Ponderings and Musings

I grew up in a retail environment. One side of the family owned a hardware store/lumber yard/contracting business and for the most part it was family that worked at the business. I started slinging lumber at 14 and then made my way into the office area along my grandparents, dad and later my aunt. It was this environment that piqued my interest in computers because the lack thereof; it was a good opportunity to learn how things work instead of “just making it work” through computer use.

However, even though this retail environment fostered my geekiness, there was actually something much more important that I learned during this time that has stuck with me all these years. It is the concept of “I”.

When a customer entered the store and approached, they were asked a simple question. “What can we do for you today?” The question was asked with enthusiasm and naturally implied that there was a team of folks hidden in the walls of that old mill that were anxious to help the customer. I remember my grandfather sitting me down one time when I asked, “Can I help you?” instead of “What can we do for you today?” It was one of a handful of times that I can remember that he wasn’t yelling or ranting about something to me; instead he calmly explained the difference between “I” and “we”, especially when it came to teamwork in a retail environment. “You don’t own the store. You don’t own the sale. Many people will have contributed to getting the customer what he wants. You don’t help the customer, WE do.”

That’s what has stuck with me ever since.

I bristle when I hear someone run contrary to this concept. It makes me doubt their sincerity. For example, Earl and I recently asked about a dessert menu at a local restaurant. The reply was, “I have coconut cream pie, apple pie, ice cream”, the list went on but I tuned her out a little bit. I wanted to ask if she had baked the pies herself. Had she picked the apples? Did she buy the coconuts?

As part of a growing team at work, I get irked by the same thing. “I told him that I could get that done for him.” I wanted to reply, “if you can get that done, then why are you coming to me to build the database for you?” I might be a little cantankerous but I believe that if you say that _you_ can do it, then go ahead and do it. Plus, as I mentioned before it flakes out my trust in the situation just a little bit. It’s a personal thing, but I think it’s important. That’s why it’s stuck with me all these years.

Once in a while I find myself thinking along the lines of “I” instead of “we” in various team environments at work. I then remember the talk I had with my grandfather about it and try to get back on track before he starts hollering from the other side. After all, I wouldn’t be worth much at work if I wasn’t part of a bigger team and lord knows I don’t want Gramps yelling from the great beyond.

I want him to snicker instead. Snickering was good.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

The alarm clock on the nightstand started playing a classical selection in HD radio high-fidelity. Since the actual clock part of the clock radio is obscured because modern technology demands that clocks use bright displays instead of the older LED displays, I squint to look at the older clock on the other side of the room. It’s 5:30 a.m. Time to get up.

I hop out of bed, do my business in the master bath, put on my bathroom and look out the window. The moon is shining brightly and I can see quite a few stars in the sky. It looks cold. The neighbor’s kitchen window is lighting up the side lawn. There is no sign of any sort of sunrise.

It’s 5:30 a.m. This is a traditional time for farmers to get up and get moving. It’s when the garbage men come by on their truck, it’s when the tractor trailer drivers start moving their goods from point A to point B along the interstate. 5:30 a.m. The start of the day for many. And because of the newish yet obscenely outdated Daylight Saving Time law, the start of the day takes place in the darkness of night.

Yesterday I mentioned in one of my blog entries that I love the magic this time of the year brings. Part of that magic is stepping out into the darkened world after a long workday and a nice supper with the family and listening to the wind rustle the trees. It is a time for peace, for meditation and for reflection on the day’s events.

But we are trying to do everything backwards.

I often hear that we have Daylight Saving Time because the farmers love it. This is a crock of manure. The farmers don’t like getting up in the dark anymore than us office dwellers do. The cows are still sleeping, the chickens are still sleeping and we should still be sleeping. I believe humans are wired to arise with the sunrise, for the most part, and getting out of bed before the sun has made an appearance for the day starts us off on the wrong foot. For many folks, myself included, this includes an unnecessarily early start to the normally-reserved-for-winter Seasonal Affectation Disorder, we start to get depressed.

All so that Americans can think that they’re enjoying a longer day.

We don’t really save energy with Daylight Saving Time anymore. We burn just as much light trying to see where we are going no matter what time of day it is and because we are trying to stay active in the after work hours, we burn more fossil fuels than if we just stayed home and enjoyed an evening with the family.

My existence in Daylight Saving Time is like living in a constant state of jet-lag, especially at this time of year when it has been extended an extra week or two. I know that my mood and disposition will be brighter once our clocks are in relative sync with the sun.

Until then, I’ll just talk about my discomfort a lot.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

I have always said that one should never work at a job that they don’t enjoy. That doesn’t mean that no one should do menial labor, because I know a lot of people who enjoy doing what others consider “grunt work”. I know that one of my most enjoyable jobs was working as a cashier for a large department store chain back in my early 20s, because you got to talk to a lot of people, it required a bit of skill “back in my day” (no scanning where I worked) and my curiosity was satisfied in two ways: the cash register was fun to try to crash once in a while and I got to see what people were buying.

I’m so strange.

After having such a magical long weekend, what with a wedding kicking it off and then the whole honeymoon thing in the fine City of New York, I wasn’t particularly excited about getting up at 5:30 this morning and driving the darkened roads for an hour to sit in a beige cubicle for eight hours, only to drive home another hour along a commute that is populated by slow moving vehicles, mainly horse drawn wagons that are getting crops from point A to point B. In fact, I had a little bit of a feeling of dread getting up this morning but I did my best to muster up an acceptable attitude and I did what we all have to do on a Monday morning.

So here I am, halfway through my work day and I have been congratulated by many on the legal marriage to my partner and I have told a few that no, I did not change my name, nor did he change his. We are still married though, and we have the paper to prove it. Now we get to play with HR and do the whole married health benefits thing. That’ll be fun.

I have found that the sense of dread was unwarranted. Like many people, I imagined work would be more chaotic than it actually is today and I thought that I would have this sense of being overwhelmed, which I don’t. Before leaving for work this morning, Earl suggested I find a way to meditate. This probably wouldn’t be a good thing to do when driving along the one hour commute amongst the buggies in the dark, so instead I tuned into a non-committal radio station on Sirius/XM (the 40s on 4 for those that are curious) and I just kind of found my way to a good place in my head. It took a little effort but I found it and I’m finding that it’s much more enjoyable than that place I was when I was dreading going to work this morning. I guess the sounds of the 40s music and the effort to make my mood better helped me find my center today.

I know many people that make their work their life. And that is awesome for them. While overall I enjoy what I do very much, I consider myself to be more than just my job and I like to explore all the dimensions of this multi-dimensional. multi-faceted slew of interests and quirks that I have.

Once I find a good balance of work and play, I find that the grind isn’t so bad after all.

The last 1/4 of my daily commute home usually involves the Thruway. This is by choice and quite honestly, while I prefer to drive the back roads for all of my commute, there is a part of me that wants to get home as quickly as possible, and driving home on the Thruway allows me this luxury. Especially since driving on the Thruway means that I won’t have to deal with the endless construction going on along the newer parts of the Interstate System near our house. Construction crews aren’t working on the bridge that should be condemned; instead they are working on the bridge that was built 15 years ago.

I think I got off my original topic.

As I was driving along the Thruway this evening, I noticed that every vehicle that I encountered, aside from the tractor trailers, had all of the windows closed. Since it was in the mid 70s, I can only assume that the occupants of the vehicles were enjoying an air conditioned ride as they sped along at speeds exceeding the posted limit.

On the other hand, I had taken the top off the Jeep and I was enjoying the wind blowing me all over the place and the sunshine that was filling the Jeep (at least until sunset, which happened right before I got home).

I’m not a fan of air conditioning. I never really have been, but then again, I’ve never lived in an area where it was considered mandatory so my opinion could be changed if we ever relocated to a warmer climate. But as a person born and bred right here in Upstate New York, I can tell you that for me, fresh air trumps air conditioned comfort any day of the week. I would rather feel the warm breezes from outside with a tinge of “fresh country air” over the sterile, cool air blowing from your local air conditioning unit. Enjoying the ride like I did today made me think of how things were before everything was air-conditioned, or as I like to think of it, sterilized for your comfort. Perhaps I hearken back to the day before air conditioning was considered a necessity, but I feel much more in touch with everything that’s going on around me when I can feel the breeze, smell the scents and embrace the warmth of the sun.

You can ride all you want in your air conditioned vehicle, I’m certainly not going to stop you, but I invite you to roll down the windows, set down the mobile device and feel the world around you sometime. It might make your smile broader and your heart sing louder.

I know it has the effect on me.

I’m typing this blog entry on the virtual iPad keyboard today, so please excuse any gross spelling or grammatical errors and email me if you need further clarification.

Work is a hoot today. Systems are struggling, training classes have commenced and conference calls are happening in all parts of the globe. People are coming into my cube looking for answers or a question (sometimes it’s hard to tell which) and I’m looking at them with a dopey grin and giving them something they want to hear.

You see, we are getting married is week, on Thursday night to be exact, and that’s where my focus is this week. Yes, work is important, but all I can see if that phenomenal moment that I thought would never happen and the long weekend in New York afterwards.

When I get back on Monday I will be a legally married man with all eyes on the ball in the busy game, but for now, my eyes are looking forward to seeing the other eyes I know so well as I say the words, “I do.”.

This blog has been in it’s second decade for a few months and the other night I entertained myself by reading some of the older posts I’ve splattered up here on the intertubes. (What an odd choice of words?!?)

Earl doesn’t really enjoy it when I do this sort of thing (the reading past entries, not the splattering) because I tend to crack myself up with my writing at times and I enjoy engaging in howls of laughter. It’s like a form of therapy for me and in this day and age of political unrest, high prices, unemployment and ending of the free glasses campaign at McDonalds, lord knows we all need howls of laughter in our lives.

Speaking of the therapeutic nature of this, I have to admit that I do find a bit of stress relief by writing in the blog and though it has taken a conscious effort to maintain the blog, especially in this day and age of spurts of wit via Twitter, Facebook and the like (again with the weird word selection). When I take my focus off of the world and into the world that I am writing about as I plod along on my keyboard du jour, I find that the knots in my head unwind a little bit, my left eyebrow cocks up as I concentrate (I just noticed that) and that a smile forms on my face, even when I’m writing about unfortunate topics such as taxes, the dismal selection of presidential candidates and DMV clerks that should be named “Donut Breath”™.

I noticed that my older entries were a little more outpouring as to what was going on in my head. Perhaps I was a little less rough around the edges back then and I didn’t think anyone was really reading my entries, so I would share some things that I’m not sure I would share today. Ironically, these posts seemed to be my better written entries. Maybe I had a little more time to sit down and write instead of sitting in the Jeep 60 miles from home on a daily exercise called “lunch hour”. There was a certain amount of therapy in those writings that I think I miss and I need to find a way to get back to. I sense a little more, well, something, in those earlier entries that I need to seek out again. I’ve always been complaining that I need to slow down a bit, perhaps I need to realize this and actually do it.

A couple of weeks ago I moved my habit of writing down my dreams from a notebook to a new Mac and iOS app called “Day One”. The transition has been good and I’m finding myself writing in it more than I expected to. Apparently there’s stuff inside of me that’s bubbling to get out and writing is an outlet for it.

Perhaps I should stop worrying about what people think about what I write and post (not that I think many read this anyways) and start just writing again.

As I write this blog entry, there’s a Big Event going on somewhere important. It’s all about the latest incarnations of the iPhone. I hope they announce the immediate availability of iOS 5, because my beta testing has not been as smooth as I would like it to have been. It’ll be golden though when we have the real version.

I’m not following the Apple event closely, though, because it’s my lunch hour (albeit later than normal) and quite frankly I’m enjoying relaxing a bit and watching a pair of blue jays jumping around on the grass along side the parking lot. They are taking turns darting in and out of a dense group of trees; I suspect there’s a nest in there somewhere.

The blue jays seem rather bold but I don’t want to risk taking a picture and scaring them off. Their presence is bringing a sort of zen to my lunch hour and I kind of like that. Besides, the photo would be taken with an undoubtedly by-now outdated iPhone and I don’t want to risk the shame of being shunned by a passerby for having outdated equipment.