Loved this!!! As ever, amusing how many parallels we have given dramatically different roots. In addition to call center phases —which as you know I consider valuable— we also shared a screensaver phase. I was taking last night with a friend about the (probably well known) likelihood that for lots of us, aesthetic control and discovery and exploration on computers was an appealing alternative to a “real” life in which we had none of those things, at least reliably. I fiddled with my icons while the Rome of e.g. my high school life burned!
Management might be the same thing! I don’t know. Anyway: this ruled.
The comparison to management is interesting. There’s still a lot I need to unpack there. But you may be right: something feels safer about management. Although, in my experience, it’s always led to sorrow.
Well it all leads to sorrow! I find the sorrows of management marginally earlier to handle than the sorrows of e.g. family life. Like many people of my type, I strongly prefer other people’s problems (yes: I am down with OPP) to my own. Everything is clearer when my garbage-tier self isn’t directly in the mix!
Right, but management is not *only* about other peoples problems, right? That’s the ways part. The hard bit is navigating corporate structures when your output is people, not pixels (and the inhumanity that comes with it is too painful for me to bear). “Supporting” my reports is fun and fulfilling, but interacting with other leadership is often cold and calculating and, above all, too invested in the abstraction of the corporation and not its common goal.
Oh definitely. It’s no picnic. Constant moral dilemmas make me feel like a grownup, but sometimes when I’m trying to navigate something my eye twitches in a way that lets me know I’m sublimating an immense amount of stress lmfao.
Haha, as I was writing this I remembered that when I got my first computer I was living in a town called Ciudad Quesada in Costa Rica, which is LITERALLY 30 minutes away from an always-erupting volcano. Somehow the computer was more captivating.
"To the managed, Management is presented as a supportive role: nobody wants to be managed but everyone wants to be supported. To the managers, Management is presented as a leadership role: nobody wants to manage but everyone wants to lead." –– so true
Loved this!!! As ever, amusing how many parallels we have given dramatically different roots. In addition to call center phases —which as you know I consider valuable— we also shared a screensaver phase. I was taking last night with a friend about the (probably well known) likelihood that for lots of us, aesthetic control and discovery and exploration on computers was an appealing alternative to a “real” life in which we had none of those things, at least reliably. I fiddled with my icons while the Rome of e.g. my high school life burned!
Management might be the same thing! I don’t know. Anyway: this ruled.
The comparison to management is interesting. There’s still a lot I need to unpack there. But you may be right: something feels safer about management. Although, in my experience, it’s always led to sorrow.
Well it all leads to sorrow! I find the sorrows of management marginally earlier to handle than the sorrows of e.g. family life. Like many people of my type, I strongly prefer other people’s problems (yes: I am down with OPP) to my own. Everything is clearer when my garbage-tier self isn’t directly in the mix!
Right, but management is not *only* about other peoples problems, right? That’s the ways part. The hard bit is navigating corporate structures when your output is people, not pixels (and the inhumanity that comes with it is too painful for me to bear). “Supporting” my reports is fun and fulfilling, but interacting with other leadership is often cold and calculating and, above all, too invested in the abstraction of the corporation and not its common goal.
Oh definitely. It’s no picnic. Constant moral dilemmas make me feel like a grownup, but sometimes when I’m trying to navigate something my eye twitches in a way that lets me know I’m sublimating an immense amount of stress lmfao.
Haha, as I was writing this I remembered that when I got my first computer I was living in a town called Ciudad Quesada in Costa Rica, which is LITERALLY 30 minutes away from an always-erupting volcano. Somehow the computer was more captivating.
"To the managed, Management is presented as a supportive role: nobody wants to be managed but everyone wants to be supported. To the managers, Management is presented as a leadership role: nobody wants to manage but everyone wants to lead." –– so true