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Week fourteen (home again, home again)
Oct. 1st, 2018 12:19 amThe London trip was without incident; stopping in Toronto on the way out was a good plan, and the 11-hour direct flight back was not awful, once I knew my body could take it.
I set a new personal step-count record in London; over 15k steps in a single day. Felt good; breathing and heart rate were steady, and my feet didn't blister too badly. Yay for Bigfoot socks! The weather was phenomenal: no rain at all over the week, sunny and high temperatures in the high teens and lower 20s. I got some lovely photos of the Thames at dawn, and the dragon who guards the Tower of London.
Blood sugar was amazingly steady, given the carb-heaviness and time-inconsistency of my intake. I mostly remembered to take my meds on time, but even when I didn't, the measurements were not bad.
The work-related meetings were ... pretty much what I expected. No big revelations, just a continuation in the direction I was already aware of. Progress is not uniform, nor is it guaranteed, and we are backsliding (regressing?) in some areas even as we make forward motion in others. I did pretty emphatically confirm that I am still unsuited to middle-management -- functioning well in that space requires compromises that I am not prepared to make. Give me this group of engineers to take care of, and I'll improvise, empathize, extrapolate, and go to great lengths to keep the working environment for them as sane as I can make it. But ask me to treat front-line engineers as fungible "human resources," more like counters on a game board than human beings with lives and passions and terrors, and I lack the necessary abstraction tools. Some things I can compartmentalize; the lives of people who work for me and with me every day do not fall in that category. That's what power means, to me. I'd make a terrible executive; the ramifications of every decision would swirl around and around in my brain forever.
My fellow managers continue to delight, amaze, and exasperate me. And I do the same for them, I'd bet. Two valued colleagues left while I was away; I will miss them a great deal.
Take good care of each other, and yourselves. Thanks again for reading.
I set a new personal step-count record in London; over 15k steps in a single day. Felt good; breathing and heart rate were steady, and my feet didn't blister too badly. Yay for Bigfoot socks! The weather was phenomenal: no rain at all over the week, sunny and high temperatures in the high teens and lower 20s. I got some lovely photos of the Thames at dawn, and the dragon who guards the Tower of London.
Blood sugar was amazingly steady, given the carb-heaviness and time-inconsistency of my intake. I mostly remembered to take my meds on time, but even when I didn't, the measurements were not bad.
The work-related meetings were ... pretty much what I expected. No big revelations, just a continuation in the direction I was already aware of. Progress is not uniform, nor is it guaranteed, and we are backsliding (regressing?) in some areas even as we make forward motion in others. I did pretty emphatically confirm that I am still unsuited to middle-management -- functioning well in that space requires compromises that I am not prepared to make. Give me this group of engineers to take care of, and I'll improvise, empathize, extrapolate, and go to great lengths to keep the working environment for them as sane as I can make it. But ask me to treat front-line engineers as fungible "human resources," more like counters on a game board than human beings with lives and passions and terrors, and I lack the necessary abstraction tools. Some things I can compartmentalize; the lives of people who work for me and with me every day do not fall in that category. That's what power means, to me. I'd make a terrible executive; the ramifications of every decision would swirl around and around in my brain forever.
My fellow managers continue to delight, amaze, and exasperate me. And I do the same for them, I'd bet. Two valued colleagues left while I was away; I will miss them a great deal.
Take good care of each other, and yourselves. Thanks again for reading.
