Thought Picnic: Easing into ease

All bothered too much

Sometimes, it is that sense of idle listlessness that appears to consume every passing moment that you wonder what it is you might do to exit that morass of discomfort and melancholy that presents as a lack of productivity.

Then again, you do not need to be beavering away with work at every opportunity. We need to learn to break away and do something else, learn to play, find some enjoyment in something leisurely, even seek out the quiet, a place of solace and solitude, and relax.

Learning the art of ease

That probably is the least of the skills I have, the ability to relax without being caught away by expecting and expectation. I recognise this is something I need to develop better even amongst the many things I want to do, I need to allot time to not being exerted by anything, anyone, or any place.

Yet, I am my greatest critic, beating myself incessantly about aims or goals, worse still on issues like what could have or should have been done. That is spilt-milk territory that I need to accept is not redeemable and is gone.

I should stop suffering for the past that is gone, settle into the present that I should give the reins of ease and in that unburdened setting begin to see better ways of doing the things I have heretofore not been successful in doing as well as I might have thought possible.

Thought Picnic: Learn to play again

To work and to play

“They who don’t know how to work, don’t know how to play.” These were the words of the renowned educationist, Dr Tai Solarin.

The truth in this is too evident, yet, many fail to see the significance of this statement and its meaning towards wellbeing and happiness in life.

He worked to the end

I remember a cartoon of I saw early when I started contracting in 1995, a man appeared at the heaven’s gates and all the hosts of heaven were rejoicing and the record innings of age he had put in on earth and that number had not been recorded since close to the beginning of time.

In his confusion, at the fanfare, he asked Apostle Paul, why all the jollity and ululation, to which the apostle answered, “We totted up all your contracting hours and that gave you an age of 140 years when you died.” The reality on earth was that the man had died at 36, but he had worked all hours for the highest reward he could get with overtime and much else until one day he expired from exhaustion.

He probably thought he knew how to work, but he never learnt to play, it is possible he had opined that play could come at a much later time when all the work was done. Sadly, he never got to play.

Break away to hold sway

This is a story that is probably told in many lives, people who have become slaves of work and enemies of play and fun, having failed to develop a work-life balance then sadly reap a bad harvest of poor health, failing relationships, depression and possibly early death. It out not to be so.

We need to make time for our minds and lives to escape the rat race, get off the treadmill of routine and let a sense of the carefree take hold so that laughter, enjoyment and fun can tease out the child in us. It is not escapist, in fact, it is renewing, rejuvenation, refreshing and re-equipping us for new goals and purpose, and it brings meaning to life and the joy of living.

Bad examples are lessons too

Too many times, I have watched people of my parents’ generation go on annual leave and they simply plough themselves in other strenuous activity that they are neither resting nor relaxing. On returning to work, they are like they need another holiday, yet they carry on bringing stress and blood pressure issues into their lives because that have not learnt the art of play in their quest to maintain the aloofness of their status in the family and community, it is a shame.

We their children are not learning new lessons either, the many living in Diaspora who choose to take their holidays in Nigeria just heap on themselves additional strain and in their delusions they assume they are achieving something, not really.

Make time for play

Life is more than work and whatever the success of a workaholic is, one should hope that it does not end up being in vain, they having made themselves seemingly indispensable, then find that life dispenses of them in quick despatch.

When I first started contracting, I gave a lot of attention to my rest periods, it was such that I only worked 40 to 42 weeks a year and found time to enjoy the finer things in life. With time, I never allowed anyone to usurp my time, I had a life outside work and responsibilities for my rest period.

Even when I had the generous remuneration of double-rates for overtime and triple-rates for weekends, I spent that time for myself, money is not everything, much as money can do a lot of things.

Rediscover your sense of fun

I learnt the need and benefit of a work-life balance and most importantly I learnt that when any job was beginning to have an adverse effect on my wellbeing, it was time to walk away and recover than stay there and expire.

Take time off and spent it doing exciting, adventurous and wild things, find time to rediscover the joy of living and never lose your sense of fun, renew your youth with experiences that take you places to discover beauty, wonder, intrigue, mystique and magic. Find time to dream and feel free to live it.

Know how to work and know how to play.

The accordion principle of project management

The bellow of the bellows

I have always been fascinated by the music of the accordion, the player playing the treble piano side and the pressing the bass buttons to something that sounds more like folk music than anything else.

More so, the player moves the concertina bellows, something rhythmically whilst playing keys and buttons all learnt by practice because they do not have sight of keys or buttons as they play.

Yet, I have found use for the accordion not so much to play music but in expressing the fear of being squeezed in the concertina folds of a project because other elements of time, resource and cost have not been properly managed and I am pressured to deliver to atrociously contrived ends.

The project squeeze

The project manager decides what music they want to play, the rhythm, the tempo and that is how listeners might get entertained or even dare to dance.

Some projects managers however do play such dastardly music that not only would people cover their ears, they might instead pick up stones to pelt the accordionist.

We the project resources who fall between the bass and treble ends of the accordion are squeezed until our pips squeak if we do not react, respond, advice and escalate when we need to, to ensure we are not completely crushed and carrying the blame for a badly run project.

Play that funky music

I love good music and what document as much as I can is evidence of where I have striven not be part of the bellows to help in deciding how the music is played, to whose hearing and for what purpose.

In the end, as much as the project manager, I want to be involved into making good music too, that is how the discussion went earlier today, whether good music would result is anyone’s guess, but in the cacophony that ensued, maybe some silence is what we need to retune the accordion and try a different tune.

That is the accordion principle of project management.

Childhood: Defanged by Misadventure

Taking a poor call

That evening my mobile phone rang and no caller identification was shown apart from the nondescript Unknown. The time of the day allowed for me to take the call but I heard nothing from the other end as my patience began to wane with each subsequent “Hello”

In typical Akin fashion, I rang off the call with, “If you are not ready to talk, I am breaking off this call.” A few minutes later, the phone rang again and I noticed that the indicator bars for signal strength are low signifying a possible poor connection, I was prepared to be a bit more patient and I finally got to hear who was calling and I rang off promising to call back when I return home in about 30 minutes.

My friend was curious about the calls and I said, she is the reason my dentition is the way it is. Without the backstory he immediately jumped to the conclusion that a girl had knocked out my teeth with all the connotations it entails.

I failed to get a word in edgeways as to the how and the why, I knew he would eventually find out and I should expect a call the moment he reads this blog.

The wheelbarrow tyre fell off

It was an evening of horseplay and pranks as we played in the corridor that linked our bedroom to the bathroom, a door to the left lead to the dining room and further up to the right was the door to my father’s bedroom, at the end of the corridor; straight ahead was the toilet, to the right was the door to my auntie’s bedroom and to the left was the bathroom.

We started at the end closest to our bedroom, my hands on the floor, she lifted up my legs in was to be a wheelbarrow walk, I had probably just moved my hands like leg strides twice when my arms appeared to give maybe because I was not keeping up with the speed of being pushed.

So, I fell forward, my front teeth hitting the floor and the damage was two pieces of enamel that could no more be put together again like a Humpty-Dumpty mishap. It was painful, I cried but there was nothing that could be done to rectify the situation.

Had this happened 6 months before, I probably would have had the luxury of a shark, my milk teeth would have been shed for the permanent ones, I had no such luck and that was the beginning of my disfigurement.

Marked for life

Six months after the accident, I was in such great pain that I had to visit the dentist. In the 70s the drills were very much like spinning pneumatic hammers, I was marked for life as the pulp was replaced with cement fillings and they took on a light marroonish colour.

That was the way I looked and I should have let it be until I was cajoled into doing some major work on them when I got to England, the contraption lasted about 8 years and since then it has been a complete mess that would require major reconstructive surgery.

It really does not bother me even though it could be rather unsightly, but in the scheme of things between Hollywood Teeth and dealing with cancer, I know where my priorities are; I was just defanged by misadventure.

Fly away holiday

Work hard play hard

Going on holiday is an integral part of my work-life balance, I work hard but reasonably within the hours God provides rather than all hours as if we have reached the end of time.

A whole stretch of working is always followed by a period of holiday that would last a minimum of 15 days and can go up 22 days.

The holiday we get in Europe is one reason why I will not cross the pond for work, productivity should always include the ability to have more time off, productivity is not living in fear of losing your job and only having 2 weeks off a year – that, in my view is slavery. Period. To borrow an Americanism.

For good reason you need the first week to wind down, the second to get out and do stuff beyond the routine of bathing, beer and beach.

By the third week you should be ready to return and be the freshest proponent of your calling and career as well as have stories to tell about your experiences and adventures – my stories are told in my blogs and pictures – I take plenty of them and throw them up on flickr.

Routine or adventure?

Planning a holiday is not too difficult, it settles somewhere between seeing something new which I do at least once a year and returning to old haunts which have their benefits of comfort, security, knowledge and service.

Packing for holiday is however a completely different conundrum and one struggles between what one wants and what one needs. Not to forget anything I might need is what I want but I never end up with what is really needed.

So, after shopping for holiday things – first aid kit, vitamins, batteries and reading material it was left to me to pack for 3 weeks holiday in the sun, not just shorts but other things that would allow you to turn out well without having to go shopping for those things whilst away.

Scheduled for a charter

Usually, I travel to Gran Canaria by scheduled flights but that includes a stop-over in either Barcelona or Madrid and a 4 and a half hour direct flight from Amsterdam ends up run for 7 hours or more.

The benefits of scheduled flights are myriad, 4 trips to my frequent flyer account, double the miles and rights if things go wrong – though I was miffed when I found that flying on my own accord was almost EUR 400 more expensive than if I went by the included charter flight.

Besides, I am able to take up to 35kg as opposed to a paltry 20kg, that is just about enough for basic makeup and lip gloss.

So, I packed and weighed the stuff on a set of two scales, one digital the other analog and it came to 24kg, so I unpacked everything and struggled to jettison some stuff, it came down to 22kg on my contrived measuring system – it was in fact 24.5kg and I had to pay excess baggage to Transavia, a KLM company that KLM does not accord any flyer bonuses.

The way they get you to pay up is to ask if you want to jettison stuff at the check-in desk – how you could ever do that, I do not know, the suitcase alone is probably 8kg – I should have asked if I could have sealed mailbags.

My boarding pass was ripped up and I was given an invoice to pay up at a KLM window where I was issued with another boarding pass, but really, I could have just had it printed out at one of the terminals again – my suitcase was already on its way onto the plane.

For the witching hour

Did I say, my taxi picked me up at 2:00AM? I do not enjoy charter flights for all sorts of reasons and that is one of them – our flight was to take-off at 5:15AM and it was already airborne at 5:08AM – we were the second flight out of Schiphol.

My seat was on the second row, typical of when I travel on scheduled flights and I always have the window, a magazine or two and a Sudoku puzzle book, my Creative Zen Mozaic MP3 player was playing back the classical playlist as I settled down to a nap, a snore and the occasional jolt.

The seat belt was quite extended, the person who occupied it before me must have been wider than they were tall, but there was no heat from the last sitter.

Front row seats also have that unusual situation of being sparsely populated, the middle seat was unoccupied, and travelling Economy really did feel like I was travelling Business Class.

The man behind me must have been in his 60s but he fidgeted like a kid, banging at the back of my seat that I first gave his wife that look, she restrained him for a while and it continued, then I gave him that look and it stopped.

Observing people dropped off

On arrival at Las Palmas, at baggage collection you could see a study in bizarre human behaviour, I am no anthropologist but the baggage comes out on a conveyor belt meaning eventually no matter where you are stood along the 70 metres of conveyor belt, your baggage will eventually get to you, but they all bunch up that the starting point and wreak havoc on each other collecting their stuff.

I now arrange a personal transfer from the airport to the hotel because when we travelled on the coach we had a tour of all hotels in Maspalomas and Playa del Ingles until we are the last to be dropped off 75 minutes later.

I arrived at the hotel to the greeting – Welcome to your second home, Sir – it is my 4^th time at the Riu Palace Maspalomas Hotel and I am a creature of habit because the staff here have the habit of making my stay the complete absence of stress the epitome of ease.

The rooms are not that luxurious, I have been in bigger suites, but it is people that make hotels not the building – as I remember, when leaving home, the heavens were open with rain pouring down, I arrived at my second home and the heavens were open with rays of sunshine kissing my body and making me tan naturally.

It is too far away to think of the 25^th, I’ll just have a cocktail and put my feet up today.

When to close your year

Counting the years

One has had the advantage of being able to close ones working year, the weekend either before ones birthday or just at ones birthday. When one was self-employed, one had no problems making that decision and sticking to it. One used to have the luxury of 10 weeks holiday a year and still declare it a good and profitable year.

However, last year, ones work status changed and one became a salaried permanent employee with a fixed number of holidays amounting to five, each bean-counted on pink or green cards through out the year.

In these circumstances, one becomes rather more perceptive at selecting what holidays to take off allowing enough days to close the year as one is accustomed to doing. Having no particular allowance for time off in lieu of extra hours, days or weeks worked, five weeks does not amount to much a year.

In Europe, we do place more premiums on holidays than the Americans. Though they seem to have had this unassailable improvement in productivity over the last few decades, one's candid, view is "They who do not know how to work can never know how to play".

The point of high productivity without ample time off amounts to just two weeks a year is absurd. One would think the whole purpose of high productivity is to have more time off to be leisurely having achieved whatever goals, aims, purposes or plans.

Anyway, looking at the working year of 2003 - we started in a flux of change, managing infrastructure we had aggressively taken over the previous November and handing over to the new team brought in to ensure that the future became just as we had mapped it out.

Experiences

One can refer to some issues that became highlights of the year.

• The remnant after the November retrenchment were systematically deprived of privileges to perform functions they were once managers of and they did not help issue with their bickering about rights - a failure of their management to inform them of their drastically changed circumstances.
• The major deployment and upgrade of our backend and front-end CRM solution - this was an uphill task of educating the backend teams of full-cycle deployment; the logic being, what you roll out on the server is not complete till the end-user confirms that it all works. Broadening the horizons of such personnel to the realities that the user is the linchpin makes all the difference.
• The client operating system upgrade to Microsoft Windows XP - a classic tale of how not to run a project. One must state here that in conversation with one of the project managers involved; the project did run as planned, only that the whole system was short-circuited by irrational management targets that preferred immediate implementation to reasoned and ordered assessments leading to working solutions at the point of presentation.
  We never learnt the lessons throughout the whole year.
• Knowledge unravelling the effectiveness of our solutions integrators, when we repackaged all their applications for the new operating system. The sharp practices of shoddy coding that went unnoticed when deployed to Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 were laid bare in Microsoft Windows XP. Polish up your act, you are failing dreadfully, still.
• Are you trying to absolve yourself from thanks for a job well done? One of the many questions or rather classic statements one made in the year. This after a successful client deployment even the local staff could not bring themselves to acknowledge that success.
• A number of projects that required weekend work also brought to light some of the inconsiderate practises that involved petty purveyors of power mortgaging our weekends without due consultation. In all the cases we were involved, where no one had the courtesy to seek our consent and availability, we successfully rescheduled for our convenience. The morale being, nothing is set in stone, even if the milestones are in the project plan.
• Project managers came up with ingenious ideas that made technical prerequisites obsolete in favour of pressing issues, which eventually would lead to dealing with those prerequisites. All doom for the department was forecast if we flunked the deadlines. Eventually, reality got the better of the whole situation we had two rescheduled deadlines within a week. One could never bring oneself to say, "I told you so", nay, never said I.
• We delivered time and time again, albeit with regular but temporary setbacks driven by the quest to PowerPoint [Sorry for using this as a verb] all activity. We had to be like them, the only difference being we did our jobs and so covered our arses, they just covered their arses and gave us grief - customer demands, uncertainty, bungling, accusation, problems and at times unprofessionalism - NEVER!

We had a good year, full of work, new experiences and many lessons, hopefully properly learnt for the New Year.

Take time to count the cost, survey the availability of resources and set your target dates with achievable realism.

One is ashamed that in many cases we could not deliver on promised time because we were driven by unrealistic projections with no bearing to existing volume of work and priorities.

The hopes and fears of all the years* which are met at Christmas, should give rise to new purposes to do better in the year 2004. It has been great working with all my colleagues whom I respect, even those who flinch at being called gentlemen and deserted me at lunchtime. One acknowledges your apologies, but you had to get a mention.

* O! Little town of Bethlehem

From Eagle Eyed to Watching West Side Story

At Work

The boss has an interesting saying - "Imagine, you could be a hero if you solve this problem"

Give me a break, my name already means hero; why strive for what you have always been since birth?

Before you get any ideas, I choose the things I want to be heroic in very carefully. I do not do heroics for stunts

Anyway, we have had this intractable problem for ages, I was told we had an STM1 pipe to a foreign site, which meant oodles of bandwidth for file transfers which should average 50MB per minute or more.

Help me, for days I was getting under 2MB per minute, it was painfully slow I could have run there and back faster.

So we sent our network gurus out there to find the gremlin gumming up the works. They narrowed it down to a section and then needed the clincher.

Per chance the boss walked over to comment about the installation process which as taking ages to complete and missing essential components.

I delved in to have a look and noticed things were just too slow then observed a number of interesting discrepancies which had escaped all of us.

In Tech-speak, the server which had the role of domain controller, DHCP server and WINS server was in the same subnet as the addresses being doled out for the DHCP service but they had different subnet masks.

Also, none of the addresses of servers were excluded from the DHCP range; theoretically, this should still be OK, but in practise a lot was wrong.

1. Change subnet mask of server
2. Exclude server addresses from the DCHP scope

Suddenly throughput shoots up 20 times.

That was a good result, credit to all concerned, we more or less saw it at the same time.

At play

Every once in a while I treat myself to some cultural fare, this time West Side Story was in town. I had to book tickets.

Sometimes I wonder why some organisations think displaying numbers as 0900-CALL US NOW is an easy nnemonic - you have to look for C, then A, then double LL and so on. Well that is easy.

Take Dutch where IJ is really a "two-character" letter of their alphabet, sorry, the phone keys do not come in the Dutch alphabet. I is 4 and J is 5.

In the case of 0900 CARRELIJN you would have come unstuck.

My advice - call 09002525255, we call numbers on phones not letters.

It was a good show.