IOTMT
Tempus Fugit
It occurred to me today that, sometimes, you just need some more time.
I got an email from a coworker earlier today, asking me to look into a problem with a device that wasn’t connecting to wifi the way that it should. I saw the email, and I thought to myself, “I’ll handle that in a few minutes.”
By the time I got back to my inbox to look into the details of the issue, there was a new email in the thread, saying, “Never mind, we figured it out.”
My favorite kind of problem is the problem that solves itself and my favorite coworker is the coworker that perseveres a little bit to try to find their own answers. As the sole technician for my school district, I have had many, many occasions to discover the joy of the problem that solves itself. With just a little bit of time, a percentage of stuff in my inbox solves itself, sometimes because people continue to work toward their own solution and sometimes because the issue goes away on its own.
Which got me to thinking about the bigger picture (as I so often do).
How many problems have we faced that, through the simple passage of time, become easier to solve or, maybe even, solve themselves?
Of course, this can be a dangerous approach to take with things. My final words to my brother, who died of a freak accident at the age of 31, were words of anger that I thought I would have time to repair. Turns out, I never got that time. But, there have been other examples of interpersonal problems that I’ve been involved in that, regardless of how you tweaked or fiddled with them, weren’t going to be fixed without the passage of some time.
I am a Sudoku fanatic and have been for several years now. I do at least one puzzle everyday (and on most days I do even more than that). Sometimes, when it comes to the hardest puzzles, the best thing I can do is walk away. I will wrestle with a puzzle until I’m blue in the face, but, to walk away for a time, and then to come back and re-engage, I can see things from a whole different perspective.
And, when this happens, I usually smack myself in the forehead and think to myself, “Why didn’t I see that before?”
It’s a loss of perspective that results from me sitting there, frustrated, staring at that puzzle, thinking to myself, “I should be able to solve this!” and “I am probably just a moment or two away from a breakthrough!” and “Why can’t I get this?”, and that’s when I know that I’m too close. I’ve lost my perspective.
Just walk away.
Allow for the passage of time.
We aren’t trained to do this in a society that is perpetually in a hurry. Stopping and giving yourself time is a dying art. But what a difference it can make. Deadlines and pressure to perform and massive workloads make us think that taking time to stop on a problem when we’re stumped is going to get us in trouble or is a waste of time. But, it’s not any more of a waste of time than it would be to sit at a problem, starting it in the face, perspective lost, going nowhere.
At least, if you get up and walk away, you could go and do something else.
And, I promise you that this has happened to me a thousand times –> after I’ve walked away from something, it will occur to me what I should try that I hadn’t tried before.
Additionally, but along these same lines, I’ve found on multiple occasions in life, the best thing to do when you don’t know what to do is to wait for things to become clearer. As time goes by, often, more of the picture gets revealed to the point where it’s easier to make decisions that are level-headed and intelligent.
For example, I used to play trivia games in bars and restaurants where the point of the game was to be able to answer the question as quickly as possible, for max points. But, if you didn’t know the answer, the clock would tick away and wrong answers would get removed, so that you could eventually answer correctly –for fewer points, of course– even if you didn’t know what the correct answer was in the first place.
Or, if you’ve ever seen these puzzles before –> a super-zoomed-in picture of something that you can’t possibly recognize pans out until you are, at a certain point, able to recognize what you’re looking at. Sure, you could guess early on at what the picture might be, or you could just for things to become more clear.
When it comes down to it, the passage of time is good for a lot of things.
When my children microwave french fries to have them done in thirty seconds but they end up tasting like rubber, but I get out the deep fryer and preheat the oil and cook the fries and they taste phenomenal.
Or the student who reads the email in twelve seconds but got none of the information vs. the methodical and steady student who takes their time and does things right the first time. When Speedy Gonzales has to go back and reread the email a second time, they end up having accomplished the task no faster for having to do it twice than the student who did it slow and properly the first time.
Or, if you ever seen the movie “Cars” (a Disney Pixar classic), the story of Radiator Springs, and the story of Route 66 in real life, is the story of America’s desire to get things done as quickly as possible and how that obsession affected the cities and towns that were eventually bypassed by the resulting freeways. The most wonderful part of that movie is the feel that Radiator Springs has, with its slower, more enjoyable pace of life.
Time is valuable, no doubt. And wasting time is to be avoided, most certainly. But, taking a little bit longer to do things well, or allowing for some time to pass so that you can regain perspective or so that things around you can become more clear, isn’t a waste at all.
My Cookie Recipe
It occurred to me today that life is just so damn complicated, we might be incapable of understanding much of any of it.
I have a chocolate chip cookie recipe. It’s mine, and no, you can’t have it. It started from some generic cookie recipe off of the internet, about a decade ago. I remember, at the time, being jealous of some of the old ladies from my church whose chocolate chip cookies were so enjoyable. And, of course, I asked these ladies, one by one, what the secret of their wonderful cookies was. I asked Carol and Lucille and Nancy.
They wouldn’t tell me.
And so, I set out to discover the secrets on my own. The first time I made the recipe that I printed off of the internet, I didn’t like it. Not because what I made on that day, so many years ago, was bad. No, I didn’t like it because it wasn’t like the cookies that those little old ladies were making.
I remember standing in front of that first batch of cookies and hearing those little old ladies laughing at me inside my head. “Those aren’t like our at all!” “I wonder what they’ll taste like?” “They won’t be delicious like ours!”
And so began a years-long process of tweaking it to make it my own.
In fact, to look at the recipe now, it’s hard to read the original printed text underneath all of the additions and corrections that I’ve made to the original sheet of printer paper. I tweaked just about every part of that recipe, and I documented those tweaks on the recipe itself. More often than not, my tweaks were bad ideas and so I would end up tweaking something else. In fact, I would often make small batches, specifically because I wanted to tweak something and I had no idea how it would turn out –> a batch of two dozen failed cookies wasn’t as bad as a batch of five dozen.
I tweaked the ratio of baking soda to corn starch. I tweaked the amount of chocolate chips. I tweaked the baking temperatures and the baking times and how long to leave them on the parchment paper before transferring them to the cooling rack. I tweaked blend times and vanilla amounts. In the end, I am sure that I seemed obsessed, to my wife, for a period of about five or six years.
Then, the tweaking got to be less and less drastic. At that point, slight changes, that made the recipe even better, were the norm. And finally, after years and years of experimentation and trial and error, I would say that the recipe has been pretty good now, for at least a year or two.
You want to know the funny part?
Sometimes, when I make the cookies these days, after having tweaked just about every single facet of that recipe, they still turn out bad.
And that’s when I throw my hands up in the air and I think to myself, “What the $&*%@????”
And when they go bad, I try to figure out what went wrong, and that’s when I stand, staring at a fairly complicated equation, right in the face, and I wonder.
Has my baking soda gone bad? What’s the relative humidity today inside the house? Is the oven starting to go bad? It is ten years old. Where did I buy that last bag of flour from? Am I using Aldi’s flour when I should have used Harding’s flour?
And I can literally stand there for several minutes wondering what happened.
And, mind you, this is a cookie recipe. It’s not that complicated, relatively speaking. Sure, when you get down into the nitty-gritty of the details of the thing, it seems pretty complex. But, how complex is this recipe compared with, oh I don’t know, epidemiology?
Because, here we are in the middle of this pandemic (you didn’t see this coming, did you? Me, turning the conversation in this direction? Huh?)…
I mean, I literally don’t know what to believe anymore. Masks, or no masks? The CDC or the WHO? What’s the current list of symptoms? It used to be four, and now it’s nine, and next week it might be twelve? If I had it, can I get it again? What’s the difference between a test for the virus and a test for the antibodies?
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!
If I have no idea what went wrong when my cookies don’t turn out right, how am I supposed to know what the right thing to do is, for my health and the health of my family? And, before you offer me your opinion of what I ought to do, make a copy of your medical credentials available for my review, thank you very much. At least I have learned to stop getting my medical advice (or moral advice or economic advice) from politicians and/or social media.
And, I’m no dope. I am a pretty well-educated, pretty ‘quick on the uptake’ kind of guy.
In the end, maybe it’s just too complicated to know.
I guess I’ll just eat the cookies when they turn out bad and be thankful for those batches that were perfect.
And…
I’ll trust that the next batch will be just fine.
Nineteen Years
It occurred to me today that I’ve been married for nineteen years.
And I can’t even tell you all of the wonderful things that have happened during those nineteen years. Amazing things and exciting things and marvelous things.
My wife and I have purchased two homes in those nineteen years. Our starter home, which we bought because circumstances required us to move out of our starter apartment, was 1100 square feet. Our current family of five would have driven each other to homicide if we were still in that home. We stayed in that home for almost seven years. All three of our children started out their home life in that cozy little home. We ended up selling it to the man who sold us our second home, and he flipped our first house as he’d flipped our second.
Our current home has been our home for ten and a half years. There’s a bit of contention as to whether or not this will be our forever home, but it has definitely met our needs. Primarily, it is almost three times the size of our first home. And, contrary to what you would have expected to happen, we moved from a house built in the 1950s to a house built in the 1860s (I’m still questioning that move).
My wife and I have brought three children into the world in those nineteen years. Our eldest, born in 2004, is now getting close to 16 years old, and he is my favorite son. Our twin daughters, born in 2007, are among my three favorite women in the world. The five of us are each uniquely individual and, at the same time, a strong single unit with unbreakable ties.
My wife and I have owned six vehicles in those nineteen years: 3 sedans, two mini-vans, and a truck. We have been in possession of a mini-van for as long as we’ve been a family of five, but when we first started out, we were a two-sedan couple. The truck came in during a time when my job required me to do some hauling, and I’d secretly always wanted a truck. Of course, we got rid of the truck not long after we got news that we were expecting twins.
My wife and I have rented one apartment in those nineteen years, when we were first starting out. As a matter of fact, I lived in the apartment for a week before the wedding because I needed a placed to stay after the end of my college apartment lease, but before our nuptials. We stayed in that apartment for about a year and a half, from the spring of 2001 to the fall of 2002.
Our only other significant real estate dealing was the purchase of a single piece of vacant land while we were in our first house, when we thought we might build a house some day. Do you know what it costs to build a new home, by the way?!?! We bought it before the slump of ’08, tried selling it thereafter, and ended up taking a bath on the whole thing.
We’ve only had four jobs in those nineteen years, which is, in itself, a major miracle. We were both in starter professional positions at the point when we got married, we both ended up moving into better professional positions within eighteen months of our wedding, and we’ve been in those better professional positions ever since. We have been extremely blessed to work for institutions that have been faithful to us and have been inspirational places to work, for the most part.
Unless I’m mistaken, we’ve been using the same electric can opener the whole time.
I bring all of this up because, as much change as there has been in nineteen years –this car and that house and this job and that child’s major life event– the constant has been the two of us.
When I was waiting tables, hoping to get a teaching job somewhere, Jennie was my wife.
When the World Trade Center was attacked and the world seemed to become a little less stable, Jennie was my wife.
When my wife and I figured out that her periodic back aches in the middle of a June night weren’t back aches at all, but rather uterine contractions, Jennie was my wife.
When I earned my Master’s Degree and she earned her Master’s Degree, Jennie was my wife.
When my only brother died and I thought that the world was coming to an end, Jennie was my wife.
When our twin daughters were born so small that there was a real chance that they wouldn’t survive, Jennie was my wife.
When neither of us knew how we were going to make it through having a child recovering from open-heart surgery, Jennie was my wife.
Jennie has always been my wife. She will always be my wife. We will stay together, as we have always been together, because we are –at this point– one. Our oneness, our shared identity, this shared set of experiences we’ve had, our family, our entwined destiny, all of these things are treasures which belong to us because our marriage is a sacred thing.
It hasn’t always been great, but no life is all roses. The greatest thing about it is this –> the bad times aren’t as bad because we have each other, and the great times are even greater, because we have each other.
I’ve made some crap decisions in my life (I never should have gotten rid of that truck — I loved that truck), and I’ve made some pretty decent ones, as well.
The very best choice that I’ve ever made was marrying my wife.
Always and Never Are Quite Rare
It occurred to me today that there are very few things that are “always” or “never”.
Think about it –especially during this unique moment in history when our previous lives have been significantly disrupted– how many things do you know that always happen or never happen? Try to come up with a list in your head. I’ll wait…
* * *
The fact of the matter is that you probably couldn’t come up with much of a list at all. While I have been thinking on the subject of this post, I tried myself to come up with a list. The list of things that seem to me to be most consistent, all tended to be natural things (i.e., the sun always rises and always sets, the tide always goes out and the tide always comes in, etc.), but that’s not where I want to go with the subject of this post.
Rather, I want to talk about people and blanket statements.
Accusations aimed at people that they “always”, or they “never”, are called blanket statements, because they are meant to ‘cover’ a variety of different options. Blanket statements are, more often than not, untrue, if for no other reason than the fact that people just don’t tend to be that consistent. While the tide and the sun might be consistent, humans just don’t ever really achieve that same level of dependability.
The husband who always leaves his socks on the floor has probably, at some point, left his socks somewhere other than the floor. It might even be the case that the husband, at some point, has put his socks where they belong. But, the wife who is attempting to make the strongest possible case against the sins of the husband, can’t say something like, “You leave your socks on the floor a majority of the time.”, even though it would be closer to the truth. Firing that particular volley across to the ‘enemy’ wouldn’t have the same weight. The argument against a statement like that is clear –> “Well, I sometimes put them where they’re supposed to be.”
The wife who never has dinner prepared on time has probably, at some point, made dinner on time. The employee who never shows initiative has probably, at some point, taken it upon themselves to start a project.
The problem is that people just aren’t that consistent. They’re not consistently bad, no matter what you’d like to think of them, and conversely, they’re not consistently good, either (no matter what you’d like to think of them). It’s the inconsistency that really bothers us.
Who wouldn’t want a husband that always puts his socks in the hamper, and for that matter, also does everything else a husband’s supposed to do? Who wouldn’t want a wife that always has dinner ready on time, and for that matter, also does everything else a wife’s supposed to do? The same goes for the employee.
We have in mind an ideal, and as it turn out, people never can match that ideal. They are all, without fail, inconsistently getting close to the mark and also, at other times, falling short of the mark.
But, heaven forbid that anyone ever hold us to an expectation of consistency?!?!
* * *
From here, we move to stereotypes, which are blanket statements about entire groups of people, again that “they always blah blah blah blah” or “they never blah blah blah blah”.
The word ‘stereotyping’ probably got you thinking about certain groups of people that are the popular targets of blanket statements (different races, different genders, etc.), but you can make a blanket statement (stereotype) about any group of people that you’d like.
And, chances are, if you’re going to do it, you’ll end up doing it about the ‘other’ group if the blanket statement is negative and about ‘your’ group if the blanket statement is positive. For example, if I’m a Democrat, I am less likely to say that “All Democrats are morons.” than I am to say “All Republicans are morons.” Or, if I’m an American, I am less likely to say that “All Americans are fools.” than I am to say “All Europeans are fools.”
The issue with the blanket statement is the same here as it was when we were making blanket statements about individuals. The inconsistent makeup of a group of people doesn’t lend itself to us making blanket statements (stereotypes) about any group. Are there blonds who are brainless? Absolutely! Are all blonds brainless? Of course not. In the same manner, all black men are not criminals and all Jews are not stingy and all college graduates are not intelligent, even though some members of each of those groups live up to the stereotypes.
It’s a shame that, as a society, so many of us are still stuck in the mode of thinking that buys into the hype of stereotypes. However, as time has gone by, there have been signs that society is starting to recognize the problem with these over-simplifying blanket statements.
Take heroes and villains, for example. Fifty years ago, our heroes were good and our villains were bad, and that was the way that we liked it. We wanted heroes who were good all of the time because they gave us a character worth admiring, and we wanted our villains to be evil, because they gave us a character worth despising.
Additionally, heroes and villains like these make things clearer for us; we ought to root for the hero and we ought to jeer the villain.
But then, somewhere along the line, we started muddying the waters. Our heroes became complicated by their darkness, by their less-than-pristine hearts, BY THEIR INCONSISTENCY. I’m not sure why we started to head in this direction –more relatable characters, perhaps– but the result is that we end up with heroes that aren’t worth cheering for and villains who really aren’t that bad. Maybe, when I think about it, this is the way that things really are. Maybe, heroes and villains like these are a more honest reflection of reality.
Stephen King, my favorite author of all time, has been quoted as saying that we ought “to tell stories about what people actually do –to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street.”
Remember the movie “Hancock” (2008), starring Will Smith as a drunkard of a superhero who almost does more harm than good? How about the recent string of Deadpool movies? These characters are referred to as ‘anti-heroes’, because they end up doing heroic things in their stories, despite lacking many of the classically heroic traits. And of course, then there is the ‘anti-villain’, who aspires to something great, but goes about their aspirations in the most evil of ways. If you’ve never seen “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”, this movie will destroy all of your preconceived notions about heroes and villains (viewer discretion is advised).
In the end, we are all so inconsistent. Don’t ever believe anyone who would have you understand otherwise, because what they are selling you is a myth that could lead you to expectations that are unreasonable. Guess what, spouses? There isn’t a mate around that is doing it all right, all of the time. Guess what, employers? Good luck finding that perfect employee.
We should just start cutting each other some slack. The blanket statements that we use to impose our expectations on each other are over-simplifications that just don’t hold up in the real world. The good guy isn’t always good and the bad guy isn’t always bad.
If we could free the people around us from the burden of meeting our expectations, we could also free ourselves of the eventual disappointment when they don’t.
Enabling
It occurred to me today that I am an enabler.
I wonder if we all are, to some extent.
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before or not, but in addition to being a teacher, I am also a technologist for my school district. Actually, I am the only technologist for my school district. That means I’m a helper.
The great thing about being a helper is that it makes people happy, and I have always enjoyed doing that. I’m a people pleaser. Additionally, I picture myself a pretty funny guy, which is really just a different approach to making people happy –> getting them to laugh. Between being a helper and being a comedian, people around me smile all the time.
Well, maybe not ALL the time.
Anyway, when helping people makes you happy, it creates a dependency. I need to help people, especially the ones who I know will end up happy as a result. I like being happy (who doesn’t) and so I help people because making them happy, makes me happy. Just this past Thursday, as a matter of fact, I helped someone and she emailed me back and said, “YOU ROCK!”, and that made me happy.
I may even (subconsciously, of course) avoid helping people who seem to be perturbed regardless of whether or not they get the help they need –> you know the ones: “My computer’s broken (GRRRRR!)… you fixed it (GRRRRR!)”. Those people don’t do it for me, even though I’m obligated to help them (because of my job). I will eventually get around to helping those people, but only after I helped the “YOU ROCK” crowd.
Now, it becomes a co-dependency when the people I help, need me to help them as much as I need the opportunity to help them. There are staff members where I work that need me very little, and that’s okay (in fact, it’s great –> I wouldn’t be able to handle it if everyone needed me significantly). And then, there are the staff members who struggle with technology and they are loathe to do anything about it.
Because they need me, the technologist, and I need to be needed, we end up in this co-dependent dance. They pretend to feel bad for requiring my assistance all the time (which of course doesn’t really bother them or they’d do something about it –> take a class or watch a YouTube video or something), and I pretend that it’s no bother and that I’m happy to assist.
But, it’s in the midst of this co-dependency that a critical problem arises. Maybe you’ve already seen it coming (the title of the post).
I enable the bad behavior of the people around me so I can help them.
The mother who bails her son out every time he gets in a pickle because she needs him to need her. The wife who covers for her husband when he fails as the father of his children. The employee who cleans up after his fellow employee to keep the boss from noticing the ineptitude. These people are enablers. Enablers prevent people from ever having to face the music, and because they’re never made to feel the consequences of the bad choices that they make, they continue to make those bad choices, thereby creating the circumstances in which the enabler –more than willing– is able to offer assistance and be the helper, the people-pleaser, the hero.
Perfect example: in February, I sent an email out to the people that I work with, including some advice that they should follow to keep from getting into a bit of tech trouble coming in the future. The email went out to about sixty teachers, with a link to a video that I’d posted to help them with the issue.
Then, on Friday, the tech trouble that I warned about in February came home to roost, and I got more than a dozen (and counting) requests from people needing assistance with the problem. When these requests starting coming in that morning, I LOST MY MIND. I LOST MY FREAKING MIND!
I went back and I checked to see when I’d sent that email (February) and then I checked the number of views on that YouTube video.
–13–
13 people watched that video, linked in that email. I sent the video to 60 teachers and 13 people watched it.
And then I lost my mind AGAIN!
And then, I realized something: I’m creating my own problems.
What I should do, when these requests come in from people who haven’t followed the directions that I gave back in February, is ignore the requests. In fact, if I ignored every request for assistance that came to me on an issue for which I’d previously issued instructions, people would start following my instructions when I gave them, for there would be no other choice… well, no other choice than failure.
How amazing would that be!
Then again, I’d probably run out of things to do to keep me busy. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.
I mean, how long would it take me to address, in some form of communication, all of the problems that all of the users in my school district are likely to ever face with their technology? Hell, I’m already the laughing stock of the district when people ask me a question and I answer with, “I’m sure that there’s a video about that on my YouTube channel.”
What if I built instructions for every problem and then stopped responding to requests for assistance? People would know where to get the information, and I could stop enabling their bad behavior.
Sure, there’d be new problems, but I could then issue instructions on those, as they came up.
Or, for that matter, what would happen if doctors stopped treating patients who failed to follow their directions? What would happen if paramedics only treated people in emergency situations that were accidental. Tree falls on you –> paramedic treats you, shoot yourself in the foot –> you’re on your own.
Google “naloxone and paramedics” sometime; you’ll be treated to a very real world example of the argument between enabling bad behavior and forcing people to face the consequences of their choices.
That’s the thing about helping, I guess. Even if the helping is enabling, in some form or other, and even if the enabler realizes that they are enabling bad behavior, it is their desire to help.
Is helping people with their problems always the right thing to do? Probably not. Is there anyone out there with a good rule as to when you should use tough love and when you should come to someone’s assistance?
Probably not.
Time to Talk
It occurred to me today that some people think I’m a magician.
I’ve run into it before with my kids. I’ve run into it before with my coworkers and with my students. They think I’m a magician.
And I’m sure that I’m not the only one. There are probably different types of workers, all over the economy, that are viewed as magicians because people don’t understand what’s involved in their work and so, the fact that these people are able to do their jobs must mean their magical in some way.
For me, it comes with the territory of being a computer technician. Because people don’t understand how computers work, how to fix them, how to troubleshoot the issues that you have when you are working on one, they think that anyone who is capable of fixing them and making them work is somehow special.
I assure you, I am not special.
I have a friend in the town where I live who’s the head auto mechanic at one of the most popular auto shops in town –> he says the same thing. When a customer doesn’t understand that there is an intricacy to the way that an automobile functions, they are likely to view those people who fix cars as endowed with some sort of special powers.
There are multiple problems that this creates, not the least of which is a communication gap.
When someone asks me to troubleshoot a computer problem that they are having, the least they can do, to help me in helping them, is to offer as much detailed information as possible. But, this often doesn’t happen, especially when the person with the problem doesn’t know much at all about computers. When I am dealing with users who fall significantly short of being knowledgeable, the request for assistance usually ends up sounding like, “It doesn’t work; please fix it.”
I can’t do anything with, “It doesn’t work; please fix it.”
Imagine taking your car to the mechanic and saying, “It’s broke; please fix it.”
Or going to your doctor and saying, “I’m in pain; please fix it.”
My favorite user is the one who offers as much pertinent information as possible to try to help me troubleshoot the problem. For a computer technician, the kind of information that is useful to me is information like, “When did the problem first start happening?” and “Does the problem happen all the time, or only part of the time?” and “What are you doing on the computer when the problem occurs?” and “What steps have you tried to fix the problem yourself?” and…
You get the idea. The more information I get, the better. I can’t do anything with, “It doesn’t work; please fix it.”
In the event that I get a “It doesn’t work; please fix it.” kind of a request, the problem usually ends up going in one of a couple of different directions.
I will sometimes just ignore the request, in the hopes that the problem goes away or the person realizes their own issue and solves it themselves.
Or, I can pull information out of them, which is sometimes like pulling an infected tooth out of the mouth of an alligator –> not pleasant and to be avoided when possible. I ask questions, either one at a time or a series of simple ones all at once, and the user either gets frustrated with having to answer so many questions or the exchange of information takes so long that it gets me frustrated.
I guess when it comes down to it, the issue is an issue of time. I don’t necessarily enjoy having to spend a large amount of time getting the details that I need out of the user. In my rush to do a thousand different things in a day, I don’t have time for “It doesn’t work; please fix it.”
And now, I can feel this post coming full circle. I feel like I am coming face-to-face with this truth: I need to exercise more patience with those people who know the least about computers because they are the ones most likely to give me a “It doesn’t work; please fix it.” kind of a request. It doesn’t require a lot of patience when I am working with someone who is 1) somewhat knowledgeable, and 2) significantly forthcoming, because I know that dealing with these types of users isn’t going to be so bad. We will put our heads together and we will find the solution to the problem.
The patience becomes of paramount importance when I’m dealing with less skilled users because the distance between their knowledge and my knowledge is the farthest.
Additionally, in my drive to DO! DO! DO! DO! and ACCOMPLISH! ACCOMPLISH! ACCOMPLISH!, I feel that I am under pressure to get things quickly done. I don’t mind that pressure, most of the time, because –to be completely honest– that pressure gives me an excuse to avoid having to engage people in meaningful conversations centered around their needs as computer users.
Come to think of it, I am starting to wonder if I treat everyone this way?!?!
I don’t have time to talk, I’ve got to do X and Y and Z and we should catch up sometime and I’d love to come over but Timmy has soccer practice and Betty has an ortho appointment.
Maybe the busy-ness of our lives is always at war with our attempts to establish real connections with people. For me, the drive to accomplish secretly serves my introverted tendencies so I don’t have to connect with people because I’m “too busy”.
Do you have time to talk? Do you have time to invest in the connection between you and the people around you? If I fix one thousand computer problems, and connect with zero of the computer users around me, what have I accomplished, really?
And, I swear, I’m not a magician.
Consumers and Producers
It occurred to me today that there are two kinds of people in the world.
I just got off of the phone with a friend of mine; he just reached out to catch up and to see how my family and I have been doing. We shared some pleasantries, and then the conversation turned toward some of the things on which we’ve been spending our quarantine time. He was talking about being happy to have had the extra time to connect with his family more. I talked about being able to write more and read more.
In that respect, I have actually enjoyed being quarantined. I have had the opportunity to reorganize my priorities and to investigate other options for spending my time. I know that many have been clawing and scratching to get out of the quarantine, but as for me, I’ve chosen to make the most of the time that I’ve been given. I’ve chosen to look at the bright side. I know of others who’ve been using this time to be productive, as well –> I have one friend who keeps posting pics on social media of all of the home improvement projects he’s completing.
I have always believed that there are two kinds of people in the world: consumers and producers. In fact, this is one of the entry-level lessons in a social studies classroom unit on economics. Everyone knows (or should know) that the producers are the ones that create the goods and services that the consumers, well, consume.
I have tried teaching this lesson to my children, especially when I feel like they’ve been spending too much time starting at computer screens or television screens or cell phone screens.
And, of course, each of us is each of these, to a certain extent. We all consume and we all produce. The question is this, “What’s the ratio of one’s production to one’s consumption?” The question is also this, “Is the ratio of one’s production to one’s consumption pretty even, or is it askew?” The question is additionally this, “If the ratio of one’s production to one’s consumption is askew, is that a bad thing?”
A life of productivity (notice the root of the word ‘production’ and the root of the word ‘productivity’ –> produce) is a good life. A life of consumption ends up being mostly pointless.
Of course, the trick in this balancing act, as is the trick with so many things, is to avoid the extremes. If you’ve been reading my blog for very long, you know how I hate extremism (and if you don’t know how much I hate extremism, try THIS POST on the subject).
Now, it should be obvious how consumption, to the extreme, is a bad thing. Ever seen a plague of locusts on a field of crops? That’s some extreme consumption! It might be less obvious how one could manage to be an extreme producer. Nevertheless, extremes are very rarely a good thing, and the same rule applies here. You should try to strike a balance in your life. Take an inventory of your ways –> if you died today, would there be a hole because of the things that you’ve been doing that people would miss?
I can tell you this: if you died today, no one would miss you because of the lack of your consumption.
Another way to look at this –> give and take. Do you give to the world, to those around you, to our society, as much as you take, or do you take more than you give?
Now, at the start of this post, I tried to draw some comparisons between people and how they’ve been dealing with the quarantine and whether or not they give more than they take. I don’t mean to say in all of this that people who have not enjoyed the quarantine time are useless and unproductive. I know people who I respect, people who I know to be producers, who have been put upon by the quarantine and its limiting effects.
However, I have also noticed, in the rush that people have had to get back into the pandemic world that is waiting out there, that there is a sub-current of consumerism at work. I just watched a video of a restaurant in Colorado that opened for Mother’s Day, in violation of that state’s quarantine orders, and the place was packed and the people that I saw there weren’t looking for ways to be productive –> they were looking for ways to consume.
Before I go off, let me just say that I think that all Americans would be wise to look at what they’re doing with themselves and try to err toward the productive end of the spectrum.
Gaming
It occurred to me today that the world of gaming has changed, and that gaming has changed our world.
I don’t know when I’ll end up dropping this post, but regardless of when it happens, I should say that I literally just left my bedroom five minutes ago because my wife and my daughter were gaming in there and I came down to my kitchen to get some coffee.
Now, rewind thirty years, and my brother and I were involved in a strategic campaign to get our father to break down and buy us a Nintendo Entertainment System. We wanted one for the same silly reasons that any kids want anything: all of our friends were getting them, all of the commercials said we should have one, etc., etc.. You get the idea. We eventually wore him down and then, let the games begin!
We set it up in a communal room in the house, to keep the sibling rivalry to a minimum, and my gaming interests began to take hold. To be honest, even before that, I felt I was a gamer. Dig Dug and Pitfall on the Atari were great, but they left a little to be desired. I couldn’t possibly tell you how many hours I sat in front of that NES, beating games we’d bought, beating games we’d rented from the video store, working on beating games that were so difficult as to be ultimately frustrating. I even spent hours working on the time it took me to beat Super Mario. To this day, I am still able to beat Super Mario in under fifteen minutes. Stop by some time, I’ll show you on my Wii.
Since those days, I’ve owned many different video games, video game systems, accessories, etc. In college, I was a PC gamer, when network gaming was just getting started. A college roommate and I punched a small hole through the drywall that separated the bedrooms in our apartment so we could play Command & Conquer: Red Alert against each other on a P2P connection (part of the reason that we never got our security deposit back). PC gaming in those days often involved four or five or eight CD sets that you would play through, because video-quality graphics take up a lot of space and those CDs only hold so much data.
Then, as an adult, I’ve conned my wife into letting me buy video game consoles (for the kids, of course), and the gaming interests have continued to have a hold in my life. I remember playing Guitar Hero on the PlayStation 2 while my son, six or seven years old at the time, watching at my side. His favorite song on Guitar Hero, and therefore the most requested hit in my repertoire, was a Joan Jett classic, “I Love Rock and Roll”.
Santa bought an X-Box One for the kids a couple of Christmases ago and now I have been loving Fall-Out 4 and Forza and others, as well. My son, soon to be sixteen, has followed in his father’s footsteps, and he and I have often booted each other off of the X-Box.
Speaking of my wife (the first full paragraph of this post was about my wife), when we first met, she was not a gamer. Not in any sense of the modern term. She thought video games were a waste of time and that I was wasting my time playing them. I did it when she wasn’t around, back when we were dating, and tended not to bring it up in conversation when we were together –> avoid the touchy subjects.
So, the experience of leaving my bedroom several minutes ago because she was gaming and I wanted to get some coffee occurred to me as somewhat odd.
How times have changed.
And speaking of times a-changin’, I haven’t been gaming much, just recently. I’ve been finding other things to do. Other things that I am actually enjoying more, and that seem to be a bit more fruitful. Like, for example, working on my writing.
Now, don’t get me wrong –> my wife has not become the gaming zombie that I used to be, sitting in front of that NES decades ago for hours on end. Additionally, this is also probably the time for me to mention that I still waste way too much time on Sudoku puzzles (if you haven’t heard of my Sudoku addiction, check out PART ONE & PART TWO of that particular story). And, I get pulled into Twitter too often. And I love me some Notre Dame football.
You get the idea –> we all seem to have our distractions. In fact, this is a topic that I think I have blogged on before (I was going to try to link in some of those other posts, but then I got distracted).
But gaming has been a particularly powerful distraction in my life for a very long time, and judging by what’s going on in my bedroom right now, it’s influence is still alive and well in our society. Thinking about the way that gaming has evolved throughout its history, from being a “nerd” activity to being something that many more people are involved in, the distraction has become real for a lot of people. And, while I don’t want to condemn anyone (because I’d be one of the greatest of the sinners, trust me), I do wonder what I could have accomplished over the years, over the decades, if I had all of that time back.
Research shows that the average gamer spends about seven hours a week on gaming. That’s 10,920 hours that I’ve lost since I begged my dad for an NES.
Especially mobile device gaming. My wife is still not a big fan of console gaming (although she’s had plenty of opportunities in our house, trust me), but mobile device gaming is what has her consumed at the moment. She likes to play canasta and euchre and various word games and matching tile games. Add to that list Candy Crush and Fruit Ninja and Flappy Bird and Pokemon Go! and you start to get the idea. The number of gamers grows higher and higher.
And this is only one of the multiple distractions that we face as a society.
So, what’s my point?
Well, I guess it’s the hypocrisy of the thing. Because, eventually, when these gamers run out of time to do what they need to do because they were playing games instead, that’s hypocrisy. Or, when they look around at the world, dissatisfied with the way things are, wanting change, that’s hypocrisy. Or, when they’re broke and can’t afford the utility bills but they’ve spent a chunk of money on in-app purchases to get them to the next level of their game, that’s hypocrisy.
Additionally, if you’ll allow me to get a little “conspiracy theory crazy” for a minute: couldn’t it be that gaming (or the entertainment industry or the fast food industry or the advertising industry or the social media machine) is being used by powers who seek our docile dormancy? You know what we’re not doing when we’re playing games? Rocking the boat. Improving ourselves and our world. Organizing ourselves to initiate the changes that are long overdue.
At the very least, we can question what it is that we do with our time. Perhaps the greatest hypocrisy is saying that we want something (more time, better fitness, a healthier bank account) but our actions suggest otherwise.
It Occurred To Me Today 