Review: Nameless Corporate Workplace

PROS: Chances are good that your co-workers will not contribute to a future need for anti-anxiety or other medications. Most of your co-workers will try to be supportive. Generous vacation time as compared to other employers. You will need it, but you will also be discouraged from taking it!

CONS: Management. Most job stress is needlessly caused by incompetent and insensitive management, widely-viewed by employees as having been promoted to their current positions by virtue of political favor and/or damage mitigation. Firing most of them would improve many stubborn issues almost overnight. They’ll try to blame employees for the various failures and unmet goals, but since employees are micro-managed and not trusted to think for themselves, all train-wrecks start at the engine.

At typical workplaces, holding a door open for someone steps behind you in a hallway is viewed as a simple courtesy. At this plant, however, courtesy extended to certain managers will gain you a rebuke. “Don’t wait and hold the door for me; you have work to do!” The five seconds winds up being used to poison attitudes, not get anything additional done. This is the kind of short-sightedness exhibited on an almost-daily basis.

The remainder of the job stress is caused by the constant need for fire-fighting. Priorities shift by the hour, making planning one’s day or anticipating project time allotments almost impossible. 

People are not valued, and their experience is not valued. I heard a top-level manager say this explicitly as he was walking down the hallway past my cubicle, talking loudly on his cellphone, undoubtedly to another high-level executive. Predictably, this piece of work was eventually promoted. “If you’re not happy here, there’s the door,” was the keynote delivered by the piece of work at of one of our employee meetings. 

This is not a career move. Management has their turf well-protected in an ever-circling Charybdis of transfers and promotions, adulterated with outside acquisitions, while lower echelons stagnate and struggle for crumbs thanks to performance reviews kept mediocre by the standard of absolute perfection held to “everyone else”. A lot of lip service is paid to talent management, but people with actual talent learn quickly that this is not where they should be, and those who want to gain more talent are either going to wait in vain, or have it go unrecognized.

There is a company picnic, however. It is held on-site, and therefore has to be made as safe as a four-year-old’s birthday party to avoid any potential litigation. Budget cuts may mercifully euthanize this affront to good times. Employee’s families are never invited to attend any company functions whatsoever, which is a lost opportunity to humanize the workforce to their management overlords. Fun is generally disallowed and viewed with suspicion. When management figures out how to put fun on trial and burn it at the stake, they will.

The Care and Feeding of Physicists: Communication

My spouse and I are minutes into our early evening walk. During the first leg of our three mile loop, we have to walk single-file along the narrow shoulder of a two-lane road. I am leading us, and he is behind me several paces. We have been walking in near-silence. Intermittent traffic creates enough noise to keep our conversations minimal.

“Is your hair naturally wavy like that,” he asks suddenly, “or did you do something to it? Is that what happens to it when you twist it up into a hair thing?”

“No,” I answer, unsurprised that even though he sees me every day, he has either forgotten or hasn’t noticed before now that my hair is wavy. “I washed it last night and let it air-dry, and that’s what it does on its own.”

“You don’t curl it or do anything? The top half sort of curves to the left and the bottom half goes to the right.” He takes two slightly longer strides and is right behind me. I feel his hand at the back of my head now as we walk, touching and examining the wave, lifting locks and trying to figure out the mechanics.

“If you Fourier-transformed it, it would have an inch scale,” he says. “You’d have a big spike at each end representing the waves.”

“What does that mean?” 

“You see power in one mode.”

I pause, and then just ask the question. “What does that mean?”

He asks me to imagine being at a lakefront, looking at the waves on the lake’s surface. A very windy day would create short, choppy waves. A fetch would create larger waves, spread further apart. Here and there, a larger swell would appear. He says that if we could look at and measure every point on the lake and put that data into a Fourier transformation, we’d see different power points representing the different wavelengths. I would just have the one wavelength, and one power mode, representing the wave in my hair.

We are now ten minutes into our walk. It has begun to rain gently. We checked local radar and discussed the weather before leaving the house. I had expressed feelings that it was going to rain again. He said that we probably had an hour before it came. We decided to go regardless of what we each thought. He wants to turn around now, worried that I’ll get irritated at being rained on. I’m not, but we turn around anyway since I don’t want to catch a chill.

During the brief walk back to the house, he tries to explain in plain language what Fourier transformation is, and I try to understand what he’s telling me. I ask him about it for the tenth time while we’re in the bedroom together, changing into dry shirts. There’s some frustration in his answer. 

“Are you getting frustrated? I really am just trying to understand.” I ask.

“No, I’m not,” he says. “I just wish I understood it better myself so I could explain it clearly to you.”

The creative process

Some people think creativity requires inspiration, provided mysteriously as manna during dreams to be harvested at morning. Others imagine ideas to be coaxed from the ether by capricious talent. Sometimes, inspirations and ideas can be found by those who look carefully for them within tangled briars of thought. These are sweet as wild berries. For most people engaged in creative pursuits, however, ideas and the words to form them are elusive. Not only are they shy, but it often seems as if they know they're hunted, and actually loathe us.

I've been making a deliberate and sustained effort at writing for about five months. That sounds like a much shorter period of time than it feels. In that period, I have written almost 30,000 words towards what I think might be a high-concept novel, but then again, it may all be garbage if I can't distill a pitch line to it or figure out what the protagonist is actually doing. I've bled 1500 words' worth of beautiful images into a short story, which is still unpublished. I'm currently three months into an entirely different project with a collaborator, and what I think is one-third of the way to completion, with a first (and only, we hope) proposal nearly ready for submission to a pretty big publishing house.

Every single step has been a struggle. The only easy aspects of this have been my partnership with the collaborator and the helpful good sense of my spouse / editor. Everything else- the hunt for ideas, the crooked paths to effective expression of these, and the necessity of sitting down and doing the work when spring so expertly distracts- is difficult. It has been said that creativity is like a muscle, and it gets stronger and better with use. I've also been told that just getting words down on paper is a victory, because writing helps to organize thoughts, and an organized mind helps accomplish almost anything more easily, or thoroughly.

Today I am deep in the tangle, and most of the blood on me is my own. Only a tiny bit belongs to the prey. But I have a sharper stick than I did a few months ago, and I am starting to recognize sign from litter when I peer more attentively at the forest floor.

Sonnet for Alan

Alone, adrift, run hard aground in May

Amidst friends’ beachfront wedding leisure,

Hammer-blows of fetch-fueled waves, salt spray

Stung unhealed wounds of unfathomed measure.

Midday, a second shadow joined me there

To cheer my futile clash against the sea.

Well-made from warmth and kindness, Southern fare,

The earth’s good salt, he taught astronomy.

As one star-set sparked millions more to light,

The ocean sighed, and I agreed, beguiled.

And turning toward him since that radiant night

His kisses blazed a trail from cheek to smile.

Of all gifts borne by ocean tides to buoy,

The best was brought to me as Alan’s joy.

Chicago: Spring, with lake fog

Watching the weather from our 36th-floor window was always fascinating. There were amazing views of supercells in summer, lake-effect snow forming towards Indiana in the winter, and winter waves crashing along the shore in winter. Sometimes a great fog bank would roll in, and one could easily imagine being above the clouds in an aircraft.