Survival of the filthiest

Back in the last century, I could not feature what people saw in Macy’s, and my opinion has not changed much since then.

Their merchandise is unexceptional and it’s put out on the sales floor with all the élan of Kohl’s. A friend of mine in the Valley They Call Silicon used to pick up some extra cash around the holidays by putting clothes that customers had pulled out—refolding sweaters and jeans, and hanging dresses and the like on the racks. After the Cupertino store closed, she was sent to the Stanford Mall one, and I don’t know how she found the strength to come in to work: the two times I went there, clothes were jammed into the rounders and actually just tossed on the floor.

Stanford Mall is one of the snootier shopping centers in the Valley.

Anyhow, a month or so ago when I was in Tysons Corner mall, I wandered through the Macy’s and was reminded why I don’t even like to go in there. These are louvres on fitting room doors:

They haven’t been dusted in donkey’s years.

And here’s the floor of the fitting room:

I was there around 30 minutes after opening time. They obviously don’t vacuum between store closing and opening.

And I remember that, back in the 90s, I saw the same thing.

I do not comprehend how this is the department store left standing over Wanamaker's, Marshall Field, Hecht, Bullock's and the rest.

Another first

Holy cow, guys!

At my 1:1 with my manager yesterday, I brought up my quarterly goals, which include a shedload of ramping up about cybersec; come the New Year I want to have a path (internal and external) to understanding more about the tech and the practice, because I’m behind. I mentioned that I came across my “90-day onboarding calendar” that they give you and said I hadn’t had time to look at it since I printed it out a month ago, because Stuff.

Then I showed him something I’d captured in a customer call (how they categorize cyber threats); I found it interesting because it doesn’t use the nomenclature that seems to be standard in cyber security, and giving customers the ability (through AI) to map what they’re looking for to the categories we use might be A Thing. And I mentioned something that struck me in an IDC report on one of our competitors: one of their customers uses threat intel to rule out vendors if they show up on the Dark Web. (There was a bunch of Cyber Stuff in the report, but I found that off-label use of the data just fascinating, like pivoting on migraine meds and coming up with Botox.)

Well, we got to talking about Project Brioche and I’d just finished spitballing about the prototype demo that’s coming up in a couple of weeks, and what I see as the next steps when he said, “Going back to the start, we made the right decision.”

It took a while for the Pachinko ball to filter through, but I realized the “right decision” was hiring me. I’d just been pointing out some things that strike me as interesting, and a good part of the reason (aside from just the weird things I find interesting) is that I am not cyber-embedded. I’m looking at it from my own different perspective.

Well, I cautiously recounted what the SVP had told me was the explanation given her as to why I, and not the person with much more cyber experience, was their choice. I told him that that description was true, but what’s remarkable is that they value me because of my differences, not despite them. And this makes me very happy.

He said his position was that they can teach me the tech, and the environment, but that my “new eyes” and ability to articulate what I see is not something just anyone can do.

(It helps, of course, that everyone I work with is supportive, generous and professional—which I told him. There are going to be assholes, but there are none on my team, and none in the greater business unit so far.)

Like many other experiences here, this conversation is a first for me. I love this job.

A great beat; I give it a three

I was at a conference last month. Not much of a brainer but the official party at the end of Day 1 was an Octoberfest jobber. The weather was nice, so it was held in the hotel’s courtyard, the sauerbraten and other snacks were fine and the sparkling wine was eminently drinkable.

But then they had a band.

I have so many questions. Like—do they wear those outfits to and from the gigs, or do they change at the venue? You wouldn’t want to get stopped by the State Police and end up spending the night in the hoosegow in those getups. Also, do they have other outfits for when they’re The Mariachi Brothers or play at bar mitzvahs?

Frankly, I find that stuff kind of cringeworthy, although not as much as Morris dancers. Those guys give me the willies.

But my real issue with them (and I was not alone in this) was their volume. Their playing was fine, but they had a sound setup that would have provided enough amplification to fill the Rose Bowl. They’d have been pleasantly audible if they’d turned off all the amps and just gone acoustic.

It was rather amusing, though. I left as they were breaking into that old Bavarian standard, “The Gambler”. America, gonif.

Wintering up

Predictions are for a serious cold spell this week, although it looks as though the worst forecast for our area has been amended. By which I mean that they’re taking back the promise of snow, which is fine by me.

But imagine my surprise when I opened my patio door yesterday late morning to toss out a handful of Fine Tunes seed on the ground for the quintet of juncos that have been acting like vacuum cleaners for the past couple of days and finding the temperature so mild that I left the door open.

Meanwhile, it’s 92 in Palm Springs, and Chicago’s snowstorm is so bad that planes are skidding off the runway at O’Hare.

But the juncos are happy. Although they’re going to have to get by for the next few days with what I toss out in the early morning and then in the early evening. Gotta go to work to be able to afford all this flipping birdseed…

Gratitude Monday: honoring service

At the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, the guns of the War to End All Wars fell silent. The survivors crawled out of their trenches, scraped caked mud off their uniforms and tried to understand how to live normal lives again.

Well—that was a pipe dream; societies always try to return to normal after cataclysms, but the fact is, “normal” is one of the first casualties of wartime service. Along with truth.

I thought a lot about that as I visited the military cemeteries of the Western Front—French, British, German, American. More than other graveyards, military cemeteries display the true democracy of death: the uniformity of the headstones; regular rows; whatever the rank, no one more elaborate than any other. But that’s the dead: the living (more or less) returned to their homes to find that their governments wanted them to resume their pre-war stations on pre-war terms, and their families wanted them to pretend they hadn’t been through what they had.

We still do that—send men and women out to do the worst things imaginable and then ignore the human consequences, pretending that being a sapper or a tanker is just like being a plumber or a marketer. The fact that our longest-war-ever is not even a national effort, the way the World Wars were, keeps the blood-and-treasure costs out of mind for most Americans. If you’re not serving or know someone who is, it’s easy to ignore the price of policy.

Well, it’s Veterans Day here in the US, one of two days that we pay lip service to the sacrifices made by those who serve in our defense. Who take their oaths to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and pay a steep price for it. I am grateful for all of them, all the generations of them. And I’m grateful to be working with many of them who continue their service by protecting our cybersecurity.

Raising canes

Wednesday afternoon I looked out the window at work and saw these being put up:

This was 6 November, mind; people are still coming down from their Halloween sugar high, and Boston Properties is putting up Christmas decorations, right in the heart (or possibly the kidney) of the People’s Republic.

This abomination is at the faux urban construct known as Reston Town Center, a collection of butt-ugly high-rises anchored by a rotating stream of chain shops and restaurants. The rotation has been given a kick in the pants by BP imposing parking fees in a scheme involving byzantine and confusing divisions of garages and initially-mandated use of a parking app that demands access to your contacts, videos, photos and more on your mobile phone. (I had to download the app when I came for my interview back in August; I deleted it immediately afterward.) When BP combined the throttling of customers who refused to pay to park for goods and services they can get at any other mall with raising rents for retail space, well…

Anyhow, given that utterly ersatz ambience that pervades the place, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that they couldn’t wait to start slapping up the holiday reminders.

They haven’t lighted them yet, but I’m still outraged.

BREAKING: When I walked in this morning (at 0530; don’t ask), the canes were gone. Dunno the back story on that. But I’m still outraged.

Brioche and whisky

We made inroads into the uncertainties of my Project Brioche today. My colleague MG and I basically pulled the “we aren’t leaving this web page until we’ve collected all the requirements”, and I feel heaps better about it.

Well, as the meeting ended and we were leaving the conference room, I said I was glad that my terror at seeing all those empty spaces in MG’s requirements matrix helped spur this. My manager replied—intending to be encouraging, I know—“No, you’re leading Pickett’s gallant charge up the hill.”

I stopped in my tracks, goggled at him and stuttered, “Wut? WUT? That charge did not end well.”

(Actually, I’m trying to think of a charge that did end well, and I’m coming up short. The Light Brigade at Balaklava? Custer at Little Bighorn? Flaminius at Trasimene? D’Albret at Agincourt? Huh.)

Well, he recognized his error, so that’s okay.

Also—we spent about half of our weekly 1:1 catch-up talking whisky. And not only does he have no time for Laphroaig, his “spirit animal” is Highland Park 18.

I can forgive such a person much.

Positive declaration

Another absolutely cray-cray day yesterday. So here’s something amusing I saw last week:

Google Translate says “Ya llegue” (with the double-L sound pronounced as a Y) means “I’m here” in Spanish. But the verb llegar means “to arrive”, and “ya llegue” would translate literally to “I already arrive”.

So I’d make it “I’ve arrived”, or “I’ve made it.”

Getting to know the neighbors

Yesterday was a bit loopy, so I’m posting a picture of a cat that came to visit for about a day a couple of months ago:

She made herself completely at home, as you can see. Turns out her name is Sammy and she lives next door. She got out one day and spent about 24 hours in the wild.

I cooked her some chicken, which she picked at, and she was also a Kitty of Substance, so I figured she had humans somewhere. I’m glad they were reunited fairly quickly.

Gratitude Monday: comrades in Brioche

I’m struggling some to wrap my head around the dark web-related product I’m managing. Partly because of Atlassian-based tools we use (I’ve never used them before), partly because the process is different from other companies where I’ve been a project manager (every org is different), partly because I was not involved in the initial stages of it (like defining requirements; that’s one of the strongest bonds between a PM and a product) and partly because not three days after my manager explained what the application was going to do I sat in a meeting where it became clear that this sucker had morphed into something new, now with only about 35% of what I’d been told.

And—even though I like to think of product management as performance art, the reality is that it’s performance art with Jack Russell terriers; you’re always trying to get all the disparate (and very well-meaning) colleagues lined up in some order that will facilitate the performance, but they’re way too interested in passing moths, a straw sticking up from the ground and the scent of bacon coming from somewhere.

So, because I really want to do a good job for this company, there’s a continuo of anxiety underpinning my struggle; I keep thinking I’ve lost IQ points because something I’ve been told just doesn’t stick.

Well, my colleague, MG, has alleviated most of that angst. This woman is not only widely versed in our product set, she’s one of the two best program managers I’ve ever worked with. If MG had been involved in Operation Overlord, there wouldn’t have been that major SNAFU on Omaha Beach. And if for some reason things had started out badly, she’d have had them sorted by the time the second wave was hitting the sand.

I watched her in action during the day-long engineering planning session last month—she was documenting the activities and would not let the room full of engineers, architects, PMs and directors move on until she’d clarified what, in fact, we’d all agreed to, step by step.

I was in awe.

Since then, she’s taken the lead in making sure that PM is following through. Again—we don’t move off a PPT slide until she gets the level of information she thinks is necessary.

Well, back to my dark web thing. I’ll refer to it as Project Brioche. We agreed a couple of weeks ago that we’d have operational meetings on a weekly basis, and last week was the first one. The day before I was staring at the item on my Outlook calendar with a feeling approaching despair, because heretofore the techies have been driving it, and it’s up to me to take over the leadership, because I’m PM, but I’m unclear about this thing, what it is supposed to do, where it came from and the whole megillah. At that exact moment, MG popped up on Teams asking if I had time to chat.

That chat turned into a 90-minute call during which MG put together the framework for that particular meeting (which involved getting everyone associated with it on the same page) and for future meetings (where we check progress). She asked me so many questions I could not answer and I was getting close to crying, but then I realized that what she wanted is absolutely crucial to not only Brioche’s success, but to mine as the PM. She also gently laid out responsibilities for various parts of the meeting, taking a huge burden off of me and giving me confidence that I could in fact deliver on my part.

And—just as I was about to suggest that we do this pre-meeting synch regularly, she asked, “What do you think about the two of us getting together before each group session?” If hugs could reach from DC to Dallas, she’d have been squished.

That first operational check-in was difficult, largely because so much of Brioche is amorphous; way more than normal. But also because of all those Jack Russells sniffing bacon and chasing moths. Although I was not as leaderly as I’d have liked, MG was right there to keep things moving.

And she followed up later in the week to plough through the agenda, nail down action items and get us set up for this week. Again—I was so grateful I could have cried. I told her that this kind of thing is not my strong suit, and I’m deeply thankful that it’s her very happy place. We’re like yin and yang, complementing each other’s skills and mitigating weaknesses. As I said: it’s a marriage made in heaven.

A couple of other things I’ll share. Before the big engineering session, MG and I had only “met” over the phone. Once or twice I said something that I really thought nothing of, but she found impressive. The first time, we were on a team call where our manager (being at a conference) kept dropping off the audio. MG was the first to tell him what was happening, and I added, “Yeah. I’m sitting here taking notes and [with JH cutting out] I don’t know what to write.

MG: “I’m so glad JH hired a smartass.”

The other time was two days before the big engineering matinée. We had a semi-come to Jesus meeting with the head of engineering, our manager, the VP and the SVP. One of the issues was around the value in some of our pricing strategies, and I blurted, “[Product package] is basically handing out baggies of crack at the playground. The money comes in after they’re hooked.”

(Well—it’s true. Perhaps not elegantly phrased, but that’s a time-tested method of breaking into a new market.)

MG: “I am really looking forward to meeting [Bas Bleu].”

So on this Gratitude Monday, I’m giving it up for MG, who is way more than a colleague; she’s a comrade. We’re going to turn out the best Brioche ever.