But others, you may have noticed, are just kind of spectacularly pointless, or at least, tortuous. (Which doesn’t mean painful, by the way.)
Then again…”tortuous” plus “pointless” can definitely produce a quantum of pain here and there.
My God, this entry is turning pointless and tortuous itself, and that, despite me actually having an idea what I wanted it to be about before I started typing. I must be getting really good at not having a point. But here’s the real point: this is just practice.
I want to write a blog that’s worth reading. I want to extract the stuff that’s been fermenting in the oak barrel of my mind for the last half century and dole it out here and (see what I did) there, but Rome wasn’t built in a day, and as you can see, I got no idea what the hell I’m doing, or what I have to say.
But since I am pretty much 50, and also, pretty much recently unemployed, I feel like I got a little time and so I can use that time writing, to keep the old synapses firing and here we are. To learn, you must do. So I set myself a goal of writing a blog every weekday.
So. What the hell is this? It’s a practice blog. You might find something interesting or amusing here, I hope you do; but don’t take any of it too seriously. Until I tell you to.
And that’s that.
Oh wait, actually please go read Petit’s Moon. I do like that one.
“Projectionists,” answered Jerry Seinfeld as George Constanza sat on the floor wondering just what the hell he was going to do with his life now that he’d rather abruptly quit his job in a fit of tantrous rage.
I just made up the word “tantrous”. It means “having the quality of being a tantrum”. I also like to put the punctuation outside the quotes. This is from years of writing computer scripts. I guess I could change, but why?
Do they pay people to make up words? Obviously I check my emails and job alerts and I look for things along the lines I was doing when I was summarily executed by people who didn’t know who I was or what I actually did at the organization – that was my fault, I’ll have to write an entry on that at some point too.
But I also find myself, at the start of a long slog of a job hunt with a fairly long severance period in my back pocket, completely rewinding my adult life and thinking about doing other things. Like ANY other things, for a living.
Like the Zero Percent Solution. Remember that? Remember all those people in their Planes Trains and Automobiles, going to who the hell knows where to do who the hell knows what, but whatever and wherever it was it wasn’t where and what I was about to do?
Well, now I’m kinda like them. So I’m like that old Russian Babushka after Gorbachev caved and Glasnosed all over the place, standing in the grocery store blown away by the concept of “store” and perplexed by having a choice of toothpaste and not having to stand in line for toilet paper.
So yeah, I think about crazy shit right now. One thing I can do is cook. Maybe one day I’ll do a blog post about how to make the perfect chaffle (actually that’s bush league, I just wanted to write the word “chaffle”), but the point is, even after a long week of working for people who would eventually spit in my face and call it champagne, I could stand up all day in the kitchen preparing food for guests or holidays or just batch cooking – from 9 to 5 I could basically pull a shift on my feet and smile and be happy the whole time, and I used to think I could do this for a living.
Of course, the emphasis was “I could do this.” See doing that, unless you’re Grant Achatz or Thomas Keller or Gordon Ramsay or Wolfgang Puck or Tom Colicchio or Emeril Lagasse or Rick Bayless or Daniel Bouloud or Eric Ripert or Anthony Bou- oh wait. Well unless you’re one of those guys, running a restaurant may be personally fulfilling but it doesn’t come close to the compensation I got for my previous gig.
That’s because when you run a restaurant, after last call, you’re done for the day. Unless there was salmonella in the spinach or e. coli in the bratwurst, nobody’s gonna call you up at 2AM to let you know your platform is on the fritz and if you don’t get it running, we’ll be losing a million dollars a day – or the like.
But what comes with responsibility is the dollars to keep your ass in the chair where you’re needed – until they decide they don’t need you anymore.
I promise I’ll think out the next blog entry a little better. This one I just had to bang out on a cloudy day. I do like to write these blogs. Do they pay people to write blogs?
They pay me, am I a people?
That’s a great question, Creepy Tim Ferriss. You’re definitely a survivor though. So I don’t know if I should take your advice.
I guess the point is that I’m slowly realizing the world is my oyster. But it may be a Rocky Mountain Oyster.
The other day,my wife was playing me a recording she made of the incredibly annoying teenage girls in the same waiting room as her, complaining about their stupid teachers and I remembered the times I would listen to something like that with the smugness afforded a successful middle-aged man who had conquered life.
But listening to it as a fired dude without any job or prospects, just having been cut loose from his gig of fifteen years with no ceremony or respect, it was a different experience. Credibility was absent in my mind, and it’s all mindset baby.
Because I never had any credibility even with my job. At least, my job wasn’t credibility, although I put it in the same mental bucket. If what I thought was true, I wouldn’t have been let go, and I wouldn’t be writing this right now.
(I also wouldn’t have been able to go to the gym at 10:30 and not get back until 1:30 and not give a damn what anyone thought about it as long as I answered just enough emails to continue to qualify for having a severance but perhaps that’s a bit too transparent.)
Anyway. Here’s what you do when you feel like you’re a complete failure: just go with it. It’ll pass. This shit doesn’t come from your mind, and it doesn’t come from your circumstances. It comes from your gut biome.
Seriously. That’s another secret to life I’m giving you for free, right there. Guts cause feelings not the other way around. You know how when you feel nervous about something or slightly sick and queasy and anxious? (If you don’t, then I applaud your sense of mental well-being and fantastic-adjustedness.) What do you usually think about that? Probably you think it’s because of something going on in your life.
Nah. What’s really happening is you feel that way and your mind picks a thing to think it’s feeling that way about. At least most of the time.
When you get fired from your job of 15 years and are suddenly thrust into a world where you again have to worry about the lowest level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, you’re allowed a little genuine anxiety and a few sleepless nights.
But overall, just ride out these little adventures of the gut biome. Whether you’re feeling negative in a sad way or angry way or just plain nervous. Think happy thoughts. Force yourself. Think of things that are good, like “I’m not on fire right now” or “At least my eyeballs aren’t bleeding.”
Note: if you’re on fire or your eyeballs are bleeding, feel free to think of other things.
And eventually you will find that the bad feeling passes. They always do. The trick is to attach too much importance to when you feel happy and remove all significance from when you feel bad.
This will have good results in the long term. And you can tell Nelson Muntz to swivel on it.
The right thing to do…it’s so hard to know what that is!
I’m reminded of this line from a comic, I think, but I can’t remember, for the life of me. I wish I could, because I have a mental image of something. Ah. No. OK are you ready for a meaningless paragraph? I have that line about the right thing in my head but the image is from Reign of the Supermen, when the cyborg is saying “my memory, so much of it is gone.” Which is possibly apropos considering my memory is pretty much gone regarding the thing I wanted to use to open this blog. So let me just try again and we can forget this, the worst intro ever written to anything.
Sometimes it’s hard to be a robot.
I don’t know what I should do. As you may or may not know, I was recently let go from my job. I’m still at that company however, as of this writing, and will be probably for a few more months.
Now I have to determine a course of action. How do I maintain gainful employment to support my family right? One option is to apply internally. And that’s where being a robot comes in.
Because I have emotions. Like Dr. Hfuhruhurr, I’m a man, flesh and blood. And as such, being fired, no matter how clinical and impersonal, stings. And it makes you think a lot about a lot of things, some of which I’ve thought about here in the open and anyway one of those things is – EFF THIS PLACE. Only I’m not sayin’ “EFF” if you know what I mean.
As I look through online internal job postings I see any number that I might be appropriate for. And I know after fifteen years here that I do have a fair amount of internal karma. I guess what I’m saying is not only is there a nonzero chance I could get one of these internal positions – there might even be a better than 50% chance.
Thing is. Do I do it? That’s where emotions come in because why do I want to stay at a place that already told me to hit the bricks? But then, that’s just emotions talking, you know. If I could latch on to some other gig here, then the immediate financial problem is resolved once again. Is having that, plus a new mindset, enough? Or would I fall back into a rut?
That’s the other thing. This is like one of those life chances to really do something special and great. Get another job. Start over, start fresh. Lose that old baggage. Truly it’s not all bad. If I get a gig internally I’m a lame duck and I lose all that. I probably would just get comfortable all over again.
NO, okay I wouldn’t do that, but it would remove a great deal of motivation from me to start filling those extra buckets, motivation that right now, I have in spades, as evinced by me writing a blog at least every weekday, no matter how vapid.
What the hell am I trying to say here? What the hell is this entry all about? You gotta weigh everything. When you’re presented in life with something this big, there’s not one part of the brain it leaves untouched and you have to get down to the nitty gritty. You have to balance the emotional – holding a grudge against a faceless corporation that never cared about you in the first place, thereby continuing your old codependent relationship with them even in job death – against the logical – taking a job internally that continues to pay the bills, hoping that you can refrain from just sighing deeply in relief and becoming a human cog again, working once again for a corporation that doesn’t give a fig for you.
Right now I’m taking the robot approach. I’m looking at all my options and remembering that the main thing is to support my family and continue to move forward in life, taking recently learned lessons to heart.
Life can suck. But that’s not necessarily bad, it just depends on your point of view.
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.
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?
You let me worry about blank.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When you’ve been around as long as I have, you kinda get used to it.
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.
