I have a complaint. Why can no browser companies / web design companies come up with one standard way for browsers to interface with humans, such as the act of submitting a form either by pressing "enter" or by always having something that you can "tab" to and hit "enter" after that, without having to move a mouse around? Why can't they just come up with some standards for interfaces and everybody implement them the same way? Why why why?

That isn't how I was going to get into this weekend's diary entry, but I couldn't decide which way to get into it anyway so I went for the non-sequitur. Other candidates, more germaine to the subject at hand:

1. A friend used to have a .sig line at one point that was a quote from Kids in the Hall, saying, "What kind of a restaurant are you running here that you don't know how time works?" I had a weekend that must have come out of that restaurant.
2. When I was in college, I made the ill-advised decision to become an RA in the dorms. But it put me in contact with the RD for one of the three facilities at my esteemed university, who had an interesting habit: on Friday evening as he left the office, he took off his watch. He did not put it back on again until Monday morning. It was the only way he could force himself to relax on the weekend.
3. I have sometimes taken a nap before dusk only to wake in complete darkness, no lights on, and without an inkling of what time it is or how long I've been asleep. This is one of my favorite times ever, that of waking sometime just because it was time to wake, with no stress, no noise, no diversion, and no stimulus to give me any clue as to what time it is other than "night."

I fell asleep on the couch sometime in the early evening Saturday and awoke in complete darkness. It being Saturday and me being particularly lazy this weekend, I'd never put on my watch and I had no idea what time it was. Since it was a holiday weekend, there was also an almost complete absence of traffic on the street in front of the house, so any road noise that might otherwise have acted as a clue to what time it was couldn't help me. I wallowed in the darkness and quiet for a bit, then decided that I might as well get up, if for no other reason than I was dearly thirsty and there was cold, filtered water in the fridge.

I had two glasses. It was 10:30, meaning that I'd been asleep for maybe 4.5 hours. I returned to the couch, turned on the light, and read a bit more of the book I'd started that afternoon, Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch. It proves the maxim that any sufficiently realized obsession can form a more than adequate framework for a memoir, as it takes its format from important football matches in the author's life, then goes from there to the other stuff that was happening around the same time. I finished it tonight. It's good. I'm starting on High Fidelity next.

I had a completely miserable week, so I needed this weekend just to disappear into my apartment (I only stepped outside to move the car this evening, and to let the pizza delivery guy complete his mission tonight). We were supposed to be released from the office at 2pm on Friday, something I was aware of before I'd even left the house. This didn't happen because I was particularly slothful getting out of bed, it happened because after I woke up I discovered one of the machines I'm monitoring had failed early Friday morning, so I ended up attempting remote triage before ever leaving the house and didn't get into the office until around noon. I'd eaten a couple Twix that happened to be left in the fridge after a candy run the other night, which came in handy because I missed lunch dealing with that flaky server, which crashed in a different and worse way after I left the house, plus another server that we needed more licenses for by Friday night, but which nobody had bothered to figure out needed more licenses until Friday after lunch, at which point it was too late to attempt to get a PO cut. There was a package of graham crackers on my desk, so I ate those.

2pm passed. I was still in the office. The server crashed again and I tired of trying to fix it myself, so I called Webtrends technical support, who weren't able to help but had me start one last operation the results of which I was supposed to call them with whenever it finished. I also got on the line with their sales people, then with somebody from purchasing, then twiddled my thumbs, then finally got a return call from one of their sales people who was sending me the license numbers and would deal with the PO the next week (which was the right answer, but it took them 45 minutes to call me with it). And then the operation the tech support guy had me run finished ... at 8:10pm. I called the tech support number. They close at 5pm PST. I was SOL. I left a rambling, bitter message, sent off some email, managed a bandaid on the server that kept it from crashing over the weekend, and got out of the office at 8:30pm, only six and a half hours later than everybody else in the building.

Sneh.

Prior to that this week, I had a lovely Wednesday night where I slept all of an hour, and even that was fitful. Thursday night was better once I fell asleep, but I either didn't fall asleep early enough or had to wake too early Friday morning because I still needed about two more hours of sleep once I got up.

Before that, I'd been summarily dumped (via email, no less) by Ann, who doesn't see a future for us as a couple and doesn't think we should go out again - a decision I can't figure out if I want to fight or not.

I tend not to fight people. I don't like it. I only like having the arguments that don't matter, that it's really okay to lose, because there isn't any actual pressure involved and I can be as silly or obstreperous as I might feel at that moment without actually affecting anything important. Other people's personal decisions definitely fall in the category of things I'll walk away from instead of arguing.

I don't know why that is. I think it's a combination of having watched my parents fight all those years, never understanding how it was they could stay together when that much acrimony existed between them, and the knowledge that my own will, on things that matter to me, can't be bent at all. I'll argue things that other people might possibly win and run and hide if I know they can't win with me, because I'm terrified if I show how strongly I believe something I'll lose somebody who might otherwise have been close to me - and if I argue the things that they might win, maybe they won't think I'm totally impossible to deal with. For this reason I try never to argue about the things that actually matter to me.

And I generally attribute the same strength of will to other people. I have to, because if I didn't I'd be boorish and impossible because I'd always get my way. People who have experienced the imposition of my will don't think it's a very pleasant experience.

So I don't know why Ann thinks we don't have a future, and I think she's wrong, and I want to know why she thinks that, and I want to tell her how wrong she is, and I want to pick her brain like the neurotic I am and find out if it was something I did or said, and I want to go off in a corner and sulk and not have to deal with her at all. That's the easiest way. But it's not what I want. It's my natural reaction, to sigh, decide this was another one that wasn't meant to be, and walk away.

Am I always going to walk away? Is that who I am? Am I so afraid - of the reaction I might get from somebody else if I actually fight for what I want - that I'll just give up now, without a fight? And the next time, and the next time?

I don't even know that she's "the right" one, but I know that she's definitely not the wrong one, and she gave me that spark that I've only felt twice before. And I was summarily dumped twice before, to boot. By women who then vanished. Is it me? Is it them? Do I open a door they don't know they have, or that they don't want open, and the only way to shove it closed again (and keep all the stuff from falling out) is to kick me out of the way?

Is it worth it to try to change somebody's mind? Is it possible? Is it an exercise in futility, or just a way to salve my own ego? Is it sad and desperate and pitiful to tell somebody, "you're worth at least the effort of fighting to find out if you're worth fighting for?

Ehhh.

I don't like me when I'm like this.

So anyway, I had a weekend where I didn't actually wallow in pity or anything, but I steadfastly avoided thinking about or doing, well, anything. I watched a lot of TV. I read. I looked at far too much stuff on the web. I slept. I killed a whole lot of time, dead. I never put on my watch.

I do at least feel better for having had the weekend of nothing, and I'm not depressed or anything (I don't think), but I'd like a week where I have something positive happen for a change. Sigh.

link (2000-05-30)

So as I was leaving the office today, my manager said, "thank you." And I said, "for what, showing up?"

I hated my job today. I don't know if this is a permanent thing or not. I was just demoralized about it this weekend but I didn't quite hate it yet. I've had some preexisting problems officially dropped in my lap as of this morning, and if there's anything I hate more than having somebody foist their problems off on me, I don't know what it is. I don't mind digging myself out of problems of my own creation, but I do not deal well with being put in a position of cleanup after other people have done stuff wrong. Which is where I am now.

So we've got a couple clients we've done a good job of disappointing, and I've been placed in the damage control position. There are ways we can spin this so that I come out smelling like roses, but the whole thing just irritates me. I don't want to be an admin, which is a big part of the reason I left my last job anyway. And now, for the most part, I'm an admin. I'm an admin with the backing to kick some ass if need be, but I'm in this admin position. And I hate it.

So today was also not a good day to get those problems dropped in my lap, since due to some other technical issues there wasn't a whole lot I could do about them today. "Hi, this is the problem, this is what I could do to fix it, but I can't because this other thing is down for maintenance today." Grumble grumble grumble.

Anyway, the people from the company whose software I've been evaluating were by last week, and we told them to whip up a tasty contract. So in the way of spin (getting back to the original problem) I may be able to tease these customers along long enough to get the new software in without actually having to fix anything. Which would be good. But I don't think it'll work that way, since it never does. Grump grump grump.

My comment to my manager was that maybe they should make that an official corporate policy. "Thank you for bothering to show up today and not quit. We appreciate it." I wonder what the net cost would be if they bought everybody lunch every day or just gave them ten bucks or something. Five bucks at 10am, another five at 5pm. Must be present to win. Offer not valid in Georgia.

And to think I had such a nice time last night.

link (2000-05-22)

Ben and Jerry's Orange and Cream ice cream kicks ass. Not that you care, but I do. I tend to like my ice cream to be more cream and less junk, where the B&J idea is more junk and less cream. This was brought home to me when I was in Tulsa last weekend and had lots of Blue Bell (oh, I miss Blue Bell), which is the far superior ice cream for my style of ice cream consumption. Not that you care, but I do.

Anyway, didn't do a whole hell of a lot this weekend. Spent most of yesterday being a huge ball of slack, topping it off by watching the "Office Space" DVD. Didn't realize until last night that the guy who plays the restaurant manager (Stan) is actually Mike Judge. It's a good movie to watch when you're demoralized about your job, as am I.

Today was spent with some idle cleaning and lots of procrastination, then around 5 I got a call from Ann, and we came up with a final idea for today's (tonight's) date. We met at City Lights for dinner.

I'd asked Ann for her birth data so I could do her chart, and she insisted that I tell her all about it tonight. So I did. I brought along printed copies of her chart and mine (not that the charts do her a whole lot of good). It was entertaining, but more than a little awkward. "Oh, and here it says that you didn't have much of a supportive framework at home when you were growing up." "How does it know that?" "And it also says that you shouldn't try to get married until you're at least 30." (moot point)

I kinda feel like this is unfair. I know what her chart means and she doesn't know what mine means. She did say she has a cow orker who does astrology so I told her to take my chart by and let her cow orker have a crack at it.

So we ended up going to Teaism after we were finished with dinner, and we talked a bit more, and we're planning to get together again, but don't know when. She's going out of town over Memorial Day weekend, so the date of the date is as yet unknown.

It did go well. Yay. Good second date. :-)

link (2000-05-21)

2000-05-16 00:15:00

This is absolutely stunning.

My dad has been rendered somewhat homebound recently because of a problem that cropped up suddenly with his vision. He's okay (it seems), although I'm worried that he's going to end up blind in one eye before too long. It's a problem with the vitreous in one of his eyes, and could possibly lead to a retinal detachment.

Anyway, while he's been stuck at home he's been working on putting together an album of very old photographs of his family, sorting through the pictures and putting captions with them. Now, I've always been one of those glib Americans with no history, and this has never particularly bothered me. I'd never been able to trace my ancestry farther than my dad's birth in Garfield, Arkansas, and the name of his father - but not his father's father, or anybody beyond. Or any other relations. And this wasn't an issue.

A couple years ago, I was at a friend's apartment leafing through a book his mother had bought him as a gift. It was the history of Boston Avenue Methodist Church, a landmark of Tulsa history, which also happened to be his family's church. The church was one of the first, if not the first, churches in Tulsa, and its history is tied in closely with that of the city itself. So as I was leafing through the book, I came across a picture with the name Louis Milton Poe in the caption. He was the first judge in Tulsa. He was the fifth mayor. He's also probably related to me, and I'd lived in Tulsa all my life without knowing my family was involved in founding it.

I confirmed the probable link with my parents. The exact link is not known for sure, but it is known that Louis Milton Poe gave my grandfather Louie Leonard Poe a job at one point, that L. M. Poe's son John "Ned" Poe became a lawyer, and that when my own father moved to Tulsa and started studying towards his own law career, he introduced himself to Ned Poe and was welcomed as a relation. They compared folklore and both branches of the family claim a link to two Poes (Andrew and Adam) who were in Kentucky and Tennessee with Daniel Boone.

Anyway, dad has a cousin who is his maternal uncle's (John Virgil Banta) daughter from his first marriage - the second marriage was to dad's aunt Edith (dad's father's sister, or Virgil Banta's sister in law - before she became his wife, that is). That cousin has been researching her ancestry and sent some photographs to dad, which he has added, this weekend, to the album he's putting together.

Included in them is a photograph from about 1902, of the family of John Alexander Poe, my great grandfather. He was born in 1854, and left either Tennessee or Kentucky (this is unclear to me, since it all runs together) some time after the Civil War while, as the song goes, workin' on the railroad with his brother James Edward (after whom my father is most likely named). They settled in Garfield, Arkansas. The picture includes my great grandfather and his second wife (my great grandmother), Mary Elizabeth Mills, along with their children Edith, Lyda, Willis, Earnest, Albert, Charles, Jesse, and Louie - my grandfather. He's about six in the picture. Charles is a year old. Also in the picture are two half-sisters, offspring of John's first marriage, with their husbands and two daughters.

I offered to help dad make some more permanent copies than mom could do on her color inkjet copier, and set about scanning some of the old pictures today. The one of the family from 1902 was washed out, obscuring several of the faces (including Mary Elizabeth and her two daughters), so I opened up Photoshop and worked on the image for about 15 minutes. I'm no Photoshop expert, but I was able to get some pretty swift results after adjusting a few sliders, and I saved the edited copy and printed one on some of mom's photo paper, and then took it to show to dad. I think he didn't realize how pleased he was until he had about ten minutes to pore over the retouched image. I think I made his week. :-)

Anyway, I keep going back to that photo album, as well as a collection of old photos of mom's family (there's one of her at about age two that looks shockingly like her granddaughter, my niece Darcy). After all these years of having essentially no history, it's weird to find not only a link, but what appears to be a thread woven through time and place linking my family's history to the places we've lived.

This is really cool.

link (2000-05-16)

Do other people's parents do this?

So I'm sitting at Mothers' Day brunch with Mom and Dad because, you know, I'm a good son and stuff and I bought a plane ticket to come home. But we're sitting there talking and Dad starts asking if I think it's odd that all these people I've known in one way or another have all moved to DC (although some of them have already moved away again). I respond that DC's kind of a way station for a lot of people my age, that it's a transitory place, that people move there for four years or whatever and then they move on.

But then, then, Mom starts to chime in with this anecdote about, well, there's the problem. Because Mom doesn't remember stuff very well anymore. So she starts to tell me this anecdote, but first she has trouble remembering the people's names whose child it is she's trying to remember, but then at least she gets the parents' names, but for the child (who is only my contemporary by the very broad criterium that she was a child of somebody roughly my parents' age) the effort fails. So the daughter whose name cannot be remembered, and whom I never really knew, now lives in Washington, or actually what was that place I lived before I moved? "Crystal City." Oh yeah, that's it. She lives in Crystal City. Mom said they were supposed to get my address or email address for the daughter whose name they don't remember. She's a lawyer, and she works for, uh, she works for somebody there.

All of Mom's anecdotes are told this way, as are some of Dad's. He's actually a bit better in this regard than she is. I don't know what's worse about them (the anecdotes, not my parents), the complete lack of any salient fact that would make them anecdotes and not fill-in-the-blankdotes, or the general assumption that I not only remember the parents (usually some lawyer and his wife, an endless stream of whom passed before me during my childhood of annual bar conventions), but their children - most of whom were age peers to Mark or Emily, but definitely not to unplanned, late-conceived me. I was always the youngest tagalong on all the bar convention trips by at least the 6 years separating me and Emily, if not more.

So while many of the other lawyers and their families remember me quite well (I was never one not to make a spectacle of myself), I frankly am lucky to remember anybody's name from that period. There are many stories in my family that basically revolve around me doing something memorable on whatever [outing|vacation|bar convention] and how people who were present at any of those ask about me and then recount how they'll "never forget the time ..."

There was an other Mom anecdote in the car on the way home from brunch, but it didn't even get as far as the one about the lawyer's daughter who may or may not be named Lynn and who may or may not live in Crystal City.

link (2000-05-14)

Argh. I'm in the terminal at BWI, waiting for a Southwest flight. Now, Southwest is my favorite airline, and if I'm going home to Tulsa I don't have much choice but to connect somewhere so flying on my airline of choice means that I get to make the trek up to BWI.

Now, the trek up to BWI isn't so bad. It's accessible via transit so I don't have to bug anybody for a ride or pay for a shuttle (hellooooo, Dulles), but taking transit means getting on the Metro, changing trains on the Metro, getting to Union Station, buying a ticket, getting on Amtrak, taking that train to the BWI station, then getting on a shuttle bus that will get you to the terminal. This is in contrast to Ronald Reagan (sic) Washington National Airport, which is accessible via Metro alone, although I still have to change trains to get there.

Anyway, there was a 10:00 Metroliner that was my target, but I didn't get out of the house when planned and I barely made it to Union Station in time for the 10:10 Northeast Direct. So I went to a ticket machine, put in my credit card, punched through the process to get a ticket for the train leaving in five minutes, and then the receipt printed out. I didn't realize until I was on the train that it wasn't my receipt. The stupid machine printed out the receipt for some other random person's transaction, meaning that I had no receipt and no ticket. Stupid machine.

Anyway, the conductor on the train at least sold me another ticket for the ticket price instead of charging me the extra seven dollars that they normally attach if you buy your ticket on the train. I think I may have lost 19 bucks, since the conductor told me to talk to the ticket people at the BWI station, and they told me they couldn't do anything about it and I'd have to talk to the ticket people at Union Station when I get back. Ugh.

Anyway, all this means that I got to the terminal at BWI still an hour ahead of scheduled departure time. Now. Southwest does open boarding, but you get a numbered boarding pass corresponding to your position in the checkout line. Whatever. All the seats are the same. But they normally start boarding an hour before departure, so me getting to the gate at 10:58 for an 11:55 departure should have been no sweat. Appropriately low boarding pass number, get a bagel and a coffee, and then get on the plane quickly enough to ensure an exit row window seat.

It was not to be.

My boarding pass number is 66.

Now, I love Southwest. They have the right attitude to this whole flying thing - get in, get out, badabing, badaboom. But they fly to podunk towns, and the people who need to fly to those towns are about what you'd expect (not your standard frequent bidness travelers in other words). So those people don't really get the fact that all the seats are the same and they're all getting to the same place at the same time. So now I'm stuck behind a bunch of people who just don't understand how to get onto a plane quickly, how to get off quickly, and how the whole carryon baggage thing works. So an hour before departure, 65 other people had already checked in to board this plane. And I'm going to have to wait for them to waddle down the aisle, futz around with their too-large and too-numerous carryon bags, and take my precious exit row window seat. Bastards.

Oh, and the gate was in Terminal B, whose only food vending options are a sullen looking black woman with a cart and some iffy "pastries." So I didn't get the bagel or the coffee. Luckily I carry a Clif Bar in my laptop bag for emergency food rations so I'm not dying, but this is not an auspicious beginning.

Argh.

link (2000-05-13)

It's the simple things in life.

So I had a date tonight with another personals chyk. Happy sigh. It went well. Yay.

I've ranted here (and made things apparently seem much more serious than they really are) several times about how wrong this whole personals thing has gone. I would like everybody who reads this (all three of you ;-) to know that I am hereby expressing my pleasure at the same thing gone well.

So I'll call her Ann, since that's her name. She's also a sagittarius, in the same way I am, and we hit it off instantly. That problem I had on the one date where I did all the talking? Not a problem. The thing where I sorta have sixteen things I'm always kinda doing at the same time? She has that too. And I didn't, like, fidget myself to bits. (Woo! Go me!)

At the point when she was talking about college, and she said that she went to college believing it would be possible just to major in everything, I told her she could stop talking right then, since I already liked her. Hee hee hee.

Anyway, we're both youngest children, her sibs are almost the same age spread as mine, she absolutely adores her nephew who is the same age as my niece (we traded stories), and I left feeling very good about the whole thing. Puppy love, totally. I can deal with puppy love.

Oh, so she asks me if I listen to NPR, and I say it's part of my morning wakeup strategy - which she immediately picks up on, and asks me to share. "I'll show you mine if you show me yours." Y'know, I can actually see that being dangerous, since were we ever to share a bed (getting ahead of myself here) neither one of us would ever convincingly encourage the other to get out of it. Not that there's anything wrong with that ...

So yeah, puppy love. We're planning something again next week "after 9pm" since she's got a condo association meeting, (I'm out of town, then she's out of town, and we only have the one night), then it'll probably be another week before we could possibly do date #3. Heh. This is Washington, alright.

link (2000-05-10)

Cake (the band) hit on the ultimate existential question of being a musician in their song Guitar. The chorus (and the question) is as follows:

If I threw my guitar out the window - so far down - would I start to regret it? Or would I smile and watch it slowly fall?

I don't know a single professional or working-to-be professional musician who doesn't ask him- or herself that question at least once a week. If not once a day.

That is all.

p.s. Why haven't my credit card companies received the checks I mailed last Monday, when every check I wrote that day except for those two has already cleared? What's up with that?

link (2000-05-09)

The internet business is doomed ... to mediocrity.

I'm not saying the internet itself is doomed to failure or anything, because it isn't. More people and more business will continue getting hooked up to the net, and it'll keep trundling along under the weight. It'll get bogged down at times, but it won't fail.

The business of the net, well, that's another story. The internet business, by which I mean dot-coms, service providers, and backbone carriers, is going to fail to succeed wildly. The companies that are on solid enough foundations will stick around, but they'll be permanently hamstrung by the poor decisions they're making today. They're going to be playing a perennial game of catch-up and looking for places to land the blame, but it's pretty obvious that they're not going to fix what's broken. They don't even realize it's broken.

It all boils down to one thing:

If your company's most valuable asset is its stock, you're dead.

The stock market has encouraged internet businesses, old and young, large and small, to focus on short term stock price instead of, well, everything else. Management is rewarded for "success" with stock, which adds to this death spiral in several ways:

• Dilution. The value of each existing share, on an open market, should and eventually will drop if more shares are added. Some companies have already seen this happen. More will. Your company's market cap shouldn't just magically rise every time you issue more shares, and eventually that practice is going to catch up with you.
• Instability. In today's world, employees - even management - don't tend to stick around very long. When any given employee leaves, what reason does he have to hold onto the stock? The answer is, of course, none, so he's probably going to sell it off. He's going to sell it off even faster if he's seen from the inside how poorly the company is run. In this day and age, every share that's sold is seen by day traders as a sign, and a large enough block of shares (such as was dumped by a departing manager) will cause a sell-off. There goes your market cap.
• Negative feedback. Giving a manager stock will encourage him personally to seek to "increase shareholder value," since he owns shares himself. This is synonymous with, "think in the short term only," or, "don't spend any capital to make serious improvements." The idea of "increasing shareholder value" is misguided at best, fatal at worst, and is magnified by the number of shares owned by management.

It's that last one that's the biggest problem. It encourages managers to see the stock as the company's most valuable asset, which is so amazingly, appallingly wrong I'm shocked that nobody's caught up to this yet. I know why nobody's caught up. That's an easy one. As long as the stock price is artificially high, it's "good for everybody." We get to watch the economy sail along on inflated stocks, every little guy and day trader is encouraged to buy stocks in the industry, and that cash is indeed necessary to fund growth. That's why stock existed in the first place. The problem is, management can no longer see the value forest for the stock price trees. This is true across the entire industry. Decisions are repeatedly made which consider only the short term stock price, and not the stability or viability of the company that stock is attached to. And the bottom is going to fall out.

There are three things that are more valuable than stock. If this list doesn't cause you to say, "well, duh," then you are part of the problem:

• Customers. This should be terribly obvious but it isn't. If companies realized that their customers were important, they'd have actual customer service. They would train their support staff better, they'd monitor them more, they'd survey their customers and find out how they were doing (and pay attention to the results), they would take new business to the customers instead of waiting for the customers to come to them. They would increase value to the customer instead of to their shareholders ... which would have the effect of increasing the value of the company, since a happy customer is one who not only is a repeat customer, but one who refers his friends.
• Infrastructure. This is the company part of the company, the actual physical assets. This means the servers in the case of a service provider, the network in the case of a bandwidth provider, and the inventory system in the case of a dot-com merchant. It also means making sure you have enough phone lines for customer service, enough bandwidth that customers never get locked out, enough warehouse space and inventory in order to fulfill orders in a timely fashion, and a plan that makes sure you have more capacity than you need at all times. Infrastructure requires investment, investment requires capital expenditures, and capital expenditures have a negative short term impact on the stock price. The going wisdom is, never mind that if you don't have the infrastructure you're going to drive away your customers, the only goal is to "maximize shareholder value." This will backfire when companies that don't have enough capacity fail to deliver services to their customers, driving those customers to the competition.
• Employees. None of this can be done if your company isn't holding on to its employees, training them, and keeping them happy. Treating employees as expendable, easily replaced, liabilities - instead of assets - will assure that your company never has an adequate employee base to make continued success possible.

Now, the saving grace here, the thing that makes me say that the industry is doomed to mediocrity but not failure, is that in spite of themselves the companies in the internet industry are managing to deliver something, most of the time. Customers who get fed up and find different providers discover when they get there that the grass wasn't greener on the other side of the fence after all. So what's going to happen is that customers will become less and less enamored of their vendors, and in lieu of actual service (which none of the vendors seem to be focusing on) will ask for, and get, lower pricing, rebates, refunds, SLAs. They will be forced to get by with less, because the vendors haven't bothered to focus on actual value. But since there aren't any companies that actually have focused on actual value (possible exception here of Amazon, although I've heard horror stories about their customer service) what the customers will find is that it's pretty much the same everywhere. And the steam will run out of the industry. Revenue growth will drop off, the stocks will level out at something resembling a P/E ratio, and the expansion phase of the internet will be done. At that point the logic will be, "we already have a mousetrap, why should we build another one?"

There is a way for internet companies to perpetuate the growth they're seeing now, but it goes against the logic by which they all seem to operate. It's an older rule of thumb than the internet, though:

You have to spend money to make money.

Internet companies should be spending all the capital they can get their hands on right now. They should invest it in customer service, infrastructure, and most importantly, their employees. I'll admit they shouldn't spend this money indiscriminately, but they should be trying very hard to end up each fiscal year with most of their cash spent. It'll pay for itself as they build up extra capacity, expertise, and customer base, and as those customers stick around because there's nobody else who provides them that level of service. It'll also pay for itself when they have employees who have been there for a while and who are happy to work for a company that treats them well. It'll pay for itself when their existing customers sign up for new services and refer new customers. All of those are things that will make sure that the long-term stock price is high, which is where everybody wants it to be anyway.

link (2000-05-07)

I have a couple of rants bubbling up this weekend, but I don't know if they've both reached the point of coherence. Here goes for number one:

There's been a whole lot of news coverage lately asking the question why doesn't anybody in Generation X ever keep a job very long? As you'd expect, they get it wrong. There's an easy answer for this, and it's not that we're particularly lazy or hard to manage, or that we're idealistic, or that we're all running off to pre-IPO dot-coms, or whatever. It's this:

Employers discourage loyalty.

Say it a few times, let it roll around your tongue. Put the stress on the first word, and then on the second, and then bark it out one word at a time. Employers. Discourage. Loyalty.

If your brain doesn't want to wrap around the concept, you've been reading too much Newsweek and we're going to have to cut you off. Otherwise, allow me to explain.

Generation X grew up watching a recession and then the following boom. We saw the oil crisis, and how much it screwed up the economy. Many of us watched our parents get "downsized" away after they'd worked for the same companies all their lives. We then looked on in amazement in the 80s as the economy turned around and everybody started getting great jobs ... except the people we knew, who were either too old (our parents) or too young (our friends and older siblings), or who didn't have "enough" or "the right" experience for whatever job. And we knew that this was bullshit.

So then after we all got out of college, the economy picked up enough speed that we got to the point we didn't know anybody who couldn't get a job. Everybody was hiring at breakneck speed, and it started not to matter that you were the wrong age or you had the wrong college degree, because so many companies just needed people, any people, in order to try to get enough accumulated intelligence to make it possible to get things done.

So now we've all got jobs. And they suck.

Because it turns out that the mentality that we were too young or had the wrong experience or degree never went away at the management level. They only hired us because they decided they'd never find any good people and we'd just have to do. Yes, even though we all have jobs now, and we're probably paid pretty well, the truth is that our employers still think that we're not really the right people for our jobs. Ask them. They'll tell you they have their doubts. Bastards.

Since our employers have already decided that we're not capable of doing our jobs, they treat us incredibly poorly. They pay us a lot of money, so they reason that we must not be worth it. As a result of this pretzel logic, we get to watch our employers hire outside people to manage us instead of promoting from within ("he works for us already, he must be an idiot"); we get to see senior level management get bonuses for work we did ("congratulations to Steve, VP of Engineering, for meeting all of his deadlines for deliverables! Great work Steve, here's your bonus!"); we get either comically small or no bonuses at all ourselves for those same deliverables; we apply for promotions and are dismissed out of hand; we watch as decisions are made to "increase shareholder value" instead of to make the company better; and we are prevented from doing the jobs we were hired to do by decisions that were made by management that, frankly, doesn't understand what it is we do, doesn't think it's important, and won't bother to ask us.

Oh, and when it comes time for raises, too many of our employers are stuck in that old mindset that gives 2%, maybe 4 or 5% for "excellent" performance. (And remember how unlikely it is we'll get the "excellent" rating since our employers have already determined we're overpaid and underperforming). Do the math. If we leave and get new jobs, on average the new pay is equivalent to a 20% raise. My previous employer gave me a year-end bonus equal to one day's pay (before taxes) and a raise of under 2% at my annual review. I had a job offer for 25% more money before I'd even gotten the first paycheck to reflect that 2% raise.

Is there anything that makes us want to stay in a job under those circumstances? The latest brilliant scheme is the stock option. You know what? Stock options don't work either. Because in spite of the carrot we still have to put up with the same management that doesn't respect us, thinks we're overpaid, won't let us make decisions, and takes credit for the work we do. The only way stock options really work is if your employee number is low enough that there's nobody who's your boss except the president of the company. Well, there's one other way, and that's if you're hired in right before the IPO and given tons of options for the sole purpose of fixing the stuff that bad management did wrong. Otherwise, the value of your options is probably low enough that you can still be bought by another employer.

Oh, and management doesn't see all this as a retention problem, they see it as a hiring problem. Since they've already decided that they people they have working for them are overpaid, underqualified, and hard to manage, they don't think it's significant that those same people are leaving. At the same time, they can't hire new people fast enough, can't pay them enough, and end up hiring more overpaid and underqualified staff. Lather, rinse, repeat. They don't perform exit interviews (or if they do, they don't do anything with the results) and find out why it is their door is revolving at such high speed. They've already decided that the problem is the employees, not the management. "Due to the large number of staff departures, no bonuses will be given this quarter."

So Generation X employees quit their jobs all the time because their employers aren't giving them any reasons to stay. While the employers may think we're overpaid as it stands now, every time we leave we make more money. While the employers don't think we're worthy of promotion, every time we jump ship we gain a rank on the other side. While the employers don't give retention bonuses or raises, we often get signing bonuses for joining up with new companies. And while the employers might give stock options, there's always the chance somewhere else that we'll be taken seriously, treated with respect, and given credit for jobs well done. Our employers have proven to us that they have no intention of doing any of those.

That's why Johnny won't keep his job.

link (2000-05-06)