Month: March 2009

The Last Question

A question from Jason, my brother.

from Jason
to Joan
date 23 March 2009 22:00
subject Hey

Hey Joan,

You know that short story we read ages ago?
It had to do with the evolution of God.
Starting off with humans wanting to calculate entropy (or something like that) – and they built a computer, and the computer couldn’t do it, so it built a successor. Computer after computer, until eventually the computer was smart enough to figure it out – but existed only as pure energy. Unfortunately by the time it figured it out, there were no humans to tell, so it said “Let there be light..” and the process started again.

That short story – remember that? I’m trying to find it, any clues?

Ta

[Then…]

from Joan
to Jason
date 23 March 2009 22:11
subject Re: Hey

Hi Jason,

I was thinking about this story a while ago and I couldn’t remember where it had come from. I think it was by a famous science fiction author.

…I think it’s this one!!! ‘The Last Question’ by Isaac Asimov, indeed a famous author. http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

Joan

One of the best science fiction short stories ever. Read it!

[Update…]

from Jason
to Joan
date 23 March 2009 22:21
subject Re: Hey

that’s it! good find. how’d you manage that while typing an email??

 

from Joan
to Jason
date 23 March 2009 22:24
subject Re: Hey

Heh. I’ve now blogged about it too — http://www.joanko.net. I’m so fast 🙂

I thought it might be by Arthur C Clarke or Isaac Asimov. I searched in Google and ‘arthur c clarke humans build computer that becomes god short story’ and ‘isaac asimov humans build computer that becomes god short story’. The second search got it!

Getting it wrong easier than getting it right

I read a frightening article in the Observer’s Food Monthly magazine. It was frightening to me, even though I probably have a relatively good diet. But I can see how people could very easily fall into the trap of eating badly even with the best intentions.

Read this on The Observer’s website here — Running on Empty Carbs.

I’m a fruit fiend. Every day, I typically eat a banana, two oranges and an apple. I’ve known for a while that each orange has the same calories as a small chocolate bar. The article confirms this:

‘Even fresh fruit… is a highly calorific food that should be treated with caution. “One consequence of the government’s Five-a-Day campaign is that children are eating fruit rather than vegetables to meet their target… If you are consuming an extra five pieces of fruit a day and changing nothing else, it will give you more calories because fruit is very sugary.” ‘

There are other depressing revelations (or reminders) about mashed potato, chorizo sausages, apple juice, Rice Krispies (like Rice Bubbles in Australia), muesli bars, dried apricots, bread and crumpets.

Why is it so hard? Why is it much easier to get it wrong than to get it right?

I’m trying to find ways of increasing the protein in my diet but I don’t have the skills or knowledge. It’s also expensive. What can I snack on, if not fruit, rice cakes, muesli bars or salted almonds? Am I meant to keep cans of tuna and boiled eggs on my desk?

Dentist review

This is a bit weird but I feel the need to share my most recent experiences at the dentist.

In the past month, I’ve had a check up and a filling. I am halfway through my treatment to get a crown (cap) for one tooth. I hastily wish to explain that the current spate in dental work is due to me finally finishing some treatment that I had more than 10 years ago. These days, I take excellent care of my teeth and gums.

Anyway, back to my review. I feel like the whole clinic has really gotten behind the concept of ‘patient care’. The dentist himself is reassuring and friendly, giving the impression of being deeply competent. He takes photos of my teeth and explains what he is doing and why. He makes sure that I have local anaesthetic on my tooth and my gums so I don’t feel even pressure, let alone pain. He gives me information about my treatment options and I can call back after I’ve had a few days to make a decision about expensive dental work. There’s been no hard sell.

The dental nurse smiles at me and asks if I’m all right. She anticipates what I might need — a tissue here, a playdough mould for a temporary crown there.

The magazines in the waiting room a really good — I’ve read National Geographic, Harper’s Bazaar and Smart Life. The clinic play nice happy music in the waiting areas and in treatment rooms.

There are always at least two reception staff, sometimes three, so I never have to wait for someone to get off the phone. They call me the day before my visit to remind me to come in.

I have been telling people how great my dentist is. You know, I think I might even be enjoying getting my teeth done.

Careers counselling

Damjan’s sister Jana is thinking about how she can develop her career in the next couple of years. This reminded me of a a book called the Job Guide, which I used when I was 17 years old. Back in the day, I went through every single of the hundreds of job descriptions in the book, crossing out the jobs that didn’t appeal to me and highlighting the ones that might be okay.

I used it to confirm that I wouldn’t mind being an environmental engineer. Following this, I put in my application to the environmental engineering undergraduate course.

Having been reminded of this great resource, I wondered if it was still be published by the Australian Government. Indeed it is, and you can find it a handy new searchable e-version here.

The description of ‘environmental engineer‘ hasn’t changed from what I remember. It begins:

Environmental engineers are concerned with assessing and managing the effects of human and other activity on the natural and built environment. They apply their engineering knowledge and skills to such things as environmental impact assessment, natural resources management and pollution control…

Although this is the job I started out doing, I can’t say this is what I’m doing anymore. I spent some time looking through the Job Guide 2009, trying to find a description that matched my present job. There was no ‘sustainability engineer’ or ‘sustainability consultant’ or ‘consultant’. Is my job too new, too niche?

But finally, I found it in a unexpected place. My work matches closely to that described for an ‘urban and regional planner‘. In fact, the match is rather uncanny, considering I never studied urban planning.

Urban and regional planners develop policies and plans for the use of land and resources. They advise on the economic, environmental, social and cultural needs of particular localities or regions.

They also work on large-scale projects such as new suburbs, towns, industrial areas, commercial and retail developments, urban renewal projects and transportation links…

Planners work closely with professionals in other fields (e.g. surveying, architecture, engineering, environment and conservation, property development, community services and transport planning). There is a high level of public contact as planners spend a lot of time in meetings and discussions. Time is also spent on field visits, writing reports and performing research. Planners are also required to prepare documentation of decisions for independent review and are often called upon to appear as expert witnesses before appeal hearings.

That’s pretty much it exactly. I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised, considering my department at work  is called ‘Planning Plus’.

Daydreamer

Once again, I’ve had one of those revelations that are so fundamental that I can’t believe I did not know this. It’s like that time I found out that people eat when they’re hungry.

Damjan tells me that sometimes, especially at meetings, during dull conversations and at classical music concerts, he starts to daydream. By daydreaming, he means that without realising it, he loses concentration and thinks about something else.

I don’t think I do this. When I’m bored, I usually have to decide to think about something else. My mind doesn’t free float easily.

In fact, I find it very difficult to fill my mind with undirected thoughts. I hate having an empty mind. When I eat breakfast or brush my teeth, I usually carry around a magazine just so that I can avoid generating thoughts, which is kind of tiring. Five minutes without some kind of external stimulation is dull for me. When I walk to work, I am listening to a pod cast. If not, it’s because I have an agenda such as mentally planning my day. And when I’ve finished mentally planning then I think, ‘Okay, now what do I think about?’

This also means that when people are talking to me, I am really, really listening. I thought everyone was listening too. But I believe Damjan, now that he tells me that often people are only pretending to listen or have switched off without realising it.

How very odd! And I think it’s me who is the odd one. And maybe this is why I don’t doodle or fidget, and why I’m organised but not creative.

Lisbon by night

Lisbon by night is as interesting as it is by day. While we were there for work, we went out to dinner every night. I don’t have any photos from then, but here are some from my weekend off.

557

This made me, Wolfgang and Rosangela laugh for a long time. Maybe it wasn’t an error, though. Maybe resistance does give rise to more resistance.

150

The streets are lined with orange trees. I’m told these are Seville oranges, which I sometimes see at the grocery store labelled with the warning ‘BITTER ORANGES. Best used for marmalades and cooking’.

Despite the warnings, we decided that we would try them out.

284

Many people seem to have had the same idea as us because we couldn’t find any low hanging fruit. Damjan and Rosangela, the tallest of the four of us, were tasked with fetching some oranges.

287

Although Wolfgang is grimacing, he actually seemed to quite enjoy suffering.

290

 

299

And here is a view of Lisbon from a lookout that our hostel manager recommended. In fact, he mapped out an extremely detailed itinerary for us for the two days that we were there.

You are the weakest link, goodbye

Cardboard boxes

To me, the cliché image for recession and redundancies is the person in a suit leaving the office with a cardboard box of belongings. Often, this person is being escorted by a security guard.

I said to my workmates, ‘You know to start worrying when a pallet of empty cardboard boxes shows up at the office.’

‘Especially if one of them has your name on it!’ Jessen added.

Escorted off the premises

Jessen continued. ‘Speaking of being escorted off the premises, a friend of a friend working in finance was approached by rival company. He was being head hunted because he had lots of great clients and contacts. Well, my friend’s friend accepted the offer and a month before he was to start at the new place, he told his boss that he was changing to the other company. Within minutes, the security guards had arrived and others were confiscating his laptop and files. And the headhunted guy was like, “Hey guys, that’s not going to help you. I’ve been copying files for weeks. Why do you think I was working from home all the time?” ‘

The signs

Jessen has another friend (let’s call her Gemma) who worked in banking. One day, Gemma heard the phone in the next workstation ringing. Her colleague picked up the phone, listened, put it down, then went into a nearby meeting room. Minutes later, he came back to his desk and started packing.

Then the phone rang for the colleague who sat in front of Gemma. The colleague picked up the phone, listened, put it down, went into the meeting room, came back and started packing.

By the time Gemma’s phone started ringing, she was already halfway through her own packing.

Pop idol style

One of our secretaries, Tanya, described what happened during the last wave of redundancies. They got all the secretaries together for an ‘away day’. Away days are usually for team bonding. This time, though, they separated the secretaries into two groups. To Tanya’s group, they basically said, ‘You won’t be seeing the people in the other group anymore.’

Redundancy Day

A friend told me what happened last year at one of our competitor consultancies. The staff were all told that a particular Monday coming up would be ‘Redundancy Day’. Arriving at work, each person found a white envelope on their desk. The letter in the envelope told them that they were either safe or dismissed. Those dismissed had to leave the same day. Of course, even those who were safe could not do any work that day while their team mates and friends were packing their desks.

False pretences

Another story I heard involved everyone being invited to a keynote presentation. When they were all gathered for the presentation, the person on stage sheepishly began, ‘Actually, this isn’t a presentation. We’re making redundancies and you’re here so that we can notify people all at once.’

Roll call

Last week at a manufacturing company, everyone was called to a meeting. Management then started reading out the names of 170 people who were being made redundant. Those who had lost their jobs had to leave in half an hour — no time to say goodbye to friends. In a manufacturing environment, you don’t want to risk having angry people sabotaging equipment. Understandable, but how very sad.

It could be worse

Devastating as redundancy is, it could be worse. One of our client contacts in the Middle East has been put in jail, accused of corruption by his own bosses. He’s been locked up for six weeks now. I’ve never met him but those who have worked with him say that he’s an honest bloke who is the unfortunate scapegoat for his company’s current dire financial situation.

Poor man. Let’s all count our blessings.

Consultation

When we came back from the Christmas holidays, we received an email from management regretfully announcing that they were kicking off a consultation period that would lead to up to 400 people being made redundant around the UK.

In the UK, there is a rather odd law that any time 20-99 people are to be fired, there is a 30 day ‘consultation period’ during which the company must ‘consult’ with employee representatives. When 100 or more people are to be fired, the consultation period is 90 days. Our 90 days ends on March 16. The tension (and black humour) is building up, as people wait for dismissal notices.

Because the consultation period is so long, it is sensible for the company to set an overly high limit to the number of redundancies they will make. They don’t want to start another round of consultation, should they find that they’ve set the limit too low. There is a balancing act between setting the limit high enough to give the company room to move, but not so high that it panics and demoralises everyone.

Many people have remarked to me that the 90 days for consultation is too long to be left hanging. Hearts pound quicker when an email arrives without a subject line. People view suspiciously meetings between upper management people, and upper management and HR. Some people I know had planned to go on holiday in April, May or June but are reluctant to book tickets and accommodation in case they find out on March 16 that they need all their savings to get through unemployment.

Yet, 90 days is better than 8 hours. I took part in our company’s the first sustainable construction materials conference. Invitations for the conference were sent to offices in the UK, mainland Europe, Australia and the US. For two days, specialists in America and the UK were to present to a a worldwide teleconference. However, two days before the conference, all the American presentations were cancelled without explanation. My Outlook invitations suddenly had big red crosses on them.

The conference went on without the Americas and it was there that I heard what had happened. In the US, people showed up to work and found dismissal emails in their inbox. They had to leave the office by the end of the day.

Losing 15% of staff was so devastating and the need to cut costs were such that US management withdrew participation from the conference. I don’t know if the presenters themselves had been axed. In Australia, too, about 10% of staff have been ‘released’.

There are many ways to handle redundancies badly and here is one of them. I will write about some stories that were shared in the aftermath of this news from the US. Some of them were so horrible that they were funny.

I will say that our company is more cuddly than most, being employee owned and sustainability focused. Many people have commented that the way the American redundancies were handled was uncharacteristically cruel.

10am, 1pm, 4pm, no excuses

Being constantly ‘on call’ at work by email, phone, at my desk and the newly installed enterprise-wide ‘chat’ program (aargh!) means that my ‘to do’ list grows faster than I can tick things off. The only way to clean the slate is to catch up out of hours, during which no one can add anything to the list. That is, unless they’re in our Melbourne, Sydney, San Francisco or New York offices. However, many of these colleagues have recently been fired so this is less a problem these days (more about this in a future post).

Not only am I chasing an ever-growing ‘snake’ of tasks and meetings, because most tasks or meetings are small, much of my day is spent recovering from the last interruption and steeling myself for the next ‘to do’. So while the quantity of time for my projects is reducing, the quality of time is also plunging.

I am pretty good at multi-tasking (or rapid switching, which is probably a more accurate term). But recently, I reached my limit. I had two days in a row where I struggled to work out what to put on my time sheet. I was busy all day but was I productive? Could I justify charging this time to a client? Could the budgets on my projects handle days like this?

A very timely article appeared on Lifehacker: Simple Guidelines for Workday Quality over Quantity. These are the rules.

QUALITY vs quantity, UX process.
Check email ONLY:

  • 10AM
  • 1PM
  • 4PM

Send any time
Set email to check every 3 hours.
NO email on evenings.
NO email on weekends.
EMERGENCY? = Use phone.

FOCUS 1-3 Activities max/day
LOG 1-3 Succinct status bullets every day on team wiki

MINIMIZE chat
MAXIMIZE single-tasking

OUT by 5:30PM
~No excuses~

I bookmarked this on Delicious on February 28 and tried to implement it when I went to work on Monday.

I wasn’t successful straight away. First, I got rid of the pop-up that told me I had new email. Even this small step was helpful, despite me still checking my mail twice an hour. Then there was an unfortunate (but necessary?) evening where I worked until 8:30 PM. But as the week went on, I checked my email less and less often.

By Friday, I no longer had Microsoft Outlook open at all. I followed the 10 AM, 1 PM and 4 PM rule (interestingly, every time I checked my mail, I spent at least half an hour responding to the accumulated messages — but I was thankful for the uninterrupted three hours of productive work that had just passed). I finished one task on Friday. And at 5:30 PM, I dropped it all and went to the pub.

It was a rather extraordinary day. I was so thrilled by it that I’ve been telling everyone about the rules. My colleagues are envious. They immediately recognise the wisdom of the rules but are doubtful they can apply them.

Maybe if I can show them these rules are achievable (at least on some days) at our workplace, more people will adopt them.

First tier friends

I have five ‘first tier friends’. I’ve known this for a few years now. Sometimes, I am unwise enough to say aloud who they are but those people who aren’t first tier friends generally know this. I think it’s very rare that someone would consider you a first tier friend, while you think of them as a second tier friend.

Here is an interesting article from BBC Magazine — What’s the ideal number of friends? The article posits that the maximum number of ‘core’ or ‘Premier League’ friends a person has is between six and twelve.

This is funny:

‘A newspaper columnist once told of her shock when, having struck up a rapport with a man over dinner, she was told at the end of the meal he had no vacancies for friends. He was operating a “one-in, one-out” policy. Six months later she received a card stating he was now available for friendship.’

I will add one more feature to this theory of friendship. Like the United Nations Security Council, there are five permanent members of my first tier and one or two rotating members. At any one time, I feel close to a person that I am usually spending a lot of time with. These days, it’s often a work mate.

It may not be obvious at the time that this person is not a permament first tier friend but rather a rotating one.

Right now, though, this post is vacant. Apply within.