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The Price of Rice

You may not have heard, but we’re in something of an economic downturn. This may or may not be the cause of what I have to tell you today.

As part of this economic downturn, we’re trying some new things with regard to looking for new projects. One of the things I’ve done is to use a site called Craigshelper to build RSS feeds of a couple of searches, so I can keep an eye out for 3D projects that may pop up around the country. I haven’t landed anything yet with this method, but have gotten close a couple times, so it seems worthwhile. We’ve also been watching a site called Elance.com, with similar results. As I’ve been watching the postings that show up, I’ve made some observations about some recurring themes that have shown up on both Craigslist and Elance postings.

First and foremost, is the tendency of posters to want a very high quality product. We all want that. I can see that. People do a pretty good job of explaining what they want. Some even provide examples. Fine.

There is a very simple saying that applies very strongly to the work I do and throughout my industry. It goes something like this; “Time, quality, or money. Pick two.” Another variant is “Good, fast, or cheap. Pick two.” It works. Every time.

Which leads to the second problem. People posting for these jobs are trying to pick all three. I guess thats the bottom line. I don’t have a problem with people wanting to shop their work, or get bids, just to make sure they’re getting a fair price. Heck, I don’t even have that much trouble with someone wanting to outsource work to India (because I know that if someone in India called me asking me to do work, I’d surely do it).

So what’s my problem? My problem is that someone is saying, “I’d like to get Product X. I’m willing to pay $10 for it.” Not a problem, in and of itself, except that a fair market rate for Product X is closer to $200. Its like walking into a Cadillac dealership, saying you need to have a new Escalade, and you have $3500 to spend. They’re going to laugh at you. The price that they’re offering to pay has absolutely no relationship to the actual cost to produce the goods.

Here’s a great example of what I’m talking about . . .

Maybe I should just be laughing at these jokers instead of getting mad.

The other thing I’ve noticed is a theme that goes something like “Great for a student to build their portfolio”, which is code for “You should be honored to work for about $.50 an hour, and might even want to consider paying us for the honor of doing the work for us, just because you’re a student.”

Anyway. Just needed to get that off of my chest. Pick two. Seriously.

Watch List

I had the realization the other night as we were sitting at the dinner table, doing our daily de-brief of the kids. I wasn’t just asking questions (especially of Allison, the 4th grader) to find out about their day. I had crossed a threshold.

I was gathering intelligence.

You only have to hear the names of the kids at school so many times before, having not met them, you begin to categorize them. Smart kid. Drama princess. Troublemaker. Athlete. I realized that I’m starting to build, in my mind, a database of who all the kids are in their grade, and most importantly, which ones I need to be keeping an eye on and/or out for.

Which makes me wonder whose watchlist I ended up on.

I’m making a list, checking it twice. Gonna find out who gets to play with my kids. Or take my daughter on a date in about 20 years. Or something.

Redux – Blueline

I realized that I had a great source of material I hadn’t quite drawn on. Stuff I already wrote! Is it too late to post a story that I originally wrote three or four or more years ago? In any case, this is one of my all time favorites. By recyling this post, I also reduce your carbon footprint. Be glad, and enjoy.

You know, when you’re fourteen, there are only so many jobs you can get. Being the oldest of four boys, I think my mom was really ready to kick my butt off to a job, so I was strongly encouraged to seek employment the summer before my freshman year of high school.

Well, we have this law where, essentially, you are required to work at a grocery store, namely, a Hy-Vee store. Since you aren’t sixteen, you can’t run the cash register, so you’re basically slave labor for the Shift Managers. Most of the managers were pretty decent, but there was this one guy named Eric who was, well, he wasn’t. To get a picture in your mind of what this guy looked like, picture the cowboy in the wanted posters from Bugs Bunny – big, mean, hunched over, and “mean guy” mustache. Something like this:

He’d assign those he really disliked (read: me) to do the most menial of jobs, like facing all the shelves so that they looked full, even though we only had 3 cans of pickled pig’s feet remaining. Or, even better, stand in the semi-protected shelter on the side of the building in the freezing cold loading groceries into people’s cars.

This grocery store had these little intercom phones with a green button and red button. These were used for in-store communications – so that instead of price-checking your #10 can of K-Y Jelly, we could do it quietly. You’d just get on the over-the-air intercom, and say “Ed Grimley, Red Line”. It all sounded very official, and you’d hear it all the time. There was a little-known fact, though, that if there was, say, a very drunk person, a violent shoplifter, or a terrorist in the store, they’d get on the intercom and say “Ed Grimley, Blue Line”

Any “Blue Line” call was secret code for “Bad mojo is happening, everyone get up to the front of the store and get ready to kick some ass!”. Didn’t happen much, but when it did, it was an adreneline moment.

Fast forward a couple years. I have LONG realized that even a part-time career in the grocery business is definitely NOT for me, and moved on to better (well, different) things. It’s about eleven o’clock on a Friday night, and as sixteen year-olds are want to do, we were out cruising around West Des Moines, being our usual bad selves in the burbs. For some reason, we find ourselves down at the grocery store where I used to work. Maybe we were picking up some toilet paper to hang in someone’s trees or something (a story for another post). As we’re leaving, I get this Idea.

We drive around the corner of the building to the grocery-loading area (in this part of the country, we get our groceries loaded into our vehicles, thank you very much). This is where the afore-metioned semi-protected shelter stood. Thing is, it had a internal intercom-phone with access to the over the air intercom. I get out, pick up the intercom phone, and say in my most calm intercom-voice;

“Eric, blue line. Eric, blue line. Thank you.”

Get in the car, slowly drive by the front of the building. There’s Nasty Canasta and six of his grocery-bagging henchmen, all standing around looking mean and ready to kick ass, but also with a sense of bewilderment as to who exactly made that call.

Blame the Dog

We has a dog. Her name is Sophie, in case you haven’t rung (rang?) my doorbell in the last year to hear her ferocious labrador-weimeraner bark. We’ve had her for just shy of a year. Great dog. Very laid back. Catches a frisbee (clutch), retrieves a ball, has sad puppy-dog eyes, play-eats my arm. All good things. The kids can try and ride her, and she grunts and rolls over.

There is one significant problem. The dog has gas. Really bad, super stinky, make you nauseous gas. She is the only dog I’ve spent significant amounts of time around who has this issue, so maybe I’m just not used to it. We have tried changing food, changing when she eats, getting her more exercise, but to no avail. The dog stinks.

So, next time you eat a bunch of refried beans and broccoli, come on over. Do you what you have to do. Blame the dog. We’ll believe you.

Negative Space

This is negative space.

It works better with graphics than with words.

It can also be tough to find negative space in our lives. Space and time that has nothing in it, but causes the “positive space”, or the “stuff” in our lives to balance out. People who think about this stuff a lot like to call this idea “margin”, but I like the design metaphor. I’ve been searching out the negative space in my life lately. What’s interesting is that it can be harder to leave nothing in a design (or a life) than it can be to put in just one more brush stroke, just to have something there.

this space intentionally left blank.

Operator

I have a secret.  Some of you know this secret, some of you do not.  The secret is this.  I do not actually possess all knowledge.  However, I know who does, and his name is Google.  My pal Brandon has it figured out – I’ve trained him such that when he calls me, he says “Tank, I need an operator” (a reference to The Matrix which might be, nine years on, too obscure).

Here’s how it works.  Someone calls me, says “Hey, do you know X?”  I might respond with “um . . . .” but the truth is, I’m already typing something into a Google search window.  I’d like to think you think that I know, but really, we both know the truth.

I was reminded of all of this tonight when I found this website called Let Me Google That For You, which is pretty helpful.  I’m not sure I’m snarky enough to use it, but its nice to know its there just in case.  Keep calling.  I’m probably the person I know most likely to have access to Google (except for everyone who now seems to have an iPhone), so call away.

Charting it

You may not have noticed if you own a Prius and haven’t filled up in awhile, but gas is suddenly a bit cheaper than it was, say, yesterday. Fuel prices are approximately at the point where, in 2001, I started to say “Man, gas is getting expensive.”

There’s a fun little website that has probably gotten more traffic in the last six months than, well, ever. Its called Gasbuddy.com, and the idea is that it helps you find cheap gas. What it also does that is kind of fun is let you generate charts like this one;

Fun stuff. One of my favorite features of this website is that it includes the ability to chart the price of a gallon of gas against the price of crude oil. I would like to suggest, for our friends at Gasbuddy, some additional economic benchmarks you could also track the gallon of gas against.

• One Gallon of Milk
• Nachos BellGrande
• The Ford F-150 Pickup
• Admission to a movie
• Your favorite illicit drug
• Sugar Gliders

Portfolio

I had an interesting thought a few weeks ago, as we were polishing up our portfolio of work at the office in preparation for some marketing.  Due to the nature of the work I do, for the most part, every time I finish a project, its a little better than the last one I did.  In theory, we’re the opposite of the clip of Peter from Office Space that you see above.  We hope.  Cleaning up our portfolio largely consists of taking everything we’ve done since the last time we updated things, and taking the best of that stuff.

The thing is, though, when I use the standard of the work I can produce today, things that looked great even eighteen months ago look like crap.  Projects that I was extremely proud of are culled like its nobody’s business, because they don’t hold up to what I know now.  The end result is that you see the sixteen images I’ve carefully selected to show you just how awesome we can be.  

I was wondering something.  Would it be more impressive if I was to show you everything?  If I was to show you just how far I’ve come?  If I showed you the things that embarrass me today next to the bright shiny stuff, would the bright shiny stuff shine brighter or lose its sheen?

All of this pondering of the merits of my portfolio – of the nature of my work, led me to an interesting parallel with my faith in Jesus.  There were times in my life where I thought, “wow, I’ve got this really figured out – look how well its going.”  Now, in retrospect, I see that I didn’t really.  It wasn’t that I wasn’t working at it (well, sometimes even that wasn’t true), its just that I had to, as Paul tells us in Philippians 2:12, work out my faith with fear and trembling.  

So, my hope is that, just as my work looks better the more I work at it, the more that I end up having a faith that brings me closer into relationship with Christ as time goes by and I keep working at it.  I’m pretty sure that once I get a little further into my own faith-story, I’ll be able to look back, shake my head at the Ryan of 2008, and be excited to see how I’ve figured a little more of it out.  Also, like my work, I wonder if my faith doesn’t shine brighter next to the reflection of who I once was.  

One of our favorite pseudo-mottos for our office is “we don’t suck as much as we used to . . ” – and as much as we say it in jest, at the same time, it holds up.  We know we haven’t gotten there yet, but we’re working on it.  Hopefully, in another year or two when I look back at my work and my faith, that motto will hold up.

Skating Party

It is possible that those are my legs.  It is also that tonight was my first visit to Skate West, the roller rink of my youth, in approximately twenty years.  Much has changed.  The building has been reconfigured, some kids wear inline skates.  The lights were on – I remember it being a very dark room most of the time.  

Some things have not changed.  Open skate.  Girls Skate.  Guys Skate.  ALL-SKATE! Reverse direction.  Limbo.  Backwards skate.  YMCA.  Dice Game.  I had the realization that these guys have been pretty much running the same routine every single friday night for twenty-plus years.  Thats a thousand Friday nights.  In any case, it was a Cub Scouting Skating Outing, which is a lot of ing.

The funniest thing of the night, which you weren’t able to witness, was the moment that I had my right foot roll off of a single step down.  That wasn’t that funny, but the fact that my body wasn’t planning a roll off of the step means that the rest of my ever-so-slight frame came down that step behind my right foot, in a slow motion crash that several other parents from our scout den watched, witnessed, and laughed at.  Then they asked if I was ok.  Which I was pretty sure I was.    Now – four hours later – I’ve got a pretty sore knee.

You may now commence laughing at the expense of my pain and suffering.  I allow it.  Carry on.