Posts tagged as “We Call It Living”

My wife and I just celebrated 8 years of marriage and 12 years together … we married on almost precisely the fourth anniversary of our first meeting, and it's been a lot of fun!

I can't tell you how blessed I feel to be married to a beautiful and talented artist. And one who puts up with me and my crazy shenanigans … and encourages them!

Thank God for our marriage; here's to another 8 times 12 years more …

-the Centaur

P.S. If you're reading this, Boobie … I love you!

I'm not a big sports fan - my favorite "sports" to participate in are martial arts, my favorite sports to watch are sumo and baseball (though I can watch football with my family in a pinch), and of the real sports I've played, I prefer basketball - perhaps that's because it's the only sport in which I've scored an official goal.

My entire basketball career consisted of two seasons of grade school play, which I only dimly recall. I wasn't a dedicated player - I was in grade school, and hadn't yet learned the value of practice - and in official games I only got on court a handful of times. Actually, I only remember being on court once, but that one time, I got the ball, and took a shot.

I don't remember the outcome of that shot. We were playing, I got the ball, I was in position, I took the shot, the game continued, we all ran to the other side of the court. Reviewing that sequence of events later, it's clear what happened - if you know the rules of basketball - but at the time I didn't think about it. I was told later that I not only got the ball and took the shot, I scored a goal.

That amazes me to this day - I still don't quite believe it, and if one of my old grade school buddies told me that the onlookers were mistaken, I wouldn't be at all surprised. But the onlookers told me that I did score - and if it was my only shot in the only game I played in, I have the weird experience of my crappy basketball career having a field goal percentage of 100%.

But I did play other sports, notably soccer. So at some level I've got the tiniest sliver of interest in the game, which is perhaps why I picked up something from all the World Cup coverage going on - in particular, a story of a black athlete booed by fans in the stands, and his coach telling him to be strong, to show character, and as for the people who were his critics:

We will answer them on the field of play.

I love that sentiment. I took it to mean that there may be people who hate you for who you are, where you are from, or for other things about yourself you cannot change - but you should not answer those criticisms; instead you should focus on conducting yourself at the highest level in your chosen work, and let that performance speak for itself.

I did some digging, and apparently this is an old phrase - I found references to similar phraseology dating back to the late 1800s and early 1900s (back when the word "soccer" was still remembered as a contraction of "AsSOCiation Football"). The closest I could find to an exact quote was the following news article, which is not from the same event, but had the same idea:

We have told the youngster to be strong because we know they (Bosso supporters) are going to boo him. I have told him that playing for Dynamos has always been associated with pressure. I have told him he will be against thousands of supporters and he cannot answer them all by reacting to what they will be saying from the stands. He should just answer them on the field of play. I have told him to be strong, to show character.

This matters for many reasons, but it's particularly relevant to me because of the ideas of people who I care about - some of whom are quite willing to critique others based on features they cannot change, and others of whom have called into question the whole project of focusing on people's important similarities, rather than their obvious differences.

Now, I could take on those criticisms directly, and one day I will - but for now, I'm not. I am willing to discuss ideas, but I don't want to dispute someone's ideas if I haven't taken the time to express the ideas I have of my own. Regardless of the merits of their position, clearly a person who says what they think is doing a better job of communicating than the one who doesn't.

It's hard even to write this article, because there are things I want to communicate that are based on ideas I have that themselves need so much explanation that it would derail everything I'm writing to express them. So I'm going to continue to do what I said I was going to do earlier: rather than arguing, I'm going to be strong, to show character, and express my own ideas clearly.

It's likely that I won't have a 100% field goal percentage in this endeavor. I'm not the Hemingway type, willing to throw 99 pages in the wastebasket to get to that one good page - you can't be a blogger with that attitude. Instead, I believe in working hard, trying frequently, getting your ideas out there, acknowledging your mistakes, learning from them, and moving forward.

As for my - as for our - critics, for the time being, we shall not even acknowledge them. That isn't to say that their criticism isn't important, nor is it even to imply that the criticism is wrong. It is instead to acknowledge that if someone has criticized your behavior, the answer is not to defend yourself - but to instead prove them wrong by example

We shall answer them on the field.

-the Centaur

Pictured: My good friend Nathan Vargas, showing us, his friends, a proof of his competence in his chosen field of play. This will all become much more clear later.

I'm a regular at many places - restaurants, cafes, bookstores. I'm a regular because I like good ruts - where you find something that works, like going to a good restaurant, with healthy food and clean tables suitable for working on your laptop, and located near your house and next to the bank and pet food store. When I find a good rut, I stick to it, so I hit the same places a lot.

And I'm friendly to the staff at these places, because I admire my father, who could be friendly to anyone, and because I'm a follower of Jesus, and I interpret his teachings to mean that everyone you meet is a person, and is just as valuable a person as you yourself are, and that you should treat them as you wish you should be treated.

So I get to know the staff, and often become friends with them. So while waiting for my food at Aqui Blossom Valley, one of my favorite restaurants (because it has healthy food and clean tables and … oh, heck, it's the one I was talking about above, interpolate that description), I saw one of the staff, a busser turned part-time bartender, and walked over to say hello.

We talked for a while, and I asked if he wanted to become a full-time bartender. He hesitated a moment, then said yes. He said that bartending is faster paced than bussing tables, but unlike bussing, everything you need to do is right there at your workstation. There's no circling the restaurant, then the kitchen, then the storeroom, then the restroom: it's all right there.

Yes, but sometimes the line gets long, I said. And then my eponymous friend behind the counter said something interesting:

There's always a line.

The line at the bar at Aqui can get intense on the evenings and weekends, easily a dozen people deep. But in his training, the bartender said that his trainers warned him that there would always be a line - and that he should do his best to ignore it. They told him to work at his own pace, because if you hurry up to get ahead, you'll screw up and fall behind.

Early on in his training, he said, he would see the line stack up and tried to pick up the pace so he could get ahead. But when he did so, he found himself forgetting ingredients, ending up short, or mixing up the order. On one occasion, his shadow trainer looked at the drink, shook his head, and said "Pour it out and start over."

From then on, he worked at his own pace, focusing on the order at hand, and it's worked better for him.

There's a lot of wisdom here. First, in the staff of Aqui, who train people for their positions, who shadow them to provide advice, and instruct them in how their jobs really work to be efficient, rather than trying to create the perception of efficiency by ordering the staff to rush and then screaming at them when they fall behind, as happens at so many other less successful restaurants.

But I perhaps I paid attention to that lesson because I'm a professional in the software industry - and, in my mind, a professor-in-training, learning how software really works so that one day I can go back to academia and help train the next generation to be better software engineers - and I'm always analyzing workplace environments and what makes them work … or not.

But the lesson that "There's always a line" is more general. You always have a line of tasks stacked up in front of you: each day you need to get up, dress, breathe, drink, eat, excrete, and sleep, and you have a thousand other tasks besides. You never stop wearing clothes or eating or excreting, so you'll always need to make sure you have laundry, good food and toilet paper.

But for any more complex tasks, there's usually a right way and a wrong way to do it. When you're a novice, you may fumble around, but once you become expert, there's a system. You may improve the system, you may try to perfect it - but if you get in a hurry and you skip steps, you can make mistakes, and be far worse off than you started with.

Software is particularly vulnerable to this - mistakes found early in the process, say when you decide what you want, can be easy to fix, just by changing direction. Once a design is started it gets harder to fix mistakes, and even harder when there's code. By the time you get to deployment, the costs skyrocket: according to NASA, mistakes in operation can be 1500 times as expensive.

I guess they would know. NASA lost a third of a billion dollars to a software glitch, when the Mars Climate Orbiter, which had inadequately tested software mixing English System and Metric units, misjudged its altitude - and even though the error was noticed in advance and a team met to discuss it, they skipped the course correction maneuver, causing the Orbiter to crash.

So remember: there will always be a line. Hurrying up to get ahead can lead to mistakes, which can put you behind … or, hey, lead to your fiery death on re-entry, and the ignominious legacy of being used forevermore as a warning and example to others of how not to conduct your business.

So ignore the line, take your time, and get it right.

-the Centaur

Pictured: the bar at Aqui, not yet open ... so not yet having a line. ;-D