The world is falling apart and we're all doomed.
There. That's my political take on the day's topics, whatever they are, whenever you read this. I know it's a real change from what you normally see here, but I figured I'd switch things up a bit today.
They're The Same People They Were Yesterday
On with the show.
I retired from my old job and then came back as a consultant to do basically the same job. Now that I'm not so vested in what happens in the hierarchy, I've discovered that office politics bore me. They're irrelevant.
What I've noticed is that the workforce complains about the same behaviors from leadership over and over and over again. It's like they're angry about the stop sign on the street three blocks away.
Monday: "That stop sign! It drives me nuts! I hate it!"
Tuesday: "I can't believe they put that stop sign there. I had to stop at it!"
Wednesday: "Want to know what I hate? That stop sign. It's the worst!"
And so on.
People are who they are. If your boss was a squirrel last week, she'll be a squirrel this week and a squirrel next week as well. As soon as you get the irritants dialed in, you can stop examining them and doing psychoanalysis on her to figure out why she's such a squirrel. She just is.
Instead, you'd be better off figuring out how to work with a squirrel. You can do that, you know. You can even guide a squirrel and help it go where you want it to go. If you figure out what motivates the squirrel, you can focus your energy on giving her the rewards she wants.
There. That's my advice for today. I've been giving it to the kids at work and it seems to be helping.
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| This is a waterfall photo I took on Maui in 1990. I've finished scanning all of my old photos and I have to say, I'm very grateful for modern, digital cameras. The old film cameras were pretty meh. |
6 comments:
Yes, this is an excellent point. People are what they are, and you have very limited influence on that, so the best you can do is try to use what they are to guide them rather than trying to change them. That kind of applies to society as a whole, not just individuals.
And on the camera front, yes, I don't miss film at all. The big issue was always that, every time I tripped the shutter, I was aware that it was going to cost money to see how it came out. As opposed to digital, where I can take 100 photos, throw out all but the 2 best ones, and not feel bad about it. Not to mention not needing to wait a couple of weeks to see how well *this* collection of camera settings worked.
Oh yeah. I finished the great photo scan some months back. As I went along I tried to name them all with the date so something like YYYY_MM_DD_name.jpg. Then I sorted them all into directories by year. Almost all of the digital photos store the date taken in the header. I found a tool that let me do batch updates to append that format date to all the files so now all my photos exist in digital format and are named with the date. The biggest surprise during the process was that the old photos, that seemed so good, turned out to be not nearly as good as the digitals (also the photos printed with a matte finish don’t scan nearly as well). I was also surprised how many photos I had completely forgotten about, and hadn’t looked at in years and years. Because of that I’m now working my way backwards in time to make a series of photo books to gather all the best into a family history.
A German saying translates (roughly): The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Do the picture on the old camera look better directly than when translated to digital? I've never had an eye for that sort of thing.
With regards to that particular office, it sometimes offers some amazing opportunities to do something of lasting value. Lately I have been viewing everything I do through the lens of helping those who follow me to achieve even more than me. I also know there are parts of the office that are dysfunctional as hell; so glad to walk away from the influence of the 8’s.
One Brow -
The old printed photos are definitely of inferior quality to the printed versions of the digitals. I do not think that the reason is decay. Certainly many did fade the blue tint and then they are too red. But even those photos that seem to be unfaded still just aren’t as good (not just the colors not being as vivid, but the sharpness is clearly inferior).
The scanning doesn’t seem to have had any negative effects on the images, except for the matte prints. At least my scanner had some issues with those.
Last year I was laid off from the company I had been at for 25 years. I saw it coming and had been looking for jobs.
There, I had my own little fiefdom. I owned the network, hardware, software, etc. I knew what was needed and how everything worked. Everything wasn't right, but I had it working reliably and orderly. I had to, I was basically the only oncall. If something broke, there was only me, 24x7x365.
The new job is different. It is development of a 30 year old product. Many of the people here are long timers, and they know every in an out of it. I try to do things the way they've always been, but often there is conflict because somethings I just have to fix. There are also seeming contradictions on how things are here verses there.
The old timers are threatened by the latest upstart to replace the product. It is new, pretty, and uses all the proper buzz words of the day.... But it doesn't do what the customer wants or needs. So our group has frequent venting sessions.
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