O O Ø O O O O
.calm
How do you feel
Some mornings you wake up fully clothed on the living room floor, bent into a shape that would fit in a saxamaphone case and wondering where, exactly, you are. Your mouth feels like there's fourteen different varieties of vegetation–with associated wildlife–growing in it, and your tongue is the same consistency of beef jerky with a little sandpaper mixed in for good measure. You can time your pulse to the throbbing you feel in every joint of your body, and it resonates deep into your skull like the rice boy's bass cannon three blocks away.
You lift up your head, which is face down on that lovely ochre shag, try to focus, and look at the nearest source of light. The result of this is that someone jams an ice pick through your eye-socket and buries it deep in your brain, causing you to drop back to the carpet, hitting your head on the coffee table on the way down and creating an explosion of brightly coloured lights while creating a feeling similar to being microwaved alive. You resume the position you held moments ago until the stars go out, and the pain recedes until it is once again simply a jackhammer pounding the insides of your cranium.
relive the glory of those seven shots of tequila and subsequent gastronomic insurgency
You lie there, barely breathing, in a haze from the previous evenings festivities and relive the glory of those seven shots of tequila and subsequent gastronomic insurgency through the fetid stench that oozes through your pores and is exhaled from deep within. You recall the events that led you to this small corner on the carpet, and it hurts. You try to allow yourself to succumb to the fog that fills your head, but realize that your kidneys have been busy while you were not. Slowly, ever so slowly, you unfold your limbs and assume a semi-erect posture. You move from the living room, banging into doorframes, bookcases, the cat, and phantoms hiding in the shadows, relieve the pressure, make a feeble attempt at re-hydration, and hit your Sealy like the drunken bowling ball you are.
You curl up in a ball, pull the covers over your head, and vow not to emerge until the pain goes away. You sleep lightly, snippets of the evening before flashing through your mind tantalizing you with happy thoughts tempered by the grim reality of your vitamin D deficiency and rebellious-minded gullet. You swear to dog you will never do this again, if only this period of suffering would end now and return to the times of glowing warmth that are your anchor to normalcy. You finally get somewhat comfortable, and drift away until you feel better.
Hell of a party, and an even bigger hangover, it was. Last week, I finally climbed out of my bed from a two—year hangover from what everyone lovingly calls “dot bomb.” It's amazing how quickly everyone turned from thinking tech could do no wrong to treating it like most Canadians treat Alanis Morissette. For seven wonderful years I rode the bleeding edge of the boom in technology, and for the two years following I have been a total yutz.
hey, it was cool, so why worry?
I've pissed and moaned about where I am today versus where I was two years ago ad nauseum, receding into a shell and trying to figure out where I went wrong. I've bemoaned the loss of playing with big toys, travelling all around all over the world in planes, and spending a shitpile of money bringing bright shiny trinkets to the unwashed masses. I've marvelled incessantly at how my take home today is less than one-third what it was eighteen months ago, and I've tried to figure out how this happened to me, the formerly un-dampable shooting star.
Truth is, I've known why all along.
From 1992 through 2001, we were privy to an unbelievable rate of advancement in the development of information systems technology across the board. Nothing was left untouched; networking, software development, processing power, storage systems – you name it, it was improved upon over and over again at a blistering speed. I spent a lot of money, met a lot of really cool people, designed and built a lot of systems, learned a lot of lessons the hard way, and in the process forgot completely why I was doing it in the first place. But hey, it was cool, so why worry?
Sometime in the mid-nineties I started joking about how what I really did was make peoples' lives more complicated by throwing ever-increasing volumes of information at them. The sad part is, it was no joke. For the past two decades, our peers, executive, clients, and shareholders have invested trillions of dollars in technology to make things “better”. My peers and I have introduced increasingly complex systems that change the way we run our business, and have patted ourselves on the back for our accomplishments. As a result of this added complexity, many businesses have IS/IT departments–who directly and indirectly support only the maintenance of the IS/IT infrastructure–which compromise 30% or more of the total workforce of a large company, and 50% or more of the capital and operating expenses.
This is unbelievably wrong. How can a company operate it's day-to-day business if it spends that much on supporting the systems that are supposed to facilitate business? How do they deal with a group that sees themselves as policy and process makers who know next to nothing about the core business of the company, and think their ignorance is ok because they are IS/IT, and are openly hostile to the people who bring in the revenue and justify their existence? How can they keep throwing good money after bad into systems developed by people who should be answering helpdesk calls (but because of a certification that says they're an architect–sorry, Ev–are designing overly complex systems that no one but a select few can understand) that increase the expense of a process instead of reduce it. It's simple, they can't.
I put myself here. I made myself miserable. I let the people who trusted me down. It's my fault...
We were trusted with the responsibility of making an unwieldy tool simple to use. We failed miserably. Instead of teaching those around us of the potential of this tool, we hoarded the information and made it into something close to witchcraft. Instead of trying to understand where the roadblock was and using a couple of well-placed jabs to clear the logjam, we tried to reinvent the wheel without realizing what “round” meant. We treated those that trusted us as peasants, and the insurgency has come around and whacked us on the head, and we are reaping what we have sown.
I've been too busy getting over my hangover to realize I helped put us here. I am forever preaching that technology is a tool, not a policy maker or a saviour, but I have just been speaking the words without listening to what it is I am really saying. I put myself here. I made myself miserable. I let the people who trusted me down. It's my fault, and I've been blaming everyone from the investment houses to short-sighted, ignorant executives (the fact that I still believe this doesn't change, however ;) ).
No more.
I can't believe it's taken this long to figure out that I should be ranting about me, and not my situation. It's time to stop the “woe is me” act, and start helping again. It's time to simplify things and remember why I started down this path. It's time to show that I can actually deliver on the promises the industry has made over the last two decades. It's time to accept responsibility for putting myself here, and to get out of bed, get over myself, and show people that what we've developed over the last 20 years can be a good thing, and can make a huge difference.
Technology is a tool, not a religion. It's good to remember that, and I am feeling strangely fine as a result.
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
PD DCVII
A huge “thank you” to Dorrie for pointing out where the bottleneck was in this little problem 'o mine – I owe ya!