Another Job Ends

Last Friday was my last day working at Hacker Group; they have a new director who will be controlling the process that I was brought there to manage (the situation was very fluid when I started, to put it charitably), and they didn't want to keep paying me to do reconciliations, because I am an expensive reconciler.

This was really quick job, four weeks and two days, but it was a good contract in some ways.  The client had a big problem, wanted to do something about it quickly, and was willing to pay for that.  By the time I left, they were in much better shape than when I started, good enough that they could let me go and start with a newly-trained (cheaper) temp in my place.  In the one-month-less-one-day that I worked there, I made more money than I used to make at Farmers in a month.

So now it's back to the between-jobs grind, looking for work and filing for unemployment.  I called my insurance administrator each of the last two days to ensure that I have health insurance still.  Jackie's employer can provide insurance for her and the kids for less than I can, so that is a huge help.  I re-opened my unemployment claim, and I have had two inquiries about work possibilities already, although neither one panned out.

As long as the jobs keep coming, this is kind of fun.

Minerva

We had to have the cat euthanized today.  Her kidneys had failed, and she was in terrible shape.  The vet said she would have died at home very soon if we had not done anything.  I don't have very many pictures of the cat, but the first one posted here is the second picture I took with my camera, and it's a pretty good picture of her.  The second picture was taken this morning.  Her eyes are closed, and she could barely move, but that picture is more how we will remember Minerva -- in Lucas's arms, her favorite place.

Minerva was our first pet, long before we had any dogs.  She came from someone who knew someone who worked with Jackie who had a litter of kittens to give away, and I liked her because she was pretty.  We named her Minerva after Minerva McGonagall, Harry Potter's teacher who could turn into a cat.  (Our first dog was named Lily after Harry's mother; then we inherited Jackson and Emmett with non-Harry-Potter names and ended that tradition.)

Lucas was six when we got her, and I remember that in the first day or two we could not find her even though we looked in every corner of the house, and we kept asking Lucas if he had let her out.  At one point he told me that he wished we had never gotten the cat, because he was upset that we thought he had let her get away.  It turned out that she was inside the torn fabric on the underside of an old loveseat that I brought to the marriage, and that was a favorite hiding place for years.

But Lucas got over being sorry that we had a cat, and the two of them developed an amazing bond over the years.  I have always had a pretty good way with cats.  Woofie, our cat when we were kids, stayed away from most people but would at least sometimes come to me.  Centime, my brother's cat that most people thought was outright unfriendly, would come running to me when I came over.  And Minerva tolerated me well enough, as long as I did what she wanted.  I could pet her on the stairs, and she did like that, and she would lay on the floor in front of the pantry or in our bathroom, but if I tried to pet her anywhere else, she would walk away.  If she came in my bed, she would usually stay out of reach, then leave quickly.  If I picked her up, she wanted down, and if I held her too long, she would take a swipe at my face.  She would never stay in my lap.  If I called her, she usually ignored me.  She was a bit less friendly toward Jackie, and she ignored Jarrod altogether, except that she liked to poop in his room.

But she loved Lucas, and he adored her, and that is what really hurts about losing this particular pet.  Lucas is a quiet kid without a lot of close friendships, and his relationship to the cat meant something to him.  She slept in his bed every night and stayed in his room a lot, her sanctuary from the dogs.  He could pick her up, hold her upside down, and she was perfectly content.  She would lay in his lap while he petted her, and often he would just take her into his room and stay with her for long stretches.  When she slipped out of the house at night, lots of times when I couldn't find her or get her to come back, he would go out and call her, then bring her back in.  Lucas was her favorite, and nobody else even came close.

And here's the really sad part.  When I got up Friday and Minerva was just laying on the floor, I knew she was really sick, and I wanted to get her to the vet quickly, before she died.  She held on, and Lucas took her to the vet that afternoon.  They took some blood, gave her an IV, and when Jackie picked her up, they said if she made it through the night, they would know more in the morning.  Her body temperature was way low, she was dehydrated, she wouldn't eat or drink, and she could barely move.  I didn't really think she would last the night, but we gave her to Lucas, and I told him his job was to keep her alive all night.  He gave her water using a syringe, kept her covered in blankets, and stayed with her all night, and to my surprise (and it turns out the vet was surprised as well), he did it.  She was still alive this morning.  It seemed like a little miracle.  Then the vet called around 9:30, and it was kidney failure, and it was all for naught.

We took some pictures, Lucas kept her a little longer, then I asked if he was ready to let her go and took her away.  He wouldn't go with me.  Jackie says that I handle these things better than the rest of the family, but I don't think so.  I just have to do them.  I was actually falling apart, including at the vet.  But I took her in, and although I did not stay with Lily when I took her, I stayed with Minerva until the end.  I always felt a little guilty about Lily, that in her last moments she was with strangers.  I rubbed Minerva's head until I could see that she stopped breathing, then rubbed it some more after she was gone and they left me alone with her.  I started to leave, then went back and smoothed her fur where I had left an impression in it, then left her on the table, laying still with her eyes open.  She was still a pretty cat.

And now, of course, life goes on for the rest of us.  Cats don't take a lot of care, but there will be a few things to put away -- the litter box, her food dish amd water bowls.  Jarrod doesn't need the gate on his door anymore to keep her out, and we don't need to lift up the gate that keeps the dogs upstairs at night so she can crawl under.  There is some cat food that the dogs will eat.

Another day, probably soon, the disappointment of today will fade, and we'll just be glad we had a cat who worked out so well.  Pets are like that; they live fairly short lives.  The thing I feel best about is that Lucas had the experience of growing up with a cat, and I suspect that there will be more cats in his future.  Still, he may never find another who likes him, and only him, the way this one did.

Engagement

It's quite good to be able to write about a truly mundane subject and still find an interesting picture that fits.  (If you don't know why this picture fits, I probably don't know you.)

I have written about engagement before.  I'm against it.  Here's why:

Once, long, long ago in a place very far from here, I worked for a company that became interested in employee engagement.  The reason for this interest was that studies have shown that engaged employees are more productive than unengaged employees.  In the training class on engagement, I asked if this was a correlation or a causation -- are people more productive because they are engaged, or more engaged because they feel productive?  The answer was "Hmm, good question, never thought about that, I don't know."  Then, of course, we moved on, assuming that if only we could get people to be more engaged, they would be more productive.

However, I suspect that I was on to something.  Based on my own experience, I am more engaged (there is some definition of this word, but let's agree to each use our own definition based on what we think it means, and we'll be all right) when I feel that I am doing something that fits my interests and talents, and I believe that, in such a situation, I feel productive.  I think everyone everywhere feels that way.  I'm pretty damn sure of it.

So, based on my insightful (but admittedly obvious) question, they should have scrapped the whole idea.  But that is not the way the world works.  The world really, really does not work that way.

The company took a survey of the employees and measured their engagement.  Then they started trying to raise the engagement scores on the survey.  They took surveys every year for a few years after that, and after about three years of concerted efforts to increase engagement scores, at least in my department, engagement scores plummeted to levels lower than I would have thought possible.

So what happened?  I will tell you.

The department tried forming groups to address various issues, like job rotation and working from home, and they found that there was very little interest among the staff.  They formed an "engagement committee" to address the problem, but substantive ideas were shot down by management, and the committee was reduced to trying to have some fun events, like potlucks and Wii bowling.  I tried to tell them, when I could, that what people care about at work is not how well they get along with their coworkers on a personal basis; instead, they care about the work they do eight hours per day, whether it is interesting, whether they see value in it, whether it is a good fit for their abilities.  I found articles that backed me up on this point.  However, we continued to try various gimmicks to make people feel better while ignoring the need to give the staff new opportunities and chances to develop.  And engagement scores went down.

It wasn't too long before an interesting change took place.  At first, management was responsible for improving employee engagement.  But when they couldn't do it, the burden began to shift to the employees.  Suddenly, people were praised as good employees in management meetings because they helped organize department events.  The word "engaged" started to creep into performance reviews.  A director suggested that something was wrong with employees who were not engaged.  Then they started trying to identify people who were not engaged so they could get rid of them.

But wait a second.  Increasing engagement was supposed to be a way to increase productivity in a group, although even that connection is dubious; it was never intended to be a measure of how effective an individual was.  By the time you start equating individual engagement with job performance, you have stepped completely off the reality track and into crazy world.  Engagement itself is not a measure of performance.  But management was being evaluated partially based on engagement scores, and since they could not focus on (and didn't care about) anything that really mattered to employees, their solution was to try to get employees who would score higher on engagement surveys.  What was supposed to be a way to make employees more interested in their work quickly evolved into a weapon management could use against them.  The staff knew it, and engagement scores tanked.

So my final words on engagement are these:  ignore it.  Give employees interesting assignments that match their skills and allow them to learn.  Give them opportunities to be productive.  Make sure they understand that what they are doing makes a difference.  Judge their performance based on how well they perform, not on unrelated factors that you hope correspond to performance.  If you do it right, they will engage.

10-Hour Days

I love them.

At my last contracting assignment, I did not work even an hour of overtime, but at this one, I am working 10-hour days every day, plus the last two Saturdays.  (This should end in a couple of weeks.)  And this is one of the great benefits of being a contractor;  10-hour days, and weekends, are no problem.

With hourly pay, the incentives are aligned much better.  Consider the average salaried employee; better yet, consider me, an average salaried employee, at my job at Farmers.  I worked long hours sometimes, and weekends sometimes, basically every quarter end.  And while you could correctly argue that those overtime hours were worked into my base salary, my incentive was to work as few of them as possible.  Those extra hours made me tired, used up my leisure time, interfered with family plans, screwed up my commute.  And if I worked an extra 100 hours per year, I got paid $0 for that.  Sometimes I got a free meal; that was it.

On the other hand, Farmers had every incentive to have me work as much overtime as possible.  After all, they couldn't care less whether I'm tired or don't have time with my family (trust me, they couldn't have cared less), and more importantly, any extra hours they could get out of me were free.  The only disincentive was that I might quit, which isn't much of a factor in a crappy economy.

By contrast, in the contracting world, the incentives are aligned nicely.  The company does not want me to work overtime unless they really need the hours, because they have to pay time and a half after eight hours.  The extra hours are still an inconvenience to me, but I don't really mind, because I am getting paid lots of money.  I really love the idea that a company won't ask me to work additional hours unless they really need it; believe me, that isn't how it normally works.

One thing I am finding out about the contracting world is that you had better make hay while the sun shines.  In Seattle, we don't get much sunshine.  So bring on the ten-hour days, weekends, whatever.  I'm your guy.