16th Feb

 Work was such a shitgasm on Tuesday that I forgot we had our vet appointment, and so, I've missed taking Athena to the vets to get a follow up and her started on her anti arthritics.

This has not made me feel good. At all. Epic fucking failure.

The good news is that it's not a super critical vet visit.

The bad news is that the vets have become rammed, and our next appointment is 1st March.

Only myself to blame. I had a reminder the day before, yep, all set. But the work was such a ballache, that I entirely forgot about it.

That would be the whole herp a derp, trying to manage the creche.

Not only is it frustrating, annoying, stressy. It has an even more real impact on me because it makes me forget shit because I am concentrating so hard on wiping asses.

If you wanted some great visibility on Why That Shit Isn't Healthy, look no further.

And at the end of it, it basically comes down to because people don't want to change being a mess, a disaster, being allowed to be an annoying shitbag.

Because they wont change. Everything else does.

Meh.

But no mistake, at the end of the day, forgetting the vet appointment is my failure. My fuck up. And potentially Athena suffers for it. Worst case of all. My failure causes another pain. Very bad juju. This is my frowny face. This is my do better face. This is my I am not good enough face.

Anywho. Work.

Today, got a similar request for stupidity management.

Could I just do X.

Where X is a manual task that has been done 3 times before.

A flat out no.

No. Fuck that.

This is a regular data load. The process CANNOT be, oh, get a warm fleshbag to escort the file through a number of manual steps and load it. That would be bad enough in any company. An IT consultancy doing that, ha, fuck me, talk about being the poster child for how you shouldn't do that.

If you're not in the field, you might think, ok. Why can't you just manually do something ? What's the problem ? It's just a task someone needs to complete. Right ?

1) Human error. Anytime you have a human in a process, you are subject to human error. This is a fact. You pick up a probability of the task fucking up due to a human mistake. We have to factor that in as part of the risk assessment. You have to cover the costs of the cleanup of the task. When you're planning that shit, drawing up budgets, looking at your costs, you have to multiply whatever your maintenance is by whatever your failure risk is. A bit like an insurance policy. If you make 10% mistakes on a maintenance task. And, in a naive world, the 10% mistakes mean a 10% increased effort ( not true ! ), then, you're now running at 110% maintenance costs for X.

In practice human mistakes are often lop sided. Their impact is way more costly.

2) Scalability. A human in a process is inherently unscalable. This is the death by a thousand cuts problem. You can give Alice a task to sweep the yard. You can maybe even double it, and give her two tasks to sweep two different yards. But by the time you're on multiples, she no longer has time to sweep all the yards, is now spending all of her time sweeping as many yards as she can, and you've now become a yard sweeper employer in the yard sweeping business. For many businesses they accept this as just how it is. This is a huge mistake. You've hit a growing pain. Typically you see this in small businesses that start with management of their business based on an excel spreadsheet. Or a word document. Or an email folder. Which is fine when you're managing half a dozen things. It's not so fine when it becomes a dozen, or two dozen. And it entirely collapses when you double it again. In fact. These problems can be a very real threat to the entire working of a business. You can get to a place where your capability to manage what you're doing has been exceeded by the scale of the task, and everything, literally, breaks. You cannot keep track of customers. Jobs. Things get forgotten. Complaints ramp up. As you start to try and put fires out, you have even less time to manage, the problem gets worse. You can't do your job. You lose jobs. People get fucked off. Your reputation tanks. You have no more business. ( As an aside, NHS parallel anyone ? )

It happens. It's painful. We see it at key points in the life cycle of a business, the first time it crops up, is that small business to medium business transition. One man band, becomes multiple people. You get it again later, when multiple people becomes many multiple people. Or goes cross site - multiple locations. Countries. Volumes. Whatever. Many pain points.

How do you fix it ? Let computers into your life. You let IT manage your shit. You let the roomba sweep the yard.

Back to the problem at hand.

Someone sends you some data. It needs to get loaded into a system.

The zero tech, no brains way of doing this is you get Bob to manually press buttons, copy files, watch it load.

Hey that works. Yay.

Until Bob is now doing 10 of these a day.

That's all he does. Whatever job he was doing that you hired him for is not being done anymore.

Perhaps you hired him just to do this though ?

He makes mistakes. He gets fatigued. All he does is load files. He is bored. Sick of it. His mistake rate goes up. You have an employee cost of X per year, just to load files.

This is instinctively how Andy works.

Bodge it. Do it. Half ass it. What's the shortest path from A to B.

And continually paints himself into corners.

Give him 24 months control of any proposition and it will start to bear problems of critical collapse.

This is how he used to work a long time ago. Do shit. Keep on doing shit. When it's about to collapse, run away. One of the guys we used to work  with - our corporate colleague - a very long time ago confessed to me that he thought in 3 years time, Andy would pull the plug on what he was doing and run, because it had become unmanageable. Uh huh. Not just me that sees that then.

Architecture, planning, strategy is not his thing. At all. He's downright dangerous with it.

The bulwark against his constant need to do that, is me.

No one else. Just me. Everyone else will do what he says, because, he's the boss. And. They also don't know better. Albeit just about everyone has a sense, small or great, that Andy half asses it. It Is Known.

So today.

I had to say No. Fuck that. I am not loading that data. Automate it. And then set out the reasons why that has to be. Why it has to be now - because everyone in that chain is shit and will given the chance just continue on with bad behaviour unless you absolutely force them not to.

It's like giving a kid medicine.

They dont want to do it. Yuck. Eww. No.

But they will be better for it. In spite of themselves.

Your options are, throw a fit, refuse the vaccine - probably die in a number of years.

Or grow up, take the vaccine, get to continue on.

It's part of the job of being Super Sensible Professional IT Know It All. And in a perfect world, consultants get a hum of satisfaction of keeping all their charges within their lane.

In practice for me it smacks far too much of parenting.

And having to continually repeat lessons to the point of nauseation.

Meh.

In this case. There is a silver lining though. The automation task required is interesting, slightly crunchy, and a perfect project to teach one of our techies who is branching over into coding. It lets him see from a familiar point of view - email management and handling - and follow the chain all the way down, not something he does, where you have to figure out how to dump it out, extract what you need, slurp it up, spit it at the database, and do your verification. Full life cycle. From the point of view of someone who perhaps only sees the email land, seeing it progress all the way through to a running online system as part of a data feed, and, learning how to do all that, is, I think, pretty rewarding, and if you're into that shit, quite exciting. Look At All This Power You Have. Turn anything, into anything. For thousands of users. Completely automatically.

So. Should be a cool project for him to learn on. He has plenty of time to do it as well. A month. So. No sweat.

Hazel pinged me yesterday. She had fucked up her meds again. As in. Forgetting to get them in time.

This is a recurring thing. I would guess every 4 months or so we go through a bit of a panic. I am at this point fairly familiar with how emergency prescriptions of drugs work. Who knew ?

Midday. Run out of meds. Ok. You're sorting that out though right ?

Yes. 

Because. You don't want to be in a place where you're running around at 8pm as everything closes trying to get meds. We've done that. It sucks. ( we famously drove halfway across norfolk once, only to find that they did not in fact have any.. on a Sunday... at stupid o clock.. because of course ).

I am getting it sorted she said. Waiting til 4.30pm til the pharmacy gets back to her.

Hmmmm. This is also typical of Hazel. If it can be put off. Put it off. Leave it til the last minute. Then usually, fail at the task. I didn't push her, but, 4.30pm smacked to me of leaving it and not actually doing it. For Hazel this seems perfectly reasonable. To any one else. Leaving something critical til at least 4.30pm in a working day to do anything about it is.... nuts. Who does that ?

But. You don't say that. Hazel doesn't do well with that. Also. People need to make their own mistakes sometimes. Definitely true of Hazel. Though in this case, she never learns. Same mistake. Same pain. Cannot be told different.

Uh huh.

By 9pm she was in a mess.

She had left it again. Too late. The pharmacy had screwed her over. Had it. Didn't have it. Their fault.

Mmm.

Except. Really not. Sure. A pharmacy can cock up, make a mistake. But. You know that's a possibility. And at midday you have all the time in the world to visit every pharmacy in the city and beyond to get what you need.

But you don't.

You leave it.

And leave it.

Until it's the only hope. End of the day. And it fails. Then you run around like a lunatic. And fail at the task.

Been there, done that, got the t shirt. Repeatedly. It is her MO.

So she didn't get her meds yesterday. Which sends her into a panic.

Perhaps today she will be more galvanised from the get go to sort it out.

I understand what's going on here. And I too can suffer from exactly the same shit. The difference is, with me, if it's critical, it gets done. Usually, if I am not fighting a hundred other fires and busy up the wazoo ( but then that's just a problem of being too busy and not enough time to do it all ). So I can plan stuff. And execute it. High functionality. Through the pain and screaming. Just fucking do it.

Hazel does not. She explodes. You can bank on it. Even when her day is completely empty.

Push comes to shove, part of our relationship is that she relies on me in some circumstances to be the calm executor that she is not, bailing her out of shitty situations. She has poor visibility on this though. Her demons often refuse to see how much I help her.

Yesterday she didn't ask for help. I suspect she thought I was too busy and stressed. And also. Not a little bit ashamed of fucking up her meds again after I explicitly told her not to do exactly what she ended up doing.

It can be a hard pill to swallow when you fail to take simple advice and in short order it blows up in your face.

Eh well.

We are all flawed. Sometimes spectacularly. Hazel gives me a very deep grounding in just how fucky mental health can be, how imperfect the world is, and how much people can self sabotage.

I don't get annoyed with her. Or hold her in contempt. Or at least try super hard not to. I know what she's like. I wish she wouldn't do what she does a lot of the time. But. I don't beat her up about it. It's part of her struggles. I can help when I can. Understand. Advise a little when the time is right and she's receptive.

Perhaps you might say, she needs much tougher love.

Maybe. 

Tough love is such a crock of shit though. Honestly. The easiest path to take. Just kick the ever loving shit out of someone til they do something resembling normal.

Uh huh.

So often it's just a vehicle for someone venting their own anxiety and rage out on someone. Hilariously often the victim. Victim blaming. I'd even go so far as to say, that it's pretty much always that the tough love approach is more about the teacher loosing their demons than it is the pupil learning difficult lessons. And in that grouping, it's often the anxiety demon. The worry and the fear. About someone else. So it gets vented on them. Vomited out as a harsh stream of language which makes the ventee feel so much better about getting it out there. Cathartic. I've said my bit. Done my bit. Whilst making the actual original sufferer feel much worse and STILL have their original problem.

Good job.

I've lost count of the number of times I've personally experienced this, and beyond count the number of times I've seen it incurred on someone else.

My mom used to do it. End up ranting at me about work. Yes. I just told you work was shit. And now here you are, giving me a good kicking. In the spirit of trying to help. Do you think it's helpful ?

I used to frame it to her that way sometimes. Please don't beat me up. Work is a problem. I don't then also need you beating me up about work.

She would apologise. She got it. And people do. Pull them up. Do you think you're being helpful right now ? People get lost in the anxiety and frustration of it. They need to rant it out. At you. The original abused party. So. Just more abuse then. Ho ho. It's fucky. But very human.

There's no doubt that sometimes a harder edge can get a message through. But bear in mind the world is full of hard edges already. No shortage of hard lessons and brutal realities. It's not like the world is some happy clappy soft edge cuddle bear lulling you into sleep. Quite the reverse.

But it can be tricky. Sometimes people can get caught in a self reinforcing spiral, they make excuses and erect obstructions to justify why they are the way they are. Self reinforcing destructive behaviour. And in those cases. Sometimes it requires a kick. Difficult. There will be pain. And screaming. And tears. But necessary.

That being said.

The thing that is missing in peoples lives is not usually hard lessons. Step outside your door and you're likely to get slapped in the face by one in fairly short order.

The thing in short supply in peoples lives is understanding. And help. Without criticism.

There is, I think, a very high wisdom in understanding that being flawed is part of being human and beyond that, not to take it personally or become enraged by it. And that it's also something that can't be fixed. There is no such thing as a perfect human. Like fitting a liter of water into a half liter glass, something ends up spilling out. It's just how it is. You can rant and rave about the spillage. And force someone not to spill that particular bit of water. But elsewhere they will still spill water. And ironically, the more you force them, often times the worse it can get elsewhere.

We are not designed to be perfect. We are designed to be just good enough. Evolution is not interested in perfection. But in just enough for you to get through the day. THAT is human nature. THAT is life. It is who we are.

Flawed.

Be kind.

Don't be a dick when you see flaws.

For sure, learn, improve, grow.

But don't be a dick about it if people are slow. Or stuck. Or just can't do.

Be kind.

You can rant about someone spilling the water. Punch them in the head. Or. You can wipe up their spill. And help them out. And maybe when you spill water. They'll be inclined to wipe yours up. 

Because here's another bit of high wisdom. We all have strengths and weaknesses in different areas. As a society we pull together by leveraging individuals strengths. Not everyone gets to be a lawyer. A programmer. A surgeon. A nuclear physicist. A baker. We don't all perform heart surgery. We rely on the strength of an individual - the heart surgeon - to do that for us. And in turn, we do, whatever it is we do and can do. Even if it's very humble. Making a sandwich for someone.

The lesson here is that we are better when we don't try to do it all ourselves, but recognise what we are good at, what we are bad at, and help others where they aren't so good.

If we don't do that. If we all try and do everything.

Then the farmer dies of heart issues. The heart surgeon dies of starvation. The programmer dies of heart failure AND starvation. And everyone dies in a plane crash because there were no computers.

Nothing works. At least. Not above a level of bare animal survival.

The rule of life that is played out is that you can be poor at everything. Or you can be really good at somethings and piss poor at others. And that having strengths and weaknesses as opposed to a malaise of being quite bad at everything, is a far superior strategy. It turns out, you get much better results when you have a system that can have strengths AND weaknesses, as opposed to just even handed meh. Strengths are a force multiplier. An exponential curve. What you put in, is multiplied many times on output. The more you put in, the far more you get out. The simplest example being the farmer. Specialises in farming. Can end up feeding hundreds. The non specialist back yard part time farmer. Is lucky if they can feed themselves. Let alone their family.

So. Strengths and weaknesses. In particular to our discussion, having flaws. Failing at shit. It's by design. Not failure. Of course you can sit and wish to be great at everything. Perfect. That's cool. Something to strive for. But also realise, it's not possible. You do not have the time, the capacity, the hardware, to do everything well. Forget perfectly. Perfection is an imaginary unattainable goal.So. You have to pick and choose what you're good at - in a best case scenario. But also remember, even when you're not picking and choosing and life is just happening, there is going to be shit that you're not good at. That your other half is not good at. That your friend continually fails at. This is not a mar on their character. This is being human.

Something to think about.

And also explains why I am, or try to be, zen with the failures of people. Annoyed. Or understanding. A lot of it comes down to choice. But, we're all flawed. And subject to emotion. So. Getting it wrong. And pissed off at someone failing. Is also human. And sometimes warranted. But often not.

Heh. 

Last minor note.

When driving around. I see twat drivers - yesterday it was some dickhead guy in a mini, roared up my inside, braked massive hard at the lights, ended up half way into the junction, then, whilst waiting for the lights to turn green, edged slowly forward, impatient to be off.

My usual response is to call them a dickhead. Loudly.

I've started to change it.

Instead of calling them a dickhead. Imagine they are your good friend. And come up with a plausible reason why they are behaving that way.

In a way, I guess this is like CBT for road rage.

So yesterday. Impatient twat. Almost certainly impatient douchebaggery.

And yet.

It's an emergency. He has someone waiting for him to deliver something vital. He needs to get home. Something.

It's possible.

Imagine if it were your friend dashing home to help their ill other half.

Suddenly, that impatient driving makes sense. Justifiable.

So yeah.

I've started doing that.

Think the *best* of someone. Not the worst.

Not sure how well that will hold up when someone is clearly being a dickhead driver. Perhaps there will always be a clearcut percentage of dickheads.

But where doubt is possible. I will try and take the high road.

If nothing else, imagining the dickhead was dashing home to help in an emergency made ME feel a lot better in myself. No annoyance. Just understanding.

Less stress.

Early days. My impulse is to yell dickhead. Something I am working on.