hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0929.txt

Episode: 929
Title: HPR0929: The Knightcast KC0060 : "Storytime"
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0929/hpr0929.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 05:05:40

---

Bundle
&
&
&
&
on the edge of real and cyberspace there's one place you can go
on the edge of real and cyberspace there's one place you can go and you found it
welcome to the nightcast the one and only podcast at Yoon's Tech into a way of life and
let's the technology work for you my name's nightwise and for the coming 60
minutes or so I'll be your host on this episode of the nightcast KC-0060 story time
for more information and a shoutout head on over to the website www.nightwise.com
that's can i g h t w i s e dot com or you'll find the links to everything we
talk about and the nightwise dot com media feed you can use this media feed to
subscribe to all the nightwise dot com content the nightcast podcast and
the k w t v screencast and get them delivered to your favorite pod catcher
automatically letting technology work for you if you want to get in touch with
us you can feed back at nightwise dot com is the email address and of course you
can find us on twitter twitter dot com slash nightwise you can look for us in
google plus by looking for nightwise or on facebook facebook dot com slash nightwise
com hey guys and girls welcome to the edge of real and cyberspace welcome to
another episode of the nightcast we are a little bit behind on our k w t v airing
schedule but that's because we're kind of doing a lot of stuff in the backhand
at the moment I have been working hard on a new blog and on moving nightwise dot
com to another server and I've also been jiggling around some hardware around
the house to get myself a new and cool setup I sold one of my iMAX and I am
currently waiting to install a brand spanking you i7 mac mini with 16 gigabytes
of ram hooked up to 220 full-inch screens making it one hell of a server for
both my OS X line server and the countless virtual machines that I'll be
running on it we also my it'll also become my production machine but at the
moment there's not much there I just have my trusty mag book pro and two empty
monitor arms because I don't got the screens yet and a little mtv my closet in my
cupboard underneath my desk because I don't have to make many heads and I'm a
little bit tied down to what I have so no very fancy screencast right now just
another great episode of the nightcast I mentioned something about blogs and I
wanted to tell you about the new blog that I started at Joe Hendrix dot
WordPress dot com but link in the show notes I've actually started a personal
blog why well quite frankly because I wanted to split the contents between the
nightwise dot com website for all you wise guys wise girls and to you know some
other people who want to read some stuff on another website long winded written
articles on my personal blog nice entertaining stuff on nightwise dot com you
can pick and choose and today as a little bit of a showcase I'm gonna bring you
two blog posts that I read on my personal blog in this episode of story time
you know the drill you close your eyes and say unless you are in the car you sit
back relax and let me tell the story as you can just enjoy you don't have a
read you just have to sit back relax enjoy the show because we'll be back after
these two stories because it's story time
a little while ago I was confronted with a very peculiar remark in the office you
don't have your email client open all the time like the rest of your co-workers
when I heard the sentence I had to turn it over in my head a couple of times my
initial reaction was one of defense like somehow I'd been scolded or that
there had been a vague insinuation that I wasn't working as hard as my co-workers
because I did not spend all of my time in my email client but as I sat down in the
car for the drive home I am mulled the request over in my head over and over again
and came to the conclusion that it was absolutely absurd not the remark itself of course
it was a valent Cobbon to make when somebody deviates from the norm he stands out
and as behavior is noticed by the rest of the group it's a matter of common group dynamics
what after some philosophical pondering did surface was the absurd realization that email
is considered a valid form of occupation these days the more males you answer the harder you work
somehow in the crazy group mind of the cubicle work be the quantity of communication has become
the norm of productivity not the quality of that communication where does this bizarre mindset come
from if we take a look at our modern history the roots of this uh way of thinking can be found
in the industrially revolution back then workers had to come to the factory and produce
ex amounts of goods in order to meet their quota as you are sowing together ladies corsets or
smashed a piece of raw iron into the shape of a bolt beneath the giant weld the more pieces you
churned out the harder you worked but those days have come and gone and still their echo remains
as we march towards our office building and sit inside the cubicles of our conveyor belt of ideas
we try to find meaning in this landscape where we no longer produce anything tangible
I've been running around all day long and it feels like I didn't get anything done today
I take that all of you and all of us including you and your boss have murmured this sentence to
their beloved at some occasion it's a symptom of the fact that our technology has changed our way
of working at a pace that our brain cannot keep up with and I'm not talking about the pace of life
or the speed of which we interact I'm talking about the fact that we are no longer sowing together
corsets but are welding together abstract procedures ideas and workflows that no longer give us
anything tangible to show at the end of the day so the human mind goes in search of patterns it
recognizes in this new factory of thoughts numbers of meetings attended numbers of calls received
I got 14 voicemails today look at the 45 business cards I got at the conference today I had over a
hundred and fifty emails to get through everywhere we can we try to count the quantities of work
to give us hold on this completely abstract work environment so how many emails does it take
to be a good off his drum it's a fact let question back in the 1900s your foreman gave you a
quota to meet five hundred bolts by the end of the day and that would be something you could do
you could make the bolts count the bolts and show your foreman the bolts at the end of the day
life was easy you know you knew when you were behind and had to speed up you knew when you were
ahead and could slack off a little but these days it's not like that anymore
but if quantity of emails processed is the new bolt I challenge you to step up to your manager
and ask for that quota how many emails a day is the quota for a good office worker
the question is utterly absurd but if we take a look at the way we seem to count our emails
it's a valid question nonetheless if we all want to meet our quota where does it end
because you have to face it if we all want to meet our virtual bolt quota we need to push out some
emails so don't tap your co-worker on the shoulder email him even if he's right next to you and
please put as many co-workers in the cc field as you can because the good thing about email is that
you cannot only punch your out your virtual bolt you can also share your hard labor with your
co-workers to keep them up to date in the process you send them virtual bolts to count and on the
end of the day we are just one big emailing swarm of office bees that have produced a thousand
virtual bolts a piece but we didn't get anything done there was a time where communication was a
supportive process of the production process and somewhere along the line communication has become
the goal on its own and the one thing that makes me crack up when we think about this our lines
like I wanted to get so much done today but all I did was trying to get through my emails it's
hilarious somewhere handling emails has become more important than handling work this can be right
can it so if you want to step away from the virtual conveyor belt of bolts try reasoning with
yourself the next time you want to hit send do I need to send out a message to the co-worker that's
sitting right next to me if he is or she is within spitting slapping talking shouting or walking
range don't it will do both your delabitated physical condition and your deteriorating
social skills and good to get the frack out of your seat and walk on over I'll send them the
email otherwise you'll forget that's a good one too unless you are working in the Alzheimer
office of terminal Alzheimer patient there is a small but feasible chance that your co-workers
are able to remember stuff you tell them unless of course you eat we write everything down in an
email and then swamp each other with emails yes that will help really perhaps it's your personal
visit to his or her office or the sweat stains on your co-worker or the sweat stains under your
arms that make your co-worker notice you and remember that there was something that you asked him
I need to cover my ass oh oh yeah please let's go uh let's all go uh office Gestapo on each other
by emailing every single detail to underline the fact that you trust absolutely nobody at face value
the fact that you need to send out every critical are non-critical event in an email also says a
lot about how trustworthy you feel about yourself there are important things that need to be formally
communicated but for the love of God let's not bury ourselves in more democracy sorry I don't
have the time I have a lot of emails to get through that one even happens to me sometimes but it's
bizarre unless you walk at a Russian spamming factory doing emails is not your main task
to round it up I can conclude with a simple logical deduction that even Spock would find
enlightening if we all spend less time doing email and more time getting things done we will
get less emails and so the email spiral let's just sound wrong will be broken for all of us
so
grandpa
What's an IT guy? Just close your eyes a minute and imagine sitting in your rocking chair
with one of your grandchildren on your lap. As she absolutely plays with her holographic
Nintendo DS66, she asks you a very odd question. Grandpa, what's an IT guy?
You look up startled, momentarily distracted from the YahooTube video you were watching on your
transparent digital contacts. You sigh, look at her, and start telling the story of the old days
when they still had IT guys. Although this example may look like science fiction,
the Yahoo YouTube merger is actually the more implausible factor in my example. The DS,
the transparent contacts, and the question are one day to become very, very real.
In my 15 years on the job, I've seen many changes in the landscape of the IT profession.
From the time where single programmers wrote up an entire suite of bookkeeping software for a
company, and holding that company ransom later because they were the only one who knew how it
worked, to the aftermath of the .com bubble where everybody with a keyboard and a geocities
account suddenly became webmaster or web designer. I remember the time where I pondered whether or
or not I needed to get my MCSE certification or where I friendically tried to fight into
right pins on the motherboard to attach the cable of the power switch. In those 15 years,
a lot has changed. Not only has my career moved along, I started out as a tech sales guy at
a small computer shop and I'm currently holding a position of demand manager for new technologies
at a Dutch multinational, the landscape we've worked in has also changed dramatically.
When I used to ponder about the future, I thought us tech heads would become the predominant
group in the workforce of the future. As I saw IT technology grab hold of society and sink
its digital teeth into the soft underbelly of our communities, I wondered how many techies it would
take to keep it all running. Lots of them, right? But perhaps, I was wrong. As I integrated,
as IT integrated our daily lives more and more, the techies started to vanish.
Where at first every company still had its own IT crowd, nudged away somewhere in the basements,
yes sub in there, and given the task of keeping the servers up and running while also taking care
of the fish in the company pond, yes I've been there too, the first generation of outsourcing
was taking its toll. I've seen help desk departments go extinct, gradually replaced by outsourcing
partners on the floor, and in time I walked the floor of companies where they did not have any
techies in house whatsoever. Every server was house somewhere in a data center,
every user was remotely supported, and once in a blue moon you would see a nerdy looking guy with
white patches around the knee section of their jeans, linger around by the coffee machine.
Only with those white kneecaps could you recognize a field engineer.
The white kneecaps are a result of kneeling down on carpets a lot to fix computers of users.
I too have been there. Coming from the age where the in-house IT guys were revert or hated by
the entire company, but where everybody knew your name, it changed to a work floor where some
strange kid you didn't know comes by to fix your computer, and you let him.
But even the white kneecaps will start to go extinct someday. As we start using computers that
don't open up anymore and use mobile operating systems that do not require reinstalling,
the rollout of our system engineers is starting to dwindle away.
As we slide down or should I say ascend into the world of cloud computers,
their services and those of their bread run taking care of the service in data center are becoming
obsolete. Hard disks fail? The data is in the cloud, network goes down, I'll just plop in my 3G
dongle. Laptop eaten by dog, I'll just pick up a fresh one. All I need to do is log in and
configure my account. With the consumerization of IT, the second generation of outsourcing the
migration to the cloud and the fundamental change of how we approach you and use technology,
things will change for the IT guys. In my own career I've found I've become a diplomatically
liaison between technology and users, assessing their needs and seeing what can be used to meet
their demands. Although I still have a technical background, it all more my communication skills
and my creativity that helped me find a solution than actually popping open a case and yanking out
some wires. I too am a fallen angel that now walks between the users. My jeans are deep,
deep shade of blue even around the knees and my hands are no longer scratched from the sharp edges
of the insides of PC casings. As I look to the future I wonder what interesting times lie ahead
of us in the IT business, how our role that I've seen evolving from bookkeepers to engineers
will go more and more into the realms of digital diplomats, where we wield knowledge and insights
about technology we might no longer truly understand. I once said that a computer should be like a
toaster, easy to operate and processing the simplicity of an appliance. As I punch in this blog post
on my iPad I realize that my prophecy has come true. My iPad is a toaster. It just works and there's
nothing to fix. And we don't need IT guys in the next room to fix a toaster or do we?
Well guys and girls, I hope you enjoyed this episode of Storytime where I actually gave you
a little bit of an insight into my professional career and that's something I don't do very often
on the nightcast. I hope you'll have a great week. I hope you enjoyed this show and I hope
you'll let technology work for you. We will be back next week until then you know where to go.
www.nightwise.com for the website, subscribe to the media feed or look for the nightcast in iTunes
and of course you can follow us on twitter twitter.com slash nightwise or find us on Google plus.
If you want to do something for the show, do something very very easy to do, share our RSS feed
or our media feed with one of your friends. Recommend us bring new listeners to the nightcast
or thenightwise.com website. That's about all we have time for this week. Let technology work for
you not the other way around and see you next week. Bye. Thanks for coming to the edge of real
and cyberspace. You have been listening to the nightcast. Send your feedback, questions,
promos or rants to nightwise at nightwise.com or Skype us on nightwise. For more information
visit the site on www.nightwise.com or look for us in iTunes by searching for the nightcast.
Please remember there's a real world beyond cyberspace but it's not all that important.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio. We are a community podcast
network that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday. Today's show, like all our shows,
was contributed by an HBR listener by yourself. If you ever consider recording a podcast,
then visit our website to find out how easy it really is. Hacker Public Radio was founded by the
Digital.Pound and the International Computer Club. HBR is funded by the Binary Revolution
at binref.com. All binref projects are crowd-responsive by linear pages. From shared hosting to
custom private clouds, go to lunarpages.com for all your hosting needs. Unless otherwise stasis,
today's show is released under a creative commons, attribution, share alike,
videos held license.