Nub of an idea

I’m part of a class in innovative thinking at work—basically, since my department is sponsoring it, I have to take it pour encourager les autres. This is the second iteration of the course, and I’m not going to go into how gobsmacked I am with how incredibly doltish my colleagues can be about mastering the utmost basics—like when and where the class is meeting.

At any rate, an ongoing assignment is to be always on the alert for ideas: ideas about anything, really. Remembering you need to pick up whipping cream; there must be a better way to keep track of time than ADP; maybe if you lay out your kid’s clothes at night, you can save five minutes in the morning and get out of the house in a timely manner. Whatever—the deal is, you should just be aware of things that are going on around you so that when the time comes to come up with an idea for a product or service that might actually make money, you’ve got the wherewithal in terms of knowing how to recognize when something annoys you enough that it might also annoy others, and they’d pay for a solution.

We have to come up with ten ideas a day, and keep track of them.

The last time I went through the class, I took squares of paper to people on this floor, giving everyone I found four of them and asking them to write a word—any word—on each slip of paper. I then collected them into a bowl, and when my trigger mechanism went off (back in December, it was whenever I heard Christmas music on the radio, but for others it was whenever they filled their water bottle, or checked social media), I’d reach into the bowl, pull out a word and try to come up with an idea around that word. Any crackbrained idea.

I dusted off the bowl o’ trigger words for this round, and yesterday upon hearing Mozart for the 42^nd time that day, I pulled out “nubs”. (Perhaps I should preface this by noting that some of my colleagues may have been taking the piss. In addition to “inspire”, “fire hose” and “black”, yesterday I also found “kill”. Yesterday I was entirely ready to act on that suggestion.) Well—kind of interesting, no?

I was struggling to be inspired by my existing understanding of “nubs”, so I Googled it. Turns out that a “nub” is someone who totally sucks at playing a video game, even if he’s been playing it for a long time. No matter how long they keep at it, they’re still going to suck.

Ah, I thought—like the Kleptocrat trying to be president. I wished he was limited to playing the role in a gamer environment instead of the real life version. So my idea was a video game with him scuttling around the White House in a bathrobe, screaming at his Gauleiters, ordering pie with two scoops of ice cream, calling Putin to check in on how he’s doing, etc. Every 30 minutes, he’d have to go somewhere to play golf.

There’d be a lot of fundraising, of course, and money laundering. You’d have to decide when to raise the membership fees or rent at various Kleptocrat properties. Also, you’d have to decide which family members are part of the administration and which ones have to live 500 miles away and only be trotted out for ceremonial events. One of the best parts is that there's no requirement for internal logic: just like the Kleptocrat in our space-time continuum, reality shifts at irregular intervals.

Oh—and the tweeting. If you don’t interrupt whatever he’s doing at six-minute intervals, you lose the round and have to start over again running in the primaries. Plus whining; there'd have to be a constant stream of that, mixed in with grandiose self-puffery.

See—a lot of this ideation stuff is just releasing personal stress. But this one might actually have legs. I should write up my pitch and start looking for VCs.

Semper Paratus (not)

We’re in commencement season, which means that Personages high and low will show up on university and college daises to mouth platitudes as one final trial for graduating students. If you’re lucky—and your institution has juice—you get Matt Damon or even Condoleeza Rice.

If you’re not, the Kleptocrat may show up.

As he has done twice this week. The crowd at the completely misnamed Liberty University, an offshoot of the RWNJ Jerry Falwell’s evangelical enterprise, kind of had it coming as penance for their individual and institutional support of someone who in every respect both professionally and personally is the antithesis of Jesus.

The poor cadets at the Coast Guard Academy, now—they did not deserve to embark on their careers in service to this country by having the whiner-in-chief whiz on their commencement. Because, after submitting a budget to Congress earlier this year that cuts the Coast Guard’s budget by $12B, somewhere in the vicinity of 12%, he had the unmitigated gall to not only congratulate himself on how swell a job he’s doing as president, but to go on and moan that “no politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly.”

And this, BTW, was part of his “advice” to the graduates. You know—the part where the person at the podium, who’s supposed to be imparting a few final nuggets of wisdom, gives his or her secret of success. The Kleptocrat’s secret is to moan.

Well, not secret, really. More like his defining quality. "You want advice, guys? Lemme tell you what a great job I'm doing. Best in history. And I don't understand why the cool kids don't want me to sit at their lunch table."

That “no politician in history” thing—Jesus wept. Just off the top of my head: Julius Caesar, Michael Collins, Cataline, Abraham Lincoln, Jean-Paul Marat, Yitzhak Rabin, Gustav von Kahr, Anwar Sadat, Patrice Lumumba, Thomas More, Gabby Giffords, Salvador Allende, Rosa Luxembourg, Nelson Mandela, Alexander Hamilton, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. To my knowledge not one of them hawked up the kind of self-pitying vomit as the Orange One. And anyway: I thought his whole point was that he's not a politician. At this point I believe it's his claim to being humanoid that is being called into question.

As for the cadets, it’s a mark of their professionalism and class that, when the Kleptocrat started his self-puffery and cringeworthy sniveling, the entire class did not stand up, turn their backs, drop trew and moon him. But I’m betting they couldn’t wait to hit the bars to start drinking away the memory of yesterday.

Bushes-whacked

As you know, following the Kleptocrat’s axing of FBI Director James Comey last Wednesday, much hilarity ensued among the cut-rate Goebbelses in the White House as they came up with more stories to explain the action than a porn fan fict site.

One of the highlights was press secretary Sean Spicer cowering among bushes desperately trying to get newsies to turn off the lights and cameras that are a basic function of his job, because even he was uneasy at the optics of the hogwash he was about to spew in his orange master’s behalf.

Social media, as you might imagine, sprang into action. There were Spicey-in-the-bushes memes plastered all over Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. How could there not?

Well, a geography professor in British Columbia also was taken by this image. Lisa Kadonaga dropped a PDF of that unprepossessing face of the White House mouthpiece and began propping copies in shrubs and hedges around town. After she posted to Facebook, people took notice, so she posted the PDF to Dropbox, and the idea spread like pyroclastic flow.

This needs no further set up, so I’ll just give you some examples.

 I'm a little afraid of this prophecy:

And I’m kind of waiting to see what will emerge from the latest Oval Office Follies of the Kleptocrat showing off to his Russian buddies how good his intel is—the best. Bigly.

Piss up in a brewery

Okay, further to my recent posts about Human Resources, it’s almost as though they sensed a disturbance in the Force and decided to double down on their efforts.

The first two weeks in June are the Open Enrollment period for resetting all company benefits. (Last year, the director scheduled a three-day off-site “team building” meeting for the entire department during this time, which I know because I got an out-of-office email response announcing it, when I tried to get clarification on one of the benefits.) Open Enrollment is preceded by all-staff meetings where representatives of the various providers get up on their hind legs to try to convince us that higher premiums and lower coverage are definitely the way to go.

At any rate, HR has been sending out a blizzard of emails reminding us that these meetings are being held, with accompanying Go-to-Meeting details if you want to attend virtually. (I am not making this up: there were at least five system-generated emails reminding registrants that the all-important Open Enrollment webinar would start in three days, then one day, then one hour, then 30 minutes, then five minutes.)

Since I do not fancy being stuck in an auditorium for 90 minutes to glean 12 minutes of pertinent information (Kaiser, no) and watching HR swan about like beauty pageant contestants, I registered for the GTM webinar yesterday. At the appointed time I launched the web client and dialed in (this crowd has never mastered the art of running audio over the web, so you have to call as well as launch). And I waited. And waited. And waited. (Think Casablanca levels of waiting.) I got thrown off the audio twice because the webinar had not begun.

Finally, 21 minutes after this big event was to have started, this went out:

Every time I think they cannot possibly underperform worse than any given instance, I discover that I have underestimated them completely, and they are indeed capable of plumbing ever darker depths of amateur-hour incompetence.

Seriously: could not organise one.

Gratitude Monday: It's in the air

We’ve been having kind of weird weather here around the District They Call Columbia. Last week I actually hauled out my down jacket and ate the last of the cottage pies I’d stored up in the freezer. I even turned the heat back on at home, because it was below 63 degrees.

But yesterday the sun was out, I hacked out some of the overhanging branches of some probably overgrown tree-like entity in my back yard, and I opened my patio door to let in the spring air and listen to the birds outside.

In the morning I read the Sunday paper at my dining table with a view through an azalea bush, and then went out to meet a friend for a catch-up. Walked away from that one with a gorgeous sparkly-puce pussy hat, a pound of "Sweet Love" coffee beans and many things to think of about the healthcare system.

I also enjoyed my first supper of poached chicken breast with tomato mayonnaise of the year, with a glass of Prosecco, while looking out onto the patio and watching the juvenile cardinals peeping at their parents amid the bird seed I toss out there; they haven’t quite grasped this concept of feeding themselves.

Thus, today I am grateful for the joys of Spring in an area that has a true change of seasons.

I am also, tbh, grateful for Flonase, because you can practically see the pollen in the air around you.