How long does it take to travel 900 miles?
Could you answer that question? Maybe you’d say a day? A couple hours? Three months?
The answer depends on your mode of transportation, of course, but it also depends on your time frame. Last weekend, I made the trip from Pleasant Grove, UT to Maple Valley, WA. To save you getting a map, I’ll tell you I started about 40 miles Sourth of Salt Lake City and ended about 25 miles East of Seattle. The trip is about 900 miles one way.
My lovely wife had a death in the family and the funeral was in Lacey, WA. We packed the van full of kids and set out at 6:23AM on Friday morning. (Yes, we DID want to get started at 6:00AM. No, our children were not ready to go when we told them to be.) We drove straight through, just making stops for gas and bathroom breaks. We arrived at about 6:30PM, thirteen hours later. That’s an average speed of 70 MPH. Big stretches of Utah and Idaho have a posted speed limit of 80 MPH.
Yesterday, we came back along the same route and made about the same time.
It was a miracle.
You probably don’t see it that way. We have a very nice Chevey Express 3500 van. The weather was perfect. The drive was in all ways uneventful.
And it was still a miracle.
Portions of our trip follow the old Oregon Trail. You’ll see the historical markers posted on the side of the freeway; a reminder that not only have many people gone before, but people have been following this route for centuries. And that’s where the miracle comes in.
During a 13 hour drive, you have lots of time to think. The kids were watching movies, but I couldn’t really hear them that well in the front seat. I thought about those early pioneers. A covered wagon made between 10-15 miles per day. At times crossing the plains in inclement weather, a wagon train might camp within sight of the previous days camp.
Suppose you could travel in time rather than in space? Suppose you were riding along the front seat of a wagon drawn by a team of oxen, or mules and you tried to explain to the farmer whose wagon you are sharing, just what the future will hold.
You know, some day, this whole route is going to be a nice paved road.
Uh huh.
And the people will travel in vehicles without horses, or mules, or oxen pulling them.
Oh?
And they will travel farther in an hour than you will travel in a week.
Get off my wagon!
It sounds crazy. Or it would, to someone who was familiar with the speed and capabilities of beasts of burden. If they believed you at all, they might think it was a miracle. Tell a man who can get his family 15 miles on a good day that people just like him will be moving their families 1000 miles in a day? They would think it was divine intervention.
Yeah, we sure are more advanced than those poor people sitting on that wagon seat under the hot sun plodding along at ten miles per day.
And then, for just a brief moment, I travelled the other direction in time. I imagined a future messenger sitting in the passenger seat of my van as we sped down the road at 80 MPH.
You know eventually, this entire route is going to be dramatically different.
Uh huh.
People will travel without the need of a vehicle.
Oh?
And they will travel further in five minutes than you’ll travel all day.
Get out of my van!
It would be a miracle.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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It sounded too strange to be true. A study in Oklahoma said that 4 out of 5 kids, 80% of the kids aged 6-12 know how to read an analog clock. In case you are one of those 80% or just a little rusty on clock terminology, an analog clock is one with a face. It’s round. It has those numbers around the edge. Interestingly, it’s where we get the term “clockwise,” meaning that if the clock were in front of you, if you start at the top and travel toward the right side. Counter-clockwise means you start at the top and travel to the left.
Clocks are where we get the term “half an hour.” An hour is when the large hand goes all the way around the clock face. A half hour means it only travels “halfway.” Unlike a digital clock that shows a “:30” for the half hour, an analog clock will have the big hand pointing at the number 6.
Is this really a thing? Are there really people who cannot read these? Are there people who read the first two paragraphs of this story and went, “Wow, I never knew that!”? Because, I’ll tell you, it feels pretty silly to be explaining how a clock works. Oh sure, of course I know how to read an analog clock. I’m old. But, it’s not just because I’m old that I know. I have a thing for clocks. It’s not anything weird, or obsessive, it’s just that I own a lot of analog clocks.
At work, I have three clocks above my desk. One is set for Mountain Time, (the time zone I’m in.) One is set for Eastern Time, (the time zone two of my call centers are in.) And one is set for Central Time, (the time zone one of my other centers and my client are in.) Of course, the clocks are each an hour apart.
I got the clocks because sometimes I’m on a call with one call center and they’ll say, “The problem started about 45 minutes ago.” It’s much easier to simply look at their clock and “wind back” the minute hand 3/4 of a turn than it is to do the math in my head. “Okay, they are two hours behind, and then add back 45 minutes. . no, that’s not right, take the 45 minutes off in addition to two hours?”
I like clocks. I have those three at my office. I have another three at my second office.
Then, I have three at my home office. The office clocks are about $5 at WalMart. The Mountain Time Zone clock in my home office is custom made.
My daughter made it for me for Christmas one year.
The problem with all of these clocks is daylight savings time. I have to reset these 9 clocks, plus the car, the microwave, my bedside clock, and my pocketwatch. (Yeah, it’s another analog clock. Maybe it is an obsessive thing.)
Daylight savings time kicked in last weekend. I’m almost done resetting my clocks. I have one more clock in my office.
It’s unique in that it runs counter-clockwise. Last year I never did get around to changing the time. Fortunately, this year it was already done.
We have other analog clocks around our house. My kids have been exposed to them since they were little and I’m pretty sure they can all read an analog clock. Telling time with that counterclockwise one might be tricky.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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I admit it. I’m going through withdrawls.
I’m not supposed to be working today. Correction, I’m NOT working today. But, I can’t help myself.
The system I support is very complex. It involves thousands of workstations, hundreds of circuits, dozens of servers, and stretches across six states and 3 times zones. And I designed it. I don’t mean that I created the network routes, or the firewall rules, or the GSPs (I’m not even entirely sure what a GSP is, but I think it protects our workstations.) But, I oversaw the creation of it. And it works really, REALLY well. In a typical month, my systems are down less than 0.5% of the time. I know that because 0.5% is where we start having to pay outage penalties and I hate paying penalties.
I built it from the time we had 50 workstations in a single location. I’ve watched it grow up. It’s my baby.
I have 7 kids at home. As my signature says, I have 13 kids total. I raised most of them from the time they were babies. I watched them grown up. At some point I was happy to see them leave home. Some are married. Some are in college. Some have kids of their own. They are all good people and well-adjusted adults. When the time was right, I was happy to let them go.
I’m not ready to let go of my systems.
We suffered a death in the family last week. My dear, sweet mother-in-law was 88 years old. She’d live a long and full life. She left behind 13 living children, 73 grandchildren, 76 great-grandchildren and missed seeing the birth of her first great-great-grandchild by a few months. We will miss her, but know she’s been reunited with her husband whom she missed terribly for the last 20 years of her life.
My company understands that employees have lives and they try to accomodate that. One way is to grant employees a bereavement leave when a close family member dies. It’s a very thoughtful benefit and one that I’m grateful I have available. The funeral is this weekend in Washington. We are taking a van full of kids from Utah to Olympia and back.
I have designated backups to watch my systems when I’m unavailable.
I hate babysitters. Not when they watch my kids, but when they watch my systems. It’s nothing against the people who are doing the work. But, unlike my adult children, where I’m willing to stand aside and give them the freedom to make their own mistakes, I’m not that hands-off with my systems. I know them better than anyone. I know the processes, I know the people, I know the programs. It is completely unreasonable for me to expect a backup to come in and function as efficiently as I do. That’s unreasonable. I get that. That’s what I want.
I know when I return to work on Tuesday there will be a whole pile of work for me to do. Some of it will be stuff that was postponed until I got back. Some will be new work that just is part of doing business. And some will be stuff that got done while I was gone that I’ll need to revisit. Stuff, I would have done differently, that someone else did their way instead.
I know it’s unreasonable to have an issue with that. I know it’s unreasonable to feel possesive of an account that hundreds of people help service. I know I’m being childish.
But, I want what I want and I want it right now!
Yes, I need to quit being a big baby about it.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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I didn’t have to answer the phone. Nope. I called in sick. I had a doctor’s appointment scheduled for the next day and everything. I did not have to answer my phone.
I answered my phone.
Maybe it wasn’t an outage.
It was an outage.
I didn’t have to take this call, right? I mean, it’s not like I own the company. I’m a cog in a really big wheel. . .house. . .or something. Anyway, while I work lots of hours, I do occasionally have times I’m unavailable. I have people to back me up. Cosby is my backup and if he’s not available, my manager is my backup. Cosby is in the Philippines this week. He’s not available. I sent email to my manager.
Not feeling great. I’m going to take a sick day.
I got an auto-reply.
I’m in a training class all day and have no access to email.
There were additional contact names of his backups, but they were not my backups. They didn’t know my account or my systems.
Hi, this is Rodney joining the bridge. What errors are we seeing?
Did I have to take that call? I’ve debated that as I’ve considered what was the right thing to do. Fortunately, I was not feeling so terrible I couldn’t take the call. But, suppose I had been? What would have happened. It’s easy to think that something would have worked out.
Every winter there are cases of people who die in the mountains, stuck in the snow because their GPS told them to turn at a particular intersection and sent them up some forest road packed with snow. Those people used their GPS correctly. They followed the directions perfectly, and it sometimes killed them.
How do you decide that you need to break protocol?
I’ve always worked under the assumption,
If YOUR customers cannot get to YOUR services, it’s YOUR problem, even if it’s not YOUR fault.
My call floor had an issue. That made it my problem. The choice seemed to be let them shiver while stuck in the snow or haul my butt out of bed and down to my home office.
Of course, being a salaried employee, my sick day disappeared as soon as I swiped right to take the call. If only it were that easy to not feel sick.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2017 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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Today’s a special day. Here, have some pi
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2017 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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The calm before the dawn
The dark before the storm
It’s a form of control, of manipulation. There’s even a word for it:
Vaguebooking is any update on a social network (although primarily Facebook) that is intentionally vague. Status updates which fall under the category of vaguebooking can be long or short, but most comprise just a few simple words.
It’s the misunderstood, hiding in their shadows and lost in their own crisis, crying out, “Help me without me asking for it.” We are imploring for someone to introduce our own deus ex machina to magically “make it all better.”
And yet, we cannot look away. We cannot walk away. Too often we have heard the stories, “If only I’d known,” “I didn’t realize she was crying for help.” So, we engage. We write back, “What’s wrong? Can I help? Call me.” And for those truly in danger, we help. We give them what they want. For the simply manipulative, well, we also give them what they want. We dance as they pull the puppet strings. And like the little boy who cried wolf, they laugh. They laugh as we come running with our comfort and our understanding.
I’ve never been to war. My brother served, although his unit was never called up. My daughter is serving now, although she’s in grad school and unlikely to see combat. But, I read. I devour stories of wars and battles; heroes and cowards.
I try to imagine what it’s like, as the landing craft makes it way toward the beach. The thick steel plate providing a measure of cover until it doesn’t and the soldiers scramble, some to engage the enemy, some simply to get out of what has become a kill box.
What did that soldier think, feel, as he huddled in his foxhole waiting for the expected enemy attack? Knowning he was safer standing still, but the adrenaline pumping through his veins screaming for movement, any movement. And yet, to move was to die. Safety and ultimately victory rested with his, and every other soldier’s ability to be still when every impulse was to run.
Under attack
Under cover
Being patient
Being a patient
Waiting
Watching
Is my indecision base on cowardice or caution? Am I the hero waiting for the right moment to act, or am I a member of the chorus? A nameless, faceless Star Fleet officer in a red shirt?
I’m sorry if this didn’t make sense. I did try to warn you.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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It’s a universally accept maxim of performance improvement:
That which is measured, improves
It’s true. . .except when it’s utterly false.
The two paladins rode side by side, their employer a few paces behind. They had assured him that they were LAWFULL-GOOD characters. He apparently didn’t believe them as they were hit with a DETECT ALIGNMENT spell. Of course, the results came back as LAWFULL-GOOD, but the damage was done.
“We cannot work for someone who thinks us liars and breaks trust. You are on your own, Rodney”
“Argg! Now I’ve lost my paladins. Why would you do that?”
My brother was the DM or Dungeon Master. In a game of D&D (Dungeons & Dragons) the DM is basically an omnipotent, omnipresent and all-powerful deity. His word is law and cannot be appealed.
Why did you cast DETECT ALIGHNMENT on them?
I wanted to know if they were really LAWFULL-GOOD or if they were lying.
So, you didn’t trust them.
Right.
Then what makes you think they would trust you?
My brother was attempting to teach me a very important lesson. The idea that attempting to prove trust might actually destroy it. It kind of flies in the face of the idea that “What is measured, improves.” Not, when it comes to relationships, it doesn’t. “Prove you love me” is a pretty quick way to destroy a relationship.
Quantum particles are some of the smallest detectable particles in existance. They aren’t actually observable. That’s one of the frustrating aspects of them. A quantum particle both exists and does not exist in a particular point in space. If you don’t look at it, you can assume it exists, and it does. If you attempt to observe it, it disappears.
In the field of quatum physics it is certainly not true that “What gets measured, improves.” In fact, you could say,
What gets measured, disappears
I had an employee, Milan, who didn’t fit our corporate model when it came to timing. His clock and my clock seemed to perpetually be set on different time zones. This was a problem for me, but seemed to be unconcering to Milan. There was no performance issue. He did good work. He met his deadlines. He kept his clients happy. He just did it on his own schedule.
Finally, I decide that I needed to do some “managing” and I started holding Milan to a more strict schedule. I started watching when he came in and went home. I started “measuring him.” In my efforts to turn a good employee into a great one, I nearly destroyed one. The more I “managed” him the less he liked being managed. The less he liked it, the worse his performance got. The worse his performance got, the more I felt I had to manage him.
Milan was a quantum particle. . .or a LAWFULL-GOOD paladin. When I let him focus on results instead of the process, he seemed to always be there. As more I watched for when he was there, the less he wanted to be there.
I wonder if he was interested in physics? Or maybe rollplaying games?
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2017 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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My grandfather was born at home in the Benawah country of Northern Idaho. I have a friend who is a midwife and helps modern women have babies at home. Everytime I’ve watched a movie where a baby is being born at home, people are frantic. The midwife or doctor is preparing for the deliveyr. The nurse or helper is fetching and carrying. The mom is trying to push and not die from pain. Everyone has an important job to do. The dad also has a job and it’s always the exact same job: go boil some water.
I suspect that despite the hackneyed Hollywood aspect of it, there was a good reason for assigning the dad to boil water. And it had nothing to do with the water.
Much of my job is involved with computer system outages. My system outages fall into two categories. First are the outages that are my fault. And by that I mean outages that are caused by my engineers, or my agents. When I am on an outage call for these type of issues, I’m very involved. We have to first identify the problem system. Then, we have to analyize why it’s broken. Next, we devise a fix for it. The fix is implemented and finally we have to validate that the fix worked. I’m involved in nearly every aspect of that process.
The second type of outage is one that is caused by our client. My agents use the client’s systems and databases. If one of those systems goes down, the client has to follow the same process to get it fixed. The issue for me is that I don’t have access to the client engineers, or their systems. We spend a lot of time sitting on a phone bridge waiting for updates.
However, on every outage, at the beginning, I’m given the exact same job: gather impact counts.
And impact count is a record of how many agents are staffed and how many are affected by the current issue. I might have 300 agents, but only 10 are having trouble opening the Widgetcounter tool. Or, I might have 10 agents assigned to a particular line of business and all ten are having trouble opening the Widgetcounter tool. When you consider I have 4 sites, and several dozen different lines of business, the maxtrix to find the number of agents impacted for each line of buisiness is pretty big.
The impact counts let us know how widespread the issue is. However, they really aren’t necessary to determine that we actually have an issue. Occasionally, on a particularly long outage, the client will ask me to get “updated” impact counts. I can’t help but hear, “We need more boiled water!”
NOTE: Truth in advertising – Two of my lovely daughters are expecting babies. One in April, the other in August. . .You’ll find me and my son-in-law with a pot of water at the stove.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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How long can you hold your breath? I used to be a swimmer in high school. It was for one year and I never made it very far out of the “newby” stage. When I started I could swim maybe 25 yards or half the length of the pool, while holding my breath. Consider that I was also swimming and using up my oxygen. But, still not a particularly impressive feat. By the end of the season, I could swim from one end of the pool to the other and back, all while holding my breath. Many of our top swimmers could go farther than that. Much farther.
The point was that holding my breath was a temporary thing. I knew that eventually, whether it was at the 25 yard mark, the far end of the pool, or a round trip, I was going to hold my breath for a set amount of time and then get to breath again. That “get to breath again” knowledge is what kept me going “just a little more,” “just a little longer.”
I got very sick as a kid. I had Crohn’s disease. It’s basically an ulcer in your intestines. Fortunately, I got better. But, during my treatment, I had to endure some pretty uncomfortable examinations. And they were scheduled on a regular basis. I kept telling myself, “It’s only 15 minutes. I can endure anything for 15 minutes.” By looking at the end, I could get me through the middle.
No pain, no gain.
Okay, it’s a stupid phrase, but it illustrates the concept that we are willing to endure a short amount of discomfort for a long term payoff. In fact, without the pain, we don’t appreciate the payoff. Back in the 1970’s there was an antiseptic spray called Bactine. It was developed in teh 1950’s, but I remember my mom using it on my scrapes and cuts when I was a kid. At one point Bactine realized they had a problem. The ingrediants in Bactine were effective, but didn’t discomfort the patient at all. In other words, it didn’t hurt when you sprayed it on a cut.
And that was the problem. People tended to not trust it was working if it wasn’t painful, at least a little. The makers of Bactine added a slight inert irritant to make it sting slightly. Kids everywhere felt better because they felt worse.
We are similar to those kids. What is too easily optained is too lightly esteemed. Interesting that a man with the last name Paine said that.
Whether it’s in our exercise program, our personal study, or our careers, we should expect to endure some pain and discomfort. But, just like my swimming experience, the process will change us. We’ll not only get better and stronger, we’ll become more successful. We’ll find that we can hold our breath for a lot longer while swimming two lengths of the pool.
Just don’t try to hold your breath for 15 minutes. Pretty sure my metaphor doesn’t extend quite that far.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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There’s an old joke,
Two women are staring at a freshly erected tombstone. One woman says, “We had 20 happy years together.” The other woman responds, “I thought you were married for 25 years?”
“We were.”
I’m not like that. I’ll celebrate 30 years of marriage this year. I definitely married above my station. I did subject my lovely wife to a lifetime of “wedded Bliss” jokes, but it’s been good. I can’t say the same for those around me. Society tells us that half of all marriages end in divorce. I can certainly see that in my extended family. My siblings and I are batting about 50/50. Half the marriages have ended in divorce, half are still going. My parent’s generation was even worse.
Although, I’ve escaped it myself, I have watched it unfold. It follows a typical pattern.
Everyone is excited at the beginning. Your first day, you get a new desk, meet your coworkers. You find out where the best local restaurants are and start to learn everyone’s name. Everyone loves the start. And from there, where it goes is not always up to you. Sometimes, it changes around you. You might have been asked to do a particular set of tasks when you were hired and then the needs of the business change. Your role shifts and changes. you need to shift and change too.
Sometimes, the people change. You start with one group, through promotions, demotions, retirement, and new hires, the group changes. Sometimes, the changes are for the best. Sometimes they aren’t. And sometimes, the changes start to tell a story.
I’ve “lost” several jobs in my career. Lost is a funny word. I didn’t lose it, it’s still there. There’s just someone else doing the job now. Sometimes, I deserved to lose a job. It changed around me and I couldn’t adapt quickly enough. Companies are in the business of making money. If they can make money by keeping you they will. If they can make money by “letting you go,” they’ll do that.
Other times, I’ve lost jobs that I didn’t feel I should have. A large non-profit went through a downsizing. Eight percent of my department got let go, including my entire team. I was doing good work. I had turned around a project that was losing money and turned it into one of the star programs of our department. It didn’t matter. I’m not bitter. It wasn’t personal. . .just business.
Often the signs are telling: increased scrutiny, increased reporting, your start to be placed under the microscope. And if you happen to be an employee who doesn’t do well under a microscope, it quickly spirals into a cycle of poor performance, which leads to more scrutiny which leads to worse performance.
If I had the answer to what to do in that situation, I’d write a book. I don’t. I think I’ve learned to recognize it, and the best things I’ve found is to avoid it. Don’t find yourself manning the bilge pumps on your personal Titanic.
My lovely wife and I have weathered our share of storms. We’ve had tragedies that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. We’ve had heartbreak and overwhelming joy. We’ve always believed in each other. Looked out for one another. Thought the best of each other when things got rough. And we’ve avoided starting down the road of suspicion and distrust.
It wasn’t business. . .just personal.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2017 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved