Throughout my career I have been fascinated with process. At a certain level of abstraction my job is nothing but implementing processes, big and small, to achieve some goal. After spending twenty-five years examining existing processes to understand them, and designing new automated processes to replace or augment them, I tend to see processes everywhere.
The best processes are the ones that you don’t see, that fade into the background. The worst are ones that constantly jar and batter you as they run counter to your goal. Most fall in the middle ground somewhere; they work well enough to not require updating or change, but they are at times cumbersome or annoying.
One pitfall a number of processes seem to fall into is what I call the “two minute warning syndrome.” American-style football is played for 60 minutes, and with just two minutes remaining on the game clock a warning is sounded. Many teams shift gears into a hurry-up offense, or “two minute drill” at this point in the game, trying to catch up or win the game.
To my way of thinking this is wrong. Why wait until the last two minutes to catch up and win? Why not come out and play the first two minutes to win, and then the next two, and then the next, and so on?
The most recent example of this “two minute warning” thinking I have seen is a placement program I’m in at work. My position has been eliminated and the organization is searching for a new assignment for me that matches my experience and compensation level. The program is six weeks in duration, with a possible extension should there be a placement pending when it expires. The announcements sent out to over two dozen managers made no mention of the deadline involved. Few, if any, response trickled in during the first four weeks. Now, in the middle of the fifth week, HR has started calling managers to inform them that the opportunity to interview me ends next week. Suddenly there have been several inquiries about me, and I have three interviews lined up, with one or two more potential interviews pending.
When HR sounded the “two minute warning” on the placement program everybody shifted gears and the placement process actually started to move. Had that kind of motivation been brought to bear in the first week, I would have been placed weeks ago, and all this stress and confusion these last minute efforts would have been eliminated.
The two minute warning may make for good football games, but it is a lousy paradigm to model (consciously or unconsciously) your process after.
After some poking around on Google, I found a Wordpress plugin that closes the comments on posts older than 14 days, automatically. Since most of the comment spam I get is on older postings, I am hoping that Close Old Posts will reduce the amount of spam Askimet has to filter for me.
On our trip to Europe this year, Sibylle and I will be doing some travel by train. Our flight to Europe lands in Zürich, and we are taking the train to Stuttgart from there. Wanting to take advantage of some special rates for trains starting or ending in Germany we went ahead and booked our seats. Today’s mail brought an overseas envelope containing our seat reservations and tickets.
We still need to reserve and by our tickets between Stuttgart and Bressanone Italy, where we are spending a week of our trip. Once those tickets have been secured we’ll be largely set, transportation wise.
On Sunday, Sibylle and I purchased two new Eddie Bauer backpacks to use during our trip to Europe this year. We gave them a “Dry run” yesterday during our trip to Chicago; one that they both passed with flying colors.
One of our concerns was their size when filled. All the airlines publish the size limits of your carry on luggage, and they all restrict you to one carry on and one personal item. Of course these restrictions and limits rarely seem to be enforced.
The outward size of some of the wheeled luggage on our flights was clearly beyond what would fit in the little sizing stands by the jetway doors. And many people bring two or three pieces of luggage each onto the plane. The problem isn’t the standard, but rather the expectation of the airline that the person or persons working the gate be the “bad guy.”
Unless the gate agent is willing to force each person to test the size of their bag, and to force each person to their one carry on plus personal item limit, then there is no hope for the rules to work. The gate agent can’t easily single out the egregious offenders, as those people will then point to the less egregious, but still over the limit offenders. Increased security, long lines, short connection times, weather and mechanical delays have already increased the stress level in the crowd of people waiting to board a plane. A gate agent who tries to enforce the carry on policy risks getting an earful or worse.
I certainly don’t want a job that requires I be respectful and polite to a potential stressed or angry customer, much less a job that requires I do this for hour after hour, day after day. My hat is off to those people who work in those customer facing positions; by and large they do so with courtesy, professionalism, and often a smile. That the airline expects these people at the front line to bear the brunt of whatever ill-will policy enforcement may generate says a lot about the gap between management and employee.
What the airlines need to do is setup, between security and the first gates, a luggage check station where travelers can quickly and easily measure their carry on items for proper size, and check any that are over the limit. Then the gate personnel can, and should, turn away any luggage that is outside the published limits. Until the airlines enforce their requirements across the board and without fail, people will take advantage of the possibility of getting away with one extra bag, or a bag that is too large. And until the requirements are enforced well before boarding time, the gate personnel will have to deal with the rudeness of people lashing out when caught doing something they new was in the wrong all along.
Using the “Create a Map” feature over at Wayfaring.com, I made this map of our walking route through Chicago yesterday. All told we covered about four and a half miles on foot.
(You can hover your mouse over the waypoints to see what they are.)
In order to renew her passport, Sibylle needed to travel to Chicago, where the nearest German Consulate is located. We debated several options for getting her to the city and back again. Flying by herself, the pari of us driving, or the pair of us flying.
At the start of the weekend we were prepared to drive to Chicago on Sunday, visit the consulate first thing Monday morning, and then drive home. At 550 miles each way, we were looking at 16 hours in the car in two days. Needless to say our enthusiasm for that much driving was rather low.
Sunday morning we finally decided to fly, together, rather than drive or her fly solo. Southwest has direct flights several times each day, and we could get their “Anytime” fare, which would give us some flexibility on our return flight. After scheduling the flight we ventured out to the mall to see if the Eddie Bauer store there had the backpacks we wanted.
We have been talking about getting one or two good travel backpacks, which hip belts, to use in Europe this year. Last weekend we saw some at the Eddie Bauer store downtown that we really liked. Moreover they were on sale through the 4th, and we wanted to take advantage of the $20 on each backpack. Being out in the mall, and doing some window shopping was light and carefree, in large part due to our decision to fly rather than drive. It’s not that we were in a bad mood prior to making the fly decision, but making it certainly made us feel more in control.
This morning we got up at 3:30 am, in order to be at the airport shortly after 5:00. Our flight, which was surprisingly full, left promptly at 6:05 am. By 7:25 we were on the ground in Chicago, and shortly before 9:00 we had arrived in downtown, having taken the CTA “Orange Line” from Midway to the Loop. It took us perhaps 30 minutes to walk to the consulate, and we were third in line once we arrived there.
The consulate passport clerk was efficient, if a bit humorless. Sibylle’s expedited passport renewal was completed and we were back on the street shortly before 10:00. With our new backpacks on, we walked out to Navy Pier and then took a trolley back to Wabash for lunch at Pizzaria Uno. After lunch we walked up Michigan to the Water Towel shopping arcade, and then made our way back to the Loop and our train to Midway.
Our flight home should have us back in Kansas city by 6:30; we’ll be home by 7:30 at the latest. All in all, not a bad day. As a bonus to getting her passport renewal in the mail, we also got to test the new backpacks, and to try out some walking shoes. The backpacks are superb; having a good hip belt makes all the difference in the work when carrying any kind of weight. The shoes I wore, while okay for work, were not good for extended walking. Even with a good leather arch support added, my fallen arch was painful most of the day. I’ll definitely be taking my boots to Europe; they were excellent for walking last year. Sibylle tried out a new pair of sandals today, and wasn’t too happy with how the right one pinched her foot. She may take them to Europe, but will definitely have an alternate pair of shoes to wear.
Earlier this week, Sibylle and I took a box full of used books to the Half Price bookstore we frequent. Between the two of us we have lots and lots of books, some that we no longer want. Recycling them through the bookstore allows us to clean away some of the clutter, and gives the books a second chance.
The appraiser was thorough enough to discover an old money order tucked away in one of the books. A $50 money order from July 2003. Examining the check revealed no time limit on cashing it, which makes sense in a way. After all, the sender put $50 down on the counter, plus a small fee to buy it.
The fine print on the back of the money order said there would be a 35 cent charged, per month from the original purchase date, if the check wasn’t cashed in the first year. Since it has been 60 months, that fee now amounts to $21.
On my way home from work yesterday I stopped at my credit union. The teller there had to speak with her supervisor about the check, before telling me that they couldn’t cash it. It seems that the issuing back isn’t part of the Federal Reserve system, and therefore my credit union isn’t guaranteed payment. That, and the question of the 35 cent fee, eliminated the credit union. The teller did suggest that Walmart was the source of many money orders, so I went to Walmart next.
The “Money Place” at our local Walmart also wanted nothing to do with the check. Primarily due to fact that it isn’t a Walmart issued money order. And that it is five years old. Their suggestion was a check cashing location. You know, one of those places with the gaudy flashing sign about “CASH CASH CASH!” I’m sure they’ll want a fee on top of the 35 cent per month fee.
I am reluctant to go to one of those check cashing locations; they seem like the corner loan shark somehow. But I am also determined to get at least some of the $50 back. That some third-rate (not even Federally insured) financial institution may get to keep $50 from a woman living who was living on less than $800 a month, just bothers me.
My note taking involves three kinds of paper. Plain, or blank paper, lined paper like we all used in school, and graph paper.
At home and at work I tend to reuse paper for random notes or temporary lists. Anything the I print out single-sided gets torn into quarters and used a scrap paper. When I stumble onto a website or snippet of information that I want to record, I’ll reach for one of these quarter sheets and jot it down. Grocery lists are the other prime user of these paper scraps.
Recently at work, all the printers capable of two-sided printing have been defaulted to that mode, so the amount of scrap paper I’ve had access to has dropped. I now sometimes grab a half dozen pristine sheets of paper to use as scrap.
Having plain, unlined paper is nice. There is no imposed structure or order on the paper to begin with. Notes can, and are, written at angles to each other; and some pages end up with several generations of notes scattered about their edges.
Lined paper feels more formal; there is structure imposed before the first word is inked onto the page. I prefer narrow lines to wide, and white paper to colored. In the last year or so I have started using spiral bound stenographers pads for daily task lists or meeting notes. Knowing just enough German to date them in German, I flip to the next empty page every morning, date the page and use it through-out the day for notes that I may want to return to later.
Lined pages tend to have less doodling than their plain cousins, but geometric doodles to appear from time to time.
Graph paper is special, not only is there structure, the structure runs in two directions. Because the grid of faint blue lines lends itself so nicely to scale drawings and precision sketches, I tend to reserve any graph paper I have for those purposes. Note taking on graph paper rarely works out well for me, as I tend to explore the geometric doodling possibilities of the page to the extent that there is no room for notes.
Sibylle and I are preparing for our next overseas trip, which starts in just six weeks. Travel brochures, train schedules, dreaming of places to go, et cetera. Last year, after some deliberation, we opted to not take a laptop with us. Instead I took a 40 GB drive in a USB/Firewire enclosure, and the card readers for our cameras. We relied on an Internet café for getting email, and to transfer pictures from camera to had drive.
By and large this was successful, although not every machine in the café worked with USB, and, as we discovered after getting home, the machines were virus infested. Both of our camera memory cards had to be cleaned using anti-virus software once we were home.
The other inconvenience was not having a computer ready to hand when a blog posting idea struck, or when we had some down time that could be filled with picture moving. Therefore, this year we are planning on taking a laptop with us.
There are enough stories about laptop thefts in airports and tourist areas to make me nervous about taking my prize machine out in to the wild. I have a cable lock that would slow down an opportunistic thief, but there is still a real chance it could get taken. There have also been a few horror stories about border agents confiscating laptops, or sifting through their contents. We talked about investing four or five hundred dollars on a used laptop for the trip. Enough machine to do email, web browsing, and picture off-loading. The added advantage to a new (to us) machine is that it would have no, or very little, information about us on it. If it were stolen or confiscated, we’d lose nothing, especially if we had kept a copy of our pictures on the memory cards.
Tonight it occurred to me that I have the original hard drive this machine came with - it’s the 40 GB portable that went to Europe last year. Why not swap the 100 GB drive out, put the original drive back in place, and install a fresh copy of OS X? We’d could setup our email accounts, import browser favorites and bookmarks, and we’d have iPhoto for picture duty. Best of all, the accumulation of my digital life, would be home in relative safety.
The machine itself is valuable to me, but nowhere near as valuable as the pictures, files, documents, and other bits of digital flotsam and jetsam it contains. Not risking those irreplaceable parts of my life feels like a very smart thing to do, being able protect those digital parts of my life with something as simple as a hard drive swap feels very good.
Amateur Neurotica has a new posting about those incredibly annoying telemarketing phone calls that greet you with a computerized voice when you answer the phone. I couldn’t agree more with the sentiment expressed in her posting. I would add, however, that until you endure the computerized greeting, and the hold time, and tell the human at the other end of the wire not to call your number any more, your phone number will remain on their list for future calls.