The first computer I ever had was an Apple IIc. The second computer was a newfangled 486 when I was sixteen or so. That’s when I started to really get in to computing. That computer had Windows 3.1 installed on it, which had the “Program Manager” interface, which stunk. At the time Steve Jobs (of Apple fame) had a company called NeXT, that had a skin/interface that worked on top of Windows with which you could replace Program Manager with a series of buttons that would today be analogous to the Quicklaunch Bar (incidentally, I make more use of the Quicklaunch Bar than anyone I know. Probably not a coincidence, given my computing roots).

I made this rather drastic alteration without actually consulting my parents. Mom was more mad at that than she was anything else I did with the computer except for deleting those weird files that it turned out our Internet connection was reliant on. Oops.

Sometimes I take for granted how dynamic my computer use is and how easy it is, on the whole, for me to switch software packages. On top of that, I forget that not everybody can see all of the upsides to making such a change. That’s why some people still use Windows 98, for instance, nearly ten years later. It’s also what makes a massive Linux conversion rather unlikely.

But anyway, I got a reminder of what I take for granted this weekend.

Shortly after I discovered Flashpeak Slimbrowser, it became my backup browser of choice. When Clancy would use one of my computers, I had her use Slimbrowser while I used Mozilla Firefox. What I didn’t realize was that Clancy was becoming more and more accustomed to Slimbrowser.

Now Slimbrowser is a good, but not great browser. I recently decided to retire its usage in favor of Firefox and Avant.

Meanwhile, after weeks of dealing with a bug with Adobe Acrobat, I decided that the time had come to format and restore Clancy’s computer. I decided that this was as good a time as any to ween Clancy off of Slimbrowser. So while installing software, I simply declined to install it.

I cannot remember the last time Clancy was so mad at me. When she first objected, I made the situation considerably worse by laughing because I thought it was kind of funny to see someone get so worked up over a simple software change (an upgrade, at that). What I declined to realize was that I was not switching out one product for something better; I was switching out something that she had spent quite a bit of time learning how to use in favor of something that she knew nothing about. In favor of something more complicated, to boot.

So on the whole, let’s just say that I could have handled the situation a lot better than I did.

Luckily, things have calmed down somewhat. A lot of her frustration was that I didn’t ask her before I did it, which is certainly fair. In ordinary circumstances I would have. We also had a difference in perspective on whether or not declining to re-install something constitutes as removing it. I see a commission/omission distinction while she points out that the result is all the same.

The next step is going to be moving her email from Yahoo to GMail. Hopefully that transition will be less dramatic.

It turns out that one of the reasons that we lost so many in our sales staff is because of the Sam Cleaver. Sam wasn’t actually let go during the layoffs, but when his brother was he left out of solidarity. He quickly landed a job at Greyskull Enterprises. Upon arrival, he gave Greyskull a list of the twenty employees at Falstaff they should be most interested in getting. That’s how they started picking off some of our best salespeople. Also on the list was our Cheif Officer of Strategic Initatives and… Geoff Hansen, the COO and the guy who was actually running the company.

It hit the company like a lightning bolt. One day Geoff Hansen was talking about the heights to which he was taking the company, the next we discovered that he was leaving our company for Greyskull. the COSI alone would have been a big deal. This was earth-shattering. There was no natural successor.

Naturally, we all started running through worst-case scenarios. Interestingly, shortly before we heard about the COSI leaving, he was mentioned as a likely candidate. There was a point in which we all would have howled in protest back when he was an Account Manager, but since moving in to leadership I guess someone talked to him about dealing with people. Maybe he took a leadership class. The degree to which he improved was both indicative of how much he had improved and how queasy we felt about most of the other candidates.

The Accounts Chief was an old guard good ole boy who actually apologized to candidates for jobs in Account Services for the fact that there were so many women in his department and told them that they were hired before he got there. He is emplematic of a lot used to be wrong for the company until Geoff Hansen came on board. Then there was Cliff, the HR guy from hell, who was considered the worst-case scenario. Bill Darden, the CIO and my boss Willard’s boss was mentioned as someone that was “on board” with the program, but his inability to deal with people would become a bigger and not smaller job if he were to take that leap. And there was Stan Markam, the current President of Falstaff Canada, whom as near as I can tell is unloathed by nobody. Most likely one of these people would be leading the company.

The only candidate we could think of that didn’t send chills down our spine was Gary Hansen, the former CTO that was now working mostly in a systems and process analysis position. Gary is Geoff’s younger brother and has been with the company some time. He doesn’t have his bro’s charisma, but he’s always had a lot of respect for what we do, which would be a first for a leader of the company.

To add good news on top of good, not only did Gary get the job, but Don Fallon announced that he was stepping aside as president of the company, giving Gary full reign. It’s odd that for all the complaints I have about the company, nearly every management shake-up we’ve had since Geoff Hansen signed on has been an improvement. The company has an impeccable record of getting all of the really big things right and everything else completely and utterly wrong.

Spectron, one of the tools we use on every project hasn’t been working for a week. Jason Carter, the recently-appointed CTO was out of town and, despite the fact that our entire department is working at less than 50% efficiency for lack of this tool, it was not considered worthwhile to contact him.

The thing about the Spectron bug is that it is only working for those that have rebooted. Fortunately for me, I don’t turn my computer off at night, so I had Spectron still up. Mine is one of the few computers it has been working on.

I knew that CTO Carter returned on Monday, so I assumed that it would all be fixed when I got in this morning. Windows informed me that it needed to run an update. I told it to go ahead. But before I rebooted, I found out that Carter had not actually fixed the application. Apparently, when he got back he declared that maintaining this program is no longer his responsibility and assigned it to Internal Tool Development, a department under his supervision. The problem is that nobody that works in ITD knows the first thing about the application. While they try to figure it out, we continue to languish.

We had a record-breaking week last week when it came to incoming requests. They got an extraordinary amount of work done, but fell further behind. Requests are going out late. This is all terrible, but let me for a moment carp on the merely annoying.

Because Windows updated, it is asking me every ten minutes if I want to reboot in order to affect the changes to the system that were downloaded in the update. I tell it that I do not want to and it asks again. And again. And again. I know that when I reboot, I will no longer have access to Spectron. It’s more important than ever that I do because I am one of only two people that have it running. Bit by bit, my system is running out of resources. Drip by drip, my memory is leaking. Four times after noon it had to shuffle around the virtual memory, slowing everything down further.

Meanwhile, Internal Tool Development is spending all of its time trying to figure out Jason’s application. That means that all other ITD requests are being ignored.

What’s important here, though, is that Jason Carter no longer has to do mundane programming anymore.

And he had a wonderful time in San Diego.

One of the many changes going on at my company is drawing up intellectual properties policies. This is not incidental to any software company and this has been an issue at Falstaff specifically. The person that designed the original software that generated our reports one day decided that he did not want to do everything the higher ups told him to. Naturally, this did not go over well with the company and he was fired. He then asked them if they wanted to buy the software he had written. He had managed to write up an employment contract that stipulated that he was not work-for-higher and that all of his code belonged to him. The company, owned by a man with absolutely no IT or software experience at all, signed it without understanding its full implications. The programmer got a $15k severance package in return for the sourcecode and licensing.

So apparently now they have veered entirely in the other direction. I was talking to an intern that told me about the contract they expected him to sign in order to gain employment with the company. It stated, essentially, that any and all intellectual property concieved during his employ at Falstaff belonged to Falstaff, whether it was done during work hours or not and whether it is related to your core job function or not. Since he was a college student developing all sorts of ideas, he refused to sign it and they made special arrangements for him.

Here’s the interesting part. I looked in to the Employee Handbook and sure enough, the same verbiage was there. I never signed the Employee Handbook, but the handbook stipulates that continued employment without alternative arrangements made concerning the policies confers consent on the part of the employee to the policies in said handbook.

That means that technically speaking, anything and everything that I have written belongs to Falstaff. That includes a short story, several story outlines, and a handful of business ideas. It also, ironically, includes this blog — or at least its contents since the beginning of the year.

Somehow I doubt they would want to put this in their marketing brochures…
means that, almost unbelievably, this blog belongs to my employer. I hope they are enjoying it…

Danielle Mattingly is the deputy chief of Legal Standards and Compliance and an inveterate worrier. It makes her good at her job.

Several months ago she told me about a problem on one of the most important Serbanes-Oxley disclosure reports in our library. The problem made the numbers in the entire document look off. When numbers look off on that big of a scale, either investors get unnecessarily scared or the FTC gets unnecessarily concerned, depending on which way the error runs.

She called me and told me that the request had been put in my queue. I said that I would get to it at my earliest convenience. This is our company’s equivalent of saying “I am falling from the sky. I ought to consider opening this parachute attached to me.” My earliest convenience meant right away, just as considering opening a parachute will almost always result in the affirmative. In either case, if you don’t do it you’re doomed.

The second we got off the phone, Danielle called Willard to have him tell me that I needed to get to work on it immediately. It was less than two minutes later when Willard got to my desk, and of course I was already working on it.

When I am creating a work order, I sometimes discover that I don’t understand what the request is specifically asking for. It used to be that I would just abort the creation. Lately, though, I’ve decided to go ahead and make the work order and assign it to myself. Every work order must have a subject header and description. My subject header on these work orders is “Do something unspecified…” and appearing in the description box is “… and do it soon and perfectly.”

Danielle ran across a couple of these work orders and absolutely went through the roof. She told me in no uncertain terms that the changes made to the request were without her approval and that she really tries to translate account manager’s requests in to something the programmers can understand. She apparently thought that I was upset at her for giving bad instructions and/or that I was mocking her.

No, no. I was mocking the company, whose motto is “100% accuracy 100% of the time” and yet has a pretty high threshold for vague and incomplete instructions from account management.

Unfortunately, she does not get my sense of humor.

A couple years ago, I had lunch with my ex-girlfriend Julie. I was in Colosse visiting and at the time I felt some sort of obligation to see her whenever I was in town. Lunch was probably not more than thirty minutes on the clock, but it felt much longer. We sat there and struggled for something — anything — to say. I always had to carry the conversation with her, but when I was with her I didn’t mind. In fact, I sort of liked someone that I could bounce all of my ideas off of. But these days I am more tired of talking and she no longer cares about my ideas. Or, for that matter, ideas in general.

The only emotion I felt during the entire lunch, and only for a moment, was one of curious sadness. This was the woman that I was going to share the rest of my life with, and now we can’t even share a conversation. Something was lost that day — her relevence in my life. That loss, however, remained incomplete.

I can’t remember exactly what the acronym stood for, but it was a secret word that the ex-girlfriend and I used before the “ex-” modifier was attached in the description of our relationship. Truth is that I think somewhere along the way we forgot what it stood for, but usage of the fictitious word that it created lived on. It became, in some ways, indicative of our relationship. It was something that started out unique and special. But by the end it was no longer understood and neither of us could remember where it came from (well, it took her a little while after the end, but you get the idea). It was the magic word that lost its magic.

Interestingly enough, the word outlasted the relationship.

Julie used the word for her password to just about everything at the time, including her account with Allstar Internet, a local ISP. We both ended up using the account for dialup as Allstar did not track multiple log-ins. More importantly to me, after my college email account expired, all my oldest surviving accounts were through her Internet provider. She got high-speed shortly after we broke up, but she kept the Allstar account because… well… because. I honestly have no idea why. Her money management was one of the more practical reasons that our relationship was on the skids towards the end.

I think that I ended up using Julie’s Allstar account more than she did. Any time I needed a new email address, I’d just set one up on her account. She got unlimited addresses. Whenever I needed to dialup (which hasn’t been that often since I have broadband, too), I used a calling card and phoned in to Colosse.

Julie lost her job a few months ago and I guess finally buckled down to take a look at her expenses. Last week all of my Allstar email addresses stopped working. I couldn’t log in as her to get to the admin area. It’s making my whole email situation pretty stressful. I don’t even want to think about the accounts I’m not going to be able to retrieve passwords for. My intricate email address setup is no more.

But in a way, it’s the loss of the word that I’ve been thinking the most about. Without using it as a password, I really have no use for it anymore. The relationship it defined is no more. It’s a secret word, so I can’t really tell anyone else about it (not the least of which because it still could be her password to any number of things). I can’t think of a single reason why I need to remember it. I’m not sure whether that means I am less or more likely to forget it.

I haven’t spoken to Julie in months. I’ve no real desire to, though not out of any malice. She enters my thoughts pretty rarely. I don’t wonder where she is. I don’t wonder what she’s doing. When I am feeling nostalgic, I reach back past her to earlier loves or I reach for more recent ones. But I thought of her everytime I used her account. Every time I used that word. It was really the last formal connection that we shared. There are no more, except for five years of togetherness that have been eclipsed by better - and worse - things.

I will probably be thinking of her sporadically for the next few days. But after that, she is likely to slip further out of my consciousness than before. If that’s possible.

If I had been told this seven years ago, I’d have told the messenger that they were insane.

In the back of my mind, though, I would have known that they were right.

Despite placing straight in to calculus, my major required me taking an intro to math. The course material was analogous to what I got my sophomore year in high school in Algebra 1. Though I made an A in the course, I would periodically freak out during the test because I would find something that I didn’t already know because I never went to class. I didn’t go to class because I already knew 90% of it and it’s extremely difficult to stay tuned in for the other 10%.

Today, Simon helped me move a matress down from Mocum, where I work, to Fort Beck, where I live. I specifically timed this so that it would be on a day where Clancy is on-call.

I feel at least partially like an idiot for this because I missed the perfect opportunity for Clancy and I to actually do stuff with other people. Well, one other person. Maybe take Simon out to eat or something in gratitude.

Then I found out that Paige was coming, too. That allieved any guilt I might have otherwise had.

Speaking of Paige, a while back I wrote about a conversation we had, the punchline of which was:

Paige: Please don’t compare me to Edgar. Besides, I’m not sure about him, but I left all my jobs voluntarily.

Me: So it’s not a matter of being incompetent, but rather a matter of being a flake.

Paige was able to make the trip out here at least in part because she was canned from her sales job for not meeting the quota. She said that her first thought when canned was something to the effect of “Well, at least Will can’t accuse me of being a flake this time. Incompetent, but not a flake…”

Truth be told, I had an interesting conversation with Simon and Paige about a few things. It’s funny. Paige is one of the most irritating people on earth in person. And in theory she is an enormously obnoxious person. And I fervently wish that Simon would leave her. But every now and then I realize that she she really does have interesting things to say sometimes. It’s just really hard to keep tuned in when 90% of it is so useless.

Camino Holdings, one of our biggest customers has its headquarters in Los Angeles. So important was this customer that the company installed moved their account manager, Anita Kershaw, out there. Camino has given her an office in their building, where she not only helps keep Camino up and running with our software package but ironically handles the accounts of Camino’s competitors from their building as well. Camino is the only client we have this arrangement with. And we are generally hush-hush about it because we don’t want competitors getting ideas.

Anyway, Anita has been offered a promotion. Camino demanded that we station someone else there and asked specifically for George Welton, the former head of our division who is now a Legal Standards officer. There isn’t much doubt why they chose George. Though he was an absolutely dreadful manager, he is a one of those guys that keeps his nose to the grindstone and gives 100%.

But nonetheless, we all broke out into hysterics when we heard that George was who they wanted.

I’m not sure if there is anyone at Falstaff that is more ideally suited for our sleepy Mormon town, and less suited for Los Angeles, than George. I don’t even think I’ve heard him say “gosh” or “darn” more than a couple of times. If there are any differences between pot and LSD, he doesn’t know what they are. He is a relatively simple man who wants nothing more than a simple life.

There are several others that would kill for the opportunity. Half of my team wants desperately to get out of Deseret. But the one guy they want is the one guy I don’t think we could pay enough.

Congratulations to Hit Coffee reader and commenter Abel Keogh, who has gotten his own radio show! I’d heard him fill in on Rick Koerber Free Capitalist show here and there, though after listening today I think I much prefer life issues exploration to the more political/market stuff of Koerber’s stalk.

Today’s topic was on our growing tendency to label any and all anti-social or counterproductive behavior as some sort of disorder. They opened with the renewed interest in Intermittent Explosive Disorder (which I had been under the impression was something new, though Clancy informs me that it has already been established), a determined cause of road rage. It also touched on Attention Deficit Disorder, a problem with which I have at least a certain empathy for.

I often cringe when I hear radio personalities — particularly those of a more conservative sort — start talking about ADD because they very frequently are dismissive of not only its prevalence (a skepticism I share, actually) but its very existence. I thought that Abel and his co-host approached the issue very respectfully. They also talked to a doctor who explored alternative treatments, involving among other things dietary changes. Interestingly he mentioned that red dye exacerbates hyperactivity in some. I hadn’t heard of that until two weeks ago when Simon told me that one of his step-kids had hyperactivity that seemed to very tightly corrolate with the dye. Clancy is a bit more skeptical on the matter, it’s worth noting. I don’t know enough about what’s in the dye to actually have an opinion.

Anyway, I have a thought on the subject of ADD, depression, and similar conditions that can be demonstrated with chemical deficiencies or imbalances in the brain. It seems that many in psychiatric medicine (or perhaps it’s more the reporters that cover it) seem to find what brain functions are associated with what undesirable behavior and quickly label it cause-and-effect. Road ragers have a lack of seratonin, therefore a lack of seratonin must be a cause of road rage. And maybe it is. I don’t pretend to know.

I do wonder, however, if things like the lack of seratonin are not oftenly the effect of the behavior rather than the cause. So that I don’t get bogged down in the specifics, let me make up a condition and a chemical. Lets say someone has notice a connection between a lack of vlaximin in the brain and the inability to sing in-tune. The most logical conclusion that many come to is that vlaximin must contribute to harmony and that a lack thereof is at least a factor in being out-of-tune. The question I have is whether it’s not so much that the lack of vlaximin is causing the inability to sing in tune, but that the persistent singing in the shower and to the radio on the car, with a complete disregard for singing in tune, might lead the body to produce less vlaximin. In other words, taking vlaximin tablets may or may not help, but if the person would sing in tune maybe the person’s body would produce more vlaximin naturally.

If seratonin is part of what keeps the pysche from experiencing intermittent rage, then maybe the body produces less seratonin because the person has been so freely flying off the handle since he was two that the body does not bother to produce the seratonin to help keep him calm. Similarly, what if ADD is not caused by the abnormalities in the brain so much as the abnormalities in the brain that identify ADD to us are caused by a brain not being trained to pay attention. To use a common canard, kids playing video games since they were little may be conditioning their brains to need excessive stimuli to remain interested. This need has its affect on the brain. A scan reveals the abnormalities in the brain and the doc says that the abnormalities are causing the ADD. Now replace the video games with a natural predisposition towards daydreaming and you have an honest chicken-in-the-egg argument.

I ran this by Clancy, who did not seem to necessarily disagree to the extent that I successfully communicated what I was trying to say. She noted that a lot of this stuff is at least circular. The chemicals inform the behavior. The behavior informs the mood. The mood influences the chemicals. Pick two of the three or go practically in every order and you have the always popular answer that “It’s all true!” The doctors are right. I’m right. Dr. Phil is right. And so on.

Unfortunately, as Clancy also pointed out, the vagueries of the causes behind all sorts of mental problems make it extremely difficult to treat. If you could just demonstrate that 15% of it is chemical, then you can tell the patient that 85% of it is a result of behavior or circumstance. But as long as the percentages are vague, which they always are, they can permanently hide behind the 15%. The fact that the treatment for the 15% is the most easily treated - at least superficially - the dye is cast.

And to the extent that the meds work, I don’t really have a problem with their proliferation. But in cases where only 15% of it is physical, they’re often not going to work. Then Clancy gets to hear all about how the meds aren’t working.

Compared to the hot and humid city of Colosse, the town of Mocum is as dry as a bone and even in June can carry with it a cool breeze.

I had lunch in the park today. Unfortunately, my usual picnic spot was on the radar of the sprinkler systems of the football field. I ended up sitting under a nice and peaceful tree. While I was eating, I felt something that I have not felt in a very long time: a humid breeze.

Though I was out of range, the sprinklers managed the moisten the air as surely as they did the ground. Though the air was somewhat warm, the cool water made it feel like December back home.

Meanwhile, the sprinklers that were missing me were nailing my car. My windshield has been in dreadful shape for weeks now. It’s still in dreadful shape, though it got a little bit of a cleaning.

At some point I will drop some quarters in a machine with a hose. But there was something blissful about the sprinkler cooling me down and washing my car at the same time.

It’s less and less often these days, but there are times I am really glad to be working where I do.

Twice a week we’ve been having a class on the industry that our company serves so that we learn what exactly it is that our clients do. I’m always looking for more marketable skills, so I signed up doublequick. In fact, I signed up several months ago when the class was being offered (by the legal team of our company) at the Mocum Institute of Applied Technology. That class was cancelled, but they held on to the slide show even as they let three of the four lawyers go. Along with others, I had been pushing for them to do a class locally if not at the college. They apparently relented, agreeing on the importance and deciding to video tape Eldon Cooper, our last remaining lawyer, teach the class.

Unfortunately, the combination of the big lunch I had today, the uninspiring lecturer, and the familiar teacher made it a bit tough to stay awake. Even more unfortunately, I was sitting next to the Cooper. About three quarters through the class, he paused and said, “And that’s for that section. Which is good cause apparently Will couldn’t take any more of it.”

The documentarialist immediately grabbed the camera from the tripod and aimed it right at me. In a room with several important people in the company including my bosses boss and two other Chief Officers, everyone burst out in to laughter. Cooper actually apologized to me after the class for bringing me to everyone’s attention. He said that he had been having trouble keeping a straight face while listening to me obviously fight off the sleep and the snores. He offered to talk to the documentarialist about cutting that from our footage.

I told him not to bother. I figure it will provide some comedy relief. And besides, it’s my legacy.

In any case, the whole incident could have turned in to something very bad at another company. But for all of its faults and however uptight it tries to me, once you get outside of official policy there is a certain laid-backedness about Falstaff that keeps it from getting too uncomfortable.