My Valiant effort

Okay, I’ve realized that my work life has moved out of the realm of fine art—no matter how apocalyptic or surreal. It’s strictly Toontown:

 

Snack on that

A while ago someone left a partly-full jar of chocolate-covered almonds in the kitchen at work.

I had a couple of them, and I’ll attest to the fact that they’re aptly named.

But it was interesting: I went into the kitchen a few hours later and found that someone had emptied out the jar onto a paper towel. Perhaps he or she needed the container.

They looked somewhat less appetizing spread out over the towel. Kind of like a rabbit had run through the place. Regardless, they disappeared in a New York minute.

What this world needs...

If you want to know how people lived in the past, you don’t turn to art, you look at fashion and architecture. I was reminded of that by this meme going around the Internet:

The wide porch or verandah was a common sight in the American South, and in colonial structures in places like India, Africa and Australia. These are all places that get right hot in the summertime, and a covered porch was a place where residents could sit in the shade, catch any cross-breezes stirring at all, and take it easy.

A secondary benefit was that they were typically constructed at the front of the house, so the residents faced out into the neighborhood, and they and passers-by could commit acts of sociability with some frequency.

In the South, things slowed down in the summer months. You wore lighter clothes. You took longer breaks. You drank cool beverages poured from glass pitchers into tall glasses. You weren’t expected to exert top effort at the office, where windows were opened, creaky fans blew air around, and there was an actual use for paperweights.

Yeah, the penny only dropped for me within the past couple of years. As a kid, I recall paperweights in “gift” shops, but only ever seeing them on people’s shelves. As far as I could tell, they were just something you stuck on mantels and the like, tschatschkes like glass animals or souvenir spoons; things that you had to dust.

But take a look at this 1943 office in the Department of the Interior, and imagine July and August, with the windows open and fans cranked up to the max. Your glass ashtray wouldn’t have been enough to keep all the stacks of paper on your desk from flying around.

And at quitting time, you’d have left that office, maybe had supper in the dining room, but then you’d have repaired with the family to the porch, to sit through the evening until it was time to go to bed. In the South, the porch or a portion of it might have been screened, because insects. But you’d still have spent a good part of your life out there. And as neighbors strolled past, you’d invite them up for a glass of iced tea or lemonade, and you’d have caught up on all the gossip.

We had a front porch in the house where I grew up.

It was in Southern California, so not quite the heat factor as in Mobile or Atlanta. But it was on a quiet street, and the kids of multiple families used to play games in one or another front yard (or—truth be told—in the street), while the parents would sit on the porch and talk about whatever parents talked about. It seems like another planet now.

(And can I just say that the current residents clearly don't use the front yard for anything, and obviously don't make much use of a lawn mower or the sprinkler system. Someone's taken out all the camellias and let the crepe myrtle go ballistic. But whatever.)

Air conditioning changed all that. It’s a tremendous boon, I am here to tell you. But you can chart the point at which AC changed attitudes toward both work and play here in the South. Office windows stayed closed (and then sealed) all year long, and full effort was expected whether it was January or July.

And houses lost those front-facing porches, swapped out for two- or three-car garages in places of prominence, with decks on the back, where individual families could engage in activities as small units. (Having the most eye-grabbing part of your house be where you park your cars tells you a lot about priorities.) You’d have to be invited to come over and have a chat or a drink.

And nowadays, of course, it wouldn’t matter where you are—front porch, back deck, living room, dining room or bathroom—each individual person would have his/her shoulders hunched over a mobile device, fully engaged with people not in front of them, whether personally known or characters in a game or scripted show. You see it when groups of people (whether families or friends) gather in restaurants: each with his/her own device, barely looking up to order or receive the food.

So it’ll take more than a meme to get people to interact in the way they did pre-60s, when sitting down with your neighbors was the best defense against nature’s idea of a summer. But it’s a nice thought.

The art of work

Well, alrighty then—my job has moved a few rungs down from Designed-by-Dalí. It’s now Built-by-Bosch.

Hieronymus Bosch.

’Nuff said.

Gratitude Monday: the best of civilizatiion

We are at the apex of a DC summer here. I own up to the fact that, if I want to have a change of seasons, I’m going to have to put up with some discomfort. But honestly, weather, give it a rest, will ya?

Don’t believe me? Here’s the forecast as of yesterday:

Friday afternoon, the Metro car I rode on my 30-minute commute home had no air conditioning. Three middle-aged guys dressed in Hawaiian shirts, Bermuda shorts & walking shoes got on at McPherson Square, noticed the oven-like state and hopped off at Farragut West to try a different car. (I actually didn’t mind it so much for myself, but I had a container of overpriced macaroons I’d bought at the downtown farmers’ market; they’re made with sweetened condensed milk, and I was afraid they’d melt. They did.)

Saturday I had to run some errands, including going to the library, which doesn’t open until 1000. By the time I got home at 1100, my brain was pretty much fried. It was such a relief to be out of that miserable, stifling heat.

So, as that miserable, stifling heat continues unabated, I’m grateful for two things: an automatic ice maker and air conditioning. How did a society that invented both of these things ever get sidetracked into Pokémon Go and assault weapons?

Party hearty

The building where I work has two atria, one spanning floors 6 through 8, and the other spanning floors 9 through 11. The internal staircases in these spaces were designed to resemble the double helix of DNA, and they’re rather cool:

The down side of these areas is the noise level, if you happen to have an office opening into them, because they’re basically just big-old sound chambers. But if you don’t mind that, they’re impressive meeting venues.

On 30 June, an email went out to everyone at the atrium end of the ninth floor, advising us that they were in fact going to hold a retirement party there yesterday:

What is interesting is that we were being given notice that a noisy party was going to take place and:

a) We weren’t invited to it

b) If we thought we might find the noise distracting, we should anticipate it and not noticeably close them off, because that might look like we were raining on their good time

As it happened, I did close my door when they started setting up beforehand, but when I heard the bluegrass music, I quietly opened it, because it wasn’t bad. To my discomfort, I discovered that the musicians had set up almost directly in front of me, and therefore all the audience were staring into my office. And the CEO happened to be right next to it, and he leaned in to comment, “You didn’t think you were going to work, did you?”

Please, God—let this week be over.

Forget it, Jake; it's Twitter

The Twitters-dot-com is so entertaining. Sometimes you just have to let it wash over you and do its work.

For example, I don’t think that either Radia, the original tweeter, or Leticia, whom I apparently follow for some reason or another, understands the irony of putting forward this endless loop diagram of the effectiveness of prayer, and giving it the hashtag #prayforGermany.

Or, for that matter, of changing your profile picture and urging #prayfor[anything], without taking some appropriate action.

Social reach

Everyone knows that on the Internet no one knows you’re a dog. And of course you can make your social media profile into anything you want.

And, believe me, I see a lot of them on Twitter, especially on my “professional” account. They follow me because their social media management application finds some keyword in one of my tweets… Actually, their social media management application connects with me, and sometimes sends me a direct message (DM) to assure me how thrilled they are to be connected, and why don’t I like their Facebook page, download their ebook or visit their website where I can admire their awesomeness.

Or, in this guy’s case, he doesn’t even bother with the automated faux DM; he just invites everyone to set up a Skype session:

I’m not sure why, though.

Welcome to it

Okay, well, not to be a complete drag, but let me just share with you what my work life is like this week:

And this is what I’ll look like in two weeks when I have to give an all-staff presentation ("staff" being highly intelligent, skeptical about any kind of organizational change, and very quick to ask bolshy questions in public forums) about a “transformation” project that was put together by external consultants but must appear to have been created by internal teams. Actually, created by "tiger teams". And, specifically, "tiger cub teams".

It's going to be a long, hot summer.

Gratitude Monday: Looking away from the Gates of Hell

Man, July has certainly turned out to be a bitch, hasn’t it? And we’re barely halfway through it. Dunno about you, but I’m having to reach kind of deep into the gratitude grab bag to find an upside of anything.

It’s hard for me to decide which side to root for in the one-night coup in Turkey, but news reports yesterday of 6,000 people being taken into custody by Erdoğan frankly is not heartening. Actually, what it is is a start, and Erdoğan will have a field day settling old scores. This is a guy who shuts down social media and regularly stifles what passes for a press in that country. He doesn’t like dissent; imagine what he’s going to do with this opportunity. The undertakers of Turkey are going to be in business for a long time.

As for Nice, I have no words.

And, as of writing, Baton Rouge is a crime scene after a deadly shootout between police and one or more gunmen.

Honestly, world—WTF?

My fallback position in this kind of situation is art. So I’m mainlining on Mozart and Tracy Chapman, and I’ve gone back to Rodin for a manifestation of how I’m feeling:

This is a sketch he did for his commission, “The Gates of Hell”, which is pretty much what we’re looking at.

So my rather small gratitude today is that there are places I can go to pull away—even for a short while—from the world.