Google Problematic

Press release, Google, 1 Apr 2017

As an important internet company, Google owns a lot of information, and let's be real, a lot of it is problematic: it is the sort of thing that knowing it will get on your conscience and keep you up at night: searches for hit men, questions about how prosecutions of accidental sex deaths failed, searches for grotesquely of every kind. And then there's everything else, everything we index, which is about everything. Also, we know who is searching for or uploading these things: people.  Parents, kids, serious people with responsibility for other people's lives, managers, leaders, judges, politiicians, the desperate, the mentally ill, the unstable. All with an expectation of privacy, despite the reality that everyone is tracking everyone around the internet: governments most of all, but also advertisers, credit raters and general internet intelligence gathering snoops. We at Google generally believe in transparency and being real.

So since 1 Oct 2016, Google's latest team, Google Problematic, has been emailing a machine curated digest each week of the online behaviour of concern to those it might concern: the people who will find it a problem:  your wife, your parents, your parole officer, your kids, your boss, your female subordinates or co-workers, your therapist.  We hope it has helped.  We certainly feel better taking what responsibility we can.

The Fool Proof

If you are a gin enthusiast, you could do worse than laying out for Poor Tom's gin.  For Fathers Day I have been graced with a bottle of the 'Fool Proof' 52% Poor Tom's.  I have just had a dry G&T (equal parts making it 'dry') and holy kablooey in. A craniium.  Delicious, and nourishing.

Love your work

You might not have picked this up, but my foolery extends to the workplace.  I have been through an escalating series of difficult conversations about my non-compliance, non-performance and general devil-may-care attitude to achievement.

This results from an accumulation of disappointment.  I thought I was going to be amazing the world with discoveries and inventions, but so far the only thing I've invented has been generally regarded as silly or incomplete.  Those who judge these things use criteria pretty far from those I would apply, and if I judge their performance I find leadership almost totally lacking except in the domain of domination, performance measurement - very rarely are we stopped from addressing clients' non-problems.  Someone once asked "could the leaders give us an overview of their understanding of the field we're in, just once a year?" and the answer was a round rejection of the very idea.  So my demotivation is not coming from nowhere.

Still, I was being pretty ridiculous.  So I went into a long weekend seething with resentment that I was being held accountable for my timesheets, a very weak tool measuring in painful accuracy, my attendance. My performance is also measured, but less frequently and with better-designed paperwork.

Then, I watched a lecture on Oedipus from Peter Sruck's Coursera.com course on Myths from Greece and Rome.  Oedipus' story is amazing. Peter brought out the question of Oedipus' responsibility.  Here was Oedipus meeting a man of his fathers age on the road and, over the issue of who should step aside, killing Lais (his true father) and his whole retinue. I had been thinking about the Oedipus complex of irresponsibility and wondering why I was so much closer to Oedipus than Oddyseus.  This moment crystallised it.  Even if I am in the right about the uninspiring leaders, the naff prescription of measures and mechanisms that are not applicable to my type of work (I am not manning a desk for a shift, I am solving problems), I still believe I should get out of the way of the silly old king when he asks.  And that gave me the key.

I have to love work charitably, not Libidinally.I am not going, ever, to get a glandular charge from doing what these guys ask.  It will always be disappointing. But I shouldn't make these guys die in a ditch defending their stupid practices and total lack of vision. There are times to represent that, but stepping aside, just going along a bit more, out of charity for their feeble age might be the answer I can live with.