The intellectual equivalent of a ham sandwich.

Posts tagged ‘project’

Sports Analysis and Your Daily Life

I am watching game three of the Bulls/Heat series and the announcers are making me laugh. It’s not anything unique they are doing, it seems to be all sports announcers. And ESPN talking heads during SportsCenter and what not.

These are some of the most dramatic people you will ever meet. I’ll give you an example.

“Boozer has 8 points six minutes into the first quarter, and he only had fourteen points total in the first two games!”

Sports announcers and ESPN folks love to give dramatic projections.

So and so has four home runs through the first six games of the season, that means by the end of the season …

So and so has eight rushing touchdowns through four game of the season, at this rate …

It’s silly. And then they have conversations over their straight projections. Other times someone will come on and say so and so is having a hot streak, so they’ll say, “ok fine, if you reduce this by …” and then they’ll give a slightly less projection.

I want to apply this to boring, daily life activities. Please read this in your best radio/sports caster voice.

“Only up for twelve minutes and Jon has ALREADY consumed ONE bowl of cereal. He’s on pace to break a record for CEREAL meals in the course of a day! We could be witnessing history.”

“Woah … ANOTHER sneeze from June which is … I believe that makes three already today. If you think about that, we could be seeing a WHOLE LOT of sneezing through the course of the day!”

I could go on … but you get the point … and I’m lazy.

(P.S. If you think that’s a lazy ending, just wait for tomorrow’s post.)

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Du Jour of the Week

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Weekly Wacko (55)

(Note: This is really not that interesting, but the ‘weekly wacko’ section serves as a diary for me and I wanted to write out how I felt about this. Also, I wrote this 11/9/10.)

Hello Again, Feelings …

Today was a fairly big day for me. Since I love telling stories I of course can’t just tell what. I have to tell why.

Last week I came back from my trip to Florida and worked on Friday. I saw that my boss had his door open so I swung by to tell him that since NASA had not launched the shuttle, I needed the Lego Shuttle set to comfort my wounded heart and spirit.

“Ohh! Yeah, I’m surprised I haven’t bought that yet.”

My boss is cool.

He didn’t say he would buy the Lego set for his kid – he’d be buying it for himself. He then pulled up the Lego website and complained that they misrepresented the size of the shuttle. We tried to figure out how big it would be, and decided that it’d be cool, but even cooler if it was 5 feet tall.

After that he asked me to sit down. I am a worrier and a pessimist so this made me nervous. I asked if I should close the door and he said yes. Yikes.

I came to Houston on a one-year contract: January to January. At some point I began working on another project outside the one I was hired into. This project was(/is?) slated to be finished in March so I approached my boss (actually I talked to 3 bosses about this – gooo corporate!) and asked about the idea of extending my contract until March. I got a thumbs up. This was a few weeks ago.

On Friday, I was sitting there and the first question from my boss was, “how do you like working here? Be honest.”

Double yikes.

I told him I enjoyed it, but lately the changing scope of the work (the economy and I are enemies) had sucked the enjoyment out. Currently the feeling is: “you can do that, it doesn’t matter anyway because this project might be trashed, so sure … go do that.”

He told me my name had come up for a new project that is just getting underway. It’s an intense one, it’ll be a big challenge, you know, that old bag of tricks. Nevertheless, it’s exciting and was a boost to my ego to be wanted for this team (though it’ll be a huge team so not that big a boost).

He told me to think the idea over during the weekend. I thought, and talked with my folks, and thought some more. My gut feeling was yes please and Occam’s razor told me go for it – but I felt like there should be some down-sides I was missing.

On Monday I met with another boss who talked with me about it some more. When I said, “this sounds like it’ll be very challenging work,” he laughed at me. An, “oh you poor, ignorant fool,” laugh. My bosses are piloting me across the river Styx.

Today I met with boss number 1 (Lego boss – who informed me that boss number two is a karate whiz and probably sits around thinking of ways to break people’s necks. Again, Lego boss is awesome). Lego boss was being pushed to get an answer from me and I … said yes.

Yikes!

The project may fail, it has a nebulous shape at best, it’ll be very challenging and this worries me because I don’t want to look dumb. But my desire to not look stupid does not outweigh my desire to be a part of this. I emailed my sister and told her that the two downsides to my accepting this offer are: fear of not being good enough/fear of the unknown, and not getting to move to a cooler place or closer to home. Sorry Houston, don’t mean to hate on you.

My sister had a very nice response which was: “Duuuuuude that is so awesome. take a moment to be positive before you start bashing yourself.”

This is my being positive. Congratulations, self. Don’t blow it.

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Weekly Wacko

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Weekly Wacko (16)

Lean, Mean Crying Machine

The past few weeks have been very stressful to me, and I’m about to whine about stuff like I did before (blah blah blah), but I’ll try and keep it interesting (read: I’ll make fun of myself).

Last week (le what?!) I found an apartment. This week I started at my new job. Today my co-captain of the move left. The co-captain was more commonly called: mom, ma, and her favorite, lady (she has proclaimed this website “the greatest space on the internet. period.” Note: my brother and sister do not have websites).

When I moved to California about 2 years ago (Feb 5, 2008), my mom came with me to do much the same as we did this trip. Apartment hunt, furniture shop and drive me to work the first day (this mama’s boy tradition dates back to my first internship).

When she drove me to work the first day in California, she then drove around and did some errands, and finally caught a flight to go home – all before I got home from work. So, as she dropped me off for work (a little ways away from the location so my co-workers wouldn’t see that my mom drove me to work – I’m an ADULT now!) it was our final goodbye. I saw that she was upset, which made me upset. And that, combined with the scariness of my first real job, a new home where I knew pretty much no one (except Anna and Whitney) … made me cry like a little girl.

I don’t deal well with emotions. I’m a boy. I’m an engineer. And at 25 I’m living in my 11th new home. I am one emotionally stunted monkey. When people see me interact with emotions it’s like watching a calf take it’s first few steps – it’s awkward, you want to help but don’t know how, and you crave veal (kidding?).

Anyhow. I decided crying like a baby was a good tradition, so as I left to walk to work today (my hotel is across the street from my work) I cried like a baby. Thankfully I walked to work looking into the sun which made it more socially acceptable. Or maybe I’m just very passionate about my first week of work.

Just a reminder, I’m an adult!

The weird thing for the crying this time was it wasn’t started by SEEING my mom be upset. I think it’s a fair guess she was sad to go, but usually my emotions are reactive – they start up when I see others emotions in action.

I think this is because I am much more stressed about this move – I feel bigger expectations (and my boss confirmed this by saying, not in these words, “this is Brad, and he thinks he’s a hot shot”), and I have an outside work project going on. Let’s just hope I don’t take to crying all the time, because that would be annoying.

But don’t worry for me – there are two bright spots.

At my work there are a lot of acronyms, and an acronym finder. When I was reading through some documents today one of the acronyms I came across was my brother’s name. I found this funny so I ended up looking up acronyms for my and my family’s initials. This is surprisingly entertaining to me, but that is maybe a bad sign.

The real bright spot is this. I work in Texas. And one of my co-workers names is … Peggy Hill! Are you serious!? How great is that?

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Weekly Wacko

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