Thedwick

So every once in a while I purposely ignore my calloused urban instincts and trust someone I know I probably shouldn’t trust, almost as a test for humanity and a verification that I’m not erring too much on the hardened side.

Yesterday I was doing yard work in front of my house and this sketchy guy on a bike comes up and starts talking about how great he is at digging the weeds out of driveway and sidewalk cracks with this funky bent metal rod thing he was carrying. He starts to show me and, in fact, he is quite good at it and the tool works pretty well.

So he goes on and on about how well he can do it, and how much he needs the money, hasn’t eaten in several days nor had his insulin because he has no money. We get people like this around every month or so, always with quite elaborate stories.

After much talking about what a great weeder he is I hire him to do my driveway and the strip of grass between the street and sidewalk for $30. Yes, that’s an outrageous sum, but remember I’m deciding to purposely ignore my instincts and believe he really needs $23 for insuln and the rest for food, so it’s part work and part charity.

Almost immediately he starts talking about how he really needs the insulin and food first and will come “right back” to finish the job if I’d only give him the money right away. For a while, I pretend I don’t know what he’s talking about and manage to get inside. When I tell him I don’t believe he’ll come back, he acts offended. I offer to drive him to get the insulin and he doesn’t want me to. By that time he was half done, so we work out that if he finishes scraping the rest of the weeds then I’ll give him the money and he can come back to sweep up everything after he goes to the store (remember, purposely ignoring my urban instinct).

I left the stuff that needed to be swept on the sidewalk until almost sundown. Of course, he didn’t come back.

I am saddened but not surprised. It took me 5-10 minutes to finish his job; that’s all the work he would have had to put in to keep his word.

So I’ve figured for a while that my ideal job might be as a consultant. The reason is that I like to tackle new problems all the time, like to implement things start to finish, and like to learn new technologies.

There’s one huge barrier: I don’t want to travel very much.

So, really, my ideal job might be as a kind of ‘internal consultant’ at a company large enough to have such a thing. I could move from one project to the next to help out where needed. If only such a job existed, I might be the happiest man in software.

So I’ve gone to a flurry of offsites this month and they’re a pretty interesting beast. The assumption is that you can’t get this group of people all in the same place to talk about something without actually removing them from the office and moving them to a hotel for a few days. The first day always ends with a dinner where many or most people get fairly drunk.

Since we’re a global company, all of the offsites include people who have flown from other countries.

I sat on a ‘panel’ at one of these offsites and gave a presentation at another. Both made me fairly nervous because they were for an audience that included a lot of upper management types but in the end they went very well. It’s a fairly surreal environment and it makes me realize how rare it is to spend an entire day in the company of the same set of people non-stop.

But I finally understand where a lot of the “big decisions” companies make come from. At least the ones that are made at these kinds of offsites are made by groups of people who have 45 minutes to talk about them in breakout sessions and then present them back to the larger group for another 30 minutes of discussion. There’s no ponderous research and review of statistics and cost-benefit analysis. Just a bunch of smart people shooting largely from the hip based on their own experience and perceptions and going with whatever consensus they can come up with.

Reminds me of a gripe my wife has when her employees or colleagues start talking about “them” and “they” and how “they” must have designed xyz policy with whatever nefarious hidden motives to make their life more difficult. In reality I think the truth is much more pedestrian; most business decisions are made with a genuine set of best intentions and any unintended consequences for the rest of the employees at the company are from a simple lack of time or research.