Thinking With My Mouth

Boy, this'll make you think twice about blowing rent on drugs. Note how convenient all the timings are for the council. Imagine being old, infirm, and finding that your house has literally been sealed from the outside--this also means power is cut, water is turned off, etc. How long would you last?

At first, it's an obvious joke, and kind of a funny punch line. "Microsoft operating system crashes in vehicle onboard system, trapping the occupants alive."

Except, when you read the article, that isn't the story. It may have been the story the author wanted to write, but several facts fly in the face:

- It was an electrical problem
- The car was 10 years old
- The bulletproof glass made extraction difficult

The author deliberately chooses techie language like "glitch" and refers to other speculated reports, and wholly ignores that the story he wanted wasn't there. Instead, he builds a case of inference and speculation, all to take shot at an obvious and easy target. Let's hear it for impartiality!

Fear of success bigger than fear of failure.

Some lessons can be taught, others just have to be learned.

You only get what you measure for.

Your customers will merrily push you into bad behavior.

It is no longer the most qualified or the most likely to do a job well that gets hired for a job--it's the one that can pass all the tests, or is willing to chant the right lies in the right order. A lot of our business model seems predicated on lies. If you tell a client an honest quote, he chokes on the budget and wants you to hack it. He presumes there is slack in the estimate, and expects the vendor to take it up.

I certainly am guilty of this--when I am the customer, and I have a vendor across the table from me, it's all about the Vendor Twist Game. How much free stuff can you get? Cajole the vendor, tell him his people suck and screw things up, and hand him evidence of the same. Refuse to pay invoices. Demand lower prices whenever something goes really wrong. It's all short term thinking on my part, and it's bad for the vendor to give in.

So if you hold your ground on your estimate, you have to accept that the business can't be done for less than that. Which is an opening for some other whore to step in and say "I'll do it for less! Sure!" And then that whore gets the contract, and two years later you hear about how the client has now spent more than four times your original bid, and still doesn't have the solution.

I guess sometimes toxic customers select themselves out of the pool, but I haven't met any that weren't TOXIC. They all engage in this stupidity--they feel entitled to pay less, for whatever reason. They want to feel like they're "gettin' a deal."

It's like I'm suddenly coming to realize that the game isn't played on the competence spectrum. It's played on the bullshit spectrum. Like dating: we seem to think that finding a mate is all about meeting someone and then acting like someone we aren't in order to be liked. Like business: don't tell me you're gonna fuck me in the ass, and I'll do my part and believe you even as you slide it in.

What the fuck?

How did we end up this way?

It rails at every assumption I have about what I should be doing and why. I work hard--I'm not a spiritual person, so I'm not planning on living forever. I hold that we are the sum of our experiences, and therefore I have a responsibility to accrue as much experience as possible. Opportunity is. In this is the assumption that I work hard, do good, quality work, and goodness flows back to me.

I just don't believe that anymore. The concept of a womb-to-tomb job is dead--that social contract got ripped up in the 80's. I've never believed that a 20-25 year "career" was available to me anywhere except the military. (No fucking way.) The way through was the entrepreneur's route: build an asset, build it into a business, provide a good product for a real need at a competitive value and business should come your way. But that doesn't map: those who are succeeding are not those building the best products, but those doing the best marketing.

We don't get leaders who are the most qualified, we get the most "electable". We don't get engineers who are talented, we get charlatans that can pass tests and play office. We don't get clients who value good work, we get misers who want to pay for chipboard lean-to's and expect cherry-lined mansions.

What the fuck happened to ACCOUNTABILITY? Where's INTEGRITY in this process? Where's the HONOR? I always said that I wouldn't play political games, but the truth is that it's the only fucking game in town.

Backups save lives.

Alright, just one, and this one's OBVIOUS: tastes like chicken!

I got a lot to do today, so Blog l8r. Meanwhile, figure it out: are you a LOSER?

This headline says it all with feeling.

Get a fucking helmet and cover up that soft little head of yours.

I have been dragging my feet getting a job. At first, I built the Rock Star Resume, guaranteed not to get me hired anywhere. It lists all of my jobs, with their real titles: COO, Director of Development, Manager of Quality Systems, Principal Engineer, Lead Architect, Lord of Time and Space (yes, I did actually get a company to let me put LoTaS on my business card; one afternoon, the guy who owned the place poked his head into the large corner office I was sharing with Rob Brunk--he had a clipboard and asked us "OK, guys, time to pick a title." When I announced LoTaS, he shrugged and wrote it down; Rob immediately started whining, "Ohhhh, I wanted to be Looord of Tiiiime and Spaaaaaace." It was perfect.).

Anyway, any hiring manager with a job opening available right now is a middle manager in a biggish company. This middle manager is special, because they are still employed in this economy. This almost guarantees that this is not the most competent middle manager that the organization in question has ever seen. More likely, this middle manager still has a job because he is the most politically astute middle manager that the organization in question has ever seen. These are entirely two different animals, and the political animal will see a resume like mine and go "Oh, no, this guy will definitely come in here and make me look stupid, there's no damn way we're calling him."

So, it's been four months, and I've sent out over 100 resumes, and I got exactly one phone call.

I don't mean to brag, but before that, I hadn't gone more than 3 days without employment offers, and have spent enough time contracting to know what it's like to not want a job.

Like now: I am so completely unprepared for the rigors of a 9-to-5, and a supervisor. Geek buddies keep telling me "Now is the time to find a big company and curl up in it and hide, ride out this wave." But I just don't have it in me.

It seems that, this close to the bottom, it's time to start keeping track of what the hell is going on.

This is a deep, dark hole. There is not a train.

In the months that followed the previous invasion on Iraq, the company I worked for (Phase III Commercial Factors) was raided by various Attorneys General and the US Postmaster for mail fraud. (It was an important lesson in powerful interests coming to bear on dangerous upstarts, but that's another day.) My small family of four ended up in the spare bedroom of a newly-married couple of friends for several months. It was horrible; I have many deep scars from that period. Cameron (son, now 11) was not even walking. Jessi (daughter, now 16) was not yet in school. Bear and I had just gotten back together after being apart for several months while I searched for work in Phoenix. Iraq annexed Kuwait on our second anniversary. We were evicted from our home on my 23rd birthday.

Today, in the months following the Iraq Confrontation of the Decade, we have yet another Shrub discrediting himself noisily chasing oil interests and NWO building. And I'm staring at a negative bank account, no serious prospects for money, and the dwindling dream of a business evaporating.

Sometimes, I think it's a test. But I'm not spiritual, so I know it's just the environment tossing challenges at me. 200,000 years ago, I'd be on the prairie, hiding behind a tree, trying to figure out how to bring down that damn buffalo. 200,000 years from now, I'd be a rogue dreamer in the Matrix consuming too many resources for your standard battery. Same shit, different day.

You might reasonably question the wisdom of going into business during a depression. I have two responses: 1) it's not like I can just go get a job, 'cause there ain't no such thing these days, and 2) it's better to learn to be a business now, when business is hard. If the business grows up around plentiful fruit, it doesn't grow the muscles to handle down times, it has to count on taking on fat to trim. Note the number of dotCommunism businesses not making it through these austere times (see fuckedcompany if you don't believe me).

Throughout my career, I have been amazed at the types of people I'd met who were business owners and executives. All of them were dipshits. Many of them could carry on a reasonable conversation, but to a one, they had some component of complete and utter blindness, that often led them to make astoundingly stupid moves.

I believe it is this capacity for blindness that is necessary for success. One must not be able to see the train coming, otherwise, they wouldn't be able to press on. Intelligence, in this sense, works against the entrepreneur, in that intelligence lets one see each threat for what it really is. But a business owner needs to ignore all of that: "Forget that the bank account is empty! Forget that you don't even have business cards anymore! Here's a lead: GO WORK IT!" Some days, it's just enough getting out of bed and checking email.

There is not a train.