Corp Speak Alert, edition 2

Come, let's journey down Corporate Etymology Way again. Lately I've been hearing:

Machine: an organization's structure and processes, writ large. E.g.: "We need to fix our machine if we want to get this done."

Siloes: over-specialization among departments. Indicates a need for better communication and even overlaps among departments. E.g.: "Let's tell everyone about the change in this department; we don't want siloes about something so important." Note: this one is so well built into our lexicon where I work that it only just occured to me to think it strange and share it.

Fred has an East Cost update:

Flow-Down: a report communicating decisions from upper-mgt to the rest of the team. E.g.: "Today's flow-down includes the following..."

My final word is a little bit separate from the others because I know its source exactly and there's only one manager here who really abuses it (and I adore her, so this has no bearing on who she is).
Arranger: from the book Now Build Your Strengths, it is defined thusly: "People strong in the Arranger theme can organize, but they also have a flexibility that complements this ability. They like to figure out how all of the pieces and resources can be arranged for maximum productivity." The manager who learned this as one of her 5 strengths has been running with it ever since - now everything is a product of her Arranger strength, from coming up with creative ideas, her interest in staff perks, or just pulling a meeting together, and if you do the same, then you must be an Arranger too! I particularly like this one, though, because I keep hearing it as "A Ranger," and I think of her tromping through the woods in a Park Ranger outfit, helping the trees to organize their leaves and giving the woodland creatures assignments and words of encouragement...

Old building, new building

About 3 weeks ago, we packed up our old office and moved into a new one 6 blocks away. I have never been a part of this kind of shift before, and so there are lots of small culture shocks I have to get used to.
Today, for example, when I got in the elevator, every single button for every floor was pressed. Had this happened in our old building, I would have considered it a very bad sign -- our old building had 14 floors, and that would have meant there were at least 13 people in the elevator. Our new building has 6 floors, and there were 7 people in the elevator - it was a short and comfortable ride.
Another good example is the bathrooms: Old Building: genders alternated floors, there was only one per floor, everything was manual, there were two stalls per bathroom, entry doors didn't lock, and each had either windows or those squirty smelly air fresheners blasting out canned scents every 10 minutes. New building: both genders on every floor, 3 sets of bathrooms per floor, automated everything -- flushing, sinks, and soap (!) -- three or more stalls per bathroom, keyed in codes for the bathroom entry doors, no windows (at least in the one we we use most frequently), no air fresheners. For some reason the soap is the kicker for me -- automated soap? Who does that? New building does.
There are large things that are different too -- the fact that we have twice as much space, the fact that we moved into a Class A building (i.e. really really nice), the fact that I have my own office -- but those were all known changes. It's the little things that truly reinforce that we moved on -- and up -- in the world.

Pretty much my picture of heaven

Trilogy

Today marks my 3 year anniversary at the Donor Network. Remarkable. Not only have I worked here longer than any other job I've had, but I've worked here longer than all my other post-graduation jobs combined!

In honor of this momentous occasion, I wanted to let you know of three new corporate-speak alerts. We all know that the lingo flies fast and furious in an office...but have you heard these recent new-comers to the scene?

Have Energy About: A guarded way to state that you're really worked up and angry about something. E.g.: "Can I talk to you privately about something? I have a lot of energy around it and I need feedback..."

Bucket(s): a way to financially group costs, employees, etc. "Let me know if that event is going to cost a lot because if I have to put it in a different bucket I will."

Operationalize: Taking something theoretical (or not perfectly functional) and making it practical. "We need to work on operationalizing this plan so it makes sense given work flow."

As an addendum, Fred notes that he's hearing a lot of "the reality is..." over in Virginia!

The ultimate in armchair ornithology

Click here to see the live-Falcon camera up on top of San Jose City Hall: Swoon!

Today I saw:

*Mom and Pop both falling asleep and startling awake depending on the chicks' activity
*Pop shredding a small bird and feeding the chicks
*Pop resting on his very fuzzy brood
*Pop pacing to and from the nest (to stretch legs?) and checking out his surroundings
*Pop taking a quick flight (to stretch wings?) and coming right back
*Mom standing nearby to keep an eye on things

I'm assuming that the lone bird I saw today is the dad, but I might be wrong. I'm looking into it and the easiest way to tell the sexes apart is that the females are 15-20% bigger and usually have slightly darker markings on the belly, and I haven't seen them together frequently enough to be sure...

I'm also guessing that the young are only a couple days old, as the websites say they will separate from each other a bit in the nest after a few days, and right now they're still huddling together. In only a matter of a couple weeks, they'll be growing their feathers and flying!

All right here in sunny San Jose!

Falcon information found here.

Post-script, 5/2/07: Apparently 11am-12pm PDT is nap time for the falcons. Today is the second day I've found them dotingly dozing on the job during this time frame!

Better even than expected

Two weekends ago, S. and I finished moving everything we own into our new apartment, which is situated up on the side of Twin Peaks, one of the larger but less populated hills in the heart of San Francisco. This past weekend we were able to start building our environment from all the raw material we moved, and sacrificed our extra second bedroom to the clutter gods so that our actual bedroom and our living room could take on a semblance of organization and polish. We could -- and did -- finally, in good conscience, have guests over. We also discovered, to our delight, that S.'s projector can handle high definition cable channels, and we have been completely infatuated with the Discovery-HD channel's Planet Earth series ever since. (Watch it, watch it, watch it. Beautiful, astonishing footage! There was a scene with Birds of Paradise in which the display of a male bird was so surprisingly transforming that everyone watching literally exclaimed out loud "WOW - WHAT WAS THAT??")

Our biggest triumph, however, was our back roof-patio. We are situated in the building thusly:

So as you can see, we have nothing but roof stretching out before us, giving us a spectactular view of the bay. We are asked not to walk out on the roof past our little fenced-in portion of it (as indicated by the rectangle drawn above) as it supposedly weakens it and causes leaks for our neighbors below, but we loooooooove our little fenced-in portion of it so much anyway that it's no big deal. Our major project this past weekend was to find and put up some kind of pleasant barrier to give us more privacy from our neighbors to the left and right (we have a building's light well to the right of our little patio which has windows with a direct view of us, and the building to our left has the same set up as ours so that they can walk out on their patio and look directly on ours) without seeming to be completely unneighborly (to spin on the saying -- pleasant fences make pleasant neighbors). We found some great 6 foot high woven straw matting at Lowe's which we put up that gives the patio a bit of a tiki-feel while still being mildly transparent. We also chose to cut it into a triangle by our neighbors on the left, so we can still poke our heads around it and say hello. (I'll try to take pictures.)

Having this all done by Saturday meant we could bask in the glory of our patio on Sunday, and bask we did. San Francisco was kind and gave us a glorious, mostly-sunny day where we could stretch out on the patio chairs and enjoy that famously mild San Francisco weather. Even then, I got more than I bargained for: the neighbors who live on the top floor of the building to our left have a hummingbird feeder complete with black-chinned hummingbird client who pops by to feed (we ran right out and bought a feeder too!); a mourning dove is nesting in one of our gutters (which, oddly, is one long horizontal piece without a drain in it, (?!?!?) so we cut a small hole in it to drain it of accumulated rain and spare the dove a soggy nest!); two raucous scrub jays came by scouring for food (we bought a feeder and some seed for them too, althought if it attracts pigeons, we'll take it right back down -- fingers crossed); and either a merlin or a prairie hawk flew by (judging purely by the shape of its all-black silhouette against a pale blue sky) being heralded by alarmed smaller birds. And on top of that -- it is so quiet, so away from the city roar of street-cars, large thoroughfares, crowds, taxis, etc., that we can hear all kinds of bird calls, out of which the only ones I can identify so far are mourning doves and crows.

Can you guess? I was in heaven. Home sweet home!

All hail the hale and hearty hail!

Or as one of the managers I work with put it, "what the hail was that??"

Yes, last night at approximately 9ish pm PST we heard a familiar tap-tap-tapping at our window panes which was not the known rogue agent Jack Frost but was instead his sneaky samurai cousin, Jethro Hail. Only Jethro Hail could have snuck into San Francisco for about two minutes to regale us with morse code for "winter precipitation can happen to YOU!" and indeed, it did. Steve and I ran out to our back stairs and stuck our hands out to find cute little candy sized (think Nerds or Pop-Rocks) nubbins of hail tap-dancing with wee feet on everything around us.

Being the total weather-weenie that I have become after 3 years in San Francisco, I immediately rushed inside and put on a winter coat and then rushed back outside to ogle the little deposits of New England nostalgia still bombarding us.

We got a good two minutes of bonafide precipitation people! I was 30 seconds away from buying a snow blower...

It's been quite the eventful climate week -- a 3.6 quake felt by our office on Friday afternoon, the thunder and hail storm that struck last night, and as I'm typing still another thunderstorm is flashing its wares and gnashing its teeth outside. Highly irregular -- our 'thunderstorms' out here are usually the equivalent of a limp handshake -- lightning that would rather be on its lunch break, thunder that would prefer to hire telemarketers, and rain dropped from a machine whose meter is obviously set on the "low/moist" end of the spectrum, rather than the "high/zero to soaked in 7 seconds" end. Thunder that can actually be heard -- repeatedly -- is, well, unheard of. As is lightning born of something stronger than heat.

On another note -- does anyone know why it's called "hail?"

Move over chameleon!!

COOL:

Taken from National Geographic:
An Octopus:

A Lion Fish:

An Octopus Mimicking a Lion Fish because they're poisonous:

Release

For a long, long time now I have had one quotation serve a gentle reminder at the bottom of all of my emails:

"Let the beauty we love be what we do." ~Rumi

When it comes to quotations, particularly those I sign my emails with and see a lot, I tend to be fickle. They last weeks, in rare cases months, until I grow bored, or until I seize on a quotation from something I read and want it around for inspiration or further rumination. This one from Rumi, though, came at a time in my life (I believe something like 2 or more years ago) where I was struggling for so many things and the desire for the reminder was pervasive: in love, in your job, in your friends, in your independence, even in how you comport yourself on a day to day basis -- remind yourself of the beauty you love and let that govern your choices. This, too, necessitates knowing what you find beauty in, giving an added level of depth to the missive. I never cease to get a light frisson when my eyes fall on the quotation -- even now.

That being said, I have finally reached my saturation point with seeing it. I crave newness. Part of it is feeling some accomplishment in finding and doing "the beauty I love" -- I'm ready for a new challenge. Read for a little badinage in my emails, a little extemporaneity (is that a word?? It is now! Hmmm...how fitting). Those of you who get missives from me, be prepared for some fluctuation in the signature line. I did, however, pay small homage to the Rumi quotation by adding it as my scrolling screen saver at work, perhaps one of the most relevant places for such a reminder.

As for this blog, which I have left fallow for such a long time: This post is indeed a sign of a renewal, though I make no promises as to how often and how consistent it will be. I do like writing on a public forum, and at this point I have read enough personal blogs to realize that even the mundane musings of the most random person can still be relevant and interesting, so I feel renewed comfort in tapping out my own maundering mundane musings again.

"Maundering," by the way, is my latest favorite word.

Happy New Year to you all.