Blessed be

This came across my Facebook feed yesterday, so I’m sharing it with you. “Ein Keloheinu” is a Hebrew prayer. The title translates to “There is none like our God” (I’m told) and is typically chanted at the end of Shabbat morning services.

I do not know what the usual melody is for this, but last week Cantor Azi Schwartz at Park Avenue Synagogue recast it to Harry Belafonte’s “Banana Boat Song”, in tribute to the iconic singer/actor/human rights activist who died last month at age 96. This is absolute gold.

May his memory be a blessing.

 

 

And it was only Tuesday

Well, well, well—Captain Capslock liable (to the tune of $5M) for sexual abuse and defamation and George Santos charged with 13 felony counts of wire fraud, unlawful monetary transactions, money laundering, theft of public money and making false (financial) statements to Congress.

Here—have some photos of rhododendron flowers.

 

Filtered light

Sometimes in the morning at the office, the blinds at one window vibrate. I don’t know why—there doesn’t seem to be anything different about them from the windows/blinds on either side, but it makes a flickering pattern on the floor.

There are HVAC vents next to all the windows; maybe the one in front of this window works overtime.

 

Growing things

I decided to make cole slaw the other day, so I pulled out some red cabbage from the fridge.

 

I think it may have been there a while.

 

 

Gratitude Monday: king at last

Well, the multi-million pound coronation is at last in our rearview mirror. Charles—who’s actually been king since last September, although he’s chafed for the job for at least 30 years—has had what is essentially every bridezilla’s dream day. Nothing like parking your butt over the Stone of Destiny wrapped in dead stoat skins and dripping in bling being broadcast to an audience of billions to one-up the Kardashians. There were no leaky pens and, therefore, no visible tantrums. Master level success! Quiche and fizz all around.

Britons will be spending today’s holiday cleaning up all the detritus—I rather imagine the streets of central London are like Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena the afternoon of 1 January in terms of trash pickup. Though maybe no ladders and sofas to be hauled away. The rest of the country—well, maybe just England and parts of Ulster; I’m not really picturing Scotland or Wales being much fussed with the thing—has to pull down the bunting and put out the little Union Jacks for rubbish collection. Maybe dump the remains of the coronation quiche down the garbage disposal, cuz that recipe was whack.

Anti-monarchy protesters—who were arrested by the Metropolitan Police before they even really hit the streets, because Tories don’t hold with no dissent in any form; not the done thing, don’t you know—may be making bail and returning to the multiple jobs they probably need to hold down just to keep up with raging inflation. Along with tens of thousands of their fellow subjects, including staff of the National Health Service, public transport workers, teachers and others who’ve been told that they need to accept the fact that they’re just going to be poorer for the foreseeable future. Hey-ho.

The rest of the world just carries on. For example, in Texas, they marked the occasion in the traditional Texas way with another mass shooting, nine dead (including the gunman) at a suburban Dallas outlet mall. We all have our customs.

Well, Bas Bleu, you ask—why write about the coronation on Gratitude Monday when you don’t seem to care that much for it?

Well, dear reader, I’ll tell you: because I reckon we’ve got one more week of analyzing this event every which way possible and then it will well and truly disappear from the news cycle. That is something to be grateful for.

Texas, though—damn.

 

 

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.