Bore myself to death

I have become a wreck loose. I am spending most of the day around the house. I read and send email, watch TV and surf the web. I have to think about showering and shaving. I have settled into an every other day routine. Shave one day, shower the next unless I run in which case I shower that day. I am sure my wife is trying to figure out what that hell I am doing (or am going to do). I know that I have NO idea right now and nor do I want to. The weather in conducive to staying indoors. A series of small storms are sweeping in and out and it’s cold outside. If it weren’t for my lunches and now and then breakfast dates, I would probably be considered a recluse.

But I am not.

I am trying hard to bore myself to death. I want to bore myself to death and then I will figure out what is next. I know one thing. I don’t want to do what I have been doing for the past several years. No more in-house jobs. I wrote this poem back in early October of 2008 vowing not to go this route again and yet it happened (again).

To leave this place
To which I should never have come
A cloud of paper
A morass of process
I put it all down
And leave it to them
Those who stay to be buried under the weight of it
I was never any good at it anyway
It will be a relief for them and me
But mostly for me.

So I don’t really trust myself. I need to break the string. The only way I know how to do this effectively is to stop doing what I was doing before.

So I am stopping.

My day is mostly my own. Pretty much the whole day. If my wife asks me to do something with her I go willingly. She pretty much has a blank check from me as long as it doesn’t look, taste or feel like work.

People think I can’t stop but that is because they can’t imagine themselves stopping.

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Breaktime

After going back inside for 15 months I have left my latest job. The truth is that I hated being an employee. What I hated the most is not singularly directed at my latest binge. I found it throughout my career.

Company meetings, performance reviews. Having others judge your work. Employees who think HR is garbage can for their complaints and problems and HR people who get off on that. The lack of leadership and courage. I can count on my hands the  number who stood up for what was right versus the normal avoidance behavior of doing the right thing.

I won’t miss it.

Right now I am taking some breaktime. I have no idea how long I will remain out in the cold but from where I stand, it actually feels tropical. It’s been since 1979 that I last took a good deal of time off. I had just finished reading Bernard Lefkowitz’s book Breaktime about folks who just decided to stop working and take unstructured time off from the grind.

It’s a hard book to find these days. I found my last copy on the web from a used book dealer.

It’s a good read and in fact I am re-reading it right now reminding myself of what has driven me to seek  refuge in the world of those who choose not to work. Does this mean that I won’t want to work again? Not at all. Just not right now. But it takes months to detox from being caged and in my last job I felt the bars closing in and the clink of the lock on the cage door.

Ka-link!

What was it Eowyn said in Lord of the Rings?

“A cage. To stay behind bars until use and old age accept them and all chance of valor has gone beyond recall or desire.”

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A Prince Of A Guy

How often do you hear this at work.

Someone is about to diss a co-worker but first they add in a protective, precursor type comment.

I really like him but…..

or….

He is a really nice guy but……

A colleague of mine has one of the best.

He’s a prince of a guy….

Then he pounces, telling us how he really feels about his target. Whenever I hear him say the words “prince of”  I know nothing good can come of it. He is not going to say he is a Prince of Denmark. Of course is its Hamlet we’re talking about perhaps that’s not so good either.

Many princes are in reality, frogs which can be OK if you are a toad.

He is a prince of a guy but………..blah, blah, blah, blah, BLAH!

But here I am throwing stones. It’s not like I have never used a similar phrase.

The truth is I HAVE! And I am sure others have used adjectives when referring to me.

“He was a really nice guy but I am really glad he went to another company.”

“He was a really nice guy but frankly he digressed too much.”

If the shoe fits as they say.

Personally I would rather someone would just get tot he chase. if you don’t like someone’s behavior or their performance at work, then JUST SAY IT!

If you really liked him or if he were really a prince of some kind, you would tell him your issues to his face. By the way you can substitute “him” or “his” for “her” or “she”.  Also don’t call a woman a prince of a gal. Not good. As a matter of fact princess of a gal is not good either. These days you can get called on political incorrectness for just about any off the road remark.

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Schwartzed

I first met the most recent CEO of Sun back in 1996 when Sun acquired his small software company, Lighthouse Design. He seemed like a likable enough guy. After meeting with his 20 or so employees it quickly became obvious that he would be the only long-term survivor of the acquisition. But even Jonathan wasn’t thinking of Sun long-term.

I am going to vest my stock and then go and  join Steve at Next. Or so he told me. Steve was “the” Steve as in Steve Jobs. This was before Next was purchased by Apple and Jobs returned as interim CEO.

More on that later.

During one of our first one on one meetings he told me that he liked Human Resources (I was in HR, by the way) to be the bad guy while he played the good guy. So basically HR was the messenger of bad news and he brought the good news. I looked him square in the face and told him that in my world HR was a business partner not a whipping boy. Don’t mistake us for a trash can, I thought.

So no deal, I said.

About a half-year later almost all of the original Lighthouse folks were gone but Jonathan was hanging in there. I dropped by to say hello. He reiterated that he was fed up with the Sun bureaucracy and would leave as soon as his stock vested.

Yeah, yeah. I get it! Of course I didn’t think he would leave. Not anytime soon.

Have you met Scott yet? I asked. Scott being Scott McNealy the then CEO. He said they had met, but only briefly.

You won’t be leaving anytime soon, I stated firmly. he jerked his head in disbelief.

Jonathan has an arrogant streak and he shot back (in an arrogant tone), what makes you think so?

Oh, once you get to know Scott, you two will love each other. You are both arrogant assholes I said. Now understand while I only talked to McNealy a few times in my years at Sun, I actually liked his style of leadership but from afar.

Of course the  rest is history. Jonathan never did leave. He got to know Scott quite well and moved up the ladder until he out Zandered Ed Zander and got the top job.

His end came slowly as Sun twisted in the wind while the world stamped its approval on the Oracle cash buyout. Then and only then, did he really leave. I don’t think that Jonathan really wanted to see the company sold. Certainly not to Oracle. Just a guess on my part. Jonathan became what he said he didn’t want to be. A Sun type of guy. Maybe late Sun, but Sun never the less. That very creative, innovative NIH chaos that took Sun so far in the 90′s also was the big fat weight that sunk it as a company in the 2000′s.  Jonathan will be remembered in the same breath as Captain Smith of the Titanic.

Oracle will swallow Sun. Not quite as quickly as I thought. There will be blood but for right now only some blood. But a year from now…….???? At least some of my former colleagues still have jobs. In this day and economy that counts for a zoo animal something.

Jonathan (2nd from the left) in his Scott McNealy-jean and sneaker dress-down outfit.

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17 companies

I may be a bit jaded. I have worked for 17 companies since 1977. This only includes my stints as a regular full time employee. You see there are are a lot mkore if I throw in my consulting jobs.

A lot more. But let’s not count those right now. It gets way too crazy.

Having 17 jobs tends to change your outlook toward employement. I was laid off 4 times. I probably left another 5-6 jobs to escape a pending layoff or a merger. The rest of them I left all on my own. Usually because I was chasing down stock or a higher level job title or I just got plain restless of . Early on it was just to keep a job or because I got the itch to move on. later on it became about seeking higher titles and more pay. My last big move was for title and stock. I was out to make some money and executives generally make more money than peons.

But you come into a job planning on staying and yet if I look back, I wasn’t very good at staying anywhere for long.

I was much better at finding jobs than keeping them.

That’s the reason my career as a consultant and contractor worked out so well. The job of a consultant is to leave. Sort of like a relief pticher in baseball. get the side out and leave. Get this batter out and leave. Leaving felt natural. If there is one thing I hate is contractors who don’t this. And many contractors are JUST like this. They talk about being independent workers but then they obsess about the length of their contract and whether they are treated like employees. One contractor (OK, not one but many) complained about not being invited to company employee all-hands meetings. Another griped about not being given enough notice when his contract ended abruptly. He’ll never work with me again.

You are a contingent worker. Your job is to be temporary and fungible.

Anyway, once I started doing that type of work, it felt natural to me. Much more natural than working as an employee for anyone.

By the way, the leaving goes both way. Either you or the client can pull the trigger. lately I have not been very good about this and like Ben Franklin’s fish and visitors, I or the job started to stink about 3 days.

Several years ago a contract recruiter I know calls me and tells me that the department he has been working for over the past year has changed. HR is starting to really lean on the recruiters to follow a certain procedure. It turns out he doesn’t like the new way.

Yes, well you are a contractor. You could leave.

I don’t want to leave, he replies.

Then just take it. It’s their company after all. Can you take it? I ask.

Oh yes, he says, but I am going to do things my way.

Then they will fire you, I warn but as long as YOU can take it and remember that YOU are a contractor, you’ll keep things in perspective.

It doesn’t take long. A few weeks later he calls to tell me he got fired.

You are a contractor, I remind him. They can end the contract but they can’t fire you. You’re not an employee (and by the way STOP acting like one).

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Zoo Animals/Beast of Prey

I entered Silicon Valley in 1977 as  a newbie. I came in as a recruiter filling cookie cutter jobs in a semiconductor company called Siltec.

Like many of the places I worked at, Siltec no longer exists.

One of my first lesson as a Silicon Valley Warrior was to learn to not get too attached to companies. They have a tendency to disappear or be marginalized or be merged. Recently one of my favorite companies was wolfed down by Oracle. Oracle is the King of the Jungle. It eats anything it wants.

The second lesson I learned at Siltec was that There Will be Blood. In this case blood is jobs and jobs are layoffs. It’s not that layoffs were happening while I was at Siltec. But I happened on the remnants of a past layoff in the loft above the manufacturing floor one hot late Indian summer day when I was asked my boss Bodester (well, her name was Esther but we all called her by this nickname that Siltec Woman slapped on her) to retrieve some files from 1975.

Anyway, it was a hot day as I said and as I clambered up the ladder that led to the loft I had the distinct feeling that I was in a barn minus the hay.

This what it “felt” like. The woodsie ambience is similar but the ground floor was a manufacturing facility.

I got up there and was confronted with a myriad of cardboard boxes filled with old employee files. I was looking for an ex employee’s file from 1975 but none of the boxes were marked so I just went box by box until I stumbled upon a whole slew of files in which each employee had been terminated in 1975. Basically their end dates were all the same. Once I found the file I clambered back down the steps and headed directly to Bodester’s office in the building across the parking lot.

“What happened on such and such a date in 1975,” I asked?

“Oh, that was the big layoff,” she replied. “Better get used to those.”

It’s 33 years later. I have been laid off 4 times myself and have personally helped to lay off thousands of co-workers. In the late my mere apperance in a company sent the chills up and down the spines of my colleagues.

Over the years I discovered there are two general types of employees in the Valley.

Zoo animals and beast of prey. Those who survive best in long-term employment are the former and those who can survive in a constantly changing employment situation (many jobs) are the latter. I am a beast of prey. Not by design, but by nature. It is the way I am.

I myself am a cheetah.

I am fast

But I can’t climb trees.

I don’t always get to eat my prey.

Lions and jackals often show up in large groups and chase me away. So I rarely eat but I wouldn’t have it any other way. At least what I run down is mine.

One thing I know. I don’t do well in captivity but I am known from time to time to jump a fence and live off a habitat. In the end, through, I will eventually leap back over that same fence when there is too much authority. Zoo animals don’t leap the fence. They stay and bite their keepers and talk about how independent they are.

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