Sadly, standard

Since moving into my house a year ago, I’ve found another category of humanoid with the same work ethic, honesty and communication skills as recruiters.

Yes, I’m talking about contractors—those who can make repairs and improvements in your living space.

Finding contractors who combine competency in their declared area of expertise with reliability and accuracy is like finding a purple squirrel. You either go to Yelp or you ask your friends for recommendations, but even then it’s problematic.

I learned within the first couple of months here to ignore any of the names given me by my realtor: his plumbing firm came out twice; each time there were “lady, you should get this done” sizeable additions to the final invoice. And of the two handymen he recommended, one never responded at all to my call, and the other kept insisting on texting me even after I told him repeatedly that texting is not how I communicate. His estimate was also quite vague.

I lucked out on the electricians, whom I found via a neighborhood social media platform, Nextdoor.com. Every person I’ve dealt with at Autumn Electric has been professional, competent and good at explaining things to me. Plus—they clean up after their work. They didn’t give the lowest estimate, but I’ve had them out for two rounds of remediation work, and I’ll happily call on them for the improvements, too.

I just wish they did plumbing, too. Because I’m back on the grrr corner. I’ve called a total of six providers, four from Nextdoor and two recommended by friends.

Of the Nextdoor crowd, two flat out refused to come out to look at the job, and gave me estimates over the phone, based on hearing “replace a kitchen and two bathroom faucets”. I don’t do business without a written estimate, and I’m extremely uncomfortable with someone tossing one out without actually seeing what the issues are. So they got scratched straight away.

One came out, looked around and gave me a quote. He’d put himself forward on Nextdoor as being “cheap”, which isn’t necessarily a positive. Moreover, I gotta say that I had to air out the house after he left because the stench of cigarette smoke he exuded like to knocked me out. I wasn’t looking forward to the prospect of him being around for hours in somewhat small spaces.

The fourth is someone I’ve used before. I found him agonizingly slow, although thorough, and he had to go out three times to Home Depot because he only completely scoped out what parts would be needed for the job immediately in front of him, not once for everything on his list. Still—thorough and competent. Although I got a little tired of him talking about Hungary, the paradise of the universe. (His parents brought him here when he was a boy; they’ve since returned and he goes “home” once a year, where he gets another injection of nationalism.) Dude—do not wave that flag in front of someone who’s ingested the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, interbellum Europe and nation-state Nazi collaborators.

He came out, did a thorough assessment, and pointed out that if I want to attach the dishwasher drain directly to the garbage disposal, he’ll have to uninstall and reinstall it, because it’s using the wrong size/type line (half-inch copper instead of three-quarter inch flex). Well, no one else had mentioned that, so I thought about it and put out a call to friends for recos.

Enter the last two. One joined the ranks of don’t-need-no-stinkin’-visit-to-quote, but embellished it by being rude, condescending and insulting. He quoted his rates ($110 for the first 75 minutes; $15 for each quarter hour thereafter), and tossed out what he thought it would take to replace a standard faucet. I asked what his definition of standard is, and he gave me a brand name (Moën, if you’re interested), not a description (center-set, single-hole, widespread, for starters). He then dissed the replacements I’ve already bought (“Take it back and get a Moën.”). When I suggested that there might be special circumstances, he reverted to his rates again, only very slowly.

Again—nothing in writing, incomplete assessment of the jobs to be done and the very real possibility that his upfront laziness could end up costing me a lot on the backend. Plus—in a free market, there are many plumbers out there who aren’t jerks to the customers’ faces. So he’s dismissed with prejudice.

The final outfit were quite professional, showing up in an extremely gaudy panel truck. They took a look at the kitchen sink, and were marking it down on their estimator app when I drew their attention to the dishwasher drain line issue. Oh. Well. Yeah—wrong size/type. Have to disconnect and reinstall. Okay, fine. But then they didn’t bother to look at the bathrooms because “they’re all standard.”

I got their app-generated estimate, but honestly: what kind of estimate doesn’t have a total? And there was only one bathroom faucet listed, not the two. Again—it’s an app; you couldn’t click on the function that indicates the number of instances, and the function that totals it all up?

So I called Mr. Hungary, and get this: he’s not sure when he can come do it. I gave him a three-day window next week, but… (He runs a renovation company and does this on the side.) Dude—you bid on the job, WTF?

Well, I just stayed quiet, and eventually he thought he might be able to do it next Thursday. Send thoughts and prayers for me, readers. I want the new faucets.

Innovate this!

As you know, I’m fascinated by how people present themselves on social media, particularly on Twitter. Those who are legends in their own misspelt minds, click follow only so they can spam you with system-generated DMs, or just go straight for the money shot in their profile.

And then there are those who—having found tweets they think are clever, or profound (in a fortune-cookie kind of way), or pithy—use some third-party app to keep flinging them out to the Twitterverse.

I follow a woman (she followed me first; at some time I must have looked at her profile and decided she did not appear to be a pornographer, RWNJ or someone eager to sell me thousands of Twitter followers, so I followed her back) who’s a prime example of this. Here’s a sample of the type of thing she tweets:

Your basic corporate platitudes. Well, earlier this week, I was scrolling through my feed and stopped at this:

My first thought was, “Well, that’s a complete crock of moose milk. Yeah, we want people to acknowledge our ideas. But one splendid form of recognition is monetary, particularly when our ideas bring in vast sums of money to the corporation. Giving us an attaboy when we’ve favorably affected the bottom line is a sure-fire way to find your innovators jumping ship, you cheap-ass skinflints.”

My second thought was, “Hey—I’ve seen this before, because it sparked the same response then.”

I don’t think I necessarily twigged that it was this woman who’d done it, but I went to her page and started scrolling. Sure enough, in addition to Tuesday, she’d spewed this recipe for a decline in morale and innovation on:

2 February

30 January

26 January

25 January*

23 January

19 January

16 January

12 January

9 January

5 January*

1 January

*On these occasions the message was slightly varied:

As though “a study”—an anonymous study—is any kind of validation. Also—she obviously doesn’t read her little platitudes before she clicks the Tweet button. (Or, perhaps she’s just not very sure about the construction of simple English sentences.)

Interspersed with that little gem were others similar to it—also repeated ad nauseam.

Well, at this point, I looked at her actual profile, and all became clear:

“Head of Global Executive Talent” for Cisco is the antithesis of an innovative mindset. Also, 5846 tweets in nine years. I’m betting that there are actually fewer than 200 unique tweets. She’s just recycled them 300 times each.

Thank God for the mute button.

Setting expectations

As I’ve mentioned, my gig until the end of June is to produce a business plan for a new-ish service for my company. Toward that end, I’ve put together a project plan, breaking down all the goals and deliverables in a multi-page schedule. It’s a straightforward plan—a matrix of deliverables, due dates, components, information sources, dependencies, comments, approving authority and completion dates. I’ve also got a fistful of assumptions, resources and constraints, because I want to be clear that I’m not pulling any of this stuff out of the ether, and that Stuff Happens. I’m just laying out what some of that Stuff might be.

It's called managing expectations.

It’s not the most sophisticated thing—it’s in Word, not even Excel, much less Project. But it’s easier for me to work with it in this application, and since I’m the sole actor in this project, I don’t see why I should have to wrestle with Excel, or try to get IT to buy Project (and then try to learn how to use it). After all—I’ve only got until June to deliver a business plan.

One of the milestones was to have said project plan reviewed and approved by today, so I sent out a draft version (with DRAFT watermarked on each of the 12 pages) on Friday. My former manager had already given me his input, so the only thing I needed was feedback from my new manager, which she returned over the weekend.

With two exceptions, all her comments were regarding the content of milestones/deliverables—i.e., she was not responding to the elements of the project plan, but to what I speculated will be elements of the business plan. (The business plan is the end result of the activities outlined in the project plan, which is how I propose to produce that end result.)

I puzzled over those comments for a while on Monday. Then I wandered into my former manager’s office and asked, “Is the concept of a project plan new to this organization?” He replied, “Yes. Yours is the first one anyone here has ever seen.”

Huh.

Well, I don’t know whether to be amused or dismayed by this. On the one hand, no one’s going to be peering over my shoulder and tsk-tsking me about my lack of project management finesse. On the other…oh, dear.

Well, nevermind. I got the plan approved on Monday, and I’m working toward my next milestone. Plus, you know, networking for my next gig.

Non-opioid addiction

I came across this story in the New York Times yesterday on the effects of digital addiction—both mental and physical. The specific focus of the article is on mobile phones, which have essentially become the always-pumping dope syringe most people carry around with them—including to bed and to the toilet, which…ugh.

There have been plenty of studies on the loss of actual human connections when people disappear down the virtual connection rabbit hole of social media, along with hand wringing and advice. For example, “distracted walking” has been A Thing for several years, partly exacerbated by the Pokémon Go lunacy; pedestrians bump into other pedestrians, smack themselves on light stands, fall off curbs and walk into moving traffic while they’re busy scrolling through their Twitter feed or texting.

About five or six years ago I was at a Panera Bread in San José, Calif., and watched as a mother, father and two kids sat at one of the big tables, each engrossed in the screen of his or her device. Not talking, not paying attention to their food. That was the first time I’d noticed it, and since then it’s become the norm, not the exception.

What completely wigs me out is that this kind of behavior happens at home, during family meals. I recall with great discomfort some unpleasant dinner conversations in my family home, but the notion of replacing actual realtime verbal interchanges between multiple participants with heads-down finger poking at screens just…well, it wigs me out. (The picture of what Mom would have done if anyone had showed up for dinner and plopped a book in front of our plate is even more unpleasant than those conversations. We were every one of us avid readers. But at the table? No.)

(Also: nothing says "I'm hoping there are much more amusing people than you queuing up to text or call me" like a clutch of people pitching up at a restaurant and putting their mobile phones on the table. Face up or face down, doesn't matter. That device is a clear message that its owner doesn't rate your ability to capture and retain his/her attention. At all.)

And don’t get me started on convening meetings where you’re constantly repeating yourself to a roomful of people tapping furiously at laptop keyboards or mobile devices, because what’s going on anywhere else is ever so much more important than what’s going on in that room.

Well, back to the NYT story. That stat on vehicular accidents—25% of accidents in the United States are caused by the driver talking or texting on a mobile phone. This means that no matter how religious you may be about putting your device out of sight/sound, you have to assume that the drivers around you are squirreling around with them, and you have to be extra super vigilant for them. “Inattentional blindness” seems much too benign a term to apply to people making deliberate choices to focus on their quasi-imaginary friends instead of paying attention to the operation of 2000 pounds of lethal equipment in the immediate dynamic environment of traffic.

The other point I found interesting is the one about “text neck”—actual physiological damage caused by sitting with our heads bent over a screen. I feel it myself when I use my mobile for checking Twitter on my morning and afternoon Metro commutes. I try to prop my phone up on one of my bags, but it invariably starts sagging into my lap, and I definitely feel it in my neck.

A while ago I introduced you to Anastasia Dedyukina, who’s on a mission to get people to step away from their devices and just, you know, live fully in the present. Last month she ran a #DigitalDetox challenge and posted one- to two-minute videos on steps you can take to detach from your device. If you’d like to try some of her tips, go to her YouTube channel. Each video includes the supporting neuroscience for why you’d probably be better off following the day’s challenge.

The time to defeat inattentional blindness is…now.

Gratitude Monday: harmony restored

Kind of a small Gratitude Monday today: on Saturday I picked up my repaired Osgood Marley backpack bag, now good as new.

This is literally a relief, physically, because my canvas J. Peterman jobber—even without the two cameras, laptop, journal and miscellanea—was causing a strain across my middle back.

But it’s also a relief figuratively, because now I’m restored to my routine, and can thus keep track of my wallet.

Yay!