Rodney M Bliss

April 20, 2016

Let’s Judge These Books By Their Covers

It was a simple task: Pick a book you’d never heard of and based on the cover, tell the story. Of course, you aren’t going to tell the actual story. You are going to make it up. But, that’s the point of the exercise.

Yesterday, I attended a Toastmasters meeting for the Olympic Orators club in American Fork, UT. One of the unique activities at a Toastmasters meeting is something called “Table Topics.” The Table Topics Master picks a topic and then randomly picks people from the crowd to come up and speak on that topic for 2 minutes. The point is to practice extemporaneous speaking.

Personally, I’ve never met a microphone I didn’t like, or a crowd I wasn’t eager to perform for. I love Table Topics. Not everyone is as eager to be put on the spot like that. Yesterday, I was the Table Topics Master. I picked five books at random out of our home library and gave each one a number. As I called on people from the audience, they picked a number and had to either give us a review or tell the story of the book, based on it’s cover.

Being familiar with all the books, it was interesting to me to see these books from a different perspective. Even more interesting was to watch people who are much more experienced with giving speeches than I am, work through the process of coming up with a story on the spot.

Buzz Boy And Fly Guy

What the reviewer said it was about: A boy and a fly go on adventures throughout his neighborhood.

What it’s actually about: A boy and a fly go on adventures throughout his neighborhood.

The Patchwork Girl of Oz

What the reviewer said it was about: Dorothy, the scarecrow, the lion and some other people go on a patchwork of adventures in Oz

What it’s actually about: Dorothy, the scarecrow and the Patchwork Girl go on more adventures in Oz

The Big Book of Tell Me Why

What the reviewer said it was about: Why do kids ask so many questions? Why did Don Quixote attack windmills? Why did I agree to come up here?

What it’s actually about: Answers to 100’s of questions that kids ask about how things work.

Sons of The Profits

What the reviewer said it was about: These people on the cover founded Seattle. Some were respectable, some were not. The lady was the least respectable of all.

What it’s actually about: The people on the cover founded Seattle. Some were respectable, some were not. The woman was the Madam of a brothel that at one point was the only thing between Seattle and financial ruin.

Schlock Mercenary – Under New Management

What the reviewer said it was about: A rip roaring adventure told with brilliant word smithing and some plot holes big enough to drive a truck through.

What it’s actually about: A rip roaring adventure told with brilliant word smithing and a very tight plot.

The fascinating thing to me was first that the artists who designed the covers managed to convey so much of the story in a few words and pictures. But, also how we as readers are influenced by the cover of a book. Actually, the exercise failed to meet my initial expectations. I expected stories that while tied to the cover, were wildly different than the actual contents of the book. It wasn’t the case at all.

I guess you really can judge a book by its cover.

April 19, 2016

Sixteen Is Too Young To Die

My son is hurting and there’s nothing I can do. I didn’t know River Ackley. And if not for a trick of geography, her story would have simply been one of so many other accident statistics, to me anyway. To her family, and to her friends, her story is a tragedy. Friday night, while travelling with some friends, the car River was driving in was hit by a distracted driver. He was looking at his GPS and didn’t realize the light hadn’t changed. He t-boned, the SUV River was in and it careened into a pole. Three of the teenagers were hospitalized. River was the only casualty.

(Photo Credit: River Ackley’s “Gone Too Soon” GoFundMe Account)

She was 16 years old and a sophomore at Pleasant Grove High School. There are 2500 kids at PGHS, four of them, all sophomores, are mine. The odds that one of my kids was friends with River was pretty high. My kids all have separate groups of friends. Maybe it’s the large number of kids available to meet. Maybe it’s the fact that we live in a neighborhood with lots of kids. Maybe it’s just a desire to not hang out with your siblings.

Only one of my kids was good friends with River.

As a parent, your worst fear is that it will be your child that isn’t coming home one day. When a tragedy hits this close to home, there’s a sense of relief that my kid wasn’t in that car. But, there’s also a sense of guilt. Maybe it’s survivors guilt. Maybe it’s simply the guilt you feel from having any sense of relief when confronted by tragic news. Like I said, if it weren’t for my kids, River’s story would simply be a tragic story on Facebook.

And, I’m reminded (by myself mostly) that this tragedy isn’t about me. But, it is about me. How can it not be when it touches those I love? What do you say to a 16 year old child when one of his friends is taken so unexpectedly and violently? How do you comfort him?

I remember being 16. I was invincible. My friends and I got into any number of situations that might have turned out badly, but didn’t. River didn’t have her seat belt on, but given the force of the initial impact, it probably wouldn’t have made any difference. The car she was riding in, while being driven by another teen, wasn’t speeding, wasn’t being reckless, wasn’t at fault. How do you prepare your kids for that?

Don’t get into any unexpected accidents? Avoid being struck by a distracted driver?

And how do you explain the injustice of the fact that a 16 year old girl who was a passenger, who had no control over either car is the one who had to die and the driver of the truck that hit her lives? I could go through the physics of how much safer the person in a head-on collision is over the person in a t-bone collision. But, that doesn’t address the randomness, nor the sense of loss.

The first person to die from my high school graduating class, died in college. His name was Danny Murdock. He was struck in Provo Canyon by a car that drifted over the center line. We had been close in high school, but drifted apart as people going off to college will. I remember thinking how he would never get married, or have a family of his own. I remember thinking what a loss it was for both him and those left behind.

How much more when the victim is still a child?

My son is working through it. He’s at times angry, other times mournful, and still other times simply numb. It pains me to see his pain. I recognize that his pain, my pain and the sorrow that his friends feel, is nothing compared to what River’s parents and siblings and family are feeling. Pleasant Grove, is a town of about 40,000 people. It’s a fairly tightknit community.

When one of us mourns, we all mourn.

Rest in Peace, River Ackley. Gone too soon.

(You can contribute to a GoFundMe account to help the Ackely family during this difficult time, by clicking here.)

April 18, 2016

Where 42 Meets April 15

Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy fans know it’s the ultimate answer to “life, the universe and everything.”

It’s the day that taxes in the United States are due.

But, there’s a more important, more symbolic meaning behind this number and this date and where they intersect.

When Michael Jordan first retired from basketball in 1993, the Chicago Bulls retired his number, 23. They wanted to ensure that no Chicago Bulls player would ever again wear number 23. It would forever be associated with Michael Jordan. Jordan later came back to play many more years and win additional championships before retiring for good in 2003. Interestingly, as his career was winding down, the Miami Heat, a team that Jordan had never played for, decided to retire the number 23 to honor his contributions to the game.

Retiring a number is considered the ultimate honor, greater even than induction into the Hall of Fame. The team with the greatest number of retired numbers is the New York Yankees baseball team. They’ve retired 16 numbers. Players that even non-baseball fans would recognize played for the Yankees: Babe Ruth, Lou Gherig, Joe DiMaggio and Reggie Jackson, along with names that baseball fans revere: Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Whitey Fork.

Occasionally, a player will have his number retired by multiple teams: Michael Jordan, as mentioned above, but also Wilt Chamberlain, who once scored 100 points in a basketball game, had his number retired by two teams. Hank Aaron, the one-time home run king of baseball has his number retired by both the Braves and the Brewers. “Mr. October,” Reggie Jackson had his number retired by both the Oakland A’s where he first had success and by the Yankees, where he helped them win multiple championships.

But, who had their number retired by the most teams? That distinction comes down to two players. Wayne Gretzky, the greatest hockey player to ever laces up a pair of skates has his #99 retired by all 30 NHL teams. And Jackie Robinson, the first black man to play Major League Baseball in the modern era matched Gretzky. His #42 is retired by all 30 MLB teams.

Jackie Robinson first played in the major leagues in 1947. It was 50 years later in 1997, that the league took the unprecedented step of retiring his number throughout all of baseball. On that day, a player named Ken Griffey Jr asked for permission to flip his #24 to #42 to honor the man who broke the MLB color barrier.

Ten years later, on the 60th anniversary of his achievement, MLB made another unprecedented change. They allowed palyers to wear 42 for a single game. The idea caught on to the point that by 2009, everyone in baseball was wearing it, each year for one day only.

That day was last Saturday, April 15th. That marks the day of Robinson’s first game as a Major Leaguer, April 15th, 1947. If you saw any pictures from last Saturday’s games, every player, coach and manager was wearing #42. (Any teams that had an off day on Saturday honored Robinson by wearing #42 on their next game.)

April 15th is a day that many in the United States look forward to in dread. If you haven’t done it before then, you have to get your taxes in by that day.

But, for baseball fans, and fans of Civil Rights, April 15th is a day to look forward to. It’s inspiring to see every player in baseball honoring a man who did so much for the game. And, fittingly they are honoring him in the best way possible; just by going about their day, doing their jobs; simply by playing baseball.

April 15, 2016

The Junior High Piano And The Call Center

Five copies of the same email from Trevor Manning arrived in my mailbox. One for each of my kids in choir and a second for my daughter who has two choir classes. It was an appeal for money to buy a new piano. As I read through it, I realized that my kids’ music program was going through a decision making process that, as a project manager I go through on a regular basis. They were faced with the classic “build or buy” decision.

Of course, they weren’t planning to build their own piano, but the economics were the same.

My company is essentially a call center provider. Our “product” is agents sitting in call centers around the world that we can train and make available to companies that need to provide “operators” for their members. Most of the time when you call a large corporation, be it your bank, or your phone company, or even many computer companies, you are not talking to an employee of the company. You are talking to a highly trained agent that works for a dedicated call center company. The company you are calling has hired a company like mine to staff and handle calls.

The relationship is typically a tightly integrated partnership between the call center company and the client. The goal is for the person calling in to never know the difference between talking to an employee of the call center and an employee of the company itself.

This arrangement works out great for all parties involved. A software company, for example, is typically an expert in writing software. It’s what they do, it’s why they are in business. And, having worked for Microsoft and WordPerfect, I can tell you that to get to be a company of their size, you have to be very good at what you do and very focused on writing great software.

There are not a lot of similarities between writing great software and being able to explain to other people how to use your software. Even more complex and hard to do is taking calls from people who have a problem using your software. If you want to offer your software worldwide, now you have to consider how are you going to let people in Europe and Africa call for support? How many phone lines do you need? What about call routing and call queuing software? There are a million little details that go into making the customer’s phone experience the best it possibly can be.

And most people who are good at writing software, are not great at communicating with people. The skill set that lets you conceive of how to turn a bunch of obscure software commands into a word processor is not the same skill set that lets you patiently explain to an elderly woman in Florida that “moving the mouse to the upper right hand corner” doesn’t mean you pick up the mouse and put it on the computer screen.

So, specialization happens. My first job at Microsoft was to be on the phones answering questions about Microsoft Mail. I was a Microsoft employee. But, even then, it was more convenient for Microsoft to hire contractors to work in support. Eventually, as the software matured with the release of Microsoft Exchange, the company started moving away from having their own employees and their own call centers and contracting it out.

A company like mine, can provide the infrastructure to scale up to take millions of calls. We buy thousands of phone lines. We have specialized software to route calls to the next available agent. We can place call centers in countries all around the world to provide local support for international companies. And, we can do it much cheaper than a software company, or a bank or a phone company could do it themselves.

In the “build or buy” equation, we come in as a “buy” solution. Companies will buy our services rather than build their own.

Back to my kids and their choir program. The choice the music department had was to rent a piano for a few hundred dollars per year, or buy their own piano for $20,000. At first glance this seems like an easy choice, right? Renting has huge advantages. Someone else comes in and installs the piano. They tune it, they maintain it and at the end of the year they take it away and bring you a new one the following year. So, you get a new piano every year.

And in the world of music, that’s the problem, not the solution. Pianos last 50-100 years. And when you get a new piano, it isn’t like getting a new car. With a new car you expect it will work perfectly as you drive it off the lot. But, a piano needs to adjust to the location you put it in. Temperature and humidity affect an instrument that is made of wood and metal and long strings under tension. As the piano adjusted to its environment, it changes shape very slightly. But, even a slight change changes the tension in the strings and you have to tune it again. . .and again. . .and again. Eventually, the piano gets to the point where it’s fully acclimatized and it will stay in tune with a minimal amount of maintenance. So, renting a new piano every year means that you constantly have to tune your piano. And it takes over a year to acclimatize a piano to a new location.

Now, you see the problem. Just about the time the piano is getting used to the school auditorium, they take it away and bring in a brand new one. Old pianos are preferable to new pianos. So, my kids’ junior high school is planning a fundraiser to buy a new $20,000 piano. Ironically, in the the classic “Build/Buy” equation, the school will stop “buying” the piano rental and they will “build” a solution that allows them to own their own piano. The fact that their build solution will result in them buying a piano suggests that I may have wanted to better think out this comparison before I started writing this.

If you want to donate to my kids’ music program, the details are below. It’s tax deductible.

April 14, 2016

How Not To Tell People About Yourself

I went to dinner last night with our new team member. He’s in from out of town. These types of visits are important for us to get to know each other so that as we work together over the coming months we will already have established a relationship at a personal level.

What’s more personal than family, right? Sean has three grown kids. He has two grandchildren that live near him. I asked him all sorts of questions about his home in Kansas City, his love for the KC Royals, his family of course. We talked for hours at dinner and at a minor league baseball game after.

Sean’s a pretty interesting guy.

Most people think I’m a pretty interesting guy. I have 13 children. Ten of my children are adopted. Between work and adoptions I’ve been all over the world, China, India, South America, Europe, the Middle East. I’ve been told I’m one of the most interesting people in my circle of friends.

I didn’t share any of that. When the subject of grandchildren came up, I mentioned that I have three grandchildren, with one on the way. And that they live near enough that I get to see them often. Even then, I skipped the awkward part of the conversation explaining that one grandchild was stillborn, so I only get to visit with two of them.

It’s not that I was trying to hide anything. I love to talk about my kids and my family. I love to tell stories. I love to talk. (Says the guy who writes a blog. . .) But, I also like to have conversations. Conversations are different than two people taking turns speaking. A conversation has a direction and a flow to it.

I also have ADD. People with Attention Deficit Disorder often have a hard time holding normal conversations. We think that whatever we are thinking at the moment must be interesting to whoever is around us. We tend to dominate the conversation and babble.

Knowing this about myself, I do lots of self censoring. The funny thing is that I think whatever story I want to tell is probably going to be interesting to the person I’m talking to. I have received lots of positive feedback in my life that I’m an amusing conversationalist. And yet, I also know that if I talk as much as I would like, I will be talking too much.

So, I censor. I listen. (Even though I really want to talk.) I ask lot so of questions. Because, here’s the key: everyone likes to talk about themselves. Everyone has interesting stories to tell. I’m going to work with Sean for a long time. At some point, Sean will figure out that I have a houseful of kids from all around the world. He will probably find it interesting. But, if I had told all my stories last night, I’d not know anything more about Sean than I did at the beginning for the evening.

The purpose of our conversation was to build relationships of trust. We needed to establish a common language that we can draw on over the coming months. They’ll be plenty of time to share my stories, but last night was my only chance to hear Sean’s stories in person.

Active listening can be just as valuable as telling an interesting story.

April 13, 2016

My Barber Will Save Me From The Robot Singularity

I got a haircut last weekend. The conversation is rarely about much more than the weather. I go to Dean’s Style Shop in Orem, UT. I’ve been going to Dean’s for about 15 years. In all that time I’ve never seen Dean. In fact, Dean passed away five years ago and I don’t think he cut hair for 20 years before that. My barber is named Mary.

(Photo credit: Daily Herald)

I like having her cut my hair because I hate haircuts. But, after 15 years, I don’t even have to tell Mary how to cut my hair. In fact, every time I sit down in her chair, she says the same thing.

Then, Mary goes to work and in less than 10 minutes I have the haircut not only that I want, but that I’ve had for the past 15 years.

Barbers are an interesting group. They’ve been around for centuries. Gioachino Rossini’s opera “The Barber of Seville” was written in 1816. I’ve never seen it, but apparently I’ve heard the music. (Think Figaro.) The barber in “Man of La Mancha” sings a song about the enduring need for barbers:

In fact, barbers used to be doctors. The barber pole, with it’s red and blue lines is designed to look like blood spiraling down a pole. Barbers are one of the few professions that have kept their ancient symbol and use it today. Obviously, we don’t go to the barber today when we are sick. We go to the doctor.

And here’s where I wanted to talk about robots.

I enjoy the Demotivator site. One of my favorite posters says:

(Photo credit: Despair.com)

You already use robot doctors. Don’t believe me? Google can track flu outbreaks better than the CDC simply by tracking where people are searching for the symptoms. Even brain surgeons use tiny robot controlled instruments to assist in delicate operations. Researchers are investigating the ability to create nanobots: Tiny robots that will live inside us and fight disease, or clear clogged arteries.

Barbers used to be doctors. Now we have robots being doctors.

But, there is a really important role that barbers fill that robots can’t. Robots can’t cut hair. I haven’t even seen any research on trying to get robots to cut hair. There’s a silly scene in the movie “Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius” that shows Jimmy, a cartoon computer genius, using a robot to try out different hair styles.

(Photo Credit: Paramount 2001) (What the full clip here.)

But, even in science fiction movies, the role of barber hasn’t really been taken over by automation.

Mary uses an electric razor to cut my hair and a vacuum to get the little pieces out after she’s done. But, much of her work is done the same way it’s been done for centuries: a comb and a pair of scissors.

The actor Alec Baldwin described a haircut as “A suit for your head.” It’s nice to know that when the robots come for our jobs, when the suits we wear are all shiny foil looking ones, when my job has been replaced by a robot, I can still go see Mary and for ten minutes talk about the weather as she does the job that no robot ever can.

April 12, 2016

Am I A Good Nephew? (Are You?)

Go see your relatives before it’s too late. That’s what we are told, right? I have an aunt that lives in Salt Lake City. I didn’t see her for years and years. Then, my cousin (her daughter) got super sick and we thought she was going to die. Our family rarely gets together. We sometimes get together for weddings. We nearly always get together for funerals.

So, the family rallied. Fortunately, my cousin didn’t die, but it was a close thing. I reconnected with my aunt. I go see her once per year. That’s once more per year than I used to see her. But, I have a problem. I only go when there is something in it for me. I’m really not as terrible a person as that sounds. At least I hope I’m not.

There are departments at my work that I need things from. They don’t have to give them to me. But, if they do it will make my life a lot easier. How do I get them to help me? I’ll tell you what I don’t do. I don’t wait and only talk to them when I need something. Many of them, I go out of my way to visit when I’m in town. I do what I can to help make their jobs easier. With some departments, I’ve been very successful. With others, less so. But, if the only time they hear from me is when I need something, eventually they stop answering the phone.

Friends can be the same way. We all have friends, close friends and aquaintences. The difference between the three is often proximity and trust. If you and I meet, we become aquaintences. If we end up working together, we may become friends. As I come to depend on you, and you to depend on me, we become close friends.

But, how does that pattern work in reverse? Close friends drift apart, of course. And especially when jobs change, or people move, aquaintences and friendships can wither and eventually die. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. You cannot stay friends with everyone you’ve ever met. It would be exhausting.

But, the concept I worry about with my aunt, also applies to people you work with. If every time Bill, from accounting shows up at your desk, it’s to ask you to unlock his account because he forgot his password again, you might start to think that you and Bill are not friends. You are Bill’s help desk tech. If the only time you interact with Beth in marketing is to ask her to make you “just one more” flyer for your monthly karaoke night, Beth is not going to consider you her friend.

You need to give in order to get. You need to “be a friend to have a friend.” (I think I have that on a poster around her somewhere.) It’s how things get done.

I pick about 8-15 bushels of grapes at my aunt’s house every year, depending on the yield. That translates into about 10-15 gallons of the best concord grape juice you’ve ever tasted. It’s phenomenal. So, I actually see my aunt twice a year. Once when we pick the grapes and then several days later when we bring her a supply of fresh grape juice.

Yeah, I still feel a little like a bad nephew for only seeing her around grape season, but I placate my conscious with a gallon or so the fruit of the vine.

Go visit your relatives while you still can.

April 11, 2016

Can I Just Check The Back Of The Book?

My friend Sean Neuman is a computer expert. People, many who don’t understand computers, think that I’m a computer expert. And while I admit that I can find my way around a network, I’m nowhere near where Sean is at. And he’s stuck on a problem that he can’t seem to fix.

My car is broken again. Actually, it’s still broken from the last time I replaced the water pump, the thermostat and the radiator cap in an effort to get it to stop overheating. And like my computer, the car is currently winning the “Guess what’s wrong with me” game.

College classes, especially when it comes to IT, are not designed to teach you a whole lot. Not to say they are worthless, not at all. But, the actual information that you learn in a computer class very quickly becomes dated. My first programming class used Turbo Pascal. I don’t know anyone who has even written a program in Turbo Pascal today. Ruby and Python are two of the trendy languages today. They were only invented in the past decade or two.

If programming classes and computer classes are going to become outdated quickly, why even take the classes?

Because the purpose of most classes is not to provide you with information, but to help you learn to think. The techniques I learned in that first computer class are just as applicable today as they were 25 years ago. For example, if you need to sort a list of names, you can do a bubble sort, an insertion sort, a heap sort, a radix sort, etc. Each sort algorithms has advantages and disadvantages. Some are easy to program but take a long time to run. Some are better on pre-sorted data. Some take a long time to write, but run really quickly. Some are better on small data sets. Some will take years on large data sets.

Understanding the different types of sort will help me write programs in Turbo Pascal, Ruby, or the language that will be invented 10 years from now. Hopefully, in college we learn to learn.

Solving problems in college classes did have one major advantage over trying to solve similar problems in real life: the answer key. There were times where I spent hours, possibly days, on a problem but still coudln’t get the right answer. At that point, I was willing to take half credit and “look in the back of the book.” Many texts, especially math texts included the answer key to a certain number of problems in the back of the book. And if I was frustrated enough, I no longer cared how I got to the right answer, I just wanted to know what the right answer was.

Unfortunately, that’s typically not an option in real life. My car, for example, has something wrong with it. I can drive it for 45 minutes and it will be just fine and after about an hour, it will start to overheat. I’ve done all the simple things. I’ve moved on into more exotic testing. I’ve done the “turkey baster” test to check for hydrocarbons in the coolant system. If the test came back positive, I’d know that I had a blown head gasket. The test came back negative.

I’ve done a pressure test, where I artificially pressurize the coolant system to find any leaks. There were no leaks. I’ve checked the rating on my radiator cap. It’s rated 1.1 bars which translates to 15.94 lbs, which is close enough to 16 to eliminate that as a problem.

The car is not magical. It isn’t being sick on purpose. I’m confident that eventually I’ll figure out the problem. But, in the mean time, I’m stuck trying one ineffective processes after another. I’m ready to take half credit, if someone will just show me where I can look up the answer in the back of the book.

My friend Sean is facing a similar challenge with my server. The computer was working fine until we tried to move it one day. From that day on, it’s given weird boot up errors. I did everything I could think of and couldn’t fix it. I gave it to Sean who was confident he could diagnose and fix it quickly. But, like my car experience, Sean has run into one failed test after another. Computers, like cars, don’t have a soul. They are not breaking because they hate us. There is a mechanical reason that my server will not boot up. Sean will eventually find it and fix it. But, in the mean time, it would sure be nice to have someone share the ultimate answer.

I guess the real lesson is to college students. Enjoy the experience. The real world is nothing like it.

April 8, 2016

Why Dr. Seuss Wasn’t An IT Guy

Have you ever heard of the Zax? There were two of them. Zaxes? Zaxi? Are maybe Zax is like deer or moose, it’s both the singluar and the plural. Anyway, these two Zax ran into each other. One was headed North, the other going South and they refused to move aside for each other. Like two people who keep mirroring each other as they try to pass in the hallway, these Zax simply refused to yield. The reason is that the North-going Zax insists he only goes North. The South-going Zax insists he only goes South.

It’s 1,430 miles from Salt Lake City, UT to Shreveport, LA. I went there last week and travelled 2,468, over 1,000 miles farther. Why? Because unlike the Zax, I went North to go South. Or rather I went East to go West. Well, actually, I went farther East to come back West. (This is why I don’t write Dr. Seuss stories.) My flight routed through Atlanta, which is in the Eastern Time Zone, before coming back West to Shreveport, in the Cntral Time Zone.

The point is that you often have to go backward to go forward, in business as well as in travel. Nowhere is this more true than when it comes to computers and IT. There was a time when I was an expert on WordPerfect Office, later renamed to Novell GroupWise.) I was one of the very best in the world. I flew all over the United States as a high paid on-site technician. With Office 3.0, if I didn’t know how to do it, no one did. And then, I moved. I went to Microsoft where I had to start all over learning Microsoft Mail. A couple years later it was another change, this time to Microsoft Exchange.

Since those days, I’ve changed companies and changed vocations. Sometimes it was my choice. Sometimes the choice was forced upon me. But, regardless it was always a step back to move forward. There have been times where I’ve felt like the North-going Zax. I’ve stuck with a position long past when I should have stepped aside. I think, “If I just work harder.” “If I just put in a few more hours per week…per day.” “I can fix this.” When the reality was, I couldn’t fix it.

The trick is knowing when to step aside, and when to stand your ground. I don’t have great advice on how to know the difference. I know that I’ve often stepped aside when I should have stood my ground. More often, I’ve done the opposite. I’ve stood there like a North-going Zax staring at the South-going Zax insisting that I didn’t have to move. The other guy should move.

Don’t be afraid to move backward to move forward.

The trick is knowing when to stand and when to move. Don’t be a Zax.

April 7, 2016

How My Working “Vacation” Made My Job Exciting Again

It wasn’t even clear if I was even going to go. We were on an impossible deadline and I really needed to be both in Louisiana and in Salt Lake City at the same time. The person who was my backup wasn’t available to cover for me if anything came up. The stress was pretty high.

Finally, we decided I’d be gone for 8 days; fly out on a Monday, fly back the following Tuesday. The trip was full of long hours and a million and one issues that I needed to deal with. On Wednesday night, I got to sleep at 4:30am only to get up at 6:30 to prepare for a client meeting.

Even after we passed our audit on Thursday, we still had numerous things that had to be followed up on. Saturday and Sunday were spent working only 4-5 hours each. Monday was the start of our training class. Now, people were using our systems and we found some spots that were not quite done. Even Tuesday morning, before my flight, I was making trips to pick up computer hardware and working on fixing even more issues. All the while, I had to keep up on email and deal with any outages.

It was exhausting.

It was just what I needed.

I realized about half way through the trip that while I was tired and I missed my family, I was having a good time. No, I was having a great time. I didn’t see much of Shreveport. We did go out to eat a bunch, but mostly we were in our call center the entire time.

But, what made the trip satisfying was a combination of two very important situations. First, I was so busy that I didn’t have time to think what I should do next. It’s said if you want something done, ask someone who is already busy. I dealt with whatever was most pressing at the time. I had an oil can and my world was filled with squeaky wheels. It helps me focus when I know what needs to happen next.

And I was the one making the decisions. I didn’t have to worry about someone else second guessing my priorities. I’ve helped launch four call centers now. I have a good idea of what needs to be done and when. Even if someone had wanted to second guess me, by the time they objected, I would be done and moving on to the next crisis. It was very clarifying to be able to work like that.

Secondly, I was accomplishing things. My job is a combination of maintenance and project management. Maintenance work means that when you get to the end of the day, your “work area” looks like it did at the beginning. It’s one of the drawbacks of computer work. Your desk looks the same at the end of the day as it did at the beginning .

But, last week, we were building stuff. We started with a room that was concrete and unpainted walls. We ended with a training room that had not only carpet and paint, but tables, monitors, computers, mice, keyboards, headsets and a bunch of other pieces. There is something very satisfying to get to the end of a long day and say, “I helped build that!”

As I flew home on Tuesday, I realized that I had a new appreciation for my job. I was excited to get back to the office on Wednesday. My tasks would be largely the same, now that this phase of our project is done, but a week away had rejuvenated me, almost like a vacation would.

Not every business trip gets me back to being excited, but this one was just what I needed.

Rodney M Bliss

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