Dave | unobtrusive lucidity

No, Really…the Pleasure’s Mine

A crew poster from "McDonald's Open Doors" by coolinsights on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons.

There’s a certain restaurant chain that’s quite prominent in the South. It exists sparsely in New England, but when we moved to North Carolina last summer, we were reminded of just how popular this certain restaurant chain is here. This particular restaurant chain has a policy. When you thank the person waiting on you (which, having been on the other side of that counter for a good bit of my college career, I always do), they respond by saying, “My pleasure.”

No matter how often you say it, no matter how passing it is, no matter how repetitious it is for the person serving you…”My pleasure” must be the response.

It’s become a bit of a trend in the past couple of years, as well. Two years ago, Karen and I purchased a car. As I sat in the salesman’s office in the dealership, I noticed, taped to his phone (and presumably every other phone in the building, as well, as it was the response that I received with every call), was the reminder to say, “My pleasure.”

When I schedule an appointment with my chiropractor, the response on the phone is, “My pleasure.”

For crying out loud…

Don’t get me wrong, this is perfectly polite, and all. And, certainly, if there’s anything for which the South is known, it’s politeness. It’s just that I would rather hear the actual thoughts of the person assisting me…I’d rather hear the way that they would say thanks, rather than a scripted response. And if they don’t want to thank me, that’s fine too. I’m a New Englander. It doesn’t bother me.

And, the problem goes further.

You know the feeling, I’m sure. You’re on the phone with a support person for some large company or service, and you’ve asked the question that you know isn’t going to be answered the way that you want. You’re greeted with, “Unfortunately…”, and you tune out, because it just sounds too scripted. Or, you’re reading a job post, and it’s sprinkled periodically with phrases like, “Here at (insert company name), we strive to….”, as though you’ve forgotten about which company you were reading.

When I worked at a fast food place to earn the rent during my undergraduate days, part of the motivation for me to continue my education and do better for myself was the complete prohibition of thinking on your own. There is to be none of your own polite responses or conversation in those environments, there can be only the scripted response that someone in the corporate headquarters has decided is appropriate. The problem goes further up, though. Technical support staff answering a phone must reply to your questions with a script that sounds all too robotic (“I’ll be happy to help you with…”, instead of something simple, like maybe, “Sure, let’s see what we can do”). Copywriters can’t just fluidly be creative with their copy, they must force the marketers’ scripts into the project, no matter how foreign it may sound. The larger the company, the worse the epidemic. What surprises me is the fact that the corporate decision makers still think that this is a good idea, continuing to have these scripts in place. Do they not realize that it serves only to frustrate?

The repercussions of this issue are huge. We’re removing more and more independent, critical thinking. We’re squashing creativity at record volumes. We’re reducing the quality of human interactions, objectifying both the customer and the employee with whom they are conversing. All because of a lack of trust.

If you interview and hire your staff for a certain role, then trust them to do that role. Trust them to think and to make decisions on their own. Trust them to exercise (*gasp*) some creativity and to be themselves in their interactions with customers. If you don’t trust them in this way, then you either shouldn’t have hired them, or you don’t deserve to have them as employees to begin with. My personal opinion tends toward the latter.

Image attribution: coolinsights under Creative Commons.

Degrees of Separation

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I made my living in the behavioral sciences. My workday revolved around seeing people face-to-face. While it was quite exhausting for an introvert to spend most of a workweek conversing with others, I found that I knew the team with which I worked every day. We knew what was happening in each others’ lives, we celebrated career milestones with each other, we had each others’ phone numbers. In some cases, I worked in high-stress situations keeping very odd hours, and I knew what it was to see my colleagues more than I saw most of my other friends. We were, after all, the only ones who could really appreciate what the other was experiencing.

Now that I make my living in the digital realm, I mostly work for myself. I do work with clients from multiple states, most of whom I haven’t seen in person in over a year. In one case, I did a project for a client that I had never met in person. I’m currently doing work with a team that is spread out all over the world, from both coasts of the U.S. to Europe. As everyone in the world of digital content has the freedom to work from wherever they choose, I regularly have “meetings” with people that I have never met face-to-face. I speak with them every week, and know their personalities at some level, but I cannot say that I really know any of my colleagues on this current project.

That’s not to say that I never keep office hours in this line of work. I actually do on many projects, and, on the occasions that I have, I feel that I’ve gotten to be very well acquainted with my co-workers. On each of those occasions, I’ve kept in contact with those co-workers and carried at least some of those professional relationships forward.

This isn’t so much an issue of effectiveness. I’m an introvert, so I’m perfectly content to be alone with my work for long periods of time. I’ve found, though, that I feel more satisfied with the projects that I’ve completed alongside people with whom I’m connected, colleagues that I’ve seen in person and whose interests and personalities I’ve gotten to know.

It’s interesting how the human factor to doing our work is only effective up to a certain level of abstraction. Beyond that, while not, at least in my experience, a point of diminished returns, there’s certainly a point at which the work becomes more robotic, less…meaningful…in nature.

And we all want to do work with meaning, to not be subjected to drudgery.

Ultimately, we’re doing our work for people, for each other. I think that our work is done the best when keeping that in mind.

Photo Attribution: mark sebastian under Creative Commons

Batgirl’s Psychologist – The Atlantic

Flurries of Change

Screenshot of weather forecast on iPhone: 64 degrees in February

There was a time when I hated snow. Detested it. Loathed it.

Having grown up with more than my share of ugly winters, I jumped at the chance to move south for grad school. I still remember my first January in Virginia, driving around my new city with no jacket on and my sunroof open. I felt as though I had arrived in a paradise.

You see, somewhere around my sophomore year in college (the best that I can remember), I began to struggle progressively more with each winter. The grey skies brought with them a deepening depression with each year of my life. That’s why a southern move was such an enormous relief to me. Instead of attempting to cope for months on end each year, I was now faced with this struggle perhaps once each year, and then only for a day or two. This seemed like a good situation in which to be.

Fast forward several years…getting married, having our daughter, moving to the Boston area, and now having landed back in North Carolina. These moves and events have been a whirlwind of occasionally contradictory experiences. My first New England winter was brutal, but I learned to cope. I bought the gear, and I re-acclimated with the rituals of my childhood: shoveling, scraping, and leaving early (at least, in my new career, working from home is sort of the norm). You see, if you grow up living with winter hardships, it’s sort of like riding a bicycle. You never forget how to drive in these circumstances. You may be rusty for a few minutes, but when the white stuff starts falling, you just sort of know what to do. I found that these sorts of things aren’t things that many people know about in the South (like brushing off your car halfway through a storm in order to significantly lighten the workload when it’s over, or keeping a steady momentum at all costs when going up a slick incline).

That said, this has been a good winter to have spent in the South, as my friends back in the Boston area tell me about the six feet of snow that they have (with more coming each weekend, it seems). Last weekend, though, I had one of those moments in which your brain sort of…short circuits. In February…a month in which I’m used to wearing base layers and heavy wool…I was wearing a t-shirt and no jacket as I walked into our Sunday morning worship service. That day came in at just short of 70 degrees.

Now, as I write this, we’re in the grip of an ice storm, and life is forced to slow down a bit. This is the exception, though, not the rule at all. Life doesn’t slow down here. There is no season of rest, no season of early darkness in which to drink cider and talk with friends and family, no easy time to catch up on your reading by the dim light. All of those things that I never thought that I would miss, I now do. And, while snow is not among them, the quiet that results from it is.

Perhaps it’s an overly positive recollection of an area with which I was quite enamored. I miss New England so much it hurts some days, and I remember the times that we had there during the harsh winters…much harsher than the ones that I experienced as a child. It’s a season of life that’s important, one that I didn’t truly miss until I had experienced it. There’s much to be said for slowing down, for pausing, for appreciating the seasonal flow of the life around us.

Could it be that I miss the snow?

I should probably stop just short of admitting that…

A Review of “Black Widow: Deadly Origin”

Black Widow: Deadly Origin by Paul Cornell

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The Black Widow has long been one of my favorite characters in the Marvel Universe. Before the world at large was introduced to her in Iron Man 2, I was reading her adventures. I was thrilled to have her introduced into the cinematic canon because she’s a strong female character, a hero of tragic origin with a darkness that brings an enormous amount of depth to her stories. Natasha Romanoff has been involved in many adventures within Marvel comics through the decades, playing an important part in various continuities. I hadn’t read the Deadly Origin issues, though, and I was looking forward, as I always do, to reading anything Black Widow when I picked this collection up at my local bookstore.

How disappointing.

This story alternates between a plot called the “Icepick Protocol” to kill everyone that Romanoff loves and hinging around the man who was a father figure to her, Ivan…and flashbacks to her past, from her origins as part of the Red Room through her involvement in the Civil War story arc. This is the retconned history for the Black Widow, in which biotechnological enhancements prolong her life substantially, and thus she has lived through a great deal. We see her husband, the Red Guardian, and other interesting glimpses into the Widow’s past that has crafted her into the strong and fractured character that she is. The flashbacks seemed to be well-paced within the context of the rest of the story to me, but the dialogue seemed out of character in both present and past on many occasions. The sweep of the story is too broad for so confined a collection…we’re simply covering too much of Romanoff’s life because we have to see how it collides with present events. The present events are then reduced to a cacophony of violent confrontations that don’t leave room for the sort of character evolution that I would hope to see in an origin story.

Then, there’s the art.

Two different artists draw this collection: one the modern events, another the flashbacks. The flashback art by Leon is brilliant. The emotions of the characters carry far past the dialogue, and there are moments where I feel I know the Black Widow’s character better based only on her facial expression or posture in tableau from these flashback sequences. Comparing this to the majority of the collection…the current events…is striking enough to be painful. In modern day, Romanoff looks as though she’s seventeen rather than the woman she is, her apparent age completely incongruous with the skills she evidences in the fighting sequences. Which is sort of noticeable, as fighting sequences are really all we see in the present events.

Overall, I also find the events of the story a bit too steeped in the “off-camera” sex. Yes, the Widow is a product of the Red Room, but she has become so much more as a hero, and this just doesn’t do her justice. I think the motivation of the writer was to paint Romanoff as the woman she’s become, but this missed the mark entirely.

Deadly Origin’s writing is, unfortunately, a lot of failing to do the character of the Black Widow justice. Combined with profoundly disappointing artwork for more than half of the collection, and this is a book that will likely gather dust on my shelf without ever being re-read. If you love the Black Widow, you’ll want better.

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