From crashing winds and lashing sea

Ah, right. Saint Patrick’s Day, and I’m feeling no need at all for alcohol, but a whole lotta need for rebellion. So let’s have a couple of rebel songs to rally the masses against the latest round of repressive government.

Pretty appropriate, actually, given how many generations of Irish immigrants have nourished the ideals of freedom in this country and at home—but who likely would not have made the cut in the current administration’s idea of acceptable additions to the nation, being largely poor, non-Protestant and bad hombres.

So I’ll start you out with “The West’s Awake”—lamenting Ireland’s history of internal warfare that left it open to the predations of its Anglo-Saxon neighbor. For much of it, as England lops off section after section of Ireland, Connaught (the last holdout of Irish language and culture, the province that was not profitable enough for English colonization), in the west, lies asleep. And the song looks forward to the day when the West awakens, breaks its chains and reclaims the entire country.

Here the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem sing it:

Ireland is often depicted symbolically as a woman—Cathleen Ní Houlihan, Dark Rosaleen, Sean-Bhean Bhocht (Poor Old Woman) are a few of the personas. This may to a certain extent have been a masking function: no, ya Sassenach gobeen, we’re not talkin’ smack about your poxy queen, we’re just singin’ a little thing or two about our sweetheart…

It also helped that they were frequently singing in Gaelic.

“Óró sé do bheatha abhaile” uses that construct—speaking of the afflicted woman in chains, whose fine land is in the hands of thieves. I particularly like the reference to Gráinne Mhaol—known to the English as Grace O’Malley, who as commander of both land and sea forces  scared the bejesus out of them during the last half of the 16^th Century—coming over the sea with armed warriors as her guard.

Gráinne was from Connaught.

This version by Sinéad O’Connor is somewhat atypical, but I believe it’s appropriate in this time of the pussyhat to have a bolshie chick singing this particular song.

Because my people did not leave Donegal in coffin ships 170 years ago to have their descendants return to the yoke of any unjust government. Especially one with a feckin' Orangeman at its head.

Attack of the pod people

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear—there is trouble in the ninth-floor kitchen. Trouble with a capital T, and that rhymes with C, and that stands for coffee.

(Or maybe that’s a capital T, and that rhymes with P, and that stands for pod…)

I’ve written before about the sad state of employee amenities when it comes to beverage support here. I don’t believe I mentioned that, in addition to the coffee-club crap, there was a small Keurig machine, the kind that you have to add your water to the reservoir for each cup, so it had some years on it. Apparently some comradely colleague brought it in and shared with all, because it certainly wasn’t supplied by HR. If you brought your own pod(s) in, you could use it to make your coffee.

(Evidently at some point one user transgressed by walking away post-brew and leaving his/her pod in the machine, because that pod pointedly remained in there for a couple of days—people removed it, made their cup and replaced it. But I don’t think the transgressor got the point. They often don’t when you’re subtle.)

Well, a couple of weeks ago there was a very sad yellow stickie on it proclaiming that it wasn’t working, and after a day or two, it disappeared altogether.

However, joy returned to Mudville last week when a bright new machine appeared—one that has a multi-cup reservoir, and buttons!

Well, it did not take long for the transgressor to revert to his/her reprobate ways. Because yesterday this appeared on the kitchen wall:

It’s printed on 11x17 paper, which you have to dredge around to even find in this building.

So I’m going to be interested to see if this works. Because I pinged HR about the prospects for company-supplied coffee and tea, and that’s a negatory. I think they blew their amenity budget on putting a couple of sofas, three TV monitors and a foosball table in the lunchroom.

Snow day

The DC area got its first real snowfall of this winter yesterday. I did not realize this was coming, or I’d have looked for a snow shovel on Saturday when I was at Home Depot getting spare keys (plural) cut. Instead I was one of those clueless morons at Home Depot on Monday afternoon looking in vain—by that time, nothing left but an empty carton that had once held them.

So I was reduced to praying that we’d get only a dusting, so I wouldn’t disgrace myself in front of my new neighbors by being the only resident with unshoveled walkways.

No such luck.

It wasn’t of snowmageddon proportions, but we got a couple of inches. 

The only thing I had to try to deal with the snow on my car and the sidewalk was a push broom. I did my best, but it was pathetic (although my car is cleared off). So I was reduced still further to hoping for temperatures to rise to the point that it would melt.

Not quite, but let’s pray for tomorrow, eh?

At any rate, I tossed a couple of handfuls of Fine Tunes out on the snow and then I almost got no work done at all, because the birds were so happy. Cardinals, a really bossy robin, chickadees, juncos, jays—it was big screen kitty TV out my patio door. See:

The squirrel did not show up until late afternoon, so the birds got a pretty good buffet before it started vacuuming everything up.

I had to come into the office today just to get real work done. Maybe I should print out an apology to my neighbors for not clearing my walkways, and stick it up on my door.

Manna from...

Okay, not all of last week’s whackjobness was entirely negative.

Wednesday I was going to go to Walgreen’s to pick up a prescription, but I couldn’t because at least two blocks of 12^th Street were taped off on account of a “suspicious package” at Metro Center. This is of course negative, and the first time I’ve encountered it in this country, so it was kind of interesting.

But I did not make it to Walgreen's, so I went down on Thursday, and it was a nice day, so I walked on the sunny side of the street. That side has a liquor store, so I stopped in to see if they carried Writer’s Tears Irish whiskey. It’s a bit of a hole-in-the-wall, so I wasn’t expecting much. And indeed, their entire inventory of Irish appears to be about three shelves of Jameson and Bushmill’s.

The guy behind the counter looked it up, showing me the result (with pricing in Euros) and didn’t offer to order it for me.

I thanked him and was getting ready to walk out when he put a bottle of chardonnay in a bag and said, “Here, free.”

Well, that certainly does not happen every day, so I thanked him and trotted off to Walgreen’s, trying not to look like I’m the sort of person who washes down prescription meds with wine-in-a-bag.

Really—just a very odd week.

Gratitude Monday: Blondes, rats and jerks, oh, my!

Well, last week registered about a 9.6 on my weird shit-o-meter.

It started out at the weekend, actually, when the little oil can icon (and how archaic is that image?) on my dashboard lit up, along with the dread red exclamation point-in-the-triangle light.

 

Rats.

So after consulting Google (the consensus of all the Saab forums was that this denotes “sludge” in the system, and you “have to drop the pan and clean the filter, man” to remedy it), I took it into the garage. Where I was told that it’s sludge in the system, and they have to drop the pan and clean the filter, which has to be done on a cold car, so I couldn’t sit there and wait for it.

Fine. After giving them every reason to think I must be a secret blonde (“Yeah, I don’t know my home phone number, because I just moved house and I lost the piece of paper I wrote it down on.” I’m also somewhat unclear on my license plate number. Although I do know they’re California tags.) Their driver took me home in their Benz shuttle, and I realized that I’d left the part of my keychain from hell with my house key on it under the driver seat, but I have a spare key in my wallet, so it was okay. I could walk to the Metro in the morning, and get a ride from the Benz shuttle in the evening and go on my way.

Tuesday morning, at 0540, I was a little disrupted out of my routine by not having the keychain from hell to pick up, so what I did was collect my briefcase and the tote with my lunch in it, and close the front door behind me, realizing instantaneously that on the other side of the locked door was my handbag. With my spare key, my cash, my credit cards and my mobile phone.

Rats and little mice.

I thought I’d given a spare key to a friend, but I couldn’t ring her at 0540 to ask her to get up, drive over and let me in. Even if I had my mobile phone to call her with. I did at least have my Metro card, because it lives in my briefcase, so I could at least ride to work. (A 45-minute ride, without any online amusement; just me and my dark thoughts.)

Where I recalled what else was at home, in my handbag: my security badge.

Rats, mice and termites.

Well, the night guard escorted me up to my office, and the day guard gave me a temporary badge. But my inner blonde was exposed further when the garage rang to tell me my car was ready. I had to explain that my payment capability was locked in the house, and I couldn’t get into the house until I picked up my car and drove to it, and…

But one option I offered them was that I happen to know all the digits of my American Express card (including the expiration date and the security code), so if they could input that manually, I could rattle it off when I picked up the car…

“That’ll work,” the guy said.

Of course, I then had to explain that I could not call them when I got to the Metro stop, on account of having no mobile, so I’d have to call when I left, and give them the expected arrival time (and hope that the Metro gods played along). This they were less happy about, so I was much relieved when I got there, went down to the Kiss-&-Ride lot and about fifteen minutes later the Benz showed up.

The fellow at the service desk input my digits into the POS machine, and it happily coughed up a receipt for $1000, so I got the car and drove home.

The second round of weird revolves around work. Our Chief Digital Media Officer retired at the end of February and a week ago Friday my manager popped by my office to chat and announced that that very day they’d be proclaiming that, in addition to my function, the “community engagement”-and-“online collaboration and communication platform” that he founded, and the professional development team that was bolted on to him when it failed to meet its goals where it was, he would now be running the digital media group, as well.

My knee-jerk response was, “Are you going to start doing speed?”

Well, no (thank God). Taking on this new responsibility means that he’ll finally step away from that platform’s operations, and hire both a sales person (which was already in the works), and a product manager. He’s been doing both those functions since he dreamed this, uh, platform up more than three years ago. And the functionality of this software shows the lack of product management in every aspect.

(Also—you may recall the class where we had to pitch an idea for a “start-up” business, either within our organization or externally. My idea was for an AI-powered recruitment platform that matches STEM professionals with the more than 270,000 critical business openings that are posted every year, at an average cost of $3500 per opening. My manager dismissed it as a prospect for in-house development because, “that’s what [his collaboration/communication platform] is going to do.” Leaving aside the issue that what I’m proposing is not about academic scientists, but tapping into the very lucrative market of recruiting for industry, this platform couldn’t match a pair of socks, and the interface is from the early 90s.)

Okay, well, we got to chatting about product management, and he set up a meeting for us and the Stick Insect who runs the platform and “community engagement”, and who apparently is also an expert in event organization and product management. I started slapping things up on the whiteboard, outlining the core elements of product management—competitor and market intelligence; customer and user understanding; business case development; pricing strategy; product roadmap; and the all-important functional matrix. Then we get into the outbound stuff, like value propositions, messaging, sales training, collateral development, etc., etc., etc.

I looked around and asked, “How much of this exists?” And got four blinking eyes. Well, they had a feature list back three years ago, but…

Okay, well, there’s where I’d start. Revisit that, refresh your competitor landscape, build out user personas and use case scenarios, shake out the product backlog, and…like that.

My manager put together a job description, which I went through and scribbled all over. I met with him on Thursday and just checked that he was okay with all the stuff I was adding. (“You have at least five years of PM experience, but you don’t mention Agile…”)

As we were closing that down, he said, “I have to ask this: you’re clearly enthusiastic about this work, is this something you want to be doing?”

Dear reader, trust me that my head was shaking by the time he got to “something”.

Well, it seems that I really know this stuff, and…

No.

But then I pointed out the obvious. “You do realize, right, that when you hire a product manager, you have put [collaboration/communication platform] up for adoption, and you have to let the PM dress it up and send it to schools that you might not have chosen. You have to step away and let the PM do her job.”

Which for some reason sparked him to ask again, “Are you sure you don’t want to be doing this?”

I picked up a red marker and wrote “NO” on the whiteboard.

Man, trying to pull that puppy out of the brambles is not something I want to attempt.

(Although later on he scared the liver out of me because it turns out that nowhere in this entire organization of a not inconsiderable instance of IT development is there product management. Not even in the digital media group. WTF?)

Okay, weird-on-a-stick. I was back at my desk writing up my take on the job description for him and the Stick Insect, when the phone rang. Normally, I don’t answer the phone if I don’t recognize the number, because it’s generally someone with a membership issue, and not only do I not know how to solve their membership issue, but I don’t even know how to transfer their call. (Sometimes it’s even telemarketers!) So I just let it go to voice mail. If someone does need me, they’ll leave a message. But for some reason I picked it up and got a somewhat icky blast from the past.

Some time ago I wrote about someone who periodically reappears, under the pretense of “apologizing” for being a jerk. The apologies never last, but being a jerk does. The last time he tried it was via Facebook. I ignored it and blocked him. This time he apparently tracked me down via LinkedIn and called the main company number. Well, aren’t you just the clever clogs, eh?

I let him make the latest apology for being a dick the last time (some 13 years ago)—which, as always, was due to his “madness”—and allowed him to yap for a while before I brought the call to a close. Did not give him any contact details or ask for any from him. I do not need any more drama queens in my life.

All of that got me to Thursday, and I decided to work from home on Friday, because clearly it was not a good idea for me to leave the house.

What does this shaggy dog story have to do with Gratitude Monday? I’m thankful that this long, blonde week is over, that’s what.