“Daniel Dravot, Esquire. Well, he became king of Kafiristan, with a crown on his head and that’s all there is to tell. I’ll be on my way now sir, I’ve got urgent business in the south, I have to meet a man in Marwar Junction.” – The Man Who Would Be King
Well, maybe not this doctor.
I have a friend that I’ll call “Joe”. Mainly I’ll call him “Joe” because that’s his name. Since there are estimated to be 1,782,432 people in the United States named “Joseph” that’s really not blowing his cover, except to (I think) two readers. And, no, his wife’s name isn’t Mary.
Joe is fantastically smart. He has an intelligence that makes correlation leaps that catch most people by surprise. In one instance he pointed out a basic physics flaw that showed a billion-dollar business deal was destined to fail. The company did the deal anyway. Physics won – physics always wins.
Joe had been right. You’d think that being right about a fatal flaw in a billion-dollar business would be rewarded, that Joe would be sought after for advice.
If you think that, you’ve never worked in the corporate world. Being right about something like that means that an executive was wrong. Executives never like to have people around them that remind them of when they turned $1,000,000,000 into $100,000,000.
There are times it doesn’t pay to be smarter than the boss.
My boss caught me taking NSFW selfies. They’re serious about mask-wearing.
Besides being right when an executive was wrong, one problem that Joe had is that he had a fairly high capacity to do work. Normally that would be a good thing, but most work was routine for Joe. When he and I were working as peers, he would often do no work at all for days on end.
None. He’d goof off all day, or just play and experiment. He’d break the software in his computer just to see if he could fix it.
Then, in a furious burst of energy (often before a deadline) he’d work. Sometimes, the work would last through multiple 20 hour days.
“Joe, you realize that you could have done that work last week when you were trying to get unauthorized access to the company’s main software server and setting up an unsanctioned private e-mail just for the group. Why didn’t you?” I asked.
“That would be boring,” Joe responded, “so I waited until I didn’t think I’d be able to do the work on time and that I’d miss the deadline. Then it got interesting.”
I got pulled over while going to work with my loom in the front seat. The cop said I was weaving all over the road.
In truth, I’d seen some of the same characteristics of creative procrastination in me, so I immediately understood what Joe was saying. The work itself was rather routine, so the way to bring challenge was to wait until the real risk of losing my job led to peak production. I had a mortgage and Joe didn’t, so I didn’t fly nearly as close to the flame.
But that’s not the only kind of job there is out there.
On the other end of the spectrum is a job that’s chaos. Everything is an emergency. Everything is urgent.
Priorities keep shifting on a daily basis – sometimes on an hourly basis. It feels like there’s no end to the work, and the pressure is unrelenting. There are long lists of things that have to be done – now. The previous day’s plan gets thrown into the trash due to the events of today.
Well, that’s not a job that’s boring.
Don’t worry – they got jobs with Elon Musk, so they could go to otter space.
Lose a day on a job like that, and it feels like the business might implode. I once told The Mrs., “I can do any job for two years.” I had that particular chaotic job for 32 months. 32 months really was 8 months too long – there are only so many 70 hour weeks that I could do consecutively and not become as mentally vacant as Joe Biden circa 2021.
An example from my time in ChaosCorp®: on Sunday around noon when I just started to feel normal, I’d realize that tomorrow was Monday, and I’d have to go back to work. Goodbye feeling normal. I knew there would be some fresh crisis on Monday, I just didn’t know what it would be this week.
This was a time when life was too interesting.
Perhaps, though, there was another way?
Going into my Wayback® Machine, I actually created a picture that I can use to illustrate this. This is from a post back in 2018 (Franklin, Planners, The Terminator, My Unlikely But Real Link With President Eisenhower, Star Wars, and Kanban):
Gotta love Microsoft® Paint™, making a $500 computer just as effective as a box of Crayons® and a sheet of construction paper (plus a sticker).
In this particular graph, one axis shows how important a task is, and the other how urgent. We’ll skip the unimportant stuff, and only focus on the two boxes on the right side of the graph:
Important and Urgent, and Important and Not-Urgent.
The job I described above where everything was chaos? Almost all of our work was Important and Urgent. It’s the kind of work that causes people to get ulcers, gray hair, a facial tic, and start muttering to themselves when they’re hanging out by the coffee machine.
That was me for thirty months.
The “boring” first job I described? That was one where almost all of our work was Important and Not Urgent. This was reasonable work that was really important, but we had sensible timelines. Being generally Type-A personalities, there wasn’t enough pressure for Joe (and me), so we had to invent it ourselves.
Recently, though, I’ve come on a revelation: the optimum amount of work types (for me) is probably about 80% Important and Not Urgent and 20% Important and Urgent.
Pareto would be proud of that blend.
I tried to put my dog on a vegan diet, but we ran out of vegans.
The nice thing about Important and Urgent work is that it gets me going. Rather than get to work and plan about the plan I need to schedule to put the Important and Not Urgent work together, Important and Urgent work has to be done. Now. It has immediacy. It gets me going. Once I get momentum and a pace going, well, it’s easy to keep it going.
Then I get the Important and Not Urgent work done.
The great thing about a day with a good mixture of work like that is that, at the end, my productivity is nearly maximum. As I get in the car to go home, I realize that, yeah, I really did give it all at work, and it felt pretty good.
But writing these posts? That’s Important and Not Urgent. Until I wait to 11PM to get started on writing, like I did tonight.
Then writing becomes Important and Urgent.
Joe would be proud.
Hey, look, the Sun is coming up . . . .
On one of the Apollo anniversaries, the various high-level managers at Boeing Huntsville where I worked were interviewed on their memories of that time. A VP way above me in my direct line of supervision was quoted as saying he was put in charge of the Saturn guidance computer team at age 30, and that no 30-year-old would ever be given that level of responsibility today. The newspaper even broke it out as a photograph of him and that quote. I cut it out and taped an enlarged version of it to the wall beside my desk as a demotivator. You know, like these:
https://despair.com/collections/demotivators
And so I lumbered through a career, prioritizing my efforts by the principle of who-wants-what-by-when, recognizing that 90% of my assignments would be OBE (overtaken by events) and that I would be directed to drop any work that I had done to that point (which was usually zero from playing the odds), creating excitement in my job by working 20 hour days just before the 10% of deadlines that really did matter.
Silly me. The VP was wrong and I missed a good bet by believing him. Kids in their 20s get incredible levels of responsibility these days just by ignoring the conventional wisdom and starting their own companies. They’re well paid, too. Just look at Brian Armstrong…he’s gonna make a million dollars a day for a decade with his Coinbase IPO for a total of $3 billion.
https://remarkboard.com/m/coinbase-ceo-to-make-million-dollars-per-day-for-decade/1fgv1ifpb34u7
My work hero is still Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame. He’s humble, has his priorities straight, and is only worth a paltry $30 million.
https://mikerowe.com/
A few years ago I got to meet the 8th most popular YouTuber in the world (his mom made him) and holy cow, did that kid have a full plate. Being bored at work was not one of his problems.
Now that you mention it… Keeping people under 30 away from the controls is very much an Old Guy establishment thing. Makes sense.
Never believe them when they say what you can’t do. Me? I prove they’re right by trying.
Mike Rowe is awesome. Miss Dirty Jobs. Great show.
Most jobs are mind numbingly boring, even the ones where you are very busy. This is especially true for people on the far end of the intelligence spectrum. Someone who is exceptionally bright is just not going to be engaged sitting in a cubicle or office all day doing mindless work. It is no coincidence that our schools are designed to train people for those sorts of mindless jobs and that both government policy and mass immigration are working in tandem to weed out smart people and replace them with hordes of dumb people who are suited to boring jobs. That is one of the cool things about working for yourself, even when what I am doing is not that exciting, it still directly impacts my revenue while most corporate jobs I held your performance was mostly uncoupled from your compensation.
That’s very, very true. I did my whole engineering career in optics, and was more or less specialized in metrology (measuring things that need measured) and alignment methods. Based on two qualifications, it was amazingly easy to become the company “expert” in this stuff. First, I was willing to work in a cleanroom, wearing the full “bunny suit” and working with optical alignment instruments and equipment, autocollimators and theodolites and such, which for stability reasons tend toward cast iron in their construction, making a day of lab work a sweaty business indeed. Most of my colleagues greatly preferred living in their cubicles and offices and conference rooms upstairs, tapping away on their keyboards and sending each other vital emails when they weren’t just out-and-out screwing off, so they were content to let me do the alignment work. Second, I remembered high-school analytic geometry. Your typical engineering graduate, particularly the ones who find their way into management, forget such matters by the time they’ve been out of school for five years (at most), and tend mostly to be masters of PowerPoint, Word, and Excel, that last being pretty much limited to budget and earned-value uses. If you went to a decent high school “back in the day” (I got out in 1972), and you took the math and physics that was offered, and IF you remember it, you can do differential and integral calculus, you can solve ordinary differential equations, and you will outperform a contemporary master’s degree-holder who’s a few years out of school. You don’t even need most of what you learned at the university, although it will have kept you in practice. Hard to believe, but true.
Most of what I did was, after a while, dull routine, but every now and then something interesting would come up. At one point, I needed to measure the location and diameter of the entrance pupil of a very large reflective test collimator. Trouble is, the entrance pupil was simply the image of the exit pupil, formed in the air inside the structure of the collimator — not somewhere you could crawl into. “Seeing” the entrance pupil wasn’t a problem, since the exit pupil was an accessible physical aperture. Just put a diffuser in contact with it, illuminate the diffuser brightly, and Bob’s-your-uncle — there was its visible image. But, to verify that the builders of the collimator had met its specifications, I had to measure its diameter and its location. Observe and establish the X-Y-Z coordinates of three points on its perimeter, and you have the center coordinates and diameter (a notion that, believe me or not, was mysterious to better-paid people to whom I reported). At least one company that I knew of — Leica — made turnkey systems for doing measurements of this sort; they sell lots of them to shipbuilders, people who build very large machinery … applications that don’t lend themselves to measuring tapes or coordinate measuring machines and so forth, that you can use on smaller objects. But the cost of such a system would have been prohibitive. So I got busy and devised a way of making such measurements, using two (or, preferably, more) theodolites, plus the mighty Excel. Took me three days to “invent” this method, verify it on objects whose dimensions could also be measured by conventional methods, and survey that entrance pupil. I put quotes around “invent,” because someone at Leica had already invented the method, made it slick and easy, and packed up equipment and software in turnkey form, so what I’d done was to reinvent it, to save money. (As they say, an engineer is someone who can do for 50 cents what any damn fool can do for a dollar.) It was fun, and I was almost indecently pleased with myself. We could have driven a tractor-trailer into the lab (well, the lab was too small, but I could have packed up my stuff and gone to where the truck was), established a coordinate system based on significant parts of the truck, and quickly determined the coordinates of anything on that truck, as long as I could see it.
So, all excited, I wrote a lengthy “reference memo” — these were, in the outfit I worked for, controlled documents that were available to everyone else for use. And I quickly found out that I was the only one who was all excited. Indeed, I found out that no one “up the food chain” had the slightest understanding of what I had done, nor any wish to acquire that slightest understanding.
I stayed on that job for several more years before they offered the older folks with a lot of “service” years an early retirement deal, and I instantly punched out. But, really, that was when I mentally and emotionally retired. It was just more than I could do to care any more.
And yet women were and are sold on the notion that it is more empowering to be a serf in a corporate bureaucracy than the Queen of a household kingdom.
Side note: Your job is as “mind numbing” as you choose to make it. Boring = a failure of imagination. “Ask first. Miss out.”.
Arthur, I think the mix is different for everyone. Mr. Gump might like (and be suited for) licking stamps everyday, whereas my ex-wife couldn’t exist in a job without continual chaos.
YMMV
I’m going to redistribute that Office Space meme
Why redistribute it when you can live it????
“Hi, my name is Aesop, and I have a Joe Problem.”
Me, to a “t”. And then a “uvwxyz”.
Guilty as charged.
All term papers since ever done in one night.
Aced them.
I Christmas shop at noon on Dec. 24th. And get it all done.
Taxes? Always on April 15th. I drop ’em off after dark, in the drive-up line at the post office. At quarter to midnight.
That’s what it’s for.
Also:
1) Not Important and Not Urgent describes 98% of everything done in corporate America. Hung out there long enough to see it firsthand, and say “O Hell no!”
I’d have gone all Michael Douglas in Falling Down inside a year, and probably taken out the entire company in a blaze of glory, just to do it, left there for very long. Or maybe just gone Ed Norton in Fight Club. Who can say?
Confirming my impression: all the companies I worked for do not exist any longer, including one that was a Fortune 500 company.
In fact, the only wage slave job I ever worked prior to my current profession that still exists as a business entity is In-N-Out hamburger, and I lasted there exactly 3 days.
True story: one job I had after exiting the Marines’ full-time side involved being the parts monkey for the company that made the lotto machines for everyone in CA, in the then-brand new state Lottery. They were working two shifts, six days a week to keep up with demand. My job, contracted in by a temp employment agency to avoid paying me benefits, was simply to take the list of parts needed for each new contract of machines, load up the bins, and deliver them to the production line so they could make more Lotto reader machines.
One day in about Week Two, the Big Boss comes in and finds me counting a bag of 1000 Motorola IC chips by hand. Tens into 100s, 100s into the 1000 invoiced and billed, every time. They sold to us at $25@. My salary was about $8/hr.
Big Boss goes livid. “You’re holding up the line!”
I point out that I’m only holding it up about five minutes. Then I hand him the corrected invoice. Motorola has billed us for 1000 chips at $25,000. They have delivered 823 chips, shorting us by $4,425, because rather than counting the chips, they weighed one, on their shitty postal scale, and then extrapolated reading that to a bag of “1000” that was a wee bit short.
Before me, no one had ever counted the chips, and thus on every contract, we had XXX number of machines sitting unfinished, because of this exact lack of IC chips to make the machines work, representing thousands more in wasted manhours and unfulfilled contracts, piling up by the week.
I had just saved the company more money than they would pay me, gross, for the next three months, and figured out a huge bottleneck in production that was killing them, in about 10 minutes.
I had three years of college but no degree (which is known in HR offices as “high school graduate”), and 8 days on the job, and the boss I was talking to, not one but actually two levels above me, had an MBA and 20 years experience in production management.
He was literally slack-jaw stunned.
Until I asked him, in honor of my diligence, if I could have the next three months off, with pay. (I was jesting, and he knew it.)
But he told me, “No, but I want you to do This Other Big Project”, and he put the literal pothead surf punk co-worker on something as mundane as counting IC chip orders thenceforth.
And, of course, took full credit with the company higher-ups, and called and explained to Motorola why their check was going to be appropriately light.
(And obviously, none of Motorola’s parts monkeys or managers, at any level, had ever thought to actually count their chips beforehand, rather than just fraudulently bill untold numbers of customers, like they’d obviously been doing for years.)
And when my 90-day probation was up, and they didn’t move me from temp company flunkie to payroll hire, I turned in my notice and beat feet to a job that was a lot more fun (playing with guns), but at a slight decrease in pay.
When the temp guy in the parts cage is smarter than his boss’s boss, and they’re the ones management hired to run their joint, you’re working for morons, and it’s best to depart the ship before Titanic sails from Liverpool.
2) Not important, Not Urgent, and Total Waste Of Time describes about 110% (okay, maybe actually only 99.9999999999%) of everything government does, and/or lays onto private enterprise, 24/7/365/1000 years and counting, by all accounts.
The seaweed story in The West Wing isn’t just a parable.
Most corporate work and just about all government is somebody ignorant about what’s supposed to be happening telling you to stick a boathook in the water.
GTFO of corporate America, unless you’re the CEO.
And remember when you’re hiring:
If you pay peanuts, you’ll get monkeys.©Aesop
Dear Mr. Aesop. I owe you a letter. You’ve been a resource in mediating between the “common sense spit guard” and “I will not wear a yellow star” in my neighborhood. (The internets are hopeless)
See my comment above about “failure of imagination”.
Though you probably don’t have ” procrastinate ‘cos don’t wanna” as a vice so you can play with that fire. And make it shine.
I sharpen my knife and my aim on stupid people.
I figure that’s what they were put on earth for, and I am loathe to deny to any person the opportunity to live up to their potential.
For some of them, that’s being a dart board.
So be it.
If the brain-free mask-free idiots would simply print “Biden is a fraud” and “Trump actually won” on their spit masks, they’d
a) be able to retire on royalties,
b) make DemoCommunists’ heads explode,
c) sneeze and cough less COVID on total strangers, and
d) deny me the opportunity to point out obvious common sense by correcting stupid people.
Win-win-win-lose.
I could live with that, but the internet proves I don’t have to.
)Heavy sigh.(
So, you’re admitting you’re Batman?
Aesop I can’t even begin to guess the dollar value of global small parts shorting you have described, since that day but it only got worse. It increased faster than customer service decreased but both very expensive.
Youngest daughter turned 21 yesterday. Working and going to school. Chain young people retail outlet, customer has 2 c notes on $130.00 purchase register has only fins, $5.00 dollar bills for you young’s, in register.
She calls the not much older manager who was to lazy to bring her some sawbucks and or twenties. Customer did not want handful of fives. Manager said no and you guessed it. She now had to get her lazy ass out of the office and come ring out no sale. Lesson learned and reinforced.
Term papers? Ditto.
Christmas shopping? By Amazon deadline. Two hours.
Taxes, the Sunday before. Drop ’em off at noon on 4/15.
I had a client for about 15 years that specialized in giving me numerous important jobs with insanely quick deadlines. Since I was a small, one-person shop, I could usually accommodate that client. I developed a reputation for quick turnaround, high-quality and a reasonably low price as the client’s business grew. I eventually figured out that 15 hour days 7 days a week were burning me out. I didn’t want to add staff (I hate being a manager) so I added a rush-charge to my fees.
Amazingly, the work load dropped to something manageable… at least until the client found a new provider, and then they dropped to zero.
That’s how I discovered my super power: I help a client grow their business to the point where they dump me.
Take that, Iron Man!
Sigma it is a real shame. I could give you similar stories from the father-in-law. Had a retail clothing store solid of a man as anyone I have ever met.
New suppliers annually because they would get bigger and better and then sign exclusive contracts with the bigger retail mall chains. His reputation kept him in the game longer than most and I don’t have enough fingers to name clothing brands you or someone you know has worn and now are gone because the big chain mall stores are now gone.
He retired and got out at the right time, I have heard hundreds of customers say they miss his store most are women his wife and my wife took care of them.
Well, supply and demand. But there really are clients you should fire.
There’s something profound to write about your post, but after scanning my past, I realized the reason I retired was because I wanted to forget about all the unreasonable people, things, events, places, projections, and ideas that led to days of agonizing stress. Deadlines are great, until unseasonable weather destroys a weeks worth of preparation, or the shipment of materials is delayed because a salesman forgot to place the order. That, and supervisors that think their college education allows them to ignore the decades of experience their employees have for good reference.
I think I’ll make some tea, and check the bird feeder.
What wins do you remember?
Tea and birds are good, but you might have young un’s to teach.
Enjoy the tea. And the sunsets. Hope you can avoid the sunrises now, if you want to.
The sun is shining on the fourth day of 70 degrees! Two weeks ago it was almost two feet of snow.
Maybe the vegan diet, the Department of Education coming along in the late 1970’s and participation trophies got us to where are now in Twitter speak woke corporate HR Red Guards Emoji world.
Don’t forget decades of serious drug usage and people wonder how the cartels got so strong.
Chaos is fun and that which doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger because even mad at God philosophers have some good ideas that shouldn’t be thrown out with the bath water.
I avoided that soul sucking corporate shuck and jive by never going there and slacking against the machine. Contribute to a society that plots my demise? Naw, I’ll have to pass.
Another group that will never admit to a mistake is doctors. I had one that wore a bow tie and vintage clothes and his peers couldn’t stand him but he saved my bacon so that is the best doctor ever in my book.
The mean sadistic nurses did me a favor by being Nurse Ratchet on steroids as it prepared me for this time.
If you practice hard then the game really does seem like playtime.
The best jobs really do feel like you’re playing. Good times.
The US government used to have no income tax and was funded mostly by tariffs.
Now Americans scream tariffs should be increased while keeping the income tax.
WTF?
Glyph and I had been talking about the corollary to “Facts don’t care about your feelings” to wit: “…and feelings don’t care about your facts.”
Since The Feelz succeeded in publically stealing an election, the value of the original statement would appear to be in dispute.
She came up with an alternative : Physics doesn’t care about your feelings.
In an unrelated note your friend “not Mary’s husband (*snort*)” should have gone to work for the gummint. You get the same effect by waiting for the bureaucracy to finally let you get to work 72 hours before your deadline while adding random obstacles to the course.
In a moderately related note, do you know any young men and women from good families who want to work on Latin?
Last things first – sadly, I don’t know any folks who would be ready to work on Latin. I’d be interested in throwing Pugsley in, but he barely has time to hiss at me, possum-like, when I remind him it’s trash day.
I like it. Physics don’t care about your feelings. Perfect.
One of Joe’s brothers tried to set himself up as a leader of a South American country when he was sixteen. They caught up with him several hundred miles into Mexico.
“A box of Crayons® and a sheet of construction paper (plus a sticker)” AKA a Biden Brainstorming Session
Well, they don’t let him have sharp Crayons anymore.
I like your opening meme. It reminds me of that truism: what do you call someone who graduated bottom of medicine school?
Doctor.
I was also one to begin my school assignments the night before they were due. The difference was that after about an hour I’d get bored and blow it off and then hand in a pile of crap the next day – care level zero. I still passed my final exams after doing no work at all which pissed off my teachers no end.
The main reason that I leave projects to the last minute today is that co-workers above and beside me will cause the project’s goals or outcomes to be changed or adjusted based on their own ineptitude. Thus, I wait until the very last minute so that I know what the actual expected outcome is to be. And now my care factor is above zero because I like to spend my money on stuff that I don’t need or want.
Such is life.
Yes! That’s the ultimate victory – to play the game you want on your terms.
Due to lack of a college degree and lack of opportunity (no, ma’am, we don’t hire women for linemen jobs and we have no operator openings – ad nauseum), I ended up working as a clerk-typist for the Feds. Promotions were regular, the work was easy, and by the time I ended up with DOD, I was very well paid and in charge of 50+ people.
Along the way, I learned about deadlines. Our command level sent down a project that was lengthy but not too difficult. They also put a 2-day turnaround time on it. I had a question regarding some figures (they were notoriously poor at math and details) so I called the Project Officer and was told she had just started a TWO WEEK vacation. Completed, my project would have sat in her inbox the entire time. I intentionally missed the deadline, got the project completed before she returned (without needing my staff to jump thru hoops) and never again in my entire career paid attention to a deadline. Quality over expedience became my mantra, and I taught my entire staff that Managed Failure kept upper management in line.
This came in handy when we were forced to get computers (which all the clerks hated), because when management found out what the computers were programmed to do, we suddenly had demands for all kinds of arcane reports, compilations, viewgraphs, slide shows, yada yada. It had to stop somewhere. We actually had real useful jobs to do. So I made it stop, pissed off a lot of people, took the crap being heaped on my folks, and immediately signed up for early retirement when the Post finally closed.
I’ve never missed any of that job for a millisecond, but I am glad about the pension. Of course, that was 20+ years ago when most lower-level government employees were true public servants and competent at their work.
The layers of Political Appointees and high ranking senior officers were pretty much like they are today and ever have been.
Public servants . . . I do miss those. And I’ve worked on jobs with bogus deadlines. December 31st deadlines cost me more than one Christmas with my family.
To the people writing the contracts I finally said, “Why not make it January 31st?”