So. As I Was Saying....

So, yeah. I got RIF'd.

All-in-all, it was a very well done thing, inasmuch as one never seems to enjoy the efforts everyone puts into an enterprise such as this.

I'd come to work that morning fat, dumb and happy, secure in the knowledge that my boss had told me we didn't expect any layoffs in the current year, just maybe a little less travel, a few fewer computer upgrades and maybe not quite so much software. Okay, fine. I could live with that. Apple was on campus that day, giving a dog-and-pony show about the iPad and how it figured into the modern classroom. I figured I'd pack mine along and attend.

So there I was, listening to the Apple guys talk about how far and wide the iPad had spread in the education market, and how we were going to learn a whole bunch of new and interesting ways to use them in the years ahead, when I noticed out of the corner of my eye, my boss's boss was standing in the doorway. She waved. I waved and nodded. I went back to hearing about iPads in the classroom. A moment or so later, I looked back and she was still there, only this time she was gesturing kind of emphatically. It's about twenty minutes to 10:00am, now. I pointed at myself and she nodded and signaled she wanted me to come to the door. And so, I did.

She told me that her boss wanted to see me this morning. And not at my desk, or in his office, but right next door. And not at 11:00am or 11:30, but at 10:15am. You know me well enough to know my first question was "Okay, but what's this all about?"

"I think you'd better hear it from him" was her reply.

I let out an audible groan and she reached out and squeezed my elbow a little and said, "You'll be alright" but she turned away right away and left. After fifteen years, you can kind of get a read on people, you know? I could feel my face flush, and my ears filled with a high pitched whine like standing on the airport flight line next to a jet, or being in the next room while someone runs the vacuum cleaner next door. I texted my wife, "Honey, I'm going to be fired in twenty-three minutes" and made my way back to my seat at the Apple presentation.

She was great, she really was. Very supportive. At the appointed time, I gathered up my stuff and went next door. And there, on entering, was the CIO and the department HR person, both looking grim. I took the seat in front of them at the table. "As you know, the economy hasn't been doing well, lately. The rest was like Charlie Brown's teacher, really. "Wha-whaaah wha-whaah-waaah". Sign here, and here, and here. We stood and shook hands again, and I was led into the next room, where the University HR guy was ready with the "So, You've Been Fired" packet of valuable resources. Answers to questions about insurance and unused vacation and all of the rest, plus a page on an upcoming "So, You've Been Fired" seminar I'd be sure to want to attend. He led me across the hall to another University HR person who explained I was to go straight home, now, and not back to my desk. I was to make arrangements with my boss to come in and get my stuff after hours. I called my wife and she met me out in front of the union and drove me home. We'd worried, talked, planned and joked about this day off and on for a dozen years. It was finally here.

I did a lot of crying. It was frustrating. I thought I had done everything right. My boss's boss, the woman who signaled me to come to hear about the appointment, cannot name three things in fifteen years that I didn't volunteer for. Whenever she needed someone, I was there. New students need to have buildings pointed out to them? I was there. The computer store was having a big sale and needed to get a bunch of stuff to the Union? I was there. We need a second voice for an Abbott and Costello Who's On First? skit about the Windows Start button? I was there. I was also there for her whenever I thought it was important that she be in the loop. I finished a task and checked my home page to find a story about "a light plane" that had crashed into the World Trade Center. I refreshed the screen, only to find the story replaced with one that said two planes had crashed into the towers and I thought to myself, "You know? If I was the boss, I'd want to know about something like this." So, I got up and walked to her office and told her, "The nation is under attack. Go to CNN.com".

Some years later, her boss was killed in an auto accident on a snowy morning on his way to work. We had a big meeting with the staff to discuss the ramifications of this and then we were excused, while she dealt with her managers. She started, as we filed out, saying that no decision had yet been made on who would fill in, in the interim. It might be her, it might be one of a few others. When I got back upstairs, I got the official e-mail announcing the interim replacement, and knowing she hadn't seen it, and knowing she was in a room full of managers who needed details, I printed off a copy and walked it back down stairs to the meeting room and handed it to her.

I was always doing stuff like that. When I'd happen upon a kid staring blankly at a sheet of paper and holding it up to a building and turning around and looking over his shoulder for another building, I'd walk up and ask, "How lost are you?" We'd usually have a pretty good laugh and I could figure out which "Hall" he needed and send him on his way. Did that with parents, too, from out of town, driving slowly down an otherwise busy street. I tried to learn the names of everyone in our building, if not everyone in our department. I learned their names, and a little about them, by the dozens. When new people were hired, I walked them around introduced them around because I knew everybody.

The Internet and the Web weren't going anywhere. And we were in the middle of a push to change the way we did all of our Web pages, and I made sure I was the guy who taught everyone how to do that. I'd been the one who taught them HTML, CSS, Dreamweaver and the Templates, and I would be the one to guide them through the wilderness to the CMS promised land. But I would not get there with them. I was sad, I was frustrated, I was angry. I went through all of the Kubler-Ross Stages of Grief. There's no way this includes me-it has to be a mistake. Those fuggers! Hey-maybe they'd let me come back half-time, or work as a contract employee? I'll never find a job as good as that one, again. And finally I started looking for work.

Disruptive Tech, Again

I had a couple of people come up to me after the page about disruptive technologies and offer up their own examples. Mine were more personal–I have a box of once-expensive cables to hook up peripherals I no longer own to computers I no longer own, either. But all you have to do is look around to see other examples.
The United States Postal Service is in trouble. This was one of Ben Franklin's ideas, for crying out loud, but its usefulness may be coming to an end. My mother loves to talk of a time when she could count on twice-a-day service. As she put it, you could invite someone to dinner that night in the morning mail, and receive word back that afternoon that they were planning on attending. Pretty cool, huh? And this cost a nickel or less.

But it was a time before e-mail. It was a time before "everyone" had a telephone, too. It was the only way we had to do these kinds of things, so it's the way things worked. And generations depended on a system like this. It was a part of their daily life that I suspect went largely unexamined and unquestioned. Of course we people handling paper and bringing it to our homes. How do you communicate with faraway others?

In hindsight, mistakes are always more easily seen. Geeze, maybe first class postage did get kind of out of hand there at the end. Maybe second class postage and third class postage should have been more spendy—that would have cut down on the tonnage of catalogs and sales flyers and saved a forest or two, perhaps. With less "Junk Mail" clogging the system, there would have been less wear-and-tear on all of the equipment, including the letter carriers.

Maybe having to go to a box down the street, instead of to your very own door makes "The Mail" a little less personal and a little less precious. It was a matter of architecture. The Mail was so dependable, so ordinary and so necessary that we put little slots in front doors to keep from having to open a door and retrieve the daily delivery. In an age of increasing precision and accuracy (thanks in large part to computers), can we accept something like approximate mail delivery? A nickel used to bring a handwritten note from your grandmother from Ohio all of the way to your very own front door. Now, fifty cents gets your electric bill only as close as your neighbor's driveway? Really? That's the best we can do?

Netflix put a serious hurt on the mom-and-pop video rental business, and on local cable-TV and satellite franchises. Now, Netflix itself is in danger of becoming redundant as various concerns struggle with the problems of squirting movies and TV shows into our homes. It may be that the electronic side of their business, the "Net" part, eventually takes over everything. Or it may be that someone else will get it right, or get it righter, or offer it cheaper. Maybe one day we'll all watch TV piecemeal via some kind of a super-service like Apple's iTunes. I love HBO, but don't care much for boxing, so if I can get all of HBO's movies and original programming for $9 instead of the $12 my cable company charges, I'll probably go that route.

Economics plays a role in these decisions, but ultimately it seems like the best technologies eventually make it, in a survival-of-the-fittest kind of way. If your costs are lower this way than that, or if speeds are faster here than there or if your technology is massively cheaper than someone else's, then you're going to win. If not, then there doesn't seem to be much that you can do, except try to hang on.

In the 1980s we heard magical stories of wizards working on ways to get data from the same wire that gave us Skin-a-max. It was hugely expensive at the time, and not particularly fast by today's standards, but everyone saw it coming. Same with DSL on the phone lines. Where once we had two phone lines, so we could be online and still order pizza at the same time, now you can carry on all kinds of up- and downloading activity while, well, ordering pizza.

There are a lot of dial-up plans available, offering cheap internet access. But time is money, here, too. I know a lot of cheap people, but I don't know anyone with dial-up internet, any more.

Who is In Charge?

Who's In Charge, Here?

It's not always clear. And the results of uncertainty are sometimes terrible.

Consider for a moment, the case of the Royal Mail Ship TITANIC. The pride of the White Star Line, the ocean liner famously met her fate on the flat-calm moonless morning of April 15th, 1912. Back then, trans-oceanic travel was a severely big deal. Rich clientele would book passage with favorite ships and also with favorite captains. White Star badgered Captain EJ Smith away from retirement for one last turn of the wheel, aboard the giant steamship's maiden voyage.

This was fine, as far as it went. But leading lights of White Star would also share the journey, including Joseph (J Bruce) Ismay, the chairman of the line. These gentlemen had different goals for the journey than perhaps those of Captain Smith.

Flash ahead to that last evening, the weather reports and ice reports and wouldn't it be grand to arrive early in New York and surprise all of the newspapers? It would be easier to sell tickets for a grand ship like TITANIC if it could be seen as opulent and fast, though speed was never a design consideration. A more prudent option may have been to throttle back while traversing the icy area, or to take a more southerly route. Or at least to post more lookouts, and make sure they had the proper optics for their duty.

The White Star brass knew Captain Smith was experienced. They knew he would not place their new ship at undue risk. But while Smith was the boss of the boat, his boss was also aboard. And his boss would like to get to New York ahead of expectation. Smith knew his authority was unchallenged—he was doing this last run as a favor and there was nothing White Star could do to harm him or his retirement. And Ismay knew Smith wouldn't run the ship any faster than was prudent, given prevailing conditions.

The upshot of the whole thing is the majestic ship pointed at a dark mass and unable to steer clear of it without brushing against it for half the length of the ship, popping rivets and bending panels allowing water in. They say that given the weight of the water needed and the time it took, the "Gash" the press talked about amounted to just twelve square feet, spread out over hundreds of feet of the ship's length. A pantry door left open to the sea 2' by 6' for a couple of hours and it was all over.

More recently, consider the case of young Jessica Dubroff. Jessica was only seven years old, in 1996, when she was attempting to become "the youngest person to cross the country in an airplane". This was in its entirety a media stunt. To be a student pilot, you have to be at least sixteen years old. Jessica was not. So Jessica was in no way the pilot, or even a pilot aboard the airplane. For the trip to be legal, though, someone would have to be a pilot, and for Jessica to have any legitimate place, that someone would have to be a certified flight instructor. Enter Joe Reid. For all government and insurance purposes, Reid would be pilot in command for the entire trip. Reid was fifty-two years old, a stockbroker, and the registered owner of the Cessna used for the "record". Her father would also accompany her on the trip.

There had been a few kids who rode along on flights like this over the years. Nobody remembers because they weren't really records, but still, the trend was younger and younger children. Jessica's trip was designed for media coverage. ABC even gave her a camera to record her journey. She was given several minutes of national TV news coverage, appeared in hundreds of newspapers and magazines and some huge percentage of the country was at least somewhat aware of the little girl that they thought was trying to set a record by flying across the country.

The left California with a big farewell. They traveled west-to-east and finished up the day on TV again. It was all very scripted. Look at how far she's come! What a challenge, yadda-yadda-yadda. A fifty-two year old pilot had flown from Half Moon Bay to Cheyenne, with a little girl at his side, her dad in the back, and somehow it was news.

The next morning the three of them went to the airport. Forecast weather had arrived—a big storm. Normally, pilots wait out weather like this, but it was highly localized over the neighborhood and they had a media schedule to adhere to. They had to be in Lincoln, Nebraska, in time for interviews and editing and getting the taped piece to NewYork for the evening news. So while airliners waited for the weather to clear, Reid took off, nearly a hundred pounds overweight.

They took off, and bobbled under, into and out of clouds as they swung around to the east, going slower and slower. Finally, the aircraft stalled and crashed in someone's front yard. But here again, who was in charge?

Technically, legally, it was Reid. But Reid was being paid as an instructor and/or a charter pilot. And he was being paid by the guy in the back seat, who may or may not have known how dangerous their situation really was. Dad might have thought, people drive through this kind of weather all the time, right? So, let's go. We've got reporters to meet. And if it gets too bad, we can always come back and wait it out. And he's thinking Reid is an experienced pilot and he wouldn't get us into anything he couldn't get us out of.

And Reid is thinking we have to make time, we have to make time. And it's not really-really bad. Let's go up and take a look—it's a small storm and we'll probably be out of it before we have the chance to make too many mistakes, anyway. And little Jessica likely had no idea at all the risks involved.

There are hundreds of sayings in Aviation. Little homilies and platitudes we use to remember important lessons. One of my favorite's says "Pilots who crash in bad weather are almost always buried on nice days". There is no wait that's too long, too inconvenient, when it comes to flying and weather.