Widget Consultants of Austin

Dear valued customers,

We hope you and your loved ones are remaining healthy and safe during these uncertain times.

New Office Space

We at Widget Consultants of Austin (WCA) would like to update you on some exciting news for our practice. In July 2020, a state-of-the art renovation for our central office was completed. Now Widget Consultants of Austin is located in Suite 419 on the same floor as before but to the left of the elevator.

Austin Research Center for Widgets

In addition to this beautiful upgrade, WCA's current and future research endeavors will be conducted through WCA's research arm: Austin Research Center for Widgets. WCA and its consultants have chosen to part ways with Widget Research Center of Austin. However we remain evermore committed to providing ethical, high quality, specialized widget research to the greater Austin community.

With over a decade of combined research experience, we continue to provide first class widgets at WCA. As always, we remain dedicated to providing compassionate and skilled care to you. We look forward to continuing our valued relationship with you.

Best Wishes,


WCA

The above letter is reproduced with only two substitutions, widget and customer. Inquiring minds would like to know what prompted the split in widget land such that Widget Consultants of Austin are now affiliated with the Austin Research Center for Widgets, having severed ties with the Widget Research Center of Austin. All this upheaval took place in the middle of a pandemic, no less. Especially titillating is the pointed comment about ethical standards, things must have really soured. What breach of ethics in widget research might the practice have witnessed that shocked the conscience? The human drama behind those few words is intriguing and deserves attention.

Further confusing things is that it appears that the offices of both organizations are on either side of an elevator. Those rides up to work must be fraught. Printing out the acronym soup only deepened the puzzle for WCA has now split from WRCA to go to ARCW, it's all Greek to me. I have postponed my annual appointment to check up on my widgets during these uncertain times, but look forward, with no small amount of trepidation, to my next encounter. I pray that I exit the elevator in the right direction.

See previously:

• Recent Non-Specific General Threats
• Duty of Care

Also: Naming, a playlist

This note is part of a series: In a covidious time

File under: language, culture, odd, absurd, confusion, bureaucracy, conflict, humour, satire, Observers are worried, pandemic, covidious, toli

Back There Yonder

"Back there yonder" goes a man in some distress
"He's messing with someone else", mental health can be such a mess
You wonder if he's also ripping up their flower bed
Or if his demons have since summoned different tactics instead

"I feel bad for guys like that... They go on a bender like that"
Your neighbor commiserated, then looked at the ruined patch of earth.
"But this...", he gestured, "sucks". A statement of fact.
He didn't need to elaborate, this gardener was feeling the hurt

Another neighbor had knocked on your door earlier, quick to alert
And you'd walked out to catch the vandal in furious motion
Pausing first, though, to don your face mask from the pile near the stairs
The necessary prelude these days to any social confrontation

You might have saved more plants but for your public health caution
Our covidious predicament has caused all manner of collateral damage.
A root and branch clearing, it appeared that that was his intention
This homeless man dutifully uprooting your flowers was hard to manage

His shorts fell down as he grabbed a cosmos flower with speed
Thankfully, modesty would save this one that you'd grown from seed
He made to cover up his privates; he dropped the stalk.
By then you had approached him, all the while yelling "Stop!"
He turned and backed off, now chastened perhaps.
Recriminations would surely ensue, he was caught in the act.

Still, he remained belligerent and was plainly not happy
That a tall black guy would be the one dressing him down,
However mildly, for his transgressions. Some folk are uppity.
He was in a fugue state, if not drunk or high, and dealing with demons
Of his own. Amidst the raving, the bloodshot eyes were what you focused on.

You must confess that you briefly contemplated wrath
And extravagant violence of some sort,
Stung, even as an amateur gardener,
Revenge, you wanted him to pay the cost.

You guess he expected a beating or something
For he seemed to shrivel up into a shell
So he was quite confused when you, instead, asked him
If he needed any help,
"Anything I could do for you, sir?
Can I be of any assistance?"
Those with your skin tone are used to navigating
Rage and civility with a fine balance

Modernity too, you took out your phone to record the floricultural crime
This your rectangular glass slab of digital android protection
You're not quite sure if he registered the directions that you gave him.
For his destination was surely the torrid zone, a far region of the mind

You know all about mental illness, sadly, more than you could mention
And you wondered who one could call for a psychiatric intervention
You used to spend time with your uncle in his office at Asylum Down
It takes a village, they say, and lots of behavior to get along.

As he walked off, still ranting and raving
You made to salvage your garden of Eden
The tallest and most glorious flowers,
Those wildflowers that had grown to five feet and more
Were done for, shredded and dug up from their bitter roots.
A few others too, you picked up the pieces off the earthly floor

Oh well, you now realized just how much this had been bringing you joy
Your amateur horticultural labor was the source of much delight.
Well, at least you'd taken photos of your pandemic garden
Preserved the digital memories, before this unfortunate abuse
But you held on to the thought and pithy insight:

"People are to be loved and things are to be used."

Sadly, too many people in this world seem to think the reverse
Well, you'll shower your antagonists with concern rather than a curse

It was no surprise, however,
That this lost soul continued on his bender
And someone else, a half hour later,
Was dealing with him "back there yonder"

Back There Yonder, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• Down Here Below by Abbey Lincoln
• Asphalt Gardens by George Howard
• You Bring Me Joy by Anita Baker
• A Flower Is A Lovesome Thing by Joe Henderson
• Golden Flower by Galliano (ft. Omar)
• Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes by Paul Simon
• Wild Flower by Wayne Shorter
• Royal Garden Blues by Charlie Christian

See also Pandemic Garden

This note is part of a series: In a covidious time

File under: life, poetry, mental health, conflict, garden, coronavirus, pandemic, culture, observation, perception, loss, anger, violence, USA, covidious, toli

Calling Things By Their Names

So I heard that sanity has returned to these parts. ^[1]

Our marketing folks are now going to call Lotus QuickPlace, QuickPlace instead of whatever bland and insipid name that had been previously mandated. IBM Lotus Team-Workplace-something or-the-other?

Similarly Sametime will now be called Sametime instead of "IBM Lotus Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing". For a while the Lotus in that designation had been deprecated.

This probably portends that our marketing teams now better understand how to sell the Lotus portfolio. A few years ago, the perception from the trenches where I live was that there was a rush away from the land of Lotus simply because (in my estimation) it wasn't understood or didn't mesh well with the compensation structure of our sales teams. Presumably we've adjusted and now understand what these products are capable of instead of dismissing them out of hand.

Now when belts tighten in the IT industry (and right now, it is a deep retrenchment), people fall back on things that work, whether it is the glue, spackle or wrenches that I keep referencing. And much in the Lotus portfolio works even if it isn't pretty sometimes. And it works especially in the SMB space that is in the Long Tail of software. See our recent acquisitions of more Glue Layer People or even my recent hand-waving thoughts on Lotus Notes:

"For those unfamiliar with Notes/Domino, my handwaving elevator pitch is that it is a platform essentially based on the fundamental insight that a huge class of applications can be built based on just a few compositional building blocks: Forms, Views and a standard file format, the note in Notes terms. The brouhahas made about messaging, security, directory services, and all that paraphernalia that marketing people throw about when they pitch the platform to you are all syntactic sugar around the core competency of Forms and Views and the client and server processes that can manage them. A whole cottage industry of business partners are doing very fine thank you building custom and evolvable applications for businesses, small and large, everywhere. The fact that email can be construed as a forms application is just a side benefit and detracts from the real focus of the platform. This is much misunderstood by people whose only encounter with Notes is as a Mail client. It's really just a forms and view app for people and processes. Incidentally this same platform is most likely what is funding my current work and much of the IBM Software Group, even as resources are spent on other "sanctioned" and more "strategic" approaches. C'est la vie."

So that's the good news.

The not so good news:

Coincidentally the [redacted] domain was removed from the internal dns without notice sometime in the last 2 weeks. I was wondering for a few days why I coudn't couldn't post to [redacted product] or vnc into my development servers from home. I thought it was a temporary flaw and added temporary entries to my hosts file. Of course I eventually realized that nothing in the internal [redacted] hierarchy would ever resolve again that this was part of the reason why [redacted product] moved away from [redacted domain]to its current location at [redacted new location]

Some of us who had to jump through hoops to get static ip addresses like [redacted] were a little disgruntled for a good 15 minutes. Mr Feinberg even brought Godwin's law into the mix albeit with a smiley at the end of that invocation.

I guess it was approriate that the hard drive for that twilight zone machine died 2 days later. Cosmic justice or Sign of the times. These are strange days...

Now this was probably just a case of run-of-the-mill miscommunication, but let's remember that simple things like naming bring out the tribal instinct in people with sometimes shocking reactions... A lot of goodwill could well be lost.

Take for example the time 5 years ago when it was not announced that Lotus Development Corporation had been deincorporated and a good 7,000 people suddenly received payslips from the IBM corporation saying that they had received only their thousand or so dollars year-to-date (and it was mid-year). Indeed it was only months later, after prompting by an atypically tough question in an Lotus all hands meeting and seeing the quite hurt and vociferous articulation of pent-up feeling that the question belied that this was acknowledged in a subsequent prickly corporate message. Perhaps we were being babies (after all we were still getting paid), why should we care about trivial things like the name on our paycheck? I didn't attend said meeting but I caught the fallout since I just became "reverse-mentor" to [redacted executive] and had to explain why such things would matter to us "[redacted] folks"...

The identity of a community is to be found in the most unlikely of things. The things that draw people together to form a cohesive whole are not the explicit things that one thinks, it's not a kind of warlike territoriality or dedication to some mission statement or other, it is rather in small insignificant items that the tribal instinct is articulated.

People will rally round the most surprising items (Elian Gonzalez, OJ Simpson, Teri Schiavo) and they quickly become litmus tests. Think of some of the most intractable political conflicts (say Serbia/Croatia/Bosnia or and here I hesitate, I wonder who else will have an Israel/Palestine category on Blogcentral) and wonder whether the political, religious or economic arguments were really the cause of the conflict or if there weren't instead some more mundane hurt feelings that then blossomed into what we have seen and subsequently rationalized by opportunist political or religious hacks.

Or take this example form my part of the woods: for the past 9 years, Northern Ghana has been in turmoil because of an argument at a market stall over a chicken or guinea fowl (the historians will have to figure this out at some point). Two ethnic groups, the Dagbons and the Kokonbas who have lived peacefully together for centuries are now in open dispute. Many, many lives have been lost, and a huge amount of money, goodwill, diplomacy, cajoling and outright bribing has had to to done to try to cool things down and to get that part of the country to begin to contribute again to the rest of the community. This in a place that can ill afford such distractions. Now in my analogy, the guinea fowl is the stand-in for the name or for a dns entry.

All this to say that when nurturing communities, it is best to keep such sensitivities in mind and call things by their names. If not all those Sensational Fruity Delights might come home to roost.

Editors note: I posted this piece on May 18 on my internal blog but now that the information is no longer a rumour but has received confirmation, I decided to remove the embargo since it speaks to the tribal instinct in communities, something that interests me as an anthropologist of social software

File under: language, naming, communities, tribes, patterns, best practices, software, history, strategy, Lotus, quickplace, sametime, notes, IBM, web, conflict, israel, palestine, Ghana, Dagbon, Kokonba, africa, chicken, Guinea fowl, anthropology, sociology, social software, technology, toli