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Jan. 30th, 2018 07:46 pmLunchtime ride: windy. I always know it's going to be interesting when I can hear the vent covers being blown open and clanging closed on the roof. We rode down to Boulder the fast way and back along rural roads. The way down was a mix of quartering tailwind from the left, where we'd scoot up to 50 km/h or so, with occasional huge blasts of headwind from the right, that would slow the person in front down so quickly it appeared to people behind like the person was doing an emergency stop. But once we got headed back north and then east, we scooted along at approximately automotive speeds.
There were doughnuts in the break room this morning. One was maple. That's my kryptonite. As I ate it, I was thinking about how far I'd have to ride to burn it off again. By combining my bike computer and Google, I calculate I burnt 4.75 doughnuts at lunch. (I could have had another! damn!)
I'm not a manager. I don't want to be a manager. I'd be terrible. But I'm becoming a manager, at least a social one, at work. My coworker comes to me to ask me what he should do next and what his longer term priority list should be. My manager comes to me and lets me know what he thinks my coworker should be working on. They don't dislike each other, but my coworker drives everyone he works with crazy, except me. (I was talking with a friend about his tendency to come in and ask a leading question that provides him with context to point out that we are doing a lot of new stuff on a very short time budget with insufficient direction, upwards of eight times a day, and the content of his nervousness is almost word for word identical every time. I feel like my, or any of my coworkers', response isn't really important, because he's going to continue doing this, and at that point my choice is to be nice or be a jerk, and I'd rather be nice.)
I wrote a program that controls some communication hardware, and tried very hard to abstract as much of the hardware and firmware details as possible, to make it into a black box function that takes the minimum number possible of inputs, with the most obvious names I could come up with, and sent it to him encapsulated in a demonstration program to illustrate its functionality. We went through it, and he wanted me to talk him through every single line of the code, twice. It's not because he's stupid. I think he's just terrified by change, and he's trying to resist and produce enough friction and inertia that we do things the way we did them in the past. We can't: we don't have enough time, and for the next year we're not going to be able to hire someone new to replace our coworker who died, so it's change-for-greater-efficiency or failure, and while change could fail, it might not. I'm not managing to convey this to him very effectively. (But I am clearly doing so better than anyone else.)
There were doughnuts in the break room this morning. One was maple. That's my kryptonite. As I ate it, I was thinking about how far I'd have to ride to burn it off again. By combining my bike computer and Google, I calculate I burnt 4.75 doughnuts at lunch. (I could have had another! damn!)
I'm not a manager. I don't want to be a manager. I'd be terrible. But I'm becoming a manager, at least a social one, at work. My coworker comes to me to ask me what he should do next and what his longer term priority list should be. My manager comes to me and lets me know what he thinks my coworker should be working on. They don't dislike each other, but my coworker drives everyone he works with crazy, except me. (I was talking with a friend about his tendency to come in and ask a leading question that provides him with context to point out that we are doing a lot of new stuff on a very short time budget with insufficient direction, upwards of eight times a day, and the content of his nervousness is almost word for word identical every time. I feel like my, or any of my coworkers', response isn't really important, because he's going to continue doing this, and at that point my choice is to be nice or be a jerk, and I'd rather be nice.)
I wrote a program that controls some communication hardware, and tried very hard to abstract as much of the hardware and firmware details as possible, to make it into a black box function that takes the minimum number possible of inputs, with the most obvious names I could come up with, and sent it to him encapsulated in a demonstration program to illustrate its functionality. We went through it, and he wanted me to talk him through every single line of the code, twice. It's not because he's stupid. I think he's just terrified by change, and he's trying to resist and produce enough friction and inertia that we do things the way we did them in the past. We can't: we don't have enough time, and for the next year we're not going to be able to hire someone new to replace our coworker who died, so it's change-for-greater-efficiency or failure, and while change could fail, it might not. I'm not managing to convey this to him very effectively. (But I am clearly doing so better than anyone else.)
