Friday, November 25, 2005

The World’s First Outdoor Winter eLearning Symposium and Trade Show

So Fossil and Brad and I were sitting around at work talking about…

The World’s First Outdoor Winter eLearning Symposium and Trade Show scheduled for February 7-9 2006 at Sweeney Flats north of Fredericton, New Brunswick.

This is a first-of-kind event in the eLearning industry. The premier event’s theme is Extreme Frigid Learning. Guest speakers will include Random Gall on 25 Ways to Freeze Dry an eLearning Survey for Re-distribution, Mallet Icy on 10 Great eLearning Gurus of the 21st Century and Why All They Boil Down to One, and Steve the Hound on something really cool and out-there.

Matt Winterwood and the Open Ice Experience will provide continuous 24/7 music in a variety of listener styles including audio off and audio on.

Vendors In A Tent features a wintry blend of vendor booths and ice sculptures with eLearning themes such as scaling ability, ski-mobility, and collaborative multi-platform infrastructure – all under the roof of the world’s biggest open-walled tent.

Presentations will be delivered 24/7 under magnificent 2006 Canadian winter skies from the world’s largest amphitheater carved out of ice. Free “I Survived the World’s First Outdoor Winter eLearning Symposium and Trade Show” straw pillows, blankets, hot chocolate mugs, toques, and parkas will be provided.

On-site accommodations will be provided in two, three, and six person all-season tents opulently equipped with heat lanterns, propane stoves, and Arctic sleeping bags. Twenty person hospitality tents equipped with beer kegs and skating rinks will also be available.

Transportation from Fredericton airport to Sweeney Flats will be provided by MUSH. Please advise if any members of your delegation have allergies to sled dogs.

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

IT Industry Blues - Part 1.2: Team Player - It Starts

Team Player. That’s the name of my second novel – originally published in Australia and to be republished in 2006 by Double Dragon. It’s about the world’s biggest software company, ErectSoft Inc, and the goofs who work there.

Team Player is also the name of the employee who’s least likely ever to be seen as the first person to leave the office at the end of the day even if it means staying hours late asking him or herself who the hell has anything important enough to do around here to stay this late, for crise sake?

I was a Team Player once. Yes I, Biff Mitchell, used to work evenings, weekends, and weekend evenings for days, weeks, months on end whether it was really important to get the job done that fast or not. It was like an addiction. One moment I was a normal fun-loving individual with a life – the next, I was selling my soul to some inhuman Gantt chart that existed only in my imagination.

I was a Team Player for almost a year before the employer introduced the first Gantt chart – and not one of those electronic drawings from the wildest imagination of the world’s most prolific fantasy writer was nearly as unforgiving as the imaginary one in my own head during that year.

You see, I was driven by a fanatical belief in the value of my work and the indelible nobility of viewing that work in the context of a contribution to a Team. You know, finish those sixty screen builds before tomorrow morning and it’s like you just hit a homer with the bases loaded. And knowing damn well that you wouldn’t have hit the homer if the bases weren’t loaded. After all, who needs a grandstander taking up the light all by himself? We need someone who “blends.”

And blended I did. Right into the furniture and floors. I swear, by some sick magic, I was there more than they were.

Oops, was I just grandstanding?

I worked almost every evening and weekend. I stayed late Friday nights. Nobody stays late on a Friday night. There are natural laws deemed necessary for sanity by the Earth Goddess. She dispenses them in the hopes that people will think for themselves as opposed to submitting blindly to mob rule.

Which is exactly what being a Team Player is. It’s a mob. Nobody’s controlling it. Nobody’s really in charge of it. It exists only in the minds of its components. Its rules are illusory. It eats the stragglers. It’s easily influenced by the project manager. The quality manager. The marketing manager. The media manager. The office manager. The …

Isn’t it strange how mindless conformity seems to breed new deities?

Team Players have a deep-rooted sense of everybody else’s time being more important than their own, unless of course they’re standing around outside in the cold smoking a cigarette and muttering about not having any spare time to do anything right before marching back in to work another two hours of overtime when they could just as easily have done the work the next day, but then, they figure that Manager X is probably in a really big bind over the, you know, that got messed up the other day and yeah we tried to warn him but he wouldn’t listen and where the hell is he tonight? But yeah, he’s going to ask me to do it and if I don’t, well, it’s just going to make the whole Team look bad.

I mean, Manager X should listen and even Manager X knows it at some subconscious level, but why should he listen? Why would he think for a moment that he might be accountable for his bad decisions when he has a Team of Team Players who will lay down their weekends to make his world right so that he can get that productivity bonus and not have to give up a single night of TV with his family.

Team Players do a lousy job of educating the people around them.

Prochain episode: Team Player – The Pain

And always remember: People don't exist to fulfill the needs of work; work exists to fulfill the needs of people.

Monday, November 14, 2005

IT Industry Blues - Part 1

A friend in Chicago told me on the phone the other day that she should move up here to the edge of the world because the lifestyle is more relaxed. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve taken three days of vacation, and then Friday was a holiday, so I took the long weekend off from the world to spend some time with my daughter. My friend’s comment, though, brought back memories of a time when I practically lived for work.

When I first started working in the IT industry there was always some new program to learn or some new version of a piece of software that I’d mastered and now had to learn all over because it had changed so much. Application crashes regularly chewed up hours or days worth of work and spit out digital nothingness.

A typical day could be described by: “I’m almost caught up to where I was this morning.”

There were unforgiving slave-masters like the managers who were convinced that every word the client said was gospel, so if they wanted it done last week with a hundred gigabytes of information on a one-and-a-half megabyte floppy disk, then by God someone would have to work late to make it happen, someone other than the project manager, of course. And there were those insidious little unreasonable, two-bit lying pieces of workflow junk, the Gantt chart.

I was handed a Gantt chart once that showed me three weeks late 15 minutes after I started the project.

How many evenings and weekends did I work to finish something to make the client happy and get repeat business so that I could work more evenings and weekends in a never-ending cycle of ball-busting project after project?

That’s right. It just went on and on from one mad rush to get the project done and make the client happy to starting the same idiotic cycle the next day. It never stopped. And what happens in the meantime?

Your kids grow up, your hair disappears, your wife leaves you, you get laid off.

And then you realize how expendable you are. Then, all those weekends and extra “just a few hours” show their face value: nothing. They get summed up on your resume as “hard worker” or “willing to work extra hours” or “I bend over better than anyone you’ve ever met.”

And I'm not saying that nobody should ever work late or spend the occasional weekend on work. Sometimes, there are genuine emergencies, but these should never - not everyk - be allowed to become the norm.

Here's what the norm is: You spend a reasonable amount of time on your job and you spend a reasonable amount of time on your life. And here's the rationale for that: People don't exist to fulfill the needs of work; work exists to fulfill the needs of people.

Think about it.

Next post: The Team Player Syndrome

Thursday, November 10, 2005

The Two Sides of Fredericton Drivers

So, right after I blog about the lousy drivers in Fredericton, I'm driving along Sunset Drive and I have to make a left turn. I flick the stick to flash my turning signals, look at the long line of cars in the oncoming lane and think, "Shit."

But then, a miracle.

A white van stops just before the road onto which I want to turn and the driver signals for me to go ahead. Thunderstruck, I wave to him and turn, looking all around for signs that the sky falling or raining frogs.

After dropping a movie off at Blockbuster, I got about a quarter mile down the road before a white-haired man in an SUV cut out in front of me, nearly driving me into oncoming traffic.

Ten minutes ago, I stopped for a man crossing the street in front of the Chalmers Hospital. An SUV behind me veered to the left as though the driver was going to pass me but came to a screeching halt at an angle less than a foot away from my rear bumper. I could see the woman behind the wheel scowling at me, angry that I interrupted her flow of traffic.

Screw her. Screw the white-haired man. Screw about 90% of the drivers in this town. Bless the man in the van who let me make my left turn.

BTW, the picture shows Fredericton at it's best ... without the drivers.

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

Worst Drivers In The World - Fredericton

I live in a small city called Fredericton. It’s north of Maui. Unlike Maui, the weather sucks. So do the drivers. In fact, Fredericton’s main boast to fame is the sad truth that it has the most inconsiderate, ignorant, dumbass, stupid, hollow-headed, vindictive, brain dead, petty, mean little asshole drivers of any municipality on the planet.

Last summer, I was driving in Toronto. One of the things that amazed me was seeing cars slowing down to allow cars to get in front of them to change lanes. If a Fredericton driver sees your turning signal begin to flash before you change lanes, that driver will speed up and close the space between his or her car and the car in front so that you can’t change lanes. I’m not joking. I see this almost every day.

A couple of months ago, I was in Chicago en route to a meeting with a client. The client was in Lisle, so it was a long drive. The driver had to change lanes (yes, I counted the number of times) 47 times there and back. Not once did the drivers in the other lanes try to stop him.

The three-way stop at the Regent Mall is the Fredericton driver’s wish-come-true. “I wish to be an especially mean little asshole today.” And so is. One car from lane one pulls out, followed by one car from lane two, followed by one car from lane three, and … oh uh … mean little asshole just got his wish as he pulled out right behind the car from lane three, upsetting the equilibrium of fairness and almost crashing into the second car from lane one, whose turn it is to pull out.

Putting a traffic rotary in Fredericton would result in one of the greatest motor vehicle disasters in history. Thousands would die. In minutes.

At the University of New Brunswick, three roads feed into one short lane that leads out the front gate of the campus. Traffic usually backs up ten or fifteen vehicles deep on two of the roads because the gate leads smack into a busy intersection with traffic lights. The third road leads into a gym parking lot and cuts through one of the other two lanes. Last week, traffic was backed up waiting for the intersection lights to change and I stopped my car just before the road to the gym, leaving enough space for cars coming up the hill to turn onto the gym road. I could have pulled ahead and blocked access to the gym road but I wouldn’t have been going anywhere because the traffic was still backed up. I would have gained a staggering two car lengths. So why not let cars turning onto the gym road through? The ignorant dickhead in the car behind me had other thoughts. He honked his horn continuously and shook his fist at me. The whole time I was stopped.

If I hadn’t been in a hurry, I would have sat through a couple more lights in the hopes that he would get out of his car so that I could clobber his mean little ass. The unfortunate part is that this has happened to me before in Fredericton. Others are angered by attempts to be a considerate driver.

Forget about trying to pull out in busy traffic in Fredericton. Nobody’s going to stop for you. If you’re a pedestrian, don’t step out into a crosswalk until the traffic has stopped completely. Law or not, most drivers are just going to ignore you. At intersections with double lanes, watch out for drivers cutting into the right lane instead of the left like it says to do in the driver’s manual. In Fredericton, traffic laws are made on the fly and assholes reign on the roads.

Here’s how bad it is, I was stopped in a busy lane waiting for a break in the oncoming traffic so that I could make a left turn. The traffic in that lane stretched as far as I could see. I hunkered in for a long wait when suddenly, a car in the oncoming traffic stopped. I didn’t do anything. I just sat there. The other driver honked her horn and smiled. And then it occurred to me: she’s giving me a break. I almost burned rubber making my turn, smiling, waving, and thinking: “Is there hope for the drivers of Fredericton?”

BTW, if you think the city you live in has worse drivers than Fredericton, make a comment below.

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Mean Lean Writing Machine

OK. So I'm scrapping the hibernation thing. I don't have a tooth for acorns. Never did. Never will. Gimme sushi any day. But not right before an eight-month sleep. I think I'll stick around for the occasional sunny day ... viewed through the heat-capturing panes of glass in my windows. Not outside. God, not out there where the wind and the cold could shrink Paul Bunyan's testicles into dried peas.

Instead of hibernating, I'm going to set a new record for writing production this winter. I'm going to stay home (with the exception of forays into my day job to pay those extras like food and shelter) and write continuously. I'm going to be a writing behemoth. I'm going to be a page churner, a sentence assembly line, a word weaver.

I'm going to finish the three to four stories I promised J for the Twisted Tails anthology (more on this later). I'm going to finish my next novel Murder by Burger. And I'm going to start the sequel to The War Bug.

Saint Peter dontcha call me 'cause I can't go ... I owe my soul to the printed word.

Monday, November 07, 2005

A Few Thoughts on Summer and Winter

If you live in the Cayman Islands, this message isn't for you. This is for those who live in areas of the world afflicted by climatic events involving snow, high winds and freezing temperatures. In short ... winter.

I've been around for more of my fair share of them and I'm fed up with the uneven scheduling. Around here we get winter for six months, summer for two months, and spring and fall for about two weeks each. Don't ask me where the rest of the time goes. It sure as hell doesn't translate into summer.

Around here we spend our lives freezing our asses off, skidding on roads, paying ridiculous heating bills, dressing in suffocating layers of clothing, pretending to like sledding and skating in sub-zero temperatures that obviously freeze our brains into non-fuctioning entities ... and then winter starts.

Well, I'm sick of it. I'm not doing this winter thing anymore. This winter, I'm hibernating. Bears do it. Bugs do it. Biff begins with a 'B'. I'm doing it.

Over the next couple of weeks, I'm going to eat a hundred pounds of acorns and drink a hundred flats of beer. And then I'm going to sleep until June 8, my birthday. Don't call me. Don't email me. Don't send me letters. Here I go. Mmmm ... acorns. Bye bye winter blues. Guzzle guzzle. Hey buddy, pass some of those mixed nuts this way ...