Merry Christmas. Best of 2013. In keeping with the theme of book reviews on holidays, here is the most popular book review I wrote last year. Not my fVorite book, but you guys seemed to like the review.
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Best of 2013. This was the 5th most popular Blog entry for 2013. It was original posted on August 2.
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Best of 2013. This was the 6th most popular blog entry of 2013. Originally posted on May 24th.
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I’ve enjoyed the feedback and discussions on this blog this year. I’ve also watched the viewership numbers and discovered that I’m most appealing to people as part of their workday. Hopefully I’m providing enough value that people feel it’s worth it.
That brings me to today. It’s the Friday before Christmas. Next week is known as a “dead week” in just about every industry. I would expect that people are going to be home or on vacation. Whatever you’re doing I would imagine you will not be checking in here at 7:00 Mountain Time. And I’m fine with that. I wish all of you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Here’s the plan for the rest of the year. Starting on Monday, I’ll be reposting the 6th most popular post from the past year. Tuesday, I’ll post the 5th most popular, and so on. On Christmas, in keeping with tradition, I post a book review. The most popular one from the past year. We’ll then count down to the new year finishing on New Year’s Eve with a repost of the most popular post from the past year.
So, enjoy your time off, and check in here if you get a chance, but realize that we’ll be picking up again in the start of the new year.
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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Rodney?
Yeah Jessica, what’s up?
You just sent another update to the move map. I think this was the third one.
Actually, it’s the fourth. They’ve changed our location at the new building, so we have to reassign offices again.
Stop it.
Stop what?
Stop sending them to me. I don’t want to get another move map until it’s finalized and I know where I’m going to be sitting.
Oh. . .okay.
Jessica was new to our training team. And she was new to Microsoft. The one perk of seniority at Microsoft was choosing office locations. Typically when a team moved into a new building, they were assigned a group of offices. Within the team, the person with the most seniority at Microsoft got to pick first. The person with the next most picked from what was left and so on. As the newest member of the team, Jessica pretty much got whatever was left.
We were writing training courses for Microsoft Exchange and we were assigned offices in the Exchange development building, Building 43.
Microsoft Building 43: Photo Credit NorthWest Lady Bug
This was extremely rare. Most of the training group was in cramped cubicles in an old building on the other side of town. The fact that we ended up in the development building in actual offices was a little bit of luck and a lot of “be nice to the admins. . .they run the world!” Grace was the Exchange admin and we had become pretty good friends. Grace also was the person who owned the master seating plan for all 800 people in the Exchange development buildings.
Grace, is there any chance you would have some spare offices that we could use?
Where do you sit now?
Well, we’re in the building across town, which means if we want to meet with testers or developers, we have to catch a shuttle. We can double up in an office if that would help.
Well, Gary’s team has a some offices that he’s holding for a couple new hires that got snarled in immigration. I can let you have those temporarily. As soon as his new hires get their visas you would have to move.
That’s no problem. It’s great in fact, thanks very much.
When we move to the new building I can get some offices assigned to you. How many do you need?
Five.
I’ve got you down for it.
And just like that the Exchange Training team got to move. Of course, it wasn’t quite done. I still had to tell my manager that we were moving to campus.
Bryce, I want to move Jessica, Jacob, Tandy and me to offices on campus.
Yeah. That would be sweet. LOL No way. We don’t have any offices on campus.
Oh sorry, I should have mentioned that I already have offices lined up with the Exchange team. I just need you to approve it. That will free up some cubicles here.
How did you manage that?
No idea. They just told me that we could have them. So. . .can you approve it?
It wasn’t that I had done anything wrong. But, if he had the impression that the decision was made by some vague “they,” I figured it would go better. As I mentioned in the post about Ship It Awards (They Switched to a Cash Prize and Totally Blew It) I had no formal authority. I wasn’t even a lead. I was just a course developer who really wanted to help my team succeed. Several months later as we were planning the move to the new Exchange building, Grace looked to me to tell her where “my” people were going to sit.
Fortune favors the Bold.
We went through three or four more iterations until the seating was finalized. I didn’t send any of them to Jessica. . .or Bryce.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife and thirteen children. . .Most of whom have their own rooms.
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Microsoft was making us get new ID badges. With tens of thousands of employees in the Puget Sound area, the ID badge makers took their show on the road. One day the van showed up at our location in downtown Bellevue. At lunch we streamed out and stood in line to get a new picture and badge. I was only half listening to the person in front of me give his information to the Badge Maker lady.
First Name?
Robert
Last Name?
Jackson
Middle Initial?
M. . .like Mary. . .But THAT’S NOT IT!
It brightened my whole day. The man in front of me was pretty embarrassed. I’ve tried to think about what profound lessons I learned from that experience so long ago. I’ve tried to draw lessons that I can apply to other areas. After all, the event happened 20 years ago and it’s stuck with me this long, surely there has to be some lesson.
I finally decided it was just a funny exchange. How often do we slip into “automatic” mode? Like the line in the Tim Allen Movie “The Santa Clause” where he asks his son, “Do you know the number to call 911?”
I listened to a motivational speaker one time that our company had brought in. He talked about his first visit to Utah. The mountains here are truly spectacular.
Sunrise Over Mahogany Mountain
He couldn’t believe that people got to look at these everyday. As you might expect after he’d been here a few years he got used to it. He had a friend visit from the East.
The mountains are spectacular! I can’t believe you get to look at them out your kitchen window every day!
It was a wakeup call to stop sleep walking through his life, to look around at wonder that surrounds us. Think about the first time you fell in love with your partner. Do you look at them the same way? Think about how excited you were to get that great job, how you could hardly believe they were hiring you! Do you still feel that way?
Think about the first time you saw the mountain of Utah. If you haven’t seen then, you could come visit. Especially in the winter they are great. If you ski, even better.
Mount Timpanogos an hour before sunset
Live your life in such a way that when someone asks you a question as seemingly mundane as “What’s your middle initial,” you don’t find yourself answering by rote.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife and thirteen children. His middle initial is M, but not like Mary.
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I wonder why they quit giving Ship It awards to other teams.
What do you mean?
You know, we seemed to be the only team that was still getting Ship It awards all the way up until they announced the department was being reassigned.
Jessica, management hasn’t given out a Ship It award in over a year.
But, we got. . .you mean YOU?
Shh. Don’t tell Jacob. The awards mean a lot to him and I’d like him to leave thinking management was rewarding him.
Jessica and I were course developers for Enterprise and Support Training (EST), an internal Microsoft training group. We wrote training materials for Microsoft support engineers. Our team consisted of four Instructional Designers focused on writing Microsoft Exchange courses. Technically we were peers. But, I’d been with the group the longest and unofficially was sort of the lead.
Several years earlier, before Jessica joined our team, our department decided to offer recognition awards. They were patterned after Microsoft product Ship It Awards.
Microsoft Product Ship It Awards were awarded for creating software
To qualify for a product Ship It award, the requirements were pretty strict. You pretty much had to be on the development team. But we, or rather the EST managers decided we could create our own Ship It awards for writing courseware.
EST Ship It Awards were awarded for writing courseware
I thought it was a great idea.
The department set up a long list of criteria that a course had to meet to qualify for a Ship It award.
I thought that was a terrible idea.
I understood what they were trying to do.
“What we obtain too easily, we esteem too lightly.” Thomas Paine
But, by loading up the requirements too high, the award became more of a demotivator. If only a few courses qualified, the award becomes a sign of division rather than a source of pride and unity. However, I had little control over the requirements. I just made sure that all of the courses that our little Exchange team created met the criteria.
And things went along pretty well for about a year. An award is strange. Even people who claim that they were only motivated by money display their Ship It awards in their offices. And then one day, management screwed up a good thing.
We had an all-hands meeting once per quarter. They were somewhat of a pain since my office was all the way across town from where the rest of EST had offices. But, it was important to see and be seen in a company like Microsoft. And they typically handed out the awards at the all-hands meetings. None of the Exchange guys were getting an award and I was the only member of my team to make the drive. It turned out that this was a fortuitous decision on my part.
At the meeting they announced that they were changing the recognition program. It seemed like everyone already had a Ship It award so they were discontinuing that program. Instead, the managers would vote on one member of the department who would be given a $50 award.
The managers seemed to think this was a great idea.
So, who’s idea was it to offer cash rather than Ship It Awards?
Me and the other managers. Why?
You really don’t want to know.
There were two big problems with the new program.
First, was that we were all working for Microsoft. Most of us were worth quite a bit of money, on paper anyway. Fifty bucks while appreciated would be quickly forgotten. It was a nice dinner and that was it. A marble plague has a little more permanence. But, what was even worse was what it said about the person who won it. I mentioned that my team worked across town from the rest of the department. We were all good at our jobs, but our jobs involved working directly with the programmers and testers in the Microsoft Exchange team. We didn’t interact with the EST managers very often at all. The odds that the managers over the programming courses, or the manager over the database courses, or really any manager except my own would ever know what a great job my team did was pretty small. The people who won the award would be the ones who made a point to hang out around the managers. In fact, it might even be people who ditched some of their course development work to spend time working on high visibility department projects. The award was going to become a recognition of the department employee best able to schmooze with the managers.
As I drove back across town, I tried to think of how I was going to explain this to the rest of my team. It wasn’t really my role, but naturally, they’d ask me how the meeting went. What was I going to tell them about the new program?
Ultimately, I decided to tell them nothing. Maybe management would see the problem and correct it before my team members found out. Maybe.
Several weeks went by and Jacob and I finished up an Exchange new-to-product course. I went down to the trophy shop and had them create two brass “award” plates that were exactly the size that our old ones had been. I then put one in an interoffice mail envelope and stuck it in Jacob’s mailslot.
Hey, Rodney?
Yeah?
Did you get the Ship It award for the NTP course we did?
Yup. Sure did.
Can you believe this? They are just sending them to us in interoffice mail now. They aren’t even having us stand up in front of the department and shake our hands.
Yeah. . .ah. . .can you believe it?
Funny thing. Jacob hated to stand up in front of the department. It was part of the reason he avoided the all-hands meetings if he could. And yet, he valued the award. It was around this time that we hired Jessica from IBM. She was a cc:Mail expert. As she completed her first course, I took my Ship It plague down to the trophy shop and said, “I need you to make me one that looks like this.” It was a couple hundred bucks, but it was absolutely worth it.
Over the ensuing months I kept supplying my team with Ship It awards and they continued to display them in their offices. In some ways it was a relief to do it this way. I no longer had to track the various requirements to make sure our courses qualified for the award.
Finally, the department was told that our funding model had changed and we were each released to go find jobs in other teams. Maybe I should have kept silent and let Jessica think the Ship It awards were still a department policy. Maybe I wanted someone else to tell me that they also thought it was important to recognize people for doing their job well. Maybe I just wanted a chance for someone to say “thank you.” I knew Jessica would understand the reasoning and appreciate it. I also know that Jacob would be devastated if he realized that the department had quit recognizing his individual efforts.
When you are building a rewards program, make sure you structure it in a way that will reward the Jacob’s and the Jessica’s in your team and not just the person who is the best at self promotion.
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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(Microsoft Word 6.0 circa 1993, Photo Credit Eli’s Software Encyclopedia)
Thanks for calling Microsoft Support, how can I help you?
Why do you put bugs in your product?
Excuse me?
I noticed you guys started charging for support this year.
Yeah, it’s. . . .
So, now you are putting bugs into the product so we have to call you and pay $75 per call! I don’t think that’s right!
He didn’t actually have a problem he was trying to report. He was just upset that Microsoft was introducing bugs in our products so that people would call support. The computer industry in 1994 was in a state of transition. The internet was about to be adopted by mainstream businesses and consumers and change everything. Support was also changing.
I had just come from WordPerfect Corporation to Microsoft. WordPerfect owed much of its success to its extraordinary support staff. And I was part of that. (You Want A What? We Don’t Even Make Those Anymore!) The company had about 5,000 employees in Orem, UT and about 800 of those were in Support. The support was free. Even the phone call was free. It was a huge expense, the phone bill alone was more than $1,000,000 per month.
The reason they could offer this fantastic support was that a single copy of WordPerfect cost $495.
(WordPerfect 4.2 for Dos, Photo Credit: csdn.net)
It was also a great word processor. WordPerfect wrote printer drivers for every printer on the planet. They created different versions of WP for each operating system, DOS, Macintosh, Data General, VAX, Unix, and others.
Microsoft, of course was very interested in cutting into their marketshare. Microsoft did two things that in hindsight turned out to be very smart. First, they developed Windows and put Word on it. Second, they bundled Word, Excel and PowerPoint together into a single product and sold the entire product for $495. We know this product as Office, of course.
WordPerfect had to respond. They missed the Windows boat. But, they attempted to create their own “best of breed” bundle. They included WordPerfect and Borland’s Quattro Pro spreadsheet software. Both sold for $495 separately. Together they were $525.
WordPerfect would eventually lose that war, but they would fight on for months. However, it was in that first bundle that they sowed the seeds of their destruction. The margin, or the amount of profit on the bundle was half of what it was on the stand alone word processor. And the pressure would only get worse to reduce the price. WordPerfect’s vaunted support was very expensive. They couldn’t fight a price war and keep support.
It was during this time that I left WordPerfect to go to work for Microsoft. There was nothing personal about it. I just got a better offer. (How I Became a Pawn In the War With Microsoft.)
Microsoft support was free also, but only for a limited amount of time after you bought the product. And you were limited on how often you could call. Microsoft, like WordPerfect, lost money on support. So, in order to attempt to recover some of the costs, they introduced a paid model. You could call anytime you wanted, but it was $75 per call.
Of course, big companies signed contracts that gave them a number of calls, or incidents, and they paid less per call. But for average users, it was $75. And that’s what my customer was upset about. He didn’t think it was right that we were introducing bugs just so we could turn around and charge customers who needed to call in about them.
He didn’t understand two important pieces of information.
First, no software company introduces bugs. Bugs just happen. In fact, companies spend lots of money trying to eliminate as many bugs as possible. The second piece of information my customer didn’t know, but I did, was how much each call cost us. On average each time the phone rang, it cost us $125 to help that customer. So, the $75 was an attempt to recoup some of the costs. But, we were still a cost center, and probably always would be. The best we hoped for was to someday become revenue neutral. In other words, we would cover our costs.
I think the reason that charging for support was such as hard sell was the awesome job that WordPerfect did in helping an entire generation of customers learn to use computers for free. Like I said, the world was changing in 1994. None of us could really see where it was headed, but having an understanding of where it had been, helped us at least plan.
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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>
Lloyd V Bliss 1931-2009
We’d never been close. It’s hard when you meet your father at 11, except he’s not your father, he’s just your mom’s husband. And he’s the fifth father-figure in those 11 short years. And a few years go by and you long for a “normal family.” But, you don’t understand that no one has a normal family, each just has their own form of dysfunction. Some have learned to cope, others never will. Finally, at 14 he adopted me. I took the name Bliss, and realized that a shared name does little to bridge a relationship gap.
I knew he loved me in the ways that he could. And I survived my childhood. I got a call from my brother who lives in Olympia, Washington, not far from my parents.
Hey, Dad’s in Denver.
I thought he was too sick to travel?
Yeah, well apparently he was. He’s in a hospital there. They aren’t sure when he’ll be able to travel. . .if ever.
How’s mom doing?
About like you’d expect.
One of us needs to go.
Yeah, I know.
I’m close. Salt Lake’s only a few hundred miles. You’d have to fly. I’ll go.
Okay.
Now to convince my mother. My relationship had been strained with my dad, but always pretty good with mom.
Hey Mom. I’m coming to Denver.
Oh, you don’t need to do that. We’ll probably only be here another couple of days.
Well, that will work out well since I have to be back at work on Tuesday. I’ll see you on Saturday.
You really don’t . . . okay.
And off I went. Driving my Suburban through the Rockies. I stopped for the night in a rest stop. I just climbed in the back and pulled a blanket over me.
My dad hated to depend on anyone for anything other than my mother. I could see it was tearing him up to be so dependent on others. We danced a dance that we’d practiced since before I was a teenager. When he stumbled back, I stepped up. When he stepped forward on his own, I stepped back, always close enough for support, but back enough to allow him to do as much for himself as he could. When I was a kid, he provided the support. Now it was my turn to return the favor.
I was struck by how weak and old and tired he looked. He’d had a hard life.
His condition stabilized enough for him to get on a plane on Sunday. We had a nice leasurely lunch. Not realizing until about five minutes before it was too late that mom had never set her watch to local time, and she’d packed dad’s watch away. He thought that was hilarious. After all that, they nearly missed the plane. I watched the airport personal maneuver the wheelchair they’d secured for him to the door of the jetway. Without a backward glance he took my mother’s arm and made his way down to the plane.
It was the last time I ever saw him.
He went straight from the plane to a hospital room. For two weeks the doctors battled to stabilize his vital signs. They finally told my mother there was nothing else they could do.
Rodney, do you want to come and say goodbye?
How long does he have?
The doctors don’t know. They’ve got him on a morphine drip for the pain. Could be a day could be a week. Not more than a couple weeks.
I said my goodbyes, Mom. I’ll be there . . .for . . .after.
My brother was there at the end. Dad had been unresponsive. The doctors expected him to pass peacefully in his sleep. Unexpectedly he opened his eyes and asked for a glass of water. My brother helped him with it and cautioned him to be careful not to spill or he’d ruin his looks. Dad looked up at him.
Yeah, I am a handsome devil.
And with that he closed his eyes and went back to sleep. He never woke up again.
My team had suffered through tragedy and near tragedy the entire year. A team member nearly died in a fall from a ladder. Another injured himself falling from a hayloft. Another’s 3 year old son was diagnosed with leukemia. Another had his son fall and break his arm, and also lost his brother to brain cancer, and yet another lost his step father.
I had tried to do everything I could as the manager to provide comfort and accommodations for my team members as they struggled with personal issues. And now, it was their turn. I drove the 1000 miles home for the funeral. I delivered his life sketch. I did a lot of writing. It’s how writers work through our grief and our issues.
I appreciate those of you, the readers who’ve stayed with me through this week as I talked about some of the challenges that my team went through. It’s been about five years since all this happened. We’ve all moved on. Mark still doesn’t climb more than a single step up a ladder. Jared bought a hay hook and uses that when throwing hay out of the loft. Ammon’s son’s leukemia responded to treatment and is in remission. And my mother remarried.
I’ve had occasion to talk to my former coworkers about that year. Team unity is an elusive but vital characteristic to successful teams. You want your team to care about each other on a personal level. You want them to be willing to invest in each other’s success. That year of challenges pulled the team together in a way that no amount of R.O.P.E.S courses, or seminars, or “team building” exercises ever could. Not that there isn’t a place for those activities. There absolutely is. But, when a team has literally suffered together, born one another’s sorrows, they either disband, because the stress is too much, or they become bound together stronger. Our team had been through hell together. We came out stronger for it.
This is the fifth in a five part series on the most snake bit team I’ve ever been a member of. I’m proud to call each of these men my friend, even years later.
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 supposed to be like this. This was not the type of team activities a manager plans for.
We all stood as the casket was wheeled in. Ed was walking with his family. He raised a hand in acknowledgement as they made their way to the front of the chapel.
Reserved seats. But, not ones that anyone would covet today.
We were here to support Ed and his family in honoring the life of his brother Quaid, who had died suddenly from brain cancer. Death at any time is hard. And each culture finds their own way to deal with it. We were all members of the same faith, and funerals in our faith were a celebration of life. One of the tenets of our faith being the idea that families can be bound together in death as well as life.
Had Ed and his brother been men advanced in years, looking back on a lifetime of memories, the funeral would have been a celebration of that life, a chance to remember the good times and wish him on his way. But, that wasn’t the case. Quaid was a young man, not even 40. He left behind a young bride and three small children. His father spoke of the pain of burying a child. Parents shouldn’t have to bury their children. If life were fair it would always be the other way around.
Yesterday, I said I didn’t know what to say to Ammon when his 3 year old son was diagnosed with leukemia. Even more so, I was at a loss for what to say to Ed. We know we need to say something and yet whatever we say will never really be enough.
“I know how you feel”?
No, I really don’t. I’ve never buried a brother. I’ve never gathered with my family to discuss how the family will step up to provide my nephews with a father figure, and make sure my sister-in-law is cared for.
“It’s God’s will,” or “It will all work out for the best?”
Those just sound like minimizing at a time like this.
So, you give him a hug, if you’re a hugger. You let him know that while you can’t take away any of his sorrow, that you are willing to bear it with him, as much as you can. And then you go on with life. Maybe you hug your own family closer. Maybe you call your brother whom you haven’t talked to in awhile just to let him know that you’re thinking about him and you look forward to seeing him at Christmas.
With the death of Quaid, the jokes stopped. I no longer got teased about the Messaging team needing hazard pay. Or jokes about who was going to be hit with a catastrophe next. As a team, we didn’t mention it much. We all were aware of what had happened over the past several months; Mark falling on his driveway and nearly dying. Jacob falling out of his hayloft and shattering his ankle, Ammon’s son with leukemia. Ed’s son with the broken arm and the harrowing dash through the snow.
It was almost expected then, when Allen announced that his step father had passed away suddenly. He was going to take some time to go and help his mother in Colorado.
I wasn’t particularly close to him, so I’m not sure it really counts as part of The Curse.
His attempt at levity did little to lighten the mood.
Of our seven team members, five had been hit with varying levels of personal tragedy that year. Joel and I were the only two left untouched. But, even that distinction was about to change.
This is the fourth in a five part series about the most snake bit team I’ve ever worked with. Monday I told how one team member Could Have Died. . .Putting Up Christmas Lights. Tuesday was the story of another team member who fell out of a hayloft, And The Horses Just Laughed At Him. Yesterday was the story of team members children being hurt as we decided It Was Never Funny. . .But Now It Was Serious. Tomorrow, I’ll relay the final segment of our hell-year. But, I’ll also be explaining how the experiences drew us closer and strengthened our families and our friendships.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife and thirteen children.
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