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by Michael Cote.
Original Post: Strange Dreams: Chewing Out a Bad Teleworker
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I had a weird dream this morning. Some folks and I were in a northern region of Canada or the States, in a region that'd been heavily influenced by Scandinavian architecture and culture. We were touring a model home along these lines. The hallways were narrow, and I recall that the kitchen floor was raised higher than the rest of the house. There was a window between the kitchen and the dining room: I guess where you'd serve food through.
Another group of people looking at the model home came through, and my uncle and aunt were in the group. In real life, I don't encounter my uncle very much due to family "history," so, I was rather cagey with them, simply saying "hey." And then I encouraged my group to get out of there...my excellent social skills carry over into my dreams as well ;>
After this, we came across some kids swinging at a little playground. They spoke with that Fargo English, which confirmed in my mind that this was a Scandinavian influenced area. Then, we went to stand in line for something, and we came across a co-worker of one of people in our group. He was somewhat pudgy, had a dark goatee, and I recall he was wearing some sort purple super-hero like suit with a double horned Viking helmet.
Another thing about this purple guy was that he worked in a different location than the co-worker in my group: we were all programmers in one city, and the purple guy was in another city. Oddly, the purple guy and the co-worker were employed by The Cobalt Group, the place (in real life) I worked a little over two years ago before moving on to BMC.
So, this purple guy starts complaining about how it's impossible to work over long distances and was blaming his poor performance on the fact that he wasn't in the same city. In the dream, this set me off my rocker, and I started yelling at the guy:
"What do you mean?! There's no excuse! If you can't get ahold of them on the phone, just email them! And then don't sit around bemoaning the fact that you can't get to them, call them again! You have to be persistent and proactive!"
"I mean," I continued, "I could understand a little if you were on a different side of the world, and didn't speak English well, but you're a native speaker, and just one time zone over! Come on, there's no excuse! Everything is there: NetMeeting, email, IM, phones!"
And then I think we walked off, or I woke up: it's always hard to figure out the difference between a dream ending and simply waking up.
While I was in the shower this morning (in real life), I thought to myself, "wow, that's really weird that telecommuting worked itself into my dream, and that I was so fervidly positive about it." Reflecting on it in light of chewing out the purple guy, at work, we are geographically disperse, and it works out better than I'd expect.
Without having everyone in the same hallyway, there's difficult kinks in the maintaining the tacit-knowledge pool among sites, but we seem to get by with lots of phone calls and things like NetMeeting (for example, when debugging). And, as I said (or yelled) to the purple guy, ll the tools you need are available.
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