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Fishing Is Poetry
I fell in love with fishing sometime growing up. My Mom loved to fish and started taking us to creeks and rivers to get us out of the house. A few times we brought home a stringer of fish to fry up but eating them wasn’t really the thing we cared about. We’d sit on the banks of Beaver Creek and pull spinners or toss worms until a white bass, trout or something else tugged on the line. There was a pond we frequented as well and I remember renting a boat at a larger lake where we caught crappie on bobber rigs and my sister took a huge catfish trolling a spoon.
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Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear
Nobody seems to know what a pumphouse is. That’s perplexing to me. If, as is likely, you’re not sure either, the basic situation is that if you don’t live where there is a municipal water system you need a well and a pump to pull the water up and out of the ground. You also likely want something that keeps pressure in your water system so there is often an air-bladder system. The whole mess is controlled by an electrical unit that knows when to power on both devices and hence, far from the city, you have running water. All of these bits and pieces are subject to the elements unless you protect them so you build a tiny shed around them and that is the “pumphouse”.
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Untested Assumptions
I have a good friend who I’ve worked with before and who is in a role with the same title as mine but it’s one of those roles where the reality and execution have more to do with the place where you’re working than what it’s called. These roles tend to suit me because I like to go where I’m needed. One day she challenged me about a fork in the road and I told her that I didn’t want to switch paths right now, “But why?” she asked. To which I replied “Sometimes my timeframes are geologic.” but my answer felt weird. I cocked my head to the side, took a sip of my beer and told her “I’ve never really unpacked that assumption though.” She has a remarkable way of challenging me to ask new questions.
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The Year 2020
The year is almost over and I’ve had a hard time recapping it in my mind. I went through my calendar to remember how it started. We were smack in the middle of a customer implementation, multiple pilots and building out a nascent team. I got really sick in late February and had to take a week off of work for the first time that I can remember in a long time. I can still recall riding the train home and starting to feel the off-kilter out-of-alignment that means my body is under attack. I can remember too my manager calling me the weekend after, as I was ready to come back, and saying “Billy, this COVID thing is exploding. We’ve been working all weekend. Just know what you’re coming back to”. Later I’d read the case study of the first patient treated successfully at our Everet hospital and follow up on a UW researcher that suggested we likely had 100s of active covid cases in the community without knowing it.
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Time Off
I now am lucky enough to lead a new team and have a couple of members who just got back from time off and another about to embark. Our work is fast and furious so there’s been more checking in of slack, during time off, than I like to see and when I pointed that out someone mentioned how I seem to work on the weekends so there! They’re right so who the heck am I to suggest that someone unplug?
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N-Pagers
“My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him all good things-trout as well as eternal salvation-come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.” ― Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through it and Other Stories
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My Useless Degree
I’ve been seeing posts about “useless degrees” lately, usually in reference to liberal arts degrees or majors that don’t translate directly to a job. I also recently picked up a book called The Physicists World by Tomas Grissom, who happened to be one of my professors at The Evergreen State College (TESC). He was a great teacher and I wish I was a better student. As it was I was busy working, dating my soon to be wife and struggling through the more advanced math that the program demanded. I’m only through the first couple of chapters of the book that mostly hinge on the history of thinking about motion from the presocratics and other philosophers. There’s no physics per se yet and I love it. This got me to thinking about my journey in higher education.
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Nobody Uses a Magical Trapeze to Put Their Pants On in the Morning
At a HIMSS conference in New Orleans, not long after Hurricane Katrina, I was in a large auditorium where I got to hear Colin Powell speak. As a one time Secretary of State, Four Star General and overall well respected public servant I was super-excited to hear him speak much more than Steve Ballmer or any of the other industry luminaries who were present at the time. Being a newly minted Director of Technology, I was hoping to soak up as much information as possible from leaders who I looked up to.
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On Ambiguity
I’ve had reason to think again about the oft provided career guidance about “being comfortable with ambiguity”. It first showed up for me when I began working as a manager. This was right after the dotcom boom so automation and the widespread use of software was still a newish thing so to speak. This led me to think, young and naive as I was in my career, that as long as leadership could just clearly communicate their really clear goals, life is easy for everyone and we can make huge jumps in progress.
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What grinds my gears? Advice to Millenials
As I scan my LinkedIn feed, I’ve noticed a trend that torques me off pretty good. It usually looks something like advice for millennials by a non-millennial who assumes that millennials need the advice. The famed Avocado Toast Article that says Millennials don’t buy houses because they overspend on coffee drinks and unnecessary breakfast food items is possibly the most horrible example of this.
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Welcome, at least for now.
Everything is ephemeral. All of our perceptions, belongings, reality and the universe at large is ephemeral. It eventually goes away. It changes, mutates, becomes something else, dies, transitions, undoes, unties or just isn’t anymore. The moment we’re in now passes in an infestimally small quantum. What was, is already not by the time we perceive it. If a tree falls in the woods…..
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