FitBit(e) Me

Gingko berries: abundant, smelly, delicious (?). Find the answers here. 

I first strapped on my Fitbit on October 25. It's been my bossy, know-it-all little friend ever since.

I got the Fitbit because I don't trust the heart monitoring sensors on the equipment at the gym. It seemed impossible that my heart rate could be so high.

Now I wonder.

Anyway. Now, not only do I know all about my heart rate, I am fully briefed on the steps I've taken, the calories I've burned and how well I have slept.

The gist: I get enough exercise; I don't get enough sleep. And it takes everything I can do in a day to burn 2,000 calories.

A few surprising things about my new gadget: the Fitbit is a movie critic. While I watched the new Coen brothers movie - the Ballad of Buster Scruggs - on Netflix, the 'Bit said "Oh, I see you've taken a nap."

The 'Bit is also easy to fool. I chopped vegetables to make a pot roast and it said, "Overachiever! You're 2,000 steps over your goal!"

Thanks for reading!

Karen

I made this in 2,367 steps.

Kids These Days

Greater than teen pregnancy or drugs or alcohol, the prevailing parental prohibition of my youth was ear piercing. My folks were agin it. Father said so many times it's seared in my aural memory that if any of us got our ears pierced we'd get our heads pierced, too.

And then, quietly, without fanfare, on the day of her eighteenth birthday, my oldest sister Carol went to the jewellery store - Bruinix - in downtown Trenton, and had her ears pierced. 

The sky did not fall. Father did not pierce her head. A precedent had been set.

The next one across the bright line was, of all people, my mother.

That was it. I got my ears pierced.

Back then you could wander into a jewellery store and have a retail clerk under not sanitary conditions use a sort of staple gun to install gold-plated studs through the fleshy, tender but comparatively blood-vessel-free part of your ear lobe. 

Then you were to turn the stud every day and apply copious amounts of hydrogen peroxide to your ear. Infections were common.

After I'd had my pierced ears for a while, I'd amassed a collection of single earrings, so I had another store clerk put another hole in my head some time in the mid-80's.

And that was it. As the years passed and tattoo and piercing parlours took an increasing share of the "do weird shit to your body" market, my flesh remained unsullied but for the three small additional holes in my ear lobes.

Until now.

I bought myself some sapphire studs for my birthday this year. I already have a pair of diamond studs that Bruce got me for Christmas a while back. That's four earrings. But I have only three holes.

You can appreciate my dilemma.

So I googled "best piercing parlour Toronto." Chronic Ink, three blocks from here on Yonge Street at Gerrard is the local favourite according to Yelp. I called to see if I needed an appointment. I didn't. But I did, said the young man on the phone, need to eat before I came. "For your blood sugar levels," he explained.

So, after lunch, I walked over to Yonge Street and up four flights of stairs (Chronic Ink is over the fine old bank building formerly occupied by the Elephant and Castle) and entered a space different from any I'd ever been in to date.

This was Monday, November 12 at about 2 in the afternoon. Four or five of the ten or so tattoo stations were occupied. The tattoo chairs were a cross between a chaise lounge and a dentist's chair, upholstered in black leather or leather-like material. There were lots of latex-free gloves and face masks. Everyone was twenty-five or younger.

Trying to blend in, I pulled out my phone and read Facebook posts while I waited.

I also filled in a form, signed a disclaimer, and bought, for about $100, the "jewel" that would be inserted in my ear lobe. The piercing itself was $25. 

Of course the person who provided the service was young enough to be my granddaughter. Everyone these days is.

She was pleasant and skilled and did her job with dispatch. I imagined it was one of the usual enquiries someone in her trade makes, to see if the customer has had any bad experiences with past piercings, when she asked me when I'd gotten the other piercings in my ears.

To my credit, I did not say "twenty years before you were born, dear." 

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Ways of Seeing

I've blogged before about the poster in this week's picture. It hangs in an examination room at the clinic where I see my family doctor. 

The last time I wrote about it, I observed how traditional depictions of a thing can be different from their current version. Christmas was the example I used. 

I surreptitiously took this shot on Thursday when I was visiting the doctor for a routine test. 

I'm still sorting out my feelings about it. (The poster I mean. Not the test.)

On the one hand, the poster has a grade school textbook appeal; it conveys a simple message that could build a foundation for understanding more complex ideas such as, for example, in the USA, you could hear every one of the ways to say "hello" in just one place. 

On the other hand, these days, a cheerful depiction of girl-positive racial diversity feels like nostalgia for a lost age. 

Eyeball Update

The last we heard of Bruce's eye was when he went in for his "final" procedure at the end of August. That was to remove the oil bubble in his eye, replace it with an air bubble and, within a couple of days, Bruce's vision in that eye was to come back to what would be the new normal.

Except that didn't happen.

A week after the procedure, Bruce still couldn't see at all out of the eye. The doc peered into the gooey depths and saw a lot of blood. Bruce might, said the doc, have to have another surgery to remove the blood.

The idea of putting Bruce's poor, perforated eyeball through another procedure did not appeal to us in any way. We opted to wait for a while longer.

But, when the eyeball doc declared in late October that not only was the blood still there, it seemed fresh, Bruce resigned himself to undergo another procedure. It didn't seem like there was any other choice.

He booked another surgery for November 1. 

And then, almost immediately, Bruce's eyesight improved. A quick trip to the doc confirmed the eye was clearing. 

Bruce cancelled the last procedure. He can see again.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

That's Real Life

Hallowe'en at the Ministry: Deni, a policy analyst on my team, is the late, great, Ontario Hydro, the Crown corporation privatized into Hydro One in 1999.

Twice this past week I pretended I was something I'm not. Hallowe'en had nothing to do with it. I went to work dressed up as a bureaucrat that day.

On Tuesday I was the Innovation Manager at the WestEnergy coal-fired power facility situated in the fictional land of Newtonia. In that role, I failed to persuade my CEO to invest in renewable energy early enough and, by our third year, our company was getting crushed by the competition. 

On Thursday, I was a 35-year-old, freshly minted Senior Vice-President of a pharmaceutical and cosmetics company. In that role, I had to let my star performer, Jamie, know that she was not going to get that promotion she had her eye on. 

These roles were in safe-to-fail simulations. So I embraced the learning and failed in each.

My first "year" as Innovation Manager went well enough. I brokered a four-way partnership to install Newtonia's first section of smart grid. But, then, real life got in the way and I had to step away from the simulation to brief the Premier's Office.

By the time I got back, it was year three, the plant was still burning coal and the competition had gobbled up the scarce supply of renewable power. Worse, my corporate colleagues had gotten used to my not being there and I had no real role.

I went rogue and cooked up a deal with the federal government and a local steel company to build a carbon sequestration plant, clean up the power that we had and sell it to fussy, climate-conscious customers.  

While I was doing that the CEO made a deal to buy fusion power from another energy utility, rendering both the coal plant and carbon sequestration deal obsolete. Since this wasn't real life, I easily shouldered the broken deal and sold the coal plant back to the market.

Thursday's simulation was part of a day-long training session put on by the Ivey business school. The 35-year-old Senior Vice President was a featured player in a case study. 

The class bashed around the case study for about a half an hour. The senior VP needed to choose between two candidates, Jamie, the star, and Michael. 

I held firm to the position that Jamie was the best candidate. Others in the class switched over to Michael because he seemed less risky. The class did finally agree that Jamie, even if she was the better choice, had room to develop.

Then the trainer asked the question, "who would like to coach Jamie?" 

I said I would, because I thought the question was rhetorical.

Turns out not. After about a minute to prepare, I was seated at the front of the room and the trainer brought Jamie in.

Jamie was smartly dressed, in her mid-to-late thirties and looked every inch like the person in the case study. 

After some animated small talk, I started with what felt to me like neutral questions about where she thought she needed to develop.

Things went badly after that.

I can't disclose the details without edging onto Ivey's intellectual property, but, leadership skills other than coaching got tested that day.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Hallowe'en at the Ministry:
Emma's a Spice Girl.

Class Reunion

Fall colours: the Brickworks, Don River Valley, October 14, 2018

Against all odds, I went to a law school reunion last night. It's been 25 years since the class of '93 threw off the shackles of being indentured students and took on the shackles of practicing law.

But that's not the reason I went. 

There were probably parts of law school that I enjoyed, but, for a long time after, those were not the parts I recalled. I remembered being alienated, appalled and annoyed by law school and, by association, a lot of the people I went to law school with. 

Everyone whose company I enjoyed at law school, and who still lives in Toronto, I've continued to see. So I never saw reunions as a thing I needed to do.

But, this time, people whose company I enjoyed and who had moved away from Toronto were making the trek for the 25th year reunion. 

So I put on a new dress, a 100% sequinned jacket and a punishing pair of heels. Bruce, sporting an eye patch because of the wear and tear on his poor old eyeball, came and got me after work on Friday. We walked across Queen's Park to the law building on the University of Toronto campus.

It was a good party, even though the food circulating on trays set new standards for grim. Most of the people we were hoping to see were there. There were a couple of other people I was glad to connect with, but the din of the crowd made conversation impossible. The floors were bare concrete; I was in agony by the second hour on my feet.   

The law school rebuilds itself every quarter century or so. A new library went up the first year I was there. That library has been superseded by a massive new structure that the alumni association was eager to show the party guests. I passed on the tour, my feet were so sore.

If I make it to my 50th reunion, no doubt there will be an even bigger new building to tour around. It's also certain I won't wear heels.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Stakeholdering

Domus emergen: the march of the fifty storey towers continues skyward 

Last week I alluded to a post from April 2016, where I mocked an unnamed Assistant Deputy Minister for using the word "stakeholder" as a verb.  You know... "we stakeholdered last month and are planning to do more stakeholdering next month ...."

Lazy, ugly jargon like this drives me crazy. 

The unidentified ADM in that post was from the Ministry of Energy, where I now work and where I fight a daily rearguard action against my staff's use of this irritating term in briefing materials.

This past week, I also finally met some energy sector stakeholders for a real live conversation about a proposed regulatory initiative.

None of my team or I knew these guys, but none of us expected anything different from the usual order of mumbled introductions, feigned interest in one another's opinions and friendly competition for air time. The meeting was really just to get the conversation going. My team and I expected to take whatever we got and use it for a more brass tacks discussion next week.

Just to get everything on the table early, after we all introduced ourselves, my team described what we thought was an agreed parameter for the program.

The stakeholders disagreed. Quite a lot. And got real heated about it.

One of them demanded that the meeting end. 

I've had stakeholders wig out on me before. The normal fix is to reassure them that no decisions have been made and that we have these conversations to shine light on areas of disagreement. 

I said it would be very helpful if we did not end the meeting and rather continue the discussion so they could help us understand their expectations which we were suddenly very curious to know.

As two of the folks at the table began to tell us their thoughts, another one - the one who wanted to end the meeting - was texting furiously on his phone.

We all saw this, and one of my team sent me a message saying he thought the stakeholder was texting our Minister's office.

A few minutes later, my boss was at the door of the meeting room, pretending that she needed all of her staff for a higher priority matter. She was very sorry but we would have to reschedule.

Disgusted, mortified, angry, I shut my computer and led my team out of the room. 

The stakeholder had not, as it turns out, sent a text to the Minister's office. 

He sent a text to the Premier's office.

The Premier's Office then contacted my Minister's office, who then contacted my Deputy Minister's office, who then reached out to my boss, who sped from her desk, climbed a flight of stairs, found us and ended the meeting.

This took five or six minutes, tops.

Just so you know that the bureaucracy can move fast when it needs to. 

And now I know why "stakeholdering" is such an ugly word at the Ministry of Energy.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen





















  

Neologisms - Part II

Burgess Shale Beasties - Lovingly recreated at the Tyrrell Museum

I learned two new words this week - new both to me and, I think, to the language.

Anecdata

People sometimes rely on evidence to make decisions. When that evidence is founded only in assertion and uncorroborated by facts, it is called anecdotal evidence. 

Nowadays, data is considered to be one of the highest orders of evidence. If you want to make a good decision, you have to look at the data. If the data is incomplete or cherry picked in order to provide a skewed or corrupt picture, it is anecdata.

A fossil of the first thing you'd think would rot away into nothing.

Consultelling 

When you consult with someone, you share your ideas with them and then respectfully hang around until they have told you what they think. Often what they tell you will help you modify or improve your idea. The name for this behaviour is consultation.

When you share your ideas with someone so they can understand that their fate is sealed so far as you are concerned, that is consultelling. 

****

I heard both these fanciful constructs at an Ivey Executive Training course. I'm not a trainee in the program. Rather, I am coaching a five-person team enrolled in the Ontario Public Service Leadership Development Program, a large part of which is the Ivey training. 

Each five member team - the members carefully selected to be the sorts that drive one another crazy - is challenged to come up with a proposal all three of useful, doable and attractive to the government of the day.

In the time-honoured pedagogical method of setting utter strangers on an impossible task, the empty space below illustrates how much actual information the teams were given to help them get started.






For about three hours on Friday, I sat, listened, said a few things but most of the time bit my tongue as the team struggled to find enough commonality among their number to land on anything at all.

They didn't. But they will. 

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen