An Electric Rant

With gas at well over $4/gallon, a 120 mile/day commute and a car with 177,000 miles on it, it should be no surprise that I'm shopping for a new car. I've always loved cars - the engineering, the speed, the wind in your face and the g-forces as you accelerate fast, corner hard and brake even harder (like when you see the radar gun around that blind bend in the road). I fit right in with the Top Gear guys in England - I would give anything to be The Stig.

This is a very bad time to be a car nut. Engineers are making better cars than ever before - they look great, handle great, accelerate well and are vastly more comfortable and better built than any previous generation of cars. Sounds great, right? How could this possibly be a bad time to be car shopping??

Unfortunately, the other side of this wonderful time more than cancels the great work of those engineers.

Let's start with the promise of eliminating the high cost of gas with an electric or hybrid car. Most of the major car manufacturers now have hybrid models, and more all-electric cars are appearing. By far, the most popular car on the road in SoCal is now the Toyota Prius. Remember my praise of the looks, handling, acceleration and build quality of new cars? Yeah - forget that when talking about the Prius. They are butt-ugly. They accelerate like a hippo on a moped. The suspension is soft and the seats are hard & uncomfortable - and worst of all, they are just crappy little cars with poor fitting plastic and a cheap feel. If it wasn't for the "Hybrid" badge on the back, they wouldn't be able to sell 2 of those little turds a year.

But, you say, they are a Hybrid, so it's all worth it because of the great gas mileage, right??

The 2012 Prius is rated at 51 MPG city and 48 MPG highway. Hey that's pretty good! Right???

Well, yes - and no...

There is no question that the hybrid dramatically improves the MPG during city driving. The Toyota Yaris, the other small econobox from Toyota, is rated at 30 MPG city. If you drive primarily on city streets, a hybrid is a great choice - but who in SoCal drives only on city streets? On the highway, the Toyota Yaris is rated at 38 MPG. The Prius is certainly better, but the gap is much narrower. Let's do some math - if you drive 20K highway miles a year (that's well above average), and gas is $4.25/gallon (that's above the current average) and you drive a Prius, then you will use 417 gallons and spend $1,772 on gas. With the Toyota Yaris, you will use 526 gallons of gas and spend $2,236. The savings after 1 year is therefore $464. After 10 years (assuming the price of gas stays the same - admittedly very unlikely!) you will have saved $4,640. According to Edmunds.com, a base model Prius with typical options sells for $24,711 and a base model Yaris with similar options is $15,838. That's a difference of $8,873!!! Factor in the additional interest cost if you finance the purchase, and the cost premium for buying a hybrid is even more.

Now, I think both the Toyota Prius and Yaris are crappy, ugly little cars. I want better! Go big or go home! Staying in the Toyota line, let's move up to the Lexus CT200H vs the Lexus IS250. Once again, city driving is no contest - the hybrid CT200H is rated at 35 MPG in the city compared to the IS250 rating of 19 MPG. On the highway, the CT200H is rated at 34 MPG and the IS250 at 28 MPG - a difference of only 6 MPG - and less than the difference between the Prius and Yaris. The savings in gas for the luxury hybrid works out to be $536, and the price difference between the two similarly equipped Lexus is $3,553. OK, so moving up to the premium line made the hybrid appear to be a bit more financially viable - but only because the total cost you are spending on your transportation is now much, much higher - and it's not like the hybrid is actually saving you very much more money - the savings is still very small compared to the price premium. In terms of performance, the hybrid shows it's real weakness - the CT200H does 0-60 in 8.7 seconds, while the IS250 can get there in 7.5 seconds. The IS250 also has better braking from 60-0 at 113 feet compared to the CT200H at 125 feet.

How about the new all electric cars? Good luck. The Nissan Leaf has a range of 73 miles. That's not a misprint - you need to charge the batteries every 73 miles. It will take 8+ hours to charge the car from a standard 110v electrical outlet. The price for that much inconvenience? $36,000 for a base model. But at least electric cars have excellent acceleration, right? Nope - the Nissan Leaf does 0-60 in 10 seconds, slower than a $15,000 Yaris. The Chevy Volt is one of the hot new electric cars - it is not a pure electric - it also has a small gasoline engine, so it is really a hybrid - but unlike the Prius, the Volt can be driven purely on electric power, and can be recharged from a electrical outlet, so it can be driven without using any fuel - as long as you only drive less than 50 miles between charges. Once you are out of battery juice, you will run entirely on the gas engine, and your mileage will be in the 30-35 MPG range. The cost of the Volt with typical options: $42,675!!!

Compare all of this nonsense to a nicely equipped "non-green" all-gas Hyundai Sonata. The Sonata looks good (to me), is very well built, very comfortable inside, handles well on the road and is quick - 0-60 MPH in 7.9 seconds. The Sonata's 2.4L engine is rated at 24 MPG city and 35 MPG on the highway. A typically equipped base model Sonata is a very affordable $20,635. That's over $4K less than the crap-box Prius. I'm sorry - I love the planet and all, but I am NOT going to be sucked-in to the marketing hype and eco-pressure to buy an over-priced, under-performing and ugly little smug machine like the Prius, and I would much rather spend 10 minutes at the gas pump rather than wait 8+ hours for my batteries to recharge so I can go get a gallon of milk.

And that's the real problem for car lovers today. We have to look like social misfits just to make the sound, logical decision of NOT buying a hybrid or electric car. I'm tired of listening to co-workers who think they made a great decision in buying a Prius, and I'm REALLY tired of having to weave my way through the sea of smug Prius drivers poking along on the freeway with no concern for getting the hell out of the way of people who have chosen to drive a car that doesn't need to plod down the road like a hippie microbus on the way to a Grateful Dead concert.

I think I'll wait for this to be the electric car I can buy...

 

For all you Prius drivers out there - do me a favor - look in your rear view mirror occasionally, and if you see me back there, get the hell out of the way!!! Thank you.

The Big Lie

Is honesty a dead concept inside corporations?  Why do managers lie to their employees?  Is it all just to protect the company against litigation?  "Open and honest feedback" is a catch phrase in the majority of corporate statements on ethics and values - but I believe the reality is that the vast majority of corporate leaders refuse to give *any* feedback - and when they do - it will be (at best) corp-speak: legally blessed yet completely meaningless.  At worst, it will be a complete fabrication - a lie to satisfy the employee and make them shut-up and get out of their office.

I recently read a blog (sorry - I didn't save the link) by an HR recruiter that said that the primary reason many companies do not provide feedback to job candidates is that often that feedback simply starts an argument with the job candidate and leads to job candidates responding with an abusive reply.  I'm sure that's true - especially when the interview was as ridiculous as some of the interviews I have been on - and you then find out that it was a waste of time because they promoted an internal candidate or they give you a BS reason that is an obvious brush off.  Of course, some candidates are also just jerks - and they would blast back at any failure to be hired.

However, is that really a good excuse for a company not living by their own corporate values?  Perhaps they should change the corporate values to say "Open and honest communication, when it is convenient and doesn't lead to conflict."  In addition, even a system generated "thank you for applying, however you have not been selected for this role" is FAR better than simply providing nothing back to the candidate.  How rude do you have to be to invite a candidate in for a face-to-face interview, then simply never respond to the candidates phone calls or emails asking for a status?  Are you really that busy, or do you simply have so little thought for another human being?  I suspect the latter - because job candidates are not really people - they are just resumes or names in a database.

Of course, it's not just the recruiting process where honesty is dead.  Lack of honest communication runs rampant through organizations.  I pity the poor employee who actually believes the senior executive when they give the "I have an open door policy" speech.  The typical senior executive wants to hear only "It's done" from their employees.  If you are part of the inner circle of a corporate leader, you can see the planning that goes into the half-truths, misdirection and spin-doctoring at the top - of course, you won't see the planning that goes into the spin applied to *you*...

The typical justification for not being honest when speaking to employees is that managers "must do what's in the best interest of the company."  If they actually told the employees that they will all be replaced within a year with lower cost offshore contractors, the employees would all bail and the corporation would grind to a halt.  So, the managers lie.  They say that the future looks bright.  They say that you are a key member of the team that will lead the company into the future.  They say that there are no plans to cut staff.  They say these things at the same time they are working with HR to eliminate your position, meeting with candidates to "upgrade" you for another resource and/or working with offshore staffing firms to move your job to Bangalore, Bucharest or Shenzhen.

Once upon a time, when a company wanted to use a different technology, the project would include training for the existing IT staff so that they would be able to work with and support the new technology.  Now, the existing staff is simply replaced with new resources already trained in the new technology.  If there are still older legacy systems that also need to be supported, contractors are hired until those systems can be replaced.  The IT staff is rotated with the systems, and since the typical life of an IT system is 3-5 years, that is also the maximum time you can expect to keep your corporate IT job.

OK - so looking at this from the CEO's position, what's wrong with this scenario?  He's getting the best IT resources for the lowest cost, and he doesn't have to continuously spend money to train his internal staff.  After all, once they are trained, they might just leave the company for another gig anyway.

I see several issues with this short-sighted strategy:

1. No functional business knowledge continuity - It is tempting to believe that the tech geeks in your IT department don't need to understand how your business operates.  That is dead wrong.  The more the technical staff knows about how the business operates, the better your systems will match your true business requirements.  Translating functional business requirements into technical system designs is the absolute key to any successful technology project.  It is the difference between happy & efficient users, and an expensive pile of useless HW & SW.  Fail to recognize this at your peril.

2. Failure to form a Business-IT partnership - If you have fallen into the fallacy of believing your IT staff doesn't need to understand your business, then it must follow that you believe all business knowledge must come from the business users.  Congratulations, what you have just established is the typical Business vs IT organization where neither understands the other's world, and the business sees IT as simply a group of techies that need to be told what to do.  Conversely, IT sees the business as demanding technophobes that have no clue what they are asking IT to build.  There can be no partnership without understanding, and there can be no understanding without knowledge being shared in both directions.  This requires the ability to build long-term relationships at the employee level - not just at the executive table.

3. Lack of Innovation - It's all well and good to hold the CIO responsible for the long-range IT strategic vision - that's his job.  However, the CIO often does not see the day-to-day technical challenges that are faced by his staff.  It is very common for these daily challenges to drive ideas for improvements in processes and systems that represent the source of innovation within the IT department.  If your staff is composed of specialists in your current technology and augmented with low-cost contractors, you may very well have limited the amount of innovation that will be generated by your staff.  An employee looking at a maximum of a 3-5 year gig has very little incentive to maximize efficiency - particularly if that efficiency means a new technology that will ultimately result in them being replaced with another specialist.

4. No commitment - You are simply fooling yourself if you think your employees are unaware that a new technology means the end of their job.  They absolutely do know - they know because they are not receiving training on the new system, and their role on the implementation project is limited to "data conversion and migration" or "legacy system interfaces".  It will only be a personal desire to do good work that will keep your staff motivated.  You haven't earned their commitment and, quite frankly, you don't deserve it.  You will blame your project manager and the project team for not hitting their milestones - but really, you should be looking in the mirror to see who is to blame.

I'm not an executive (clearly!) but to me, the possible gains from this type of short-term thinking does not seem worth it.  Not when very expensive, business critical systems and projects are on the line.

There is another solution - don't lie to your employees.  If you believe a new system will mean an employee will be replaced, then be honest with them.  Tell them the end date, and give them an incentive package to stick around and hit that date.  The money is a pittance compared to failing to complete the new project.  Companies want it all - they want their employees to be happy little trolls toiling away in the salt mines, and they also want the ability to sweep them to the gutter when they aren't needed any longer.  But it won't work. Even the flying monkeys knew she was an evil witch.

    
  

The Corporate Noose

Yes, I know its been FAR too long since my last post. I wish I had a really good excuse, like my new job has kept me too busy, or I was traveling on important secret business for the CIA - but alas, the best I can do is admit that I've been spending all of my time playing Mafia Wars on Facebook. It's not even a particularly good game - just a completely mindless distraction. But ENOUGH - I am going to try to keep the words flowing. In this case, I'm sitting in a hotel room in Quincy, MA on a business trip - and between the boredom and the two vodkas I had with dinner, I think I am ready for a new installment of "Bumped His Head". The real question is: Are you ready? Too bad - I really don't care either way...

What is the dress code where you work? Do you even have a dress code? If not, you should thank the gods. I do, and it seriously chaps my hide. I consider "Business Casual" one of the greatest evils in corporate America. It represents much that is wrong with the corporate life, and it symbolizes exactly how idiotic and narrow-minded the vast majority of our world's economic & social leaders really are. But first, a little history lesson...

Most of what we consider modern "formal dress" can be traced to European royalty and their courtesans. Probably the man who most influenced man's modern dress was Beau Brummell. Brummell was an Englishman from the late 18th century who is considered the father of English "dandyism". Brummell, who was a friend of the future King George IV, was himself NOT a member of the royal class, but had many associate and friends within the socialites of England & France. In fact, Brummell was most famous for simply being famous, and for being considered the pinnacle of style - which makes him the 18th century equivalent of Paris Hilton.

Brummell was extremely fastidious about his appearance. He rejected the standard breeches, ruffled collars, powder and wigs of the aristocrats and instead introduced a much more understated dress consisting of close fitting trousers, jacket and a complexly knotted cravat. He also meticulously bathed and groomed himself. It was said that he took 5 hours every day to groom and dress himself, which means that I suspect he didn't have a 1.5 hour commute in L.A. freeway traffic. Dandyism eventually became a social & political statement by non-aristocrats against the upper classes. When the middle class could adorn the epitome of style, they were essentially thumbing their noses at the aristocrats.

Fast forward to the present. Today, the perfectly tailored suit, dress shirt and silk tie is the uniform of the corporate elite. The term "The clothes make the man" is more true today than it has been in the last 30 years. But why? Why are the clothes I wear important to my employer? Am I somehow a smarter or more productive employee because of the color of my pants or the length of my shirt sleeves? Does wrapping my neck in a tightly knotted piece of silk cloth make my thoughts and words more important and worth listening to? According to many corporations, the answer is apparently YES. But I say the answer is a resounding HELL NO!

The late 1990's were a great time for the casual dresser. The tech explosion on the west coast meant that employers were more interested in what you knew and what you could produce rather than how you dressed. Jeans, shorts, sneakers and t-shirts were the standard uniform. Then the tech bubble was popped. The tech worker was once again considered an outcast social misfit that needed to be put into their place by their betters in finance, sales and marketing, and part of that return to power was the return of the corporate "dress for success" mindset. Of course, in my view it was not the tech guys who were responsible for the tech bubble and the crash - it was the finance, sales and marketing dweebs who over-leveraged, over-hyped and over-sold the ideas of the technologists. And for doing that great job - those finance, sales & marketing boneheads became the CFOs & CEOs running today's corporations.

Today, we are struggling to recover from a near economic collapse. A collapse primarily driven by those same finance, sales & marketing leaders. This time they over-leveraged, over-sold and over-hyped the insurance & financial industries. And STILL, they remain in positions to dictate the dress codes and social norms of corporate America. Why? I have no freaking clue. Tell me - when were you happier with your job, your life and your financial future - the late 1990's or today? If your answer is the same as mine - you have those captains of industry to thank.

Remember those old episodes of Bewitched and the Dick Van Dyke show? Old Darin Stevens and Rob Petrie wore their gray flannel suits everywhere. They could be just sitting around the house, and they would still be wearing a suit and tie. Even in the 1960s, did anyone really do that? I can't believe they did then, and I know they don't today. When we think the corporate secret police aren't looking, we wear jeans, shorts, sneakers and t-shirts. We have no problem being seen by our neighbors, friends and family wearing casual clothes - and yet on Monday morning we set aside our own preferences to satisfy the whims of the people in the corner offices.

They say things like "We must project a professional business image" and "It shows respect for our customers" - I say: Bullcrap! It's about control - the ability for an executive to dictate and control every employee in a very personal way. That exercise of power gets them off - and it makes them feel better about their own self-doubts. It makes me wonder what those executives are attempting to compensate for - but I'll let you fill-in your own details. They also use the "slippery-slope" argument to claim that if there wasn't a dress code that employees would show up wearing gangsta' baggies, Hitler costumes and G-strings. I have a simple solution to that - how about we simply let people wear whatever they want AND we let everyone else point at the stupid people and laugh derisively? There's nothing like good 'ol peer pressure to weed out the outliers who haven't got the sense to know the difference between casual and idiotic. Let's face it, there are some people that it just doesn't matter what they wear, they will still end up with their picture on peopleofwalmart.com.

To those who say "What's the big deal, it makes your boss happy, just do it!" I say, you're right, how I'm dressed shouldn't be a big deal - in fact, it shouldn't matter at all! I think what we need is collective courage - the courage to stand up, pull off the corporate noose, put on our jeans, and show the task masters that we will take this idiocy no longer. I'm mad as hell, and I don't think you should take it any more! So - lead the charge - convince all of your co-workers that they should dress however they want every day. Tell your boss to pound sand - make them decide whether wearing slacks and a tie is more important than running the business.

And what became of Beau Brummell? His lifestyle eventually caught up with him. He was buried in debt, and he died alone, penniless and insane from syphilis. That's hot!

High-Tech Worker In A Low-Tech Company, Part Three - The Final Chapter

"Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more."

My good friend Billy Shakespeare dressed weird, but he really knew how to string words together. I sometimes wonder what he would think of blogs, facebook and twitter. I suspect he would have made some hilarious youtube videos. But I digress...

This is the third installment in the continuing remembrances of a high-tech worker in a low-tech company. The first and second chapters were very fun to write, and I hope they were just as fun to read. I suspect this will be the last episode in this theme for a while. As time goes by, the memories (and my brain cells in general) of that period are fading, and quite frankly, I'm simply ready to move on and put that horrendous experience where it belongs - swirling down into the cesspool of my past.

But that's the bad news. The good news is that I *do* have a third episode for your consideration. First, the standard disclaimer:

Disclaimer: Both of these stories are true and personally witnessed by yours truly. None of these are reposts from Snopes or anywhere else. Any similarity to stories you may have read elsewhere should be chalked-up to the fact that there are idiots everywhere and our species is doomed.

Now, I present the finale to this trilogy:

Doing Nothing *Is* Sometimes The Best Move
The Accounting processes used by corporations can be a bit complex - and that's why they spend millions of dollars to purchase and maintain expensive Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, and also why they often have large staffs of trained accounting clerks whose sole job is to use the ERP system to perform the transactions for purchasing, order entry, accounts payable, accounts receivable and all the other financial processes needed to run a $2B+ public company.

Or, you could do what my company did...

The primary requirement to be a member of our accounting staff seemed to be the inability to have any desire to learn. These departments included some of the longest tenured employees in the company - including several people with over 30 consecutive years working at the same jobs. I would like to be able to say that this long experience made them valuable members of their departments - but alas, I can't. What it did was make them completely impervious to any attempts to train them on changes to the systems and processes they used every day. We once needed to make a significant change to the ERP system that included several changes to the processes used by the Purchasing department. As part of this project, we partnered with an extremely experienced group of consultants who were experts in the ERP software we used. One of the first steps in the project was to have the Purchasing department step us through all of their key processes and use the existing ERP system to demonstrate what they did on a daily basis.

During one of these sessions, a Purchasing clerk was going through her operations and came to a step that involved submitting a job to be processed and then waiting for it to complete before moving on to the next step. After the job ran, she started to move to the next step, when one of the consultants suddenly said: "Wait - can you please go back and open the log file from the job you just ran?" The Purchasing clerk had a bewildered look on her face and said "What?" After explaining exactly what the consultant wanted the clerk to do, a file was shown on the screen that contained only one line of text. The consultant said: "That's what I thought, you don't need to run that job, it doesn't do anything." The Purchasing clerks (and their manager) were completely befuddled.

The consultant then went on to explain: "Look at the line in that file. It says 'No records found.' That means that job didn't actually do anything. That is exactly what it should say, because that job doesn't need to be run - it is useless." The Purchasing clerk then said: "But I always run that job, that's the way we've been doing it for years." But, she had absolutely no idea why she had been told to run that job, or what she thought it was supposed to do - all she knew was that it was step #10 in the process and she had been doing this dozens of times a day, every day, for 10 years. If we had not needed to make the system changes, she would *still* be running that job. True story!

Be Prepared!
Has there ever been a medical event as completely oversold by the media as the H1N1 Swine Flu? According to the news reports, we were on the brink of a disaster the likes of which had not been seen since the Black Death. Luckily for the human species, the wildfire has not materialized. In fact, to put the H1N1 pandemic into perspective, the CDC says that in a typical year approximately 36,000 people in the US die from flu-related causes - this is for ALL types of flu. To date, 320 cases of H1N1 have resulted in death in the US - much lower than many other strains of flu. Hmm - that doesn't quite sound like the level of mass carnage the media prepared us for during night after night of hyperbole.

Don't get me wrong - I'm very happy that the disaster has not materialized, and I'm all for the CDC making sure we are fully informed - even if the press completely misinterprets the data and turns it into a hype circus. But, the folks in leadership positions at large corporations are smart enough to cut through the BS and focus on the facts, right?

Then there's the company I worked for...

In the midst of the H1N1 media frenzy, I received an email from one of the mindless butt-kissers that was also my peer in middle management. The email wanted to know if we had developed an emergency IT response plan for the Swine Flu. Emergency IT response plan? WTF? Why would a company that runs restaurants need an "emergency IT response plan" for the Swine Flu? What was this, a scene from Andromeda Strain?

Now, let me be clear, the company operated and franchised restaurants. Those restaurants were essentially autonomous - the franchised restaurants could operate indefinitely without any support from the corporate office, and even the company operated restaurants could (and did) easily operate for days or even weeks without any IT support from corporate. But, apparently, a couple of attention whores in the corporate "risk management" department decided this would be a perfect opportunity to boost their own careers by capitalizing on the media hysteria surrounding H1N1. Like Alexander Haig, they wanted to assure the people that "they would be in control" during this time of crisis.

In my 25+ year career, I had never heard of ANY company having an "emergency IT response plan" for an outbreak of the flu. What's my plan? Well, how about this - we tell people to wash their hands and we muddle through with a short staff for a couple of weeks until the flu passes. There - I'm done. But (of course) it was even worse than this.

Apparently, this was not the first time the "risk management" boys had played this game. They had previously responded the same way during the "Avian Flu" outbreak, and they had actually convinced the IT management to prepare an "emergency IT response plan" specifically for an Avian Flu disaster. It should now be pointed out that since 2003 there have been ~300 confirmed deaths from Avian Flu *worldwide*, and *NONE* in the US. Whew - I'm glad those risk management experts are protecting our company from these disasters!

Good grief - this company had been experiencing declining sales for several years and was bleeding cash while executing a never-ending series of failed marketing campaigns. BUT - they were ready with a plan for how the IT department was going to respond in case 25% of their staff got the chills and diarrhea! True story!

I have no deep-meaning lesson to convey from these two stories. In my humble opinion, these were simply stupid people who were tolerated (and promoted) by equally clueless corporate leadership. I believe it is every thinking human being's duty to expose stupidity. I know it can never be eradicated - but it also should never be tolerated. As Bill Engval says: "Here's your sign."

This trilogy of business brainlessness has been fun - and very cathartic. But at the same time, it makes me incredibly frustrated and sad. Every one of the primary characters in the six stories I have presented is still gainfully employed in the same positions they held at the time I had the misfortune to work with them. As you read this, I'm sure they are merrily committing random acts of idiocy and making some other reasonably intelligent coworker do additional work in order to correct the senseless stupidity. My sympathies go out to those poor souls - I feel your pain!

High-Tech Worker, Low-Tech Company - Round Two

A few weeks ago, I posted about a couple of the technology-challenged folks I encountered as a high-tech worker employed at a low-tech company. At the time, I mentioned that I had many more stories to tell, and I have received quite a few requests to post the next set of tawdry low-tech tales. So, here ya go! Once again I will make the same disclaimer that I made in part 1:

Disclaimer: Both of these stories are true and personally witnessed by yours truly. None of these are reposts from Snopes or anywhere else. Any similarity to stories you may have read elsewhere should be chalked-up to the fact that there are idiots everywhere and our species is doomed.

Now, for part deux:

Spaminator
Spam is the bane of the 'net. It is like the weeds that grow in your garden and in the cracks in your sidewalks and driveways - you can pull it, chop it or spray it and you may be able to control it for today - but it will always be back. There is one flavor of spam that has been around since the very early days of the internet - the fake notifications that tell of "secret" coupons or deals from well known national brands. Many large brands have been targets - including many restaurants, retailers, automakers, electronics companies, etc for anything from free cars (Honda) to free beer (Miller). You've probably all seen some of these, right? Did you ever think any of them were real? Granted, there are occasionally genuine offers that are similar - like this one - but come on, it's just spam, right?

Well, some people apparently take them just a bit more seriously...

One particular Chief Executive Officer was forwarded a well known spam that promised that our company would send a $50 coupon to anyone who forwarded the spam email to them. One of the store franchise owners had apparently been sent this email and wanted to know what the corporate office was going to do to stop it. This CEO immediately tasked the IT department to "stop these emails from being sent." Huh? It's spam! This CEO was dead serious - they thought there was some way for us to intercept and stop these emails from being sent - not just from our company servers, but from every mail server on the internet!

Our explanation that this is not how the internet works, and that there is no central control center we can call to have these emails stopped was met with the classic "you clearly misunderstood my last order - try again" look from the CEO. The head of the IT department eventually had to meet with the CEO and explain that this was not something we or anyone else could control, and that the vast majority of people in the world understand that these types of emails are just annoying fakes. A letter was then drafted and sent to all the restaurant owners, and a notice was placed on the company web site declaring these emails to be fake. I am willing to bet the CEO *still* believes we are just incompetent and there must be some way for those emails to be stopped. True story!

Anti-Social Networking
Internet discussion forums are a great way for people with a common interest to socialize, share knowledge and engage in healthy debate and disagreements. Forums are not new - they are as old as the internet. Many companies are using private discussion forums as a way to share information between employees, or with customers and/or vendor partners. Unmoderated public forums can get extremely unruly - but there are many moderated forums that manage to discuss very contentious issues and remain civil. Most private forums are much easier to manage - because (in theory) the members are all there for the same reason.

And then there is the forum that was built at our company...

The communications department wanted a discussion forum added to our private company portal. The users of this portal included corporate employees, the franchisees and the franchisee's employees. The public had no access to this portal or the discussion forum. Sounds fairly easy, right? There are dozens of free internet forum software packages available, and some of them are used in very, very active public forums. But, a private forum actually has a few unique requirements that are not an issue in public forums. The first is that we didn't want the forum users to have to login to the forum after they had already logged-in to the company portal. Since several of the best portals now support directory services like LDAP or AD, that wasn't a big problem and was easily solved.

However, the communications department and the marketing and legal departments apparently had a completely different view of how a discussion forum is used than I did. They were extremely paranoid that someone might post something that was not favorable to the company. I explained that could be controlled by having moderators police the forums and delete or edit any offensive posts. But that wasn't deemed good enough.

They decided that corporate employees could read the forum, but could not post. That would prevent a corporate employee from saying something that might be construed as putting the company at risk. It didn't matter that the corporate employees talked and emailed to these same folks every day - the forum was deemed "different". All questions asked by the franchisees and their employees would need to be posted by the forum admin who was also a communications department employee. If the forum admin did not know the answer to a question, then they would contact the relevant department, obtain an answer, and then post the forum response.

The brain trust also decided that the forum would ONLY be used for the franchisees and employees to post "Best Demonstrated Practices". If they knew about something that worked, they were asked to post a story explaining it so that the other franchisees could benefit. There was no Q&A forum, no general discussion forum - there were ONLY forums for them to post their tips & tricks.

Can you guess what happened?

Well, since corporate employees couldn't post to the forum, they typically visited the forum once, then left and never came back. Why should they? What fun is a forum unless you can participate? I suppose reading the posts from the franchisees could be interesting, but that leads to the second problem...

The franchisees weren't posting either. It seems that they weren't all that eager to share their "tips & tricks" with each other. They wanted to communicate with each other, and many of them did through email, but there was no way they wanted to post where corporate could see and know who was posting. In addition, since there was really no forum for them to post questions or just have general chit-chat with each other, the entire "social" aspect of the discussion forum was completely missing.

The result? Six months after launch, there had been a total of 6 posts to the entire forum - and that includes the post from the forum admin saying "thank you for your post" to the one guy who actually posted ONE "best demonstrated practice", and also the post from a franchisee who complained that the free item he had received from a franchisee conference had arrived broken. In short, it was a complete failure. The forum software itself worked great - posting was easy and simple. But the many weeks of effort to install, configure and modify the forum software were completely wasted by the desire to have complete control over how people engage in social interaction - completely missing the entire point of web-based discussions. True Story!

Well, there you go - two more examples from my files. Both of these stories share a common trait - the desire to control the uncontrollable. In the first story, the CEO needed to discover that it really isn't possible to control the breadth and speed of worldwide email communications. It shows a complete lack of understanding for how the internet has changed the dissemination of information - which is really, really scary when you consider this was the leader of a $2+ Billion company. The second story is also about control - the desire to control how people communicate with one another, and not recognizing that when you attempt that level of control, people will simply find a different way to communicate in order to bypass the oppresive controls. Don't worry - I have many more stories coming to future posts!

This Is News?

Do you still watch the news on television? I haven't used TV as my news source for several years. However, when something really significant is going on, I have no choice - the news invades into my viewing whether I want to see it or not. They are preempting my entertainment with the drivel they think is news. There are no journalists left in television. Edward R. Murrow must be turning over in his grave. It's hard to believe there was once a time when the news was the trusted source of the truth - and that when a "Special Report" interrupted the broadcast schedule, you paid attention, because the world was about to change. Apparently, we've had some *really* significant events lately, because the news has been blitzing more than Dick LeBeau. Let's run down a few of the earth-shaking news stories that have the entire news industry in a tizzy for the last month...

(Jon & Kate + 8) / 2
This absolutely takes the prize for the biggest non-story. Let's see - family with 8 small children has a film crew follow them everywhere they go for a couple of years, and now the couple is getting divorced. Wow, who could have seen that coming? But somehow, this story was not just plastered on every gossip/media tracking/scandal show - it was also a huge story on the network news. Interviews were shown on ALL of the major news shows, with analysis of who was the unhappier party, what this means for the kids, etc. This is news? Really? According to the U.S. government, 7.5 out of 1000 US residents have been married, and 3.6 out of 1000 US residents has been divorced. Gee, I don't recall seeing any of the other thousands of divorces on the news. Sure, I feel sorry for the kids - who wouldn't - but any divorce involving children is going to impact the kids - this is NOT news! The only part of this story I found interesting was how in the world a guy could hook-up with a mistress when he has 8 kids and there are film crews following your every move. The entire story is sleazy on many, many levels, but wow - that dude was an operator!

David Carradine Was Weird
If David Carradine had fallen down some steps and died, it would have been a page 6 story with a small headshot picture from Kill Bill. If some nameless schmoe had been found tied up and dead in hotel room in Thailand, that wouldn't have made the US news at all - of course, it also probably wouldn't have made the news in Thailand either. I admit this was a weird story - but does this belong on the mainstream news channels? Exactly how does this affect the world economy, or the state of our public schools, or the war on terrorism? OK, David Carradine was even weirder than we could possibly imagine, but I'm no longer surprised by anything one of the Hollywood crowd does. I expect them to be deranged and deviant. It isn't news. Once again, the life and death of a naughty celebrity was somehow considered newsworthy by an industry that pretends to take the higher ground.

We Are The World Of MJ
You didn't think I was going to forget the story that was bigger than the first meeting of the new US President with the leaders of some of the most powerful countries on the planet, did you? What can I say about this spectacle that hasn't already been said 24x7 for two weeks? Nothing. I was a little too young to pay much attention when Elvis died, and I was definitely too young to remember when JFK was assassinated - but from what I can tell the Jacko media frenzy was on par with JFK - even though the actual attendance and personal feelings of the general population for the person were probably much less. In other words, the news did not just report the story - they created it. The JFK funeral was held on November 25, only 3 days after the assassination. The MJ funeral was held 12 days after his death. I admit that some of that time delay was caused by the coroner investigation - but a lot of that time was spent planning the huge media events. Good grief, they flew the leader of the free world's body half way across the country and they had a state funeral attended by over a million people in 3 days! Can you imagine what the modern news services would do with an event on the scale of the death of JFK? That's a frightening thought!

TV news has become yet another reality show. They show us 15 second teasers during prime time commercials to get us to watch the 11 o'clock news. The news reporters look for the most entertaining witnesses to interview, and if they can't find a scared child, a sobbing woman or a angry man, the reporters will interview each other. Celebrities increase the value of any story, and the more outrageous the situation, the more coverage it will receive. So, now we have reality shows pretending to be news, and we have nightly news pretending to be reality shows. Thank goodness for the invention of the DVR!

The High-Tech Worker In A Low-Tech Company

It's my birthday, and on this auspicious and historically significant day, I am taking the opportunity to vent a little. Given my luck, *this* will probably be the post that causes my career and life to go up in smoke - but what the heck - it's my birthday!

My career has taken me into both high-technology (aerospace & electronics) and low-technology (restaurant) companies. Although they each have their challenges, I must say that being a high-tech worker in a low-tech company was without question the more frustrating experience. There were many days when I was ready to pull out what little hair I have left. I didn't realize how many assumptions I was making on a daily basis until I was faced with an entire industry of people who had zero experience and understanding of the technology surrounding them. It's not that they were stupid (well, not most of them) but they were ignorant - and they were making just as many assumptions about my world as I was about theirs.

Disclaimer: Both of these stories are true and personally witnessed by yours truly. None of these are reposts from Snopes or anywhere else. Any similarity to stories you may have read elsewhere should be chalked-up to the fact that there are idiots everywhere and our species is doomed.

Now, for two entries from the all-star list of forehead slappers from my 5+ years as a high-tech worker in a low-tech company:

Shortcut To Nowhere
I'll start with one my favorites - the infamous desktop shortcut to nowhere incident. One of the accounting clerks was responsible for verifying that a step in the monthly close process had completed successfully. The verification consisted of opening a report generated by the ERP system and making sure the totals tied together. She wasn't responsible for running the job that created the report - just for reading the report and verifying the results. She did this process on the third Tuesday of every month, and had been doing it for over 10 years.

However, on this particular third Tuesday, she had a big problem. We received a frantic phone call from her manager that the ERP system was "messed up" and that we couldn't complete the monthly close. Oh crap! She said she was getting an error message saying something about a file being missing, and she wanted to know why we had deleted her files. Wha??

We checked the server - and everything looked fine. So, we visited the user. After enduring the typical "Why do you guys always change things without telling us?" (we don't) and "If you don't fix this you are in big trouble!" (what else is new!) She finally showed us her problem. She went to her desktop, double-clicked on a Windows shortcut and got a Windows error. "See!" she said indignantly, "It does that every time!" After pausing for a moment, I said "Umm, you aren't in the ERP system? What is that shortcut supposed to do?" She looked bewildered, then said "What's a shortcut?" OK, obviously I wasn't going to get anything else useful from her!

The shortcut pointed to a file located on the shared file server. That file wasn't at the location specified in the shortcut. The user said "It always worked before". We now started a search of the file server to see if we could find the file - and we also began questioning other users about the file.

Eventually, we pieced together the answer. The missing file was an Excel report created by a batch job in the ERP system. That job is manually run on the third Monday of every month by another accounting clerk in a different department. She was sick on Monday. Her manager had submitted the job, and had run the job with incorrect inputs and the job had failed. Since the job was written to first delete the old file then create the new file - well, you can guess the rest...

That batch job had been written by a developer who had left. The accounting department ran the job but they had no idea what the job was supposed to do. An IT tech had created the desktop shortcut to the report many years ago because the accounting clerk kept forgetting how to open the Excel report. She had no idea what the shortcut was for, all she knew was that she was supposed to double-click on that icon on her desktop on the third Tuesday of every month. True story!

Executive eMail
My second story moves up to the top of the food chain to a CEO. You really can't get any more low-tech than this senior executive. Can you imagine someone in business today who doesn't use a computer at all? No email, no web - nothing. Oh, you can send the CEO an email, and you may even get a response - but the CEO didn't use a computer or Blackberry or any other electronic device to do it. Here's the process used by an industry leader running a $2B+ company:

• An email arrives at the CEO's inbox.
• One of the CEO's two Executive Admins located at the corporate office opens the email and prints it out.
• The printed emails are then delivered to the CEO - and since the CEO is often traveling, the printed pages are usually delivered via overnight shipping to wherever the CEO happens to be. If the Admin determines it is an urgent message, the email may be faxed to the CEO, or even read over the telephone.
• The CEO receives the stack of printed emails and hand writes a response on each page. It is not unusual to see her reading and writing responses during meetings.
  
• The stack of responses is shipped back to the corporate office via overnight mail.
• One of the CEO's Executive Admins reads the handwritten response and types and sends a reply email.
• You receive your reply "from" the CEO.

The number of things wrong with this picture are simply mind-boggling. That quick note you sent to the CEO resulted in a piece of paper being flown across the country and back again! So much for email being a greener alternative to the paper memo! Did you really believe the confidential email you sent the CEO was private? Guess again - it was also read by at least one Executive Admin and whoever else handled the printed email and the written response. Did you think sending an email might get the information to the CEO quickly? Nope - your email is subject to the whims of the shipping companies - and the location of the CEO and the weather along the route. But even more than these practical aspects - this is just wrong - a low-tech zone has been created around the CEO like a protective bubble. The rest of the world is rushing forward to make electronic communications faster, more secure and full of rich media - but this CEO is pretending that the technology clock has stood still since 1978.

What chance did an IT professional have in a company run by this CEO? How could an ERP upgrade or an increase in data bandwidth be explained such that this senior executive would understand the importance and impact to the company? The answer is 1) none, and 2) you can't. True story!

Trust me - these two stories are just the tip of the iceberg. I think I'll save the rest for future posts - this garden is simply too fertile to harvest all at one time.

There are plenty of corporate IT stories about silly users on the web. But why? The personal computer has now been around for 30+ years. My 90 year old father reads email and can use a laptop touchpad well enough to play solitaire. And yet, there are still professional employees in large corporations who avoid technology whenever possible and see absolutely no reason why they need to do anything differently than they did before some IT geek placed a PC on their desk. Is this only a phenomenon of the low-tech business? No, of course not - but in my experience a company that has a large number engineers & scientists has much less tolerance for this kind of nonsense. There were plenty of challenges for an IT professional working in a company full of techies, but at least I never had to worry that my users didn't know how to use a mouse.

So, call me a typical arrogant IT geek - but if you were able to logon to your computer, start your browser and read this story, then it's a good chance I'm probably NOT talking about you!

Education Means Anything Except Teaching

As my children have navigated their way through the California public school system, I have had a parent's view of another of my favorite examples of the decline of the human species - the education system. I need to throw out a disclaimer that I am NOT a product of the same school system - I was sentenced to 8 years at a small Catholic school, and was not released into the public school system until high school. So, my personal experience was MUCH different than the modern public school - but I think that also allows me to look at the current system as a complete outsider.

My kids were very fortunate, a brand new elementary school was opened in our neighborhood when my oldest son entered 2nd grade. The new school was really excellent - the principal was top-notch and she hand-picked her crew of teachers. However, even this ideal situation was flawed. At my son's previous school (only 3 miles away) the first grade program had embraced a hand writing method called the D'Nealian Method. OK - I don't know why they felt they needed to use a method that none of the parents knew anything about, but if they thought it was an improvement - OK. But unfortunately when he got to the 2nd grade, they announced they had abandoned the D'Nealian Method and gone back to the more traditional Zaner-Bloser Method. So, after having the slanted, curly D'Nealian method drilled into him for an entire year, he was now told everything he was doing was incorrect, and he now needed to try to both advance his skills AND re-learn the basics at the same time. Since 1st and 2nd grades are critical in the development of writing skills - he was seriously screwed, and I honestly believe this affected him at a crucial time and continues to affect him. My daughter (who is younger) was more fortunate and did not have this disruption.

But, all-in-all, elementary school was fabulous - especially when compared to middle school. Middle school is an absolute nightmare. It is the worst combination of jaded, uncaring teachers plus draconian, inane school policies plus obnoxious, viscous preteens - all jammed together in an over-crowded and under-maintained facility. Kids learn some important skills in middle school - they learn there is safety in groups, they learn that the weak become targets, and they learn that adults will not always be around to save them. Is this really what we want to teach our 11 to 13 year old children? But it's not just that it isn't a safe environment - they also fail inside the classrooms.

The middle school curriculum is bizarre. For the first time, kids are categorized and segregated - both by their abilities and also by their interests. But God help your child if they don't fit in one of the available categories. Your child has one big decision to make. If they want to take ANY music, then they give up all of their electives and take music for the 3 years of middle school. They are not able to take shop or computers or art - only music. Or, if they choose not to take music, then they can choose from a variety of electives - but they can not take any music classes. Why? Who decided that at 11 years old you need to decide that music is more important than anything else? It is yet another ridiculous and arbitrary rule created by the group that believes they are the only ones who are qualified to know what is best for our children - the educators.

The educators like to blame the parents for not helping to educate our children. I call Bull Crap. The school system doesn't want our help. If they did, they would actually communicate to the parents about the assignments that are coming up, the topics they are teaching and references we can use to help our kids complete the assignments. A very small minority of teachers use tools like Parent Connect to inform us of the scores our children have received - but even the best of them give us those scores only AFTER the assignment - they do not tell us what the assignment is, or when it will be due BEFORE the due date. Why not? Don't they know what assignments they are going to assign? Isn't it nearly identical as it was last year and the year before? Here's a new flash to the school system - the parents can't help if we don't know what you are doing in the classroom! You can't honestly believe we are going to find out everything from our kids, can you? Have you talked to our kids? They can't remember what they had for lunch, let alone what assignments were issued. You claim that it is the kids responsibility to keep track of the assignments - but which is more important - the lesson in accountability or turning in the book report? Gee - since you only issue a grade for the report, maybe that should be the priority, no?

The schools are completely focused on the state testing scores. That's really a shame - because focusing on standardized testing is not going to produce better students or better human beings. Should there be standardized testing? Yes, there should - it is the only way I know to evaluate a large population. However, there is a fundamental problem with using standardized test scores and ignoring that problem completely oversimplifies the reality of teaching children. As an example, I use my own experience in a college engineering class. The department head decided to evaluate the different teachers all teaching the same class by having each teacher submit two questions for the final exam. Every class would take the same final, and the test would be composed of all the questions from each of the instructors. When I took the final, it was obvious which two questions came from my instructor. I easily solved those problems. The questions from the other instructors were MUCH more difficult - I didn't understand the problem statements and I didn't have a good grasp on how to approach the problem. When I spoke to students from the other classes, they felt exactly the same - the problems from their own instructors were easy, but the others were extremely difficult.

What does this example show? It shows that how problems are presented is just as important as the core concepts being learned. All of those instructors were presenting the same concepts - but how they presented those concepts and the example problems they used to illustrate the ideas differed. I have no doubt that with enough time and with access to the right reference materials, we could have all figured out all of the problems - but in a test environment you don't have a lot of time or any references - you either recognize the problem and the solution approach, or you probably aren't going to get that problem correct. I believe the same situation affects the state standardized testing. Problems that the kids recognize are solved easily, those that are not recognized are probably not solved. Of course there are kids who do well no matter what - and there are kids who will not do well - but the vast majority in the middle of the bell curve are the ones being hurt - and that is the overwhelming majority of our children!

Of course, the schools are focused on the state testing because their funding is tied to the test results. I'm not sure that's the right metric to be used for school funding. It's tempting to make the funding performance based, because we want the schools to have incentive to succeed. I agree the schools need to be held accountable for their performance, but if the standardized testing is flawed (and I claim it is) then that's the wrong metric to use for funding decisions. I would rather see the schools judged against standards, but controlled more locally. And part of that local control is parent involvement in the policy decisions at their schools. I'm not talking about the PTA or the other pretend organizations - and I'm also not talking about the school board or the other political/bureaucratic bodies - I'm talking about parents with kids currently in the school with a seat at the management table and with direct input and visibility into the operations of our schools and how the money is spent.

Would this work? I have no idea. Could it be worse than what we have now? I very much doubt it! I believe it would elevate the issues that matter to parents, and it would blunt the schools penchant for using the parents as their excuse for their own poor performance. I want the accountability at ALL levels on ALL parties - the kids, the parents, the teachers AND the administrators.