23. April. 2021
Don't force it. Get a bigger hammer.
Roughly 18000 of my coworkers took advantage of an early out program last year and left the company. In their wake, there is a lot of internal transferring happening to balance staffing levels out. One of my coworkers was offered an interdepartmental transfer, but declined because “[your] area has too much seniority.”
This was a nice way of saying we’re old, but she also asked how I/we managed to do it; how we stayed for so long. With a shrug, I simply replied that we keep showing up. Days become weeks become months, and pretty soon, that becomes decades.
I first learned that phrase from my stepdad. He wasn’t big on pithy advice, or productivity hacks. He modeled the behavior he wanted us to adopt. A journeyman carpenter, he left at the (to my teenage mind) impossibly early hour of 6 AM to head for wherever the job site happened to be. Rain, wind, heat- it didn’t matter. The work had to be done, so he kept showing up.
At home, his workload was harder. He married my mom, but a disaffected teenager came with the deal. We got off to a rocky start, but like a lot of men from that era, we tacitly mended our relationship while working on a car—specifically my ‘74 Malibu.
To be clear, when I say “we” it’s really closer to 70/30 in his favor. Maybe 80/20 if I’m being honest. But he kept showing up, and little by little things got better. No moralizing, no scolding, just a determination. Just showing up.
A lot of life lessons were tacitly taught under that hood: Show up, be on time, do good work, look out for others.
He left us this past week—the 2nd time in less than a month that my family has felt a loss— but not without first making a lasting impression on a listless suburban kid. This week closed out a lifetime of service for him; to our nation, to my family, and to me.
And as pithy as it might sound, I’m forever grateful. He’ll be missed.
On to the good stuff:
You ever notice how some people always have a dark cloud following them? When you actively look for it, they seem to be everywhere.
I used to think negativity was a state of mind. Now, having watched for long enough, I come to realize it’s not a state of mind. Negativity is a character trait. All of us possess some quantum of it, but on a spectrum. There are people at the far end of the spectrum who are so completely imbued with negativity, their personae so thoroughly animated by it, that not a day can go by without their expressing it. Infecting others with it. Spitting it up into the sky. Flinging it into your hair. Catching you in a web of it.
The good news is when you know what to look for, avoiding them becomes easy.
Speaking of dark clouds, McDonald’s Ice Cream machines are a frequent object of scorn. Their unreliability is so bad that the company itself once tweeted this:
The machines are intricate and over-engineered, with even the simplest of errors knocking them out of service. But there’s also a hidden service menu on them that until recently could only be accessed by the manufacturer’s approved technicians, costing franchisees 1000’s of dollars monthly for routine service calls. That started to change when a couple hacked the machines and offered an alternative. Here’s what happened when McDonald’s fought back.
“…The secret menu reveals a business model that goes beyond a right-to-repair issue, O’Sullivan argues. It represents, as he describes it, nothing short of a milkshake shakedown: Sell franchisees a complicated and fragile machine. Prevent them from figuring out why it constantly breaks. Take a cut of the distributors’ profit from the repairs. “It’s a huge moneymaker to have a customer that’s purposefully, intentionally blind and unable to make very fundamental changes to their own equipment,” O’Sullivan says. And McDonald’s presides over all of it, he says, insisting on loyalty to its longtime supplier. “
In The Air:
A couple of weeks ago, I shared Airport History’s beautiful photo essay of the Memphis Tennessee airport. This time they’re back with one of Portland Oregon (my hometown airport).
The facility looks completely different now—even as I write this, it’s undergoing a massive renovation—but this is a wonderful look at an earlier time.
Speaking earlier times, it’s hard to believe this was once a thing in aviation.
In less than 120 years, we’ve gone from Kitty Hawk to the first flight on Mars.
At the other end of the travel spectrum, this bridge is less than 1/3 the length of that first flight, and redefines “international travel.”
In Your Ears:
Do you ever go to shows by yourself? Here’s Rob Janicke on why you might want to do it.
Also this:
Thanks for showing up,
Kevin—
P.S. This week’s subtitle came from the bumper sticker on my stepdad’s work truck. It was there for years. Absurd and literal all at once. Not unlike life itself.