2008 Voter’s Guide to Joes

The 2008 race for President of the United States has been a Joefest. Joe is a common name in America, and has long been associated with good, hardworking people. In this election though, Joe is everywhere and everything. You can’t keep track of the Joes without a scorecard, so here is a guide to election year Joes.

The Average Joe: The Average Joe is an ordinary guy. He is often mistaken for Joe Six Pack, but he could be anybody.

Joe Six-Pack: Joe Six-Pack is a red state staple. He is their symbol of a regular guy (The Average Joe). He is the kind of guy who might work a construction job all day, then hit the convenience store for a six-pack of beer (Bud if he’s doing well, Pabst if times are tough) and down every beer while watching Nashville Star or Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. His wife is a soccer (or hockey) mom and his children attend public school (or are home-schooled if Joe Six Pack is a particularly devout evangelical).

Joe the Plumber:  Joe the Plumber is Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, an “uncommitted” voter who is registered as a Republican but not licensed as a plumber. Barack Obama met him during a campaign stop and talked to him for several minutes. Joe wants to buy a business that he thinks would make over $250,000, the magic number at which the Obama tax hikes kick in. Wurzelbacher actually makes about $40,000 a year, but that’s not an important point. The point is that John McCain mentioned his name 25 times during a debate, so Joe (warts and all) is now the living symbol for Joe Six Pack. Depending on what reporters dig up on him, he could end up in jail or hosting a home improvement show on TLC.

Joe Biden: Joe Biden is a Senator and Barack Obama’s running mate. Joe might have been president twenty years ago, but he made the mistake of repeating someone else’s speech almost word for word and became known as a plagiarist. It has taken him 20 years to get another shot at the White House (if Barack wins but dies) so he is making the most of it. When he isn’t using someone else’s speech, he tends to stick his foot in his mouth, so he is pretty fun to watch. Joe Biden tries to act like an Average Joe, but nobody takes him seriously.

“Shoeless” Joe Jackson: Shoeless Joe was one of the greatest baseball players ever. Even though he played in the early twentieth century, he is still ranked in the top ten for best career batting average of all time. Unfortunately, he will never be in the Hall of Fame because he apparently took money to throw the 1919 World Series, even though other players say he never met with gamblers and by all accounts he played very well in the series. He hasn’t been mentioned by name very often in this election, but when Sarah Palin exclaimed “Say it ain’t so Joe!” during the vice presidential debate, she was evoking a famous (unconfirmed) confrontation between Shoeless Joe and a young fan who was heartbroken by the thought of Jackson throwing the series.

Joe Lieberman: An Independent who won reelection to the Senate after losing in the primaries as a Democrat due mainly to his frequent support of George Bush’s stance on the Iraq war and other issues. In 2000, before his falling out with the Democrats, he was Al Gore’s running mate and came within a Supreme Court party-line vote of being Vice President. Lieberman was briefly considered as a running mate for John McCain as well, until somebody asked “seriously?” and the whole matter was dropped.

Joe Scarborough: A conservative commentator on MSNBC, which is just as thankless a job as being a liberal commentator on Fox News. People mainly watch him because they keep waiting for him to explode – literally explode. Sure, it isn’t likely, but everyone wants to be there to see it if it does happen.

Joseph Stalin: Joseph Stalin was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s Central Committee from 1922 until his death in 1953. He was a very naughty man. Some people think that Stalin would have dealt with the current Banking Crisis in much the same way that the U.S. Congress has, with the small exception that he would have killed all of the bankers. Interesting bit of trivia: before Stalin became General Secretary of the Communist Party, he was a bank robber. You can look it up.

Joe The Six Pack Plumber: My new nickname at work – for reasons I cannot fathom. I am, after all, an unapologetic elitist.

How to Fake Enthusiasm for Corporate Platitudes

The corporate world loves enthusiasm. They want it at every level, from the rank and file all the way up the ladder. Enthusiasm can make up for a multitude of sins, especially incompetence and arrogance. If you are incompetent and arrogant, but unenthusiastic, you are doomed at a corporation. If you add enthusiasm though, you just might make it to the top.

The problem with enthusiasm is that, unless it just comes naturally to you, it will be hard to maintain in a corporate environment. Sitting in a cubicle all day is torturous on a number of levels. You cannot control the look (blue/gray accented by fluorescent white) or the noise (every conversation you never wanted to hear). You will be asked to “get on board” a number of flawed initiatives that will seem doomed to failure to you. At times you will be given a list of values/covenants that you are expected to believe in wholeheartedly and speak about enthusiastically. These run along the lines of:

• We will make our customers love us.
• We will obliterate our competitors.
• We will always succeed. Failure is not an option.
• We will fix every issue the day that it occurs.
• We will give 100% effort at all times.

Some of these will seem possible, and others will seem silly, and a few won’t make any sense at all no matter how many times you read them. In most cases, there will be about twenty of them, and some will seem to completely contradict others. You will be tempted to point this out. Don’t bother. Nobody wants to hear that the values are silly, contradictory or impossible. The important thing is that you will need to embrace all of these things enthusiastically, no matter how much you want to run from the room screaming.

Here are the rules for faking enthusiasm:

First, do no harm

Your natural instinct when confronted with something you believe to be massively, painfully stupid is to say so. That is the instinct you must crush inside of you. When confronted with such a situation, talk yourself out of being critical. Critical thinking will only get you in trouble. Ask yourself, “How would someone who can’t see how stupid this is respond?”

Put the corporate values up on the wall of your cube

Nothing says “I Believe!” like having the values up on your wall. Try to find a place where everyone can see them but you. Actually looking at them every day could prove to be too painful to bear.

Learn to speak their language

When a corporation asks for enthusiasm, they are generally willing to accept any sign of it that they see. Remember that the same people who will be judging your enthusiasm are the ones who made up the empty platitudes that they expect you to get enthusiastic about. These are not deep thinkers. Pick a few phrases that you think you can deliver without wincing (a sure sign of a lack of enthusiasm) and have them ready to deliver. You don’t want to have to think about this. Stopping to think is also a sign of a lack of enthusiasm. Here are some good stock phrases:

• That’s Fantastic!
• This is what I’ve been waiting for!
• Sounds good to me!
• I’ll put these on my wall!
• Words to live by!

Work on your tone of voice

One of the biggest challenges of faking enthusiasm is to keep your voice from betraying you. If you undersell it you will seem sarcastic and if you oversell  it you will seem either sarcastic or just plain insane. You want just a hint of enthusiasm in your voice. A truly enthusiastic person can deliver more, but you want to stay on the safe side. Sell it, but just a little. You should probably practice in front of a mirror. Until you get it right, stick to being enthusiastic via email.

Come up with some tips

Sometimes you can get away with just saying a stock phrase, but at other times you will be asked to “implement” the platitude. That means you will have to come up with something you can do to carry out the platitude. Look for very small ways in which these things can be implemented, preferably by doing things that you already do or that cannot be verified. Be prepared for your ideas to be shot down. If they are, nod. Nodding is a great way to make no comment while appearing enthusiastic and agreeable.

Platitude: We will make our customers love us.
Response: We should spend more time listening to our customers!

Platitude: We will obliterate our competitors
Response: We should start a United Way campaign!

Platitude: We will always succeed. Failure is not a possibility
Response: We should form collaborative teams!

Platitude: We will fix every issue the day that it occurs
Response: We should make sure to act on every item in our inbox every day!

Platitude: We will give 100% effort at all times
Response: We should all make a to do list!

Move on

Most of these values statements just get ignored after a while. The important thing is to show enthusiasm every time they come up, then go back to doing your job once the furor dies down. Be prepared though. Another list will be in its way soon enough.

Better Writing Through Stress

My friends, I could advocate stress-free productivity like all the other bloggers, but when it comes to personal improvement, I’m a Maverick. Productivity isn’t for wimps. Here’s some ways to whip your way back into stress-filled achievement.

Make a Long List

Buy a set of 100 3 x5 cards. On each line of each card (both sides) list an item that you want to accomplish. Do not leave any blank space. No task should be considered to large or too small to list. If done properly, you should have approximately 2000 tasks that you need to accomplish. That should tide you over for the first month. Every time you feel yourself starting to relax, pick up one of the cards and do not rest until you have completed every task on the card.

Don’t Clean

A clean environment is a relaxing environment. Stress needs chaos to survive. Clutter your desk. Add a new junk drawer. Pile your dishes. All of these messes will make it almost impossible for you to relax, which will make for dynamite productivity.  Remember, a messy desk is a productive desk.

Avoid limits

Setting limits on your time just encourages you to become protective of your needs. Being protective of your needs means taking the occasional break. Breaks are for losers and orthopedic surgeons, and you sure don’t look like an orthopedic surgeon. Spend too much time on your email. Edit that paragraph another seven times. Common sense says that you need to move on, but common sense if for common people, not achievers.

Move faster

Walk fast. Drive fast. Eat fast. Read fast. Motion equals progress. If you stop to think, you may think of a reason to stop, so speed through tasks as quickly as possible. The more important a task is, the faster you should do it.

Multitude-task

Most people think that they have to multi-task in order to succeed. Those people are fools. Multi-tasking doesn’t come close to describing what you need to do. Multitude-tasking is far better. If you aren’t working on 20 tasks simultaneously, consider yourself to be a slacker. Up the ante. You never know how many things you can accomplish at once until you accomplish something.

Sleep as little as possible

Sleeping is not a productive use of your time. Try to avoid it.

12 Ways to Write Terrible Documentation

When I began my technical writing career, I was under the impression that companies valued good documentation. After twelve years in the industry, I can assure you that is not the case. Judging by the documentation I have seen and the documentation I’ve been asked to produce, companies would prefer to put out unmanageable manuals and meager guides. Realizing this, I have decided that they should have their own set of instructions — a sort of quick reference guide for bad documentation. In keeping with their style, I have chosen to write this quickly, and avoid numbering the steps.

• Never outline what you are planning to develop. Outlines give you structure and help you to organize your thoughts. That is just the sort of thing you want to avoid. Always write on the fly.
• Learn as you write. Clients are learning as they read; you should approach your documentation the same way. As long as you’ve figured it out by the time you finished, you’ll be fine. Even if you don’t, if you throw enough words at the problem, the reader will get bored or frustrated long before they figure out that you don’t know what you are talking about.
• Avoid graphics, especially explanatory ones. A picture is worth a thousand words, so throw a thousand words at it instead.
• Embrace inconsistency. Every time you write about the same process, approach it a completely different way. Stay away from style guides, standardization and repetition at all costs.
• Edit sparsely. Editing is like smoking. If you’re editing now, stop. If you haven’t yet begun to edit, don’t start. This goes for peer reviews too. Avoid them if you possibly can. They’ll only make you change stuff.
• Avoid white space. Good visual design is far too helpful. Readability is your enemy. Crowd as much text onto the page as you possibly can. Long paragraphs are the way to go.
• Create as unreasonable a schedule as you can. If you have a product that you need documented, don’t even think about giving the writer more than a few days. Sure, it took you sixteen months to develop the product, but it should only take six hours to document it.
• Start the documentation as late in the process as possible and end it as early in the process as possible. If you have a ten-month development cycle, contact the documentation people after about eight months, but make sure they have to get it out before the product is finished. The more features you change after the manuals are out, the more frustrating the documentation will be. The customers will hate your product (they probably would have anyway), but you can blame the whole thing on the documentation.
• Use Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word has the ability to crash while creating a table of contents. For longer documents, it often loses pages. Even better, the automatic numbering feature appears to have been created by dyslexic boll weevils. A random lost page and a bad table of contents will go a long way toward reaching your customer dissatisfaction goals, but inconsistent numbering will really put you over the top.
• Avoid establishing any processes or procedures. Procedures create repeatable results and avoid confusion. Processes can only hurt the documentation if they are unnecessarily complex or completely inappropriate for what you are doing. That is a lot of work to go to just to screw up your projects. It is easier to keep things nice and random. That will screw the documentation up with a minimum of effort.
• Never pay for usability testing. Usability testing is the nemesis of bad documentation. Actually letting the people who use your product have a say in the documentation (or god forbid the actual product) will result in unwanted improvements and increased customer satisfaction. Luckily, most companies avoid usability testing the way democrats avoid cohesion and unity, so it shouldn’t be a problem.
• Once your manual is produced, forget about it. Revisions are for suckers. Products come and go, but bad documentation blows and blows.

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