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For a long, long time I held the belief that if something was broken or wrong, then it was your (that is, my) job to fix it. Even if it wasn’t totally broken, you fixed it so that it wouldn’t break further down the track.
This applied to mechanical, electrical and even professional or personal relationships. With regards to relationships, I felt doing something was often better than doing nothing.
Something happened this weekend that has forced me to conclude that perhaps things are just broken and that no amount of trying to fix things will put them back together. A run-in with a borderline sociopath and narcissist turned the light-bulb on in my head that the way I saw the world and the way this person saw the world was just so much at odds that no amount of work I did was ever going to fix the relationship.
In my head I traced this person’s behaviour back some 40 years and discovered to my horror that I had ignored his bizarre, emotionally crippling behaviour because I imagined he was getting better or that we simply had never managed to ‘connect’ properly. So I imagined that perhaps trying to connect with what he did and make him feel as though I was indebted to him might trigger some breakdown in his wall of self-delusion and start a dialogue going. That was not to be: he misconstrued that behaviour for something very different, something that projected the way he used people on to me instead as a way of self-reinforcing his pathology.
Indeed, he projected that all the way through to my nuclear family, although he never took the time to ever really meet or engage with them in 30-or-so years. So much is the pity that I am actually glad that never occurred because he might have warped their sense of what relationships such as these should be. Sad. His caricature of relationships and friendships would have served as a poor role model and possibly could have endangered my children’s emotional well-being.
I once used to proudly say to people in his industry that I knew such-and such, believing he probably left the last firm on good terms or his reputation was such that he was held in high esteem. It never occurred to me that he might not be regarded as highly as I thought. After a few times his former workmates gave me cold stares or nervously shifted the conversation to something else, I twigged that perhaps the person I’d known and the person they worked with displayed the same hair-trigger rage, callous indifference and cavalier attitude to the truth and people. It looks like he did not discriminate between work and friend — he was an equal opportunity hater.
For ages I thought that perhaps I could fix it if I could build some sort of bridge to him. He’s not bad after all, just misunderstood, I thought. A lost sheep.
This weekend I was disabused of that sorry belief. I am sad for him because I know what he could have been and what he could have done. However, I am glad for me because suddenly I no longer feel any responsibility to fix anything and neither do I care what he thinks or doesn’t think about me and my family in his little cocooned world of self-loathing and delusion.
I no longer feel as though I have to fix anything. I am free.
 Right vs. Left explained I saw this very effective Left vs. Right political conceptual digram and thought I’d post it. It’s very, very clever.
I put my motorcycle up for sale (if you’re interested click HERE) and listed it on a number of sites to help get the word out. Those included paid ads as well as enthusiast sites.
Within 24 hours, I got a response. Beauty, I thought, and what’s better he didn’t haggle. He offered to pay me the advertised cost. Too good to be true? Yep.
Here’s the scam: he could only pay me by PayPal. Supposedly he’s an oceanographer at sea at the moment, with no access to his bank account but did have access to his PayPal account, which was linked to his bank account. He could transfer money into my PayPal account and then organize an ‘agent’ to collect the bike when the money had hit.
Sounds foolproof, right? The money goes in, he sends his guy around, collects the bike and we’re all happy.
As a former journalist (ex-crime rounds), all of this sounded fishy in the extreme. His story sounded lame (‘if he can access PayPal over the Internet, why not his bank account?’; ‘what’s with the flimsy oceanographer at sea line?’, etc.) and I did some homework as to how PayPal works and doesn’t work.
Essentially the scam works because PayPal allows buyers to dispute a transaction and if done with a credit card, the issuer can ask for a ‘chargeback’ if the buyer disputes the sale. This means that after the money has gone in, even if you have transferred it to your account, the buyer’s issuing bank can order a ‘chargeback’ on the money you were paid, which means you have to pay it back one way or another. Meanwhile, your goods have been delivered or picked up and you have no way of recovering them because the phony buyer has disappeared.
This asymmetry in the buyer/seller dynamic means the seller can be caught short — big time.
I emailed my erstwhile oceanographer with a hanking to buy a motorbike for his favourite cousin in Perth saying I would only take cash (on pick-up was was fine), a cashier’s cheque (with goods to be picked up AFTER the cheque cleared) or a direct deposit (bank-to-bank, with 24-48 hour pick-up after the transaction cleared). I never heard back from him, which was not much of a surprise.
Also, one more word of caution: it’s not just PayPal, it’s also Western Union that you can have problems with, so beware folks, there’s some serious shonks out there that are waiting to take advantage of you if you don’t have your wits about you.
You are young, footloose and fancy-free.
No rent, medical bills taken care of and no other worries to furrow your smooth, handsome brow except perhaps nailing that pesky degree because uni has to fit in behind the other stuff you do with your mates and love life.
Someone comes to you and says: Why don’t you come with me, pay rent, have me looking over your shoulder 24×7, make your commute longer, let me dump my emotional crap all over you when I feel like it and generally complicate your life so much you won’t know up from down and in from out?
What do you do?
Naturally you move quickly, saying yes to this most generous offer, all the while beaming from ear-to-ear at your good fortune and even better judgment.
Such a deal!
All I was doing was walking up the street to get a sandwich and do my obligatory 2 km circuit around the dreary confines of St Leonards/Crows Nest where I work.
She was there with her snout out, silver perfection, sleek lines. Low and squat, wide wheels and a profile that screams speed. A rag top, no less.
I’ve always wanted a rag top. At high school, when I had hair, I dreamed about squirting around the Old Swamp Road in Jamberoo in a convertible. Taking the twisties to Kiama after a nice lunch at Jamberoo Pub. I was in my dad’s boxy, understeer prone HQ Holden stationwagon but I dreamed about being in a slick little Austin Healy or classic MG.
Today I was transported to that time. The time machine was a Porsche Boxster 986 looking alluring at a used car lot up the road. A 2001 model with only 56,000 km on the clock — brand bloody new, hardly run-in. The rag top was immaculate, pristine. The grinning car salesman (Alan) sidled up and asked me if I wanted to start her up. Bastard, evil, evil bastard.
I weakened: yep, I’d love to. He got the keys and I cranked the engine. It hesitated and spluttered as the barely charged battery eked out its last amperage to kick the motor into life. But it did start; a low throbbing pulse from behind the seats. I had the clutch in and ran through the box. Snick, into first, snick, into second, snick into third, slide into neutral. Throb, throb, throb in the back, as the engine idled.
Man, that car felt and sounded so good.
Young Alan gave me his card and a print out of the Porsche’s specs, asking me to come back any time and maybe bring the wife.
I gritted my teeth, thanked him and trundled off up the hill, where I spent my lunch money on a Powerball lottery ticket. Alan, you smirking bastard, if my numbers come up on Thursday night, you are going to be the first bloke I see Friday morning.
Fingers crossed.
But I was in a hurry. I had to get to a media training session I was running 50 km away in North Ryde. I gave myself plenty of time to get there, so I could have stepped out and seen how he was, but I didn’t.
I knew he was sick. When they brought him back from the vet’s last night, ‘Nes had him on his leash and he loped along gently; every step carefully considered. I scratched behind his ear and he gently wagged his tail, looking up with his soft, brown eyes. His coat was dull, his eyes hooded as he looked up at me.
We put him in his doggy house and seemed comfortable. X-rays scheduled in the morning and we thought it was fixable. The thing we thought he swallowed turned out be a tumour. Surgery was mandated. The tumour wasn’t operable and he didn’t wake up because it would have been cruel to bring him back from his sleep.
‘Nes and Tom helped make the decision. The little girls were at school and didn’t know. I was in the middle of a training session when I got the text message.
Too late.
The right decision had been made.
Last night I went to a joint 21st and 18th birthday for two kids we are very, very fond of. They grew up with our kids when we lived in Silicon Valley during the 90s — the height of the Internet boom. We had a great time — all seven of us, since we bought one of my eldest daughter’s friends to the party.
After greetings and some smalltalk, we retreated to the kitchen upstairs where most of the oldies congregated to avoid killing the mood downstairs for the hip and groovy (do they say that any more?). My friend is a chip engineer. He worked at a number of companies, some large and a few start-ups, in the US and in Australia. He’s been semi-retired for a few years, a condition I aspire to reach sooner rather than later.
He was back in the US a few months ago, sniffing around to see what was going on in the highly active (and gossipy) engineering comunity in San Jose. He came back depressed. The news from his network of engineering mates was that hardware start-ups were being starved of VC funds. The Global Financial Crisis had stymied funding, but that was not unexpected. What was is that his contacts felt that the mood towards hardware engineering had turned negative. And it’s not a temporary mood, he told me.
Depressingly he told me that it was going to be harder and harder to kick-start a new Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel, AMD, Broadcom, NVidia, Signetics, etc. just to name a few of the great Silicon Valley hardware companies that were the cornerstones of the last century’s tech revolution.
I have to do a bit more homework to do on this and check how many deals went through Sandhill Road, for example, but my friend’s connections are impeccable, so I have no reason to doubt that something fundamental is changing in Silicon Valley.
I’d be very sad to witness a decline in hardware innovation in the Valley. It bodes poorly for tech innovation in general.
Tonight I am going to a catwalk fashion parade thing in Sydney’s Museum of Modern Art in The Rocks.
The highlight for me is not the event, where all these glam people and models strut their stuff, but that my 18-year-old daughter (with boyfriend in tow) is coming with me tonight. She loves design and art, sewing, drawing, painting and all of that stuff.
Last night she spent an inordinate amount of time going through her wardrobe (and her mum’s) to find what she wanted to wear. It’s raining tonight in Sydney and a balmy 16 degrees Celsius, so her black number is going to be a tad chilly until she gets to the museum. More worrying is that she’s wearing heels and still has learner’s plates on them ’cause she’s still a bit wobbly on those things.
The point of this all is that I am really excited to be doing something with her that she loves — art, fashion and design. Sometimes being a parent can be super, super rewarding. Tonight is one of those nights.
PS — Thanks must go to Kat Colliton at Howorth for the invitation. Cheers, Kat.
I am ploughing through a 1 or more inch stack of planning documents for a client. The level of detail is excruciating in terms of process, but this level of detail hides a basic issue: what does the company want to say to whom, when (and how, with what)?
Nowhere is this detailed cleanly and you have to extrapolate and intepret so you think you know what needs to happen when and to whom. Frustrating.
A clear case of the documentation and process getting in the way of delivering quality communications, since clearly the process seems to be more important than the impact (notice I didn’t say results, because they go through extraordinary effor to detail how results are going to be tracked. Whether it is the right result is never realy questioned.)
Back to the stack of damned paper …
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