Month: January 2020

Confession time. They say for a blog to be successful you have to be transparent and tell it like it is, no bullshit. So I been thinkin’ about like, well, why do I feel so bad for having been laid off? Happens to the best of us, right? And I can’t pretend that I had the best career out there. My “team” was spread across two states and two countries and the person who fired me was my boss’s boss’s boss and never met me before the day he represented the true meaning of at will employment and told me to hit the bricks.

So why feel bad? Here’s why. See, I’ve been where I was for fifteen years. Actually closer to sixteen, since I started as a contractor and flipped to FTE (full-time-employee for the uninitiated) after a year for – get this – job security. Cue Nelson Muntz.

Anyway that’s a pretty long time. And I’ve been through a lot of reorgs. As I’ve also said, I think, the primary product of our upper management is not a strategy or new products or ways of working – it’s org charts. I mean, that’s really all they do, is just rearrange the deck chairs. (If anyone from there is reading this all indignant that you developed new operating models and such – please. Spare me. You just cross off names and fire people when the CFO comes around, because at your company, IS was, and never will be, anything but an expense.)

I survived reorg after reorg. And here’s the thing. It made me feel special. It made me feel like there was something great about me. And that’s the confession part, because the people that were let go were generally good people too. Sometimes they were my friends, and even as I was bidding them farewell and good luck and acting all sympathetic – deep inside I was gloating because I survived. I was better than they were, and management could see it. I was special.

Nope. Just lucky.

So getting laid off takes that little illusion away, strips reality bare and you see just what a dickhead you were, or at least I think I was, and that’s my little confession for the day.

Good news: I’ll never feel special again. Except maybe when I beat my high score in spell tower or my kid draws me a picture. That I’ll allow. But a company will never again matter to me in any significant way. It’s just an income bucket and the key to all of this is to have a lot of buckets going forward.

In closing, something relevant.

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

I am, your humble correspondent, signing off from lone and level sands.

Good news 2: it’s Friday, baby!

Later.

For the past few days my LinkedIn feed has been filled with people talking about the great influence Clayton Christensen had on their lives and personal philosophies and that’s fine but I never heard of this guy.

I’ve read now that he came up with the concept of “disruption” and also wrote “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” which I have heard of, so I’m not about to sit here and say that just because I don’t know who the hell this guy was, he wasn’t a great guy.

But he was nobody to me, and I was a nobody to him (and by definition, almost everyone who ever existed) and that’s all I’m trying to say here. The moral of this story is that the nobody who writes Vectroblog can’t be a person who likes all the people who are worth liking. Or maybe it’s this: no matter how many people think you’re king shit of the universe, somewhere there’s a dude who made it through half a century and doesn’t know you from the dude who pumps gas at Costco. Not that there’s anything wrong with pumping gas at Costco – in fact I may end up – no, let’s not put that out in to the universe just yet.

I would however, like to take this opportunity to wonder if any of my gurus will warrant such a disruption on my LinkedIn page when it’s their turn to shuffle off this mortal coil?

Like Tony Robbins, master persuader, and a guy – or possibly extraterrestrial – with acromegaly, who changed my life and so many others with his own weird brand of NLP and positivity. Oh yeah. When this guy goes, it’ll be tribute city. Although I’m not sure Tony will really die, he’ll probably just transition into some kind of energy being in about a million years or so.

Like James Altucher, who writes books about quitting your job, that make it much easier not to quit your job, because reading them makes you feel like you just did, or could. Yes, again I think we’ll have tribute city, from all the other self-help bloggers. I wonder what they’ll do with his remains. I feel like he’ll probably have himself recycled. Maybe there’s an opportunity here for low-cost Internet enabled funerals….Air C&B?*

Like Scott Adams, who failed his way to success, and beat linguistic dystonia, and reinvented himself as a political pundit?

Actually yeah, probably. Those guys are famous. But what about this guy?

This is Brian Tracy. He’s been doing salesman self-help for decades and for my money he’s the king of all gurus. He taught me about affirmations before Scott Adams. He told me “I like myself” before Kamal Ravikant figured out that’s all he had to do turn his life around.

And Brian Tracy, up there in his starched white shirt and corporate Robocop-villain lookin’ face, taught me about true inner peace.

No, seriously. You think a guy like that is just in it for the money, or the most crass, commercial dude ever. But one piece of productivity advice he gave just stuck with me through the years and I give it to you now, for free.

Sit and do nothing.

He said that one of the most productive activities anyone could engage in was to just sit and do nothing. Find a spot, sit, and do nothing. No distractions. Stare into space. Look at grass growing. Watch clouds drift by and evaporate. Whatever. At first, you’ll go out of your mind, feeling like you should be doing something but eventually, at some point, that feeling goes away. And you’re fine. And then answers to questions start to flow. Ideas come. Your brain is freed.

This, in case you’re wondering, is the root of meditation. It’s all it is – stopping thinking, letting your mind stop racing.

I was always blown away by this advice because it’s so true and so incongruous for the mental image of 80’s guy. He taught me to meditate without any hocus-pocus – just to let my brain have some headspace, decades before Andy Puddicomb made billions (of pennies) on the same concept.

I don’t know how old Brian Tracy is, but when it’s his time to become someone who will always have been mortal, forever, I hope that I can disrupt my followers’ LinkedIn feeds with an admonishment to slow down, and realize that true self-help comes from the self, and some gurus don’t stand on beaches, wear robes, or build their own lightsabers. We learned in Ratatouille that a great chef can come from anywhere. Well, a great monk can, too.

Later.

* Cremate & Burial

Yes, that’s me, in case you’re wondering. Well technically it’s a picture of me. I’m not trapped in your whatever the hell you’re reading this on. The picture in question was taken by the absolutely horriderful webcam in the amazingerrible Lenovo IdeaPad s340 that I bought from Costco for $399, which was such a better decision than buying a new ThinkPad for $1500+ that I can’t even get over how great I feel about it. Especially since I got fired and the gravy train is just about up to the station.

Where was I? Oh yes another blog entry. This is a fun one.

Did I ever tell you about the greatest video game I ever played? Stick with me here, even you chads, because it’s not as bad as it sounds.

The best game I ever played was Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

Why? You ask. Welp. It was 2004. I was 34 years old and didn’t know nothing about games except that I was a Nintendo fan and like Zelda OK. Wind Waker was my recent favorite of those and nothing would dethrone it.

Then I got myself a trusty little Playstation 2 to replace my aging GameCube and played the flagship there – San Andreas.

(Please I know how excruciatingly boring this is to a grownup – I am going somewhere with this.)

San Andreas started out pretty straightforward. You did missions, you got some experience, etc. I barely even remember – except for one thing. It got to a point where you had to reclaim neighborhoods in LA for your particular gang – you were green. Your enemy gang was purple. You’d go into a section of town, trigger a gang war and then fight off the purples to turn that little part of the map green. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I got used to this, and good at it, and was turning a lot of purple into green until finally there was this mission I had to go to. It was a drug deal. And it went south. And then something happened that had never happened in any game I’d played up until that point – there was a plot twist. The deal went south. I was betrayed by my friend. I had to escape. The entire map turned purple and I found myself in the middle of the woods, at night, in the rain, running for my life with nothing but the tank top on my back.

That was the real beginning of the game. And that blew my stunted 34-year-old mind.

So. What the hell does this have to do with anyone who’s 50 and just got laid off? Well. I would say only this. As I went through life, fairly successful by many standards (but an abject failure by other standards – more blogs on that to come down the line) I developed a little notion in my mind that life itself was kind of a game. Something that fits rather well with simulation theory and the like. And when I had to do something, whether it was pick up my kid’s prescription or fix a hole in the wall or whatever, I’d think of it kind of like a side quest in a game and –

Man is this boring. Here’s the upshot: life IS a game. You might as well think of it that way. That doesn’t mean you get an extra guy or you should go out and pillage the neighborhood or do all the crazy things – you can’t push reset. But you should consider that all the consequences of things are mostly in your head. You don’t know what’s going to happen so you might as well enjoy it. Thinking of life as a game lowers the stakes a little bit.

And believe me. When you find yourself in the middle of the woods, wearing nothing but a tank top and it starts to rain and you just keep seeing that image of your neighborhood turning purple in your mind – lowered stakes can definitely keep you looking up through the trees rather than down at the mud.

PS I know I mentioned Animal Crossing. That’s a fascinating game as well. Happens in real-time and you have a mortgage and a ton of other things. My wife and I played it pretty regularly until we got a real mortgage and a real life and realized – yeah. Life is better.

Peace out.

Later.

Just a little hint from Heloise this morning. This morning I was lamenting my fate – wait, no, that’s wrong, I don’t use language like that, it’s harmful and destructive. Let’s just say I was considering my situation (brief summary: laid off after 15 years at almost age 50) and perhaps paying attention to some of the negative potentialities thereof and those negatives started to affect my mood as they are wont to do. Then I thought about it and realized that what’s happening to me right now is not all that different from a typical early retirement package that they offer year-over-year – in fact, it’s almost identical.

And the last time they threw that around, I lamented that I wasn’t old enough to take it. That was last year. And I took a lot of pleasure in telling whoever would listen that I would be eligible for it this year.

Well, I got it, didn’t I? And the only difference was, it wasn’t voluntary. I don’t get the opportunity to chicken out. I have to take it. And I thought a thought that was so bitchin’ I just wanted to get here as soon as possible and write it for anyone else that might be in a similar spot. I thought this:

I’ll just pretend I decided to do this on purpose.

Immediately I fell in love with that notion. Immediately I was not just being put upon by the fates, immediately my perceived locus of control shifted from the external to the internal, and immediately I felt better.

This I offer to you. If you have been put in this position – no matter what, whether you have a year of severance or two weeks’ notice or less – reframe that shit and tell yourself you quit. Tell yourself you are getting yourself something better.

I can pretty much guarantee, the vicissitudes of life and experience being what they are, and the law of averages being what it is, and the moods and chemicals in the brain being what they are, if you’ve worked somewhere for more than a year or so, you’ve had at least one instance to think: “eff this place, I should just quit. There must be something better.” Or some shit.

Time for the rubber to meet the road. You can’t think about what’s been lost but you can focus on what can be gained. And you can put yourself in control by saying you meant to do this, this is your life, and your direction.

Hell, I half think I made this happen simply by visualizing leaving so often and so clearly, over the past year or so. I’ve even mentioned in here that I already had a (somewhat updated) copy of my resume and a LinkedIn Pro subscription and as Blake says – A MAN DON’T WALK ON THE LOT LEST HE WANTS TO BUY!

You meant to do this, it’s your destiny. It’s true from a particular point of view. Life is Darth Vader and Obi Wan Kenobi all mixed together into a delicious pate of Your Focus Determines Your Reality. The truth is Qui-Gon Jinn.

That’s all. I hope this helps. Later.

Here’s a thing that’s gonna happen – you’re gonna tidy up. ‘Cause you’re not gonna know what the hell else to do.

I guess it’s natural. The brain wants to take action. But I can’t go out and just get a new job this afternoon. And that’s not arguing for my limitations or defining a negative reality, that’s just the way it is. It don’t work that way. But the urge is there. 

My God! They’re letting me go! I have to … have to… DO SOMETHING!

And so I sit in my office which was so cozy just a couple of weeks ago and now has to become some kind of NEW LIFE CREATION COMMAND AND CONTROL CENTER and I see all the little things that were cute before and now are just clutter. 

And I see the coffee stains on my desk, underneath a thick layer of dust that I always look at, and I see that there’s really nothing else I can do, and so I grab the duster and clean that up. I take a bunch of stuff and throw it in a box. 

I mean. There’s any number of things I could be doing. But eliminating surrounding clutter – straightening up, a neutral activity that has nothing whatsoever to do, directly, with anything I have to do – seems to be the rising tide that lifts all boats. It’s one less thing I can procrastinate with, but it’s more than that. It’s control, and for me that’s huge.

See, I took control of my life and ceded it to someone else. Someone I didn’t know and who didn’t know me, except as a mark on a ledger and an expensive mark at that, that may or may not have been a key contributor, but at any rate, was nothing you couldn’t get somewhat cheaper offshore and so hey, here I am writing blog entries that are just about as useful, at this point, as dusting my desk. But they’re mine.

Cleaning my office – and, as the weather warms up, doing work outside in the yard, and watching what I eat, and going to the gym, and all the other things, these are myself exercising control, and returning control of my life, at least perceptually, to the inside, where it belongs.

I don’t know what I’m going to do in the next few months. I don’t know if I’ll get a full-time position or whether I’ll be stuck in one of these long slogs that last years and make you question the entire nature of the universe and reality. Actually what I do know is that whatever will happen will be something I didn’t expect but will seem perfectly natural in retrospect as I rationalize it (more on that in another entry).

But whatever I end up doing, I Kurt Kober, author of Vectroblog, and one time Emerging Leader, Key Contributor, and Service Owner, and now, discarded human asset, will never count 100% on any one thing again, even if that’s all I have at any given time. I put all my eggs in one basket and some dude I never met before tipped it over because I gave him permission to without thinking it through.

Filling a lot more baskets this time around.

Habits form, whether you want them to, or not.

It’s been two weeks (more or less) since I got shitcanned. Well, it will be have been in two days, anyway. And the thing about that is, I have to break some newly glomming patterns post haste, to prevent said glommers from becoming bona fide habits.

Because in order for your humble author to move on and restore a status quo that can let him continue to exist on this planet with his chosen cadre of fellow humans and offspring, he can’t be waking up early in the morning just to watch YouTube and play Minecraft while telling himself “it’s okay, you need to decompress and decouple.”

You can only be so decoupled, after all. And I think, especially considering the whole Schroedinger’s Employee thing, where I said I was instantly decoupled, or employed and not employed at the same time – wait, what did I say in that article? Ah who cares. The point is: if I act like a piece of shit too much longer, then I’ll start to literally become a piece of shit, and nobody gonna hire a piece of shit, or buy his book or whatever the piece of shit in question wants to do for the aforementioned cadre of whatever.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH MY BRAIN WHY AM I WRITING THIS WAY?

Can you tell I let this blog fester in drafts for a day before revisiting it after just one paragraph? Anyway you should know, if somehow you’ve stumbled up on this blog, that this is just practice. And records for the future. I’m sure, thirteen or fourteen years from now, when I make enough money to move out of the refrigerator box, and find someone with an i-implant nearby who can contact my estranged wife and child to let them know my DNA wasn’t affected by the global coronovirus pandemic back in 2020, it’ll be fun for me to check this out on the Internet Wayback Wayback Machine Machine.

Or something.

Anyway. Not much of a point here. I guess I would only say that in addition to not giving a fig for the place I work anymore, and getting up on time only to screw around and do nothing, and drinking too much, in addition to those things, I am also getting used to writing a blog post every day (no matter how pointless) and checking my LinkedIn and doing a host of other wonderful things.

I should probably also update my resume. Do they still use resumes in 2020?

I’m not gonna do it today, anyway. It’s Sunday afternoon. We got invited to a friend’s house for chili, and I still have to FaceTime with my parents (both still alive and kickin’ ass at almost 80) and give them a lingering fear that even after thirty years, I might have to move back in with them. Which they shouldn’t mind, considering all the stories I’m starting to hear about the basics of life – like going up a flight of stairs or peeling ten potatoes – are starting to turn into things you have to think about.

The last time I was looking for a job, there was no such thing as an iPhone. And…holy cow, Ronald Reagan was still alive.

And so was Richard Biggs. Not sure if that makes sense to include here but it does bookend the Babylon 5 references quite handily.

There’s a whole world out there, he wrote as the first line, without understanding why. But what do I mean? Let’s try again.

I’m generally a positive, optimistic dude. I don’t get down, and when I do, even though I said I don’t, I do, and when I do, I recognize it now as just a state of mind that will pass, rather than a reasonable and appropriate response to the general directed shittiness of a world that is perfectly designed to bring me down.

You know what I mean, right? You’ve felt that, right? It’s easy to go down that path. And you tell the positive people that they’re so dumb and full of shit and the world isn’t like that, that’s not reality, and you cynical yourself right into some asshole’s couch where you have to pay $250 for 45 minutes of someone just to say, in a very polite way, “have you considered the possibility you might be completely full of shit in every aspect and every regard?”

But I digress. I’m a positive dude. I try to think positive things. I do positive reinforcement, affirmations, mantras. I tell myself things like “everything’s gonna work out fine” and “I like myself,” and “nothing really ever gets me down” and these statements are a brain reprogramming itself just like a brain that says “there’s no one out there for me” and “I’ll never find anything” and “everything I touch turns to shit.”

So I’m DOWN with all that, and it works, trust me, after years of cynicism and finely honed complaining about damn near everything in life, I’m back, baby.

And I’m laid off. As I keep mentioning. Which is why I’m writing in here in the first place.

So I am in a place now where yeah – the negative thoughts are coming. The blight bubbles in through the cracks and I have to just clear it away and if it comes in faster than I can bail it out, I have to hold my breath and wait for morning when the tide goes out and it always does.

I should rename this blog, “Metaphor Mash.”

All of this just to say the following. One thing we tend to do at a time of loss is lament. And we think about all the things that were good that we no longer have and the brain deletes the things that were bad that we want nothing to do with.

So that’s what I mean when I title this entry “Let’s Focus On The Negative. You see, I got fired, it’s true. It happened. And yeah from the on-site pharmacy to the commute to that nice fat pharma paycheck that rolled in year after year, there was plenty there that I would consider “nice to have”. It was, in those respects, great. But thinking about that ain’t gonna help me when I’m ankle deep in blight and it’s soaking up towards my crotch, threatening to shrivel my testicles like two currants.

No. I have to focus on the negative. This is the one time in life when it’s useful. I had nothing but contempt for my upper management when I was there. They seemed to have one mission, one product that they produced, year over year, and that was (and is): new orgcharts. That really is it. They talked out of both sides of their mouths, and the company I worked for was a foreign firm, which meant that no matter how good you were or your ideas were, the mothership over in the EU had to call the shots. It’s one reason I’m gone. I’m not core.

At the time of my firing, I had two suits in my closet that I’ve bought over the past 15 years, both when things happened at work that I considered so egregious that I had to get another job. I never did, of course but I had the suits. At the time I was fired, I was, and is, a member of LinkedIn Premium, a $200+ annual subscription to extended job search features and whatnot. Who does that, if they’re happy where they are? If they love their job?

Last but not least – I was one of the last of the Mohicans. Pretty much everyone I’d come up through the ranks with was either already a victim of reorgs, or had taken early retirement. They rearranged the office into an open workplace where nobody had their own personal space, and it was just a lousy situation all around.

These are the things I am remembering now, the things I’m holding on to, the things that let me remember yes – it’s good. This is what you wanted. Now the universe has finally aligned. That means it’s time. Don’t fight your negative.

Let’s see. Yeah. Oh man. It’s been a week and three days since I got SAMOLFed. (Shitcanned At More Or Less Fifty). And you wanna know something? I ain’t done shit.

Now of course that’s not entirely true. It’s kind of a shock when the place you’ve been wishing would fire you for ten years actually turns around and teaches you a lesson in being careful what you wish for, so I did have some of all that to work through. Not only is it a shock to be fired, it’s always surprising to me to find I have all the normal reactions and emotions of my fellow humans – takes a while to build back the comfortable illusion that I’m superior to all you mere mortals, with the clear exception of Wim Hof.

But like, no. I haven’t called around my contacts. I’ve only told a few people in my inner circle, and only a few people were I exwork seem to be aware, either, which is fine. I haven’t updated my resume, although I did open it up and look at it, so I could get my subconscious flowin’. I haven’t posted for anything online, in short, I’m just sort of sitting here.

My circumstances are part of this. Assuming I continue to do my exjob to the fullest of the requirements thereof, I will qualify for a rather plush severance package which will cushion this fall. I also have a few months – as of this writing – before my final day. I got fairly extensive notice in advance (which is a mixed blessing, more on that later, and also see my previous post on Schrodinger’s Employee).

But still. I suppose I could be doing more, but why waste the effort? I know for a fact my brain is not right. If I start calling around, it would be from panic and fear. I can’t take a full month off to find myself. But I can chill and decouple and unlearn for a couple of weeks. Detach myself from my exjob the way that it detached itself from me.

I’ve spent the last fifteen years at that place. And apart from the various trials and tribulations of personal life, that place has been responsible for almost all my emotional ups and downs, been a major priority for most of my time, and yes, taken up the vast majority, by percentage of my waking hours.

Like it or not. As much as I might not want to even get close to the possibility of even thinking about saying this, it’s true, just by default, by objective observation: this job has been my life for more than a decade.

Ya can’t just turn that off willy nilly. Takes a while.

It seems contradictory. After I left that meeting (where I got SAMOLFed), all my fucks went away. Everything I was worried about was no longer any concern to me. But as I got back and knew that I had to stay there a while longer, I did feel myself concerned about issues, wanting to help, and indeed, contributing – as I am supposed to, until my end date.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, it’s a huge restructuring in the mind.

What’s my plan? Well. Obviously I don’t have the great American novel ready to go and earn me seven figures. I had all my eggs really in one basket and likely my short-term solution will be to seek gainful employment elsewhere at a similar, or heck, I can wax optimistic and say maybe even a higher level – but at the same time, I’ll keep this work in context.

At my exjob I never admitted the extent to which I counted on it, took it for granted, and, most importantly, let it take over my life. I considered income a solved problem. Not so much anymore.

This time around I’ll be filling more baskets. I won’t slack at any new position I acquire – probably I’ll do even better. But I will always remember, that all employment is at-will employment.

So work for yourself my friends, and if you don’t, then start moving around the game piece so you can, one day.

End of ramble for today.

Nine days ago now – holy crap, time is flying – I got shitcanned. In that time I’ve run the gamut. I don’t know what stage of grief I’m on just now, let me check…

Ahh, thank you, Thing.* So yeah I think, I may, after just 9 days, be hitting the upward turn because the positive thoughts are definitely outweighing the negative ones. Granted, this is a deliberate choice on my part to do so. But that’s the blight, which I talked about in my previous entry. Everything negative must go! And some negative things actually masquerade as positive things. I confess. In my back pocket I am keeping a nuclear option where I ask my parents for financial help. We’re a year away from even being close to that position – but still. I’m 50 years old and my brain seriously entertained the notion of (at least virtually) moving back in with my parents.

I’ll chalk that one up to anger and bargaining and leave it at that. But that thought led to weakness and would prevent me from looking at all options to get into a better situation for myself and my family, if I thought well, this was all just a joke this last 15 years, I was just pretending to be a grown-up.

A lot of other people don’t have it near as good as me. I know that too and I’m eternally grateful. But I could be more grateful. A lot of my life has been spent focusing on the negative. I made an art form out of it. Like the unruly kid who wants attention and one day, unfortunately gets it for the wrong thing and from that moment on, does wrong to feel right. I became a professional cynic and man was I an asshole. I think I’m better now but who knows. I don’t know how others see me but I do know that when I sought out the evil and ugly in the world I was depressed and moody to the point of qualifying for therapy and medication, both of which I’ve been through and that’s no picnic.

So yeah. The Upward Turn. Here I sit, at my job, writing this on a $400 laptop I bought (see what I mean about being better off than most?) hooked in via wifi hotspot on my phone, writing blog entries for practice as I think about getting myself a better life for my family. Isn’t that something awesome? And as I watch emails go by that would have pissed me off, sent me to LinkedIn or Indeed.com to scroll mutteringly through job opportunities, but never clicking “apply” because this place was just so cushy, well now I feel fucking great. I’m allowing myself to feel great. Allowing myself to realize I won’t be here for another Jan. 1 go-live, 8 am on 1/1 in the office what the hell was I thinking? Only to get let go, not two weeks later?

He sat back and smiled, and clicked “Publish.” Was this 500 words? No matter. It was words, parts of it had a point, and he was on the upward swing. Maybe by Saturday he’d be up to Reconstruction and well on his way to Acceptance and Hope.

Heck, maybe he was already th–

click!

\* That’s an MST3K reference by the way. If you got it, you can be my friend.

The blight will come in the night. It will creep up on you during the day, until you watch the sun set and want to go with that star to whatever dark place it rests. (I know, it’s just the Earth rotating but work with me here.)