Do we have to forgive the murderers?
It’s harder to forgive the rapists.
The remark passed unnoticed in the adult Sunday school class. Like many lessons, this one focused on God’s commandment that we forgive all people. It’s a tough teaching to follow. There are some really nasty people int eh world, or at least people who do nasty things to others.
I know. Some of those terrible things happened in my house. This isn’t a blog post about the horrors that happened in my house to my children. Maybe I’ll write that some day, but not today.
Today I want to talk about redemption. Both those seeking it and those offering it. I offer you the above opening simply to point out that to me, this topic is more than a Sunday school lesson. It’s more than a tale of attempting to overlook minor slights.
First let’s talk about those seeking redemption.
One of the stories in the news right now is about the owner of the NBA basketball Clippers. He said some very offensive things and might end up losing control of his team. Each NBA owner retains his ownership at the whim of his fellow owners. If enough of them vote that he has to sell the team, he’s out.
So, what did he do? He went on TV and apologized. He claimed he was baited into it. He was very sorry and he’d never ever do anything like that ever again.
Do you believe him? It doesn’t matter. What matters is if the other owners believe him. Personally, I have doubts. He’s apparently said offensive things like this many times before. He looks like someone who is sorry all right. Sorry he got caught.
But, it’s true that had he not apologized, there would be no chance he keep his team. At this point it’s a slim chance.
But, someone in the public square like that doesn’t really impact us much. It’s like when the US president screws up. He might apologize, as some have, but he’s not talking to us personally.
Let’s bring it a little closer to home. I’ve talked about two employees that needed to be fired. The first one was Sam (He ALSO Deserved To Be Fired.) Sam fell asleep at a customer site. When I confronted him about it, he gave me plenty of excuses, but took zero responsibility. If you read the link above, you will see that Sam had very little chance. However, over the years, I’ve considered what I’d do if Sam had instead said, “I screwed up. I was too tired and made a mistake.” Would I have still fired him? I don’t know. But, it would have made it harder.
As it was, his protests that he did nothing wrong, left him no hope of saving his job.
The second person that I’ve written about who deserved to be fired was James (He Deserved To Be Fired.) James lied to me. He told me a task was complete when it wasn’t. He compounded his error by deleting an entire department’s login accounts the day before he left for two weeks of training.
But, James’ attitude was different. He admitted he screwed up. My manager wanted me to fire him, but I really saw a chance for him to redeem himself. He helped himself a lot by admitting that he made a mistake. We put him on a 90 day performance improvement plan and 45 days in, James came to me and claimed the previous month had been the best of his career. James is still working for our old employer and doing a fantastic job.
I’ve screwed up at different points in my career. At one point I shared information with my team before I should have. It reflected badly on my review. I went to my mentor and asked him if I should simply transfer to a new department and start over.
My mentor looked at me with a look a disappointment.
Rodney, if you run from this, you’ll be running your whole life. I’d recommend you stay and clean up the mess you made.
It was hard advice to hear, but it was good advice. It took a couple of years, but eventually, I was able to show that one mistake didn’t define my career.
So, what about the story I opened with? My children owned up to their mistakes. Apologized. And then devoted themselves to therapy and attempting to make amends. It’s taken years and will take years more.
But, what the successful examples have in common is an acknowledgement that you’ve screwed up, and a willingness to improve. That looks like a simple formula, but looks can be deceiving. That NBA owner acknowledged that he screwed up and said he’s willing to improve. But, some think he lacks sincerity.
None of us can look into the heart of another. We cannot know if they are sincere despite what they say. We can watch what they do and if it looks like they are willing to make changes, we can start to trust that they are sincere. But, like Sam, who I fired, without at least the appearance of remorse, redemption is probably not possible.
Tomorrow I’ll talk about how I was able to forgive some of the biggest disappointments I’ve ever experienced.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife and thirteen children.
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Call the family.
It’s that bad?
She’s in a medical induced coma. Every time we bring her out the strokes start. We’re running out of things to try.
My cousin, in her 40’s was younger than me. The day before she’d been out snowboarding in “The Greatest Snow On Earth” in Utah’s mountains. It was one of her passions and she’d been doing it for years. She’d count down the days until the resorts opened each fall.
On this day she’d been boarding for several hours when she downed a 5-hour energy drink. She’d had them often and never with any unexpected effects. Today was different. Shortly after the first one she drank a second one, and a few minutes later had a massive stroke, the first of many. Her friends notified Ski Patrol immediately.
Ski Patrol quickly got her off the mountain and to the University of Utah medical center. The doctors were able to stabilize her by putting her into a light coma. The strokes stopped. Every time they tried to bring her out of the coma, the micro-strokes would start again. The capillaries at the base of her brain would spasm. When they closed she’d have another stroke.
My aunt and I have grown close over the years. She called me to let me know that my cousin was in the hospital and wasn’t expected to make it. I made the short trip from Pleasant Grove to Salt Lake City.
She also called her son and her ex-husband, my uncle. My cousin started driving in from North Dakota and my uncle drove down from Coeur d’Alene, ID. We weren’t sure what to expect. Physically both were big men, 6’4″. Both had worked in physical jobs that meant that they were also very strong. And they couldn’t stand each other. The dislike was so intense that they hadn’t spoken in 20 years.
How many of your company policies are built around personalities? While I worked at WordPerfect, Pete Peterson, the Executive Vice President ran every aspect of the company. I was a support engineer and I needed a new computer because mine burnt up. Pete had to personally approve my department buying me a new computer. Why did everything run through Pete’s office? Because he insisted and no one wanted to cross him.
In fact, when the founders finally decided to reform the company, they summoned Pete to a meeting and started off by saying,
This is an official meeting of the board of directors of WordPerfect Corporation.
They felt the need to shroud their conversations in legal-speak. Incidentally, my success with the EPA account indirectly lead to Pete being asked to leave. (How I Saved the EPA. Don’t Tell Pete!)
Speaking of the EPA, the administrator, Bernadette had a reputation as someone that no one wanted to work with, but certainly someone that no one wanted to cross. She was very demanding. However, I discovered that once we got into the same room, it was much easier to understand her demands. She wasn’t attempting to be difficult. She simply needed to run a 30,000 user email system and didn’t have time for pointless questions.
We got along great.
My current position also requires me to work with a very demanding administrator from our client. She reminds me a lot of Bernadette. People, both at my company and at hers are kind of afraid of her. They are very hesitant to say or do anything that might be viewed as crossing her. But, like my experience with Bernadette, I found that once we got into the same room, our goals are actually very similar. She and I both want our systems to run smoothly.
We get along great.
It’s that recognition that we have common goals and common interests that lets us move past personalities and focus on the bigger goals.
I saw a similar experience with my uncle and my cousin. The initial meeting was strained. Both were still hurt by events in the distant past. However, a common love for my other cousin let them set aside their differences. And then a funny thing happened.
They started to talk. And as they talked they realized that neither of them remembered what had caused the rift so many years ago. In many ways it was obviously a happy discovery. However, it was also twinged with sadness. My cousin had married and had children. Grandchildren who had never had a chance to meet their grandfather. Years of pointless isolation were wasted.
After a few hours, my uncle and his son were thick as thieves. Both still obviously worried about my cousin. But, happy to be reunited.
And then the miracle occurred. The doctors tried an experimental unproven technique. (When the patient is terminal, nothing is too extreme to at least try.) They used a technique to deliver drugs directly to her brain stem. They then slowly brought her out of her coma. . .and the capillaries didn’t spasm. She was going to live. And better than that, she eventually recovered fully.
She works as a rigger in the arenas in Salt Lake City. She climbs into the rafters and sets up speakers and lights hundreds of feet above the arena floor. We are naturally grateful for her recovery, but also grateful that her near death experience brought her family back together. My uncle has already made trips to North Dakota to get to know his grandkids.
My cousin is back to snowboarding.
But, she NEVER drinks energy drinks.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife and thirteen children.
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Does your dad even own a flannel shirt?
Yeah, he owns several.
I just can’t picture Rodney in anything except a pressed shirt and slacks.
My daughter was working for Andy Nienas, owner of Echo Canyon Rafting in Colorado. Andy was a customer for our RESMARK software. I’d been to see him multiple times at his location on the Arkansas River. Every time I showed up I wore slacks, a pressed shirt and a sport coat. Why? Why did I insist on wearing business dress to visit a rafting company?
Because I didn’t want Andy to see me as a rafting customer, I needed him to see me as a businessman. He gave me a pile of money for software that wasn’t written yet. The uniform was very deliberate.
My brother is a CPA. He owns a CPA firm and has for years. He used to drive a Chevy Silverado. He loved having a truck. Once he bought the CPA firm he sold the truck and bought a BMW.
You might be saying, “What a couple of phonies! The clothes. . or the car doesn’t make you a businessman or a respected CPA.”
Ask yourself, if you went to see your mechanic and he was dressed in a tuxedo, would you let him work on your car? Suppose he was wearing Bermuda shorts and a flowered shirt?
You MIGHT have him work on your car, but you’d be concerned. If you went to church and the preacher or minister or rabbi was wearing a baseball uniform you’d think it was odd.
The point is that what we wear influences how others think of us.
I know developers and programmers who laugh at this rule.
Dude! I wear whatever I want. I don’t follow some arbitrary dress code!
And we all know exactly what they were wearing when they said it. . .shorts, sandals with socks and a free t-shirt they got at a trade show.
Here’s the key for you. Knowing that every job has a uniform, you get to pick the uniform you want and people will assign you the job you’ve picked. I’ve seen this written as, “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.” I don’t disagree, but if you want to be the CEO and you work in the mailroom, don’t show up in a three piece suit. But, if you want to be the manager of the mailroom, it might not be a bad idea to skip the t-shirt and wear a shirt with a collar.
Especially if you are new in business or new to a company, look around at the people you work with. Notice the ones that you want to emulate, the influencers. Take your dressing cues from them.
And it doesn’t always have to be dressing up. If you want to be a programmer, by all means invest in some logo’d t-shirts and white ankle socks.
Every position has a uniform. . .even if it has no dress code.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife and thirteen children.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com
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I want to send pictures.
Okay, but I thought you refused to allow the school photographer to take any pictures?
Yeah, but I changed my mind. I want to send pictures with my graduation announcements.
The mother and daughter were spending the day doing normal pre-high school graduation activities, shopping, pictures, announcements, lunch. Very traditional family stuff. . . and it was starting to scare the mother just a little bit.
I’ve had the opportunity to meet people with all sorts of different family situations. In this case, we’ll call the daughter Adrian and the mother Bella. Adrian and Bella had a complicated relationship. Adrian had made some bad choices, horrific actually, and she had been living in the Arizona foster care program for several years. Bella and her husband had been very involved in Adrian’s life even after she left their home. But, Adrian continued to make tough choices and the mother/daughter relationship was strained. At times a court order was the only thing that kept them seeing each other. Adrian was graduating from high school and would soon age out of the foster care program. Bella seriously wondered if she’d see her after that.
So, the normal day was a little spooky. Adrian was interested, engaging, and seemed genuinely happy about spending time with her mother.
If you’re used to crazy, normal is a little scary.
I’ve had bosses like that.
Matt was my manager at Microsoft while I was working in the training organization. Matt was crazy. Well, maybe not crazy, but his view of leadership and management was completely different than mine. (The Switched to a Cash Award And Totally Blew It.)
So, when Matt did something reasonable and normal, it always made me nervous. “Crazy” I can learn to live with and manage around. But, how do you deal with a boss who’s crazy on Monday and totally sane on Tuesday?
Remember the Titans is one of my favorite movies, probably because I have black kids and white kids, and the movie is about integration. In one scene, the black head coach benches Petey, an emotional player who is black. The white assistant coach pulls Petey aside and gives him a place on the defense. After the game the head coach talks to his assistant about it.
All right, listen, about Petey…
No thanks required, Coach.
Thanks? You challenged my authority in front of the entire football team, Coach. Now, you think you’re doing these boys a favour taking them aside every time I come down on them, protecting them from big bad Boone. You’re cutting my legs from under me.
Some of the boys just don’t respond well to public criticism. I tell them what they need to know, but I don’t humiliate them in front of the team.
Which boys are you talking about? Which ones you talking about? I come down on Bertier. I don’t see you coddle him. Come down on Sunshine. Don’t see you grab his hand, take him off to the side. Which boys are you talking about? Now I may be a mean cuss. But I’m the same mean cuss with everybody out there on that football field. The world don’t give a damn about how sensitive these kids are, especially the young black kids. You ain’t doin’ these kids a favor by patronizing them. You crippling them; You crippling them for life.
What the head coach understood, was the value of consistency. Even if you are going to be a mean cuss, be the same mean cuss to everybody on the field. Okay, probably not a good idea to be a mean cuss to your IT team. But, the lesson is consistency.
Because if you’re used to crazy, normal can be downright frightening.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife and thirteen children.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com
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My Bacon number is 2, and that impresses me way more than it should.
This is kind of a weird mix of two nerd cultures. (It’s not an insult when we call ourselves that.) Movie trivia and Information Technology.
As far as I know, Kevin Bacon has never rebooted a server, or taken a support call. I could be wrong, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he had no idea what a DLL is for!
The Bacon Number comes from a game, the Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon that was started back in the 1980’s.
(Photo credit: imdb.com)
You pick an actor and try to find the shortest number of connection to connect him back to Kevin Bacon. So, if you pick an actor who was in a movie with Kevin Bacon, their Bacon Number is 1. If they were in a movie with someone who was in a movie with Kevin Bacon then their number is 2 and so on. The idea was that every actor could be connected to Kevin Bacon by less than 6 “connections” or degrees.
Here’s the funny thing. The game could be called the Three Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Google makes it easy to play. Just Google (actor’s name) Bacon Number. And Google will not only tell you the number, but trace the connections for you.
In preparing this blog post, I tried a few. They all came back as Bacon Number 2. So, I searched for people back in early films.
Abbott and Costello?
Bacon Number: 2
Abbott and Costello appeared with Carol Bruce in Keep ‘Em Flying.
Carol Bruce and Kevin Bacon appeared in Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
Charlie Chaplin?
Bacon Number: 2
Charlie Chaplin and Eli Wallach appeared in Slapstick, Too.
Eli Wallach and Kevin Bacon appeared in Mystic River.
I tried historical figures.
Mother Teresa
Bacon Number: 3
Mother Teresa and Peter Graves appeared in Mother Teresa: A Life of Devotion.
Peter Graves and James Hong appeared in Airplane!.
James Hong and Kevin Bacon appeared in R.I.P.D..
Adolf Hitler?
. . .on second thought, I really don’t want to know.
So, what’s this have to do with IT? How could I get a Bacon Number of 2 without being in a movie? Well, if you google Rodney Bliss Bacon Number, you won’t get a result.
But, I used to work with a guy named Robert Allen. You won’t find Robert’s name in the Internet Movie Database (IMDB.) In fact, he’s a great software engineer at a large non profit that I used to work for. However, back in 1983 Robert was a student at BYU and a gymnast. They asked him to do a stunt for a movie. It’s this stunt. (Robert appears at 2:27 on the high bar.)
(Photo credit: imdb.com)
So, Robert’s Bacon Number is 1. In fact, you could almost say his Bacon Number is zero since he WAS Kevin Bacon, or Ren McCormack. Since Robert worked with Kevin and I worked with Robert, we’re calling that an IT Bacon Number.
There has been a lot written about how interconnected the world is, and specifically why a Bacon Number will always be pretty small.
Think about your own field or profession. There are probably only one or two degrees, three at the most, that separate you from the most senior and influential people in your field.
The temptation is to use those connection to improve your position. And that might work, I suppose. I have my doubts. A friend of mine is a senior executive in an entertainment studio. We are friends from high school, so he takes my calls and tells his gatekeepers to let me through.
But, those people have people who protect them from people.
No, the lesson I take from the Bacon Number game is that it’s really not about who you know. We ALL know people. Instead it’s about doing your work or your art so well that you stand out from everyone else who is in that second or third orbit around the powerful.
I’m still excited about my low Bacon Number. But, I realize the real advantage comes from being known as a good project manager, being known as good at what I do. Being able to pick up the phone and call people I’ve worked with in the past and know their opinion of me is positive.
(But, a low Bacon Number is pretty cool too.)
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife and thirteen children.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com
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Oww! My stomach. I think we’d better go to the emergency room.
My wife and I had been on a date. We’d had a nice dinner and gone to see a movie. . .all without kids, and we were just about to head home when the attack started.
I’d had appendicitis. . well, not exactly appendicitis, they thought it was when I went to the emergency room, but after cutting me open they discovered it was Crohns Disease, although years later they thought it couldn’t have been Crohns, since I got better and Crohns is incurable, but my original doctor swears it was, but none of this has much to do with my wife going to the ER. Except to say that her pain seemed an awful lot like appendicitis. . .or Crohns. . .but probably appendicitis.
Naturally, when a woman comes in doubled over in pain and she’s not pregnant, the hospital wants to do lots of tests. And then they do some more tests. And then they go back and do some of the first tests again just to be sure.
We were there a long time. It was already late when we arrived and the tests continued past midnight and several hours into the early morning. I fell asleep in a chair in the hallway. And that was how I injured myself.
You would think that a hospital is an excellent place to get sick. It’s not.
While serving as a missionary in Chicago in the early 1980’s my missionary companion and I went to the hospital to interpret for a deaf woman who was pregnant. Yes, that interpreting assignment was just as awkward for two 20 year old young men as it sounds like.
But, what was worse, was they were showing a birthing film in the lobby. There was nothing much else to do while waiting so we watched the film.
Big mistake.
Remember when I said I had Crohns disease as a kid? Yeah, well I was really sick for a lot of years and I developed PTSD symptoms around blood. And as you might imagine a birthing film has a lot of blood. I started to feel like I was going to throw up.
I stood up and headed for the restroom. About half way there I passed out. Fortunately, I turned as I fell and the back of my head hit the marble floor and not my face.
But hey, we’re in a hospital right? How convenient!
Nope. They did every test you could imagine. They didn’t believe it was simply a reaction to the blood in the film. Five hours they kept me. The deaf woman was long gone home. Finally, I told the doctor
I’m leaving.
You can’t leave until you are signed out.
Then you’d better get the discharge papers pretty quick because I’m leaving right now.
The papers were quickly produced and I learned two important lessons. First, no more birthing films for me. I didn’t even see much of my own kids birth. I figured that’s what we paid the doctor for. And second, a hospital is a terrible place to get injured.
So, at about 2:00am the nurse came and told me that they were getting ready to discharge my wife. Well, the nurse woke me and then told me. I’d been passed out in the chair for hours with my legs crossed, right over left.
I did okay with the first step. It was my left foot. There was something definitely wrong with my right foot though. It was totally asleep. To compensate, I made sure to lift my leg high enough to step forward with that foot.
I almost made it.
My entire weight came down on foot as my toes were still pointed behind me. A heard a very loud CRACK and I fell down.
Fortunately, there were no hospital people around. I quickly picked myself up and limped to my wife’s room. She was fine, BTW. Problem with her gallbladder. They took it out a few months later.
Sitting in her room, I started to go into shock. I didn’t recognize it as shock. But, I knew I couldn’t get warm and I had terrible shakes. Finally, I staggered over to the bed next to hers laid down and pulled the blanket over me.
We should tell the doctor.
No!
But, you broke your foot!
I don’t care. We’ve been here too long already. I’m just going to get a little warmer and then we can go.
Are you sure?
Yes. I’m not staying in the hospital a minute longer than we need to.
Okay, it was stupid on my part. I bought a heavy-duty foot brace and wore it for the next 5 months. Even today my foot occasionally twinges if I step just wrong.
I think about that hospital trip sometimes and think about our computer systems. Engineering Discipline is the process of documenting your system and following a process for making changes. Engineers are eternal optimists. Some of them are like me in the hospital. They will make do with a broken system rather than take the time to go back and fix the underlying problem.
Every time I’ve tried that I end up with my foot in a brace for five months. But, I think I’ve gotten better about it over the years.
And I quit breaking things while in a hospital.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife and thirteen children.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com
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I live in a desert. It’s a pretty desert,
but it’s a desert. And if you go out into the desert, you must respect it. If you don’t it just might kill you.
I also have lots of kids. My kids, both the boys and girls love to go hiking and camping. They understand what it means to be going out into the desert. Unfortunately, not everyone does.
And that nearly killed my second oldest daughter.
The Gospel of Saint Matthew Chapter 25 includes the following story.
(Yeah, I know it’s not a lamp, but it’s the closest I had.)
1 Then shall the kingdom of heaven be likened unto ten virgins, which took their lamps, and went forth to meet the bridegroom.
2 And five of them were wise, and five were foolish.
3 They that were foolish took their lamps, and took no oil with them:
4 But the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps.
5 While the bridegroom tarried, they all slumbered and slept.
6 And at midnight there was a cry made, Behold, the bridegroom cometh; go ye out to meet him.
7 Then all those virgins arose, and trimmed their lamps.
8 And the foolish said unto the wise, Give us of your oil; for our lamps are gone out.
9 But the wise answered, saying, Not so; lest there be not enough for us and you: but go ye rather to them that sell, and buy for yourselves.
10 And while they went to buy, the bridegroom came; and they that were ready went in with him to the marriage: and the door was shut.
11 Afterward came also the other virgins, saying, Lord, Lord, open to us.
12 But he answered and said, Verily I say unto you, I know you not.
I’ve read this story multiple times, but yesterday I finally understood what it means. Oh sure, I understand the Sunday School answers, but why couldn’t they share oil? That part I always struggled with. Yesterday my niece and her husband came to our house for dinner. He said something that made it very clear. Matthew was really talking about water. Or, he might have been.
My current job as an IT project manager requires that I balance resources across multiple projects. Every project has a list of deliverables and a deadline. Often my constraint is the resources, the people that I have available to throw at a project. If I do my job well, then I can move people from project to project and meet my deadlines.
If I do my job poorly, I’m likely to get stuck. And here’s how. I end up with two projects, both of which have a deadline and they both require the same resource.
Rodney, you’ve asked me to work on the whitelist for Conteso and you also asked me to reimage all the machines for Barcolm’s. I can only do one or the other by Friday. Which one is most important?
It’s a PM’s worst nightmare. Especially when both projects are mine. Half of me hates the other half for stealing my resource. (I think many PMs could use therapy, but that’s another post.)
I can’t “share” the oil between these projects if I don’t plan well. My poor planning won’t get anyone killed. But, that’s nearly what happened with my daughter.
In her defense, she did everything right. She understood the risks and dangers and planned accordingly. The problem was she was too nice.
The young women at church decided to take a weeklong summer trip to Southern Utah a few years ago. My daughter went with them. She was about 16 years old at the time.
All of Utah is a desert. Southern Utah is a HOT desert. They were going to an area near Goblin Valley. The average July temperature is 100 degrees. Even if it is a dry heat, that’s hot.
(Photo credit: lightrainproductions.com)
Mistake #1
A big event at girl’s camp is the five mile hike. The leaders decided they didn’t want to get up super early in morning. They had all day to make the hike, why not start at 11:00am?
They were going to be hiking during the hottest portion of the day.
Mistake #2
My daughter realized that this was going to be a grueling and hot hike. She took all the water she could carry. She had multiple bottles in her pockets and carried more in her hands.
She was the only one.
Oh sure, some girls grabbed a water bottle on their way out of camp. But, enough for 2-3 hours in the sun?
Mistake #3
It got hot on the hike and the girls got thirsty. . . really thirsty. Here’s where the scripture from Matthew really hit home.
Hey, Bliss. Share you water, won’t you?
What would you do? Even the leaders joined in, pressuring her to share the water she brought with the girls who were less prepared.
She shared. I can’t really blame her, but she condemned them all to suffer. And since she actually understood the water needs while hiking in the Southern Utah sun, she conserved. She didn’t drink as much as she should have.
Mistake #4
The end of the hike was at a glacier fed pool high in the mountains. It was over 100 degrees on the trail, and the water looked so inviting. It was probably about 40 degrees.
She jumped in. . . and went into shock.
Mistake #5
They got her off the mountain. They were primitive camping. No cell coverage. Pretty much on their own until they headed back to civilization. My daughter’s body simply wanted to sleep. And they let her.
The problem with heat exhaustion or worse, heat stroke, is that your body starts to shut down. You quit sweating. You are no longer thirsty. You end up going to sleep, and then often you die.
The leaders put her in a trailer and let her sleep. . .for hours. Fortunately she didn’t die, but the following day when camp was over and she came home she was still suffering the effects.
So, what do these three stories have to do with each other?
The ten virgins
Overscheduled resources
My daughter’s hike
In each case, some people failed to properly prepare. While on the trail under a blistering sun, you WANT to share your water. But, at what cost? If the situation had been even slightly different, her decision to “share her oil” might have cost her her life.
I’m proud of my kids and my daughter. I’m proud she understood how to prepare. I’m even proud of her for sharing her water knowing it put her at risk. That’s what we do. I’m still, years later incredulous that leaders would, COULD make so many mistakes during a desert camp and hike.
Fail to respect the desert at your own peril. Make even one mistake and it could be the last mistake you ever make.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife and thirteen children.
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It wasn’t a t-shirt. But, it might as well have been.
How would you reward an employee who figured out a way to save your company $300,000 per year?
Now, what if the employee wasn’t tasked with saving the company money? What if he was working in your shipping department and just thought it up?
And if your employee were making $35,000 per year? Now, how would you reward him?
I’m guessing you would be more generous than WordPerfect was. Don’t get me wrong, I loved working for WordPerfect, but this story was not their best day.
The year was 1990. WordPerfect was at the top of their game. Part of the reason was that support was free. In fact, if WordPerfect had released an update and it fixed your problem, they would send you a new set of disks free. This was before the internet. You couldn’t just go online and download software. You had to call the company and have them send you floppy disks. WordPerfect sent a LOT of floppy disks out. They had their own disk manufacturing department. Every day hundreds and thousands of packages would be shipped out. And WordPerfect was picking up the shipping costs on each one.
An employee in their shipping department got to thinking about all those disks. His job was to put disks in boxes. All day long he watched boxes go by destined for locations all over the world.
That got him to thinking. And with a little bit of research he figured out how WordPerfect could reduce their shipping costs. . .by A LOT. I never heard what his suggestion was, but I’m guessing it was to sort the packages by zip code before handing them to the post office. Whatever the change was it cost the company nothing and it saved the company $25,000 PER MONTH.
That was nearly what the guys in the shipping department made in a year.
You would think the company would be grateful. They were. You would think they would find an appropriate way to show their appreciation. They didn’t.
Two gift certificates for dinner at The Tree Room, a fancy restaurant owned by Robert Redford and located up Provo Canyon. In hindsight, he might have preferred the t-shirt.
Now, maybe you’re saying, the company had no obligation to give him anything. He should be grateful for a free dinner.
You would be correct, and I have no idea if he enjoyed the dinner. Because I never heard that part of the story.
But, here’s the problem for WordPerfect, and any other company that is tempted to pawn off compensation vastly out of proportion with the savings. All of us at the company heard the story.
Do you want your employees to look for ways to save you money? Do you want employees who are interested in maybe stepping outside their comfort zones to find a better way of doing something?
Of course you do. All businesses do. Think about WordPerfect. How excited do you think the rest of the employees were to find innovative ways to save the company money?
We weren’t. In fact, even 25 years later the story still bothers me. That $25K / month was free money. Imagine if the company had awarded the employee their first month’s worth of savings? NOW, how motivated do you think other employees would be to find ways to save the company money? We’d be spending our free time looking for ways to help the company. Instead we were all left with a feeling that the company was kind of cheap. Like a guy who leaves a $2 tip on a $50 meal.
Compare that true story to this story which probably isn’t true, but still makes a valid point.
Carl went to work for a large company. It was his first job out of college and he was excited to finally be in a “real job.” On his first day his manager introduced him to all his coworkers except one. He noticed that he wasn’t introduced to Bob. Figuring that Bob was tied up on another project, he ignored it.
Carl loved his job. Every morning when he came to work he had to walk past Bob’s office. He started to notice that every time he walked past Bob was staring out the window. And come to think of it, he never saw any emails from Bob. Bob never appeared at any of the project or team meetings. It became a mystery as he tried to figure out what Bob’s role was. After a month he finally admitted defeat. He had no idea what Bob did for the company. In fact, from his view Bob did nothing.
Finally Carl went to his boss.
What’s the deal with Bob?
What do you mean?
Well, he’s never in meetings. He never sends email. Everytime I walk past his office he’s just sitting there staring out the window.
Yeah, about that. See, last year Bob came up with an idea that made the company $10,000,000. . . and we really hope he comes up with another one.
If you want your employees to look for ways to help the company in addition to doing their jobs, don’t be cheap when it comes times to share the benefits of their ideas.
You can’t afford to be cheap.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife and thirteen children.
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It must have been a ferocious battle, a young female horned nose viper versus a monster centipede that weighed more than she did. Evidently the viper eventually got the better of her foe. She ate him.
But, that’s when it got interesting. The centipede wasn’t about to give up simply because he got eaten. Like Tommy Lee Jones in Men In Black, he attacked from the inside.
When the battle was over, both the snake and the centipede were dead. Fortunately for “J” he did better than the centipede.
(Photo credit: Ecologica Montenegrina)
What could this possibly have to do with business or computers? I’m glad you asked.
I was making one of my frequent visits to Washington DC as part of the WordPerfect SWAT team (How I Saved the EPA. Don’t Tell Pete!) This time I was meeting with Ryan Watkins, the administrator for the International Monetary Fund. (IMF) Ryan was old school even back in 1990. He ran a BBS on the side.
A BBS is a computer Bulletin Board Server. It was what the internet looked like before they invented the internet. Basically you dialed up on your 2400 baud modem and you were able to navigate through a set of folders. You could share files, or post comments. The Internet killed all the BBS’s long ago.
I enjoyed working with Ryan. Today he was fuming about one of his users.
Stupid users screwing up my email system!
What’d they do?
Well, a user was supposed to get a new computer. He didn’t want to bother with backing up his 40 megabyte hard disk to floppy disks.
That would take like 30 disks. What did he do instead?
He zipped up the entire thing. . and mailed it to himself.
Not like this.
He decided to email his entire hard drive to himself. Perhaps he’d seen the Star Trek The Next Generation episode where Mr Scott from the original series uploaded himself to the transporter buffer to survive a ship’s failure. (Relics)
Unfortunately for Ryan’s user, his experience was more like the snake and the centipede than it was Star Trek. Forty meg might not sound like much to you today. I’ve created Excel spreadsheets that were bigger. But in 1990 it was HUGE. Ryan’s entire email system probably only had a couple hundred meg of storage. So, when the user attached his huge file to an email message and addressed it to himself, it pretty much crashed Ryan’s system.
He had to manually rip the file out of multiple locations. He also had to explain to the managers why email was down for the day. Strangely he wasn’t able to “save” the file. Like the centipede, Ryan decided the file had to die on it’s way out of the system.
Mostly I think he was trying to teach the user to stop abusing the system.
Today, we lack such drama. A good email administrator can restrict the size of attachments and restrict the size of mailboxes. Storage has increased many times what it was in 1990. But, no matter how big you make your database, users will find way to fill it up.
More often than not, their attempts to cram too much into a system end up killing both the data and the host. After all, Men In Black was just a movie.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife and thirteen children.
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We’ll meet you at the church. What’s the address?
It’s on the corner of Grove Creek Blvd and 700 East.
My GPS says that’s not a valid address.
It’s not an address, it’s an intersection. I don’t know the address. Just look it up on a map.
I don’t have a map.
There’s one on your phone. Did you forget how to read a map?
My mother was in town last weekend for my son’s ordination and granddaughter’s blessing. (Growing Old In A Digital World.) She and my stepfather have been traveling around the world for the past several years spending their children’s inheritances and having a great time. But they’ve become those people you hear about. The ones who end up driving down a snow covered logging road in Canada because the GPS said to turn right.
I love maps. I always have. I like the idea that they represent places, but I also like the workmanship that goes into a good map. I enjoy the amount of data that can be packed into what is essentially a picture.
And there’s something about finding your way with a map, and your car’s compass that is a feeling of accomplishment. (Yes, I recognize the irony in that statement.)
I don’t hate the GPS. But, as a man, I’m not wild about someone telling me
Turn here.
No you missed it!
Recalculating
Turn left in 200 yards.
Admit it, if your best friend was sitting next to you and talking to you like that you’d tell him WOULD YOU SHUT UP!
It’s supposed to be the older generation that is afraid of technology and the younger generation that is pushing the envelope. I apparently missed that memo, as did my parents, aged 69 and “older than 69.” I was talking to my step father about it after they arrived at the church.
You couldn’t just look at a map?
We drove 7200 miles on our cross country trip last year and never looked at a map one time.
You say that like it’s a good thing.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife and thirteen children.
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Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com