I had the first piece of outright nonsense that I can specifically associate with the new company owners today. This was a Webex presentation about Change. I learned about it when I did a cursory check of my work e-mail before starting lunch and found oh, whoops, something was happening. It wasn't on my calendar, although in digging through e-mails I found that it was warned about, just not, you know, put forth as an event that would be added to calendars and make it harder to miss. Still, that's on me; I can create calendar events as well as they can. There were other people there but somehow I never got to the screen where it tells you who else is there. The presenter mentioned someone else from the office by name, though, so I know they were there.
The presentation was an hour-plus talk about coping with change, specifically in the workplace but framed as change-in-general. That's maybe a noble goal, but it lost me early on when the presenter offered this quote, attributed to Socrates: ``The secret of change is to focus not on fighting for the old, but on building the new.'' I grant there is leeway in translating any language, and that it's only convention which makes us render anyone over 250 years in the past as sounding like a sublease agreement. But that doesn't sound like Socrates to me. It's not, as ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger quickly confirmed. It's from a fictionalized memoir published in 1980, bunnyhugger speculated to get some of that Zen and the Art of You're Okay, Seagull Livingston money.
So it goes. The principle is maybe useful, in giving a guide to how people react to change, and what to do about making change more or less stressful. But the actual presentation was filled with vague or mushy metaphors, and dubious exercises. Like, one piece asked us to think about recent fears about change, and then to rate them as real or as imaginary fears. The thesis being that we tend to have more imaginary fears than real ones. The presenter gave as an example of an imaginary fear she'd had that she had worried on taking this new job that she'd be bad at it, even though the job was very similar to what she already had. The exercise crashed hard for me because I'm not sure how to draw the distinction between ``imaginary fear'' and ``realistic fear about something that turned out not to happen''. The fear that the new job is not actually as close to the old one as it appears, and that you will be appreciably worse at the new one, seems realistic to me.
It did make me wonder if an academically rigorous version of this, like, one that could show its sources and had checked its sources, could be made. Of course it could be made, yes, but the question is whether a company would buy it. That Socrates ``quote'', sheesh.
Now let's close out --- believe it or not --- January walks where I took my camera and photographed late light-hangers. Also get some pictures of pets in, because who doesn't like pet pictures?
I love that there's little ribbons of reflected lighting in the street here, along with the leaves illuminated by the street light.
The back door of our hipster bar, the one with the pinball. As they're also a ramen restaurant they reopened over the winter, helping the pandemic get out of control again, but at least they decorated to make it fun.
Another porch, another set of decorations.
Mid-month I started to worry I didn't have any pictures of Fezziwig. He was never easy to photograph, since he was fast-moving and in the darkest corner of our darkest room, but I gave a try and am glad I did.
Fezziwig learned pretty fast that if he came to the bars he might get a treat. Also, notice where he chewed away at the corners of the plastic window there.
He's starting to lose faith in my generosity here. (I likely gave him a seed, something at least.)
Our pet rabbit enjoying a nice bit of chard.
Sunshine looking positively happy, or as happy as a bunny will look, at lunch.
Nice soft-focus shot of our pet rabbit considering her lunchtime workload ahead.
Trivia: In 1953 Americans bought about 1.3 billion pencils, from 23 firms, about half of them from four makers. Source: The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance, Henry Petroski.
Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Volume 2: Homeward Bound, , Tom Sims, Doc Winner. Editor Stephanie Noell. More of this fanzine with 1939-era comic strips. As the introduction promises there's a lot to love: spiriks, mermaids and mermen, and harpies. Plus a bit where a guy's turned into a giant because of the reasons. Wimpy threatens to take over the strip, as he was prone to do, before Popeye gets him back in line.
PS: How April 2021 Treated My Mathematics Blog, and a question about my A-to-Z's on my mathematics blog.
