Grains of reality

A couple of nights ago I spilled about half a box of couscous grains all over the kitchen counter and the floor.

That stuff is a nightmare—it’s like sharp-edged rice, and it sticks to the soles of your feet (even with socks) like burrs. I didn’t want to dump it in the sink for fear that it would balloon up when wet and clog the drain. Ditto even washing my socks—I have visions of it filling up the washer and foaming out onto the floor.

(After all that, it tasted really nasty (the stuff I didn’t spill)—the spices were weird, and I suspect it might not be authentic. It was, however, old—the box actually had a circle on the top labeled “price”. As in from the days when markets used a labeler jobber to slap prices on merchandise.)

I want a Roomba. But a Roomba that will mop the floor and then climb up onto the counter and wipe that down, too.

Leadership lessons

From 23 December until Monday, my manager took over for the VP, who was out on paternity leave. During that time, he was running not only the product management group, but a variety of co-equal branches of the business unit. Monday morning I left him a mini-bottle of bourbon (his particular tipple) with a snarky note congratulating him for surviving paternity leave.

But aside from the snot, it struck me over the weekend that he must have been under tremendous strain—not only from regular operations, but because Mr. BW has basically stuck a big spoon into the division and stirred vigorously. It did not occur to me until I consciously turned my mind to it at the weekend—because he made it look like it wasn’t anything at all. He was not any less accessible or responsive to our PM needs; everything ran as though we were his only concern. Yet he was responsive to all the other departments as well as us.

During our weekly one-to-one yesterday, something sparked me to tell him that. That I had no notion at all that he was under exceptional pressure because nothing fell on me. He replied that he’d felt plenty of pressure and I responded that I never saw it.

I assure you I have not had the reason or the desire to tell many of my managers anything like this. Today I’m going to inform the VP. I’m sure he knows it, but I want him to know that I know it, too.

Give a mouse a cookie

I do not know what’s going on—it’s nowhere near the end of the quarter, but on Monday two different account managers emailed me separately to ask if I might graciously condescend to grant them a few minutes of my precious time to speak on matters of importance yesterday.

One was fairly direct—he’s working on a deal, and in the course of his rounds discovered that I know someone with the customer involved somehow in making the decision on which vendor to choose. When we spoke, he spent five minutes buttering me up—I work for the division that is the absolute industry leader, that must be marvelous and I must be genius-level smart. But—sadly—when it came to giving him any help, I was functionally useless. I do not know what my friend does in his company, and for that matter, I do not know what the particular solutions are. I don’t do boxes.

But I gave him a few bits of info that I know about my friend as a person (“What about if I host a happy hour?” “He doesn’t drink.”), and he had to go off with that. I know I was a bitter disappointment to him.

When I got the email from the second account manager Monday evening, I IM’d my manager and asked, “Any idea who X is, and why he’d email to ask me if I have five minutes to chat?” Here’s the reply:

“That’s unexpected. He’s a very effective sales guy who works on the [team] team. Keep me posted on how that goes and be mindful of what you offer. If you give a mouse a cookie…he’s going to eat your face.”

Well, yeah.

In the event, this guy was smooth, and a super sharp dresser. I felt like a frump. And I was wearing cashmere. But in this case, I was able to provide more substantive help: I hold the keys to access to one of the products I manage. We’re parsimonious about what we let account managers into; with reason. He was clearly cognizant of that, but he’d paved the way by talking with a couple of people and getting their buy-in.

There was a bit of a kerfuffle, but I got him what he needed, and he was very gracious in his thanks. He told me he’s been with the company a long time, and if I need any help, he knows things.

This is how you build alliances, folks. Being tight with someone who can pull skeletons out of his pocket is a very useful thing. I’ll take that over a happy hour any day.

Return of the father

Our VP returned from paternity leave yesterday. He’d been out since 20 December, and apparently he took the term “out” seriously: as soon as the Help Desk staff got in, he had to go down to get his emails synched on his mobile again.

There must have been tens of thousands of them backed up in those six weeks.

I’m sure this is a relief to my manager, who’d been acting in the VP’s place during this time. He did a bang-up job, but he was working just about all the hours God sends, and we’re in weird times, what with Mr. Big Wheel and all.

WRT what, precisely, is going on, I’m still unclear. Actually, I think everyone’s still unclear about that, including Mr. BW. But with the return of the VP, we have one more layer of sanity to cushion us.

Gratitude Monday: bad medicine

As I mentioned a while ago, I’m in the process of trying to reclaim my knees from decrepitude. When I saw the orthopod two weeks ago, he said that the process of getting the hyaluronate for injections could take four to six weeks.

Last week I found out why.

On Tuesday, I picked up a voicemail from a woman who identified herself as Kayla in the orthopod’s office. She wanted to talk with me “about your injections”. She gave me a callback number including an extension, which she said would be answered “by someone named Julie”, but I should ask for Kayla.

Well, I rang twice on Tuesday, getting voicemail both times. Wednesday morning, I called around 0845, went straight to voicemail again and left a message saying this was my third call and if I did not receive a callback by 0930, my next one would be to the office manager.

At 1000, I called and spoke to someone who said that Kayla only works Mondays and Fridays (not mentioned in her message to me), and that she doesn’t have a direct extension, so that’s why she gave me the Julie line. There was a note in my record that Julie had rung my (home) number at 0927 and left a message.

Well, I spoke with Julie, who said Kayla hadn’t left any notations in my record regarding what she needed from me. She said she’d text Kayla and see what was going on, and she’d call me.

Needless to say, there was no call. On Friday morning, I rang again and asked for the office manager. Naturally the person who picked up the line wanted to know why, and I gave her the 30,000-foot view. She danced around for a while trying to fob me off, and eventually said that Kayla was in the office and would I rather speak with her? I drew in a deep breath and said okay.

Well, Kayla was pretty bolshie—she claimed that she’d annotated my chart and Julie could have asked for the information, nothing to do with her. And it turns out that what she wanted was the exact name of the hyaluronate I had been given five years ago. She claimed that without that information, Cigna (my insurer) might well deny my treatment.

I was dumbfounded, so I asked if she meant that if I’d never been treated with hyaluronate before, Cigna wouldn’t let me start? She assured me that it was entirely probable. So either I dug out that information from my orthopod from five years ago, or live in pain. She was entirely indifferent to which I chose; nothing whatsoever to do with her.

Considering that my insurer at that time never had a problem with the treatment, I find this extraordinary. But whatever.

When I got home that afternoon from my first physical therapy session, I tracked down my PCP from 2015. Fortunately the practice is gigantic (including every possible specialty) and Tina in my old PCP’s office called me verified when I went through several addresses that might be on my records (I hit the jackpot with D.C.); she didn’t make me cough up a phone number that I hadn’t used in five years. She pinpointed the treatment, but had no info on the hyaluronate because that was done by the orthopod.

But Tina connected me with Cindy, in the orthopedist’s office, and Cindy came through with the name. (Orthovisc, if you’re asking.) I thanked her profusely.

I called Kayla back—calling the main number, waiting for a human and asking for Kayla, but do not put me through to an extension that only goes to voicemail. The human kind of sniffed, and then told me that Kayla’s extension is 1422. Interesting, as the Julie-never-answered line is 1411.

Well, I gave Kayla the information. And she thanked me. But it turns out that part of the reason that this process takes so long is that she doesn’t stir her stumps to set it in motion until days after you’ve seen the doctor. She described a future of back-and-forth with Cigna, that—if I’m extremely lucky—ends with the doctor’s office receiving the hyaluronate (for which I pay—again, unlike my previous experience with another insurer) and them graciously condescending to set up the multiple appointments for the injections.

Jeez Louise.

So here’s what I’m grateful for today: that Tina and Cindy, with Palo Alto Medical Foundation, were so on top of things; that Tina gave me the benefit of the doubt on my identity verification; that PAMF had the information I needed; and that I closed out the day at least knowing what’s ahead. I told Cindy that my convos with her and Tina were the best of the day, and I meant it. Would that the staff at OrthoVirginia were as good.

My brush with stardom

I wasn’t much of a fan of the 1950s Hollywood movie stars. I think it’s because in those movies (which I mostly saw on Channel 9’s Million Dollar Movies) they seemed so far removed from any reality that touched me. There was no way that I could connect with them.

So when a Navy videographer friend of mine came into town one summer with his team for a project with Kirk Douglas, I though the invitation to shoot the production stills as more of a lark than anything else. (I love shooting those.)

The spot was part of what was called “Sitrep 30”—a half-hour of essentially newsreel-type news that was broadcast at Navy installations and on ships. The film The Final Countdown (about the supercarrier USS Nimitz being thrown back in time to December 1940 near the Hawaiian Islands; Douglas played the captain) had just been released, and the team’s commander had managed to wangle the star into a pro bono voiceover narration, with stand-ups for the beginning and the end.

I helped edit the script the night before, and on the day, we converged on the Helmsman statue at a small park in Marina Del Rey. We got set up and Douglas showed with his lawyer/manager—he was apparently on his way to evict a tenant from one of the condos he owned in the area.

Well, it was not a felicitous experience—Douglas kept flubbing his lines for the standups, so the commander had to quickly write up gigantic cue cards. Then the soundman kept having to re-record, what with the air horns from boats in the marina and take-offs and landings at nearby LAX. The actor was impatient with it all, so we did a bit of scrambling.

But eventually we got enough to go with, and I got to shoot about a gazillion frames. (I was loaded with two Nikons, one for black-and-white and one for color.) Here are a couple:

His obits said that he was active in the community, and a major factor in ending the Hollywood blacklist. Maybe he was just having a bad day. And so may his memory be a blessing.

Also toadies

You’re familiar with collective nouns, right? An army of ants. A fleet of ships. A flock of sheep. A murder of crows…

Yesterday we all learned the collective noun for lickspittles: a Senate.

But he's still impeached.

Belief systems

Apropos of nothing, really—except that at time of writing we still haven’t seen Cadet Bonespurs deliver his willie-waving SOTU address—here’s something I shot on one of my walks.

It’s good to know that people have strong beliefs.

I believe I’ll have another drink.

The best medicine

It says something—a great deal, tbh—about where we are that #StoneColdIdiot can trend on Twitter and everyone in the world knows immediately who that idiot is. (Former Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill used the phrase in response to the Kleptocrat’s tweet about the Kansas City Chiefs doing “the great state of Kansas” proud in the Super Bowl on Sunday. He’s clearly a guy who not only could not find Ukraine on a map, but he couldn’t find Missouri on one, either.)

He’s going to be acquitted by the gutless lickspittle Republican-controlled Senate tomorrow. They fear his tweets more than they honor the Constitution or their sworn oaths of office and of this process. A few of them have gone on TV to proclaim that he’s surely learned his lesson from this experience, so we won’t have to worry about him abusing his office again. That’s their lame rationale for absolving themselves of the need to convict and remove him from office.

Anyone with three synapses firing in sequence (which does in fact include many Republicans) knows this is utterly false. Cadet Bonespurs is incapable of learning anything, much less how to act like a President of the United States and conduct himself with the dignity befitting the office. And his red-hatted goober fans will cheer him on regardless. (Actually, they’ll cheer him on because he won’t learn and will continue his increasingly slurred and staggering capering about the world’s stage. In this he is their true representative.) So, he’ll declare a major victory against decency and up his campaign fundraising.

(Also, apparently, he'll go after the people on his enemies list. Just like a mob boss.)

My take is that he’ll certainly feel so empowered by this experience that he turns the State of the Union address tonight into one of his campaign rallies, lying for however long he can stand while Republican Senators and Representatives fill in for the MAGAts, cheering him on. But here’s my hope:

The instant he opens his yap, Democrats should start laughing. Maybe just a few chuckles and giggles to begin with. But they should move into guffaws and belly laughs until the entire chamber is roaring with hilarity. If there’s one thing in the world he can’t bear, it’s ridicule. (Remember how he took his tiny balls home early from NATO after that video of world leaders poking fun at him?) Just keep slapping your knees and holding your sides until he shuts up and leaves.

I’m thinking of the Star Trek episode, “Day of the Dove”, where the Federation crew and the Klingons stop fighting one another and instead laugh. It kills the entity that was feeding on their hate and fury. I say we should give it a shot here. It’s one thing that will get the #StoneColdIdiot’s attention. And his goat.

Gratitude Monday: purposeful work

Last week was quite the marathon at work. As I mentioned in my post on Friday, I had 25 meetings, 20 of which I scheduled. There’s a lot of stuff we in product management have against our names this year, and I was really hoping that the four two-hour sessions I put into the books would give us a leg up.

We had a kind of a spanner tossed into the works on Tuesday, when a Big Wheel showed up and took over two meetings (nearly three hours), pontificating on How Things Will Be to both engineering and PM. There are reasons why he’s been asked to do this, but the jury’s still out pondering whether he’s a savior or a seagull.

(Seagull managers are ones that swoop in, crap on everything and fly away, leaving everyone else to clean up the mess.)

And by “the jury” I mean “me”.

Even so, we got a metric ton of work done, and made significant progress on the Brioche project, if not so much on PM’s strategy. Turns out that, when you’re working for a cybersecurity company, standing up an application for external testing involves at least two metric tons of boxes to tick, from stakeholders I’d never even heard of before last month.

Just before he got on a flight back to Amsterdam on Friday, the leader of the team building Brioche thanked me for all the hard work I’d put in throughout the week. They really needed me to be on top of all the box-tickings, because if I weren’t, we’d be delayed forever; this is stuff they didn’t know about before last month. I replied that this would be the first time I’ve ever said this about a week of 25 meetings, but it was a pleasure.

And it was—not seven hours of back-to-backs on Tuesday, or Mr. BW, maybe. But pulling together people and plans and feeling like I made valuable contributions was indeed a pleasure. Which extended into the weekend, when I got together with MG to plan the agenda and create a preso for a meeting today at 0930 with Mr. BW, to explain Project Brioche to him and help him decide to keep the project going.

I realized while out on a walk yesterday that I’d have resented the hell out of spending a few hours on my weekend on any project for my last three employers. But I jumped right on it this time because keeping Brioche going is important to the company, and because I do not want to let my team down, even a little bit. They get everything I’ve got.

And that is my gratitude today—to be part of a team that inspires me to be better and work harder. It’s definitely part of #playingtowin.