Infantile Work

My friend M told me a strange workplace story last time we met for lunch. They had a bi-weekly call with their skip-level manager - something this guy does to rally the troops and give them a chance to engage with him directly. A very notable exception in her company which is fixated with level and title. M and her peers are appreciative of the gesture and effort. However, this last call went quite strangely - the majority of the time was spent in discussing questions and concerns about attendance in the office, how it is tracked and what happens when some folks are flagged for habitual patterns of non-compliance.

Folks were asking this guy scenario questions like if my dog were to become deathly ill and need me to give him medications five times a day, can I stay home for the day. The answer was that should be okay as long as the reason is properly documented and the manager has awareness of the situation. Someone else had a question about taking off a day in the week every week until their vacation days ran out - how would they be measured for the purposes of attendance compliance. This one the hapless skip-level manager simply could not answer. 

M was the only one in the call who did not have any questions. She says she felt like she had regressed in age and intellect back to middle school, trying to score an unmerited hall-pass. We calculated the total amount of productive dollars wasted by this group of ten generously compensated resources for the hour long discussion of truancy scenarios could buy a years worth of groceries for a poor family of four. By her estimate 95% of meetings in her company are entirely pointless, the rest may have some passing point. With that kind of volume an hour of wasted time talking nonsense across the organization, could be enough to buy a house.

Reading Again

I read The Second Sex as a teenager and it was one of the books that shaped my thinking as an adult woman. Many times since then, I have wanted to return to it but hesitated fearing that a second reading so much later in life may rob it of the brilliance and magic it holds for me, it will somehow come to mean less to me - that felt like too big a loss to risk. Earlier this year, I decided to do it anyway and am so very relieved to find it is there for me - maybe in a different way in the confused adolescent years, but solidly, meaningfully there. 

Early on, Beauvoir  talks about how women have never been able to bargain collectively, agitate for and win rights in the manner of many other groups of marginalized people:

The proletarians made the revolution in Russia, the blacks in Haiti, the Indo-Chinese are fighting in Indochina. Women’s actions have never been more than symbolic agitation; they have won only what men have been willing to concede to them; they have taken nothing; they have received. It is that they lack the concrete means to organize themselves into a unit that could posit itself in opposition. They have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and unlike the proletariat, they have no solidarity of labor or interests; they even lack their own space that makes communities of American blacks, the Jews in ghettos, or the workers in Saint-Denis or Renault factories. They live dispersed among men, tied by homes, work, economic interests, and social conditions to certain men—fathers or husbands—more closely than to other women. As bourgeois women, they are in solidarity with bourgeois men and not with women proletarians; as white women, they are in solidarity with white men and not with black women.

I could not help transposing this wisdom to a woman's experience in the modern workplace. There are symbolic things that they might do for each other even make tangible gestures of solidarity but when it comes to actually getting ahead at work, a woman is much better off with a male manager. The worst enemies of women can be women - not much has changed. As such, collectively we are still in the state of "symbolic agitation" and accepting what men are "willing to concede". As a young person, I remember feeling glee at Beauvoir's factual basis for equating a man's intelligence to that of a woman - something that was far from a foregone conclusion in my place and time. Reading it again brought back that feeling of vindication from long ago 

..to compare two individuals correctly while not taking into account the body, one must divide the weight of the brain by the power of 0.56 of the body weight if they belong to the same species..  Equality is the result. But what removes much of the interest of these careful debates is that no relation has been established between brain weight and the development of intelligence

I am so excited to take the journey all over again- this time with lived experience of a woman, not the haphazard confusion of youth trying to make sense of what womanhood even meant.

Losing Connection

Found this story about retail shrink very informative. The separation between the business ownership and the community it serves is cited as a factor :

..an emptier store — where workers are fewer and farther between, lower paid and less satisfied — may be more vulnerable to theft by both customers and employees, according to Lawlor. Especially if it’s a chain that seems disconnected from the community, he said. In 2022, the average reported dollar loss from employee theft (including merchandise theft, refund fraud, cash theft or passing merchandise to friends) was $2,180, in line with 2021 and 2020 levels, according to the NRF’s report. 

“In the good old days, a lot of stores were family-owned, the owner was right there,” he said. “You knew them or the family, you had a personal relationship, or you might just feel more of an obligation and be protective of the inventory and the business. So all this kind of builds upon itself.”

One big change I have seen in the time I have been in America, is at the Home Depot. It used to be that you would find an employee ready to help at every aisle. Irrespective of the aisle, they were all knowledgeable about the what was on stock at the store and eager to learn about your project and steer you in the right direction. All you had to do is ask. On weekends, the Home Depot in my town had these DIY classes that you could sign-up for and learn to do the job under expert guidance before you ventured forth on your own. As a new-comer to the country, I absorbed all of this, learning how to do customer experience right. 

These days, the staff at Home Depot can be hard to track down and once you do they have no idea where things are (if they even are in the store) and look up the same app as you do as a customer. The inventory database the app uses is highly unreliable so it almost does not matter what they claim to have in stock. The employees most certainly can't consult you on your project - they lack both the knowledge and the passion to do the job. 

Ironically for me, when all the help was available for the asking, I had no need or use for it. Reading this Retail Dive story makes me wonder if stores like Home Depot were more anchored in the community back then and started to become faceless and soul-less over time leading to such disappointing and subpar customer experience. Maybe shrink follows from there.

Random Chance

It seems like lot of people discovered the joys of being introverted and solitary during the pandemic. Once they could not have the "air" of social contact they thought they needed to breathe and live, maybe they learned it was not air at all - that in fact they had sufficient inner resources to be solitary and not lonely. For someone who has never experienced it, this discovery of self-sufficiency can be deeply empowering, even lifechanging. Workplaces changed in different ways - unevenly based on their ability to adapt. The workplace chatter has become more devoid of life and meaning than before. People want to have serendipitous connections which is the best thing a workplace can offer but commuting insanely to make that happen by the watercooler is not appealing. 

That makes sense given the tradeoffs for most people. Missing of time with kids, being able to be there for family when it counts in hopes of some random connection at work that may in theory lead to great outcomes. Coffee Roulette and other solutions like that are a much smarter option. I met my friend S through such a roulette. It was good match-making. S and I hit off, learned we have a lot in common and could help each other navigate through challenges that could be unique to women of our age. There is no way I would have met her at any water cooler given how far apart our jobs are and where it requires us to be. Yet, this was a very worthwhile and useful connection.

Prying Eyes

If you want to read something "controversial" the public library (unless they are zealously banning books) maybe your best bet. It is one of the last remaining escapes from unrelenting digital tracking. It's not surprise that the generation that is most digital native would be the one to most seek escape to the public library. Just because they grew up with always-on tracking does not make it a wanted or desired thing for them. Those of us who grew up pre-internet probably see the library in a very different way. It was our window to the world and depending on where your local library was located, this window could be tiny or ample. Mine was walking distance from my childhood home and I went there a lot - at first accompanied by my mother and then alone. The librarian was a peaceful and friendly soul. We chatted about books and he set aside things he thought I might like. I wrote my recommendations for books in a ledger, where the wishes of readers were dutifully recorded.

Many of my wishes were granted and those books that I had only read about were ready to borrow. That whole experience was personal and intimate as things in very small towns can be. This library was far from any wonderful window to the world but it served as an escape for an awkward tween and teen that felt trapped in her surroundings and yearned to be part of the world beyond what she had seen or known. 

Around the world I am sure there are such narrow vents of light as that library was for me back then. Then there are the more magnificent ones where a person will require multiple lifetimes to read everything that is available. The light through these windows is blinding and glorious. The joy of sitting in a library and reading is greater now than before because the person is safe from prying cyber eyes. No marketing genius can dissect the data to sell this person things that they are most likely to buy. 

Cartoon Villains

Reading this article about your boss's impact on your mental health was triggering for me. I have had a few horrible ones in my life and it was no surprise that anyone who had to deal with them hated it. Being their direct report carried a different level of pain. However, it made sense because they were like cartoon villains and no one had anything positive to say about them. You did not question how they made you feel - it was all unfolding exactly as nature had intended. 

Your best bet was to find another role or another job - which all of us did over time. I had a former boss who had the best poker face I have ever seen. There was some good to C but he was entirely inscrutable. People generally held neutral to positive opinions about him. So this guy was not quite the nightmare that some of my past bosses had been. For the one year that I reported to him, I recall having an extremely hard time disconnecting from work in my mind, sleeping well at night and feeling good about anything during the work day. 

This despite the fact that C was not a micro-manager, he gave me freedom to operate in anyway that I saw fit. He gave me rave performance reviews and was nothing but respectful in his demeanor. But something made me anxious about him the whole time. Then came an org change and C was no longer my boss. The new guy was unremarkable and I had no reason to believe he was capable or interested in being a people manager. 

But something changed about my mental state immediately. I was able to decouple from work mentally after the day was done. I slept way better. Still not jumping for joy on Monday morning but I was not entirely dreading it. Some kind of invisible but oppressive weight had been lifted off my shoulder. To this day, I don't know what it was about C as a boss that produced such a bad mental health outcome for me - but he was on par with the most cartoonish villain of a boss I have ever had. That would be S and a story for another day.

Good Disruption

I am very far from a car enthusiast and have no desire for novelty when it comes to car. Its always the safe, boring and reliable Japanese auto for me without the technology bells and whistles. We went car shopping recently and its been a long time. At a traditional dealer not much had changed. It was still some rookie sales guy trying to pitch what little he knew about the car we were interested in, running back and forth between us and his boss in the back room to work up the numbers. We did not like any iteration of said numbers and left. It was a weeknight and the place felt dreary - the number of sales people vastly outnumbered the number of car shoppers - the parking lot was full to the brim with cars that they were hoping to sell. 

I am not a Tesla fan, have never test driven any of their cars. A friend of ours has a vivid blue Tesla with the gullwings. I recall feeling particularly awkward when they picked me up in that car outside my hotel one time I was in their town for work. It felt highly dramatic and quite excessive. I was glad to be inside and not making a spectacle on a busy street - that is simply not my kind of car. The drive to their home was very pleasant - I had no reason to dislike the car at all. That was my one and only encounter with Tesla this far.

So that evening after our disappointment with the car dealership, we went to the Tesla showroom down the street. The experience was remarkably not like the car-shopping as we know it. It felt like visiting the Apple store to pick up a new phone. The customer experience alone felt so refreshing, that I would consider buying the car despite my desire for safe, old, boring and such. The numbers were significantly more competitive. The side and by side experience got me thinking about what good disruption looks like for customers. It makes me read stories about Tesla's woes in very different light. 

Big Avoid

Heard this really interesting story about responsibility avoidance. My former co-worker P shared this bit of office gossip last time we caught up. Her boss had been out on maternity leave for over seven months last year and old showed up in the third quarter. But she came all guns blazing, made sweeping org changes, slayed ever so many demons all while mostly sleepless from having a new baby. Now she is out on yet another long leave and slated to return early summer. She cannot be contacted in any way shape or form while she is out. P is responsible for everything her boss was while she is out. 

But the house is on fire by now thanks to all the things she shook up and did not restore during her short stint back in the office. The way P sees it, she came and set things in order so everyone could go forth and be successful. With her gone, everything will fall apart (really there is no other way this story ends based on how she set things up) and she will return blameless ready to take on the job of cleaning up after a bunch of incompetents. With any luck she can be out before the next big thing to deliver appears on the horizon. This is how significant careers are made, P opined. We can only hope to observe and be edified. 

Shopping Crazy

I have shopped on Temu a couple of times - primarily driven by curiosity. My orders were small and the experience was good enough mainly because I had no performance expectations. J had never heard of Temu and now that she knows about it, has no desire to buy from there. In an ideal world, we would be able to buy direct from an artisan who makes things by hand using skills they have learned over many  generations. Each item would be unique and created with time and care. These things would be useful to us and be made in a sustainable way. We would only buy the things we actually need and intend to use for many year and even pass them to the next generation - there would be no wanton, excessive consumption.  

These wonderful things would all be sold at a fair price that creates a way for the traditional way of way a viable and a productive one for the artisan. While we may all be ever so well-intentioned but that is bit far away from the realm of reality. The truth is doing good in the world is often more expensive and complicated than we have capacity for. There is a significant gap between what we need versus what we want - the bulk of the online shopping is fueled by want not need. It is why the likes of Temu thrive - they address the wants in the cheapest way possible. We get to choose between feeling good about not being frivolous spenders or not exploiting cheap foreign labor. We are closer to the former than the later - so Temu wins again. It makes sense that it is popular with boomers but the reasons described

Bloomberg cites a professor of consumer culture who suggests that one reason might be that older people are less sophisticated internet shoppers, and so they are dazzled by Temu's roulette wheel of discounts when you open the app and other gamified discounting 

Landing Blame

I was looking for a card to give a friend who has lined up a new job and a bit nervous about starting there. We talked about the dreariness of what she did even if it offered stability and good income. She was not learning and growing at all. She is ten years into her career but one of those people who have the youthful energy of someone who graduated college last week. I was excited for her when I learned about the new opportunity and believe after the initial jitters subside, she will in fact enjoy the work. This card felt so right for the person and the occasion, like it was made expressly for her. I wondered if it spoke to me as well in a sense. 

Not quite in the same place or time as her as far as work goes. But is it true that I don't see incentives at work (generally) being aligned with thinking, innovating and be yourself. The people who thrive in the average workplace are masters at deflecting blame and responsibility around most efficiently. The trick is not to saddle one hapless individual with all your failures and have them take the fall - that is not smart or creative enough. The real mastery is to apportion the blame in a way that you come out squeaky clean and shiny and get other people to own your problem in inverse proportion to the power and clout that they wield. I have been around masters of the game so do know how it is done, if done well and right. The person who I had it mind when I saw this card was no master and not even in the ballpark. 

No Ring

Very relatable article about older financially independent women not wanting to get legally married and put everything they have worked hard for at risk. I think the situation is reciprocal for men as well - the ones that do not need a nurse and/or a purse. They too have nothing to gain and much to lose from getting legally tied in marriage. 

Life is a lot simpler without the papers specially that they have zero value in terms of level of commitment. People are either in love and want to stay together or they are not and in time for the right stimulus will spilt apart. Having papers and resulting complications will only make that process harder but if the person is motivated enough they will still get out of the situation. Those that stay on in unhappy marriages because pulling apart will be a financial nightmare, only end up making each other deeply miserable if not physically ill. Between the two bad options maintaining status quo is the less bad.

The interesting thing is that society on average has not caught up to this phenomenon - people still tend to view marriage as a sign of a stable union. Socially if a couple has been married for a couple of decades, people think of them very differently than if a woman was to describe her long-term partner as fiancé or boyfriend. There is an inherent mistrust of that situation and it is presumed volatile and likely to end without notice. But those are not good enough reasons for people to create a mess of their lives - specially those who have been there and done that, survived a divorce or two. 

Whole Body

This essay on how all cells in our body can think and not just brain cells made for an interesting read. 

It turns out that regular cells—not just highly specialized brain cells such as neurons—have the ability to store information and act on it. Now Levin has shown that the cells do so by using subtle changes in electric fields as a type of memory. These revelations have put the biologist at the vanguard of a new field called basal cognition. Researchers in this burgeoning area have spotted hallmarks of intelligence—learning, memory, problem-solving—outside brains as well as within them.

Recalling sad or painful memories can make the heart ache quite physically - we have experienced that. Maybe the cells in the heart can act on the memory and be triggered in a way that manifests a pain. People do have gut feelings about things and are known to act on it and often to their advantage. 

..a team of scientists at the University of Western Australia and the University of Firenze in Italy conditioned the plant by jostling it throughout the day without harming it, it quickly learned to ignore the stimulus. Most remarkably, when the scientists left the plant alone for a month and then retested it, it remembered the experience. 

I do believe that houseplants can tell when they are truly forgotten and abandoned versus when you genuinely help them thrive but missed a watering or two for reasons beyond your control. In the later case, they often rally and get back on track even they got in bad shape. If there is actual, willful neglect they won't bother. Maybe there is more than just wild imagination to such observations. 

Ranch Balm

This sounds like a fun collaboration  - lip balm meets salad dressing. This set of flavors may not be for everyone but the I love the general direction of this idea. On our walk earlier this week, we stopped at the local ice-cream store because I remembered how much I loved their lavender and berry flavor and at just had to have some. Reading this lip-balm story made me think about the marketing and brand building opportunities that could arise from giving away say ice-cream flavored lip-balms to customers to see if smelling the favorite ice-cream each time they applied lip-balm would generate more return business. 

Smell is a powerful thing and brands have not even scratched the surface of connecting with customers based on happy smell associations with their product as a way to grow loyalty. While passing by a house, sometimes you can smell their laundry detergent and if you recognize the smell, then you can imagine the scene of laundry being done - clothes being folded away, still warm. There is a certain wholesomeness to that smell and the associated image. I imagine there is a family that is leading a normal, happy life. So much can be conveyed by that smell. 

Old Knit

In a recent picture of my mother, I noticed her wearing a sweater she had knitted for me when I was in my teens and that was a second act for this sweater. An aunt had knitted the original sweater for my father as a birthday gift but he felt very weird wearing turquoise blue. It fit him perfectly but the color was not within his small range of comfort and tolerance. I remember him trying it on and thinking how it shakes things up from the black, brown and gray - it made him look quite different and not in a bad way. But that was my opinion and no one really cared. So that sweater was pulled apart and the yarn recovered to make me something out of it. 

And so there was this second act - it was a nice enough sweater and I wore it a lot. I am not sure my aunt was happy with how her gift ended up but my parents were never known for worrying about such minor details - they were too preoccupied with their own problems. I for one made it a point not to wear it if she was likely to be around because I did not want to make her sad. So this sweater has a bit of a fraught history besides being terribly old. It has held up for all these years and still does not look very shabby. My mother is prone to wearing well-preserved things from a very long time ago. Some of her saris are over thirty years old and don't look their age. When I see her dressed like a scene from history, I always wonder why she likes staying stuck in time and if her present life does not give her nearly as much as the past did. Reading about this unique and wonderful knitting project brought this ancient and far more mundane one to mind. 

Self Sabotage

It was over fifteen years ago when R said to me that I don't accomplish most things I want to because I have this great fear of succeeding at something which will then break my inner narrative. I have to admit I found that statement stingy and offensive but the fact that I remember it to this day proves he was right. The words he used to diagnose the situation were not the right ones and to be fair to him - this was not his profession - to help coach people out of their problems. He told me what he did as a friend and a well-wisher (he was both at the time). Life moved in mysterious way and he ended up being neither to me over time and his short and somewhat hurtful statement has been my reliable litmus test ever since.

If I am in a situation where I am looking for reasons to no go through with something, I have to ask myself if that is because I am afraid I might succeed and that puts me in a place where the rules become new and different in sense - which implies lesser control, lesser predictability. I did not quite connect the dots this way until reading this post. From a very young age, I have been someone who had almost no control of their situation - things in my home were turbulent as I was raised by parents who were terrible as a couple but did their best to maintain a "stable" family base for me. There was no knowing what kind of calamity would erupt when. 

My first attempt at trying to give up control came about in my 20s when I decided that I would not interfere with the natural flow and order of things. This meant not saying no to things proactively - giving time a chance to do its thing and bring about natural resolution. Some truly bizarre outcomes came from this phase and then much later when R met me, I was as he described quite well. 

Bot Utopia

At New Era Insurance, Ellen, a seasoned project manager, was in a quandary. Jen, a key team member, decided to leave midway through a pivotal project. The departure threatened to derail their timelines and disappoint the stakeholders. However, equipped with the new capabilities of their generative AI-driven HR system, Ellen was optimistic about handling the turnover and facilitating a quick return to normalcy.

When Jen submitted her resignation, Ellen logged into the company’s enterprise AI platform, code-named “HR-GPT.” She entered the job role and project specifics. Within minutes, HR-GPT pulled up a list of potential candidates from both internal databases and external job platforms. The AI system screened résumés, matching candidates with the required skills and expertise for the project.

Ellen received notifications of top candidates, complete with AI-generated interview schedules based on Ellen’s availability, that of the candidates, and available conference rooms. HR-GPT even prepared a set of interview questions tailored to assess the candidates’ skills in relation to the project’s needs. This saved Ellen hours of preparation.

After the interviews, Ellen felt a bit torn between two candidates. She turned to HR-GPT again, which provided an analysis comparing the candidates based on their responses, past job performances, and fit with the company culture. This made Ellen’s decision more straightforward.

The brave new world of hiring described in this book about how Gen AI will change the game for project managers is already upon us. It is how the best qualified candidates are summarily screened out by AI. Resumes can be written for humans with experience, the ability to connect dots between things, spot signals good and bad based on their lived experience in the world as a human being. A good recruiter has a very strong BS-meter and can screen out questionable candidate even on a short phone call. The scenario here fails on all counts when compared to what capable human recruiter can do. Yes, the process is efficient and you are hire and fire at unprecedented scale without obviously impacting the rhythm of the business. The book proceeds to describe exactly that utopia next: 

Fastforward: once the new employee, Max, was selected, HR-GPT moved into onboarding mode. Max received a series of personalized tutorials about the project. These tutorials, generated by the AI, came from documentation, past team discussions, and actual code snippets to help him understand the project’s current state. Such onboarding can take a significant amount of time away from the project team.

On Max’s first day, he didn’t wander around looking for supplies or access permissions. HR-GPT had already set up his workstation, granted him access to necessary files, and even scheduled a virtual meet-and-greet with the team.

Ellen watched with satisfaction as Max quickly integrated into the team, armed with insights and knowledge that typically took weeks to accumulate. The project not only stayed on track, but also thrived with fresh energy.

Starting from the match-making step all the way to the enablement of the new-hire relies on data being complete, accurate, timely and just perfect in all other ways possible. I found the on-boarding phase particularly intriguing having been in situations myself where I had to come up speed by end of the first day and placing people in that position because of delivery timelines. The process is a bit messy and organic - the problems that the new hire will need to roll up their sleeves and solve do not arise from well-defined or well-controlled sources. If they have any experience at all they know if the solution is fairly obvious to them and has not been implemented chances are it is impossible to implement - people are not stupid or crazy.

So you give the person a lay of the land, a sense of the power-dynamics, the idiosyncrasies of people and teams involved and the multifarious sources of technical debt - some of which cannot be paid-off in the foreseeable future. There is no sense in paying someone good money for their experience, if these were not infact the problems that they needed to solve within 24 hours of having their access situated. It's all dandy to dream up utopias with the aim of writing a book that needs to sell but real life as practitioners know does not work that way. 

Bounced Email

Early last year, I thought about M one of my former colleagues and wondered what he was up to lately. His work email which he preferred for communication bounced but his LinkedIn profile still showed him employed there. Layoffs were happening there at the time and I wondered if he had been impacted.

Since I did not know of anyone who was looking to hire for M's skills, was not sure what I could contribute immediately. That did not feel like the right time for idle chatter and a mostly pointless check-in. A few days ago, I learned completely by chance that M had infact passed away by the time I received that bounced email (and thought more time should pass before I checked in on him). He had infact taken his own life a few months prior. 

The news hit me hard and having worked very closely once. It made me wonder about how little we know (or care) about people we work with and claim to respect and admire - all of this was true in my case. M did not hesitate to call bullshit on things and did not fear consequences. He spoke truth to power and held on stubbornly to well-reasoned but unpopular opinions. 

For all those reasons, he had many fans in his peer group - I was certainly one of them. And one day he became a bounced email and a person like me imagined he needed time to process his layoff. It was like he never existed or mattered to anyone. I read his obituary where his work at the said company was highlighted as one of the achievements he was known for and proud of. That really left a really rotten taste in the mouth for me. 

Over the next few days, U reached out to others who worked with M and me during my time there. They had heard to sad story but none saw it coming even those that met him a few days prior to his death. The company had treated this is as a non-event. No one talked about it, there was no remembrance - nothing. 

One day M had become a bounced email - no different from any number of other bounced emails - people being let go, fired, quitting, retiring, some dying perhaps. All lumped together in one big bucket of irrelevance - no longer driving measurable business value. They had been processed out of the system. 

Last time we chatted, M mentioned his trips to India working for some non-profit there and how much he adored the country and wouldn't at all mind settling there for good.

This was not based on a random soul-seeking trip to India taken by a foreigner. He had not decided that the country could offer him salvation in time. M had been around for years, worked a regular job, lived in an apartment in a mundane neighborhood, commuted by public transportation. This was the real deal, understanding what it really takes to live and survive in India. There had been a resonance between this man's soul and my motherland. I wish he had acted on his desire to go make that country his home - maybe he would still be alive.

One Sided

I am definitely the person that does all the outreach to my friends and acquaintances with a very small minority who also do their part. There would be any number of reasons for one-sided friendship and they are unique to the person and their circle of friends. In my case, I would attribute it to the fact that most of the folks I am talking about are acquaintances who I picked up at certain life stages. 

That context is very important because it brought these people into my life and led to us becoming "friends" at the time. Most if not all of them had settled into what would be their life going forward. If they were married at the time, they still are. The house they lived in then is still where they live. Their lives were steady state and mine was in flux. Most continue to work for the same company - a few have moved around for work but all other parameters have remained exactly the same. 

In contrast everything about me has changed several times - they had to reset their relationship with me each time a big change event occurred. Comes a point when the other person can no longer count on me being anyone or anything they know, like or recognize. 

To them this is the equivalent of being friends with someone who transitioned from middle school to college to working adult life while they remained the established suburban white picket fence existence the whole time. If they happened to like the middle school version of me that is no guarantee they will like what they see today - that is not nearly the same person. Middle school friends rarely become you lifetime best friends. 

What I am dealing with is not a one-sided friendship but a bizarre situation of me trying to convert someone who hung out with me (on occasion) in middle school into a meaningful friend in belated adult life. They on their part have long moved on to a normal functional adult life complete with a circle of like-minded friends and peers. They have no idea what to do with me when I pop-up to say hello - I bet they have no idea why I am still in touch after all this time. It may feel quite weird infact. 

Letting Go

A one-time manager who I have remained friends with, put a lot into his career. It meant that his family had to sacrifice the amount of time and attention they got from him for decades. S made great strides thanks to such collective effort applied on his behalf - and at a great cost to those he loves most. When we met, he was a rising star at the company - already high up at a relatively young age. Since then a lot has changed. 

The money went from being nice to have to essential due to major changes in his family circumstances, his health took a severe beating and he is no longer as invincible at work as he had once been. Multiple re-orgs have left him in a strange twilight zone - his fans, sponsors and boosters (which he had plenty of) have moved on to other companies. S has been left behind with his golden hand-cuffs trying to make the most of what remains of his once glorious career. 

Reading this article about proximity bias and ability to get promoted brought S to mind. He was one of those people who made all the right moves - if he needed to show up and be counted, he made sure that happened, if it served his cause better to be on the road making deals and not showing up in the office for months, he did that. S had an instinctive feel for these things - and he was duly rewarded for his skill and talents until he was not. There is only so much a person can do to keep up with the constantly evolving set of things they must do to further their career goals. Comes a point when they have to recalibrate and make peace with not being top of their game, not winning at everything they try their hand at. 

S was reputed to be one with the Midas touch. He was brought in to close large and complex deals and he executed flawlessly all the time. That kind of impeccable reputation does not come without a tremendous toll on the person. We exchanged new year greetings earlier this year and S is very far from who I knew him to be when we first met - boundless energy, optimism and drive to see things through no matter how impossibly difficult. He is trying to coast the best he can, fighting against the tide of his own nature of a man has never coasted or learned how to. 

Fading Fashion

My oldest, most over-worn jacket is the most trending color of the year it sounds like. I usually wear it when I am working in the yard on a chilly day and after I am done the jacket is often left among the tools and wheel barrow. Maybe its time to give it a whole new lease of life since its still in one piece. My mother used to have a leopard print coat when I was a child which was accompanied by a bag of the same print. 

I remember the smell of mothballs combined with remnants of her favorite perfume, the olive green faux-silk lining of the bag whose zipper was a bit capricious. In winter she would wear her zari-bordered monochrome silk saris with this coat - usually to some special occasion. I liked to see her in the silk and leopard print and thought she looked very fancy. The leopard print fell out of favor a long time ago and I don't recall seeing her coat and bag even in my tweens. If she has preserved them knowing fashion is cyclical, I could have been completely on-trend right now. 

Over the years, I have maintained a bin of clothes that have sentimental value for me but don't wear anymore. Reading this story about a woman who wore the same dress hundred days in a row resonates with me. Whenever I look at my wardrobe, I think about what is the fewest number of items I need to get by and that is not at all a large number for me. Taking that to its logical limit would mean asking the question how long can I keep wearing the same basic outfit until I feel the need for change. 

Both my grandmothers wore handloom white cotton or silk saris with beautiful borders after they became widows. They had maybe dozen such saris in good condition at any point in time. The older ones they wore at home. They looked well put together despite a very monotonous and sparse attire. I could not imagine them wearing anything else though I had seen pictures of them in younger years where they were colorfully attired. Their white sari style never went out of fashion. Each puja they would receive gifts of such saris. Since the inventory of what they had was well known, they always got something with a novel border color and design.

Warm Contact

Every few months, M gives me an obligatory call to check on me and mine. She is a friend of my parents and I did not know her until rather recently. All our phone conversations follow the exact same pattern - she starts by complaining about her life - how she is severely overworked and can't wait to retire, followed by her upcoming travel plans and then checking on the health of every single person on my side - one at a time. 

Once she is done with her wellness checks she is ready to hang up. I have to assume this pattern of engagement is not unique to me - she must do this with the anyone who is somewhat remotely connected to her, where there is not much to say and yet some time needs to be invested to keep the contact warm. The fact that we are in touch at all is to M's credit. The mechanics of the contact may be unsatisfactory but it gets the job done and does not take any effort at all. My own record of staying in touch with people I know from various phases of life is quite lackluster so I have something to learn from M. 

Maybe there is something to be said for sporadic, meaningless contact just to keep the connection from entirely dying out. My concern about meaningful conversation, memorable meetings keep me from doing what M does so effortlessly and efficiently. It takes her less than fifteen minutes every three months - that is time anyone can find without it being an encumbrance.

For contrast, I am trying to get together with my friend L for dinner all last year without success because she travels for work most days of the month and has an intense social calendar on the rare occasion she is at home. Timing my outreach to exactly coincide with her free evening is close to impossible and so we are where we are. I will see L eventually at some point and we will enjoy the few hours together and promise we will be better friends to each other going forward. We have a decade long record of doing all those things with no outcomes to show for it. 

Writing Style

Loved the quote about not being able to draw or write in this post about good writing. I have not read the book Ogilvy recommends reading thrice - that may be the primary source of my troubles with writing given its his first piece of advice. 

For work, I do follow the rest of his advisory - specially the last point. If I need action, I will not email. Compared to folks I am surrounded by, I email quite rarely, I try to hold myself to the standard of not shooting off an email unless the occasion truly calls for it. Unless addressed directly for a response, I do not provide one. If a response is likely to muddy waters further, I refrain. 

All that said, there are some who do not like side-bar chat, texts, messages and the like as the foundation of their work and decision-making. They want to hang their hat on an email thread that has several dozen people in copy for reasons known only to those who looped those folks in along the way - for visibility.

The person of whom action is desired simply will not do what is needed until the ask is made on that same thread. Their boss must necessarily be copied if any satisfaction is expected at all. 

For those types, I do write the laborious emails, taking my time to pare and edit until the word count is reduced to a quarter of what I had started with. That's when I feel like I have been clear enough about what I want. 

To preserve goodwill with those who are in receipt of emails from me, I try to limit the word count and always keep things well above the fold. I realize I am in competition for their limited time and attention span. 

If all other emails are denser and more verbose than mine, chances are I will have priority - they may see my brevity as a reason to get me off their to-do list before they take on the more daunting items in their pile. 

Recalling Past

 An ad for Coldwater Creek popped up on my browser earlier and immediately triggered thoughts of my former boss R. She was in her early 60s back when I worked for her and I recall how startled I was when we first met because of her strong resemblance to Shirley Temple (as a child). It's been over twenty years since R and I parted ways. She was one of the most loving people I have come across in the workplace - there was no one R did not get along with and conversely, there was no one that did not love R. I was one of the fortunate recipients of her warmth and affection. On a cold or rainy day she would give me a ride to the bus stop. Knowing that I was going to be alone for the holidays, she gave me a small care package - containing little gifts all handmade by R. 

There was not a single redeeming quality about the job but having R as my manager, friend and mentor made it worthwhile to stay. And R always wore Coldwater Creek clothes - it was her favorite brand. Then there were these fantastic and elaborate brooches that were R's signature piece of jewelry. She could make them work almost all year round on any kind of outfit. So many people come and go from your life specially at places you work - it is all but impossible to carry more that a highlight reel in your memory of the time you spent together. But R was different - she was a bright, dazzling, kind, and funny. You remembered a lot of detail because she made the moments count. I dug up her email and realized it had been six years since I last reached out to her and had never heard back. While that made me sad, it did not prevent me from trying once again - maybe this time I would. 

Cleaning Up

I was cleaning up my bathroom cabinets recently and thought of this Jane Hirshfield poem: 

MY MEMORY 

Like the small soaps and shampoos 
a traveler brings home 
then won’t use, 
you, memory, 
almost weightless 
this morning inside me.

There are several dozen of those small soaps and shampoos from my trips over the years. The ones I went on alone and wished I could have taken J with me because the place was kind of special even if I was only going there for work. There are those from trips we made together and memorable just because of that - almost does not matter where our travels took us, though some places have been spectacular. 

More recently, when I arrive somewhere I have never been, I find myself thinking its likely I will never return here another time. That thought creates a different weight and value for the things that remind me of that place. It could well be a piece of unused soap that I bring home in hopes that using it one day will reconnect me to a time past - a time of good memories. 

I was able to reduce my pile of half used shampoo and lotion bottles. The smells revived memories as they were meant to. Some I could not bring myself to throw away. I know I will never use them but they are meant to be discarded another time - it was not quite their time to go yet. 

Background Helpers

Interesting disclaimer of Bard "Your conversations are processed by human reviewers to improve the technologies powering Bard. Don’t enter anything you wouldn’t want reviewed or used.". Makes you wonder what in fact you could use the thing for and also conjures up a vision of a million human being working backstage coming up with answers to your questions. The disclaimer broadly extends to our use of any online service that is free and/or ad-supported. So no particular reason to take pause because it was clearly highlighted in the case of Bard. 

Following instructions, I turned activity off so the human intervention would stop going forward. Keeping the disclaimer in mind all the same, I decided to get a ciabatta recipe since that was on my to-do anyway. Comparing an actual recipe with what the AI had produced was interesting. Bard had produced the right list of ingredients but the process steps (though the right ones) were all out of order and the details were completely delusional. It was amazing how basic search could lead me to a no-fail recipe in a heartbeat whereas the AI would have me setup for guaranteed failure. Maybe those Mechanical Turks do need to read my question and mull it over for better outcomes for everyone else after me. 

Salad Elevation

My efforts to establish a salad everyday routine led me a few different places including this book Salad Freak. I read through the getting started, staples, kitchen and pantry essentials sort of stuff and then the first five or so recipes. At that point I decided to seek guidance elsewhere. That is not because the book had fallen short in some way - on the contrary, it had elevated salad to an artform. It had debuted mainstage and was not something satisfied to peek at the entree from the sidelines. Just about any recipe in this book could hold its own and become a meal - sometimes it might ask for a simple side of protein. That is not the kind of spectacular salad I am seeking. The salad I want to turn out reliably once a day every per my plan, needs to be simple but not terribly boring. 

There has to be small element of surprise but it cannot be entirely composed of surprise and delight. Furthermore, salad-making is not the sole avocation of my life - I do have to work and pay the bills. Food is important and eating healthy even more so, but that cannot require that I carve out twenty hours from my work-week to set myself up for ongoing salad success - that gets beyond the point of untenable. I assume a lot of average people who work full-time will experience similar challenges with this book. The point of each recipe it seemed was to elevate the humble salad to be more than it was ever intended to be. With such elevation comes pain for the would-be salad-maker. If they are like me they will get away from this book and find something more suitable to their life and salad paygrade. I am still looking. 

Imagined Out

Dropped into a Pilates class recently for the very first time in my life and had the experience of walking into a room where conversations had been happening for a long time before I showed up and will continue well after I leave. There were a lot of elderly people in the class and only a minority of the attendees were younger than me. I found that both unexpected and surprising. 

I had imagined Pilates to be something reserved for the young, fit and flexible. When I was all of those things, my life was pretty complicated and over-scheduled, leaving no room for such "improvement" focused activities. I had a simple but effective fitness regimen that I followed - and that was all the capacity I had. The women I knew back then who did go to Pilates class were all blessed with "simpler" lives - they had a spouse, partner or family member who could reliably take care of their children while they were at said class. 

Unlike me they did not have to worry about the next job, next gig and heaven forbid next city. They lived in homes they had lived in for many years by then - my apartments always felt like a waypoint to the home I did not have yet. Somehow my life circumstances of that time and Pilates simply did not mix. Was I right to think that they could not, was there a plausible path to mixing it at least sometimes? There were days when I had some support too - my friends could help, my parents visited from India quite routinely. Any one of them would all be glad to give me an hour to myself once a week - I only had to ask.

So there was no reason for me to believe it was out of the realm and yet I did - stuck with that narrative until a few days ago when I dropped into the class. Do I fit better now that I don't have many of the "problems" I had back then? I realized it was not the lack or presence of the so-called problems but in my decision to put myself in the out-set of my own volition and finding some supporting evidence to do that. Just by waking into that studio, I had chosen to be in not out - that made all the difference, my life circumstances had nothing to do with it. Too bad, some of the simplest changes in life take so long to make and once made, you wonder about all those wasted years. 

Identifying Pointless

Several times in my career. I declined to interview because the hiring manager was fixated on some or the other certification that I did not have and had absolutely no desire to acquire at any time. I told the recruiter that it is a red flag and the person likely has no idea what job they are meant to do so they would not be able to manage anyone who is being hired to help perform at that unknown and unknowable job. The recruiters seemed to get the point but they had their marching orders so even if they thought I had an interesting argument there was not much they could do with it. It is highly unlikely my immediate size-up of the abilities of the hiring manager was communicated to anyone. I wish more people heard feedback from the field but that is a whole another problem about how we work hard at protecting feelings, managing expectations and try not to tell people managers that they are really bad at that job and need to go find something else to do. 

Reading this Medium essay about the uselessness of certifications made me chuckle. I changed jobs a couple of times because X number of certs in Y months had turned into a performance metric driven zealously by some guys at the very top of the food chain who had never come to come into any kind of contact with technology they insisted on everyone being certified on. But in their hearts they knew that the X in Y months was the only way the teams would be productive and bring in revenue. 

In each instance, my managers agreed with me wholeheartedly that this metric was pure bullshit and the top performers on any team were not doing as well as they did because they were certified - it was always a combination of experience, hustle and emotional intelligence. We both agreed, it would be a waste of time fighting the good fight - just get the damn cert and move on with your life. Each time this conversation happened, I did move on with my life but to a place where my value as a human being was not being measured by the number of certs behind my last name. 

Two decades ago, certs were useless and that has yet to change. Yet, people do pursue them and there are periods of time when the powers that be imagine they can solve for their lack of leadership ability and vision by keeping their workforce properly certified. My grandmother used to believe in the power of certain amulets she got from her Guru to solve all impossible problems in the family. Faith can move mountains as they say, 

Wrong Cadence

Sometimes a book is just not for you, does not matter what. In this instance, I will attribute it to my lack of open-mindedness though even that cannot be entirely to blame. I very much enjoyed Sita Sings the Blues - a very unorthodox but clever take on Sita. Peter Brook did a nice job with Mahabharat though not everyone is a fan. Maybe I had very different expectations of a book about Kaikeyi which collided harshly with something like this very early on:

He must have shoved Shantanu out of their mutual hiding spot to distract me. I spun, chasing Yudhajit around the stable, knowing as I did that I could never beat him in an outright footrace. He rounded the corner out of sight, and from just beyond the wall came a strangled shout. A second later, my shin collided with bony flesh, and I fell onto a tangled heap of bodies, Yudhajit right below me. “I got you!” I shouted breathlessly. Someone, probably Shantanu, groaned. I rolled off the pile and onto the hard ground, laughing, asking if they knew where Mohan was, when I saw legs coming toward me.

Something felt strangely off-putting about having Kaikeyi in such context and having her act out her destiny much like a character out of Gossip Girl (a show I completely enjoyed) - with an opening gambit like this, there is no other way this can end. There is a place and time for everything and this is entirely missing the mark as far as I am concerned,