NaBloPoMo 2020

Back in March, about a million years ago in QuaranTimeâ„¢, when we were still afraid of our cereal boxes and soup cans, TGF and I made a decision that we would finally go paperless on the bills.

There’s no marginal amount of irony in us going paperless now. I spent 15 years working in the environmental non-profit space. You’d think that we’d have gone paperless a long time ago.

The thing about paper bills is they function as a physical reminder that I need to pay that company. I see them, handle them, and am bothered by them much the same way I am bothered by the pip on my email program that tells me how many new messages I have.

Paperless bills seem to make sense from an environmental perspective too. Activists have been screaming for years about deforestation across the globe.

The Amazon rainforest has lost close to 20% of its mass in the past 40 years. Trees are, in fact, one of humanity’s best allies in fighting climate change.

You’d think it would make sense to go digital for bills. But there’s the thing: digital isn’t free.

We think of digital – those email notifications from credit card companies, insurance companies, and utilities – as existing <waves hand> in the cloud, nebulous and not corporeal.

Digital is real. The cloud takes storage capacity and that capacity lives in massive server farms in the American Midwest.

Those server farms take energy. Lots of it.

In a report card published in December 2019 , Wired said the top three cloud providers – “Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure — account for about two-thirds of the rentable computing services.

That means almost every email, streaming service binge watch session, web search, or online bill paying activity most likely goes through one of those three companies.

And it’s not just more modern services like video streaming taking up space.

Analysis by KeyCDN based on data provided by the HTTP Archive shows that the average web page size increased from 702 kb in 2010 to 2,332 kb in 2016. That’s a jump of  218% in just 6 years, mostly due to images and video.

I’m old enough to remember when access speeds were so restricted that if your web page file, because there were no content management systems or externally loaded CSS or JavaScript files back then, edged toward 50 kb you were pushing your luck.

The idea that on average video takes up more than triple that in size boggles my mind.

Digital isn’t free. It contributes to the climate crisis in a massive way even beyond those giant data centers.

That device that we all have glued to our hands, the one with more power than the computer that sent humans to the moon for the first time, is a leading factor.

Going paperless hasn’t been the boon I expected. During the transition I missed at least three payments to three different credit card companies, primarily because I get about 800 emails a week.

I recently decided to destroy the updates tab in Gmail. I bulk selected everything and moved it to my primary tab. And when I was done I had 1,400 emails to sort through. At least only 857 of them were “unread.”

Starting now I’m going to tie knot in the digital firehose.

 

 

Just because we finally have an adult ready to lead the country doesn’t mean we can relax.

There’s still a pandemic going on. It is still “these unprecedented times.”

<waits while you take a shot>

We know a lot more now about how you can catch coronavirus than we did seven months ago. Remember back in April – I know it’s hard since it’s about 15,000 years ago in PandemicTime^TM – when we were all frantically wiping down our groceries?

Remember that doctor from Michigan who thought it would be a great idea to tell us to wash our vegetables with soap and water? (Hint: Do not do this unless you want massive digestive upset). Remember when he thought it would lend him credibility to do his first “how to sanitize your groceries” video wearing hospital scrubs and everyone freaked the fuck out because they judged clothing that had been in a hospital where patients with active, severe COVID-19 infections were being treated to be more dangerous than a can of soup or a bunch of oranges from the average Mejier?

As reported in USA Today, the U.S. CDC says “because of the poor survivability of these coronaviruses on surfaces, there is likely a very low risk of spread from food products or packaging.”

That doesn’t mean there aren’t still things you need to do to protect yourself, the people you live with, and the people you are in contact with every day.

Stay 6ft away

6 feet or 2 meters. Doesn’t matter how you measure. And always a challenge in a society where men think one inch equals a mile.

Multiple sources state that the average woman in the U.S. is between 5’3″ and 5’4″ (about 161 CM) tall as of 2016. I’m about 5’9″ (175.25 CM) tall.

If I could lay down with my feet where I am standing and stretch my arms above my head and touch the person in front of me in line I am too fucking close.

Yeah, I know that’s over 6 feet but that recommended distance is the minimum.

Wash your hands

The CDC recommends regular hand washing to help you from spreading or getting SARS-COV2. They say especially after you have:

• coughed, sneezed or blown your nose
• been in a public place (Seriously, people. Did you leave your house? The first thing you should do when you come in is wash your damn hands.)
• handling your mask
• using the rest room (Honestly, how sad is it that this needs to be said?)
• changing a diaper (IBID)
• caring for someone sick
• touching animals or pets

Or before you:

• eat (Were you raised in a barn?)
• prepare food (Oh, FFS people! Really?)
• touch your face

The US CDC’s guidelines for hand washing kinda suck in my opinion. They hit the basics, sure, but the instructions aren’t clear at all. I much prefer the ones from the World Health Organization (WHO), which come with some good visuals.

And if you’re tired of “Happy Birthday,” you can use Wash Your Lyrics to generate your own poster with lyrics instead of the written instructions.

Wear a mask

I wear a mask to protect you. You wear a mask to protect me. It’s the simplest expression of the social contract.

Lots of things that we though would make good masks back in April – bandanas, old t-shirts, a discarded pair of tighty-whiteys – don’t really cut it.

Two layers of high thread count cotton are probably the most effective thing you can make a mask out of at home. And as much as I heart Spoonflower, custom printed fabric can be hella expensive if you need to make a bunch of masks in a hurry.

If you feel like you need to buy masks be prepared for masks with earloops as this is the most common design commercially available. And if you do need to buy commercially, try buying from a Black-owned business. Etsy has a wealth of Black-owned shops making masks.

If you aren’t happy with ear loops or just want to make your own masks you can do what I did: Buy high thread count cotton sheets on sale. “Black Friday” is coming up and I strongly recommend The Company Store cotton percale flat sheets as a good source for this. These are 300 thread count.

If you want something more interesting than a plain color for your outer shell, you can look for patterned sheets on their site or you can mix and match with fabrics from other places.

The pattern I like is the Olson mask (pdf). You can choose to do ear loops or, like me, you can use a single, 36 inch shoe lace for a tie.

I’d link you to an easy video for how to make these but for some unknown reason YouTube has determine the tutorial violates their terms of service.

Just please, please, keep doing these things. And if you haven’t been doing them, start. Our daily case count is going in the wrong direction.

It’s going to be a long, cold winter.

We need Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia to flip. But this. This map is everything.

Previously on 2020 – Worklife Edition: Surprise! You’re getting a new boss!

I can’t really blame CoolBoss for leaving.

As one of the founding members of the design org at Large Financial Institution, she should have been on track to make real headway in how the organization approached design. Unfortunately, her Bohemian style and lack of organization all but ensured she would never be effective.

CoolBoss believed in flat management structures. Large Financial Institution most manifestly does not.

CoolBoss was not a strategic thinker, which is what is required for success in a place that functions on politics and relationships. Large Financial Institution runs on relationships and hallway meetings.

What she had going for her is she trusted her people, her senior people anyway. She gave us the freedom to work at home at will primarily because we made our deadlines and impressed our partners. Watching her learn that her junior people, who took that same freedom and ran with it, was an education I couldn’t have paid enough for.

She advocated for me hard during my conversion from contractor to full-time employee. So hard, in fact, that as she was leaving she told me that the year I converted I made more money in salary than she did.

CoolBoss wasn’t perfect. In fact, she was only good-adjacent.

Sure, she trusted her senior people. And we never got more than even the vaguest direction about the politics and the rumblings among the titans (aka: senior managers).

That meant we were constantly walking into project meetings with partners thinking that the things that had been decided in the last meeting were still the things.  We didn’t know those partners had told her different things in meetings we were excluded from. She was so disorganized we got information too late to avoid looking like fools.

It was super fun being constantly out of the loop on a year-long, multi-million dollar project with 14 executive stakeholders.

She also expected us to figure these kinds of things out on our own.

In a hierarchical organization that functions in silos and on relationships, being expected to figure stuff out on your own, even as a senior practitioner, is a bit like being given the parts in an assemble your own car kit and a manual where 42% of the pages are missing.

Given that our team seemed to get the dregs of projects – which was a combination of poor positioning on her part and lack of understanding of our capacity on our Vice President’s – I really can’t blame her for leaving for a Chief Design Officer position at an agency. She wanted the chance to be a design rock star.

Even with all her flaws, being with CoolBoss had the advantage of being a known quantity and type of chaos. This the logic that causes people to vote for the incumbent even if that person isn’t serving their needs.

We got 15 minutes to process before the rest of the team learned we were getting a new boss. Some of us got a little more because EmpireBuilder Boss was, conveniently, out on vacation.

That gave the 60% of us going to her team time to:

• have real-talk conversations with folks already on her team (Hint: perception is everything. Nothing in that “real-talk” proved true for us)
• obsess over whether we were getting “real-talk” (ibid; or maybe that was just me)
• try to position ourselves to present in the best light once she was finally back in the office (definitely not just me)

My first big clue it was all for naught was when she got back to the office on Wednesday the following week and blithely went through her previously scheduled meetings.

She didn’t even bother to clear 15 minutes to meet with us as a group so she could reassure us that yes, she understood this was sudden, and yes, she knew there would be an adjustment period.

No, she just had her regularly scheduled meetings. For three days.

Then she left to go to a conference in San Francisco, which got cancelled while she was on the flight there because of COVID-19 concerns. Then she got trapped in the hotel because Large Financial Institution, like so many other corporations, makes you buy the cheapest possible travel tickets which usually don’t allow for changes.

By the time she came back to the office on March 9th, sick, and we had a first team meeting, I was already checking the Johns Hopkins University COVID tracking map hourly in much the same way, and for many of the same reasons, people are constantly refreshing the electoral college tracking maps as I write this.

I had my first 1:1 meeting with EmpireBuilder Boss on March 12th and the micromanagement was already in the wind.

We had already been talking about COVID, hand washing, and social distancing in my circles. It doesn’t hurt that I have some really smart friends, one of whom once had a grant from the WHO to study hand washing techniques in rural societies.

That 1:1 meeting was an exercise in boundary setting. My informal agreement with CoolBoss was I would work at home two days a week during curling season (October-April) and one day a week the rest of the year.

She pushed back, of course. Did I have a formal work arrangement filed with HR? Had she met CoolBoss, I asked back.

Then I told her that based on the JHU map, the trends, and my family situation that starting the next Monday I would be working remotely for at least two weeks. She was smart enough to agree to that without much of a fuss.

Later that afternoon, we got an all-staff email saying that to prep for possibly having to work at remotely for an extended period Large Financial Institution would do a phased systems test.

All employees in our DC-metro and regional offices would work at remotely on March 13th. On March 15th, the following Monday, all employees in our Texas office would work remotely.

By 1pm on March 13th they told us they were closing all offices effective immediately and everyone would be working full-time at home until further notice.

While it had the advantage of protecting me from getting COVID-19, going home to work meant that all my interactions with EmpireBuilder Boss now happened via video call.

It’s hard to read body language when someone refuses to turn on their camera, or turns on their camera but walks away from the computer while treating it like a speaker phone.

And I was uniquely positioned to be a difficult employee for EmpireBuilder Boss.

I am one of two people in my group who do what I do. I’ve spent that last two years building up a subject matter practice inside this design group. Socializing what I and the other SME do, why it matters, and what value we can add to the design process.

I’ve essentially been in sales mode for two fucking years.

And since I am not a people manager but a senior individual contributor, something EmpireBuilder Boss “doesn’t believe in,” she excluded me from all her senior leads meetings while simultaneously expecting me to know and react to things said in those meetings.

As the other SME and I started having meetings with EmpireBuilder Boss, the cracks started to show.

She had zero interest in the subject matter area my colleague and I specialize in.

We laid out the year-long plan we’d made for the community of practice we run and she immediately began to make changes as if she knew better what we do and what the designers we’d already been working with needed.

We had project update meetings during which she talked about my colleague instead of to her while she was literally on the call.

Instead of trusting us to turn in good work we’d get impossibly short deadlines, no responses to requests for feedback, and then she’d just change stuff back to the way it was ignoring best practices.

After two years of making progress with getting visually oriented people to understand that the words in the things the design matter to the user experience, I found myself having to justify my existence all over again. Every day.

In retrospect, I’m surprised it took me until April to realize there was no way I could work for this woman and stay sane.

And since I am an introvert, a bit reserved, and largely a private person, the idea of trying to sell myself and my colleague to another Boss inside the organization or, even worse, look for another job in the middle of a pandemic made me want to vomit.

I used the data instead.

I took a hard look at the projects my co-worker and I were on and realized that 85% of the work we were doing was for another team.

And this is how I ended up with Nerd Boss.

Nerd Boss saw this and ended up exactly where I wanted him to go: It made more sense for me and my colleague to be on his team than to be on EmpireBuilder Boss’ team.

Nerd Boss is not a dream. To refer to conversations with him as “word salad” is all too often accurate. He sometimes gives vague, confusing directions expecting us to find our own way through the thicket of expectations.

But Nerd Boss respects his team. He sees the value in what I and my colleague bring to the team.

He lets the people in his group make mistakes. It’s okay to ask questions, to be genuine, uncertain, and need help.

He absolutely wants us to do the work and he sees his team as a team. I think he really believes we can do good things if we all row the metaphorical boat in the same direction.

Not to mention that on our Friday huddles, funny hats are the dress of the day.

My colleague and I moved over to Nerd Boss in June. And because I am not a people manger, she got her third manager in 6 months. Everything was great.

In September my entire group got moved into the Marketing & Communications roll-up.

Next time on 2020 – Worklife Edition: I don’t think that word means what you think it means