Year: 2009

How do you know when to call it quits?

As I’ve grown older, I’ve found fewer and fewer absolutes.

Five years ago or so, on a canoe trip with an acquaintance, the subject of “joining” came up — as in becoming a member of an organization. He’d joined a local church and we were discussing what he actually knew about it, the seriousness of the commitment.

Surprisingly, he didn’t seem to know much. How could one make such a significant commitment based on so little information?

“If I don’t like it, I’ll quit,” he answered simply.

In hindsight, maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised.

My father’s generation joined companies out of high school or college, and stayed with them for life. My generation saw companies treat their “human resources” no better than plastic buildings on a Monopoly board. Whole departments and divisions and larger were subject to being wiped out in service to some senior executive’s need to hit an EBIT target upon which some suit’s stretch-bonus depended.

Although I don’t revisit my past (see Genesis 19:26) — wouldn’t do a thing different even if I could — I do wonder upon reflection if I haven’t had a problem of sticking with some things for far too long.

I don’t think “quit” need be viewed today as the pejorative it might once have seemed to have been.

That’s not to advocate making the sort of hollow commitments that came so easily to canoe-trip-guy. Due diligence largely instructs my looks-before-leaps.

But the story of Sodom and Gomorrah isn’t limited to Genesis 19:24, which reads: “The the Lord rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah….”

No, it starts over two pages earlier in my NIV. Second chances abounded. With each succession, it looks to me like the bar was lowered beyond that which anyone should have expected. Warnings were clear.

My Grandma Deaton used to muse about folks who’d stick with organizations that had “quit us” long ago. In the Bible story here, I think Sodom and Gomorrah quit God long before God quit Sodom and Gomorrah.

Commitment is important. But there’s gotta be a reasonable basis for it.

I don’t think it’s wrong to say “enough is enough” when you have, indeed, had enough. How do you know when that is? Pray for discernment.

Amen.

Are compartmentalization and image management still possible?

Ian Fleming is said to have been most disciplined in showing different aspects of himself to different groups.

You saw only what he, with conscious direction and discipline, wanted you to see. As a result, two strangers could meet, each thinking he “knew” Mr. Fleming — but neither in the end would continue to believe this after they’d compared notes in conversation.

To lesser or greater extents, we all do this, of course. Relaxed at home is different from workplace. Project meetings are different from end-of-the-day unwinds with those very same colleagues on the road at a trade show.

And it wasn’t that many years ago that it actually took a bit of effort to really flesh out every disparate aspect of a Supreme Court nominee’s background.

“Screen names” used on Internet Forums and Chat Rooms provided somewhat of a challenge in connecting the person expressing views on movie interests on what part of the Internet with that same person’s pitch to would-be romantic persuits on another.

But what are you gonna do with Facebook?

You can spend years developing expertise and respect in advanced rocket science if you’d like. Still, that image will forever onward be seasoned with high school connections from decades past to the choice you made for prom date.

It’s all “who you are.”

Privacy! when you “have nothing to hide”

One of the more challenging areas of restraint for me is when someone rationalizes unbridled access to someone else’s information by arguing, “Well, if you don’t have anything to hide, you shouldn’t have any objection.”

What could it hurt?

Naïvely, and, more importantly — dangerously — this position fails to recognize the difference between data and intelligence. The former is raw, unconsidered information. The latter adds interpretation to that record of the former.

So, to you and me, “667 Main Street, Apartment 16,” is just an address. But coded into a database that runs character strings without spaces, apartment information preceding building, the number “16667” appears in a string. And it’s only a matter of time before some intelligence person sees the three of those sixes together in an apartment-first, street-second layout, and draws “the only possible conclusion,” ie, “mark of the devil!”

Stop and think about some of the best thriller-genre story lines. “Mistaken identity” is really nothing more than otherwise innocent data being taken the wrong way. Happens all the time.

And, as a matter of fact, so much so, I’m guessing, that folks who were here long before me and undoubtedly a lot smarter than I am, felt it important enough to spell out as a prohibition.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

As arguments go, Fourth Amendment trumps rationalization for riffling through my underwear drawer. At least as far as I’m concerned.

How ’bout you?