traveling with kids

This post from Meg makes me a little sad, a little nostalgic, and a little inspired:

Our Mexican Vacation

 I remember the prior post about France, and how I shared it with my wife; at the time we did not have a child and we were working through a decision tree about whether we wanted kids or not, and how we wanted our life to look if we did bring a child into the family.

I may have mentioned it here before, or this may be new to most of you, but just before we got pregnant, and well before we made the move from Chicago to Chattanooga, mi esposa y yo were seriously considering a different sort of adventure.

The basic idea was that we were both going to take a sabbatical from our work and hit the road (or airways, or sea-paths, etc) and see some of the world.  We had been decent travelers before; together we had been to Buenos Aires in Argentina, to several spots in Italy, on a driving tour of Canada (hitting Montreal, Quebec City, and Toronto in a whirlwind), as well as a number of spots in the States.  And so we thought we might light out in search of New, and Different, and Exciting.

The plan was to blog about our travels, possibly generating some community that would eventually evolve into a business, or a travel advice resource, or at least content for a book / magazine article.

And then this happened:

we call this look redneck vogue

Well, he didn't immediately show up this sophisticated looking, but in the midst of our planning to quit-our-jobs-and-wander-the-world, we got the two-pink-lines-on-the-pee-stick news.  And we did what any reasonable people in our situation would do, and re-imagined our plan as a travel-with-baby adventure.

Oh, how we daydreamed for about a week, talking up our ideas for how our child would love to be a world traveler, and how our blog could framed as a guide to other parents: This is How You Travel With Child!  And then reality set in, as it is wont to do.

But, here's the thing, I am a big believer that perception informs reality, and that the constraints we see for our lives are largely of our own design.  I was reminded of this a few months ago when some friends of friends blew threw town on the return leg of their own travel odyssey (read about it here).  They had done something so similar to what we had envisioned, and I was jealous and encouraged and wistful.

And now Meg drops this post on me, and it finds me in the midst of some serious career malaise, and it's making me thing, again, of what may be.

performance review

Have you read the Ribbon Farm blog, in particular the explication of the categories of actors in the workplace, using the sitcom "The Office" as a reference?  Check it out, and get comfortable with the specialized meanings of "sociopaths, losers, and the clueless".  It's really very interesting stuff, whether you buy in wholesale or not.

I was reminded of this blog post (really a series of posts if you dig in) when considering my annual performance review.  On the off chance my reviewer reads my blog (hi there!) let me here carefully and sincerely qualify that I don't consider him a sociopath, loser, or clueless in any pejorative sense (believe me, there are non-pejorative ways to be called a loser - read the other blog!)

Allowing for the possibility that other, non-American, cultures may differ from us in this regard, I suspect that one of the least comfortable experiences of the modern office place is the performance review.  I'm going out on a generalizing limb, but people do not enjoy being judged.  And for all but the most boneheaded and/or ego-maniacal folks, being the judge is tough too.

I have strong memories of the first few reviews I had in my first real "professional" job, and how I felt like a jumble of anxious, emotional, volatile, and contradictory reactions were all jostling for the opportunity to be expressed.  Going into the review knowing that I had checked off all the boxes, had acquitted myself well against any reasonable set of expectations, etc did nothing to quell that feeling that I was somehow going to be called out...and the managerial masochism that informs how a review must go always snuck up on me and pulled the carpet from under my feet.

If you've been there, on either side of the desk, you know what I mean.  If the scale is 1 - 5 or 1 - 10, or A - F the rule is the same:  managers can't give out 5/5 scores (or can't give out many).  The rationale goes something like this:  Nobody's perfect, and if an employee gets too many ratings of "strongly exceeds expectations" then one of two things will happen, and both of them are bad.  1. the employee doesn't think there's room for improvement; or 2. the employee will ask for a raise


The trap for most managers is that there is no room for secret choice number 3: some employees really are competent, self-motivated, conscientious, and will not take all 5s as an allowance to coast for a while, but will take it as a challenge to figure out what lies on the other side of a 5.

And this segues to a future post (coming soon to a small screen near you!): my version of the Ribbon Farm study, slightly different in its calibration, and based on a scale of relative competencies.