Who cares if it's real?
I just spent the past 20 minutes working with a co-worker to come up with a project plan for a project that has no scope yet but a defined deadline. I tried to explain that it was an equation (Time) x (Resource) = (Output) working through that we basically had two down.
"But what are the deliverables?" she asked.
"We know rough percentages of project tasks; you can set up a calendar based off of those best practices." I replied.
"But how are people supposed to know when they have to have things done? Once I put this in writing, people's feet will be held to the fire."
"Put in steps to re-estimate the process; both time and money to re-calibrate the timeline."
She continued to protest.
"It's not real." I said.
She is going to work on it a little more; I slid my chair back to my desk, continuing to eat my turkey and spinach salad; and then I realized, I am officially part of the system that just slides the shit through, without putting on the brakes. Nothing has changed people still want it simple and easy ("When can I have it? Huh? When?") without understanding.
Happy Monday indeed.
2 Comments:
And to think that we academics worry about the lack of reality involved in, say, deciding to give a B+ instead of an A- on a take-home final essay comparing seduction strategies by drag queens in different Latin American novels....
11:18 AM
So, as I was saying to Scarlett, I have decided to start in on my Hard-Cover Summer Reading.
(I discovered with a guilty start about a year ago that hard-cover books constitute a separate category of books for me. I buy them when they are on discount at Unabridged, or when I ask my folks to get them for me for Christmas; in that sense, they are not the books that I buy for myself and read almost immediately. Mostly, I don't read them immediately because I don't feel like lugging them around in my backpack. Roughgroove and I had a brief conversation about this in May. The result is that I have a list of eight books that I have acquired in the last twelve months that I would like to get read this summer, squeezing them in between the Freudian theory on subject-object relations and the materialist culture essays on "Thing Theory" (can you believe that that essay did not contain a single allusion either to the Fantastic Four or to The Addams Family?).)
The particular hard-cover book I am embarking on is Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude. It is terrifyingly close to home: Lethem details individual blocks of Boerum Hill, at the other end of the neighborhood I was born in, with an almost Joycean specificity, and his protagonist is exactly five years younger than I am (he had finished fifth grade when Nixon resigned and I had finished tenth grade). he grows up with a single dad when his mother leaves them; my own mother died in a car accident at about the same time. On the other hand, because his artsy parents stubbornly kept him in a public school as the only white kid, whereas my own family departed first to Park Slope and then to Flatbush, and followed the conventional advice of enrolling me in Catholic schools throughout, there is also a parallel-universe feel to much of the novel, a Marvel What If? episode in which the radiation turns Sue Richards into the Human Torch and Reed into the Thing, or whatever.
I realize in many ways that the lives of the narrator and his best friend, a mixed-race kid who is obsessed with graffiti art, are really almost equidistant between my own life and that of some of the kids I taught at Saint Ann's in 1982 (the eighth graders were only ten years younger than me, the twelfth graders exactly the same age as the protagonist), and indeed the rich evil old lady gentrifier of the first chapters of the novel seethes because she cannot turn Dean Street into Pacific Street three blocks over, where I met the woman who most reminds me of the narrator's mother, an opera singer whose daughter attended Saint Ann's.
I'd love to see what Scarlett --and, I suppose, Roughgroove himself, he added condescendingly-- thinks of this novel, free as they are from the Brooklynolatry that colors my own response to the novel. Perhaps she or he will say, as the blog entry is titled, "Who Cares If It's Real? It's just damned good fiction."
12:59 PM
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