All right. So what did I used to do? Back when I got paychecks…
One night last year, I met a group of new people at a bar - it was this night, but that doesn’t really explain what I’m getting at here… People asked me what I did at Olsson’s, and I didn’t know what to say at first - it’s a “variety of boring things” - but, when I muttered something about migrating the web site to a new server, people got interested. So, I filled in some details. At one point I had most of the group mesmerized… but then, I got bashful: “Oh, it really wasn’t all that complicated…”. They weren’t having it - it sounded impressive to them.
Well, of course it sounded impressive. None of them were computer specialists. I would be mesmerized by a tale of brain surgery. Because I’m not a brain surgeon, and I find it almost unfathomable that such a thing could be done at all.
Now, it’s all very flattering, but I’m not fooled. I’m grateful for the positive attention, but I still discount that - none of those people were in a position to judge whether I had done a good job of it. No matter what you do, you can probably admit that it could have been done better, or faster. I guess I don’t have to feel too bad about lacking better or faster, since I hadn’t ever done it before.
I never wanted to keep doing what I was already doing. People who think they know me, think I want comfort, but that isn’t true at all. What I want is manageable change. I want to be able to try new things without jumping out the window. When the new possibilities require great sacrifice, I’m not into it. I don’t think the world is truly structured this way - I think that perverse thinkers are in charge and it is their doing: I want open work; I want to be free to apply my abilities in ways I don’t yet know about. While there are some places it isn’t safe to dabble (Airline pilots, Nuke plant operators… Can you get excited about “Experimental Techniques in Nuclear Power Plant Management”?), most of life is not some disaster waiting to happen.
It doesn’t matter how well I can regale a group of strangers in a bar - none of that is going to cut it with the Human Resources department at some faceless corporate office. I doubt that’s how I’m going to arrive at my next full time position.
Why is everything so official? Who is responsible for such an uptight world - where I can’t just make some positive contribution? Why is work organized into positions, and why are there even companies at all?
Sorry - if you didn’t know, those are supposed to be rhetorical questions - but the more I ask, the less I understand the received wisdom. I read a lot of books in search of new answers. It’s got me very unsettled. These questions are driving me to read books with titles like “The Riddle Of The Modern World” and “A Culture Of Improvement”. Today I read a chapter on the history of Silicon Valley in “Cities In Civilization”.
When I look at a job listing - and I just looked at enough to make my head spin - I see precision: Precise requirements and precise responsibilities. People tell me not to take that too seriously… Heck, I bet a lot of people doing these jobs don’t have all those things required. But, if those specifications are not meant to be taken seriously, then the whole damned process unravels for me: Suddenly, everything seems meaningless.
There, I’ve gone and said it.
I Can’t Even Remember All The Things I Did
In the final days, everybody talked about what a great job I did, and how important I was to the company. Nobody ever talked about me that way before. Were they delusional? No - they thought it would “encourage” me to grumble that nothing I did was good enough or fast enough. Too bad that didn’t work. Otherwise, I could just pay someone to berate me all day and it would do wonders.
I like to simplify:
- Book Ordering
- Tech Support
- Web Maintenance
Book ordering sounds really dull. I was never a “buyer”. When I started that job, so many people worked there that that part of my job consisted of printing purchase orders one afternoon each week, and then spending several days figuring out where/how to send them - mail and fax were popular, but sometimes people would take the order right on the phone. We dealt with such a multitude of publishers, but - remember the “Long Tail” or “Pareto’s Law” - 90% of the work was contacting 10% of the publishers. Or something like that.
Tech support was nice, because it deserved respect. Some people really knew how to be condescending, and on occasion I had to do it too, but when things were going well, I treated people the way I wanted to be treated. I had an unspoken assumption that what I told them could help them rise to my level - that was how I got there - and some day they wouldn’t need my help anymore. But, most people don’t want that. And, some people were routinely petulant about needing help at all - they could make it sound like they believed deep down that it was my fault the computer was ‘broken’ in the first place.
Web maintenance infected me over the years until it was coursing unimpeded through my bloodstream: I was around to attend the first meeting. Back then, I couldn’t wrap my head around leased hosting. We already had one computer, what harm would one more do? I was all for doing the site - but I started to worry about content - I didn’t know what we thought we were going to stick up there. Now that sort of thing seems pretty normal - but the memory haunts me still. I find sites interesting if they have art or information, but e-commerce was like a bad word to me. I despaired of seeing the web turn into one big shopping mall. My skin still crawls at the though of being too pushy: Let people find you. Offer something to them to make it worth coming back. The author event calendar was that. And, the staff blogs that I helped set up. Amazon already existed back then, and I think they still only sold books. Competing with Amazon sounded like a stupid idea (it probably killed our company in the end).
Remind me to use some Action Verbs…
Posted in olssons, employment | 1 comment | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Fri, 17 Oct 2008 01:12:00 GMT
When I don’t have to go to work in the morning - as would be the case during a week of vacation - I realize the absurd amount of chores that I’ve been neglecting at home.
Hey… Don’t laugh.
I think it may be reasonable to say that I will never have another real vacation again. I don’t really care about leisure - I would much rather feel that everything I do is functional. Utilitarian. I don’t care for plain old enjoyment - I only want to be engaged in enjoyable work.
I am reluctant to find full time office work now. It has always been hard for me to stick to someone else’s schedule. I don’t know how other people can carve hours out of their day to travel back and forth to be in the same place every day at the same times. Commuting time is a dead-weight loss if you ask me. It was true for me in school and it was still true for me with work: There may be some comfort in routine, but there is hypnotism also. A lot of people think I cling to what I know, but that’s not even half of the story. I wanted a structured environment, and all I got was a veal pen.
Posted in employment | 2 comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 05 Oct 2008 17:47:00 GMT
Today I met my librarian friend Elizabeth for lunch in Dupont Circle. She works in the library at The Society of the Cincinnati. Elizabeth is one of the nicest and kindest people I know. Yeah, I’ve seen her get angry or frustrated plenty of times - she worked for a stretch in the old bookstore, then with us in the office doing data entry - but she hardly has a mean bone in her body. She grasped quite quickly who I was and what my talents were, and she also connected naturally with the idea that most of us had the bookstore as a safe haven. With the loss of that safe haven, one of her first thoughts was to worry about me, and what I would do next. This sort of consideration is like bright sunshine for me after working for years in a dark basement at a computer screen.
I have no desire to stop working, or indulge in leisure. I also hardly have the savings for that. People who guess at my situation and predict that I should take a break are misreading me. The best tonic for me is to redouble my efforts on the kinds of work I enjoy. I ought to have more of a puritan work ethic, and I would prefer to focus that ethic on a new set of things. But it is first necessary to survey the landscape: I build on my skills relentlessly. I have always been adventurous in my mind, if not out in the world. Elizabeth and I agreed that now is the time for optimism. All along, with the bookstore or without it, we are living in a turbulent time. It can seem a weird coincidence that one small business should fail at this moment in macroeconomic history, but I say it is simply emblematic: The people spending money on books are the same ones now facing their own uncertainties. Their reluctance to spend is no accident, and it chokes every retailer stretched to the limit, counting on that revenue. If you believe in Schumpeter’s “Creative Destruction”, this is both tragedy and opportunity: Isn’t this the world’s way of communicating, invisible-handily, that it doesn’t want those bookstores? And, so it raises the question of what: What does the world want instead? To those of us who love books - and it’s a bit more complicated than that for me - it feels like a personal insult, but there must be beautiful worlds we may now create instead. For Elizabeth it’s a library, for me it’s also something to do with how people share what they know - the Internet, obviously. But, more than the tubes themselves, a way of balancing our lives and sharing the best of what we know. One of the simple things I can do right away is lend my services in web programming. And step one is to make new contacts. If I can support myself on freelance work, I can continue building my portfolio and work to my own peculiar tastes.
So we sat down together to eat pizza…
We were both mildly hampered by our hangovers. She had a story about a date last night with a French guy and wine with his rowdy friends. I had another night of watching presidential debates - the vices this time - over Oktoberfest beer at the Reef. Elizabeth had not seen either of the debates and wanted my opinion. They have trained Palin well: I didn’t notice a rout. There were times when a grin came across Biden’s face in reaction to something Palin said, and it pained him to have to wait for his turn to rebut her. But I didn’t find her nearly as ridiculous as she is accused of being.
Elizabeth didn’t know about the testimonials page on the Olsson’s web site, and when I mentioned it, she was curious about what people were saying. I was happy to report that it was mostly positive. There was a lot of outrage over the general economic climate threaded through many of the comments. I feel proud to be part of something that would give so many people such good memories.
Once lunch was over, Elizabeth suggested I come back to see her library. It is quite a place: The Society is housed in one of Dupont Circle’s great mansions - the home of Lars Anderson, Harvard Graduate and career diplomat. The library is very nice: Down a narrow flight of stairs I wasn’t sure what I would encounter, but it was ultra-modern. I got a the round of introductions and we talked more about the demise of Olsson’s with the library’s director. But, more importantly, we talked about the possibility of freelance work for me - I got the sense that web site maintenance is not Elizabeth’s primary responsibility, and that there must be ways to help her streamline her maintenance tasks. This is exactly what I was just doing in my old job. She was adding photo gallery pages from recent events, but they are all full sized high resolution images. Those pages take a long time to load. Clearly, they need to be resized - and a slide-show script wouldn’t hurt either. And, finally, a representative thumbnail for each event in the list would do wonders. I got a sense of her workflow, then tried to set her up with a different ftp client, but we couldn’t get a login on the first try. Eventually, I had to let her get on with doing it the hard way so she could have any hope of finishing it in a day.
So then I took a guided tour of the mansion. It is opulent to say the least. One double staircase was measured to fit an enormous painting of the crowning of a Venetian Doge (hmmm… actually it was the Doge’s wife who was being crowned…). There were Billiard rooms, Music halls, Drawing rooms in French and English styles. There were paintings, tapestries, sculpture and curio cases. Enough Japanese screens for their own exhibit - and an expert is coming to give a talk about them next month. Wherever walls were bare of art objects, the walls themselves were painted with allegories. The breakfast room with a replica of the view of the garden from their house in Brookline, Massachusetts. Every room had a distinctive marble patterned floor, and I’ve never seen so much carved wood all in one place. Members stay in the bedroom suites - there is one for each of the thirteen original colonies - but the Georgia room was unoccupied and we got to take a look.
So all told, it was a wonderful excursion. Hopefully a rejuvenating experience.
Posted in employment, web-craft, olssons | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Fri, 03 Oct 2008 23:26:00 GMT
As I prepare myself for the possible jump to freelance self-employment, there are a number of… incongruities that are bothering me about where I work.
I get paid by the hour, but I’ve been doing two very different jobs at the same time: A state of perpetual readiness called Tech Support, and a craft based piecework called Web Maintenance. This suggests a contractual arrangement. I hate to say it, but I get paid to sit there. I’ve already developed a consulting mentality, which may serve me well in the future. I see myself as support staff.
The Marketing Director has been obsessing for years over how much time I spend doing what. Lately, that obsession has become more relevant. It would be nice to know. It would, however, be embarrassing to discover that there is about 30 hours “missing” from my week when nobody knows what I am doing. But big deal: If they want that to change, it means a lot more than they think it does. Solving problems is a lot more valuable when it takes less time. It sure would free up a lot of my time to do other things. I doubt very much that they know the market value of what I do.
But that’s part of what I mean when I talk about price as an ‘index’. You go to the market, you see the fresh melons, you see the price, you make a decision about how badly you want the damned melon. Vary rarely is cost no object when anybody wants anything. Cost goes into every calculation. In some markets you just have to keep looking. Prices vary in a rational way, whereas products and services are not so easily valued. This is why we seek benchmarks and standards for these things - an attempt to fix precise values. This is also why we lock into supplier relationships, which include social pressure to maintain mutually favorable conditions, even if it means ignoring cheaper alternatives.
The bookstore is a dilemma. I’m starting to know what I would do differently if I were in charge. What I don’t know is if it would actually work. Like most real world problems, it’s thorny when you reach in to pick the rose.
But on the other hand, as much as I feel a part of this place, I have never felt myself to be the voice of it. If more people above me left over the years, there is no doubt I would have grown into that role.
I just saw something weirdly relevant: Major delay looms for World Trade Center rebuilding.
It occurs to me - maybe because I was just thinking about it - that we suck at predicting how long it takes to do anything. This is profoundly disturbing only becuase we’ve never been more obsessed with how long every little thing takes. The fact that we can’t seem to scale that up should probably tell us something about the nature of reality. We all know about risk and uncertainty, right? They can’t be predicted. Except that we can predict they will be there in every future thing we do. Making unrealistic promises is one more way the the price on the melon at the market can deceive. When you can just buy a different melon, you’re in luck - but so many things we do in this market economy are no simple to take back.
Posted in employment, economics, olssons | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:18:00 GMT
I was amused to see this YouTube clip of Mr. Pink’s thoughts on tipping from Reservoir Dogs. Via kottke.org.
It can be difficult to have this discussion with people, because emotions tend to run high. I’m not really complaining about the state of affairs. People tip bartenders and waiters in this country. But it is always interesting to me how discussions are suppressed - I’m a devil’s advocate kind of guy, and I believe everything ought to be open to discussion. If I wanted to change the entire model of how people in the service industry are paid, do you think that I could do it? I suspect not.
From an economic standpoint, it’s a fascinating issue. Employers are willing to abdicate some measure of performance evaluation to the customers. This trade-off should be worth real money to the employer. They still fire you if you drop a lot of trays full of expensive food, but they don’t have to analyze your customer service skills.
In the clip, Pink says “If if’s such a lousy job, they can quit.” I won’t say it that way, but it’s not so far off. What are the possibilities?
There are jobs in restaurants because people insist on going out to eat. The market provides competition in service, quality, and price. Every business is caught between the market for their product/service and the market for their raw materials (usually including labor, but not capital so much since it’s a fixed cost). Drastic changes in the supply of inputs or the demands of customers have an effect on the quality, service, and price. In some situations, new entrants will rush in, and in other situations, they’ll be dropping like flies. Workers, businesspeople, and customers will adjust - customers by adapting with subsitute goods, and workers and businesspeople by entering other markets. You don’t spend all your life in one market, a typical day is a blend of several.
But this process doesn’t flow so smoothly. People run restaurants because they identify themselves with that business. People work as waiters or bartenders or chefs for the same reason - and often because they actually enjoy it (even if I do get to hear endless complaints from my friends in that line of work). In other words, there is some friction or latency in adapting to changing markets. If you lay off an auto worker, they spend some time unsure of what to do next. And maybe they retrain for something else - which can take years. Most people are not ready to jump into the next career at a moment’s notice - or gradually one by one as the balance shifts.
Now specifically: To Tip or Not To Tip, what’s the difference?
If I go out to eat, and purchase a $100 meal, then tip $15, it is actually a $115 meal from my point of view. Meanwhile, the waitress is making less than minimum wage, as the government considers tip money to be real income - even though I might choose not to tip. There is no law that says I must tip the waitress, but there is a law regarding minimum wage. For some reason, a concerted effort to not tip the waitress can cause the restaurant break the spirit of the minimum wage laws. I never could figure out why the job doesn’t just pay more. And, reward good workers with pay raises. Isn’t that how it works everywhere else? Wage disparity is supposed to be an index of how valuable the worker is. (Not how hard they are working! - we didn’t say anything about that.) In a perverse situation, hard work might not be worth more to the employer. And, the effort might be misguided anyway - not exactly what the job called for.
I generally get upset over anything that distorts price. If it’s going to be the same money, then we need to have the same basis for valuing workers. I personally witness many instances where tip money makes the worker beholden to the customer in ways that do not exactly benefit the business. If you tip well, the bartender sometimes pours you free drinks. Apparently, this is so common that there is an allowance for it, and the bartenders are encouraged to report it - it builds an intangible good will with customers (but it’s sort of hard to measure - do they really spend any more money? Maybe the consistent ability of a bar to draw customers makes it a happening place… Nobody goes there anymore - it’s too crowded.)
Posted in bar-scene, employment, economics | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Wed, 11 Jun 2008 21:29:00 GMT
The weather is back to the ‘Summer’ setting again. This causes practical problems: It’s hard to do any work at home when my computer is always on the verge of overheating. And when reading a book means sweating on it and wrinkling the pages. I’ll try to take refuge in the air conditioning of coffeeshops and the office at Olsson’s. I’ll limit myself to a few feverish hours of sleep and a cold shower at home before going back out.
I’ve turned my attention back to Richard A. Lanham’s “The Economics of Attention”. It can be frustrating: The book is dense with ideas, and so many of them are not new to me at all - but it takes some time to realize it.
This morning at the bus stop, I was standing with the book open but staring off to the horizon. My friend Mitch rode past on his bicycle and got my attention by calling out “The book won’t read itself, Evan!”. I would be done with the book by now if that were true. My mind drifts quite a bit reading this particular book. It gives me a lot of ideas to pause and consider before moving on.
One of my bartender friends was lamenting that there is nobody to walk her dog when she is on the ‘night shift’. Well, I know a guy who walks dogs, and I bet he would do it - my friend Mitch. I said I would look into it. But I don’t have a good way to contact Mitch these days, so when I saw him this morning, it was my chance to bring it up with him. I was just trying to be matchmaker, but now all of the sudden, Mitch thinks I should run the show. The agency he works for doesn’t offer late night dog walking, and I suspected that there might be several bartenders making good money with nobody to walk their dogs in the middle of their shifts. But start a dog walking business? With one employee and one potential client? I guess it’s got to start somewhere. Let me research it - maybe the market is already served, and I just don’t know about it. That’s the role of the consultant: analyze the whole situation.
Posted in employment, books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 01 Jun 2008 15:39:00 GMT
I heard that Reiter’s might need my help again. The web hosting company they were using is going belly-up, and they need to change their hosting fast. The easiest thing to do is what Olsson’s did - on my recommendation: Sign up with the Domain’s Registrar. In this case, it’s also Network Solutions, just like for Olsson’s. I actually have the experience necessary for this little project. The hard part is seeing through their opaque business practices - they’re small too, so they do a lot of things their own way (who could blame them?), and figuring out how to educate everyone responsible in the organization on the changes may not be a simple task. On the other hand, I misjudge the outside world some days because my Marketing Director has bona fide computerphobia most days.
I say when something is easy for me to learn, it ought not be intractable for others. With most things, you just have to accept the challenge. Wasting too much mental energy on how difficult it will be to learn doesn’t help anybody. You have to find that balance point - some of you surely know what I am talking about - where you give the task the respect it deserves, but wrestle with it all the same. It’s not terribly different from weightlifting: You become strong lifting those weights, but the weight doesn’t change - you do. And it doesn’t happen overnight. I suppose that I’ve been guilty more than a few times of complaining that something was too hard before I even tried. When I look at it from the other side it’s downright annoying. “Hey - fail a few times before you tell me you can’t do it.” You know, because otherwise I have to do it.
But tomorrow is the day: I’ll find out whether Reiter’s wants to bring me in on this project. I’m at a disadvantage because I don’t really know how their organization functions. I’m going to hit the learning curve - I’ll need to absorb some information before I can act. But, it should be good practice in consulting. Every new job is going to be like that for me: Accepting the challenge.
Posted in employment, web-craft, olssons | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 24 Apr 2008 20:24:00 GMT
It seems like I had more conversations with people yesterday than I do on a normal day. Some of it has a perfectly reasonable explanation, but not all of it.
My sister came to town. Her train was later than she expected, and I misunderstood - thought she sounded pessimistic about the arrival time when she wasn’t. So, I was planning on a late evening. However, she arrived, I wasn’t at the station yet, and she was leaving me phone messages at home while I was visiting at the Reef. I planned to return home, get my bearings and head over to the train station when in she walked with Olga. It may not have gone as planned, but it did solve the problem of dinner - by this time most restaurants in the neighborhood had stopped serving, but the Reef’s kitchen stays open late. So we ate there.
Leah called me at work to ask about our friend who was having surgery this week. We talked a little about job prospects of someone with bookstore experience, She also reminded me that the people at her bookstore play ping pong. I believe the gauntlet has been thrown down…
My brilliant plan was to work until seven, then take the subway down to meet my sister at 7:45. Plan B was to leave a little earlier, go home first, then go to the train station. Two things caused that timing to drift: I worked until seven anyway, and the bus was in no hurry to take me home. I heard a lot of other people grumble about how long they waited. Not me. I read my book. But I noticed there was a guy craning his neck to get a look at that book. I was reading “The Economics of Attention”. I was starting to get nervous about his attention. I made eye contact, and he asked “What do you think of that book?” He’s read it? The sheer improbability! But it was true. We launched into an exchange of intellectual bravado - tossing out the deepest ideas we could, straining relevance at times, but always returning. This was not a conversation as most of you know it. We took long silent pauses to integrate each other’s point of view into our own. I had a thought about the silence of companionship, and how comforting it can be, even if it is usually quite awkward. We eventually traded some biographical details. You know the sort of thing: Career hilights, bookstore preferences, etc. It didn’t even occur to us to introduce ourselves.
Later at the bar, I fell in to some chat with some of the regulars. April the bartender was running her usual Wednesday night iPod jukebox. Producing my sister out of the blue served as an excellent conversation starter. April’s friend Amber was suddenly much more motivated to talk to me. She’s moved to Baltimore and dedicates Wednesday nights to visiting DC. We both had a boss go in for surgery this week. I pulled out my little folder of photographs, since neither Vanessa or Olga had seen them - they’re different from what is online now. Eventually, Amber was unsatisfied with the guys down on the other end of the bar trying to chat her up, so she ditched them. There was some odd social dynamic happening with a smug guy who was plastered and nobody could claim him as a friend. He hovered a bit, not receiving the nonverbal cues. Soon after that we broke up the party and wandered home, most of us grumbling something about work in the morning.
Posted in bar-scene, photography, employment, books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 03 Apr 2008 15:04:00 GMT
It looks like we may be getting to the end of the road here at the store. I’m not privy to the details and I couldn’t discuss it in such a public forum anyway. Combine a barely profitable business in decline over a period of years with sudden economic downturn and you’ve got the perfect recipe for a little Schumpeterian Creatve Destruction.
It’s unclear which of my many roles here in the organization would continue through a transition. For one thing, web sites are a particularly well suited vehicle for disseminating information to the public… Or they could just abandon it. A lot of aspects of a business can just go into limbo for a while, but they cannot simply be ignored. So there could be a lot of job left here, or just a little. And as I peruse the local job listings, I am confronted with some very interesting facts about myself.
In job listings, I don’t know what a lot of the job descriptions really refer to - it all sounds like qualities I don’t have, which isn’t so implausible. I think I can see how all my qualities are potentially advantages or drawbacks. For instance, maybe I wouldn’t be any good at the things I want to do, while I would get along just fine doing something arbitrary. I also want my experience to count for something without necessarily continuing to do the same kind of work. But that phrase ‘kind of work’ can be as vague or specific as you wish it to be: In one sense I’m thinking about the ‘kind of work’ where I earn a paycheck, as opposed to something like volunteering. But drill down to the details, and maybe I don’t want to deal with SQL all day, or a lot of HTML & CSS. Maybe I’m done with those things and want to move on, but in the meantime that’s what people desperately need somebody to do.
I don’t think I have ever fit well into conventional situations. Every move I could make seems so out on a limb to me now. There are not a lot of good ways to get casual experience with - say - Information Technology Purchasing. I might have acquired some of that experience here, but there was never much empowerment conferred. It all sounds a bit more intimidating than it needs to be - aren’t there systems in place for me to follow? Or, is the only system high expectations of failure avoidance?
My modus operandi in the past has always been to try doing something and see how it feels. But in those cases, it was only me. On the one hand, nobody was inconvenienced, but on the other hand, nobody sees me being adventurous. To top it off, I am much more adventurous in my thinking than I am in my actions.
This site is one element in my portfolio. It’s not particularly complex, but I’m the administrator.
Posted in employment, web-craft, olssons | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:29:00 GMT
