Half Dad, Half Misfit

“Piss in a toaster” is a term for something technical-sounding that’s been promised to the CEO, that is pointless, wasteful, very risky, burns out your staff and offers no benefits to anyone. It sounds like such a simple request, so middle management feels shy about asking too many questions about why exactly it needs to be done in case they get targeted in the next restructure, and just to make sure it's done. Then once it’s promised, no wants to ask the CEO why it needs to be done in case they look dumb. Here are some of the things you will hear from the manager who has told the CEO that you will piss in a toaster for them: “I told the CEO we can piss in a toaster for $1000. I’ve done the hard part of researching it. Now you just need to piss in the toaster by next Tuesday!” “I looked online, and ordered a toaster off Amazon for $20. Why won’t you just piss in the toaster for the CEO?” “The CEO is always right! Just piss in the toaster.” “What if I get one of those 4 slice toaste...

Isn’t it amazing that when you need to hire someone urgently to fill a gaping hole in your organisation, there is always someone available who is a Perfect Fit? You do a quick CV screen, quick phone screen, and interview the candidates and hire one. And this candidate is a Perfect Fit. How could they not be? After all, you’re a great person, and you wouldn’t make a bad hire. You wouldn’t let a bad hire through the CV screening, phone screening, and in-person interviews. You’re not dumb. It would be impossible. Therefore, every person you hire is a Perfect Fit. And sure, even though there are some odd things that happen in the candidate’s first 90 days, they’re not outright awful. Imagine not having them around? Okay, so they’re fucking up on the job daily, but at least SOME work is getting done. Without them, nothing would get done. Anyway, we don’t have time to fire them and hire someone else. We’ve got to get this project finished right now! And now that project, and now that project...

Once upon a time there was an egg corporation, Egg Corp, who wanted to make golden eggs, because market research told them that the goldsmiths would buy golden eggs. The market research team brainstormed what a golden egg could look like and consulted with two people who no grasp of the concepts “golden” or “egg” and spent two financial years knocking up a wireframe demo of what a golden egg could look like. Sadly, the CEO, Eggy McEggface, saw that the wireframe looked more like a poop emoji than a golden egg. The CEO assigned an engineering task force to develop golden eggs by the end of the financial quarter, to be spearheaded by a salesman. Determined not to let down their CEO, the salesman directed the engineering team to knock up something that looked enough like a golden egg to launch the product, while they figured out how to really make golden eggs. The corporation had a great launch campaign and the market analysts were amazed — there really was a golden egg. They weren’t allo...

I’ve always been suspicious of Positivity in the workplace. It’s always seemed like a scam. I’ve recently started meditating, exercising, eating healthier and reading Self Improvement books that have all given me a more positive outlook on life. There are undoubtedly benefits, that I am experiencing myself, to a Positive Outlook on life. Smiling more *will* make you feel happier. Accepting that failure is part of the path to success is important to achieving anything without becoming demoralised. Finding new opportunities by looking for rules that have changed and nobody else has noticed yet is a viable strategy for innovation. And yet I’m still cynical. I call it ‘cynicism’ but I think it’s a gut emotion that has been formed from bitter experience of Positivity being used as a weapon against me, in the various corporate workplaces where I’ve spent my career. In these workplaces Positivity gets used as a kind of Gaslighting, a form of bullying. The kinds of people who insist on Positiv...

In the past, I often mocked ‘Self Improvement’ books. But now I think that’s because I was reading the wrong ones. I’ve listed the books I found helpful to me. I’m a little bit cross that they didn’t teach us this useful stuff at school, instead of memorising dates from history and verb conjugations for dead languages. I think many of these books should be on the reading list for the University of Life. (Spoiler: a great many of these books boil down to “practice meditation or mindfullness to build self-awareness and use that self-awareness to make better choices”) I’ve sorted this list into best ones first, and worst ones last; I recommend starting at the top and stopping when you get to the ones I scored 2/5 or lower: The Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal: An amazing book that tells you some of the ways your brain works, so you can work out effective ways to achieve the three types of willpower challenges in your life; “I will”, “I won’t” and “I want” without subconsciously sabot...

As an IT Consultant, I decided to handle my mid-life crisis in the most Consultant way possible. I’ve ended up with my own spreadsheet fusing “Seinfeld Streaks”, Gamification, Lead Measurements and other shit I’ve either read about or made up, and it has worked for me. I’ve decided to share it in the hope it helps one other person. The Origin Of My Spreadsheet Born out of a fusion of the “Seinfeld Streaks” and “Lead Measurements”, I first made a small table on paper showing every day of the month, measuring every day whether I did 4 things that I felt were important. I chose them pretty arbitrarily, on the principle that something was better than nothing, and the initial goals were: 10K steps every day (I have a Fitbit) Meditating every day for at least 3 minutes Doing at least one press up Doing at least one sit up From this basic table that I carried in my notebook, it rapidly escalated to a Google Spreadsheet that I update every day. The advantage of a Google spreadsheet is that it ...

By now, we’ve all heard the old saw: “Faster, Cheaper, Better — Pick Two” For IT projects, I like to rephrase it as “Faster, Cheaper, Better, Secure — Pick One” Speed adds risk to any IT project. How many times have you been asked to do a “cheap and simple” project by the end of the week, only to discover that the urgency stopped anyone thinking about whether it really was cheap OR simple. Why do we do this to ourselves? Why don’t we allow the invisible hand of the market to help the customer decide if it really is urgent? My tongue-in-cheek suggestion for today: The Urgency Factor Give the customer a normal price for doing it next month, but If they want it next week, the Urgency Factor is 10 times the normal price. If they want it tomorrow, the Urgency Factor is 100 times the normal price. If they want it today, the Urgency Factor is 1000 times the normal price. If, somehow, we could get away with this, we’d spend a lot less time creating messes that we have to clean up.

(rescuing old posts from an old platform) My day job is best described as an IT Solution Architect; that means people tell me their business problems and if appropriate, I choose bits of software and hardware that might help, and write a plan for how to stick those bits together to solve the problem. As a result I often need to learn about new products and compare them. Classroom-based courses cost $10,000 per week plus hotels, and involve travelling without my family on specific dates in three months’ time to shitty places that I already decided I didn’t want to live (Sydney, Melbourne or Auckland) and will tie me financially to my employers (who want me to pay back training costs if I leave). I want to learn from the comfort of my own desk without mortgaging my soul to my employer. The best way I’ve found to get training under these circumstances is to register with each potential supplier and use their online training to learn about their products. A bonus is usually that if I pass ...

Over the next few weeks I'll be rescuing posts from an old blog and reposting them here. Re-reading them has reminded me how toxic my old job was, and how good my current job is. But some of them have relevance to abusive relationships, even if they were workplace instead of home...

A local beehive recently hired a wasp as their queen and they then invited management consultant wasps in to identify opportunities to improve productivity. We listened in to conversations in the workspace to understand what kind of changes had been made. “As a result of restructuring, all bees need to reapply for their jobs. Again.” “We had a fairly flat business structure between workers and the queen, and the queen doesn’t like hearing the drones moaning about problems, so we’re introducing several layers of middle management and have selected wasps for these management roles because they already have MBAs “Dave was a good worker and was hitting his nectar targets but he failed to fill out the new paperwork so we’ve fired him.” “We’ve discovered that some bees are carrying pollen between flowers and not just nectar. Our KPIs are purely focussed on nectar. Pollen does not help with our quarterly targets and is slowing workers down. Any bees found carrying pollen in future will be fir...

A good short sci-fi story about a cyborg bodyguard and an adventure on an alien planet. I liked it, 4 hours long is a nice size, action packed, dialogue-light, no big ideas, and didn't require the brainpower of a space opera. Looking forward to the next story in the series. 5/5