NaBloPoMo

It’s not a preference

Created to mourn and memorialize the lives of transgender people lost between October 1 and September 30 year over year, November 20th is Transgender Day of Remembrance.

This year’s day mourns the lives of 432 people across the globe – 53 in the U.S. alone – lost to violence, medical neglect, or suicide – because, let’s not bullshit here, they made someone uncomfortable.

The bulk of the people subject to violence across the globe because they are transgender are women of color. In the U.S. that means most of them are Black.

The only countries without reports of anti-trans violence are exactly the authoritarian ones you’d expect. Which means it’s happening, we just aren’t being told about it.

The trans community isn’t perfect. In fact, it has a lot of fucking problems. That doesn’t make it right to kill people, or to declare them less than human. I’m looking at you JK Rowling.

We’ve been doing inclusive writing talks at work since George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police at the end of May.

As part of that, we’ve started talking about pronouns and how “preferred pronouns” isn’t a thing. The way I’ve been explaining it to meeting full of meeting of slightly stunned heterosexuals is like this: someone’s pronouns are their pronouns.

It’s not a preference just the same way someone’s name isn’t a preference. If someone is named Laura you wouldn’t just randomly start calling her Sue.

They seem to be getting it. And that makes me happy.

Just one more hole

It’s funny how even when you like and trust your boss certain things trigger suspicion.

In the past couple of weeks I have spent a good chunk of time at work reviewing resumes and sitting in on interviews for a contractor position in my specialty area. Even though this position isn’t for my direct team, my boss asked me to prioritize this for a couple of reasons.

One is that he sees me as the “head of practice,” which is flattering and a good example of how being first and just declaring yourself something can make it so.

The other is he judges that because the managers hiring for this position to be inexperienced enough in my specialty area to be unable to decide based on a candidates skills. He told me he wanted me to make sure that we got someone good in that position, someone who had the right skills and could contribute not just to the team and the assigned project, but also to the practice area as a whole. And I’m glad he did.

We did four first-round interviews. Two of the candidates looked perfect on paper.

Both of them had about as much experience as me. The jobs and projects they highlighted on their resumes showed a progression of responsibility.

HospitalityCandidate even ended up managing the team in charge of the content and voice & tone for the first mobile application for a major international hotel chain.

FinanceCandidate had a huge amount of finance space knowledge, working for multiple large banks over a 20+ year career, in addition to working in other large, corporate environments.

The other two candidates looked less perfect on paper. One had the domain experience to have less catch-up time at Large Financial Institution. Like me, she has done most of her work in non-profit spaces. I was predisposed to like her.

The other candidate had no financial domain experience. Mostly in healthcare, some in publishing, she looked young even on paper. And it turned out that paper sometimes lies.

FinanceCandidate came into the interview, virtual of course, as if she already had the job. My Co-WordNerd and I asked her for:

specifics about her process
about a time when she had to convince a reluctant product owner or stakeholder that what we do has value
a story about a time when she took the wrong approach, how she corrected, and what the outcome ultimately was

We got vague responses that usually started with, “Well…” which is a bad sign in an interview. As we were closing out the interview we asked if she had any final questions. In not so many words she asked when she could expect the offer letter.

HospitalityCandidate presented slightly less arrogantly and no more specifically. Sure, she named dropped a bunch of my professional heroes in the first 10 minutes. Just because you know and have associated with a who’s-whoÂ doesn’t mean you know how to do the job.

We asked her all the same questions. Her responses were just as vague and filled with buzzwords. I have a set of tick marks in my notes for the number of times she said agile.

When we asked her the question about getting buy-in from reluctant product owners or stakeholders her response was to tell us a story about the time she presented to the CEO the hotel chain that carries his family’s name to move her idea forward.

As much as I would love to throw time on our CEO’s calendar and tell him why we need more people doing what I do in my department, I know that shit isn’t going to happen. Large Financial Institution has a problem with silos, hierarchy, and hallway conversations.

Non-profitCandidate faired only a little better. She answered the questions more specifically and still had the same “I’d go to the chief” issue with how to solve problems. She also seemed to lack insight and understanding of the critical, unsexy aspects of what we do.

HealthCareCandidate had it all, though.

She answered questions with specific examples.
She was able to show how her skills would translate even though she had no financial experience.
She was that right combination of confident and humble that being in a design job requires.

She asked us great questions about what we valued about where we worked and why we chose to work there during her Q&A period, and she asked us great wrap-up questions. Co-WordNerd and I were well sold, as was the UX designer doing the interviews with us. We recommended to the hiring managers they schedule her for a second interview.

Yesterday we found out that all hiring is frozen until further notice.

I’m okay with us having to go to a candidate in the interview process and let them down easy. Funding changes. Product owners change their minds. Shit happens.

What I’m not okay with is us fucking someone we’ve hired who has already given notice at his current job, which is what happened on my immediate team.

We extended an offer for a contractor position to a designer and he, being a responsible person, said that he would have to give two weeks’ notice at his current job. Not being complete assholes, we agreed to that.

Today is the middle of week one of his two weeks.

I believe NerdBoss when he says he fought to keep this person in the hiring process. He seemed genuinely angry when he told us our new hire wouldn’t be joining us. He also seemed angry that the new guy was being punished by timing; if he’d just walked away from his old job, which he has a right to do by law in the state where he lives, we’d have him on staff by now and everything would be fine.

Fortunately, the new guy lives in a city where the pool for folks who do what we do is small. Also fortunately, he was working for someone he’d previously worked for who had recruited him to the job he was leaving. I like to think he is going to be okay. And cutting him off because he got caught by timing because he did the right thing sends a really shitty message.

NerdBoss also told us yesterday we will not be backfilling the full-time employee position opening up on his team until probably next spring at the earliest. That means we are all going to have to work a little harder, which I’m not sure how I’m going to do given that I’m rolling almost a full week of uncompensated overtime into the last month of the year.

One more hole on the metaphorical belt.

We spent about 20 minutes of a scheduled-45/actual 1 hr 5min meeting yesterday listening to NerdBoss tell us this hiring freeze plus the retirements of several Senior Vice Presidents and Vice Presidents over the past two months weren’t any kind of indicator. The more he talked the more I started to wonder what he knew that we don’t.

Performance evaluations

Yes, it is that time of year at my job.

Despite the fact that our Human Resources department rolled out a new “talent architecture” in August, and despite the fact that we did have our annual individual development plans on the books until September, we’re supposed to be writing our self-evaluations. These evaluations will, in theory, help our bosses remember what we did and why we deserve raises.

I haven’t started mine yet, partly because I have so many meetings I’m lucky if I have time to get up to use the bathroom much less focus on telling a slightly sales pitchy, accurate story that still highlights my achievements while owning my mistakes and focusing on what I learned from them.

I’m also dragging my feet a big because I’m having trouble resisting the impulse to write:

I’ve had three bosses this year, each of whom had vastly different management and communication styles, and expectations for me as a senior individual contributor.

My schedule is exactly what I’ve said multiple times I don’t want it to be – back to back meetings with no time to process information.

Despite these conditions, plus the pandemic and the uncertainty that has been our Federal leadership, not once have I completely lost my shit in a meeting.

This alone merits a bonus and a raise.

As for my achievements this year…

I’ve been thinking a lot about job performance lately, and not just because it’s that time of year at work.

Unless you’ve been under a rock for all of 2020, you’ve probably heard about The Mandalorian. Set about about five years after the end of Return of the Jedi, according to series creator Jon Favreau, The Mandalorian follows the adventures of a lone bounty hunter on the outskirts of settled space. He’s not just any bounty hunter, though. He’s an orphan raised by a members of a warrior sect. Their beliefs hinge on the ideas of:

loyalty to a code and each other
knowledge of their history
a collective conscious known as the manda

In the finest spaghetti Western tradition, this Mandalorian doesn’t have a name. One of the brokers he works with just calls him “Mando” which is the equivalent of calling that dude at the office, the one whose name you can’t remember because you only see him once a year yet he still greats you like a long-lost sibling, buddy.

Lured in by the promise of payment in Beskar steel, the metal traditionally used to make Mandalorian armor, the Mandalorian takes an impossible job in the series first season: retrieve a heavily guarded prisoner and deliver him to the client.

Turns out the prisoner is a child with powers wanted by the remnants of the Empire skulking around the outskirts of settled space out of reach of the governing and rules of the New Republic.

He delivers the Child and second thoughts lead him to steal the Child back from the Empire and take on the quest of delivering the Child to the Jedi.

Set out on this quest he does. Unfortunately, he gets continually sidetracked by people who offer to help him if only he will kill this beast, or help them fight off invaders, or join their raiding party to steal those weapons from Imperial soldiers.

We’re 11 chapters into this story and the Mandalorian has been betrayed by almost everyone he’s allied with to get information to further him on his main quest.

The Mandalorian is really bad at his job.

We’ll keep watching though because The Mandalorian has something going for it that almost no other entertainment has right now: it’s a strange combination of familiarity and novelty. That’s exactly what we need in a year when everything has simultaneously been massive problems that need solving and absolutely no ability to solve any one of them.

Oh, and based on his behavior in Chapter 10, “Baby Yoda,” who isn’t Yoda at all based on the official timeline placement of this story, is a bit of an asshole.

Monday morning clip show

This week is going to be a drag. It will be the only full week I work during the month of November.

To ease my life this week, I’m doing the equivalent of a clip show today. Here are a few things that have kept me sane during the shitshow that is 2020.

Full disclosure: If you are using Firefox with the Facebook container blocker enabled, you aren’t going to see diddly. I’ve included some descriptions just for you.

NatGeo Wild

Amazing animal photos. Just animals being animals.

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Paul Nicklen

Also a National Geographic contributor. His photos, both black & white and color, capture our world in the most amazing ways.

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The National Park Service

So much beauty. So many puns.

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Writing about writing

It’s been a busy weekend. I’ve been nurturing, and demoralizing, the fiction writer part of me at an “at home writing summit.”

Nurturing because yes, it is great to be able to focus on fiction for a few minutes, to be free of the obligation to tell the story the way other people want me to, to have the chance to achieve the goals I want to achieve with the words I write.

Demoralizing because I have so much work I have been neglecting since, well, a while. A long while.

I’ve been a “member” at NaNoWriMo.org since October 21, 2004. That was the year I wrote my first complete novel. I say complete because I started a novel in the late 1990s but never finished it. I have it around somewhere…digitally…maybe. That was several computers ago.

I’ve won – meaning I wrote at least 50,000 words in 30 days between midnight November 1st and midnight December 1st – six times. And every time has been the same.

This is 1/3 of the spread my mother put out for our family cookie exchange last year. Yes, we are Italian.

I usually shoot for a goal of 2,000 words per day, which is slightly over what the lovely folks at NaNoWriMo headquarters say you need to win.

That extra few words allowed me to ease into Thanksgiving, traditionally my favorite holiday despite it’s smallpox-infected blanket colonizing overtones.

Part of this is because the November Holiday is crazy in my family, or at least it used to be. We’d start around 11:00 with a massive table of snacks. Then we’d move on to dinner. Then pie. So. much. pie.

Between that schedule and the weird joy of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, which yes, they have found a way to do in “these trying times,” <waits while you take a shot>, there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell I’d be able to write anything on the actual Day of Eating.

For the NaNoWriMo report cards I could dig up, I was always in the same place mentally at about the same time.

2013, the year I wrote the sci-fi novel I’m now in draft 5 on, that place looked something like this:

AM: I am shit. This book is shit. I have no idea where I am in my plot, and I think I’m going to be short. This is not good. PM: Slightly better. I’ve hit my 50% mark and I have a subplot I don’t really know what to do with.

By the way, in Draft 5, that sci-fi novel is about 30,000 words over what agents and publishers recommend for an unpublished author in that genre.

In 2018, the year I overwrote an erotic lesbian romance novel by about 55,000 words, that place looked a little bit like this:

Feel like a complete fucking phony today. Maybe because today’s scenes are emotionally hard and hit too close to home. Also, I’m not really sure where to go from here.

It’s only fitting that I get to the midpoint in my experimental blogging month that I torture myself with a whole day of good writing advice that my anxiety-oriented brain immediately absorbs and turns into this:

You’ve been working on this book for 7 years. No one cares. And in the way the publishing climate is turning, your story doesn’t matter. You’re white. You’re over 50. Why are you bothering? And why do you call yourself a writer? You’re just a hack.

I’ve written 7,767 words, give or take some statistical issues with counting HTML tags, so far this month. But I’ve written every day. And that is what matters.

I’m going to go pull my book apart now and see if I can make it like the 6 Million Dollar Man.