Christmas Pud

One of the things I like about this time of year is Christmas Pudding.  A good Christmas Pud is far too good to eat once a year on a full stomach.  I’ve always liked it cold for breakfast or fried in butter, if you want slices of it hot.

A couple of weeks ago I bought my first one of this winter.  It was a Tesco’s Finest and wasn’t bad at all: moist, tasty, good texture, recognisable bits of fruit and large chunks of expensive nuts.

And rather a strong smell of brandy.

Which I hadn’t taken into account when I decided to have some for breakfast at work the other day.

Suffering fools

As I get older and crankier, I am less patient of people who refuse to trust my professional judgement. It would be nice if I was growing more tolerant of human insecurity, but I’m not.

My former team’s new boss put a meeting in my diary so that I could explain one part of my previous job, planting sunflowers, which apparently I had failed to include in my handover.

Now there is nothing to planting sunflowers - you bung the seeds in the ground, water them, and a few months later you’ve got twelve foot tall bright yellow daisy-things tapping on your bedroom windows. My former team member knows this well enough. On top of which, there was nothing to hand over. I’d picked up an action from a previous meeting (buy the sunflower seeds and put them in the kitchen drawer until the spring) and done it: the packets of seeds were safely in the kitchen drawer. The only thing I missed was telling anyone I’d done it, and I only missed that because I’d done it and crossed it off my “to do” list a month or so before the handover. I forgot to tell my team I’d wiped my nose on the third Thursday in August too.

Instead of ringing me up and saying “Aphra, I went to a meeting the other day and they asked if you’d bought any sunflower seeds, but I didn’t know whether or not you had” we had a meeting request followed up with emails using words like “very embarrassing” with stuff underlined in red, and using phrases like “all aspects of the sunflower project”. Eventually we got to “even so” and “at any time that’s convenient to you”.

You know things are tense when you get to “even so”. “Any time that’s convenient to you” is Defcon 3, really, isn’t it?

I refuse to spend an hour of my one and only precious life-time in a meeting explaining that the packet of sunflower seeds is in the kitchen drawer, topping and tailing it with a 15 minute walk to their site and a 15 minute walk back. Instead I’ve taken them at their word and booked a meeting which makes them do the walking. And I am going to get my former team member to explain to his boss that the way you grow sunflowers is to put the seeds in the ground and water them. You see, this is the thing that annoys me: he already knows how to do it because I taught him how, and the whole thing is a bloody great drama over nothing - so much so that one, single, ten minute phone call sorted it out with my former team member, but his boss “had a meeting to go to” both times I phoned him. Which is how we arrived at “even so”and “any time that’s convenient to you” and the 15 minute walks.

I don’t mind being asked to explain things. But I really dislike being asked to explain myself.

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The image is by a photographer called Leisa Hennessy. I am so glad I chose sunflowers as my metaphor.

Aphra’s top tip…

Aphra’s top tip…

… if you want to retain any degree of respect and professional credibility among your colleagues, don’t tell them that you store you dirty clothes on the floor. They will look at you, but say nothing.

Sorting the sheep from the coats

For reasons I am too tired and too crotchety to go into, I have to devise an exercise to kick-off a workshop at work.

The workshop is to define categories of data and the exercise is to intended to make the peeps really feel that there are many different ways to label and sort information. For example, the father of the one who turns up here occasionally organises his books in order of the date first published. I’ve already told you that my former friend Catriona used to arrange hers by colour. Reed tells us that the British Museum rules for sorting anonymous books are “stark staring bonkers“. I group mine by subject so Heinlein sits next to books about the moon-landings. Diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks.

So I have put together two large tupperware boxes of stuff from various drawers, cupboards and shelves, not to mention the garden, for the group to sort. I don’t even know what all of it is, so it should be fun for the peeps to categorise. I wouldn’t like to sort it myself, so I am glad that the whole thing was my idea.

Here is a selection:

Oil paints, fridge magnets, a stone apple, a bit of plastic that broke off my TV, indoor sparklers, an empty tin of peppermints, a full tin of air gun pellets (I’ll probably remove that one because it may upset people), turbine blades, a rusted nut and bolt (that came out of the garden), padlocks, peacock feathers, some pieces of haematite, a hair scrunchy in the yellow and green BP colours, a length of silver coloured cord, a jar of tarragon from Sweden enticingly labelled “dragon”, a thermometer, a compass, a broken mobile phone, ach… you get the idea.

It will be interesting to see whether or not getting the folks to sort them into categories works as a warm-up exercise. I haven’t yet decided whether to give, say, 20 items to each person and get them sorting individually and let the others work out what categories they’ve used, or whether to give the whole lot to the whole group and see what happens. The first will be more controllable but the second might be more instructive.

I still remain slightly startled by just how eclectic my miscellanea are though.

Nothing to laugh about

I’ve recently shifted offices, and the building where I now work houses the man with the most annoying laugh I have ever heard in real life. I am sure there is a cartoon character somewhere that would beat him and I know a kookaburra could do it, but in terms of your actual people, he’s easily at county level and should be taking national trials. He also makes astonishingly inappropriate remarks, frequently involving buggery. The other day he was explaining his approach to dealing with noisy, disobedient or dangerous dogs and I realised I could cause him trouble any time I wanted by grassing him up to the RSPA. He explained it away with the comment “that’s growing up on a farm for you”, to which I replied “more than that Dai, it’s growing up on a Welsh farm”. I am, as my grandmother used to warn me, so sharp I’ll cut myself.

We bumped into each other by the loos today, and we started talking about the holiday he’ll be taking in three weeks time. Then he told me that he’d taken his son to school the other morning and found he’d driven himself straight home afterwards. He said “that’s wrong, isn’t it?” and I thought, yes, it is.

Once, many years ago, my then partner was a nervous breakdown about to happen and I got a phonecall from a colleague which started “it’s alright, but….” The “but…” involved A&E and a cardio clinic. The thing was, he hadn’t had a heart attack; he’d been so obsessively focussed on his work on a completely impossible project, that he’d brought on a combination of hyperventilation and palpitations so severe he thought he was having a heart attack. Hence his visit to A&E, his overnight stay in hospital, the barrage of tests and wall of monitors. The attacks didn’t go away immediately, and they scared him enough, and slowed him down enough, to stop him working for 4 or 5 months. What fun that was.

So I told this rather personal story to Dai, and his face changed. If it were a cliché I were fond of, I’d say the mask slipped for a moment or two. Then a colleague came up and started talking to him and the mask clicked back, but before they went off Dai said “thanks for the meeting, that was useful”. His laugh rattled out across the office about 20 minutes later.

Mr Red and Mr Blue and Aphra’s Humble Pie

I ought to update you on the Mr Red saga. You may remember that I had a disagreement earlier this summer with my boss. His middle initials are J.F.D.I. but I like to have a Plan A, a Plan B and if necessary a Plan C. So much so, in fact, that a previous boss once said “Ms Behn IS Plan B”.

The long and the short of the story was that I had grave misgivings about the fact we were failing to plan because of course that meant we were planning to fail. In the end I realised it was a doctrinal difference, gave in gracefully, and we agreed a five pound bet.

I paid up yesterday because the bugger was right and we didn’t need any more planning than we had already done, and we drank it at the team’s disbandment do. Nothing alarming, just another go round on the merry-go-round.

In other news, a local Blues Club has chosen our wee village Hall as a venue, and while I am far too lazy to seek out the Blues, I am more than happy to partake if they are on my door-step.

In the immortal words of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band:

Can Blue Men sing the Whites
or are they Hypo-Crites?

(Scroll down to Line 19 for a sample).

Mr Red and Mr Blue and the Other Boot

I’ve already blogged about the fact that I feel distinctly uneasy working without a Plan B.

Management texts define a Project as a complex one-off activity and a Process as a repeatable one. I have put it to Mr Red, who’s my boss, that no-one chez nous has previously done the work we’re are doing, that there are lots of places where it can go wrong and that therefore it qualifies as a Project. I won’t bore you with the scope of the thing, but I do tend to win “my roll-out is bigger than your roll-out” discussions with former colleagues at the Geek Reunion Ball.

Anyway, it isn’t being managed as a Project and we don’t have any contingency plans if things go wrong except “work out what to do at the time”. We are a bloody minded bunch so it’s an approach that will work, but it takes so much effort to make it up as I go along. I’d much rather implement a plan I made earlier. Maybe I just watched too much Blue Peter as a child.

I have been predicting doom and gloom like the dour Scottish one from Dad’s Army, and reminding my team that people always over-promise and under-deliver, and being told on a daily basis “Aphra, you are so cynical”. Well, cynical or not, I’m also right. Ner.

We are in fact only one week behind where I expected to be, which is a month behind where the rest of the team expected to be, all because other people over-promised and under-delivered and we believed them instead of tracking their status on a daily basis. I may be cynical, but Mr Red told me not to be anal, and now look at us.

All of that as it may be, I have spent the last 8 weeks waiting for Something to Go Wrong. Now that it has, I feel an enormous sense of relief. We have no choice now but to deal with reality. No more floating around in pretty-fluffy-cuckoo-land where people do what they say they do without being checked up on and software tests perfect the first time through.

I am thinking of having a motivational poster printed up saying:

People lie.

 

Software fails.

 

Deal with it.

First day back…

First day back… and the world at work has not imploded!  Given my doctrinal differences with my boss, I am both delighted and surprised at this.  Heaven’s above - Mr Red may be right after all.   On the other hand, there is still a lot of low flying brown-stuff scheduled to arrive next week or the week after and if you ask me, there’s precious little protecting those fans.  I’ve started looking at the internal vacancies on the intranet. 

Introducing Mr Red and Mr Blue, and the fight for Aphra’s Soul

I’m caught up in a doctrinal war at work.

In the red corner we have someone who is intensely delivery-focussed. (Forgive the jargon, it’s late and I don’t have the energy to translate). He likes to get in there, get stuck in, tackle the problem head on and just sort the fuckers out. He’s good at it. It’s a bull in a china-shop approach, but if what you want is empty shelves then it works.

In the blue corner we have someone who is equally focussed on delivering results. However his approach is much more measured. He plans. He analyses the problem and works out how much time and effort is needed to deal with it. He discusses the options with the people involved to get their agreement. He looks at the risks and takes the same approach of planning, analysis, discussion, and so on fractally, until the thing is done. This way not only are your shelves empty, but someone else did the heavy lifting and the china is neatly stacked and sorted too.

And then in the middle there’s me. I was born a Red girl (ever the Scarlet woman) but experience has shown me the benefits of the Way of Blue. As the RAF so elegantly put it, poor planning leads to piss-poor execution.

On Wednesday I realised that this is a doctrinal issue; a matter of world-view and belief, that there really is no point in putting Mr Blue’s arguments to Mr Red or indeed putting my own azure viewpoints myself. Mr Red simply won’t countenance the unnecessary over complexity of what I propose, any more than I can accept the risky, dangerous, scarletness of how he wants me to work.

This leaves me with a problem. Do I do my work the Red way, in the belief that I will fail and the knowledge that my name is written all over it? Or do I fight Mr Red tooth and nail, even though he is my boss and ultimately what he says goes? Or, rat-like, do I leave the ship?

When I typed that I brought myself up short. The answer seemed pretty obvious. Look for a nice turquoise or aquamarine project to work on and stop banging my head against a red brick wall. So what’s stopping me?

The problem is I really like Mr Red; he’s fun to work for. We work well together when we do work together (he’s not just red, he’s invisible). He’s funny, supportive, energetic, helpful, positive, determined, optimistic, enthusiastic. The perfect boss in very many ways. Except for this foolish adherence to the Way of Red. (Mr Blue on the other hand is a dour bugger, and can be hard work to work for, but that’s another story). If I did leave the ship and scuttle off somewhere else in the harbour then I’d miss out on a lot of good things, including trust, by not working for Mr Red.

Interestingly, one thing I said on Wednesday brought him up short completely. I said “I don’t think I can fly by the seat of my pants for 6 months; I don’t think I can handle the adreneline”. There was an audible crashing of mental gears (we were on the phone - perish the thought we’d actually meet to talk these things through) and then he said “then I’d have to look at restructuring the team”.

He did soften that immediately, but I do find it interesting that we are both aware that the that task and the tool might not be best suited to each other.

Sorry about the over-flow of metaphors. It’s been a colourful week.

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Had a meeting with Mr Red today. He pointed out that we are both itching to be able to turn round to the other and say “I told you so”. So we’ve each put down a fiver on it which we’ll drink when we know who was right, probably on an appropriate Friday in September. It is going to be an interesting summer. He seemed quite confused that I don’t view work as an extreme sport.

No kicking, no biting, no gouging

I had such fun yesterday.

I spent it on a training course which included elements of role-play. We were there to improve our facilitation skills and when I explained this to the one I explain these things to he said “oh, chairing meetings”. Mmmm. Not quite. Meetings are for sharing information among people who meet regularly. Workshops - in theory at least - produce “jointly-owned” “outputs” or “work-products”, the hole being greater than some of the parts an’ all that. Facilitation is more like being a referee - you aren’t part of the match but you make sure the match happens and that there is no kicking, no biting, no gouging. You also get to record the score. Not the best analogy I’ve ever written, but I like it for the suppressed violence it implies.

There were seven of us, and we took it in turns to facilitate various mini-workshops. One of my team-mates was there, and he was briefed to be incredibly talkative but know nothing at all. That was fun to facilitate. Of course it was fun. Yes.

Then I got to be the stroppy one, twice. First time round I had to make sure that my (rather irrelevant) point got made, talking over people if necessary. That was a very therapeutic experience. Second time round I didn’t care what happened so long as no-one gave me any more work to do. Being completely irresponsible and giving the nod to stuff that was clearly crap was pretty therapeutic as well.

I wish there were more days that I could go to work and be paid to behave really really badly.

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