Tag Archives: work

What the hell am I?

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In a timely coincidence, this image has been making the meme rounds in Facebook and whatnot:

 

I don’t know the exact source of this version of the list, but it comes from this article by Linda Kreger Silverman.

It’s timely because I just got the results back from a Myers Briggs personality assessment. Happy to say this time around it was paid for by work, but I’m still all working and employed and shit. Unlike the last official “personality assessment” on my permanent record this one was all warm and fuzzy.

Anyway, turns out I have a personality. Of sorts.

Here’s the timely of the timely part — heretofore, I tested as INTP. I totally have thought of myself as a giant, big old, introverted “I.” I love being alone. I love processing shit my own way in my own time. Better a couple. of great friends than a crowd, yada, fucking, yada.

Then, round about a decade ago, probably longer, I decided to come out of shyness with a vengeance. Now I totally dig that Carl Jung wasn’t saying introversion is the same as shyness, but I never got “my energy,” as the pop psych crowd would have it, from crowds. Holding back seemed like a fine response to life.

Only thing was, I had journals and private writings. I had words I wanted to say, thoughts rattling in the brain pan. The older I got the more I realized that the world was going ahead without me.

Like a terrible version of the crazy that was G. Gordon Liddy overcoming fear by eating a rat and tying himself to a tree in a lightning store, I took an adult ed class in stand up comedy. To overcome a fear of public speaking, to bring my writing public, to speak out, to shake my own personal status quo, to step up and out, I thought going on stage would be a good idea.

I almost puked and shat myself the final night of class, when we stood behind a mike at an actual comedy club. I didn’t try again for two years, when I screwed up the courage and took another class.

Ultimately, I whacked away at it for a while and got comfortable(ish) on stage. Comfortable enough to combine most sane people’s two biggest fears, getting naked and standing alone on stage with nothing but my jokes. The butterflies and/or gurgling fear of evacuating my bowels stopped.

I have no scientific proof, but I feel like I took the skills acquired on stage to other settings. The stage and writing cliche is that I found my voice.

Turns out that voice had other things to say besides jokes. When I moved west and interviewed for a job, I was outspoken and direct and more outwardly reaching than I remember being back east. Whatever made me get in stage sunk in and stuck

So the other day, I fired up the interwebs in my workplace and took the Myers Briggs dealio on account of some professional coaching I’m doing. Well, I’m not coaching. I’m subjecting myself to a little coaching action on account of wanting to be a better person and cog and all.

Lo and fucking behold, my trusty reliable “I” is now and extroverted “E.” This time around the test says I’m ENTP.

I don’t know how the hell it happened, but I turned into somebody else.

Remembering a dream I had

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Recently, I remembered a happiness I could never achieve despite my belief that some can attain it. For me, it will never be a reachable star.

Many moons and a couple of thousand of miles ago, I sat in a classroom. There, in the front, sat color-coded file boxes. They were the slick, good cardboard, shiny like magazine covers. Contained within were shiny cards, a bright color band on top, each with a different story or puzzle or game.

The product was called SRA. The acronym may be for Standardized Reading Aptitude. Or maybe Symbianese Reading Army, as it was the 1970s.

Each kid in the classroom was told what color they were, and they got to cluster around their colored box selecting an activity. As we moved through the weeks and months, we would development and be given access to a new color in the series.

Warren and I weren’t assigned a color. Within that classroom we were relegated to a strictly black and white world, no color codes for us. Black letters on white backgrounds, the text of books.

Together we walked to the front of the class and asked the teacher for our color. She was nice about it, but she clearly laughed at us. “Red, I guess. It’s the last color in e series.” We spent the rest of the afternoon amusing ourselves with a game or two that focused on vocabulary and comprehension skills we already had.

I loved being an early reader. Books brought me a sense of an entire universe that I couldn’t see from my window.

To this day, I remember the special vocabulary lists my second grade teacher wrote out just for me and tucked into new books I hadn’t tackled yet. Most definitely I learned the word “extraordinary” from Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

However, I also noticed something as I occasionally popped my nose above the pages and looked around the classroom. The other kids, the slow readers, always seemed to be having a raucously good time. They played loud and boisterous games, even when we were supposed to be quiet.

I was slower in learning how to make a triangular paper football and flick it over the goalposts of a friend’s two hands.

Worse, I got extra assignments. No matter how quickly I completed my work, the teacher always had a pile more waiting for me. Thin books moved to heavy tomes that tore away at the straps of my book bag.

In my childish brain it seemed so unjust. Purely because I could do my work, I was given more work to do.

My fantasy, therefore, was wishing that I never learned how to read. Or, maybe, more realistically, that I only ever could read at a minimally acceptable level. My whole life would have been different, as teacher after teacher passed me a long but never expected particularly much from me. I’d have more free time to master kickball and twisting a paperclip into the perfect missile to be launched from a rubber band.

Sometimes today, a fully grown adult, I still feel that way.

People expect more from me in some situations. I had a recent spate of meetings in which coming in or going out the door I got buttonholed for a couple more comments from the powers that be.

Meanwhile, I find myself shoulder to shoulder with the kids who never even made it to the red box, the last in the reading series. These kids, now adults, color-coded green or yellow or orange, get to leave meetings on time.

Happily, they go back to their desks. They work next to me, unaware, that I’ve just been handed an extra report to write and don’t understand why I like meetings even less than they do.

I fancy myself a raconteur

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Today, I helped add a little more awkwardness to the world.

One of the many funtabulous, swell things I’ve gotten to do over and over and over again in my daily, pay-checking earning toils is interview people who also want to toil. Lots and lots of jobseekers out there in the world, and coast to coast I’ve had to make with the questions and conversations.

Years ago I got to hear my all time favorite answer ever given to the cliched “Why are you interested in leaving your current position for this job?” The woman being interviewed explained that after the cops had come to her house for the third time for a domestic quarrel complaint they advised her she needed to make some changes. She continued that her current job was so stressful and intense she was forced to work late and would come home exhausted to an angry husband who would fight with her about working late. Hello escalation.

Job interview tip #1: Don’t mention the near arrest.

In all of the interviewing I’ve done or had done to me, I’ve kind of sorted some things. All bristling with management tips and experience I’ve mostly learned interviews suck, but they suck a little less if you have a conversation.

It’s not a conversation, really, but you can try. The problem is the format. Whether it’s television late night, the back of a gossip magazine or a dank interrogation room, the old Q&A is a clumsy o way to keep things moving. I put job interviews alongside interrogations. I’m not into water boarding and like to keep the torture minimal, so if I can get the ball rolling conversationally it seems more humane.

I’ve found, too, that if you can keep someone talking and they get comfortable they say the damnedest things. The violent chick who didn’t get the job that might save her from the police calls piped up after we put her at ease. The dude who once told me he was a “lesbian,” he was kidding, and talked up hanging out with me once he started was way too at a ease. As wAs the young woman who saw my old office and announced her first step in her new job would be to clean it up.

Another fave was the woman who part way through a doubled up interview with my director, a medical doctor, went into excruciating detail about the fun she had watching a new polar bear get loaded into the Stone Zoo. In our meeting afterwards, my director confessed that she stopped listening herself at some point and instead started watching the interviewee’s involuntary tics and tried to guess which psycho-pharmaceutical was responsible.

California hasn’t been as ripe with the forehead smacking interviews. Between the kind of jobs with which I’ve been currently involved and the proximity to a university of some repute, the over the top is more of the insufferable variety.

Today, though, was special, because the conversation I looked for, I pine for, I try so very hard to instigate never quite gelled. It wasn’t my show to emcee, and I let others take the lead. Holy smokes, I didn’t realize job interviews could be so painful. I couldn’t sit still and grasped for some reins to start steering partway into one.

OK, I knew they are almost always painful. These were first, bad date ugly. Stilted would be the discussion.

I learned two things. One, I’m actually not bad at interviewing, I should never ceded the lead. Two, if you never put the person a tad at ease, you get almost no information. I really got to write out a self-help how to book on my wisdom, damnit.

There's a reason they all died there, I think

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I think there’s a reason so many celebrities are found toes up in hotel rooms. Janis, John Belushi, David Carradine. Is there any space on earth as weirdly distant and alien than a hotel room somewhere in the universe.

I’m currently sitting in a bed about 75 miles due south on the scenic coastal highway from my own bed. The occasion is signing up for a workshop for work. Apart from meeting fatigue, waking up extra early to drive that 75 miles and it being the end of the day, I’m just feeling bone tired from being all by my lonesome in that wall-crawling, restless, fidget way hotels bring on in me.

I want to be home. I’m not sure I’m designed to actually learn and think in a conference room. Maybe that sentence should be full stop I’m not designed to learn.

It was actually an interesting day, where I got to see how organizations can walk through getting to a message and a plan for getting it out there into the ether. Communicating and all in important circles. There was even an ex-governor in the room.

Sadly, I’m more voyeur than real playa this time around, and it’s going to be a tough slog in my row-hoeing workday world to use what I learned.

I got back to my room and paced. I took a shower out of boredom. I deep conditioned my hair, because I had an abundance of conditioner and time. I inventoried my miniature toiletries.u

On a regular Wednesday night, I’d check email, scan some news and various websites and maybe write right here. Telly on in the background.

It’s the same here. But it’s not the same.

Here, on the same coast I can hear from my house, faraway from M. whose snoring I can’t hear right now, I’m thinking of hotel rooms and dead famous people. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, I’m just as far away from an errant speedball, deadly bump of coke or bag of heroin.

(Of course, such a level of drug use is beyond me, just as elusive as the celebrity I don’t enjoy.)

Living smoothly

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The other day, I imagined myself writing in this space to vent about the resumes I have to read at work and advise on what not to do. I didn’t get around to it.

In truth, my resume, job applying advice is very brief — show empathy.

If your prospective employer asks for your name in the subject line of your email, include your goddamn name. When your naming your attached documents, it’s no longer relevant if the names make sense on YOUR computer, they need to make sense on someone else’s. Somewhere in the kit and kaboodle, provide some kind of clue as to why your applying. I ain’t got the time to mine for your gold.

That’s about it. Oh, and save the crazy for after you get the job. Although, folks where I work are kind of digging your advertisement of the goodness of your homemade jam, we may not be laughing with you.

In my personal case, the job has a glamorously worldwide sounding name. It’s not, it’s paperwork locally for the most part. But, good god y’all everyone who has imagined travel or lived abroad thinks that’s enough to establish global bona fides. Do some research about the job, people.

All of the above is preamble to what I want to write about now, social network anger. I got a dose and realized that a whole lot of people are talking but not listening.

Admittedly, in a less than charitable mood, I Twittered and Facebooked about a job applicant that stated his desire to work among folks of “various socioeconomic backgrounds.” I was amused not just by the thought of someone hoping to rub shoulders in the workplace with the strata of American society, but the fact of the matter that where I work is pretty much no melting pot.

In response, I got an earful from a socially networked “friend,” actual close relative, about his own experience with the paperwork of job applications. Truly, I didn’t get it. It was a conversational hijack with a sweeping generalization that wasn’t matching my own experience or current reality.

It was clearly social networking equaling two simultaneous monologs masquerading as dialog. Somewhere I was told we should agree to disagree, but for that to happen we would have had to have been speaking about the same thing.

Of course, the comedian in me was miffed that my punchline was hijacked by a non sequitur.

I’ve noticed that kind of “conversation” happens a lot online.

M.’s coworker ended up blocking people in her Facebook circle, rather than continue to participate in the non-dialog. In her case, she sometimes throws out affirmations and whatnot from her personal New Age-y perspective. Quite possibly not one’s cup of tea, but harmless enough and her belief system.

She got tired of “friends” criticizing her posts or proselytizing their own beliefs.

I totally can’t relate to her naysayers. In my own feeds, I have plenty of folks who don’t believe what I believe. In particular, thanks to comedy, there’s a good amount of 12 steppers. No way can I imagine shitting on someone else’s call to a higher power.

Pretty much, I keep my snarky counterpoint to those contacts encouraging provocation or political dialog. Otherwise, I guess I live the cliche, if you ain’t go something nice to say, shut the fuck up. (Or the comedic corollary, I at least try for something funny.)

Speaking of comedy, I follow a few Twitter feeds of comedians of various levels of fame or success. Some of them go for one-liners, quick, witty observations and other humorous notes. Others keep it much less purposely funny or a bit more personal.

What amazes me is how repetitive the slamming is. For quite a few of them, it would seem especially the ones who share a bit of the personal, there’s a steady-ish stream of “fans” deciding how unfunny they are.

If you’re fan enough to find some comic and start following what they write, why the insults? I really, really, really don’t understand liking someone enough to seek them out, but being contemptuous enough to shit on them.

Life is short and all that.

It used to be that Internet arguments among Usenet readers with a shared interest in common would devolve into anonymous shouting matches and ad hominem attacks. I think I understand the underlying passion and anonymous safety of a good, old-fashioned flamewar.

I almost understand the trickery and prank sensibility that is trolling.

Angry posting among “friends” is another animal. One I don’t comprehend. In social networking either you know people or feel some kind of connection. How did that devolve into contrarianism?

It’s like all of the shifty dark part of the net is taking over the good junk. Makes me kind of nostalgic for a good Usenet argument and Godwin’s Law.

In the end, I just can’t sustain the anger. Maybe it’s as M. claims, we’re doing alright and life is fine and others can’t see it.

Yesterday was sunshine in Napa with four friends. We tried reserves, and Pinots and cabs. We sampled Francis Ford Coppola’s Rubicon, which at $145 a bottle was damn smooth and tasty. The afternoon was lunch and more wine,

M. and I ended the day by wandering SF at night. Finally, in lieu of dinner we shared a banana split at the chocolatier’s that lends it’s name to Ghiardelli Square and headed home.

Maybe he’s onto something with this happiness thing.

Hedging toward the forbidden

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Of course, being somewhat educable, i try to learn shit. Sometimes I succeed. Sometimes it even sticks.

In other words, given past experience, I try not to write about work. And with that, you know I’m going to skate near that particularly rice paper thin ice.

Mostly, I like my job, and I haven’t felt the wrist-slitting perturbations that became daily episodes in my last state of employ. It’s a weird little group of people. A collective building heaped from the chief on down with folks who academically achieved even when it meant ass kicking and wedgies.

A nerd’s paradise in some respects. But, it is fucking work, and trials and tribulations there are.

The other day, I was driving there, before my getting old V-dub decided it didn’t want to drive, and listening to the radio. Specifically, I was listening to that solid, quirky voice of public radio, Terry Gross on Fresh Air. She was chatting away with Stephen Sondheim on the occasion of his living 80 years on earth.

Total aside, I love Sondheim in terms of his work, but after listening to this interview I think he must be a dick if you were ever to hang out with him Very old school marm-ish corrections and stuff. I kind of wanted Terry to take a shot back, like “Yes, so what are you are saying is you find other people, such as me, to be plodding and inaccurate clowns, is that correct?”

One thing he talked about has stuck with me for days now. In talking about working with Leonard Bernstein in the early days of his career, he mentioned that Bernstein always failed grandly. He said he learned from him that “the worst thing you can do is fall off a low rung.”.

If you’re going to fail, fail big. Might as well get to the top rung first.

I think it’s a life philosophy into which I could swan dive and feel at home.

Arguably, in the many employment failures I’ve had, I’ve failed big. Mind you not Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein big. Just big enough for little old me.

Maybe to them, it would be bottom rung junk. But, for me, it’s from the perspective of a micro-millimeter long ant and a conventional-sized ladder. For an ant, I’ve dropped some dizzying distances from what felt like a pretty good rung of achievement.

Sondheim talking about failing big struck me this week, because I’ve been feeling a familiar fear and loathing.

Like in my last gig, I’ve been a reliable workhouse. The higher up types have given me sufficient strokes to make me feel like there’s a corporate future in which I just might feature in some way. And, now, word on the street is that we might be reorganizing.

It’s a road so familiar, I still got the dust on my shoes to prove it. The strokes, the good positioning, the reliableness, the work ethic, the dealing with team dynamics, the helpong to make change happen and reorganizations possible. I have seen this movie before. I’ve lived the scenes, memorized a whole lot of dialog.

Yet, it is different. I gotta hope it’s different. Different folks, different gig, different job, hell, different fucking state. And, maybe, just maybe, I learned something last time at the rodeo, and I’m a little different too.

If not, if my pit of the stomach fears come true. It’s a higher rung and potentially a better failure. I just fucking hope it’s a good story, if the road turns down that same hill.

August alone

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Finally, after days and weeks and a month of too much contact with the human race, I am sitting alone. Thank fucking god. I’m only sad that I had to wait until August to feel the recharge of not having to do anything with or for anyone. Of course, the humanity I hate at the moment is minus one. M. is still the exception.

Here’s what I learned in the month of July:

* I really am glad I made friends through Boston comedy. There were some kickass humans in the mix when I started, and I’m glad to know them.
* The Atlantic in July is way warmer than I remember and makes the Pacific seem like ice cubes in alcohol.
* I have to plan a trip to LA and see some Boston transplants.
* Meeting planning is one of a handful of things that I’m good at but hate like poison.
* Accounting and managing costs are other poisonous activities for which I have a knack.
* People in hotels at work-related activities turn into assholes. Or maybe hotels have an asshole-amplifying effect.
* Folks who pout and scowl through a day are some of the biggest dicks in the whole dick spectrum of humanity. Fucking lighten up.
* One measure of maturity just might be the frequency in which you pout and scowl.
* I will never respect anyone who shouts at hotel and restaurant staff. Listen bitch, the dude swinging by with the sandwich cart didn’t make them or order them, leave him the fuck alone.
* If a situation is well-planned and under control, someone will inevitably fuck that mojo up with his/her “bright” ideas.
* For better or worse, I sometimes measure my humanity by the fact that I usually can swing good deals, free drinks, extras and other perks from service industries. I attribute this phenomenon to the fact that I’m not a total cunt.
* If you’re at a resort hotel, and you need your room changed not once but twice, it’s you not the hotel.
* A sometimes overlooked part of negotiation is being a good guy. You know why the hotel charged me extra for your request and denied us extra space? Here’s a hint, it was not unrelated to them pointing you out to me and questioning if you had any authority at all and wondering why you acted like you did.
* Sometimes all you got to do to be a good guy is listen. Simple really.
* My happiness at a job is inversely proportional to my mastery. When it’s new and messy and I’m still learning and fixing, I’m cool. When everything is in place and working out and can take care of itself, I gots to go.
* I don’t actually hate people, I just hate their behavior. I’m sure I’d get along with catatonics.

So that’s my list. It’s kind of a tag for my articles of faith for good living. If I were writing a self-help book, I would seriously question why folks get so fucking worked up to thinking they’re needs are higher, better, faster, smarter, superlative-r than the next guys’. We’re all dust. Why not be the kind of dust that doesn’t blind someone or getting into the ass crack of major annoyance?

What a day

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Man, oh fucking man. Today was one of those days when shit didn’t stop and a late start meant I wasn’t no never catching up.

My own damn fault on the late start, too. I woke up the same time as usual, but I had left my car at work and had to hoof it. A ten minute ride is a lot shorter than a 45 minute walk
The plus side (and it’s delusional) is I haven’t yet talked to anyone impressed by old Sarah Palin. The delusion part is due to my chunk of the United States being about non-wedge, non-swing as you can get. I’m pretty sure when the ballots are counted the Bay Area just might swing left.

We need a summer place in Toledo, so we could vote where it might matter.

We’re maybe kind of sort of closer to deciding whether to buy a house. We’re getting in real tight to the rental/mortgage break even point. Better yet, thanks to fucked up corporate greed and mismanagement in housing, the now government owned Fannie and Freddie, we’re looking at the possibility of a measly 5-6% interest rate.

Holy smokes. This might be the second time in my life I might ride the misery left behind in a Republican Bush presidency into personal success. Holy Fuck. I hope that does mean I have to join the GOP.

The peculiar alienation of unfamiliar lodging

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I’m awake in a hotel room. I never know what to do with myself in hotel rooms. Especially if it’s for work, for which, on this case, this isolated room in wine country is occupied right now. By me.

I drank some Napa wine. I did some Wii exercising. I did some whirlpooling in the bathtub. Then, I stayed up too late. Only it’s no later than I usually do. It’s just I can’t guage time in the hotel vortex.

I know how to handle free time alone at home. I cherish free time alone at home.

But, in hotel land, I don’t know what to do with myself. I thinks it’s because I have to use a different remote.

Up too late for a school night

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But, you could argue that it’s work related. I work in a rather globally focused workaday world. So, staying up late to watch Babel makes sense, right? You dig, we all be globally inter-related and everyone is kind of the same.

I got to see that up close and personal in Uganda. Happily, unlike in the moving pictures, no one was shot or even dehydrated.

Meanwhile, speaking of my toil — Conceivably, the only reason I got my job at all was because I mentioned in the interview that I own a Mac. (Remember I did interview at this somewhat reputable, somewhat high-class gig at the same time as the ultimate in international marketing presence, the L’Occitane store at the mall. I mean, hell, they’re from Provence. That’s in France.)

Anyway, I got this job instead. The person under whom I toil, loves herself a Mac. Only problem is the MacBook Pro is hella heavy. That’s why I myself picked up the $400 wonder that is the Asus EEE PC.
Two pounds, tiny and snug, and the puppy works. I even pimped it out with Windows XP, so I could hook up to the work force. You really don’t want to sling a MacBook Pro over your shoulder if you’re logging any one of the seven continents on a pretty regular basis.

The answer, of course, if you’re a Mac fanatic of means would be the MacBook Air.
Buynowstrip Air20080115

As any Mac freak as myself would tell you, you don’t go buying the latest in the Apple world the week of their World-Wide Developers’ conference until AFTER Steve gives his keynote. Your thing could be the now cliched “one more thing.”

So, tomorrow, among my other stresses and tasks and things they make me do for the ability to pay my bills, I have to keep an eye on the web reports. Poor me. Hard work that.

Now instead of being surreptitious about my web ways at work, I have to report back in about web surfing. (Amusingly related, some one half asked at a real meeting in SF if I might want to do some consulting on web stuff, spreading info through weblogs particularly. Something might come of it. Who knows.)

While I’m checking in on the keynote, I, of course, will be wondering on the big rumor of Apple rumors of du jour, the new generation iPhone. I wonder what I might be dialing later this month, if I was to call you. After all, that fucktard GWB gave me a couple of bucks to stimulate the economy. It’s chilling unglamorously and unspent in my savings account earning interest. But, I gather that’s un-American or something. I think I’m supposed to be buying gas.

By the way, I heard on the radio the rest of the country is now averaging over $4/gallon. Wimps, California has been rocking that level for a while.

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