I was having a good run at work after returning from China. I made alliances with players in the Marketing and Technical Publications tribes, and the other players were praising me and eager to keep my torch burning. As usual, I was not fed enough work to satiate myself. Rather than waste away, I spent considerable time foraging for enough to feed my creative appetite. I also earned another immunity challenge, which scored me enough points to work remotely again. When I learned that my boss was going east to India to visit her peeps, I decided to go east to Florida and New York to visit mine as she clearly would not be missing me in Sunnyvale.
When I was younger ah hah
Everything simple but not so clear
...
Now I am older
The more that I see the less that I know for sure
--JWOL, 1984
I went to Florida for the first phase of my trip. There I learned that Mom has a burgeoning interest in Mary Shelley. She’s still recovering from a losing battle with the Spanish Steps in Rome so I keep reassuring her that she’ll be kicking Dad’s butt again in no time.
Another scary sight was the loads of jellyfish on the beach, which caused me to take precautions. To get even, I had some good sushi with MFBC, whom I don’t get to see often enough.
After about a week, I flew north to visit Grandma and Grandpa at Ellis Island. After Ellis Island, I continued on the ferry shuttle loop to the Statue of Liberty. As a typical New Yorker, I had never been there before. I was hoping to climb up into the statue, but this has been forbidden since 9/11, so I guess this is one case where the terrorists did win. Nevertheless, I had an especially good time with the ranger, who assured me that the statue was indeed tall enough to walk to Manhattan in Ghostbusters. He also helpfully pointed out where Daryl Hannah swam ashore in Splash. On my egress, I was happy to lay tfillin as it was the last night of Chanukah.
Goes to show, you don’t ever know
Watch each card you play and play it slow.
--RH, 1972
After returning from the east coast, I was poised to break an employment longevity record that I set over 10 years ago. Then suddenly, I got voted off the island!
For years, I’ve imagined that companies consider my role to be a luxury to them. That is, when money is tight, companies—like people—get rid of luxuries first. As long as there’s a market for products with lousy usability, and as long as competitors’ products have lousy usability, usability jobs will be in jeopardy.
Recently, however, I remembered that Sony gave me an award for designing an integrated help system that would save the company support costs by helping users help themselves and thereby saving them from making an expensive (to Sony) call to Customer Support. Highly usable products decrease the money that companies need to spend on support engineers, software developers, technical writers, and other areas. Indeed, I’ve learned that I could easily pay for my salary in some cases if companies would continue to have me improve the usability of their products. So it is often a false economy to eliminate usability professionals in the effort to save money because in the long run, we more than pay for ourselves with savings.
We’re all in the same boat ready to float off the edge of the world
The flat old world
The street is a sideshow from the peddler to the corner girl
Life is a carnival--it’s in the book
Life is a carnival--take another look
--RD, LH, RR, 1971
I know that I should never take my employment for granted and that I need to protect myself. I need to look and listen because some things in the workplace are mysterious. I’ve sometimes wondered whether companies would prefer to have unusable products. Fortunately, I’m able to maintain my balance even when the rest of the world is falling over.
I generally take advantage of the time between jobs to do things I can’t do while working. The activities this time included taming turtles at a party at the new California Academy of Sciences and going back to NASA to see some of my work in the visitor’s center.
You cannot displace through logical argumentation a position that was arrived at emotionally.
--SC, 1835-1910
People often ask me how long it takes to find a job. Well, there’s no standard answer. It’s a dynamic situation with supply and demand constantly changing. Typically, it takes a few weeks from when the job appears until I get my badge. Fortunately, this time was one of my shortest lapses.
The process has changed a bit over the years, though. For example, in recent years, more and more employers are asking to see an online portfolio as part of the evaluation process. For a variety of reasons, I don’t think this is a good way to evaluate a candidate. Nevertheless, I rose to the challenge and posted some representative work online.
My new boss has been very appreciative of my contributions right from the start and I enjoy biking to work on the same path I used for my previous job. In fact, this is the seventh job to which I have biked, and if I reduce my carbon footprint any more, that might be the end of diamond production as we know it.
I’ve been my usual productive self and I’ve been way ahead of schedule in my deliverables. This is good, because since I don't have a social secretary, I have a lot of overhead on my life. I need to plan my own tennis matches, research and buy my own theater and concert tickets, etc. Recently, I’ve been excited to reconnect with childhood friends and babysitters. I spend hours a day on the internet managing my empire and I’m more comfortable when someone is paying for my time.
Recently, some engineers from our Beijing office visited. They enjoyed seeing pictures from my recent trip and otherwise learning of my adventures in their home city. I hope I get a chance to return to China on business. Maybe I will even be able to bike to work there.
People are always eager to learn about my new job situation so here are the answers to the questions people often ask me after I get a new job. Yes, through no effort of my own, I did score the desk farthest from the boss and closest to the ladies room. Also, the stock of my former company is up less than 1% since I left (after dropping 5% that day), while the stock of my current company is up a whopping 29% since I started there less than one month ago. Of course, as a shareholder of the former and not the latter, I wish the situations were reversed. Go figure.
And I think it's gonna be a long long time
Till touch down brings me round again to find
I'm not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no I'm a rocket man
--BT, 1972
Another employment question that people often ask me concerns why I don’t return to NASA, home of my glory days. The simple answer was that the labs and facilities that I created did not exist before I created them and no one continued to work with them when budget cuts launched me out the airlock. Recently, however, I’ve been talking with NASA about designing mission control for a lunar mission. Of course, it’s a long shot like some of my other aspirations. However, I’m still young, healthy, and I can still score a second serve ace, so we’ll see what happens. I hope they still have the active softball leagues that I enjoyed so much years ago. Ad astra!
Ô chò for playing.
©Adam Brody All rights reserved.
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