Musical Christmas Day
First of all, allow me to thank Jimmy Wales for the email he sent me today. I shit you not, kids!
Anyway. I had a week off work, and now it's over. Strangely enough, I feel I've had enough vacation and am in fact looking forward to coming back to work. The weather was nasty, we couldn't go outside, and there's only so much crap you can do around the house. Like for instance, every little thing in the house, short of knives and furniture, has been run through the washing machine this week. We hosted a party, we went to a party, I did my writing homework, I made the obligatory latkes, now I'm bored and ready to go back!
I went to visit my old job on Friday. You know, the BigPaper Corp. Caught up with my old friends. One of them said a profound thing to me: she was talking about their offshore partners - she said that, to make it work, you have to establish a relationship and build trust with the offshore programmers. This actually is true of work in general. The more critical your work is, the closer to truth these words. I found when I worked at BigPaper that, whatever you do, you interact with people. It could be your teammates, it could be your users. It could be a blue-collar worker who called the helpdesk that paged you. It could be a plant manager trying to find why your program does not work the way she expects. Either way, if you and that person fail to show complete, 100% respect and support for one another, it's not going to work. You're not going to solve your problem and you're not going to fix your support issue. Or, if you do, it will take three times longer. I've always thought this Dire Straits song says it best:
Anyway. I had a week off work, and now it's over. Strangely enough, I feel I've had enough vacation and am in fact looking forward to coming back to work. The weather was nasty, we couldn't go outside, and there's only so much crap you can do around the house. Like for instance, every little thing in the house, short of knives and furniture, has been run through the washing machine this week. We hosted a party, we went to a party, I did my writing homework, I made the obligatory latkes, now I'm bored and ready to go back!
I went to visit my old job on Friday. You know, the BigPaper Corp. Caught up with my old friends. One of them said a profound thing to me: she was talking about their offshore partners - she said that, to make it work, you have to establish a relationship and build trust with the offshore programmers. This actually is true of work in general. The more critical your work is, the closer to truth these words. I found when I worked at BigPaper that, whatever you do, you interact with people. It could be your teammates, it could be your users. It could be a blue-collar worker who called the helpdesk that paged you. It could be a plant manager trying to find why your program does not work the way she expects. Either way, if you and that person fail to show complete, 100% respect and support for one another, it's not going to work. You're not going to solve your problem and you're not going to fix your support issue. Or, if you do, it will take three times longer. I've always thought this Dire Straits song says it best:
