The cranky pot whiny monster

Beat the traffic, rein in the road rage, and finally get to my parent’s house to pick up my son.

Time check. If I leave here in 10 mins I’ll be home by 7.30pm then 30 minutes for dinner 15 minutes for bath 15 minutes story time and he’ll be asleep by 8.30 that makes it 10 hours of sleep before he wakes up at 6.30am and can catch the bus for school without being cranky all morning still not enough sleep for his age but can’t help that now that’s what it’s like having a working mom he better learn to deal with it…

“Hi Dad….DHRUVVV, come on get your shoes, let’s go!”

“NO.”

Deep breaths.

Dad’s voice floating in from behind the kitchen counter “You want a sandwich?”

“No thanks Dad. I got to rush. Come on sweetie. We have to go now. Dad, has he eaten? When did he eat last? You know he gets so cranky if he doesn’t eat……PUT ON YOUR SHOES DHRUV! ”

Whining and shoe finding drama in the background. Probably hungry.

“Really, Dad, I mean why can’t he just eat and be in a good mood. He won’t eat, then he gets cranky and doesn’t want to eat, but all the time he’s hungry and I’m trying to force him to eat so he’ll be in a better mood. Kids are just so illogical!”

A sandwich has appeared on the kitchen counter. I wolf it down. It has been 6 hours since lunch.

“I mean, seriously is it so hard to know that when you’re hungry? I mean I try to teach him this all the time – if you’re hungry, eat, and don’t be a cranky pot whiny monster.”

More whining and shoe finding drama in the background. Finally got all his stuff found his shoes checked his bag everything’s there its been more than 10 minutes now recalibrating he will sleep only by 9 now ruining everything sigh better prepare for a cranky morning.

“OK, bye Dad. Got to go and stuff the monster, he’s hungry and will be super whiny all the way home. Thanks for the sandwich!”

Apparently kids never do learn how to eat when they’re hungry and not be cranky pot whiny monsters.

 

The death of the intranet and the birth of (gasp!) the meme!

So it has officially been 12 years now that my love story with internal coms continues. And intranets in this story, being the backbone of internal coms, have been the ‘Coffee Day’ of frequent rendezvous in this analogy.

I think a little backstory is called for. My first internship was with i-Vista Solutions, and one of their first products was an intranet. I wrote the marketing content for it, sat with techies who patiently deconstructed the techspeak for the average arts student. My first job at ABB then had me spend massive amounts of time on CAWP – a Lotus Notes powered system of databases with a user interface that served as the intranet. Incidentally, when I came back to ABB 10 years later and saw my name under the pages ‘page created by Nandini Naik’, it felt akin to finding my star on the Hollywood walk of fame. At HP, I was part of an entire team that made updates to the intranet, for the whole of the company, worldwide. Clearly, they were already living in the future.

Then was Logica – when I fell head over heels in love with the intranet as the definitive internal coms solution. Swamped with the need to communicate to employees, give individual teams freedom to communicate, but maintain control over the messages and grammar (!), the intranet was my savior and my career launchpad. Over three migrations on various platforms, I evangelized intranet with zeal, marketed it as the win-win solution for everyone. As the responsibility of the organization, not the coms team. Had collaborative workshops with each team to understand what they wanted to say, how they could say it and what functionalities were best suited. Trained a network of ‘Intranet SPOCS’ who learned the tool, understood its value and then ran with it. It was the dream. The last migration to MOS gave us a world class, intuitive intranet that everyone was proud to own, not a tool that was part of the coms mandate. When Logica was acquired by CGI, final validation came from the fact that the intranet was the tool chosen in the integration discussions that would stay.

Now, back to the present. I met the founder of i-Vista riding a shuttle to catch a flight. They had moved away from their intranet product years ago. Hard to sell he said. I know. I ‘sold’ it internally for years.  Without a coms person crazed with evangelical zeal and armed with budgets pushing the decision from inside, it was a hard sell. Came back to ABB 12 years later, and still using CAWP, but in the process of migrating. Just saying, despite being passionately involved with intranets, I now go to LinkedIn to search for people within my own company. Met an ex-colleague who now works with a major lifestyle brand. They’ve just adopted Facebook@work. He says they only use intranet as a document repository now, and plan to communicate with employees only on FB. No need to train, evangelize, hard sell. Crowd-sourced content that can be moderated. Employee engagement at its best – through a truly social network.

Over a decade, is the writing on the wall? This love story seems right where it started, and destined to end where star-crossed lovers end up with all odds against them.

Reluctantly, I agree that Facebook is probably a better platform – easy to post, share, moderate information, balance of text, video and words, and let’s face it, fun. If you don’t have to force people to be there, that’s half the battle won. In my love story of internal coms, I must say, I have never imagined the meme rising up as an official mode of communication.

The times, they are a-changing.  

What would happen if you told your boss you couldn’t travel because it was your kid’s birthday?

Well if you are a man, you wouldn’t because this would seem frivolous. If you are a woman you wouldn’t, because it would make you seem like you obviously preferred to stay home and care for kids rather than work.

Either way, your child loses out. Growing up, I was always made to feel special on my birthday. My dad, who was away at sea, would send me the prettiest card full of glitter. My mom, who ran her own pre-school and managed four kids, would still find time to stitch me a new frock, and my siblings were tasked with decorating my place at the dining table for breakfast.

Making children feel special takes time, planning and yes, also needs to be recognized by your boss as something worth pushing back for. And I think needs to be done by moms and dads, because nothing makes a kid happier than when his parents connive to make him feel special.

This is a choice that managers can make, one that is guaranteed to foster immense loyalty by the very simple decision on how they react to such an honest reason for not traveling. In one story narrated to a child at home, a boss is someone who keeps his parents away on their birthday. In the second version, a boss is someone spoken of with affection and gratitude.

Which manager are you?

The fulfilling nature of procrastination

Contrary to popular belief, procrastination is productive. With the immense pressure building up from the THING you’re avoiding doing, you suddenly get done so many things you really wanted to do. The things that actually matter to you, that you’d been putting off to do the things that you had to do. The shelf you meant to clear and organize for two years. The quality time you spent making a super mess with your kid on an art project. The phone call to a really old friend you always meant to catch up with. The dinner you wanted to plan with friends. Suddenly you’re convinced that these are more important, and you have time to do the THING later. Then at the last minute, you get the THING you HAD to do done and screech in with a hat under the falling door, Indiana Jones style. Funny thing is, much of the time, the lack of effort on the THING goes unnoticed.

It’s ironical that in the day to day prioritization of activities, we bump up the to-do list the things which really aren’t important, which we’d rather not do at all. And that there actually is time for it all, but you spend unnecessary time stressing about how to do the THING that you got done at last minute. Procrastination is so fulfilling and so spiritual!    

100 Days, 200 Words

All successful writers attribute their success to one thing – that they write. Not what, when, or how they write, but simply that they write. For a few years now I’ve had an existential crises, and it seems like a vague voice tells me that my purpose is to write. Okay, I may be reaching here. Perhaps my work isn’t quite validating my life, and I’m stuck in an everyday routine that looks like it won’t change for the next 15 years, so I’m looking to escape. Discussing my bleak outlook one day, at midnight, battling sleep for quality time, when my mind has relaxed over a mojito (or maybe two), the epiphany came from an unlikely source – my husband. Unlikely because he is the motorbike-fixing, Handy Manny sort, and runs the other way from anything ‘arty’. Whereas I’ve written for companies for ten years, and have the process of crafting content perfected to a science. From what he’s heard, he pointed out, it’s only about sitting down and writing 200 words a day. Perhaps it was the mojito, but I couldn’t argue. (and I can always argue).

So I pose myself a 100-day, 200-word challenge. Where will this delicious adventure lead, and what will I discover?