Kat no kitty: Hurricane Katrina

Even in this very active storm season, it’s a crap shoot whether a storm will grow enough and throw a threat your way. I’d planned to be in Baton Rouge this past weekend (8/27-28/05), and it was a beautiful one until 6 p.m. on Sunday. The sky lowered gun-metal clouds and the spinning storm raked them into furrows. The rain started. The rain stopped. I came away from the grocery story after an hour and a half wait with water, batteries, charcoal, sausage, beans, and buns believing I would not need them. Hoping I would not have to light the last candles to be had: Moonlight Sighs votives.

I woke up Monday morning to the sound of jetliners low overhead. The power flickered off about 5 a.m. Then flickered on. Then off, and as far as I know, it stayed that way. The dawn brought a yellow-brown sky to light the trees bending in a vacuuming wind from all directions. As a lifelong Yankee, I was afraid. Nor’easters blow. This sucked. Those were no jetliners; that was the storm wind. The question that eats at you the way the pressure stabs your sinuses is, if this is the beginning, how can it end?

For me, it ended in an airport in Houston the following day. Late Monday in BTR I saw some roof shingles flung around, a few signs and fences down, a half-dozen trees tipped over, and all of nature’s leaf bag shaken out by Katrina. I was without power, so you knew more about the storm than I did. Local radio, which I tuned to, relayed questions and spotty answers from people with cell phones standing on their porches. “Clarence, [the host’s real name] I’ve got a sister in Kenner and all I hear is bad news out of there. Can you tell me what’s happening in Kenner, near Thibodeaux Road, and in LaPlace where my MawMaw’s kin live?”

Power was coming back on in West Baton Rouge, someone said, but the utility warned it could be five days or more before the entire city was restored. Without air conditioning, news, refrigerator, internet, or air conditioning (emphasis mine), it seemed a good time to accept my girlfriend’s urging and come home. Thirteen hours of Tuesday later, I was there.

I was always safe but for three hours I was scared I wasn’t. Remind me to tell you about the books I read before the sun went down. There was no moonlight. But there were Moonlight Sighs.

Thanks for all your benevolent thoughts, prayers, fretting, nail-biting, and railing at the storm. Assume the picture above, tells you nothing. In the future, my storm strategy is plan, prepare, then RUN AWAY EARLY.

Stirs me to the bottom of my TPS reports

What can be said about Office Space that hasn't been said better elsewhere? I'll simply add that I watched Office Space a few weeks ago on my birthday with a couple colleagues who live here three and three quarter days a week. I guarded my birthday as closely as tobacco industry marketing plans because of such scenes as the cake-cutting in the Mike Judge movie. Incredibly, my colleagues had never seen the movie. Quoting favorite lines ensued and continues.

P., whom I met on my first project with this company three years ago in Seattle and is here in Louisiana, gave me a belated birthday gift yesterday (see picture). It's the offical Milton stapler. Neat coincidence: I first saw Office Space in Seattle three years ago.

'Yeah, I'm going to have to go ahead and blog that for you.'

What I did this week

To learn in detail, see the following forms (an actual tally) I filled out to report my accomplishments:

1. Time sheet
2. Travel and Expenses reimbursement worksheet
3. Tasks and meetings status report
4. Five daily status reports
5. Client time sheet
6. Weekly status report (which neither my consultant-manager, engagement leader, nor the client's project leader knew anything about, though it was the last of these folks who requested we completed it.

Do you get paid for reporting what you should get paid for? Notice that when I earn income for completing forms, I am reinforcing the organization, or two in this case. I'm throwing a sandbag on the bulwarks.

The task is not productive. We could argue about its value. I'm feeding the information beast.

Reminder: Potentially forgotten facts

Gossip is good

Let's put aside for a moment all those forms of lying that go under the heading "gossip." That's largely the stuff of TV shows. In fact, research is uncovering that while gossip is not journalism, a lot of it is based in fact. That's why it's good for us.

"Gossip not only helps clarify and enforce the rules that keep people working well together, studies suggest, but it circulates crucial infomation about the bahavior of others that cannot be published in an office manual." The New York Times (See Link for more.)

Gossip is the other half of spin. Leaders and others in power manage information to have an effect. In fact, we all do, even us individual contributors. Gossip counterbalances that information: personal, where spin is abstract; saucy, where spin is bland; revealing probable motivation, where spin is cloaked in organizational passive voice.

The challenge I've always faced as a consultant is how much is the right amount of gossip. Habit shows that I shy away from the personal; people's emotional lives are inscrutable and two programmers and two business analysts are not going to figure it out. I am willing to listen to and store up the professional: "you'd better have your ducks in a row before that meeting;" "it'll go just fine, but you won't get a word in edgewise;" "She's keen to get promoted." This gossip is based in fact, helps me influence people, and guage some of the obstacles ahead. This is gossip I share with others who are trying to have a positive effect.

Then there's the black and tarry gossip that I hate and do battle with by putting my finger in a dyke holding back a sea bile. "Oh, honey, stick around. That's the kind of good idea sure to get you stomped." "You better cc the world on that, CYA-wise." "She won't do it. You'll learn." This is kind of gossip that comes from having learned the lessons of the organization at the bottom of the sewage sluice. I don't blame people, but the shred of fact in this gossip is, "Nobody gives a damn about my ideas, and nobody is going to give a damn about yours either.

I think consultants have a responsibility to influence people to try to change. Gossip works in our favor. We have to give folks better tools than just saying something can be so, but they haven't even heard that in years. They don't trust us to tell the truth. After all, we're consultants. But we are telling the truth: You can change things. You should make good, hard, big decisions rather than easy, small ones.

Repetition is the purest form of learning, and that's another reason gossip is good.