HAZOP Blues III: The Final Insult

Introduction

In two recent from-the-archives posts (here and here) I described my old job, decades ago, scribing HAZOPs for a consulting firm. While discussing those posts with an avid albertnet reader, I happened to tell the rest of the story: how I came to my senses and bailed on that job, going out in a blaze of … well, if not glory, at least a fireball.

As I recounted all this I realized the story of my departure made a pretty good yarn. Thus, I’m providing here the world premier of the rest of the story. (What follows is as true as memory permits.)

HAZOP Blues III: The Final Insult –December 1995

Eventually it dawned on me that my job wasn’t going to get any better. I was never going to finish a workday at a reasonable hour; our reports, comprising reams of paper in giant binders, were always going to be FedEx’d at the last minute, and I was always going to be sprinting down the sidewalk to the FedEx office mere minutes before they closed. We were always going to be facing a workforce shortage, and the entire staff would always be disgruntled. The cush local contracts were always going to be snapped up by a competitor or done in-house (in fact, we’d just bid on a job in Korea that, if we won it, would have me living in a hotel for several months). And perhaps worst of all, none of this would ever end, no matter how dicey things got, because petroleum companies have deep pockets, lots of things to HAZOP, and seemingly infinite patience for flaky consulting firms that overrun their budgets. It was time for me to look for a new job.

Actually, I’d already started looking, months before; the recruitment process (at the firm that still employs me) took over six months. This was awkward because my employer had switched to a business casual dress code but I needed to continually slip out at lunch for interviews, in a shirt and tie of course. I solved the problem by simply continuing to wear a suit, every day, while the rest of the staff wore khakis and polo shirts. When questioned by my incredulous colleagues, I replied, “I just think a suit is more professional.” To my great surprise, one of the engineers followed suit (no pun intended). This all worked out fine until I had an interview on a Friday, as I’d always observed my company’s “casual Friday” policy. I solved that one by packing casual clothes in my bag, changing into them in the bathroom after the interview, and dropping the suit off at the dry cleaners on my way back to the office. BAM!

Finally, the recruitment process (which included, bizarrely enough, a Computer Programming Aptitude Battery Test), finally completed and I was offered the new job, at an up-and-coming company that all the cool kids wanted to work for. Oddly enough, the very same day I received the offer letter, a colleague of mine (the receptionist) walked into my office, asked if I had a minute, closed the door behind her, and asked, “Do you have low self-esteem or something?!”

Bemused, I stammered, “Why would you think that?” She replied, “Because you’re still here! What the hell! You appear to have a pulse … why would you continue to put up with all the bullshit they pile on you?” I grinned and said, “Well, believe it or not, I have just received an offer at another company, after months of interviewing, and I’m outta here!”

“Thank God,” she said, clearly relieved. Now the only chore remaining for me (besides my regular workload, of course) was giving notice to the boss.

This would be difficult. For one thing, my boss was always on the road and barely ever had time to talk, so this would happen over the phone at his earliest convenience. Plus, he was the kind of guy who views everything that ever happens in the entire world as a series of win/lose propositions, and he couldn’t stand losing. Thus, I know he’d try to talk me out of leaving, even though I’d already accepted the new position. Fortunately, this would be our last real dialogue. History had shown that once an employee gave notice, the boss would basically never talk to that traitor again. The grudge was swiftly formed and never relaxed.

After trading countless voicemails over a day or two, my boss, D—, finally called with time to talk. This was at about 5 p.m. my time; he was a couple time zones ahead on a HAZOP trip with one of our senior engineers, C—. Now, I need to pause for a moment to describe C—. He was a brusque, stuffy Englishman with little patience for incompetence … and this was a trait he ascribed to almost everybody. My own start with him had been rocky, as he’d had to interview me (along with the rest of the staff) before I was hired. I’d been coached by my wife on how to interview: at the end, you should ask the interviewer point-blank if he or she has any misgivings about hiring you, so you have the chance to address them. When I put this question to C—, he retorted sharply, “Well I can’t see that you have any experience or qualifications of any kind!” Over the time I worked with him, though, I managed to win him over. In fact, he became something of an ally: since he considered so few people competent, he valued those who passed muster.

Sure enough, when I gave notice, D— put up a big fight rather than simply accepting my resignation and wishing me well. “How can you leave?” he demanded. “I just gave you a ten percent raise!” This was true enough; since my interviews had been going well and I didn’t want to blindside my boss with my inevitable departure, I’d trotted out a laundry list of grievances during my last review, and he evidently felt desperate enough to keep me that he got pretty generous with the salary. (This was a lot easier than resolving my grievances, after all.) But money isn’t everything; I told D— now that my decision had to do with overall career prospects. “How can you say that when the sky is the limit here!” he cried. I mentioned my lack of an engineering credential and he boomed, “Just look at J—! Last week she was a junior engineer … now she’s Director of Software!” This didn’t make any sense in this context, because she did have an engineering degree. And “Director of Software” simply meant managing our HAZOP software vendor, which a rhesus monkey could have done.

We went around and around for something like 45 minutes, by which time I had ceased to bother explaining myself and simply restated, again and again, that I’d already made up my mind. Finally the dreaded call ended.

A couple days later, D— and C— returned to the office, their HAZOP over. D—, looking in at me, stood there in the doorway for at least ten seconds, clenching and unclenching his jaw, like he was trying to decide whether to even say hi. Finally he walked up and said, “I just gotta tell you something. When C— got the news you were leaving, he was—he was devastated. I’ve never seen anything like it. He was so upset, he had to leave the room.” I was, needless to say, totally taken aback. I mean, this was a company that simply couldn’t keep people. It seemed like every week someone left, and some new guy started, like a revolving door. Could C— really have been that surprised? And to be that upset didn’t make much sense anyway … it wasn’t like I was the backbone of the operation or anything (though I’m sure I had the fastest time of anyone on the run to FedEx). I didn’t know what to say, and D— left my office without another word.

I futzed around at my desk for a while and then C— came in. He said, in his starchy British accent, “I just want to say thank you.” I assumed he meant for all my hard work over the last couple years, but I wasn’t sure and didn’t want to assume. “Um … for what?” I asked. He replied, “For a really great evening. You see, when you gave notice, D— and I were at a restaurant, about to have dinner. We ordered a nice bottle of wine and a bunch of appetizers and then he stepped away to call you. Well, he was gone a good while and in the meantime the wine and appetizers arrived. I didn’t feel like waiting so I just tucked right in. I ate one appetizer, then another, had a glass of wine and then another, and still D— didn’t come back, so I just kept going, and before you know it, I’d eaten all the appetizers and drunk all the wine! Still D— didn’t come back, and after all that wine I had to piss like a racehorse! I couldn’t leave the table, though, because the waitress would think we’d skipped out on her. Finally D— came back and gave the bad news, but I couldn’t sit around and listen—I had to run to the bathroom! I barely made it in time! But other than that, it was great … all those appetizers and all that wine, all to myself, and I didn’t have to make conversation or anything. So anyway, I just wanted to thank you for a wonderful evening.” With that, he turned and strode out of my office. Ah, I thought. All is explained.

Epilogue

In those days, when you gave two weeks’ notice you actually did work for two more weeks, rather than being immediately escorted from the office by a security guard. Thus, I had a chance to help recruit and train my replacement. He seemed like a good guy and in fact held a law degree. He seemed to hit it off just fine with most of the office, though one colleague said, “Wait, that’s the new technical assistant? He doesn’t look anything like Dana!”

During my final two weeks I continued to wear a suit and tie, because I didn’t want D— to realize just how long I’d been interviewing (i.e., deviously planning my departure). The new guy wore a suit too, which I chalked up to his being new and wanting to make a good impression. But months later, I came back to the office to visit (and to buy one of their old computers), and this guy was still wearing a suit, despite the whole rest of the office being dressed business casual. I asked him why, and—looking confused—he said, “I just think it’s more professional. In fact … didn’t I get that from you?”

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All I Need to Know About Corporate America I Learned in Team Time Trials - Part 2

Vlog

What could be more embarrassing to my teenage daughters than my blogging? Well, vlogging is probably on the list. For that reason alone I’m providing this post in both text and video formats. If you want to laugh with me, at me, or at my kids for having such a dorky dad, click the Play button below. Otherwise, just scroll down for the text.

Introduction

This post continues my discussion of how lessons learned in cycling team time trials (TTTs) can apply to survival in corporate America. If you haven’t read my previous post, go back and start there.

Lesson 2: Pace yourself

On the face of it, pacing in a TTT is pretty straightforward: you just go flat out the whole time, right? Well, yes and no. When you’re on the front, sure—you go all out (or, more precisely, at your anaerobic threshold). But how long do you stay on the front? That’s the tricky part. If everybody’s pulls are too short, there are too many transitions, too many efforts spent latching on to the back of the line, too many opportunities for tiny losses of efficiency. But pulls that are too long don’t allow enough recovery and riders will grind themselves down. There’s no pre-established pattern, such as everybody leading for 20 seconds. It’s up to each rider to decide how long to be on the front each time before dropping back.

This will vary by rider, by race, and by how the rider is feeling at any point in the TTT. The only rule is, if the team is going, say, 30 mph on a flat road, you better keep up 30 mph when you’re on the front. If your pulls are only half as long as the next guy’s, that’s fine—but don’t you dare take a slow pull. Your team will never get that time back, and what’s more you screw up the rhythm and thus the morale of the whole team. When you take the front, everything and everyone depends on you. To pace yourself accurately means being completely honest with yourself about how long you can pull, per rotation, at the group’s speed. This isn’t a one-time assessment, of course; you must always be ready to adjust the length of your pulls (because your stamina erodes, or conversely if you start poorly but begin to feel better). In short, you are on high alert the entire time (which is part of why I always found these races terrifying).

Needless to say, pacing is important in the workplace too. And yet, I have known plenty of people (over my decades in the working world) who don’t seem attuned to this. They take on too much responsibility and let their workdays drag out too long—which is like taking too long a pull. Eventually they start to get overwhelmed and, for all their workaholism, start dropping this or that ball, or turning out poor quality work—which is like taking a slow pull. Of course it’s hard to admit you took on too much, which can lead to blaming others, making excuses, and so on.

So what does pacing look like in the workplace? Sometimes it’s not always putting your hand up to lead a big project, but more often it’s pushing back a bit on your boss if you’re getting overloaded. I’m routinely surprised how few people do this—they’ll volunteer to work on something over the weekend, for example. (I would never do this; I figure once you’ve demonstrated that your personal time isn’t sacred, a boss would have to be crazy not to take advantage of that. Today’s stretch becomes tomorrow’s job description.)

Another corporate equivalent of a shorter pull is delegation. I’m talking about handing off a task not because you’re too slammed to do it, but because it might be a nice challenge for a colleague, who may appreciate the opportunity. I used to think delegation was just for managers, but it’s not. If you’ve coached a colleague a number of times and thus built up goodwill, why not offer him or her an interesting task? In my experience, a manager won’t fault you for this, as long as the work gets done.

In a TTT, if you pace yourself poorly, you could slow down the team by taking slow pulls or blowing up and going off the back, unable to contribute anymore. This can ruin the race for your whole team. When we consider what’s at stake in the workplace, the analogy falls down a bit because if you don’t pace yourself well in your job, it’s not just a project or campaign that suffers. It’s your whole career.

Lesson 3: Get help when you need it

We can’t all be “on” 100% of the time, but we’re taught not to make excuses, and to deliver on time, every time. Individual ambition drives us to just dig deeper when we’re struggling. This is fine here and there, but if it becomes a habit, it stops being sustainable. Our mental health suffers, probably our work/life balance, and the collateral damage to our personal lives can eventually become a serious distraction. (My father was a hopeless workaholic, and during his divorce, he couldn’t sleep at night and would often fall asleep on the job—the workplace equivalent of crashing out of a TTT.)

Why don’t we ask for help? Surely somebody could pitch in on a project, revise the scope, or relax a deadline, if we ask? I think the problem is often lack of humility … it’s hard to admit you’re not up to the demand. This is easier to spot in a TTT than the workplace because a rider who doesn’t ask for help is just suddenly gone. It’s a disaster and I’ve seen it too many times, usually in the first few miles of a TTT. In the photo below, we lost two guys in the first mile or so … and needless to say didn’t go on to have a great race.

What does asking for help look like? In a TTT, it’s yelling like crazy if you get gapped, or sitting out a pull if you’re feeling crappy. When you’re on the back and a teammate finishes his pull and drops back, you wait until he’s just ahead of you and tell him, “Take it.” You let a gap open for him and joins the line early. Granted, he won’t be stoked about this, as it gives him less time to recover before his next pull, but tagging him in like this is way better than slowing down the group or getting dropped, thus abruptly leaving the team without your services. I’ve had TTTs where I started badly, got some help, and then went on to fully contribute.

So how do we ask for help in our corporate jobs? That’s more complicated, of course, but it starts with humility, trust that your colleagues won’t resent you for reaching out, and a focus on team results vs. worrying about your reputation.

Lesson 4: be grateful you’re in the race

The team time trial was definitely my best event as a bike racer. I recover quickly from deep efforts so the repeated hard pulls on the front, followed by rest periods in the line, suited me perfectly. Unluckily for me, the team time trial is a somewhat rare event. I did my first one in 1982, but didn’t have another opportunity until 1985 when a TTT featured in the Red Zinger Mini Classic stage race. My next chance wasn’t until 1988 when I started collegiate racing. Happily, in college there were several of these races during each season, followed by the conference championship TTT and—since my teams qualified—the national championship. I was so grateful to ride so many of these TTTS during my college racing years, and bummed that there hasn’t been an opportunity for me since.

Meanwhile, I was blessed to be on that UC Santa Barbara team that was loaded with amazing talent. It has certainly helped shape my worldview that my greatest success in the sport came not so much from my own ability, but from having been on the right team at the right time. I can never forget how lucky I was just to get to race those TTTs when I did, so I am always grateful for the opportunities I have in my career, even if it can be difficult and frustrating trying to make the most of them.

Moreover, to even have a career in corporate America requires a lot of luck. You were born in this country; you had the educational opportunities needed to be qualified for a white collar job; and, you had enough opportunity to secure a position. This is a really big deal. There are something like 65 million Americans employed in the professional and technical workforce, and while this is about 41% of US workers, it’s only about 1.4% of the world’s adult population. Think of all the things that had to be true for you even to have your job.

Why does this matter? It’s because being talented and educated enough to get and keep a job isn’t the whole battle. You have your own contentment to deal with, and I suspect lots of corporate employees have a bloated sense of entitlement—which can make them disgruntled, or bored, or restless. This in turn can a) affect their performance such that they don’t survive the next round of layoffs, or b) cause them to job-hop too often (like hitting the Hyperspace button on their careers) because they blame their employer for a dissatisfaction that has its roots in lack of gratitude.

I’ve outlasted colleagues who spent far too much energy fretting over the golden parachutes the executives get, or the fact of younger people passing them up on the way up the ladder, or the apparent lack of advancement opportunities given to them. I find it a shame when someone lacks the humility to just knuckle down, do their job, and be happy to be there. In this country we are all pressured to pursue and gratify our individual ambitions, but I’d like to point out that where life balance is concerned, contentment isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Instead of worrying about your rise through the ranks, just be glad you’re on a team.

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All I Need to Know About Corporate America I Learned in Team Time Trials

Vlog

Ear hair. It’s becoming a real problem for me, but I don’t always get around to trimming it. Nothing motivates me to groom myself like posting a video to the Internet. For that reason (and because I’m told some people prefer watching videos to reading a lot of text), below is a vlog version of this post. Close your eyes and you’ve got a podcast. Scroll down and it’s a blog post. Enjoy please enjoy.

Introduction

I have worked for the same employer for over 25 years, and have made it through three acquisitions, a bankruptcy, and countless reorgs. Along the way I’ve had thirteen different bosses. How have I lasted this long? I joke that my spirit animal is the cockroach. But actually, I’d say my longevity is a combination of the right attitude and the right practices.

Of course it would be a stretch to say that the team time trial, a type of bicycle race, taught me how to survive in corporate America. However, as I will explain here, the same attitude and practices apply to each. The team time trial is a great metaphor.

What is a team time trial?

In road racing, the individual time trial—often called the “race of truth”—consists of each rider racing alone, against the clock  (typically sent off at 1- to 3-minute intervals). A team time trial, aka TTT, is the same thing but with teammates racing together to try to put up the best time. Crucially, it’s not the time of the first rider that’s taken. If it’s a five-person team, the third rider’s time is what counts. For nine riders, it’s the fifth or sixth. To be competitive, a team needs all (or at least most) of its riders contributing to the effort of taking turns breaking the wind for the others. They must cooperate perfectly.

Lesson 1: Work for the team

“Be a team player” is obviously a cliché. It’s something management routinely tells us, and they might even mean it, but it often doesn’t pack much punch in a culture like America’s where individualism, and individual success, are promoted so universally. So it is in sport, and in cycling in particular, with Lance Armstrong being perhaps the greatest example of the self-focused sportsman—a bully obsessed with individual domination, fearful of any personal ambition among his teammates.

The team time trial is ideally the purest antithesis of all this. A TTT team that works well together is a thing of beauty. Every rider is acutely aware of how every other rider is doing. If you’re totally on fire, you carefully channel this by increasing your output gradually, without disrupting the smooth functioning of the formation. You may take a bit longer pull, and you can even slightly increase the speed of the group while you’re on the front … but harmony is your first priority.

This is harder than it sounds. It’s almost automatic to accelerate when you start your turn at the front, because this is right after you’ve recovered in the line. But, if you’re a good team time trialist, you never forget how hard it is to latch on to the back of the group, after having slowed down to let the other riders past. This is the hardest part of a TTT because at the back, you’ve just finished your pull, aren’t yet in the slipstream, and need to accelerate slightly. If the guy on the front increases the pace at all as you’re latching on, he practically breaks your legs.

Let’s think for a moment about teamwork in corporate America. In your workplace, how much energy do you think people devote to helping their colleagues? Is much attention paid to buoying up those who are struggling? Other than managers, do people even care?

It’s amazing how many seasoned bike racers screw up the team time trial by kind of missing the “team” part. In fact, it’s often the team leaders that cause the most  problems—because their drive and talent and alpha-dog-ness is what made them leaders in the first place. Returning to my Lance Armstrong example, to watch him in a TTT was like agony for those of us who understand this event. He pulled too hard when taking the front, screwed up the rhythm, sometimes dropped his entire team, and—as came out later—would terrorize his teammates over the race radios for not going fast enough.

Not that Lance was the only team leader to do TTTs poorly. In the 1993 Tour de France, the Gatorade team was selected, in part, to support their leader, Gianni Bugno, in the TTT stage. This was supposed to be an opportunity for Bugno to take serious time out of the race favorite, Miguel Indurain, whose Banesto team was better suited to helping their leader in the mountain stages. But Bugno apparently couldn’t keep it in his pants and his team floundered in the TTT, actually losing 12 seconds to Banesto. How was this possible? Well, Indurain—though he was hands-down the strongest individual time trialist in the race—matched his team’s pace perfectly. As reported in Winning magazine, “When asked how it was that Banesto stayed more or less together while Gatorade were all over the place in the TTT, [Banesto team director] Jose Miguel Echavarri responded that ‘it was necessary that the king went with the people, rather than that the people try to follow the king.’”

(Ironically, pro cycling teams are run like companies, and yet all too often the prima donna behavior of riders like Armstrong and Bugno has been allowed, perhaps encouraged, by management … hence the revolving door of talent on US Postal, which can’t have been good for long-term team morale.)

When I was at UC Santa Barbara, our TTT was a perfect case study in selflessness. We were all completely devoted to the team’s success, despite the fact that our two best riders really didn’t get along. This didn’t affect how they rode—they unfailingly set their grievances aside and worked together flawlessly in races. Our reward for perfect teamwork was a TTT victory at the collegiate National Championships.

The next year, I’d transferred to UC Berkeley, and though on paper we had a more talented overall roster, we never got such good results. The reason, as all but one of our riders would happily explain to you passionately and at length, was our team leader. He was headstrong, self-absorbed, and a terrible team time trialist. The way he started his pulls, you’d think he was deliberately trying to saw his teammates off the back, like this event was about him showing us how dominant he was. Spiritually, a good team time trialist is almost like a Girl Scout den mother; this guy was more like Ahab—and every other living human was Moby Dick to him. (For a more complete case study of this strong, successful, but flawed individual, click here and do a page search for “Ace.”)

Okay, so how does this relate to the corporate world? Beyond being an obvious object lesson in the downside of selfishness, I think it points to the need for wider awareness than your personal ambition will give you. A TTT isn’t about you being fast; it’s about your team being fast, which requires a whole lot more than your own strong pedaling. In my experience of the workplace, revenue and earnings are the measure of victory, and maximizing them is extraordinarily complicated. Creating the right products and services, building them right, marketing and selling them effectively, and providing good support cannot be achieved by the smartest guy in the room performing brilliantly.

Yes, you need smart—but also patient, careful, and generous—people in countless rooms working together. Those who rise in the ranks by “promoting their personal brand” and striving to stand out may naturally have a hard time leading their teams toward the results that matter. A company will only thrive if it promotes those with a sensitivity to how well everyone is rowing together. A sales director at my company once joked to me, “I’m good at this stuff because I’m pretty stupid, so it’s impossible for me to overcomplicate things for my reps.” His humility, and his focus on collective results, have apparently served him well.

In all my years of bike racing, I was never the team leader. This isn’t because there’s anything wrong with me, some fundamental lack of ambition or fear of success. It’s that I’ve been lucky enough to be on teams with better riders than myself, and selflessly supporting them was the obvious and correct thing to do. Bringing my support (aka domestique’s) perspective to the TTT was a natural fit, and nice insurance against instinctively trying to show dominance and messing up the flow. Steeped in the art of looking after my team leader, I was a natural at looking after my team as we fought the wind together.

Similarly, in my work life I’ve never been the alpha dog, and my humble approach—i.e., helping others in the background vs. showing off—has worked out well. I sincerely believe it hasn’t held me back; if anything, I’ve been given all the responsibility and growth opportunities I can handle. Even if my approach isn’t the ticket to rising through the ranks at work, it does seem to help with career longevity. Maybe I’ve missed out on some promotions and the income growth that can bring, but I’ve also avoided the pitfalls of the kind of self-serving behavior that hampers the results an employer cares about. I believe there are certain risks in clawing one’s way up the corporate ladder too swiftly; whether or not I’m right, I can say that I’ve never been unemployed. For the last 26 years I’ve had continuous income, and that adds up.

I chalk all this up to my TTT mindset. Recently I had my annual review and my boss told me I “need more swagger.” I took this as a compliment.

To be continued

Dang, this has taken me more words than I expected. Tune in next week for three more (shorter) lessons gleaned from the tarmac crucible of team time trialing.

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Teleworking During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Vlog

This post is available as a vlog. Watch on your phone, tablet, Jumbotron, or in IMAX theaters everywhere. If the sight of my face bothers you, switch to podcast mode by closing your eyes. Or, scroll down for the traditional Gobs-O’-Text version.

Introduction

As companies continue to ask employees to telework in response to COVID-19, you might find yourself in unfamiliar territory—your own home. What is this place called “home” where you’re suddenly spending so much time? Who are these people called “family”? And how do we keep this “new normal” from destroying our careers? This post walks you through a menagerie of best practices.

Define your workspace

Sure, your kitchen, dining room, bedroom, and garage may seem totally familiar—but take some time to explore other areas of the house that may seem new to you. Who sleeps in these other bedrooms? What is this strange space called the “living room”? What goes on in the basement?

It might be tempting to involve your whole house in your teleworking. You could take your laptop to the sofa, the La-Z-Boy armchair, or your back deck and expect to get work done. Experienced teleworkers will tell you they tried this and it simply doesn’t work! Sofas are made for sleeping, not marching toward quarterly performance goals. As for taking your conference call out to the back deck, nobody wants to overhear birdsong—that’s just depressing. What’s next, taking your laptop into the bath? Don’t take the bait. Dock your laptop in the home office, and act like you’re chained to your desk—just like good old days before teleworking and COVID-19.

Prioritize privacy

Whether you work from your home or in a common area, take five minutes to assess the privacy of your workspace. Can someone standing behind you read your computer screen? What if your spouse, or your kid, is hunting for trade secrets? It may seem like “all in the family” now, until your teenager suddenly has a coveted internship with your competitor and they start poaching your customers!

Is it okay to work from Starbucks? Well, that depends. Is your local Starbucks even open? If you broke in, or pushed past their ad hoc takeout window, that may strike your colleagues as unprofessional behavior. Conversely, if your local Starbucks is open, because you live in one of these benighted cities that don’t believe in COVID, your colleagues may be shocked, during a videoconference, to see unmasked idiots seated near you. This could be a major distraction, so it’s probably best to work from your actual home.

Have a good Internet connection

Set up your workspace near your wireless access point (WAP). If the WAP is in the kid’s room, and you’re out working in the garage with the furnace duct blocking the signal, you won’t have a good WiFi experience and neither will your colleagues. Trade places with your children, even if banishing them to the garage—with all its toxic cleaners, solvents, and sharp tools—presents a significant risk. At this point you may wonder why you installed the one WAP in the house in their room to begin with. Or did your children do the install? How old, exactly, are these hypothetical kids? A couple sentences back they seemed like children or toddlers, and now they’re high school seniors with internships at Cisco. You can see how complicated teleworking gets!

You might want to splurge on a true business-grade Internet connection. A fully redundant setup such as dedicated concentric Synchronous Optical Network (SONET) rings can be acquired for just a few thousand dollars a month. You can defray this cost by installing an outdoor, all-weather WAP that your neighbors can tap into—for a fee. Just remember to let them know when you change the SSID password, or they might soon be offline and out of a job!

Audiovisual presence

Many first-time teleworkers commit the “rookie move” of failing to optimize their video conferencing setup. For example, the angle of their laptop screen—where the built-in camera is housed—might be set such that their nostrils seem to gape, or the age-related folds in their neck are accentuated. Take some time to set this up right. This might mean sitting with your back to a brightly lit window, so that you appear as just a silhouette, which creates an air of mystery even as it hides signs of ageing, frustration, or boredom.

Don’t neglect your audio connection either. The built-in mic on your modern laptop might be quite good, so it’s tempting to just use that—but then you lose the opportunity to show off your wealth and status by rocking Apple AirPods during videoconferences. Not feeling that flush? Here’s a simple hack: snip off the cords from a cheap pair of white earbuds and wear those, while actually using the audio from your laptop’s speakers and built-in mic. Trust me, your colleagues will never know the difference!

Note that in some cases, your video camera shouldn’t be used at all. For example, if your manager and director both approved the purchase of an external monitor for your home, but they see you plain as day on the video conference, they’ll know you’re just using your undocked laptop. They’ll figure out right away that that expensive hardware billed to their cost center is being used by your kids for gaming. Don’t get fired just because you’re a “cool dad!”

The mute button

Perhaps no other technology has stymied as many people as the mute button. Whether it’s a physical button on a telephone handset, or an onscreen button you click or tap, it seems to have a mind of its

own. Does anything erode your professional reputation as badly as colleagues telling each other, “I think he’s on mute” and yelling, “Bob, can you hear me? You’re on mute!”? Why, yes: forgetting to mute before screaming at your children or muttering profanities to yourself. (And you thought that was a rhetorical question!)

Take some time to master this “mute button” technology. Practice with your colleagues, or even with your kids, outside of scheduled calls. Also, learn to spot the telltale signs that you’re accidentally muted: nobody answers your question, or nobody responds to your statement, or people talk right over you. If these things are happening, it’s time to un-mute. (Now, if you’re already un-muted and these things are still happening, it may be time to find a new job.)

Eliminate distractions

Alas, teleworking can mean pets, children or a favorite hobby are only a few feet away. If you give in to temptation, you might find yourself totally distracted, doing something you actually enjoy or talking to people who really care about you and have interesting things to say. This can derail your career as surely as a three-martini-lunch habit. It’s best to nip these distractions in the bud. Chase your cat around the house screaming until she’s terrified of you, and she’ll steer well clear of your workspace going forward. Alienate your children by bawling them out over petty offenses—or better yet, get all Tiger Mother on them. They’ll stop coming around to chat, no matter how bored they get. Harsh, yes, but sometimes career’s got to come before family.

Sometimes the distractions can come from just outside the home. It seems like every city in America is taking advantage of shelter-in-place to fast-track civic projects like road maintenance and sewer main overhauls. Construction sounds aren’t just distracting—they’re unprofessional. Nobody wants to overhear a jackhammer or earth-moving machine during a conference call. A polite letter to your city council can work wonders—maybe they’ll put their projects on hold until your next vacation. If that doesn’t work, talk to the construction workers themselves. Explain to them how important your business calls are, and how much revenue is at stake. You might be surprised how accommodating they are. Many foremen will be happy to reschedule their work crews until after business hours.

Despite your best intentions and practices, you’re bound to get distracted from time to time, especially during long conference calls. Inevitably, somebody will ask you a question and catch you off-guard. This happens time and time again, and often the distracted party will try to save face by pretending he or she was paying attention. “I’m not sure I understand the question” is one such ruse, another being, “Can you provide a little more context?” Or, the person will try to win points by “coming clean” and saying, “I’m sorry … I [was multitasking] [zoned out] and didn’t hear the question.” Neither of these is acceptable. The first two are transparently disingenuous, and the  last one disrespectful—as if it’s okay to be distracted.

The only truly professional response is a sincere apology: “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear the question because I was totally distracted. I don’t even have the context. I know this is unacceptable and I promise to try harder. When you consider how many people are on this call … let’s see, there’s ten of us, and this is an hour-long call, which equates to about $400 in wages … gosh, it’s such a waste for anybody not to be bringing his A-game. Which is why, starting now, I’m going to turn over a new leaf. From now on, you will have my complete and undivided attention, and what’s more…” Keep on like this for as long as you can, like a filibuster. That way, it’s highly likely nobody will ever ask you a question during a conference call again.

Be intentional

As the pandemic creates new and uncomfortable ways of working, setting up regular routines and workflows can help you stay effective. Being intentional means “doing things with intent.” For example, joining a videoconference or working on a spreadsheet is something you would do “on purpose,” which is to say intentionally. Knocking your coffee over on your keyboard would be unintentional. Know the difference. You can’t be an effective teleworker if most of your actions are accidents.

Nurture workplace socializing

Many of us truly miss the water cooler and employee lunchroom. Teleworking can be lonely, especially when you’ve totally alienated your family, so be creative about how to interact with your colleagues. Consider making time for “virtual coffee breaks” using video chat. Please note that the coffee, in these instances, does not need to be virtual. Drinking an actual steaming mug of your favorite beverage is more enjoyable than settling for an icon, GIF, or even a high-res JPG file depicting it. If possible, get that “cuppa joe” into the video frame, to make your coffee break seem more real! But don’t get carried away … try to consolidate your virtual coffee klatches, to cover all your colleagues at once. Otherwise, by the time you’ve “made the rounds,” you’ll have had like eight cups and will be shaking, irritable, and unable to focus. (That is, more so than usual.)

Consider if teleworking is actually appropriate

Yes, we all take orders from management and tend to comply. But if you think teleworking really isn’t right for your role, speak up! For example, if you are an EMT and have shifted to working only from home, your customers—that is, your patients—will definitely feel the difference. If you can help your employer to understand that your job performance is suffering, and that in fact lives could be lost, they may well heed your advice. If they don’t, though, just back off … consider that they may have a more nuanced understanding of these things.

Go easy on yourself

Especially with the added stress of the pandemic, teleworking can be stressful. You might not always feel as productive working all alone in your home office, and nowadays the fact that you actually showed up to work is not always visible to your colleagues. If you find your focus lacking, maybe it’s time for a break. If your employer doesn’t offer paid sabbaticals, try to get an unpaid one. If that doesn’t work, sometimes it’s best to simply resign.

As with all workplace adjustments, don’t take any rash steps until you look at the big picture. If you have a sizable trust fund and your spouse’s employer offers healthcare, it’s a slam dunk … otherwise, you might want to consider if unemployment is right for you. Sure, the stigma if being “on the dole” has greatly diminished in this new era, but many people find that a stable income and benefits may actually be worth the stress of employment.

Separate the personal and professional

Video conferencing tools like Google Meet, WebEx, and Zoom are now being used for both our professional and social activities. In many cases, people are socializing with far-flung friends more often than before the pandemic took hold. But there’s a downside to this: all that teleworkplace videoconferencing can lead to “Zoom fatigue,” where you spend so much time looking at faces on screens, your socializing starts to seem like work. Take stock of your situation and decide if this is a good time to even have a personal life. After all, is it worth the risk that you’ll spoil friendships by equating your pals with workplace stress? Maybe it’s best to cut off all contact with friends and family until after the pandemic. Don’t worry, they’ll almost certainly still remember you when all this is over.

Other reading on the pandemic 

• Shelter-in-Place FAQ
• E-Book Options During COVID-19 Lockdown
• Is Cycling Safe During the COVID-19 Pandemic?
• The Toilet Paper Hoarding Conundrum
• More COVID Chronicles – Baking in Place
• When Will the Pandemic End?
• What Are Hospitals Like During the Pandemic?
• How to Talk to Your Cat About COVID-19
• Why Don’t The Dutch Wear COVID Masks?
• Travel Tips During the COVID-19 Pandemic
• COVID Wristbands

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—

Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

From the Archives - A Very Odd Letter

Introduction

I came across this old letter recently that I’d written to a friend, sort of. While it does cohere, the document as a whole is a complete non sequitur. It had nothing to do with my life or my friend’s life, and its tone is completely unrelated to our friendship.

I’m not sure what inspired this. My only theory now is that I had a stray impulse to let my friend know how cool I thought it was that he was a full-time professional bike racer and a part-time college student—but of course it would be lame to actually praise him. So instead, I roundly criticized him. I think I was reading stuff at the time about how you cannot state something without also implying its opposite. For example, when you see a stop sign, you think “stop,” but you also think about “go.” Perhaps I figured that by groundlessly bagging on my friend I would cause him to reflect favorably on his actual life.

Or maybe I just wrote the incongruous letter for no reason at all. I share it here because I think it’s kind of funny (which of course implies that it may actually be dull and unfunny; you can decide for yourself).

By the way, my friend’s name is not “John.” I changed the name for this version just to make sure nobody attaches any biographical meaning to anybody. Oh, and one more thing: I never got a response to this letter, in any form.

A very odd letter – September 30, 1991

Dear John:

Word has gotten around that you’re neglecting your college education and have wasted the last three weeks of class time. You are supposed to be working on your projects. But you do nothing. Can I help?

I guess it’s not accurate to say you do nothing. I mean, nobody is completely inert. Probably you write on the desk, or scratch your initials in with a razor blade, or maybe you stick the blade of a pocketknife between the Formica and the wood and pry it up, to split off big pieces of the desk, like picking at a scab. I can picture you idly peeling off the ironed-on letters on the sleeve of your t‑shirt, or staring at the clock to will it to speed up. Or maybe you envision yourself running your hands up the legs of the teacher, up beneath her dress. (This fantasy may require you to scrunch down under your desk.) But what is the value of all this? You’re only cheating yourself through this lackadaisical behavior.

This is your life! This is your big moment, the springtime of your life, the time to blossom into the fine young man we all know you can be. If you would just apply yourself, it would make all the difference in the world. Spread your wings and fly! You can do it! I mean, come on, you’re John Doe! You just have to tell yourself, “John, I can make a difference in this life!” It’s time to take off and soar into your future!

Oh, John. I just don’t know what the world is going to do with you. You can’t just sit back and wait for your life to come along and create itself for you. You’ve got to make those miracles happen. All that’s missing is you. You must want to succeed, deep down inside, like we all want you to. Surely you have some kind of ambition, if you would just search for it.

Remember, you are not alone in this! You’ve got your friends, we’re all pulling for you. Sure, we aren’t the greatest friends you’ve ever had, what with Tommy in prison now (for a crime he didn’t commit—remember that!), and sure, Jake hasn’t spoken to you since he laid you out cold at that party, but I think even he has high hopes for you. Maybe you think I shouldn’t be the one to give you advice since I dropped out of college myself, but you know school just isn’t right for me, at least not right now. I think I belong here in the Price Pfister factory. Working the electronic scale really isn’t as simple as a lot of people tend to think. I’ve still got my pride.

Just keep in mind that you were always our role model. At least, until you decided to just throw away all your talent. I can’t express what a letdown it’s been to me and the rest of us when your grades started slipping. High Valley Community College may not be your only chance for success, but you’ve got to take it seriously since it’s the best shot you have! The rest of us would give almost anything to have the opportunity that you do.

This one friend of mine got into Adams State College, and after he graduated he got a really good sales position selling office products to small businesses. He took me for a ride in his new car and told me to open the glove compartment, and when I did this pen rolled out and when I picked it up I saw that it had his name on it in gold. I was pretty impressed, and then he opened this little door above the gear shift and I thought it was an ashtray but it turned out to be this neat drink holder you can either put a Coke can or a coffee cup in and it doesn’t spill or anything. His car is a Nissan Sentra, and he’ll have it paid off before President Bush’s second term ends, before things could get bad with the economy.

So I guess you can see where I was going with that. You can be great! Please tell me how to help!

All my best,

Dana

From the Archives - The Shirt

Introduction

I had forgotten all about this little story until today, when memory of it popped into my head. All at once I remembered the night it chronicles, and I remember writing it, and I remember how I was initially pretty pleased with it, and I remember remembering it, years later, and wondering if it actually sucked. So this evening I found it, reread it, and decided it’s worthy of albertnet. Enjoy please enjoy.

The Shirt – January 13, 1992

This guy has got the Shirt. To say it’s nice is not enough, because this is not merely the kind of die‑hard, go-anywhere, versatile shirt that I’m wearing. I happen to think my own shirt is just fine, but that’s only because I know almost nothing about fashion. I know enough, though, to know that this guy has got the Shirt and I don’t. His Shirt isn’t practical, it isn’t versatile, it certainly isn’t economical—and so it is probably chic. (If a friend of mine came over to my place dressed chic like that, I’d call him a chick and send him home to change. But I’m on someone else’s turf ... I wasn’t even invited this party. I am here as someone’s date.)

With a strange reverence, I gaze at the Shirt, imagining the guy modeling it for himself in the full‑length mirror, deciding if it is to be the shirt for tonight. If he makes the slightest error in judgment, the evening is ruined. A shirt could as easily kill him as make him the center of attention. Before settling on this one he probably threw away—not just aside, but away forever—several shirts that have slipped quietly into fashion dysfunction (dysfashion?). And of course he never makes a mistake, anywhere in his outfit. He knows that the perfect Shirt requires the perfect pants, which begin with the perfect belt and descend lovingly down his legs, with perfect pleats and a perfect crease, down to crisp cuffs perfectly caressing the perfect shoes.

These shoes are the dope: the kind of extravagant Nigerian kid’s‑belly suede leather ones that you and I ignorantly laugh at in little shoe boutiques, whispering to one another, “What the hell are these shoes? And what are those tassels for?” until a salesperson approaches and says, with the most faintly masked disdain, “Can I help you?” We wish we had the nerve to say, “Yes, I was wondering how well these would hold up for bicycling. Would grease stains wash out easily?” but instead we apologize: “Just browsing. Well, see you later. Cheers!”

If I spoke the language of this party, I could perhaps bridge the cultural gap of my versatile shirt and strike up conversation, but alas I do not. The Shirt’s confident speech is laced with wonderful abbreviations like “CPA,” “MBA,” and “JD,” along with hybrid names like “Arthur Andersen” and “Deloitte & Touche.” As an outsider, I watch Rob, my date’s sister, try to parley his distinctive belt buckle, high heels, and earnest patter into an important business connection. That’s why he’s here; i.e., why my date did him the favor of letting him tag along.

(I do not ever wear high heels and am amazed that such a product exists for men. But then, there’s a lot about this world I do not grasp, so I know not to judge.)

“Do you know how I made my entrance?” the Shirt is saying. “I was at an important function, found a partner, and just tugged on his arm, just like this” (he tugs at the sleeve of Rob’s shirt) “and made my eye contact. I told him, look, I know what your company needs and I’ve got what it takes. Two weeks later, I was made an offer.”

Yeah, great, easy for you to say, you’ve got the Shirt! Rob fairly melts at this wonderful success story, his eyes probing the Shirt longingly, in real awe of his social prowess. The Shirt begins expounding the virtues of real conviction, not the assumed ambition that partners, recruiters, and personnel managers (the last resort) can see right through. Before my eyes, he is giving Rob an invaluable survival kit for the corporate world, and I only hope Rob can ingest it all at once. This is turning into an important party indeed! Two colleagues of the Shirt stand by, dressed very impressively but without that dear fashion perfection that would be so lucrative to their careers, their egos, their very beings.

As Rob begins the well-polished story of his own professional history, these colleagues fix their eyes on him as they would on a highway patrolman who just might be letting them off with a lecture: staring not at him, not through him, but towards him and at nothing. Rob deftly drops the hybrid name of his former employer, throws around some sophisticated business jargon, and then falls fatally into a crevasse by using some toxic phrase. I did not hear the phrase but it had something to do with phones. Rob realizes his mistake and abruptly stops talking. (He has been out of work for awhile and I sense that this isn’t the first time he’s cratered like this.) Unable to orchestrate an escape from the grave dug by his faux‑pas, he freezes up and almost seems to gasp for air.

The Shirt and his sidekicks deal humanely with Rob; soon the Shirt, after exposing for a moment his gold wristwatch, shrugs his shoulders, skillfully sending impressive ripples down the silk flowing over his chest, and says, “Well, fellows, I think it’s time to visit our favorite watering hole.” The sidekicks, who have long since stopped listening to anything said, shake slightly as if waking up from a light sleep, blink several times, and one of them says, “What?”

The Shirt grins. “Drinks, gentleman, down at Thomas Glintcock’s.” He shakes hands with Rob, emphasizing vice-like grip and eye contact, and says, “Be in touch now. Good luck.” He turns to me, having been introduced sometime earlier, extends his hand, and says, “Nice meeting you Darnell.” I fight the urge to temporarily confound his internal connection register by saying, “Certainly. I’ll contact you about that interview.” Instead, I flash my best knowing grin and attempt to turn the tide of our handshake so as to crush his hand instead of mine. It’s no good. Is this why they call it “the upper hand”? In pain now, I struggle to fathom who is supposed to let go first. It’s all so awkward, but also kind of exciting. Is this my first power handshake?

When the Shirt and his lackeys are out of earshot, Rob approaches his sister and me as he’s if a pro ball player meeting the press in the locker room after the big game. I can’t predict whether he’ll say “It was a good ball game and I gotta hand it to those guys, they really got the job done,” or “Did you see me out there!?” His expression is a mixture of fear and pride. Sure, he wasn’t flawless, but there he was, right in the thick of it, right?

My gaze wanders, though: I find myself drinking in, for the final time, the unmistakable prowess of the Shirt as he shrugs off a few more ambitious junior businessmen, having no more time to spread his success around among the little people. Rob is frantically recounting to his sister what he learned, and what his next step needs to be, and how she must find him a few more good connections and a few more important functions to attend. She replies, with splendid offhandedness, that she went to a basketball game with such-and-such person, who brought along such‑and‑such important partner. Rob chases down the shirt and gleefully announces this connection.

“Oh yes, James Masterson is a splendid guy. Very approachable,” says the Shirt. “How did you say you knew of him?” Rob mentions the basketball game. Flourishing a game-show gesture towards Robs’ sister, the Shirt says, with oily precision, “Well there you are! Go set it up. And good luck!” Then he is out the door, and with him the fashion presence I’d found so tingly.

Rob returns, and begins speaking far too quickly for me to follow him. I fix my stare in appropriate sidekick fashion and nod occasionally. Finally, he puts it to me: “What do you think?” Realizing my social inadequacy and total lack of business sense, I decide to just go random on him. “You know what I think, Rob?” I ask. “I think you should completely reinvent yourself professionally, and teach junior high school.”

Two pairs of jaws drop, as if these siblings were in a cutesy movie about twins. After a great deal of gasping, they simultaneously express their incredulity: “A teacher? What the hell for?” “Where did you get that?” This time my grin is unharnessed, uncontrolled, uncalculated. (I hope nobody saw me.) I put it to Rob that he could no more convince an Arthur Andersen partner of his love of accounting than convince a school principal of his love for kids. “I hate kids!” he snarls.

“Well, how much exposure do you have to accounting?” I ask.

“Two classes in college,” he replies.

“Did you like it?”

“No, I hated it,” he concedes, “but that was just because of the crappy professors.” I ask him to explain his sudden craving for accounting, and beyond “business environment” and “social interchange with clients” he cannot. He leaves to get a drink, and I wander into the kitchen and read the cartoons posted on the refrigerator. Rob’s sister does not join me.

Ten minutes later Rob finds me, his sister trailing behind. “I have an answer! I have the answer!” he cries. His sister chides him for blurting this out so loudly, but I let it go, interested in his breakthrough. “I wanna learn!” he cries. “I wanna learn accounting and Arthur Andersen is the firm I want to teach it to me.” I am very disappointed with this shallow attempt at epiphany. “Sure, of course you want to learn,” I say slowly, “but why do you want to learn accounting? Why don’t you want to learn about, say, educating kids?”

We leave the party. During the drive our silence is broken by sirens. Three honking police cars weave through the traffic and disappear into the night. “I wonder what happened. Maybe there’s a riot!” Rob says brightly. I shake my head. “No, I’ll bet it’s something more routine. Just some cops doing normal cop things.” Rob says, “You know, if I hadn’t gone to college, I’d be a cop. That’s my second choice. Accountant, then cop. Well, maybe it’s not my second choice, but it’s definitely up there.”

I hold back a smirk: the evening may yet be young! “Well, you know—” I begin, but Rob’s sister cuts me off. “No more! Shut up! Just stop!” So we stop. It’s just as well: I’m suddenly exhausted, and I’ll bet Rob is too. I stare out the window and it occurs to me that, out there somewhere in this beautiful nighttime city, the Shirt is still going strong.

From the Archives - Temp-to-Perm: A Study in Shame

Introduction 

Ages ago, right out of college, I got a job through an employment agency. It was a temp-to-perm job: if I worked out, I’d get hired outright, but if at any point the firm decided I was no good, they could place a quick call to the agency and I’d be out of there within minutes. (I did get past the temp-to-perm purgatory, eventually.)

During my first few weeks of this, somebody at the firm decided they needed to have an internal corporate newsletter, and solicited articles for it. To my surprise, my boss asked me to submit something. What follows is that submission. (Oddly enough, I ended up being the only person to provide an article, so the newsletter itself was never produced.) 

Temp-to-Perm: A Study in Shame – March, 1993 

To quote Dostoevsky, “I am a sick man, I am an angry man. I am an unattractive man. I think there is something wrong with my liver.” Why? Because I’m a temp. I’d be a fool to deny it—it’s right there on the invoice. Don’t think I can’t envision the expression that Michelle in Accounting has when she pays it, week after week. I know what she’s thinking: how much chargeable time does the kid need to accrue for us just to break even on him?

Oh, you can afford to ask this, you blessed permanent employees. You don’t have to fill out a time card every week; you don’t have drop it off at the employment agency so they can take a third of it away. Most of you doubtless have direct deposit: an income so automatic it just becomes a fact of life. I, meanwhile, wince every time I fill out my time card and read, “Job with this client completed and ready for another assignment?”

Sure, I can check the “No” box this time, with a shaky hand, but what about next week? What if I screw up? I’d get sent home, and next time I went to the agency to get my check, I’d check “Yes” on “ready for another assignment?” and renew the bleak process of waiting by the phone for the agency to call.

Well, for all of you who are annoyed at the hassle of paying so much money for a stranger in the office, I ask for your patience in letting me describe the woes, on my end, of the temporary-to-permanent ordeal.

Last January I spent a pleasant but anxiety-ridden vacation at Lake Tahoe after graduating from college in December. Hiking alone through a vast expanse of snow, I was finally able to gather my thoughts after the brain-numbing frenzy of final exams, and I made the following life-altering realizations: I was deeply in debt, I was unemployed, I was homeless, the cabin in Tahoe cost $200 a week, and I’d already maxed out two of my credit cards. So I hightailed it back to civilization, found an apartment, and started looking for a way to pay the rent.

It took about ten minutes to ascertain that no decent positions were available through the classified ads. But before losing all hope and putting my head in the oven, I asked my roommate for help. He said, “Ya can’t work without but ya go to a agency. Trust me.” He’s unemployed, but by choice, so I decided to take his advice.

I’ve worked with employment agencies before. They seem to be experts at placing young office workers in companies that do not, and should not, trust them to do anything important. Years ago at another temp-to-perm job, I finished typing a document and was summoned into the vice president’s office. 

ooooo“You’re still working on the rest of this, right?” he asked. 

ooooo“No, it’s all there,” I told him.
ooooo“You mean . . . you can type?”
ooooo“Of course I can, didn’t the agency tell you?”
ooooo“Well yes, but . . . you really can!” 

He called me into his office again when he discovered I hadn’t made any mistakes. He was completely amazed.

Another time I temped as a receptionist at the Office of the President of the University of California. I sat at a giant marble desk facing the bank of elevators and smiled at the people walking through to the office. That was all I was supposed to do, since the office manager didn’t want to confuse me with names or phone extensions. When calls came through I would say, “I don’t know if he’s in or not. I don’t actually work here.” It was never clear to me why they hired me in the first place, and the gig didn’t last long.

This is why I was determined, this time, to use a top agency, and only to find permanent work with a company that would buy me from the agency and accept me as one of its own. So I hit the yellow pages. The problem is, how do you find a job through the yellow pages? How does one agency stand out above another? If I were looking for a big safe to store valuables in, I would be overwhelmed with information: the ad for Pioneer Safe and Vault, for example, tells me they have jewelry safes, modular vaults, vault doors, floor safes, home safes, fire safes, fire files, and drop safes. (What’s a drop safe, anyway? Something out of a cartoon?) Employment agencies, dealing only in humans, have much vaguer terms of distinction. My future was in their hands, yet I felt like flipping a coin to decide which ones to use.

The ad for Pathways Personnel Agency told me they’re “Minority Owned.” Is this supposed to help me, with my blond hair and blue eyes? Another ad read, “Finding the RIGHT Jobs with the RIGHT firms!” Could I even work for a company that would respond to such drivel? Yet another read, “JOAN SPRINGER . . . THE ‘ORIGINAL’ COUNSELOR OF THE YEAR . . . VOTED 1976.” Whatever. Leaving nothing to chance, I decided to go with four different agencies, including one called ProServ, because they once got Mark Gorski, an obscure athlete, $100,000 in endorsements for winning a medal in the ‘84 Olympics when nobody was there. They must have some kind of clout, I figured. (This turned out to be a false connection: there are two different ProServ agencies, which are entirely unrelated. I found this out after the fact.)

Then I began the loathsome paperwork period. The truly sinister thing about interviewing at employment agencies is dealing with their office personnel. I could not prevent my seething. They’re so damned polite! Sure, I thought: you can afford to be easygoing, you have a job! While I went through reams of paperwork, they could calmly, blithely go about their various office routines. Routines! What I wouldn’t have given for routines right then! I just had forms, pages and pages of forms, which I feared would be left to molder away in a manila folder somewhere while I sat at home by the phone, begging it to ring.

Chip, the ProServ clerk, gave me complete battery of clerical tests. For some reason, he started with a ten-key-by-touch test. I’d never taken a ten-key test before in my life. It consisted of a long list of numbers which looked like this,

574850684385626275070895864516485696978675634231638221029384754562414465826583759601947592048573515347585956039575636596919193956748038294738103856193856329812356231091938567301983659568603485639283675861383928563923596843826173402856105765836568492745272894974362451273494

only it went on for several pages. Three minutes later, my eyes tearing up from trying to focus without losing their place, I had finished the ten-key test. I never did find out how I did.

After that came the typing test. No problem there. What Chip likely didn’t know was that I’d been to three other agencies that same day, and they all used the same typing test copy. I’d already typed, three times over, those four paragraphs of clumsy, didactic prose advising temps on how to have good phone manners. I knew where all the tough words were, like “contemptuous” and “sniveling.” For me, the typing test was like a choreographed dance I’d practiced since I was six. When Chip came to collect my results, he could not hide his covetousness: “Eighty-seven words per minute with no errors! Holy cow!” I almost spoke my mind: “You know what this means, Chip. I’ll work in an office with a better elevator than yours.”

And it’s true. The elevators at 100 Pine Street are far bigger than ProServ’s. We have the biggest elevators I’ve ever seen. Elevators bigger than my bedroom. And they’re gut-crunchingly fast. Now I scorn the ProServ office staff, with their endless employment applications, their vast library of résumés, the paper trail following their endless scavenger hunt for skilled people.

But is my fate any better? After all, I’m still beneath them, as registered ProServ property. But what is to be done? For now, I wait. I wait for the hand-to-mouth, paycheck-to-paycheck game to end. I wait for that coveted spot on your employee roster. What else can I do? I feel like a commodity, a slave being purchased on the installment plan.

So next time you gnash your teeth over my inflated hourly rate, remember: blame not the temp. His lot is to be pitied.

What Do You Do?

Introduction

Upon meeting somebody new—the friend of a friend, the parent of our child’s friend, a newcomer to our club, a stranger at a cocktail party—we naturally look for easy conversation starters. Many, including myself, observe the age-old rule of avoiding the forbidden realms: sex, politics, religion. But a great many do jump to the simple question, “What do you do?”

This seems an innocuous enough inquiry, but viewed a certain way it is actually pretty thorny. If you ask somebody about his accent, or her hat, or some activity you see him engaged in, the interest seems sincere. But since the career question generally comes out of nowhere (i.e., it’s not based on anything observed), the person asked this may naturally assume you’re attempting to place him in some sort of social hierarchy. (Martin Buber would roll over in his grave.) If the person asked this is insecure, the question may strike him as a euphemistic version of “What the hell good are you, anyway?” Meanwhile, with our ongoing economic meltdown, the person you ask may well be unemployed, which would start the conversation off on an awkward foot indeed.

I doubt that people really have ill intentions when asking this loaded question; for many or most it has simply become a habit, a standard opener. This blog post is about the problems inherent in this question; the duty incumbent upon all of us to quash it; and some handy how-to suggestions.

What’s the big deal?

You may think this isn’t really a problem. Perhaps you’re proud of your own career, don’t mind being judged by it, and like talking about it. Well, good for you. But what if you were unemployed, underemployed, have a job that is hard to describe, or just don’t like talking about work? Can you see how this would be a bad start to a conversation?

A special case involves a career mom asking this question to a stay-at-home mom. The stay-at-home mom finds herself saying something like “I’m just a mom” or “I’m a homemaker.” She may feel lame in the face of another woman who does everything she does in life and also has a career. The career woman, meanwhile, may feel silently judged for her life choice. The whole thing can get awkward.

True stories

When I met the parents of my college girlfriend, the first thing out of the mother’s mouth was, “What does your dad do for a living?” I was taken aback. Embedded in this statement were several notions: 1) She is interested in the prospects of persons peripherally associated with her daughter; 2) she considers a man’s work more important than a woman’s and is thus not very progressive; 3) she considers the vocation of a young man’s father to be an indicator of something important about the son. Wanting to make a good impression, I didn’t mouth off with a statement like, “Oh, Pop’s on the dole” or “He sells narcotics and hallucinogens to junior high kids,” but I did consider asking, “Don’t you care what my mom does?” Instead I replied, truthfully, “He’s a rocket scientist” and let the matter drop. (I wasn’t quite craven enough to say “aerospace engineer.”)

A stay-at-home mom of my acquaintance—I’ll call her Alice—and her husband were visiting an old friend of his. I’ll call the friend Bob. Bob and his wife had never met Alice before. Bob had his own business and Bob’s wife was a successful artist; her work was hanging on the walls of her and her husband’s elegant dining room where they were all having dinner. Halfway through the meal Bob popped the career question. Of course he meant well, and was just curious, but he neglected to consider whether Alice worked outside of the home: “I forgot—what is it you do?” After a brief pause, Alice replied, “Nothing.” There was an uncomfortable silence. “Which is pretty good,” Alice’s husband remarked, “when you consider that’s where the rest of us are hoping to get eventually!” There was laughter and supportive statements were offered all around, but it can be hoped that the brief awkwardness conveyed a small lesson.

Sometimes this inquiry can cause awkwardness if the person asked has a particularly respectable or glamorous career. I met a guy at a barbecue who turned out to be a medical doctor. I wasn’t sure what to say about that. After a slightly awkward pause I said, “Wow, that’s really ... great!” He replied, “Dude … I am really, really smart.” It’s hard to evoke here how obviously facetious his remark was. It completely dispelled the awkwardness and I immediately liked the guy: he was a joker first, with his vocation a distant second. His response was a splendid recovery from the morass of “What do you do?”

How to respond

Bearing in mind the downfalls of “What do you do?” and also the tendency of chitchat to be excessively anodyne to begin with, I encourage you to equivocate, dodge, parry, and otherwise neutralize this question. I’m not asking you to lie; just take the topic off into the weeds until it slowly rolls to a stop. (Not that I haven’t lied myself. I ran into an old college friend a couple years after graduation, and when she asked the question I said, “I work on an assembly line de-burring plastic parts.” She said, “Oh, that’s great!” I replied, “No it isn’t, I’m miserable!” I did eventually set her straight about my real, slightly less humble occupation.)

So: if you’re asked, “Where do you work?” you can just give the location: “San Francisco, south of Market.” Sometimes this is all the person was wondering, in which case you can be really relieved you didn’t misconstrue the question. If he says, “No, I mean what kind of work do you do?” you can say, “Indoor stuff” or “You know, I’m just a weary cog of the corporate machine like everybody else.” (Often I just give a straight answer, but then I feel like a coward, hiding behind the fact that my title is fairly respectable.) Get creative. You could do worse than, “Look! Krill!” Or you could use the Socratic method: “What makes you think I’m employed?” A final ruse: “I already told you.”

I’ve thought of one response that I’m waiting for just the right opportunity to try. I’m picturing myself at a cocktail party where, just as I’m starting to nibble on a little lamb chop I’ve plucked off a passing tray, some stranger walks over and introduces himself. I will forget his name instantly (one of my failings) and then he will ask what I do. “I’m a vegetarian,” I’ll reply. He’ll say, “No, I mean for work.” I’ll reply, “Yes, it’s a lot of work.” He’ll persist: “I mean for a living.” I’ll say, “It’s a living.” He’ll point at my lamb chop: “But you eat meat!” I’ll reply, “Yes. Yes I do.” By this time the conversation will have gone completely off the rails and I’ll be left to chew my hors d’oeuvre in peace. Or, he’ll appreciate the humor and we’ll have a nice chat on some more noble topic.

More benefits of avoidance

Beyond defending your own role from being placed within a social hierarchy, avoiding the “What do you do?” question has additional benefits. For one, it frees you from talking about work. I suppose some of us have really compelling job titles—surgeon, cop, prison guard, actor, assassin—but others of us may not relish the idea of explaining a complicated and/or boring job to somebody else. Meanwhile, if you answer the career question, you may well feel compelled to turn it around and say, “What do you do?” This can give the other guy an opening you might come to wish he didn’t have.

At a party once I carelessly asked a guy what he did for work and for the next twenty minutes he went on and on about how he hosts a radio talk show about sports. I’m one of those oddballs who doesn’t care about sports, at least the kind that get radio programs. Throughout the soliloquy I was dying of boredom. The guy’s speech sounded almost rehearsed, and morphed into a motivational speech (“I was really just lucky—right place at the right time—but I did manage to take advantage of the opportunity I had,” and so on). I desperately hoped somebody would come rescue me, but instead some other guy came over to listen in (out of real interest or schadenfreude I have no idea), and then my wife arrived to watch with amusement as I slowly rotated on the spit. Finally—around the time I wished the whole building would catch fire and the ceiling would collapse on us—the radio guy finished his monologue and said, “What do you do?” I said, “I’m an outside sales rep for Science Diet. It’s the premier ultra-premium pet food on the market. I’m basically doing it out of my garage at this point but I see that changing eventually.” He said, politely, how great that was, and then somebody burst out laughing and the radio host stormed off. See? Better to avoid this topic altogether.

A friend of mine never asks what anybody does. (He himself does a little of this, a little of that. I once asked him about a business venture of his I suspected had failed and he replied, “We’ll talk about that,” and then never did. Well played!) Once, during the early ‘80s, this friend was at a marketing event for Coors, with whom he had some business. He was bored and struck up a conversation with some random dude. I don’t remember much about the story except that the two of them didn’t talk about work. Their conversation was cut short when the man was called up to the stage. Turns out he was Al Unser Jr., in whose honor the event was held. My friend had had no idea.

This same friend had a similar experience at a cocktail party. He chatted up some random guy for a good while, mainly about the guy’s newfound love of the guitar. My friend didn’t learn until much later that the guy was none other than Gary Larson. How different would the conversation have been had my friend learned Larson’s, or Unser’s, identity up front? He’d have been unable to resist asking the typical questions (“Where do you get your cartoon ideas?” or “What’s it like driving that fast?”), thus boring these guys to tears and making real conversation impossible.

When is this question okay?

Of course the question isn’t totally off limits. I just recommend it not be used as an icebreaker. Once you know somebody well, it’s bound to come up, but by then you’re not at the fragile point of first impressions. A guy on my bike club once asked me what it was like being an attorney. “I have no idea,” I said. “You’d have to ask one.” He was puzzled, as was I. The mystery was solved a few rides later when he called me Trevor. He’d totally confused me with another guy on the club, who actually is an attorney. I was flattered—not because Trevor is an attorney, but because he was always a much better bike racer than I.

Oddly enough, I’ve found that this career question doesn’t even need to play a huge role in a job interview, at least in the industry I’m in (which is an indoor one). A former colleague of mine interviewed a candidate and came away laughing. “She asked me if I was ever going to ask her about her qualifications,” she said. “I told her, no, I’m sure you could do the work or I wouldn’t be interviewing you. I’m trying to figure out if we’d get along.” Another guy at this firm asked a candidate, “If you were a flower, what kind of flower would you be?” The guy replied, “A sunflower, because it’s not just an ornament, but has seeds that are nourishing and lead to growth.” (The guy was hired.)

The flower question inspired me, so when I interviewed a guy (for the same firm), I had a list of questions that included, “Are you any good with your fists?” I chickened out and didn’t ask that one, but I did run the candidate through a list of arcane protocols asking if he had firsthand experience with any of them. As I went down the list he replied, “No … no … no … no … no,” which was good, as I was making sure he wasn’t a B.S.er. Toward the end of the interview I glanced at his résumé and said, “I see you have a double major in political science and philosophy. What makes you think that will help you in this [unrelated] role?” (I was seeing how easily he got flustered.) He replied smoothly, “It will make me more interesting to work with.” And he was right: I’ve enjoyed his workplace banter ever since.

One of my favorite Woody Allen movie scenes is in “Take the Money and Run.” The protagonist, Virgil Starkwell, a failed criminal, lies his way through a job interview. “Mr. Public, have you any experience working in an office before?” the interviewer asks. “Yes, I have,” Virgil replies.

ooooo“What kind of office was it?”

ooooo“Rectangular.”

ooooo“Have you any experience in running a high-speed digital electronic computer?”

ooooo“Yes, I have.”

ooooo“May I ask where?”

ooooo“My aunt has one.”

ooooo“And what does your aunt do?”

ooooo“I … can’t recall.”

ooooo“You said before you worked in an office. Did you deal in products or services?”

ooooo“Products.”

ooooo“Is this something found in the home?”

ooooo“No, it’s not. One down and nine to go.”

ooooo“Is this product edible?”

ooooo“No, it wasn’t. I think our time is running out and I’m sorry you haven’t guessed my occupation. So I’m going to flip all the cards and tell you what I used to do. I used to manufacture escalator shoes for people who get nauseous wearing elevator shoes. I’m sorry you didn’t actually guess my occupation, but you did win $10 and I want to thank you very much. Better luck next time. You’re a good sport.”

The point of quoting all this is that this scene makes a fine blueprint for your response should you be asked what you do for a living.

Conclusion

I don’t actually expect my albertnet readers (if any) to dodge the question of what they do for a living, but I hope my point here is well taken. At least we can refrain from always asking this question upon meeting somebody. We can ask ourselves first, “Do I really want to know? Is this important?” If the journalistic mode strikes us as the most natural for conversing with a stranger, at least we can remember that there are more questions than just “What.” To run through the reporter’s standard six:

WHO: A classic opener, nothing thorny there.

WHAT: See if you can skip over this one.

WHERE: Where do you live? Where are you from? No harm there.

WHEN: Not likely to apply unless you’re delivering the classic line, “Come here often?”

WHY: Now we’re getting somewhere! “Why do you do?” could really open up a dialogue.

HOW: Fine thank you, how are you?

After my wife and I had a really fun dinner party recently with the parents of our younger daughter’s school friend, we got an e-mail from the mom. She wrote of her husband that he “marveled at how we didn’t just sit around talking about work, saying happily ‘I don’t even really know what Dana does!’”

See, it works: don’t ask, don’t tell.

dana albert blog