I’m a news junky. I have been for years. I was the only kid I knew who read the Wall Street Journal in high school. I left at 19 years old to serve a two year mission in Chicago.
Six days each week we were focused on service, spreading the Gospel, and teaching. But, on Mondays we had time to ourselves. Well, in pairs, we were still Mormon missionaries, of course. Chicago has great pizza, two baseball teams and two newspapers.
I would get a copy of both the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun Times each Monday and read them cover to cover: Metro, politics, religion, sports, and especially the comics.
When I returned home, I read our local paper, The Daily Olympian. High school sports, business, politics and of course, the comics. I attended college at BYU. I enjoyed the university paper, The Daily Universe. I fell in love with political cartoons. The letters to the editors were always entertaining.
Eventually, I quit taking the local paper. The internet came along and with it, dozens of news sites. Politics is a passion for me. But, so are technology sites. And, of course, there are the comics. The only one I follow on a regular basis is Schlock Mercenary. It’s written by my friend Howard Tayler. He’s updated it every day since June 12, 2000.
For Christmas my lovely wife gave me a very thoughful gift. She got me a subscription to the local paper, the Daily Herald. It’s the real dead-tree edition. Local high school sports, politics, and of course, comics.
It’s odd, reading the paper in print edition. There are no hyper links, obviously. I regularly read the website for our local paper. So, many of the stories that appear in the morning edition I’ve already read the day before.
But, the comics. The comics are new each day.
The paper delivery started on Monday. The editions are thinner than the last time I took the paper. A few stories and a lot of ads. It was comforting to hold newsprint in my hands. The paper was delivered in a red plastic bag to keep it dry.
Sunday’s edition was larger, of course. The first Sunday I was so excited. There were going to be ads and more articles, but I was looking forward to the comics.
My kids also like the paper. One son enjoys the sports. Another likes the gossip pages. My daughter likes the ads.
So, when the Sunday comics came up missing, I assumed the worst. I had to wait an entire week for the next edition. And that’s when I realized that the newspapers had changed. The stories are still there. The ads are there. And on every day except Sunday, the comics are too.
Things change.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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There’s a pile of presents in our bedroom. Each one an identical small box with white wrapping tied up with a red ribbon.
My kids are not interested in these packages. Even if they were, it wouldn’t do any good. Each one is labeled for specific people.
The month of December means several things at my work. People try to spend the last of their “use it or lose it” vacation time. Our systems become unstable as every IT team tries to get their projects implemented prior to the end of the year. And people decide whether to give their coworkers gifts.
It’s a strange protocol. Anyone can decide to participate. Typically gifts fall into two categories: food and non-food. Typically food is safest. If you don’t have a close relationship with your coworkers you can buy them a nice candy bar or a box of chocolates works great.
Homemade treats are an option as well. Rice Krispy treats, or brownies, or cookies.
For people you know better, you can give non-food. But, typically you shouldn’t give non-food to people you don’t know well. Why? It’s too personal. Food is easy. Food doesn’t represent a commitment. Just like the fast food worker is committed to the Crispy Chicken Sandwich they are making for you. Food is impersonal. Even homemade brownies.
But, non-food represents at least some level of involvement. You had to choose a particular puzzle or book, or knicknack. And food is perishable. For better or worse it will be gone in few days. Non-food, on the other hand can stick around forever. Or worse, you ditch that knick knack and later the person who gave it, asks you about it. Then what?
That’s the route my lovely wife is taking. The pile of presents are for coworkers.
The challenge with gifts is who do you give them to? And that’s the challenge with playing Santa Claus. Unless you work in a small office, or are very wealthy, there are going to be more people than you can provide gifts to, no matter how many cookies you bake.
And the other challenge with gifts, is reprocity. Did Sally in Accounting get you a coffee mug? Do you need to get her something? Does it have to be non-food since she got you a non-food gift? If you grab a candy bar from the vending machine and wrap a ribbon around it, is that enough? Will it be weird if you only give one to Sally? How many candy bars are in the vending machine, anyway? And where can you get some ribbon at this point?
That’s why you might want to consider the Grinch route. Basically, you wish people Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, maybe a Happy Hanukkah. And then, you just go through your regular days.
It helps if you take all your stored up “use it or lose it” personal time during the holidays.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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The rest of the people in the room didn’t even notice. It was just a typical gesture that people who are bored in meetings make all the time. The lead consultant idly twisted his pen. Where it had been horizonal across the top of his yellow notepad, it was now vertical along the side of his notepad.
The junior consultant, who had been presenting the PowerPoint slide deck quickly brought his presentation to a close.
I participated in a multistate conference call today. It was set up by our client. We had people on the call from five different states. It was an important launch. But, launches are tense. If everything is perfect, we come online at the scheduled time. If anything goes wrong, we have a delay.
We try to avoid delays.
In addition to the launch bridge, we set up a second bridge that was chat only. It included the players from our team. Questions get asked on the chat channel first, before they are voiced on the launch bridge. Answers are discussed and researched on chat prior to being voiced on the launch bridge.
It’s actually pretty standard procedure. Most times the chat channel is pretty bland. But, occasionally it can save us from an embarrassing situation. It can also give us a chance to tell each other to stop talking. I’m pretty sure our client does the same thing on their side.
It’s an age old practice. It’s much easier in the age of Skype, chat and text. Prior to private chat channels, we had to use more rudimentary methods, like twisting your pen sideways.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2018 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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I have a pretty good idea what I’m getting for Christmas. Not for certain, but I have a pretty good idea. In fact, I have a “Christmas List.” I’ve seen it. Of course, I’ve seen it. I wrote it.
We have a tradition in our family. With 13 kids, and mom and dad, and birthdays and Christmas, picking presents can get kind of hard. Especially when you have to help kids pick presents for other kids. So, we decided to implement Christmas lists (and birthday lists.) A Christmas or birthday list, is just that, a list of presents you want.
Most times kids get it. Occasionally, one of them goes a little off the rails. We’ve seen Rolex watches listed, expensive vacations to Europe, cars. But, most of the time the lists are reasonable.
I have kids headed to college. They want things like
- Mini-fridge
- Math Calculator
- Toaster
- Backpack.
- Dishes
Others are more interested in
- Ski stuff
- Name brand clothes
- Gas. . .lots of gas
Some of the items are more simple,
- Gum
- Apron
- Curved needles
We also do name exchanges at Christmas. We put everyone’s name in a hat and each person draws a name. That’s the person you have for Christmas. The twist is that no one knows who has their name. It’s like the old game of Assassin I played back in high school. You had the name of the next person. Someone out there had your name.
It’s why the Christmas list works. You don’t have to worry about multiple people picking the same thing off the list. Only one person is working from the list.
And lists are not absolute. Just because someone puts up a list doesn’t mean that you have to buy from it. It’s more a guideline than an actual rule.
My case is somewhat special. My brithday is this month, just after Christmas. And my anniversary is just a few days before Christmas. So, my list is often an anniversary/Christmas/birthday list.
My kids are old enough that they can actually afford to get their own presents. The last few years I’ve typically put a “combined” gift on my list. and I’m past the ties and socks phase. A couple years ago I got a dishwasher for Father’s Day. Another time I got 50 landscaping rocks for our front yard.
This year, my list includes simple things through some more complex things. The combined gift if all my kids get together and want to buy it is an over-the-stove microwave. Our current one quit working about a month ago.
The rest of my list is:
- “The Spy” by Clive Cussler
- Pleasant Grove High School sweatshirt
- Dilbert desk calendar
- “Jack Welch and GE Way” business book
- Pocket watch
- Clock radio
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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Well, the math isn’t hard, but sometimes explaining it can be.
I typically have a single report I’m responsible for every month in my job. It has multiple names depending on which group I’m sending it to. Let’s call it the “Lost Time Report (LTR).”
The report is pretty simply conceptually. We count up how many minutes our agents are on the phone each month. That’s not hard. We have reports for that.
It’s slightly more complex when you consider that we have multiple sites: Five to be exact. We also have multiple call types. But, not every site handles all call types. Some sites handle as few as three call types and other sites handle as many as ten call types. Only one call type is common to all five sites.
But, again, that’s all an automated report. Not complicated at all. Where it starts to get interesting is when something goes wrong: an outage.
During an outage, I have to keep track of which sites were impacted, which call types were impacted, when the outage started and ended, and how many agents were impacted.
Oh, and I have to decide who’s fault it is: my company or our client. Sometimes it’s our fault. Circuits go down. Computers crash. Power outages happen. We have multiple layers of redundancy for every critical system, but even despite our best efforts, occasionally we have an issue.
The client can also have an issue. They own all the tools, and phones.
The LTR report has to capture all of that at the end of the month. We have SLAs or Service Level Agreements around our availability. In other words, if we have too many outages for too long that are the fault of my company, we fail to meet our SLA and that triggers potential consequences.
My entire job can be described as keeping us as far away from those consequences as possible. And the LTR is where I document all of it.
The math isn’t hard. Suppose agents in our “Accounting” call type were scheduled for 250,000 minutes in November (25 agents for 10,000 minutes each.) If we have no outages, we are at 100% available. In formula format it looks like:
100% – ( 0 (lost minutes)/250,000 (scheduled minutes)) = 100%
If we have a 40 minute outage, the math changes to
100% – (1000 (25 agents for 40 minutes) / 250,000) = 99.6%
Obviously, longer outages mean lower percentages and we fall into the SLA consequences.
Of course, the client also has outages that impact them. We don’t have to use their calculations when I do the above math. So, if the client caused us to lose 1000 minutes in the account call type, the math would change to
100% – (0 (my company’s lost minutes) / 249,000 (250,000 – 1000 minutes of client time.)
A couple months ago we had a situation where the amount of minutes we lost due to the client’s issues was about equal to the amount of minutes we lost due to issue with our local IT infrastructure. I was trying to explain to my boss that the two amounts didn’t “cancel one another out.”
Why not? If we lost time because of us or because of them it shouldn’t make any difference, right? Lost minutes are lost minutes.
You don’t understand. Our minutes affect the numerator. Their minutes affect the denominator.
I don’t get it.
It’s easier when we do the math. Let’s assume we lost 1000 minutes of time because of local IT issues. As we showed above, the system availability would be 99.6% Now, let’s take that 1000 customer minutes out.
100% – (1000 (our minutes)/249,000 (250,000-1000 client minutes) = 99.6%
Okay, it’s actually, 99.5984%. But, no one will complain if we round it up to 99.6%.)
In fact, if we lost 1000 minutes, no amount of client minutes would push our percentage back above 99.6%. We could reduce that 250,000 to 10,000 and our formula would become
100% – (1000/10000) = 9%
Zero downtime is so much easier to work with. Math is hard.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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After ten days I was finally ready to take my truck back out for a test drive. It didn’t go well.
I recently fixed my daughter’s Honda Civic. She rearended someone. Her repairs were kind of extensive, new hood, new headlights, new compressor, new condensor, new radiator support. Lots of cutting, welding, grinding. Stuff I hadn’t really done before.
And it worked.
I took her car in today to get the emissions done. (Why Utah cancelled the safety inspection requirement but kept the emissions is beyond me. But, that’s a different post.) Jiffy Lube offers to do a “free” safety inspection while they are doing the paid emissions test.
I know why they do it. They want to sell you additional services. I don’t mind. I’m not going to pay for any additional services, but I’m not opposed to them checking my work. In fact, I was sort of happy about it.
During the repair work, a lot of brake fluid ended up on my driveway. I never did find a leak, but the fluid level was way down. I topped it off after I put the frontend back together, but I had a worry that the system might have a slow leak somewhere.
Nope. The technicians went over my car and found a few minor items, a burned out taillight, a dirty air filter, missing cabin air filters. The brake fluid was in great shape as was the rest of the repair.
It’s always a good feeling when you work on something for a long time and manage to actually fix the issue.
That didn’t happen with my truck. It’s an old truck, a 94 Dodge Dakota with 136,000 miles on it. Recently it started making some really scary noises when turning right and when accelerating from a stop going up a hill. I would describe it as a ca-chunk, ca-chunk noise.
I did some research on the internet and identified the issue as a possible problem with the differential. That’s the “pumpkin” shaped thing in the middle of the rear axle on a rear wheel drive, or a four wheel drive vehicle.
I decided to rebuild it.
I’d never done a rebuild. I learned new stuff. I did a full rebuild, axle bearings and seals, pinion bearings and seal, new bearings for the spider gears, new fluid, new gasket. The whole deal. It took almost two weeks.
I rushed to finish the last of it on Sunday. My neighbors came over to help me remount the truck bed. I normally don’t work on Sundays, but this was an Ox in the Mire.
And when I took it out for a test drive? Ca-chunk, ca-chunk.
The problem with being your own mechanic (or plumber, or computer tech) is that if you misdiagnose the problem, you don’t have anyone to blame but yourself.
So, my broken truck has a brand new differential. . .and a serious sounding problem from the drivetrain area.
My next guess is that I need to rebuild the transfer case. . .I’ve never done one before.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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Everyone hates it right? You work on a joint project and when it comes time to report the results, the guy making the report takes full credit. Or worse, yet, you are working on a project solo and when you complete it, a coworker manages to get credit.
I was working at Microsoft. Through a recent reorg, a guy that I’d helped hire was put into an advisory position within our training team. I had seniority on the team, but Jay had managed to gain a lot of influence. Much of it was by playing politics. At that time, it wasn’t one of my strong suits.
I didn’t realize exactly what Jay was up to until one day we were discussing an idea I had for a new course. Jay and I had discussed it previously and I was still trying to finalize the details.
Don’t bother.
What do you mean?
I mean, I already suggested it to management and they don’t want to do it.
It was a good plan on his part. If it turned out to be a good idea, he got credit, if it was a bad idea he had nothing to lose.
The next time I had an idea I kept to to myself until I was ready to present it to management. Ironically, the next major project I developed was a comprehensive curriculum for new engineers. The program involved dozens of courses, some written by us, some purchased. In all there were three different tracks and the program would take almost two years for the engineers to work their way through.
As I went to present it to management, Jay insisted on tagging along. Every time someone asked him a question he had to defer to me. The funny thing was, I love collaboration projects. I much prefer to share the credit than take it. But, share and share alike.
I recently got an award at my company. It goes to the top 2% of the employees. I was nominated by one of the groups I work with. When they came to tell me about the award, I was surprised. I talked to my boss about it a couple hours later.
So, what did you say?
I told them I thought they’d made a terrible mistake.
It wasn’t false modesty. I really didn’t see that I did that much. Sure, I did my job, but top 2%? There were too many others who had contributed to my success. I was often the one pulling virtual teams together to solve issues, but the team did all the real work. My job wasn’t to fix problems. My job was to get the right people involved who could fix the problems.
I guess I was good at it.
I mean they gave me an award for it.
Share and share alike.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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We’re just going to give you a really nice little nap.
The man speaking was wearing hospital scrubs. In fact, I was in a hospital. And he was a doctor. And he was late.
I’m really sorry for making you late. I got held up at the ICU.
That’s no problem.
Well, it’s nice of you to say that.
I mean, were you off plaing golf, or were you saving someone’s life?
. . .ah. . .the latter. I don’t even know any doctors that play golf. Not sure where that rumor came from.
I’d been avoiding this day for as long as I could. I’ve recently struggled with general anxiety. As part of talking to my doctor about anxiety, she constantly pointed out that I was now older than 50.
The dreaded “c” word: colonoscopy, not cancer, fortunately.
As a kid I had Crohn’s disease. It’s a lower bowel disease. I endured many, many uncomfortable exams. As a 15 year old self-conscious young man those exams were humiliating. Fortunately, they were successful. The treatment I received through my teen years meant that as an adult the Crohn’s was in complete remission.
But, the memory lingered on. As my doctor pressured me to have the procedure, my thoughts returned to those awkward appointments fourty years ago.
Well, they put you to sleep.
Excuse me?
Yeah, during the procedure, you’re out the entire time.
Oh. . .
So, here I was. Prepped and prepared. I hate needles. While I put the IV in, I not only look away, I “think away.” I mentally distract myself.
The doctor, despite showing up late, was calm and even jovial.
I always tell people three things to remember after the procedure: Don’t drive, don’t drink any alcohol and don’t make any financial decisions for at least 24 hours.
Well, my wife drove, I don’t drink and she makes all the financial decisions, so I think I’ll be fine. So, how many of these have you done?
About 12,000. Don’t worry about a thing. We’re going to give you a nice nap.
They had me roll onto my left side and get comfortable. The sleepy gas was supposed to work in about 40 seconds. It was weird because it never seemed to kick in at all. Instead, they were telling me to roll back on my back.
And I wasn’t in the operating room anymore.
And the clocks were all wrong. And it was time to get dressed and go home.
Oh, the pictures didn’t show any signs for concern. But, the doctor wants me to come back next year, just in case.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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Not everyone is great at their job. Some people are superior, of course. I think the majority of us are simply adequate. But, a few manage to be horrible.
The thing about people who are horrible at their jobs, is that typically they don’t end up staying in their job for long. Walt was an exception.
I was an Instructional Designer for Microsoft. That means I wrote courseware. I literally designed it. There’s an entire process that goes into ID work. You build a learning domain. That’s the stuff you want to teach. You set objectives for each item in your domain. And then you build a course to meet all the objectives.
A reasonable development ratio for a technical course like Microsoft Exchange would be 50:1. In other words, it will take you about 50 hours to create each hour of classroom content. Our courses were typically 40-80 hours long. That means, the ID would be working for months on a course.
Once it was done, the fun part started. The ID would hold a “Train the Trainer” course, were our full time instructors would come in and learn the course. Then, especially if it was a new-to-product course, the instructors and the IDs would head out to teach.
It was one of the best jobs I ever had.
I worked closely with our fulltime instructors. They were very good at what they did. Well, except Walt.
I’m not sure how Walt stayed in his position. He was significantly older than the other trainers, and certainly older than our trainees. Being older, he assumed meant that we should defer to him. Considering we were training around brand new software, I’m not sure where he got the idea that age equated to wisdom.
Most of the time, Walt did a tolerable job. But, he was quick to take offense if anyone challenged his teaching. At one point, we had a new Microsoft Exchange course and I flew to Charlotte, North Carolina to observe Walt teaching my course for the first time.
At one point in the lecture he missed a concept. It happens, especially with new material.
Walt, don’t you mean that the feature doesn’t cause this condition?
No, Rodney. I mean that this feature will cause the condition listed.
Are you sure? I’m pretty sure it doesn’t.
You’re wrong. It works the way I expained it.
We had a room full of trainees, so I didn’t push the issue. It was a minor point, but I wanted to make sure the students didn’t come away with bad information. I pulled Walt aside during a break.
Hey, I didn’t want to say much in front of the class, but that feature doesn’t work the way you described it.
Sure it does.
No, you’ve gotten it mixed up. It actually works the opposite of how you expained it.
No, it doesn’t. I’m sure it works the way I said.
I don’t want to argue, but you’re wrong.
I’m not wrong. I can show you in the book where it says it works like I said!
Walt? I wrote the book.
Walt never did lose his job training. Eventually, our department was shut down and people were reassigned.
I guess I should feel good that my interaction with him went as smoothly as it did. At one point while teaching a new class a student disagreed so strongly with him, that Walt suggested they continue the discussion out in the parking lot with a hands on demonstration.
I miss that job.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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Our puzzle was nearly complete. It was a 48 piece puzzle of Elsa, Anna and Olaf from the Disney movie Frozen. But, we were missing three pieces. An inconsequential piece of the river, Elsa’s hand and Olaf’s stomach. We were one of four groups of parents and children that were putting together puzzles. All four groups quickly realized that their puzzles were all missing pieces.
The exercise was to watch what the kids. . and the adults. . . but mostly what the kids would do. The kids quickly spread out and searched the room. It was a large conference room with plenty of book shelves, tables and chairs. All together about 60 parents and kids were in the room. Their search of the room came up empty. They next asked the counselors for the pieces. They were met with universal responses of
I don’t have any puzzle pieces.
We all knew that the counselors had a lesson they were trying to teach us. But, what lesson?
What do you think it would mean? Maybe they wanted us to solve a puzzle? Kind of like one of those escape rooms.
Maybe the lesson was patience? Don’t expect everything right away.
Maybe the lesson was to work for what you got? There might be some effort that needed to be put in.
The other 8 people in our group discussed it. Kids and parents. There were several possible theories. The one we felt best about was not ultimately what the counselors were aiming for. We decided the lesson was that no one is perfect. We are all broken in one way or another. We might struggle forever trying to become “perfect.” The point we need to a remember is to accept ourselves and each other as we are; imperfect as that might be.
As we discussed it we also realized we were focused on the wrong thing. We had a 48 piece puzzle and we were focused on the three missing pieces. We failed to really look at the remaining 45 pieces. There was a story being told in a that picture, in a very “Disney” way. But, still, there was color, and movement and beauty. And by simply focusing on what was not there, we were missing what was there.
Ultimately the counselors produced the missing pieces. The kids had to ask for them, and find which counselor had their piece. The lesson was that we can’t “fix” ourselves. We have to not only be willing to accept help from others, we had to often ask for that help. . .and not always from the same person.
In the end the puzzles all got put together and then all got returned to the boxes. The kids agreed it was a fun activity. I guess at the end, each took their own lessons away from the activity.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2018 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved