7: The Makers

There is a quote on some of our t-shirts.  It is a fragment of a sentence Barack Obama said during his inauguration. The t-shirts say:

"...the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things."

 This describes us and we are proud to be those people.  We craft.  We drill, cut, weld, design, envision, and build.  We are the makers of things.

We are at the Maker Faire, a gathering of the diversity of silicon valley geekdom.  This is our Ritual.  This is our Sabbath.  This is our Woodstock.

Our tribe gathers and we are at once one and the same.  A collection of strange faces we recognize immediately.  The creators of things both useful and abstract.  The doers of stuff most people don't get, that the rest of us admire and covet.

Machines that transport us via pedal, steam,  fire, explosion.  Computers that reproduce Michelangelo on egg shells.   Comic book rockets the size of buildings that fly to every planet in our imagination.

People who love us ask us "why?"

We thought you knew by now.  When you caught us tearing apart the TV with rusty pliers and dull screwdrivers - when we had to be towed because the nitro injector we added to the Taurus blew out the headers - when we set the garden shed on fire modifying the lawn mower to act as a rocket sled - when monopolized the television watching every minute of space shuttle coverage - when we burned out the microwave making nuclear balls of plasma - we thought we were out of the closet.  We thought it was clear.

We are this way.  We can't help it.  Some people just are.

And now there are hundreds of us in one place.  The tourists laugh nervously at the chainsaw robots and the dragons that spit real fire.  The compulsion that drives people to create such things seems the stuff of science fiction movies.  Are these the evil mad scientists come to roost among us?  Will they subjugate the world with giant robots?

Yes.  Empathetically, yes.

The true participants great each other asking, "what's your make?"  And nobody hesitates.

I make rockets.  I make clothes that electrically respond to your moods.  I make boats that cross the ocean without humans.  I make houses you can pedal.  I  make 20' tall computer controlled steel giraffes.

"I make giant killer robots," says one.

Nobody blinks.  Of course.  It must be.

The blonde haired girl and I traverse the festival in the shirts issued to volunteers - red on purpose - the joke: "you are the red shirts," reference to Crewman #1 in every Star Trek episode.

We move furniture.  Deliver power cables to the makers on the show floor.  I direct cars in the parking lot while just beyond the gate two middle-aged guys launch towers of spew from 75 of bottles of diet Coke contaminated with after dinner mints to the cheers of hundreds.  We are connected.  We are part of the show so we are one with the energy that drives us all year to drill, saw, solder, program over and over the drawer full of Arduino boards, so full there is no room for my socks.

I was walking through the Festival Hall, returning to home base after my stint running the sound board at the stage in the Expo.   I was moving between two points like any good line, when God himself spoke to me and I had to stop, captivated by the drum beats,  thoughts shredded and blown like autumn leaves on the bass line.

On the stage, two 7' tall Tesla Coils shot 12' arcs of lightning that made music.  Rock and roll.

It's not enough for these guys to simply command the lightning bolts - they made them sing.

I didn't move until it was over and the crowd that had gathered erupted into the sort of cheer that's reserved for the most famous of rock stars.  A  gutteral, visceral peal of pure ecstasy.

"I have never seen anything so cool," someone said standing beside me.

"...me neither," I said.

And it was true.

----

My happiest moment - the following day I brought my daughters to Maker Faire.  The blonde-haired girl were not working this day, but rather, observing, participating attendees. 

After the Tesla Coils blasted lightning music into the aether I looked at my children and asked, "What did you think of that?" and I was hoping, that for a moment maybe there would be some tiny connection - perhaps they would realize what kind of man I was, and what they had been witnessing all these strange years.

"Dad, that was unbelievably awesome," said my kids, wide-eyed, mouths agape. "I don't even know what I just saw.  It was awesome."

"Yes," I said, knowing that for once we were on exactly the same emotional track.  For once in nearly two decades they could appreciate something as I did.

I have rarely been happier.

----

We spent two full days at the Bay Area Maker Faire.  I forgot to put on sun screen so I added to the sunburn I got while acting as an "extra" in a Mythbusters episode that was shot outside - and we were forbidden to put on sunscreen because it would wreck the experiment.  

So now I am as brown as my Sicilian ancestors, like Archimedes, who made death rays and giant repeating arrow slinging bows.

And we are proud to be some of the doers,  the risk takers, the makers of things.  We are proud to be misunderstood.  A commander of computers and lightning.  A bringer of unforseen objects onto this sphere.  And I have been one always.

Nothing that has been said about me, or done to me, can ever change that.

I am ready to build.  

I am always building.

I am always making something.

----

"I have to go to Home Depot," I said to my daughter this morning before I left the house.  "You'll probably be at school when I get back, so have a happy day."

"What are you getting?" she asked.

"Some wood."

"Building something?"

"It's for the Tesla Coil."

"Yeah.  Cool.  The Tesla Coil.  How long till that's done?"

"Soon,"  I said.  "We'll have lightning soon."

"I can't wait," she said.

With a bright heart and equally bright smile I got into the jeep.  

Yes,  I am a good father.

6: Creation

We're waiting for the break out
And burning rods of tungsten
We're winding our secondaries
On low-speed lathes
If I could find a better way to love you
I'd have to rewire with four gauge

We can't see no difference
Between construction and demolition
Now that Shiva's using iPhone apps
To squash the old town and birth new worlds
If I could find a better way to love you
I'd need a thicker blast shield

I met dear Dr. Maxwell
By sticking screwdrivers in wall sockets
Pulling signals from the air
With varnished coils and copper in the trees
If I could find a better way to love you
I'd need a bigger ozone fan

Yes, darling. It's love.
Stand back.
Stay grounded.

-------

There's nothing good on the internet.  The web is flooded with drivel and dreck produced by unemployed slobs regressing to unhappy childhoods, seeking the attention they never got from parents who were distracted by game shows and cigarettes.

I have to keep rereading my last hopeful e-mail.  Hours go by.  The glow fades.  I have to read it again.

"We're interested.  Stay put."

I don't know what's worse about being unemployed - watching the assets evaporate into the aether, unreclaimable like a children's birthday song moments after the candles are extinguished, or watching the world's wheels turning fluidly without me.

There is no blip.  No interruption in the video stream.  No change of plans. No moment of silence.  One out of six billion is a very small number indeed.

Death is not nearly as terrifying as irrelevance.

I  go back to the last hopeful e-mail.  

"We're interested.  Stay put."

-------

We are makers of things.

I married a woman who was happy to honeymoon at a machine shop.  We learned how to turn metal on a lathe.  We went home with our classroom results and had love on a bed I stiffened with 3/4" plywood.

When we are in trouble, we build things.

I made a jacob's ladder out of copper water pipe and a neon sign transformer.  The sparks lit up our garage.  We machine our parts, setting fire to titanium.  Planting bulbs, pruning trees, hanging houses for the birds.

I write stories.  She writes lyrics.

We have a piece for musical theater about the U.S. Antarctic Program.  When we get sad I go to the piano and she hums a tune or two I pluck out of the air and press onto the keyboard.  "Antarctica: The Musical" performed nightly behind our eyeballs, just underneath the forehead.

-------

I'm building a Tesla coil.  A resonant high voltage power projector.  I would never have  built one before losing my job.  Too dangerous.  Too big to store in our tiny house with no closets.   

I'm building a Bedini motor, if only to show my friends this wonderfully simple design obeys the laws of physics.

We are watching episodes of Mad Men and yearning for our days in Alaska.

I wish my children were still babies.

I wish my father was alive.  

I would talk to him about my troubles, and he would remind me I was a good kid.

When we are distressed we create things.

-------

There's nothing but garbage on the internet.

5: Better Them

Couple months ago I saw a guy I knew at the local Safeway.

I'd known him from back in the 1990's when we were both young engineers helping a burgeoning tech giant get to its legs.  Things were good then.  We were riding high on a wave of inflated stock prices, buying Corvettes and taking expensive vacations in cities where we couldn't speak the language. We were inventing new things weekly.  You couldn't get any closer to the front of the technology spear than where we sat every day.

I hadn't seen him since those days.  Nearly 15 years now.  At first I didn't even recognize him.  I think he recognized me.  There's the way the pupils dilate when some visual blob resolves itself into an old acquaintance instead of a stranger or enemy.  His eyes said, "friend," but the body language was pure fight or flight.

Given his odd reaction I didn't say anything at first but went on with putting my grocery items on the belt to be totaled and bagged.  When I looked toward him he kept looking away, and his demeanor put me off on greeting him.

What was his problem?  What was he hiding?  Could it be I hadn't seen him in 15 years because he had been in prison or otherwise shamed to the periphery of society?

Finally I could avoid him no more.  I looked him straight in the eye.

There was a look of panic. He stuttered, then said, "Paper or plastic."  A thin line of sweat ran from his ear to his graying beard.

I said, "Plastic's ok."  I looked at his name tag, just to be sure.

It was, yes, it was.  I turned my gasp into a sigh.  Maybe I could somehow, just for that moment, not be me.

I said, "Dave?"

He said, "One-twelve ninety-five.  Need any change?"

I swiped my card.  I shook my head.

He put the rest of my groceries into plastic bags.  "Have a nice day."

Then he started swiping the groceries of the person behind me.

------------

I've had the opportunity to let go of a lot of people in my life.  To "let go" is a euphamism for "firing".  We like to say "let go" because more often than not the person losing their job didn't do anything to deserve losing his income.  It's just the way it is.

Business goes bad, money gets tight, can't pay the same number of people anymore.  Someone has to go so the others can go on.  It's battlefield law.  A couple get killed so the greater number can live.

When we go to work every day we don't think of it as a battlefield.  We spend so much of our waking time at the endeavor we call "work" that we try to make that time as pleasant as possible.  We bring in pictures of our families.  The father's day paperweights our youngsters made us in school.  We hang pictures of ourselves riding bikes or standing in front of amusement park castles.  It's supposed to be an extension of our being, and generally speaking, we are all pleasant beings.

Over the years I had risen the career ladder to the status of "boss".  As boss, I was in charge of bringing to an end a person's daily grind.  Usually the reason for the termination was something nebulously called "downsizing".  For whatever reason, the company wants to spend less on our activity.  We can stop supplying pencils and high-end laptops, but it  takes a lot of pencils and discount laptops to equal a working person's salary and benefits.

When you terminate someone, they say the conversation should start like this, "Joe/Sally/Bob/Betty/John/Mary - this isn't going to be easy."

It's unclear who made up that riff.  I learned it back in the 1990s.  I was taught it by a company called Challenger-Gray-Christmas, which sounds like some sort of mutant party organization group.

They taught me what to do when the person starts crying after you tell them the envelope in your hand is their last paycheck plus severance.  They tell you what to do when the person becomes violent because upon receiving his last paycheck, he knows it will take him longer to find a new job than it will for the bank to foreclose on his home.

They tell you not to smile.  They tell you to remain calm.  You are just delivering a message.  It was not your decision.  They are victim of forces beyond your small conversation.  They were killed by others, far away.  All they can do now is accept their fate and leave quietly without upsetting everyone else.

Because they are all good people - they go to their offices and collect their Father's Day paperweights, the pictures of themselves smiling in front of the Disney castles, the company logo coffee cups - they pause in front of their papers and pens, can't stop the subconscious impulse - there's a big meeting on the calendar for this afternoon, need the notes?

And they head out to the parking lot to their cars as quietly as they can, avoiding contact with any of their coworkers.  Because they're in shock.   A big part of the process of being "let go" is having the shock tame the extreme emotional impulses.

The true pain of what has just happened won't sink in until darkness falls and the recently fired worker realizes he will not grab his coffee in the morning and head into the office.  Then the anguish and grief will set in.  Tears will fall.  The man will avoid his wife because he has failed her.  The kids will be kept away because no one has ever seen him this way.  The woman's tears will fill the phone receiver and dot the bills on the kitchen counter.

How could this have happened to me?  I was good.  I worked hard.  I delivered.  I cared.

I've used that line, "This is going to be difficult," exactly once.   I still have nightmares about it.

------------

Most managers are bad at it.

Bad managers are put in positions of authority by other bad managers.  It's a Ponzi scheme.

This should surprise no one.

Every year corporations spend hundreds of millions of dollars on management training.  They select individuals and place them into management roles and then figure that a couple days of training will set everything right.  These people are usually as good at management as Vincent Van Gogh, Steven Hawking, or Elvis Presley.   Which is to say - what the hell are we thinking?

Usually  these individuals are selected because they have performed extremely well in individual contribution roles.  Or because they are great individual contributors and their grandmothers won't be proud of them until they can come home and say they've been made "manager," so they're going to quit and go somewhere where they can get that title.

They are then offered the slot right in the company they're at, and to make up for that awful decision they get sent to a training course.  This will fix it, thinks somebody in higher management who goes on to worrying about other things.

Then, the newly minted leader goes back to work to make life miserable for 2 to 100 people.  

They  may as well have been given a week's training in concert piano and sending them off to Carnage Hall to wow the whole world. 

Things are going good when he takes over - then mistakes get made.  Unlike when the new manager was an individual worker, every mistake is multiplied by the number of people in his charge.  Tiny mistakes become very visible.  The great employee doesn't make such mistakes, so they either must be hidden, or even better - they didn't happen.  It must be the fault of the workers in his charge who either can't understand his wisdom or don't share his vision and energy.

Eventually the bad performance can't be hidden. Upper management wants to know how to improve things.  They're hearing about bad morale and they can see the lousy productivity with their own eyes. They wonder if people shouldn't be let go.  As easily as he ascribes blame, the new manager is scared to death of the idea of firing someone.  He knows how he used to feel about it when he wasn't a manager.  He doesn't want to become one of "those" managers.  He's a man of the people.  He wants to be loved.

But upper management wants to teach him the important skills of business.  He must be crisp, direct, and ruthless to some degree.  Too many things are going wrong.  If he doesn't trim out the "fat" in his team, maybe he's the wrong guy for the job.

So he goes to the human relations department.  They will tell him how to do this thing and stay legal.  They choose a victim.  Some days later a meeting is held.  No one is surprised.  Things were going so bad he was going to have to blame someone.

Words are spoken.  "This isn't going to be easy."

---------------

There are fabulous managers in this world, the same way there are amazing guitarists and mind-blowng poets.  And then there's just a whole spate of plain good managers,  the way there are a lot of good piano players and plenty of pleasing novelists.

They get into tight situations like everyone else, only they tend to have the support of everyone who works for them.  

You want to work for these people.  You want to be one of these people.  

Just because you want to, doesn't mean you can, any more than you can stay home next week and write a bestselling novel.

-----------

No one wakes up in the morning and says, "Let me go be a bad manager today."  Or, "Gee, I'm a bad manager I should go do something different."

Most bad managers are frightened unhappy people who live in fear of things going wrong, and they always go wrong.  But somehow things get fixed.  The people who work for them come through every now and then and make things right.  Then they can breathe easy.  

They wake up in the morning and think, "Is today a day I should be afraid, or can I breathe easy?"

It doesn't occur to them these mood swings are caused directly by their own ineffectiveness.  They figure things are happening to them from the outside.  And things bad things happen to good people, all the time.

When it's time to figure out how to make something better, the bad manager will look to his people and try to penetrate their weaknesses rather than accentuating their strengths.  The weaknesses are obvious to everyone, the strengths, sometimes hidden.  And if it takes a while to come to a good conclusion, the company can afford to wait.  If things start going bad, everyone sees it right away.

So the bad manager always has a list in his head.  Who goes first?  Next time I have to let someone go, who is it.

Then, when things get tight, he offers up his victim.

"This is going to be tough."

"I don't understand.  What did I do?"

"At least," thinks the bad manager while his shocked employee's eyes well in front of him, "At least it's not me."

----------

"You didn't even say, 'hi,' to him?" asks the blond-haired girl as we drive home.

"He wouldn't make eye contact."

"You could have asked him how he was."

"I could see how he was.  He's got 25 years experience in high tech and he's a cashier at Safeway.  How do you think he is?"

We stopped for the red light at route nine.  An old Genesis song came up on the satellite radio.  It reminded me of being a kid.

"This really bothers you," she said to me.

"Well, yeah.  Are things really that bad that a guy with Dave's skills is working at a grocery store?  I don't think so.  I think the business world is just populated by jerks.  They've got a lock.  The good guys can't win."

"Maybe you should go back and talk to him."

"That could be me - don't you get it?  There's no difference between him and me."

"Then help him."

"How?"

"Offer him a job."

"We've got a damned hiring freeze -- I just don't know what I can do."

I  made a left hand turn.  The light was still red.  Horns blared from all angles.  We didn't cause an accident, luckily.  There were no cops.

"I can't do anything..."

---------

Three months later I was fired by a bad manager who was afraid his weaknesses would be exposed and I would get his job.

I didn't want his job.  I was happy supporting him and helping him out.  But he was so afraid he couldn't imagine anyone helping him out, much less the guy he saw as a competitor.

He started the conversation:  "Joe, this is going to be difficult."

Damn right.