Areas of Unrest

30 March 2000 - The Real World

QOTD: "I personally think we developed language because of our deep need to complain." - Lily Tomlin

Reading: Laurell K. Hamilton, Burnt Offerings

Listening to: the original cast (1963) recording of She Loves Me

When I was in college, we used to refer to life after graduation as "the real world." I remember jokingly asking questions like, "Are there problem sets in the real world?" and people talking of grad school as a way to postpone entering the real world. While I've been known to admit that one of the reasons I went to grad school was the realization that getting a job meant getting up far earlier in the morning, I am increasingly convinced that the world of work is no more the "real world" than universities are.

Consider, for example, how I've spent the past few days. Monday morning found me at LAX at 6:30 a.m. and reasonably comfortably ensconced on a 757 to Denver some 45 minutes later. In the real world, I'd still have been asleep for at least another 2 hours. Or I'd have been on that flight because there was a cheap fare and I actually wanted to go to Denver. Instead, I was enduring having to function an hour earlier than normal (and several hours earlier than I'd prefer) because I had a meeting in Boulder that afternoon.

As for meetings, they obviously have nothing to do with the real world. Most meetings are simply a way for people to fill in time, to make themselves look important at the expense of other people, or to satisfy some formal requirement to report information that nobody does anything with. I shouldn't complain that much this week when there was some useful content in 3 of the 4 meetings I was at. But the basic point remains that meetings generally have little to do with getting anything done. The part I find eeriest is that none of my colleagues doodle. As I fill page after page with glorified stick figures (or, sometimes, crickets, or, in moments of intense boredom, a creature I refer to as vampire kitty) I realize that I am stuck in some demonic dimension where the natives lift their pens only to take notes! (Actually one of the test guys from one of our contractors does doodle, but he doesn't count because if I had his job I'd have been confined to a locked and padded room long ago. My doodling is not an indication of any mental illness, of course. Even if I drew a lot of aliens wearing bowties the other day.)

At the end of the day on a business trip one retires to a bland hotel room, where it is impossible to tell from external cues what city one is in. Clothes are changed and dinner is procured from some expensive eatery on the grounds that one who is suffering from business travel deserves some compensation. In the real world, people would eat at Full Moon Grill if they were celebrating some important event, but would eat at home much of the time, particularly on Mondays. A steady diet of seared ahi in balsamic reduction, accompanied by amazingly garlicky mashed potatoes, would pall. It's like the song from The Gondoliers - "when everyone is somebody, then no one's anybody." But this is a business trip so one indulges again the next night, this time at Redfish, where there is again ahi (with creole mustard sauce and a delicious corn cake sort of thing) and bread pudding for dessert. Really that is an excuse for going downtown for a good browse at Boulder Books. The punishment for indulgence is the next night when one is at the mercy of United Airlines for dinner, except that we aren't quite back in the real world there because in the real world, a flight that left at 6 p.m. and arrived at 7:30 p.m. (there's a time zone change involved) would actually have dinner instead of the snack box that those of us in cattle class get.

It isn't only business travel that is vaguely disorienting, though. I was in town today, for example, but my work life continued to be just as unreal. My major accomplishments today included:

1. Explaining to my boss's boss that April 6th is a week from today, not today, and, therefore, I couldn't go to a meeting scheduled for then today, particulary since the person whose meeting it is wasn't here.

2. Looking up the phone number of a newly opened hotel on the web because the travel agent handling my travel for a meeting in 2 weeks kept insisting that said hotel doesn't exist.

3. Writing a lot of email, most of it having to explain something to somebody that I have explained 473 times in the past but he can't seem to remember.

4. Estimating how much a task should cost, an estimate that was within dollars of what we had previously estimated and was, therefore, a quarter of what the contractor was claiming it would cost. The skills required to do this were: a)some knowledge of the English language (specifically, the difference between the words "select" and "create"), b) recognition of numbers, at least to the extent that I can distinguish between 2 and 6, and c)the ability to multipy two digit numbers.

5. Calling various support people to set up meetings so they can show me results of what they've been doing. All of them want to meet during exactly the same 12 minute time slot. None of them want to tell me whether or not they've actually done what I've asked them to.

6. Telling Mary Joan that the real reason that the contractor marked the box having to do with a test that didn't get done because some hardware hadn't been installed yet as n/a is not that it was "not applicable" but that there was "no antenna."

That left exactly 26.3 seconds to think about serious technical matters. You can imagine exactly how productive I felt, particularly as I believe I have 7 hours and 56.2 minutes worth of meetings scheduled for tomorrow.

If this were the real world, I'm sure I would be able to get paid for spending the day in a bubble bath, drinking champagne, eating chocolates and reading trashy novels.