Not Your Daddy’s Mary Poppins

So I’ll get to the reasoning of the title in a minute. But first I must say "howdy-do" and "hola", and explain my absence.

The short explanation is "I’m getting married." The long explanation is "I’m getting married, wrangling my kids through their last quarter of school, making arrangements for the wedding, changing jobs, looking for a house, and generally not having much free time." It continues to be a good busy, and should calm down in about a month. One of the happier times of my life really.

So about the title for this post. Last night was daughter #2’s last band concert of the year. Or ever. She’s wanted to quit band for while because she much prefers choir, but I told her she had to stick it out for the year since I paid actual money for that clarinet. But I digress. It was the last concert of the year, and the closing number was "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious". I think I spelled that right. The song started up, and as my brain is wont to do, a thought immediately came. I leaned over to my other kids and said:

"Super cows and fragile pigs explode and are delicious"

And then I had a couple kids sitting on the floor, falling over in hysterical laughter. Fortunately we were sitting just behind the timpani, so nobody could hear us.

After the concert, in the parking lot, I shared the rest of what had come to mind.

Super cows and fragile pigs explode and are delicious.
If you cook them well enough they’re even good with fishes.
Don’t help in the kitchen and you’ll wind up doing dishes.
Super cows and fragile pigs explode and are delicious.

 

I talked with my bride-to-be later on in the evening and shared it with her. How great is it to find someone who not only thinks it’s funny, but that it’s cool my brain throws these things out?

A Watched Clock Never Boils…Or Something

At least if you’re Salvador Dali anyway. He had all those melting clocks and that entire dream sequence in Hitchcock’s "Spellbound". Yet another example of drug-infused art. But that was last post.

I really enjoy my job. Quite a bit. I get to be creative, have a leadership role, and push boundaries of thought and design in an arena that most people would say "Quit your lying, you lousy liar" if they knew what kind of projects I worked on. Pushing boundaries and being creative are not largely regarded as being synonymous with financial mega-corporations.

But this week, I’ve wished I had a hit or two of whatever Dali was taking (wait…he regularly dropped acid, so scratch that) to help get me through to the end of Friday, when I can head over to my friends’ house and play a Hallochristmagiving-themed game of Mage Knight Dungeons and look forward to Trick-or-Treat with the kids on Saturday.

Before anyone starts strapping in to read me whine and complain about my lousy boss or crummy long hours or how my projects are too demanding, let me stop you right there. It’s none of those things. I love my manager. She’s great. We get along famously. I enjoy my projects. I find them mentally stimulating and I enjoy challenging people’s preconceptions. And I don’t have crummy long hours either. I’m currently a contractor, and if I go over 40 hours I get paid overtime. Ergo, nobody ever wants me to go over 40 hours in a week.

My problem is that this week, I’ve had squat to do. And I’m massively, extremely, painfully bored.

My projects are currently in a temporary state of limbo. My manager, along with most of the rest of our department, has been tied up all week getting a site released polished off. And what work I have had to do, well, I finish up faster than the average bear. And sitting around for the better part of four days makes me antsy. There’s only so much I’m interested in having corporate IT track me reading online during work hours, and the book I’m reading isn’t holding my attention as well as others have. I’m currently working through a book on CSS styling for web sites, and while I am finding it informative, it’s one of the duller technical tomes I’ve read this year.

Yeah, now you’re getting the image. Loves a good zombie flick and reads technical books in his spare time at work. It’s a wonder some intellectual beauty like Diane Keaton in her early 30’s hasn’t snapped me up already. But hey, at least I’m not an accountant.

What I have a hard time understanding is all the people who seem so comfortable with not having anything to do at their job. Wally in the Dilbert comic is their lord and master, except he’s to lazy to lead them and they’d be to lazy to follow even if he did. How can people be so at ease with their sloth? Don’t they worry that, perhaps, someone might find them to be expendable at some point? Don’t they have any ambition? Any drive? Any kind of autonomic nervous system?

And then there are the people who don’t actually have anything to work on, but somehow manage to maintain the illusion of being busy all the time. That’s the one I really don’t get. How is that possible? The one answer I’ve been able to come up with is claiming to have meetings at the other offices downtown all day, then stopping instead at the movie theater for the afternoon.

So what I’ve had to come to grips with is that sometimes the money I’m paid isn’t about having me being constantly productive. Sometimes, just sometimes, it’s going to be about having me around and available to be productive when things are ready for me. But it would still be nice to have something meaningful and interesting to fill the time with.

Of course I’m working. Don’t you see this hammer in my hands?

Have I mentioned before that I love my job? Well, I do. I love my job. My position is referred to alternately as “interaction designer” or “information architect”. What it all means really is that I figure out how to present stuff in computer programs so that it makes sense and connects on a personal level. It’s creative and thought-provoking, and when it’s done at it’s best you look at it and go “well duh, of course that’s how it should be because that makes total sense”.

I can talk about that some other time though, because even from here I can see that the mere mention of something pseudo-intellectual-geeky is putting people to sleep. This isn’t an association journal article after all.

But one of the great things about my job is where I work. It’s a great group of people in a decent company. This week, our entire group is out at a retreat of sorts. Which is cool, except that it’s only the full-time people and not us lowly contractors Which is okay besides being a bit out of touch with whatever new company mindset might come out of it. But what it does mean is that it’s really quiet at the office. Maybe a little too quiet. But at least there are some other people there, and somehow I just concentrate better in the office setting.

Which of course brings me to today, and another upside to where I work. When something happens the requires staying at home for the day, like having a scheduled maintenance appointment at my apartment, then it isn’t a big deal to work from home. So home it was for me today. My home computer rig is better than my office setup, my dog is here, and today so was my four-year-old daughter. How could it be any better? When I had my own business I worked from home all the time with my kids around and it was great. So I was looking forward to it, getting to do my work in the comforts of home while enjoying my daughter’s fun and creative play. (As a quick aside, has anyone else ever thought it’s funny how close “precious” and “precocious” are in terms of spelling, but not necessarily in meaning? Anyway…)

I, however, have lost my laser-sharp focus when it comes to working at home.

Not that I didn’t still do my work. Got a good bit done actually. But creative four-year-olds do have a way of…uh…distracting you. With anything they can think of. I’m not sure how many rounds of “Break the Ice” I actually wound up playing over the course of the day today, but I knew it was time to cut it off we we started playing a new home-rules variant where the object was to slide the blocks of plastic ice down the hammer handle cocked up against the frame for the game. An interesting variant, but it was kind of difficult to tell whether you were winning. Honestly I’m not sure that anybody won, aside from the fact that we were having fun together. But the revised game rules clearly weren’t ready for tournament play.

Tomorrow I’ll be back at the office and will be able to better concentrate, so I’ll get close to finishing this prototype I’m working on. But in the meantime it appears I have a game of Sponge Bog Tic-Tac-Toe waiting for me.

How do you outsource that?!

So there hasn’t been a whole lot of hubbub in the press lately about outsourcing. I used to run my own business and outsourced some work at one point. The word “mistake” springs immediately to mind. When the Indians that you outsource to then turn around and outsource some of their workload to the Indonesians, well…again, the word “mistake” springs immediately to mind.

I’ve gotten out of the business of having my own business though. Now I work for a Fortune 50 company as part of their Internet Marketing group. Yes, that means I work on the web sites. I do not do the programming, though that kind of thing is definitely in my repetoir. Our programming isn’t outsourced where I work, but could be well-defined as being “insourced”. We don’t ship the work out overseas, we just ship the workers in. I’m all good with that. I don’t care who does a job, as long as it’s done right and well. And by someone locally where there’s a modicum of oversight.

But that isn’t what this post is about. What this post is about is an extra-special, something different I’ve noticed with the imported workers. I don’t know if it’s just a cultural difference, or some deeper mass psychosis caused by something bad in the curry. Whatever it is, it is disturbing. For whatever the reason, I have been regularly encountering people talking on their cell phone in — the restroom.

Now, I really don’t know who they’re talking with on their cell phones. I’m assuming it isn’t business since they are speaking in their native tongue. But if it isn’t business, then it must be family or friends. At least that’s what goes through my head as I’m either occupying a stall or urinal and one of these guys walks in, already engaged in conversation, and begins to take care of business. While still engaged in conversation. Like I said, I can’t understand a word they’re saying, but I can definitely tell when the guy in the next stall breaks in the middle of a word, and I’m sure the person he’s talking to, that can understand what he’s saying, can tell even better than I.

If that’s what you do at home, hey, whatever. If your wife / kids / parents / friends don’t mind listening to your private moments, well then they’re just damn weird. But this is all about me, and for crying out loud I don’t want whoever you’ve brought into the bathroom with you to be listening in on whatever I might be doing in there. Can’t say that I’m terribly comfortable with you being in there with me in the first place, and now you’ve just doubled my psychic struggles with the public restroom. Thanks. If I wasn’t such a WASP I’d probably reenact the restroom stall scene from “Austin Powers” just to get the person on the other end to ask you what the heck was going on and hopefully shame you into some tact.

Just in case it hadn’t occurred to you yet, being on the phone means that one hand is occupied. Have you ever tried washing up with only one hand? Do you know how hard and ineffecitve that is? Yeah, well neither do most of these guys using the phone in the restroom, because they don’t even try. So now they have not only shared their “business” with whoever it is they’re talking with, but also their complete lack of hygiene.

Yuck.