I will no longer be updating Iron Guide (see below). Instead, I am now writing at my new, personal blog. Though that will be about some of the newer things I'm doing in life, if you want to see updates about Louie, Lester, and now Dusky, add me on Facebook -- there's enough ridiculously cute pictures to go around.

The last couple weeks have been rough for my team. Last Thursday was especially bad. Frank, our manager, went home (understandably) very grumpy. After he left, the team got together to make a mailing list, make-frank-happy-again-interest@. Brett and Jim worked late into the night yesterday to finish a couple prototypes they thought would brighten his day. I spent a few hours teasing out a timeline of events and writing up a post-mortem on the whole mess.

On the drive home at 4am, admittedly a bit delirious, I started thinking: if we were all just a bunch of cute little puppies, what exactly just happened?

The big, big thing about training dogs is making sure that what you're actually teaching is what you think you're teaching. Dogs are smart animals, and they'll soak up everything you teach them like a sponge, but they'll soak up everything, for better or for worse. If you try to teach them not to jump up on people, but let them greet you after coming back from work with a big leap, they'll learn that, hm, you clearly didn't really mean that bit about not jumping up on people. Yelling "no! no! no! no!" when you see them trying to chew up your expensive, imported rug? They'll just figure out that they can ignore you unless you repeat something ten times. Repeating a command because you think he didn't hear you? No, you're wrong, he really did hear you -- he's just ignoring you. Without consistency, without enforcing every command you give, he'll learn that he only needs to listen when he wants to. A great example of all this is my mom, who did the "no! no! no!" thing all the time with my family dog. (This was true the last time I was in Los Angeles at least. She now claims to have gotten better.) Koji, who listens just fine to me, would just start eating directly off her plate if she got distracted with the TV or something.

So what happened here? Frank got grumpy. Team pulled together and worked like crazy to try to make him happy. If Frank were a puppy, doesn't that just teach him to get grumpy more often? It's classic positive reinforcement.

Here's proof that something is very much at play here. I'll be the guinea pig and psychoanalyze myself. We did some pretty cool stuff on Thursday. Ignoring the pain of working like crazy for right now, that's just great. Ignoring the pain of my also being there so late, that's especially great for me because, for the past several months, I've been trying to restructure the team to encourage more such cool stuff. (I'm sorry for being so vague, but I obviously can't get into what it means for a project to be "cool" on this blog.) And, subconsciously, something must have clicked. I was joking to Brett that maybe I should just start blowing a gasket, completely randomly, every so often. Maybe that would make people work on cool things, just to calm me down? Brett thought I was joking and just laughed.

So, fine, yeah, I was just joking. That'd be pretty evil, otherwise. And, although I'm not the manager, I suppose there can be such things as pointy-haired tech leads. *shudder*. Regardless, like I said, I'm generally a pretty calm fellow. It takes a lot to make me angry. I don't know if I could throw a fit with no good reason, even if I actually tried. I'd probably just bust up, laughing uncontrollably halfway through.

Anyways, I'm going to hope we're not all just a bunch of cute little puppies in training. For so many reasons.

Although, apparently, if we were all puppies, unnamed persons on the team think that Frank would be a Shih Tzu. Why? Apparently, they normally appear cute and cuddly but can kick your ass when they're mad. And, also, apparently, they start balding early. I don't see the connection. Do you? =P

Labels: Lester

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