Lately, I’ve been posting to a Substack newsletter I call Second Thoughts. Yesterday, I posted this one: Slouching Toward Waschke Road
Slouching Toward Waschke Road
Digital Presence
As we leave the Covid-19 pandemic, new ways of life are emerging. New vaccinations have entered the fall flu shot ritual and we cautiously wait for an annual “summer covid surge.” Management experts debate the effects on productivity of a “return to the office,” and cities fret over declining tax revenue from empty office buildings.
I’m reminded of a productivity study, perhaps ephemeral, I heard about in high school. A factory experimented with lighting. They increased light on the factory floor and productivity improved. They increased light more. Productivity improved further. They were on a roll. Then someone noticed that lighting costs were high, so they decreased lighting. Astoundingly, productivity increased again. After fiddling with lighting for some time, they concluded that changing the lighting in any way short of darkness increased productivity.
I keep this story in mind while thinking about working from home.
There’s nothing easy about managing a workforce. As a cynical observer of business management, I’ll hazard that short term decisions on remote work depend more on preferences and prejudices rather than objective analysis of pros and cons. Nevertheless, eventually, a smart manager will figure out a solution in their organization that gives them a winning edge and it will be written up in the Harvard Business Review, thus becoming common knowledge.
I doubt that the smart solution will be a return to 2019. Some increase in working from home over pre-pandemic is likely, but the form and extent of that increase is still unpredictable. In any case, I will be thunderstruck if one solution is best for all enterprises.
I worked remotely long before the pandemic. I still live on a homestead farm that goes back to my emigrant great-grandparents, a heritage I will not relinquish, but I don’t have the farming gene.
Most of my career has been with multi-national corporations. For nearly thirty years my official corporate office was on the Seattle east side, a two hundred mile commute from the farm. I’ve burned outrageous airmiles, sometimes effectively commuting between the northwest corner of Washington State to a job in New York City, but most of the time my real office was in the old farmhouse on Waschke Road from which I participated in and led development teams that stretched all over the world.
I have faced the challenge of remote work. I’m not here to say that I have answers, but I have experience.
Before I go on, I should disclose that I’m an introvert. After meeting face-to-face, I seek time alone to relax and recover. After online interaction, I’m often energized. However, my preference for online connections does not reveal anything about the quality of those interactions, only that I am open to them.
Aside from the remoting forced by pandemic lockdowns, online interaction is particularly suited to the 21st century.
Having lived in the same geographic location for over seventy years, I am aware of how much life has changed in my community. When I was growing up, we had far fewer neighbors than today and most were more or less related. Everyone knew everyone else’s business, who was arguing with whom, and what they were arguing about. Calling ahead to announce a visit was unheard of and knocking was often optional. I note that in this, our life was similar to Jimmy Carter’s account of growing up in rural Georgia.
That has all changed. I have a nod-and-a-wave acquaintance with everyone living on “our” road and the four-lot development that has popped up at its end, but I don’t know all their names, and I’ve never entered most of their houses. I’m content with this relationship. My circle of friends is no longer limited to physical proximity, and I am glad it is not, because I now communicate daily with friends in every U.S. time zone and beyond.
I read and write daily emails, message, and video conference with a group of friends who share my interest in Victorian novels, software architects from my former career, a group who lived in the same dormitory fifty years ago on the South Side of Chicago, and friends from my church, which happens to be close to my old corporate office in Seattle not the farm. This bunch includes astronomers, lawyers, surgeons, geophysicists, psychologists, and chemists, very different from the narrow physical community of sixty years ago.
This in an improvement in life.
For those who cling to the magic of personal proximity, I point to Christian and Zen Buddhist communities. Today, churches hold daily online prayer sessions following centuries old traditional rites. Zen sanghas hold online zazen meditation following traditional practices. These things work. They don’t replace face-to-face interaction, but they add opportunities that didn’t exist in the past.
Is humanity about to become a disembodied digital phantasm? No. Digital connections augment physical presence, they do not replace it.
But we are entering a new world.
Outrageous: How To Sharpen a Kitchen Knife
Outrageous. I am outraged by well-intended advice. Twice.
Yesterday I read a well meaning but outrageous bit of advice on blogging: have a theme and stick to it. None of this some nostalgia, some book discussion, some social commentary stuff. Choose a theme and stick to it. Anyone who knows me well, knows I wander all over the map. I never stick to routines for long. If you are as old as I am, you might remember a plastic surgeon back in the 1960’s who claimed all you had to do was repeat something 20 times and it became a habit. What rot! If I do the same thing 20 times in a row, it’s time for a change.
Good advice, this sticking to theme. I’m sure many readers want blogs to be predictable, but for me, no thanks. I’m not following it. Can’t follow it. I can’t even stick to bad habits. Hence, this post.
This weekend, I read an item in the New York Times, Improve Your Life With These Tiny Chores. Very sensible. Wash your sheets, throw out expired prescription opioids, unclog your sink. Yeah. Sure. Fine. I do these things whenever I am forced to. Who doesn’t?
One outrageous task sent me into low earth spitting orbit: sharpen your knives.
I know something about sharpening. I got my first jack knife from my grandpa when I six. And my first sharpening stone. The NYT article mentioned that a sharp knife is safer than a dull one. My left hand is covered with scars from dull knives that skipped off of the piece of wood I was whittling on and into my hand. These are old scars. I’ve learned to sharpen knives.
Dull knives are dangerous
The article starts with a modern nod to the counter-intuitive danger of dull knives. Good start, I said to myself, glancing at my scarred hand.
The rest was drivel
The rest of the item was drivel. It suggests sharpening knives once a year. Once a year? Piffle. Sharpen your knives the instant they loose their bite. It depends on the knife and how you use it.
How I do it
I sharpen my knives every time I use them, once or twice a day for my chef’s knife. Treat your knives with the care they deserve. Sharp edges are delicate and fragile. Don’t throw a good knife in the dishwasher to get rattled around, dented, and nicked.
After I use a knife, I clean it, and sharpen it on a steel, a dozen or more strokes on each side of the edge. Sharpening on a steel removes little or no material from the blade. Instead, it reshapes the metal into a sharp edge. A steel can’t get rid of a nick in an edge or remove a blunt spot, but it will return an undamaged edge to keen slicing form. The duller the edge, the less effective the steel.
You can’t reshape forever. Eventually, you have to grind the edge, which might amount to once a year, although once every few months is more realistic for knives you use daily.
You must be judicious in grinding, which removes metal from the edge. Grind too often and your knife disappears or morphs into an unusable shape. But if you don’t grind often enough, you have a dull and dangerous knife.
Trial and error
I won’t get into tools, angles, and techniques here. My best advice reflects my experience. Trial and error, grasshopper. Trial and error. There are many techniques and they all work, but not necessarily for you.
The blunter the angle of a blade, the less keen the edge, but the longer it stays sharp when cutting is tough. My perfect edge is not your perfect edge, but when an edge is not perfect, sharpen it. Use the steel often, a grinding stone only when needed. Power grinders are fast, but require expensive guides or great skill. Hard stainless steel blades are bears to sharpen, but stay sharp longer. Good carbon steel requires frequent maintenance, but with proper attention, it cuts like a dream. I have a cheap Chinese cleaver that looks like a mess, but cuts cleaner than its much more expensive German stainless brethren.
As an aside, most kitchens have too many knives. Learn to use and treat a few good knives well. Give an impoverished homicidal maniac a break and send the clutter to goodwill. Your life will be better. Ask Marie Kondo.