Smithology

I have a swearing problem. Not really too much of a problem publicly, at work or whatever but just in my own private space, which now includes a child, I swear often and regularly.

My father taught me to swear and my mother taught me swear even worse. As a child I knew Dad had stuffed something up when he said Bloody Hell! (accompanied by a crash or the sound of breakage). I knew he was annoyed at something when I heard CRAP!. And I knew something was very wrong with the world when I heard SHIT. Before he became a Christian I would occasionally hear Jesus Christ! thrown into the mix.

Mum on the other hand never let a crass or indecent word cross her lips as far as I can remember. I might have heard her occasionally saying things like oh bummer. My grandparents on that side were very strict about swearing too. I wasn’t allowed to say things like gosh or heck when grandpa was around.

So when I reached those unruly teenage years, I chose swearing as a place where I could safely rebel from my parents and impress my friends with my imaginative vocabulary and use of the ‘F’ word in innovative ways. If Mum had not really cared (or given a shit) about swearing then I may not have gone so hard on the swearing front as a teenager. I remember riding through the suburbs on my pushbike with a friend just yelling out all variations of f-ing and combinations of crass words for genitalia and women as we went past the neatly manicured lawns and freshly painted fences.

While I grew out of that, I’ve never really given up swearing as a therapeutic expression of a great many emotions that would otherwise remain repressed.

When I worked as an embedded engineer, it was fairly routine to swear at work. Electronics can be pretty frustrating and when you’re debugging software and electronics at the same time, you need to be able to talk to the system in a language it understands.

When I got my new job, I happily sat at my desk swearing at any javascript errors I saw and happily declaiming the sexual performance of miscreant php code. Until I realised that hardly anyone here swears.

Since becoming a father, I’ve had to try and curb my potty mouth. Steph has only occasionally complained of my swearing (usually when driving) but I don’t want Sol’s first word to be Fuck! – he already knows Duck (at least I think that’s what he’s saying).

I have tried a few different methods of fixing my language. The solution I’ve found most effective is to try and raise my swearing threshold. A lot of swearing creats a kind of background swearing radiation so you need to swear more intensely to get what you need. So if you can lower the swearing background radiation, then when you really need to swear, you don’t need to swear as brightly – a twinkling star instead of a super nova. Part of lowering the swearing background noise is the substitution method: Fracking, freaking, shedload of shite etc… It seems to be working ok for me but sometimes I still just want to fill my lungs, put my head back and yell FUCKING BULLSHIT!.

[tags]swearing,fatherhood,childhood,parenting[/tags]

fatherhood

Right now at work I have a million things to do. It seems like I get phone calls, emails and people coming to my desk all the time with more work to do. Mostly it is just things that are annoying people, other times it is planned work that needs to happen on a deadline.

So my method works like this. I first try and work out all my deadlines. What has to be done by when and why. Then for those items I can work out tasks that need to be done etc to make it all happen. Then I can schedule my time and get the work done or alert my boss if I think it’s not going to happen.

But then I get into the phase where I am now where pretty much all my deadlines came and went and I have a bunch of projects on the boil and things stacking up. We’ve got two new programmers in the pipeline who’ll be on the job soon enough so this is how I’m getting through stuff.

1. I work in half day blocks on a problem.
2. When someone comes and sees me, I tell them that I’ll look at it after lunch or tomorrow if it’s already the afternoon – most people are happy with that.
3. When it gets to after lunch or the next morning, I work on the most recent task I was bugged about.
4. Then the process repeats.
5. If by some miracle, no-one bugs me, I take a look at my top ten issues in my pile (actually it’s the bug tracking system) and pick the one that seems to have the most impact.

So the lesson is – bug me just before lunch or right when I’m about to go home. Maybe I should make a cut-off to avoid rewarding people who call at inconvenient times.

[tags]productivity, fire fighting, time management[/tags]

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So you thought this blog was going to be about computers and engineering and stuff right? So why have I titled this post People Skills? Well as it turns out I’ve learned over time that people skills are very much a part of good programming and engineering.

My engineering career has had many high times and low times. The best times have been when I’ve done something really cool and not only do I get the sense of fulfillment that comes from seeing your creation come to life but also the praise and admiration of colleagues. I’ll never forget demonstrating the laser guided fine positioning system for an overhead traveling crane the morning after we pulled a 3am-er debugging and ironing out it’s deficiencies.

But there have been plenty of low times and almost all of them have been because of an interpersonal problem with my boss or a colleague. In every job I’ve been in, I eventually run into problems with my boss – I feel like my boss doesn’t respect or understand what I do and usually my boss tries to micromanage me. I’m not an aggressive or assertive person so I’ve tried all kinds of passive-aggression and avoidance to try and solve these kinds of problems. I’ve left many a good job just because it got to the point where I loathed being in the same room as my boss.

Meanwhile, I have been thinking that one solution might be to become a boss myself which is why I found myself checking the bookshelves at home for texts about leadership and project management. My wife who is a social worker recommended People Skills which was used as a text in her degree.

What I wasn’t expecting was that People Skills pressed a lot of buttons for me when thinking about problems I’ve had in my workplaces. The book describes a lot of different behaviors which has made me more aware of my own behaviors and responses at work.

I’m about halfway through the book now in the part that deals with assertiveness (having finished the ‘listening skills’ part). As I’m reading I’m thinking more and more about how important all this stuff is when it comes to workplaces and how deficient I’ve been in communicating with my bosses and colleagues over the years.

So once I’ve mastered the art of assertive communication I can move onto the last part of the book which is about handling conflict. Perhaps I can write a post sometime in the future about how I was able to have conflict with my boss and not need to go home and spend the night on seek.com.au afterwards.

[tags]management, people skills,communication,workplace[/tags]

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Wow.

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