Pockets full of sand

It’s Cinco de Mayo, so I by rights should have something appropriate for the occasion. But Gordon Lightfoot died earlier this week at age 84. And Lightfoot was my North Star.

Way, way back, my BFF and I went to see him at a tiny club in Huntington Beach, Calif. I probably shouldn’t have been let in, because I was under age, but not only did I have some kind of too-cool-for-school coffee drink, I had enough chutzpah to go backstage (not that it was much of a backstage at that place) and take a photo with my Nikon S2 rangefinder:

A lot of years later, I went with another friend to the Universal Amphitheatre to hear him again. This time he was backed up by a band, singers and the whole megillah, and he had a bit of the air of someone who'd already been rode pretty hard and put away wet. He went through some rough patches, but eventually came through.

Even if you’ve never heard Lightfoot, you’ve heard his songs. Seriously—if you don’t know “Early Morning Rain”, you haven’t been alive at any time in the past 50 years.

(I know this will sound antediluvian to Millennials, but when I rode my bicycle from Paris to Santiago de Compostela, I had no iPod, no smartphone, not even a Walkman. I sang to myself, and I well recall blaring out “Now the liquor tasted gooood and the women all were faaaast” as I pedaled through a Spanish village, much to the visible surprise of the residents.)

And so, let’s hear the man himself singing “Early Mornin’ Rain”. Vaya con Dios, Gordon.

 

 

  

Left behind

Oddities don’t typically appear on the stretch of the W&OD Trail that I walk, but in the past couple of months someone with a puckish sense of humor and a very strong back has changed that up.

First, there was the wheelbarrow.

More recently, this:

Back in the day (50 years ago) it was considered a centerpiece of cheap-chic décor to have a wooden predecessor of this in one’s $95/month apartment. But I’ll be blowed if I know what anyone not laying industrial cable would do with this.

 

Do the hustle

Okay, this is painted on the elevator doors on every floor of the parking structure at the building where Megalithic Software Company leases four floors.

I just wonder.

 

 

Omnivore

I tossed some birdseed out on the patio last Saturday for the ground feeders (bits of peanuts, pistachios, almonds, millet, sunflower kernels and pumpkin seeds), then went upstairs to fold laundry. When I came back down, this is what I saw:

Yes, a fox hoovering up the birdseed. And with his long snout, he looks rather like an anteater snarfling up an entire colony.

 

 

Gratitude Monday: silver lining

About two years and 16 re-orgs ago, I was moved into a group called Customer Success Operations, reporting to a woman I’ll call Natasha The focus is completely tactical and she is definitely in her element; she’s all about the detail and she does not have long-range vision.

I won’t go into the tall weeds of the goals of Customer Success overall, except to note that there’s only one: renewals. Natasha is nose-down in those weeds operationally, though—process, tools, procedures. What I do—product management, right now focused on customer feedback—does not directly advance the retention of customers, so it’s deemed as no value to the org and to Natasha.

This is why I got the chop.

(As an aside, it’s interesting that all the various stakeholders of customer feedback gush about how great the information I report is, but no one is willing to fund it; i.e., allocate  a staff slot to it. It’s  been my observation that people will pay for what they value. Therefore I conclude that people in my company do not value what I’m doing. Therefore I am without value. Which is to say, worthless.)

Let me give you a few facts about Natasha as a manager. She holds weekly one-on-one meetings with her direct reports. I have not had one with her since last August.

She has never had a discussion with me about my career goals. This is because to think “career” implies that you might want at some point to be doing something except serving her team needs. The one time I brought up needing time to meet with a mentor on a weekly basis, she became palpably upset. “Is this something the program requires or just something you’ve set for yourself?”

One day last June, the pain in my knee was so bad, I IMed her about it, saying I was clocking out. Her response was, “Oh, hope you feel better for sure.” Never a follow-up inquiry.

When I logged sick days for my surgery in January, I noted them as being for surgery and recovery. She approved them; never inquired about the reason.

At one of the weekly “team” meetings, she and the two other direct reports were chatting enthusiastically about her being on PTO the next few days. After some minutes of this, she finally said, “Oh, [Bas Bleu], you may not know that I’m going to Cuba.”

Well, no, I wouldn’t—that might be the kind of thing that would come up in a one-to-one, which we have not had since August.

When I got the fixed-term offer in September, I had one exchange (via chat) with her, before going to the VP of Customer Success, her manager. Since that time, she has not once reached out to me to ask how I’m doing or how she might help.

Until last week, when she IMed me to say that the acquisition transition IT team informed her that I can’t participate in a particular program because my contract ends in May. And here’s exactly what she said:

“can we sync up today or tomorrow, I know you’ve been chatting with [VP]

“but would love to hear about what’s happening with the job search

“I’ll send an invite”

Six fucking months and now she’d love to hear about my job search. I was deeply concerned that I would not be able to keep a civil tongue in my head for that conversation. However, it’s not like my family didn’t put the dys in functional, so in the end I just kept silent except to answer her questions.

The call lasted 18 minutes, about half of it spent with her using the internal jobs site to conduct searches so she could give me pointers on how to search. “Try using quotation marks.” That’s her idea of managerial support.

She sent a blizzard of links to jobs she’d found that had only ancillary relevance to my skills because she has never once asked about my skills in the two years I’ve reported to her. My computer audibly pings every time I get an IM, so I had to just leave the house for a while until she got sidetracked in the tall weeds.

Well, you may be wondering what this narrative might have to do with gratitude. So, here it is:

Whatever happens, three weeks from now I will not be reporting to Natasha, and I am deeply grateful for that.

 

 

Outcry and birth cry

I’m closing out National Poetry Month with Nobel Laureate Seámus Heaney. His linguistic mastery included lyrical translations from Irish, Latin and Greek. For today, I’ve chosen “The Cure at Troy”, which is Heaney’s take on Sophocles’ Philoctetes.

All you need to know about Philoctetes is that he was one of the approximately 72 squillion suitors for Helen, and thus honor-bound to help Menelaus retrieve her from Troy. He was stranded on the island of Lemnos on the way (different versions give different reasons, but all seem to involve some kind of suppurating wound whose putrescence offended the Greeks). After many years of siege, the Greeks were told they wouldn’t win the war until they possessed the weapons of Heracles, which were…on Lemnos. As you might imagine, Philoctetes (reduced to a solitary animal-like existence in the intervening time) wasn’t exactly overjoyed at the prospect of handing over the sacred weapons to the very men who’d abandoned him (he was particularly pissed off at Odysseus), but Heracles appeared and told him to give up the artifacts and his wound would be healed by Asclepius, and he would become a great hero, a key driver of winning the war. (Some versions have him killing Paris, the little toerag who started the whole thing; others put him in the actual Trojan Horse. Either way he was instrumental in driving a stake through it.)

So there are a lot of symbolic moving parts to this one—the festering wound that won’t heal and leads to the debasement of a warrior; only by a series of redemptive decisions is he given a permanent cure, which leads to the end of a long, exhausting war.

Heaney wrote his version in 1990 as a tribute to Nelson Mandela, and an indictment of apartheid. (Its relevance to the situation in Northern Ireland is also obvious.) Note that—like Mandela—Heaney urges the reader to move beyond revenge, to the “further shore” with “cures and healing wells.” I believe these are thoughts we should keep before us in these times.

“The Cure at Troy”

Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard,
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker’s father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.

History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.