NaBloPoMo 2020

Calculated risk

Confirmed U.S. cases of COVID-19. This line is way too steep a curve. Remember the curve from March? Yeah…this ain’t flat.

Medical professionals, amplified by the news media, have been vocal about their opposition to holiday gatherings this year. Who can blame them?

The pandemic is out of control.

The pandemic is out of control because Americans don’t want to do what is necessary, and they aren’t trained to think about systems and consequences.

I know I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating. The reason it bears repeating is TGF and I are on day 15 of our pre-holiday quarantine.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday and 2020 has taken so much that I decided a while ago I wasn’t willing to give it up. To figure out if Thanksgiving with MyMom, who is vulnerable due to age and due to a chronic lung condition, we did the math.

The CDC defines close contact as:

You were within 6 feet of someone who has COVID-19 for a total of 15 minutes or more
You provided care at home to someone who is sick with COVID-19
You had direct physical contact with the person (hugged or kissed them)
You shared eating or drinking utensils
They sneezed, coughed, or somehow got respiratory droplets on you

Based on these criteria and a deep, abiding desire to avoid having to plan my mother’s funeral for as long as possible, TGF and I made some assumptions:

Eating together is high risk. It requires being unmasked, and I doubt my mother’s dining room table is more than 6ft long. Also, if the weather is normal for where I live I expect it to be about 50degF and rainy just in time for Thanksgiving dinner.
I am the biggest risk vector. I have been going to in-person physical therapy for a shoulder injury. This requires some close contact with the therapist and distanced contact while inside a room with other people, who are also distanced.
TGF is the next biggest risk vector. She has been going to the grocery store and running other errands, always masked, always doing her best to maintain that 6ft/2M worth of distance.
MyMom has been exactly three places between February and today: Her doctor’s office (September), LabCorp (September), the dentist x 2 (no later than October 15th).

Because we are careful and all three have low exposures we made a choice to refrain from getting tested. After all, what better place to get exposed to COVID than a testing site?

The CDC also has guidance on how to quarantine if you are sick or think you may have been exposed to someone who is infected with SARS-Cov2 and is asymptomatic.

I have had no contact, not even masked or socially distanced, with anyone but TGF since November 4th.

TGF did a grocery shop in the middle of the day on November 10th, masked and as socially distanced as controllable, and has had no contact, not even masked and socially distanced, with anyone but me since that day.

Indeed, neither one of us has physically left the house in at least 10 days.

How to calculate when your quarantine starts and ends based on potential exposure. Courtesy CDC.gov

That means today is day 15 of a hard quarantine for both of us.

And while will be having Thanksgiving dinner and the usual events tomorrow, we’ll be doing all that with some precautions:

Traveling with no exposure to other people (i.e., we are literally walking)
Masks for TGF and me unless we are actually eating.
Limiting contact between us and MyMom even while we are masked.
Seating will be spread as far apart as possible while we are actually eating.

And, if course, MyMom has the absolutely right to decide she is not comfortable with any of this as late as when we open her front door.

Life inherently contains risk. The trick is to manage it smartly.

The dream is always the same

One of the great gifts of “these trying times” is the realization that depression isn’t my primary problem.

Anxiety is my primary problem.

The scientific method tells us that now probably isn’t the best time to consider that a hard conclusion given the amount of generalized anxiety in 2020 what with the pandemic and the possibility of a second Trump term. There are some leading indicators that it’s a strong candidate though.

I haven’t been a good sleeper for decades. Where other people see sleep as mechanical restoration or as a respite from the world, sleep for me is a challenge. It’s something I can never do right where right is defined as “coming out feeling rested, refreshed, and ready to take on a new day’s challenges.” Menopause has only made this worse.

It started a couple of years ago with the hot flashes, which were fine as long as they were only happening during the day. When they started happening regularly at 03:00 they got more than a little inconvenient. At least they were predictable, I told myself.

Somewhen during that initial year I reformed my attitude on sleep. The idea that we should be sleeping 8 hours right through is misguided at best and farcical at worst.

Waking up at night is normal, according to WebMD. And while this is one of the few WebMD articles that doesn’t immediately lead to “You have cancer,” waking up can be an indicator of something serious.

What matters, most experts says, is how quickly you get back to sleep. Which is a comfort when you wake up multiple times during the night.

The thing is, removing the pressure to “get good sleep” combined with other good sleep hygiene habits – consistent bed time, avoiding sugar, caffeine, and digital screens at night – has actually improved my sleep. Sure, I still wake up multiple times but if I’m back to sleep in under 15 minutes, I’m usually going to wake up rested.

Then the pandemic happened.

My usual level of anxiety – around a 4 on most days – rocketed up to about an average of 7 on a scale of 0 to 10. And that’s when the dreams started.

I don’t remember all of them. But they’re intense and weird.

In one memorable one this summer I was part of an outlaw gang hiding in the mountains. While the gang played board games I had to figure out in a wintertime mountain environment how they could go surfing. Shades of Point Break perhaps?

Then there was the house with bleeding walls. That was a fun one. Strangely, it was the house from How to Get Away with Murder.

And my brain is susceptible to influence. Fuck The Mandalorian and ice cave spiders. Fuck it right in the ear with a chainsaw.

These nightmares have gotten so frequent that even though I have the physical reaction – the terror, the sweating, the awakening, the aftermath – when I have what I’ve started to think of as the basic COVID-19 nightmare I can pretty much shrug it off because I know what it means because the dream is always the same.

Last night my two favorite grocery store chains had decided to open a location that was just one big megastore. Instead of having to go to one store for these items – special treats all because the closest outlet of this chain is not easy to park at and the next closest while easy to park at isn’t all that close – and this other store for the regular groceries, I could now go one single place to get all the yummy things I want to have in the house.

The problem was it was grand opening day and everyone was there. And I do mean everyone. It felt like an aerial photo of JFK Stadium in Philadelphia during the Live Aid concert in 1985.

And no one was wearing a mask.

Sometimes in these dreams I’m not wearing a mask, which adds an extra layer of anxiety and yet another way for my brain to beat me up. Last night I was.

Anxiety expressed is so commonplace it’s become a trope of film, TV, and novels.

No matter what form the actions take, what happens, or what you do, the dream is always the same.

Scatterday

I’m fortunate to be able to work at home full-time.

I’m even more fortunate that Large Financial Institution forecasts on the pessimistic side. Our C-suite has looked at the COVID numbers. They’ve also looked at our Q3 all-employee survey in which 56% of us said we’d be perfectly fine only coming into the office for special events.Â Based on these data, they’ve decided the soonest we can begin limited reentry to the office is June 2021.

While I am fortunate to be able to work at home full-time doing that has some unintended consequences. The days take on a certain sameness. The eleven stair commute to my office doesn’t quite have the same bounding effect as the walk to the subway, the train ride, and the walk to the office downtown. Rinse and repeat in reverse on the way home and you have a set work time and a set home time.

I’m rolling into the last month of the year with more vacation than I can roll to next year and with 20+ hours of uncompensated over time. I work too much.

The number of hours plus my shitty abilities to:

enforce my boundaries
prioritize my own pleasure
grasp the idea that it’s okay I’m not getting everything done

plus the sameness of the days lead to weekends when I have too much to do (seriously, ask me about the shelves I’ve been trying to put up since April) and have no idea what do to with myself.

I am like Robin Williams freaking out in the coffee aisle in Moscow on the Hudson. Or Mr. Bean trying to get to the dentist on time. It’s too many choices of things I need to do, want to do, and must do.

It’s getting so bad that I may have to make an actual list of things to do for the pleasure of crossing things off and so I don’t get lost and discover it’s 6pm on Sunday and I’ve spent my entire weekend in front of the TV trying to find something to watch.

None of this is helped by the fact that I historically haven’t slept well. Drop in menopause and the dumpster fire that is 2020 and you get a stew of weird dreams, broken sleep patterns, and resignation to the fact that the days when I could go to bed at 23:00, sleep right through to 06:00 and wake up feeling refreshed are so far in the rear view mirror they might as well be in another time zone.

Last night I turned out the light around 22:00, fell asleep pretty quickly, only got up for the toilet a couple of times, and was able to fall right back to sleep when I did. I had weird, disturbing dreams and was wide awake at 04:00.

And I mean wide awake. Like no chance in hell I’m going back to sleep. So I watched a movie – Pride and Prejudice.

When I say Pride and Prejudice I mean the 2005 version with Keira Knightly as Elizabeth and Matthew Macfadyen as Mr. Darcy.

I have not read what is perhaps Jane Austen’s most beloved novel. Why would I when I can enjoy lush cinematography and not have to wade through piles of description vastly necessary when the book was published because no one ever went anywhere but hardly necessary when I can get a live video stream from halfway around the world? And as I watched it I wondered, what is Mr. Darcy’s first name?

Turns out it is Fitzwilliam.

Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813. According to wikipedia, the tradition of royalty using fitz as a prefix for bastard sons dates back to the Stuart era (1603-1714). It was revived in the 1830s for the Duke of Clarence’s illegitimate sons.

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? The Jane Austen wiki says Mr. Darcy is the maternal grandson of the Earl Fitzwilliam, which probably explains why he’s so rich. But why would a peerage choose a surname that implies lack of lineage?

I could spend hours digging through the the internet but then I still wouldn’t have any shelves hung.

It’s not a preference

Created to mourn and memorialize the lives of transgender people lost between October 1 and September 30 year over year, November 20th is Transgender Day of Remembrance.

This year’s day mourns the lives of 432 people across the globe – 53 in the U.S. alone – lost to violence, medical neglect, or suicide – because, let’s not bullshit here, they made someone uncomfortable.

The bulk of the people subject to violence across the globe because they are transgender are women of color. In the U.S. that means most of them are Black.

The only countries without reports of anti-trans violence are exactly the authoritarian ones you’d expect. Which means it’s happening, we just aren’t being told about it.

The trans community isn’t perfect. In fact, it has a lot of fucking problems. That doesn’t make it right to kill people, or to declare them less than human. I’m looking at you JK Rowling.

We’ve been doing inclusive writing talks at work since George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police at the end of May.

As part of that, we’ve started talking about pronouns and how “preferred pronouns” isn’t a thing. The way I’ve been explaining it to meeting full of meeting of slightly stunned heterosexuals is like this: someone’s pronouns are their pronouns.

It’s not a preference just the same way someone’s name isn’t a preference. If someone is named Laura you wouldn’t just randomly start calling her Sue.

They seem to be getting it. And that makes me happy.

Just one more hole

It’s funny how even when you like and trust your boss certain things trigger suspicion.

In the past couple of weeks I have spent a good chunk of time at work reviewing resumes and sitting in on interviews for a contractor position in my specialty area. Even though this position isn’t for my direct team, my boss asked me to prioritize this for a couple of reasons.

One is that he sees me as the “head of practice,” which is flattering and a good example of how being first and just declaring yourself something can make it so.

The other is he judges that because the managers hiring for this position to be inexperienced enough in my specialty area to be unable to decide based on a candidates skills. He told me he wanted me to make sure that we got someone good in that position, someone who had the right skills and could contribute not just to the team and the assigned project, but also to the practice area as a whole. And I’m glad he did.

We did four first-round interviews. Two of the candidates looked perfect on paper.

Both of them had about as much experience as me. The jobs and projects they highlighted on their resumes showed a progression of responsibility.

HospitalityCandidate even ended up managing the team in charge of the content and voice & tone for the first mobile application for a major international hotel chain.

FinanceCandidate had a huge amount of finance space knowledge, working for multiple large banks over a 20+ year career, in addition to working in other large, corporate environments.

The other two candidates looked less perfect on paper. One had the domain experience to have less catch-up time at Large Financial Institution. Like me, she has done most of her work in non-profit spaces. I was predisposed to like her.

The other candidate had no financial domain experience. Mostly in healthcare, some in publishing, she looked young even on paper. And it turned out that paper sometimes lies.

FinanceCandidate came into the interview, virtual of course, as if she already had the job. My Co-WordNerd and I asked her for:

specifics about her process
about a time when she had to convince a reluctant product owner or stakeholder that what we do has value
a story about a time when she took the wrong approach, how she corrected, and what the outcome ultimately was

We got vague responses that usually started with, “Well…” which is a bad sign in an interview. As we were closing out the interview we asked if she had any final questions. In not so many words she asked when she could expect the offer letter.

HospitalityCandidate presented slightly less arrogantly and no more specifically. Sure, she named dropped a bunch of my professional heroes in the first 10 minutes. Just because you know and have associated with a who’s-whoÂ doesn’t mean you know how to do the job.

We asked her all the same questions. Her responses were just as vague and filled with buzzwords. I have a set of tick marks in my notes for the number of times she said agile.

When we asked her the question about getting buy-in from reluctant product owners or stakeholders her response was to tell us a story about the time she presented to the CEO the hotel chain that carries his family’s name to move her idea forward.

As much as I would love to throw time on our CEO’s calendar and tell him why we need more people doing what I do in my department, I know that shit isn’t going to happen. Large Financial Institution has a problem with silos, hierarchy, and hallway conversations.

Non-profitCandidate faired only a little better. She answered the questions more specifically and still had the same “I’d go to the chief” issue with how to solve problems. She also seemed to lack insight and understanding of the critical, unsexy aspects of what we do.

HealthCareCandidate had it all, though.

She answered questions with specific examples.
She was able to show how her skills would translate even though she had no financial experience.
She was that right combination of confident and humble that being in a design job requires.

She asked us great questions about what we valued about where we worked and why we chose to work there during her Q&A period, and she asked us great wrap-up questions. Co-WordNerd and I were well sold, as was the UX designer doing the interviews with us. We recommended to the hiring managers they schedule her for a second interview.

Yesterday we found out that all hiring is frozen until further notice.

I’m okay with us having to go to a candidate in the interview process and let them down easy. Funding changes. Product owners change their minds. Shit happens.

What I’m not okay with is us fucking someone we’ve hired who has already given notice at his current job, which is what happened on my immediate team.

We extended an offer for a contractor position to a designer and he, being a responsible person, said that he would have to give two weeks’ notice at his current job. Not being complete assholes, we agreed to that.

Today is the middle of week one of his two weeks.

I believe NerdBoss when he says he fought to keep this person in the hiring process. He seemed genuinely angry when he told us our new hire wouldn’t be joining us. He also seemed angry that the new guy was being punished by timing; if he’d just walked away from his old job, which he has a right to do by law in the state where he lives, we’d have him on staff by now and everything would be fine.

Fortunately, the new guy lives in a city where the pool for folks who do what we do is small. Also fortunately, he was working for someone he’d previously worked for who had recruited him to the job he was leaving. I like to think he is going to be okay. And cutting him off because he got caught by timing because he did the right thing sends a really shitty message.

NerdBoss also told us yesterday we will not be backfilling the full-time employee position opening up on his team until probably next spring at the earliest. That means we are all going to have to work a little harder, which I’m not sure how I’m going to do given that I’m rolling almost a full week of uncompensated overtime into the last month of the year.

One more hole on the metaphorical belt.

We spent about 20 minutes of a scheduled-45/actual 1 hr 5min meeting yesterday listening to NerdBoss tell us this hiring freeze plus the retirements of several Senior Vice Presidents and Vice Presidents over the past two months weren’t any kind of indicator. The more he talked the more I started to wonder what he knew that we don’t.