my sometimes-skeptical social commentary

Archive for the ‘work’ Category

This is not one of those technology blogs where you see people getting made fun of because their technology skills are poor, even though my previous blog entry might come off that way. Have you ever seen the Dilbert comic strip? There’s one about the Point Haired Boss when Dilbert gives him an Etch-A-Sketch and tells him it’s a laptop computer.

And this is not one of those blog entries that is supposed to make fun of people for general stupidity either. Let’s see if I can write this post clearly enough to make my point. This is an observation about a quality that I have observed in people that disappoints me.

Background: I work more than one job. So if you think you know where this post comes from, you may be wrong. And maybe this is a post about people you might meet at any job.

A person asked me a question that I could not answer. The person needed information that I don’t have, so I referred him to another employee, who happened to be unavailable at the time. The person needing the information would have to wait about 30 minutes.

Here’s an edited version of the conversartion:

Q. Can you tell me Information X?
A. No, I don’t know the answer to that question. You should talk to Person Y.

Q. Yeah, I know that, but Person Y is not available for about 30 minutes. Do you think that the answer to my question would be 57?
A. I don’t know, because it is not my area of expertise. You really should talk to Person Y, because you need to have the correct answer.

Q. I see your point, but I don’t have 30 minutes to wait for the correct answer. I think you are qualified to answer the question, so please tell me, what do you think the answer is?
A. I can’t even guess at the answer, because I know that you need the correct answer, and there’s no way for me to know what the answer is.

Q. But I don’t want to wait about 30 minutes for an answer that would definitely be correct. I would rather get your best guess so that I can go about my day. Do you think the answer would be 71?
A. Seriously, I don’t know, and if you go about your day with the wrong answer, you’re going to have a really hard time. You should wait for Person Y to get the correct answer.

So the point is not that the person who came to me for help was impatient, although that might be true. It was how quickly the person was willing to settle for the wrong answer. The wrong answer would have jeapordized something very important to the person.

Why settle for something that will do, when what is best is just a short wait away? Why risk something important, so glibly ignoring the right thing to do?

I don’t know, I don’t think I would agree with the author who wrote the article below. I mean, no one even reads my blog, so how could blogging be so good for me? (It’s an interesting essay, as are a great many posts on penelopetrunk.com, but to save space, I replaced big chuncks with ellipsis points below. To read the complete essay, click the link.)

Blogging essential for a good career

Blogging is good for your career. A well-executed blog sets you apart as an expert in your field.

…

But pick your topics carefully and have a purpose. “The most interesting blogs are focused and have a certain attitude,” says van Allen. “You need to have a guiding philosophy that you stick to. You cannot one minute pontificate on large issues of the world and the next minute be like, ‘My dog died.’”
Day realized the value of focus after a misguided mashup of his politics and business. “I used to have liberal politics on my website as well, but my mentor said, ‘Dude, you gotta trim that off.’ Which was fine because in the world of liberal politics I was just another piece of noise.” Now his blog is all about software development with an emphasis on technologies such as NHibernate and C#.

Once you zero in on your topic, here are eight reasons blogging helps your career:

1. Blogging creates a network.
A blogger puts himself out in the world as someone who is interesting and engaging — just the type of person everyone wants to meet. “A blog increases your network because a blog is about introducing yourself and sharing information,” says Kaputa.
…

4. Blogging helps you move up quickly.
To escape the entry-level grind, you can either pay your dues, working up a ladder forever, or you can establish yourself as an expert in the world by launching a blog. High-level jobs are for people who specialize, and hiring managers look for specialists online. “Decision-makers respect Google-karma,” writes Tim Bray, director of Web technologies for Sun Microsystems — on his own blog, of course.

…

Curt Rosengren, a career coach, periodically Googles “career passion” — words he thinks are most important to his business — just to make sure his blog, Occupational Adventure, comes up high on the list. He estimates that his blog generates at least half of his coaching business.

…

8. Blogging makes the world a better place.
“Blogging is about giving stuff away to a community,” says Day. “For years, as a junior developer, I would go to the Internet for solutions and I would always take, take, take. Now I am happy to be a contributor and give something back.”

1996 Ford F-150, originally uploaded by doubtingthomas_blog.

Sometime between now and the start of the bike taxi season, I would like to get an old truck like this one. I was going to buy this tan one back in January, but I changed my mind, because I was thinking what would I do with it for the three months of the winter when I didn’t need it?

For the past two years, I was taking the bike taxi downtown on a trailer I was pulling behind my old car, which I’ve since sold. The car I replaced it with is about the same size, and I’m sure it’s capable of having a hitch mounted on it to pull the trailer, but that’s not really what I want to do now.

The trailer was kind of a pain to use. At the start of each bike taxi night (or day, but mostly nights), I’d have to get the trailer out of the garage, which usually means moving three or four other bikes out of the way first. Then I’d hook up the trailer, lock it onto the hitch, hook up the brake lights. When I get downtown, I’d have to find a parking spot that I could easily pull out of, since it is not easy to back up a trailer. Then I’d have to unhook the ratcheting straps I use to keep it from falling off the trailer, roll it down off the ramp, then get the canopy and stuff out of the car and put them on the bike taxi. At the end of the night, do all this over again. I’d say I spent at least 20 minutes every time I used the bike taxi just doing transportation-related activities.

So I want an old truck. Actually, what I really want is an old cargo van (like the one in the background of the photo above), but they’re harder to come by. If I get an old cargo van, I’ll be able to leave the bike taxi in it, regardless of the weather, and I won’t have to worry about putting it away in the garage at the end of the night. With a truck, I’m still going to have to do a lot of the same things I did with a trailer, except parking and stuff will be easier. Unless I find a truck with a really tall cover (or fabricate one, I suppose).

This happens every now and then. The Dilbert comic will almost exactly be about something that happened to me at work.

Take this one for example (click to see the normal size):

That happened almost exactly the same way to me. Only no one told me I was uninteresting or boring. Just gave me a hard time for excluding someone from the meeting. Oh well, at least my current boss is a good one.

I’m doing a major revision of my bike taxi website, and instead of using phpWebSite, which I’ve used for the past two years, I’m creating it all over again using WordPress, which is the same software I’m using for this blog, my bike blog, and plenty of other sites that aren’t blogs at all.

Why not? Why not go with what I know? It’s easy to update, once it’s all set up, and there are so many nice features built in that it’s hard to argue why I’d even go back to phpWebSite. Okay, there is one thing I’m going to miss, and that’s the “upcoming events” portion of the calendar feature of phpWebSite. There may be a WordPress Plugin to do what I want, but even if there isn’t, I think I can live within WordPress.

So check out the new bike taxi web site and let me know what you think. (You’ll have to comment here, because I have comments turned off on the new bike taxi web site for now. I may turn them back on in the spring when the next bike taxi season starts.