You Know, I Don't Find This Stuff Amusing Anymore

The latter part of this week was a wash with respect to productivity.

Starting late Wednesday night, my throat started to turn scratchy. By the time Thursday morning rolled around, the soreness worsened, my head was aching, I was measuring a body temperature of 101.3 oF. I took the day off trying to rest it off.

For a while, I feared that drinking no liquid after having three beers with coworkers at the end of Wednesday had left me dehydrated.

Past-the-sell-by-date acetaminophen, the only fever reducer on the premises, was having minimal impact on the fever. I had to pick up the kids from the dance school at 7:30 pm, since X was working until 11 pm. I picked up some ibuprofen on the way there and took them home, put them to bed, and slept on the couch at X's apartment, waiting for her to get back from work. I started to develop chills around 10 pm.

She got back from work around 11:15 pm, surprise to find me sleeping. I told her that I had been through a rough day with the fever and sore throat. She said that her friend, who had watched the kids during the day and brought the kids to the dance school for their summer class, had noticed that I looked rough.

I drove home shivering and climbed into bed. The chills subsided, but I woke up at 1 am measuring a temperature of 102.8 oF. I got up and went to the couch in the den, where there at least was a ceiling fan.

Not being able to sleep, I looked up my health plan to see if the primary care physician I specified some two years ago, but never visited, was taking new patients. The plan's network directory said "yes", but the website for the doctor's practice said "no". I decided it was a lost cause on that front, so I started to look for other doctors in network and in my zip code.

I found a doctor less than a mile away who was accepting new patients and called my network first thing in the morning to see how I should go about changing the primary care physician. I found out that the choice isn't handled by the network, but by another agency that deals with the providers. So I got that number and gave them a call. They said I should just call them back when I got an appointment set up.

So I called the doctor and got an appointment set up for 1:30 pm that day. Then I called the agency, which said "no can do". I said that the doctor was on the network. The person handling my call said that it wasn't enough to be on the network. The provider also had to be "contracted" with the agency.

I noted that made the network directory virtually useless because of this undocumented subsetting. The agent then looked up their directory and found four providers in my zip code who were listed as taking new patients. I started calling the list. One was taking new patients, but couldn't see me until next month. The next one's office wasn't open yet. The last two were at the same practice and no one could see me until the middle of next week. The receptionist there said I might want to try a Minute Clinic.

So I went to the Minute Clinic and waited for a little over an hour to be seen. I paid $122 for an inconclusive diagnosis, other than my throat looked "pretty raw". About $50 of that was spent on a tests -- a quick test for strep that turned up negative.

The second got sent off to a lab and wouldn't hear anything back for 24 - 48 hours. Because prescribing antibiotics for an infection is a no-no without evidence of a bacterial infection, the recommendation was to continue the ibuprofen and rinse the throat with salt water. The temperatures continued to vacillate above and below 100 oF for the rest of the day, with the fever being completely gone today. Throat is still raw, though.

I have a strong feeling that succumbing to this illness was driven in part to my body not being able to withstand a steady diet of stress over the past couple of months...

• I haven't had a completely kid-free weekend in over two months. One weekend where I didn't have kids (June 26 - 27) was because X took the kids to the older daughter's dance competition in The Volunteer State. I wound up keeping them two nights before they left. Another weekend, the first in June, was offset by the fact that I put in 16 hours working at the daughter's dance recital and its dress rehearsal. Her reason for the extra weekends has been that she has had to work extra hours to pay for the house, but there have been a couple of weekends where I've found out after the fact that she wasn't working.


• The divorce and mortgage have been a very stressful process. I already have noted some instances of X's bitchiness when I didn't have answers for her on whether the divorce was final or that my mortgage refinance was ready to close. In addition, the mortgage lender was being very invasive about some petty things. I understand their need for bank statements and pay stubs, but when they started to dispute the legitimacy of the divorce when they said that there weren't enough items listed on the division of property request list, I about lost it. Apparently because we weren't at all out war over everything, we were considered questionable, not taking into account the child support payments I had been making since X moved out in Aug. 2008 and the fact that she lived in a separate residence for almost two years.


• X has been sending a steady stream of money requests... I've paid 100 % of the younger daughter's all-day kindergarten tuition (first two installments totaled $600). Paid for two months' worth of summer dance classes at $135. Because she was in danger of not having enough money to close on her house, she asked for two sums of money -- $1,059 and $1,500 over a period of three weeks. This was on top of the $3,600, half the 2009 tax refund, that she claimed entitlement to even though she was not gainfully employed, save for a couple of part-time jobs in 2009. Pile on that the cost of trophies won at dance competitions.


• The President and the CEO have no clear vision of what they should be hiring for our department. All they know is that development isn't as fast as they want it to be. The CEO gave me flack a couple times the past couple of months for not being more aggressive in recruiting at the same time that the President told me that we needed to be careful about starting salaries. The CEO decided that we needed a VP for me to report to, so they did some recruiting, brought in someone I once interviewed with back in 2007. After many hours of interviews, the other managers decided the candidate wasn't a fit. So CEO decided that maybe we should hire this over priced guy we considered for a UI Engineer who was making more at his current job than what I make. So we brought the guy in for another interview with management. It wound up with a split decision. Meanwhile, our team gets a candidate we talked to back in Oct. 2008 whom we bring in this week, and the President starts talking like we might not hire him even if he does well on the interview.


• The Executive VP of Sales continues to target big clients, and because his sales team can't carry their own weight in the technical vetting, both my team and I get brought in on conference calls, sometimes just so they can show they have someone with a big title on the line. As much as a big game he talks about "strategic HR" and hiring only "A team players", two of his hires he brought on in February already have been canned, and another is on the bubble.


• My IT guy, who got me in hot water with the President when I refused to fire him on the spot back in April, decided that rather than work with me in a smooth transition out, he would quit on me with minimal notice in mid-June, once he got the mortgage for his new house closed and started a new job the very next day. Since then, my systems engineer and I have been slogging through the IT demands of some very non-technical people.


• Two weeks ago, the display on my 2 1/2 year-old laptop refused to re-illuminate after bringing it out of sleep mode. I feared the worst, thinking my laptop had died completely. Fortunately, I had the presence of mind to ping the computer from my other old laptop and got a response. The webserver also responded to requests, so things were still alive. Found out later on that the issue was caused by a horrible defect in the video chipset and was so onerous that Apple was replacing the video hardware at no cost, even if the machine was no longer under warranty. A local Mac reseller got my laptop fixed and it was back in my possession at the end of the week.


• During a pool party at my dad's on the 3rd of July, my stepmom called us aside to talk about her situation. She said that she had seen the doctor recently and had been diagnosed with severe depression, caregiver burnout, and ADD. She was in need of some time away, and wondered if we could take turns coming down to visit my dad while she was on a brief vacation. I can tell from his actions that my dad can be very high maintenance, so I don't think she's exaggerating. My brother and I were willing to do this, but it saddened me that he has become such a drain.


• My house is still a mess, and most nights I can't bring myself to attack the paper pile I've mentioned in prior posts.


• I think my car has suspension problems and its air conditioner is non-functional. The thought of having a car payment again terrifies me.


• With seemingly annual repair bills of $300 on the heating and air conditioning, I know it's only a matter of time before I'll need to replace that.


• My attempts to locate some divorce support groups on Meetup.com around here were futile. One is closed to new members, and the other is about 25 miles away and meets on alternating Sunday evenings. The ever helpful organizer of the closed group said I should go look for a support group at a local church (heaven forbid there should be respite for those in crises of faith) or start one of my own.

I have been talking about being in an increasingly dark space for a while. And I know I've gotten advice and even talked about getting help. I think the illness this week was my body telling me, "We can't go on like this."

So on Wednesday at 3:30 pm, the first time that one of my eligible doctors can see me, I'm going in for a check-up, and I'm going to talk with her about how this is taking a toll on me and that I probably need formally evaluated for anxiety and depression, if not Asperger's.

I've also decided that its time to say no to X on money. We've got a divorce decree in place, with a child support schedule based on state guidelines that factor in income, health insurance, and child care costs. The child support payments she get are as much as her pre-tax income for her job over the same time interval. If she can't make that work with her life, then she needs to do one of the following:

• Readjust her lifestyle (e.g. give up the deluxe cable package with DVR and the Droid Smartphone) and live with what she's got.


• Get a higher paying job.


• Find a sugar daddy.

What sent me over the edge was a conversation she started today while she was fixing our older daughter's hair for her team's performance at a local dinner theatre tonight. She tells me that she's signed up to work the concession stand for the dance school at all of the home games for the local pro football team, so she'll need me to have the kids those days even when it's not my weekend to have the kids.

She's worked some of the games in the past two years, but never all of them. When she does it's an all-day thing because they have to be on-premise for the setup, and then they have to wait a couple hours afterwards because they have to turn the money into the bank at the stadium. On the days when it's a Monday Night Football game, I've had to take off work early to get the girls.

I asked her how many home games there were, knowing that there would probably be eight of them plus some other special events. I expressed reluctance to just accept that. She said that my other option was to pay her for a babysitter during that time because it didn't make sense for her to work the games, which earn her maybe $8/hour for tuition credits.

I started to put together an argument that the child care allowance for child support was based on child care needed for employment, not sub-market barter work, but I stopped myself because I remember from the parenting class that potentially contentious financial discussions shouldn't happen in front of the kids, and both were present. I told her that we'd have to have this discussion at a later time.

I am angered by the sense of entitlement she continues to have, even now that she is supposedly on her own legally. Making such an in-your-face demand for time or money after you've repeatedly offloaded extra overnights and requested or demanded thousands of dollars in assistance beyond an already generous child support allowance seems like a really bad calculation. Prior to the divorce, I was more lenient for many reasons... wanting her to get on her own on an even keel, wanting the kids to be taken care of, not wanting the kids to be let down over the house. Now I know this has done nothing but to create disrespect.

The following scenes capture that lack of respect in a nutshell...

Scene 1: On June 28, X sent me this text message:

Ok (older daughter) is performing at (northwest side dinner theatre) on july 10 at 6. Tickets will be 146 total for all of us to go. Then they will watch high school musical Tickets r 25, 25, 48, 48. I could pay for one ticket if u wanted to pay for girls

I agree to this. On July 2, she sends me a text telling me to drop off a check for $146 at the dance school mailbox for the tickets. I presume that she is going to pay me back for her $48 ticket. A week goes by without reference. Today, I send her a text message asking if she is going to reimburse me for her ticket. She replies, "Sure." At the performance, she hands me a $20 and a $5. I ask her what that is for, and she says, "The ticket." I thought about asking where the other $23 was, but I got the hint.

Scene 2: We drive separately to the dinner theatre late this afternoon so that I can take the kids home with me for the evening. As I arrive, she tells me that I need to go back to her place because the older daughter needs the gloves and bracelets for her costume. It's about 5:20 pm, and the dinner starts service around 6:30 pm.

I tell her that it is probably going to be a little over an hour to make the round trip, because it's about 30 miles. She then gets testy with me about it saying that if I can't do it, then she'll just have to do it. This is not a realistic option because she will need to help the daughter get ready for the performance during that time.

So I set off on my way, trying to go as fast as I can without running afoul of speed of safety. About 25 minutes into the trip, she calls me to ask me whether I've made it. I tell her that I'm still about eight miles away. She seems irritated and tells me to call her when I get to her place.

I get to her place and get the forgotten items and head back up. About 30 minutes into the return trip, she asks me where I am. This time, I am a couple miles short of the exit. I arrived right around 6:30 pm. Just in time to catch the last line of buffet goers.

In the grand scheme of things, a couple of gloves and bracelets seems inconsequential. Even if she were the only one lacking these accessories, she was in a troupe that numbered over 20 dancers. She was among the younger members, who are less visible. It was an exhibition event for which the school received no compensation, yet the dinner theatre sold 81 tickets to the families of the dance school student body. It was not for a competition, where they would have gotten docked points.

I've been in this situation numerous times before. I am given ownership of a problem that is of her making (like forgetting to make sure all costume items are packed). There is not so much an expression of remorse at having to ask or even gratitude that I would do this for her. There is only disbelief that there would be any other option than me doing what she wants done. It's a dynamic I've seen in our relationship from the early days, on the wedding day, and even during the divorce.

I have been subconsciously aware of it. I think now that I am no longer legally bound to her, I am free to admit its full existence in all of its ugliness.

I don't know what I hate more. Her for treating me this way over the years or myself for having not stood up to it. Either way, there is no other word for it than "hatred". I FUCKING HATE IT.

Drama TXT from the X

The X sent me a series of texts this morning to find out whether I had found out when they would do the closing for my mortgage refinance. I replied informing her that I had left a message on the loan officer's voice mail just before 9 am this morning and was awaiting a reply. She then wrote back this:

Then who knows when u will close. I am just about to throw in the towel. I will just concede to the girls that I am a horrible mother and we will live in apt forever. I am sure it won't be the only thing that I cause them to have therapy about

Bear in mind that this was the mortgage lender she recommended to me and is the same one who is handling the mortgage for her house.

Letting the Coworkers Know

Stress level over the past 30 hours or so has been pretty high.

Yesterday afternoon, I had trouble bringing my work laptop, a MacBook Pro, out of sleep mode. The screen remained dark. For a bit I feared that the machine had failed entirely. Later on I got the idea to try requesting pages from the web server that was running on it, and I got responses, so the machine was not lost.

I later verified that this was the symptom of an issue that existed with the video chipset on the laptop, and that Apple was replacing the part at their expense. So the computer will be resurrected in some way, but at signficant loss to productivity.

One of the lingering questions that has dogged me since I started my current job, way back at the end of 2007, was when should I let my coworkers know that a change in marital status would take place. Over that time, I've taken very discreet approach. I talk about the kids, but don't mention much about X.

Last week, after the divorce was finalized, a feeling of heaviness began to sink in. I needed to dismantle the facade and at least admit that I wasn't married anymore, so I didn't cringe when someone asked me a question about "my wife" and I was evasive about details.

I decided to have a conversation with another manager with whom I have a pretty high level of trust. I knew that she had been through a divorce prior to coming to work with us two years ago, and had some inklings that it was a pretty difficult one. I gave her some basic facts. She said she had sended that I had been "off" the last few days of work.

I asked her if she had any advice to offer from her own experiences. She said that the divorce made her feel like such a failure that she couldn't bring herself to let her coworkers know and wound up quitting her job after the divorce was finalized

After I wistfully noted that quitting wasn't much of an option for me, given support obligations, she recommended that I at least tell my boss and the rest of my team. She also gave me the contact information of someone who had counseled her with her own divorce.

Later that day, I broke the news to them. I think my team didn't know what to make of it. One of them wondered why I had chosen this time to disclose. Another said that I had done an amazing job of not letting on that there was trouble. I made it clear to them that what transpired had its roots well before I started working there, just so they didn't get the impression that working there had been a factor.

I felt like the weight had been lifted, but I also still had an awful feeling. This evening, I felt restless and depressed. I finally tore into a huge pile of junk mail, newspapers, and other things that had been sitting on the floor for weeks, the aftermath of an earlier attempt to clear the clutter off of a kitchen table. I managed to put a dent into it, but I was feeling stir crazy and felt like crying at times.

I will get through this. I have to.

And Now, She is Known as Simply "X"

It's official. The divorce is final. I went over to the City County Building early on Wednesday afternoon to pick up the signed divorce decree documents. It had been a harrowing few days with work involving meetings, a stressful release, and an elusive database performance issue that was bringing the production environment to its knees.

Against this was a recurring stream of IMs, e-mails, and text messages from the woman who had been my wife for 14 years, two months, and three days. The 60-day waiting period from filing to decree review passed over the weekend, so she developed the (unreasonable) expectation that the document would be signed and ready to go on Monday.

When I called the office on Monday to check on the status, I got an answer that it wasn't done yet and that I should check back on Wednesday. She was not happy about that, badgering me to call the office back to find out why. Sure enough the slow grind of justice delivered on the schedule that they told me.

After her last nag message, which included the text, "Divorce ? ? ?", I was finally able to write back that the documents were ready and that I would pick them up in the afternoon. She texted back saying, "Thanks for taking care of this." I wrote back saying, "No problem. I guess you can now make it 'Facebook official' as they call it :-p ." She wrote back with this statement:

U know I didn't mean to hurt u. I'm sorry it had to end this way. I'm glad we can still be good parents to the girls. Thank u for giving them to me.

I didn't know what to make of that.

I felt a deep sadness after picking up the papers, a sense of acceptance that I had failed in this relationship... a lingering doubt over that feeling of being different, defective, and inadequate. I could not self validate in the moment.

Where do I go from here? There are still loose ends... getting the mortgage re-fi wrapped up, getting the house restored to order. Right now it looks like a scale model of the 9th Ward in New Orleans circa mid September 2005. I need to start making time for making new real-life friends. I need to start getting resumes out there before I lose my sanity on this job. I need to get some help.

And Soon, the Legal Bond Dissolves

Less than ten days to go.

That's right, it's ten days until the passing of 60 days since STBX filed petition for dissolution of our marriage. We've completed the county mandated "be a good parent" class, we've squared away the division of property and allocation of parental time. It now all comes down to having a judge sign off on the agreement, and it is finished.

The grounds for urgency from STBX was based on the goal of buying a new house and closing before the end of June so as to qualify for the tax credit, but this week she learned that those hopes may be dashed, for the bank will not loan to her with less than six months of employment at her new job. For those of you who are keeping score, her six month mark transpires sometime in early July. Still she wants the house.

Her quest for the house has affected me on a few fronts...

To qualify for her mortgage, she needed to be liberated from the the mortgage on this house, so I have been rushing to go through the meat grinder of refinance, and I am eating the cost of that.

It's a shame she has been in such a hurry because I could have done an assumption of the mortgage for about 1/3 of the cost, but it would have taken 90 days to get it done.

For the most part the refinance has gone well, save for the fact that my employer outsources its payroll and other HR functions to another company, and the underwriters wigged out when my paycheck stubs did not match the name of the employer.

Also, her quest to pay for costs of buying the house have required her to pick up some extra days at work. Combine that with dance competitions and recital, and you get a picture where the kid-free weekends have been few and far between. I am logging the requests for extra days, and if this becomes a recurring pattern that bumps up the overnights by a couple weeks, I will push for a recalculation in the child support because overnights affect the balance.

With the financial scrutiny over the refinance, I've also had to put the job search on the back burner. I can't do anything to spook them until we're past the refinance at best and maybe even until STBX closes on her house, since almost half of her pre-tax income is child-support payments.

With all of this in play, I think it becomes pretty easy to see why I feel locked in and out of control of my near-term destiny.

On the personal front, I think STBX is starting to date. A couple weeks ago, she asked me to keep the kids on a Wednesday night because she and her friends were going out and were planning on staying out late. The next morning, she called me and told me to take the kids directly to their sitter instead of her place because she said she had too much to drink. The next Wednesday, she asked me to keep them another night.

I'm not mad or jealous. Indeed, if she finds someone who "does it" for her, that will be great. Still, after the collapse in 2007, I was pretty certain that she'd never seek to reconcile, but I figured that she would remain very focused on the kids' lives at the expense of another relationship. Just goes to show how off base my perceptions and speculations might be.

Work isn't quite as demoralizing as it had been, but my faith in the leadership is fading.

My boss has backed off from the "bring me our IT guy's head on a platter... NOW!" stance, but I suspect that could come back with a vengeance if there are random glitches that impact her directly. My IT guy has been interviewing and preparing documentation for a successor with the goal of being out of there by the end of June or so.

The CEO had a talk with me a few weeks back and has decided that they need more of an empire builder guiding the development of product, and they've sensed that I find greater reward in the coding aspect of my work moreso than the manager stuff. I think what finally pushed them in this direction was pressure from their advisory board on why the developer team had not grown so that new features could get released at a higher rate.

So they are starting to look for a departmental VP, a role that they said they were going to fill during my promotion to Director last summer, but held off doing, most likely in an effort to get cashflow positive. As of this writing, they are starting to interview candidates. The part that puzzles me is that although they are looking to take on this new person, which will command a six figure salary easily, they are also holding the line that we cannot hire anything else other than a user interface engineer up through the end of the year.

Hiring in general has been a point of confusion for me, with the CEO telling me to hire as many new people as possible and the President telling me to be very measured in hiring. I report to the President, and she has to deal with the numbers much more closely than the CEO, so I think she has a closer lock on reality.

Burn rate shot up in March, shooting up from $100K-ish in the early part of the year to $500K in March. Much of that has been driven by aggressive hiring by sales and marketing. The EVP of sales they brought on at the beginning of February has been very high maintenance, both in terms of spending and dragging other department members into meetings and conference calls.

We could be at a point where we are out of money by late in the year. With VCs looking at our renewal rates and shaking their heads, I don't know where they will get the cash to keep things rolling.

For those of you who have been following the saga involving the Pacific Northwest Prima Donna Travel Agency, they finally sent out their initial e-mail a week ago, nearly two weeks behind schedule. The missed target wasn't due to any problems on our end. There were tons of technical bungling on their end in getting other pieces of the project into place. Our VP of Ops said that we are very much "under water" with this contract, and probably will be for a couple of years. My guess is that upper management went this route because they wanted a really big name logo on the site.

A burning out factor for my job is that the challenges I've had to face have migrated from ones involving technology to ones where people are involved. Conflict is much higher, and I have to deal with a lot of situations where I am on the defensive from the start.

The bumpiness of this journey, combined with my fear that I'm going to snap and say something inappropriate, has turned my focus toward whether I might have Asperger Syndrome. The obsessiveness over problems, my continued withdrawal from others, and STBX's behavior has left me feeling overwhelmed and inadequate. There's been several days where I've felt washed up and unattractive. I'm at a point where I need to get some help, even if it is just initially just reaching out to our employee assistance program.

Late Night Listening XXXVIII: In the Room Where Light does not Find Me

Tonight, I am immersed in the 80s. In lieu of the Groove Show on WTTS-FM, I am listening to the Saturday Night Safety Dance on Sirius/XM First Wave. They haven't played this song, but out-of-context snippets from this work certainly capture my spirit.



Work/life balance is way out of whack these days, and my desire to write for clarity has been almost nil. I have lost sight of a forward-looking narrative and have had a world of trouble regaining it or at least revising into a work that could revitalize me.

Pointing my browser back to the editor to write another post has been hampered by a false premise, that I must somehow have a grasp of what is going on before I can write about it. And as I have become mired in the fog of lessening awareness, I have been all the less moved to write on matters personal.

There is always an e-mail to answer, an IM conversation to have, a fire to fight, another coding task to wipe out. Somewhere in between there are parental tasks, bills to pay, and a whole host of other issues. Tonight I am writing because I forced myself to get the bulk of my coding tasks out of the way, and the kids are in bed.

The divorce papers were filed officially last week, one day after our 14th wedding anniversary. STBX had a recently-divorced friend complete the initial paperwork. If we complete the parenting class and get all of the settlement items worked out, our divorce will be final on the first full day of summer.

STBX has been super motivated to get the divorce moving forward because she wants to move out of her apartment when the lease is up in August and get moved into a house. I don't see how she thinks she will be able to handle the mortgage and upkeep, something she sought to get out of when she moved into the apartment, but it is her life.

The kids are doing well. My older daughter's grades have been really good thus far, but she has been having a rough patch in math with things like counting money. Her dance school has had two competitions so far, and she's been performing in two routines -- one with girls her age and a production number that runs the full gamut of ages. The production act won overall high points for their first competition.

The younger daughter has been enjoying the church-sponsored preschool co-op she changed to at the beginning of the year. They have a different instructional style from the co-op, but she seems to be really enjoying her homework. She seems to be having a harder time with not seeing me every day. There have been occasions where she calls me and cries saying she "really really misses" me. It tears my heart out to hear it.

Since STBX started her new job, I've started keeping the kids three days in a row on the weekends that I have them, which allows her to get ready to go to work on Friday mornings without having to wake up the kids.

A few embarrassing disclosures:

I haven't completed my Census form, but I did get my taxes paid on time. Federal refund was big. I owed the state money because STBX didn't do any state withholding for her unemployment benefits.

I haven't mowed the lawn at all this year, so the yard looks like a jungle. I wrote someone advertising on craigslist and got an estimate for a bunch of yardwork items that would greatly improve the situation, but he has been slow to get things going. He came over on Wednesday evening to scope out the property but then said that he wouldn't be able to get over to do the mowing until 8:30 am tomorrow, which is questionable now because we've gotten some rain. I got my first anonymous hate message in my mailbox on Friday, informing me that I would be reported to the county health department.

I haven't updated my direct deposit to reflect the child support recalculation based on STBX's child care bills. I have been writing supplemental checks to cover the difference and annotating the checks appropriately. It will be nice once this is all switched over to the state's payment system.

As for work, I'm finding myself increasingly burnt out, with some days going in wondering whether I'm going to have a job by the end of the day because I'm going to just throw up my hands and say that things are untenable and I'm quitting.

What has happened to make me so sour on my employer? The migration to management in August of last year moved me from a rather cloistered role where creation was of the greatest value to another which involved interacting with other parts of the company which have varying degrees of dysfunction.

The upper management knows something is wrong, but they haven't been able to develop the self-awareness to see how they contribute to the problem. Instead, they have sought out the corporate analog of religion, tea leaves which give them ways to explain away the problems with vague statements like "we don't communicate well enough".

Indeed the search for cosmic truth has led them to have a week-long training course on personality types back in August, another week long strategic planning session in January complete with a massive list of worksheets, an overwhelming list of followup tasks, and, most recently, a series of management meetings (two business days and counting!) based on a compulsory reading of a business book about management teams where we've allegedly figured out that no one has a clear idea of what the company is supposed to be about.

Since throwing the third VP of post-sales client relationship management off the ship back in February, the President of the company has taken on the role of managing that department. Her calendar is a wall-to-wall list of 1:1 and status meetings. She sent a company-wide e-mail a few weeks back enumerating all of the things they were doing to stem the churn of customers (which has been awful). They fell roughly into two categories -- giving away more free stuff to the customers who complain and smothering the others with tons of attention, including hand written notes.

Over in marketing, a department which has been amazingly free of accountability in the face of turmoil in sales and post-sales client relationship management, there has been an unearthing of some ugly statistics by the VP of Ops regarding just how much they skew the incentives so it's impossible for them to fall short of their targets. There is a dearth of automation, so things like lead distribution takes days. The department manager seems to think the only thing that will solve the problems is to throw more bodies at it.

A new EVP of Sales hired on at the beginning of February. I'm still trying to figure him out. One one hand he is very big on "collaborating" with other departments. He seems very hard nosed, which should bring some discipline to a department that has been adrift sans rudder since last fall. But there are some very big red flags.

For one thing, he is very resource intensive. He makes his home out on the East Coast and flies back and forth at the beginning and end of the week. For high profile leads, he will bring in three or four other people from other departments to sit in on calls or even make trips. He has brought on a large number of new reps, with more to come by mid-July. He shut down sales activity for the better part of a week in March to have sales training courses.

He is also very big on delegating tasks, which means he creates work for other departments, myself included. I've had to write more special documents for clients, and have prepared several hours of training materials for his team. He treats the Office Manager as his personal secretary, so a lot of his requests come to other people through her.

I also am not certain I can trust him. I know of anecdotes at his former employer where he had the habit of promising big ticket clients lots of custom work and then strong-arming the company into bending the roadmap to satisfy the client's whims. He has been chasing a major online travel website for three months now, sucking up lots of resources in landing them. This has included travel out to the Emerald City for him and the CEO to visit their HQ and for us to pay for three people from that company to come over and visit us on site so that they could have two full days of planning meetings with members of our team.

As for that travel site, the people we are dealing with are empire builders. They see social media as a gold mine for personal data, so they want to use a mix of e-mail and our application plus some custom development to collect all kinds of data about who drives the most revenue in their direction so that they can offer the deepest discounts. Their biggest competition, in their eyes, aren't other companies, but rather other departments within the same company.

One of the guys from the team, a meta manager with an overinflated sense of self, shared his enlightened visions of project management, his stint as a professional player of soccer overseas, his decade working for SauronSoft, and his pet dog of exquisite pedigree, traceable back to a champion. One of my coworkers, who had the horrible experience of sitting across from him at dinner during their visit, referred to him as a "douche wallow".

The CEO keeps expressing frustration that our team can't give his full wish list at full speed, going so far as to ask whether we needed to bring on contractors or offshore. So far, I have been able to hold my ground, refusing to compromise the department's history of high hiring standards. What we do develop gets done on time and with high quality. The new developer we took on in February has been doing well, taking on the bulk of server side software development for the last two sprints.

I've lost all respect for the President. At the beginning of the year, I found out that her father is among those on the company's board of advisors (translation: daddy bought me a job). She takes great pride that she majored in highly non-technical course of study -- writing of the creative sort. She's also in thick with the marketing manager cited above, with ties that date back to their hellenic affiliations in the college years. But these are small change compared to the things that really bug me.

Back when we did departmental budgets, I allocated enough money to pay raises to my team based on past payments, which are a sliding scale between 4 and 7 percent based on the quality of the effort. If you wind up on the 4 percent track, you get fired because it is a sign of zero growth. When the budgets were being reviewed, I was complimented on my restraint on spending, and I thought that would mean that my items would be honored.

I was worried at the January planning meeting when managers were told that the raise pool was 3 percent of the existing payroll. I figured that didn't apply to us, especially since we were the only department that had no form of bonus built into the compensation.

I recently had my annual review with my system engineer, who has done a great job moving our platform to the cloud, automating recovery of problems in production, and keeping costs so low that our cost of hosting the servers that serve our 400+ clients with more than three 9s of uptime is less than our company phone bill.

I recommended a nice increase, thinking that it would have a good chance of going through since I knew that both the President and CEO were worried about him leaving. In fact a couple months prior, they were so afraid that they asked me if a raise wasn't in order then.

After she read the raise request, the President wrote back telling me that the 3 percent value applied to my team, too and that it would deplete the pay for others. I wrote back strongly encouraging reconsideration of the decision, citing the fixed compensation and the fact that the overall value was less than the traditional "you're fired" value. She said she would consider it, and that circumstances might change if we managed to get outside funding this year, but no concrete improvements.

When it comes down to an issue raised by a non-technical person either inside or outside of the company, I am seldom given the benefit of the doubt, so a lot of my discussions with her start off on the defensive. After recounting many of these things with my system engineer, he said that if he were a manager and put as little trust in my work as it appears she does in mine, he would have fired me.

Moreover, because she is non-technical and unwilling to pick up much of any new knowledge in that area. If there are ever issues with her computer or one of her friends within the company, you can be sure there will be hell to pay.

In late March, I took a couple days off to spend time with my daughters when they were on spring break, and she interrupted my time off to drag me in on drama involving my IT support guy. The main gripe was that a new phone auto answer greeting wasn't live yet, even though we had made no promise that it would be. We were still awaiting the delivery of the recording from the professional voice service, and they were still within their turnaround window.

And then again when we had the high profile visitors from the Emerald City a couple weeks ago, she pulled me out of another meeting so she could rail off about the unacceptable IT conditions with said IT employee present. The infraction? She couldn't get her wireless network or ethernet to work in the conference room. The wireless issue was caused by her leaving her ethernet connection turned on after disconnecting from her docking station, and the ethernet didn't work because she didn't have the cat 5 cable fully plugged in. Still that was somehow our problem.

She wanted me to agree with her that he needed to go right then and there. I sat there listening to her throw a fit about how time was money and she was so far behind in her work and that we had a people problem. I asked her what we could do to help make the situation better, but she continued to press for him to be gone.

I told her wearily that I wouldn't make a personnel decision in the heat of the moment, so she scheduled yet another meeting at 3 pm the same day so that she could complain more about it. I talked her down to a two week performance improvement plan where she wanted no problems with the networking or her ability to connect to anything. Moreover she was refusing to authorize any more spending on IT until all the "problems" were resolved.

I wanted to quit then and there. So did the system engineer, whom the IT support guy helps out, when he heard about the whole thing. Had we all been gone, that would have meant 60 percent of the engineering team would have disappeared in a single day. Moreover, there would be no one left to keep either the internal IT infrastructure or our production servers alive.

Moreover, since something like 60,000 lines of code of the application were written by me, there would have been a huge evisceration of knowledge. That's not the kind of thing you want to happen when you're burning money at a rate of where you might have four months of cash left to live on and you're in talks with VCs. I joked to my team that it would have be the $6 million hissy fit. Shortly after that eruption, I found a blog post written a little over a year ago that seems to sum up her personality.

The IT guy sees the writing on the wall, and he's been trying to line up a new job so he can get out of there. He's in a precarious situation because he's working on lining financing on a new house, and the last thing he needs to have happen is lose a job.

As for me, I've sketched out the revisions I want to make to my resume, and I'm contemplating putting it into circulation. My Aspergic mind keeps rerunning the calculation to see whether there is any hope for the company. The one bright point in management, the VP of Ops (who is a strong ally on many fronts), is making some traction, but probably not enough to make the needed difference. He is getting more and more stuff dumped on him by the President, and he gets pulled in to play Dad in more and more squabbles between other departments.

During a 1:1 with the President, where she asked me what might need to change to reduce the burden on me so that I had more time to recruit new employees, I mentioned that the lack of desire by some team members in sales and client relationship management was generating a lot of work for me and recommended that we start encouraging them to take more of an initiative to increase their tech savvy to handle customer requests without having to continually turn to more skilled team members.

She said that wasn't going to happen with her team. I told her then we needed to get rid of them and start over and raise the hiring bar. She came back with some handwaving mumbo jumbo about how marketing and sales people, because of their personality types, would not be inclined to learn the details. The thing is, our team doesn't even think twice about taking it upon themselves to learn more about marketing and other areas that concern the other departments, but the curiosity is not reciprocal.

I guess the bottom line is that there are few islands of doers which survive in a sea of people who fail to execute or just toss things over the wall to those who can get things done. Further complicating things are that some of the people who need to go most are closely tied to the founders, either by longstanding friendship or even blood relationship, so there are critically entrenched vestiges of unassailable incompetence. At some point, there has to be a sort of Atlas Shrugged moment with in such an arrangement where the skilled people leave the whole mess behind because working harder is just an exercise in futility.

There are several things that keep me from moving on... I have been accumulating options, and I'd hate to see them go to waste. I enjoy the company of my team, and the lunches I have with them provide very stimulating conversation. There are a couple members of the product support staff that I get along well with, whom I would miss dearly. I've learned a lot about the finance of startups from the VP of Ops, and I want to help him succeed at his goals. I don't know if I could earn as much somewhere else, which is important to keep in mind when child support is a recurring obligation. I like working in the city, which is a much shorter commute than the sterile office parks on the north side.

So that's where I stand... light at the end of the tunnel on the personal front... lots of uncertainty and ambivalence on the professional front. The good thing is that I find myself much better armed with skills and experience than I was three or four years ago.

Damn, These Videos Have Great Production Quality

I apologize for the lack of post activity in this space. I've been underwater with work and home stuff. I'll be back soon. For now, enjoy this...


New Law Would Ban Marriages Between People Who Don't Love Each Other

Schnarch's Writings Applied to the Age of Social Networking

It's been a while since I've made mention of Schnarch in this space. I saw a post over at the New York Times blog Schott's Vocab that reminded me of his writings on two-choice dilemmas.

The term being discussed was e-ttenuation, which is attributed to Raymond Tallis. The post quotes an essay by Madeleine Bunting published in the Guardian:

... faced with such an abundance of interesting choices, there is a reluctance to commit and a provisionalism which promotes grazing, keeping options open. Above all, there is a paradigm of contractualism: relationships are measured by the question “what’s in it for me?”

When I read this, I heard echoes of Passionate Marriage (p.298):

None of us wants to face our dilemma(s) and choose one option over the other. Manic attempts to "do it all" maintain our secret fantasy that we can have it all -- and never have to face our anxiety. The 1960s free-love ethic that "it's unrealistic to expect one person to meet all your needs" subtly reassures us that we can have everything we want (all we have to do is spread our needs around several people). But decisions, commitments, friendship, and integrity only become meaningful in a world of finite options.

In Constructing the Sexual Crucible, Schnarch quotes Tristam Engelhardt:

(Friendship) is also a sacrifice. Since humans are not gods or goddesses, friendship entails the abandonment of other possibilities. Humans have limited resources of energy and time. The person who has a hundred friends has none, or is a god.

Perhaps once the craze over social networking websites has subsided, we will interpret it as a period where society was seduced by the connectivity of the web into believing that friendship could be as free as love was thought to be back in the 60s.

I sense that the seeds of disillusionment with social networking sites are beginning to take root.

In late December, the New York Times published an article about high schoolers making a pact to reduce Facebook dependency.

Then word broke out about a parody site called the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine. The virality of the site is a hint that there are good number people who are ready to unplug.

Finally, Bunting's own remarks point to another issue with social networking:

It is not technology per se at fault, but how it is used, and in particular how it combines with another equally powerful phenomenon – commercialisation; the assessment that everyone and everything has a price. It is the two combined which I would argue are so corrosive to our capabilities to create and sustain relationships of depth and durability.

It's not just person-to-person relationships that are commercialized. The site itself commercializes on a relationship of its own, just as Danah Boyd writes in her blog apophenia:

Let's take this scenario for a moment. Bob trust Alice. Bob tells Alice something that he doesn't want anyone else to know and he tells her not to tell anyone. Alice tells everyone at school because she believes she can gain social stature from it. Bob is hurt and embarrassed. His trust in Alice diminishes. Bob now has two choices. He can break up with Alice, tell the world that Alice is evil, and be perpetually horribly hurt. Or he can take what he learned and manipulate Alice. Next time something bugs him, he'll tell Alice precisely because he wants everyone to know. And if he wants to guarantee that it'll spread, he'll tell her not to tell anyone.

Facebook isn't in the business of protecting Bob. Facebook is in the business of becoming Alice. Facebook is perfectly content to break Bob's trust because it knows that Bob can't totally run away from it. They're still stuck in the same school together. But, more importantly, Facebook *WANTS* Bob to twist Facebook around and tell it stuff that it'll spread to everyone. And it's fine if Bob stops telling Facebook the most intimate stuff, as long as Bob keeps telling Facebook stuff that it can use to gain social stature.

Why? No one makes money off of creating private communities in an era of "free." It's in Facebook's economic interest to force people into being public, even if a few people break up with Facebook in the process.

Perhaps this exploitation of relationships will be what drags the collective consciousness into the crucible.

The shrinking number of active bloggers that once were counted among my unspoken social graph is also evidence of this fatigue. It's hard at times for me to imagine just how many posts I read and wrote during 2006 and 2007. Now I can go for days and weeks without corresponding with these erstwhile net friends, perhaps validating just how easily friendships can dissolve online.

Still, I don't think the friends I made writing here could be discarded purely as shallow. Indeed, the conversations we had online were deeper than what is usually found on a Facebook wall. We were struggling with big questions on our relationships, perhaps things that we weren't ready to share with friends in our real lives. As for me, it was more of a testament about the lack of depth in my real-life friendships, which I let subside horribly during the deterioration of my marriage.

What matters now is that I continue to work on building real life friendships where I can be my authentic self, finally accepting that by living in the real, I must let go of the promise of many for the rewards of deeper, and fewer, friendships.

Late Night Listening XXXVII: Darker Days

One of the things I love about my Friday and Saturday night radio shows is that they introduce me to so many new things. I heard this gem from Widespread Panic on WTTS-FM's Groove Show.

This song does a good job of capturing the mood I've been in since I went back to work. Somber, drained, yet hopeful that lighter days will return.

Dark day program – pen to page
Nothing’s broken – show our age
Feed the flame – tears enrage
Wait till morning to face the day

Now we’re toiling over
Thoughts and mixed emotions
Hard to really see
What’s lying underneath
Like a roller coaster
Up and down just floating
Touch the grass and leaves
Faces in the trees

Kick ‘em over – the darkened days
Tip ‘em over – the darkened days
Door is open – light the way

So what's got me in this funk? I think it's a culmination of many things, some of it is valid concern, part of it is just the pain of going through changes.

The snow and bitter cold has been a drain on my energy, and that's just the start.

In the wee hours of Sunday, Jan 3, we had an outage caused by a runaway process on a key server, which caused a cascade of server failures. My systems engineer, support engineer, and I spent two and a half hours on IM and phone trying to untangle the mess.

I started of the week by working at home. I had my daughters over the weekend, and as Sunday was drawing to a close, my older daughter was starting to look tired and droopy. By the time they got into the tub for bath, she said, "I don't know if I'm going to puke," which is her way of saying, "Get met to the toilet. STAT!" She got sick two or three times before the night was over.

STBX's first day at her new job was on Monday, and she had no place for the kids to stay with the older daughter being sick, so upon learning the the older daughter had gotten sick, she asked me whether I would be able to work from home. Since the meetings I had on my plate could be done by phone, I agreed to do so. The girls stayed an extra night, and they enjoyed having an extra dash of daddy time before they went back to school.

STBX's schedule is going to be variable these first couple of weeks because she's still in training, but once things settle down, she will be working three days a week with 12-shifts. One of those days will be on the weekend, which will coincide with when I will have the girls.

I came back to work having to deal with the president in a tizzy similar to that meltdown back in November. She was bent out of shape by problems that were being encountered by the three biggest customers, and she had a list of things in mind that she wanted fixed.

She tried to blunt the criticism that this was falling back into the trap of wasting development resources to mollify complaints of a few customers by making the hand-waving argument that if these customers are running into it, then other customers are, which isn't really the case.

There was a meeting of with members of the client services on these issues. Prior to the meeting, I asked for the raw data upon which the complaints had been based along with some narratives on the genesis of the problems. What emerged was a picture of scattered data points and bad analysis.

The more I work with the president, the more I am reminded of Master Shake from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, who had the unique capacity for drawing the least reasonable conclusions given a set of facts (c.f. Master Shake's analytical capabilities in Bus of the Undead).

My team wasn't happy because the technical solutions were being formulated and presented to us without our input, which was different from what we had done in the past, where we were given a description of what problems we were trying to solve, and then our team determined the technology to address the needs.

During the meeting, I worked to point out in places where the customer's complaints were caused by the inability to properly set up and manage customer expectations. When we brought on these larger customers, there was no agreement with the clients on what metrics would be used to determine success, and so we had fallen into a trap where our good standing with the client was imperiled by whatever measure they chose to focus on for the moment, an that was definitely happening in each case.

We managed to eliminate many of the proposed solutions, but the president was adamant that we didn't have enough time to do an analytic approach, modifying individual parameters and waiting to see if they had the expected effect. She wanted to make all the changes and right away. My counterargument to that was that by making all of the changes, we stood to gain little knowledge regardless of success or failure. She refused to budge. We have a project planning meeting Monday afternoon where we're supposed to start drawing up the to-do list for the next few weeks. I suspect this will be a doozy as well.

If there is any hope in all of this, it's that the VP we hired at the beginning of December has been gathering hard data and is starting to see the processes, or lack thereof, that wind up hurting us. Our department has been very open to providing him with cost data on our production environment and advocating areas where we saw opportunities for improvement through automation. From his preliminary findings, it looks like he could succeed in making the president aware of the true costs of perpetual fire fighting.

Some other things that have been going on... Been working my way through another round of resumes submitted via online ads and a posting the CEO put on a business networking site. We've also got a big management strategic planning meeting coming up that will take up the time of all department heads for two full days.

Changes on the personal front with respect to STBX's new job include me getting up really early one day a week to get the daughters ready for the school bus and preschool. My nights out remain unchanged, but on Wednesdays I have to pick up the kids from SBTX's friend, whom we're paying to watch the kids. The cost of that has been something of a stressor for me, but STBX's insurance is much cheaper than mine, so she will be putting the kids on her plan. All in all, I suspect it will balance itself out, but there's a part of me that's worried about making all the ends meet.

2am... Back from Fountain Square

Made it home from the music venue safe and sound. Last alcohol was consumed at 10 pm, so I was not even so much as buzzing after the Born Again Floozies finished up their last number.

All in all, it was quite a night. For a mere $15 + small convenience fee, I saw four local acts made up of some of the city's most talented and creative musicians. I wound up buying some CDs from the merchandise table. I'm glad I pushed myself into going, and I think this will motivate me to get out and see some other local music performances in the year to come.

My only regrets... First was showing up at 8:30ish. I figured that there wouldn't be many people there, but many of the good tables were taken. I wound up sitting towards the back. Second, although I had a great time with the music, the New Year celebration was hard going alone. I felt like the grade school playground again, where I was the odd kid out who didn't really relate to others.

Loneliness anxiety is painful for me. Very painful. I need to dig up my readings on this topic because I am far from transcendence in this area.

Late Night Listening XXXVI: I Went out Tonight Edition

The year, and arguably a decade, now come to a close. Three and a half years have passed since the events leading to this blog took place. I can't see myself ever wanting to return to that life. Yet, the last year or so has felt like a wandering in the wilderness, a time to shake out the remains of an life before moving on to Canaan.

I have visions of what a life after marriage looks like, but I have struggled with the inertia of making it a reality. Maybe there is a part of me that feels guilty for wanting these things. Or perhaps it is fear that some unexpected negative karmatic event will visit itself upon my life, making it impossible to get where I hope to go.

Indeed I have seen shades of such things in the past year or so. STBX's extended unemployment. The major breakdown of her van. My dad's hospitalization and his further deterioration of health.

I have not come to terms with Loss. This is an awareness that I have gained in recent days. I reflect on past experiences... unreliable parents, untimely deaths of relatives during times of celebration. I think the message I have submliminally garnered from these things is that there is no joy in life that could be so utterly destroyed by an indifferent, or even sadistic, divinity.

I keep the feelings of hurt buried well, but sometimes they come back to haunt me. Sometimes it is late at night when I am alone. Sometimes it happens when I see narratives of others' losses, even in cartoons like Up and The Pricess and the Frog. My daughters must think I'm nuts for bursting out in tears.

It's during these dark moments when I realize that my attachment to this world is tenuous, driven not by love for this world, but rather the sobering awareness that I have commitments to fulfill before my time here is through.

And so I bide my time here, ensuring that my children do not do without a father in their lives. Getting lost in the Flow of work helps me to escape this sorrow temporarily. Indeed the lost self awareness is the closest I can come to resolving the Absurdist Dilemma.

I cannot work through this stagnation alone. I need to reconnect with a greater community, someplace I can feel welcome. I don't know where that is, but I know that I cannot find it by staying at home. I need to accept that Loss will come again, and that the avoiding the pain by avoiding life will mean that I have no life.

To this end, I am forcing myself to go out tonight to a music venue I have never been to. To the best of my knowledge, I will know no one. The self consciousness has been weighing on me. Can I be happy in being alone in a crowd of many? Can I open myself to the possibility of meeting someone new, without indifference to the possibility of rejection? Can I be brave enough to be who I am regardless? It is a raw test of differentiation, self soothing in the face of projected exclusion.

I will go, and I will be.

Late Night Listening XXXV: First Day of Winter Edition

I don't think there has been a time in my life where this song has been more relevant than now.



The past month has been rough for me. Shorter days and colder weather usually don't help my spirits, but this year I couldn't even bring myself to listen to anything remotely Christmas themed until today, when I finally tuned in to the XM Pops channel to listen to chorales.

I don't think I'm turning into a Scrooge. I make a distinction between that spirit which is pure and good and rightly represents the season and the commercialism and the compulsion that drives peoples to misery in the quest of doing things that are believed to keep others happy.

I was generous with gifts to my employees, and I took them out for lunch on the day of the final release. I have been active in selecting and purchasing gifts for the kids. I have donated freely to charities, and I've even tried to set a good example for my daughters, teaching them to put money in the bell ringers' kettles.

I know that workaholism has been a recurring theme in posts here, but my funk isn't really a work/life balance problem. It's more like an everything else/me balance issue. I've been spending way too much time handling requests from others that I've neglected to tend to my own needs.

The condition of my house had deteriorated into an embarrassing mess over the past month. The family room had been cluttered with the girls' toys and art supplies. My kitchen table once again reached critical mass with bills and junk mail. I was behind on laundry, and nary a dish was clean. I hit rock bottom this past weekend and finally rolled up my sleeves, getting the house straightened up. The bathroom could use some work, and I still have an unruly pile of note pads from work, but the day-to-day stuff is caught up once again.

On the work front, we had a development cycle that ran between Thanksgiving and the middle of last week. As sometimes happens, some items required way more work than what was anticipated. There were even a couple of things that we hadn't anticipated working on. There was a lot of client side work, too, so I had to step up and code some JavaScript. There were even a couple of Bozo items that came up from some of our high maintenance clients.

The last two releases involved going into overtime with test completion times in the late evening. Just about four hours before the first release, our hosting provider had a power issue that wound up taking out 3/8 of our server capacity for a couple hours. The other release had to be delayed by a day to make sure that must have features were implemented.

On top of this, I was busy trying to find a new developer. After revisiting the resume pile, I picked out five candidates for consideration. One of the interviews lasted a mere six minutes because they weren't aware we were a Linux shop and they had no desire to learn that. The other four made it to the point where they got the mini project assignment. One of them didn't submit a response. The other three had problems serious enough that I sent them rejection letters.

On the personal front, my daughters and I attended the wedding and reception for my cousin whose mother is the aunt with whom I've had issues in the past. I really didn't want to go because it was back in my hometown, and I feared that I'd have to face and talk to people about my situation. In a small town like that, there isn't much respect for boundaries. Fortunately, most of the people there I didn't know, so I was able to remain in obscurity.

STBX asked me to work from home on the 11th because our younger daughter had a fever, so she couldn't go to her sitter. STBX had a full calendar that day, complete with a test for the secretary training course she had been taking and driving her mother up to a clinic to see a doctor. The doctor's visit ran way over, and her mom got sick on some medicine that she had taken, so I wound up staying late with the kids, missing the company Christmas party.

Then on the 16th, she asked me to take the day off to take the younger daughter to the pre-school co-op for her last day of school there. After about a month of elevated drama, STBX decided she couldn't take it anymore. The school's finances are a mess, and the executive director has been trying to pin the blame on STBX's close friend, who served as the co-op president the previous year and as treasurer the year before. They submitted complaints to the county prosecutor, who looked at the claims and decided there wasn't enough evidence to file charges.

When STBX found out what all had been going on, she was livid, so much so that she stopped taking our younger daughter to class. On some days, the younger daughter didn't go at all. On others, she was taken by the sitter.

It suffices to say that my day at the co-op was awkward. One of the mothers asked me whether there was anything they could do to change our minds. I said that I wasn't sure about the circumstances of the withdrawal and that I only wrote the tuition checks. My younger daughter volunteered during circle time that she was going to a different school after this.

The irony of all of this is that the co-op had been a social underpinning for STBX. For the past four years, she had been on the board, chaired fund raising efforts, had served as president, and had baked countless items. One of the things that had weighed on my reluctance to push forward with the divorce was that I didn't want her to have to pull the younger daughter out of school because she would have a full-time job. But now, it is a moot point.

I am still struggling with isolation. There's a part of me that wants to get out and connect with others, yet there is inertia. There are feelings of guilt that I can't quite explain other than I feel like it's wrong for me to have fun before I'm fully divorced, so I am stuck in limbo.

I have been listening to some local programs that promote local music acts, and I caught word of a parody lounge act that was going to be backed by a big band orchestra for a Christmas show at a popular jazz venue. I wanted to go badly, but I couldn't bring myself to go alone.

I ran a "strictly platonic" ad on CL a week prior to the show to see if anyone wanted to go along. I got one reply from a woman from the northern part of the state whose life I would find was rife with drama and lacking in reliable transportation. Another was from someone who planned to go to the show and said I should go alone regardless. On Friday, when I had resigned myself to going alone, I found that all seats were sold out for both shows.

If there is any consolation from this experience, it is that I will get another chance to see the lounge act, sans big band, on New Year's Eve at a great place on my side of town. So I've committed to that night by purchasing a ticket up front. At least I can take comfort in knowing that I won't be spending my New Year's Eve in isolation.

Three years ago, I used the phoenix as a metaphor for the self dissolution that I was undergoing in the big job search of 2006-7 and the collapse of my marriage. The phoenix certainly rose from the ashes on the career front, but my social life still lies dormant. The hiatus is taking a toll on my spirit, and I fear that if I don't take decisive action to break through this year, I may not be able to recover. My gut is that I'm going to have to build a social graph from scratch.

Just as a Scrabble player whose current set of tiles allows no useful word combination, I must cast them back and draw anew if I am to make progress.

Thoughts on Thanksgiving 2009

Saw this e-card in referenced in an e-mail newsletter today. I couldn't help but laugh and share the sentiment.



Before I descend into the navel gazing stuff, I want to offer up a list of things for which I am thankful this year:

• My older daughter has had a good transition to grade school and finds joy in learning from a teacher she loves.


• Both of my daughters find so much joy in being creative.


• My dog of eight years is still as healthy and happy as ever.


• I received a promotion that has given me a chance to grow and provide better for my daughters.


• My department has continued to do so well in getting projects done on time with high quality code.


• I have public transportation nearby that can get me to work.


• The DJs of WTTS-FM have helped me keep my sanity, especially Todd Berryman and Brad Holtz.


• Amazon MP3, for making it so easy to locate and purchase music that I hear on my satellite radio.


• The Mozilla Foundation, Yahoo, and Google, for providing tools that make web development fun.


• Web comics like Basic Instructions, xkcd, and Dinosaur Comics, for giving me reasons to smile.


• For a number of friends, who shall remain anonymous, who have helped put smiles on my face.

As I did last year, I took a trip up to the north burbs to visit with my brother and his family. I wasn't all that enthusiastic about going.

I can't seem to get past this mental energy barrier that makes the thought of any family gathering extremely painful. It's not that I dislike my relatives, but there are some things about their behavior patterns that make interaction as grating as it is predictable, especially my mother and my aunt. Add to that the continuing cloud of my marital breakdown, and there's not a lot to get excited about.

Fortunately, so much of the conversation centered around my cousin's wedding next weekend that some of the old patterns were disrupted for this year. My aunt didn't seem to be as ready to rehash the old stories about my behavior as a two year-old for the umpteenth time. My mom wasn't ranting about how biased the Peacock Network's commentators are against the collegiate football team of Universitas Dominae Nostrae a Lacu and whether they should fire the coach.

Still, after everyone had left, my sister-in-law tried to get me to talk about the divorce, wondering where things stood. I gave some basic information... we were still technically married... we'd be filing in the new year... STBX is taking a unit secretary class... we were still civil.

She asked me if I had done any dating and whether anyone had tried to fix me up with someone. I told her that I hadn't and that I had intentionally stayed off of the social networks because I am not ready to reconnect with old acquaintances. I'm pretty sure that if I did have a profile, it would show my status as "It's Complicated". Moreover, I don't think I would respond well to one of those retrosexual, "You know, I had a thing for you way back when... but I never said anything about it."

I think she's still very curious about why the marriage broke down. I have been very quiet on the events leading up to it. Last year she told me that my mother had speculated about the sexual orientation of STBX, so I can only imagine what sorts of narratives that they have constructed since then.

My daughters are staying with me tonight because I have the day off tomorrow, and STBX has to get up early for her class. I'm not sure what we'll do. I've thought about taking them to the light ceremony show downtown tomorrow evening, but it's supposed to be cold and yucky, and for the most part they would be cooped up in my office until it was time for the lights to be switched on, so we might have a movie night instead. Once they are a bit bigger, I'd love to take them to see that show.

There has been less tension with my team than there was a few weeks ago. We managed to get commitments worked out for the "clean up" development cycle, and out of that came the fulfillment of all but the dumbest requests. Still, there are times when my employees express concern about where the company is headed. One thing that left the team rankled was that in lieu of our standard company meeting, where there is a recap of goals and how we met them, the President decided to make it a form of a quiz show, with questions created by managers based on things that their departments did for the month of October.

My boss has assured me that we as a company will dig deeper into that question at the beginning of the year when we do a strategic planning session. The CEO is very interested in opening up the architecture so that third parties can develop widgets and apps that integrate with the application. The President is fixated on totally revamping the system that is used to adjust the look and feel of content pages.

Nov. 17 was an awful day for the systems engineer and I as we had the worst outage that we've ever seen in our collective experiences. He was careless with the management of directories checked out under revision control. Instead of using the appropriate deletion command and committing the change, he used a standard file system command to delete the files. When he updated with the repository, the obsolete files were restored and pushed into production, causing a failure in our caching and bringing the application to a cascading failure. After getting things fixed, we had a long post mortem and worked on some systems and code level changes to keep that component from being a single point of failure.

The past couple of weeks have included budgeting meetings, and I have seen some tension between the CEO and the President there as well. The CEO, noting that we are getting a total of a million in funding from a state-sponsored fund, said we should aim for the fences and try to grow aggressively. The President is fixated on the goal of being in the black, which was a goal that we missed in November. I don't know all the details of why we missed that, but I suspect that it was because we hired on some new people in the customer service end of things.

At this time, my department will likely get everything I requested, which included big increases for professional development and reference materials. But I've also heard that some departments will get much less than what they requested because they asked for some pretty ungodly increases in their budgets.

The President floated an idea suggested by the company's advisory board -- eliminating salary increases for the entire year, replacing it with a company wide collective bonus based on whether the company met its targets, to be awarded at the end of the year. Given that none of the other departments meet their targets, or do so in a way that is laden with asterisks, I wasn't about to buy into this. I told them that moving the goalposts out from under my team when they have been working under a different compensation reward system would most likely motivate them to look for employment elsewhere.

On the recruiting front, we interviewed someone on site a couple weeks ago, and decided that there were enough red flags to not extend him an offer. I phone interviewed a couple of others who have proved to be promising, but one of them gave up on the sample code exercise when he couldn't get the software working on his computer. The other submitted a good result, so we will probably bring him in either next week or the week thereafter.

Another amusing item from the marketing end of things... Our marketing team decided it wanted to revive dead leads for whom we had offered a price quote. The package essentially offered twice the amount of priced units for the original price quote. All I could think of was some annoying informercial guy screaming, "Check this out! Well give you more of what you didn't want at the price you weren't willing to pay!"

Word came to me late last week that upper management was in the process of putting together an offer to a guy for a VP of Ops. According to the President, he was working for another start up in town that was crumbling because of a bad funding plan, and they saw a real opportunity by "scooping him up."

Never mind that they bypassed the rest of the company's managers in vetting him through a formal interview process. My guess is that this guy is connected in some sense and had the job handed to him. As someone who had to interview and earn jobs without the convenience of connections, I can't imagine just getting a job handed to me, much less feeling good about getting a job like that. Since this role currently doesn't exist within our organization, it's not clear what the org chart will look like this. I did some Google stalking and found out he was not technical, so I hope he won't have jurisdiction over our department.

On a completely unrelated note, I got a promotion from my cell phone carrier for an early upgrade, and being a fan of Do-No-Evil, I am falling prey to the siren song of getting a Droid.

Late Night Listening XXXIV: Of Boiling Points and Breakdowns

Before I do the big information dump, let's pull out something out of the ordinary. I heard this unlikely cover on WTTS-FM's Over Easy a month or so ago. I was reminded of it last week while listening to a WICR-FM's Have You Heard?, where they had Sean Baker, a local jazz musician talking about vocal groups, and he brought up his soft spot for the Andrews Sisters.

Heart Of Glass - The Puppini S...

Yeah, I'm a sucker for those harmonies, too. :-)

The last few weeks haven't been very easy on me.

On the work front, my team and I spent most of October working furiously on the last phase of a larger project that has consumed most of our development time since I took over the helm of my department.

It all started last summer when one of our sales reps got in touch with the purveyor of aftermarket vehicle accessories. This guy had a vision for using our application in ways we hadn't envisioned, and scale of some of the usage requirements would tax both the user interface and the back end so heavily that it would surely break both.

The development roadmap was rapidly shifted toward meeting these goals. What we envisioned at the beginning wound up being much of what we implemented, save for one administrative interface and one standard user interface item. We swapped those out for a couple of additional changes requested by the customer, so things balanced out.

The good news is that we met the letter of our commitments to upper management, so we were able to collect on a bonus funded out of money that had been budgeted originally for the employee we let go in early Sept. That money will be coming our way later this month.

The bad news is that one of the changes we made removed a feature that we warned management would go away, and it was explicitly listed in our work items, but the client management person who is the point person with our demanding customer didn't communicate this to him, so he wasn't happy.

Moreover, despite my advice to the President that she needed to communicate this change to Sales in advance, she chose not to follow through with this, so the sales team continued to plug this feature in their demos right up through the day of its removal.

Pile on top of that various observations and complaints for customers to a dysfunctional client management team that doesn't know how to manage such situations effectively, and all of the sudden our department was under pressure from upper management to restore the old feature.

It suffices to say that my team was not happy with this. I pushed back and negotiated a compromise. The old feature would remain dead, but we would extend an existing feature, currently available only to administrator roles, to regular roles but limited to viewing things rather than having the ability to make changes that administrators could.

Of itself, that exchange wasn't awful, but a number of other events started to strain my relationship with the President. We have a standing brief 1:1 status meeting in the afternoon. Normally it's small administrative items that can be taken care of in short order. A new pattern started to emerge last week, where she started to ask me about changes to the application and whether we could fit them in before taking on the next big project.

For about a year and a half, our department has used a project management style that has proven to be very effective. We let management set strategic priorities from an ongoing wish list, and we gradually work down that list developing concrete lists of work items and time commitments. We also have a shorter term planning process that lets us respond to tactical issues, like bugs.

For the most part, we hit our targets, and the execution is the envy of other departments in the organization. Some of the departments have established "cargo cult" style practices that emulate what we're doing but they lack some key ingredients -- one is they don't make actionable commitments, and the second is that there is no accountability for failure to meet them.

Anyway, the nature of the requests from the President started to look like ways to circumvent that process because they asked for specific things rather than asking us to solve classes of problems. Almost all of the requests were specific to either a single customer or a small group of customers. At least two of them were driven either by personal connections between the President and the client. She also seemed to be pushing for commitments to resolve them without me discussing the details with my team.

After about five days of this, my team was starting to wonder what the deal was with upper management. Were they abandoning longer term roadmap items for revenue chasing one-offs? Two of my three charges were seriously concerned about the future of the company because they had seen similar patterns in prior jobs and weren't happy about it.

On Wednesday this past week, I met with the President and had a long talk about what I was seeing, offering a willingness to work with her to meet company goals but needing a better sense that these smaller items were going to be addressed through our usual procedures, which ensure accountability on both sides. It was a useful discussion, and I got in writing a concrete plan for dealing with both the short term issues that had been occupying her as well as the need for longer term vision.

The week ended with a timetable for getting these things straightened out, which left both my team and I in a better emotional state.

Another recurring battle I have been dealing with is the influence of consultants who claim to know how to get search engine rankings. This is field that is rife with poseurs, hacks, and quacks. Advice is dispensed with handwaving and minimal statistical backing, sometimes justified by claims that they got high rankings for their clients. Most of these people have no background in computer science, let alone understanding of network protocols and indexing algorithms.

My employer has been very concerned with how consultants view our application, be it as something that is of no use to them or as a direct competitor. Nonetheless, local and national consultants both have weighed in and given bad advice with authoritative voices. As a result, I've spent more time than what I would have liked researching claims and determining their credibility.

It's gotten to the point where I think we need to invest resources on our own independent research using controlled experiments. Much of the more exotic advice we have received would require major application modifications, and if the techniques were later ruled as disreputable by the search engines, all that work would have been for naught.

I've also decided that my next dream job would be to go work for the spam detection folks at Do No Evil and work to ferret out the shady tactics these guys ply and destroy them, but that's just my Aspiness showing through.

Job applications have started to come in over the past month, and I've been doing phone interviews. The quality of developers around here is really hit-and-miss. Out of four candidates, there has been only one which has been worth bringing in on site. (side note to Drunken Housewife: I suspect that I might be just as picky as Sober Husband about screening, which could make this painful)

STBX started a six-week Unit Secretary training class with a local hospital a couple weeks ago. The hope is that this will help her get hired on there, but there is no guarantee of employment, and the cost of the training is being paid entirely by her.

On the kids front, our older daughter is doing well in school. Some days she has problems with some homework items if the task is unfamiliar, but once she gets familiar she does really well. She is really into writing. This weekend, she has been working a composition about what Thanksgiving foods she likes.

I took off early on the Friday before Halloween to attend both kids' Halloween parties. Their trick-or-treat choices for the older and younger daughter were Batgirl and Daphne from Scooby Doo respectively.

This morning, I took the girls up to a dinner theater on the northwest side of town for a children's performance of Jack and the Beanstalk. One of the preschool moms works at the theater and arranged for a good discount on admission. They both loved the watching the show, and they got to get the cast's autographs afterward.

Had a bit of a scare earlier this past week with my car. I drove out on Monday evening to get something from the grocery, and my car started running really rough, so badly I feared that I wouldn't make it home. I took it to the mechanic, and it turned out to be ignition issues. I needed a new coil and new plugs. I also had them fix a slow coolant leak I had been deferring for several months. It turned out to be a bad hose. Set me back about $480, but the car is really running well now.

To speak to Anais' recurring question on my sex life. I'm still keeping a low profile on such things until we get the divorce taken care of, modulo a few encounters of the type described by ChelseaGirl, which happened back in early February (blushes).

I've been dealing the lack of touch by getting massages, which have become much more affordable with my increased income. That's been especially helpful in dealing with the stress, but it doesn't entirely address the loneliness anxiety that crops up from time to time.

I also wanted to thank everyone who commented on my post about the "I would be honored to be your first" woman. It was good to get some other perspectives and finally get that whole story out there. It's a secret I had carried around in my mind for some time. Bonus points go to Desmond for pointing out that the song is a cover.

Speaking of secrets, I was amused by a post from Tech Crunch a few weeks back. There is now a microblogging site for people to post about their relationships. The site's tag line pretty much sums up the nature of the Diggersphere -- "It stays between us (and the web)." :-)

Late Night Listening XXXIII: I Should Have Forgotten by Now, but I Haven't

I'm going to indulge in some self-absorption tonight, sort of a Post Secret confessional, extended dance mix version.

Let's set the mood by pulling out a copy of a forgotten 90s hit...



... my mind goes back to 18 years ago...

    October 1991
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
       1  2  3  4  5
 6  7  8  9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30 31

... a Thursday night, just before the midterm break at Universitas Dominae Nostrae a Lacu... a gathering at my apartment. A couple days before, I had disclosed to you and another classmate that I had not yet had my "first time"... While we were alone on the balcony, you spoke to me with an admiring voice and riveting eye contact. You took my hands, holding a glass of wine, into yours and told me that you'd be honored to be my first. We never found the time or place to give you a chance to live up to those words, but we did dance to this song at the senior bar later that night.

I will never know the motivations behind that conversation. By your own admission in a conversation a couple weeks later, I would learn that the statements were just "mental gymnastics". The time in between, I experienced feelings of confusion and euphoria... things a man at the age of 22 should not have felt. For the first time in my life, I thought someone had found me to be truly desirable. I thought, spoke, and wrote things that were truly foolish. Indeed, I was your fool for a night.

If I could set the time machine and find myself on 10/16/1991, I would slap myself silly and say, "Don't go on that balcony tomorrow night. Go out, drink, try to have fun, get a cab. Just stay away from her."

(recovers composure)

I hate that this specter lurks in the reaches of my memory. It's a petty grudge, certainly not worth carrying for all of these years. Most people get past these things and wind up forgetting they ever happened.

Over our time up there, she went on to shack up with another classmate for a couple of years. I know from Google that after earning her doctorate she married another grad student who would earn his pay writing about politics, sociology, and food. I think she's since divorced and remarried, living out in the Mountain timezone. I doubt if she remembers me at all.

At the core, it really isn't about her. It's about a set of beliefs about myself that I have struggled so hard to bury, but they keep resurfacing, like a band of tireless zombies. I am not good looking... I am uninteresting... I lack some unnamed essence that makes women crave men... I cannot satisfy a woman...

To my credit the list used to be much longer, laden with lots of negatives about my potential as a professional. My latest job has taken me past those feelings. I am a much more productive and skilled person as a result.

I sometimes buy myself respite with mental affirmations or rationalizations... I'm unique... I don't think like most, so I won't be compatible with most... I need to live somewhere else... I need to be at peace with myself before I can relate to others. I need time to heal from the changes I've been through... There so many suffering so much worse... Other times, the loneliness overwhelms me, and I wallow in self pity.

So tonight, I fess up to this intermittent replay of insecurity and resentment, hoping that by committing it to text, giving it form, it will be exorcised from my soul and imprisoned in these paragraphs. Rather than seeking to remind myself of past injustices visited upon me, I should live in the here-and-now, doing my part to be loving and just to others.