January 28, 2007
Station Break
I'm back from Vermont, and home now... where I will be for all of about 16 hours before heading to Atlanta to keynote a conference, then off to Chicago for work for the rest of the week. Doubt very much I'll have opportunity to blog...never say never, but it's not a likely thing.
I'll be back on the air again on Sunday.
June 09, 2006
On The Road Again... I Just Can't Wait To Get On The Road Again..
Since mid-February, I've been on this crazy stretch at work where there's been an unusual amount of travel involved. That run comes to one heck of a conclusion this month, as I leave this afternoon for a two week business trip through western Europe. I'll be in London, Paris, Madrid, and London again before I get home in a couple of weeks.
I still might blog a little bit from the road, although I doubt I'll have much time. I will probably turn off comments altogether; my spamment infestation has not abated, and in fact the bastards even figured out I'd put in extra blocks on their commenting, so I got 140 trackback spams last night... and in two weeks, the odds are that I'd probably return to 2500 or more spamments. I just don't feel like dealing with it. And because I am remarkably un-technical, I wasn't yet able to figure out how to install authentication on Movable Type (every time I tried, it kept telling me when I tried to do test comments that "the author has not enabled this function," and wouldn't let anyone comment at all)... so the easiest solution will be to turn off comments. Anyway, that's just blog minutae to warn you that you might not be able to comment for a couple of weeks if I take the nuclear option to get rid of the little insects.
Thanks to my whirlwind immersion in the blogerati this spring through conferences and seminars, I've gotten to know a lot of people in the blog world and now count them among my friends... so I now have people to see outside of the office when in London and Paris. That part alone just makes me shake my head; that this very blog you're reading right now managed to eventually lead to my having friends in England and France -- some of them among the most influential bloggers in Europe. Ever see the Sesame Street skit about "one of these things is not like the other?" Yeah, it's like that. But I'll still enjoy seeing them. So there's some fun on this trip as well.
Anyway, this is a lot of navel gazing that I'm subjecting you to, all just to tell you that I'll probably be silent for the next couple of weeks. (Don't stop checking back, though -- I might just surprise you and drop a quick post or two on you!) If we don't blog together, have a great June, everyone.
Posted by Christopher at 06:06 AM | Comments (0)March 02, 2006
You Load Sixteen Gadgets, And Whaddaya Get?
I saw this article last week and I knew I'd write something about it at some point, because it just reinforces something I have believed for a very long time: we Americans work too damn much. And all those little toys and gadgets "they" tell us make our lives easier are in fact little more than trojan horses that allow The Man to get his hooks into us more deeply... owning increasingly larger percentages of our lives and returning the United States to the workstyle of a century ago, when 12 hour days were the norm.
Workers completed two-thirds of their work in an average day last year, down from about three-quarters in a 1994 study, according to research conducted for Day-Timers Inc., an East Texas, Pennsylvania-based maker of organizational products. The biggest culprit is the technology that was supposed to make work quicker and easier, experts say.
Expectations that technology would save time and money largely haven’t been borne out in the workplace, said Ronald Downey, professor of psychology who specializes in industrial organization at Kansas State University. “It just increases the expectations that people have for your production,” Downey said.
Ironic, ain't it? The kicker is that the whole system is beginning to have the opposite effect of what we were all told it would... personal productivity is heading down, as the relentless encroach of technology and communication means that we never have time to concentrate on getting any single task or thing done. Combine that with the increasingly ratcheted-up pressure for workers (funny, it never seems to be the C-level guys whose resources are cut... wonder!) to do more with less, and workers are feeling increasingly stressed and less productive. It's my opinion that if we don't take steps as a society to return some freaking sanity to the work environment -- and make work-life balance more than a platitude or cliche that receives lip service every now and then -- we are heading for a dire health crisis in this country, as stress-induced or exacerbated illnesses and conditions become a self-induced epidemic that could threaten the economic strength of our country.
This isn't a rant about my job, by the way, as much as it is an observation of the work culture we have set up in this country. My work pressures wouldn't be any different anywhere else. And, I like my job. Understand where I am coming from and why... this isn't about my personal situation, it's rather my observation of American culture.
I swear to you, once my grad school loans are paid off and I don't owe anyone anything anymore, I might well just quit the rat race, move to the Caribbean, open up a bar & grill and take tourists fishing on the side, and go all Jimmy Buffett on y'all and leave the whole sick pressure cooker behind. And the only rule in my bar or on my boat is that no damn Blackberries, cell phones or e-mail devices will be allowed.
Posted by Christopher at 09:13 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBackMay 26, 2005
The Lovely, The Talented...
Maya Angelou once said, "Talent is like electricity. We don't understand electricity. We use it. You can plug into it and light up a lamp, keep a heart pump going, light a cathedral, or you can electrocute a person with it."
If Angelou's analogy is accurate, then I work in a damn power plant.
I've written in the past about my friend Ethan, the should be-rock star who works at my company. If you want to know the difference between respect and admiration, I can sum it up easily for you: I respect Ethan's ability as a business professional; I admire his ability as an artist. Both are good statements and meant well, it's just that one is ratcheted up a couple of notches.
Over on Ethan's site, he's been posting up a storm lately... and he's got two new songs up, one of which is included in a compliation album put together to raise money for a local musician in Ohio who is battling cancer. And check the review he got from the Athens Musician Network:
"Tied for most creative on the compilation are Hazy Jane's techno-to-acoustic 'Box Elder Opera' and Indelible Beancurd's 'I Left My Blargh in San Francisco' - a layered, mock-lounge litany by Dreifort and NYC cohort, Ethan Rand."
I won't steal his thunder by lifting the link onto my blog -- you've got to go over there and click the link on his site to hear it. But despite another of Ethan's unique titles (Dude, if you're reading, what the hell is a Blargh?), the song is exactly what the reviewer says it is. Color me duly impressed. (Besides, as a commenter on his site points out, any song that can mention AstroGlide -- and in French no less! -- has got to be pretty damn cool.)
Another extremely talented and thoughtful creative type whom I work with is my friend Derek Baker. I should have linked to him before, but I honestly only learned of his blog just before I went on my little vacation. Now that I'm back and reading co-workers' blogs more often, I wanted to correct that oversight.
Derek is a calmer, more rational thinker than I am - you'll find more thoguhtful, reasoned analyses of what's going on in the world than you find on my rant-laden blog. He's also got a perspective that's somewhat different than mine on politics; I have been a lifelong Democrat, while Derek had always been a Republican until George W. Bush and Dick Cheney came along and swung the party so far to the extreme right that Derek felt he had no choice but to switch parties -- which he did, finally, earlier this month. So I guess I'd say that when you're looking for spitting, hair flaming, burst blood vessels anger, come to me... but when you're looking for a calmer, more dispassionate but no less urgent analysis or commentary on the world we live in... well, Derek's your guy.
Man, I work with some sickly talented people. Daaaaaamn.
Posted by Christopher at 10:17 PM | Comments (1)May 17, 2005
Suits, Success, And An Office In The Big House
Anyone who knows me in person will tell you I am one of the absolute least corporate people they know. Whatever I have accomplished in my career, I've managed to do so while stridently efforting to remain perpetually 22 and as un-serious as possible. My whole career, my office demeanor and behavior have been more likely to meet reproach from bosses than any mistake I ever made on anything I've ever actually worked on. And that's the way I like it.
Most of all, I don't dress like a professional unless I absolutely have to. I was dragged kicking and screaming into the world of having to dress like a grown-up, and thankfully just about the time that I left Capitol Hill, the dotcom-fueled business casual boom hit. For most of my professional career, I have gone to work in nothing nicer than polo shirts and khakis -- and that was a concession to propriety.
The way I see it, I am a writer; I don't meet with customers, I don't meet with the public... I sit at my desk and wait for creativity to hit me, and pump words out when they come to me. Who needs a tie for that? Hell, I'd wear a backwards baseball cap, a Tommy Bahama tiki shirt, cargo shorts and sandals to work if they'd let me get away with it. I'm not a dresser-upper in my "real" life, and that follows me to the office. (Don't get me wrong; I'm not a slob. I dress well, just very casually. And I did, about a year ago, concede to the increasing importance of the jobs I kept getting, and I bought about a half dozen ties. But they were Dilbert ties, or Jerry Garcia ties. If I was gonna play the game, I was going to do it my way at least.)
But all that changed with this new job that I started Monday. It's taken me from a divisional center to the corporate headquarters. And when you go to corporate, you dress the part. No more polo shirts. No more khakis. No more Dilbert ties. I was going to have to become one of "them."
This presented me with a quandry. I don't own a suit -- haven't since I left Capitol Hill ten years ago. I have one black blazer and a pair of black slacks that I wear to weddings and funerals (not that there's much of a difference between the two events!), and that's the extent of my formal wardrobe. But seeing as how my new office is on the same floor as the big boss's, I figured I might not want to stand out so much. So I went and bought a couple thousand's worth of suits a week ago, got fit for them and had them tailored. To my chagrin, they weren't ready until today -- I started the new gig yesterday, which meant that for two days my wedding outfit did double duty.
I picked them up tonight, and tried them on. As I checked myself in the mirror, what I saw frightened me: I look the part. I'm standing there in a Ralph Lauren charcoal pinstriped suit, shoes that cost more than last weekend's bar bill, and a tie on... and I didn't look uncomfortable, out of place, or like alien body snatchers had replaced me with a crude replica. I looked like what I've become, I guess -- a corporate executive-type.
This is causing me more trauma than I can tell you. I've spent my whole east coast professional career trying to avoid this very fate. And yet somehow I'm morphing into it. And it's got to be arrested before it gets any worse.
So I'm soliciting advice on the best way left to show a little bit of individuality, if not rebellion. I could simply stop getting my hair cut until the end of 2005, or grow a soul patch... I could get my ears pierced again (it's been 10 years now since I let the holes close over). I could go get a tattoo (always wanted one, almost got one while I was in the Navy). Any suggestions are welcome... because I'm not going totally corporate, and I'm not growing up. I refuse. So please help me.
Posted by Christopher at 09:52 PM | Comments (9)
