Future tense

Saw this yesterday somewhere between Chantilly and Herndon:

Not exactly sure what a PFR might be (possibly "proof"? or maybe "professor"?), but my guess is that anyone who can afford to drive a Tesla Model S has a good start toward anything.

Emergency preparedness

It’s probably a coincidence that my company—located in Downtown D.C.—scheduled what they called training sessions in emergency preparedness (in reality, just presentations by various representatives of local agencies) yesterday. Yesterday being the day of walkouts by elementary to high school students across the country highlighting the most recent round of mass shootings at schools and demanding that our leaders take action on gun control.

I mean, I’m sure the awareness sessions were planned some time ago, but in addition to the usual disasters—hurricanes, earthquakes, cyber attacks, bombings, floods—we had something new: what to do in the event of an active shooter in the building.

Turns out you’ve got three options: run, hide or fight, as demonstrated in this video we saw:

(My office door doesn’t have a lock on it, but I could jam my visitor’s chair against the handle. I also have a bottle of Virginia cabernet someone gave me, which would probably be my weapon should the shooter decide to try to enter. That’s assuming that I can’t get to the stairs and run down the nine flights to the ground, which would of course be my first choice of strategies. People in those open-plan offices so favored by the tech industry are stuffed.)

I suppose if our schoolkids have to undergo active shooter survival drills, we should, too. But it pisses me off that the NRA and its bought-and-paid-for GOPig stooges at every level of government are making us go through this instead of actually solving the problem of easy access to guns.

And I’m glad that the kids are showing more backbone than our elected officials.

Marketing projection

Not to flog the proverbial, but I was reminded yet again yesterday that I may well be too much of a round peg in a square hole on this project.

I should preface it by stating that one of my colleagues has made it as plain as can be (without actually speaking the words of one syllable out loud) that this is her project, and she’s the boss. In case I get ideas above my station.

Yesterday there was an exchange of emails about a project budget to submit to potential funding organizations. I raised the notion that the first-year figures for marketing and IT seemed low—the same as years two and three, even though those would be more maintenance than constructing. It’s my sense that neither of these components can or should be provided in-house, because this is a program unlike any to come out of the company so far, and it’s clear that this outfit doesn’t do “new” well.

My colleague—I’ll refer to her as JC—had just sent a reply that she’d “brainstormed” (her term) to the executive director two weeks ago a couple of things around IT needs, and I had to politely suggest that this sort of thing is really useful information to someone (e.g., moi) who’s putting together a business plan, so I’d really appreciate being kept in the loop. (Even though, of course, hoarding information is a classic behavior of someone engaging in a real or imagined turf war.)

But then JC followed it up with her take on marketing:

“What sorts of marketing do you think we’ll need? For context, I have already commissioned and received an email template, PPT template, letterhead, logos, etc etc etc. [sic] I did that all in 2017 because that was the last time it was offered [by the marketing department] for free. 😊 Oh and there’s a website and it’s finished, just needs to be vetted by legal and approved.

“I am sure I am probably missing key elements?”

Oh, honey. Yes. Yes, you are. If you think “marketing” begins and ends with free logo design, I just can’t even.

My reply: “Well, as I said, I’m sketchy on details [I’d pointed out earlier that a comprehensive marketing plan isn’t within the remit of the business plan], but it would be essentially what you’d expect for a product launch: go-to-market plan, launch campaign, events, webinars, raising awareness, etc.”

No reply as of COB. But I don’t think I’m going to ever fit in this square thing.

Slow day at library school

Alex Halpern first came across my Twitter radar in October when he took down a columnist for the New York Observer, who’d pished that libraries are anachronistic holdovers from an earlier time and should be shut down as pointless in the 21^st Century. Halpern, finishing up a MLIS program in Portland and using the moniker The Angriest Librarian, took down Andre Walker so thoroughly that eventually Walker cried uncle and advised followers to donate to a library fund.

Since then, he’s kept it to a simmer, but his tweets are always worth a look. Yesterday he came out with this one:

I suppose it could be the 21^st-Century update of Soupy Sales telling kids to send him the “little green pieces of paper” they’d find in their parents’ wallets. I mean, you’d hope that folks these days wouldn’t be so daft, but folks frequently prove that they are precisely that.

Here are the first few replies.

So far, no one has tripped the alarm that people SHOULD NOT GIVE OUT THIS INFORMATION. But early innings yet.

Gratitude Monday: stay of execution?

In accordance with company…decree, I ran through a bifurcated performance review/goal-setting exercise last week with my once and future managers. It was a process only somewhat more crazy-making than the single shot that most people will have gone through, on account of the transition from once to future.

I won’t go into detail, but I’m taking it as good news that my new manager does not seem to view my employment on the team as ending with the Summer Solstice, which was the deadline for me turning in a business plan. The iffy news is that expectations beyond that point are…well, vague might be entirely too concrete a description for them.

It looks like it’s up to me to define what I’ll be doing once the business plan is approved, which might not be entirely a bad thing. Although when I look around a room and realize I’m the most organized person in it, I get decidedly uneasy.

However—I have been authorized to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing again this year, which is in October, so this gives me a bit more of an opportunity to enter into a serious job search. And GHC is prime hunting for that.

So, after the past weeks of uncertainty and dread, I’m really grateful for this respite.