Bread and Lilies

“We need someone who knows more than us.”

That sentence just blows me away with the sheer magnitude of giving up inherent in those words.

I’ve worked with a lot of different people and I’ve always striven to be the one who know more.  When I’ve worked with people who knew more than me, I tried to learn everything I could from them, I paid attention to everything, sucked in every bit of knowledge I could so that I would know more.  When I’ve worked with people who knew less – and who wanted to learn – I’ve passed on as much knowledge as I could because working with smart people who want to learn is the best damn thing.  When I’ve worked with people who knew less – and didn’t want to know more – I got away from them as much as possible.

When I didn’t know enough and there wasn’t anyone who knew more to teach me, I sought out the knowledge myself so that I became the person who knew more.  I read, I googled, I went looking for other people to ask questions and I found answers.

“We need someone who knows more than us.”

Translation = I want someone to tell me what to do, thinking for myself is too hard, please get someone who will just tell me what to do so I don’t have to think.

Those days are gone, Office Space jobs, IBM jobs, sit in a cubicle for 40 years and retire with a gold watch jobs, they’re gone for good.  They’ve been going away for the last 10-15 years, because of outsourcing to other countries and because of new generations of kids (whose grandparents were boomers like me) who want a job that makes them think, that’s challenging.  The last nail in the coffin for those jobs was the recession, companies finally figured out that people who think, people who want to know more, who want to learn, are much more valuable to the company than people who want to be told what to do.  And if a company needs people to be told what to do, they’re literally a dime a dozen in India and all over the Pacific Rim so they’re not hiring for those jobs here in the US.  You want a good job here in the US?  You have to make yourself into the person who knows more and you have to stay hungry to be the person who knows more every single day.

You can be the guy who thinks big, who thinks everything is possible.  You can discover that challenging yourself to learn more, to do more can be a lot more fun than doing what you’re told.

Or you can be the one who’s always trying to shut someone down, who’s always saying that’s just too hard…the one who says:

“We need someone who knows more than us.”

What’s my choice?  I want to work with the deck chief on the Battlestar Galactica!  Cause he’s teaching himself to be the someone who knows more.

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Battlestar Galactica, Flight of the Pheonix

Deck crew hand: “What’s going on, chief?”

Deck chief: “Alright, here’s the deal, we are going to build a new fighter!”

Deck crew hand: “Uh, what about the rest of the ships, I’m three days backlogged as it is…”

Deck chief: “Strictly an off duty project, nobody takes one minute away from regular maintenance and repairs, you got it?”

(lots of “gee, this sounds like a lot of really hard work” looks between crew)

Deck chief: “You don’t think we can do this?”

Deck crew hand: “I wouldn’t even know how to begin…”

Older hand: (under breath) “What else is new…”

Deck crew hand: “Screw you – he’s talking about fabricating a frame, avionics, life support, it’s frackin’ impossible!”

Deck chief: “You know what then, forget you, I don’t need you!”

Female hand: “Chief, wait, it’s not like that…”

Deck chief: “I said forget it, get back to work.” (turns away with look of disgust)

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The deck chief doesn’t know how to build the fighter, he doesn’t have the knowledge to do it, none of them do, but he’s going to do it anyway because they need it.  He’ll figure out it out one way or another, he’ll become the someone who knows more and anyone willing to pitch in and help him will be that someone too.

You hear it most places you go, restaurants, stores with clerks, fast food drive-thrus, even the food marts in most gas stations and it comes in variations:

Can I get you anything else?

Did you find everything you need?

Will that be all?

All translating into the same thing, can we sell you anything more?

We hear it so often, it’s a routine, both on the part of the person asking and in our responses, nope, I’m good, yep, got everything, yes, that’s all and we pay the bill and we’re on our way.  Every once in a while tho, we pause, we think, we do have something else we need, something we couldn’t find and we break from routine.  Opportunity!  Even if the store/restaurant/fast food/whosis can’t get us what we asked for, they tried, they voiced concern and a willingness to fulfill our needs and wants.

Tonight, as I’m sitting in a decent mid-level restaurant, the waiter brings the check instead of the question.

Maybe on a different night I would have said, no, nothing else, just my check please.  But tonight, the waiter lost 75% of his tip and cut the check total in half, all for the lack of one little routine question.  Because this night, the night the waiter was in a hurry to turn over the table, I wanted coffee and dessert and the resulting higher check would have gotten him a much higher tip.

Instead I drove a block down the street and got my dessert from a cafe/bakery and went home for coffee.

One routine question missed = opportunity lost.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles starts again tomorrow night! And so the scifi fangirl in me is watching the first season again!

I have been a scifi fangirl since the first Star Trek series, back then it was okay to think William Shatner was hot. Back then, it was a groundbreaking show, women in miniskirts as a normal everyday thing! An interracial kiss!!!! Tribbles! I seriously wanted a tribble back then and come to think of it, I still want one!

The later series got a bit tamer, as I occasionally catch a Star Trek TNG ep these days, I realize how thinky it was, how much everything wrapped up in neat little bows with a good little utopian ending. The Borg brought in good conflict and then the war with the Founders in Star Trek DS9 attempted to display the realities of war but it never quite worked for me. By then, I’d seen space wars in the first Star Wars trilogy and movies like Alien, Independence Day and Terminator.

Star Trek Enterprise took a step back in time, before the first Star Trek series and that held promise, all the newness of space, all the aliens new again and not friendly, no Federation to make everyone all chummy, but again, a bit too much with the thinky-ness and too much foreshadowing of the other series. I am interested in the new Star Trek movie tho, set in the academy with the original series’ characters just starting out. It could be good, could be bad tho, I can’t remember if it’s an odd number or even number…

I’ve been searching for more effective ways to manage my days.  Where I presently work is about twice the size of any place I’ve worked before (in terms of people in the office that I’m in) and my job encompasses two areas that involve a lot of impromptu people contact, HR and Billing.  This means a lot of interruptions that can’t necessarily be put off and those interruptions are important in their own right both for what I learn from each conversation and what help I can give the other person.  My position also has been in a fire-fighting mode since I started and that hasn’t let up much in the five months since.

My main goal at this point is to move out of that fire-fighting mode and into not just getting all the tasks done but seeing more of the bigger picture and more long-term planning.  I work with some terrific people so I’ve been letting their good management techniques rub off on me as well as taking all the input I can get from them about the company and the projects we’re working on together but I’ve still been looking for a better way to handle my to-do list.

Recently a friend who’s job hunting posted a link to a post about resumes on Rands in Repose and in checking out the rest of the site, I found two great posts about handling tasks and to-do lists that sparked some light bulbs above my head. The first one, The Taste of the Day, minimizes the task list to three areas. I particularly like his thoughts about how priorities are fluid and therefore it’s pointless to simply set priorities on each task. And I’m all for not spending time managing the structure of my to-do list! I have a tendency to take work to sleep with me – to either dream about it or wake up and start thinking about it and I liked his idea of scrubbing the to-do list each evening, it may help me put work aside at the end of the work day, give me a feeling that I’m ready for the next day with no need to stress over it all night.

The second post is The Trickle List and most of it is something I’ve already been doing intuitively without the structure he gives it. The focus is more about the future, about moving forward and planning and it’s too easy to get caught up in simply crossing things off the task list without ever looking up to see the rest of the world.

Ah, the beauty of the empty blog!  All that lovely white space to fill up with magical words!

Life changes, it’s the only constant.  A change in jobs has brought me to a different place, where I have managed lots of things and a few people, now I find myself having to think in broader terms, to find new ways to go beyond just managing the work as well as have a life outside of it.

The title of this blog comes from a poem I cannot find now, I found it on a printer some twenty years ago, when you hit the test button on this little dot matrix, it would spit out this poem, the author not understanding why the poet would spend his last dollar on lilies when they grew freely in the ditches and bread fed so many senses as well as the body.  I had it once in a text file on my computer but in the years of changing from one to another, it’s been lost along the way.