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Saturday Morning Request for the Collective Professional Wisdom of Ricochet
A notable quality of Ricochet’s members is that quite some number of you are both extremely professionally accomplished — and remarkably modest about it. Few of our members brag, but since I’m a curious woman and good at reading between the lines, I’ve figured out that many of you have been quite successful at managing businesses, in particular — unsurprisingly, given the pro-business orientation of our site — and many of you have excelled in a number of other fields that demand an uncommon level of ambition, discipline, professionalism, and commitment.
As I mentioned on a recent editorial podcast, one of my favorite member posts in Ricochet history was Concretevol’s glimpse into his industry: Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Concrete (But Were Afraid To Ask). I love learning about jobs I know nothing about — that’s why I also love Dave Carter’s explanations about how the trucking industry works, and really enjoyed Bryan G. Stephens’ recent post about his experiences as a psychotherapist.
I have a sense that we have many people here who have had fascinating professional experiences — but who rarely discuss them, perhaps out of modesty or the mistaken sense that they wouldn’t be of interest. I’d personally love to hear more about what you do: about your training; about the economics of your industry; about the skills and temperamental traits required to succeed in it; about the lessons you’ve learned from it; about the way your industry has changed (if it has), and if so, how you’ve adapted. I’d love to know about the biggest challenges someone in your line of work faces, and to hear your tips for navigating them successfully.
Of course, it would also always interesting to hear how these experiences have shaped your political opinions. But even apart from that, we have such an interesting group of people here: We seem, truly, to have among us a highly qualified expert on every subject under the sun. And not everything about our lives is political, so there’s no need for every post to be about politics.
So may I invite you to tell us a bit more about what you do for a living? I’d love to see a lively discussion about this in the comments on this thread, of course, but even more: I’d love to see posts about it in the Member Feed. This morning, I put a little post on the Member Feed about a common dilemma in my own industry, to get things started. (It doesn’t make what I do sound like fun, but might give you a bit of insight into the way “the news” becomes “the news you read this morning.”) Let’s keep that as a Ricochet Member exclusive, though: If my thoughts about that go too far on the loose, they do have a bit of “You’ll never eat lunch in this town again” potential.
So tell us more about your job. And to those of you who reckon what you do is boring, I’ll bet you anything you’re wrong. For those of us who’ve never done a job like that, I wager it will be a lot more interesting than you’d ever think.
Published in General
Concretevol,
I live in the Last Frontier. The land of maddening light and darkness.
I definitely recommend it…fascinating book.
Ahhhh, lower Alabama. :)
Oh, not another Great American Novel written by someone who should write a Great American Autobiography! Fiction is a wonderful genre, but why do so many people feel they want to write fiction when they haven’t yet written the non-fiction book that’s obviously trying to come out of them? I can’t tell you what you should write, but if the main character is a young pediatrician, I can tell you this: a non-fiction book about that character will have a huge audience. There’s a huge market for well-written books about real doctors and their experiences — people are fascinated by this. (I’m one of those people, as I explained to Kozak here.)
Fiction is almost impossible to sell, by comparison — not only as a genre compared to non-fiction, but especially by comparison to the “medical memoir” genre, which sells like crazy. I’m not saying you should care about how it sells — if money isn’t an object and you just want to please yourself, of course, you should write what gives you pleasure. But deep down, every writer does it because he or she feels he has a story to tell — and because he or she wants that story to be read by someone else. I’d be very surprised if deep down, that story wasn’t your own.
Don’t let your modesty about your life or your desire to disguise yourself get in the way of writing what I bet you anything would be the better book. I’ve seen a lot of writers make this mistake, and it really is a mistake. People chronically underestimate how truly interesting their own lives have been, and feel they need to fictionally embellish them to get peoples’ attention. It’s the opposite: When people know that a story is true, it inherently compels their attention in a way very few made-up stories can. That’s why writing fiction is so much harder — it requires so much art and technique to compensate for the reader’s sense that what he’s reading is just a made-up tale.
It sounds like you have a real tale to tell — and probably many of them.
I’ve written two fiction books and two non-fiction books, and while maybe one day I’ll try my hand at fiction again (who knows), I would really prefer to write non-fiction. The truth is just more interesting than anything I have the talent to imagine. And it just doesn’t feel good to pour your time and your heart into a book no one ever reads. The market for fiction is lousy, and that means that even if it’s great fiction, it’s unlikely ever to get a wide readership.
I would only advise trying to write fiction to someone who had a truly unique talent for it. Most of us don’t. But many of us do have a talent for writing about our own experiences and lives — which in your case, I’ll bet, would indeed make a wonderful subject for a book.
Okay, I really, really want to know more about what the two of you do. Talk about interesting jobs.
But if you both get lost in insider-talk, the rest of us will lose the plot. Would you consider (both of you) writing about this for the Member Feed, but also remembering we’re a lay audience? In other words, would you consider explaining what all the terms mean, exactly, assuming that most of us won’t know much about how these things work and the organizational culture? I could look up the difference between the 601TCS and 601TCW, but that wouldn’t be nearly as good as hearing you explain it and tell us more about their respective cultures, the personalities, and just what it was about these locales that made you reach for the word “colorful.”
(As for the last request, a professional writer’s tip: Show, don’t tell. You know what I bet this story needs? Dialogue.)
I was kidding about that one, but I know as sure as I know the sun will rise tomorrow that one day I will need IT help. And when I do, this promise will come back to haunt you.
My suggestions for your Member Feed post? “The Top Ten Problems You’re Apt to Be Having with Your Computer, and the Best and Cheapest Ways to Fix Them” — yeah, you bet everyone wants to read that — and also, “How to Tell if Your IT Pro Has a Clue.” Because this is a field in which many who claim to be pros are not pros at all, as you probably know.
I’d love to know how to figure out whether I’m handing my computer over for expensive repairs to someone whose knowledge of how to fix things is hardly an improvement on my own. (I do know that Step 1 is turning it off and on again, and that this will work in 90 percent of all cases. I also know that resetting the PRAM & SMC which will fix the another 10 percent. But it’s the 10 percent that doesn’t fix … that’s when I need to call one of you guys, and I’d really like to know what questions I could ask someone that would help me figure out, fast, whether he or she really truly the competence to make things better — and, given that they usually charge by the hour, to make it better fast.)
Yep. No such thing as someone who’s served in a combat arms platoon who doesn’t have an interesting story to tell about it. Off to the Member Feed with you, too.
Good luck with that. That’s one of the best things about a military career, from my POV — that chance of getting some of the best language training in the world, or at least, I know it used to be. (One day I’ll tell everyone the story of how close I was to enlisting when I was 17 because I so wanted to study at Monterrey. Only reason it didn’t happen is because the military recruiter made … well, a big sales mistake. Big. But I’ve often thought about how totally different my life would have been. I was minutes from signing on the dotted line.)
I believe you. One of the ways I put myself through college was through a little business my then-boyfriend and I started, painting professors’ offices. We’d do it at night, blasting the music as loud as we wanted, and well, we did other things that made it a lot of fun, but since I’m a grown-up now, I must firmly discourage any young person ever from being so stupid. But yeah, that was a great job, and yes, there’s something really satisfying about painting — turning a place from run-down, depressing, and drab, to bright-fresh-and-new-and-sparkly. It’s a good-vibes job.
Home-brewing is tough. Russian’s probably a lot easier to master.
My husband was an F-4 back seater. I have tapes of missions where I controlled him. I visited Pruem once. Went from 603 to 601 TCG at Kapaun. Our C-141 out of Saudi broke down and had to overnight at Rhein Main. We were stuck in the airport snack bar overnight and everyone fed the juke box. Unfortunately, most selected Walk Like an Egyptian not knowing it was in the queue about 30 times already. Was doing remote in Korea during Seoul Olympics. Was recalled off my honeymoon. Preferred foxholes to flying-got airsick on AWACS on bumpy days. Never got sick in a camouflaged tent. Qualified on and carried an M-16 because .38s are useless in combat and aren’t as much fun on deployments.
Stop this! I know everyone here is just being modest, and yes, modesty is a very likeable quality, but you’ve all got to stop insisting that your lives are boring and unimpressive when that is so manifestly not so. First, you might accidentally make people believe it, so it’s bad writing technique. Second, it just offends me. What you’ve done is not only impressive, but hugely interesting, and I won’t hear people here belittling their own real accomplishments. There’s no need for bragging, but you’re far from being in danger of that.
(I’m not very patient with people who wish to be admired on the grounds that they’ve got .003 percent Cherokee blood or something, but people who’ve spent their lives doing jobs that clearly require an immense amount of hard work, study, and discipline? That’s a different story. And if you look at what you wrote right after saying, “Not that impressive,” I think you’ll have to admit that it comes off as false modesty — because yes, that is impressive. If you’d be kind enough to tell us more about what it was like to do this on the Member Feed, I reckon we’d all love to hear the stories.)
I’ve had two careers. My first was Navy wife, and mother of our five children. I never assumed that I would do anything else except mother these five children. But, one day, I realized that we would probably need more money when they all grew up and were in high school and college. (They were all born within 8 years.) So, although I LOVED being the mother–sewing, cooking nearly everything from scratch, gardening, canning, toting people off to piano lessons and soccer games and Cub Scouts—I enrolled in college.
After ten years of studying, while also mothering and volunteering at school and church, I got a degree and a teaching certificate. I graduated one week before our oldest graduated from high school. I started teaching 4th grade and never looked back.
I’ve now been teaching 4th grade in three different states and with those paychecks helped to pay for lots of marching band uniform rentals, orthodontia, church missions, and weddings. I also LOVE being a teacher…when I’m working with the students.
However—the bureaucracy, the bad-mouthing by the public, the low pay and the 10 hour days are not my favorite part of teaching. It’s not like other jobs: after all, everyone has spent their entire childhood in a classroom. So, of course, everyone knows what teachers do, and assumes that they could do it, too. So, we pretty much don’t get much respect.
BUT…nevertheless, I know how important my job is; and I know that I can make or break a little kid’s entire life (or so it seems) because their whole life is happening that single hour. It’s a huge responsibility and I take it seriously. It’s a big job, and I’m glad to have been doing it for 20 years.
OK, what I want to know more about — others may have different questions — is this. Simple question: How does a large building work? I don’t mean a house — I pretty much get how all the systems in a normal house work — but what changed, technologically, that suddenly allowed people to start building skyscrapers and large office buildings? Why did this start happening when it did? What innovations made it possible, exactly? Were there changes in the way materials were sourced that made it economically feasible? I just don’t have a sense of the history of the technology and economics of this — but I bet you do.
I’ll bet you do. And perhaps some insight about it that we wouldn’t have, too. I’m seeing a Member Feed post about living through that — just a straightforward, “Day 1, Day 2, Day 3” narrative — that would make a hell of a read, aren’t you?
I’d like to see the Member Feed post on this: “The Top Ten Hours.” The top ten hours, in other words, in which you felt most responsible for making or breaking a little kid’s entire life, and why, and how you handled it.
I retired almost a year ago from the U S Department of State Diplomatic Security Service. I was a security technician at embassies in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Central America. Now I play with my Grandchildren and fish. So far I’m very happy with my new life.
Claire, don’t get stuck on the jibberish. We just exchanged some info to compare backgrounds. We both were in an air defense career field. In this field, at the radar operations level, we could be assigned to the blockhouses that defend the U.S. borders, fly on AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System), or do what we did, deployable radar units. The TC stands for tactical control and the third letter is the level, F for flight, S for squadron, G for group, and W for wing. These radar units deploy on a moment’s notice overseas and go with their own radar, communications, AC, power, medics, supply, food service, and administrative personnel in operations and maintenance. They provide their own defense. They handle both air surveillance and weapons control mission. They identify friend verses foe and engage the enemy with their weapons- fighter aircraft or associated army surface to air missiles. The deployed units exchanged their air picture via various data links (sorta like dial up internet but older). If you combine dial up with wi-fi, you get something similar to the ground to air links. Things are a little better now. And then there were the remote radars on mountains.
Yep, this is another job that I know almost nothing about, and I bet a good account of it would be fascinating. Thing about janitors is that they’re sort of invisible — they work when everyone’s out of the office, usually, so you don’t really see what they do; you just know that they did some kind of miracle and that now everything’s like new again. So my two ideas for your Member Feed post are these: First, what do you actually do? What’s the routine, what kind of equipment do you use, are there different styles of janitoring, are there different subcultures in the business? Is there a special janitor lingo? If I wanted to write about a janitor as a fictional character, what sorts of dialogue would I put in his mouth to make him or her sound like the real deal? Are there any famous janitors who are known for their super-janitorial skills?
Second — you guessed it — “The Top Ten Things Your Janitor Wishes You Knew.” The toilet-flushing thing is gross, and it’s amazing to me that people do this to you. (Why do people do that, do you think?) What else do people do that you’d really rather they didn’t? I reckon everyone knows, deep down, that not flushing the toilet is a profoundly antisocial act for which they’ll spent half an eternity in purgatory, but maybe there are things people do that make things unnecessarily unpleasant for the janitor — but they just aren’t aware that it causes problems. (I’m thinking along the lines of, “We really wish you understood what kinds of things are way more difficult to clean than you’d ever dream, and why your seemingly innocuous choice of, say, shoe polish, is one every janitor in the world hates.”)
I’m a computer programmer. My system collects and reports statistics on freight trucks, drivers, and service center employees.
One statistic is missing shipments, you’d think that would be fairly easy to figure out: “how many shipments have we lost, and if we found them again, where did they end up?”
I end up asking a lot of questions like: “what exactly do you mean by lost?” we track pallets of freight, and our data points come from service centers. A pallet is picked up at the shipper’s site, it gets a number assigned, and it goes to the nearest service center. It gets taken off the truck that picked it up, goes across a dock, and gets put on a truck that will take it to the next service center that’s closer to the destination.
A pallet is considered missing when the estimated delivery date has gone by more than 2 days ago, and we don’t have any activity on the event table.
That’s just one of the 20 or so statistics that I collect and report.
Fun huh?
NB: If anyone reads these comments from start to finish, I think you’ll have to agree with my original post: We’ve got some pretty interesting people among us, do we not?
The only problem with you guys is that so few of you seem to realize how interesting your jobs and lives have been, and what great reading your accounts of what you do would make for the rest of us — if only you’d just write them.
So, you say “you’d think that would be fairly easy to figure out,” which I take to mean — it isn’t. Why is it hard to figure out? Because sure, I would think that would be easy to figure out, and quite critical, too. Is it a record-keeping problem?
So that sounds reasonable — it’s tracked at every point, right? So I’m still not getting why it’s hard to figure out where these things are. And I’m curious, too, because I always wonder what went wrong when I order something and it’s not delivered — and I always figure it’s because a) someone at the company was bad and lazy, or b) someone at customs was corrupt and stole it — which from what you’re saying may be incorrect.
If the shipment is on a dock, or on a trailer, its not *really* lost, its only late. But because it hasn’t moved to the next service center, it hasn’t generated any event data. We could report a shipment lost, have it show up again in the event stream, and then be lost again. If we don’t see any activity for 30 days, we stop looking for any.
The most difficult part turns out to be, how do you count things that aren’t there? And what is the denominator for showing percentages (all the stats have to be presented as percentages because that’s how the goals are stated.)
So we fudge it a little. The denominator we use has absolutely nothing to do with the number of missing shipments for a particular day, we just use a count of all shipments that are in transit on a day.
And the counting of what isn’t there is done by rigidly defining the time period, and trying to take into account exactly what we knew at a certain point in time.
So, shipment 1 was supposed to be delivered on 6/9, and when we went looking for info on it on 6/12, we didn’t find any, so it was “lost”. If we look again on 6/15, and we see it popped up somewhere, its not “lost” anymore, its just late. Even later, on 6/18, no more events have been seen, its “lost” again. There are, in actuality, quite a few more conditions to consider, but that’s the gist.
I’ve had one in the works for a while about manufacturing electronics, but I’ve been too busy to finish it. Will aim to have it up eventually, but make no promises on when.
First Act:
I started out as a systems analyst for a large company . It was early in the computer era (I wrote my first code in 1965) and very few had the arcane knowledge to deploy the technology into a business. I stuck with it and climbed the career ladder to become IT Director handling worldwide technology development.
I moved on to run merger teams which took newly acquired companies and bashed square pegs into round holes to make them fit into the corporate family.
I did a stint during the 90s in silicon valley doing product and market development for a major player in software. I was the guy with some gray that could talk business in boardrooms to customers and guide development in several industries.
In between, I consulted to major companies and government divisions on systems, service and supply chain.
Second Act:
I became an advisor to small business owners. I found a great association of consultants who trained me in the psychology of entrepreneurs, how to listen, how to influence them and how to guide them. After decades of company politics it was a huge change. I loved it. Hands on, one on one work. Decisions made by one person who could make things happen. I worked with businesses from steel foundry mold makers, financial advisors, restaurants, construction, landscapers, trucking to one which sold baby items . I guided companies through growth and the credit crunch , the real estate bubble and various financial issues. Most obscure business- Meth Lab Clean Up specialists, founded by a former high school teacher. (Their name was not Walter White)
Third Act:
I have embarked on a new venture which I believe could be a model for boomer professionals. I was asked by an friend to join a group of geezers in their 60s and 70s who were forming a new manufacturing company with a new product for dentists. The entire group has never met in person, spreads across four states and two countries. I set up the systems and supply chain, another guy markets, a third is the engineer, another handles patents and so forth. We contract all manufacturing and distribution.
We all can do our work wherever the internet exists. Next month, I will handle order flow from a Hawaiian resort for a bit. I have done it from an interstate rest area at times.
Our 70 year old engineer is having a blast using 3d printing to accelerate development.
Imagine a startup where the tech savvy geeks have known their market and customers for decades, have seen most of the things that can go wrong in product and service and all do expensive pharmaceuticals just to feel normal.
Epilogue:
I began my journey in the Mad Men era and am now helping invent a new nimble enterprise.
I hope I get to write that novel. Those authors I read that publish on the Amazon kindle model seem to be having a ball. Need a fourth act plan now.
I’m just a bawdy house piano player.
It is fun. I have put out two volumes of science-fiction that way so far, and have others in the works.
Given your outline above, though, I suspect you’d do much better with a memoir.
Thanks for the suggestions! I’m going to re-read your “how to write a great post” and go at it.
Many interesting people from varied backgrounds here at Ricochet.
My life experiences have been varied and there is no continuous line of occupation.
I dropped out of college in 1967 and enlisted in the Air Force. I was trained in communications maintenance and served variously at a communications center in California, a weather station in the Fiji Islands, a quick TDY to Vietnam, and ended up at a missile wing in Montana.
When I got out I finished up my college with a degree in History from the then Claremont Men’s College and a commission in the U.S. Army.
I commanded tank units in Germany, went to flight school, did everything from humanitarian missions to combat missions, served as a staff officer for General Lewis Menetrey at Combined Forces Command Korea, and retired after the first gulf war.
I found my quiet place in the world working as a director of a small non-profit that provides nutritional services to seniors. My rest was short lived when my wife decided to open her own retail Beauty Supply business. We used our life savings and did most of the build out ourselves hiring contractors for what we could not do. Elizabeth Warren was no where to be seen the night my wife and I laid the carpet in a 2000 sq ft store by ourselves. The store is still open, but I never quit my day job.
Along the way I had four wonderful children, two boys and two girls. They are the light of my life.
Talk about interesting jobs.
Not so much. Other than the Zen/gestalt of controlling a DACT dog fight, at which point you’re truly dependent on the Sergeant at your right hand to keep you connected with the here and now. Or later up the food chain having two intercoms in one ear, three radios in the other, and that Sergeant slapping your hand away from the telephone because even thought that’s HQ calling, it’s his d*n telephone. So he speaks with your voice to HQ. And tells them, because he knows that’s what you’d tell them if he allowed you near his telephone, that they need to get their panties on frontwards so they can go…up a rope. Only more politely.
Otherwise, I did my duty. There’s nothing inherently remarkable in that. What should be remarked, and too often is not, is all the folks who sit on the sidelines watching, or worse sniping, instead of doing their own duty.
Eric Hines
That’s starting to sound familiar. When were you at Pruem? I was there for a couple of years around ’78-’80, then moved to Sembach.
One of the reasons (not the only) I never volunteered for AWACS was because I have a weak middle ear. It’s why I learned to fly.
It turns out when I have the stick, I don’t get airsick. But sitting in the back of a crowbar trying to get the fershlugginer radar to work so I’m not stuck with a ’60s vintage IR sensor was…trying, both for me and for my barf bags. On the flip side, fighting with an unstable radar so I can time giving the pilot a dot that will stay up long enough for data exchange, and he can puke the blivet reliably before the radar craps out again, now that’s fun. But with my eyes, the USAF wouldn’t ever let me do that officially.
Eric Hines
This never fails to amaze me. And it’s at all levels of all organizations, from the top to the bottom. Ahem.
I did not say it was boring, or even uninteresting. It was really fascinating. Just that it sounds more impressive than it actually was.
When I was doing real-time nav, during vacations to my hometown old high school friends would ask what I was doing. I told them “Oh, I navigate the Shuttle when it flies.” The would give funny look (I have always tended towards over-heavy). Finally one would say “I didn’t know you were an astronaut.”
I would explain I was one of the back room guys, but I was always amused by the reaction.
I touch on my nav work tomorrow in my Hindsight posting, and likely in the second one Dime cadged me to do.
Seawriter