Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

Ends to a mean

Isn’t the best part of a workweek day going home time? Our servitude towards money is temporarilyy over. The hours left truly belong to us. The world is infinitely our oyster.

At least that’s how it feels. No matter how many chores are on the list, or how much attention the child is asking for, anything is better than being at work.

Sometimes I walk by the mall, and I can see the literal relief of service workers at the end of their shift. Fold away that apron for the day and moving on to happy hours. Best of all, service workers truly do not have to think about work while they are not at work.

Not so lucky for those of us in the knowledge economy. The higher you are on the ladder, the higher your pay, and more responsibility you’ve got. There’s no turning off the work brain even when it’s time to go home, because a problem on that ongoing project still needs solving. So you’re going to thinking about it all through dinner, and for the rest of the evening.

That’s why they get paid a salary: a facade to avoid actual calculation. Perhaps if one is to add up all the hours that brain signal is being used towards work, the knowledge worker might not be that much higher paid on a per hour basis than the service worker. Especially in California where the fast food minimum wage is unusually generous.

But those are the tradeoffs. Sacrifices have to be made to make more money. Even the illegal drug dealer has to stand in the corner for many hours, risking police capture. Often times I think what I want is to be like Ralph Fiennes’ character The Menu: a plain chef making a plain cheeseburger. Nothing extraordinary, nothing status-seeking. Every day you leave work, you truly leave work.

Plus, He’d get paid at least $20 per hour here in California!

Basic table stakes

For a control-freak like me, it’s difficult to entrust tasks to somebody else. But that’s just it: we can’t avoid that in this life. It’s impossible to have all the expertise. At some point you’re going to have to pay someone to do a job. More expensive the service, higher the anxiety. It’s a leap of faith every time I task things out to a new-to-me establishment.

My requirements are not (or shouldn’t be) out of the ordinary: competence, attention to detail, and great communication. I want the job done correctly and comprehensively. I want inquiries to be answered in a timely manner, and be constantly updated during the process. Control-freaks hate to not know what’s going on. You have no idea how much I welcomed package delivery tracking in the early days of the Internet. To be able to know exactly where a box is and when it will arrive? That’s just good customer service.

Notice I did not mention price. I am willing to pay a premium for any place of business with the three requirements I mentioned. This is capitalistic America, after all.

I try to mirror the same three qualities in my line of work. Solving user computing issues is definitely a customer service job. So I take care to be the sort of support agent that I myself would want to bring problems to. Users get timely communication every step of the way. The work will be done within an appropriate timeframe. Laptops leave my hands in better shape and cleanliness than when I receive them.

We’ve all encountered bad customer service in our lives. I do not want to be a part of the problem. And when I find an establishment I can rely on, we are best friends for life. For example: I will patronize only this America’s Tire branch for as long as I live in this region.

Once again I'm asking for some critical thinking

While the supposed incoming A.I. revolution into every aspect of our lives remain to be seen and written, I can firmly say at this moment that if you act like a robot, you will be replaced by one.

In any service support role, part of problem solving is to critically think. That’s where the money is. If all you can do is follow set directions and nothing else, then a robot can be programmed to take your place. Best of all, that robot doesn’t incur healthcare costs or ask for raises every few years.

It’s frustrating for me to see colleagues who cannot critically think. None of this is the proverbial rocket science. Half of this I.T. support job is Googling for answers. It’s impossible for a single support person to have seen every possible problem out there. Every new year brings new software and hardware, and along with it new potential issues. None of it is written down, you have to go find it yourself.

I’m nobody special. If I can do it, then the royal you can absolutely do it too. The point of support ticket assignment is for the assignee to figure some stuff out. The first little roadblock isn’t enough a reason to ask for assistance. Not when there’s a wealth of information out on the Internet. That’s how I learned: researching, applying, making some mistakes along the way, then arriving at the particular answer to a particular question.

Part of it I think is some people are afraid to make any mistake at all. They want to be certain of a move before making it. That’s unfortunately not going to cut it at a job where you’re paid to think. If I have to give you the answers, then I rather use a robot because its execution I can trust 100% - no change of human error!

You all are nasty

Part of my duties as IT support is to facilitate fixing laptops when they break. And let me tell you, the sanitary condition of some of these is utterly disgusting. I don’t quite understand how someone can look at a screen caked with various oils and reckon that to be “normal.” I mean, it’s got to be normal for them, right? Otherwise they would have cleaned it already.

One time I had a user complain about the laptop display getting fuzzier as he used it from new. You guessed it: it was a dirt and oil that was progressively getting stuck onto the screen. A classic case of problem existing between keyboard and chair.

I understand everybody has a different conception of cleanliness. But I bet we can all agree the definition of absolute clean: when a device is brand new (or a car is brand new). You would be rightly pissed if you opened a sealed MacBook Pro, freshly purchased from the store, only to find a lid with a smudge on it. Meanwhile, people are capable of using a computer with a smudge for a very long time, so long as the smudging was done by the user.

I reckon people also tend to be more cavalier with items that they don’t feel a sense of ownership with. Say, a work-issued computer. It costs the user absolutely nothing. Things given freely don’t tend to last very well. Just look at public housing. Compare that to a personally purchased MacBook Pro costing many thousands of dollars: I would hope users are more inclined to take care of that. Because they have skin in the game.

When the penalty of ruining a work laptop is essentially nothing (we simply issue them another), the incentive to take care of devices is completely absent. Needlessly to say, I wear gloves at all times when handling user machines. For my protection.

Dopamine nation

The WiFi has been spotty at work this week, so my iPhone is effectively useless during work hours. (There’s no cellular network in our dungeon of an office.) Be that as it may, I still find myself reaching for it to check stuff, even though there’s nothing that can be checked. It’s like unlocking your phone during a flight: you know there’s nothing new to see, yet reflexes that’s been honed for over a decade is difficult to pause.

I like to think of myself as a mindful person, but I guess I’m not immune to the smartphone dopamine addiction. Every second of downtime must be filled with brand new information. The latest sports news on ESPN, or the latest nihilistic banter on Reddit. Boredom has been extinct since the first iPhone introduction. We did it!

Everybody does it, though. If anything, you look like the weird one if your face isn’t plastered to your phone. Imagine waiting with a crowd for an elevator, and you’re the only one staring into space. The strongly introverted me is not ready to stand out like that.

A coworker’s car failed, so he’s been walking to work. The obvious perplexity is: he doesn’t live anywhere near walking distances from work. (Otherwise the car failing would have zero bearing.) Instead of replacing the broken car, he’s choosing to commute on foot for over an hour. I admire the grit, but I have to wonder at his financial situation if he can’t easily replace the broken twenty year old car. Our State government job doesn’t pay extravagantly, but it’s sufficiently middle-class.

I get it: needing to replace a suddenly out of commission car is a huge blow to the wallet. But that’s why you keep an emergency fund. You know, for emergencies. I can’t fathom the stress living with such thin financial margins. Yes, right to privileged jail, right away.

Dell support

At work we deploy, on the PC side, mainly Dell computers. Word on the street (I don’t handle purchasing) is Dell is a fantastic vendor to work with, and the discount we get is hefty. As well it should be, with the amount of hardware we buy.

Obviously, on the Mac side it’s just Apple.

As personnel on the support side, I can say Dell computers can do with better quality control from the factory. Every batch we buy, there seems to be always a few computers that need immediate servicing. During the pandemic, we bought hundreds of Dell laptops, of which dozens had to be serviced because of poor fit and finish (a trackpad should click). I get it, pandemic times were uniquely funky, but the batch of Mac laptops we bought from Apple had zero such issues.

Good news for Dell is that the servicing is solid. Though that’s a back-handed compliment, isn’t it? I reckon companies would want to put out a product so reliably good that the end-user never has to know about after-purchase servicing. Nevertheless, if Dell isn’t capable of ratcheting up its quality control, at least it’s super easy to get items fixed.

So long as the product is under basic servicing warranty (we prepay for four years for everything we buy), Dell can dispatch third-party technicians to your location within business days. Or, if the customer is not in a hurry, an overnight prepaid mail-in option is also available (the Dell repair facility is in Houston). All of this can be initiated on the Dell support website via chat, which is great for people like me who avoids using the telephone as much as possible.

It still won’t pry the MacBook Pro out of my hands. But, if I ever need to run a Windows PC, A Dell-branded unit is a fine option. Even if it malfunctions within the first week of use, Dell support will get it fixed with haste.

Not without the sacrifice

Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, got into some controversy during a recent talk at Stanford. Basically, he said that Google is falling behind AI startups like OpenAI because of work-life balance and working from home policies. The virtual-signaling crowd has come out in criticism, saying work-life balance is super important, and not everyone wants to dedicate a majority of their time energy towards work.

And that’s fine - have your work-life balance! Just don’t expect the same results as a team of workers spending 80 to 100 hours a week slaving away at a problem. As the great Thomas Sowell wrote: “There are no ideal solutions, only trade-offs.” Eric is absolutely correct: a mature company of many thousands can get beaten by a plucky startup dedicated to a eureka moment. For every Adobe, there’s a Figma willing to out-grind its ass.

Work-life balance has many positives, but there are indeed trade-offs. I know this first hand. My career working IT at a university has tremendous work-life balance. However, I know I’m leaving lots of money on the table. In fact, I make the least out of my group of friends. The equation is simple, really: the more time you spend working, the more money you will make. Show me a CEO who goes home right at 5:00 PM, and I will show you a failing company.

I think what people want - and honestly, who wouldn’t if you can get it - is to have work-life balance, but also the high salary. They want the results without the sacrifice. Obviously, that’s not how it works in the real world. If you have aspirations of climbing a company ladder, you put in more work than what is minimally required. You are going to get beaten to the higher seat by the coworker who can come in on a Saturday, while you are home tending to the kids.

Is it fair? Of course it is. The lunch is not free. What do you want to sacrifice?