Summer

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School is OUT! I fondly remember, as a child, waiting anxiously for this day to come, and revelling in the ten (or was it twelve?) weeks of summer. Summer, in my case, was summer camp, at the local YMCA. This was in California, and so I spent every day in the pool, if we weren’t going to Disneyland, Magic Mountain, Knot’s Berry Farm, or into the mountains to hike. Every summer I got a wicked burn, then a wicked tan (for those who know me today: yes, it is possible. I have proof.) At the end of camp in 4th grade I broke my arm skateboarding, at the end of camp in 6th grade I had a “boyfriend”. We held hands.

School seemed an interminable period of judgement, testing, studying, and BORING things. Fun fact: I like learning now, I did NOT like learning then. I have dozens of saved report cards from my formative years informing my parents that “Bobbie could do so much better if she just applied herself.”

When I hit 28, I was in full-on baby-mania. Actually, that’s not quite accurate, I was in “have a kid, change my life” mania. It wasn’t just the “baby” I wanted; I wanted the 9-year-old telling me he forgot he needs to bring 2 dozen cupcakes (the morning he needs to bring them). I wanted the cramming for the SAT’s, and the first trip to Disneyland, and reading books goodnight. And I felt sure that when I had a child, what with my academic-leaning parents, I too would become an academic-leaning parent and come to see the value of school.

It is therefore with a mixture of embarrassment and wonder that I report that while I do truly cherish the value of school, and I am that academic parent (that was me, putting my kid in tutoring), I also could not wait for summer. Because it meant a reprieve.

A reprieve from parent-teacher conferences, from enforcing homework revisions, from watching the frustration on his face when he didn’t get a concept or (in the long tradition of my family line) didn’t get it exactly perfect the first time. (He carries that trait to everything, skateboarding and electric guitar have been recent lessons in “no one is perfect the first time”). It’s a reprieve from emails from the teacher, from looking for lost hoodies in the Lost and Found, from waiting for the June Box (items taken by the teacher go into a box and are retrieved… in June), from nights filled with homework, projects, and the dutiful requirements of school.

By the time the end of August rolls around I will revert to the feelings of my youth and delight in back-to-school shopping, even if my son doesn’t. I will feel re-invigorated and redouble my PTA efforts, all the more excited as this is our last grade school year (and I’m chairing the Science Fair). I will be all excited again.  And the boy… the boy will have had ten weeks of fun, and sun; he will have a wicked tan (bless his Father for giving him better skin than I had, the kid does not burn). Even he will be looking forward to school and seeing his friends on a more regular basis, if not the excitement that being a 5th grader (and therefore, top of the heap) brings.

But here we are excited and grateful, officially, for summer.

Dabble, Dabble, Toil and Babble

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“Your biggest problem”, he stated flatly, “is you’re a dabbler. You don’t specialize in anything. You are not going to succeed because you do not focus on a given talent; you just dabble in this and that.”

This was actually stated, to me, in a 1:1 with my boss at the time. He was a financial services guru and I was his personal and executive assistant, so assigned because I was technically inclined and could type fast. In short, I was good enough to be his e&pa because I dabbled.

Despite initial reaction, this was meant to be a positive speech: it was going to Incite Me To Action and I was going to Make Something Of Myself. Instead, I quit the job, moved back home, and dabbled some more.

I dabbled my way into SQL.

Then I dabbled my way into ASP.Net. Then I dabbled into VB.Net.

Then I dabbled into SQL some more, and into project management. And the dabbling continued, through business development, communications, operations, and back into development (but C# this time).

“Which one of your degrees does this job come from?” wondered my stepmom one night in Spring when I told them I had acquired this one. “None of them!” my dad said wryly.

My old boss is correct: I am a dabbler. None of the things I have done, have I truly specialized in. There are better people at SQL out there than I am, there are certainly better people at .Net and BusDev. But there are damned few who can speak those languages and are willing to translate them, painfully, carefully into shiny PowerPoints and ROI-laden SWAT analyses.

A few months back I had my midlife crisis, it lasted 36 hours and was of the vein  of “what am I DOING with my life? Where will I go next?” And I realized that every other time in my life I’d been faced with that question things unquestionably got better, more exciting, and more rewarding.

I have friends who went to college for what they ended up being in life, they seem happy and fulfilled. I have friends who picked a field and stuck with it, and will have a decent retirement to speak for it. My own parents offer four different examples of picking a road and trotting down it come hell or high water and they’ve all done fine.

I do not believe, though, that diminishes any success by a diagonal route.

Phoning It In

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I’m freely admitting here that I’m phoning this one in: life, and work, have taken over as is wont to do with a new job, and summer approaching. The sun gets early and so do I, I am proudly Foursquare mayor of my gym and I sleep better now that I have in six years. Work is intense and yet has finite boundaries, home is satisfying although I do admit that this school year it feels a bit like I’m limping to the finish (to quote a Facebook friend).

This sounds pitifully like a synopsized email to my mother: I’m alive, I’m happy, I’m sorry I haven’t written, I’m just really busy, and it’s all good. As I have two plane trips spaced at one-month intervals coming up, I hope to have a new rant up soon. Ideas for said rant include:

1. Wow, people in Seattle have no idea how to drive at all once change is instantiated.

2. I may become a shoe fanatic. I bought new shoes that happened to be high heels and I’m really, really enjoying them.

3. Gardening is frustrating if you resolve to do it without chemicals.

4. I have no problem turning 40, the fact that my son is already 10 is scary.

5. I am a dabbler, and despite the best advice of many I think I’m succeeding.

There was a time in my life where I blogged because the volume of drama necessitated it; there is no drama and unfortunately there’s not much I can add in terms of overall social commentary that I feel has to be imparted RIGHT NOW. This is a good position to be in.

Owning Your Data

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I realize I’m terribly late to this party. I’m not even fashionably late, I’m “you arrived just as the caterers were cleaning up and the hostess had taken off her shoes” late. I’ve been busy (as, I think, I’ve amply covered).

However, I really must say a word or two about Reinhart and Rogoff.

For those who don’t follow economics or kinda remember they heard about it but aren’t sure what the big hullabaloo is, I recommend you google it; look for the Economist, the Guardian, and the Atlantic non-editorial resources to start. There’s a few. Then you can go off to the editorials for dessert. For those who don’t want to google, here’s the Twitter version: Two economists present a work in which they suggest that there is a deep drop off in economic performance without austerity measures. Essentially they said that when debt is high, growth slows to a grinding halt; the graph they presented roughly resembled the cliffs of Dover.

And it was wrong.

Because of an Excel spreadsheet formula error.

Normally this wouldn’t be awful. Anyone, and I do mean anyone, who has used Excel to convey data (or volumes of analysis) has made that spreadsheet error, and it can be as simple as not properly conveying a Sum formula, or as complex as messing up your Vlookup in your nested IF statement. Excel has been bastardized over the years into an analytics function (by courtesy of default in that it’s on nearly every machine) that it really can’t fully accommodate without failsafes; EVERYONE makes an Excel error.

Reinhart and Rogoff’s mistake is NOT that they made a spreadsheet formula error. And, contrary to the article above I linked to, it’s only partially that they did not peer review.

It was governments’ (plural, many, varied) mistake to use it to shape policy.

Lookit, suppose I told you that, according to my Excel spreadsheet, you were very likely to die from dehydration if you didn’t eradicate all but 0.4 grams of salt per day from your diet. For perspective, the average diet has about 5 times that. You would very rightly look to other studies, other data, other sources of information. You’d poll your neighbors. You’d check with friends. You’d do your due diligence before you used my say-so, no matter how shiny my Excel spreadsheet, or even how shiny my MD would be (this is fiction, after all).  Plenty of people are told by their doctor to lose 10lbs because it will make a difference in the long run, and plenty of people seem to blithely ignore it because they don’t have corresponding (personal, attributable, anecdotal) data.

So why, why, why did any government, financial body, fiscal institution leap on the screeching panic train when R&R’s study hit?  Why did no one look to a 2nd opinion, a different study; why didn’t they check the data for themselves before subjecting their economies to the fiscal equivalent of a rectal exam?

I have been in data now for 15 years. It’s not a long time in the scheme of things, but it’s something I’m known to be passionate about. I can go on and on about how data works, or doesn’t; what you can derive from it; how data *is* integrity if done right. Any form of analytic reporting that is worth its salt has been tested, peer-reviewed, and validated against two or three other methods before it is used in a practical space. At Expedia, at one point, I managed 500 ad-hoc requests per month, and each of those was eyeballed against existing reporting and a decent sense-check before being used to cut deals (or not).

Now, please understand: R&R screwed up. And, apart from their formula error, they insist the outcome is the same (and it is, but it’s the equivalent of saying “ok it’s not a steep drop off anymore, more of a speedbump, but still it’s a delta!!”). This is the foible of the data monkey; again, something we’ve all been prey to. But not all of us have done it to the culpability of large (and small) governments, and most of us have learned to admit when we’re wrong. That is the crux of it: if no one is perfect, no data is perfect, to pretend yours is against evidence to the contrary is specious at best and negligent at worst.

I argue though that the more egregious mistake is to *follow* that data without validation. To quote Ben Kenobi: “Who’s more foolish, the fool, or the fool that follows him?”

Typing

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It’s my “me” night — the boy is with his father, the man is with his brother, and I am home watching a James Bond movie. It’s “Thunderball”, released in 1965; at this time in history my father had been in the country 1 year, I do not believe he had as yet met my mother, and I was -8 years old.

All of the women are decorative, deadly, or both. Any one of them who was competent and even remotely personable was a secretary. The only two remainders were a deadly assassin (ultimately, and inevitably, poor in her job) and the clueless, innocent heroine.

When I was in 8th grade, typing was a requirement for everyone, but you had to do it on an IBM Selectric that was only slightly quieter than a beehive. Typing had time-tests as well as visual tests — you could NOT type the volume in the time if you hesitated to look at the keyboard. I had managed to multi-task and eyeball the keyboard through the first quarter, so my second quarter C’s were not welcome at home. (In point of fact, C’s were never welcome at home, but A’s that went to C’s were very much not ok). My grades came home and my parents acted.

My stepmother grabbed a sheet of blue, circle-shaped stickers. And covered every key in the keyboard of the computer my brother and I used. It was torturous. But I learned to type.

Not to become a secretary.

Seventeen years ago I took a couple of classes at the local community college to learn how to program websites — I was a “web developer” when everybody was, it founded a slightly profitable side business. In 2000 I took classes in DB development, by 2003 I had argued my way into a dev job. In 2004 I got the dream job, at Expedia, to do development in their Reporting group. By 2010 the good jobs had moved to Geneva and I had to find other pursuit. By 2013, I had tired of “other pursuit”.

Today I find myself with two keyboards, two machines, a multitude of projects and lots of things to build. I type a lot these days. But I’m not a secretary.

Sur La Awesome

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My resolution to blog more often has gone by the wayside courtesy of a new job. I started working at Sur La Table about 10 (calendar) days ago (officially) and I’m having a bit of a hard time.

I’m having a hard time separating reality from all of the awesome.

Any time you start a new job, you’re going to be in a “honeymoon” period. Everything is new, and different. It’s a bit like the 4-week rule I had when I was dating. It went something like this:

Week 1: Dating again. Ok, this is cool, this is normal, everyone dates. Cool.

Week 2: He can do no wrong! He’s going to be a Doctor or Lawyer or Artist or Trashman and this totally meets with my life plans because of X/Y/Z contrived plan.

Week 3: He has a fault. It’s not a big fault, it’s a fault; everyone has faults! I’m totally not judging!

Week 4: The fault… has spawned. It has morphed into one giant gelatinous blob of fault-ness, and I can’t stand it.

(At the end of week 4 I’d dump him. He was still on week 1.)

Fully aware that I’m in week two at my new job, I’ve been doing my damnedest to be diligently down on the novelty, and… it’s just not working.

I get to *build* things again. My professional experience with C# is very, very little and very, very old, but I’m almost done building a nifty little widget complete with error handling. I’ve reaffirmed my faith in Stack Overflow, my lack of faith in MSDN, and re-verified that “Dummies” books are anything but. Half of my day is spent “managing” (two rock stars in their field, incidentally) and the other half is spent “creating”. There are two good coffee sources (NOT including those directly in-office) nearby, two Subways, and my desk has a view of Mount Rainier.

Don’t get me wrong: we’re a small shop. There’s a lot of cross-functional, “ok-you-don’t-know-it-so-can-you-build-that-into-your-estimate” expectations, a lot of last-minute, “oh by the way”. But… I get to *build* things again.

And… there are no more 5am meetings (or 6am, or 7am, or 8am). My earliest meeting is 9, most people don’t set one past 5. People show up, they work balls out, they go home. A tremendous lot gets done and while the shortcomings of the vendor/system/funding/etc. are all publicly, and explicitly, acknowledged, this somehow does not diminish the drive of the people who are involved.

We are selling kitchen supplies for the devoted chef. We are not saving lives, we are not universally accessible. But we are providing you the very best that you can get, at the very best value you can get it, with the very best, real advice you can get it with. We are trying lots of things, and we are experimenting, and we are innovating. And yes, my first paycheck will likely be contributing to my future Le Creuset collection. The real value, however, is that I get to build things again.

Even if it means I hit Stack Overflow six times a day.

Taking Back Travel

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Sitting on a plane that until recently held a screaming baby (the baby was not jettisoned, the baby stopped screaming) I realized that I no longer will be traveling for work, or not nearly as much, and this is, I think, a good thing.

While I love to travel — specifically to see new things, eat new things, to take pictures of the new things I’m eating so others can see it (tweet tweet) — traveling for work is much different from traveling for pleasure. When you travel for work, your time is NOT your own; your arrival is usually timed for *right before* your first meeting, your departure is usually timed for *right after*. There is no sleeping in, you rarely use that fitness center you wanted to be certain was in the hotel, you frequently discover you packed the wrong shoes. Airports become a game of “who has free wi-fi?” (NB: in Heathrow and Fiumicino you need to pay for it, I recommend the business traveller get a Boingo pass; in Phoenix and SeaTac it’s free) Your fellow passengers, even at their most charming, are merely cogs in the system and a hinderance to getting through the security line, or to the restaurant, or to the gate, or to your seat. You become a connoisseur of airlines for their coffee service, for their in-flight magazine, for their leg room. The trip isn’t fun anymore, in short.

As we drove in our rental car to the airport today (fun fact: Phoenix airport has an offsite car rental facility — 20 minutes’ drive offsite. If you follow the freeway signs, you’ll be treated to the full driving tour of all 4 terminals of PHX before being sent down a variety of roads for 15 minutes to get to where the facility actually *is*, only to get bussed *back* to the terminal), I realized that my son and I had “time” at the airport — time that wasn’t going to be spent playing “catch up on email before 9 hours in flight”, or “see who can get the freshest sandwich out of the vending machine”. I was not flying at an odd time, the restaurants in the terminal were open, we even looked at overpriced souvenirs. (We chose a hot sauce that may or may not have a swear word in the name).

I will miss team dinners in foreign lands where the currency is colored and the food is graciously unhealthy, I will miss someone else paying for my in-flight wi-fi. I will miss the welcoming of my team and the ferrying duties of bringing treats to, and from, “home”. (Tip for Americans traveling to teams abroad: bring Girl Scout Cookies. Just do it.)

I am, however, ready to travel for fun again.

Transition

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Managing transition is either awesome or sucks, there doesn’t seem to be a “transitory” mood to it; either everything buttons up all sweetly or everything runs amok at the last-minute. Or so it seems.

My transition between Expedia and Sur La Table is marred by my boss’ work trip, my personal trip, and a whole host of concern over who takes what work management piece over. Not to fear, the formal plan has been (properly) vetted and communicated, now is the task of actually putting those succinct bullet points in place. For the most part they’re actually aligning nicely, so I’ll deem this transition “awesome”.

I’m very much looking forward to my new position, and a bit sad to leave Expedia, although I really do feel it was time. After nearly nine years, 8 offices, 7 countries, 6 bosses, 5 titles, 4 buildings, and 3 groups (not including a brief reorganization into Finance (?!)), it’s time see new things. And so I go from Passion One (Travel) to Passion Two (Cooking).

When I was 15 I got a job at a Dairy Queen. “Don’t worry,” they said, “after a couple of days you won’t like ice cream or fast food anymore. Everyone loses weight.”  That actually was true for me but more because the walk to and from work was a mile each way, which was certainly good for my food-centric self. I am not, nor have I ever been, known to eschew a Blizzard or a cheeseburger. Going to Sur La Table does not mean I will stop cooking, it will mean I will want to procure more cookware and do more things, and that is an exciting prospect.

Aside from the added incentive to create in the kitchen, though, is the incentive that I will be creating product again — specifically technology product. I’ll be running a small development team, as well as doing some dev myself, and I’m extremely excited at the prospect. I’m quite rusty in parts — although the SQL whiteboard was fun my C# skills are woefully outdated — and so the next few days will be that awkward position of cramming for the “new” job whilst handing off the old.

Transition, indeed.

OW, says the Bobbie

Bobbie2 Comments

I can’t tell if it’s actual full-body disintegration or if it’s old age or if it’s bad karma, but I find myself *back* getting X-rays and *back* on anti-inflammatories. This sucks. I was being so good, and it’s not like I signed up for anything crazy or over-trained. I’ve been lifting weights (lightly, nothing more than about 25/30 pounds) 2-3 times per week, and running 2-3 times per week (nothing more than about 2-3 miles), so I should not be dealing with this.

About a week ago the Male Person and I were commiserating on lower back pain, the kind you get here and there that is annoying and you may put a heating pad (or ice) on it and take an Advil and it goes away. Annoying, but live-able.

As of yesterday I had to use assistance (chairs, tables, handles, etc.) to sit down/get up. I went back to my French Canadian Doctor, because it was time for some punishment anyways. The good news: It’s not sciatic nerve stuff! Bad news: it’s probably more degeneration, but we’ll find out. Eventually.

In the meantime, I have purchased a back brace. There is absolutely nothing at all attractive about a back brace. It’s all white nylon and velcro, and reminds me of oversized superhero belts. Today I could be Monochrome Woman, as my grey tank top and black pants mean the white belt just really makes me look … spiffy (insert eyeroll here). Walking around gingerly means lots of people look at you funny. In this case, my walk is something like that of the cartoonish old man – butt tilted forward, therefore abdomen tilted forward, upper body tilted slightly back to help with balance, and a slow, shuffling gait to get places. Combined with my spiffy back brace, I look a prize idiot.

The fervent hope is that between anti-inflammatories and muscle relaxants (night-time only! no wine! um, yay!) things will calm down enough so I can fly out to vacation (yay! Arizona!) and then come back to do my last three days of work for Expedia.

Because I don’t want to make the post about my new job led-in by all of this whining, and because I will have plenty more time to blog on the plane to/from AZ, I won’t get into that here :). You will just have to wait.

(I hate waiting…)

OK, you can have this much: I’m going to work for Sur La Table, in the Applications Dev Team. I’m very excited, and yes I get a discount, and believe it or not no, that wasn’t the biggest selling point.

Urgent (?) Care

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There comes a time in one’s life where one will find oneself in need of Urgent Care, but one is mindful of one’s health insurance and still has some steam, so one goes not to the ER but to, well, Urgent Care.

This is the predicament I and a friend found ourselves in last night, and went thusly to the Urgent Care clinic that is about 5 minutes from her house.

Now, to my mind, and I realize I’m picky, “urgent” means, “right now, or as close to right now as you can get”, and so I would imagine that all things that happen in an Urgent Care clinic happen “right now”, or at least with the attempt to make it as “right now” as possible. Urgent Care to me denotes moving quickly and with purpose, not frenetically but also not languidly.

In their defense, their doctor was very “right now”. My friend got a room, a bed, and within about five minutes an initial evaluation, some trial meds, etc. The Doctor Was Doing Something, and Doing Something Urgently. Check.

The front desk staff (and indeed, the telephone staff I called in advance) were Not Really Into My Definition of Urgent. As in, “Oh, if you don’t know her date of birth/social security number/mother’s maiden name/location of her baptismal socks” we can’t put you on the list of people we expect to see in the next fifteen minutes.”  As in, “Oh, you need directions to the ER we told you to go to? Here let us go to mapquest and wait, print, um, wait while I answer the phone, now wait some more while I attend to someone else, continue waiting as I pull the pages from the printer and carefully, carefully staple them together, etc. — and wait some more”. As in, after the doctor said to pull up and double-park so they could walk my friend out to the car, “wait a second while I look at you strangely whilst you are double parked, then wave in recognition, but continue to not go and get your friend because I totally forgot we said we were going to do that.”

My recommendation therefore is if you find yourself in need of Urgent Care, sick a friend on the front-desk staff and get yourself in front of the doctor. And then try to have the friend find decent parking in front. You know, so she’s not double parked, like an idiot.