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!

Good advice

Seeing as to how this week has gone down a kind of careers pathway, I’ll close it out with this Pro Tip:

While I’m sure that no hiring manager is favorably impressed with a job aspirant screwing up his/her name, it’s pretty much the kiss of death for any career that revolves around communication through the written word. 

This Mr. Holton's ears must still be crimson at the memory 40 years on. One wonders if he left the field of journalism altogether and became, perhaps, an investment banker, where all anyone cares about is the number of digits to the left of the decimal.

 

Career sidestreet

Further to yesterday’s post about not signing up to the course that’s all about writing a book, I was thinking about the instructor’s suggestion that it would be swell if I wanted to use publishing my idea about strategies women use to shift careers around age 50 as a way to start, say, a coaching and speaking business.

This guy framed the suggestion within the context of knowing me, but if he did, he’d know that such a business is not anything to which I’d aspire. Spending 14 weeks writing about anything doesn’t make you an expert in it; it only—best case—scratches the surface. I’m not going to prance around yapping at people about the one tiny part of the subject I think I understand; so, no.

But it occurred to me, looking at the profile of a self-described coach and speaker on Twitter, that this is in fact the model for a good number of people describing themselves as speakers and coaches. They keep regurgitating the same few one-size-fits-all “guaranteed [number] of steps” to success, regardless of the audience. The only guaranteed success element of their methodologies is the one that fills their bank accounts. I wonder if they started out in a writing course?

I’m insulted that the instructor thinks I’d want to join their ranks.

Cradle me

Yesterday was pretty craptastic, even before we got to #SOTU.

I’d been toying with the notion of taking a course whose object is to publish a book. My idea was to write about mid-life career changes, but turns out there’s no point to going through the course if all you’re going to do is publish a book; it’s supposed to be a stepping stone to something else—a great job offer or a new gig. Well, I know I’d never get a job offer on the back of my book idea, and I’d rather swallow coarsely-ground glass than start up a coaching or speaking career about mid-life career changing.

So that was a bummer.

Then, I spoke with someone who’d said he’d be happy to help with my job search (but has been remarkably unforthcoming), and asked him about a specific company that makes community engagement software. He knows most of senior management of this company, so I asked for an introduction. Oh, well, um—I should talk with my recently ex-manager about this company—he introduced him to the company, and I probably wouldn’t like the culture there. (Dude—my ex-manager doesn’t know I’m job hunting; I’m not going to ask him about the culture of a company I’m looking into as my next gig. Just come out and tell me you’re not going to be any help.)

So that was a bummer.

Then there’s all the news from the cesspool that’s the White House and Capitol, which I don’t have the stomach to summarize. Suffice it to say I did not watch the Kleptocrat struggle against sundowning to read the teleprompter last night.

And that’s a real bummer.

No, I got home yesterday afternoon and just inundated myself in something that’s unequivocally beautiful: music. And here’s one of the pieces I chose.

I first heard Natalie Merchant’s “Motherland” a couple of weeks after I returned from my European assignment in October, 2001. I was in my car, listening to someone from NPR interview her on a Sunday morning, and she sang it live in the studio. I kept driving down Route 7 until I got to Tower Records in Tysons, and I bought the CD.

I’ve not thought about it for a while, but its lyrics seem especially appropriate these days. What’s crawling about a thousand miles a day now is worse than concrete. Lust and avarice? Yeah. 

We have got to figure out a way through this.

And I have to figure out a way to get over the bummer that was yesterday.

Lost and found

One of the straps on my backpack bag was starting to disconnect, so I dropped it off at a repair place last Saturday. Since I won’t get it back until this coming Saturday, I had to swap my stuff into an alternative. I’ve had that bag in constant use for two-and-a-half years, so having to carry around something different is a huge break in my pattern.

Sunday morning, I popped out to Whole Foods to pick up stuff for my workweek breakfasts and lunches. I didn’t want to haul my substitute bag, which is a cavernous canvas jobber from J. Peterman that’s mostly used for travelling (it will hold two cameras, a laptop, a folding umbrella and my journal with way too much room to spare for more stuff), so I just took my wallet and a tote bag with me. I paid for my groceries, popped my wallet in the bag and came home, thinking to myself, “Self, remember to put the wallet back in your bag, because you’re going out to lunch later.”

Well, I put away the groceries in the refrigerator, made breakfast and did some work until it was time to meet my friend for lunch. As I was about to walk out the door, I thought it might be good to check that I had, in fact, put the wallet in the bag, and I discovered that indeed I had not.

You ever had one of those searches where you start out looking in logical and reasonable places, and then move on to ridiculous and stupid places? Yeah, that was me. For 20 minutes, I looked in the J. Peterman bag (which only had three things in it) repeatedly, checked the pockets of my parka, ran upstairs, riffled through papers; bupkis. Also: I looked in the refrigerator, behind the container of cottage cheese I'd bought. Twice. Eventually I grabbed a couple of twenties from my backup stash and went out to meet my friend.

On the way over, I called Whole Foods (even though I distinctly remembered dumping the wallet in my tote bag after I paid for the groceries, but remember: once you start down Stupid Street, you find it’s one-way, and you just have to keep on). Nope, no wallet.

I had a nice lunch and a major catch-up, which is always nice, and then I came back for another round of searching. I recalled one of my friends going through a similar exercise the week before—she was trying to remember where she’d put her passport. Someone posted something like “Seven Steps to Finding Everything You’ve Lost”: methodologies for trying to remember where you left stuff. I didn’t read the link, because at the time Susan was looking for her passport, I hadn’t lost anything. But just as I was considering PMing her to ask for the link, I recalled how she eventually found the passport. She associated it with the last time she’d used it (on an African trip), and then fished out the envelope where she’d put all her leftover Rand. Hey, presto!

So, I started associating what I do when I come home with shopping; one of my constants is to put the receipt in a kitchen drawer. I opened the receipt drawer, and Eureka!

Massive relief, because I almost never use cash, and in addition to my driver’s license, two credit cards and ATM card, my wallet holds all my supermarket and restaurant affinity cards, my Dolcezza frequent drinker and District Taco frequent eater punch cards, library cards for four local systems, and the paid receipt for my handbag repair. I would not fancy having to replace that lot.

Gratitude Monday: a helping hand

A couple of weeks ago I got a message through LinkedIn from a woman who said she’d just moved to the District They Call Columbia from San Francisco, and noted that we seemed to have some similarities in background. She asked if I’d be willing to share my experience in making the transition from California to DC, and from tech to non-profit.

Well, you know—LinkedIn, right? But I thought, oh, why not, and I connected with her (I’ll call her Carol) on LinkedIn. She said she was interested in a couple of positions at my company, and would I be willing to meet in person to discuss?

I did a bit of sleuthing and discovered the reason for one of the requirement for a Ph.D. in one of the essentially social media positions (basically, they’re looking backwards, quelle surprise), and set up a coffee date for last Wednesday. Further to that, I asked my ex-manager what he knew about the non-Ph.D. opening. He got very excited—this position, it seems, is one of the best in the company, melding social media with social policy. Apparently, next to [communication and collaboration platform], this remit is the innovation that’s going to change the world. One component (the SoMe) will be led by someone who’s certainly sold herself as a thought leader/guru/disruptor in the area; the other (the policy content) will come from a woman who is a globally-recognized treasure in the field. So the incumbent has an opportunity to learn a great deal while doing some good work.

I met with Carol, and we commiserated on The Weather—that’s always a good conversation starter—and how we’re adjusting to it, coming as we do from what’s essentially a climate paradise. (If you leave out the droughts, fires, floods and earthquakes/tsunamis.) Carol moved out just before Christmas, and hasn’t yet bought real winter clothes. We’ve both recently started looking at Uggs, for pity’s sake.

I’d looked at her LinkedIn profile and seen a string of short-term contract SoMe gigs at Valley They Call Silicon giants. I didn’t ask her about them because I’m painfully familiar with that employment model of indentured servitude practiced by the tech industry—they hire contractors through vendors in a system where the actual providers of labor get no benefits, no future and no sense of being valued. Instead, I gave her a data dump on the position—such as I knew, which wasn’t in depth, tbh—and my take on the organization.

As it happens, she mostly grew up in the area, with a B.S. in biology from the University of Maryland, and she added an Ed.M. in public policy from Harvard. (My ex-manager has an MBA and an MPP from Harvard, so when I discussed Carol with him, I made a point of bringing up that connection.) She’s also worked in non-profits before, so she really didn’t need much from me on that score.

Well, the short version of this is that when we parted, Carol was visibly energized. Back in the office, I sought out the madam who’s doing the screening for the position (and who will be the dotted-line supervisor of the SoMe part of the job), who declared herself “happy to have an informal chat”, and I made that introduction. They had the conversation on Friday, which elated Carol further.

Naturally, there’s no predicting how this will turn out. (Over the weekend I recalled my difficulties filling an intern position once HR inserted itself into the process before I could even see the submissions. The “talent acquisition specialist” passed on applicants without qualifications, and I had to ferret out someone who I knew had applied, but hadn’t been sent on to me, so I don’t know what good researchers never made it to me because of HR. There’s no telling what could happen to Carol’s application before it even makes it to the interviewers’ eyes.) There are also other people in the works, with whom Madam has also had informal chats, and I have no insight into that.

But my point, on this Gratitude Monday, is that I was in a position to offer help to someone who’s standing where I’ve stood in the past. And I did. It’s pretty ballsy to do a cold call via LinkedIn (our mutual connection is someone I don’t recall); most of the unsolicited communications I receive there are spam, and get filed in the appropriate bin. But I recall people who surprised me by offering help, and I recall how very much those offers meant to me.

Over the years I’ve sunk into the mindset that I don’t have much to offer; I’m not well connected, I don’t have a wide expertise; I feel my limitations acutely. This time, I was able to do a bit of digging and make connections that may help Carol find a job sooner rather than later, one that makes good use of her background and sets her up for more good things in the future.

That’s best-case scenario. Worse case is that I’ve given her encouragement early in her job hunt, made her a more confident networker and become a new acquaintance with common experiences in this area.

In turn, she’s reminded me that I do have things to give, and that even small acts of generosity can warm the soul and be banked against the days when everything looks bleak. And I am grateful for this.