I cannot let this day pass without noting it. Attention must be paid.
I’m starting this under the wire of March 15 (but willl finish after midnight). Today would be Pat’s 95th birthday.
I’d have to look back to see if I managed to honor the Ides of March, the birthday of Pat, ever since she left this plane in 2002. I think so. I hope so.
This week was one of those weeks where I thought of her a lot. I thought a lot about common sense and New England and the Massachusetts attitude that won’t stand for mollycoddling. Pat would have opinions, no doubt, about modern workplaces with the discussions of life/work balance and all of the stress and anxiety work and life seem to bring to the millenials and Gen Z.
She’d maybe remark that there is nothing about work that is actually promised to be anything but a pain in the ass.
She’d maybe contradict that thought a moment later to reflect on how things are easier and maybe better now and how the olden ways were too harsh.
She’d maybe say that she wished she could have had life/work balance.
Or, maybe she’d laugh and come up with a funny line about how the new generations have fewer skills to survive and thrive.
Here’s the Pat wisdom that I kept hearing over and over in my head this week — You just need a hobby. An inveterate crafter, she always had some project or another. As kids we had hand-knitted mittens all winter. In later years, she constructed a village of dollhouses, decorated and jammed with miniattures she also built.
She also read two newspapers a day, kept mystery and other novels at hand, did crossword puzzles in ink, cooked, ocassionally baked, and had some time to browse discount stores for treasures.
The solution to all feelings of stress and anxiety was to stay busy. Or, maybe the solution to all feelings.
Pat could be eccentric and all sorts of kooky, but making something really does have salutory effects. Creation is therapy. Some days after toil that feels like nothing got done and work is futile, I whip up a crocheted dish cloth. Then the day isn’t a total sinkhole.
I wanted to hear Pat’s sense of humor this week. Nay, I wanted to be Pat and tell an overworking colleague they need a hobby. It was a day where their bad day at work was becoming emotional. I wanted to will them into having a creative activity in hand to prevent them burning out. I wanted to blurt out, do something fun.
Problem after problem cropped up all week. Mostly just misunderstandings born from the ginned up sense of urgency that revs Silicon Valley combined with inexperienced people fumbling.
I work tech adjacent with a young workforce that wants to change the world. Using bleeding edge new tech and old-timey scientific research, if all goes well everythig biological about us meatbags will be understood, diseases will end, and there will be dancing in the street.
Meanwhile, though, I help out, because someone needs to push papers around, make spreadsheets, figure out what checks to write and pay the bills. I’m an A#1 paper pusher.
To some in the virtual corridors of my largely remote workplace, I shine on Zoom screens, regaling people with campfire stories from when work was done on paper and stored in manila folders. I used the ancient tools, faxing, typing,copying, using phones (connected to the wall or desk) to talk words out loud without text.
Emojis looked like this : – )
A wrinkled shaman, I have seen things. I draw on a lifetime of experience and the wisdom of those who came before me and through the ether people arrive inside my computer screen. I listen. And the youngsters ask me for help. Lost in the office wilderness.
For them, I summon the holy gods and mystical fairies and occasionally ask people to breathe with me. From a dark space — one could say that is pulled from the vicinity of my ass — I solve problems with suggestions like, “let’s ask the person who manages that, and see if they’ll help.”
Twice this week I heard that I’m repping some kind of magical problem solving.
My magic is only magical to the kids these days who never got sworn at in an office by the office bully or were forced to repeat boring ass shit over and over to “pay dues” before you were ever allowed a task that was vaguely interesting. Hammered into my head the hard way are 1,012 tricks to get work done.
But that’s not at all why I wish I could pick up the phone and talk to Pat. It’s really about resiliency.
A lot of what people tell me about stress. Some of my conversations are rooted in people coming to me when they want both a neutral point of view and maybe a sense of humor. I get asked a crazy tapestry of random things from a wild assortment of workers.
Some of my advice is basically “buck up.” Or maybe, “what’s the worst thing that could happen.” Inside my head, and then jumping through the computer, I hear Pat’s voice essentially coming out of my mouth. One day, I’ll convince all the kids to find a hobby.
In the end, I will honor her legacy. I’ll keep crafting. Also, now that I’m 60, I want to live what she announced when she hit a milestone age — Now that I’m old, I won’t be holding back.
