Vitoria Regia

I moved hotels yesterday, to a different area of San Juan, and was transported to a place in Belem, Para, Brasil, almost 40 years ago.

I had just turned eight years old.  Mom and Caroline and I flew down from South Carolina to meet up with Dad in Brasil.  He had been there for several months already, and was already thinking like a local: language, food, culture, pace, traffic; he had the rhythm down pat.

When the three of us arrived, Dad had some business to attend to for a couple of days, and so we stayed in Belem.  The place we stayed was the Vitoria Regia (pronounced Vit-TOR-eeya HED-gee).

When I moved into my new hotel yesterday, my mind flashed back to the Vitoria Regia, and I just laughed.

If you want an accurate review of the hotel where we stayed, check it out here or here.  The TripAdvisor reviews for my current hotel read much the same....


Victoria Water Lily.  Image stolen from here.



Vitoria Regia, which translates to the Queen Victoria, is a species of enormous lily pads that grow in Brasil and the adjacent British Guiana. I think that the intent was to name an enormous lilypad that was both fragile and strong after a strong leader.... and the intent of naming the hotel after the beautiful lilypad was to give a nice old world/new world vibe to the place.


Nope.

There are no descriptive terms to explain the Hotel VR, but to call it a dump. The bathrooms are communal (the website says the hotel offers private baths now - an improvement, but all the reviews say that the private baths are all non-functional, which I would imagine fails to improve it).  The one bright spot I recall is the breakfast.

I was a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich kid, and I ate anything else under great protest.  I had a particular revulsion of bananas, because of the brown spots.  So when Dad tried to walk me through the difference between fresh bananas and what I was used to, I fought him.  "But I don't like bananas," I said, with all of the whine in my voice that an eight-year-old can muster.

Eventually Dad won, and I reluctantly tried the banana.  Dad watched me, and smiled when my eyes grew wide.  "That is SO different!"

I ended up trying all kinds of new fruits that were offered as part of the continental fare.  I simply could not get enough, and it opened my eyes to something new and strange and different.  And very unexpected.

I also remember Dad introducing me to a man who was a US Navy diver, and being impressed with his stories, and especially with the pin he gave me.  I still have it somewhere.  The old salt and I got to talking about things, and he told me stories that I have long since forgotten, and I just reveled in the new experience of new smells, new tastes, new sights, and new people, most of which spoke a new language.

Later that day, we went to a Portuguese restaurant, which had the most amazing shrimp creole ever - teeming with tiny river shrimp that were served in a spicy sauce over rice.... Again, Dad convinced me to try a food with which I was unfamiliar, and again, I was blown away with how good the fare was.

I believe that day was the day that set me on the course of being an appreciator of local cuisine.

So when I checked in to a sketchy-looking hotel with dingy, tired sheets atop a sagging, low-quality mattress, and which looks to be in dire need of a deep cleaning, I start looking around for food to try.  And my heart just starts to grin like a fool.

Not all that bad.  But not as good as it looks, either.

Place is not defined in my heart by the amenities, but by the people and the food.  I am meeting nice people at every turn.  I am eating great food at every hole-in-the-wall place and food truck I try.  I feel fortunate just to be allowed entry into the society, in any small way, whatever nook I can occupy.



At the end of the week, my stay at the Sandy Beach Hotel will come to an end.  When it does, I will probably not work too hard to extend my stay.  Eventually, I will want a place with clean sheets, with mattresses that were bought sometime in this century, and maybe even one with a bar in the lower floor where I can watch the game.

But until then, this Victoria Regia, inexplicably, will just make me smile.

&*%^#!!!

"Que mucha poca p**a madre!"

I am behind the wheel in San Juan, screaming with absolute glee at the top of my lungs at the idiot in front of me that just came to an inexplicable full stop in the middle of the intersection.  And in mid-stream profanity, it really hit me.

I am back home.

Lemme 'splain.

No.  There is too much.  Lemme sum up.

My wife is the quintessential southern lady.  She does not leave the house without makeup carefully arranged, and follows rules I never had to learn.  If you think Steel Magnolia, you have the right picture.  And then she begins to speak Spanish.....

Moustaches are as Cool as Fezzes

Bottom line up front: I am asking you to donate, at
https://mobro.co/cromobronola My facial hair has always been a little wispy. Way back in
high school, I followed my friend Brad’s sage teenage advice,
and shaved every day (I needed to shave once a week) to ensure that my beard would fill in. It never did. I have heard it all: "Tuft guy." "Cat died?" "Don’t worry; it’ll fill in." "I wish I didn’t have to shave twice a day...."

Horseshoe? Really? Only Hulk Hogan could make this style cool.

So why would I shave it all off and start again. On purpose? Because it gets me a chance to talk about getting checked out for prostate cancer. I work

Big Problems. And Thanks Giving.

Every day, I tilt at windmills. It is my job.

Deep in the heart of a very bureaucratic institution, I fight to get the projects I shepherd - I think of them as 'my projects' - through an arcane process.  I write memos using inscrutable acronyms, I call people, I prepare briefings, and I review documents to ensure that they are complete, reasonable, legal, and policy compliant.

And often I come home frustrated and angry because I did not make progress.  The wheels of the burrocrazy grind slowly, and they grind everything to the finest dust.  My job is a part of this process:  Big Problems become small problems; small problems get broken apart into tasks that comply with policy, and the tasks are all verified against checklists.

Endless checklists.

Today, I am working on something different.

Risk Sharing in my Online Family

A friend of a friend had his car break down, and he could not get to work.  The next day, there was a gofundme account set up to help with the unexpected expense.

A friend had massive migraines, and the docs said surgery was needed.  The deductible was massive, but a couple of motivated friends got the word out, and dozens of people who had never met face-to-face were donating money to cover the cost.

A friend had a movie that she wanted to make.  Her kickstarter campaign provided backers with the chance to join in on the fun, get updates on the show, get the opportunity to download the final version, and for a certain level of investment, be allowed to attend the opening of the film.  (I seem to remember that you could even have your name included in the script).

A number of my friends in my new hometown shared information about a family in town whose house had burned.  Suddenly, people across the area - and beyond - are looking through their closets to find clothes for the five children, and figuring out how to help with replacement housing, bedding, dishes, furniture, and, well, everything.

I looked down the list for each one, and found that many of the donors were anonymous.  This was clearly not the equivalent of putting a wealthy family's name on over the door at the local medical center.  It is something different.  Furthermore, the people who did announce their donations were a bit of a surprise.  They were not 1% family members.  For the most part, the donors were friends living under tremendous financial strain themselves, with low-paying jobs in places with a high cost of living.  And giving anyway.

Giving generously.

In 1968, there was a group of anthropologists led by Evon Vogt in Chiapas, Mexico.  They were doing research on how small communities make their living: what the different spheres of life were and how they were intertwined.  Investigations touched on religion, work, family, life cycles, seasons, and how the universe is ordered. 

One of Vogt's students looked specifically at how the community dealt with risk, and observed that money was pooled within the community to help people who had need.  The money was considered a loan, rather than a gift, and the debt had to be paid back at the time of the next crisis.  The payback, as observed. did not conform to any traditional Western social rules of debt and repayment. 

The student decided to give it a try, and for his next field season, bought a one-way ticket down to Chiapas, and then brought enough money to buy the return flight.

Once he was down in the village, he did what he had observed.  Every time someone had a need, and asked him for a loan, he gave it to them.  He lived in the village, did his research, embedded himself in the work and politics of the village, and when it came time to go back to the US, he asked the villagers who had received loans to help him (and his wife) get back.  He got exactly the amount he needed to buy the ticket.

The story really stuck with me.  At the time, I thought of how very strange it was.  How foreign, how quintessentially 'other', to have a community that shared the risks by a series of debt relationships, and helping one another out when in need.

Growing up, I had learned that these risk management measures were the job of family.

I grew up in a pretty tight-knit family.  Other than my uncle Johnny, who left SC for Arizona, everybody in my family lived either in/around Greenville or in/around Beaufort.  I had family ties, places to stay, couches on which to crash everywhere I turned.  There were stories - many of which were probably apocryphal - of personal/legal/financial troubles that were staved off by using family connections.  The lesson - and one that I learned well - was you could go to family whenever you were in a pinch, and you could rely on them to help bail you out.

Now, however, my family is flung everywhere.  Any friends I had when I was growing up have all moved, some of them many times.  Military.  Job postings.  Grad schools and professorships.  So what is the basis of the community that I relied on?

I am also a new kid in a small town.  I love Vicksburg, and am building friendships here with people that I have already grown to love.  But inserting myself into a tight-knit community in a small town is kinda tough.

Where is my community now?  Where is the place that I can turn to for help?  Where can people turn to for me to help?

I am beginning to realize that the online community has started to function in some ways like the small community in Zinacantan.  Debts are accrued and paid as people have needs.  It is not important, really, whether we have ever met face to face.  You are a friend of Ben's, and he shared your need with us on a public forum, I will help a little, because of my love for Ben.  I will donate some money to Molly's 150-mile MS ride.  I will make a donation to the Southern Poverty Law Center because of my love for Suz.  I will help.

And y'all will help me.  I will pass along my concerns, and y'all donate to my causes, too.  I mean, I am not asking for booze money.  (Even if I did, I suspect that some of you would help pay down my bar tab - worthy cause that it is).  But we help one another, even sometimes when we don't agree - politically, socially, and ethically. 

I suspect part of the desire to help people on social media is a change in the way we do charitable giving. My faith in agencies and institutions has dropped, and I tend to investigate overhead rates before I donate money to any cause.  But if your friend needs help because there was a death in the family and they don't have money for the funeral?  I might be able to help.  Maybe not a lot.  But some.  Crowdsourcing the solutions to problems - be they big or small - brings my community closer together.

We are making our own communities; some of which include, but which is not limited to, our families of origin.  We love and trust one another, and care for one another when the chips are down.

And when I am in need, I might just come back to you.  So that I can get my plane ticket home.

Change the world

"No, no, no, no, nooooOOOO!"

"Did Thib come out this way?"

It is a repeated conversation in my household.  I leave doors open where the dogs can get out and join me on the porch, in the yard, wherever.  They like to hang out with me, and love the freedom that being outside with me gives them.  I usually watch them pretty closely, so that they aren't eating stuff they aren't supposed to.  And they occasionally give chase to a squirrel or a chipmunk and stop listening for my commands.

Kathe is more of a preventive maintenance kind of gal.  She makes sure the gas level doesn't get dangerously low.  She gets her 50k mile car maintenance done at 45,000 miles.  Thanks to her, we have tp in every bathroom, clothes are clean and dry and in the closet, and there is always food in the pantry.

And the dogs do not spend any time running free in the yard.

They are two approaches, plain and simple. Neither one is better than the other.  My way leads to unnecessary excitement from time to time, when that 25-gallon truck tank gets down to 0.056 gallons left.

Seriously.

The dogs are not as well protected from harm under my care.  They might find something to munch on that would give them a bellyache or worse.  And Thib is notorious for eating stuff he isn't supposed to.... and has the enterotomy scars to show for it. (Not my fault, for what it's worth)

But without letting them run 'free', I have no chance to teach them what is allowed and what is not.  Which means if they do get out, I have no control.

The occasional loss of control allows me to teach, correct, and get them to accept the commands I give.  We can practice what we expect.

Trade off.

I work at an agency that works on the assumption that if you follow the process. the same way, every time, you end up with a consistent product.  We are engineers, and we are military, and we follow orders and we follow procedure, and we love templates and predictability.

There is truth to the old joke - you ask an engineer what the volume of the blue rubber ball is, he looks it up in his blue rubber ball table.  Same result, every time.

I was recently in a class.  It was a really good class on the procedure that our agency uses, with the compelling and immediately understandable acronym PMBP.  The class was good.  The speaker was engaging, and kept my attention for the full 8 hours of the class: no easy feat.  For some reason, however, my ears perked up at one of his assertions.  I had heard variations on this theme over and over through the years:

"Faster, Better, Cheaper.  Pick two.  You cannot do all three."   It is one of the basic tenets of project management.  If you require something fast, you have to cede efficiency on one level or another.

But there was something in that simple statement that bothered me, and it related to my aforementioned loss of control with the dogs.  After the class was over, I stopped him and challenged him on the statement.

"Sir, Eli Whitney, with his cotton gin.  Henry Ford with the assembly line. Edison with the light bulb.  Al Gore and his internet."

"OK," he said, "I'll grant you that. But those were not ordinary efforts.  What you are talking about are all things that changed the world - they are actions that changed the course of history."

"I understand," I told him.  "And during a lecture of process is not the right time to discuss it.  But what you describe here is the rule of efficiency, using the way that we are currently doing business.  If we look at things differently, there is a possibility of making changes that can do all three.

"If we are not allowing ourselves the possibility of thinking differently, we have no chance to change the world."

I know that the inside of a large Federal burrocrazy is not the likeliest place to look to make that kind of change.  But the principle is more pervasive than that.  Instead of working to train people in good planning, we are creating templates that even an idiot cannot screw up, with checklists to make sure that we did everything in the template.  We work at preventative maintenance, rather than at creative problem solving.  We look for our answers in look-up tables, and we make sure that the details are right. We use the everlasting go-by because it was approved before, rather than re-framing our documents to fit the organization of the problem and solution.

And sometimes, in our attempt to avoid loss of control, we miss the fact that our question is wrong, because we have never left our dogs running free in the yard.  There is no chance for learning, because we have prescribed the process so completely that there is no room for error.

Innovation should not be exclusively in the domain of the private sector.  It needs to be part of our Federal process as well.  We need to take a chance that something small will go wrong, so that we have the possibility of learning, growing, and creating for ourselves, making it so we can come up with the better solution when the big questions arise.  Without an investment in innovation, and without that commitment, we will have empty process, and no inculcated ability to think beyond the template, the checklist, the go-by.  In the process, we are safe.

In the process, we lose the chance to change the world.

Bandits

A friend who is an artist agreed to sell me a piece of her art.  I collect art from friends, and the wall in my office has been slowly been overtaken with fun pieces of quirky, beautiful art.

I set aside a few dollars a week over the course of several months, and walked down to the Trustmark bank downtown and paid for a money order.  I sent it to the address the artist had provided me.  Her response when I sent her a note to look for the money was classic, and made me happy:

"Thank you for supporting my art!  It helps me want to make more!"

A few days go by, and I haven't heard that she received it.  I ping her once; she says she had not received the check.  A couple more days go by, and I get the following:

"You check got stolen out of our mail!  We havr had our mail stolen in the past so we get this USPS service that sends a picture of what should have been delivered every day.  The check was delivered Friday and we never got it."

It is labor day weekend, so I can't do anything.  But on Tuesday, I walk over to the Trustmark Bank near where I work, and ask for them to cancel the check.

Back a year and a half ago, when I first arrived in Vicksburg, I needed a local bank.  For convenience sake, I chose the bank immediately adjacent to my work. Regions Bank promptly closed down that branch and several others in town.  So the convenience I had counted on is not there.  As a result, I am in the market for a new bank.  Trustmark carries my mortgage, and I was impressed with the folks in that department.  This interaction - cancelling the money order - is working a little bit like a trial run.  Will the service be worth changing banks for?

I felt like it was a little bit like taking your car to a dealership to be serviced.  Are they going to gouge you?  Can you trust them when stuff goes wrong?  Or are they only interested in new car sales?

From the outset, I was treated with great suspicion, as though I was somehow gaming the system. The Head Cashier explained that my only recourse was to pay a fee to have the check canceled.  Then I was going to have to pay to have the new check issued (I had already paid for the money order once; now it was going to be twice).  And I could pay for it in cash, or they could deduct it from my 'account' (you know, that account that I am trying to decide whether to open with them?).

"What would you like to do?"

Well, you just told me that I have no choice.  Or rather, you have explained that my choice is a Hobson's Choice. (As much as I love game theory, this one sucks).  I can lose the money, or I can pay the fine.  To add insult, the ATM charges $3.  And it is out of order.

When I came back, I am directed to someone else, who processes the entire transaction without looking up, except when I tell her that she has misspelled my name on the affadavit.  And her own.
In exchange for the fee, she tapped a few keys, canceled the money order, printed out a new one, and held out her hand.  I walked out, just under 50 bucks poorer, with a new money order.

Less than an hour later, my cell phone rings.

"Mr. Lawton, I just wanted to apologize.  I don't know where my head was this morning."

I nodded my agreement.  I had wondered the same thing.  

"I gave you the all the copies of the money order.  I was only supposed to give you the top two copies.  Can you come back and give the others to me?"

So in summary, I was robbed, treated like a criminal by the bank I was interviewing, charged an exorbitant fee for a few seconds of computer work, and then was asked to take additional time out of my day to do them a favor, to correct a mistake that was not my fault.

Sure.  I'll get right on that.  And you can expect my business just seconds before before the Pope sends me a piece of his own art work.

I just hope he doesn't want a money order.