I found someplace that could do my glasses prescription and almost two weeks later, I have my new glasses. Now it’s just adjusting to multi focal progressives. Right now, I feel a slight pressure in my head every time I shift focus and my phone screen looks a bit distorted, like it is curving in on the sides or perhaps is swollen up towards me.
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On business travel - I travel a lot. Last night in London, free night for myself, got to the hotel at 7pm. Conked out.
Wooo! What a life!
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When I worked for G4S during the Olympics, I lived in a hotel for about 6 mths! Got really quite sick of it!
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I find nieces and nephews work well. You can enjoy their company whenever you want, as long as your siblings don’t live somewhere horribly distant (I’ve been miffed with my sisters for living in a suburb of Reykjavík so far off that it’s really rural, but my brother is going to have his first in less than five months while living in Brussels!), and when you need quiet to read or rest, you can just return them to their parents.
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Yes, we have a trio of nieces/nephew who live nearby, and they’re basically our surrogate children (we’ll never have our own). I usually try to load them with sugar before giving them back, but my wife stops me every time. She’s too clever for me, as my board game record against her shows.
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I received the official notice today that I’ve been invited to a technology summit for my company to decide how if/how/when/why to adopt AI/ML for internal business processes.
Exciting! I’ll get to meet my boss for the first time in person. Also there will be the person who had my job before me and moved on to our automation team; it’ll be great to meet him as well, as he was the closest thing I had to a work friend (for a fully remote company) until he left for his new position and I took his backfill spot.
Looking at the people who received the same email I did, it appears more than half of the attendees will be Directors (like my boss), Vice Presidents, Senior Vice Presidents and C-Levels. This is actually good for me from a career-advancement perspective- when I applied for a job a few months ago to our Product Technology Architecture department, I was very successful in the interview process, but the hiring manager and director both noted that I had been with the company for 5 years and they had never heard my name before.
Directors have a pretty good idea of what goes on day-to-day, based on my interaction with them. Unfortunately, upper management always seem surprised when I explain how our business processes work (and what I need to actually get something done). I worry that there will be so few of us “boots on the ground” types that the week will be spent at the ten-thousand foot view[1] without any real, actionable plans outside of, possible, aligning some budgets.
Another aspect will certainly be that I’ll be asking my partner to solo-parent for between 3 and 5 days (unsure yet exactly when I will leave and return). Her friend suggested a girls-only weekend trip which I thought was a good idea, but my partner seems hesitant; perhaps because my trip is, mostly, for the chance to improve my career prospects, whereas she would feel self-indulgent if she were to go away for just herself (which I can understand, but she totally deserves it).
Yet another aspect is that I am a genuine introvert. I’m terrible at small talk, but can handle myself in professional situations when it comes time to discuss interesting topics.
However, I hope I don’t come off as awkward or anti-social when it comes to whatever these people are going to be doing during the evenings. There will be times I’d happily join a group for dinner and drinks; I certainly hope it won’t be expected to be the case each night.
Unrelated to all of that, and to a much less degree of importance, I have been contemplating whether I will have the energy to play any games while I’m there.
I play very seldom currently because work, household chores, and caring for children take just about all (if not more) of my energy most days.
This will feel like a vacation[2]… better even, I think, than when we travelled out of town as a family and we simply parented in a different city.
Fortunately, the trip is close enough that I will be driving (most people either live nearby or will fly in from the east or west coast). So I’ve been contemplating solo games I could take. But also… multiplayer games? What in my collection could I play with normies?
I may make a separate thread about this (we may already have one!)
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But…you own every game ever created. Surely you have something that works with normies.
That “ten-thousand foot view” you mention reminds me of when our company was selecting a new ERP system. Our relatively new head of finance had worked with a system in the past and really liked it and pitched it to leadership. After some reviewing and meetings with the company as well as a company that would help us transition to it, they decided upon it.
Only to learn as implementation began that the system had no way of tracking containers, just the contents of the containers, which is the actual product we sell. However, many of our containers can be returned and reused, so that was kind of critical. Something that any lower-level employee who works with the containers would have been able to point out.
Also, it’s label printing capability was extremely limited, and only in black and white when we need color on a lot of our labels.
So while the ERP was leagues better than what we had before (ancient SAP system) in most respects, it left the Production group having to perform the tasks they were already doing for tracking and labeling containers and material, and then add a bunch of new tasks for the ERP system to track the product.
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Don’t underestimate the power of engaged listening. You don’t even have to talk as long as you are present and engaged.
That said, it never hurts to have 3-4 good questions. Nothing silly on one end and nothing that they’re tired of talking about on the other. I like “where did you grow up” best - everyone has an answer and it’s usually interesting and advances the relationship, and it’s easy to reciprocate. In the process you’ll generally find one thing to follow up on as well. Note that if you ask an Asian American this they will flinch but you’ll be ok as long as you engage with their actual answer and don’t follow up with “no where are you really from” - which is what they are raw from.
I’m blessed by generally being in the data group so we can talk about a game during dinner or drinks and later pull out a real table game. If you are the junior one, it’s probably safest to just let sleeping dogs lie.
That said, I’d veer toward:
- Learn by playing (i.e., a game that is best taught with a simple demo round walkthrough)
- Games with social interaction
Skull. Coup. I did well with Ethnos once. I won’t scroll my spreadsheet but you get the idea.
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This one?
I had my OnSite this week.
The games we actually played were Just One and The Gang.
I took a few more. Might add them to the other thread later.
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I often mention that being the quiet person in the back with one great question is can be much more valuable than hours of mindless chatter.
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I often wish I was the quiet person.
But I can’t bear silence at the table.
And so I fill it while desperatly hoping that I can engage the others enough so I am not talking to myself.
I think it went well mostly.
But somehow in person is the same as online. I am the one standing at the whiteboard writing or in front of the retro board going through things. And I really wish that sometimes someone else would step up. I need to learn to wait a moment longer like with taking the 8* Chip with The Gang (I have the expansion and we actually managed to sort the hands of 8 people on our last round–4 pairs and 4 high cards to sort and we did it!)
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I also struggle with this and have often been the first to break the silence because it’s uncomfortable to me.
It’s something I’ve been working on for the last couple of years and it’s hard to break that behavior.
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One or other Flip 7?
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My coop local has replaced both its tills with self service tills.
They don’t accept cash.
A member of staff must be present at all time for cash payments.
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One of the many, MANY enshitifications of the world that I loathe is the self-checkout lane.
The only upside is the amount it enables my partner to steal from the grocery monopoly we have in Ontario (technically there are 2, but that’s not an improvement when they collude as much as they do…). But I’d rather they pay their employees a living wage and stop trying to make everyone unemployed. Thank you.
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I don’t mind a self checkout lane if I have like 2-5 things, that don’t require an ID check. It’s quicker than a cashier in that specific instance.
Making everyone use them slows the whole process down.
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I use the handheld scanner for my shopping. I quite like being able to pack my bags slowly and sensibly as I shop.
Just about makes up for the hassle of the ID check or the “random” checks to make sure you scanned everything.
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Just heard from my manager that he’s gotten leadership to agree to some new job titles to allow progression, and that now instead of being a Systems Administrator I am now a Systems Administrator II, which comes along with a nice $5+/hr raise.
I’ll take it!
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Congratulations!
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