I've been saving this up.

[mbarrick]

This has been a very stressful week. Last Thursday and Friday we had our "Process Simplification Training" with the consultants. That was a who shitload of fun. Want to have a "conversation for opportunity"? I promise to "listen generously" and "enroll" you with a "conversation for action" if you have a "breakthough goal". I distinguished myself right off the bat when, as part of the first exercize we had to rate a number of things on a scale of 1 to 7 (seven being the "good" end of the scale) about what we thought and hoped to get out of the seminar. Everyone rated everything in the 5-6 range in an effort to appear keen, but not too keen. What did I do? I rated the that I figured the seminar would be a "2" for usefulness: not completely useless, but damn close. I gave myself 6's on the risk I was willing to take and how much I planned to participate, and I meant it. It's pretty clear that the only guy willing to say uo front "this is going to be next to useless" is willing to take some risk and isn't afraid to speak up. As is typical I hung back until things started getting intensely stupid and then started "empowering" people with "conversations for action" to actually get some actual planning done so there would be something to show at the end of the two days.

The usefulness and practicality of the consultants can be nicely summed up by a freakish power outage that occurred Friday afternoon. There was a moment of stunned silence from everyone, followed by one of the consultants observing "the power can't be out, all the laptops are still running." To which the room full of assorted I.S. professionals replied nearly in unison, "Batteries". "Now what?" The consultant who at that point was presenting to us was using an easel, paper, and a marker to give her presentation before the power had gone out. "Move the easel over by the window where we can see it and keep going," I said, finsihing the thought in my head with, "so we can get this uselss crap over with and go do some real work."

At the end of the day some work had been accomplished and I took the lead on the communications integration project. In fact I pounced on the project as a calculated career move. After taking on this responsibility, being able to cut loose at Retroactiv at what was once The Twilight Zone was most definitely needed.

This, however, has led to a rather stressful week so far. Basically I am responsible now for getting two offices and seven mills working together on an integrated communications system. September 2005 is the goal for this and the proposed costs are in being measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars. Want stress? We're not talkng, "I think I did badly on my midterm" or "I still have five more pages to write on a paper due tomorrow" type stress here. That kind of stress would be a vacation, a veritable stroll in the park.

So I have been working extra hours lately, and, as you may have noticed, haven't had the time to fart around on LJ much. In an effort not to burn out I've been taking "lunch" breaks and coming home in the middle of the day to hang with Elaine and the cats for a bit, which would work a lot better if our apartment wasn't a fucking construction zone. They've been hanging the new fire escape this week, which on the one hand is a good thing because it will soon be done, but it doesn't make for a relaxing break to have steelworkers yelling, clanging things, welding, tromping through the apartment, et al. Add to that the electrician in and out to repair the work that didn't meet code and the drywaller fixing the gaping chasm left by the electrician.

As is typical the drywall job has been left half-fiished and is, so far, sucking. He cracked a huge chunk of wood off the door trim that I spend quite a bit of time repairing be re-sculpting the missing bit of trim in plaster. I also sanded and filled enourmous chips made in the trim near the area being drywalled that I just know from experience would never have been sanded even or filled before being painted over and I don't want my entryway looking as shitty as the paint job on the balcony. ¼" drywall is being used to patch the hole in the plaster, only the wood slats behind the plaster are also gone and the drywall isn't anchored well enough: it moved when you push it with your finger. The holes for the electrical fixtures are a mile off and will need serious filling. These two things combined mean the the first time someone leans up against the wall to take off their shoes the filler around the breaker box, light switch, and fire alarm with crack and probably crumble.

I'm stressed out at work and my home is a disaster area rather than my sanctuary, so I'm staying stressed out. Fuck am I ever looking forward to C10 and a some industrial strength stress-relief.

On the plus side of life, however, Elaine has actually pushed me into sending a couple slides off to a magazine competition. There is no way I would have done it otherwise. I would never have found the time to have looked up the competition in the first place, let alone get slides ready for it and send them off. I've been resisting doing anything that feels remotely work-like after work, thankfully I have someone here to push me when and where I really need to be pushed.

Comments

damn...

[bitogoth.livejournal.com]

*hugs* maybe you and elaine should meet up at the park for lunch- you both could probably use some time out of the apartment together. your post *almost* makes me feel better about the shitty patching job they did to the plaster, the fact that i won't be able to pick up paint for a couple weeks yet, and that the enxt time it rains it will be the whole scenario all over again. gah.

Re: damn...

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

The tiles around on your bathroom window-sill could use some serious help as well. Last time we were there I found myself having to resist the urge to pull up all the loose tiles, seal the area properly, then replace and re-gout them. It's even more criminal in your place, because there are so many beautiful old buildings and so many millions more people that you'd think there would be plenty of craftsmen around who could pull these basic tasks off. Here there is a least the excuse that buildings over 75 years old are quite rare and it isn't terribly suprising that 20-something contractor-grunts have never worked with load-bearing brick walls, slats-and-plaster internal walls, hand-crafted decorative moulding, layers of paint that have built up over a century, etc.

Re: damn...

[bitogoth.livejournal.com]

they did and it's a lousy job as well. of course, those tiles were put down to "fix" the windowframe which is rotting away. and who forgot to include the letter with her rent check this month? *sigh*

the craftsmen are there, but the build owners refuse to hire them. more motivation to buy my own home so i can fix it up properly...

Re: damn...

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

I can never understand why a large building like yours wouldn't simply trade rent-for-work from a qualified handyman. There are what, 90 apartments in your building? Give the handyman free rent, and devote a small fraction of everyone's rent to give him money for living expenses and the problem is solved. Presuming and extremely modest average rent of $1250 for the sake of a round number, devoting 3%/unit to his living expenses would give him $3300/mo to live on, pretty good if you don't have any rent to pay. Put another 7% aside for maintainance costs and he has a repair budget of over $7,700/mo to work with. That leaves just over $100,000/mo for building services, taxes, and profit. We'll be generous and presume the place costs, on average, $5,000 a month for heat (wild ass guess - I have no idea what it would cost to run a boiler in a building that size in your climate) and is has an assesed worth of $10,000,000, making the monthy tax bill about $30,000. Let's assume that the landlord *just* bought the building with an $7,000,000 mortgage at a very sucky 9% rate and has a $55,000 montly payment. That still leaves the landlord $10,000/mo. profit. How greedy do you have to be?

[valerian.livejournal.com]

I really hope I wasn't being too pushy. I am just afraid that like me, you will let your job overshadow your creative pursuits. Although I figure that I'm taking full-time hours at home to research grants, galleries, publishers, competitions & stuff for *us*, not just for me. It's obvious that you can't have a full-time job and do all this research and crap too, god knows I've tried. It's my hope that our combined efforts will pay off for us. Remember - we didn't go to art school for nothing. I'll be damned if I'm gonna let someone else waste their education like I have up until now!

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

Not at all. I needed the push. Once it was actually done I felt really good about it. That's how this is supposed to work - neither one of us can do everything alone.

I have to dig up an old piece of software that I wrote...

[logik.livejournal.com]

You'd love it.

It is basically a clone of MOTD, that randomly generates "business oriented feedback" based on piped input.

In other words, it scans messages for keywords, recombines them and then generates a random response based on an internal dictionary of business double talk, with each phrase neatly cancelled out with another phrase later on in the same document. I ran it on port 8089 and backended my corporate email to it when I needed to be left alone for a while.

See a sample from june 1999:

"Thank you for that email.

Your email really got me to thinking about how we can implement more customer-focused strategies and synergizing them with our value add propositions.
It was a refreshing change to see someone in our organization directly address our need to leverage our existing processes. As an organization I believe that we can be proactive in this area, provided that we are more responsive to a shifting marketplace, as implied by your communication. I think that I see your point. The current policy driven approach to deployment of our customer focus, though adequate to meet our needs, may become a limiting factor in our current market growth. Your ideas are "out of the box" and really proactive. By implementing a policy of responsiveness and optimizing our business communication, I see how we can improve the ROI on our process time. Your observation really brings home the underlying need to address our need of stronger communications policies that help us define more clearly what our customers should want, and makes me think that perhaps the current segmentation model does not adequately synergize our process need with our need to motivate consumers.

I hope to discuss your ideas with you in more detail at a future date, but I am unfortunately involved in a major rethinking of our current deployment. I should have some time available in the next few weeks. In the meantime, have you run this idea through marketing?"

It could also come up with "process names" who's acronym was always a very very rude word if you examined it closely.

I'll have to dig it out - NetBSD/Linux glibc 2 or Solaris...

Re: I have to dig up an old piece of software that I wrote...

[mbarrick.livejournal.com]

Perfect.