Background: The comparative scale between the environment in South Texas and my own environment really is not all that different. But to them, it is the difference between a mom/pop shop and Microsoft. Really they are double our size. But if you double 2, its only 4. And that is the scale we are talking about on an enterprise level. 800 vs 1800… and a budget difference that is higher by an order of magnitude.

And all this is on the subtext that this company is trying to tie itself together still after a buyout that happened six years ago. That is like saying that a cadaver is trying to heal from the fatal head wound it suffered. Six years! And what to show for it?

A bunch of bickering whining babies. And I am one of them. But at least I REALIZE IT.

I am so sick of the condescension, the assumptions, and the “we have the better way” mind set. It is inane. They are so wrapped up in their own paperwork, they can’t imagine that there may be a better way. I am not saying I have that way or that my way is it, but at least I am capable of doing a ten man job out of the parent company all by myself. That tells me something is wrong. Very very very wrong.

When did “getting the job done” change from actually doing something to just filing out static paperwork and having meetings about it?

The response I get is that this “This form is built on the industry standard, best-practice ITIL framework.” Bullshit. What it does is make it sound like your 1,800 users are 50,000+ users and you are woefully ineffective and inefficient. If the change control process hinders the execution of work at this scale, then it is inherently broken.

Period. Especially when we are doing the same thing, better, at 1/10th the cost. Boo-yah.

And, by the way, if you think that your environment documentation should live in word documents and excel spreadsheets, then you are still in the 1990s. Welcome to this thing called the INTERNET.

(It is full of rainbows.)

Roaring at each other.

So there is a logic as to why we should not rule ourselves. We will ultimately fail. The short term gain is always sought over the long term, and the short term drivers for economics, society, and law generally overpower the what many consider the “right thing to do”. A perfect example is our economic debt. Another is the rampant corruption in most government systems around the world. Obviously, as a race of complex individuals in a complex system, we find ways to autocorrect the sway and pitch of our collective societies, but it usually involves mass amounts of bloodshed, and a significant amount of time, suffering, and discord. And human beings, God love us, are so short sighted, biased creatures, that we are truly effed in any effort that requires more than 3 people to accomplish (and sometimes 3 is too many).

We are creatures of the now, so we are ruled by the now. And if that means lining the rulers against a wall and executing them, most of the time the greater good (ie the masses) is ok with it. We have seen it over and over throughout history, and we continue to see it now. Such evolved beings we are. We still kill what we want to remove.

What we should be focused on long term strategies beyond any one of our limited lifetimes… because ultimately, we have finite resources on a finite planet with seemingly infinite chances for unlimited population growth. We are 7 billion strong, growing exponentially… and we all have to live on this rock… because you may not have noticed, but space hates us. It is dark and cold, and full of things that will kill us in seconds.

The best way to understand long term strategies is via statistics and probabilities. But again, it is cognitive bias that we all suffer from to prevents us from understanding the very basis of such an argument. Neglect of probability prevents us on the whole to understand how the past, the future, and the chances of an event occurring at any point along that path would effect us individually. Violent crime exists. It happens to a subset of people. They are murdered. Will this happen to you or me or someone else we know? Perhaps. Is the probability high enough to warrant that we take actions to protect ourselves? Not even close. I think I am more scared of being hit by car than I am of being shot. But people will still buy guns, still carry them, and probably end up shooting a loved one before they ever actually defend themselves from someone trying to hurt them. Now think about this: Our reaction to 9/11 is a similar event on a much greater scale. The US has spent 1.3 trillion on the wars stemming from our reaction to 9/11. The event itself was horrible. Yes, unbelievably tragic. Beyond words. But that works out to about 90 million dollars per life lost. Was it a reasonable response? And some more food for thought: the short term goals of the US back in the late 1970′s/early 1980′s is what created the Taliban. They used to be our ALLIES. Against the Russians. We armed them, trained them, and helped make the Afghanistan that we are still embroiled with today.

Will our grandchildren saddled with 1.3+ trillion dollars of debt still think it is worth it? We have hindsight on Afghanistan of 30 years… and we can see the results on CNN still. Can you imagine what will be said of all this in 100 years?

Again, I propose the response is the difference between long term vs short term thinking. What if we had taken that 1.3 trillion dollars and dumped it into Cancer research? (The equivalent of two hundred 9/11s a year, die from cancer.) What if we took that 1.3 trillion dollars and dumped into infrastructure (power, roads, civil projects) or directly into education and research? I know the military is an employer for thousands and thousands of Americans, but do we need to be soooo focused on Defense? These are obvious questions that have been asked countless times by countless others. Obviously, hindsight is a wonderful thing.

I know that most of us have thought about this time to time. I can be fairly certain that every single politician, committee, individual, thinktank, author, person etc has asked this very question to themselves. So if we have asked it, and discussed it, and been terrorized by pundits and the media about it, why has nothing changed? Why do we continue to let the short term dominate our minds?

Because we are animals, roaring at each other. Right now I am wondering when I should heat up my lunch. Rowr.

Why don’t we have a master system deciding this stuff for us? I know AI is pipe dream at this point. But it would sure be nice if we could find a method to abstract animal-selves away from our methods for ruling ourselves. In science fiction, you see this very trope all over the place. In some of my favorite books by Neal Asher, the human race is subsumed by a race of AIs that are self governing. The Polity is seen as the next step in human evolution, but realize that their governorship is the only way the human race will survive itself. The AIs take over in what is known as the Quiet War, with no lives lost, and the human race is better for it. (The books are all awesome, start with Gridlinked).

But my point is, there has to be a better way for governing our long term goals in this country, barring any usage of an AI. Imagine the ultimate presidential advisor… an open source program that takes all the inputs, studies, actuarial tables, probabilities, statistics that it can consume from government/private sources, leverage that with weights based on accuracies, and then output when something should start, continue, or end. Make it a transparent system. Such an undertaking would be monumental. But can you imagine the results?

Many authors have… and will continue to do so. It just a bummer that we will, as a society, continue to self manage so ineffectively, so inefficiently, that we will continue to blunder to our own eventual destruction. I would think this is the real problem driving the Tea Party and the 99%. Opposing sides on the same question. What do we do with our future? But since we are animals, it all devolves into incoherent noise, like a shouted slogan heard from blocks away. You know something is being said, but it is coming through as just a dull reverb on the windows.

I read a pair of articles about the future of the space program (here) and an elegy for the future of space exploration (here). Both are great reads about the very fact of our problem with long term goals… and about what our future “should” be. And both are really about our inability to see ourselves as we should see ourselves.

I really think that our society is suffering from a loss of hope about the future… we are mired in the now more so than ever. We really need to find the next thing that will propel us into the next age of being human. Because right now… we are stagnant. And we are so tied up in the now, that we are ruining it for our race in the long run. And again, how many countless times has others said this very thing?

We should have something audacious to be “American” about. Something huge. And that should help form and dictate policy. We are too busy arguing semantics that we can’t see what is about to happen. And yet, individually, we ALL SEE IT HAPPENING. That is the ultimate what-the-fuck question.

Just one more thought: Wouldn’t it have been cool if we had taken all the money spent on the drug war and put it into energy research? Think about the drug war… been on since the late 70′s/early 80′s (ie my whole life), and the gas crunch of the 70′s put energy at the forefront of the public mind, and yet has the drug war done anything great for our society? Nope. Will the war on terror do anything great for our society? Probably not.

Did the space race do anything great for our society? Unbelievably fucking yes.

So the obvious answer is…

Stop pinching that, and yes, the weather has been particularly nice for October.

You dirty Chex bastards. I hope there is a special place in hell for you, where you will languish in depth-less pits filled with sweet chex mix at volcanic temperatures, where you gorge yourself for eternity while caramel and chocolate tears stream down your face and only multiply your miseries.

I know that I will never let my eye stray on upon your little bags of horrific caloric nightmare ever again. My wallet shall stay in my back pocket, and my will will never be partner to your dirty temptations. Because after taking it rough from your proffered temptations, I am feeling a little sore. Like “I can’t sit properly” sore.

Please, keep to selling your salty crap that only pregnant women like. The sweet stuff crosses some sort of line.

And it is offensive. To both my sensibilities and my waistline. …Damn it.

Grabbing your desk with both hands, then hammering your head against its veneered surface as hard as you can, until your head either phases through the solid matter of the desk, or the desk explodes into a billion shards.

Because honestly, my days are 10% work, and 90% pulling splinters out of my forehead.

I don’t know what is more depressing. The political posturing, the ostracizing attitude, or the culture of bullshit… they all have the same level of pain for me.

I wish I could effect some real lasting positive change. But I think I have been handed a bag of “don’t-even-bother.”

I want to make positive contributions. I want to enable positive change. But instead I am pushed into a corner to watch from a distance, as the change occurs in another part of the country under its own constraints and timelines. I am being ostracized by the very process that is in place in that remote office. They do it to minimize risk, and in the end, I think what they really do is ruin innovation. They spend so much time doing it the way they have always done it, it kills any opportunity to look into doing it different. Because that is just “the way it has been done.”

You can’t succeed at anything if you are too busy looking behind. And likewise, you can’t move forward if all you do is plan and plan and plan. Letting reactive behavior drive change is a horrible idea, as is being so proactive all you do is argue “what ifs”. Being reactive is bad… unless you are a firefighter, then it is probably a good fit. But we are not firefighters, we are specialists in serving content to our users through specific services. Nothing more. Nothing else.

And now the most recent example:

Spending 10 months on planning, specing, and building a new mail system that will be in a non-production environment when it is brought online is just down right confusing. How or why it would take that long is beyond me. What is really confusing is the fact that at the time of the buyout, the company did not decide to take over the entire scope of operations in the first place. Sure it would have been more painful up front, but we would be here five years later in a very different place. Instead we are where we were five years ago, still arguing about the paint colors.

Who cares about the paint? Let’s just get the damn house built first. Without drawing up 600 different plans and discussing if it will be hit by meteors.

I am trying to shovel my way through a metric ton of shit from the parent company, a metric ton of shit that seriously could be minimized a great deal if I could just tell people how it is going to be.

But wait a minute, I don’t have the ability to do that. My gut does not have enough seniority to make it an ok thing. So the question is, who’s gut does have the seniority to just say how it will be?

Oh that’s easy, it’s the head cheese of the IT organization. But wait…

* L I G H T B U L B *

…he is has to make sure everything is honky-freaking-dory before he can make a decision like that.

So the person that can make the decisions, is blissfully chill about it. Because he is operating on bad information or no information. And I am here, dealing with the ambiguity of a larger bureaucracy that only gets things done when it has been under contract for a year or the owner has set a deadline.

Bummer.

Like at all.

I was just sick a month ago. And now I am sick again. Because honestly, if this is an allergy flare-up, then my allergies can go riproarin off and fuck themselves. My head is literally full of snot. Sinuses, Ears, Throat, Nose, probably my eyeballs, and I am pretty sure my brain is in there too.

If I were to die this very instant, the coroner would have fun trying to explain to my wife how he found mucus surrounding every part of my neural tissue. All of the neurons coated in a fine layer of slime. And how, as he removed my brain to weigh it, the pressure from all the snot caused a small explosion that flung him against the wall, brain in hand, and broke his collarbone by the sheer force of hitting the wall. And as, he clutched the brain to his chest, and grabs at his screaming shoulder, a massive fount of grossness spews from my head, covering all his utensils, equipment, and shorting out his recorder. To say the least, he goes into post traumatic shock a few moments later from the experience and decides to move to Guatemala to farm lady bugs for the local monkey population.

Yeah, I am not kidding. Guatemala.

In my biz (techie term… I am hip that way), we use this techie thing called IM (you may have heard of it). It is a preferred method for some as a nice in-between choice of a lackadaisical email which my take hours to get a response to, and the hit-you-over-the-head blunt force trauma of an actual phone call.

So sometimes I get a number of tech requests over IM, things like “internet is down” or “email is offline” or “my head has assploded”. You know, things like that.

I get an IM today saying that their internet access is down. I reply via, no response. I check the router… Yep its down. Need some physical assistance… No reply. Send another IM. No reply.

You know if the shit is hitting the fan, don’t get up and leave the critical IM you jusy dropped in my lap hanging out in space. I mean after all, you are the one that chose to use IM in the first place. Seriously.

Gah.

And I can do it to your lawn for free!

I have spent hundreds of dollars on fertilizer, sprinkler parts, soil, occult amulets, little statuary that you bury, etc, and I figure if I spend 0 dollars on any other lawn the results would either be the same or horrifically worse. Imagine Satan’s lawn. Yeah that was one of mine.

I could never do it for a living. Or for fun. Or at all it seems.

I would like to xeroscape all of it. Pull it all down, burn it and piss on the ash. I would reenact a scene from the jungles of the brazilian rain forest, slashing and burning the depths of the dark greenery to make way for cheap wastful farmland. Except my yard would grow nothing.

Except for rocks. Magical growing rocks. And maybe a cactus.

But I would kill that too.

First, stationary. Seriously? Stationary? Has our world devolved to the point that you need to make your email pretty? Seriously?!? Your stationary just makes your email harder to read and larger in size to boot. Stationary sucks. Don’t use it. It is ugly and I do not like having everything indented to the right by 6 tabs when I am trying to read a thread. We do not live in a world of Victorian values. Stationary should be reserved to the world of paper and snail mail. Use your fancy paper with your fancy calligraphy pens and your stamps. Email is email. Digital. That shit is just plain superfluous.

Second, email signatures. The company I work for is insisting that we have a consistent email signature. This I don’t necessarily have a problem with (besides bugging a ton of users, and just saddling IT with the duty to explain why). The problem I have is that the brand manager designed the sig. So it is huge, contains images, and has dead space. My sig on a standard resolution screen takes about a half an inch of vertical space in a thread. The header of an email (the date, to, from and subject) generally takes about 3/4″ on a reply or forward. This “standardized” email sig is 3.5 inches in height and 4.5 inches in width. And its JUST A SIGNATURE! Gah! Instead of signed, blah, blah, blah. It’s signed, image, space, blah, space, blah, space, space, blah, space blah, and a legal notice. Which segues into my next point…

Lastly, legal notices on email. Come on world, everyone is so gun shy about possible legal offense. Email is a nonspecific, nonguaranteed delivery method. The SMTP RFC (which is what email is), does not guarantee delivery, nor does it guarantee correct routing. It is a “best effort” protocol. It tries to deliver the message. If it can’t or it happens to go to the wrong place, that is something you cannot hold someone who received the message liable for. The only legal ground you could have against an accidental receiver is if they misuse that information in obvious nonlegal ways. Which, um, are already against the law. So don’t add 6 sentences telling me how to handle my email. Any party that receives an email unwittingly cannot be bound by confidentiality or any conditions that they did not accept. I can do whatever I want with the info I received, however I want to. If I want to print it out and wipe my butt with it, I can. You cannot, by the nature of the technology, regulate the explicit distribution. All you need is a link in an email to a corporate policy page on the net that covers any information misuse in any form. That’s it, that’s all. Misuse through any and all methods should be covered in your information policy, just not email. So stop the email legal disclaimers which are obviously a sign your company is brain dead. Please. Until email is completely redesigned or has some 3rd party delivery method that guarantees routing and delivery, with both parties agreeing to terms, legalese on your email threads is just plain dumb.

Come on.