BLOCKBUSTER VIDEO – Fort Smith, Arkansas – February 16, 1996
“Excuse me, do you have a copy of Star Trek: Generations?”
“No, we’re all out. Today’s the day it came out. It’s very popular.”
“What the fuck? There are none left?! But I drove here all the way from VAN BUREN!!!”
“Wow, from Van Buren to Rogers Avenue, huh? What an exhausting trip that must be.”
“Can you just check the box?”
“I just checked it two minutes ago. There aren’t any.”
“Can you check it again?? Someone might have dropped it off in those two minutes!”
“It only came out four hours ago!!! You think someone’s gonna rent it, drive home, watch it, then immediately drive back and return it?”
“I NEED YOU TO CHECK AGAIN.” đš
Learning in Secret
When I first started working at Walmart IT in 2004, there was a senior programmer who knew everything there was to know. He wouldn’t teach me anything, for some reason. Maybe he just didn’t like me? I don’t know. There was another new college grad he liked instead, and he spent tons of time teaching him the ins and outs of HP-UX and AIX.
We had cubicles back then, and I would sit in the adjacent pod and secretly listen to everything he said, taking notes. I would ssh into the same machine he was in and tail his terminal history. HP-UX didn’t have bash, only ksh. But it still had a terminal history file, so I’d listen to everything he said from across the cubicle wall and watch his commands scroll by on my mirrored terminal. I’d write down the interesting commands for later research. I learned a lot by doing this.
Whenever there were “blue light” issues, I would try to figure out the root cause myself in secret. I would eavesdrop on his progress and try to figure it out faster myself. I’d try to figure out why the application was down, or repeatedly failing over, or whatever. I knew I wouldn’t be listened to even if I made suggestions. So, I would just keep my ideas to myself. It became a race. Every time there was a critical issue, I wanted to figure it out faster than him.
Of course, only I knew it was a race. It was just in my head. I spent a lot of time in my head. One day, during one of these critical serious down issues, I finally figured out the problem faster than him. It was like beating a chess master. I was so happy.
I meticulously documented everything I saw. I created a large document with a cool-sounding D&D name, compendium of something-or-other. Back then, everyone on that team just memorized everything. I was the first to write documentation for a system that was already old when I joined.
For the next 15 years, even though I’d left that team, my compendium lived on as the bible for how to operate that system. I was thanked over and over again by successive generations of that team for writing that.
Documentation is always painful to write, but I’ve never been sorry for doing so.
It’s crazy to me to think some people are willing to climb to the top of the knowledge mountain and then refuse to share what they know with other people. They guard their knowledge jealously, like a dragon on a pile of gold. Why do this? It only hurts them by making them a silo of knowledge.
The Last of Me
Four years ago, my wife and I stood before a judge. We were there to legally change our sonâs name to from Sarah to Raiden.
The old courtroom was filled with people that day. Some were couples asking for a divorce. These people hated each other on a deep level. They bickered and were petty. It instilled a fear in us. We had both come from divorced parents. Was this a portent of our future? How would we avoid it? What mistake did they make that we could avoid? We had been thinking about how to grow together for nearly two decades. Iâll never forget the look we gave each other listening to those people.
One man was there by himself, with no lawyer. He represented himself and wanted to take on guardianship for a young child. He made a lot of mistakes, and the judge had to take pity on him and help him fill out the paperwork correctly. Itâs scary being in front of a judge. You think theyâre going to yell at you and tell you your whole life is wrong.
We had brought our own lawyer to the courthouse. I had volunteered to take care of everything. I went by myself to the lawyerâs office a month prior to start the process. There was a lot of paperwork. I remember being told that our success would be determined by which judge we were assigned.
Our son had recently come out as transgender. Every day, our family had endured severe panic attacks, suicide threats, and school refusal. A deep sense of panic had pervaded our house for over a year. Sometimes I wondered if it would seep into the walls and haunt us forever. We would do anything to make it stop.
I have a confession to make, though. I donât believe in gender identity. To me, if you have a penis, youâre a boy. If you have a vagina, youâre a girl. I donât say this to attack or persecute anyone. Itâs simply what I believe. I canât force myself to believe in something. I either believe it or I donât.
It feels wrong to me to use different pronouns. It feels like Iâm being forced to lie. It feels like Iâm trapped inside Ayn Randâs novel Anthem. But now, I have to lead my family in a direction I donât even believe in.
âIt is a sin to write this. It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see. It is base and evil. It is as if we were speaking alone to no ears but our own. And we know well that there is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone. We have broken the laws.â – Ayn Rand, Anthem
The reason is because I also believe in personal liberty. I think a person should be able to live their lives as they choose, define themselves as they like, and do as they wish with their own body. Having control over your own life is one of the most important things a person can have. Despite my personal feelings on the matter, I wonât take away someoneâs liberty.
So, I agreed to testosterone treatment for my child. This means I will never have grandchildren. My family line will end forever.
This year, I will pay to have my childâs breasts removed. The term people use is âtop surgeryâ, which feels to me like a pretty fancy euphemism for mutilation. Iâm strongly opposed to people cutting off parts of their own body. But we canât keep enduring this level of pain, either.
Iâm in an unusual position. I have always voted Democrat, but I agree with nearly all the Republican beliefs on transgender issues. I canât talk to right-leaning people about this, though. Even though Iâd agree with them on anything they might say on this, they would hate me for the actions Iâve chosen to take. I canât talk to left-leaning people, either. Even though they would be happy with the decisions Iâve made, they would surely hate me for my beliefs. I stand alone and forsaken in the middle.
Society is very polarized right now. People demand that you agree with them on 100% of their beliefs. If you donât, fuck you, youâre out. I donât think life works that way. People should be more diverse in their thoughts. So, if my words mean Iâm cut out of your weird cult, so be it. No matter which side itâs on.
My goals for raising my children are as follows:
- They should be able support themselves independently of their parents.
- As adults, they should be happy, self-confident, educated, and well-rounded.
- Their relationship with both of their parents is maintained into adulthood.
I believe that these goals canât be achieved without the actions we have taken. I think our strategies are working, so I stand by them.
The Mountain Man
âYou know your momâs a bitch, right? Sheâs a fucking bitch!â
âUh⌠okay.â
âI just think you need to know that. You need to know that your mom is a fucking bitch!!â
It is 1986. I am 10 years old. My dad is in the middle of a long rant about his ex-wife (my mom). He imparts this information as fatherly wisdom, looking me in the eye to be absolutely sure I get the message. He then apologizes that I have to live with such a terrible person.
My parents are divorced, and this is one of my forced bi-weekly visits. Every time I see him, I have to listen to long tirades on how much he hates her. I am in no way equipped to handle his rage or his marital problems.
âYou know, the only reason youâre here is because the courts say you HAVE to be here.â
âOkay.â
I am riding in his Jeep along the barren roads of Oklahoma. On the floorboard, there is a large piece of cardboard that covers a hole in the floor. If I move it aside, I can see the road rushing past us underneath.
We are headed to his home on Buffalo Mountain. I hate having to come here. He lives in a cabin with no electricity and no running water. This keeps me away from my Commodore 64 computer, which is my current obsession. If I need to use the bathroom, I have to head out into the woods and find a private spot with a large pile of leaves.
âNEVER get married, boy. Women are all bitches.â
âOkay.â
âAll they want is your money! If I ever get married again, I want you to slap me as hard as you can in the face!!â
âOkay.â
âLet me tell you something, boy. Patience is a virtue⌠seldom acquired by manâŚ. never by women⌠Ha ha ha ha ha!â
The Jeep pulls onto the long, rocky dirt road that leads up the mountain. It has sharp, 90-degree turns and incredibly steep inclines. I recall last year, when he got blackout drunk and drove his Jeep at top speed down the mountain. A vehicle going 85 mph down the mountain rattles around like a paint can in a mixing machine. I was completely terrified. I kept asking him to slow down, but he just kept laughing at the top of his lungs like a maniac. âOh, are you scared? HAHAHAHAH!â He thought it was hilarious. I was sure I was going to die.
That night, I watched him shove a baby kitten into his coat pocket. The kittenâs head kept popping up out of his coat. Whenever it did, heâd just shove it back down in there. I was afraid it would suffocate, but he was not a person I was allowed to question.
Feeling the rumble of the car as it moved up the steep gravel road, I glanced down at my school backpack, which I knew contained D&D books. I had come prepared. Thereâs no electricity on the mountain, so itâs an incredibly boring place to be for a kid. It was possibly the most boring place I knew.
My dad was a hang glider pilot. This was his obsession, and he abandoned his family to pursue it. He had gotten divorced and moved on top of a mountain specifically so that no one could get in between him and his flight time.
A few hours later, after we’d deposited our things at his cabin, he took me to the launch site. On top of the mountain, there was a huge rock cliff with a 20 foot tall wooden ramp built on top of it. About a dozen hang gliders laid haphazardly about a freshly mowed field by the cliffside. My dad jumped out greet his friends and set up his hang glider.
I stayed in the Jeep and pulled The Chronicles of Narnia out of my backpack. A pilot’s wife had given me the book to read, and I was totally engrossed. About an hour later, he came back and started yelling at me.
“What the hell are you in here reading for? Put that goddamned book away. You’ve got all these woods out here and you’re reading a goddamned book? Jesus Christ. Get the fuck out of that Jeep before I burn that fucking book. I never want to see you out here reading again, you hear me boy?”
My dad hated books. He felt that reading was a waste of time.
I left to go climbing along the cliffs. This is how I spent most of my time here. It’s the only activity I was really allowed to do. My dad believed good kids liked spending time outside. I would climb along the bottom of the large rock outcropping catching lizards and exploring.
This was always a busy place, filled by dozens of men excited to fly the skies of Oklahoma. On this particular day, it ended up that the wind was blowing so hard on the mountaintop that conditions were considered too dangerous to fly in. This was the type of weather that made it difficult to stand up straight.
One pilot decided to go up on the ramp anyway. He stood there on top of the ramp with his hang glider. There were four strong men standing with him, and they struggled to hold his hang glider down on the ground against the buffeting winds. They did a countdown and then they all let go of the glider at once. The hang glider went straight up in the air 150 feet.
He shouted âWooooooooooooooo!!!â at the top of his lungs, then flew away.
Iâve never seen anything like it. I’d never had to look straight up after a launch before to see someone. Usually, the person goes horizontally away from the ramp.
All the wives said he was crazy. All the pilots were crazy, I think. People often said so, anyway.
Later that night, I tried to tell my dad about the book I’d been reading. He generally did not care about the things I was interested in. He did want me to be happy, but he did not want to hear about anything that wasn’t hang gliding related.
As I attempted to explain the plot of “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”, he got an empty, disinterested look in his eyes. A few minutes later, he exploded into a rant about how listening to my bullshit wasnât part of his job as a parent.
âI don’t want to hear about that shit. I donât have to like the things you like. My job is to feed and clothe you. Are you starving? No? Then Iâve done my job. Now shut the fuck up.â
I had to hear this rant basically anytime I tried to express myself. Sometimes, I wonder if the author of the play Fences was listening in. Because it sounded exactly like this:
My dad had a strange obsession with knowing he was better than me. He would refer to me as âboyâ in the most derogatory fashion he could muster. He referred to my mom in a similar way. He would never say, “Linda”. He would only refer to her as “YOUR mom” in the most insulting and disgusted tone he could manage.
Contradictorily, he often told me I would get rich from computers. He wanted me to buy him a Lamborghini when I got older. He often spoke of this future Lamborghini that I would buy him. For my birthday one year, he bought me a giant poster of one. Was he a narcissist? He only seemed to care about things that affected him directly.
He often called me stupid, especially when I failed to understand his obtuse instructions.
âAll children are morons. This includes you. Kids donât get a brain until they reach 22.â
He had a particular method of making someone feel like they were stupid. No matter what you said to him, he would just repeat you said in the most insulting way possible.
“Hey dad, can you pass me the salt?”
“Can I pass you the salt? Can I pass you the SALT?!? Can…. I… pass… you.. …the salt? Jesus CHRIST!!!!”
He would then stare off into space, as if pondering the stupidity of my statement. He used this technique daily in order to make me feel terrible. I don’t know if it was to make himself feel better or what. He systematically crushed my self-confidence.
As someone who loved computers and fantasy novels, I was bullied regularly at school. This meant I was bullied at school and at my dadâs house. I had to figure out how to rebuild my self-confidence once I became an adult.
He believed strongly in corporal punishment.
“Let me tell you something, boy. Pain is the best teacher. If you beat the hell out of someone, they learn quick. And I promise you, they won’t do it again.”
Some of the hang glider pilots also drug their families to the mountain with them. My friend at the time, Dan Fritschie, was also forced to spend his weekends on the cliffside. His dad and my dad were friends. Danâs dad tragically died in a hang gliding accident in 1988. I often think about this incident as it relates to my own father.
I think to myself, as a parent, should I engage in an activity with a 2.5% chance of death? Even though it would be fun, I would have to say no, since I have a family that depends on me. I have responsibilities to those I love.
Letâs say I decide to go for it, but then, 10 years in, my friend dies in a tragic accident. I would think, maybe at that point, I reconsider this dangerous activity and rededicate myself to my family.
Did my dad do this? Did he once question whether he should be flying? No, he kept on doing it for another 25 years. He gave not a secondâs thought to his family, which he had already long abandoned at that point. His hobby was more important to him, even if it meant his death.
Growing up with my dad was like living with a homeless person. When I stayed with him during the summer, he would sometimes bring me to the state park so we could shower and brush our teeth. It looked like a place you could get mugged in. It was extremely dirty. What a great place to get naked in! He also made us take showers together, which terrified me. I was at once terrified that someone would walk in and that I had to look at my dad naked. He never did anything untoward, but as a kid, it still scared me.
When I turned 15, I got my learnerâs permit and he started teaching me to drive. This did not go well. The Jeep had a manual transmission, and he would often angrily yell at me when I used the clutch incorrectly. It was hard to focus on learning when he was so angry.
He loved this, though, because it meant he could fly during the day and he could make me drive the Jeep down the mountain to the landing zone to pick him up when he landed. I could not legally do this without an adult with me, but he told me it didnât matter.
The first time he made me drive down the mountain by myself to pick him up, I crashed the Jeep into a tree on the side of the road. I had to walk down the mountain by myself to try to find him. Once we reconnected, he forced me to walk back up the mountain to get to the Jeep and his cabin. This was an exhausting journey for me, as I was in no shape to climb mountains. He gave breaks sparingly, and angrily yelled at me and insulted me the entire way up. It was the worst verbal abuse Iâve ever experienced. I endured both physical and emotional exhaustion.
The next day, he forced me to walk with him down the mountain again to find a repair shop. The physical and verbal abused continued again.
It’s 30 years later, and I’m still angry about this event. I never forgave him for it, and I never will. I wish I could describe it with the right words, but I don’t have the energy to edit the section. I have never in my life experienced so much hate directed at me in any other event. I stopped loving him that day. I decided that I didn’t need this sort of abuse in my life.
Once I eventually got home to my mom, I told her I didnât want to go see him anymore. I was extremely surprised to hear her say I didnât have to if I didnât want to. My dad had always told me that I was only there because the courts said I had to be there.
I never went to the mountain see him again. Sometimes he would come to my momâs house at Christmas. Iâd see him then. He would never ask about the details of my life. He didn’t show any curiosity about me as a person. He would just ask if I was happy. If I replied âYesâ, then he was satisfied. No further questions necessary.
I only went back in 2022 when he was on his deathbed.
In a couple months, itâll be 1 year since his death.
When he died, I felt deep pain for about 30 seconds. After that, I never felt any sense of loss ever again. I just feel nothing at all. My friend’s death in 2008 impacted me way more.
I often think fondly of Buffalo Mountain. I do have an affection for that place. But it exists independently of the person who lived there.
Right before he died, in an attempt to understand why everyone says you should have a relationship with your father, I recorded this interview with him. This was my attempt to be a normal person. I think it only worked because I was asking him questions about himself.
A Comparison of Agile Software Development and Tabletop Roleplaying Games
I have a problem with Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition. It is supposed to be a game of vivid imagination. Thatâs what I like about it. Its many rules hold it back, though. People sit down at the table and look at their character sheet. They see that it is complicated. It has a dizzying array of abilities and skills. Someone plops down a thick book in front of them. They are intimidated.
The game master asks the player what they want their character to do?
The player looks down at their character sheet, scanning the numerous abilities and skills. Right away, their imagination is gone. They are now thinking about the rules. The scope of things they believe their character can do is limited. They will only consider the options that are written down for them.
This is a huge problem if you want to encourage story-driven games and player creativity. If such things are your priority, you have to switch to a rules-light RPG. These systems have barely any rules at all. They define just enough to get you going. The idea is, if you run into a situation where there isnât a rule for something, you just figure it out. You have a whole team of smart people. You donât need a rule for everything. This encourages imaginative gameplay. It allows people to get into a space where they can think creatively.
Agile Software Development is the same way. It, too, has a number of different implementations. Some of them are very heavy on the rules and procedures. The authors attempt to legislate every possible contingency.
Hereâs my problem: If you complain about a rule you donât like, advocates will throw up their hands and say, âOh, you donât have to use that! Itâs just about the story/productivity! You can pick and choose what work for you! Do what fits your team!â
This, to me, feels super disingenuous. If you publish a huge book of rules, you know that some rules lawyer is going to memorize them all, obsess over every detail, and say things like, âActually, on page 37, it says that we should doing blah blah blah. This is rules as written in the book!â
Nothing matters but whatâs written in the book. People are like this. That attention to detail is what makes us good at software.
This is about the ivory-tower idealized view of how a complex system of rules and procedures is meant to be used verses how such systems are actually used on the ground in the real world. Some people will always hyper-focus on the rules as written. They wonât care about the spirit of the rules.
I would argue that the reason people keep âgetting Agile wrongâ is because they are mesmerized by the dizzying amount of procedures and rules. Just look at this SAFe chart as as example.
I donât think modifying a large framework to your own taste is a good idea. I believe that a lighter system would work better. It makes people feel more welcome to make their own changes. My reason for this argument is human nature. People need to consider what humans do when presented with tons of rules. They follow them blindly.
Addendum: I would be remiss if I didn’t link my favorite article on SAFe. This is what I had in mind when I wrote this article. Although, it could certainly be argued that SAFe is not Agile at all.
In particular, this quote is interesting:
A key part of SAFe that I have not yet touched on is the aggregation of existing concepts like Scrum, Kanban, Lean Product, Lean UX, and DevOPs.
If youâre unfamiliar, Iâd suggest exploring each concept independently over time rather than all at once. Many are valuable themselves, but SAFe doesnât do a great job at actually synthesizing them and can sometimes add confusion.
This reminds me of D&D games where every sourcebook is allowed and players end up creating broken characters. The analogy isn’t perfect, but the general idea is that the more disparate systems you jam together, the more complex a thing gets and the less willing its participants are to question it or to think creatively at all.
Social Media is Mind Control
As I mentioned in my last post, I spend a lot of time thinking about how to control my own thoughts. I hate being manipulated, for example. I want to know that if I think a thought, itâs my thought. I donât want people planting ideas in my head without me knowing.
Well, social media is manipulating all of us, isnât it? Itâs making everyone angry all the time. Itâs pushing our friends and neighbors into extremist political views. And itâs demanding more and more of our time. In the documentary “The Social Dilemma“, a former Facebook engineer talks about how they intentionally modeled their algorithm based on the same psychological tricks that a slot machine uses. These companies want our attention, and theyâve modeled their platforms into skinner boxes to force us to stay engaged on their sites.
Have you ever noticed that if you make a post with a link, it gets barely any likes? Thatâs because the algorithm doesnât show those posts to people. They get de-ranked. If you want your post to get maximum engagement, it has to only contain text. Otherwise, hardly anyone will see it. They want to keep you on their site. It doesnât benefit them to show posts with external links.
Source: Hootsuite Global State of Digital 2022
So, if you really want lots of likes, avoid links in your post. If you have to post a link, put it in a comment below the post. Otherwise, it might not get seen.
There was a 60 Minutes episode a few weeks ago on how social media is creating an epidemic of anorexia in children. If you’re a 12-year-old girl and sign up for Instagram, you’re just a few clicks away from misinformation and damaging influences.
Iâve been thinking a lot about freewill lately. Do we have it? Maybe itâs a grey area.
We think weâre choosing to spend time on social media, or that our anger or happiness is our own. But I am seeing that basic psychological techniques are being employed by these algorithms to push our buttons.
Iâve finally reached my breaking point. In 2023, I am vowing to not participate in social media. My avoid list includes:
- TikTok
I canât take it anymore. I wonât help them destroy society.
What will I do instead? How would I even begin to spend my time?
The first thing I did was subscribe to a few newspapers. It feels wrong to pay for news, but Iâm just going to try it and see how it goes.
Maybe I could read more books? Read more blog articles? Listen to more podcasts? Run a D&D game?
Iâll definitely be doing more cycling. Thatâs one thing Iâve being doing in the past few years that seems to be working. A successful experiment, if you will.
These are all experiments. Dozens of little experiments.
Autism Diagnosis
I was diagnosed with Autism this year. One of my primary symptoms is an all-encompassing drive to hyper-focus on a specific thing, usually a hobby or a special interest. Most people seem to think I am choosing to spend all my time on one thing, but it is more like a high internal drive that I cannot control. I cannot stop thinking about my obsession even when talking to friends or family. Unfortunately, this results in me isolating myself a lot of the time. Iâve felt some guilt about this, too. I donât maintain friendships very well, because doing so would just get in the way of my obsessions.
This lack of control over what my brain focuses on has given me a lifelong mission of controlling my thoughts. To fight negative intrusive thoughts, for example, I use positive-self talk. This practice literally shapes your brainâs thoughts and pushes them in a new direction. When I see people who put themselves down or donât give themselves enough credit for the good things theyâve done, I often encourage them to use this strategy. But I find that not everyone is as concerned about their own thought patterns as I am.
In college, I learned to trick my brain into liking my classes. I liked the idea of taking something that I was not interested in and forcing myself to like it. I thought if I could figure out how to point my uncontrollable obsession at my classwork, Iâd do really well. This strategy paid off, and although I could not control the drive of my brain once locked in, I found that I could generally point it at a target if I tried hard.
In this way, I learned to use my weaknesses as strengths. All-encompassing, hyper-focus can be a very useful skill if you learn to use it properly. Sometimes, people suggest that I should âwork on thatâ or âlearn to just relax, take it easy, and focus on multiple thingsâ. I canât imagine why I would choose to do such a thing. Hyper-focus is very useful, I enjoy it, and itâs a part of who I am.
I was surprised to discover that sensitivity to taste is also common in autistic people. I have always been a âpicky eaterâ, and this problem has dominated my life. Again, people make the mistake of thinking I choose to be this way. They often get angry and think Iâm âbeing ridiculousâ. I constantly get harrassed at family get-togethers when meals are involved. âOh, you donât like that? Itâs not good enough for you? You donât know what youâre missing. Wow, I canât believe you.â
I have learned that texture plays a large part in what foods autistic people are sensitive to. Itâs not even the taste thatâs often the issue. So itâs not an issue of choice, but just the way my brain is wired. I canât help if something is revolting to me. This makes eating healthy pretty hard for me, though, as I get really stuck in my ways when it comes to food. Now that I know texture is part of it, though, Iâd like to try to use that to expand what Iâm able to eat.
Iâve been asked several times if getting an âofficialâ diagnosis is even worth it. Of course, for someone with an interest in controlling their thoughts, knowing how your brain works is very useful. But for me, it has also given me an excuse not to blame myself for things I canât control.
In other news, happy 2023! I’ve definitely been thinking about my goals for this year and also about what went right for me in 2022. This morning, I recorded another walk-through of my remote work space. Working from home has been one of the best experiences of my life. It really allows me to focus!
1% Better Every Day
In 2009, I went to the doctorâs office for my yearly checkup. I was telling the doctor about my symptoms. It was a long list, mostly my favorite selections off the depression and anxiety menu. One of the weirder issues I had was these uncontrollable jerking movements, like involuntary twitches. People noticed when it happened. I stood out and it always made social situations weird.
He asked me, âSo, where do you work?â
I told him the name of the company I worked for.
He got a look of understanding on his face and said, âOh, that explains it. This is stress induced. Iâll prescribe you Lexapro.â
I told the doctor, âI donât think you understand. Stress cannot cause this. This feels like a neurological issue. I canât control my own movements.â
He said, âLook, I have many patients with way weirder symptoms than yours. They are all caused by stress. You are not at all unusual. These people all work for the same company you work for, and theyâre all on Lexapro or other SSRIâs. Thatâs just how they deal with the stress of their jobs.â
I was skeptical, but I took the Lexapro prescription and it totally fixed the involuntary twitching. The drugs made me not care, and thatâs what I needed at the time.
Many years later, I decided to get off the medication and work through my problems on my own. Not too long after that, I started my â1% Better Every Dayâ project and began iteratively reducing stressful things from my life.
In 2018, I was hit by multiple life events all at once. My child developed PTSD from school. My friend Jerry Sims died (a person I had known for 24 years). I had a super toxic boss at work who terrorized everyone under his command. Other big things happened, too. Things I wonât mention here. Each of these can affect a person. All of them happening at the same time had a sort of amplified effect on me.
I started experiencing anxietyâââpanic attacks and stomach pains. Growing up in the 80âs has unfortunately given me a distrust of therapy. But working in tech for 18 years has given me a love of problem solving. So, I approached the situation like I would any server issueâââthrough process of elimination. I knew I felt generally bad, but I didnât know why. What is the root cause?
I thought to myself, âWhat if it isnât one thing? What if stress is like a bucket? That bucket is filled with tiny objects, each one the embodiment of a small thing that irritates you. Any one of them is not even worth mentioning, but your bucket can only hold so many things. Once the bucket fills past a certain threshold, thatâs your limit. A person can only take so much.â
I adopted a new life philosophy: â1% Better Every Dayâ. My goal became to change something minor in my life every day. No matter how miniscule the thing is, if it makes me even a tiny bit happier, thatâs my goal achieved for the day. And I just keep doing it every day. Eventually, all these tiny little changes should add up.
Mostly, I just started trying things. If a thing didnât work, it was no big deal to abandon, since it was a very small life change anyway. But if it did work, if it did increase my happiness by any amount, I kept it in.
We put in a rule at home that our family would clean the house together on Saturdays.
I started cycling, and discovered that I live right next to a 40 mile paved nature trail.
I reconnected with my mother, whom I had been estranged from for 4 years.
The more things I tried, the more opportunities for happiness I discovered. I resolved to actively fight apathy.
The thing about big goals is that theyâre big and scary and no one wants to do them. Itâs just so life-disrupting to start changing big things. Itâs much easier to make small changes. It feels better, too, because youâre being rewarded every single day.
I have found that humans have an incredible ability to tolerate bad things. I learned this in my first job developing Remedy helpdesk forms. I would sit with the helpdesk technicians, watching them take calls and using our software. They would put up with insanely complicated flows, things that no one should have to tolerate. Iâm talking like 15â20 clicks to enter a single piece of information.
I would ask them, âWhy the hell didnât you tell me about this? I could fix this for you in just a few hours!â
They would always say, âI thought it had to be this way.â
They were trapped in learned helplessness. Sometimes, big corporations do this to people. They learn to endure pain. Thatâs just the way it has to be.
Well, maybe life is like that? Maybe there are 500 things that bother me, and I just tolerate them out of simple inertia? I donât know why humans are like this, but I have decided that being happy isnât something that just happens to you by accident. You have to work at it.
Well, itâs four years later, and Iâm happy to say that my strategy worked. I am so much happier now, and I attribute this success to my iterative change philosophy. I let go of the delusion that life changes have to be big ones, and I made my life better, one percent at a time.
The biggest change I made was leaving my big corporate job. Once I took the big leap, I was shocked to discover that all my anxiety, depression, and physiological symptoms completely disappeared. I was so sure it was a âchemical imbalanceâ. But it turns out, it was all just stress induced.
You might be tempted to say that it was actually one thing, but I donât feel that way. Making hundreds of smaller changes gave me the confidence to make a big change. I also wouldnât have been able to figure out the biggest source of my stress without the process of elimination. And I also continue to use this iterative philosophy even to this day. An active, focused effort at making my life better, one day at a time.
Now, Iâm not here to tell people not to do therapy. You probably should. Donât be stubborn like me. However, I am here to tell you that some of the best practices in tech can apply to your life, too. Break large problems into a series of little problems. Make iterative changes wherever possible. Have a tight feedback loop. And, most importantly, donât accept poor quality.
The Dark Side of School Shooting Drills
On March 29th, 2018, a school shooting drill was executed at Washington Junior High School in Bentonville, Arkansas. It was not announced as a drill. School officials were screaming âLockdown! Lockdown! Lockdown!â. Children at the school thought it was real. My child was terrified and thought he was going to die.
I was angry about it at the time, but I posted about it on Facebook and moved on.
In retrospect, I now realize that this event ruined our lives. My child developed extreme levels of anxiety. He began having total meltdowns around 7:00am whenever it was time to go to school. He would begin uncontrollably shaking and experiencing intense panic attacks. These episodes were a daily occurrence for the entire time he remained in school. It was emotionally exhausting for the whole family. Itâs one thing to deal with a panic attack once. But every day for an entire year is a whole other level of stress and exhaustion.
We could not get him to go to school because he was terrified that he would be shot and killed in a school shooting. We have had our child in therapy for four years now, and his therapist tells us that all these problems stem from that school shooting drill in March of 2018. That event triggered PTSD in our child.
We tried everything we could think of, but we could not get our child to go to school. We did not know if he would be able to graduate high school. Our straight-A student was losing the opportunities he deserved in life.
Oftentimes, we would drag him to the car and drive him to the school, where he would cower and shake for hours. He refused to get out of the car. If someone tried to force him out, he would scream and shake uncontrollably. After an hour or so, weâd finally give up and take him home. This emotional bomb happened every day for a year.
My wife and I both work full time, so it was difficult to manage this extra time in the mornings, sitting in the school parking lot watching our child experience PTSD. We found we had little room within ourselves for both work stress and home stress, and we began to struggle under the strain.
We developed a good relationship with the school principal. One time, I emailed him and asked him if he could send someone out to the parking lot to try to convince my child to leave the car and walk into the building. Over the course of an hour, he sent 4â5 different school counselors. Not a single one of them could coax my child out of the car. This actually made me feel better, because it meant other people were getting the same result. I guess I thought maybe I was just a bad parent. But that confirmed to me that it wasnât just me.
We got a puppy, and our son trained it to be a service dog. This was inspirational to watch. The service dog went to school with him, and this helped get us through several years. But eventually, the anxiety forced him to switch to a remote school program. Being in the building was too stressful.
He eventually did graduate from Bentonville High School. However, this was one of the hardest things our family has ever accomplished.
My son is now 19 years old. He rarely leaves the house. This stems not from laziness, but fear. He still deals with the lasting trauma caused by believing he was going to die in 2018. He was never in any actual danger, but the psychological impact was real and lasting.
Now, I am learning that this âdrillâ was not an isolated incident. Other schools do this, too. They spring lockdowns on children, who never know if they are about to die or if itâs just a trick.
Schools should not be permitted to terrify children into thinking there is a school shooter when there isnât one. But thatâs not reality. The reality is, Arkansas did this to my family. I wonder if officials involved are even aware of the psychological damage that is being done? I wonder how many families like mine are affected?
The Arkansas Times Blog was nice enough to cover this today as well.
I also put this up on Reddit, where a number of interesting comments were shared:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Arkansas/comments/zsfiup/school_lockdown_drills_and_ptsd/
A Historical Look at Collaboration in Tech
When I was hired on to Walmart as a programmer in 2004, we had these brown phones. As you can see from the photo below, there was no caller ID. In a global company, when that phone rings, you donât know what fresh hell has come knocking on your door. It could be from someone in an area youâd never heard of with a complex problem in an app your team owns that you didnât even know you were responsible for. You learn to figure things out fast.
I grew up in the 80âs with BBSâs, and in the 90âs with IRC. I always wanted persistent chat at work. But in the 2000âs, computer chat was seen as something you do in your free time on AOL. When I would suggest we use it at work, I would be told no, that people would think we were using it to goof off.
One year, I met Joshua Rowell. He had a secret way of getting chat channels at Walmart. At a large company, you canât just install whatever you want on your PC. Itâs tightly controlled with an approval process. There must be a valid business justification. He found out that the program Exceed, which was used for managing X Window sessions, also had a little-known chat feature. We started using it to collaborate with our co-workers.
I remember one day, I watched his manager walk by his cubicle, and Josh had the Exceed chat open. He minimized it as quickly as he could so as not to be caught. The manager asked, âHey, what was that? It looked like some kind of chat program.â. âOh nothing! It was nothing!â
I still think about that interaction. The idea that youâd have to hide interacting with co-workers seems a little crazy today. But back then, it was seen as the equivalent of playing video games on your work PC.
As the years rolled on and perceptions changed, we eventually got Microsoft Communicator. It wasnât persistent chat, but it did give us the ability to IM people. For someone like me, who grew up online, it was a game changer. I loved it, and I used the hell out of it. My networks of people I knew grew exponentially.
Many, many years later, there was a time when the California people had Slack, and the Bentonville people didnât. Bentonville people only had IMs. I asked several times if our area could get licenses for Slack. I was told it was too expensive for the very large number of people we had. I looked into it, and they were right. It was obscenely expensive.
I worked on Walmartâs Build Tools team at the time. Our stated mission was to provide tools for developers to improve their lives. Another developer and I, Louis Page, decided, you know what? If they wonât pay for Slack, weâll just set something up ourselves.
This was right about the time Docker was starting to gain popularity. So, I logged into to one of the many VMs we secretly hoarded (instead of decomissioning like we were supposed to), and ran âdocker pull rocket.chatâ. It was an open source persistent chat solution. Louis and I set it up with a load balancer, added an FQDN into DNS, set up backups, and started spreading it around via IMs.
We were in a unique position in the company. Most of the developers in the company would IM us every day to help fix various build issues. We had reach. Rocket Chat started gaining popularity fast. I watched teams move in, make their own channel, and say to each other, âThis is what we will use for collaboration moving forward.â I was actually pretty surprised how fast it took off and how large the userbase grew.
Docker was a great solution for this. Very easy to set up. The high load of Walmartâs IT division made Rocket Chat start crashing all the time. It was a bug with Dockerâs virtual file system. Louis figured out you can make Docker restart a container if it crashed. Problem solved. No one ever noticed it restarting every 10 minutes.
It sort of wasnât cool for us to do this. There was already a Communication Tools team who had this responsibility, and itâs actually super uncool to go behind their backs like this. But we had a great manager who would defend us, and we had just enough plausible deniability from our being a Developer Tools team that we got away with it.
So, for some period of time, I donât remember how long, Rocket Chat enjoyed great popularity. Eventually, after many meetings between managers, it was agreed that Bentonville IT would get Slack and we would need to decommission Rocket Chat. We won. Now the whole division had Slack.
I like to think it changed the way the division communicated and collaborated. Now, I canât imagine working somewhere without persistent chat. It would just be archaic. How would I have worked in a remote position for the past two years without these wonderful tools?
Although complaining about the poor state of things can be cathartic, it is more fun to fix things and make them better. And you donât always have to follow the rules to do so. I would encourage people to not get stuck under the weight of procedures and past expectations. Try new things! You might end up making things better.
Donald Morton's Blog 
