Ferreting the methane
I haven’t written in a long time. There is a reason for it. In short my former boss. That person sucked the creative energy out of me. My friend Ian Clunies-Ross once told me there are four types of bosses in the world:
When you tell a bunch of engineers that they need to relate rocket science to terrestrial worm farming, in one or two diagrams, and be careful about the political implications you often get weird body language. Furrow your eyebrows at me, and I tend to think, hmm, I might be drifting towards the dumb side of dumb and smart boss equation. I back up, and ask questions like, “I can see you have concerns about this? Let’s hear them.” That’s corporate speak, I really just say, “I just blew something basic huh? Titan’s liquid methane lakes don’t have fish that can be baited by worms?”
My former boss usually responded with statements like this: “Don’t roll your eyes at me. You know the kind of body language affects your potential for promotion. We need people are supportive of corporate goals, and by the way, you need to dress nicer. Dress for the position you want, not the one you have. Etc. etc.” Translation – I dress like the janitor. Albeit, a janitor that can clean up the bosses messes, and figure out how to explain the commonality between interplanetary space probes and side benefits of worm poop on garden flowers, in an environment where life as we know it, would be frozen solid to diamond hardness. Never mind covering up the fact that the whole audience is pretending to know not know I am discussing worm poop, spacecraft, and withstanding the liquid methane on Titan in the same sentence. Mind you, I also have to build the Cassini spacecraft, launch and guide it flawlessly to Saturn and Titan, while also operating a worm farm and distribution center back on Earth.
Somebody, recently introduced me as “somebody that was really smart.” This was my bosses, boss’s boss’s boss, introducing me to his boss and peers in a meeting. Get the impression I have too many bosses? There were 22 of my bosses in that meeting, and me with my Cassini/worm casing, and common gasses slide show. The interesting thing about the whole meeting, my boss’s, boss’s, boss, just wanted the slide show to start a conversation about their common odorless gas. He knew that worm casing and bait crowd weren’t talking to the Cassini probe crowd, other than casual references to methane. “Bait raising, produces methane as a side benefit.” “Titan comes with methane lakes, we need to avoid when we land.” --And there was my boss “We need a methane strategy. I’m going to guide you through the process, because you don’t always understand the politics, janitor.”
In one of those moments of evil smart janitor attitude I said, “Well it rains methane on Titan.”
“We need to include that, “my boss answered without hesitation, “Anywhere we can emphasize methane will help. Make sure you include methane.”
My boss retired on Dec 31. I’m hoping this will afford me more time to smoke up the alembic of my blog with methane rather than figuring you how to correlated methane in different forms in remote parts of the solar system. I’ll leave as an exercise to the reader to categorize my former boss into one of the categories above. For my boss’s part, when I talked about the four categories, one night over beer, my boss was sure number 1 was the only option applicable.
- Energetic and Smart
- Energetic and Dumb
- Lazy and Smart
- Lazy and Dumb
When you tell a bunch of engineers that they need to relate rocket science to terrestrial worm farming, in one or two diagrams, and be careful about the political implications you often get weird body language. Furrow your eyebrows at me, and I tend to think, hmm, I might be drifting towards the dumb side of dumb and smart boss equation. I back up, and ask questions like, “I can see you have concerns about this? Let’s hear them.” That’s corporate speak, I really just say, “I just blew something basic huh? Titan’s liquid methane lakes don’t have fish that can be baited by worms?”
My former boss usually responded with statements like this: “Don’t roll your eyes at me. You know the kind of body language affects your potential for promotion. We need people are supportive of corporate goals, and by the way, you need to dress nicer. Dress for the position you want, not the one you have. Etc. etc.” Translation – I dress like the janitor. Albeit, a janitor that can clean up the bosses messes, and figure out how to explain the commonality between interplanetary space probes and side benefits of worm poop on garden flowers, in an environment where life as we know it, would be frozen solid to diamond hardness. Never mind covering up the fact that the whole audience is pretending to know not know I am discussing worm poop, spacecraft, and withstanding the liquid methane on Titan in the same sentence. Mind you, I also have to build the Cassini spacecraft, launch and guide it flawlessly to Saturn and Titan, while also operating a worm farm and distribution center back on Earth.
Somebody, recently introduced me as “somebody that was really smart.” This was my bosses, boss’s boss’s boss, introducing me to his boss and peers in a meeting. Get the impression I have too many bosses? There were 22 of my bosses in that meeting, and me with my Cassini/worm casing, and common gasses slide show. The interesting thing about the whole meeting, my boss’s, boss’s, boss, just wanted the slide show to start a conversation about their common odorless gas. He knew that worm casing and bait crowd weren’t talking to the Cassini probe crowd, other than casual references to methane. “Bait raising, produces methane as a side benefit.” “Titan comes with methane lakes, we need to avoid when we land.” --And there was my boss “We need a methane strategy. I’m going to guide you through the process, because you don’t always understand the politics, janitor.”
In one of those moments of evil smart janitor attitude I said, “Well it rains methane on Titan.”
“We need to include that, “my boss answered without hesitation, “Anywhere we can emphasize methane will help. Make sure you include methane.”
My boss retired on Dec 31. I’m hoping this will afford me more time to smoke up the alembic of my blog with methane rather than figuring you how to correlated methane in different forms in remote parts of the solar system. I’ll leave as an exercise to the reader to categorize my former boss into one of the categories above. For my boss’s part, when I talked about the four categories, one night over beer, my boss was sure number 1 was the only option applicable.
posted by Stan at 1:14 PM
1 comments
