Writing

General posts about writing

Blog spam returns

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Well, the blog spam never stopped coming, actually.  I had a pile to sort through….

Like a Freshman, I’m often performing a search on line for articles which will assist me get further ahead.

Um…  This is probably not the right place…

This is the correct weblog for anybody who needs to find out about this topic. You understand a lot its nearly exhausting to argue with you (not that I truly would want?HaHa). You undoubtedly put a brand new spin on a topic thats been written about for years. Great stuff, simply great!

It’s actually not that exhausting to argue with me.  I’m not that big on arguing.

There is an ending. Just remember that I meant for this to be an art game. I do feel like I spent an inordinate amount of time on the much more traditional gameplay elements, which might make the meaning of the game a bit unclear. In the event you mess around with it though, you’ll discover it.

This is just brilliant.  I love that you meant for this to be an art game.  I’m not so sure that I will discover the meaning of it, though, even in the event I mess around with it.

 

 

Kudos from my co-workers

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It is uncharacteristic of me to share something like this because I tend not to want to toot my own horn, but I have to share this email that was sent to my boss because I’ve been posting some about the challenges of communicating with my offshore co-workers.  It’s probably completely un-PC for me to say this, but this I thought this email was adorable – and speaking of vocabulary, ‘adorable’ is not a word that would generally come out of my mouth.  Not even when looking at kittens.  Anyway, read on…  I will use [M] to represent [My name].

Hi [My boss that takes his shoes off all the time],

As I talked to QA leaders these days, some feedback from them for [M] are that she’s a very responsible PM who’s always ready to step out answering/resolving project related questions/problems, she doesn’t hesitate to ask around to help if she doesn’t know the answers, she always tries to make project plan better and detailed including bugs and risks.

Although [M] is a new PM for [our main software system], she represents us that she’s willing to make this project better, which encourages us a lot to work towards the same goal with her.

I want to say Thank You here to [M] and report these to you as [M’s] good behaviors.

Needless to say, I’m grateful for the feedback.  Perhaps even more so because of the not-so-perfect English.  It sure is nice when people make an effort to share positive feedback about the people they work with.  We should probably all try it a little more…

Random strangers

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There are two random strangers that I see practically every day.  They are part of my life, though they remain random strangers.  Even if I exchange a word or two with them, their stranger status doesn’t change.  It’s just that I see them so often I am obliged to say, “Hey,” every now and then, lest the alternative, acting like they are invisible when really I’m trying to pretend I’m invisible, offends them.  Frankly, I doubt they’d care one way or the other, but that’s besides the point.  These two strangers strike me as unusual.  More odd than most strangers I notice, and my wallflower nature gives me lots of opportunities to notice.

Stranger One:  A very old Asian man lives in my neighborhood.  I don’t know exactly where, but I suspect he lives somewhere on my square block – not on my street, but nearby.  He walks around the block over and over and over and over and over.  I wouldn’t be able to type ‘over and over’ enough times to capture how often he slowly makes his way around the block.  It is as though he is compelled to move constantly, albeit at his age-inhibited pace.  He walks, rain or shine.  He wears an old-fashioned brown hat with a brim and has heavy dark-framed glasses.  He carries a string of beads.  I imagine they are Tibetan prayer beads, but the could just as easily be Catholic rosary beads.  I’m not sure he speaks English.  He seems to say “Hi,” now and then, but the sound comes out more as a grunt than a word, so it’s hard to say.  I’m not the best judge of age, but if I had to guess, I’d put him around 90.  It amazes me that he walks so constantly, and I wonder whether he lives alone or has family that watches over him – people that tell him not to leave the block, but let him walk for hours because he can’t help himself.  I wonder what goes through his mind on his endless journey around the block.  Whatever it is, there is something oddly comforting in seeing him pass by the house dozens of times a week.

Stranger Two:  A tall-ish woman with long-ish dishwater, light brown, hair, generally tied messily up at the back of her neck, works in an office in the same office building that I work in.  She drives a small maroon Toyota pick-up truck.  She has removed the leading ‘to,’ and trailing ‘ta,’ so the back of the truck loudly says, ‘YO.’  She wears jeans that are too big, and sag down on her hips, not quite so far as the ridiculous kids that wear their jeans half way down their asses, but approaching that level.  Her black t-shirts are in the multiple ‘XL’ range, which probably helps hide just how far her jeans are sliding down.  When she’s walking up to the building, she always cuts through the ‘garden,’ inste
ad of walking up the sidewalk, and when I’m outside she feels the need to say she’s working on taking the appropriate route instead of walking through the plants.  Now for the exciting part, though.  This woman has a large parrot that is always with her, sometimes perched on its owners hand, other times on her shoulder.  When the bird sits on her shoulder, it bobs its head up and down dramatically with each step the woman takes.

So far, I’m not a fiction writer, but if I someday decide to give it a shot, I imagine my observations of random strangers like this will help me when it comes to character-building.

Vocabulary Lessons

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Recently at work, I’ve been privy to a number of conversations or emails that are really amusing vocabulary lessons in disguise.  Or, at least I like to think of them that way.  It’s my automatic defense to the ridiculous level of intelligence I am surrounded by every day.  If I look at it as entertaining, I won’t think so much about how much my vocabulary just plain sucks in comparison.  Most of the work I and my immediate coworkers do involves making changes to a prodigious software system.  Each project gets named with a phrase that is meant to explain what the work is about.  Fix such-and-such file, or modify file processor to accept .xyz file type.  These names are not very exciting, and sometimes they border on obscene in their length or phrasing.  Like this one:  Reports for ABC jobs should indicate they are reports for ABC jobs.

In a meeting where upcoming projects were being discussed, my boss that doesn’t like to wear shoes took issue with the name of a new initiative.  It is called, “ABC Process Tuning.”  Tuning, to him, and probably to lots of other people, means tightening, optimizing – somehow making something run better.  But, apparently that is not what this project is really about.  It’s more like a housecleaning project.  Get rid of extra junk that’s not needed.  That project name would work for me, but my boss’ argument was this:

“That title is a misnomer.  It’s misleading.  I mean, you’re not really tuning anything, are you?  You are simply removing detritus!”

Now, I had heard that word before.  I could immediately spell it in my head.  And, it was fairly easy to determine the meaning based on context, but I didn’t really know what it meant.  Last night, lying in bed, thinking I was telling a rather funny story to my other half, I recounted this situation in some detail, and as soon as I got to the detritus punch-line, she sleepily said, “Oh, I know what that means.  It’s used all the time with regard to plant biology.”  Come on!  Am I the only person surprised to hear this term used in everyday speech?

According to dictionary.com, the meaning is:

de·tri·tus

[dih-trahy-tuhs]

noun

1.  rock in small particles or other material worn or broken away from a mass, as by the action of water or glacial ice.
2.  any disintegrated material; debris.
I guess between those two, I like the first description best, because I can imagine our massive software system being slowly ground away by an ancient glacier.  The only way to survive being a software project manager is to find humor and entertainment wherever you can, no matter how cheap or weak it is….

The micro-climate of my office

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Not long after I started my new job, I wrote a post on a few other new guys that started soon after I did.  The techie-from-a-cave guy works from another city, so I haven’t seen him since that first week.  The small guy with strong glasses, though, works in my office and I see him every day – well, almost every day.  Sometimes it’s hard to find him because he moves around a lot.  It seems that every cubicle he’s tried has some climate issue associated with it. He gets cold very easily.  None of the rest of us has this problem.  It’s not to say we don’t notice the temperature fluctuations.  We do.  In fact, my office seems to be a tiny indoor representation of the Bay Area climate.  You need to dress in layers because it goes from warm to cool to too warm to a little too cool.  Layers don’t work for the small new guy with the strong, large glasses, though.  In addition to moving his location frequently, trying to find just the right cubicle that doesn’t come with a draft, he’s taken to climbing up onto desks and taping papers and manila folders over the air ducts in the ceiling near whichever cubicle he is trying out.  One day last week I realized he wasn’t in the office – not because I didn’t hear him or see him in a meeting, but because I never saw him climbing around taping things onto the ceiling.  I see him as a little library mouse gopher-man now.  He’s small, and he scurries around climbing on furniture, wearing his strong glasses that make his eyes look larger than they should.  One day I suggested he bring an extra sweatshirt or sweater to work to help when it gets a little chilly, and he continued past me, muttering under his breath that another shirt wouldn’t help because it’s his bald head that’s the problem – he loses all his heat from there.  I thought about suggesting a hat, but thought I might be crossing a line, so I just watched him wander away looking for the perfect place to sit.

A wedding with the perfect touches

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I went to the wedding of a very good friend of mine this weekend, and although I would never have expected less, I was still blown away by the small details that the happy couple arranged to make their wedding such a perfect reflection of them.  It started with the “Save the Date” notice they sent out a few months ago.  They portrayed themselves as mini-South Park characters, and it didn’t stop there.  The venue was an amazing Art Deco building in Downtown San Francisco, which suits their quirky-in-the-coolest-possible-way style.  One half of the couple is the utmost science geek disguised by spiky hair, black clothes, tattoos and modestly sized plug earrings, while the other works in the hair biz and looks every bit the part with the amazing shade of bright red she carries around on her head.

Another friend became a justice of the peace for a day so he could officiate the wedding.  Instead of the typical, “Here Comes the Bride,” the DJ played Stevie Wonder’s, “You are the Sunshine of my Life,” as the bride made her way down the aisle, and at the close of a brief but beautiful ceremony, the newlyweds walked back down the aisle to Axl Rose singing “Sweet Child of Mine.”  Guests filled out Mad Libs style cards to offer them hilarious wedding advice, and we were all seated at tables that were named with quotes from The Princess Bride.  I sat at the “So it is down to you, and it is down to me” table.  Instead of feeding each other wedding cake, they each held half of a ginger sandwich cookie and took it apart Oreo-style.

My description really doesn’t do it justice, but they put the perfect twist on every classic element of a wedding and made it their own in a way only they could have.  Congrats, J & T!

More on language and cultural difference

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Last week I shared a sentence that I’d read in an email at work from one of our Chinese team members.  The sentence was : “Sorry about my misunderstand cause this idea so delay.”   A group of us in the US were discussing the idea referred to in the previous sentence.  One of our US architects had been attempting to explain a new approach to calculating whether changes had been made to some objects in a database to the Chinese DBA.  Our goal was to improve performance of the system – if the calculations can be done faster, the user doesn’t have to wait so long staring at a web page with a little gadget that says, “Processing…” that they want to shoot themselves.  In our lunchtime discussion, the US architect explained how difficult it was to get his point across to the Chinese DBA. He said, “Until it make sense to his head, three days he argued on this!”

This stuff just fascinates me.  We’re all trying to use English to communicate, which is clearly harder on some than others, but we’re so far apart sometimes.  I can’t imagine being in the shoes of some of our Chinese team members that know little to no English.  My personal counterpart speaks English well, for the most part, so we have few challenges directly related to language.  The challenges I experience are more around my learning about the cultural norms that matter to them in communication.  A new person that joined our team in the US, though, was describing a recent technical conference call he had with the US Architect and some of the China team.  The goal of the call was for the Chinese team to do a code walk-through with our US Architect and our new DBA.  On the call, the US Architect was the one that was largely explaining what the code did, which really confused the new DBA.  He stopped at one point, and asked the US Architect – “Shouldn’t the guy in China be telling us what the code does?  Why are you doing it?  I thought we needed this call because you didn’t know the code that well.”  What was happening was our US Architect was speaking to the Chinese team – one of them could understand spoken English fairly well, and he was translating for the rest of the group, then responding back to our Architect, who probably had to do some translation of his own before he could regurgitate it for the new US DBA.

I don’t necessarily have a point in recounting all this – but the subject itself is getting interesting enough that I almost feel like starting a separate blog that just talks about these issues.  I really like the juxtaposition of practical challenges and humor that comes with this stuff!

The China team is coming online right now, as this is their Monday morning.  I had sent a bunch of emails on Friday, and I’m starting to get responses to them now.  My counterpart over there just replied to an email I sent him telling him that something we wanted them to do today was cancelled.  He replied, “Roger.”  I wonder where he picked up that term.

Dish washing rules from a gay man in a Mexican restaurant

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In the summer of 1994, I got a job at a Mexican restaurant in the mall in Sheboygan.  It was interesting, in that every employee had to learn each of the three primary jobs – cook, bartender, and waiting tables.  That way, when someone called in sick, there was a larger pool of qualified people to convince to come in on their day off.  The first day I went in to work, I was a mess because the night before was the last night I’d see my girlfriend for the rest of the summer – she was going to Europe for a couple of months.  It wasn’t something I could talk about, because I was still petrified of people knowing I was gay back then.  I wasn’t out to many people – just my closest friends, my sister, and my uncle. Then, when I walked in for that first day of training, I recognized one of the guys that worked there from the local gay bar.  I could tell he recognized me, too, but we acted as though we had never met.  We didn’t speak a word of where we’d seen each other before, not even between the two of us when no one else was around.  That moment solidified for me the feeling of leading a double life in a way I’d never experienced before.

It was one thing not to be out to everyone around me, but generally that just meant I didn’t talk about certain things, or I stayed vague about the nature of a relationship.  It was another thing to look someone in the eye that under any other circumstances I’d have said, “Hey, how are you?” and gone on to have a normal friendly conversation with, and instead pretend I had no idea he existed before that moment.  In the end, I didn’t dwell on it for long, but the first few days were awkward.  I didn’t know the guy well – don’t even remember his name, even after working with him.  He was someone we saw at the bar, but didn’t talk to, for some reason.

He ended up training me on exactly how to wash the dishes when I worked in the kitchen.  There was a real science to it.  Three huge compartments in a metal sink came into play.  The first was filled with water so hot it almost burned your hands, but not quite.  It left them a screaming red, and I had to pull my hands out after every couple of dishes to tolerate the heat.  The second was filled with warm water that had some rinsing agent in it.  After scrubbing in the scalding water, I’d dunk the dishes in the chemically treated rinsing water, then dunk them into the third sink, which was full of plain old cold water.  It was the final rinse station.  As this guy trained me, he stressed just how important it was to dunk in the cold sink.  He explained with the utmost seriousness that the cold water broke down any last soap bubbles left on the dishes faster than warmer water would.  I thought that was crazy, but did as I was told.  I mean, come on, I was washing dishes either way – who really cared what steps I had to take?  Well, my secret gay acquaintance really cared.  He went on and on about it.  His relentless lecturing about cold water breaking down soap bubbles seemed so weird to me – why would anyone talk about it soooo much?

After I’d worked there a couple weeks, I finally felt comfortable enough with another employee to ask about the water thing, and found out that the secret gay guy felt so strongly about it because he thought he discovered this little known scientific fact on his own.  His endless praise of cold water for rinsing was actually his pride in his attention to detail being verbalized – his intellectual ability to look at a common situation that would seem as though it had no room for improvement, and find some way to make it better.  I was never convinced that it made any difference, but I had to give the guy credit for finding some warped sense of meaning in such a crummy job.

As I was finishing this post, I thought I better check to see if cold water does in fact rinse dishes better than hot water – I went to Google and began to type, “does cold water…” and auto-complete suggested that I might be searching for the answer to this question instead – “does cold water boil faster than hot water?”  Seriously?  That’s the most commonly searched for question about cold water?  I give up.

Breaking my own rules

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I have a set of rules for myself when it comes to this blog.  I didn’t start out with all of them, but I spend a lot of time with the Tag Surfer feature on WordPress, and on StumbleUpon, looking for other writers whose posts I like.  I share these often in my semi-regular “great reading” posts.  However, the number of posts I skip right over or even sometimes get annoyed with is quite high.  I think about what I don’t like about the many posts I skip over, and those things sort of evolve into a list of things I don’t want to do here.  Now, for the irony.  One of the things I don’t like is writers who think they know it all and are openly critical of other people’s writing.  Yet what I’m about to do is share the list of things that drive me absolutely nuts in other blogs.  I’m breaking my own rules.

It’s not that I think I’m some expert on blogging or on what people want to read about.  I am just an average person who reads a lot of stuff online.  There are, however, lots of other average people who read stuff online, so perhaps by sharing my pet peeves, some other writers might avoid some pitfalls that would tend to turn some average people off from following their writing.  So, here goes.

I hate posts that start with something along the lines of:

– Sorry I haven’t posted in so long…

If you don’t want to, or for some reason, can’t post often, you don’t really need to apologize for that.  It’s your life.  Write when you want.  When I began writing here, I had a goal of writing every day.  I haven’t met that goal, but I didn’t publicize it as some big promise to the world, either.  That way, when life interferes, I just have to get over my own frustration – I don’t really need to apologize to everyone else.

– A lot has happened since the last time I wrote…

If you’ve been away from blogging for a long time, I think we can all assume a lot has happened to you.  Skip this wordy, uninteresting intro and just get to the good stuff!

– I’ve been meaning to post for a long time, but…

I think if you’ve been meaning to post, you probably just should have.  If something kept you from it, I would think you’d be interested in diving right in to whatever stuff we readers have missed.  The stuff that gets in the way of your writing is generally not as interesting as your writing itself.  Those obstacles may be great fodder for posts – but presented this way, it feels a little like the dog ate your homework.

– Hmm, I can’t think of what to write about…

Well, think about it some more then.  Or do this kind of writing in a notebook somewhere until you do hit on something you feel like writing about, then sharing.  Or, start your post this way until you get into a groove and then edit that part out later.  If you start by telling me you don’t know what to write about, I expect the rest of the post to have zero substance, so, on I go to the next blog.

– Here’s my to-do list for the weekend…

This kills me.  You may have something really interesting going on this weekend, but why not jump into a story about it, or a description of why it matters to you, so it might be relevant to people reading.  I’m generally not interested when you use your blog as a place to jot down notes.

Bottom line – get to the point and don’t apologize.  These are the kinds of things you can think to yourself as you ponder what you should write about – but to start your blog entries with things like this makes me go right past them.  I’m sure if I reviewed all my previous posts, I’d find other cases where I’m breaking my own rules, but I’ll leave it at that for now.

Copycat communication

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I grew up in Wisconsin, where accents are thick and colloquialisms abound.  Where else do you drink from a bubbler?  For years, I went “down by” places, not “to” places.  Grilling was “frying out,” and I didn’t even hear it when people ended their sentences with, ” and so?”  It’s not quite as severe as Fargo, but it’s not far off, either.  I called a boat something more like “bow-ut” and shoes “shoo-uhs.”  Native Wisconsinites speak these words a bit faster than you probably just read them, but there is a slight hint of an extra syllable thrown in there, and it happens all the time.  I’m not sure exactly how I shed my accent, but I did, some years ago.  Most people can’t detect it, unless I’m really, really tired, or have had a lot too much to drink, and even then I only slip now and then.

I am, however, easily influenced by the speech of others.  I went to visit a friend in Oklahoma when I was around 12 or 13.  I stayed for a week and came home with a drawl.  I pick up terms other people use, most of the time oblivious to it until it’s too late and I sound like I’m copying them all the time.  What has surprised me lately, though, is how I’m being influenced by the people I work with.  And not in the way I might have suspected, adopting such words my boss uses, like “cycles” and “prosecute” which I’ve written about already.

First, let me say very clearly, I am not being critical or judgmental of the way anyone I work with speaks or doesn’t speak.  It simply is what it is, and it rubs off on me.  I work with more foreign people than native English speakers, especially if you count the hundred employees we have in China.  What’s crazy is that broken English is rubbing off on me.  It’s really hard to comprehend that I would just toss out all the grammar and vocabulary I’ve built in years of speaking and reading and writing, but I’m finding myself slipping into broken English in both speech and email.  It’s kind of nuts!

I catch myself writing things like, “Can you have team work on this today night?” or “Please have a look on this.”  So far, I’m catching and correcting these crazy sentences that are only crazy because English is my first language.  One guy whose English is fine still uses odd phrases now and then.  Instead of saying something happened a long time ago, he says “Remember long back when we talked about that?”  I have used the words “long back” in a conversation with him.  It could be worse.  An email I was copied on tonight had this sentence in it:  “Sorry about my misunderstand cause this idea so delay.”

In all seriousness, though, it is a real challenge to communicate effectively in my organization.  It’s not a challenge I am upset about – it’s a challenge I sincerely think is a good one for me.  I’ve studied diversity and the issues faced in global business – the communication challenges that not only have to do with language barriers, but significant cultural difference, and I am absolutely getting the biggest dose of both of those issues that I’ve ever gotten.  I’m determined to succeed in communicating with everyone, though, and I’m sincerely interested in understanding the cultural differences we all face.  Maybe that’s why I’m so easily influenced by the speech and writing – maybe I’m subconsciously trying to meet them on the terms I hear from them.  Whatever the cause, I will keep you posted on how my language continues to evolve, or devolve, as the case may be.