New day

The King’s Singers are one of a friend of mine’s favorite acapella groups. Personally, I prefer Chanticleer, but these guys are not bad.

I was reminded of this during a little filler video on the local PBS station—evidently TKS are frequent performers in The District They Call Columbia, and a couple of the group were featured in a blurb about how the covid-19 pandemic caused them to cancel gigs at the National Cathedral.

Evidently, “You Are the New Day” is one of their signature connections to this area, so here they are in a socially-distanced rendering of it recorded this month.

2A

It’s been a while since I posted a vanity place, so here’s one from someone in the ‘hood.

Aspirational, really.

Checking it out

Guys, guys, guys—I checked out three books from the Fairfax County Public Library yesterday! You can put stuff on hold and instead of picking it up from the hold shelf inside, you wait in the parking lot, call the library, give them your library card number, and they check out the materials and bring them to a cart outside the staff entrance

Also, they're checking things out for 5.5 weeks instead of three.

I’m in heaven. I no longer have to rely on my home library for reading material. The girl is back in business!

Wading in

Know what, folks? Yesterday was a week-and-a-half. I did get the air conditioning fixed—two fuses cost $118—but this is a stop-gap measure, so I’m looking forward to a week of getting estimates for a whole new system, AC and furnace.

At work, we had the kickoff meeting for internal testing—which was supposed to have encompassed a very limited cadre of users who could provide critical feedback on functionality. However, in the six times that Engineering delayed this start, the list has ballooned to more than 50, so we might just as well open it up to the entire company and be done with it.

Also, although I’d given ENG three days last week to provide their inputs to my PowerPoint presentation, and then gave them until 1030 yesterday (two hours before the meeting) the director AKA Foghorn) announced about an hour after that deadline that he needed the link to the deck so he could “review” it. I told him the link was in the email I’d sent last week, and resent as a reminder yesterday. Thirty minutes later, I looked at it to find a bunch of “don’t blame us” crap, along with two completely new slides announcing a “phased” test schedule, which was news to everyone in product management. And even though ten minutes after that I told everyone to stop editing it, he kept on until I finally downloaded the damned thing, rearranged the slides, cleaned them up and ran through a couple of times in the 15 minutes I had before we went live.

At least he kept quiet during the call.

Well, from that point on it kind of swirled, so I’m just going to leave you with some pix I took last week of a wading bird that was visiting the corporate campus behind my house. 

At the mo, I feel rather like I'm as deep in it as he is.

Gratitude Monday: Mod cons

This weekend was a bit of a mixed bag for me. Mostly because my air conditioning system went belly-up on Saturday. After consulting Google, and messing with the thermostat some, I’ve concluded that the problem does not lie there. A couple of reboots and some fiddling, and it was sending the message as far as the blower, but it wasn’t reaching the compressor outside.

Both the AC and the furnace were old enough to drink legally when I bought the place, so I’m grateful for nearly two and a half years of them working, but man, am I an AC baby. (That was one of my biggest whines about living in Europe: they really haven’t taken to AC. And don’t get me started about Seattle—those people have no excuse.) And technicians from the HVAC company I called three times on Saturday (and once yesterday) did not call back—evidently if you don’t “need service before the next business day”, they can’t be arsed.

But it could have been worse—at around 1830 on Saturday I walked into the kitchen to discover that the microwave, toaster oven, half-freezer and wine cooler were dead. The circuit breaker was fine, so I couldn’t figure out what to do. But I Know A Guy—and when I called him, he diagnosed that one of the GFCIs must have blown. And it turns out he was right. What a relief.

So today, I’m grateful for the comfort of AC. I’m grateful that this weekend the temperature indoors has not exceeded 79F. I’m grateful that I’ve got a recommendation for another HVAC company. I’m grateful for the remote electrical service. I’m grateful that all my appliances are working. And I’m grateful that if I have to replace the AC unit, I can afford it.

Seems like a goodly portion of gratitude.

Ev'ry rung goes higher

I gotta tell you that this week at work scored about a 9.7 on my weird shit-o-meter, for a number of reasons. We had quite a lot to discuss at our regular team meeting yesterday, and our manager closed it out by enjoining us all to try to relax a little today, because our company has made Juneteenth a paid holiday in the U.S.

But it occurred to me as he did that that none of the people on that call had to pull themselves out of a hole of institutionalized, systemic racism to get to where we are—we’re all white, and mostly male. That’s one of the definitions of privilege: you don’t have to have a special day called out for you achieving de jure (if not de facto) release from slavery.

Juneteenth marks the day (19 June 1865) that Union general arrived in Galveston, Texas, with the news that the War Between the States was over, the Confederacy lost it and consequently human chattel slavery was at an end. Imagine what it must have been like to be in slavery all your life, and then one day some dude you've never heard of announces you're now free--just like the white people. It must have felt like being dropped in an alien world that looked like yours, but was way different. We're 155 years on and that world of de jure equality still hasn't made it to de facto.

“June Nineteenth” morphed into Juneteenth, celebrated by African Americans and ignored by white folks.

Our CEO and senior leadership—almost all white and preponderantly male—have taken concrete steps in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and subsequent international protests to champion diversity and belonging in the company. Word came down late Wednesday that we’d be getting today off, and it seems appropriate that I spend at least some of it thinking about my own privilege and what I can do to counteract the inequities I see around me.

So, even though I gave you Sweet Honey in the Rock last Friday, I’m thinking that Juneteenth is a good time to hear their version of “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder”, recorded for the Ken Burns documentary, The Civil War.

We're 155 years on and that world of de jure equality still hasn't made it to de facto. But we can keep on climbing together. 

Thanks and games

On one of my recent perambulations around the hood I came across a couple of interesting things.

First, this sign in someone’s sidelight:

Then there was this…art? Recreational embellishment?

I dunno, but both efforts brightened my day.

Fly on the wall

It’s been on the cool side here in the environs of the District They Call Columbia. Like in the 60s and 70s, which is bizarre.

But I’m thinking that those low temps may account for a visitor I had on my patio screen throughout Monday morning.

I took that through the screen, and he didn’t move when I opened the door to get a shot from the outside in:

However, he did move around on the screen and eventually he must have warmed up enough to fly away.

At any rate, I was quite happy to see him.

Workplace blues

My employer is working through its plans to phase in opening its offices globally. No one who doesn’t want to return to working on campus has to do so (unless you’ve got a job that absolutely requires it), and I opted to continue working from home.

So Sunday I went in to retrieve the remaining personal Items I still had in my desk. This mainly consisted of a bottle of Glühwein, a bottle of Dutch beer and a bottle of ibuprofen. As long as I was there, I took a bunch of files to the burn barrel and scooped up a few yellow stickies and a couple of pens from the drawer. I'm not going to be back for a long time.

But what struck me was how different “the office” is going to be.

One-way traffic patterns:

I completely violated them, but I was by myself and I was wearing the obligatory mask.

Workstations blocked off for any kind of use:

Ditto the four-person conference rooms:

The supply cabinets:

And the kitchens emptied of snacks and beverages and all the furniture stacked:

I confess I cried a little, because so much of what made it a pleasure to commute the one mile to work was the visible comradery. No more turning around at my desk to ask my manager a crackbrained question. No more schmoozing in the kitchen. No more whiteboarding in the conference rooms.

Even the building elevator and lobby are changed:

I made the right decision by choosing not to return, but this is just so sad.

Gratitude Monday: candor and yoga

During my weekly one-to-one with my manager last week, we were discussing the user testing I’m meant to be running on a new application that has been built in paranoid secrecy for the past six months by Engineering. There’s a long, shaggy story associated with this, but essentially this whole thing has been run by a guy whose company we acquired last year; he’s been given carte blanche to develop it, and it turns out he holds no truck with either product roadmaps or product managers.

I expect he feels both things cramp his legend-in-his-own-mind style.

We—meaning product management—were first promised that we’d have a prototype for internal testing sometime in May. Then, faithfully, it was 1 June. Absolutely. On Tuesday, 2 June, at the weekly business unit meeting, our VP described the application and said internal testing would start “this week”. On Wednesday, 3 June—in reply to an email requesting some information—the engineering manager said that they were still cleaning things up and we’d move the internal testing to today, 15 June.

But on Friday, that date had changed yet again, and now we’re promised 22 June.

It’s like traveling in the desert and seeing that shimmering mirage, only to have it disappear as you get close to it.

And this is a product that’s supposed to launch the first week in August.

Well, from the beginning, Engineering as taken on Mr. Genius’s attitude that we don’t need no stinkin’ user tests (or product managers). Since March I’ve been met with deflections and delays as I try to build out a plan, accompanied by comments like, “we don’t want to put a lot of process around this.” And, as you might imagine, I find this off-putting, especially since we’ve worked well with the engineering manager for the nine months I’ve been there.

But the engineering director, whom I’ve given the epithet Foghorn Leghorn, has been a complete prick, not to put too fine a point upon it. Yes, he’s getting pressure from MG, but instead of manning up, he’s just been passing it on and amplifying it.

via GIPHY

Okay, well, back to the chat with my manager. I was quasi zoning out when I caught something I wasn’t quite sure I’d heard correctly, so I asked him to repeat it. “Your obvious anger is not helping matters.”

“It comes through on the calls?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Is it my tone or my vocabulary?” (When I get pissed off my language moves into hifalutin sesquipedalian words and long, complex sentence structure.) Eh, he couldn’t think of an instance, but he said he’d clue me in the next time it happens.

Well, crap. I did not intend for that to happen. And—as I specified to my manager—I would not want to do anything to make life difficult for the engineering manager, who’s been very patient and helpful to me. (I was notably silent about Foghorn.) Also—though I didn’t say it—I do not want to be the kind of cowboy who makes the blood drain from my manager’s face every time I unmute myself on a call as he dreads what I’m going to say next.

Look—we all have a lot of moving parts these days, what with a global pandemic, lockdown, protests and all outside of the office. And then we’ve got this incredibly chaotic nonsense at work; launch is stressful when you don’t have massive dysfunction, and our MG-driven dysfunction is off the charts. But that’s no excuse for me being a jerk.

But being aware of it is the beginning of remediating it. And I’ve also started remote yoga lessons with a friend of mine who is an exceptionally good instructor. I'm noticing greater flexibility, especially in the neck, which I'd started worrying about, and after a session I just feel more relaxed and centered. I swear, the Warrior II pose is my spirit animal, and I’ve taken to doing some poses on calls where I don’t have to take notes. It’s transformational.

So, today I’m grateful for a candid manager and a friend who can teach me career-saving coping skills. I’m truly blessed.