work

A Call To Goof Off For Your Own Interests

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Humanity is not the only species that goofs off, but we certainly seem to be the ones who do it most effectively. Tool use is done by many species, communication is done by many species, but we’re the only species that has managed to master the environment to the point where we have the capacity to destroy where we live.

Some say that’s happening, some say that has already happened, most seem to ignore it and continue goofing off.

We’re not that great at goofing off responsibly. As a species, we’re the babysitter that plays loud music and wonders why the baby is crying. A few decades later, we figure out that the noise is making the baby cry, but we’re so happy with the loud angsty music that we deny it. ‘We’re here for the money, not the baby.’ That metaphor certainly makes the ‘cradle of civilization’ angle in books a bit more interesting.

It’s been bogging me down a bit. We have all these complex systems in our civilization that most people can’t understand. Not even one. Most people these days operate devices that they don’t understand even conceptually, from their stoves to cars to the airplanes they ride in. They expect them to simply work, and when they don’t, they get stompy.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, gentle reader, but there’s been plenty of stompy going around these days.

This wears on me. For whatever reason, I have made it a point to understand how things work, and I’ve managed pretty well. I can’t forecast the weather, I can’t tell you off the top of my head when the star we revolve around will super-nova, or when an earthquake will hit – but I understand as best I can about these things because… well, those things seem sort of important. A lot of things seem more important to me than what we humans do to ourselves. We’re an odd bunch that goofs off.

What we can do, though, is goof off working on ways to make things better rather than worse.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

Buckminster Fuller, as quoted in “Beyond Civilization: Humanity’s Next Great Adventure” (1999), by Daniel Quinn

When we find ourselves in holes that we don’t want to be in is to stop digging. Some people want us to dig holes, and they market that and distract us with their wishes.

We have to allow ourselves time to figure out what we wish, stepping away from the busy world of what other people want so that we get the quiet mind to do just that.

After all, the only intelligence of worth is related to survival, and our survival as individuals and a species could depend on that.

Lightning Dance

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_Lightning Forest_

He and I were sitting in what we called “Production”, where I had wandered down and found Greg. I’d been working at the company, in the same department, for about a year and was fairly isolated from other members of the Test Equipment Department because I was working with other departments since I started. My boss, Matt, had tasked me with doing something with Greg.
I was in my mid-twenties, Greg in his 40s. At meetings, I’d see Greg quietly sitting through meetings, not contributing anything, answering only what he needed to, and after the meeting he couldn’t be found. This was the first time that he and I were having a conversation about a work project, much less any other sort of conversation, and it wasn’t going well.
Greg was making it a point to tell me all the stuff he couldn’t do because of all the other things he was doing, and I’d be left with the majority of the work. He had nothing really to contribute about the ‘how’ or the ‘why’. I think he noticed I was a bit surprised at his responses, because he asked me, “Do you mind if I tell you something?”

Well, of course. That, to me, would be something.

And he said something along the lines of this:

“This isn’t personal. I don’t really want to work with you. You attract too much attention, which is good for you because you do get things done and you do a lot of things that management wants to get done.” I was drawn in. He was telling me some truth and it was completely alien to a young hard charging software engineer.

“I’ve got some years before I retire. I like to do my 40 hours and go home. I only work so that I can do other things in my life. You’re a lightning rod. Work just keeps dropping on you. You’re young and you probably don’t understand this, but this is not my life.”

I was puzzled by all of this. He was senior to me. He was trying to give me some advice, maybe, but he was also telling me why he didn’t like me and it was the same reason a lot of people seemed to like me. It was confusing.

At that point in life, all I did was work. All I knew was work. I had grown up with work in family businesses, and everything had always revolved around work. This made no sense to me. Life?

What I didn’t understand was that he would go home to his wife – it was before his divorce as I recall – and kids, he would hang out with friends. Meanwhile, I would go home and… read books on software engineering, feeding myself with a firehose, and then drinking with friends. I’d average 60-80 hours a week at work. This Life thing seemed inefficient.

It would take me years to figure out what he meant. Others there also tried with me, inviting me to this and that, and I would often go, but for the most part I would just keep doing what I did. It would be later when I found myself reading stuff other than technical and mathematical texts, where I found the humanities that lead me to question everything.

To this day I’m still a bit of a lightning rod, though I perch away from everyone because I don’t really enjoy being a lightning rod… and no one really appreciates a lightning rod except during storms.

The conversation sticks with me because it was a sincere observation and expression of a completely different perspective that I had enough good sense by then to allow for and remember.

It was a landmark of sorts, where lightning was dancing around a tree that had seen much lightning… and survived.

The Red Dots of Life.

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_red dot

There’s a life skill to have that I think these days is more important than most. Probably the easiest way to explain it is by the ubiquitous cat and laser pointer that, by now, people in the Amazon jungle likely know about by carrier parrot.

Those of us that have had a cat of any generation have played with cats in one form of the other, but when the Theodore Maiman created the first laser in 1960 at Hughes Research Laboratory I’m fairly certain that he didn’t think that it would become something carried in pet stores. For those of you who don’t know, in the early days of the laser pointer, it was marketed for humans to use on humans for much the same reason.

In the days of boards and projectors, it was marketed as a tool to focus people on things. It worked really well until Microsoft decided to put out PowerPoint and making every meeting involving it a snooze fest. There was that window where the laser pointer had it’s day, only to be promoted to cat tormentor.

We think the cat is playing, but what is ‘playing’? The dictionary definition is doing something for enjoyment, and yet we don’t know that a cat necessarily enjoys attacking something it can’t actually stick in it’s mouth, which is where every other cat toy and other household item that catches their interest ends up. It’s instinctual, and one can argue that it’s a way of practicing hunting.

famous-cat-meme-which-started-and-launched-the-website-i-can-haz-cheezburger

You Can Haz Cheezeburger?
How would you feel if someone kept sticking a cheeseburger image in front of you? You’d practice grabbing it and would never get it. I don’t imagine it would be fun. Granted, moving laser dots on the carpet don’t have a taste other than carpet, but work with me.

Now take a breath and look around you every day and find the red dots in life. These are basically just some group of people trying to direct you to do something. Maybe it’s a good thing like washing your hands.

Maybe it’s a thing where when you’re hungry or thirsty, maybe that last sticky advertisement will guide your money to a place where you think you’ll get what you’re thinking you want.

I don’t even need to name food chains, they likely already popped into your heads. Maybe just the word ‘cheeseburger’ had you thinking of a particular food chain because you associate that word with their product.

no cheeseburger

The movie ‘Detached’ has a clip going around now about ubiquitous assimilation. It’s about those red dots and developing our minds beyond the quick and dirty memes that get passed around like a joint at a barbecue. They get passed around by people who never read Richard Dawkins books much less ‘The Selfish Gene’. They likely have no idea why we call them memes. They’re just memes, which occupy attention like little red dots. We have marketing trying to sell products, we have people trying to market their own ideas with memes, and then sometimes some of those memes work to the benefit of everyone.

And sometimes you just get a mouthful of something that’s blech. Sometimes you might get a good cheeseburger, sometimes you might get a bad cheeseburger, you never know. Social media has people, little ones too, just chasing red dots.

That particular scene from ‘Detached’ has Adrian Body’s masterful delivery of such a simple concept that we should not only be teaching children but also reminding adults of. If your clicky clicky ain’t getting you cheeseburgers you like, stop chasing them.

Criticism is often met by gaslighting, blaming an individual for not getting the cheeseburger that was shown. Somewhere in some very fine print that you need to have compound eyes to read there’s a catch somewhere. As we grow older we learn to expect them – but rarely read the fine print because… you effectively need compound eyes. Imagine having your lawyer look over every software license, copyright license, terms of service document… you’d get nothing done, and you need to get things done.

What do you need to get things done? Are you chasing red dots again? What are you actually accomplishing? Do you have a sense of accomplishment? Do you get the cheeseburger in your mouth feeling, or do you get the red dot on carpet taste?

We need to spend time on ourselves so that we are less susceptible to bullshit red dots. Shine your own for yourself.

And maybe think about what the cat wants when you play with it.

Work

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Working GirlWhy do we work? For those of us that do or have, we’ll say that it has to do with recompense (getting paid), or a sense of accomplishment, or both. Some of us work toward our own version of success, some of us work for society’s version of success, sometimes they are one and the same.

When our version of success and the work we do differs, we’re little more than whores – at best pole dancers performing for a leering audience. We do what they want us to do, and while we may enjoy some of it, we know that we’re just working. And why do we do that? To pay the bills. To make ends meet. Maybe even to get ahead – from what I understand, pole dancing and prostitution can be quite lucrative (someone will take issue with that, but that’s because they’ll miss ‘can be’ in their reactionary reading).

In the end, if you’re not working toward something, you’re just doing what someone else wants. You’re someone else’s bitch. And, likely, you’re afraid of losing that work so you put up with quite a bit from the pimp… or manager. The manager’s job is to get the most out of those they manage, and their manager’s job is the same at a higher level. An hierarchy.

What is the point of work? For some, that’s all it is. For others, it is a labor of love. For those of us who do our work out of love for it, we often don’t see eye to eye with those above in the management hierarchy… but we do it anyway and, as we do, they chip away until we’re no more than the pole dancers.

If feminists can argue that pole dancing and prostitution are exploitation…

Battling The Trinidad Roseau

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Bactris major Jacq.I lost 2 pounds of weight in 4 days. And I did it dealing with a Trinidad Roseau (bactris major) clump. It might be interesting to market the “Roseau diet”.

Roseau is, in my best description, weaponized chlorophyll. It’s nature’s answer to botanical warfare, designed specifically to keep out invasive species. Like mammals. Like humans. Like… me. Those spikes that you see in the photo break off from the stalks very easily. They go through the ‘cut proof’ gloves with relative impunity. And they cling together, thumbing their metaphorical noses at the Hedgehog’s Dilemma.

I loved every minute of battling it, and I’m almost a little sad that I’ve gotten rid of most of the clump, on the downhill slope of the battle that it is losing. The only casualty I’ve had is 50 feet of rope (264 lb test) that failed while I was pulling down some with the pickup, “Artsy”.

During the last days of battle, I’d come out of the bush – jersey and pants soaked with sweat. “Picker” from other plants, those annoying seeds that cling to you, all over my clothing and in my hair. I had half a mind to go into a Starbucks down here, order a coffee and sit down while writing in a notebook just to offend a few people, but I was too tired to bother.

There are people all over the world, sitting in offices, spending money on gym memberships, paying tanning salons… when all you have to do… is go outside and work on some land.

Thoreau was onto something good:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

— Henry David Thoreau.

Yes, you’re breathing, but when last have you lived?

The Constant Redefinition.

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Kayak fishing at sunrise: NSBIt’s been a busy month.

The Problem

Looking for work is an odd thing for me; so many of the jobs related to software engineering require specializations whereas I’m a generalist with many specialties. Sure, I could fit in at a lot of jobs, but the HR departments may not think so. And whether or not they think so, it may simply not be a good fit for me. So I’ve been doing some introspection, looking around, poking around.

In this article, Liz Ryan makes some valid points:

Five Signs You’re Unemployable, For All The Right Reasons

1. You cannot keep your mouth shut when you feel strongly that your boss or client is about to make a mistake that will hurt them.

2. You have little or no tolerance for the viewpoint “This is the way we’ve always done it.”

3. You hate to be boxed in by routine policies and procedures, by unnecessary measurements and/or by strict rules (like the rule that says you’ll be written up and put on probation the third time you walk into work five minutes late).

4. You have a big idea that’s dying to come out (and that won’t very likely pop out when you’re performing a structured job).

5. You feel that your contribution to this planet could be much greater than what it’s been so far.

With some margin for error, that fits.

So, really, I’m a person with a lot of experience, who has a diverse technical background in a period where HR departments don’t advertise for that diversity, etc. And, to make things more interesting, I want to feel like I have more of a purpose than a cog in a machine.

Granted, we are all cogs in a machine no matter what we do, but I’d like to feel like the machine is going the right way. Oddly enough, someone wrote something great about wanting purpose from work – and I’m not alone. Here’s a link to a PDF on Purpose at Work.

The Solution

The first part of the solution was identifying the problems, and that took a little time. It’s amazing how noisy the world can be, how demanding it can be, and how stuck in patterns a person can become as we grow. It’s amazing how little we can be in touch with ourselves and the people around us if only because we’re stuck in our own little caverns of habit built on expectations that may not even exist anymore.

So I had to identify the changes in myself since I was 16 – I got my first paid programming job when I was 17 (family doesn’t pay). At 16 (in 1987), all I ever wanted to do was become a computer programmer. Since then, quite a bit has happened, but for the most part, I’ve been told by people to tell computers what to do. Since then, I’ve grown. I’ve:

  • Written well enough to be published, and perhaps enough to be read.
  • Spoken at public events, and have gotten involved in things I never would have expected.
  • Gotten to understand myself at a very deep level, which allows me to understand others very well. I can be the diplomat, and more often than not I have been for the good of a project.
  • Seen a lot of software projects, some succeed, some fail.
  • Learned the art of observation, through people-watching and through my photography. And the photography has become good enough that I’ve been paid for some.
  • Almost always ended up being the person who researched and wrote things down.

That’s a pretty short list, and it’s purposefully not complete.

So, what am I going to do? First, I’ve already incorporated, which allows me to pursue interests in a more business-like fashion.

That’s about as specific as I can be right now as this evolution begins. I simply needed to write it, if only as a landmark along the way to wherever I end up being.

Musings

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Time - The long dark Tea Time of the Soul

Sitting in the coffee-shop
He writes, inhales deeply
On the cigarette just lit,
Sipping on his tea
Thoughtfully.

It is Earl Gray, sugar
To sweeten the warm tea,
Cream to add body,
Yet it isn’t the same tea
He loves.

He doesn’t like the cigarette,
Dislikes it but likes the habit,
Thinking of the work he likes
As he silently ponders
His working habit.

Tired, Mentally drained, physically
Alive, he sits,
He writes,
He drinks, he smokes
Alone.

Safer alone, no conflict
After a day of conflict. The
Conversation of business
Grates on his nerves
Silently.

Butterfly farms and restaurant yarns
Birdseed worries and
Butterfly scurries
Mean nothing, so
Little to him.

So he sits,
Drinks his tea,
Smokes his cigarette
And writes
The last line of this poem.

Written in a coffee shop in the 1990s.