Biased Blow-By-Blow - 2017 Giro d'Italia Stage 2

Introduction

Professional journalists can’t afford to burn any bridges by calling out a doper, an unstylish rider, or somebody who’s being a dick. They also have a responsibility to the public to provide fair, balanced reporting.  I have no bridges and no responsibility.  So read on for a totally biased blow-by-blow of Stage 2 of the Giro.

2017 Giro d’Italia Stage 2 – Olbia to Tortoli

As I join the action there are about 50 miles to go, with a breakaway of nobodies about three minutes ahead.  Today’s stage features three climbs and a bunch of other little lumps.  The last climb of the day, the Genna Silana, is a category 2, which gains about 2,900 feet and tops out at about 3,300 feet elevation.  But then there’s another 30 miles of descending,  so unless the breakaway blah, blah, blah, who cares.

The really interesting thing about this race is the return of Cadel Evans.  I guess retirement just didn’t sit well with him, so he’s back.  Now, he knows he’s long in the tooth and doesn’t want to tarnish his impressive reputation with poor riding, so he’s riding under the pseudonym Caleb Ewan.  Look, “Caleb,” you’re not fooling anybody.  But I do admire such pluck.  Far better to put in a mediocre ride in a great race than to be a greeter at Walmart.

Okay, readers, I’ll make you a deal:  if the breakaway’s gap goes back up during this climb, I’ll tell you who they are.  Other than that, it’s like temp workers at an office:  better not to learn their names, it just makes it sadder when they have to go.

So, to catch you up on the Giro so far, we’ve had two riders busted for doping already—actually, it was the night before the opening stage.  They were Stefano Pirazzi and Nicola Ruffoni of the Bardiani CSF team, popped for human growth hormone.  I’m naming theme here to help shame them.  Now, you may not have heard of this team.  They’re just a continental team racing here on a wildcard invitation, much like Danilo De Luca’s Vini Fantini team in 2013.  The difference with his doping that year (which earned him a lifetime ban) is that he should have known better, being a seasoned veteran.  With these continental teams, the riders are still learning the ropes and thus much more likely to screw up and test positive.  You get a guy like Team Sky’s Chris Froome, he’s a consummate professional.  He would never get caught.  So it’s kind of a Catch-22 for these up-and-coming riders on the little teams; they need to dope less, to stay out of trouble, and yet they need to beat these World Tour riders if they want to make the big time.  I imagine it’s kind of like being a new hire at Chucky Cheese: if you want to have the kind of energy you need to run birthday parties all day long, you’re going to need meth … and yet, if you haven’t gotten in good with the shift supervisor, he’s not going to look the other way.

It’s about 45 miles to go.  The breakaway is down to 1:26.  Here’s a fascinating historical tidbit, courtesy of Eurosport:  Jacques Anquetil won his first Giro stage in 1999, despite having died in 1987!  It’s certainly the case that ghosts have an amazing power-to-weight ratio.

So, who’s  riding this Giro?  We’ve got defending champion Vincenzo Nibali (Bahrain-Merida); Domenico Pozzovivi (AG2R La Mondiale); Tejay van Garderen (BMC Racing); current maglia rosa Lukas Pöstlberger (Bora-Hansgrohe); Thibaut Pinot (FDJ); Nairo Quintana (Movistar); the ghost of Jacques Anquetil (albertnet-Carmex); Tom Dumoulin (Sunweb); Bauke Mollema (Trek-Segafrado); Peter Stetina (Trek-Segafredo); Pierre Roland (Cannondale Drapac); Joe Dombrowski (Cannondale Drapac); Alex Howes (Cannondale Drapac); and of course Cadel Evans, aka Caleb Ewan (Orica-Scott).

Okay, I just saw some footage of Evans/Ewan, and either he’s had some cosmetic surgery or I’m actually mistaken about this comeback thing.  Cut me some slack, it’s hard to keep up with my spotty Internet connection and these hit-or-miss free video feeds.

So here’s a brief recap of yesterday’s opening stage.  Pöstlberger was supposed to lead out a teammate at the sprint finish, but accidentally gapped the peloton and decided to solo.  And he actually pulled it off!  How is this possible?  I think it’s the badass umlaut in his name!

The breakaway, comprising five very thin nobodies in ugly uniforms, is on the category 2 Genna Silana.  They have about 39 miles to go, about 10 of them uphill.

So this is weird.  Manuele Boaro (Bahrain-Merida) had a problem with his rear derailleur, which was making his chain sag and flop around, so he took a spare bike from the team car.  But instead of just climbing on and riding off, he took the front wheel off his first bike and put it on the spare.  Why on earth would he do that?  Sentimental attachment to his front wheel?  Some kind of electronic gizmo attached to the wheel?  You can tell the pace is low or he wouldn’t take the time for a wheel swap.

In a shocking upset this season, the upstart team CCC Sprandi Polkowice was awarded the UCI official Ugliest Uniform award, toppling Team Sky who had been expected to dominate this category for years to come.

The breakaway is about 2/3 of the way up the climb and the guys are starting to attack one another.  This is a bit silly, because although their lead has gone up to 1:36, they’re going to need to work together on the descent to fend off the peloton.  I’m guessing that they were attacking Lukasz Owsian, the CCC rider, because they’re sick of looking at his orange outfit.  And sure enough, he’s dropped.  It’s a shame:  if he were able to get the pink jersey, or the KOM jersey, there would be one fewer hideous orange jersey in the race.

They keep showing Boaro, chasing the peloton after his mechanical.  Why?  I mean, who cares?  Either he makes it back on or he doesn’t.  He is irrelevant.  So is Owsian, who has now been caught by the peloton.  Good.  He deserves it for pairing that hideous team kit with orange shoes.  Surely he could have begged off, said he lost the team-issue shoes and could only find these basic black ones, and doesn’t want to switch out his shoes during a 3-week stage race.

The breakaway, now just four riders, has crested the Genna Silana but their gap is down to 36 seconds.  I guess without Owsian there to kindle their ire, they’ve just lost their passion for breaking away.

The peloton is totally loafing, riding gutter-to-gutter on the only big climb of the day.  It’ll come down to a sprint finish, with Andre Greipel (Lotto Soudal) a real favorite if and only if he can get comfortable on his bike.  He did a bike swap earlier, then was fussing with his shoe, and I really wonder what his problem is.

It’s now just three guys off the front.  One of the guys, Daniel Teklehaimanot (Dimension Data), is from Eritrea.  And he’s going for the KOM sprint!  I guess they weren’t at the summit after all!  And finally I understand what they were up to with that obviously doomed effort.  I guess I’m pretty rusty at watching bike races and making sense of them.

As you can see, I’m also pretty rusty at getting decent photos.  In my defense, Teklehaimanot was going really fast so the video camera was probably having trouble focusing.  Also, I fall behind on my reporting every time I have to type “Teklehaimanot.”

Anyway, the point I was going to make about Teklehaimanot, before he suddenly made that sweet attack for the KOM points, is that he’s one of the only, if not the only, black rider in this Giro.  I have just learned that he is only the third black Giro rider in history.  I don’t know why there aren’t more black road racers.  I’m quite sure Teklehaimanot will be the first black rider to wear the KOM jersey in the Giro.  (He is, in fact, the only black rider to ever wear the Tour de France KOM jersey.)

Wow, Eurosport just showed a top-5 highlight reel of “friction in the sprints,” which was pretty exciting.  Mark Renshaw’s famous head-butting was only #4.  The top three involved pushing and shoving that caused big crashes, and of course my wife happened to walk by at that moment.  (I guess it’s actually no coincidence because I was saying things like “holy shit!”)  Anyway, I’m torn.  On the one hand, it’s very rare for her to show any interest in this sport (she doesn’t even know what brand of bike I ride), but on the other hand I don’t need her seeing any more reminders that cycling is dangerous.

That paragraph you just read?  I know it has nothing to do with this Giro stage, but I have to keep writing or I’ll fall asleep at my desk.  This stage is so boring because the riders are loafing so badly.  Steephill.tv predicted that they’d finish at 8:14 a.m., which is in three minutes.  They would have to average 440 mph for the rest of this stage to finish on time.  I resent the riders for this, because my wife wants to go on a hike today and I’m holding up the show.  I just did some calculations and at this rate the average speed for this stage will be under 21 mph.  That’s pretty far off the highest average speed for a Giro, which was 24 mph, way back in 1983, long before EPO.  So these guys really have no excuse.

I just mentioned this average speed statistic to my wife, who said, “Maybe they’re clean!”  I was waiting for that expertly timed comic beat before she started laughing, but she didn’t.  I think she might have been serious.  As I said, she really doesn’t follow this sport.  So I’ve been trying to figure out a more plausible theory, and I think it’s that these racers are so young.  That is, they’re Millennials, and thus soft.  Perhaps they all got trophies in kiddie soccer just for participating.  It’s disgusting.  I remember when my older daughter got her first trophy:  she was like five, in soccer.  She was the most undistinguished soccer player you could imagine, just strolling along twenty feet behind the action.  She didn’t kick the ball a single time, all season, and then at the end she got a trophy.  Instead of being slightly embarrassed, she was on cloud nine about it.  She asked me, “How old were you when you got your first trophy, Daddy?”  I told her, “I was 15, but I had to earn it.  I had to win the race to get that trophy.  Nobody else got a trophy.  That’s just how it worked.  So don’t get too excited about getting a trophy for just showing up.”  If you think it’s harsh for a parent to un-praise his child like that, consider the alternative:  a bunch of whiny little bitches in Lycra averaging under 21 mph in a grand tour stage.

Okay.  I take that all back.  The pros are bigger badasses than I ever was, they don't whine, and if anything riding slow in an early Giro stage is old-school, not Millennial.  And my kid has come a long way since that participation trophy.  Click here for details (scroll to the very bottom).

Meanwhile, the scenery in this race is beautiful.  The riders just snaked through a narrow little road in a tiny town.  It wasn’t very dangerous though, because the riders are going so slow and all the spectators gave up and headed home long ago.  It’s about nine miles to go and still downhill.  It’s downhill with a tailwind so they’re finally starting to go pretty fast.

You know, maybe race leader Pöstlberger, nervous about his Bora-Hansgrohe team’s ability to defend the jersey, got his soigneur to slip roofies into the water cooler at the hotel.  Do you think WADA tests for Rohypnol?  I just checked.  They don’t test for it.  So this sluggish pace is finally explained!

If I seem excessively bitter about this slow pace, it’s because I’m using a 4G LTE cellular Internet connection, and the later it gets in the morning, the more people in my community are awake, and the more bandwidth congestion there is, so my Internet feed is slowing down and my screen keeps freezing.  I really should spring for cable, but I refuse to support Comcast or whatever name they’re hiding behind now.

It’s 7 km to go and some Katusha rider has had a flat tire.  They’re showing him trying to chase back on which means he must be a GC rider, because otherwise who would care if he caught back on?  I mean, it’s not like you could with the stage after such a chase.  It’s Ilnur Zakarin, who is indeed a GC hopeful (or perhaps a GC hopeless if his team can’t pace him back up). 

Now it’s 5km to go and the peloton is still gutter-to-gutter, nobody wanting to go hard on the front.  And my feed has stopped completely.  Dammit!

Okay, 2.6km to go and the peloton has finally lined out.  Still, in the back half of the pack the riders aren’t even in the drops.  Zakarin looks like he’s going to be able to latch onto the back, amazingly enough.  I guess the tailwind helped. 

So, it’ll be hard for me to follow this sprint because every single rider in the peloton is on a different team than last year, and half the teams have different sponsors, and most of the costumes have changed.  Okay, a rider is out of the saddle, the first time that’s happened since that KOM sprint!

“Lots of different riders in here,” the Eurosport announcers says helpfully.  Now my screen has gone black.  Do I dare hit Refresh?  Okay, my feed is back but the race is over.  I literally missed the finish, after watching this damn race for more than 2½ hours.  Maybe they’ll show a replay and I can pretend I’m still watching live.  What a travesty. 

Okay here it is!  They’re sprinting!  Somebody gets a mechanical!  Terrible timing!  And here comes Greipel up the side!  He’s a great big burly man and I think he’ll get the win!

Was that convincing?  Did it seem like it was really unfolding before my eyes?  Naw, didn’t think so.  Oh well.  What a boring stage.  Their final, official average speed was just 22.5 mph, despite having a fricking tailwind.  (Obviously my earlier calculation was pretty far off … I hadn’t accounted for the last 30 miles being downhill.)

Anyway, Greipel will take over the race lead.  I don’t even get to see the podium ceremony because the race ran over its projected time for so long, and my Internet feed has switched to soccer.  And you know what?  I’m suddenly aware of how ungrateful I’ve been … no matter how slow these bike racers go, it’ll never be as boring to watch as soccer.

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Inside the Corporate Yurt

To start off, I never actually did get to occupy one of the yurts.  The tour was moving quickly, and with the open floor plan and my poor spatial skills, I feared that to be left behind would mean getting totally lost.  But I got a good look at the yurts.  They were about ten feet tall and a dozen feet in diameter, made of wood and light fabric, and open in the front.  The walls were divided in triangular sections and varied from opaque to translucent to nothing.  Some yurts had chairs; others just had cushions.

I was visiting a San Francisco tech company, in the hip South-of-Market (SOMA) neighborhood, with windows overlooking the bay.  It was a very large, high-ceilinged lofty space.  No matter why I was there; for all you know, I toured it just for this blog, or was covering corporate kitchens, freelance, for Ladies’ Home Journal.  I will tell you I was not being recruited, though it’s hard to tour such a novel, interesting place and not imagine working there.

Modern, quirky, colorful furniture was scattered around, in  (seemingly) random fashion.  There was quite a bit of empty space.  Some areas had empty chairs and desks arranged in neat rows, like a classroom, but mostly the arrangement was ad hoc.  Our guide explained that all the desks—which were pretty much just tables—could easily be raised so you could stand at them instead of sitting.  The overall vibe was more trade show than corporate HQ.

One thing I saw zero of?  Offices.  There were a few meeting rooms, but the walls and doors were all glass.  Also conspicuously absent:  cubicles.  Cubicles equal Dilbert.  Offices, meanwhile, suggest hierarchy and bureaucracy.  This wall-less, open floor plan might be designed as a spatial metaphor for the open-standards hi-tech development realm that removes barriers to innovation.  The place just says “startup.”

Oddly, the company I visited isn’t actually a startup.  It started that way (obviously), but as so often happens it was soon purchased by an industry juggernaut, though it still operates as its own company.  This is not an Uber-type outfit that will blow up a giant, embedded system of logistics and replace it with something categorically different.  Their product will not go viral, or change society, or get you laid.  As tech products go, it’s not on the same lowly end of the spectrum as an HP printer, but it’s also not Facebook.  It’s essentially the Internet equivalent of a much, much better mousetrap.

Better mousetraps, of course, are not sexy, because they’re not … wait for it … disruptive.  The Pied Piper .. now he was disruptive.  Perhaps when a more or less traditional tech company like this, that manufactures objects you can physically touch, tries to recruit top Gen-Y talent, it helps if the work environment is non-traditional, playful, and wacky.

There was an order to things, though.  Different functions (HR, marketing, engineering, operations) were arranged in informal clumps, with empty space between.  This workplace has the sprawl of a megalopolis, at least for now.  So did all this empty space feel moribund, like a ghost town?  Nope.  New-and-empty is a lot different than old-and-empty.  The atmosphere was one of great confidence:  “We may not need all this space right now, but we will soon.”

I had to wonder, where are the Razor scooters?  Maybe that would seem clichéd.  Could it be that employee scooters are over?  I mentioned them to my teenage daughter and she said, “Epic! I need that!”  So, even if they’re passé, maybe they’ll make a comeback in a few years.

Inside one yurt was a giant flat-screen monitor connected to a variety of gaming systems.  Predictable enough.  But then another space had pinball machines, which (our guide told us) were brought in by an employee from his personal collection.  My daughter played her first game of pinball recently, at the Exploratorium (a museum) and was bummed when I outscored her.  How do these pinball machines play out here?  If the rare older employee dazzles the millennials with his skills, does this make him cool or lame?

I couldn’t help but wonder, as we wandered through, what this workplace would be like for an introvert like me.  I could imagine developing a case of agoraphobia here, like so much openness would eventually wear me out.  Of course the idea behind this setting is to encourage collaboration and creativity, but doesn’t the latter flourish in a completely private space?  (I’m thinking here of writers’ or artists’ colonies where you mingle some of the time, but also have a private studio or cottage where you are utterly free from distractions.)

In tech, you certainly need extroverts to dazzle investors, recruit talent, and generate enough media hype to keep the vision alive ... but you also need coders and engineers, and aren’t a lot of these folks on the shy side?  What do they do for privacy … plug in headphones and listen to music?  It wasn’t that loud in there ... perhaps employees don’t always take advantage of being face-to-face.  Maybe a lot of them just have instant message chats all day, with colleagues six feet away.

There was a room, larger than the yurts, that actually had two or three opaque walls, and in the corner was a baby grand piano.  I could imagine this being really useful for an introvert … he could go in there and surround himself with a wall of sound.  Of course this only helps if you know how to play.

Just like at Google, there was a large cafeteria where all the food is free.  “Cafeteria” gives the wrong impression; the combination of tall windows overlooking the bay, the high ceiling, and the scattering of small, round tables created the feel of a café (though one that goes on and on).  I was too late for the spare ribs, but had some apricot chicken, and ravioli that was so sophisticated I can’t remember what was in it.  Squash, I guess, and the pasta casing was varicolored (spinach and sun-dried tomato?), lightly bathed in brown butter instead of a boring tomato sauce.  There was a large salad station (as far from the little buckets and sneeze-guards of a salad bar as this company’s workspace is from a cube farm).  The most sophisticated thing about the cafeteria was this:  not only did they have bottled soda instead of fountain drinks, they had Mexican Coke (made with sugar instead of corn syrup).  Pretty impressive.

Outside the cafeteria was a little table with a sign saying “Suggestions.”  There was no paper to write on or box to drop a written suggestion into.  Rather, the table was covered with Lego, with which to spell out your comment.  Brevity is clearly encouraged.

The tour ended with the lunch, and I never had the chance to ask what, exactly, was the purpose of the yurts.  Perhaps that’s for the best … maybe our guide wouldn’t have had a definitive answer, and maybe it’s better just to wonder.  Here are a few of my guesses: 

• A pseudo-private meeting place.  Occupation of the yurt tells passers-by not to join in on the discussion.  In this way, the yurt functions like the conch in Lord of the Flies.
• A place for having a time-out.  Talking is not allowed in the yurt, so it’s a place where an introvert goes to daydream.
• A place for a punitive time-out, like the ominously named “center pod” in my kid's kindergarten class, where misbehaving students did time.
• The yurt is symbolic of a nomadic inclination, and serves to remind upper management that they must continuously renew the love of their young, flighty talent.
• The yurt is a living experiment, perhaps one of many, being conducted by a very sophisticated, savvy HR department, to gain insight into the mysterious minds of their Gen-Y employees.
• The yurt is actually mostly useless, and exists only so the company can boast of having yurts.

Do you have any theories?  Have you lived or worked in a yurt?  Comment below, or e-mail me.  And if you’re reading this long, long after 2015, in a time when corporate yurts are ubiquitous, send me your recollections (e.g., “I’ll never forget my first yurt…”) and I’ll post them here, or in a follow-up essay.

Misspelling in Hawaii

Introduction

Earlier this month, my family took a vacation to Kauai.  (There, I typed “Kauai” without misspelling it.  That word, and all Hawaiian words, often trip me up, as “Hawaiian” did just now, and it’s a good thing—perhaps—that  my word processing program instantly flagged the error.)

Where was I?  Oh, right, Hawaii.  I can’t blog about how great a time I had there, because nobody wants to hear about it.  But I also can’t complain about anything, because any complaint that starts out “When I was in Hawaii” isn’t going to generate any sympathy.  And yet, this having been a terribly expensive vacation, I feel like I should somehow get some good blogging mileage out of it (as I have done with an overpriced museum visit and a pricey pair of cycling shoes).  So in this post I’m going to examine the strange sense I got that nobody in Hawaii can spell.

Not that I’m not saying Hawaiians can’t spell.  Somehow, visitors to Hawaii also can’t.

Misspelled food

My family is a foodie bunch.  (Can “foodie” be an adjective?  It can now!)  So perhaps it’s not surprising that the first misspellings we spotted were food-related.  The very first was a section on a menu called “Desert.”  I cut people slack when they (incorrectly) write “just desserts” because when the word “desert” is used as a noun but (correctly) pronounced like “dessert,” to indicate “something that is deserved,” we’re into some pretty arcane English-major territory.  But when a restaurant misses that second “s” in “dessert,” you hope they’re better at hygiene than spelling.  Still, we’d have brushed it off had not another restaurant, a day or two later, made the same error.

Later on, we saw “TACO’S” on the banner for a taqueria called Da Crack, and I decided this wasn’t a deliberate error (along the lines of “da” for “the”) but just an uneducated approach to spelling that treats apostrophes like garnish.  (Too bad Da Crack didn’t have any really good garnish, like cilantro.)

In the case of ethnic food, particularly Asian food, I’m very quick to forgive misspellings, and often count them as a sign of authenticity (along with their cousins, the weird word choices you see like “Fire Burst Stomach Trips” or “Eight Precious Rice Pudding”).  And sometimes Asian restaurant misspellings can be really funny, like “Braised pork in spicy Human sauce.” 

I’m less understanding when it comes to Western misspellings, like we found in our condo.  The hosts had left a handy list of restaurant recommendations, and it had some pretty blatant errors.  For example, a burger place was touted as “a much healthier choose than McDonald’s.”  The name of this burger place?  “Bubba’s Buger.”  This led to lots of corollary jokes (especially popular with my daughters) such as, “Anybody feel like eating boogers tonight?”  But the funniest misspelling on this list was a recommendation for a health food restaurant where we should “order the Acai bowel, full of antioxidants and pure energy.”

Misspelled journal entries

Perhaps you’ve stayed in a bed & breakfast or inn where there’s a nicely bound little journal in which guests can record their feelings about the place.  This journal doesn’t function like Yelp, since you’ve already paid for and occupied the place, so most guests just gush about how great a time they had and how wonderful everything is.  So there’s a lot of gloating, and perhaps some one-upmanship as well (i.e., attempts to be more thoughtful or articulate than the last guy).

Almost every entry in the little book at our Princeville condo had misspellings.  Here is a partial list, courtesy of my older daughter who read them out to me as she went along: 

• beutifil, beutifilly
• foget
• eastun (for “eastern”)
• beatifull
• evere (I had to see this one myself to make sure it wasn’t just a handwriting flourish)
• do able (for “doable”)
• awsome
• well (for “we’ll”)
• what so ever
• cando (for “condo”)
• click our heals (within a “Wizard of Oz” reference)
• use to (for “used to”)

What I found particularly strange about all this is that the people writing in the guidebook didn’t seem slapdash about it; their handwriting was neat and their sentences well-crafted.  None of the entries looked to have been penned by a sloppy t(w)een  (other than that of my own daughter); and there weren’t any LOLs or FWIWs or GR8s or other signs of Gen-Y shorthand.  And yet it costs big bucks to stay in this “cando,” so it’s not like these were uneducated people.  I was, and am, deeply perplexed.

By the way, here is my own condo journal entry, which you can scrutinize for misspellings and/or one-upmanship:

Why so much misspelling?

I suppose it would be very imperialist of me, almost Manifest-Destiny-ish you might say, to judge Hawaiians’ spelling of English words when their native language is so very, very different.  Throughout our vacation I struggled to pronounce the native Hawaiian words that frequently popped up as place names and other proper nouns.  I fared far worse than our GPS narrator when saying, for example, “Ala Kalanikaumaka Street” (though we noticed that the GPS Lady pronounced it a little differently each time).  And yet this is actually pretty straightforward compared to words like “pu’uwai”  and “ku’uipo,” with their surplus of vowels and weirdly placed apostrophes.

Still, I can’t explain away the English misspellings based on the oddities of Hawaiian spelling.  After all, plenty of people are able to master two entirely different alphabets; as a high school student I was pretty good at spelling Russian words correctly.

Could poor spelling be related to the blissful, carefree apathy that comes from drifting your life away in an island paradise?  Well, it is the case that the lovely Anini Beach had been called “Wanini Beach” until the “W” fell off the sign, and rather than fix the sign, the Hawaiians just shrugged their shoulders and let “Anini” become the new name. 

But, as you’ve already noticed, these theories don’t explain why visitors to Kauai, like those writing in the condo journal, can’t spell.  It’s not like something comes over us in the week or two we spend here.   Even my daughter’s journal entry had only one typo—a missing apostrophe—which is exactly the kind of sloppy mistake she makes at home.

And those comical misspellings in the list of restaurant recommendations provided by the condo owners?  Well, the owners don’t actually live in Hawaii.  This is their just guest home.  If memory serves, they live in Texas.

And so, after much reflection, I’ve decided that the misspellings have little to do with Hawaii, and mostly to do with technology—and the lack of it.

Huh?

Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about the journal in the condo is that it’s the rare example of non-typed text.  Think about this for a second:  how often do you read something handwritten?  The non-typed text I come across generally falls into one of two categories:  1) graffiti, and 2) my kids’ schoolwork.  Do I see misspellings in these kinds of text? 

Why, yes.  Perhaps the only words I see among graffiti that are consistently spelled right are the profanities.  Everything else reflects the fecal-mindedness of the graffitist.  Meanwhile, my twelve-year-old isn’t bad at spelling, but my younger daughter, age ten, still has much room to improve.  A sonnet she wrote recently— which  had very good meter and perfect rhyme, and which was very deep, being a letter to her future teenage self, bagging on herself in advance and promoting nostalgia for a time when she wasn’t “blotet [sic] and lazy”—contained no fewer than twenty-three spelling errors.

Aside from graffiti and kids’ stuff, virtually everything I read is typed, and our modern means of typing have all kinds of built-in technology to (help) eradicate misspellings and typos.  The original tool, the spell-checker, not only identifies errors but arguably helps people learn from their mistakes.  The spell-checker is not a perfect tool—for example, it’ll catch “buger” but not “Acai bowel”—but it’s been masking poor spelling fairly effectively for about thirty years now.  (At least, when it’s turned on.  I’m going to assume that restaurant people just aren’t very good with computers.)

The problem is, the classic spell-checker is losing out to more modern tools that are less educational.  Smartphones have features that enable you to type sloppily, generating character strings that only remotely resemble words; the operating system is smart enough to make good guesses at what you’re trying to type.  I can type “t-y-p” and it suggests “type,” “types,” “typo,” and “typed” and I can touch any of these to accept that word.  This is especially handy with trickier words like “beautiful.” 

When I’m on my smartphone I use the Swype technique, aka slide-typing, where I drag my finger through the letters of a word and, amazingly, the OS recognizes these words, no matter how sloppy I get.  It’s not so good with “Acai” or “mahalo” but does great with most common English words.  If I Swype “beutifil” it seamlessly corrects it to “beautiful,” just as it discreetly turns “awsome” to “awesome.”  Typing in this way, a person could generate readable text for decades without ever learning how to spell.  This is just great, until you’re suddenly forced to use a pen and paper to compose your message.

So, if you think the spelling is bad now in handwritten messages, just you wait.  We’re seeing the mere lack of spell-checker now; in another couple decades, when Gen-Y starts making enough money to rent “candos,” they’ll be even less well equipped to work out tricky words like “bowl” and “awesome” on their own.

Epilogue:  voice recognition

Do people also use voice recognition software to compose messages?  I don’t know.  I suspect that this technology is mainly used for giving instructions to your phone, and that the modern generation prefers the silence of typing and Swyping.  That said, it’s hard to really tell.  When you see a guy walking down the sidewalk yakking on his smartphone, he could either a) be having an old-fashioned voice conversation, b) be dictating a message to his e-mail program, or c) be a crazy person talking loudly to nobody or nothing at all, with the phone held up as a prop.

As it happens, I did investigate the efficacy of voice-recognition for large bodies of text:  because I find Swype typing tedious (and didn’t have a laptop with me on vacation), I dictated a restaurant review to my phone.  Needless to say, I’ll be making that review available on albertnet:  maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.

Fiction - Guide to Managing Millennials

NOTE: This post is rated PG-13 for crude humor and mature themes.

Announcement

I am happy to announce that this is my 100th blog post since I started albertnet! My first post was in February of 2009. Funny … it doesn’t seem like that long ago.

Introduction

I got a solicitation in my work e-mail that was either spam or a reasonable business proposition, depending on your point of view. (As the aptly named Senator Packwood pointed out, “How can you know until you try?”) The solicitation was from whitepapersforbiz.com and was for a $99, 18-page guide on “Managing Generation Y.” The ad started out: “Generation Y. The Internet Generation. Millennials. Whatever you call them, this new generation of workers is the largest to hit the workforce since the Boomers, and they bring with them unique expectations.”

Right away this caught my attention. First of all, I was thrown by this term “Millennials.” Millennials? As in, born around the turn of the century? These people are eleven now. Please tell me they aren’t invading the workforce. Meanwhile, if the workforce is being flooded with these Gen-Y types, during a terrible recession with the worst unemployment in decades, who are they to be expecting anything? How about “being happy just to have a job”? Why should we coddle and cater to these people?

Naturally, I’m just being a bitter old man here. Obviously we need these youngsters very badly, because they “get it,” they can conceive of the next great “killer app,” they can solve our office computer problems, and many of them are still good-looking enough to be the public face of our companies as the rest of us, skin wrinkling and backs aching, run out the clock on our miserable lives. It has always been thus. So, the management guide makes perfect sense.

This is where I come in. I’m guessing that most corporate wage slaves—especially “individual contributors” (i.e., non-managers) like myself—are going to find $99 a bit steep for an 18-page electronic document, especially when the advertisement has embarrassing typos like “3 way to develop productive relationships with Millennials.” (Whether they meant “3 ways” or “3-way”—which would be kind of shocking—that’s pretty sloppy). So I figured, why don’t I write my own guide, which would be shorter (and thus better), and much, much cheaper? I might not have done as much research as these guys, but a little advice is better than nothing. Best yet, I let my PayPal account lapse, so I’m not even going to charge you. You can just buy me a beer next time I see you.

[Please note that what follows is fiction. I do not allude to any actual company in this piece, nor am I a human resources type, nor do I actually have real advice for anybody in this realm. It’s just for fun. Okay? Good.]

THE ALBERTNET GUIDE TO MANAGING MILLENNIALS

Seven core traits of Generation Y

Naturally there are vast differences among the members of any generation, but certain generalizations can be made (and are essential to handy pocket guides like this). This guide will concern only Americans born in 1990 or later, and who are entering the corporate world of offices rather than service-sector jobs, self-employment, or itinerant farm labor. Also, this guide only discusses males. Research for the equivalent guide for female employees is still underway as it is a much more complicated matter. (The section about boots and other footwear, by itself, is likely to eclipse this entire guide.) Stay tuned for how to order this second guide as soon as it is available!

Here are the seven core traits of Generation Y:

Informal – They consider not only words like “sir” and “please” to be old-fashioned, but also formerly widespread ideas like politeness, hierarchies, and decorum.

Connected – They are continuously in touch with a very wide, though seldom deep, electronic network of other Millennials (along with older sickos masquerading as them).

Casual – Old-fashioned business attire like suits, ties, socks, and clean shaves have been virtually abandoned by Gen-Y.

Entitled – This generation was raised by parents who were kids in the seventies—that is, whose parents were only into themselves. The backlash of the seventies selfish parents has manifested in overindulgent nineties/aughts parents who showered their kids with love, attention, praise, and expensive toys, making Gen-Y hugely imbued with a sense of entitlement.

Scattered – Millennials don’t have time for MTV, full magazine articles, lectures, books, or this guide. Their intellectual activity is the equivalent of waiting tables. They’re able to keep a dozen different text/Tweet/phone conversations going while seeming to be paying attention to you, but their mental worlds are too frantic for deep thoughts or discussions.

Public – Generation Y has become so inured to self-disclosure, due primarily to Facebook and other social networks, that the line between public and private has been essentially erased.

Smart – As far as we can tell, these kids are really, really smart. (We kind of have to say this, in case one of them happens to read this guide and becomes really, really offended.)

Deep down, Millennials are not only aware of these traits, but are very proud of them. This means if any member of an older generation, especially somebody in management, demonstrates these traits, the Gen Y employee is likely to feel patronized. You will do well to be as polite, isolated, well-attired, timid, organized, private, and, well, clueless as possible in the presence of Gen Y. This shouldn’t be that hard. Just be yourself.

Getting off on the right foot

A big part of your success in managing a Millennial is hiring the right one to begin with. Careful recruiting has never been more important—or more difficult—than it is now. Here are some pointers.

One of the most common mistakes managers make when recruiting Gen Y is to be visibly startled by the candidate’s appearance. This can cause the candidate to clam up completely, or else to lash out. If you know what to expect, you can keep your cool and have a positive recruiting experience. Things to be ready for:

• The candidate may not wear a necktie to the interview. Many Gen Yers literally cannot believe that this would be expected, even in an interview.
• Clip-on tie? Hide your astonishment. The candidate may sincerely want to please but knows he could never actually tie a tie; or, he is wearing the clip-on ironically.
• Giant fist-sized perfectly symmetrical Windsor knot? You’ve got a great candidate: somebody who actually trusts the sartorial advice of his (albeit misguided) father or grandfather enough to get help tying his tie. This guy is more likely to be emotionally stable, and might also be more docile in accepting quaint workplace traditions like working hard.
• Corporate logo, penis graphic, or animal art on a necktie? Roll with it—unless it’s a donkey or elephant. That could mean a politically active person, who could seriously damage workplace productivity during election season.
• Totally oversized suit? Could be a loaner from Dad. Or maybe the candidate got a bad clothier recommendation from a pal and went to Big & Tall. So many Millennials are seriously overweight, Big & Tall has become almost the de facto clothier for interview suits. (In fact, the parent corporation, LivingXL, is considering rebranding the clothing chain “Big & Normal.”)

Traditionally, an interview consists of an employer asking questions of the candidate to find out if he is qualified for the job. Today, the candidate’s ability should be assumed. Technology is changing so fast, your candidate will probably have an innovative, super-efficient way of carrying out his work tasks—something you never would have dreamed of. Or, the Gen Y new-hire may think of totally different job activities, or even a totally new business for your company to get into. Thus, the main purpose of the job interview is to convince the candidate that your company is a cool place to work—even while you take care to avoid coming off as a poseur.

Three ways to Motivate Millennials

There are of course countless ways to motivate your Gen Y employees, most of which work only some of the time. But we have identified three surefire ways to get the most out of your Millennials:

Interns. Always have some interns around to do most of the work. Not only do interns not require motivation (after all, trying to turn their internship into a paying job is all the motivation they will ever need), having them to kick around will build and sustain the self-esteem of your Gen Y employees.

Rejiggered ratings. In the traditional ratings scale used for older employees, change “underachieving” to “achieving”; change “achieving” to “exceeding expectations”; and change “exceeding expectations” to “needs improvement.” The name changes to the lower ratings are to protect an employee’s morale, since Millennials in these rungs obviously came through the “praise everybody” system where every player on the soccer team gets a trophy, even the ones who never kicked the ball. The name of the top tier is designed for offspring of Tiger Mothers, who respond only to verbal abuse.

Free soda. Fountain beverages are extremely inexpensive but really make your Gen Y employees feel valued. Put the beverage company’s marketing machine to work for you! (Note: do not offer Shasta or other off-brand beverages—this will backfire!)

Public vs. private

Self-disclosure is a habit for Millennials, so you should be braced for offhanded disclosures, ranging from the candid to the downright maudlin, that would have been unheard of a generation ago. The danger here is that your reaction could catch your employee completely off-guard and cause him terrible embarrassment. It is natural to assume that anybody of this generation would have pretty thick skin, but actually they do not. There is no non-verbal communication on Facebook, and face-to-face workplace interactions are not something the typical Gen-Y person is accustomed to. A poker face and a ready comment (e.g., “How did that make you feel?”) are advised.

For example, in his first or second week on the job a Millennial might make reference to something his therapist said to him. Generation Y, unlike the proud and/or shame-filled ones before it, is very relaxed about getting a little help sometimes. To show surprise at this disclosure—to say nothing of gasping—would be a very damaging, and alienating, faux pas. Instead you should respond (practice this in the mirror if necessary), “Wow, that’s very perceptive. Say, is your therapist accepting new patients?”

Of course, playing off your Gen Y employee’s disclosure is totally different from disclosing anything of an even remotely personal nature yourself. Why? Because you’re like the Millennial’s mom or dad, so for you to open up is embarrassing (in the “eww!” way). If, say, you mention that you have an appointment with a dermatologist, don’t be surprised if your Gen Y employee says, “Dude—TMI!”

To the great consternation of human resources departments nationwide, Gen Y employees cannot be prevented from Tweeting about just about everything that happens in the workplace. The only way to keep your company’s private business private is to require employees to create a Twitter alter-ego. You can put a positive spin on this requirement when explaining it to your Millennials. One benefit: with this alter ego they can be even more brash, insulting not just their enemies but their friends.

Of course, everybody mentioned in these Tweets must have a pseudonym as well. To assure this, have your employees refer to their colleagues (and yourself) by whatever secret nicknames they’re already using. Tell your employee, “If you think of me as ‘Balding Douchelord,’ just use that nickname in your Tweets.” If the employee resists, get him excited by saying, “As of yet nobody has created an iPad app that turns a name into an alias, like ‘Joseba Bloviatronica’ for ‘Joe Blow,’ then checks its availability. Somebody is going to make a killing on that app!”

Internet use

Telling a Millennial not to use Facebook while at work would be a real morale-crusher, so you have to allow it. But with other types of Internet abuse, you need to be more firm. Specifically, you can’t have employees using the corporate network to steal media content. Gen Y-ers cannot grasp that sharing MP3 files or downloaded movies is theft; this is literally beyond their comprehension. Explain that there are some upper-level managers who just don’t “get it,” and that these managers unfortunately have the authority to fire people. This will no doubt elicit a knowing smirk—Millennials are expert at covering their tracks—so you must follow up by saying, in a low voice, “Look, there are sysadmin people in this company very jealous of your success. They might just have nothing better to do than set up network traps to get you busted.”

Of course, even bringing up Internet acceptable use policy will get you labeled as one of “them,” so to build back the rapport with your Millennial, you need to get up, close your door, draw your blinds, and let him in on a little “secret”: that there’s a conference room with an extra PC that isn’t on the corporate network but instead steals Internet connectivity from the Starbucks in the lobby. He can use this PC to browse untoward websites, just like he did at the public library as a junior high kid.

Sensitivity training

Gen Y-ers are known for being sensitive. But this doesn’t mean they’re sensitive to others’ feelings—just to their own. We’d all like to think these kids have evolved into something kinder and gentler than we are, but honestly, what can we expect from a generation whose credo is “Sucks to be you!”?

It is widely accepted among Millennials that you can insult somebody as bluntly as you want, as long as you say, “Ha ha, you’ve just been punked!” afterward. It is very uncommon, however, for them to consider their audience for such gibes; that is, they’re just as likely to insult a grey-haired senior colleague as one of their pals. Naturally you cannot assume the senior colleague will understand, so you need to alter the Gen Y employee’s behavior.

The best angle to work here is the purely pragmatic. Don’t say, “Now Tyler, you shouldn’t give Donald a hard time just because he prints out so many documents. He’s kind of sensitive about his work habits and feels like you’re making fun of his age.” That’s just not going to work. What you should say is, “Tyler, don’t make fun of Donald. He’s a gun nut and kind of unstable.”

This sensitivity washes both ways. For example, if Donald, who is putting his daughter through Columbia, sees fit to pack a sack lunch every day, he certainly may. But just because he’s always eaten peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches doesn’t mean he can continue to do so. Millennials are likely to be allergic to peanuts, and even if they’re not, would be scandalized to see a peanut product right out there in the open. After all, peanut products are practically a controlled substance in modern schools. In deference to Gen Y, have your older employees switch to another type of nut butter.

Conclusion

This guide is really just the beginning. Behaviors among Generation Y are always changing and shifting, even as older employees become ever more rigid, even brittle, in their ways. Perhaps the best way to motivate Millennials, and make them feel good, is to ask their opinion about how you should behave. (It’s tempting to have them critique this guide, but of course they’re much too busy.)

dana albert blog