Parked in Front of the Engineering Building

Yes, the key does turn when the car is in motion; I saw it the other day.

Undercover Boss

CBS is a running a new reality show called "Undercover Boss" where the CEO of a large company secretly takes on the role of an entry-level worker in his/her organization to get a better idea of what life at the other end of the food-chain is like. It provides an opportunity to honestly see without any problem-masking intermediation that bureaucracies often provide how the company is running from the ground up. This is a great idea in general and makes for some pretty entertaining viewing.

Before saying another word I have to make the standard reality TV disclaimer. We see roughly 45 minutes of a weeks worth of experience over the course of a single episode of this show. I have no idea how the companies/CEOs that are profiled are chosen and have no idea how the specific locations they work at are chosen. The goal of the show's producers is to make something entertaining to watch and that means editing out almost everything and just saving "the good parts". Those creating the show need to make a story out of the events, regardless of what actually happens. Even though there is no script, the portrayal of each person we see is not entirely up to him or her. We only get to see the parts the producers want us to see.

The last segment of the show features the CEO talking to those he worked with (now out of his disguise and back in his normal job of CEO) and his top-level executives about what he saw while working entry-level positions and what changes he'd like to make. This is the part of the show that is both the most feel-good and the most frustrating to me. I enjoy watching it because the CEO gets a chance to make things right and help out those who are sometimes struggling to get by in his corporation. For the store clerk who needs a new kidney he puts a program in place to get more of the people in his organization registered as organ donors. For the line worker with art skills he offered a position helping create some of visuals for marketing campaigns.

I'm a systematizer, though, and these solutions seem to be one-off fixes for specific people rather than trying to re-structure and re-design the organization so that other people in these kinds of situations can also receive a similar benefit. It is easy to do very dramatic and even expensive/generous acts towards the five or six people the CEO worked with that week. He could double the salary of each, give them fantastic medical coverage and an extra week of vacation and it would have no significant financial impact on the company, dramatically improve their lives, and make for great feel-good TV. This is, generally speaking, what I feel like the CEOs are choosing to do.

The harder work would involve analyzing the systems of the organization as a whole to try to determine who this undesirable situation arose. Does the line worker with art skills not show other people is work? Is there a path for a hard worker like him to move to a position that can use these skills? How can somebody with such talent who is already in the organization find a a job that is a better fit? For the lady that needs a kidney transplant, does she have good medical coverage now? Are there things the company could have done to help prevent her from being in a situation where she needs the transplant? Are there things that need to be done in the work schedule to make people in her situation more easily able to take time off to get the medical treatment she needs? These are hard questions to answer and the solutions can be much more expensive and difficult to implement. Systemic change is no cake-walk.

The CEOs say that their time at the bottom will change and impact how they run the company and I truly hope it does. If the man at the top has lost touch with all the ins-and-outs of the business and forgets the people behind the numbers, he needs to do something to get his perspective re-adjusted. I fear, though, that once band-aids have been applied to the five or six employees he worked with for that week that the motive for change will slowly evaporate and that no long-term, company-wide change will take effect. It will be a wasted opportunity.

I hope I'm wrong.

Curling

What does it mean that for the past two days I have scheduled my work-out time so that I can be around a TV with cable so that I can watch curling?

If you don't know the game, you should. I know its not very possible and lack glamor but it is a very interesting game. A little bit of billiards, a fair amount of strategy, and of course the skill to place those big heavy rocks in precise places on a sheet of ice. Plus lots of yelling. You should check it out if you haven't ever seen a game. Read the rules, sit back and be fascinated.

(The best part are the sweepers, in my opinion.)

EZCracker

While watching the Olympics the other day I saw the best "as seen on TV" kind of ad for an off-the-wall product: the EZCracker. Its a small mechanism that cracks eggs for you. Go ahead, click the link and watch the ad on the website so that you can understand power and utility of such a device.

Before I skewer this ad, I must say it clearly has a use. If you lack motor control for whatever reason, find getting some egg on your hand is unbearable, or like having kitchen gadgets, then this product is for you. In fact, the egg-separator is particularly ingenious and though I don't need to separate eggs often, this would be much faster than doing it by hand.

But seriously. Do we all struggle with cracking eggs so much that a device like this is needed? Like I said there are probably people out there who could use such a product, like maybe older people who have lost the fine motor control they once had. These are not the people in the ad, though, and thus are presumably not the target audience for this device. No, the people in the add are the most aggressive egg crackers I have ever seen. Eggs are known to be fragile and yet when trying to break them open they seem to be using a rather large degree of force.

And how about the consequences of eating a baked good with a bit of egg-shell in at as portrayed in the ad? You would think this gal hand stumbled across some raw chicken liver or perhaps a small fish head in her muffin by the look of disgust on her face. When cleaning up eggs that you were trying to get in the pan but somehow entirely missed, it looks like the gal is just kind of swishing them around on the stove-top rather than actually wiping them up. Who are these people?

The king of un-usefulness, though, goes to the "but wait, there's more" product: the EZScrambler. No more mixing eggs in a bowl, you can now do it right in the eggshell. Again, do we really need a device like this in our lives? Is is so hard to clean a bowl and mixing utensil that we'd rather buy a gadget?

This is why I hate marketing. Though there is clearly a market for this device, it is much smaller than the ad is trying to reach. This is the heart of marketing; creating a demand for a product that most people probably don't need. Its phony and manipulative and I wish it weren't so apparently effective; if it weren't we wouldn't have ads for the EZCracker on TV.

Office at school

I've moved up in the world of academia. The normal and somewhat demeaning status of cubical dweller in the business world is something of a prized token for students in academia and I have been awarded such a prize. I have a desk! At school! As part of my job for the university (analyzing some data on a research project) I have been given a computer and a desk that I will also be using for my Master's thesis work. My advisor has about a dozen desks just outside the lab where I will be working and one of them is mine, at least for now. Having a place to park my motorcycle gear and retreat to during the day is fantastic and it will make it easier to stay on campus for longer periods of time during the day. And the office has everything: a microwave, coffee maker, chairs, hot chocolate; everything!

The only thing that is perplexing is this sign I found posted on one of the cubical walls near my desk. I don't know what any Myers-Briggs ENFPs would be doing in an engineering lab. I hope its a joke because I can't stand those ENFPs. They totally through me out of my zone. INTJ is where the engineering power is at.

Livescribe Pulse Smartpen

This is it, the device that smoothly bridges that classic analog/digital divide in the college classroom: paper notes. The Livescribe Pulse Smartpen, when using special paper, records not only what is written down but, if you so desire, the audio in your environment when you do the writing. The pen does more than capture your notes and more than record the classroom lecture; it does both in a synergistic way. After class, if you want to hear the lecture related a graph you drew, just tap the page with the pen and the audio starts playing back, just like that. Even better, to clarify your written notes you can add to them while the audio is playing back and that writing will be captured as well and associated with the audio at that point. You can also upload the audio and captured writing to your PC and review everything there.

The feature list and uses for this pen could go on and this last Christmas I got one. I've been using it in class for a few weeks now and it works exactly as advertised. Its been easy to go back through lectures, listening, reading my notes and adding to them. Having the digital copy of my course-work is great and the product works as advertised.

Except when it doesn't.

My first pen had a problem. It would only hold a charge for about twenty minutes (though new), far less than even a single lecture. I called Livescribe and they said this was a known issue on a number of pens and sent me a new one, free of charge; I didn't even pay for shipping the new one in or the old one back. Though it didn't make it in time for the start of school I was very impressed at how responsive they were.

The first chance I could I put the new pen in action, recording my first full lecture (audio and notes) and then a conversation with my professor afterward regarding my thesis. When I got home I re-listened to the lecture, augmenting my notes as I went along. Except there was this loud whine through both recordings that at times made the audio almost unusable. I didn't remember anything in the classroom that was making that much noise and decided to test things out at home and in the empty classroom before everybody showed up. No noise at home, plenty of whine in the empty room. Great. The only place I really need my pen to work and its picking up the electronic Martian landing beacon or something and now I can't hear the professor over the din.

I called Livescribe and they suggested a few tweaks in the settings to see if that would help. I tried those today with no success. Another call this afternoon and after much over-the-phone shrugging they offered to send another pen out. Reluctantly I agreed. The tech support on the phone was very helpful and said that in the three years she's been working there she's only heard of a few cases of this happening. She thinks its something in the classroom making the electrical noise and not a problem with the pen, per se.

This is a product I wanted to believe in and have been hesitant to endorse or promote since I haven't had much time with it. I'm still hanging in the balance at this point but know two things. One, there is clearly still a need for some engineering work to be done. Two, their customer support has been great so far with low wait times on the phone and the ability and willingness to make things right as much as they can.

Here's hoping pen number three is the trick.

Free Time

Despite the title for this post, I don't necessarily have that much free time in my life right now. My general commitments for this semester include nine hours at Wichita State (one traditional class plus my thesis) and working half time for the university. Well, the work stuff hasn't started up yet and my thesis has been stalled out this past week while I wait on some equipment to get installed for me. In addition to this school stuff, though, I have other tasks around the house that didn't get done over Christmas due to being out of town a lot. There's also church-related stuff and other longer-term projects. I don't lack things that need to get done.

More accurately, then, the title should be "Unstructured Time". Every morning (or the evening before) I have to sit down and think through what I'm going to do, what the next day looks like for me. Even on the days when have class I have to decide if I'm going to stay on campus, for how long, if I need to bring a lunch, what I would do with that time, etc. I have to create my own structure and, in essence, my own priorities; build my own day. This is not a bad thing at all, I would even argue that it is a luxury to be able to have such control over one's life. I'm not being dictated to, I'm looking at the next twelve hours of my life and deciding what is important, what needs to be get done and what can wait.

It reminds we a lot of how I felt after graduating college and starting on my first job. Sure, I had work every day but after that I was totally free, no homework (and no family at that point). I could do whatever I wanted and had complete freedom of how I spent those hours. Life stretched before me and there was a wide, seemingly endless gamut of choices. I could be more involved in church, I could take up new hobbies or get back to ones I had dropped in college, I could read, I could watch TV or go to the movies, I could go to the park or the art museum, I could join a club or a band,....

Its a unique place to be in and it doesn't happen very often in life. Such broad latitude is a gift; we should all pray that if or when it comes along next, we don't squander it. That's what I'm trying to do, put it to good use while I can.