It’s officially Valentine’s Day now, which has never really been my thing – in all its commercialized clichés and demands that people pay attention to each other in a pre-packaged and boring way. It’s not that I don’t appreciate shows or showers of affection, love, friendship on this (or any other) day, but I’ve mostly been on my own on this “holiday”, involved with non-Americans (it’s really not such a big deal for people outside the US) or just indifferent to it.
With the years, my cynicism about Valentine’s Day has grown – not so much because of the holiday itself but more because of some greater failure to find the kind of openness I needed to see or feel love –or the idea of love – with clarity. Valentine’s Day is emblematic of the prized status of being “in a relationship”. But the whole thing is something I have vowed again and again to be more open and unflinching about. Yet as I assess my own behavior, attitudes, expression of feeling, I realize I have still held back, still been too analytical and governed by fear (and what better evidence do we have of my distance than the fact that I use words like “assess” and “analytical” and “governed” to describe my approach to emotional life?).
I recognize that there have been times in the last few years when I have been so out of touch with what real feeling might feel like that I have ignored all the warning signs of … nonsense.
In one situation, for example, I spent a good deal of time talking to and with someone but even from the first moment I recall lengthy phone conversations in which I was literally rolling my eyes and writing down annoying things he said, grammatical errors he repeatedly made, dull stories he repeated… he was dead annoying and I was trying to remind myself of this each time that I caved in and started talking to him again. I questioned again and again whether I should trust myself about these initial impressions – because I have been on my own, independent and purposely staying out of relationships for so long, could I possibly know for sure that someone was much more trouble than he was worth? Could I know that my giving someone the benefit of the doubt would be expensive, frustrating and filled with the kind of exposure to insensitivity that is almost impossible to fathom?
It’s funny to realize that even someone annoying, whom you don’t really like, can still somehow cause you to form expectations and be disappointed. Example – I expected a basic level of humanity but instead got something unpleasant, smug, boring as all hell with an incomprehensible attitude of superiority. Something full of excuses for all the missteps in life instead of taking personal responsibility, all kinds of unfinished, procrastination-fueled messes, and a non-listening, self-absorbed ass suffering from stunted development and an inability to read situations and people. Again the benefit of the doubt made me dismiss most of the anger I felt and write it off as just being at totally different spots in our lives. Truth is, though, I have experienced that before, but I don’t find that I feel residual and active dislike for any of the people who have made appearances in my life other than for this one completely oblivious person.
All that is neither here nor there (I have always hated the expression “neither here nor there” so I am surprised at myself for using it). I am far from perfect and am probably screwier emotionally because I feel like my experiences and choices have given me a skewed sense of feeling. I have let the falsehood of comparison overtake me. Worst of all I have not really allowed myself to be in the moment despite all my self-admonition to do otherwise. So many losses both for me personally and in the lives within my close periphery have infused everything with a sense of urgency about living in the moment and, more importantly, feeling in the moment and exploring real feeling without excessively questioning it. Earlier in the year I thought I had messed up a situation that has been nothing but a blessing by overanalyzing it, applying crude stereotypes, generalizations and presumption to it, overthinking it – but for once, every bit of my resistance has been met by intention and understanding.
I don’t know what will happen but I am in the moment, feeling, and following my heart, and it does, on this Valentine’s Day give me the best gift of all – hope that love and compassion are possible in a way that even I can feel.
There are about five million articles out there about “how to network”, “how to build a network” and use networking to find a job. Most of these articles are generic and repeat the same things. I am not going to echo the repetition. You can get some fairly good insight from a veritable library of online resources. But I am thinking that the right way to network is a personal journey. Articles can provide pointers, but the building process is about finding the right ways and means for you as an individual. It’s not a prefab house, after all.
About networking, I can say from a personal perspective that when it comes to advancing my own career, I am not a person who is skilled at networking in the social and schmoozy sense. I have friends who are pros at this, making personal and genuine connections almost immediately, and I am in constant admiration. (I can turn on the schmooze in a professional setting when it is not for my own gain or self-advancement because then it is impersonal.) I have largely been a highly productive, behind-the-scenes doer who believes that the work product speaks for itself. But this is not really true. After many years, I believe that both the network and the built-up work reputation are important. (Not that that is a mystery or rocket science – it is just that I think maybe many people struggle because they rely too heavily on one or the other. I have known some who schmooze their way into situations in which they are way over their heads; I have been guilty of relying too much on the work and not being as driven by relationships as I could be.)
In the early days of my freelance experience, this was one of my biggest hurdles. I did not even have a personal, let alone professional, network because I was working in a new country. I knew no one. But little by little I met one person here, one person there, I awkwardly dropped hints about needing to find work, and eventually I had a flow of freelance jobs coming in and, mostly by word of mouth, had more clients popping up. This happened because I worked hard, fast and usually overdelivered. People remembered me, both when they needed work done and when others needed work done. There is a lot to be said for willingness and the inability to say no. Bottom line, though – when there are personal stakes and personal interest – or some form of a relationship – networking is at its most effective.
As the Lifehacker articles I point to explain, networking requires a personal and genuine approach. This means that networking is a two-way street. I have needed help, but more than that, have been first in line offering my help to others in their own professional pursuits. You’ve got to give to get – and being able and readily willing to reciprocate actually improves the networking channels. Everyone needs a way to get their foot in the door.
For me, as for most introverts, it is incredibly hard to admit to needing help or even to making the kinds of connections one could eventually turn to for help. Another Lifehacker article cites a New York Times piece that tells introverts to force themselves into in-person meetings and into small talk. Any introvert would react with something like, “What fresh hell is this?” It is also a bit too much like cold-call sales versus the kind of networking I would prefer to do – which is both based on my work performance and my own quiet, observational analysis of people and situations. I eventually prove my value this way. My approach to networking is the long-game approach.
Lately, though it has been many years in the making, this approach has really begun to bear fruit. At this point, people are coming to me without my having asked for help or having reached out at all. My network has become so strong and trusted that it spreads on its own.
The positives are adding up, and the first step was finally coming to a point where I could speak up for myself to say I needed help. When I needed it, help was there. It is not unlike the incredible difficulty of admitting a need for love, really. The whole concept of surrendering to some need that you cannot completely fill for yourself invites vulnerability.
In a slightly unrelated matter, of course admitting and facing what we really need can also be comical!
“We accidentally played a clip from the Al Jazeera America channel that was threatening to get inappropriately in depth about foreign policy. Obviously Al Jazeera America is new here and don’t know how we do things.” (From The Daily Show on 11 February)
We need real information and news, but we have managed to fool ourselves into thinking that we need to know the salacious details of politicians’ personal lives. We are blind and never focusing on the right things. And how this relates to what I started writing about in the first place? Well, we live in an era that makes heavy use of comparatives – and I spend too much time comparing, particularly the present against the past. And where that’s led me, now, is the path toward figuring out how to get beyond all the wrong triggers, targets and foci to get to who, what and where I need to be. And of course, in keeping with the generous and reciprocal nature of real and valuable networking, helping other people get to their right places as well.
Every day when I watch the The Daily Show and Colbert Report on the internet, I see a bunch of Swedish ads (or Comedy Central ads for mostly offensive-seeming and unfunny shows I will never watch). Since I don’t own a TV, I never actually see Swedish advertising in its “real” environment. (I won’t get started on advertising having a real place across devices – it does, but that is not my point.) I am only saying that for the most part, I escape the majority of television advertising because it is not integral to the way I consume media. Therefore, when a Swedish ad shows up in my internet broadcast, I am not annoyed since these are virtually the only times I see examples of Swedish ads. I even remarked on one in a past blog entry about an ad I liked that included farming, a farmer, a tractor, some grains, a weird pizza and a sort of intense-looking cat.
No ad, however, has affected me quite like the Save the Children/Rädda Barnen ad (and the whole campaign) using children’s stuffed animals as vehicles for connecting emotionally with the viewer. Basically the idea is “Sexual abuse happens where children should be safe” (or feel safest). The campaign achieves its aim of, as the creative agency responsible for it (Lowe Brindfors) describes, getting people “emotional and engaged”. How can you not be emotional and engaged when someone has visualized the fact that “Sexual abuse often happens where children should feel the safest. And the child’s best friend, a stuffed animal, is often present.”?
As someone who perhaps overpersonifies my lifelong (stuffed) friend, Teddy, the campaign does hit me particularly hard.
First of all, I overthink. All the time. All weekend in between working and then taking breaks from that work to do other work, I was beating myself up over the realization that it is always just when you ease into a comfort level, feeling like you can let your guard down, that you are at your most vulnerable, a victim to be gutted. You know, gutted and chopped into pieces, not unlike a poor, hapless young giraffe minding his own business in a Copenhagen zoo (and see below). Trust me.
In other news (or non-news), what the hell is wrong with Fox News and other conservative talking heads? I cannot come up with words – nothing that has not already been said. They have started blabbing about how free healthcare disincentivizes working. Who says it best? Why, Jon Stewart, of course!
Writing (oh so seamless the segue) about disincentives to work and purported laziness, I was heartened to see a series of articles from Virgin on the future of flexwork (Richard Branson is a big supporter of flexible work solutions). Three cheers! It’s one thing for me to bang my own pots and pans on the subject of flexible, remote and virtual work (only I hear the ceaseless clanging – and maybe a handful of other folks who happen upon this blog). It is another thing entirely when someone as respected and well-known as Richard Branson puts his weight behind this flexibility.
Of course, another aspect of flexible work, as I have learned since the dawn of my professional life, is doing the most flexible kind of work there is (and that means you will get a lot of flexibility but you are going to have to be equally flexible in kind – and sometimes to your own detriment): freelancing. I find these days that when I apply for jobs that are not ideal for me but my skill set matches some other need a company has, I get calls on occasion offering me freelance projects, and I cannot complain.
On a slightly tangential note, I will never get used to how potential employers in Scandinavia, in formal interview settings, often use the word “shit” in interview conversation. This must be a failure to understand that “shit” is not quite the casual profanity that they imagine it to be. (It makes me laugh.)
As for the music and magic of hypocrisy, who embodies it better than my favorite punching bag, Marissa Mayer of Yahoo! disaster fame? The Virgin remote work segment highlights the hypocrisy and head-scratching quality of Mayer’s decision to end distance-work options for her employees (“How odd that the head of a tech company that provides online communication tools doesn’t see the irony in that statement?”). Mayer has become the lightning rod for this issue, really. One article I read questioned the fairness of piling all the blame on Mayer when other large corporations scaled back or eliminated their distance work options at the same time (e.g. Best Buy). The hypocrisy of it – the real rub – is precisely what the Virgin article on supporting remote work points out – a tech company supposedly at the forefront (or wanting to believe it is still at the forefront) of innovation and online communication is taking the workplace back to horse-and-buggy days when most of the tech world is, I don’t know, driving a Tesla or taking a high-speed train.
Another nod to hypocrisy, even if not an entirely matching overlap, is the recent decision of a zoo in Copenhagen, Denmark to kill a perfectly healthy young giraffe in its care and feed it to the zoo’s lions. I posted something about this on my Facebook wall, which sparked an immediate argument between two people who are strangers across the world from each other. One argued that those of us who were lamenting the giraffe’s senseless death were hypocrites who cannot handle how nature works when it’s shown to us with transparency. While I can appreciate the argument on its surface, the bottom line is – this happened in a ZOO, not the wild. This took place, apparently, in front of zoo visitors (the killing and the feeding pieces to lions). Yeah, if a family went on safari somewhere or were out in the wild, maybe “nature” and its transparency would be expected. In the zoo? Not so much. The zoo has defended its decision and now is paying an unfortunate price (I saw on the news that the zoo’s employees are receiving death threats now).
Back to the flexwork thing – all the articles come down to one thing: trust. Flexwork is possible when you have trust and no need to micromanage. You would also think we could trust a zoo not to kill a juvenile giraffe, and maybe once upon a time, people would have thought Marissa Mayer would not take a giant tech company back to Little House on the Prairie.
In the same way that life sometimes repeats its ugliest patterns, I keep getting songs stuck in my head. Last night and when I got up today, it was Aimee Mann – “Amateur”
“Despite conclusions I drew/
There was a chance you’d surprise me…”
But there are never really any surprises – and somehow that still surprises me!
I am frustrated by my propensity for cultivating and caring for people, friends, etc. and feeling that it is never really returned. It is not always that these people don’t care but has more to do with their priorities being different, their inability to compartmentalize time enough to really dedicate themselves to or focus on one thing at a time. I suppose I get hurt by this at times because, with people where it really matters, I have carved out time and energy to devote to them without expecting (well, thinking I am not expecting anything anyway) the same in return. Because in the moments I devote to them, to friendship or love or what have you, that is my priority. Granted maybe my approach right now is selfish and assumes that others act on friendship as I do. Assumes that they care as much as I do. And I know this is not always the case because I have been on the other side of the equation – I care but not enough to make time, etc.
Perhaps what wounds me more is when I recognize that this pattern has repeated throughout my life. No matter how busy I am, how much work I take on, how many deadlines pile up, no matter how much travel I must do, I am careful to carve out time, reliably, when I care. If I can do that, then how is it that people who swear up and down that I am important to them and who have nowhere near the time constraints that I do (unless they are concealing a lot of information from me, which is perfectly possible) cannot? They seem to disappear from the face of the earth in what feels like precisely the only moments we could have had together.
The bigger question, then, is why am I agonizing and giving it so much importance and attention when clearly the feeling involved is not mutual?
Cooking for friends, I decided to serve big platters of breakfast for dinner. I made piles of bacon – made crisp in the oven – and fluffy piles of scrambled eggs. To make the whole thing truly American, I made pancakes. It’s a rare occasion – and I really only do it American style – no super-thin crêpe-style pancakes here.
The recipe I used for American pancakes:
1 1/2 cups flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar
1 ¼ cup milk
1 egg
3 tablespoons melted butter
Whisk dry ingredients together, whisk in the milk until a lumpy batter forms. Add the egg, mix. Melt and add the 3 tablespoons of butter.
Meanwhile heat a griddle or frying pan over medium-high heat and add a small pat of butter for cooking.
Use ¼ cup for each pancake (makes 8 to 10 pancakes). Cook on each side – on the first one, when the top starts to bubble, you will know it’s about time to turn it over. Cook the opposite side and remove to plates. Serve warm with real maple syrup.
Then I decided to make vanilla lattes. I had no vanilla syrup but decided to make some. It’s fairly simple.
Vanilla syrup (for coffee drinks, for example)
1 cup water
1 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla (preferably clear but any vanilla will do)
Heat the water and sugar on the stove on medium heat while constantly stirring. Stir until sugar is completely dissolved. Add the vanilla. When well-mixed, pour the final product into a bottle. It will probably keep for weeks or even months without being refrigerated. I did not have a good storage bottle so had to use an empty Grey Goose vodka bottle!
Your lips have never kissed me, you’ve never
drunk snow. You melancholy moment, frigid
under these snowdrifts. Let me ask a cruel question –
do you still heat your igloo? I cast a spell on you
and tore your limbs off. And those creases deepening
in what was once a godlike brow, perhaps you’ve even lost
your right to them. You haven’t hurt me more, you haven’t.
Little mummy, aborted flower, the memory of you fades.
Oceans divide us, and you’re jaded. The hard stone
hopeless, smeared with silicate. We shall yet make love,
and I shall grease those beehives yet. My desire has weakened
now, you’ve won, you are indeed a void. And I,
the tree-lined path of countless others, contain your red heart,
gone rigid, too. I have gurgled with happiness only in you.
Valentine Signs – Spring Dump
Random Gum – Winter/Spring 2014
1. Brenton Wood – “Gimme Little Sign” …if you don’t want me/don’t lead me on, girl…
A great way to start. Driving the icy roads of the Swedish 172
2. Bill Withers – “Ain’t No Sunshine” …ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone/and she’s always gone too long…
My friend Terra and I used to laugh at this one for the repetitive “I know I know I know I know I know” lyric.
3. Robyn Hitchcock – “My Wife and My Dead Wife” …and I can’t decide which one I love the most/the flesh and blood or the pale, smiling ghost…
This has a bittersweet quality – does one’s long-lost love keep appearing after they’ve passed on? “You know I don’t take sugar”. Somehow makes me think with love of my friend Jared, and his late wife, Hulda. RIP
4. Mojo Nixon – “Elvis is Everywhere”
After writing about people’s tendency to quote Bill Gates (“content is king”) I set the record straight; “Elvis is still the king”.
5. Primal Scream – “Country Girl” …Country girl take my hand/Lead me through this diseased land/I am tired I am weak I am worn/I have stole I have sinned/Oh my soul is unclean/Country girl got to keep on keeping on…
January day in Oslo: mistakes, forgiveness, love. Thanks to Stephen. My Oslo-based Primal Scream connections.
6. The Legendary Pink Dots – “I Love You in Your Tragic Beauty” …You always wore the same dress/always bore the same expression/It’s a loveless world/So what’s the point of looking?…
7. Neutral Milk Hotel – “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”…and one day we will die, and our ashes will fly/from the aeroplane over the sea/but for now we are young/let us lay in the sun and count every beautiful thing we can see…
Letting go of trying to control things that logic has no hand in. For SD, ZM
8. Cass McCombs – “Sooner Cheat Death than Fool Love”
“I wish I never met you, of that I’m sure, I ain’t any better off than I was before…”
9. Laurie Anderson – “It Tango”
For my dear Jill.
10. Amanda Palmer – “Runs in the Family” …business is business/and business runs in the family…
With love for Roxane.
11. Hot Chocolate – “Every1s a Winner”
Something relentless about the sound of this song that makes it impossible to stop listening. It is an “activity song”, whatever that means.
12. Liz Phair – “Fuck and Run”
Thinking about Lóa, and “Fuck Mattresses Anonymous” (an imaginary AA-like organization)
13. Calvin Harris – “Acceptable in the 80s”
As my brother wondered, what was acceptable in the 80s? Shoulder pads? Cocaine?
14. Tom Tom Club – “Genius of Love”
“All the weekend/Boyfriend was missing/I surely miss him/The way he’d hold me in his warm arms/We went insane when we took cocaine.”
16. Robyn Hitchcock – “Your Head Here” …I walk a thousand miles to be alone…
“Everyone you care about/say you’d never do without/walk away, forsake or doubt/see them fade and flicker out/faces on the phone/Everything that you rely on/tentacles of blood and ??/pillows that you want to cry on/promises that you get by on/Life is all I own…”
17. Pulp– “Pencil Skirt” …when you raise your pencil skirt/like a veil before my eyes…
For Stephen, who knows what a pencil skirt and heels are all about. “Oh it’s turning me on”
18. Lyubov – “Fire” …but forever was a day/and we just ran out of time…
19. Stevie Wonder – “I Don’t Know Why” …I never knew how much love could hurt til I loved you, baby…
“Always treat me like a fool/kick me when I’m down/that’s your rule…”
20. Robyn Hitchcock – “Sixteen Years” …Sixteen calendars with nothing in the frame/you said you’d pencil me in/but you don’t know my name…
“You pegged me for a fool/but I’m the one to blame/I played a pretty neat fool for you/but you don’t know my name”
21. The Everly Brothers – “Bye Bye Love” …Bye bye love, bye bye sweet caress, hello emptiness, I feel like I could die… RIP Phil Everly
22. Gary Walker & the Boogie Kings – “Who Needs You So Bad?”
Bittersweet end of the tv show Treme.
23. Pascal Pinon – “Ekki vanmeta” Missing Iceland and my friends there. “Hann á heima nær en þú heldur/Ekki vanmeta fjarlægðina”
25. Minor Alps – “If I Wanted Trouble” …this growing up it never ends/the same mistakes come back again…
Last days as a tram rider, ending the Gothenburg period. And repeated mistakes!
26. The Bluetones – “Slight Return”
For Stephen.
27. Robyn Hitchcock – “Old Man Weather”
Madly in love with Robyn Hitchcock – as usual, as always, hence the elaborate presence here.
28. John Lennon – “Nobody Told Me”
Reflecting on the fact that the Liverpool airport is named after Lennon.
29. The Smiths – “William, It Was Really Nothing”
For the Smiths-quoting, dirty storyteller. “How can you stay with a fat girl who’ll say, ‘Would you like to marry me? And if you’d like you can buy the ring…?’”
30. Thin Lizzy – “Bad Reputation”
31. Robyn Hitchcock – “Ordinary Millionaire” …I don’t know where you’ve gone from me/I know you don’t belong to me/I only know you’re there…
“I always find a reckoning/always find you beckoning…” A nice song from Hitchcock & brilliant Johnny Marr. “I’ve got no love/’Cause it’s not in my DNA”
32. Mekons – “Sheffield Park”
One of the nicer memories of junior high/high school.
33. Terakaft – “Imgharen win ibda”
34. The Black Keys – “Lonely Boy” …I’ve got a love that keeps me waiting…
For Stephen. “I’m so above you, it is plain to see, but I came to love you anyway…”
35. Girls in Hawaii – “Switzerland”
For Jared and the love for Switzerland.
36. Sam Phillips – “Pretty Time Bomb” …it’s easy to change your name/but hard to change your life…
“Start counting, everybody/it’s gonna blow/Pretty time bomb/You’re a mirror of your time”
39. The Male Choir of Valaam Singing Culture Institute – “Riga Advising Stockholm”
I can’t explain the presence of this song. Its sound just overpowers.
40. Cowboy Junkies – “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”
For Stephen and the sad, longing sound of old country & cover versions that are even sadder than originals
41. Robyn Hitchcock – “Harry’s Song”…Nothing wants you like tomorrow…/Nothing tortures you like how it could have been…
“But I don’t know anything about you/Anymore”. The end of the Gothenburg li(f)e.
42. The The – “My Heart Would Know”
Dug out my old copy of The The’s album of Hank Williams covers – the marriage of two greats.
43. Os Kiezos – “Muxima”
44. Dionne Warwick – “Walk On By”
Song for coming to work on a holiday without knowing it was a holiday (set off all the alarms). Happy new year to me!
45. La Luz – “Easy Baby”…but in the evening/how things change…
46. Tanga – “Eme n’gongo iami”
47. ABBA – “Voulez Vous”
For Gary and the uncomfortable sexuality of the 1970s.
48. Paula Cole – “Feelin’ Love”
Probably the first song S. told me to listen to and I did not do it for weeks afterward; it’s fitting.
49. Peggy Lee – “Waitin’ for the Train to Come In”
All the songs that sound ridiculous – as in, my life can’t begin til my man comes home from the war. Opening the door to my would-be 1950s lifestyle.
50. Elvis Presley – “Love Me” …break my faithful heart, tear it all apart, but love me…
Reminds me of Kevin circa 1996 but no longer makes me sad. Memories of other lifetimes.
51. Patsy Cline – “Crazy”
For SD my Glaswegian firewall
52. Cowboy Junkies – “Mariner’s Song” …The last of man’s great unchained beasts lies/lapping at my door/I would give it what it wants, but I do know,/it would just ask for more…
For Mark and all the things we could not be. “In the storm you are my/destination, in the port you are my storm/But I would weather you my love, if you would be my guide,/if you would be my stars in the sky tonight”. I am no one’s port in a storm.
Given the fact that people do have different work styles that lend themselves to working in different ways – and that workplaces are constantly paying lip service to the idea that we have to infuse our entire organizations with innovative ways of working, and we finally have the mostly seamless technology options to make this feasible – we are in a unique place to encourage virtual work and home offices now more than ever.
Everything is affected by the interplay and interconnectedness of technology and our work lives. Why would workers accept being forced to be chained to a desk in an office – or conversely, why would employed limit their talent pool to the immediate vicinity? Especially in global companies that seek budgetary solutions to increasingly competitive and austere business landscapes. Not every employee is going to want to work remotely all the time, and not every job or project is ideal for this set up. But being flexible enough to see where efficiencies can be gained, employees can be happier and more productive, where costs, sometimes significant, can be saved and even semi-unrelated matters, such as increasingly long and taxing commutes to and from offices and traffic gridlock can be reduced, is the first step toward a new “frontier”. Looking at the way a remote worker thinks, or how the workforce thinks about remote work, it is clear that the trend leans toward a more flexible future. And would give people the sense that they had greater freedom and more control and balance in their lives.
Some research published by the MIT Sloan Management Review suggests that bosses are roughly nine percent more likely to consider an employee dependable if you spend time at the office. I know that was the consensus when I entered the workforce thirty years ago, but I thought we were a little more enlightened now.
Not too long ago, a friend of mine sent me an article written by Robert Pozen for the Harvard Business Review. This study conducted by Kimberly Elsbach found (agreeing with the MIT study), after interviewing 39 corporate managers, that they all generally felt like employees who spent more time in the office were more dedicated, more hardworking, and more responsible. These guys sound just like my dad.” (Emphasis in italics is mine.)
What really gets to the heart of it though is an article called “A new workplace manifesto: In praise of freedom, time, space and working remotely”, which covers the full range of benefits of telecommuting, pitting them against the downsides of the traditional work model (e.g. long commutes that lead to “misery, associated with an increased risk for obesity, insomnia, stress, neck and back pain, high blood pressure and other stress-related ills like heart attacks and depression, and even divorce”; the uncontrolled level of interruption and idle conversation, useless meetings and so on once you get to the office; go home in another hell commute. Go home, repeat.). As the article points out, it is drudgery. And the author, David Heinemeier Hansson, is in a position to know. As the creator of popular project management tool Basecamp and web framework Ruby on Rails and a partner in the software company 37signals (renamed/reinvented recently under the Basecamp name) – all active parts of a busy virtual-work future, he has his finger right on the pulse of this aspect of the changing workscape. He and co-author Jason Fried have captured a great deal of this – and addressed many of my complaints and dreams – in a book called Remote: Office Not Required. (Recommended!) You can also check out remote job opportunities on WeWorkRemotely.
The article gets to the point I have been trying to make – the drudgery of the surroundings of work is not to be confused with the work itself. “It’s time to reject the false dichotomy between work and luxury. See, none of this is about escaping the intellectual stimulation of work itself. Work is not the enemy we’re trying to outrun. We’re simply running from those accidental circumstances.”
I love my work, but I know I have always been better at it when I have the focus and freedom to do it from my home office. No commute, no being exposed to all the office illnesses that spread like wildfire, no major drains on my concentration. Naturally this works because I am primarily a writer and need the focus. Maybe someone who is a project manager who has many stakeholders to manage would have a more difficult time of it, especially in a tradition-driven, traditional industry. But this too is changing. Productivity solutions and software are making all-virtual companies a reality.
Apart from having to sell the idea to the more staid and conservative workplaces, there is still a kind of stigma attached to the idea of virtual work, as though it is inherently scammy, “But it’s still early days and it’s still “weird.” Like Internet dating was in 1997. Remote working still reminds most people of either scammy signs at the side of the road that promise, “$1,000/day to work from home!” (without mentioning what the work is exactly) or social hermits who never leave their house or put clothes on before noon.” (I love the reference to “like Internet dating in 1997”. If we have gotten past the stigma there, why can’t the same be said of something productive like work?)
There is the figurative idea of corporate suicide – what kinds of things can one do to commit his/her own form of corporate suicide? Something that causes one to fall out of favor?
It is too surface level and too far outside of everything to fictionalize, really. I skim the surface of my own life lived in the corporate world – wandering like a zombie through the halls teeming with those inoculated against reality by the shakedown of corporate life and language. I remain with calm, collected surface, never disrupted, but screaming underneath. I am reflecting on the painstaking choice of words reserved only for writers who have all day to think and no sales to make, no “value proposition” to introduce to shareholders and stakeholders.
But what about the non-corporate environment? The working world with production schedules to meet? That environment is equally tired, painful – fraught with the dangers of unaccomplished and dissatisfied late-20s to early-60s women all introduced too early to middle-age and its indignities, particularly for women. Rote, miserable work in production industries, visiting the “smoke shack” for smoke breaks, some with long coiling hairs growing from the face. Some incompetence. Some absenteeism until enough “occurrences” have accumulated to get them fired. Yes, even a legitimate illness is counted as an “occurrence”. Even in this environment, a lot of corporate bullshit language trickles down although the “troops” suffer less of it – subjected only in quarterly company-wide meetings to the talk of it. But where is the walk of it?
