She’s a short, black teenager. And she was adopted. No, I’m not talking about Simone Biles. Instead I’m talking about my daughter and her sister. They are both short and black. They are comfortable with their skin color, but they are just a little sensitive about their height. I was delighted to point out that Simone Biles, the gold medal winning, world champion gymnast was shorter than both of them. That fact was more important to them than the fact that Simone was black, or that she was adopted by her grandparents.
We’re even having this discussion because a clueless NBC announcer, Al Trautwig, announced that while Simone might call Ron and Nellie Biles “dad” and “mom” they were NOT her parents. I’m sure that Trautwig honestly regrets ever sending out that tweet. He’s done the requisite penance. He deleted the offensive tweet and he apologized.
But, it doesn’t mean that the discussion is over. What’s the big deal? Why does anyone care and what’s the harm in pointing out that Simone’s real parents are no longer part of her life?
The answer speaks to the heart of what it means to be a family. This is a topic that is kind of important to me. And I think I’m qualified to address the issue.
Bliss is not a common last name. There are a few thousand of us in the United States and we all are related. People often compliment me on my name, as if I had anything to do with getting it. The thing is, I did. When I was 14, I asked my stepfather, Lloyd Bliss to adopt me. So did my older brother. A younger half-brother lived with us but didn’t opt to be adopted.
I was born Rodney Keeney. My elementary and middle school yearbooks list me in the K’s, not the B’s.
Every adoption story is different. My experience is different than Simone’s or other adoptees. Part of my reason for being adopted was a desire to share the name of the man that shared our home. He was and is my father. He’s been gone for many years. I had a chance to help prepare him for his funeral. I pushed his casket down the halls of the church where I spoke at his funeral. I helped carry his casket out of the church. I named my firstborn after him.
Of course he was my dad. the fact that we didn’t share blood was a minor point. One of my happiest moments was when I was 16 and I met someone who’d known my dad as a young man. “You look like a Bliss,” he told me. It was a great compliment.
The man who gave me life is a nice enough guy. He’s just not part of my life.
As anyone who checks in here on a regular basis knows, I have 13 children. What you may not know is that many of them are adopted. I’ve adopted children from all over the world; China, India, Columbia, Haiti and the United States. Some of my kids are also birth kids. Our first child was adopted just a few months after our third child was born. Our oldest daughter was 10 at the time. We attended a school event and one of her friends asked, “Which one is your real brother?” We held our breath as we waited for our daughter’s reply.
They are both my real brothers. This one happens to be adopted.
We would add more children through the years. A couple of years ago, two of my kids ended up in the same class. My son, a 6′ tall white kid, and my daughter, a diminutive black girl. they couldn’t look more different. My son was teasing his sister as brothers will do. The substitute teacher wasn’t amused.
Stop flirting with that girl.
She’s my sister!
And his real sister at that.
In addition to my children, I also have nieces and nephews who are adopted. My brother and his wife adopted four children. My sister adopted three daughters. My mother has more adopted grandchildren than birth grandchildren. And they are all her real grandchildren.
Your real family is not defined by DNA. It’s not even defined by legality. I have legal siblings that are not really part of my life. Your real parents are those who raised you. They are the parents that took you to school. Grounded you when you missed curfew. Taught you to drive. They are the ones who stayed up with you when you were sick. They are the ones that shared in your successes and your sorrows.
My real children are the ones that I’ve taken into my home and into my heart. Considering the ethnic makeup of my kids (black, white, Asian and Indian), I think the most surprising thing that my descendants 100 years in the future will ask is, “Did you know they were white? Did you know the Bliss’s were white?”
Yes, the people that Simone Biles calls mom and dad are her parents. And, like my nieces, nephews, sons, daughters and father, they are definitely her real family.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
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Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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An object at rest will remain at rest unless acted on by an unbalanced force.
(Newton’s First Law Of Motion
I timed it one day. My best time was about 4 seconds. I’m sure I could shave some time off of that if I really practice. It really depends on how close the spare rolls are. I’ve turned changing the toilet paper roll into my own personal Olympic sport. I’ve had to. And it’s the fault of that 17th Century physicist Isaac Newton.
I once was manager of an team of email engineers. We had a bright shiny new Microsoft Exhange system. We’d moved 30,000 users off of a Novell GroupWise system. GroupWise had a birthday yesterday. The first version of GroupWise, (known as WordPerfect Office back then) came out on 8/8/88. Yesterday was its 28th birthday.
Anyway, our new email system was new and untuned. My engineers spent a lot of the first month watching it very carefully. My role as the manager was to report to management. I created what was called the CAM Report. CAM stood for Collaboration and Mail. Originally, I called it the MAC report, but since we didn’t support any Apple products, I had to change the name. I owned both the SharePoint team and the email team. The CAM report became somewhat famous in our company. It started out as a twice daily status update. Gradually, I moved it to once a day and finally once a week as the system started to get burned in.
The report quickly became rather large. I included information about storage, number of mailboxes, virus attacks, engineer profiles, SharePoint farms, successes, failures. I eventually started including a Table of Contents at the beginning. On an email message.
Management loved it. My manager knew just about everything he might be asked about simply by referring to the CAM Report. I started having my engineers write portions. I gave them a byline. This increased their visibility throughout the department. The only ones who didn’t like it were the other IT managers. They hated writing reports and now their terse status updates were being unfavorably compared to my verbose, multi-colored books. My distribution list that I sent it to was enormous. One of the managers asked me one day,
Rodney, why do you bother sending this through email. Why don’t you put it on a SharePoint site and just send the link?
Because people wouldn’t read it.
What do you mean?
If I force people to click a link to get to the report, they won’t look at it. Do you look at the email when I send it?
Sure, I scan it when it shows up.
Would you click a link to get to it?
Probably not.
That’s why I send it in email.
There are entire fields of study devoted to how much of a drop off you get when users have to click a link. It’s why many of our programs are designed the way they are. If I go to Facebook, I am immediately presented with the newsfeed. The thing that Facebook most wants me to see. No clicks needed.
We are all like that. And it’s silly. It takes less than a second to click a link. And yet, studies show that we will abandon a page rather than make that one extra click.
Isaac Newton was referring to physical objects when he wrote the laws of motion. And a physicist can use math to show you why Newton’s finding are a law (meaning it’s ALWAYS true.) However, we can apply Newton’s finding to our daily life as well. Not just clicks, but things that might only take a second, we often will avoid. Seatbelt laws have gotten many of us to buckle up, but there are some who still do not. How long? One second? Two? How long does it take to buckle your seatbelt?
We tend to simply not take the time. Not because we are too busy, but because we think, like the people getting my long email, that the extra click isn’t worth it. We are the objects in Newton’s motion equation.
And that brings me back to the toilet paper roll. I live in house with ten people. Eight of them are teenagers. Teenagers are the perfect example of Newton’s law. They can walk past a dirty sock for . . .well, I don’t know exactly how long because eventually I get tired enough of it, that I make them go pick it up. But, when it come to the toilet paper rolls in the bathroom I decided that it was just quicker to change it myself than try to train my kids.
And for that, I blame Isaac Newton.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
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Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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We moved to a new building. Well, it’s not new new. It’s “new to us” new. And even with that, it’s been remodeled. So, it’s more new than old, but it’s got a new coat of paint. Like a “new” car that had a previous owner, there are a few things that show its age. In our case, it was a leaky urinal. Not that kind of leak! Just a small leak from the water pipes coming into the top of the urinal.
It wasn’t a serious leak. A single drop every minute or so. And mostly it just collected on the porcelain top before slowly dripping down the side and leave a slightly uncomfortable damp spot on the floor. It’s part of the reason I hate working with water when I do remodeling. That annoying drip over time can cause huge damage.
But, this isn’t my problem. There are people who get paid to fix these things and make sure that we aren’t dripping water to the 4th floor from our bathroom on the 5th floor. But, I did think what could be done in the mean time? Was it possible to mitigate the seriousness while the building maintenance people were getting to it?
There’s a new Jason Bourne movie coming out this month. Jason Bourne is a super-spy, assassin who had a world-class case of amnesia. I’ve enjoyed the movies. Matt Damon, the actor who plays Bourne is fun to watch. And of course, it’s the fight scenes that make the movies so entertaining. As part of the press tour leading up to the new movie release, the actors and director are giving interviews. During one of these interviews, they addressed Jason Bourne’s fighting style. It was described as “Treadstone-style.”
Treadstone was the name of the secret program that trained Bourne and his fellow spies. The fighting style was designed to incorporate whatever was at hand. He fought a bad guy using a book. Another time, he showed how deadly a towel was as both an offensive and defensive weapon. Somewhere in the really REALLY big universe, Douglas Adams was smiling. In the new movies, we watch Bourne break a chair and turn the broken chair leg into a deadly weapon. He’s McGyver, if McGyver had ever figured out he could build actual weapons instead of Rube Goldberg mousetraps.
I remember one time when someone accidentally locked us out of one of our conference rooms at work. The room sat empty for a couple weeks since no one could find the key. Finally, I was sick of it and had my tallest engineer pop the ceiling tiles and use a loop tied in a mouse cord to reach over and hook the door handle. We then disabled the lock. It wasn’t the perfect tool, but it was the right tool.
As a backyard mechanic, it’s nice to have exactly the right tool for a job. But, if I had to wait for the perfect tool, I’d never complete most projects. You use what you have. Buy tools with a lifetime guarantee. That way when you break them because you used a screwdriver as a pry-bar, you can replace them.
To fix the leaky urinal didn’t require anything as advanced as a screwdriver. All it took was a little understanding of physics. Everyone knows that water only runs downhill. Everyone is wrong. Trees manage to pull water from the ground to the highest part of their branches. They use a principle called “capillary action.” The water flows from one small space to the next. When those spaces are in a tree trunk, the water “flows” uphill. I’ve oversimplified it here, but trust me, you can make water flow uphill if you give it something to climb.
In the a case of our urinal, all the water needed to “climb” into the bowl was a ladder; otherwise known as a paper towel.
The water “climbed” the paper towel then drained into the urinal. No more puddle on the floor. I figure if Jason Bourne was a plumber, this is exactly how he’d fix a leaky pipe.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
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LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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I wasn’t sure if I should say anything. It didn’t really bother me that much. Not really. On the other hand, it had been going on for months, and I still noticed it every time. Maybe it really was bothering me at some level more than I thought.
These are some of the thoughts I had as I was playing basketball recently. I play Tuesday and Friday morning for about 90 minutes. I’m one of the old guys. There’s a core group who show up week in and week out, and we get visitors occasionally.
The method for picking teams is as old as basketball itself. We shoot free throws. The first five to make it are on one team and the second five are on the second team. None of us are quite good enough that we can make it on purpose. Meaning it’s kind of luck of the draw which team you end up on. One team is “darks” and the other is “lights.” We each bring two jerseys to every game. The players recently staged an intervention. This is the shirt I have been bringing for when I’m on the “light” team.
The guys hated it. That made me enjoy wearing it all the more. I can understand them objecting to the color, which really does look like it’s a safety-vest. . .or worse. But, I never understood why anyone would confuse it for being on the “dark” team. Anyway, today, Nelson gave me this jersey.
I just laughed and promised to stop wearing the yellow jersey.
Just because we play together often, doesn’t mean there aren’t issues. They are rarely serious. Dirk broke his nose running into Evan’s shoulder. Evan felt worse than anyone. . .except Dirk. A hard foul is often met with an apology. And that is what made my conversation with Nelson so challenging.
We’ve all played together enough that we know each other’s style of play. Daryl is a deadly outside shooter. Don’t leave him alone at the three point line. David, has a great 12 foot shot, but can’t hit the broadside of a barn from the 3-point line. Let him shoot all day. Cedric runs like a gazelle. Look for him on the fast break every play.
The book on me is that I’m pretty much a non-entity on offense. An occasional 3-point threat, but zero ability to drive to the hoop. Tenacious defender. I play about three inches taller than my six foot tall frame. And I always run back on defense. I’ve never really been much of a shooter and I really enjoy my role as a defensive specialist.
I don’t enjoy being on Nelson’s team. He’s a great player. He’s fast. He plays “big.” He plays good defensive. And he passes well. . .just not to me. Virtually ever. We played three games this morning over 90 minutes and Nelson passed me the ball once. It was an inbound play and I was literally standing two feet away from him as he went to throw the ball in. That was the only pass he sent my way.
Should it bother me? I don’t like to think so. After all, I don’t really care about my own personal scoring opportunities. And it’s not like Nelson is a black hole. He works a beautiful give-and-go with Cedric. He looks for the open man. Well, the other open man. It really is just me. So, I let it go. For months I didn’t say anything.
There is a fantastic business book that I enjoy called Crucial Conversations: Tools for talking when the stakes are high. I considered the techniques that the book promotes as I considered approaching Nelson. Much of the point of their message is validating the person you are talking to.
How could I even broach the subject without sounding like I was complaining? And I honestly don’t care about scoring. But I had to admit that I honestly get annoyed that Nelson won’t pass to me. So, today, as the players filed out of the gym after our third game, I noticed that Nelson and I were going to be the last to leave.
Hey Nelson.
Yeah?
Did you realize that you never pass me the ball?
Huh?
It’s not that it even bothers me. I’m not the #1 scoring threat, but today you passed it to me once in three games. If it’s something you’re doing on purpose, that’s fine. I honestly am not interested in scoring, but if it was something that you were doing unconsciously, I just thought you might like to be aware.
Nelson got very quite on the way out to the parking lot. did I offend him? I hope not. Was he simply replaying the morning’s games in his head and examining his play? Maybe. To try to change the subject I asked if he wanted the jersey back. I got a very terse “Nope.”
If Nelson feels bad, I will have missed my effort to talk about the issue dispassionately. I hope he doesn’t. Should I have stayed quiet and simply tried to miss my free throw if he made his during the team picking? That seemed like a dishonest approach, although it’s easier.
It was definitely an uncomfortable conversation. I hope I did it right.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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I started to believe my own press releases. Always a dangerous thing. But, this was a task that intimidates many people in business. I, on the other hand, am an expert at it. I needed to do it yesterday. I’ll be fine, I said. (I wasn’t fine.)
Several months ago I was reviewing the log files for my home computer firewall system. There was a device that belonged to my son that was tripping some of my parental filters. He tried to explain.
Well, you know, it might be giving a false reading, because when it switches from cellular coverage to wifi, sometimes the phone doesn’t properly record the name of the site it’s trying to get to.
You realize that this is what I do, right? I mean, I’m an excerpt in network traces and I’ve written books about it?
Ah. . . .
Did you want to continue with your explanation?
Working in IT, fortunately, I can generally stay a step ahead of my kids. I don’t know the apps the way they do, of course. I’ve never played a minute of Pokemon Go. I don’t have a single game installed on my phone or iPad. But, computers, and especially computer systems haven’t changed that much in 30 years. They’ve definitely gotten faster, and we no longer have space heaters masquerading as CRT monitors on our desks. But, underneath, it’s still just computers.
It’s like reading Mark Twain. He was writing 150 years ago. His experiences were nothing like ours today. And yet, when you get right down to it, we are still putting one word after another. My page is electronic and his was a dead tree, but the process of what we do, isn’t that different.
And computers, once they became personal, in 1980 and everyone could have one, haven’t changed much. I had to set up a new desk yesterday. You know the drill, right? A mountain of wires, each of which has to be plugged into EXACTLY the right slot for your system to come to life.
Fortunately for me, I’ve been doing this for 35 years. My first program was written on a TI99. It was hooked up to a television and had a cassette tape drive for storage. Yep, I’ve pretty much seen it all. Been there. Done that. got the free t-shirt. Oh yeah, I R an expert!
So, I had no worries about setting up my system. I carefully separated each wire and run it to it’s respective piece of hardware. I complimented myself on how well I hid most of the cables.
I was delighted when I plugged in the base unit for my wireless headset and it showed a blue light meaning it had saved its Bluetooth pairing information. The rat’s nest behind my docking station was at least a well connected rat’s nest.
There was just one problem. The docking station that I’d been given for my laptop was defective. I hooked everything up and it would dock my laptop, but none of the peripherals worked. And the power indicator on my laptop complained.
There is an issue with the power from the docking station.
Well, there’s nothing I can do about a bad piece of hardware. Fortunately, we have engineers who are responsible for replacing them.
Hey, Jason? This is Rodney. That doc you gave me doesn’t seem to be working. I’m not sure if it has a bad connection or what.
I’ll be right there.
Our engineers typically require a service ticket to be created, but Jason and I are friends and he was willing to come look at it right away. When he arrived, I showed him the error and showed him that none of the peripherals were working; no mouse, keyboard, or anything.
Do you mind if I get under your desk for a minute, Rodney?
Sure, go right ahead.
And that’s when Jason demonstrated what an idiot I am. He didn’t even say anything. He simply picked up the power cord from my laptop and plugged it into the power strip. Like I said, we’re friends, so he laughed instead of silently thinking how stupid I was.
Okay, you have bragging rights over me from now until. . .forever. Can’t believe I forgot that.
Hey, the first one’s free.
Yep, like I said, I’m a real expert at this stuff.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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I like to talk. You might have gotten a hint of that by the fact that I scribble down some thoughts here every day and throw it out into the void. As a manager I practiced “Management by walking around” before I even knew what it was. I loved to talk to my team.
And while it never shows up here, I absolutely love to discuss politics. But, it’s tough to do on the Internet. Talking is easy. Having a discussion is not. Especially online.
Captain Davenport: They’re pinging away with their active sonar like they’re looking for something, but nobody’s listening.
Jack Ryan: What do you mean?
Captain Davenport: Well, they’re moving at almost forty knots. At that speed, they could run right over my daughter’s stereo and not hear it.
(Hunt for Red October)
I remember the first time someone stopped me and asked for an autograph. I’d written a book on Microsoft Exchange and I was presenting at a conference.
Rodney, I don’t want to bother you, but would you mind signing this copy of your book?
Well, twist my arm why don’t you! Authors and writers love feedback. Sure, there’s the occasional J.D. Salinger, Emily Dickinson types who just wants to write and never hear from anyone. But, the rest of us are thrilled to hear from fans and readers.
What do all these disjointed thoughts have to do with each other? The idea that talking only works if someone is listening. And, as my teenagers will tell you, a discussion is much more fun than a lecture.
Yogi Berra was not a cartoon bear at Jellystone Park. He was actually a hall of fame catcher for the New York Yankees. I’m not a fan of the Yankees, but as a baseball fan and as a writer, I adore Yogi. He was known for mixed metaphors and malapropism. In other words, he tripped up his words. Catchers are typically the smartest players on a baseball team. They, not the pitcher control the game. Yogi worked very hard to single-handedly destroy that image.
He was once asked about a popular restaurant.
Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.
Yogi would have appreciated the comments section of most internet articles. On Facebook, for example, you will often see a popular story or meme passed around. It might have 20K views and 1.2K comments.
The views I can understand, but for the life of me, I cannot fathom why anyone would comment on a story that has more than a few dozen existing comments. When the comment count gets up above about 100, the commenters remind me of the Soviet ships referenced in the Hunt for Red October quote above. They are pinging away with their active radar, but no one is listening.
Like Yogi said, once a place becomes too popular, people stop going. When talking about a restaurant, we can laugh at the contradiction. But, Internet comments last forever. Some threads really do become so popular that people stop posting.
I was once part of a private political discussion group on Facebook. I started a comment thread talking about breastfeeding and guns. (Yeah, I mixed topics there too.) It eventually became the most popular topic in the history of our little debate club with over 500 comments. I won a coffee mug for it. But, it was the exception not the rule.
Most of my posts generate a handful of comments. Occasionally, a topic will generate a couple dozen comments. I can easily follow the thread and talk to the posters.
As a writer, I guess I’m supposed to hope that my posts go viral and generate crazy numbers of views and comments. If that happens, I just hope they don’t become so popular that no one follows them anymore.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
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LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
– Animal Farm
I’m not sure if anyone else even noticed. Maybe it’s because I regularly work on all four floors of my building. Maybe it’s because I’m just super picky. But, once seeing it, I cannot unsee it. And now I see it everywhere.
First, let me take you back nearly 25 years to my first real job. I was working for WordPerfect in their Orem offices. The building is made of brick and tinted glass.
After a few weeks in our new building I started to notice an annoying sound.
pop
Not often and not at any regular intervals.
pop
It was driving me nuts.No one else could hear it, it seemed like. I’d sit with a coworker, ears turned toward the ceiling.
pop
THERE! Did you hear that one?
Wait, I did hear something.
And once hearing it, they could no longer unhear it.
Eventually we figured it out. Utah gets hot in the summers. This week we are flirting with triple digits (100+ degrees.) Fortunately, the humidity is less than 15%. But, that hot Utah sun heats up buildings. As a building heats up, the bricks expand ever so slightly. As they expanded, they would move, ever so slightly. As they moved, they popped.
My current building doesn’t pop. But, like those long ago pops, once I noticed it, I couldn’t unnoticed it. The restrooms have automatic paper towel dispensers. They look like this.
You wave your hand crazily under them and eventually paper towels emerge. On floors one through three, where a few engineers and a whole lot of agents sits, this is how much the paper towel dispenser kicks out when you wave your hand. Anyone who’s ever used these, knows that you take that first paper towel. Wave your hand a second time and wait for it to give you a second helping.
This is pretty much how every building I’ve ever been in with automatic towel dispensers works. B
I don’t work on the first three floors. I work on the fourth floor. On the fourth floor, where the account managers, project managers and no agents sit, the paper towel dispenses this much with a single wave of your hand.
Until I noticed this, I didn’t realize that you can set the machines to change how much they kick out. On the fourth floor, I don’t have to wait that annoying 20 seconds to get that second paper towel.
I have absolutely no idea if the machines a re set this way on purpose. I have no idea if our janitorial staff favors the account managers and short changes the agents.
But, like I said, now that I’ve noticed it, I cannot unnotice it. Movie theaters, doctors offices, public restrooms; I keep looking at how much paper towel the machine kicks out and using that to judge how important the janitors feel I am.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
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LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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Rodney, do you have any 50’s music?
Ah. . .sure. What do you need?
Well, Jack’s uncle and aunt are celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary and we wanted to provide some music for the party.
Okay, what kind of music do you want?
We just said, 50’s style.
No, they didn’t. My neighbors approached me over the weekend with the above request. On the surface, it’s a simple ask, right? Find music that was recorded in the 1950’s.
I have over 7500 songs in my iTunes library. Most of them got there because I bought CD’s, burned them to MP3s and then imported them into my iTunes library. I have just about every genre represented by at least a song or two. I have every song that Billy Joel or Garth Brooks ever recorded. I have all the Beatles songs. I have old country and new county, 80’s pop and Bruno Mars, Jazz and classical, rap and hard-rock. I even have an entire CD full of famous baseball players recording commercials and another of a scientist from the Manhattan project telling funny stories about making a nuclear bomb. (Richard Feinman, he’s hilarious.)
The point is that simply looking at when a song was recorded won’t give you a good playlist. It’s not a good enough filter. There’s a business application from this example.
Will this project have a pre-planning meeting?
Sure, that’s where you tell us 80% of the requirements and assure us that the design is complete.
One of the roles of an IT project manager is to translate customer requirements into software features. If the customer says, “I want to be able to look up my past customers’ purchases,” the project manager translates that to the engineering teams as
“Program should use a SQL database to store customer information and sales history”
Oh, and I want to be able to access that information using a web browser.
“. . .with a web server front end. . .”
And customers should be able to view their previous history, but no one else’s.
“. . .with a public facing URL and Kerberos security. Also need a security database, and a method for resetting user passwords. . .”
And if they find a mistake, I want them to be able to contact us about resolving it.
“. . .with an SMTP module. . .”
Via chat.
“. . .and a real-time chat module. . .”
The PM’s job is to get as much of those requirements up front as possible. What happens to every project is that once the customer sees the design they say one of two things:
- Oh, I didn’t realize I needed to explain that more
- Can you add this one additional feature
It’s called scope creep. Well, #2 is called that. But, if the customer thinks they already asked for a feature, you are often stuck with scope creep whether you allow additional requests or not. The pre-planning meeting is crucial to make sure that what the engineering team is about to build is actually what the customer is requesting.
Okay, let’s be a little more specific. You really have three choices when it comes to 50’s music. First, is old country. Hank Williams singing “Your chEETing hE-a-a-art.”
No. No, we don’t want that!
I didn’t think so. I’ve got lots of it, but it’s an acquired taste. Next is rock and roll. Think Elvis, Buddy Holly, the soundtrack to American Graffiti.
Oh, well, some of the relatives are pretty conservative and I’m not sure that rock and roll would work for a wedding anniversary party anyway.
Okay, that brings us to the third category; Frank Sinatra, big band sound, and jazz.
Yeah, let’s go with that.
Okay. I was done, right? My wonderful project management skills prevented the disaster of Patsy Cline belting out “Crazy” at the party for two old people.
Nope. We’re only 80% of the way to our actual design requirements.
Do you want me to burn the MP3’s to a CD, or copy them to a thumb drive or what?
Well, the party is today in a couple of hours and it’s down in Provo.
Oh. . .well, I’ll make a playlist and why don’t you just borrow my iPad?
Yes, they are that kind of neighbor’s. I was confident they would take care of my device. Okay, NOW I’m done?
Nope.
Do you have some speakers we could borrow?
Sure, I think I’ve got several old PC speakers.
Well, it’s a pretty big room. Do you think we could borrow your Mackay speakers?
I was offering this.
They wanted this
Well, you’re going to need the mixer board and you might as well take my cables and microphones. There are two speaker stands, a couple of mic stands and pretty much any connectors and cables you will need.
Wow, this is exactly what we needed. Thank you so much.
The request for “some 50’s music” morphed into a jazz/Sinatra playlist, iPad and sound system capable of lighting up an entire auditorium.
I heard the party was a huge success. They went completely through the playlist twice. Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Harry ‘Connick. And no one was offended by the playlist.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. 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) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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Rookies.You can spot them a mile away. There are not a lot of best practices surrounding moving offices. But, there some things to keep in mind, and there is one sure way to tell the veterans from the newbies.
Sure, I complain about moving. (Moving Day) But, there are advantages to moving, both for those who move and for those who are left behind.
Those Left Behind
If your office mates are moving, you DO NOT want to skip moving day. Sure, there’s a lot of confusion. Carts are being pushed around. Doors are being propped open. It’s a mess. But, if you have the heart of a rat, you can do well. I mean a pack rat. . .Maybe, I should just move on from this metaphor.
During a move, people get rid of a lot of stuff. Our cubicles and office typically develop backwater eddies. Stuff collects. Maybe it’s an extra stapler. Maybe it’s an old printer that won’t be moved because the new space has new printers. Maybe it’s just a coat hook that goes over the cubicle wall. I once picked up a mini-fridge because the previous team left it. It now sits under my desk.
The point is that if you keep your eyes open, you can inherit some of the junk that people don’t want to move. You have to be careful, of course. You can’t “inherit” the stuff before it’s abandoned. And your company may have a policy about old equipment. Putting your job at risk shouldn’t even be a consideration no matter how nice the “Velvet Elvis playing guitar” picture is.
And, there’s a chance to pick up a lot of broken stuff too. Broken computer equipment is like free candy at the 4th of July parade. Sure, you have to pick it up off the ground, but it’s then yours. And just about every company I’ve ever worked for makes it hard to get new equipment, but easy to replace stuff that breaks. That 25″ monitor that no longer works? Offer to take if off your coworker’s hands. After they’ve left the building, put in a ticket that says, “My 25 inch monitor is broken. Can I get it fixed or replaced please?”
Another time, I ended up with an HP 4si laser printer. It was the size of a small refrigerator and it sounded like an airplane taking off, but it printed the most beautiful pages. I was writing training materials for Microsoft at the time and I pushed tens of thousands of pages through that old printer. I eventually lost it. I moved and couldn’t take it with me.
The Movers
It’s harder to pick up new equipment when you are moving than it is when your office mates move. Typically, you have to rely on the hope that the new location also has new equipment. Maybe you can upgrade your desk phone. Or maybe you left a broken 25″ monitor behind and you get a new one. In our recent move, Cary ended up dropping one of his monitors on accident. It shattered the screen. Cary got a new 25″ monitor out of the move.
The other thing to consider during a move is the idea that pioneers get to (sometimes) pick their spots. Did you get stuck by the bathrooms in your last office? Moving gives you the chance to improve your office location. I say this only happens sometimes because, moves are ALSO a chance for management to reshuffle the players. I had a coworker named Milan. (He was American, so it was pronounced MY-lan, not me-LAWN, like the Italian city.) He got a new manager who requested that Milan move his cubicle 20 feet so that he would be in the cubicle right outside of his manager’s office. Over the course of a few months, Milan managed to move to a cubicle that provided a little distance between him and his boss. Still close, just not TOO close. Milan’s team moved again a few months later. Guess where Milan’s new desk is?
Moves also shake up your routine. While I dread them, I can see the positives, too. My new office building let’s me ride the train to work. Well, potentially. We’ll see. I’m trying it today for the first time.
Moving also forces you to go through the flotsam and jetsam that has collected in your office drawers and cubicle and clear them out. Your coworkers who are staying will appreciate it.
There is one piece of office equipment that you should ALWAYS take with you. It’s not easily replaced. And it’s not something you would normally think to take. In fact, during our move yesterday, several people called back to the old building trying to find someone who hadn’t left yet to bring them the piece of equipment they missed.
A garbage can. Seriously, every move I’ve ever been part of, I had to move my own garbage can. In fact, on a couple of moves that were in the same building, I used the empty (clean) garbage can as the main “box” to move with. And if you watch people who are moving, you can easily tell the veterans from the rookies. The veterans have a place to throw away their garbage.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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I went to five different schools in the fifth grade. We started in Minnasota, moved back to Washington State, moved again, and a couple more times. I don’t even remember how many different schools I attended throughout my entire elementary school years. It was easily dozens, mostly in Washington, but Alaska and a year in Minnasota. In fact, that year in Minnasota was the first time in my life I’d ever spent a year in the same place.
Eventually, we settled in Lacey, WA. I attended one Middle School and four years at Timberline High School. I vowed that when I had kids, they would get to spend their growing up years in a single place.
My lovely wife grew up in Yelm, WA. She attended Yelm Elementary, then Yelm Middle School, then Yelm High School. She had many older brothers and sisters who also attended Yelm schools. Her growing up was about as grounded as you can imagine. The first time she moved was to go off to college at BYU.
Today is moving day for my company. Well, not the entire company, just a few departments, mine being one of them. We aren’t moving far. We own several buildings in and around Salt Lake City. We are moving from a building out by the airport to one just off the freeway.
I hate moving.
Microsoft believed that it was important to not let employees get too settled; too comfortable. During my decade with Microsoft, I averaged a move about every six months. the company constantly shifted offices, reorganized teams, promoted and switched managers. The goal was to keep people from settling into a rut. They wanted to prevent fiefdoms from forming. I don’t know if it worked or not. But, I do know that I became an expert at packing my stuff.
In recent years, I’ve become a bit of a minimalist at work. I don’t take pictures of my family and post them on the walls of my cubicle. I don’t have knick-knacks or office toys at my desk. My filing cabinet has a box of cold cereal, some plastic spoons and disposable bowls, along with some herb tea.
The advantage, of course, is that I can pack my desk in a single box in about 15 minutes. We’ve known our move was coming for a while. Yesterday my manager came by and asked me if I needed more boxes. He didn’t notice the box he’d already delivered earlier in the week still in pristine condition sitting next to my desk.
No, I’m good, but thanks.
I’ll spend longer driving from the old building to the new one than I will setting up my desk. My job is typically all about my phone and my laptop. Even with the move as easy as it is, I hate moving. Maybe it’s the memory of my Microsoft days when switching offices took up most of a week. Maybe it’s a craving for stability. Maybe it’s the fact that the new building takes me further away from the agents who work on my account. They sit in my current building and they are not moving.
Change is the only constant. So, I’ll pack up my box, load it into my car and drive across town.
I’ve often considered the different upbringing between my wife and myself and how it affected us both. Me, the kid who bounced from place to place craved stability for my own kids. She, the girl who grew up in a small town, was fine with her kids moving schools occasionally.
I hate moving.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2016 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved