a surprisingly effective deterrent to this kind of behavior (I’ve seen a downtown business owner use this method before). Also, I’d apologize to the biker for getting his face in the shot, but he shouldn’t be biking on the sidewalk in the first place.

One more thing: giving someone like Lorenna money can actually COMPROMISE her housing, which she is currently in, thankfully. The guy she was pestering at the ATM understood this, which is why he thanked me and identified giving her money as “enabling”.

https://vimeo.com/828806843?share=copy

Getting back to the question posed in the title of this post, I don’t know what’s going to happen at the City Council meeting on Monday. I’ll spend the rest of the day trying to find some clarity about how to proceed. Comments are welcome!

Also welcome, funding! So if every penny hasn’t been gobbled by inflation, the main ways to support my work is through Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF), or making a donation at my about page. My TIF fund just got a $25 dollar anonymous donation. Thank you!

And thanks for reading!

by Travis Mateer

This week’s review is a solo effort that took two sessions to finish, and Saturday’s session was recorded AFTER I saw Glen Harley Stephens die on the sidewalk right in front of the doors that lead to the offices of our County Commissioners.

Here’s an image I took before the sheet went on and before the 4-5 Sheriff Deputies showed up to process his corpse:

When you listen to my podcast episode, you will hear the conversation I had with Harley two days before Christmas, 2021. This is MUCH MORE context than what you’ll get at the Missoula Current–an alleged news organization that used Harley’s image in an article earlier this month:

Since the grapevine can be as accurate as Martin Kidston’s reporting, I took it upon myself to share what happened with a few people and entities that would help confirm the identity, like a pawn shop contact I have, and The Ox. It was at The Ox I learned Harley’s beard may have earned him a Santa-related nickname.

Harley is a part of an old generation of homeless characters I knew well, and will miss. I suspect the cost of responding to him, if it could be calculated, is IMMENSE in first responder dollars alone. Harley also caused thousands of dollars in damage to the building that houses the Badlander downtown when he ripped apart nice metal gratings that had been put in place to keep riffraff from sitting on brick window sills. I also once had a conversation with Judge Kathleen Jenks about Harley because his 80+ charges in her court, and inability to address his behavior, greatly confounded her.

My last conversation with Harley actually included talk about housing, which he said he was coming up on the list for. He also acknowledged something else I heard from a private security guard, who had taken an interest in his situation and making it better, and that was the fact Harley was regularly getting robbed. I asked Harley how many times and how much he thought had been taken, since his prolific ability to panhandle money is well known. He said he had been robbed about a dozen times for probably about a thousand dollars.

This makes me sad, and I wasn’t in the greatest of places before coming across Harley’s final moments in this fucking town. I’ll be following up on this story if more develops, especially if I’m able to find any family, who I think are in Idaho.

If you value my work, Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF) is one way to help keep it going, or you can make a donation at my about page.

Thank you for reading/listening.

by Travis Mateer

The image above is from an old TikTok post from April 17th because that would be 6 days after Joey went missing. He has since been found, deceased, in the Clark Fork river, 40 miles from where he was last seen and reported missing. I have written two posts about this case so far, one on May 5th and one on May 15th.

Today is May 20th and a memorial was held for Joey where many of his friends shared memories. There were stories that included Joey wearing a bear suit, coming to the aid of nephew in a nerf battle, and being a free spirit who sometimes showed up in security footage of a family friend who noticed him doing parkour on cars in her business’ parking lot.

I say WE are failing Joey’s friends because I am a part of this community and I know some of the people who may be involved. That’s why I called Detective Deibert over two weeks ago and left a message, but I still haven’t heard anything back.

What I DID hear from one of the young people I spoke to is a concerning degree of certainty about what she thinks happened, and some of her own trauma with a person who may be involved, the same person who has a mother that is well-known in the Homeless Industrial Complex, the same system that overlaps with the broken Criminal Justice System I’ve been investigating and exposing.

I hope some of the things I’m hearing are NOT true, but if they are, I hope we have competent investigators on the case.

Normally at the end of posts I provide links to donate money to my independent journalism. Not today. Today I’m just asking that you give a shit about the kids who are still alive, and the shit they are dealing with as us adults continue fucking things up for them.

Let’s do better.

by Travis Mateer

This collage is almost done. Does it have a lot going on? Yes, there’s lots of ANIME BOOM, for sure, and a definite agenda afoot, but not everyone knows how to read the MAP.

Is Double-Standard Town a free and open place? Yes and no would be the answers. I make art anyways, like the noise one can hear from the concrete island on Friday nights. Sometimes I’m there, sometimes I’m not.

Double-Standard Town can be a confusing place to live. For example, on Wednesday, at the Public Safety meeting I DID NOT attend, a proclamation was made and authority claimed to make Juneteenth a municipal holiday. I saw this on the agenda and had to use IMMENSE RESTRAINT to make my attendance NOT a thing.

I’m having to mull over how to proceed with my public comment campaign because the reality is there seems to be no swift consequences for a media outlet like the Missoula Current when a blatant mischaracterization of my actions on Monday are added to the tenuousness reasoning for my point-of-order in the first place.

The article Martin Kidston wrote about me has now been STEALTH edited. Here’s what it said before, with my emphasis added:

And here’s what it says now:

I’m not sure what to say about this alleged media business and its sad effort to stealth-edit their way out of hot water other than to pose a question: is there a chilling effect when a media outlet is allowed to do this to a citizen so blatantly, especially when you consider how readily ALL media outlets were to broadcast this statement signed by 10 of our Council members about Zooey Zephyr?

Here’s the not-intended-to-be-ironic headline from the Current:

And here’s the statement:

“In the past week, the Montana Legislature’s actions to silence Representative Zephyr have been immoral and anti-democratic. Using the power of the majority to censor the minority is exactly what our democracy seeks to prohibit. Representative Zephyr’s lived experience and steadfast commitment to those she represents is being attacked by this legislature,” the council wrote.

Adorable statement, y’all. Too bad the words fall flat so quickly. You see, Double-Standard Town has some very queer gravity that is incredibly difficult to use words to explain.

So instead, here’s some moving pictures to undercut our Mayor’s proclamation with a song at the end. Enjoy! And, if you’re so inclined, Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF) is one way to support my work, while making a donation at my about page is another.

https://vimeo.com/828224232?share=copy