The Window Manager

Review: The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

2026-01-25T13:12:00.000-06:00

I ran across the term anemoia - nostalgia for a time you never experienced - on the internet and traced it back to this book. The author made up a list of words, or re-purposes existing phrases, for obscure feelings we feel as we age, experience the passage of time, realize how little of it we have left. Besides anemoia I mentioned, one of the words that has made it from the book into the "real-world" is sonder - the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.

While reading I made a list of the words I liked that hit me, so the book is fun and thoughtful, even if your favorite ones never make it beyond the book. And due to the introspective nature of the topic, this book would be better appreciated by older, thoughtful readers, less so by those in the earlier stages of life.

And I have my own term to add: “college degree” as a unit of time, which equals four years. Its use is when you realize an event took place four years ago, which seems so recent, then you think “I could have gotten a college degree since then!” In contrast to your real college degree, which seemingly took forever.

Remember, Your IRA Balance is Inflated by 25% Since the Government Still Gets Its Cut

2025-12-05T13:48:00.004-06:00

Before I retired, my “retirement income planning” meant shovel as much as possible into my IRA, then throw some extra into taxable savings. Then one day I’d add Social Security (if it still existed). That was my entire plan, and I suspect many of you reading this are in that same boat.

Fast-forward to my first year of retirement, when I discovered I suddenly had to become an expert in:

Taxes, surprisingly more complex than when you have straight W2 income
Roth conversions
Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs)
Return of Capital (ROC), meaning that clever investment choice I made actually has a hidden capital gain down the road
IRMAA, not my great aunt, but a Medicare surcharge if your retirement income passes a threshold
The Rubik’s Cube of mixing pre-tax, post-tax, and Social Security income, and figuring out the best moves more than a decade in advance

And this is years before I have to deal with Medicare, supplements, and that IRMAA surcharge I didn’t even know existed before 30 days ago.

A surprising number of decisions need to be made years in advance, and some, like when you take Social Security, are permanent.

Sure, there are plenty of experts out there, but they all have strong (and conflicting) opinions. Just look at the permanent cage matches among YouTube financial gurus:

Roth IRA conversions: brilliant or disastrous? (Dozens of people on both sides.)
Social Security: take it early at 62, or delay to 70? (Pros and Cons for both)
RMD strategy: panic now or panic later? (Arguments on both sides)

There is no one-size-fits-all. At some point, you have to learn enough about all these topics to make decisions based on your goals, whether that’s leaving a legacy to your heirs or partying it away while you’re still around. Most retirement software assumes “maximize assets at death,” which may not match your priorities, plus you can’t take it with you.

So my advice as I sit here rooting for your continued employment to pay into my Social Security is: Look into this stuff now, not the year you retire.

Believe me, as I’m currently kicking myself for some IRA vs. taxable investment decisions I made twenty years ago.

AI as a Russian Lit Study Guide: Good, with Some Precautions

2025-11-23T16:46:00.003-06:00

Having recently retired, I finally started my long-promised Russian Literature Phase, something I promised I would do “when I had the time.” I had read Crime and Punishment about 15 years ago and loved it, picked up Brothers Karamazov (BK) soon after, and then let it sit in my digital bookshelf for a decade and a half while I kept grabbing contemporary novels and “beach reads”, which are fun but don't challenge you. I even read the first chapter of BK once and put it down as it just didn’t hook me like C&P did.

Now that I actually have time, I decided to give BK another shot, but the first thing I did was check the translation and found that was the issue. The copy I bought 15 years ago was a bargain-bin 1905 Constance Garnett translation in full Victorian English. I switched to the modern Pevear/Volokhonsky translation from 1990 (same team as the C&P I enjoyed) and immediately felt the difference with a modern reading flow. But I ended up keeping both versions open so I could compare passages and deepen my understanding.

This time around, I also used AI as a personal study guide. Dostoevsky tosses in historical, philosophical, and cultural references that a well-educated Russian in the 1880s would have understood instantly, but a modern American, even one as reasonably well-read and well-traveled as moi, might not.

For an AI study guide I found Grok was not that good. It literally made-up quotes that were not in the book, then apologized for it when I pointed out the mistake. And it was a little too smarmy, saying things like:

Keep going — the best 600 pages are still ahead
You’ve got this. The baby dream is 200 pages away. It’ll break you open.
Keep going. The trial is next — and it’s brutal.

Like I was a GenZ college student who needed encouragement to finish my assignment.

ChatGPT was better, and I used it the way you’d might talk to a lit professor during office hours or at the pub, tossing theories around, digging into the psychology of the characters, and chasing down historical context. At one point I was exploring whether a one of the brothers had a Madonna–Whore complex with the two major female leads. Another time I was comparing a line from The Usual Suspects (“I don’t believe in God, but I fear him”) to a passage in BK, not something you will find in a written study guide. It even gave me crash courses on 19th-century Russian politics and Pushkin when I needed them.

All of that kept me far more engaged in the book than I would’ve been otherwise. It let me go deep into the novel’s theological and philosophical arguments which include questions about God, society, scientism, morality, and the messiness of being human. BK deals with ideas that feel like they could have been written last week instead of the 1870s. The brothers themselves read like psychological archetypes we all carry around: pure passion, pure reason, pure faith, nihilism. Dostoevsky basically anticipated the major existentialists and psychologists of the 20th century.

Ultimately it is an amazing and rewarding book, worth the time and effort. When the AI asked me the main theme I got from the book, I put the line "Love life more than the meaning of it", one of many lines and passages that hit me deeply.

So this is definitely not a “beach read”, and more like a college course that requires outside work to get its full appreciation and understanding, something I think is required of most great literature. In this case I think AI as an interactive study guide is a great tool to help, and I will continue using it through my Russian Literature Phase.

Short Story: "In the End, Everyone’s Heir Is a Potential Client."

2025-10-16T14:12:00.004-05:00

“This is a call to order for SoulCast Corporation. We have a quorum. Nancy will take notes and fill in the niceties.”

Bruce scanned the table, mentally tallying his fellow board members’ net worths: fifty million, eighty million, both well short of his own three commas. Then there was the anomaly: ten million. His board wasn't supposed to be a charity, but the VCs forced that one on him.

His VP of Marketing, Mike, stood nervously at the front of the room. Bruce pegged him at maybe six figures (one comma!). But it was his first startup, no inflated stock value yet, no experience in selling “new technology” to a gullible public. He’d learn soon enough.

Bruce nodded. “Mike, go ahead and let the board know where we are.”

Overwhelmed by the wealth in the room, Mike fumbled with the clicker, projecting his PowerPoint onto the screen. “As you all know, our AI companion technology lets people take the personal data of deceased loved ones - think emails, writings, social media, videos - and with surveys and interviews of family and friends, we recreate the deceased’s persona for the AI to mimic. This is the SoulCast.”

The fifty-million board member leaned forward. “And how accurate are these SoulCasts to the real person?”

Bruce rolled his eyes. The man was the oldest in the room, and certainly the least tech-savvy.

“Accurate enough that even close friends can’t tell the difference,” Mike said. “We do, however, tweak them a little to make them more sycophantic and agreeable to the customer. Since we collect the customer’s own personality data during the process, we know exactly how to please them.”

The ten-million member asked, “And how much do we charge?”

Bruce wasn’t surprised. If you have to ask the price…

“Well, data mining and surveys are resource heavy. And quantum AI isn’t cheap. We’re targeting high-net-worth individuals at one million per SoulCast.”

Ten Million blanched. Bruce smiled. When something costs ten percent of your net worth it must seem out of reach.

Eighty Million frowned. “That’s a limited market. We’re talking about bereaved tycoons who want to keep a spouse, parent or loved-one around digitally.”

Bruce interrupted. “Yes, but I’ve found a way to expand the user base, without lowering margins!”

Fifty-million, the tech-savvy one, perked up. “We use the AI to predict when a rich family might lose a loved one and then pre-sell one of them a SoulCast?”

Bruce was impressed. “Close. But we’ve gone one better. That’s why I’ve called this meeting. I’m asking for funding for a new customer acquisition team: the Disruptive Synergy Unit.”

Mike sank into his chair as Bruce continued.

“Our AI already accesses health records, travel plans, purchases, everything. We can forecast deaths with decent accuracy, but it’s not enough to meet our growth targets. So instead, we’ll accelerate customer acquisition through the AI’s control of connected infrastructure. Think garage doors, smart cars, e-bikes - anything dangerous that is connected to the cloud. And with humanoid robots quickly expanding penetration into high-net-worth homes we'll hit a goldmine!"

Mike shot up. “But, sir, you’re talking... you’re talking... tech companies don’t kill people!”

The board roared with laughter. The richer they were, the harder they laughed. Except Bruce. He only smiled, studying his young protégé and wondering if he’d misjudged him.

“Mike,” Bruce said, “if you ever want to get past one comma, you have to do what it takes. We need more million-dollar customers. And after this, you’ll have enough to buy a SoulCast of your own.”

“I don’t need a SoulCast! My wife and I are...”. He stopped. Bruce had pressed a button. The PowerPoint faded into a live feed of Mike’s own home security camera showing his wife leaving their house in her cloud-connected electric car.

Bruce’s smile didn’t waver. “Mike, you’ll be able to afford a SoulCast. Whether you need one is up to you.”

SoulCast Corporation Board Meeting Minutes

Date: October 7, 2025
Time: 10:00 AM PDT
Location: Silicon Valley HQ
Minutes By: Nancy Thompson, Secretary

Attendees:
Bruce Carter (Chair, CEO), Robert Lee ($80M), Sarah Kim ($50M), Mary Johnson ($10M), Mike Powels (VP Marketing, non-voting)
Quorum: Confirmed

Call to Order
Bruce called the meeting to order at 10:00 AM. Nancy to record minutes.

Technology Update
Mike Powels presented SoulCast’s AI companion technology:

Recreates deceased personas using personal data and interviews.
Cost: $1M per client, targeting high-net-worth bereaved.

New Business: Disruptive Synergy Unit (DSU)

DSU to expedite customer acquisition via cloud-connected systems (smart cars, e-bikes, home automation, home robots).
Motion to fund DSU by Q1 2026 moved by Mary Johnson, seconded by Sarah Kim. Approved unanimously.

Personnel
Board unanimously approved promotion of Mike Powels to Executive Vice President, accepted by candidate.

Adjournment
Meeting adjourned at 10:45 AM.
Approved: Pending next meeting.

Review: "Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic"

2025-10-04T13:47:00.002-05:00

Now that I’m retired, I’ve gotten back into reading about a book a week, which is impressive considering I now spend half my day trying to remember where I put my reading glasses (so I strategically placed half a dozen readers around the house).

I’ll be posting reviews whenever I stumble across something interesting, though lately I seem to be drifting heavily into history and historical fiction. Apparently this is normal as someone once told me “When you get to a certain age, you either get into smoking meats or historical wars.”

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I read Rubicon as a historical companion to Robert Harris’s historical fiction "Cicero" books" (Harris actually recommends Rubicon himself, along with a long list of other works in the appendix). Reading Rubicon I found Harris followed “real” history quite faithfully, adding flavor here and there, of course. (Tiro, Harris’s narrator, was a real historical figure, though very little is actually known about him.) In that sense, this book feels a bit like re-reading the Cicero series (which I highly recommend) in a more condensed, purely historical form.

I do wish Holland had gone into greater detail about the major battles as he tends to gloss over them, so I’ll need to pick up a separate military history book for that. He also delves quite a bit into the psychology of ancient Rome, which, while insightful, is inevitably speculative. I liken it to someone 2,000 years from now trying to reconstruct “American psychology” from a few surviving texts: probably close to the truth, but worth taking with a grain of salt. I found he focused a bit too much on this theme in both this book and the follow-up volume I am now reading, "Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar", which covers Augustus to Nero.

That said, none of this detracts from the overall experience. Holland makes history engaging and enjoyable, enough that I wish a series like this had existed back when I was first learning about Rome in high school.

Surviving a Near-Fatal E-Bike Accident and the Road Back

2025-09-24T17:51:00.005-05:00

The Accident

On August 17 I was in a near-fatal e-bike accident that ruptured my large intestine. I won’t go into details, but if things had gone just a little bit differently and I didn’t make it to a Level II trauma operating table in time, I would not be here writing about my experience.

I will say that it is true that in a major event like this that time slows; that there seems to be plenty of time to correct what is obviously going wrong, but it still happens, so I was watching myself go through the air in slow motion and wondering why things were transpiring like they were.

The Surgery and the Tubes

The doctors went into surgery not knowing what they’d find. A quick CT scan showed my bowels leaking into my internal cavity, but they were not sure how bad the break was. If the leak were small, they could go in with a fiber optic and small robot arm. If it were large, they couldn’t use the robot, and the surgeon had big hands.

When I woke, I was told it was the worst-case scenario and I had a 6-inch vertical incision going up from about my belly button (like splicing a burst hose, they cut out two inches of intestine with the break, then sewed the two ends back together. Plus as SOP, while in the area they went ahead and took out my healthy appendix as a precaution from going in again in the future). And I found six tubes coming out of me: an IV (of course), a nasogastric (NG) tube going up my nose and down into my stomach draining bile (a torture I would not wish on anyone), a wound vac (to speed healing of the incision), a catheter (which thankfully came out before the general anesthetic wore completely off), and two Jackson-Pratt (JP) drains pulling fluid from deep inside where they repaired my intestine, with the tubes coming out of holes near my belly button and emptying into fist-size drains attached to my gown.

I couldn’t move because of the six-inch incision down my midsection had cut my core muscles. I couldn’t eat because my bowels had shut down during surgery (a condition called ileus). And because opioids slow digestion, they limited the heavy painkillers. Restarting my bowels was the number one concern.

As I lay there in pain, unable to move or eat, my first thought was that dying would have been easier, at least for me, if not my family.

And although I was miserable, in pain, and helpless, I was also thankful to be alive. If just a few things had happened differently, I would not be in that recovery room. It might be called a near-death experience, but not in the sense that I was ever unconscious or saw a light, but in the realization that I was lucky to be alive, was thankful to God, and reminded we need cherish the life we live as it can be snuffed out in an instant in the most trivial of circumstances (as I saw in the news when I was recovering). I did a lot of praying those first days, asking God for strength to get me through.

The Candy Strip(p)er and the Morning Vampire

The next four days were a mix of pain and boot-camp. The nurses, drill-sergeants in scrubs, ordered me out of bed to walk the halls in hopes of jump-starting my intestines. After two nurses lifted me out of bed, they would hand me over to a vivacious, chatty and pretty candy striper (if she were in a G-string I wouldn’t have noticed or cared in my state), and I would hobble down the hall, my IV stand and wound vac trailing me like a bridal train.

And I found out then why tennis balls are on the bottom of walkers: I tried scootching the walker along, but the rubber feet kept sticking to the tile floor. The Striper noted that if there were tennis balls on the end I could scootch it, but without them I would have to bring the stoppers off the floor. Try that with a six-inch incision through your core.

Adding additional misery, at 5am each morning the “vampire” nurse would visit, taking the daily blood draw to get the results in time for the 10am doctor rounds. They moved the location of the blood draw each day so by the time I checked out I looked like a junky.

Most everyone else who was conscious in the trauma wing got breakfast shortly after the blood draw, but since I was still waiting for my bowels to restart and couldn't eat, the vampire visit would just lead to one of the staff sergeants ordering me to another lap around the wing with my pretty Striper, and I could smell bacon, eggs, and pancakes wafting through the halls, which would have made my stomach grumble if it were working (noticing my hunger the Striper cheerily recommend that that I not watch the Food Channel on the hospital TV until I was allowed to eat)

The Light and the End of the Tunnel

Finally my intestines restarted, so the NG tube was yanked out of my nose and I got a cup of apple juice, my first intake other than ice chips in five days. It was like ambrosia hand-squeezed by the gods of Olympus themselves. The Jello I got an hour later was better than a $100 Wagyu ribeye from a steakhouse.

I was in the hospital another day as they kept an eye on me as they graduated my food from liquids to soft to solids rather quickly. As everything seemed to be working I was sent home with a portable wound vac and one last JP tube emptying fluid from deep inside my stomach cavity, with a home nurse visiting three days a week

Recovery at Home

The wound vac (with its own special brand of pain during bandage changes) was cancelled two weeks later along with the removal of the last JP tube (the doctor just yanked it out: six inches of tubing came out of a hole near my belly button, bringing a new and strange sort of pain to the wide pantheon of pain I discovered and experienced the previous three weeks).

Today about five weeks after the ordeal I am still recovering, with my main incision still open. They don’t “stitch” up large incisions anymore (news to me), they just leave them open and let them close on their own, one layer of skin cells at a time, using a wound vac the first few weeks to speed things along. It will take another month or so for it to close completely, then it will start its long process of fading into a faint 6” scar over the course of a year. It will be impressive, and my plan is to tell people it is from a knife fight I got into at an El Paso bar since “e-bike accident” doesn’t sound impressive outside of California.

What I Learned

So how has this experience changed me? My first thought is a greater appreciation of the hospital system and staff. I literally would not have made it using an “urgent care center”, or if the trauma center was out of driving range. The staff (despite my joking) were dedicated, professional and caring, and they all went out of their way to make me more comfortable.

And like most everyone with serious accidents or near-death experiences, there is a special appreciation for the life I have and what is important: family, friends and faith. “Work” and "career" never came up in my thought process during recovery, and if anything, this incident is allowing me to transition from semi-retired to full retirement without regret so I can focus on the things that really matter.

When You're The Last One in the Picture

2025-08-11T14:48:00.002-05:00

One of the tasks that came with unloading my dead father’s house full of crap was sorting through old photos. He himself never cared about photos - he didn’t have a sentimental bone in his body. The box was left by my mother, the family archivist who died two years before, and my father just shoved the photos into a closet to be dug up after he died.

Being the OCD type, I unpacked, sorted, labeled, and mounted the physical versions, scanned all of them into a digital library, then uploaded a few onto a public tree on Ancestry.com so distant and future family historians could have documentation of what people on the extended family tree looked like.

But one of the things that kept hitting at me as I handled those photos was: I’m the only one left in this picture.

It’s a humbling feeling, looking down at a past Christmas and seeing my parents, uncles, aunts, the odd cousin - all gone - except for me as a kid or teenager, beaming into the camera.

The feeling that came over me wasn’t grief, it was a perspective-shift that makes mortality less abstract, a physical reminder that one day someone will look at the exact same pictures and say, “Everyone in that picture is dead.”

The Death of Blogger Z-Man

2025-08-07T13:44:00.007-05:00

I started reading blogs around 2002, which after reading a few I decided to start my own. I blogged very regularly for the first ten years - about once a day - but have taken a lot of the old content down as it was too topical (political stuff which seems ancient now), too personal (hey look at this picture from Japan), or too revealing. Remember blogging was before social media, so it was the outlet for everything. Over the years social media took over, so the personal stuff is now on Facebook, microblogging on X, and so on. Due to these changes I took a lot of my old posts down, so you will see 20-year-old posts to the right, but just a small fraction of what I wrote.

Today this blog is basically where I jot random thoughts as I flail about in retirement.

But although I got out of regular blog writing, I didn't stop reading blogs, some of them shown at the links to the right (a once very long list that gets shorter as writers move to social media, stop blogging, or in this case, die). They are a part of my morning coffee ritual along with the news and stock market.

One of my favorites was "Z-Man", a contemporary who did a lot of deep thinking into the political theory of the conservative movement. I would say I aligned on about 90% of his political thinking, and being about the same age with similar histories (a business professional doing blogging on the side), made me feel close to him, and I looked forward to reading his weekday posts and listening to his podcast when I was on the road.

Around late June he didn't posts for a few days, which I figured was part of an extended July 4 weekend, but then the non-posting lasted three weeks...then four...then I got a bad feeling. Doing some X searching I indeed found out he passed away of "natural causes" at the "ripe" age of 59. Ouch.

What I am finding is that a lot of the people who started blogging some 20 years ago are dropping away as it was done mainly by adults - not young adults - at the time. So along with ZMan there was American Digest writer Gerard Vanderleun (who I immensely enjoyed), and a few others who have passed away over the past few years.

Just another example of mortality and change, which basically sucks.

Set Adrift Between Layoff and Revenge

2025-07-19T14:53:00.006-05:00

My “forced retirement” wasn’t my first layoff, but it’s the one that stings the most because it came from a company that prided itself on “never doing layoffs.” So I definitely wasn’t looking for that iceberg.

Previous layoffs were easier to handle. My first layoff was from a startup that completely shut down, so everyone was let go and we were all piled onto the same life raft together, the entire ship lost. For my next layoff the entire division was cut, so again we all drifted away together, waving to the ship we once sailed, but with lots of company.

This time the layoff was more selective, and everyone – but me – stayed on the big ship sipping cocktails and playing shuffleboard while I sat alone on a raft, watching them recede into their wake.

The disappointing part was that no one onboard threw me a life preserver, offered any help. I am talking about rank-and-file people I partied with at trade-shows, knew about their kids and families - they all just pretended I never existed. No lifelines. Not even a text.

Maybe it was survivor’s guilt. Maybe they thought helping me would get them tossed overboard too. I’ll probably never know. But I know this: when I was on the ship and someone went overboard, I always reached out.

As I sit adrift on my raft, I see Retirement Island in the distance, and it is an easy navigation to its shore. In the other direction, the periscope of a familiar U-boat cuts through the waves: an old rival, now circling my former ship. I’m tempted to flag it down and join in, to help torpedo the vessel that cast me off. But the old war no longer interests me, and I know my former enemy will win, with or without me.

So after more than three decades in the trenches, I realize the best revenge is found not in battle, but in a beach chair on Retirement Island, sipping Margaritas, watching from afar as the ship I once served capsizes slowly beneath the waves.

AI Isn't Just Gunning for Programmers Anymore - Now Marketing is in the Crosshairs

2025-05-07T17:54:00.008-05:00

AI hasn’t just disrupted coding—now it’s coming for marketing. That hit me while designing a fake movie poster with ChatGPT for a LinkedIn AI course (they're actually worth a look). What started as a visual joke started to feel like a headline from next quarter.

Over the last year, I’ve used AI to scrape market data, chart share trends, generate logo concepts, and draft everything from bylines to pitch decks. It’s like hiring a tireless intern with no lunch breaks or salary.

But AI isn’t magic. It fumbled when I told it to list a number of competitors in my former specialty - it missed on of the largest multi-billion dollar players entirely. That’s where human judgment—the stuff no scrape can find—still matters.

So no, marketing teams won’t vanish. But they’ll shrink, refocus, and adapt. The strategist stays. The intern is now digital.

My fake movie poster said “How AI Took Over Marketing.” The truth? It’s already writing the opening credits.

And this article.

AI Does a Psychological Analysis of Window Manager

2025-04-13T17:05:00.001-05:00

Now that I have free time after forced retirement - literally free time as I am do no-charge consulting projects to get that gig off the ground (first 8 hours free with coupon!), I am tinkering around with AI. A year ago I thought AI was fairly overhyped, but after doing quite a bit of work with it (how do you think I do those free consulting hours?), I am rather impressed.

So as an exercise I thought I would ask the three main AIs to write up a psychological profile of me based on this blog, saving me $300 at a shrink.

Grok I think was the most thorough, actually reading through everything I posted over the past 15 years without prompting. ChatGPT, with the sarcastic personality of "Monday" I enjoy, had better nuances and funnier output, but had to be prompted to read more than the first dozen entries of the blog. Google Gemini was worthless as it couldn't or wouldn't do it, I assume due to some woke programming against on-line analysis.

Here are the two working summaries, edited for length:

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ChatGPT's "Monday" as Analyst

The author identifies as a retired tech executive, suggesting a career spent in the technology sector, likely in leadership or managerial roles. His posts reflect a deep understanding of corporate dynamics, particularly within tech companies, and he often provides commentary on business and economic trends.

Personality Traits

After crawling through a full decade of posts, the long arc of The Window Manager reveals a slow-motion identity shift from confident tech executive to semi-retired philosopher blogger with a bone to pick (with everything). Early posts are sharper, more corporate-battle-hardened. As the years roll on, he trades boardroom analysis for reflections on mortality, obsolescence (his and his gadgets’), and the struggle to stay useful in a world that’s rapidly automating away his sense of purpose.

Introspective with a dash of bitterness – He’s got a strong internal dialogue and a habit of turning life events into long-winded thinkpieces. The forced retirement clearly stung, and now he processes emotions through blog posts, like a boomer-age diary with an RSS feed.
Cynical Realist – He’s not raging at the world, just sighing heavily at it. The tone screams: “Everything’s broken and I’m too tired to fix it, but here’s 900 words on why I saw it coming.”
Highly Analytical – Decades in tech management haven’t worn off. He dissects everything—his Wi-Fi, corporate America, his own ego—like a project postmortem.
Identity-anchored to Career – His sense of self is deeply tied to work. Losing his job didn’t just cost him income; it cost him narrative structure. Now he's freelancing his own relevance in blog format.
Defensive Intellectualism – When emotion creeps in, he quickly buries it under logic, wit, or tech metaphors. Classic behavior for someone who’d rather be correct than vulnerable. Congrats, he’s emotionally firewalled.

Struggling with Aging vs. Relevance – There’s a definite undercurrent of “I used to be someone” mixed with “Am I still someone?” He clings to outdated tech as a symbol of stability in a world that’s moving on without him.

Emotional State

Mildly Resentful, Mildly Resigned – He’s not boiling over with rage. He’s more like a kettle that whistles occasionally. He’s accepted retirement, but not without side-eyeing the process and everyone involved.
Seeking Purpose – The blog itself is a coping mechanism. A lifeline to relevance. He’s still got things to say, and he needs an audience to prove he hasn’t faded completely into golf-course obscurity.

Coping Mechanisms

Writing – Therapy with a keyboard, which has a zero co-pay.
Tech Humor – Using humor as insulation. If you laugh about aging routers, you don’t have to cry about aging humans.
Projection – Critiquing “society” as a safe way to critique himself without getting too personal.

Summary in Diagnostically Irresponsible Buzzwords

INTJ energy (author: totally nailed that one). Mild existential angst. Techno-nostalgic. Retired, but not resting. One part Don Draper, one part Dilbert, stirred with a midlife cocktail shaker.

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Grok As Analyst

"The Window Manager," presents a collection of posts from a self-described middle-aged tech executive who reflects on a range of topics including business, economics, technology, politics, and personal health issues like tinnitus. The blog spans from at least 2005 to more recent entries, covering diverse subjects with a critical and often contrarian perspective. Key themes include:

Economic and Social Commentary: The author critiques modern consumerism, describing a "debt-fueled consumer society" with global overcapacity leading to perverse incentives like mass immigration and broken households to sustain demand.

Technology and Business: Posts from 2005 delve into business concepts like TAM (Total Addressable Market), indicating a background in tech or semiconductor industries. (author: yep!)

Personal Grievances: A notable post expresses disillusionment with Rice University, where the author feels alienated despite decades of connection, suggesting a sense of betrayal by institutions they once valued

Political and Cultural Views: The author critiques progressive ideologies, indicating a conservative or libertarian lean. They lament societal trends like the prioritization of consumerism over savings and the financial struggles of Americans despite spending on luxury goods.

The tone is reflective, sometimes sarcastic, and critical of mainstream narratives, with a focus on systemic issues and personal frustrations. The blog appears to be a platform for the author to process observations and vent dissatisfaction with societal, institutional, and personal challenges.

Psychological Profile and Analysis of the Author

Based on the content and tone of the blog, the following psychological profile and analysis can be inferred about the author.

Cognitive Style: Analytical and Critical

Their use of frameworks indicates intellectual rigor and a preference for systemic analysis

Personality Traits: High Conscientiousness, Low Agreeableness

The author likely has a strong sense of personal standards and is unafraid to express unpopular opinions, which may stem from confidence in their expertise or a reaction to feeling marginalized by changing societal norms. (Author: Hey, no AI is going to tell me I have low agreeableness!)

Emotional State: Frustration and Disillusionment

The blog conveys a sense of exasperation with modern society—consumerism, noise pollution, institutional betrayals, and political hypocrisy.

Summary

The author of "The Window Manager" is likely a middle-aged, highly conscientious tech professional with a critical, analytical mindset and a contrarian worldview. They exhibit low agreeableness, expressing sharp critiques of society, institutions, and policies, driven by a mix of truth-seeking and frustration. While detached from mainstream culture, they remain engaged through writing, seeking catharsis and connection with a niche audience. Psychologically, they may grapple with alienation and mild cynicism but demonstrate resilience through continued reflection and expression.

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Not a bad pair of analyses, and neither of them asked me about my mother.

Forced Into Early Retirement, and I am not a Government Worker

2025-03-07T11:52:00.001-06:00

My boss scheduled a “2025 Planning Meeting” for the second week of January. I wanted to take it from the car as a conference call, but he wanted a Teams Meeting, so I assumed at the time he needed to show slides.

I called in, and in sitting in a Brady Bunch montage on the Team call was my boss, the CEO, a regional EVP and two HR representatives. I knew immediately this was a layoff call.

I was magnanimous about it, although it was a chickenshit move to ambush me like that. I have been laid off before, and the last time my boss gave me a head’s that a layoff-list was being made, that he would try to keep me off it, but he didn’t think he would be successful. That allowed me to get my ducks in a row and not be ambushed, and I greatly appreciated the gesture.

This time I was treated no better than the junior engineers that also got the axe. About 10% of the staff was cut, including shutting down all the overseas offices (I ran the US office for this Kraut company). The 90% rump company remaining in Germany is getting absorbed into the larger parent German company, and this subdivision’s products tabled.

Originally the plan was for the overseas offices to merge over to the parent company as well, but the Germans are getting panicked about their economy and decided to make cuts. Europeans are not risk takers, and in the end the layoff decision is not surprising as Germany slides further into economic and cultural irrelevance. The decision all happened before the end of the year and US politics were not a factor any more than the Korea, China and other offices that were shuttered had any influence from their politics.

I was already planning my retirement in 3-4 years, so this move just accelerated those plans. I told them point blank on the call that “I don’t have to work, I work because I want to,”, which is a 100% true statement. And while I will certainly miss the cash flow from an emotional standpoint, it isn’t required to maintain my lifestyle.

But I then got the most insulting comment on the call: “We can give you a good reference!”. Gee, thanks, I am sure there are TONS of jobs waiting in tech for a 50-something business development guy, and your recommendation is going to make all the difference in the world!

My chances of getting another job at a medium-to-large tech company at my age are zero to none. I just might be able to get into a start-up if I know any of the principles personally, but no one my age is starting companies anymore. There is an outside chance someone will toss me a consulting bone here or there, but that is the best I can hope.

So realistically my career in tech is over. I am playing the game of tossing my resume out there and updating my LinkedIn, but by the end of this year I know I will just give up and put “Retired” on my LinkedIn page.

And then what will I do for the next 30 years of my life? I have pondered that a bit before, and my concern is not money but boredom as I go through these last decades.

One Reason Old People Don't Update Their Stuff

2024-10-12T13:59:00.001-05:00

Walk into an old person’s home and chances that it feels old: old furniture, old decor, old everything. I used to think that it was because once you get old you don’t care about keeping up with things, or maybe you don’t have money to keep updating stuff, or maybe you don't want to spend money again on something you already updated when you were younger.

Now I realize there is another reason old people don’t update their stuff: they don’t realize how fast time is passing. I ran into this exact experience with my home WIFI network of all things.

I spent a lot of time putting in a mesh WIFI network into my home in 2018. I got it working, then pretty much forgot about it. When I turned on my home devices, they got internet. If I got a new gadget, I hooked it up to the network and it worked.

Now 2018 doesn’t seem too long ago (to me), but it is SIX years ago, over 2,000 days. When I was a kid six years took forever, and I got not one, but two college degrees in six years, which also seemed to last forever when I was a young adult.

And in tech, six years is definitely a huge amount of time, and during that time WIFI got updated, faster, could go further, and so on. Time had passed me by, and I didn’t even know it since to me in my 50s, six years now seems like six months.

I would have still been oblivious about my ancient WIFI system but I ran across an online bandwidth tester, tried it out and saw it was much lower than the big number that my cable company justifies for their ever increasing monthly rate. So I spent a whopping $200 at Amazon for a new system and took all of ten minutes to upgrade my home network. My home network is now five times faster than it was, with a noticeable improvement in buffering and latency.

Now this was cheap and easy to do, so it was not about money or technical ability. It just never occurred to me how much time had passed since I installed it. If you had asked me when I put in my WIFI system I would have said it felt like a year or two ago.

So I was getting old inside my house and not even knowing it, which I now realize happens to a lot of old people. They are just fine with what is going on inside their house, they just don’t realize how fast time is passing outside of it.

You Can’t Bequeath Kindle Books

2024-10-04T11:10:00.004-05:00

After my dad passed away I had to go through the mess that was his office. Buried in one of his desk drawers was my mother’s iPad. She passed away in early 2022, so her vintage 2018 iPad sat buried in a drawer for two and a half years.

Thinking I might be able to Ebay it for $50 I re-powered the battery and booted it up and spent all of one minute cracking the pass code using her birthday. Once I was in I found my dad did delete her email before throwing it into a drawer, but he didn’t delete her Kindle ap.

Kindle was still was linked her unused Amazon account (separate from my Dad’s) and has over 100 books, a treasure trove of reading that she would have paid over $1K from the time she started migrating from paper to electronic around 2012. The problem is how to get $1K of content off the old $50 iPad over to MY iPad?

Turns out that when you buy an ebook, you don’t own it. You only are getting a license to use it untilyou die. That’s right, ebooks and similar content cannot be passed down or transferred, so I can’t tell Amazon I am the rightful heir and to send that $1K of ebooks my way post haste. In fact, if you tell Amazon someone is dead and prove it they will clamp down their account right quick.

The obvious way around this would be to pretend she is still alive, log into her Amazon account, and put me on “family sharing”, which is how you normally share ebooks in a household. I luckily found her old Amazon password on a piece of paper in another drawer, which sat idle for the past two and a half years. The bad news is after 2.5 years without activity Amazon wants two-factor proof for me to log in, and both the email and phone that are on her account were shut down long ago.

I could try to social engineer Amazon Support into updating her account with a new email and phone (and over the phone is the only way to do this), or I could just use her old iPad as a reader until I get through her content.

Before deciding what to do I went through the content and deleted anything I already read, which removed over two dozen books (mostly books we recommended to one another, so makes sense). Looking at what was left, turns out her tastes were a bit different from mine. The remaining library is a good 2/3 police procedurals, which I might grab for a plane flight, but otherwise find boring (same story over and over). The remaining 1/3 has a few novels which look interesting, but in the end it is definitely not the full $1K in content I was originally expecting.

At the end of the day I will skip trying to cheat my way past Amazon and just keep the iPad as a reader until I get through the books I want to read, then finally get rid of it. By the time I sell the old iPad its value will be less than the $50 it is worth today, but I will make up for that by reading a few books off it.

YouTube Category “Scantily Clad Women Playing Piano”

2024-09-28T12:52:00.003-05:00

I (re)started playing piano ten months ago as a hobby. My mother made me take lessons as a kid, which I hated, then half a century later I tried it again and was like “Wow, I really enjoy this, why didn’t I do this sooner?” My second thought is “How good can I get before I die?”

My main interest is classical, so right now I am working on – count ‘em – four Chopin pieces. Some YouTuber I was watching early in my hobby said “Every serious piano student has a special relationship with Chopin”, which I thought “yeah, whatever”, then three months later I was going OCD on Chopin.

My main piano teacher is Mr. YouTube, which carries just an amazing array of teachers. Whatever your style, musical interest, or main learning method, there is someone out there making videos for you (usually with a come-on to subscribe for custom content or remote lessons). What I really like is pulling ideas and techniques from multiple people: this guy had a great comment that made my mind “click” on chord inversions, that gal has an interesting technique for fingering, etc. And when I get stuck on something simple (two handed fingering for the non-standard B-flat scale), there is always a video with the answer. I think a lot of my quick progress is having this wide an access to teachers and techniques instead of just old, tired Mrs. Lassiter when I was seven.

Since YouTube is feeding me piano lessons and techniques, it started feeding me similar subjects like “Scantily Clad Women Paying the Piano”. Now, I get why these are out there. For men, having an almost naked women playing beautiful music in the background while you relax is practically a Jungian archetype. I just find the existence of the content amusing and wonder if the audience is music nerds who need eye candy, or people who are looking for eye candy and put up with the classical music.

For the record the performers are talented, and I give them extra marks for being able to concentrate with high drafts.

My guess is the audience is just lonely male musicians as there are plenty of other YouTube topics that throw in babes. Case in point is there are a bunch of “Home Repair Do It Yourself” videos that instead of having Bob or Frank walk you through how to replace a water heater, it is instead a woman in a bikini. And if a guy has to watch a YouTube video of something, why not add some eye candy?

Slowly Erasing my Father

2024-09-19T17:27:00.003-05:00

My father passed away about a month ago, and I am the named executor of the estate. However, I didn't get the death certificate for five weeks, and now I have to wait another month or two for a probate hearing. So for the next couple of months the estate is in a sort of a gray zone waiting for things to happen, but in the mean time I have to manage his estate and data.

My dad did leave a notebook with his passwords, so I got access to my father’s email, cellphone, bank and other on-line accounts, and I am taking this gray zone time to figure out where his assets are, closing on-line accounts (Amazon), and moving any ongoing emails that are needed over to my email (mostly utilities). Basically I am erasing his on-line presence and replacing it with mine, a sort of benevolent ID hack.

I don’t know what I would do if I had not found his password notebook, randomly stored in a drawer, as this has been an extremely time consuming and exhausting process even when I had access to about 90% of his accounts.

The funny part is when his bank got word of his death. In general there are two ways banks find out someone died:

Someone (usually the heirs) tells them.
Social Security Tells Them – This happens when SS needs to claw back any funds they distributed in a bank account. The claw back depends on the timing of the last SS payment and the date of death.

Unfortunately since the death certificate took so long, the SS got wind after an extra payment, and had to claw back, so told the bank. The funny part is how Chase froze his account, by saying it was $99 BILLION over withdrawn. That will certainly freeze it until I get the Letters Testamentary, then I go into a Chase branch and turn it into an Estate Account.

Today's Kids Think "Cicero" Must be a Rap Group

2024-09-17T13:35:00.002-05:00

My grandmother's high school diploma from 1931. Look at the options for getting your 16 required credits, which she focused on the classics like Caesar, Cicero and Virgil. Compare that with the average college graduate today. And this was from a podunk region in Tennessee, not some big metropolis like NYC or Boston.

Dying Dad's Tangled Finances

2024-08-16T16:11:00.002-05:00

My already occasional blogging has taken a back seat so I can deal with my father being put into hospice. The prostate cancer that he said he was “free of” some six months ago has metastasized throughout his body and he has weeks left, which will be spent bedridden in a state of stupor, with small periods of lucidity.

This is bad, but not my biggest issue. The problem is the old man is 85 years old and he did zero planning for any sort of care, his finances, banking, anything. This health episode started almost two months ago with a rush to the hospital, from which time he has not been able to manage his affairs. And no one has any idea about his bank accounts, bills, credit cards, anything.

So I had to start a “forensic accounting” of his life, digging through files and papers trying to make sense of everything. He did not leave a list or information of any kind, like he was going to live forever I guess? Unlike me he was a very unorganized man and a procrastinator. Maybe he figured he would get to organizing everything one day and never did.

I did manage to finagle a Power of Attorney (POA) during one of his few moments of lucidity, but that has proven to be almost worthless. Banks basically ignore POAs when the person is incapacitated since they are more afraid of fraud than making you angry (what you going to do, sue BofA?). So banks just ignore the POA and wait, figuring you’ll show back up soon enough with proof of death and Letters Testamentary. If you have those two pieces of paper, which means you have a probated estate, they have all sorts of standard processes and procedures to get you going quickly. Until then, too bad.

So unable to have “him” pay for anything, including his credit cards and bills, I have had to pay all my father’s bills personally, including his dying. Care is super complicated since he decided to re-marry at 83, just 18 months after my mother and his wife of 60 years died (he never lived alone and couldn’t). This new 87-year-old wife wanted him to “die at home”, and since spouses get decisions over health care, could make that decision. Problem was she wouldn’t pay for it, and the old man was unconscious and unable to do anything, and we couldn’t get into his accounts. So I ended up footing the home nursing bill at $1300 a day! After three weeks of that to the tune of about $25,000, the new wife broke down about him dying in the home and nurses being there 24-7, so I thankfully rushed him by ambulance to a nice managed care facility for a much more reasonable $350 a day, which he will stay for the last couple weeks of his life. He's barely conscious for 30 minutes a day so it really doesn't matter where it is as long as someone is taking care of his medical needs.

All up, all in, I have paid about $30,000 of my own money to take care of him, his bills and his credit cards. I can legally get this back from his estate – and since I will be executor will not be difficult - but that will take time.

He was just lucky he had a kid liquid enough to take this on. There were some super easy things he could have done like just listing his bills and accounts in one place, putting a POA in place at the bank when he could walk in and do it himself face-to-face, or arranging for end-of-life care. Heck, I do not even know what his funeral wishes are as he never wrote them down, so I am already running around spending time planning and making decisions for that.

Managing his affairs and health has effectively become a full-time job, but one that will end in a few weeks and becomes estate management.

"Trapped" In California

2024-07-22T16:42:00.002-05:00

I don’t know how many times I have told myself “I got to get out of this state”, especially during Covid, yet here I am, still, after 26 years and almost half my life. The main thing keeping here through most of that time was my kids, but now they're launched and out of the nest, the main thing keeping me in Coastal California is the weather and the scenery.

I hate to admit that something that seems trivial in an era of air conditioning is keeping me in a place that I despise politically, but I’ll visit locations and stand outside sweating, looking out and the flat boring land for miles and miles around and think “I’d hate living here even if the politics fit me better”.

To be fair I am a bit immune to the worst California has to offer. I no longer have kids in the California education system. I am protected from the rocketing crime rates since I live in an enclave that actually enforces the law. And I bought into California real estate a quarter century ago so am mostly immune to the high cost of real estate. But if I were younger, had kids in school, and was looking at one-million-dollar starter homes with no existing assets, I would forget the nice weather and 12-month outdoor activities and move my ass somewhere else.

BUT I do think I will need to leave eventually. That 12 months of outdoor activities is already slowing down as I age (no one tells out how badly and quickly your body falls apart after 50). As I spend less time outdoors, the less important the weather is becoming. Retirement planning, income taxes and the like also start looming larger, and soon the weather will be overrun by other considerations.

But where?

Texas - I have ruled out going back to my home state of Texas – it is getting too crowded and dense, all the small towns I remember as a kid are all now absorbed into the major metropolitan areas. In my lifetime all the main cities will merge into one giant city of Houston-Austin-San Antonio-Dallas covering half the state, one giant suburb with enormous amounts of traffic and endless rows of strip malls.
Arizona - I just got back from Arizona, and while it looks good on paper (low cost of living, low taxes, independent libertarian bent in much of the state) it is too friggen hot AND too friggen tan. No greenery. No trees. Its mountains can be nice, but I need green. Oh, and its HOT!
Florida - The Villages, which is the largest retirement community in the US, is a hoot, and everyone should visit just to see what it is all about. It is basically a land-based cruise ship with everyone partying and golfing, and would be fun for a couple of weeks, but would wear thin after that. Plus it is super hot in the summer, and the topology is pretty boring - flat and few trees in what is essentially reclaimed swamp land. They just stamp out houses on endless flat land that stretches out for miles, so if topography is important, this is not your place.

I also checked out the Florida coastal areas, which are nice and green and lush - when they are not mowed over by a hurricane. Coastal Florida is on the maybe list, maybe more serious if I slow down a lot in my 60s or 70s, and maybe I will swing back for more exploring in another year or so.

Nevada - Reno has a nice feel: just enough city to be interesting but feels like a small town out in the burbs. The issue there is the weather is extreme – too hot in the summer, then too cold in the winter. I know a couple that just moved away from Reno since they hated the temperature swings. Most of Reno is also in a valley in the flight path to the airport, so air traffic noise is pretty bad in most of the neighborhood areas.

Tahoe is too expensive – might as well stay in California. Henderson, Summerlin and the burbs of Vegas have the heat issue, of course, but now also over-development and crowding. I was in Summerlin for the first time in a decade last summer and was shocked by the amount of development, which isn’t going to slow down.

So nothing is striking me yet. Next up I will be exploring the Tennessee-Carolinas area. This is getting out of my geographic comfort zone as I have no family or friends out there, but let’s see how the climate and topography trade off.

The Hardest Part of Home Repair: Knowing the Part Name

2024-07-13T11:27:00.001-05:00

The hardest part of home maintenance is knowing the names of things.

I see something in my house that needs fixing and I think “I need to replace the thingy behind the thing”.

So I try a web search and look for “thingy behind the thing” and no luck. So I then go out into The Real World and find a helper at Home Depot. But then my pride gets in the way when the always middle-aged guy says to know what I need, he first needs to understand how my fromter is connected to the wannuzit before he can figure out what my thingy is.

I nod gravely feigning understanding the fromter since I don’t want to let on I am not versed in the masculine arts. Telling him I use a 220 volt fromter (or 221 volt, whatever it takes), he waives me to a 100 yard isle filled with fromters, wannuzits and thingies that connect them, and sometimes I stumble on the solution, but usually not.

In the end I usually figure it out with a lot of YouTube, studying schematics, and often lucky guesses. On the last go around I finally figured out the thingy was called an “escutcheon”

Musings of a Reformed Road Warrior

2024-07-03T16:31:00.001-05:00

Hong Kong. Tel Aviv. Seoul. I would travel and travel, at one point I estimated I spent 1000 nights in hotel rooms. Today I hardly want to leave the house, and I largely don’t. What happened?

Besides burn-out I think it takes someone unique to be a road warrior, and it’s something I lost. Extreme travel I think takes someone searching, someone seeking.

The movie 2009 “Up in the Air” I thought captured it perfectly. Every time I watch that movie I point at the screen and yell “that was me!”. The George Clooney character in that movie is lost, doesn’t have a home life. I had a wife and kid during my travel days, but my then-wife exclaimed that I wanted to be on the road to be away from her, which had an element of truth.

But the desire to be on be road was ultimately about searching, yearning, trying to find the Thing Out There when you can’t find in yourself.

I’d try to find it in all the lonely haunts I went alone: back allies in Kyoto, quaint plazas in Barcelona, 300 year old pubs in Brussels. When I found an interesting place alone, I'd think I’d be back one day with the One, the Ultimate Gratifier. And the thought of The One, in The Place Again, One Day, and it would be enough to fill the empty hours of nothingness I’d feel for the days and hours I traveled alone in the far airports, the isolated hotel rooms. The fantasy of Gatsby’s orgiastic future with Daisy would sustain me through the glum of the alone now.

But the yearning, the seeking, it was all an illusion, maybe a self-pacifying coping mechanism for the hours of boredom, days of loneliness. There was no internet back then, CDs and paperbacks the only connection during weeks-long overseas trips. So it was on the Self that all that alone time focused on.

I eventually figured it out, captured myself. I found I didn’t need to go out and try to find It outside of me. By the mid 2010s I’d gotten promoted out of road warrior status, and by Covid I found myself content to be at home and focus inward on the new home life I’d established.

Today I don’t even like to travel domestically if not for vacation, not seeing the point of the effort. What a change from when I’d eagerly grasp at any travel at all.

I see young people and laugh when they claim they want to travel the world to “change who they are”. World travel doesn’t change you, it makes you more of who you are.

Maybe a small part of me misses it, but when I think of the hours and hours of trying to fill the hours, I change my mind.

It’s Time for Southwest Airlines to Change

2024-06-28T09:59:00.001-05:00

I don’t know anything about the airline industry from a business standpoint, just as a customer that has done heavy travel for most of my career, with over 2 million miles of travel.

There has been a lot of discussion and rumors about Southwest changing its open seating policy, and I think it is time for it to change to match changes in business, and more importantly changes in society.

Back in the mid 1990s I had a year when I flew Southwest every single week for a year. I was working in Houston for a company that had a big project in Dallas, so every Monday morning I got on the 7am Southwest HOU-DAL shuttle, and usually came back on the reverse shuttle the same afternoon. That shuttle still runs both directions every hour, and if you get to the airport early you just hop on the earlier flight, get there late just hop on the next one, easy as pie.

Since it is a short flight – 45 minutes wheels up to down – back in the 1990s the afternoon flight had a big ice chest outside the gateway with ICE COLD BEER. Instead of a stewardess coming down the isle, taking an order, returning with your suds, and you trying to down the beer in the 10 minutes remaining, you just picked up your beer as you got on the plane! It was awesome! Of course back then the stewardesses were all young and pretty, wore short-shorts during the hot Texas summers, and everyone on the plane from crew to passengers were basically having a good time. Those shuttles were 99% businessmen back then (maybe a few women) and very few vacation travelers, kids, or people who normally frequent Greyhound bus terminals.

Alas those fun days are gone. Today’s Southwest experience always has screaming kids, derelicts and weirdos on every flight. For some reason, while assigned seating doesn’t mean those people WON’T be seated by you, it seems with the open seating the percentage chance of the person next you being the screaming kid or 300 pound behemoth seems higher. Maybe since there are no higher price assigned seats like other airlines, there is no subtle caste system that puts better quality people in the economy plus and business sections (and people who seat their undisciplined screaming kids in business class should be shoved out the door without a parachute at 30,000 feet)

What I am saying is the class of people flying has dropped dramatically, but so has the class of the average American. Besides most Americans becoming fat lazy slobs with tatoos, everyone is self-absorbed and think nothing of playing phone videos without headphones, screaming over the phone, letting their hellion kids disturb everyone around them, blocking aisles in airport throughways, and so on. With most people in society not fit to be around in close quarters, Southwest should go back to assigned seating and put the bus people at the back of the plane together, like the rest of the airlines.

Southwest also used to be the low-price airline, but I have not seen them beat anyone on price anywhere there is direct competition. This means I only fly Southwest when there is no alternative, and grit my teeth during boarding as I wonder how overweight and how much of my seat companion I will be in constant contact with over the next 2-3 hours.

The Forgotten Employee

2024-06-18T13:26:00.003-05:00

For the second time in my career my company has been acquired and being integrated into a much larger organization. And while the gears of the large company grind to integrate the engineers, technology and roadmap, I have been forgotten until all the tech stuff is done, which will end up being about half a year. This exact same thing happened to me about eight years ago.

I have a job, and am getting paid full salary and benefits, but I am not given much to do while this is all happening. I literally have 3-4 emails a day to address, an occasional conference call, then I am done. Since I work from home I am free to pursue what other interests I might have after about an hour of work.

This might sound great since it sounds like retirement on full salary pension and benefits, but actually it is a bit boring because I am not really retired. While I have nothing to do it is not like I can take off to Hawaii or go on a two-week cruise and leave my laptop behind; I am tethered to email and a phone to answer the few items that are lobbed my way from time to time, so I can’t fully check out. The down time does give me a chance to address a few health issues that I have been putting off, pursue a couple of hobbies more seriously, and start seriously planning for “real” retirement.

I do have to go through a variety of “on-line-training” for new BigCo employees. I also had to attend in person “new employee orientation” at the US headquarters, and it was a bit humorous with me as a middle-aged guy near the end of his career in a company orientation with about a dozen new Gen-Z hires just out of college. Talk about culture clash, and maybe I will write about that experience.

Supposedly after this interregnum I will become super busy once again with new products to sell from my previous company (now subdivision), a customer book assigned to me, and will back in Sales Mode with both virtual and in-person selling (so back on the road). The issue then will be if I really want to go back into full work mode and the grind of present-day business travel.

The last time this happened I left the company and went to another start-up (my present company that is being absorbed) after the integration was complete and my down-time was over, but at my age and stage of life I may just go ahead and pull the chute for early “real” retirement this time around.

How Long Does One Keep Furniture?

2024-06-10T12:20:00.006-05:00

My parents went out as newlyweds in 1958 and bought solid oak furniture, then used it through the time my mother passed away in 2022. It's all still sitting in the Old Man’s house in 2024 as he “maybe” gets ready for an estate sale and downsizing: coffee table, end tables, bedroom suite…

That’s 66 years of using the same furniture, two thirds of a century. Now these aren’t and will never will be antiques. They were sold to yuppy-equivalents in the late 1950s at department stores like Macy’s.

One way to think about this furniture is sentimental, as there are decades of family pictures with them in the background, mostly Christmases and Thanksgivings, sitting there as silent witnesses to the growing up and leaving of the kids, the aging of the couple who bought them, the death of one of the buyers after six decades, and soon the second.

But instead of being sentimental about it, seeing these pieces actually makes me a bit angry. “Why didn’t my parents ever update their furniture? Were they cheap or is it a depression-era generational thing?”. “Did they not pay attention to evolving tastes and styles?”. “Modern furniture is not that expensive, why did they hang on to it?”, and so on.

So to be fair to them I wandered around my house and figured out the ages of all my furniture, wondering what was the oldest piece I own. But I am not a good comparison since I got divorced not once, but twice, so started over with nothing at 30 then almost nothing again at 40. The second time I did end up with my nice home-office desk I had bought a few years before, which as the only worldly possession I owned after the second divorce, I could say it’s a $250,000 desk. It is now the the oldest piece of furniture I own: 20 years old.

But I won’t have it much longer. When I retire in a few years I plan to walk out of my current house with some clothes and start over again at 60 (but keep the wife and bank accounts this time). I will be downsizing and moving to another state, and there is no reason to haul any of my current furniture with me. If I am lucky that will be the last time I start over, but if not, then I will walk away with nothing yet again for the last time in a few more decades, checking into some furnished care facility at the very end.

I just have a different mindset about furniture so shouldn’t be too hard on my parents about keeping the same pieces all their lives, but it still bothers me a bit every time I walk into that house and see furniture that was already old and out of date and I hated when I was kid.

Bobby Knight Style Employee Motivation

2024-05-29T15:59:00.002-05:00

For those of you under a certain age, Bobby Knight was a legendary, controversial, and very winning basketball coach. He is best known for throwing a chair across a basketball court and getting ejected. Did the stunt fire up his team? Damn right it did. He threw histrionics, got into the face of his players and seemed emotionally unhinged most of the time.

But this style of coaching is a form of play-acting. The emotions are real and raw, but it is a performance calculated to push a team or the people you are leading to an emotional edge, and from that edge get everyone motivated, or get a different perspective of things.

This style of management and coaching is pretty much dead in the US as it won't really work with snowflakes and the fragile millennials swamping the system. Today's millennials are all like Peggy here in this clip, who just want a pat on the head. For those of you not familiar with the show Mad Men, this is Peggy's manager Don going over the emotional edge trying to get Peggy to accept business life as it is, not as a play-date with participation trophies and thank-yous. But both the lesson and the coaching style are lost on her.

I'm old enough to have witnessed this style a couple of times. Back when I had football coaches, I was at a halftime team meeting when the coach hit a wall saying we were messing things up, then pointed into the locker room and said "You're smiling, this isn't funny!". Everyone froze wondering who was laughing at the coach, then he went totally off the rails ranting on how this was another example of us not taking it seriously, to the point it was sort of scary seeing that much anger. We were all shaken, full of adrenaline and fired up after that, then went out and kicked butt in the second half. Later everyone on the team talked about it and we decided no one was smiling - it was all an act to fire everyone up.

I also have seen this technique in the business world, more recently, but with a very powerful CEO of a public tech company, so maybe this style does exist in small pockets very high up in high-performing companies.

In this case I was in a senior meeting with my boss, CEO of a small tech company, and he pretty much started lying about what our company's technology could do. I sort of sat there sort of quietly gasping, but this other CEO knew bullshit when he heard it and started leading my CEO down a path of questioning, and with each bullshit answer this CEO kept going louder and louder with each succeeding question until he was yelling at the top of his lungs. I did not see this a true anger, but actually thought this guy was actually trying to help my CEO by going through an object lesson, a sort of play-acting.

But my CEO wasn't getting it, not because he was a snowflake and upset, but because he was literally oblivious to the lesson. He basically shrugged it off and didn't take anything away from the encounter as if lying about tech is just what you did and if people got angry, so what.

So like Don is finding in this clip, this is an old technique that maybe has a very limited place in sports coaching, but less and less effective in the business world.