This has been a good weekend. 

I was up early yesterday to make breakfast and then do laundry, which is now my Saturday morning ritual thanks to the portable washing machine I bought a couple of months ago. This has become my Saturday morning routine now: cook breakfast, and then make ice and do laundry all morning. Generally, by about 11:00 or so, everything is washed, rinsed, and hanging up to dry. I don’t know why I like this so much. I guess the fact that I don’t have to pack up my laundry and take it to the wretched little laundry room in the basement of this apartment building or tramp out to the laundromat means that I can stay home and do it at my leisure. It’s less a chore and more something that makes this godawful apartment a bit more cozy.

Afterward, I had lunch with some friends from work at a pub within walking distance of home, which was a very good time. We’re good friends, but we mostly work remote and when we do work on site, we don’t have lunch together because most of us work through our lunch. We just want to go in, get our shit done, and then get the hell out as quickly as possible. So, lunch at our desks while we’re working is the norm for us. The important thing is that our work gets done. The problem is that nobody listens to us when we say this thing is going to be a problem, and then when it becomes a problem, management is upset that nobody caught it. You just can’t win some day.

Still, it’s nice to get together and talk about work and also talk about things that aren’t work. But mostly, we talked about work, because work is not great right now for most of us. I mentioned this in my post of September 14, and the good news is that I am out of that situation for now. 

What we all agreed upon was that our firm, while it has adequate or even good management at times, is really lacking for effective leadership. 

Leadership versus Management

Our firm had a former managing director, J, who was an excellent leader. They was a constant presence, they knew everybody’s name, their office door was always open, and you could go to them with any problem without any judgment whatsoever. Of course, they got promoted to a vice-presidency across the country because of their effective leadership. 

A month after he left, K arrived to be our new site director. While K is an effective manager (the paperwork gets done on time, at least), they are definitely not a leader. 

Point in fact: Our firm always had an annual summer picnic at a local park, which naturally got cancelled a couple of times due to covid. K arrived a few months ahead of our first post-covid picnic. This was an event that I was looking forward to as it was always a good time and of course, very relaxed. But as we were wrapping things up (this park closes at 8:00 p.m.) I lamented to a friend of mine that it was sad that K couldn’t attend because this would have been a good opportunity for them to meet everybody, especially as we had just hired so many new people recently. 

“They’ve been here the whole time,” my friend pointed out. “They’ve been sitting with [managers] R and S down there the whole evening” pointing at the other end of the pavilion. And sure enough, there was K, with managers (her direct reports) R and S just sitting around and talking. 

I was a little puzzled by this. After all, J would have been all over this event, introducing themselves to the new people, connecting with the old people, providing the presence that an effective leader does. In contrast, K just sat there with their friends, chatting all evening, like they were just any other employee. They manage, but they don’t lead. They don’t inspire, they don’t provide confidence.

And that’s how I distinguish between the two. Good managers make sure the paperwork gets done properly and on time. But good leaders aren’t worried just about the paperwork; they are also worried about the people who are doing the paperwork, trying to get roadblocks out of the way, ensuring that they have the resources they need, and making sure that they have a sense of purpose—which is ultimately the difference between having a career where you get things done, and having a job where all you do is process the widgets.

I had more to say about this yesterday, and will have more to say about this later, I’m sure. 

Sunday

I had intended to get a walk in after our lunch yesterday, but it was too hot. We’ve had some decent breezes lately (autumn is definitely in the air), but when you are not in the shade and the sun hits you, you can feel it. (Even so, between doing laundry, and then walking down to the up and then back home again, I still managed to get over 10,000 steps in yesterday.)

I had breakfast and then decided to get out of the house and get a nice long walk in before it got too hot. In fact, it was cool enough that I wore a zip-up hoodie. But the sun got the better of me, and I had to take it off about the time I got to the golf course. The weather really is unpredictable this time of year. I ended up tying it around my neck, thinking how ironic this look is now because during the 80s, the preppy look was very much about having a nice sweater tied loosely around your neck. But I am not a preppy, this is 15-year-old hoodie, and this is not the 1980s any more. We are definitely not in Kansas, Toto.

I walked to the grocery store because I wanted something cold and fizzy to drink. I also found a few good deals on produce, which is getting expensive at the same time that the quality is going down. But I found a decent head of lettuce for salads and tacos and whatnot that should get me through the week for only two dollars, some cheap coleslaw mix that I will use in a stir fry later this week, and some snap peas (the most expensive item at four bucks—ouch!) that will work in both the stir fry and some fried rice, and also just as a snack. 

I know that ongoing inflation is a thing and that it is a feature, not a bug, of capitalism, but it strikes me now that I got so little I got for my ten dollars, and yet I walked out of the store feeling like I got a great deal of food for what I paid. Have I adjusted to the recent ridiculously high inflation we’ve been experiencing lately? I hope not, but it certainly seems so. 

I also decided to add a scan of today’s receipt, if for other reason than to remind myself in twenty years that two dollars for a decent head of lettuce was a really good deal twenty years ago. I decided to pixelate any potentially identifying information, and gosh, I ended up pixelating a lot of stuff there.

Is this because I’m growing increasingly paranoid because of our current political situation? (“Only communists and instigators eat both pea pods and lettuce! Lock him up!”) Or is because I know that lots of bad actors are out there scraping the web for any bit of personal information they can get and putting data point A from here together with data point B from there, and then figuring out how to get the $36.19 I have left in my checking account? Or is it because businesses—even locally owned businesses like this one—are increasingly capturing more and more data from each interaction they have with people? 

What’s really funny to me though is that I still had that hoodie wrapped around my neck as I was shopping, and even as I was carrying my paper bag of groceries home. Because I have some mild sensory issues, I really hate having anything wrapped around my neck. But there I was, walking in the hot sun and sweating a lot, with this damned hoodie that I only needed for the first ten minutes of my walk anyway, and it took me more than a few minutes to realize that there was plenty of room in that grocery bag and that I could just stuff it in there on top of my groceries. Yep, and people have the audacity to call me “smart”.

Anyway, I got home and I was soaked with sweat, so it was time for another shower. It’s almost October, and yet it still feels like summer when the sun is out. I’m not sure if that’s normal or something new. I’m not sure about a lot of things any more.

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