Dave | unobtrusive lucidity

Cracking the Eggs

Egg Emoticons by Kate Ter Haar - Used under Creative Commons

While we take our faith very seriously, there are very few things about which I’m choosy when it comes to holidays. I’m not that person who shouts about “keeping Christ in Christmas,” if you know what I mean. Still, Karen and I had discussions early on as to how we would celebrate Easter with our daughter. As it’s one of the two most central holidays to the Christian faith…arguably even the most important one…it’s one that we want to get right. By “get right,” I mean not focused on bunnies and eggs and that sort of thing.

That said, celebrating the coming of Spring is fun, and, I think, it’s healthy to observe the changing of the seasons around us. There’s a valuable perspective that comes with that, a thankfulness and observance that’s all too easy to permit to slip by as we stay indoors all day and streamline our workflows.

So, the end result of this was to have two celebrations. The first would be on the first day of Spring, at which time our daughter would receive her basket and eggs and bunnies and chocolate. On Easter Sunday, we would observe the Resurrection, the critical holiday to our faith, and consider it’s implications in how we perform our faith.

Of course, when grandparents get involved, there’s no end of chocolate and egg hunts, but they’ve sort of earned that privilege at this stage.

This year, Karen chose a medium of which I had never heard to present the story of Easter to our daughter: Resurrection Eggs. They’re a spiffy little device, I must say, and she used them to walk through the events of the holiday last weekend.

This morning, I was trying in vain to wake up and feeding my coffee addiction while watching our daughter play. She has several small toy farm animals that are currently favorites, and she had declared a shelf of the living room entertainment center to be the barn into which they would escape the rain. During the course of the play, she got the Resurrection Eggs out of Karen’s bag, opened all of them, and involved their contents with the rest of the collection. I was struck by the way in which she incorporated these small symbols of a most holy story into the rest of her play…they walked side by side with the other “characters.” This struck me because, each year when Easter arrives, I struggle to find it’s center, it’s essence. This has been true since grad school, largely because I just don’t have the contemplative time now that I had then…and I mourn that loss. For some reason, though, Easter is a time that I can’t ever seem to set aside, to slow down and appreciate. Perhaps it’s the time of year, as well, but, with few exceptions, Easter sails by each year and leaves me on the other side wondering why I can’t find it.

I think that I see the answer in this morning’s events, because that is exactly what this faith is to be. Holidays are important observances, but I don’t for a moment believe in some arbitrary separation between the sacred and the secular, between a religious observance and the rest of the world. If the Christian faith means anything, it’s that entering into what is around us is the desired result, rather than moving away from it. I love that what was in those eggs…those symbols of the sacred for the young mind…were brought out to walk beside, and interact with, the rest of the characters around them, because it is that which Believers are to do.

Perhaps I can never see Easter because I’m always trying to look inside the eggs, when I should, in fact, be walking more amongst them.

Image attribution: Kate Ter Haar under Creative Commons.

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…