Sunday Night

Open a new page, select a font. When I finally shove it in, the editor will default it to the Chosen Sans Serif, but I do this because there was a time when one couldn’t. The typewriter chose the font, there was no autocorrect, the words had to be chosen, and chosen carefully. Enough miscues and the page would be ripped out dramatically, crumpled into a tiny ball, and cast aside like the drunks on the avenue nearby. Enough frustration and even the typewriter might hit the dungheap, the writer convinced “if only I had an Underhill, if only the clack of the keys, if only the letters lined up on the baseline.”

Now of course, things are different. The window is slightly ajar to let fresh air in, an attempt to mitigate the stifling ironic heat from the radiator still set to its winter setting. A distant siren peals through the night, to the imagination a life in the balance but more likely a craving for Chinese take-out. Somewhere there are lighthearted conversations, probably a hundred feet from where Uncle Joe Wills is beating his wife for the twentieth time, and there are deals being done on the stoop while inside the grandmother explains to the young how it was that Jesus wasn’t there when they rolled the rock away. The rain falls gently, not punishing, but encouraging the new, and a young woman looks forward to Monday because she’s finally got a job while a young man worries because it’s the first of April and he only had rent money through March.

The pulse of the city slows, but it never stops. The drunks fall down and the tradesmen haul it in at ten because the clock starts at seven. Most of us roll through the middle, hoping for the best but expecting the worst; we select our fonts but take what we’re given. Because the truth, though subjective, is unforgiving. It is what it is and there’s no point lying about it.

So I suggest to you that you do what you have to do. Light that cigarette and draw it into your lungs like a lover, tip that collar up against the wind, squint against tomorrow’s sun and swear that this time it’ll be different. Tolerate the wretches and the stabbing ignorance, find your place and elbow your way. Believe there’s something better when there’s only something different, and above all if you find someone who believes in you be worthy of their belief.

 

 

 

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Spring is Here

If ever there was a time for things to be looking up, spring is it.

Of course, with climate change, it could just as easily snow tomorrow. Bulbs are sending their shoots up, like worried mothers shoving their kindergarteners. Joggers are beginning to emerge, pasty and flabby and shivering. I’ve restarted my bicycle commute across Manhattan, twenty-six miles a day. I still have to wear gloves, but as usual my biggest worry is that people in New York City apparently never learn to drive. Or walk.

Prospects bloom, too, and romance, and kind thoughts for others. How far back does this tendency go, this tendency to protect your hoard in winter and then let the sunshine drag it out of you a few months later? Your money, your time, your heart. Your sense of well-being, of security, of hope.

Things can die in spring, but you hope they die happy. And the other shoe can surely drop when you least expect it. Sometimes I get so used to that other shoe dropping on me that I just feel grateful if it hasn’t recently stepped in shit.

A Sense of Worth

I’ve lately been trying to recollect just when it was that I started drinking myself to death. If I’d truly made an ambition out of it, I figure the starting point would be memorable;  but then, I’d probably have been successful by now and it would be the end point that was more relevant and timely.

No, this was more of a sneak-up kind of a thing. And the tee-totaller’s line is nonsense and hypocrisy. Everybody’s got something, and this one is mine, and there’s nothing wrong with it until there is. When there is, you get a funny feeling that somebody somewhere pulled a trick on you, like a junk dealer telling you “the first taste is free”. I’ve only tricked myself. I get plenty of costly tastes for free, I suppose.

Now I feel like a child who’s convinced that if he just turns fast enough, he’ll catch his shadow doing something different. Nope. It’s all me, though some days the fog is heavy enough the shadow isn’t there. Or maybe I’m the shadow now, and it’s my sense of worth that’s gone missing. At night it doesn’t matter much anyway.

When did I need that drink? When did I declare it the best necessary accessory? Builder of confidence, diffuser of pain; lubricator of creativity, gatekeeper to God. Can a man complain when his partner has fulfilled every duty asked? Probably not. I’ll grin with the stoics, get through my day, and look forward to that fourth glass when things start looking up, or at least, start looking different.

Moral Relativism

I commented on a blog post yesterday and the author responded to me with:

“Thanks for exposing your moral relativism.”

For the purpose of this post, it’s not really important what that post was about; based on a quick perusal of other writing by the same author, however, I feel safe in assigning a pejorative tone to the remark.

This surprised me, and I couldn’t really put my finger on why, so I did what any thoughtful person might do: I questioned my assumptions and did a little research. It turns out that like most pure philosophical discussions, splitting hairs over what moral relativism actually is gets boring in a hurry. I’ve been slogging my way through Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy for two or three years now and believe you me, philosophy in the abstract is some semantic, boring shit.

A hat tip is in order to Dr. Robert Noggle, whose analysis of Moral Relativism is near the top of the Google results, but here’s a link anyway:

http://www.chsbs.cmich.edu/Robert_Noggle/phl-118/moral%20relativism.htm

Dr. Noggle is (or was) an Assistant Professor of Philosophy, so I’m going to believe him when he says that moral relativism is “the claim that every society’s (or every individual’s) moral beliefs ARE TRUE.  Everyone agrees that moral beliefs differ.  What moral relativism says is that all of these differing moral beliefs ARE TRUE.”

Now this is clearly poppycock, and if Dr. Noggle is correct, a moral relativist is a pretty confused person. Beliefs are subjective; truth is objective and otherwise known as fact. You have many factual (verified) beliefs, but unverified beliefs cannot be truth. I don’t have two hands because I believe I have two hands, I just have two hands. You may believe I have only one hand, since you’ve never met me and it is entirely possible that I am an amputee. But your belief is unverified and also incorrect. We cannot both be right.

So there’s one way the snarky reply surprised me, because I was trying to point out that two people could use the same prejudices to achieve very different results. That’s only half of the story, though.

I don’t think the author/snarker assigned the Noggle definition to “moral relativism”. Again, based on other writings, I think the meaning was more along the lines of

“You don’t believe in moral absolutes; you believe in adjusting morals relative to context (and are therefore a bad/idiotic/mean/satanic/etc. person worthy of only disgust.)

And here’s the rub: I agree with that statement (not including the parenthetical.) I don’t see a problem at all. In fact, I submit that someone who applies moral reasoning to questions is a more highly-developed human consciousness than someone who relies on moral absolutes. Dr. Noggle again:

“To do this is to accept that your own moral opinions might be wrong, and it is also to accept that some answers to moral questions might be better than others.  There may even be correct and incorrect answers to moral questions.”

The last bit is a little hard for me to swallow… again, “correct and incorrect” imply fact and truth and mathematics and certainty and such.

Morals, after all, focus on what we should do, which is different than truth. Oscar Pistorius killed his girlfriend with a gun; that is a fact which even he does not dispute. His girlfriend is verifiably dead, also a fact. We come very close to assigning truth when we say “he should not have done that”, but morality changes into judgment when it’s in the past tense, right? So Oscar’s argument is “I thought there was an intruder and I thought I should kill him, because it was morally right to do so.” And we can argue about that moral position a lot, because it is not a fact, it is an opinion.

But back to moral absolutism versus moral reasoning. It seems to me that moral absolutists are way more scary than moral reasoners. The Taliban, Al-Qaida, and Westboro Baptist Church are all pretty convinced of the absolute correctness of their morals, and they range from obnoxious to deadly in their levels of asshattery.

Moral reasoners realize that there is sometimes a choice of only bad options, and they make choices based on the expected outcomes of their action. Sometimes their experience will lead them to a choice which others believe is bad, but people rarely act outside of their interests and the moral reasoner will usually believe they’ve made the best choice possible. I’m thinking here of the woman who gets an abortion, or the court that hands down a death penalty, or the president who sends people to war.

Most moral absolutists I have met have been young, and children make the best moral absolutists of all. Maybe that’s the basis for my opinion that moral reasoners have more evolved thinking… but hey, I could be wrong.

Stripped

The pressure on my left biceps, originally a snug embrace, was beginning to feel like a vise. The pressure might be bursting small blood vessels by now. The pressure was commanding my full attention. The answers came without real effort.

No. No. Yes. No. No. No.

I wondered if the old relaxation technique for public speaking would help. “If you get nervous up there,” the wise sage always imparts with a smile, “just imagine your audience is naked.” This would seem to be trading nervous for horrified in most cases, but I decided to give it a shot.

She sat behind a table of aluminum legs and fake wood veneer, surrounded by electronics, but I could still see her ankles. They were good ankles, I suppose, once you mentally strip away the stockings, not those fat tree trunks you sometimes see being pinched off by a pair of black pumps. And casting aside the pumps, I imagined, would yield some feet, probably with five toes. Would they be painted? Before she came to this job today, did she spend a few minutes spreading a lovely Cerulean Blue? Or did she only do that on weekends, and by now the chips in the facade were exposing the fungus?

The pressure in my arm subsided. She came around the desk and sat in the chair opposite me. “Well, that went fine,” she beamed. “You’ll be happy to know you’re a terrible liar!” Nothing made me happier, I confessed. “So, in the next section I’m going to ask you a few more questions, and it’s super important for you to answer truthfully, so we can get you out of here, okay?”

Fine.

As she previewed the questions, so as to put maximum doubt and paranoia in my mind, I let my gaze rest on her throat, as if I was thinking carefully. I imagined unbuttoning her starched white blouse, peeling back her plain white bra. Did she work out? Was she on that elliptical every day, getting the upper body workout while getting her cardio up? Would her shoulders be rounded yet delicate, her collarbones well-defined, her breasts trim and tight to the muscles underneath? The pressure in my arm built to a painful level as a gentle whirring inflated the blood pressure cuff. If dissected, would a doctor look at her corpse and say ‘tis a pity she’s gone so soon?

No. No. No. No. Ha ha, no. No.

She smiled again from behind the desk and said she’d be right back. I glanced at the back of her skirt as she walked out. She needed some static guard, and her ass was flat.

Left alone, I glanced around the room. White, of course, though it might have been a very pale green, I suppose, if the designer had read up on the effect of color on the subconscious. There was a window with one-way glass, and a couple of video cameras in the corners of the ceiling, not even hiding. The machines on the desk had cables and tubes which ran to the chair I was sitting in, and became wires attached to my skin and the damn blood pressure cuff around my left arm, which had been left inflated this time even though the test was not running. I could feel my pulse slamming against my bones. A cheaply framed poster on the wall featured a kitten hanging from a rainbow of balloons. Its caption spooged with uplifted eyebrows: “What Is The Color Of Happiness?”

The door opened behind me. A new voice was followed by a man in his thirties making a vain attempt to cover up male-pattern baldness. He introduced himself as Phil, and told me he was having a few problems with my answers. I stripped him just as he was, half-sitting casually on the edge of the table, his chest starting to droop on the sides, his once-chiseled abdominal obliques sagging into rolls of fat. He would protest that was just the result of his posture, but when he stood up, at least one of those love handles would remain. Keep fighting it, Phil. You the man.

He didn’t take the chair, happy instead to continue the Just Us Guys routine. “We’re getting some bad results around the major crimes questions.” You’re a liar, a terrible liar. “Sherry is kind of new at this, whereas I’ve been doing this a long, long time, and I can see what’s what. Why don’t we chat a little bit and see what the problem is, so we can get you out of here?” Just us guys. You can tell me anything. After all, I’m Phil, I’ve been doing this a long, long time.

We chatted.

After a few questions, I complained about the pain in my arm, and Phil pretended shock and embarrassment that the cuff had been left inflated by mistake. Sherry, after all, was new. He offered to switch it to my forearm, if that would make me more comfortable. He adjusted the wires glued to my chest. He practically combed my hair for me, and I could smell the cologne on him. I imagined him standing in front of the mirror, wondering if he had too much body hair, craning a look over his right shoulder to analyze his back: did he still have the V-taper from college? No, that disappeared around twenty-three, you fuck, along with your thirty-inch waist.

Yes, I know what a major crime is. Rape, murder, assault, armed robbery. Felonies, misdemeanors, I know the difference. Yes, I know that’s what you’re going to ask me. The fuck you mean, is there anything I feel especially guilty about? The whirring, the cuff inflating, the smug repeat of the questions from behind the desk.

No. No. No. No. No. No.

Just as my fingers were going numb, the cuff deflated and Phil came around the desk again, this time sitting in the chair with a sigh. “We just aren’t making progress here,” he said. “I know you haven’t committed any major crimes, right? So you must just feel really guilty about something that seems criminal to you. Anything like that come to mind?”

Reluctantly, I told him about that time I stole a candy bar. It had always bothered me, ever since I was six. Not a crime, he said, jubilantly! That’s something everyone does! I told him about babysitting when I was fourteen, how I had gotten mad at my young charge and shaken her a bit roughly. Hey, everyone explores their sexuality when they’re that age, man. Just us guys. I gave him my best stare, imagining the knife plunging into his neck, over and over. “It wasn’t like that.” Hey, my mistake, we’re all friends here, I just want to get you out of here. I spilled more bullshit. He said we were ready to try again, and moved behind the desk. The cuff inflated.

But then he paused, and came back to the chair in front of me.

“You know, sometimes there are things we figure are pretty personal, you know? Maybe we don’t want to mention,” he said softly. “I remember one time I was testing a girl, had these same problems as you; turned out she’d…” and he paused for maximum effect… “had an abortion.”

Seriously? Oh, how tragic. You prick.

He looked almost forlorn, and I imagined his genitalia shrinking, shriveling, disappearing under a distended middle-aged belly. I saw the tiny gold cross around his neck, and I saw his righteous need. I tried not to do anything melodramatic, but my eyes might have gone glassy.

“My God,” I whispered. “That’s incredible. I have fathered two children, and… we decided… not to have them. I’ve tried not to think about it; it was so long ago.”

“With your wife?”

“One of them, yes. The other was… while I was married… but…” and I trailed off.

“I see,” he judged. “But, hey, look: that’s not a major crime. You might feel guilty about it, and you might face judgment someday, but not from us. It’s legal. You have to put that out of your head. It’s not a major crime.”

“Right,” I shuddered. “Okay, give me a minute, and then I’m ready.” I imagined him naked, in the snow, freezing to death. I chuckled a little. “It’s funny; you now know more about me than anyone I’ve ever met. Strange sensation.”

He smiled. “That’s the way we like it.” I realized the cuff had been inflated the whole time, and I couldn’t feel my fingers. “Have you ever committed a major crime?” he asked.

“No.”

And then the sensors were removed, and he took a sheaf of paper out of the room. I waited and contemplated the kitten and the rainbow. The door opened, and Phil waved me into the hall.

“Congratulations,” he said, pumping my hand. “You’ve established a bridge of trust with the U.S. Government.”

I had succeeded.

Basic Management: What We Do

On a fundamental level, what managers do is pretty simple:

• Ask what needs to be done.
• Plan a course of action.
• Find resources to accomplish that plan.
• Direct implementation of the plan.
• Evaluate the results.
• Learn.

And yet, despite this simplicity, there is a cottage industry of management books designed to demystify the process. If it’s really so easy, why do we need all of this advice? And we’ve all worked for craptastic managers (and those of us with a modicum of self-awareness will admit we’ve BEEN craptastic managers)… did they just not read the right books?

The answer is that management is a relatively recent field of study, unlike manufacturing or agriculture or even marketing, and though superior American management techniques did a lot to win World War Two and the Cold War, there is still a lot of room for subjectivity. There are many different ways to accomplish each of the bullet points above, and plenty of systems and subsets to consider. A big part of “find the resources” is finding the right people for a plan, and once personalities are involved, you have to be a leader in addition to a manager… an entirely different Twinkie.

The farther up the management chain you go, the more abstract things seem to get. Get far enough into the ether, and your language starts to transmogrify and next thing you know, you’re talking about synergy, the dominant paradigm, equalizing complexities for the benefit of the enterprise, and establishing positives for stakeholders to maximize their vision. Congratulations, you’ve summited Mount Craptastic.

Maybe until you get there, however, it’s better to focus on these six steps:

1) Ask what needs to be done.

The question might be directed at your supervisor, but often it’s directed inward. What’s best for the company, the mission, the overall goal? Sometimes it might be something you actually want to work on, but many times what you want isn’t what really needs to happen. Developing a personnel policy to deal with subtle, growing harassment issues isn’t exactly as fun as planning the holiday party, but it will probably be more effective at improving morale. You have to consider time ranges (short- medium- and long-term) and stakeholders (your boss, the company, the shareholders, your co-workers, your subordinates, the customers, etc.) when deciding what needs to be done.

2) Plan a course of action.

Leadership involves developing a vision, motivating people, and taking risks. Managers can be Leaders, but should not lose sight of their primary task. Management is about organizing and solving problems. So once you’ve determined what needs to be done, you must figure out the best way to accomplish that goal. My earlier post about “Fast, Good, Cheap” comes into play here, as does consensus among stakeholders. You can develop a genius plan, but if you don’t have the ideal resources for it, the plan will need finesse and plenty of input. Your goal in developing a course of action- definite steps to accomplish the objective- should be to create something that everyone agrees with or at least supports, is within your means, and can happen on time. So planning isn’t just you behind your desk being a genius. It’s working your relationships, asking for resources and key information, and being as clear and definite as possible.

One of my favorite steps in a course of action is something like “develop new revenue streams”. It appears like this:

1) Introduce concept at staff meeting and gather feedback.
2) Assign a subcommittee to study minimum financial requirements.
3) Develop new revenue streams.
4) Design department creates a model.
5) Model introduced at general meeting.
6) Department heads hold separate meetings to discuss with staff.

I refer to step 3 as “magic happens”. Sure, you can’t be crazy specific about every step, but “develop new revenue streams” is a GOAL, something which requires a course of action all its own. You can’t just go to the store and say “I’d like a revenue stream, please.” Try to make the steps of your plan actionable.

3) Find resources to accomplish the plan.

Most of the time, your resources are people, materials, time, and money. A lot of people will tell you systems, tools, structure, political will, and any number of other buzzwords are resources, but I have found it usually boils down to The Big Four. Further, if you have all the right people, all the perfect materials, as much time as you want, and unlimited funds… you are currently dreaming and should wake up. You should ask for a raise. You should watch out, because someone is looking to steal your resources.

Again, Fast-Good-Cheap. Finding resources means achieving that balance by negotiating with people. If you’ve planned correctly, by involving as many key stakeholders as possible, resources will be easier to come by because everyone wants the plan to succeed. But you, and they, have to be willing to go back a step and change the course of action if the resources just aren’t there, for instance, if you’ve planned to build it out of aluminum but prices have skyrocketed recently.

Good managers get creative with resources, and with negotiations. In response to a deadline I felt was nearly impossible, I didn’t say no, but I asked for extra staffing; specifically, three top welders at work on other people’s pet projects. And extra shop space. And extra money to get a rush delivery on the materials. This focused the mind of the person setting the deadline, and I got an extra ten days.

4) Direct implementation of the plan.

A manager’s leadership skills really come into play once the plan is in place and the resources have been secured. Setting aside motivation, delegation, and conflict resolution for now, the real management side of implementation is directing resources and communicating. You can’t and shouldn’t rely on everyone to see the big picture, because their focus should be on the task right in front of them. It’s up to you to anticipate needs and get the right people on the right job with the right stuff. It takes practice, but the more you can anticipate a given need, the smoother your plan will be implemented.

The larger the plan, the less likely it is to be implemented without some adjustment. The best managers realize this and don’t freak out about it. I am not among them, but I’m working on it. What was wrong with my plan? Why didn’t I anticipate that polar bear? WHY AM I SUCH A BAD MOTIVATOR!?!?!

Communication is a key to getting it done. Not just communicating as direction, but in updating stakeholders as well. If you are in the middle of implementing your plan and things are going so badly you need to change the overall goal, then you are probably in trouble. But if it looks like you’ll be done Thursday instead of Tuesday, sometimes going back to the Time Lord and advising her will clarify the plan. Maybe it will turn out Thursday is fine… or maybe you need to assign more people because the Secretary is coming Wednesday and it’s her welcome party we’re talking about.

5) Evaluate the results.

Two things that managers do which are big mistakes: their plan goes to hell and they immediately jump to Evaluate before the plan is even finished, or they successfully implement their plan, give everyone a high-five, and start the next project, skipping Evaluate.

In the first case, freaking out (as I mentioned in Step 4) doesn’t help you get it done. An even worse scenario is someone who sees that failure is imminent and begins blaming, sacrificing, sabotaging, or otherwise positioning themselves to not take a hit. This is known as Cover Your Ass, but it’s really the result of premature Evaluation. After all, if everyone is on task, the failure should be a complete surprise, if it happens at all.

And if you’ve never been the victim of a manager or co-worker sacrificing you, you haven’t been around long enough. It happened to me when I was 19, and the source was someone I least expected.

So once the goal is completed, carve out a little time to Evaluate. What went right, or wrong? Could various surprises have been anticipated? Write an after-action report, even if just for yourself. I like to include topics like:

• I wish I’d had…
• I’m glad I had…
• Who was there
• How much time was spent
• Unforeseeable (random) complications
• Better practices
• Unnecessary practices

Just touching on unnecessary practices… this is essentially Opportunity Cost. If your structural materials were methodically wrapped in bubble wrap, padding, and wooden crates to protect their finishes, that’s what I mean. The shop could have not spent that packaging time, the materials cost could have been saved, and both the time and money could have been directed elsewhere.

It’s important to look not just at symptoms, but at root causes as well. This is where leadership plays a role. Evaluation isn’t blame, it’s evaluation. Blame is narrow and personal, evaluation is professional. You can blame Melissa for not bringing a forklift to the party, but if you evaluate how the need for a forklift was missed, you might find out the money for it was wasted elsewhere, or the shop underestimated the weight and no one thought a forklift was needed. Of course, if Melissa was told to order a forklift and forgot, you can blame her. But maybe you want to follow up and find out why she blew it.

6) Learn.

Sometimes learning is just reinforcing what went right, other times it’s fine-tuning practices to get just a little more productivity or profit. In more severe circumstances, the lesson could be “we should never emphasize Cheap so much again.”

In every case, learning what should have been done isn’t enough. Try to extrapolate:

“Next time, remind Melissa to order a forklift.” That’s a shallow lesson.

“For things like forklifts, a second person should be assigned to verify the order”. That’s good stuff.

“During the planning phase, identify components that are mission-critical and impossible to improvise. Assign appropriate redundancies (verification of orders, backups) and make sure everyone is aware of which components are mission-critical.” Okay, gold star.

A really slick manager doesn’t just learn from his or her own projects. Network, ask around, be candid about your failures and humbly excited by surprise successes. Note, just saying “I planned that, it succeeded, I’m awesome!” is tedious. But “hey, we ran out of Razoncrantz flibjibs and had to use coconuts and hammers instead… and it actually worked better at half the cost!” is a winner.

One final thought:

Try to read as much as possible and always with an eye toward evaluating and learning. When things make the news, try to see the planning involved. Don’t accept statements like “it’s a tragedy that man was pushed onto the subway tracks and killed” at face value. If you’ve been to London, or any airport with a train, you may have noticed the stations with glass sliding doors which only open when the train is in the station. It’s unfortunate that a man was killed in New York City last week, but the technology exists to have prevented it. Somewhere along the line, a cost/benefit decision was made that balanced that technology against the 150 or so people hit on the tracks (and 50 deaths) annually.

The Epic Power of 1977

I don’t always work in an office, but when I do, I like to end my day with a little websurfing; perhaps read a few blogs, perhaps watch some Jon Stewart. You know, that stuff that people who do work in offices all day do, well, all day.

After a few clicks yesterday afternoon, I came very satisfactorily upon this video from 1977. I apologize in advance if there’s an ad attached to the front; it’s the scourge of the First World, isn’t it?  But if you wait it out, you’ll be rewarded, as I was, by the epic glory of Styx. Specifically, the opening piano and vocal solo of Come Sail Away.

I won’t get into the nostalgic whining about “they don’t make music like this anymore” et cetera. But I ask you: can you even imagine this tune being covered by Justin Bieber or One Direction? To quote John Boehner, Hell No You Can’t.

So I’m about a minute in, and one of my young charges comes by with a problem. “We can’t get the sound system to work down the hall,” he says. “Can you come help us?”

Well, it is my job. Pause. Sigh.

We’re walking along and he expands his thesis. “It worked fine last week, but now we can’t get it to work. I don’t understand.”

“Well,” I intoned soberly, “I was just listening to an epic 70s power ballad in my office. Sometimes the awesomeness of 1977 just pulls all the electrons and life force into a vortex of cool and nearby common appliances just shut down. We may have to reset a few breakers.”

Pause.

“Sure,” he said, still needing my help. “I can see how that could happen.”

“You’re just lucky I wasn’t playing Foreigner or Journey,” I continued. “This whole wing of the building might have collapsed.”

He was born in 1990, poor bastard.