"A very Hosea-like way to react"

Son 2 called this afternoon! It was great to hear from him, and it's not like I was getting anything else accomplished anyway. He said according to his call logs we hadn't talked since January. I though we had a call a month or so ago, but I'm not going to argue. As I say, it was great to hear from him.

He started by asking me what's new ("Nothing much. What's with you?"*) and then we started to talk about a problem he's been having at work. Right now today he thinks it's getting better, but he's got a new boss and he's been having a bumpy road getting to where they can communicate successfully. So we talked about it for a while.

We have done this before, and in fact in this conversation he remarked on that. I told him there was nothing strange about it ... it's just that "dealing with the workplace" happens to be an experience he and I have in common, so it makes sense we'd discuss it. I said, "If you told me you had a great idea for a new Tabletop RPG you wanted to lead, I'd be happy to listen but I wouldn't have a lot to contribute to the conversation."

But then we talked more about his new boss. He said that she drives herself too hard, trying to accomplish things that she doesn't need to do because (so far as he can tell) they're not part of her job. Certainly his old boss didn't do any of those things. And she's chronically stressed. But he has also figured out (through trial-and-error) that he needs to be very cautious about offering to help. If the offer lands just a little bit wrong, she's likely to get offended.

Then I had an idea. 

"You know, a long time ago I had a job that they should really never have hired me for. I didn't know how to do it and they had no provision for training me, but the boss decided 'The vibes are right.' [That's a quote!] Also they all thought it would be easy, because the last person to hold the job (who had left to go on maternity leave) made it look easy. But she had grown up with the company since they were four people in a garage, so of course she knew everything already. Anyway, I was tossed into this job and started drowning.

"But the reason I bring it up is that even though I didn't know how to do any of the core tasks, I did learn pretty quickly how to do some of the peripheral stuff. So when I started to panic, I'd go do a lot of those peripheral things. I'd know they weren't the most important thing, but at least I knew how to do them. So I'd focus on the stuff I knew how to do, because when I got stressed I had to do something rather than sit and do nothing. And I wonder if your new boss is in the same boat?"

We talked about her some more, and I'm not sure that's really the best diagnosis for what's going on with her. But I was struck by something Son 2 said, when I described that ancient job of mine.

Right when I said, "I had to do something rather than sit and do nothing," he interjected, "Because that's a very Hosea-Tanatu way to react to that kind of situation."

"I'm sorry. What?"

"That's what you do. You dive in to do what you know. Some people would just figure, 'Hell, they haven't taught me what to do yet, so I'm just gonna sit here till they do.'"

It has been 35 years since I held that job, and that had never occurred to me before.

I don't know how to generalize the observation. In other words, I don't know what to do with it, or how to connect it to anything else that I know about myself. But I figure if I record it here tonight, maybe I'll have some insights about it later. 

__________

* OK, that was a cheap shot. I apologize. I do keep busy—well, kind of—and I'm not at the point yet where I identify with that song. 

           

Psychological safety

Yesterday I too a couple of online classes related to job skills. In a sense it was silly of me to waste the time, because I'm retired—why should I need to improve my job skills now? But they were offered for free and I hated to waste them. Anyway, one of the classes was about how to develop your employees, and it made what should have been a commonplace observation: your employees need to feel psychologically safe before you can talk about developing their skills or their careers. Otherwise they won't take the risk.

Psychologically safe??

And right away I thought about this post here, plus any number of other times at work that the same topic came up (but I didn't write about it).

Looking back with the perspective of ... gosh, it looks like seven years by now! ... I think I was too harsh in my assessment of what was going on. You can go read the post itself for the Grand Narrative that I spun at the time, but I think the simpler explanation is that I didn't feel psychologically safe. And this was for a couple of reasons.

One is that I really felt our Human Resources department (by that time) was dangerous, or even predatory. Years before, when we had our own local HR staff, I had a good relationship with them. But by the time all this went down, HR was located elsewhere and I felt a distinct sense of menace from most of them.

Another is that I was working in a discipline that I had learned entirely on-the-job, and there were huge parts of it I didn't know. I had established a good position for myself over the years, but I knew that there were large provinces of my own field that I knew nothing about, and I didn't even know what the possibilities were in the profession. So I had no idea where to start a conversation.

Finally, I could never really bring myself to care about making any serious, long-term contributions to the business. I talk about this phenomenon here.

All in all, I think the lack of psychological safety I felt at work was largely just an extension of my status as the Consummate Outsider. (And see also the story about Aristotle that I tell in this post I already referenced.)

Is that a good thing? No, I guess not. But it's not as discreditable as the Grand Narrative I came up with seven years ago.    

Veterinarian manqué

Marie flew home today. But one evening while she was here, we sat up talking for a while about Schmidt. And I had one of those moments where I said something and only then realized that I had never known it before—that I had literally figured it out in the process of explaining it to someone else.

We were talking about television. Whenever she is awake, Ma Schmidt has the television on as a distraction. She started this habit back when she could still hear, but suffered from severe tinnitus; the noise from the television blotted out her perception of the ringing in her ears. Now it's just a habit; but because she's too deaf (and too forgetful) to engage in normal conversation, it's not a crazy habit.

But what to watch? Schmidt says he doesn't want the channel turned to national news, because he finds the national news too depressing. (Like most of my friends, Schmidt suffers from some degree of Trump derangement syndrome, and evaluates all developments in national or world news accordingly.) In practice, Schmidt normally switches to the National Geographic Wild network, to watch reruns of The Incredible Dr. Pol, a reality-show about the veterinarian Dr. Jan Pol. Sometimes he changes it up by turning to some other animal documentary instead.

The thing is, I think Ma Schmidt is profoundly bored by all these animal shows!

The Schmidts live on a farm, though they no longer have any animals. (They let a neighbor graze his cattle on their fields.) They have certainly spent a lot of time around animals over the years. But that was never Ma Schmidt's passion. Pa Schmidt was the one who wanted to live on a farm. Ma went along with him because she loved him, and they were married, and, well … you know … "for better, for worse; for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health."

This is not a picture of Schmidt.
But in an alternate timeline, it could have been.

How about Schmidt himself? Back when he was a boy, he wanted to be a veterinarian when he grew up. Then he went to college and studied physics. (God only knows why!) When that didn't work out, he came home and carried on his father's artistic craft, though he readily acknowledged that he lacked his father's creative brilliance. But he could make the products that people ordered, and that brought in the small amount of money the Schmidts needed to get by. (They have owned the property outright since they bought it, so there's no need to service a mortgage. And once upon a time they had food wandering around in their fields, though that's no longer true.) 

That's when it hit me. Schmidt has half a dozen cats, or more. He is always adopting and taming feral cats when he finds them on the property, or raising kittens if he didn't get one of his own cats spayed in time. He insisted that Ma take on two cats in her house because it was easier than setting mousetraps; but she never had cats until he told her to. He is still the focus of all animal care on the farm, even though they "no longer have animals."

In other words, Schmidt has found a way to make himself into a (quasi-) veterinarian after all! That's what he wanted to do as a boy, and by heaven that's just what he has done. No wonder he always changes the channel to veterinary shows or animal documentaries. They're not boring to him, because he's genuinely interested in what he can learn from them. He said plainly a couple of days ago that one of the episodes of Dr. Pol taught him about a syndrome affecting cats that he now regularly checks for in his own.

So often people abandon their dreams as they grow up. It's remarkable to realize that Schmidt merely adapted his.

But now that makes me wonder. What did Marie want to be, when she was a girl? And has she achieved it? (See, for example, this post here.)

And how would I answer the same question about myself? 

   

Enemies everywhere

I talked with Son 2 today, for something like an hour and a half. You remember that he just got his Master's degree. And now he's got a job, working for a Big Employer. So we started talking about practical stuff, like which health plan should he sign up for? Then I asked him about his work, and he told me a lot about what he does. Finally I asked him about a concern that I've been brooding on for a couple of months now, more or less ever since I visited in December. Turns out he's been worried about it too.

A little background will help. Back after Son 2 got his bachelor's degree—he graduated in May 2020, right smack into the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic—he couldn't find a regular job because everything had shut down. But he finally got an internship in his field of specialty, working for a woman I'll call the Professora. They got along really well; and while they never did anything flagrantly unprofessional (by which I mean they didn't fuck, or at least not as far as I know), nonetheless they soon became friends. The Professora invited Son 2 to have dinner at her house, where he met her two sons. (She's a single mom, as well as a professional.) Occasionally they sat up drinking whiskey together. It went on like that.

But not for long, because soon the Professora left that job. She landed at a big university, instead. Fast-forward two years, and she had a graduate student leave her in the lurch even though she had a fully-funded research project. So she called Son 2, and asked him if he wanted to go to graduate school. You've heard this story before.

Son 2 enrolled in graduate school, and the Professora was his advisor. Which was fine for a few months until she got fired from the University. I should emphasize that her firing had nothing to do with her competence. Everyone agreed that she knows her subject deeply, and that she is passionately committed to it. Her ability and her commitment were never in question. And yet, she was fired—probably because of some squalid departmental intrigue. 

In the kerfluffle that followed, Son 2 kept his grants and fellowships and program because nobody thought it was his fault. He was reassigned to another professor who was friendly but really didn't understand his research. He continued to meet once a week with the Professora, who continued to guide his research. Meanwhile she got a job with Big Employer. (Maybe you can tell where this story is going.)

"I find out what I really want …," 3

A while ago, I wrote you about the possibility of a new job that had appeared on my horizon. I interviewed via MS Teams with the recruiter and the hiring manager, and then with the two senior employees in the department. The company made plans for me to fly there at the end of this week, to meet everyone in person and look around at the city. (You remember that this job is about 400 miles away from where I live today.)

Then this morning I sent an email to the recruiter and the hiring manager, saying that I'm really not prepared to move that far away, so I'd like to withdraw my application. I thanked them for their time, and said I was sad to miss meeting them in person. But it wouldn't be fair to let them pay for my travel if I knew I wasn't going to take the job. They were very understanding, and the hiring manager even added, "Wish you the very best in all your future endeavors. You never know, our paths may cross again." 

I had been tending in this direction for a while, and in fact I wrote the email last night. (But then slept before sending it.) What I was not prepared for was how much relief I felt after I clicked Send. Normally I think that words like "it washed over me" are just picturesque and a little over the top. But that's exactly how it felt.

"I find out what I really want by seeing what I do. That's what we all do, if we're honest about it. We have our feelings, we make our decisions, but in the end we look back on our lives and see how sometimes we ignored our feelings, while most of our decisions were actually rationalizations because we had already decided in our secret hearts before we ever recognized it consciously." (Ender to Miro, Children of the Mind, chapter 3, by Orson Scott Card.)

Answer to Kimberly

Last Saturday, I left a question for Kimberly Steele about this job that has come up through my former employer, BehemothCo.

Kimberly, bless her, responded here rather than just deleting my question.

I replied to her answer: briefly here in a comment on her blog, and at greater length in a post here on mine.

So far, so good.

And then, in a burst of generosity not to be imagined, Kimberly replied to my blogpost in a comment here, which runs as follows.

Kimberly Steele here, thanks for sharing this. It seems to me your Tarot are telling you the same things as my Ogham. From what I can tell, you sincerely want to take the job and you want to move away, but both your Tarot and my Ogham are saying you would come to regret it. If you need to take the job and relocate because it is your heart's desire, then go ahead. Sometimes we can only learn certain lessons the hard way.

You also have other choices -- one is taking a local job or joining a local volunteer group or other Meetup for structure. You could also look into living and working in someplace that is not related to this job. The point is you have options even if you feel emotionally blinded to them right now.

Pause with me for a minute to appreciate what this comment means to me.

The frustrations of divination

I told you all about the possible job that I've been discussing with a recruiter from my former employer (affectionately nicknamed BehemothCo for the purposes of this blog). At this point, I have spoken to the recruiter, to the hiring manager, and (just this afternoon) to the two most senior employees in the department.

I have also—this should be no surprise—been consulting divination. The problem is that the message I get from divination is consistently different from the message that I get from my regular human interactions. But of course divination doesn't speak English, and there's always the possibility that it's not true. But I remember enough times in the past that it has described reality that I am reluctant to dismiss it. This means that I am stuck.

What do I want?

Yesterday I spent several hours reviewing my resume and preparing for my interview. I had the interview. Then I wrote up my notes, looked up some relevant data online, went to the store, and talked with Brother on the phone for an hour afterwards. It was a very productive day.

Today I accomplished bugger-all, except for sending a couple of (very belated) thank-you notes for the interviews, and going to Sangha in the evening. Maybe it's just a reaction against having actually achieved something yesterday, but I also think that my compulsively doom-scrolling Twitter might be a way to avoid thinking about what I really want.

Do I want a new job? I don't know. But I do think I have stumbled on the worst way to find out.

A new job?

About a week ago, a recruiter contacted me out of the blue. Normally I ignore recruiters, because I think of myself as retired. But this one had a very unusual story.

• In the first place, she works for the same global Behemoth corporation that I used to work for up until our office closed in 2021. 
• In the second, place, she wasn't calling because "my background matched her needs" blah, blah, blah. She was trying to contact me personally, Hosea Tanatu, by name.
• In the third place, she represents a location which was just recently acquired by BehemothCo, and which is in the process of being integrated. This definitely sounded interesting. I have been through two corporate acquisitions in my career to date, and I'm starting to think that navigating that unusual terrain is something I'm good at.

So I took her phone call last week. Then she set up an interview with the hiring manager: that happened yesterday. Where do things stand now?

I'm still kind of interested. It involves work that is similar to what I used to do, but not quite the same. So I'd have to learn something new. It involves setting up a whole new program, which in turn means I'd have to navigate the BehemothCo bureaucracy to get things done. But I got good at that, back in the day. 

It also means I'd have to move. The new plant is something like three or four hundred miles from Beautiful City, and the job is necessarily on-site. Now of course I moved when Wife and I separated and we sold our house. But that was just, … like, … across town. (Well, strictly it was from the suburbs into town. In any event it wasn't far.) I have lived in the general area of Beautiful City since Wife and I moved here in 1990. That's thirty-four years, for the arithmetically-challenged. More than half my life. I own a lot less stuff than the two of us owned when we were moving out of our house, so it shouldn't be a big deal. But emotionally it's a big deal, because Beautiful City has become home to me in a deep way.

Also this move would put me farther away from Mother. I spoke with Brother last night and he thinks she is pretty stable. So from his perspective the main consequence of my moving farther away would be that it would be "sad" I wasn't around more. But I want to discuss it with her directly, as well.

Oh, … I asked the hiring manager where she had gotten my name? Turns out she was meeting a lot of people in BehemothCo who work in her area, and one of them was the guy I called "Bill" in this post here. He and I were never collocated; but over the years we worked together a fair bit. And apparently he told her, "This is a long shot, because I don't know if he's even working any more; but the guy you really want to hire is Hosea Tanatu, and here's how to find him …." So that was flattering.

The flattery is probably another reason that I'm interested.

Anyway, I don't know what the hiring manager is thinking right now, and I don't know for sure that I'll take it if offered. But I'm mulling it.  

               

Three weekends

I was going to write this post yesterday afternoon—or evening, or whatever—but I was too tired. Instead I ate and drank and went to bed. Today I didn't accomplish much besides going to the grocery store, and already it's late again. But maybe I can make a little headway on this post before I cave in.

The last three weekends, I've had something going on. Each time it was something that involved being around people, and something that involved hours of driving. I'm not sure which was more tiring. Normally I don't think of driving as a lot of work, but maybe there's a point where a quantitative difference becomes a qualitative one.

Like father, like son

This morning I realized that I've written two things about Father that are two sides of the same coin.

• On the one hand I've written that, from a professional point of view, he was much better at thinking than at deciding. (Peter Drucker says you can't expect the same person to be good at both.) (See for example this post or this one.)
• On the other hand I've written that he more or less pissed away some 30 years of retirement, doing plenty of little things but none of the big things he had wanted to do. (See for example here.)

And of course these are exactly the same thing. Because Achieving Something Big requires more than just intelligence, research, or planning. It requires lots and lots of decisions. What's more, they have to be good decisions, or mostly. There are so many things that can go wrong in any enterprise—many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip—and you have to steer successfully around them all before you reach your Achievement. And the only way to make good decisions reliably is to have a lot of practice at it. And this means that Achieving Something requires executive skills … which were exactly the skills that my Father did not have.

Why not to bring your whole self to work

Way more articulate than anything I've said on the subject. Agree 100%.

You can find the post on Twitter at this link here.

Echoes of Kimberly

You've all heard too much about how I've "written a book" under my real name about the stuff that I used to do professionally, but it's still sitting on my hard drive because I can't figure out how to publish it. Almost six months ago, I asked Kimberly Steele to consult her Ogham, to tell me what I ought to do about it. She told me that it is very important that I publish it—"one of your major tests in your life"—"but you have to be very flexible and open to multiple ways of publishing and promoting it: eBook, website, podcast, audiobook, even self-publishing... Nothing should be off the table."

Today I was traveling back home from spending the Thanksgiving holiday with relatives. Brother was driving. And out of the blue, he started talking about my book.

Becalmed, 4

I wonder if I can write a post where all of the heavy lifting is done by links to other posts? This might just be the one.

I wrote a little while ago about feeling listless. Also about drinking too much.

So far this month has been a little better on the drinking front (though I'm scared of jinxing that if I say too much). But I'm still not getting a whole lot done. I had hoped that the interview with Andrew Tate would inspire me. And indeed it did inspire me to imagine getting my shit together. That's not the same as actually doing it, though.

Just a few minutes ago, I looked up this post from nine years ago where I break down the actual mechanism that allows self-discipline to work. I'm glad that I was clever enough to figure this all out. Maybe I should try actually doing it.

Maybe it's time for bed just now.

          

Don't ask a question unless you want the answer

Last month I talked about things that it might be kind of nice to do, but that I wasn't doing because I wasn't really doing anything. One of these was, "I imagine it might be nice to publish the book I've written related to the work I used to do as a day job." As I've explained before (for example, here in some detail) I've written the damned thing, and I've talked to several people about how to publish it. But I've taken no action. And in fact the day before I posted "Becalmed," I had wasted some time by asking the Tarot how it would go if I tried to publish with this or that person. I couldn't make anything of the results.

But you may also remember a little over a year ago when I was still wrestling with whether to find a job, I asked a woman on the Internet (Kimberly Steele) who reads Ogham what her reading said I should do. (And she said no, I shouldn't be looking for a regular job.) Why not ask her again? At least it's a way to delay having to make a decision or take any concrete action, … right? What could go wrong?

In training

A couple of months ago, I mentioned that my conversations with Debbie about hiking the West Highland Way have moved from "some day" to "this spring." It's really going to happen.

• We have fixed dates for the trip: leave the US on April 15, and return home on April 30. This year. Six weeks from today.
• Debbie contracted with a travel agency that has secured us lodgings all along the route.
• We've bought plane tickets to Scotland and back.
• I had a long, necessary, and totally predictable conversation with Marie about our plans, during which I assured her—more than that, I committed to her—that Debbie and I wouldn't fuck while we were in Scotland or en route. I think my exact phrase was "no sex and no quasi-sexual activity."

Remember when I first mentioned this trip, that I said I was woefully out of shape? Well, now I've got six weeks in which to get in good enough shape that I can hike 96 miles across the Scottish Highlands.

Hair, part 5

I've written about body hair here, here, here, and here, arguing in favor of leaving it where it is rather than shaving it off. No, I'm not a Sikh; but on this one point I sure agree with them.

Anyway, I just read a social media post (from LinkedIn) that picks a whole different kind of fight about hair, and good for them. This time it's about black women's hair, arguing that it shouldn't have to be straightened in order to present a "professional look" in the workplace. For the most part that's not a fight I have a direct personal stake in. But at a conceptual level, it is all about presenting the body as it really is, and not trying to force it to be something it ain't. So I'm all in favor of that. Three cheers!

           

"I find out what I really want …," 2

Long, long ago—more than fourteen years ago, now that I look at it—I posted a quote from Orson Scott Card's Children of the Mind, where Andrew ("Ender") Wiggin says to Miro:

"I find out what I really want by seeing what I do. That's what we all do, if we're honest about it. We have our feelings, we make our decisions, but in the end we look back on our lives and see how sometimes we ignored our feelings, while most of our decisions were actually rationalizations because we had already decided in our secret hearts before we ever recognized it consciously."

So now I wonder: can I use this insight as an analytical tool? Can I—in fact—find out what I want by seeing what I do, or does it just sound good? I guess the thing is to try.

Heard a story ....

The professional conference that I mentioned recently ended today, and I headed home. The conference itself was interesting, and I learned a lot. Part of what I learned is how very much more there is to know about this field than I ever knew. So in a way it's a shame that I'm near the end of my career and not right at the beginning. Maybe I could have done a better job all those years if only I'd known what I was doing.

But during the conference I heard a funny story ... or maybe just an odd one. We'd just finished listening to a talk where the speaker encouraged creative problem-solving: the kind of advice where, if your team of engineers is stuck on a problem, he tells you to add an artist or a theologian to the team [those were his examples] because he or she will "think differently" and therefore "break the logjam." And one woman asked a question that amounted to, "How do we persuade management to accept this idea?" But in the process of asking her question, she told a story.

Some time ago, she was working for NASA. One particular launch had just been scrubbed because of some equipment failure, and she was on the team that was supposed to analyze the failed equipment to find out what went wrong. The failed equipment was being sent back for them to study, but it had not arrived yet. But it so happened that at the same time, she was starting to learn to read Tarot cards. She did a reading for the problem, and identified exactly what was wrong ... before the parts ever arrived. Analyzing the parts after they arrived simply confirmed the diagnosis that the Tarot cards had already made. And her fellow team-members enjoined her, in the strongest possible terms, "Never tell anyone. Never speak of this again."

Funny. Or I thought it was.

           

Magical thinking for the win

I told you back in August that I had started trying to learn to read Tarot. Among other things this means that I start most days with a quick check of what I need to know about the day. As often as not, I get white noise, or combinations of cards that make no sense.

But I've also used the cards, from time to time, to answer Yes/No questions. Should I apply for this job? Will there be anybody useful at this job fair? Is this plan for seeing Marie a good one? And there the answers have looked kind of reliable. One of the questions that I have asked not infrequently is whether to apply for this or that job, and I get the answer No pretty reliably. Of course I think this answer is great, because I don't really want another job at this point (or at any rate not just any old job). And in my mind I have this fantasy that I should spend the time instead producing content: writing a book about the stuff that I do professionally, or writing philosophy, or some damned thing. Even just writing more of these blog posts. (I did an inventory yesterday of ideas I've had, that I haven't written up yet, and came up with more than twenty new posts each for this site and for the Patio. Let's see whether I get off my ass and write any of them.) 

Fantasies don't pay the bills. And even if that's not an immediate concern for me right at the moment, it feels a little presumptuous to say that I am "supposed" to be spending my time doing this or that. Besides, even if you accept the whole idea of consulting oracles, I've read that it's unreliable to read for yourself about any question where you really care about the answer, because your opinions are likely to cloud your judgement or skew the reading.

Funny thing, though — it turns out there's a website whose owner will read Ogham for you for free, as an oracle. How accurate are her predictions? The people who leave comments seem to be pleased with the results she gives them, though that may be nothing more than selection bias. In any event she's never heard of me before. And it's free, so it can't hurt to ask. Right?

Anyway, a couple days ago I submitted a question:

Dear Kimberly,

I've been trying to learn Tarot for a few months now, but I'm often still baffled by the images so I'd like to cross-check something with you. Just at the moment I'm out of work; but several times I have had the experience of seeing a job posting that might be a possibility, asking about it, and getting a very clear "NO" from the cards. OK, maybe they were all just bad places to work. But it's happened enough that I want to ask: Am I supposed to be doing Something Else with this time, instead of just looking for another job? If so, what?

Thanks very much!

Hosea

And her reply was as follows:

Hi Hosea,

Yes, my Ogham agree with your Tarot -- you need to be doing Something Else.

They provide Quert or Delight well-dignified to answer your question.

Then she went on to give me a bunch of advice about saving money; some of her suggestions are things I'm already doing, and others aren't terribly practical for me right now. But of course she's never heard of me before, so how should she know the details of my situation? I did try to ask her a follow-up question, ("So what exactly should I be doing instead?") and got no answer. Maybe I'll ask again next week.

In the meantime, though, she confirmed that I'm not "supposed" to be looking for work right now. Maybe the way I phrased the question prejudiced her answer, but I still think it's interesting that that's what she said.