Meditations

"Our hero, the intrepid Buck 99," wrote the blogger by the same name and who didn't really know what the word "intrepid" meant, "continued to fall inexorably into the infinitely dense oblivion of the black hole while his spaceship's damaged LifeNet© system (see "Into the Rabbit Hole", September 5, 2006, and enjoy the gratuitous addition of the copyright character) fed his slumbering mind a series of fictional scenarios designed to trick him into believing that he was leading a typical, middle-class, Caucasian, 21st century American life. As stated before, the singularity's effect on Buck's perception of time was inversely proportional to the accelerating rate of his descent, effectively rendering him immortal. Tragically, instead of forever surfing the waves of Oahu's North Shore as he would have been doing had the Hawaiian surfing program he intended to run been initiated, he was stuck doing time as a cube jockey thanks to his buddy e-Taco who switched the programs on Buck as a practical joke just before lift-off."

Buck checked over his shoulder to make sure nobody was observing him as he typed his blog entry on client time. Not that it was a big deal: Buck was in a strange situation. He had a new client that he hadn't even met yet, so his days were spent teaching himself new skills which he would need once the client surfaced from wherever he was hiding to reveal what the actual project would be. All Buck knew was that he would be doing systems analysis, software design for web application middleware development, and the actual development work itself. He did not know, however, what system he would be working on or what business need the application would satisfy. For once, Buck was actually eager to get started. This was the kind of work he was born to do, and he was way ahead of schedule on the self-paced tutorials.

The coast was clear, so Buck continued his third person narrative.

"Buck wasn't sure whether he hoped he was a better programmer in his fictional life than he was in his real life. In real life he had made an egregious error when programming his ship's navcom system, resulting in the perilous situation with the black hole of which he was blissfully unaware." (Here Buck paused to consider the implausibility that he would be able to write about something in his blog about which he had no knowledge, and asked his forgiving readers to "suspend disbelief," to borrow a phrase from the vernacular of his fictional American context, and absorb the footnote* at the end of this entry as a possible explanation.)

"His real life error, however, had some unintentional and not necessarily undesired consequences. Sure, his self-aware avatar was stuck in a cubicle day in and day out, and yes, the program came equipped with an apparently incurable chronic back pain disorder. But he had immortality, and thanks to recent innovations in 25th century technology, he had free will within the Context. Yes, the Context enforced certain rules: he would age, he would die, and he did not have the telekinetic powers or x-ray vision he so craved. When he finally died within the Context, however, he would be re-initialized, and who knew what deviations from the original programing would follow as a result of distortions caused by the singularity? The possibilities were endless. It could be a fantastic adventure.

"Perhaps the greatest surprise of the whole experience was the existence of the wonderful Mrs. 99, and the life and family they had built together. Were they nothing more than objects instantiated by the Context and incorporated into his perceptions ? Buck didn't think so. They were too...transcendent. Mrs. 99's wisdom and emotional range was way beyond his and any of the 25th century programming powerhouses' capacity to reproduce. Instead, it was more likely that the unconscious mind had a back door through which it was connected to a network of other souls, souls belonging perhaps to bodies that, like his, had been sucked into the gravity well of the black hole. Had they, unlike Buck with the LifeNet© simulation, no consciousness available for them to draw on, and were therefore drawn toward his "reality" as to a beacon of light or a lifeboat adrift in dark, fathomless seas of non-being?

"In any event he was thankful for their company, because without them he wouldn't survive the horrors of Cubopolis."

Buck savored the syrupy sentimentality of what he had just written before caving in to the demands of the testosterone with which all true men are endowed. "Consider for a moment," he wrote to address the reader directly, "the lifespan of this magnificent black hole. Perhaps it is billions of years old. How many others have succumbed to its pull? Tens? Hundreds? Billions?

"A better question to ask might be what kinds of beings might it have drawn in? After all, Buck was in deep space, far beyond the range in which homo sapiens represented the only intelligence. Humans who had ventured this far and returned to tell the tale spoke of vile, unmentionable alien beings, abominations of nature of frightening appearance, terrifying intelligence, and sometimes even poor fashion sense. What if some of them were adrift in the sea of unconsciousness too, and were becoming naturally drawn to the beacon of Buck's LifeNet© scenario? What then?

"In what would become a classic great moment in bad timing, some of these beings would slip into Buck's simulation via the portal behind his unconscious mind at precisely the wrong time, when things were starting to go well. Buck had passed his Java certification exam, taken a relaxing vacation at home, taken some time to learn some new programming skills, and finally rid himself of the mantle of Project Manager by being staffed on a project to do precisely what he hoped to do: design and build software. It wasn't longboard surfing in a tropical paradise, but it wasn't project management either, and it guaranteed that he would be left alone to do his thing at least part of the day. The days always passed more quickly when he was immersed in the code.

"Other things were going well, too. Mrs. 99 was homeschooling the kids, and by all meaningful measures the change was doing everyone good. It was the right decision. Meanwhile, Buck had found a new passion: reptiles. Buck was now an amateur herpetologist involved with a local herpetological society, hanging out with scientists and academics and striving to conserve and protect the environments of reptiles and amphibians. He was also a budding herpetoculturalist, having acquired a total of nine pythons (seven Python regia and two Morelia viridia). It was possible that he might be able to manage a side business breeding them, or dare he dream? He might even turn it into a full-time career. He had become a moderator of a major herpetocultural site and a respected member of several others. The internet was a rapidly growing marketing channel for reptiles, and he had technical skills to bring to bear in that space. Life was looking up for Buck.

"He even managed to win the July 2007 Photograph of the Month on the herp society's web site. It was a classic close-up shot of a Coluber constrictor constrictor, and if you looked closely at the photograph, you could see the distorted image of Buck and his companions in the reflection of the snake's eye.

"But Buck failed to see something else in that reflection, something that by appearances was quite faint and may have been a trick of the light or something shadowy that might have been hovering just over his shoulder when the picture was taken, but in truth was surfacing from within an alien soul lurking hatefully behind the serpentine avatar that had writhed in vain to free itself from its human captors as the digital image was captured..."

...to be continued...


* Buck's explanation for how he can write about the black hole about which he has no knowledge: Buck is a creative writer, after all, and where, he asks, do creative ideas originate? The best ones always come to mind unbidden, as if from another place, but in truth they come from the unconscious mind, the back of the mind. The back of the mind knows more than it lets on. To hit a tennis ball correctly, for example, the body must coordinate hundreds of muscles making thousands of major and minor adjustments into one smoothly orchestrated physical act. The front of the mind cannot and does not keep track of all the details, of course: the back of the mind does. How hard is the pinkie squeezing during the follow-through? What's the left ankle doing as the racquet strikes the ball? Think about how complex such a simple act truly is. When a player is "in the zone," the front of the mind simply watches the ball and lets the back of the mind handle the rest (thanks to Timothy Gallwey, author of Inner Tennis, for the analogy).

So while Buck's conscious mind (or at least the consciousness he perceives within The Context) is unaware of the peril his true body is in, his unconscious mind, the back part of his mind, is still alert to the disposition of the body and what is really going on. LifeNet© has event handling to prevent the back of the mind from seizing control and awakening the sleeper except in emergencies (which the navcom missed, in this case, thanks to Buck's lackadaisical attention to detail when coding systems upon which his life would depend), but the unconscious self cannot be completely prevented from notifying the consciousness of things it deems of importance. In other words, Buck's unconscious self is expressing the truth as a wild idea which Buck's Context consciousness is mistaking for creativity.

Retraction

Buck has been informed by one of his faithful readers (hereafter known simply as "The Professor") that the last installment of his continuing adventures had a more bitter tone than usual. After further review of the blog entry in question, Buck is forced to agree with The Professor.

Additionally, Buck notices that the overall structure of the entry is completely inconsistent with the chronicles' hallmark narrative, third-person format. Therefore, in an effort to right this wrong, Buck submits the following entry intended to convey the same information as the previous one, except that the new entry will follow all the conventions of the idiom as established over the history of this blog:

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"Suddenly," wrote Buck from his desk, a desk which exposed both his back and his computer screen to the scrutiny of his client, "the client called Buck and a fellow consulting associate into a conference room. Pleasantries were exchanged: the client was about to take a three-day weekend vacation to a distant metropolis, and the consultants were politely questioned about their own weekend plans. In a bid to discourage any requests that might compromise his weekend freedoms, Buck made sure to mention that he did, in point of fact, have extensive plans. That his plans were frivolous and easily rescheduled he neglected to mention.

"The client shut the door, sat down and immediately underwent a complete personality change. He proceeded to launch into a sarcastic tirade, for lack of a better term."

Here Buck struggled for a moment, certain that the English language offered a noun more apropos than "tirade," especially since the client's voice remained calm throughout, despite the hostile undertones in plain evidence. Since no such perfect word was forthcoming he elected to give up and move on, after a furtive glance over his shoulder to ensure that he was not being observed. "The client spoke of the project (actually it's a program) in a curious way. 'Let's pretend for a moment,' he began, 'that there's a project, hypothetically speaking, and let's pretend this project's name is Smackdown.' "

"Buck bristled with anticipated rage, for 'Smackdown' was the actual name of the project*, not a hypothetical name at all, and the client was engaging in sarcasm, a tool he had historically proven to be clumsy with at best. It meant bad news for Buck and his friend, for the client had adopted the kind of tone one takes when chiding errant young children. He was treating the consultants like little kids, serving up a dis [sic] of cold scorn with a side of utter disregard for peoples' feelings. He proceeded to rant about the 'health' of the project and complained that he shouldn't be telling them about it, but they should be telling him. To professionals such as Buck and his colleague, this went without saying, it being part of the established principles and dogma of program and project management with which they had been programmed. And what the client was proclaiming hadn't happened, i.e., that the consultants hadn't been forthright in providing him important information about the health of the program, had actually happened on many occasions, but the client had a way of not hearing what he didn't want to hear. He was also deliberately withholding critical information so that he would have an opportunity to make the consultants appear ignorant and incompetent, and he unintentionally exposed this fact during his monologue.

"Buck was not the target of the lecture," he wrote of himself in the third person. "He was just a guy who would have to deliver one of the slides of the PowerPoint deck that this whole attack was intended to elicit. The major things the client was complaining about were squarely the responsibility of Buck's partner, the PMO Project Manager. Why the client had decided to slam the poor guy in Buck's presence was beyond comprehension, especially given the context that the client's own managers and peers were absent from the room. Why attack a guy who is supposed to be helping you? Why attack your consultant, who is your advocate, when there is no political ground to be gained, no one present who can witness you pinning the blame on the outsider?

"It's not like the client didn't want consultants around," Buck continued, almost but not quite certain that nobody was watching him. "By contrast, it was this very client who had wanted to bring in the team of consultants to begin with to help him manage a disparate group of people who didn't want project management practices employed at all. The PM consultant was on his side!

"Worse," raged Buck, "the client had put the consultants in an impossible position, requiring just two of them to institute the entire program and project management infrastructure (bearing in mind that the program includes well over 100 people), execute against it, perform in the roles of what would normally be eight people, all while trying to deliver against an inherently ridiculous time line in a culture where the performers resented the program leadership and, as fate would have it, didn't even report up to that leadership! It was an enterprise doomed to fail, and Dickless knew it."

"Is this true?" asked the seductive and always alert Mrs. 99.

"Yes it's true," replied Buck. "The client has no dick."

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Buck would like to extend special thanks to The Professor for calling Buck out on the quality of his earlier post, and also to the writers of the movie "Ghostbusters" featuring Bill Murray for inspiring the climactic punch-line.


* "Smackdown" isn't the real name of the project either, but Buck protects his anonymity from the client, just as Clark Kent doesn't go around telling Lex and his buddies that his real name is Kal-El and that he likes to dress up in bright, flashy tights.

Addendum to The Laws of Consultancy

The client will use you as a shield to hide his incompetence. Your job is to bend over and take it, bitch.

You are the client's advocate. His success is your number one priority. Your client can't succeed if you allow his weaknesses to be exposed. And if his weaknesses are so profound that you can't possibly avoid them being exposed, you must allow the burden of blame to fall upon you. It is your job.

God help you, though, if your client is so stupid as to actually believe the lies he spreads about your own incompetency, because then it will show up in the feedback he provides about you that ends up in your annual review.

So sayeth Buck.

Patsy

Suddenly, Buck started typing again.

Over two months had elapsed since his last post, and it was almost two months between that posting and the previous one. Many things had happened in the intervening four months. Buck was no longer stationed in a printer closet five floors beneath an ultra-secure super fortress, frantically documenting an intranet portal’s content in a painstakingly manual page by page process to prepare for a migration that may or may not occur in late 2009, by which time all the content will have drastically changed anyway. No, those carefree days were gone now and seemed but a distant, blissful memory of a daydream.

Buck struggled to find the words to describe his new situation. Where to start? Perhaps by giving his new role a name, one that would summarize, in a word, the core truth, the absolute essence of his role. And that word he chose was this: Patsy.

“Let’s do a little role playing,” suggested Buck to his readers. “Pretend you’re a level 3 Business Systems Analyst with armor class 8 and 12 hit points. Here’s your character sheet [he hands you a piece of paper with complicated-looking facts and figures on it. You notice that your charisma attribute score is rather low]. “You receive a new assignment: define a requirements management plan for a program that will ultimately span over a score of projects tasked with integrating two financial institutions’ systems.

“There are actually three financial institutions involved: the parent company, who is your client, and who we shall hereinafter refer to as ‘The Client;’ there is Bank A who was acquired by The Client previously and who represents most of the business; and Bank B who has recently been acquired. Three institutions, three cultures, three totally different ways of doing things.

“Bank A has already been brought into the fold, but they’re a little like the French after the Nazis took over: there are snipers everywhere. The Bank B folks seem amiable enough, as far as Italian mafioso go. The program you are joining will be integrating Bank B systems with those of Bank A.

“The program has no governance model; therefore, there is no guiding vision for how to decide which systems should stay, which systems should be merged, and which systems should be retired. There is nobody at any level willing to step up to the plate and make the tough calls. The top dog says work it out amongst yourselves; the smaller dogs are fighting for turf.

“The program does not yet have a team structure or project teams defined. There are no project schedules. There is no risk and issue management plan. There is no scope document, Commissioner. The requirements are already late, and the top dog has crammed his hand way up his ass and pulled out a date for when the integration itself must be completed. Then he flung it on everyone and it stuck. Working back from that date, you see that it is impossible. You mention this, but The Client never changes dates, so you ask for more resources. 'Prove you need them,' is the response, which you know is patently impossible without the twenty or so tightly coupled project schedules that have yet to be completed. So everyone is tense. The situation stinks.

“Your job: create a requirements management plan. You have three days. On the fourth day you will shove it down people’s throats at a huge meeting in a far away city. You will be the first speaker, going ahead of the guys who will be talking to the same crowd about team structure, project management, and risk and issue management. There are snipers everywhere who will not hesitate to sabotage anything suspected of being a structured process designed to hold them accountable for actual work. You have two hours to speak.

“You are walking down the corridor to the conference room. You round a corner and [Buck rolls a twelve-sided die] a gelatinous cube blocks the way and closes in on you! You can see the rotten corpses of its previous victims suspended in its ooze! What do you do?”

Except for the gelatinous cube part, that all happened in January. Since then, Patsy--, er, Buck, has been set up to take the fall over and over and over again. He checked the mirror just this morning and still doesn’t see a target on his forehead, but he knows it must be there, because everyone else can see it but him.

Sucker.

BSA / PM 101

Buck has been asked to create a tutorial for becoming a business systems analyst (BSA) or project manager (PM) in today’s corporate environment. Today’s blog entry is that tutorial.

Now, any BSA or PM who actually takes his role seriously will try to tell you that there is a huge difference between these two roles and that one tutorial can’t possibly cover both of them. These same people will try to tell you that serious, extensive training is required for either one and that a mere blog entry can’t possibly suffice. Buck, however, urges you to reject this point of view as the product of lost souls desperately trying to justify their existence to corporate America.

Before moving on to the easy 7-Step program for becoming a BSA or PM, Buck wishes to make it clear that this tutorial is equally applicable to consultants and client company employees alike. The principles are universal. He would also like to say a few words about his 7-Step program:

“Hi, my name is Buck 99, and I am excited to share with you my 7-Step program for how to become a successful project manager or business systems analyst. These best practices have been invaluable to me in my career, and if you studiously apply them to your own professional development, then I am confident that you will be successful too.”

Here are the 7 steps for Buck 99’s program:

Step 1: Weave order out of chaos.

Step 2: Know who your customers are, and anticipate their needs.

Step 3: Convince people who don’t want to do what you need them to do to do what you need them to do.

Step 4: Check your fonts, keep them consistent from slide to slide.

Step 5: Never let anyone do anything without an approved change control, and try not to be the approver.

Step 6: Memorize the corporate-speak terminology, and use at least one buzz word every 5 minutes.

Step 7: Suck up to the admin and see if you can get her to handle setting up the meetings for you.

See? It’s that easy! After that it’s just a matter of tracking everything that needs to be done in a clumsy tool known as Microsoft Project, and blowing about 10 hours per week (of what would otherwise have been productive time) creating presentations in Microsoft Power Point and tweaking them so they look slick and professional, thereby drawing attention away from the actual quality of the content they contain.

Any questions?

Weekends in Cryptopolis

Buck is in Hell.

It is Sunday morning, and Buck is buried beneath a ton of worthless bullshit work down in the supply closet five floors beneath the client's super fortress. He anticipates being stuck here until 8:00 PM or so. He was here all day yesterday as well. He is alone. The weather outside is nice: high 60's, sunny and breezy, but he can't see it. The oubliette has no windows.

Buck learned this past week that the information gathered through the intranet site content inventory task he is performing will likely be shelved until the 3rd quarter of 2009.

That's right: 2009. By then the content that he inventoried will have changed drastically.

Yet the deliverables must be delivered. The project must be completed on-time and under budget. The show must go on. Buck does not receive additional compensation for the additional hours he puts in. And as to the fact that a relatively simple program could have been written in 2 or 3 days that would complete in just 5 minutes what Buck has been manually working on for over a month now, well, let's just say the client is paranoid and strictly forbade it.

As you might imagine, Buck is just about ready to blow a fuse.

Happy Holidays!

Superstar

Buck was desperate for someone to invent a way to record his dreams.

Last night he dreamed that he had backstage passes to a music concert, although it was unclear who the headline act was. Several of his friends were there, on guitars and keys or in the orchestra pit, but none of them are musicians in real life. Although the music had an orchestral element, it was actually something closer to popular easy listening music with an exotic twist, like something Sting could have put together. Buck remembers thinking in the dream that it was beautiful music.

The composition was well-suited for improvisational solos from various instrumentalists. Buck recalls a keyboardist and saxophonist taking turns. These solos were nice but nothing profound or exceptionally moving, though they contributed well enough to the melancholy of the theme. Then Buck sensed a commotion behind him, a ripple in the atmosphere. A special guest star had arrived: the artist formerly known as The Artist Formerly Known As Prince. Yes, Prince himself was making a surprise appearance!

Buck watched the superstar as he strode to a roadie who handed him a strange wireless headset instrument. The microphone extended from one of the earpieces like one of those telephone headsets that only a lucky few manage to secure in the Cubopolis call centers. There was also a wire extending from it to an odd-looking keyed instrument with which Buck understood Prince would use to augment his singing notes. He made a few quick adjustments, flipped a switch, turned a dial, and walked out into the spotlight. It was all very smoothly and efficiently executed despite the need for haste.

Buck worried that Prince was handling it too casually. The top of the theme’s cycle was quickly approaching while Prince made his adjustments and walked out on stage. Would he jump in on time? Would the other musicians see him there in time to hold back and give him the musical space he needed to deliver the goods?

They did, and Prince jumped in at precisely the right moment. The instrument sounded like an electric clarinet. His solo was simple at first, weaving concise melodic elements into the theme with sustained, clear notes, and only the most subtle trills and flourishes. Buck approved of the inauspicious opening, but for a moment he wondered if Prince was sufficiently prepared to pull it all together. Had he rehearsed? It certainly seemed improvised, and Buck could see in Prince’s facial expression that he was searching for something new. Certainly The Artist was a professional musician who knew the forms and wouldn’t botch it with missed notes and such, but would he be able to turn the solo into something transcendent as everyone hoped?

Then, around the fourth or fifth measure of the first cycle, after Prince had left a note hanging in suspense begging for a resolve, he kicked it up a single gear with a syncopated walk down the scale, the final few notes of which he bent and chorded with harmonizing notes. From there he smoothly transitioned into a higher gear and took it places that only Prince could take it. It was aggressive and masterful, yet not overwhelming, and it added a totally different color to the canvas. He had found what he was looking for, and it guided him into a second cycle and he soared upon its wings from there. And just when Buck was wondering what the next musician to solo could possibly do to top this performance, the band neatly concluded the song at the end of the cycle with a well-practiced ending, Prince’s solo tying in perfectly.

The crowd went nuts, and Buck was excited to have been able to witness it. Buck got to shake The Artist’s hand before he was escorted to his limo, then Buck helped the roadies pack all the gear. Buck also congratulated and thanked the other musicians, but everyone was still gushing over Prince’s solo. The dream involved a few wrap-up kinds of things before Buck finally woke up to find it was still the middle of the night.

At first, his mind still clouded in the delirium of sleep, Buck thought about what an awesome musician Prince was. Then consciousness slowly educated him. There had been no concert. Prince had given no solo performance. It had all been in Buck’s head. The theme, the orchestration, the solos, everything. He frantically tried to recall the main theme, but he only managed to pull half of it together. The second half kept drifting into a Duran Duran tune, although he couldn’t name which one. The Duran Duran number was a less perfect rendition of what Buck had heard in the dream, as if deep in the recesses of the unconscious mind there is a wellspring of pure, perfect music that isn’t accessible to the conscious mind. Duran Duran had once tried to attain that perfection but had fallen far short and missed the mark, clumsily adding elements and chord changes where none had been needed. Now Buck had heard the real thing, knew in his heart that it had been original, never before heard or successfully brought to life in the waking world of ordinary mortals. Yet try as he might Buck could not recapture it so that he might share it with the world.

Despite this frustration he actually smiled as he drifted back toward sleep, for there was one aspect of the experience that could never be taken from him:

That solo had been his own.