Tagged: work

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

… they seem to have no desire to undertake the kind of work which makes any claim to leave a lasting legacy. They have the inner freedom to exercise their intelligence in the way that taxi drivers will practise their navigational skills: they will go wherever their client directs them to. … They have no ambition to become known to strangers or to record their insights for an unimpressed and ephemeral future. They are well-adjusted enough to have made their peace with oblivion. They have accepted with grace the paucity of opportunities for immortality in audit.

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is less about work than it is about the extremes of specialisation in the modern economy. In ten loosely linked essays, de Botton follows the path of a tuna from the Indian Ocean to a plate in Bristol, the invention and manufacture of a snack biscuit, the launch of a Japanese television satellite, and the intricacies of a large accounting firm. Along the way de Botton casts light on facets of our economic lives that, owing to our own participation in the ever-finer subdivision of labor, we rarely have the opportunity to reflect upon. Accompanied by Richard Baker’s stark and often strangely beautiful photographs of warehouses, electric pylons, and office buildings, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is an equally insightful and exasperating tour of how the world functions.

I say exasperating because the book is informed by a philosophy of work which is only briefly enunciated, and largely unexamined. De Botton draws a thread from Aristotle through Christian doctrine and the Enlightenment, and on to current self-help nostrums expounded by career counselors; it represents a distorted view of work and why we do it.

In the fourth century BC, Aristotle clarified the attitude that was to last more than two millennia when he referred to a structural incompatibility between satisfaction and a paid position. For the Greek philosopher, financial need placed one on a par with slaves and animals.
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Early Christianity appended to Aristotle’s notion the still darker doctrine that the miseries of work were an appropriate and immovable means of expiating the sins of Adam.

This view of work was challenged in the Renaissance and Enlightenment, particularly by Diderot and d’Alembert in their Encylodédie, “a paean to the nobility of labour” which sought to raise the “mechanical” arts to the level of the “liberal” arts. “[T]he European bourgeoisie took the momentous step of co-opting on behalf of both marriage and work the pleasures hitherto pessimistically–or perhaps realistically–confined, by aristocrats, to the subsidiary realms of the love affai and the hobby.”

De Botton’s approach is informed by this conflict between the Aristotelian and the bourgeois, with his sympathies apparently with the aristocratic position. He expects to find his subjects subscribing to the bourgeois expectations of deriving meaning from their work, which leads him to be disdainful of the tightly proscribed spheres in which they find their purpose. How, he wonders, can ultimate meaning be found in the design of cookie advertisements, the minutia of financial audits, and the clockwork science of logistics? The workaday world of contemporary capitalism demands such narrow specialisation that surely all meaning has been drained out of work; souls that find meaning within these narrow confines must be severely stunted in comparison to the Greek philosophers, medieval craftsmen, and gentleman hobbyists of yore.

This is a well-traveled path: I think in particular of Marx on alienation (especially in the Grundrisse), Weber’s “iron cage” of capitalism and bureaucracy, and Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, as well as the early (pre-Lockean) conservative critique of capitalism. But it is also a very narrow and elite notion of where work fits into the full human life. In tracing that path from Aristotle to self-actualization through work–two sides of the same coin, I would argue–de Botton ignores the experience of the vast majority of men and women who have had to work to survive, and the strategies they have found to balance necessity and purpose. The amount of meaning we can, do, and should derive from our work is an unsettled question.

When I examine my own life, I find that the things from which I get the most pleasure (and sorrow)–parenting, reading, writing–are decidedly non-remunerative; indeed, the paid work that I do is an attempt to fund those other activities. The hours I spend working for pay are not devoid of meaning, though; I’ve been lucky to find work that I often find enjoyable and challenging, even if it is not incredibly fulfilling. I fully expect none of the software projects I’ve been part of to outlive me, much less become monuments for the ages. This perspective does not preclude pride in a job well done, or even passionate opinions about how a project should be implemented. A pleasure that I find in my work, and which I share with de Botton’s accountants, rocket engineers, and biscuit bakers, is to see my efforts change the world, even in a very tiny way: we are, after all, homo faber, the makers of our own environment, and even in the current stage of capitalism we can face down alienation by seizing control of our proscribed spheres.

De Botton seems unwilling, in his focus on the extremes of the division of labor, to grant his subjects the dignity they’ve fashioned for themselves. Ultimate meaning may not be derived from their work, and due to the book’s focus we get few glimpses of the sphere where meaning is actually found in their lives; but surely some value is to be found in the enthusiasm these people show for their work.

This is not to say that The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is entirely condescending, nor that the philosophy underpinning it taints the entire book. This is an insightful book as well, after all, and there is much to learn and ponder in it. The chapter on logistics, and the photo essay following a tuna from its brutal death to consumption by a boy who “hates tuna, but not as much as he hates salmon,” illuminates the processes that alienate us from the sources of all the commodities in ourr lives. The vignettes that bookend the chapter on accountancy could be descriptions of Edward Hopper paintings, with their unbearable longing and loneliness.

De Botton also has some interesting things to say about the sublimation of desire as a necessary function of the modern workplace:

Superficially, the [sexual harassment] code seems wholly and admirably concerned with championing the rights of innocent parties. There may, however, be a more cynical and less altruistic aspect to this unsparing paragraph, for what is really being protected is perhaps not a particular individual afflicted by indecent attention so much as the corporation itself. The feelings elicited by Katie’s shorts are incendiary because they threaten to subvert the firm’s entire rationale. They risk bringing to light an awkward truth: how much more interesting we might find it to have sex than to work.

As an examination of the invisible girders, both physical and ideological, that support the modern economy, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is insightful and intriguing. I’ve become increasingly conscious of the trucks and wires that keep my grocery store stocked and my lights burning, and curious about the barges on the Mississippi since reading The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. But as an exploration of how we make sense of the world we’ve made, and how we negotiate work’s meaning in our lives, de Botton brings a bit too much baggage on the journey.

182 days

A.S. Gerdee, of 3251 Maypole(?) Street, working as a switchman at Proviso yard of C & NW RR, Chicago, Ill. (LOC)Give or take a few holidays and weekends (though after a couple weeks every day felt like Wednesday), that’s how long I’ve been out of work since being laid off in March. Last week I started a contract position in downtown St. Paul–an interesting project with good technical challenges to chew on, and a much-needed boost to the cash flow, but not exactly a return to full employment: the measure of my success will be how quickly I program myself out of a job.

The return to a schedule regulated from the outside is a little jarring. Summer was long and timeless, dedicated mostly to supervising the kids, going on adventures as part of my book project, and going through the motions of the job search. Now I’m expected to be at a particular place at a particular time, as are the boys, and my summertime routines of grocery shopping, meal preparation, and laundry have been disrupted. In some ways, it’s a relief not to have to plan out each hour; in other ways, it’s a hassle to comply with the bus schedule and meeting appointments.

During those 26 weeks, I’ve been able to do some thinking and reading, a little writing and picture-taking; I’m still digesting the lessons as I move into the next phase of my career. A few things that I’ve noticed and hope to unpack:

  • Unemployment is not a vacation. The open-ended nature of unemployment makes it hard to focus attention on projects that have a longer duration than a few days. Should I start on something that might be interrupted by a job offer? Can I afford to be too far from the phone and e-mail in case one of those job applications, interviews, or phone calls pans out? Is it wise to pass on a job interview that doesn’t sound like the kind of gig I’d like, just to work on something that isn’t focused on finding work? Budgeting time when you don’t know how much time you have is impossible.
  • The eternal values are truly valuable. Friends, neighbors, family: those are what count. The high points of the spring and summer–field trips with the boys, my birthday camping trip, our kayak and canoe voyages, National Night Out with the neighbors–all revolved around important people. And the private pleasures that sustained me–walking the dog, reading, writing–exist outside of the workaday economy. I find that I have a lot less patience now for the bullshit of the work world–the buzzwords and one-upmanship and petty politics–than I had before (and I had precious little patience for it before), because those things are all in service to very fleeting and ephemeral rewards.
  • Loyalty to institutions is overrated; loyalty to people is what matters. The corollary to the above is that we are far too willing, as employees in the modern economy, to give our employers far more loyalty than they deserve. Modern corporations, by and large, are not loyal to their employees; there are exceptions, but that they are so rare is what makes them exceptional. I’ve seen people who were dedicated and loyal employees get the ax in the first round of layoffs; and I’ve heard employers continue to spew the corporate loyalty lie while they trim their work force. One’s obligations to one’s employer ought to extend no further than the employment contract. Our loyalty should be to the quality of our work, to our ethical obligations to offer value to our customers, and to our co-workers when working in a team; and before that, our loyalty belongs to our families, friends, neighbors, and personal integrity. Corporations deserve no more loyalty than they actually extend, which lately has been very little.
  • Bill Holm and Carol Bly were right. About pretty much everything, but most importantly about the value of bold failure, the ethics of generosity, and the morality of poetry and music. I read a lot during my unemployment, and by far the best–timeless and urgent at once–were by these two cranky Minnesota treasures.

There are, I’m sure, many other things I’ve learned in the last five months and twenty-nine days, and I’m sure these lessons will change over time. The human mind is amazingly elastic, and oriented toward optimism (listen to this Daniel Gilbert presentation for some interesting insights into the psychology of happiness). I expect to keep some of the cynical edge I’ve acquired, and hope too to sustain the lessons in generosity; I’m hoping to pick up more new lessons as I enter this next phase in my career.

showing what you know

Last night I participated in the Board of Review process for a new Boy Scout troop founded by the graduates of the Cub Scout pack my sons belong to. It was the first time that I’ve been on the delivery end of the Board of Review process–I went through plenty of them myself as a Scout a quarter century ago–and it was an interesting experience. The purpose of the Board of Review, held when a Scout has completed the requirements for his next rank badge, isn’t so much to quiz the Scout–that’s for the Scoutmaster to do, and we take his word for it that all the requirements have been met–but to assess how well the troop is serving the Scout’s interests. It’s more of an “upward feedback” or “manager assessment” session, a rarity in the business world.

In the spaces between the four sessions (three Tenderfoot, one Second Class), I heard some interesting stories about of the Scoutmaster conferences from the troop committee chair . The troop’s Scoutmaster is a veteran Scout leader, with an encyclopedic knowledge of all the things that kids like to do and a deep commitment to Baden-Powell’s “game with a purpose”; he was the Cubmaster of the pack when I joined, and a big reason that we picked this pack.

One of the problems of twelve-year-old boys (and there are many…) is that they often know what they know, but can’t express it in words. When asked to describe how to set up a tent, or to name the rules for ax safety, or explain the first aid treatment for shock, they’ll stare blankly at you and fidget. Their hands might know all these things, but the pathways from hand to head to mouth are not quite cleared yet. Needless to say, most Boy Scouts, at least the younger ones, would not do well in a formal job interview.

During the Scoutmaster conference for one of the Second Class Scouts, which requires knowledge of first aid for a puncture wound, the Scoutmaster broke out a packet of theatrical blood and “punctured” his own hand. The Scout, who had been slouching and fidgeting through the verbal quiz, sprang into action, demonstrating that he knew what to do even if he couldn’t say it out loud.

It reminded me of a series of job interviews that I conducted when I did desktop support early in my IT career. The job was mostly about putting out fires, and there were plenty of fires to put out in those days: overloaded printer queues, missing network files, virus outbreaks, keyboards drowned in Diet Coke. During the interviews, conducted at my desk since I didn’t have the seniority required to book a conference room, I was frequently interrupted by fires. Rather than shoo the problems away, I sat back and let the candidate handle them. It let me see if they had the right combination of sang froid, courtesy, and technical know-how to handle the fragile computer environment of the early ’90s. It also gave me a breather for a few minutes.

In my current job search, I haven’t had an interview at all like this. Most IT interviews are thoroughly intellectual exercises: you get quizzed on some technical minutia and Java theology, demonstrate your grasp of TLAs and buzzwords, and then talk with the non-technical people about “opportunities” and “resources” and “initiatives.” Very little of it has to do with the actual day-to-day work. What would be more interesting and valuable would be if the candidate were given a real problem to solve–a web page that doesn’t parse, a servlet that doesn’t load–and the resources to solve it (an IDE and an Internet connection should suffice). In an alloted amount of time–15 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, depending on the problem and the position–the candidate should at least show some progress toward solving the problem, and have some ideas for how to finish it up. The quality of the solution would much better demonstrate technical skills than the ability to rattle off some technical trivia.

I have a job interview this afternoon, where I expect to be asked the difference between an interface and an abstract class, the thread-safety status of vectors and array lists, and the merits of generics in JDK 1.5. These are roughly the same questions I’ve been asked for the last year and a half, and I’ve yet to find a real world problem that hinges on knowing the right answers. Perhaps I’ll break out the theatrical blood this time and demonstrate how to properly clean a wound.

Oft stubborn, peevish, sullen, pout, and cry

Oft stubborn, peevish, sullen, pout, and cry;
Then nought can please, and yet I know not why.
As many was my sins, so dangers too,
For sin brings sorrow, sickness, death, and woe,
And though I miss the tossings of the mind,
Yet griefs in my frail flesh I still do find.

Ann Bradstreet, The Four Ages of Man

There are plenty of reasons to be peevish about searching for a job, especially in a sour economy. The “opportunities” disappear as quickly as they appear, owing to budget changes, project plans, drastic changes in direction or stultifying fear. Interesting jobs attract many candidates in similar circumstances with similar skills, and differentiating yourself from the rest while staying basically honest is a daunting task. A general wariness and distrust hangs in the air, with hiring managers talking about how “we value our employees” and candidates saying wonderful things about their last employer, both knowing that there are worries, woes, and stings beneath the surface.

These are the existential condition of recession-era job hunting in the age of the across-the-board layoff; one gets used to them and generally accepts them. But there are a couple peeves that irk me in looking for information technology work that I don’t think we should have to accept; whether these exist in other lines of work I’m not sure, but I suspect they’re nearly universal.

Coy Recruiters

Technical recruiters are a different class of people from the IT professionals and employers they work with; I’ve only met a few who have an understanding of the technology beyond knowing which buzzwords go together, and all of the recruiters I’ve worked with have been salesmen to the core. Their job, after all, is to sell a candidate on an “opportunity,” and to sell the hiring manager on the candidate; sometimes it’s a case of honest matchmaking, with attempts to find the right fit for both, but more often it’s all about the sale.

That’s fine enough; I’m used to the pitch-man approach and I can dissect the lingo. And I’m sure I’m not the only candidate who tends toward the taciturn when the recruiter really gets pitching. What really bothers me, though, is when they play coy.

I get the sense that there’s some cut-throat competition in the recruiter world, with everyone angling for a limited pool of jobs. In addition to making their matches, they’re also trying to extract leads and protect their turf, which explains the “I can’t tell you who the client is; but I can assure you they’re a top-notch, premium, exclusive company you’d love to work for.”

From the candidate’s perspective, though, this is simply annoying. We need to know where we’re applying to ensure that we aren’t submitting multiple applications for the same job, and to be sure that this really is the sort of place we’d like to work. It wastes our time to go through five minutes of pitch before we get to the punchline, the punchline being that the client is a company we’ve either applied to already, or for whom you couldn’t pay us enough to work.

This game is especially annoying when the recruiter is reading off the same job description as every other recruiter. It doesn’t take long to recognize the patterns and match the description to the company; most candidates will already have seen the same description on Monster or Dice, or heard it from another recruiter just minutes earlier.

I suppose that some enterprising candidate could game the system somehow if they had this crucial piece of information up front, or could try to scoop the recruiter and pass the “confidential” information on to another recruiter. But by the time the job description has been floating around Monster.com for a couple days, the cat is out of the bag as far as confidentiality goes. It would be much less annoying to start the conversation with, “I’ve got a job at XYZ Company; you interested?”

Redundant, repetitive, and non-portable resumés

This is a problem for everyone, but it especially irks technologists. I’ve got profiles on multiple job search sites, and a couple versions of my resume in Word and PDF formats, but every time I apply for a job online or get beyond the initial phone call with a recruiter, I’m filling out the same information yet again in a slightly different format.

When I start filling out one of these forms, the first thought that goes through my mind is, “This is a job for XML!” The same pieces of information are required for everyone; the data types are largely universal; I should be able to provide my resume in an XML format and have the recipient parse it to the format of their personal delight.

I’ve found that there are at least two XML formats for resumés: one from the HR-XML Consortium, to which Monster belongs, and an open-source XML Resume Library which appears to be abandoned (no development since 2004, no forum activity since 2008). Neither appears to be in use by anyone.

This seems like a great opportunity for streamlining, rationalizing, and simplifying the hiring process. There would need to be a large enough number of adopters to start to sway the environment, but the benefit to everyone–candidates, recruiters, hiring managers, HR–should be clear. A standardized XML format for resumes would make searching, storing, matching, and managing resumé data much simpler than it is now. If I could provide my resumé, or a subset of it, to employers in an XML format, I would spend far less time being annoyed at them for not using technology to solve real problems.

Hmmm… if any employers are interesting in integrating HR-XML (which looks like the most stable format) into their hiring workflow, or if any technical recruiters would like an education on why they should accept only XML resumes, drop me a line; maybe I can turn this peeve into a gig . . .

yet what grim society

. . . Peterson’s

calls them ‘social creatures,’ yet what grim
society: identical pilgrims,

seed-like, brittle, pausing on the path
only three seconds to touch another’s

face, some hoisting the papery carcasses
of their dead in their jaws, which open and close

like the clasp of a necklace.

Ants by Joanie Mackowski

It’s starting to feel like summer now–Minnesota springs are a short and unpredictable affair–and one of the sure signs that things are warming up beneath ground is the sudden activity of ants.

At the bus stop this morning, I noticed a swarm of them running along the seam in the sidewalk. When the kids joined me down on my hands and knees over the ants’ busy errands, we noticed that they were traveling a two-lane highway between twin hills on either side of the sidewalk. Surely there’s some huge subterranean metropolis underneath the sidewalk itself, where the queen is busy producing more citizens to go about their constant work. These are tiny ants, smaller than a fingernail clipping, and the queen’s flight must have gone unnoticed a week or two ago.

We all know Aesop’s story of the “Ants and the Grasshopper,” in which the diligent ants are shown to be better adapted to winter survival than the profligate grasshopper, who spends a lazy summer playing and singing when he should be storing food away for lean times. In the Disney version, the ant is invited into the queen’s court where he earns his food by fiddling for the colony; in the original version, though, the grasshopper (or cricket or dung beetle; versions vary) is cast back into the cold when he comes begging, we assume to die in a snowbank. In any case, it’s one of those stories that we’ve interpreted as having a message that is not only practical but moral.

Less well known is Aesop’s fable of Ants and the Pigs. Like the grasshopper’s ants, this is another colony that spends all summer hard at work, collecting grain for the winter. But in the fall, a herd of pigs descends on the colony and gobbles up their stores. The moral, it would seem, is that the miserly gathering of material wealth is vanity: all our efforts will be for naught against the rapaciousness of thieves.

Taking moral lessons from insects is probably unwise. In more recent times, E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, which grew in part out of his work with ants, was given a simplistic just-so-story interpretation and attacked as neo-Social Darwinism. (Wilson’s approach wasn’t so different from the anarchist Petr Kropotkin’s in Mutual Aid, though Wilson was armed with better scientific methods and skills of observation.) Ants are intrinsically interesting, have yielded a lot of useful information about chemical communication, and are a good distraction for kids waiting at the bus stop, but not a very useful metaphor for human behavior.

After the bus came, the dog and I continued on our morning walk, no doubt hurrying past many more Formicidaen cities. We didn’t notice, and I suspect that the ants didn’t notice, either.

Directed as by madness

I saw a ship of martial build
(Her standards set, her brave apparel on)
Directed as by madness mere
Against a stolid iceberg steer,
Nor budge it, though the infatuate ship went down.

Herman Melville, The Berg (A Dream)

The Titanic has been a major topic of discussion at my house for a couple months. I’m not sure where the interest in all things shipwreck-and-iceberg related came from–these obsessions are often a mystery to me–but the boys have devoured every book on the Titanic from the Minneapolis Library’s children’s section, and a fair number from the adult section. They know all the facts and figures about the ship’s size, means of propulsion, and passenger accommodations (as I’ve noted before, kids are really smart about the things they care about), and they ask a lot of really tough questions about why it sank and how the sinking was handled.

Their interest in the Titanic is probably similar to the interest that some kids have in fairy tale monsters and horror stories: they’ve found something that they fear, and by learning as much about it as they can they master that fear, or at least build contingencies around it. We’ve had similar discussions about Pompeii, tornadoes, and plane crashes, and I always try to respect their concerns and their solutions, and work out plans with them about what to do if we should suddenly encounter, say, a volcanic eruption somewhere in South Minneapolis.

One of their favorite books has been Eyewitness: Titanic. Like all the Eyewitness books, it’s packed with pictures and facts. And at the end of the book, it covers some “lessons learned” from the inquiries following the disaster. Many of these lessons were implemented, and passenger lines were considerably safer afterward.

It’s interesting that in transportation generally, humans are good at learning from their mistakes; one of our Cub Scout leaders drives the historic trolley at Lake Harriet, and he has explained to us that “every page of the motorman’s manual is written in blood.” And it’s equally interesting, and tragic, that we don’t apply our “lessons learned” in other spheres of human endeavor. So in the service of trying to apply the motorman’s and ship captain’s ethic to the current malaise, here are a few things that people learned after the Titanic sank that might make sense for our economic future.

Enough lifeboats for everyone

The tragedy of the Titanic was that there weren’t enough lifeboats for everyone on board. It carried 20 boats, with a maximum capacity of 1,178 people, but there were at least 2,223 passengers and crew. There were enough lifebelts for everyone, but since most of the victims died of hypothermia rather than drowning those were cruelly useless.

We have a similar lack of lifeboats in the American economy. As companies have shed employees like so much ballast, they’re being cast into choppy waters without benefit of health care, limited unemployment benefits, and little assistance to keep their homes. Indeed, many states are in the process of setting their lifeboats ablaze, cutting spending on social services as their revenues drop, precisely at the time when those services are most desperately needed.

The Titanic was in full compliance with British shipping regulations, though it could have carried more lifeboats. The White Star Line didn’t carry more lifeboats because they feared that the decks would be too cluttered with more boats, and the new and larger lifeboats were too expense. We’re similarly fearful of clutter and expense when we talk about improving our social safety net in the United States; but clutter and expense seem like minor inconveniences when the ship starts to sink.

Keep in radio contact

Another tragedy of the Titanic occurred in the radio operator’s room. Throughout the day of April 12, the Titanic’s wireless received numerous reports of heavy ice fields and large icebergs from other ships in the area. But the operators were too busy sending out vanity messages for the first-class passengers (radio from ships was a great novelty) to pass the warnings along. Indeed, when the last call about ice came in around 23:00, the Titanic’s operator snapped, “Shut up, shut up, I am busy” and took no more warnings.

When the tragedy occurred, and the Titanic began sending out its distress signals, the nearest ships were too far to respond. Some had even shut down their radios for the night. A massive failure of communication is at least in part to blame for the Titanic’s sinking.

The “Shut up, shut up, I am busy” response sounds a little like CNBC and the rest of the financial news industry in the years leading up to the financial meltdown. Though there were signs of trouble in the sub-prime and derivatives markets, and reasonable people were asking questions about unreasonable practices, exuberance was the tone of the day. The financial programs continued to send vanity messages from the first-class passengers long after the economy began to sink, drowning out the warnings and criticism that would have been very useful indeed to hear.

Water-tight compartments and firewalls go only so far

The Titanic was “unsinkable,” in large part because of its innovative design. It had sixteen “water-tight compartments” that could contain flooding to a section of the ship while protecting the rest of the ship, making it far more likely to survive without sinking. Unfortunately, the bulkheads proved not to be entirely water-tight, and five were breached by the collision and subsequent flooding; when the five compromised bulkheads filled with water, the Titanic snapped in half.

We’ve seen a similar failure in our economy, where financial institutions that should be protected from each other–mortgages, insurance, investment–have proved to be dangerously interwoven. AIG “insured” incredibly foolish investments in incredibly foolish mortgage instruments, compromising what we’ve always been taught to believe is a safe and boring part of the economy. And when enough of the bulkheads failed across the financial industry, the economy snapped in half, sinking industries in now way directly related to the ones that caused the crisis.

Truly “water tight” engineering would have been inconvenient on the Titanic, forcing people to go up and down between decks to travel from stem to stern. And regulatory firewalls between, say, insurance and speculation, would have been likewise inconvenient and put a brake on the “innovation” in the financial markets. Sometimes brakes are good to have.

The Greeks had a word for it …

And that word, of course, was “hubris.” If you really believe that you’re unsinkable, indestructible, you’ll be very unlikely to heed warnings and build contingency plans. Of course the Titanic didn’t need more than 20 lifeboats; of course we don’t need to weigh down our economy with the taxes necessary to build a social safety net; the ship will sail on, the economy will grow, and everything will always be good and getting better.

The opposite of hubris is humility. It’s a recognition that “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley” and that we can’t always predict the nature and the hour of their collapse. Contingency planning, frugality, and caution are useful tendencies to cultivate, but it’s too late to cultivate them after the disaster strikes. We can only hope that they’ll be written down and codified in preparation for the next disaster, so even if we can’t avoid the icebergs we can at least save all the passengers and crew.

Unemployment Diary: About suffering they were never wrong

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters; how well they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

Mus&eaccute;e des Beaux Arts, W. H. Auden

March 10, 2009

I went back to the MIA with the Yashica and faster film; we’ll see if the results are any better. This time I focussed on the third floor galleries, particularly the 20th century American paintings. The MIA has just one Andrew Wyeth, and a nice N.C. Wyeth “Cream of Wheat” illustration, which I found particularly calming in a strange way. In the French room, I tried to sneak a couple shots of a woman copying one of the paintings, and a man sketching a statue; I find the people in the galleries to be just as interesting as the paintings on the walls, and enjoyed eavesdropping on a retired docent walking his friend around to show off his favorite pieces. With the recent cutbacks in the MIA staff, this may be the best kind of tour to take.

On the way home, I listened to a Talk of the Nation segment on layoffs and alternatives thereto. Maria Guidice, CEO of a web design company, Hot Studio, discussed her decision to try reduced hours, pay freezes and cuts, and other methods to avoid layoffs. I’m incredibly biased, of course, but this seemed like an eminently rational and humane approach.

Companies invest a huge amount of time and money in hiring, training, and developing their employees. After a few weeks or months on the job, people have an incredible amount of specialized knowledge that can’t be learned in school. When the company sees these employees as an expense rather than as an asset, they are jettisoning not just the salaries of their laid off former employees, they’re also releasing that specialized knowledge. If (when?) things turn around, and the company needs to increase their staff, they’ll have to incur the expense of hiring, training, and acculturating new people.

Companies also sacrifice goodwill through layoffs, not only among those who are laid off (whose goodwill they may not especially care to maintain), but also among those who keep their jobs. It’s hard to feel a lot of loyalty to a company that makes such abrupt and calculated decisions about its employees; based on my own experience of watching previous downsizings and outsourcings, that loyalty is impossible to win back.

Perhaps, though, we live in a post-loyalty economy. Indeed, we’ve probably lived in one for a long time, and it’s only dawning on me that my own loyalty (second point of the Scout Law) isn’t necessarily seen as an asset. Still, I’m not willing to surrender that impulse entirely; I believe that companies that cultivate loyalty (like Hot Studio) have an advantage: they can marshal their strengths when times are lean, and unleash the pent-up enthusiasm of loyal employees when the economy rebounds, while the job cutters scramble for people who would as soon work anyplace else, loyal only to themselves.

Unemployment Diary: pure, flat immobility

To sit idly, not doing, merely experiencing, comes hard to a primate … Primates feel pure, flat immobility as boredom, but dogs feel it as peace.

The Hidden Life Of Dogs by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

March 6, 2009

The great beneficiary of my unemployment has been my dog. She used to get one long walk per day, usually at night, and spent her days doing nothing. Now she gets two, sometimes three, walks, and spends her days doing … well, nothing.

Our routine now is to go to the bus stop with the boys, send them off to school, and then take one of our usual routes: east to the river and south to 38th Street, or north to 28th, or west to the grain elevators. Along the way she inspects whatever the melting snow and ice have left behind: not magnificent boulders and deep lakes like the prehistoric glaciers, but the putrid remains of squirrels, discarded fast food wrappers, and other unidentifiable but no doubt armotic refuse. Then it’s home for a quick bath if the mud was up, a dog treat, and a nap. She moves from sunny spot to sunny spot, finally ending up on the couch with her nose by the window, occasionally letting out a warning bark at a cat or squirrel. And then it’s time for supper, another nap, and her nocturnal walk.

At first I thought that she was relishing in her unemployment, but then I realized that this is in fact her job. A companion animal’s assignment, after all, is to be a companion, or at least a resident of a human abode. Employed house dogs are fulfilling their duties by napping, walking, and occasionally barking. An unemployed dog is a stray, doomed to wander aimlessly and live off the scraps in the alley–a busy life, perhaps, but not an easy one.

For the contemporary unemployed American in the white-collar corporate world, it’s not too different. Although we look busy enough when we have jobs, we’re more likely to be engaged in companion-animal activites: finding a comfortable place, letting out occasional warning barks when someone comes too close to our territory, pleased to receive occasional snacks. And most importantly, the nervous parts of our brain are napping, comfortable in the place we’ve found. We might be desperate, but quietly so.

Without the sedating effects of work, though, those nervous regions of the brain roam the alleys with fear and trepidation. Garbage we might have turned our noses up at a few weeks ago suddenly look like tasty morsels, and we scan nervously for other scavengers that might be moving in on the scraps we’ve scrounged. Our desperation tends to be quiet to the outside world, at least here in the Midwest, but there’s a growing chorus of despair in the interior caverns.

Finding peace in immobility, serenity in the moment, is something that humans, ironically, work hard at; my Buddhist dog has already found her Nirvana. I find that I need to fill those quiet hours between nine and five (especially from about one to three) with spasms of activity to keep the chorus quiet.

Unemployment Diary: Secret Handshake

A secret handshake is a series of hand gestures that indicate loyalty to a club, clique, or subculture. The purpose of the secret handshake is to identify exclusive group members, and consequently to prevent inclusion of outsiders. Also, the element of secrecy provides the necessity of loyalty to the exclusive group. To reveal a secret handshake would be taboo and would cause the offending individual to be thought of as a traitor.

From Wikipedia

March 5, 2009

I’ve always felt uncomfortable when I’m out in the world on school or work days; the streets and shops are a little quieter, the crowds sparser, and my sense of time is discombobulated. Even in graduate school, when I would have a whole day without classes and so would take care of groceries or other errands in the late morning, I half expected a truancy officer to come up to me and demand to know what I was doing out and about.

There are advantages, of course, to being out and about in the late morning, especially where errands are concerned. The greatest advantage, when it comes to groceries, is the samples. My usual grocery shopping routine calls for me to be at the store late on Thursday evening, after the kids are in bed. My wife is in charge of making the menu and shopping list–she’s a design engineer, after all, so she has a very efficient approach to the planning phase–and I take care of the implementation. Since she has the grocery list so well-organized, I can usually be done in less than 30 minutes; and since there are no samples out at night, there’s no point in lingering.

During the day, though, there are plenty of enticements. In the produce aisle, wedges of melon and dishes of guacamole (with chips); in the snack aisle, bowls of chips and crackers; and in the cheese aisle, the best place of all, little cubes of red Leicester, parmeggiano, and sometimes even a jar of a tapanade spread with tasty Melba toasts. The signs say you should help yourself to just one sample, but I get a delicious thrill out of making an extra turn around the store to take an extra elicit bit of cheese or melon.

Of course, I still try to avoid eye contact with the staff when I snatch an extra piece, even though I’m sure they have better things to do than to count the number of samples each person has taken. And added to the fear of my imaginary truancy officer, this can make grocery shopping a bit more stressful than it should be. It’s good that my shopping list is so organized.

It would be useful if, upon receiving your severance package, you were also taught a secret handshake. This handshake would have to change monthly to keep the freshly employed from taking advantage of the benefits that accrue from unemployment, and it would have to be sufficiently complicated to prevent casual observers from discovering it. But it would have advantages, not only against the imaginary truancy officer and grocery store employees (who likely have clear memories of some of the most recent versions of the sign), but with our fellow unemployed citizens. It would let us communicate more clearly than the raised eyebrows and quick nod, the courageous smile and thumbs-up that we have in our vocabulary now. It would be a way for us, all 8.1% of us, to say, “We’re in this together, through no fault of our own, and that counts for something.”

Solidarity is, of course, out of fashion, especially in the white collar world. And red Leicester, though mild and firm, is a poor substitute.

Unemployment Diary: The good grey guardians of art

The good grey guardians of art
Patrol the halls on spongy shoes,
Impartially protective, though
Perhaps suspicious of Toulouse.

Museum Piece by Richard Wilbur

March 4, 2009

I will not sit at home, idly searching for jobs or waiting for calls. That way lies madness, or at least grinding ennui.

Instead, I’m planning to take advantage of my new-found wealth in time to go to some places I seldom get to when I’m at work. My first outing was to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, a first-rate museum packed with portraits, landscapes, an amazing collection of Chinese artifacts, and some very nice photographs (a Julia Margaret Cameron and an Edward Weston were in the rotating exhibit today, as well as a nice big gallery of Tom Arndt’s street photography from Home: Tom Arndt’s Minnesota).

Roaming the galleries, FED3 loaded with film (alas, 100 Arista.EDU, a bit slower than I would have planned for this outing, had I been allowed to plan), made for a relaxing afternoon. I found the sculptures–the big Buddhas, the Roman heads, the cool marble–especially soothing. Ganymede patiently serves the eagle, forever frozen in the moment before he is swept up to Olympus by the notoriously shape-shifting and love-lorn Zeus.

It wasn’t until I was on my way home, listening to the radio, that I learned that the MIA was performing its own round of layoffs, eliminating 6% of its staff. Sad as it is to have been cast out of the comfort of my programming job, it would be a fate worse than any the Greeks could dream up to be expelled from those lovely galleries. The eternal marbles feel a little less static now.

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