mangosteen

Eli's Law of Professional Services: Keep your promises, and set your boundaries.
Even More Important Corollary: Know when you're making promises, and know when you're setting boundaries.

In the past 19 months at the new job, the hardest lesson I've learned is that "people want you to do what they want to think you said you were going to do."

Wait. Rewind. Too many articles. Let me try again.

In the past 19 months at the new job, the hardest lesson I've learned is that "customers consider every statement to be a promise."

It's one thing to say "Yes, it'll be done on Monday." Of course that's a promise. It's quite another to say "Yes, it'll be done on Monday", and have the customer therefore assume "it'll be done by the time they wake up Monday morning, and you'll be working through the weekend to get it done, with twice-daily updates."

Similarly, it's one thing to say "I'll definitely be around until 5:30pm, but after that I can't guarantee availability." and completely another to say "It will be done by Monday at 5pm EDT subject to 24 hours notice to extend the deadline. There will be no expectation of contact or support over the weekend, being defined as Friday 5pm to Monday 9am. Time spent on the phone or communication over email will bump out the deadline on a 2:1 basis etc."

Observation: Slamming between the extremes of "doing whatever it takes, to the point of burnout" and "setting up boundaries to the point of onerousness" is a recipe for an unsatisfying life.

Realization: It all comes down to having a love-hate relationship with conflict. More specifically, having no guidance or subtlety in understanding power. Avoid conflict, and one eliminates their own leverage. Seek conflict, and trash the relationship, thus eliminating future leverage.

Note: This was my professional life for a distressingly long time.

One of the interesting things that has come out of this job is that I've learned how to set my boundaries without being reactionary, aggressive, and otherwise dickish about it. As an added bonus, I've gotten a lot more comfortable with conflict and living in the moment of tension.

Much like in a dance, the moment of tension between the participants represents the connection point in a dynamic system. More often than not, the customer wants the tension. They need to know the boundaries. If I don't provide any counter-force, the customer will start asking for ridiculous things, because they will have made ridiculous promises to their management as a result of my ability to do "whatever it takes".... right up until the point where I can't. Unsurprisingly, this helps no one.

There are so many things in the past couple of years that have re-shaped how I interact with other people (good) and that have made me more "slick" in some ways (not as good), but have made me so much more solid and reliable in others (very good). A bunch of this is attributed to my current job, but the more important part has been sitting down with myself (and others) and figuring out what I actually want, and how to get it.

I'm not there yet, but I'm certainly closer than I used to be.

Observation: There is a real gap between "that's not supposed to work" and "that won't work".

Accurate gauging of that gap is the secret to a great many successes.
Inaccurate gauging of that gap is the source of no end of mystified failures.

In the continuing effort to transcend the stereotypical culinary roles of my gender (breakfast foods and grilling), I've decided to learn how to bake things.

1. I can safely say that I have an aptitude for baking. There's something about the precision and preparatory experimentation* that appeals. You get the proportions right, put them in in the right order, make sure the transformations happen in the right way, and then add heat and wait.

Things baked so far, a slightly incomplete list:
- Pretzel rolls
- Bread boules (lean dough, white and wheat)
- Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough**
- Beer Bread
- Cream Puffs***

Next come more interesting breads (have to figure out a starter, though), interesting cream-puff structures, and probably some cakes. Point is, I've never had this much fun in the kitchen.

There's another thing, though.

2. Read the book "Ratio", by Michael Ruhlman. Find it, read it. No, really. This is the book that helped me figure out how to bake. It goes into the fundamental ingredient ratios for various kinds of food (e.g. bread = 5 parts flour to 3 parts water, (plus some yeast and salt)). It also goes into why each ratio matters, the effects of varying it, and next steps.

3. I will admit that all of this is aided by having a "Why Do I Have a 1 Horsepower Motor In My Kitchen" Kitchenaid mixer. It's a recent acquisition, and totally worth it. I didn't know that "enough torque to knead two loaves worth of bread dough" was a requirement, but clearly it was.

4. There's something very essential about baking, and kneading dough, and creating food from ingredients. Now that I'm baking on a regular basis, it feels like it's one of the hidden requirements for being useful in the world.

More on baking and essentialism later. This is clearly something I need to poke at more.

But trust me on reading Ratio.

---

* Yes. Kitchen scale *and* lab notebook. Why do you ask?

** 15 minutes from "I'll make some chocolate chip cookie dough" to "Okay, I'm not going to eat 2 lbs. of chocolate chip cookie dough. Now what?"

*** Okay. Cream Puffs are both cooked and baked. They're probably the best bang for the buck in terms of impressing people, though.****

**** I feel confident in saying that no one gets through making their first batch of choux paste without doing something that will later be referred to as "The Choux Paste Incident"

Being a connoisseur of weird song covers, it's pretty hard to faze me with "Did you hear that they slammed X into genre Y?"

That being said, nothing prepared me for Erasure putting out a live album full of country covers of their own songs.

If you're a child of the 80s, you will find this both disturbing and awesome. It was only due to my chair having arms that I didn't fall out of it while listening to "Chains Of Love".

Erasure - On The Road To Nashville.
Mango-Bob says: "Check it out."

It wasn't too long ago that I was informed of my choice to go into training. It makes sense now, I suppose. High empathy scores on the Rosenzweig scale get you banned from casinos. *Really* high scores on the Rosie get you a visit.

Surgery was 13 days ago, and I still can't move the goddamn penny.

I get one more day until I time out.

This sucks.

There has to be a Rabbit Hole around here, somewhere.

Wheels down, turn on the phone.

Two voicemails, five minutes apart, automated, mostly exactly the same but for a number.

One says "12", the other says "2". The surrounding words are the standard automated stuff about "connecting flight delays" and "new departure times" and "AM".

Really sorry here's a voucher shuttle at zone 4.

Helllllllooooooo Philadelphia.

Good night.

At first blush, it's a bit hilarious that Gingrich is a "Family Values" candidate, given his questionable personal record on that whole marriage thing. How can someone be such a hypocrite and manage to win the South Carolina GOP primary (which happened about 15 minutes ago, as of this writing)?

The answer? There's no conflict. Take a look at a few of the "Family Values" stances, as typically put forth:
- Opposition to same-sex marriage
- Overturn Roe v. Wade and make abortion a state-by-state issue (the second order effects of which work out to "criminalize abortion")
- Abstinence education, to the exclusion of safer-sex education.

All three of those represent an elimination and/or reduction of freedoms. For a Republican candidate to successfully campaign on "Family Values", they have to show that they're willing to remove those particular freedoms from others. If the candidate can execute on that, they can be as bad at practicing what they preach as, well, Gingrich.

A while ago, I created an account over on dreamwidth with the same account name as this one (i.e. mangosteen.dreamwidth.org). I don't know if I'm going to migrate any/all things over there, but I wanted to see what it's like on the not-DDos'ed-by-Russian-political-issues side of the fence.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled schedule.

Four things make a post.

Today:
0) Proved my worth as an American by driving around and buying stuff.
- Groceries, gym clothing, and loaf pans.

1) Baked a loaf of beer bread, using Guinness.
- I definitely chose the wrong week to lower my carb intake, but I'm doing it anyway. The co-workers will be getting a loaf of mindblowingly good bread tomorrow, and I'll be doing willpower push-ups in the corner.

2) Coded up a Bloom Filter to do a low-memory-footprint spell checker, mostly to see it work.
- I realized that I hadn't actually programmed random interesting stuff in a while, and I feel like I haven't done enough deliberate practice in learning how to code. Ergo, I've started looking through the Code Kata blog and started doing a few of the exercises. I fully expect I'll be doing more of these.

3) Continued reading Debt: The First 5,000 Years.
- If you have an interest in the evolution of the concept of debt at all, I recommend reading this book. Graeber goes through several thousand years of history to look at economies past and present, completely demolishes the notion that "in the beginning there was barter", and has a ton of interesting things to say about how debt intertwines with morality. Mango-Bob says, "check it out."

Not bad for a random Sunday.

1. Make whipped cream, preferably infused with something tasty (I like ginger syrup, but YMMV)
   
2. Bring said whipped cream to a New Year's party, where it's enjoyed with the pound cake you baked that day.
   
3. Bring the leftover whipped cream home.
   
4. The next morning, over-whip the leftover cream and turn it into butter.
   
5. Put said concoction on just-baked whole-wheat bread, with just a sprinkle of cinnamon sugar.
   

Nom.