Tag: curious monkeys

And by extension…

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I’m tired. It’s mostly a good tired, like the tired you get after a long but positive (either in productivity or just vibes) day. It has the same quality as the soreness you get from working out really hard, not the soreness you get from twisting an ankle or (as time marches on) that appears to show up from nowhere. (My brother and I once had a conversation on “aging” as he is junior and so I try to keep him abreast of what is up next. I told him that after 45, it’s not so much “what’s going to hurt today”, as “what all is going to hurt today, and for how long”.)

I spent my middle and high school years daydreaming, and didn’t quite get my act together until the last year, really. The interesting thing there is that last year was absolutely STACKED with stuff– unlike previous years, I participated in after school activities (to the extent that I could). I took at least one honors class. I had a fully stacked babysitting calendar plus at least one job. I learned to scuba dive. I had a bunch of things piled on in a very short period with very real deadlines and it weirdly felt like the more I piled on the more I could do; if there wasn’t a lot to do then I just kinda fell back and daydreamed and read a lot. (Note to self: if you have or are a person who likes to retreat in fiction books to the possible detriment of their schoolwork, having 2000 books *in the house* by authors like Michener, Asimov, Niven, Heinlein, Herriot, etc. are going to get you more of that behavior). I don’t regret it (much).

This extended into college, coupled with the realization that the major I picked and the reality of the world were two different things. Keep in mind this was before the internet, and before you could access information with a few clicks: the understanding of what a science degree was, what it would actually get you, and what the process actually was to get somewhere, didn’t arrive until I got into UW and realized: no one was going to hand me a bunch of money and a boat to go study sharks. Or at least, not any time soon. That path was going to entail a Master’s Degree, and probably a Doctorate, and I was already not having a good time at school. I was working three jobs (all part time, I wasn’t crazy) but I wasn’t really attending to my schoolwork. I graduated and took the first employment that had a reasonable wage so I could eat and pay rent.

Fast forward some years (okay about 10 years) and I found myself a single parent with a “career”. It just sort of happened – I mean, yes, I went back to school for some stuff and yes I cajoled and pleaded and got job transfers and tried really hard – but I didn’t do anything like the LinkedIn signaling/go do networking type stuff one does today. This was nearly 20 years ago. I just kept reaching out for things that looked interesting enough, and that would pay me.

In that time I’ve continued the pattern of piling on things when it didn’t look like there was “enough”. Before I was a mom there was always a side hustle (in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, you could make some cash if you knew VBA and could get PowerPoint to do things it does easily now, like embed videos; you could also build websites. Most folks of my generation remembers a time when “everybody was a web designer”). After I became a mom there was always something too: PTA, library trips, sports, Boy Scouts, etc. As the offspring grew and became more independent, and I started having more “free” time, I would toss in other things: helping out a local nonprofit, running food drives, taking on extra work from actual work, etc. I felt better when there was lots to do, and a variety of it.

One time I was changing companies and took a week off between the two. This gave me something unusual in and of that I literally had *no job* for that week and so in preparation for that week I made a longish list in One Note of all the things I was going to do that week. But because it was in a list, and I saw the list, the bulk of that list was done before the week ever came. (Don’t fret tho: I replenished the list). That was when I first clued into the fact that *something* was driving me to Do Things and that I couldn’t “just sit still”. I mean, I had had friends point this out before – a meeting in Montreal where I was constantly making lists and bouncing my knee and my friend looked at me and said, “you can’t sit still, can you?” (she said it *really nicely*; it was more of an observation than an accusation) – but it’s different when you realize that it’s *true*.

I have this fantasy of having a “do nothing weekend” – where I do nothing. No housework, no obligations, certainly no work. Every time I block the calendar for this, and I tell the Husband person, and we vow this will happen for real this time; and every time something comes up. Usually because I thought “well it’s just one thing”. I signed up for a knitting class (I finally have the finger dexterity to knit in the round! It only took fifteen years), I go out and deadhead the garden, well and I can’t *not* lift, etc. I get to Sunday and look back at a “do nothing weekend” in which I have indeed done something — usually many somethings — and I am tired. Yet here I sit, looking at my calendar for the week, the month, and the year — thinking “oh I can squeeze in more. I wonder if XYZ needs help? Or maybe I should plan out ABC?”

There is a part of my brain that is constantly looking for things to do and wanting the reassurance of relevance and purpose. It chooses to jam stuff into the “schedule” in a Tetris-like fashion, because it knows that if it does not and if I do not have enough to do, Things Will Not Go Well. I don’t know why it thinks that since it has been thirty years since I’ve neglected my schooling, and I don’t think I’ve dropped too many balls since then; it just thinks “more is better” and piles it in. I think there’s also a quality of “if I fill every day with lots to do of a positive and/or productive nature, I don’t have to think about the really awful things in the world” and I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. Thus far the only negative impact of this approach has been the occasional overextension, and the occasional crash that comes after fixing that. It doesn’t happen often enough to make me stop, apparently. I’m not typically over-extended, just… extended.

DMV Beige

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I want you to imagine a color, a very specific color, that I think most US-based folks would recognize and it may have an international bent (I haven’t been to the motor vehicle licensing offices in other countries). This color is that sad, slightly icky beige color reminiscent of the transitional period of the 70’s to the 80’s where not everything was yet Duran Duran and you still had smokey glass tumblers and “non-smoking” sections in restaurants were new. It’s the kind of beige with no redeeming qualities- it’s not Indiana Jones Adventuring Beige, it’s not Tasteful Coat Beige, it’s not even Mid-Century Modern Influencer Revival Beige. This is that Beige of No Redeeming Attraction that can sometimes still be found on the walls of your local DMV (or other underfunded government office).

Yesterday I was feeling very DMV Beige.

I am *not* very good at discussing strong feelings because feelings are not logical, and they don’t follow a predictive pattern. When they happen, I end up having a “retrospective” to try to figure out why they happened. Nevertheless, I have them, they will surface. Yesterday I found myself talking with some good friends at work about feeling “beige” and… they got it. It resonated. A lot of us are feeling “beige”.

Beige isn’t bad, per se. You wouldn’t pick it on purpose, at least not this irredeemable beige. You’ve heard about “beige flags” and such and this is its cousin: the idea that “everything’s fine” but somehow it could be better and/or worse; it’s this liminal, waiting room feeling.

After noodling on this with a fellow engineering friend, we came upon a hypothesis: this feeling is appropriate and also going to happen a lot more. She and I both have A Lot Going On both personally and professionally, and those Lots Going On tend to be of an urgent and complicated nature. There are often fires, emergencies, or confrontations that have to be had to further the product (or to keep it alive). There are translations, meetings, “per my last email”, and “I think you’ll find that…”. This is not limited to our work lives but also to the complications of personal lives as you get to a certain age and stage (family members passing and estates must be settled, the additional attention your health requires as you advance, etc.). We’ve both been underwater on both fronts for so long that now, as we are bobbing on the surface and we see the rescue boat coming, we’re wondering if there’s a shark somewhere.

If you’re conditioned to be hypervigilant and constantly alert for a problem to solve, and no problem (that you can solve) presents itself, then what remains are the problems that exist and that *you cannot solve*. For an engineer, or any “go-doer”, this is problematic. Maybe it’s because you do not have authority to solve the problem, maybe it’s because you do not have the ability or technological understanding to solve the problem, and/or maybe it’s not necessarily *your* problem at all (but someone else’s), and the bias to action drives one part of your brain whilst the other part of your brain screams at it to stop wasting time and energy because surely, surely a You Problem will come along soon and you’ll need your energy for that.

There is no shortage of problems to be aware of and feel inadequate or unable to solve or even subdue them. Which problems those are and how focused or personal they feel are largely determined by where you live and what 24/7 news hysteria cycle you consume. I say “hysteria” not in a dismissive tone – real news is real news – but the objective McNeil Lehr News Hour/ 60 Minutes that I grew up with is gone and replaced with Alternative Facts and non-neutral phrasing like “crushed” and “slammed” and “outrage” and such. Curating the inbound flow is almost a job in and of itself – I mean yes, you can tweak your algorithms and provide feedback to the “machine”, but the machine doesn’t feed off of you feeling happy or even content.

It feeds off of you feeling sad, angry, outraged, or any number of negative emotions. The very *best* you can hope for, on some days, is that all it wants is to feed off you feeling DMV Beige.

Marketing

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My forte is the fundamentals or “taxes” of doing business: does it work, is it secure, is it documented, can we measure it; that kind of thing. While I *can* be the product manager (the button is red, it says “Happy Birthday” when you press it, 95% of our competitors have similar buttons) it’s not my jam. On the flip side, I am (almost unnervingly) incentivized by theoretical “points” – closing my health rings on Apple Fitness, collecting “bonus stars” at Starbucks, attributing “levels” in various apps. None of these things actually translate to substantive value (you have to accrue a huge amount of Starbucks stars to actually get value from them), but nonetheless I am driven to complete them.

When a marketing endeavor ends up in my email that I think is completely ridiculous, I have to share.

For background: I have, as one is bound to, a collection of low-grade but annoying health issues. Because I have these, LabCorp knows who I am, and I have an “account” with them. The account was created to simplify data consolidation and billing. The account was not created to get marketing emails.

In my inbox today is a cheery email from LabCorp letting me know that we get an extra 24 hours in 2024 (leap year), and then asks me if I’m going to make the most of it. It then proceeds to give me the following “ideas”:

  • try a new fitness class or workout
  • meal prep
  • book an overdue doctor’s apointment
  • order a labcorp on demand health test
  • go for a walk, bike ride, or hike
  • download a meditation or sleep app
  • write out my latest health goals
  • look up a good stretching routine

It then invites me to “shop tests”.

My brain hurts.

Let’s start with the premise that, having an “extra” 24 hours this month, I should use it in wise and healthful ways. I could point out that I can do these any day of the month of any year, and the “extra” ness of this 24 hours is subjective (e.g., Feb 29 lands on a working day). But okay, insofar as we look at suggestions on what to do with “extra” time, and the source of the suggestions being somewhat health related, that’s fine.

Nestled among the “meal prep” and “meditation” it invites me to order an on-demand health test. It does not invite me to check in with my doctor(s) as to what test would be appropriate for me, which ones I may already have covered through them, etc.; no, it wants me to do it. No more “ask your doctor if XYZ is right for you”, I guess.

Curiosity got the better of me and I clicked “Shop Tests”. Would you like to know what is accessible here? I can order a Men’s Health Test for $199, or a Women’s Health Test for $199. I can get a quantitative pregnancy test for $49, or a “Comprehensive Health Test” for $169 (how this differs from the Men’s or Women’s health test is not immediately visible), a testosterone test for $69, a thyroid test for $89, and on and on. Wanna check your magnesium? Your micronutrients? Your colon (why yes there is a “colon cancer home collection test”)? What about if you think you may have menopause, or tuberculosis? Vitamin D, B12, a urine test, it goes on quite a bit. The only information about these tests is the title, the price, and “add to cart”. You can, however, click on the test without adding it to cart, to read up (for that test alone) what it contains. (If you want to compare the Women’s Health Test to the Comprehensive Health Test then be prepared to copy/paste).

This strikes me as an invitation to one of two things: hypochondria or specious complacency. I have a degree in Zoology, not medicine or pharmacology, and I have no business ordering tests and “identifying the results”. I have no context in which to interpret them (short of spelunking WebMD or the Mayo Clinic) and at its extreme I can use a home-based home-interpreted test to either make myself feel better (devoid of actual medical review) or worse. I wonder how much GP’s love this.

And yet, it’s a shiny email, all done up in comforting, reliable blue, with stock photos of people doing healthy things and being healthy people, and don’t I want to do that? It begs me to use my Leap Day wisely. It reassures me it will provide peace of mind. Some bright product manager looked at the range of tests LabCorp supplies, and figures that with its reassuring and proactive “to do” list, its call to action, and a collection of price points ending in 9, that more money was to be had in a healthcare system that already specializes in separating people from their cash. This, at a cost larger than those in socialized medicine countries engender, none the least of which is because they don’t do a bunch of extra tests simply because they can.

I have hit “unsubscribe”, a small victory, for me.

Gap Analysis

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I play a lot of Tetris. Cascading four-block shapes that have to be fit “just so” with one of two goals: either maximize your “points” (in which case your strategy is to build up four lines and then complete them by slotting a final piece in) or maximize the number of rows you exhaust (in which case your strategy is to complete a single line as often as possible). As you play either the cascade speeds up or impediments are put in your way to make it hard to complete rows. (FWIW, Tetris appears to be licensed out to a bunch of different entities and so your version may vary). I will play three or four rounds transitioning between “work brain” and “home brain”, a way to “accomplish” something, much the way finishing a cup of coffee and working out in the morning means I have “accomplished” something and/or doing a load of towels means I have “accomplished” something.

The thing is, as you progress in Tetris the speed and/or impediments do increase and so you rarely get nice, neat complete rows out of the gate (towards either goal). There’s always a gap and you can choose to ignore it (build nice, neat rows above it) or engineer towards it (what do I have to eliminate to get that gap addressed). If you are the type of person who likes everything “just so” you may find yourself using that second strategy and occasionally to your detriment: if you employ the “remove all gaps” strategy, you are giving up on “build up solid rows” strategy.

Of course this is like work.

I am a “Technical Program Manager” – but I expect this is observed and encountered by “Product Managers” and “Software Engineers” and pretty much any other role in which you have to coordinate sixteen things in order to deliver A Thing. Out of sixteen things, four will work perfectly well and four will work moderately well and four will be okay-ish and four will be an abject nightmare of permissions, architecture, personalities and/or randomization. (Your proportions may vary, your encounters will not). You can focus on those last four or you can work around them, but you will rarely, if ever, encounter a program or objective that does not hand you gaps through which you must strategize.

It’s frustrating. It’s also a muscle to build, because the nature of the world we live in now is that things are increasingly more intricate even while we strive to have things like AI and ML make things easier; I would posit that the development of AI and ML solutions have not been easy for those who *build* them. As our careers and technology progress, the blocks start falling faster, and the obstacles increase; and hopefully we get more agile and effective in dealing with them, because they continue.

Or we give up and go do a load of towels.

Ephemeral

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Every morning I open up a book of 3000 Sudoku puzzles and task away at one or more with my morning coffee. Unlike online sudoku, because it’s in a book, there is no feedback system for if I write a wrong number in a wrong slot. This means I can merrily make the wrong decision and go trotting down the 9×9 squares getting *everything wrong*, sometimes for a good chunk of the puzzle (more than 50%), before realizing I made a wrong choice *somewhere* previously and have to erase and start over.

Of course, I don’t have to actually erase and start over. I could strategically walk through every number choice, working painfully through the puzzle and pseudo-marking the *right* choices in an attempt to disambiguate them from an *unproven/wrong* choice, effectively re-working the puzzle but with a lot more noise. OR I can pull out my trusty Pentel Eraser and just axe the whole thing, with the faintest traces left on the page, and start (mostly) fresh.

There are pros and cons to each approach: the painstaking way forces me to find very, very specifically where I chose wrong, but it takes longer and is prone to confusion from previous choices. The quicker way gets me to the overall solution faster but means re-applying numbers that were good in the first place. Either way I’m giving something up: time, or effort.

One way is not “better than” the other, in the sense that sometimes wholesale erasure and restarting is important (in the case of Sudoku, this can be when you are on a fixed timeline and you have to Go Do A Thing shortly and you want the puzzle Done before you Go Do The Thing and you’ll take your lesson later) and sometimes strategic walk through is important (in the case of Sudoku, this can be when you are making the same mistake over and over and need to figure out *why*). (The very worst approach is to start off the painstaking way, decide it’s too hard, and then erase — you’ve wasted time and aren’t getting the benefit of the investment).

What is true in both cases is the problem is ephemeral and can be solved: I just have to choose my method and then stick with it. I’ve already sunk the cost of my initial investment in the puzzle, and if I choose to parse through the individual choices to find *why*, or if I choose to erase and start over, nothing is bringing back that initial time investment.

With Sudoku, I almost always choose the “erase and start fresh” method, for two reasons: I typically don’t have enough time in the morning to re-parse through my choices, and, it’s of dubious benefit if I do: the fact that there are 3,000 *different* Sudoku puzzles in this book alone tells me that parsing through my wrong choice in *this one* will probably not tell me anything useful for the next one, on a per-puzzle basis. Per this article I get about 5.5 billion combinations and that is more than I will ever do in my lifetime (I have roughly 40-45 years left and if I did 5 a day every day for that period I have maybe 82 thousand puzzles left to do). (Hyperbole: I’d have to do about 335k puzzles/day to get them all done before I die. #goals).

But if it’s a *trend* — If I consistently find myself getting it wrong, over and over, it’s less about the puzzle and it’s more about me: am I constantly making assumptions about something? Am I not really paying attention? If it’s important enough to understand why, there are times when picking through the choices are valid: oh, I made an assumption about X number being in N place when I had no data for that. Or, oh, I conflated that number with this number (e.g., looking at the trend of 3’s in the blocks and then misapplying it to a different number/relationship). That won’t help me get through the block sooner but it will help me understand why I’m messing up and that maybe it’s time for coffee or a break.

I work (perhaps unsurprisingly) in engineering, and almost always the faster way of dealing with a problem is to start over. Sometimes you get to carve in some things that you *know* are good — in Sudoku this would be the numbers that are prepopulated for you and maybe your first four moves — and then you go from there. Generally speaking, as long as everyone’s ok with that approach (in any industry you can have things cheaply, quickly, and of good quality: pick two), that is the way to go. “Starting over” is expensive but may be cheaper than “refactoring extant” (the assumption here is that quality is not up for grabs). What you sacrifice is the inability to really hyper specifically target how you got into a specific pickle, which, sometimes you need. Sometimes, though, it’s enough to know you got there… and to work more diligently and specifically to ensure you don’t go back.

Kickoff

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Here we are, on the edge of the annual change over, this time from 2022-2023.

If you are susceptible to these sorts of things — and I am — you’re probably identifying a list of productive, “new me” things to do. With the caveat that 1. everyone considering “new me” should perhaps consider “adjusted me” instead, as it’s far more realistic and 2. these things are better done in small stages rather than the whole shebang, I present the following list of things that are approachable, productive, and can be timeboxed:

  1. Charity Review: This time of year, you get entreaties from ALL of the nonprofits you’ve ever given to. Use it to weed and be thoughtful of your beneficiaries, and also remind yourself for upcoming tax season.
  2. Paperwork Cleanup: Speaking of which, unless you have some peculiar tax scenarios and/or routinely get audited, you can probably axe your 2013 and older returns.
  3. Paperwork Cleanup, Part II: And while you’re at it, consider going through your filing cabinets and recycling (or shredding) any documents no longer useful. For example, we had an Owner’s Manual to a Sears Leaf Blower no one has seen for ten years.
  4. Clothing Cleanup (Extended): Weeding isn’t just for papers – flip the hangers on all your clothes so the bulb of the hook is facing *away* from you in the closet. As you wear something, you can set it with the bulb *towards* you. At the end of the year, anything facing away still, was not worn, and can get weeded.
    • Also, no you aren’t going to wear that sweater that you bought on impulse but was too short/too boxy/too long/too deep/etc. Let someone else wear it, or (if you’re feeling adventurous) refashion it into something you would wear.
    • Sunk Cost Fallacy is a thing.
  5. Email Armament: You also probably have an inbox full of emails from everyone you’ve ever transacted with, telling you about their sales.
    • You can unsubscribe (every one of those mails *should* have a link at bottom to do so) – opting out of “marketing emails” is separate from “not getting receipt emails”.
    • Then (if you’ve got the inclination) set up inbox rules to handle inbound email receipts, newsletters, etc.
  6. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle:
    • Your holiday lights can be recycled at select locations (for example where I live, McClendon’s Hardware lets us do that) – because you and I both know that you of Next Holiday Season is going to be upset with you of This Holiday Season for not getting rid of the lights that have the inexplicable dead zone halfway through the strand.
    • Your unopened toiletries of the scents and types you don’t like anymore but still insist on keeping under the sink can be donated to your local shelters.
    • Your old prescription glasses can be donated at your local Costco Optical.
    • Your local waste service company likely has a listing of where/how to recycle things in your area.
  7. Prepare: Do you plan to have new spending habits in the new year? Or a new approach to food or exercise? If you’re like me and working your way through that box of Lucky Charms just in time to do a sugar detox Jan 1, that’s all good, but:
    • Make sure you’ve downloaded your apps, subscriptions, dusted off the treadmill, etc. *before* Jan 1 — the fewer hitches you have getting started, the more likely you are to get started – and stay started.
    • If you’re fighting habits (Starbucks, McDonalds, Fridge, etc.) you can do things like put strategic sticky notes in places, detach your credit cards from apps, etc. in order to provide a “hitch” to the habits you’re trying to break.
  8. Secure Your Shit. I’m serious.
    • If you have a password manager (NOT Last Pass — BitWarden is good, and there are other good ones) update your passwords. There’ve been a ton of breaches and stuff stays on the dark web for ages. Don’t reuse passwords.
    • If you don’t have a password manager, get one, and then update all your passwords.
    • Get a copy of your credit report while you’re at it:

Obviously, this is not an exhaustive list, I didn’t for example suggest doing an audit of your flatware to determine if you’re off one or more pieces for your full 12-piece place setting (but if you are, you can get individual pieces here). You don’t have to alphabetically organize your spice drawer/cabinet (I recommend instead filing them according to frequency of use). It isn’t actually required to review and reorganize the contents of your sock drawer, or yarn stash, etc. But sometimes little things can help when getting ready to tackle the big things.

The next big thing: 2023.

Doubling Down on Facebook

Bobbie1 Comment

I have struggled with Facebook– as a concept — for the last several months. Much as with my friends, I find the election year did it no favors with howling political rhetoric and drama around every corner. It’s not the Facebook I joined.

Remember when you could “poke” someone? And then at the holidays, you could “send candy canes” or throw sheep at them? Remember when the status updates had your name in them, so instead of saying things like “Today I discovered the best maple bar doughnuts are to be had at Tully’s!” you’d type something like, “is enjoying a maple bar doughnut from Tully’s” because it would show up as “Bobbie is enjoying…” and so forth. But over the years Facebook functionality has changed; I can’t throw sheep anymore and it lets me do things like tag people and “react” to their posts and serves up ads to me (that are, I must say, pretty on the mark).

I appreciate Facebook needs to evolve and some of these evolutions I truly enjoy. I’m Facebook Friends* (that is a new definition of friendship, I think: you wouldn’t go interrupt them at 3am in the airport in Hong Kong, for example, but if you saw them wine tasting you’d wave hi to see if they wanted to be friends in person again) with a few dozen folks I haven’t seen in many years and I *like* seeing how they are doing. There’s the guy I used to work with who quit his day job and went full time DJ (and is making a damn good living out of it and seems to be having the time of his life). There’s the gal who decided to become a photographer, the Canadian who got his US citizenship and goes rock climbing all over the place, the gal who became a florist (and again, nice work!), the guy from the old SLT job who is raising two daughters *right*, the couple moving to Austin because they can get a brand new mid-century modern house and you know they are going to make it look good.  I can check in on my  cousins in Buenos Aires, my friends in London and my friends in Australia. I can check on my friends from high school– curiously I haven’t any from college — and my friends that I see regularly so when I see them, I can say things like “so how *did* the mustard sauce turn out on the pork?”.  Facebook is particularly useful to getting out the word for civic responsibility and nonprofit work, as well, and for word-of-mouth business (that’s how I found out about Silver and Salt, for example).

Perhaps like most people the part I am unsure of — unsure because I am not certain how much of it is my perception or how much of it is Facebook’s reality — is how much of what I am being fed is representative of the “real” world. That is to say, I have the power to mute people (which I admittedly did do during the last 2 months of the election — I’ve since unmuted everyone), I have the power to “react” to ads (don’t show me this because it’s not relevant, don’t show me this because I see it all the time — they really need to have a “don’t show me this because you are tempting me and if  it goes down much further in price you’ll have my visa card”), and I have the power to say “don’t show me so much of this” or “show me more of this”.

There’s been much discussion of the “bubbles” we live in and how Facebook feeds into that, I won’t retread the ground. With all due respect to Mark Zuckerberg, I don’t believe Facebook should be my only news source — something that is/was the case with many and contributes to the aforementioned bubbles. (I don’t believe Reddit should be your only view to the world, either)**. It is evident though that as you choose your circles and selectively mute or “show me more of this” to ads and content you are tweaking the algorithm in the background and reinforcing your bubble. (It isn’t clear to me how to re-set it back to 0, incidentally — remove all of the “customizations” I’ve either explicitly or implicitly requested and see what a “new user” sees).  I therefore have my bubble, reinforced and evolving, and that is just what Facebook is going to be.

My options are thus: I can leave Facebook (directly as in closing my account or indirectly as in just not visiting), I can stay on Facebook passively (the occasional thumbs up, the occasional “Happy Birthday” as it reminds me and I remember to look), or I can actively participate. I’ve been waffling between the latter two and seriously considering the former (I know a few who have cut the cord, as it were).

The problem with divorcing Facebook is that I would no longer have a ready answer to “I wonder what so-and-so is up to?”, and I don’t have contact information (short of LinkedIn) for many of the so-and-so’s. I would miss more birthdays, I am sure. I wouldn’t get the reminder of where things were at five, six, or ten years ago; in short: I wouldn’t get the things I signed on to Facebook for.  I would not at all miss the ads, the requirement to curate the content (“see less of this”), and I would certainly not miss the uproar that echoes through the platform whenever there’s an election. (To be clear: I have political opinions and leanings just like everyone, and I back them with money and action. I am just not a yell at the top of my lungs person.)

I think, therefore, I am going to stick with one of the three options as an experiment: I’m going to carefully work with Facebook. I’ll go and like all of the things I like, and work harder to engage with the platform; I’ll use the tools it provides for privacy and for filtration, and we’ll see.  I will not make it my only source of data for news (social, local, national, or global) and if this experiment fails I’m basically fine with that. I just figured I’d give it an official run.

*see Dunbar’s number for context.

**I much prefer the Economist and then I use Flipboard to subscribe to topics rather than platforms; so for example I’m just as likely to see an article from the Wall Street Journal as I am to see one from Fox News or USA Today.  I’m also a big NPR fan. I blame my dad for that, I can remember riding in the back of a 1981 Volvo 240DL on the way to and from school and listening to NPR, thinking it was the driest, most boring stuff on the planet. Somewhere in my late 20’s that changed and now I’m putting my son through that.

Elephantine

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“You’re like an elephant,” she explained to me. “You walk in to the room or you say something and everyone notices, because it’s very forceful. Not everyone can handle that. You need to learn to change your communication patterns.”

That was real-life advice I got from a real-life professional.

The year was 1996, and I had just moved to San Diego to be with my then-fiance. He was in the Marine Corps, and I was a recent college grad, with a degree that could get me $7/hour at Scripps or $10/hour temping with my typing skills. As the Marine Corps enlisted man gets paid atrociously small (I think it worked out to $5/hour or something because the Corps assumes that until you are married, you live on base with their provided food and housing) it was unfortunately a no-brainer. (There are times when you have those late night “what-if” conversations with yourself, and mine start with “What If” I had gone to Scripps instead and resolved to eat beans and rice every day).

One of the temporary jobs I had was with a company that had a rigorous FTE hiring process: you were welcome as a temp with whatever the agency said you could do, as an FTE you had to go through a Myers Briggs assessment and a 1-hour coaching session to determine your personality type. It wasn’t the first MB I had taken and would not be the last (I’m an ENTJ, in case it wasn’t horribly obvious). From the coaching session the quote above is what I remember the most.

In the spirit of the recent articles on how women couch their conversations differently in the workplace (to their perceived or actual benefit or loss), and in particular of memes like this, I’ve got a couple of things to say.

I do it too. I try hard not to, and I’ve found that when I get on a roll — of not apologizing, or not being “we-centric”, etc., I get a different reaction. For the most part, stuff gets done.  And for the most part, I don’t have any lingering perceived/actual issues with coworkers.  I know however it would come as a shock to some friends and family to learn that I have learned to be hyper-deferential. For the person who had to take a whole Traci Mercer class on the art of saying “No” without *actually* saying “No”, this is a surprise.

Then again, I just had that conversation with my boss: namely, he suggested that everyone should be aware of how they are perceived, and maybe that should be my goal (?) for the year (?).  My boss has 3 female employees, none male. All but four of the 25-person engineering team is male. One of my coworkers and I were in a seven-person meeting the other day and she had been trying, unsuccessfully, to get a word in for about 3 exchanges. I finally had to do the “rude” thing and speak up and say “hey, I believe [A] has something to say… [A]?”

I shouldn’t have to do that.

In the hallway after the meeting, she and I were talking, and she noted that even I as the “brash American” in the group had to try more than once to get the sentence out or the point across. It stung me, because it made me realize that 1. I’m still coming across as brash, but 2. that’s somehow considered a bad things, and 3. whyinhell are we still fighting for a say at the table?

The real kicker is, I would bet you any amount of money you care to that no one else around the table even noticed. And by “I bet they didn’t notice”, I mean all of it: that we were trying to say something, and that I had to get forceful to say it. (Incidentally, yes our point was taken, yes it was considered valid, and yes it shaped the meeting: we were not dismissed.)

I am not entirely sure what my boss was driving at — and I was very conscious that we were ending the meeting in two minutes because he had another one, and I suspect that if I had pressed the conversation would be longer than 2 minutes.  I’m also not entirely sure I want to entertain it any more than as a casual mention of one thing I could pay attention to during the course of the year. For someone newly promoted, with a whole sheaf of new responsibilities, with the volume of work I have and need to help facilitate, I don’t think that my best efforts for shareholders and coworkers and customers alike should be me sitting and worrying about how others perceive me. While I agree that work is not just about what you do but how you do it, there are multiple ways in which to provide feedback to someone, and the only constructive feedback I’ve had in this position to this date is that there was one time a customer got me riled up too easily and it showed internally to the group. (Not externally to the customer). Save that, everything else was positive.

In the light of all of the recent articles this is forcing me to think about it as, “would my boss have said this if I had been a man?” In other words, would my focus for the year have been “how I am perceived” if I had been male and the brashness and posturing that is/does come with that socially were expected? I honestly don’t know (and since we don’t have a male counterpart, will not know).

Right now I am on my day “off”, and I’m working on some metrics and analysis — my “comfort” work, if you will. I like data: it’s clinical, it’s discrete, and it can help frame decisions and actions. I’d much rather live there than this current world of “how am I perceived”. In my mind, though, I’m conflating the two, and thinking about requesting a change to our internal anonymous surveys: to ask everybody if they have ever been TOLD to consider how they are perceived, and to ask them if this actually is forefront in their mind.

I’d bet it would be illuminating.

Pink and Blue

Bobbie2 Comments

I was at a child’s birthday party/dinner last night and we were discussing pedicures. One of the boys was running around with his nails done and I had stated that I had asked my son if he ever wanted to do that (for he was welcome to come with me) to which he assertively said “no”. When I retold the story I included my pointing out to him that they have “plenty of ‘boy’ colors” to which a friend of mine (appropriately) chided me with the question: “What is a ‘boy’ color?”

She and I both knew the actual text of the conversation was my attempt to clarify to my son that if he wanted to have his nails done a color other than pink or red that that was available these days, and that my use of “boy” was to appeal to a child who had already had societally-driven color choices drilled into him; and that her attempt to tease me was the sort of thing friends do. I am sexist in some ways but not that one. That said it did open the wider discussion of gender color stereotypes, which is one reason I like hanging out with the people I hang out with, because we didn’t have to devolve into a contrived political correctness or a stunted conversation about color choice equality.

To provide some background: one friend has a boy and girl each, another has the same, a third has two girls. I have one boy, and elect to dote on girls by proxy. But this conversation, plus a recent review of the Mindware catalog, got me thinking.

It’s no secret that the toy aisles of Target, or Toys R Us, or really any other mainstream store, are segregated into three types: “Gender Neutral” toys, “Boy” toys, and “Girl” toys. The “Girl” toys aisles are helpfully marked by pink signage and include things like dolls, baby dolls, Barbie dolls, domestic dress-up games, and (possibly) Pink Legos. The “Boy” toys aisles are manfully black and blue and red and include Nerf guns, trucks, traditional Legos, new movie-themed Legos, and Legos that look fairly militaristic. In the middle you have card games, balls, and Slip-and-Slides.

Why do my friends’ daughter’s Legos need to be pink? They are defaulted to build houses and ice cream shops, fine: you can build a perfectly serviceable house out of red and blue and yellow Legos, because we all did that when we were growing up. And if they are red or yellow or blue you don’t have to build a house or ice cream shop, you can build a rocket. Or a scale model of the Revolutionary War.

Why does her son’s Medieval Lego kit have only armed soldiers? Anyone who spent time in their History class knows that most of those soldiers were buffeted 10:1 by peasantry, either in terms of someone to go get the grain that fed them to someone who took care of the horses. There’s no queen, no princess, no baker-lady (for gender roles *were* explicit in those times and so Lego would be perfectly correct to have them in a set identifying as that part of history). But no females of any kind can be found in the kit. This very manful Lego kit is full of manly manliness and action. Girls need not apply.

The Star-Wars new Lego minifigures this year at Target have two (2) females out of what looks to be about 50 new minifigures. They are Leia in the gold bikini and Padme in the ripped-midriff shirt. Not Leia in her Cloud City costume, or Padme in her full regalia (Lego has found a way to make capes, they could’ve rocked this). (If you go to lego.wikia.com you can see the full minifigure line-up, and there are plenty of other female Star Wars minifigures. But they’re not on display at the Target.)

Why must Goldieblox, that bastion of gender correction in educational toys, be pink for girls? The whole point to Goldieblox was to get girls interested in engineering, to rail against the pink conformist aisles of toys for girls. Why, then, is it pink? Why are the cookware “play sets” for children almost always manned by a girl? My son loves to cook. But the photos on the box are clearly stating that this is a largely female domain.

While there are darned few pink toys in Mindware, there are far more boys in the pages of toys that are about engineering and far more girls shown next to the beading kits. If we can’t get our arched-brow, intelligent-snowflake-producing toy catalogs to play fair how do we ever hope to rescue our girls from the clutches of Barbie?

From the 20’s to WWII, the color “ownership” between boys and girls was inverted: boys wore pink and girls wore blue. Before that children wore white (which, if you think about it, is practical as long as you have a ton of bleach lying about). After WWII this reversed and we have the color “preferences” we see today. With all the challenges our kids have and will have (underfunded schools, bullying made easier via the internet — and this is not just kids, as adults have been doing that for years) can we please not heap upon them color “correctness”?

When you’re first pregnant the question you are asked is “do you know yet if it’s a boy or a girl?”  Some parents elect to make it a surprise and there’s that moment of “discomfort” for the families because now they “have” to shop for yellow or green baby gear. I honestly don’t think the baby will care if s/he is housed in blue or pink; the larger purpose is the social signaling device for this tiny creature to his/her audience as to what his/her gender is. I’m considering making onesies for babies that say things like “Manly enough to wear pink” and “Girly enough to wear blue” just to poke fun at this.

We live in a country of astounding wealth and opportunity and we have larger problems than the color or gender appropriateness of toys. The only way to shape and change the offerings is to vote with your dollars; it’s effective but it takes more patience than some of us have.

 

Learning As I Go

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I see I’ve forgotten to do hotel reviews, updates, and other things I learned on my recent trip. Mea Culpa! I blame my economics class.

Patro/Matro-nymics as a Dating Tool

Probably the most fun thing I learned on this recent trip is that Icelanders have dating down to a science. I am not kidding.

In Iceland, the child traditionally takes the father’s first name plus the word ‘son’ or ‘daughter’ (dottir) as their surname. This came up recently about the girl named Blaer, and you can read all about that and link off all you want here, but it got me thinking: you could totally tell if a girl has Daddy Issues if she choses her mother’s name for her surname, and/or if a boy has Mommy Issues likewise. It’s like a window into their childhood and you don’t even have to “wink” at them on Match.com.

Also, one of the best people I’ve got on my London job has the surname Thorisson. We did ask if his dad was named Thor, and it’s pretty close — the name means “worshipper of Thor”, and hey, who isn’t?

It is Possible to Over-Assume as to What Wi-Fi Means

This being my fourth trip to Rome (wow, that sounds really pretentious, trust me when I say as much as I love my Rome team and the fabulous food it’s not as glamorous as it sounds) I was told emphatically that I would not be staying at “that sad little hotel next door”. No, this time I got myself a fancy hotel in the old city, the Valadier, and it was very lovely. They serve a nice espresso. They have wi-fi in the room!

That crashed every. fifteen. minutes. I am not exaggerating. And since my midterm exam was available only for 24 hours, of which 8 I hoped to be sleeping, 4 I had to reserve for dinner (European dinners are breathtaking both in quality and stamina), 9 for work, I really needed my wi-fi to work in my room. A panicked conversation with the front desk man assured me that HIS reception on HIS phone was great, therefore don’t worry.

Thanks to the immense resourcefulness of a lovely gal in the Rome office, I had a quiet conference room and busted out my midterm in 90 minutes right before we left for dinner. Not ideal, but, as the company is/was paying for the class I assume they’ll understand. And yes, I got an “A”.

The Best Laid Plans Will Go Awry. Just Plan For It. 

My flight into Rome was late. My flight into London was late. My flight out of London was really, really late. Jet lag hit harder than any other trip I’ve been on. I broke one of the coffee machines. I lost a meeting room. I totally meant to spend time with someone and didn’t realize I hadn’t until I was almost to Seattle. My plan to have extra room in my bag was thwarted by the fact that it’s winter and all of my clothes were heavy sweaters. Pret changed their menu.

This last trip was a constant reminder that whatever you’re counting on, make sure you’re not counting on it. Or something.

The Best Things Happen When You Take Chances

I went for a run on the Friday, my only morning in London where I’d actually be staying in London that night. Following a map saved to my phone (which got no reception, so it wasn’t a moving map but a pic), I ran about 2.5km up a road and around a park, and then trotted back… or so I thought.

I was about a mile in before I realized *nothing* looked familiar. Not a blessed thing. No buildings, no shops, etc. As most of Islington looks charmingly alike this did not engender much confidence, so I walked into the nearest gas station and asked directions to the Angel Building in Islington. No dice. Walked across the street to a shop, same question, same result.

Hm.

Now, I had no service on my phone, so I couldn’t call up Google Maps. I did not think to bring anything with me but my hotel key, so I had no cash or card to grab a cab back to the hotel. I had run a mile in the *wrong* direction, but which *wrong* was debatable. And so…

I ran back from whence I came, back to the park, and then leveraged every tube station map and bus station map I could find around that park to figure out where I had to go. And got back to my room eventually, ridiculously pleased I didn’t have to give up and get a cab with the promise of “and then wait outside the hotel whilst I go get my wallet”.

Other successful chances included: trying a new place to eat (Meat People. It’s very yum), using my static Starbucks iPhone app to purchase a latte while I had no connectivity (totally forgot Sbux has wi-fi even in London!), and, for the first time in more than 3 years, checking my bag on an international flight. Contents arrived safely both ways.

I therefore declare this trip a success not only for the original needs met, but for the additional learning items. My next trip will be much more local but no less adventurous — please send me your ideas for Portland and the Oregon Coast, with a 10-year-old. 🙂