Lasagna Fo(u)r Days

I made lasagna on Saturday. We were having friends over for dinner, 6 of us total sitting down to eat, so I figured what better time to make a dish that otherwise gives us a few days of leftovers? Well, one person dropped out at the last minute— like, literally a minute before we were expecting him to arrive— and the rest of us.... Well, I guess it was a mistake for us to serve so much other good food in the same meal because that pan of lasagna didn't even get half finished!

That was Saturday. Hawk and I have had lasagna leftovers for dinner Sunday and Monday already, and there's still some left in the pan. The remainder is small enough that we can finish it off tonight if we both eat some. In the past lasagna has feed us for 3 days... this time around it's lasagna for four days!

Busy Last Week with a POC

Last week was a blur of activity. After we got home from a nice, 9 day vacation Sunday evening I was back to work by 7:30am Monday morning. I was starting a proof of concept (POC) project with a customer.

POCs are a common part of the enterprise sales process. We can do all the presentations and demos of our product, but before buying the customer almost always wants to see it work in their environment. It's to make sure we're not selling smoke and mirrors as well as for them to get a feel for what it'll be like to own and maintain the product.

Doing POCs used to be a huge part of my job. For several years I was doing about one a month. What changed since then is I've moved to companies that are slightly more mature. We're working on bigger enterprise deals, not smaller transactional deals. I'm called upon to deliver a POCs only a few times a year.

Another thing that's changed is travel. Years ago POCs were almost always done on-site— which raised the complexity and the risk. Not to mention, added lots of travel time to my schedule. On a week in the field I might be onsite with a customer for 3½ days but with travel that was a full, 5 day week. And by the time I was home Friday evening (sometimes in time for dinner, sometimes not) I'd be drained.

Last week was like that in some ways, in other ways not. POCs are always a complex, high stakes engagement in sales. This one I'd put a lot of planning effort into— as I always try to do— to contain the risks. But the pace of work was different. Instead of long, grueling days I had the work spaced out with just a few hours each day. Among other reasons that's a better cadence for remote work. And it's not just Coronavirus that's shifted this work to primarily remote. Even prior to 2 years ago companies were handling more and more such projects remotely, with increasingly distributed teams.

Saying it's just "a few hours a day" can be deceptive, though. It's just a few hours a day on a Zoom call with screen-sharing. After that there's homework. I've got to-do items such as looking up answers to questions I wasn't able to answer on the spot, checking with colleagues about bugs or problems I ran into, and communicating with all the stakeholders both internally & externally. It was a full-time job, and by Friday I was wiped. But by Friday I also was done.

Yes, all that hard work I put into planning and preparation paid off. I was prepared for this project to stretch to 2 weeks but I wrapped it in 5 days.

Those Impacted by a School Shooting? Thousands.

Yesterday I posted to my blog about the school shooting in Oxford, Michigan, that killed 4 and wounded 7. I'd been considering whether or not, and how, to write about it for a few days. These events are tragedies, and they're sadly becoming too frequent to write about all of them without turning this blog into "The Tragedy of the Day". What finally tipped me over to writing about this one was an interview I heard on the radio yesterday with a major news media reporter who's covered numerous school shootings. One of the points he made in his interview is that the set of people harmed by a shooting is much broader than just the people killed or injured by gunshots.

This makes sense when you start to think about it. Every student killed has a family who's devastated. Every student wounded may be permanently injured and has a family who'll have to live with the consequences of that and probably support them. Adults killed or injured in shootings have families, too, and they're not just somebody's spouse, sister, brother, child, or parent; they're also a family's breadwinner. With this consideration the number of people you can imagine being impacted grows from 11 (those killed or wounded) to dozens, maybe even 100+.

But the circle of harm is broader still, the reporter explained. Every student in the school is harmed. Hundreds of students hid from the shooter, afraid for their lives for tens of minutes and not knowing whether they'd get out of school alive. Every student in the school likely knew at least one person who was shot. Every student in the school has got to wonder when it's safe to return— if it's safe to return. Their parents are wondering the same thing, too! And it's not just the students and their families; it's all the teachers and staff, too. They were all in fear for their lives. And many of the staff will also tormented by thoughts of, What could I have done differently to protect more students? The number of people harmed, psychologically, is in the thousands.