Frontiers

I'm not supposed to be doing space stuff here anymore (or at least I should be doing architecture a lot more...) but this video is really something. It is the perfect type of thing for NASA to be doing, it is simple, short, to the point and above all, inspiring. Most of the videos NASA puts out make me feel like I chose the wrong career and that opportunities are passing us by due to lack of vision. This video makes me want to be better at what I do.

Phonecalls

The bane of my existence.

I know that like a lot of people I put off things that I don't like/can't handle/am uncomfortable with, and the biggest thing that I put off are phone calls. Especially when someone tells me I have to do it.

Last Thursday I made a phone call that I was supposed to make back in December - and by "supposed to" I mean that my boss had told me to back around the 7th. He had asked me twice more before I did it, and today we had a meeting with the person I had to call - which went well as meetings go. The problem is, we should've had this meeting a month ago. And that 1 month means a 2 month delay in my project.

That math not make sense to you? Well maybe it would help to know that the person I was meant to be calling was a city zoning official in charge of the Special Permit that we need for the project to move forward as we've designed it. City bureaucracy math is the best math.

And by best I mean the most ridiculous - and honestly, they know it.

But I digress.

The meeting went fine and my boss and I came out with a clear understanding of how we should proceed - but we also knew that we were now susceptible to a new version of the ordinance that we wouldn't have been if I had made the call when I was told to (and when I said I would).

The gist is, we need to get a by-right Building Permit before we can apply for the Special Permit. The by-right permit is a given (obviously, it's "by-right"), but the Special Permit is subject to the whim of a board of elected officials and is not a sure thing. At the minimum it can take 6 months (which admittedly we're 3 months into). By the math of the bureaucracy we can file in March at the earliest since our current communication with the city has us on the board docket in March (if I get a lot done before Valentine's Day). It would be better to be on the docket in January - which if I had made the call in early December (and then rushed a lot) is where we'd be.

If I had made the call in December we should be on the docket now and be getting permission to build on or about March 1st. The reason is long and involved and has to do with filing deadlines - and newspaper print times (stop the presses). As it stands now we'll get permission by about May 1st (if all goes well).

It may be that our client will be fine with that. Or it maybe he'll be pissed. Either way, my boss feels that we're in an embarrassing situation because of my holding off on making a phone call. If there's one thing that my boss hates it's being embarrassed, and he spent 15 minutes making that clear to me while he reamed me out on the steps of city hall.

Honestly, I had been feeling good about my work performance these last few days. Then he lit into me and I felt like all the work I had done on the drawings and specifications, and the work that my team had done (because I don't work alone) had gotten me nowhere. There wasn't much I could say to him other than to apologize and tell him that I'd do better, which didn't seem like much to him at the moment.

There's really not much else I can do really. I just have to try to do better as the project moves forward and try not to make mistakes - of course I have the risk that a mistake made in the past will come back to haunt me later. The "timebomb" effect - which is becoming more of a minefield on my other project, but that's another story.

I keep thinking of my first boss, and one of the most clear lessons she tried to teach me was to make all your phone calls in the morning. That way you had the rest of the day to work on whatever you had to do, and the person you called was on the hook for getting back to you. I don't know why I haven't learned that lesson yet, even though I haven't forgotten it in all this time.

The main point my boss was trying to make was that I wasn't leading the process. I wasn't leading the client, or the city zoning officials, and I wasn't leading my boss. I've been following, and "following" is not a skill an Architect should have.

Leadership

I've been pushing myself to be more of a leader in my day-to-day career life, which has put me up against some questions that have tough answers (for me anyway). One is that it seems to me that leaders always have the answer, and the problem is that feel like I usually don't. This would be fine except that I'm in a position where I get asked a lot of questions.

Questions from clients or contractors that I don't know the answer to make me feel pretty bad and like I'm wasting peoples time and money. Its not the same with coworkers and I'm developing techniques for handling these "no answer" situations. Basically I tell them "I don't know" and then tell them why.

I'm finding that often this exchange leads to a better understanding of the question/problem/issue and sometimes we even come up with an answer.

I not yet be the leader that my bosses want me to be, but I'm becoming a better collaborator, and that's a step in the right direction.

Mediocrity

At my review last week my employers told me that they want me to be more of a leader. They feel strongly that Architects are important to the building process and are the natural entity to lead a building project through it's many stages. Therefore in any situation, be it good or bad, we should be leading the group to the next step. The group could be the client, the builder, the interior designer, or any number of other consultants or sub-contractors.

My boss who was leading this part of the conversation is more of the tough guy of the two of them and his leadership style, while dynamic and effective, feels like it would be difficult for me to pull off - it's a little aggressive. I think the other boss sensed that Boss #1's style isn't like my own, or is at least not how I picture myself behaving. So Boss #2 told me that I can be a leader on projects while still being the laid back and "likeable" person that he sees me as, and incidentally I see myself as. That was the right thing for me to hear, and one of the things that I like about my bosses is that they are sensitive to how other people do things and know how to motivate them. It's a real skill and is one of the things that makes them good Architects.

So, I have to start being a leader, and my job being what it is, I have no shortage of opportunities in front of me. One of the first is with my client who is coming in to review the pricing drawings that I'll have more or less done for him tomorrow. Last week I was thinking a bit about how to show him that I am leading his project, and one of the first things it occurred to me to tell him was something about how sarcastic I am and how that's really a strength.

My client was in the Navy for a while and used to drive ships, and knowing that the only thing I could think to say that involved me and sarcasm is, "I use sarcasm to hide my mediocrity."

It was sad to realize that that was true, but no matter how much I try to see it differently - I can't. I was a solid B+ to A- student in High School and most of college and grad school, I was on the Junior Varsity swim team until the end of my senior year, and although I've run two marathons my times were well below average (though not the absolute slowest and I did complete them both). My record overall reads pretty middle of the road. I've been mediocre in a world where being mediocre is enough to get by. In fact, mediocre people often get praised because expectations are generally low in our society. And that's how I've been getting by.

My employers are pretty clearly telling me that this isn't a sustainable path for me. They haven't explicitly told me to "shape up or ship out", but they did imply that if didn't and things got bad again then maybe I wouldn't be with the company any longer. They are telling me that based on my age and experience level I should be performing better, and that they want me to step up.

I want to do better, I know I worked harder and paid more attention to my work while I was in college, but I haven't been able to put that energy level into practicing Architecture. At the office I just feel really A.D.D. for some reason. The phone is ringing, Emails are coming in, co-workers are asking questions or making small talk, and of course, the internet is there. There are so many distractions that I was seriously considering taking time away from my wife and friends so that I could take some work home with me tonight. That's something I've never done before.

Tomorrow before my meeting with the Navy Client I have a site meeting with another client that is in the punch list phase, and there will be a million little questions to settle out on that before I get back to office and sit down to plan out how I'll be a leader to the Navy Guy. That won't be easy and it's likely that I'll end up using "being busy" as an excuse for why I'll be mediocre for another day - and that is unsatisfying.

Sarcasm

I use it to hide my mediocrity.

Been A While

So, I've done what everyone with a blog inevitably does (no matter what they swear to) and gone a full year without a post. It doesn't matter too much though as I've had barely any readers since I never really told too many people about this little outlet for my pent up intellect.

I claim that this blog is about Space, Beer and Architecture, and so far it's been long (relatively speaking) on space, short on architecture, and beer has been non-existent (from the blog, not my life, there it's doing A-okay). I'll get to to beer later on because for now I need to focus on architecture for a while. You see, I'm an architect by training (and in the eyes of my home state) and that's what my day is basically full of, despite the fact that my head is often off in space. The problem is, I let myself get distracted by space way too much and my time daydreaming about what could be happening (but isn't) is keeping me from being good at what I need to be doing on a daily basis - being an architect.

The reason I mention this today of all days is that I had a personnel review at work. It wasn't hugely, overwhelmingly awesome - which is totally understandable because my performance in the last 2 years (since my last review) hasn't been great. I show up and I do my job, but there have been mistakes - big mistakes, mistakes that cost the firm money, and more than my share of those. I've been working for this firm for five and a half years, and to be honest, most of that time I've behaved like an employee, a clockpuncher (as my boss put it) if you will. On one level, maybe my bosses are OK with that, except that clockpunching doesn't bring job security (rightly so these days) in their eyes. They're not firing me, no they made it clear that I'm still with them (we've had layoffs) because they like me and they think I do an OK job, but they expect me to do better. They feel as if they've invested a lot of time and energy in me (not to mention cash on some of my screw-ups) and maybe they aren't getting a good payback on that.

Now, I assume all of you reading this have jobs with bosses but maybe some of them are just jobs or employment, and others might be careers or The Thing You Said You'd Do When You Were Young. Architecture for me wasn't always The Thing for me when I was young. My childhood had a pretty clear career path: Firefighter, Astronaut, Architect. Not atypical for an American male I'll admit, but for me architecture came by accident - high school was a weird time and when I figured out that astronauts weren't like airline pilots (I'll explain that later if you don't get it) I didn't know what I'd do with my life. At 14 this wasn't a big deal, but it did account for about 1.5 years of high school. After that a girlfriend and a random assignment in an excellent class suggested that maybe I should be an architect.

I dove into that with relish (and ketchup?) and didn't look back for nearly 6 years. Hell, maybe it was 10 or 12 to get me where I am today. I'm a licensed architect who has been going through the motions for a while. I've been trying to do my best all along, but what they don't teach you in school is that your day-to-day work is actually a gamble of other peoples money, and my best hasn't been good enough. I like to think my best has been mediocre for a reason, that I've been waiting for the perfect, morally awesome project to come along for me to fully bloom on, but that's not the truth.

I haven't been taking full advantage of the opportunities that I've been given, I haven't lived up to my potential. One of my bosses today suggested that I don't have the fire in my belly. I don't want him to be right - I've had the fire before, I had it nearly every day of school, and I want to breathe that fire again.

But, and there's always a but, school didn't tell me what it was really like to be an architect. School taught me how be to hero architect that may not really exist. School didn't teach me to deal with people who want to take the easy way, the cheap way, the people who have the money but don't want to spend it - the contractor who "doesn't do it that way", or the lazy sub-contractor who doesn't want to do it your way. These things wear at you and make you forget that you once had a fire inside you, that you want to make something amazing, that maybe you can make something better than what you were given - that you can be a capital-A Architect! Because back in the day that's what you were, and goddammit, people still get wide-eyed when you tell them that you're an Architect, and you want to make sure that you earn that awe.

I may not be curing cancer, but I am trying to make our surroundings better - I am an Architect, and I've forgotten what that means, but I intend to discover it again - to feel that fire again - and this is where I'll be writing about it.

(The image above is the front of a t-shirt that Ryan North of www.qwantz.com (Dinosaur Comics) made. It breaks my heart every goddamn time I see it, but it seems appropriate here, and so you should go buy it. Or just read his comic - it's awesome.)

Thank You Shuttle SE&I

Thanksgiving comes a day early this year with this highlight reel from Space Shuttle Systems Engineering & Integration. It's all the best shots from the launch of STS-129, and I don't mean just the stuff straight from the NASA TV feed, this footage is pooled from all the cameras and is artfully edited together.