Applied empathy 🔗
I got an odd compliment last week: I learned that a few of my colleagues and I are considered “unnaturally collaborative.”
I won’t go into a lot of detail about the surrounding context, but it came down to, “we identified a potential source of conflict, one of us called a meeting, the other two showed up, we took turns talking, we arrived at rough consensus, and we trusted the convener to type up the notes (which they shared in advance) and send them upstairs.”
- I think there’s a philosophical notion that anything that exists in time in space is in nature, and is therefore natural. Including, my philosophy instructor said with a wry grin for probably the 113th time in his career, purple unicorns, which must exist because time and space are infinite and therefore must contain virtually anything we could conceive. Including three directors who bias toward positive collaboration.
- If there are any moral defects to be found here, they are in the imaginations of people who think three collaborative directors are the equivalent of purple unicorns.
Anyhow, I am honestly on the fence about whether it was a compliment or not. I once had a performance review downgraded because, my boss’s boss explained, my “how” dimension was so good that it was actually a liability, and he demanded it be lowered from a “5” to a “4” to reflect the dangers it posed to me and others.
But I do have a second story from this week that has caused me to feel a little less smug about it all.
There is a process at work that everybody hates. It involves multiple layers of functional and administrative staff, a bad mix of people who are conditioned to be process-oriented close readers and people who are understandably determined to cut any corners they can. There are also three warring tools ecosystems.
I hate it because it involves things I have been involved with and fixed in my past, but I am too new and don’t have enough standing or juice to get out and push, so while nobody is challenging my right to weigh in or make adjustments within my remit, I’m in the territory of “the little attitude thrusters you use in Lunar Lander” vs. “the warp nacelles of the Enterprise.”
So I’ve been making little adjustments here and there, identifying the places my own patch of process goes wrong most often, and making little adjustments. Including a few based on things I’ve observed but haven’t introspected, that I thought were helpful to the people who own that leg of the process.
Until today, when one of them did something slightly different from another one of them that seemed to be an utter refutation of all my proactive consideration for their needs.
So I broke down and asked what I was missing and they took a paragraph to expose me to a whole set of things that go wrong for them that aren’t exacerbated by what I was doing, but that what I was doing wasn’t helping; and how in other ways I was possibly slowing down another thing. Because I was being curious and helpful, but possibly not curious enough and maybe too helpful, at least in the wrong proportions at the wrong stages.
I’m giving myself a 4/5.
My heart was in the right place, but that’s table stakes.
Chrome profile launchers revisited 🔗
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post sharing how to create GNOME launcher items for individual Chrome profiles. It’s a kind of cool thing to do if you want to just get straight to a given profile, and it works well with browser pickers like Junction or Browsers.
At some point, I noticed that one Chrome profile was ignoring my 1Password extension’s preference to stay in sync with the 1Password desktop app, so I kept having to log in to 1Password over and over: Every time you close your last Chrome window (as with any Linux desktop app and unlike on a Mac), an unsynced 1Password extension decides (wisely, sanely) that your auth’d session is over.
Years of Mac use have made it essentially impossible for me to leave a window open if I’m not using it. Why would I? It’s just visual clutter, and the app itself is sitting there on warm standby. So I kept geting logged out of 1Password and had to keep re-authing and it was unpleasant.
1Password has some guidance on how to get the extension to sync with the desktop again, and while I don’t want to sound churlish it amounts to “turn it off then turn it on again.” As an IT person, I respect that, but it didn’t do me any good. Removing and reinstalling didn’t help either, and I didn’t have a lot of confidence in that because the 1Password extension leaves some data behind when you remove it: Instead of needing your complete credentials (address, password, and the secret key), you just need the password when you reinstall.
So my last-ditch “avoid filing a ticket at all costs” play was to create a fresh Chrome profile and reinstall the plugin there, reasoning that the new profile’s sandbox wouldn’t have any legacy data in the form of cached stuff, or maybe a config file that changed between plugin versions and creates edge cases despite “mostly working.”
I turned off sync for the new profile, set up 1Password, then turned sync on. It worked as expected, even when all my other stuff got pulled in.
I flipped back over to the original Chrome instance giving me the problems and it was still stuck.
So, do I want to log back in to 1Password upwards of three dozen times a day, retrain myself to never close the last Chrome window, or just call it a day on getting fancy with profile launchers? Maybe another option is to point the launcher at the directory for the new, working profile, but as I sat here at 6 in the morning screwing around with Chrome profiles I re-remembered that over-optimization is a thing:
I wanted to save a few keystrokes here and there so I over-optimized a collection of things that I’ve observed in the past are individually complex and inconsistent, only a few of which are built with even one of the other components in mind. Something is eventually going to get weird in all that. And I don’t even like Chrome. I use it for work because we’re a Google shop and I don’t care if the data Google is harvesting reveals that I spend an ungodly amount of time in an invoicing system, a contract management system, and JIRA. There is no use case for using Chrome with a personal Google account. Firefox is fine for that.
So, lesson learned. Chrome is just “the work browser,” and I don’t have any other profiles. Done and done.
Storm stuff 🔗
We got off pretty light with the recent ice storm unpleasantness: Overnight without power, then a few downed branches and the death knell for a fence we’d hoped would hold out until spring, or at least fall onto our side of the yard. But it didn’t. It fell into the neighbor’s yard so we hauled away the part that couldn’t be propped back up and went looking for contractors.
I don’t know if there’s a secret to Angie’s List, but I’ve never cracked it. I put in a request, try to specify that email is going to be the best way to reach me, get hammered with phone calls (many of which are just hangups), and never feel like I end up with much choice.
This time around I got steered onto Yelp by a search engine, which then steered me into its contractor finder. Wow. Vastly different experience: A half-dozen emails before the morning was over, incredibly high responsiveness, and offers to come out and do estimates within the next day or two. I thought the project would be sitting until February or March, but it looks like today is New Fence Day.
To deal with the branches I ended up getting a Ryobi pruning saw to go with all my other 18v Ryobi stuff. I eyed larger chainsaws, but that just wasn’t the job at hand, storage is at a premium, and there’s not a foreseeable need given what’s on the property.
The pruning saw is great. I don’t see using it a ton, but it shares a battery with several other things, it’s very quiet, light, and compact, and it strikes a nice balance between “still obviously a dangerous tool” and “accessible.” Meaning, it’s easy to use and handle, but you’re still very clear after looking at it that it could fuck you up.
As I slapped the battery in and put on my eye protection, I remembered to pause and tell myself the micro-fiction I tell myself whenever I’m around power tools:
He approached the saw with the confidence of a middle-aged man who once took a shop class in junior high.
That’s not a completely accurate statement of the situation.
I did once take a shop class in junior high, but my bone-deep caution around tools was learned on the floor of an RV factory where there was no grumpy shop teacher yelling if you even looked distracted. Ask me to share my “the guy with the sheet of fiberglass, a table saw, no push stick, and no guard” story. But even that experience was a long time ago. Better to just pretend like I know a bit more than my fictional character, and way less than I actually do.