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As I was scanning through my RSS feeds the other day, I ran into this blog post from this poor guy who got canned from CNN.  I’m sorry he lost his job.  Apparently, CNN has rules about any writing done for a “non-CNN outlet” must be run through the network’s standards and practices department. I’m sure California is an at-will state so they could fire him for having green eyes.  Unless, green eyes is a protected class of people. He actually had created a blog and wasn’t running his content through CNN.  Oopsies… What started to go through my mind centered around if my company had such policies.  I don’t work for a media company like CNN, so I wouldn’t think my employer would care.  Well, I am checking into any policies the company might have, just to be sure.  At the urging of good friend, I searched for some information on legal issues with employers and their employees blogging.  I found this article at the ibls.com site very informative.  It highlights for areas of trouble for bloggers:

• Defamation Claims
• Harassment Claims
• Economic Damages to Employers
• Disclosure of Confidential Information

Seems reasonable enough.  Don’t say things that are false and a unprivileged statement of fact that is harmful to someone’s reputation.  Don’t make statements about people at work that can be construed as sexual harassment or create a “hostile” work environment.  People shouldn’t do that stuff at work so they probably shouldn’t do that in a blog either. I don’t think that means you can’t talk about coworkers. I do in my blog and will continue to, but I usually want to discuss issues or situations, not attack someone personally.  Attacking people, what good would that do anyway?  Don’t disclose confidential or proprietary information.  Again, things you shouldn’t do at work, don’t do it in a blog.  It seems relatively simple.  Though nothing legal is ever simple.  I did also find this guide from the folks very useful at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). 

 Part of one of the statements on the ibls.com page is what really worries me.

 an employer may also be liable for an employee’s defamatory private blog

The article crafts this around some specific circumstances. What I don’t understand is how what I do on my own time opens my employer up to being sued.  They can’t control my actions outside the office.  Maybe one of the three people who may read this posting is a lawyer and as some understanding they can convey. I am all about being educated in these matters. Though these days, just being my employer maybe enough for them to get sued.  Lots of litigious folks out there. 

I understand that the things I do and say while “on the clock” means I represent my employer and they have some liability for what I say and do.  This though thread leads me down a related tangent.  If I am a salaried employee, legally how is my “on the clock” defined.  If I’m shopping at the grocery store on the weekend and “harass” someone and they find out who I work for, can they sue my employer? (I guess can anyone can sue anyone for any reason?) I think I’m looking for legal culpability.  Here is one that seems even more gray to me.  If I’m getting on a plane to fly somewhere on Sunday for a work assignment in another city and I do something “wrong” at the airport or on the airplane, does my employer have any grounds to terminate me? Not that they can’t terminate for those green eyes I mentioned before.  I just wonder what happened to the world when the things you say and do not only gets you in trouble but gets your employer in it too. When did employers who don’t  have anything to do with what you say and do on your own time become liable for you?

 I shall post an update once I find out what (if they have one) the company policy on blogging is.

I have been married to a wonderful man who I compassionately call my geeky husband. At first it was different calling him a geek because to me geek just sounded really derogatory but he says he’s okay with it because he is a geek. He even calls himself a geek.

We have been married seven and half years now and it’s been pretty good. Yeah, I know, I said pretty good because there were times when we first got married that I felt like I was competing with the phone calls in the middle of the night, the cell phone that would ring in the middle of dinner when we would get to go out and the pager going off in the middle of the night then the phone ringing right after the pager going off. I thought, jeez give him a chance to get to the phone to call but it was what he lived for in the beginning. He would jump out of bed grabbing the phone, of course cordless so he could talk while he walked down the hall to the office he had. I didn’t always feel like I was competing at first though. I told myself that this was part of his job description and it’s to be expected. He was this way before we were married and I just can’t expect him to drop everything because we were now married. I figured it would change over the next couple of months or that I would get used to it but it didn’t change nor did I get used to it. It stayed the same and it actually got worse. When he wouldn’t have calls or the pager going off, he would call into conference calls just to listen to see what problems were going on to see if there was something he could do to help, which is nice and all, but there were times it was a Saturday night when we were supposed to be going somewhere to spend time together. I felt robbed of my time with him, especially since we weren’t working the same kind of work schedule. He was Monday thru Friday and I was Tuesday thru Saturday, so the only true day we had together was Sunday and that was usually spent doing housework and getting things ready for the coming week. Possibly, you can see where my frustrations were coming in to play. Usually when he would get his calls or be working on the problems they would call him early in the evening and I would end up having to go to the bedroom to watch TV or be really quiet with what I was doing because there were several people on the phone with him and sometimes he would have a hard time hearing them. By no means am I quiet person either. I try but every time I try to be quiet, I make the most noise. Go figure. During all of this, which was the first three years of our marriage, there were times that I would step back and take a deep breath to think if things were to change, we may not have had the house we were in and be able to do some of the things we would do when we could. Most of the things we had were due to him working the way he did at the time. We were able to take little trips when we could get the time off together. We were able to go out to dinner then to a movie and have that large popcorn instead of coming home and cooking dinner and having really nothing on TV to watch. I took what I could and let him do what he had to do to keep us going. Yes, my contribution monetary wise was helpful, but not like his. He was the breadwinner in the family and I’m not saying I just let him walk over me because of it, I’m saying it was because of him doing all of this we were able to have a life where we weren’t fretting over the little extras that some people can’t afford when they first get married. Yes there was fretting but it wasn’t the the type of “how are we going to pay the electric or phone bill”, etc..

Here we are though seven and half years later and things have changed. It just took time and a couple of moves in the company, good moves. He no longer has the calls in the middle of the night or the constant calling from those he works with to ask questions. There is though however the one thing he can’t get out of his system completely and that is the occasional calling into the conference call to listen to a problem. It’s not as often as it was but he still gets a rush when there is something he can do to help.

After all of the “competing” as I call it when we first married, I wouldn’t trade it for anything because after a few times that you get frustrated and you want to pull your hair out because they called in the middle of the night and woke you up, you start to get an understanding of the job and like to watch your geek work and sometimes get a little rush by the way he reacts when he does get that problem that no one else could fix, fixed. At least I did. If you start to feel overwhelmed by it, it will take you down and take you down hard. Sometimes it takes talking to your geek to get things on a page where you can compromise to work things out. You may have to page him with an emergency though to talk to him or grab him by the collar and say ‘Look we have to talk’, but hang in there, remember you said you would stand by him in sickness and health, through good times and bad times. Well sometimes those good and bad times take the form of his “geeky” job but remember he’s doing them so you can have a life to do what you want.

Every survey of employees I have heard people reference rate money below #1 as the biggest motivator or what makes employees’ the “happiest”.  I know that some would disagree and that’s fine.  I am as rapacious as the next guy and go to work to make money.  However, I don’t understand how people work at jobs they hate.  I respect that people have families and bills to pay, but long term how can any person be miserable for so long in a job they don’t like or don’t feel accomplished in?

I guess I now know what it might be like to go to a support group and realize that there are others out there who feel like I do.  I was touched by this article I read in the Wall Street Journal.  The title was “A Modern Conundrum: When Work’s Invisible, So are its satisfactions.” written by Jared Sanberg.  The link to the whole article can be found by clicking  Cubicle Culture - WSJ.com.  Several times through out my career I have moments of existential crisis.  I think most people want to be able to see their value and feel that they have left something positive in/to the world.  I often wonder, if I die today, would anyone in a hundred or thousand years ever know I existed and did I do anything to add value to humanity.  I’m not saying that I have to cure cancer to feel a sense of success, but at a minimum I want to give back to humanity at least as much as I have taken.  I truly relate to this in part the article:

In the information age, so much is worked on in a day at the office but so little gets done. In the past, people could see the fruits of their labor immediately: a chair made or a ball bearing produced. But it can be hard to find gratification from work that is largely invisible, or from delivering goods that are often metaphorical. You can’t even leave your mark on a document in increasingly paperless offices. It can be even harder trying to measure it all. That may explain why to-do listers write down tasks they’ve already completed just to be able to cross them off.

I actually do add things to my to-do list so I can just mark them off. I do feel good when I mark something completed. (It also allows me to keep a written record of what I do week to week) 

The team does have some metrics (KPIs) that measure our accomplishments but its hard to see how the company is doing any good in the world. I believe we do make products that make people’s travel process easier but seeing their impact to the end customer is hard.  I think when companies want to improve productivity and want employee buy in on the mission, they must find something for the employees to get behind.  The mission statements are usually a bunch of BS bingo and considered a joke at most places. It can be powerful if used correctly.  Saying that ABC company wants to be leader of XYZ industry and make $999 Billion dollars by 2010 isn’t very emotional to me.  Though if my salary is tied to revenue, I might get teary eyed thinking about my bonus. :)  Seriously, if I’m GE medical and we make defibrillators, then a mission statement of saving a million lives a year with our devices is an awesome mission to create.  I know I would want to contribute and work hard to help save a million lives a year.  Working late seems more trivial when lives could be at stake. I think meeting those people and know the good that is done by devices like that, that’s how IT people working in the “intangible” products get to see their work. 

The goal is to help each company find out how they contribute to something emotional and provide the easiest way to see the effects of everyone’s work.  All of us out there, we work for companies and have to help them find those things, so we can bring meaning, success, and fulfilment to our coworkers.  Until that’s true everywhere, including at my company, I will take comfort in knowing that I’m not alone out there, and others feel the way I do.  For now, that’s enough to help me keep digging for the emotional meanings in my world.

Comments/feedback always welcome.   email feedback at itminddesign dot com or hit the comment button below.

For those IT geeks out there that use visio for diagrams of their solutions or environments I thought I would include a few links to some good resources for vendor’s stencils. Also, I’m looking for Unisys Mainframe stencils should anyone know where to get those, please email me at feedback at itminddesign dot com.  If there are others you think others might benefit from, email those links to me as well.

Visio Cafe

includes the official collections of:

• Aruba

• BlueArc
• Data Domain
• Dell
• EMC
• Emcor Enclosures
• Fujitsu Siemens
• Hewlett-Packard
• Hitachi Data Systems
• IBM
• Mitel
• nCipher
• NetApp
• Server Technology

and some unofficial, various collections as well, including:

• StorageTek 
• Sun Micro

Additional Vendors:

• Brocade devices (requires support account, no cost)
• Cisco Networking
• F5 Networks (requires support account, no cost)
• Panduit equipment
• VMWare

A final resource:

A page with a large amount of links (Note:some don’t work) can be found here.

Frederick the Great said, If you try to hold everything, you hold nothing I want to modify that a little bit to say, if you try to do everything, you do nothing.   When it comes to the all the projects and efforts placed on a Technology team you have to fall back to a list of agreed priorities.  I am currently watching my fearless leader trying to be every thing to everyone.   Don’t get me wrong, he is a super guy.  However,  he is going to run himself into the ground and I will need more than an oven mitt to clean up the post nuclear fallout from pieces of what will be left of his sanity.

This is isn’t an article pitching project management or time management. It’s about focus triage.  We are under siege, love that movie by the way, and we must repel borders. It is warfare and we must apply some military tactics.  A fight to the end is being waged for your time and attention by others. There is only so much one person can do and being pulled in to many directions simultaneously is very tiring and unproductive say nothing of the impacts to one’s quality of work product.

Know thy enemy — real time distractions have to be contended with (IM, phone, SMS, people stopping by to talk, etc).  I often have to combat some of these intrusions by just working from home a few days a week. Not that I don’t have a few interruptions at home from time to time.  Also, we are being barraged by “normal” distracting activities such as ill purposed meetings. These are a little more subtle, like having a meeting with no written agenda and the famous meeting to discuss having meetings.  Everyone has their jobs and priorities but we have to focus only the top ones.  I see one little one hour meeting here and there turn into 10-15 hours a week of idleness.  Then there is the endless followup meetings which seem to just become perpetual.

Since I have deemed the year 2008 as the year of “getting real”, we need to cut out the low-priority/useless meetings and interactions that we participate in.  We feel like we need to appease our friends/co-workers, contribute, or be a part of the issues.   We have to stop pretending that we can be all to everyone.  It’s just not real.  But if we choose not to recognize it  or continue to rationalize it we are going to look around and it will be September or October and we won’t really have completed anything but have started many.

We will always get taken to task for those things that we didn’t accomplish or play out the should’a woulda, coulda’s  but if I’m going to get my ass spanked for not doing everything, then I’m damn well going to get beaten for the little insignificant things.