Category Archives: History

My personal history prior to the accident.

Fishy Performance Improvement

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A porpoise is a sort of piscatorial bobble-head. It goes up and down in the waves. At times it is flying completely free of the water, keening its way through the salt air, larking about in bright sea light. At other times it is unseen, submerged within an enfolding black cloak of ocean. To my mind, I have been engaged in porpoise like activity. This is my tale of fishy performance improvement.

For the past week, I have experienced mood swings. Episodes of quiet confidence alternate with bleak despair. One minute life is manageable. The next minute I plunge into black depths and life becomes impossible.

In engineering this behaviour is known as porpoising. In humans it is typically associated with manic depression, now better known as bipolar disorder. But I don’t appear to meet the standard criteria for this form of illness. According to Wikipedia, the different moods of bipolar disorder each last for a period of months. I was shifting gears in a matter of days, or hours. What was going on?

I puzzled over this question, trying to find an answer. The porpoising commenced when I located the performance appraisal / letter of reference material described in the post Time Evaporated.

Then came a revelation. My self-assessment was being conducted from two conflicting perspectives. When I contemplated my performance from before the accident, and compared this past performance to my present day performance, a range of deficits became evident. If my past performance scored at 100, my present performance was not worth more than a 6. I became depressed.

If I measure my performance today against performance from a year ago, then I find a significant improvement. If today’s performance scores as a 6 then a year ago would not score much higher than 3. From this perspective there has been a tremendous improvement. I became elated at this positive change.

Depending on my perspective, I would experience either quiet confidence, or enter a depressive tailspin; such is the disparity between my present capabilities and those I enjoyed prior to the MVA.

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There is another aspect to this issue.

As a child, I constantly experienced exclusion from my peer group. In order to gain acceptance, I would try and identify the requirements of the group: what did they prize or value? What characteristics must I demonstrate in order to win acceptance?

This form of analytic query commenced at a very age and has continued up to the present. I would undertake it without being aware I was doing it. While the other members of a work group were simply showing up for work, I was engaged in a complete analysis of the work environment, seeking to define what was critical for success and acceptance, what needed to be done, what standard of performance was required or expected. Once I had established those metrics, I would then seek to meet or exceed them.

One consequence of this behaviour is that in every job I have held I have quickly gained respect in the workplace and been promoted into a supervisory or managerial position. I did not seek out such a role. My actions were not undertaken with promotion in mind; I was not even considering the prospect of promotion. I simply wanted to be accepted as a member of the group.

This behaviour also generated domestic conflict. I remember my wife being very unhappy with me due to the inordinate amount of time I devoted to my job, She complained that I was being grossly underpaid, that the company was taking advantage of me, that there was no reason for me to deliver the level of dedication to the firm that I exhibited. I simply could not understand what she was talking about. Her complaint made no sense to me whatsoever.

In that particular job, I doubled my salary each year of employment. I had no concern for the extra money. My focus was on my expanding area of responsibility and the performance standards required to ensure that I would fit in and be accepted as a member of the new group into which I had been promoted.

 

 

 

 

Blogging & Avoidance

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I have identified another benefit of blogging. This deals with blogging and avoidance. It may also involve self-discovery and pacification.

After writing the prior post – A Litany of Forgetting – I went in search of an earlier blog post in which I had attempted to apply a metric to determine if my capacity to create text had improved over the course of time.

In my memory I believe I performed an extensive analysis of this topic, devised appropriate metrics, and then examined my written output as measured on a words per day basis between a date in summer 2012 when I wrote my first insurance claim submission (5 pages written in the course of a month) and a later date when I made a second submission to the insurer, or to some other body.

My memory of the results of this analysis was that there had been a slight improvement between the two dates, something like a 10% variation between the first date and the last. What I really wanted to find was a description of the metrics employed so that I could duplicate the analysis. I wanted to compare my present day ability to create text with my abilities in 2012, and with the contrasting date utilized in 2013.

I searched the blog using several different keywords and, while many positive results were returned, I did not locate the post that is recalled by memory. I have four hypotheses for this:

  • The post does not exist. I think I performed such an analytic comparison, but the reality is that I am imagining something that I wish that I had done.
  • The analysis was performed but was contained in some other document and was not made the subject of a blog post. This is entirely likely. I know I have sought to provide the insurer with some metric that demonstrates the effects of my injury. It is entirely possible that I performed this analysis but then did not use it as the basis for a blog post.
  • My search terms were inadequate to the task. This too is likely. Searching on the word “blog” produced a large number of hits, as did “word count.”. I do not remember the other search terms used. All gave a large number of hits.
  • The analysis was performed, and was entered in a blog post, but was not made the central topic of that post. In some posts I have added an addendum. a sort of colophon created after having had an opportunity to further contemplate the topic. So the analysis may have been performed, it may be in the blog, but it is buried deep within another topic and I failed to find it. This is highly likely.

As I searched, I was shocked by another set of posts based on a TBI inventory completed in September 2012, and again in September 2013. This inventory was very revealing. The shock was due to the fact that I had completely forgotten about it. Now that I have found it, I remember it chiefly for the great difficulty of coding the rather attractive tables that form the basis of each post. I had to hand code each of these as WordPress does not contain any inherent facility to handle and display tabular material.

A second shock came when I began to collect the URLs so that I might list each page of the analysis in this post. This analysis commenced with an introductory overview of each of the six sections in the inventory. This introduction was then followed by a series of six posts detailing the findings in each section. See if you can spot the problem:

Introducing the September 2012 Inventory
Inventory Analysis Section 2
Inventory Analysis Section 3
Inventory Analysis Section 4
Inventory Analysis Section 5
Inventory Analysis Section 6

If you arrived at the conclusion that there was no analysis of Section 1 then you are absolutely correct. I do not know how I missed this error. I do not know how I missed discovery of the omission. I can understand loosing, or omitting, a paragraph of text contained within the context of a much larger work. I cannot understand the loss of an entire numbered section.

It may sound as if I have documented another failure on my part. I prefer to congratulate myself on my success in generating a new insight.

The insight derives from two events. On the desk before me there sits a stamped addressed envelope which contains the letter that I sought to mail yesterday. The letter is dated May 10th and is going out on May 14th. It was delayed, yes, but the positive news is that I have completed the task.

I paid close attention to completion because the letter was referenced in a blog post. I therefore wished to capture the outcome in a second blog post. This blog operates as a sort of confessional. I declare my sins and seek to repair my faults. The blog is ostensibly public but it has no true public audience and is unlikely ever to gain one. Still, writing to the blog carries a sense of making something public, of speaking to the wider world, of communicating with other members of my species. Since I wish to make a good impression on you, my absent reader, I wanted to communicate the fact of task completion. Left to my own devices, I might overlook and completely forget the task.

You will laugh at this. Maybe. What is not funny is the fact that the letter I intend to send today has been in preparation for almost a month. I think I have the means to verify the elapsed time from conception through to realization. This may form the basis of another post.

The relation between blogging and avoidance also arises in respect to the 2012 TBI survey. This inventory reflects a number of issues I would rather not to acknowledge. This may explain why I ever so conveniently managed to “forget” about it. Avoidance may also explain why I failed to complete the review of Section 1. The benefit of this blog is that it makes it much harder for me to avoid encountering unwelcome facts about myself, my capabilities, and my performance. It doesn’t stop me from doing it. It just makes it more difficult to achieve.

The final benefit of the blog is its possible role in pacification. When I found the 2012 inventory and quickly scanned it, I started to become concerned, or upset. A quick reading suggested little improvement from September 2013. If true, this is a very unpleasant and unwelcome fact. I have come to recognize the onset of depressive episodes (I refer to them as “tailspins”). As soon as I recognized the onset of a tailspin, I engaged in writing the blog. The effect was one of instant pacification. Somehow the act of churning out words, and putting them down on digital paper, has a calming effect. I do not know the reason for this.

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Update 20/05/14
I recently located the incomplete draft of Section 1. It may be found here:
Section 1 Analysis
 

 

 

Time Evaporated

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For the past week I have been doing spring cleaning. The more I do the more I realize how much is left undone. Over the past year, domestic affairs have been sacrificed in order to compile the various submissions to the insurer, to organize trips to Montreal for testing, to do the multitude of other things mandated by the injury. In each case time evaporated.

Time evaporated for two reasons. The first is that I am very slow in all that I do. If I make an attempt to proceed more quickly then I make errors and become so frustrated that I want to throw papers across the room. Not helpful.

When I write a letter I need to devote my full attention to the task. And despite going slowly I will still experience the onset of fatigue and headache. And when I return to the document I will find manifold errors despite my best efforts at revision.

The second reason time evaporated has to do with my ability to become distracted, to forget my initial task objectives. I start a kitchen clean up and end up spending the day making soup stock. I tidy up my office, discover some documents relevant to my insurance claim, forget them, rediscover them, copy them, generate PDFs, email the PDFs to my doctors, draft a cover letter, go on an extended search for more documents, plan a copy run, search for envelopes, search for stamps, shuffle though more papers and displace the sorted piles of other documents in the search process. The end result is a bigger mess than I started with. This paragraph is a synopsis of what I did today.

Time Evaporated — The Documents

The documents are dated from 2003 and 2007. They relate to my work in the IT industry and constitute performance reviews, evaluations, and letter of reference.

When I read them I was struck by the degree to which I am no longer the man described in the documents.

In 2007 I exceeded target performance in the areas of Client Knowledge, Product Knowledge, and Quality Assurance. I would not be able to do this today.

  • He reacts well to change and is flexible

Today, I am very resistant to change and inflexible. I seek to establish and conform to routine and am at times unaware that I am acting in this way.  This is a major behavioural change.

  • He sets and follows priorities. He is very organized and keeps a professional work environment.

Today, I must devote immense amounts of time to address the details of the insurance claim appeal. My home work space is extremely disorganized as I am focused on attending to immediate needs. I have problems with prioritization and decision making. This is a major behavioural change.

The letter of reference dated September 2004 describes me as being “timely and efficient” and commends me for the display of “strong organizational, analytical and decision making skills.” After the accident this was no longer true.

I am also described as “patient and helpful.” My IT work environment was complex, difficult, and filled with stressors, yet I handled it with aplomb. Today, I am subject to bouts of intense irritability when I attempt to conduct a simple grocery shop. I loose documents I held a moment ago and will quickly loose my temper.

Time Evaporated — The Workplace

My IT employment continued until March 2011 (the accident occurred on a Sunday night and I was informed of the layoff on my return to work the next day). Enterprise IT customers are extremely demanding. An unexpected equipment failure may result in the firm being unable to operate (critical IT failures are a significant cause of business bankruptcy). If the hardware does not work then the hospital cannot function, the 911 system is unable to accept calls, the electrical distribution system goes dark, and the military is unable to conduct operations. My customers were the Fortune 500, departments of the Government of Canada and the provinces, and the US Military. The range of required knowledge was extremely broad. The ability to deliver an immediate solution was mandatory.

Today, I have difficulties simply trying to fulfill my basic living needs. When I try to read a manual from this period I can make no sense of it. To my lay understanding these facts suggest a significant and fundamental change in my abilities.