Postmodern Movement at Work

I maintain that modern “work” is grotesque and unnatural, and it would be better for everybody if that changed. We don’t typically get enough movement or enough different kinds of movement for our bodies (and minds!) to stay healthy. But how to incorporate a greater quantity and quality of movement without adding a whole extra category of activity to our days?

Well, what if we largely eliminated the corporate cleaning services that we contract with and cleaned the damn building and offices ourselves?

This, of course, will never work.

Yup, objections abound: “I went to college so that I didn’t have to do grunt work!” “I have to clean up after my family at home! Why should I have to do it at work, too!?” “I’m a really important person at my company! I’m the Senior VP of Global Synergy Directives and Coordination, goddammit!”

This can’t possibly work.

And the optics are poor: “The company is just trying to save money by forcing us to do the cleaning, too!” And there are profoundly serious gender issues wrapped up in who cleans what for who. And underneath that are profoundly serious socioeconomic and cultural issues wrapped up in who cleans what for who. And few people genuinely like to clean up filthy messes or take out the trash or wash windows. So yeah, let’s piss off everyone in the company by making them feel like they’re being disrespected, mistreated, abused and taken advantage of.

This might not work.

But the human movements of bending, kneeling, reaching, lifting, carrying, sweeping, mopping, wiping and scrubbing are very different from sitting motionless and using a mouse or trackpad, or standing in the same place in front of a machine. And movement has its own genius—literally—because thought is embodied and enacted: we think better when we move. (We are actually in the process of thinking even when we think we’re only just moving.)

And paying attention to the building and the space that we work in can help us to make it better. We might feel better about personally taking care of our little cube or shared spaces. We might realize that the break room could use a new coat of paint or be more willing to say something about the broken chair. We might feel a little more invested, feel a little more ownership of the building we work in if we help to take care of it. Besides, 10-15 minutes a day from everybody would more than offset the cost of having a cleaning service (and all the attendant complaints and misunderstandings that seem to come along with them) and wouldn’t impact productivity at all. It would probably improve it.

This might work...?

Waiting In Line

We recently went to a movie theater to watch a film—the first since being vaccinated and the first in well over a year. There was no line for the attendant who checked the tickets we bought on-line but there was a pretty long line for buying snacks. We decided against popcorn and instead found our seats in the theater and waited for the commercials to end and the previews to begin.

Looking around the room, it might have been half-empty. There were still plenty of seats available, even disregarding the buffer seats between groups of masked people. I don’t miss crowded theaters at all.

It was great to watch previews on a big screen and we really enjoyed the film: a fine way to spend a couple of hours after waiting to venture back out for so long. Which, of course, led to using the restrooms after the film. I waited for my wife just outside the restrooms after I was finished. 

Pause for a moment and consider that: even after a screening at a half-full theater, the women’s bathroom had a line.

Caroline Criado Perez explains in great detail a fundamental failure of building codes and the architecture of public places in her book Invisible Women: women’s bathrooms are the same square footage as men’s bathrooms. I will state this plainly and briefly: what might seem like logical and geometrical equivalence of gendered restrooms is nonsense on stilts, enshrined in ignorant building codes.

OK, I’ll expand on this somewhat. There are slightly more females in the overall population, who tend to need a little more time to use the restroom in accordance with their biology. Women also require stalls to address these needs, which clearly require more space than urinals. Women tend to live longer than men, so there tend to be more, older women who might have a disability using the restrooms than men—again requiring a bit more time. Women still tend to do most of the childcare, so women are changing diapers or helping our children use the restrooms as well: again, more time needed. (I don’t have children, but I have overheard some of these proceedings and am aware that even just going pee-pee can be an epic saga.) 

It is manifestly obvious that women’s restrooms are grossly under-provisioned for the population they are intended to serve. No one in their right mind would want their wife, their sister, their mother, their daughter, their grandmother or their granddaughter to have to wait in line for far longer than comfortable just because of a stupid and myopic convention.

The scientific community has developed an insanely effective vaccine in an astonishingly short period of time. This breakthrough is nothing short of breathtaking and awe-inspiring, and the benefit to humanity is enormous—even allowing us to go back to the movies with minimal risk. So now let’s fix the goddamned building codes so that women’s restrooms are adequately sized.

Walking and Talking Revisited

The standard for video conference technique is advancing quickly. I say technique and not technology, because teleprompters and high-quality cameras already existed, but weren’t in most people’s homes. The built-in camera and microphone that typically shipped with our pre-pandemic laptops were good enough for the occasional video chat but not for the multiple daily sessions that fill up some people’s work week. Picture quality, eye contact, audio quality and lighting are all important considerations for a lot more of us now in order to have productive discussions that don’t make us feel like either drinking or going back to bed by 11am. As a result, I suspect that more advanced video conference features and accessories will become much more widely available as time goes on.

With all of this attention on how we look to and at each other over video, it’s curious to consider how we talk to each other when we’re together physically (distanced appropriately, of course); even when we’re seated at the same conference table. I don’t think I’ve ever been at a meeting and felt like the other person just couldn’t or wouldn’t break eye contact for at least a few seconds to look for something in a document or take a couple notes. I mean, there’s usually a whole room to look around at, so it’s not like we have to lock eyes for an hour straight: it’s a conversation, not a staring contest. We just need to be able to naturally look each other in the eye some of the time.

Which brings me back to walking and talking. If you’re walking with someone at a normal pace and holding a conversation, you’re not spending the entire time looking deeply into each other’s eyes. (If you do, I guarantee you will step in some kind of poop. It’s that simple.) Instead, as you walk you’re looking at the bike path/sidewalk/road, watching the traffic, looking at the birds and occasionally glancing at the other person. But there are two very interesting things about this situation: 1) you can look at the other person at almost any time—even if they aren’t looking at you, and 2) that feels completely normal. It feels normal because despite the fact that you’re not peering into the other person’s soul-windows, you are having a shared physical experience. You don’t have to be perfectly in step—it’s not marching band practice—but you’re going roughly the same direction and are presumably close enough to each other to be aware of the same important things: moving bicycles and cars, other pedestrians, ladders, piano movers, wet concrete and dog poop.

Consider another scenario: having a phone conversation with someone while you’re walking or driving(!). You can’t see the other person at all and they can’t see you. Not only that, but they can’t see where you are or anything around you. Your partner in conversation is oblivious to what you’re experiencing, and the pace, tone and timing of their speech reflects that. At times it can feel like the other person’s speech is dubbed into the wrong movie. It’s not that they’re inconsiderate or self-centered; it’s that they’re completely blind to your current situation. They don’t sense the moments when you simply should not or cannot pay attention to them—moments that most people would recognize if they were present.

It’s another uncanny valley that we find ourselves in: if we’re going to sit still and talk, then it seems like we either need to do it over the phone or we need the ability to look each other straight in the eye without any weird web cam offset. If we’re going to move through our environment while we talk, it helps enormously to be in the same space. The look of our eyes—both where they are looking and how they look to the other person—as well as a shared sense of movement in the environment help us to exchange our thoughts and words.

Touch, Tap

I touch eggs to the edge of the sink before I crack them. Just a brief, light touch to get the feel for where the egg and the sink will meet before I tap with just the right amount of force to get me one step closer to breakfast: touch, then tap. I sometimes do the same thing when I’m using an axe (to chop wood, not eggs): a slow swing with a gentle stop at the target, then a full swing. Less often these days, I might make a quick little squiggle in the air with a pen just above the surface of a paper document before I actually sign.

I don’t know exactly how I started doing any of these things, but I assume that I picked them up from watching someone else. They’re not the sort of thing you’d learn in school.

These movements before the real movements are not quite practice or dry runs, even though they improve our performance. They are not quite simulations, even though they give us information about the movement, the endpoint and the workspace. They are quick calibrations of the system formed by our hand, eye and tool (or egg).

The movements we calibrate tend to be percussive or explosive and directed outward; not pulling movements that bring the action closer to us. Pulling the starter rope on a snowthrower doesn’t need a practice movement.

And we don’t do a dry run of pulling on our socks. We do it with movements that count. Movements that we might do only once, or a few times but want to do efficiently; otherwise why waste the time? Touching the egg to the sink saves me the cleanup of an egg that was smashed instead of just cracked. The slow-motion, targeted swing of the axe saves me the embarrassment of missing the tree. (The squiggle-in-the-air with a pen is actually a combination of a warm-up and trying to determine exactly how energetic I can be, given the microscopic space I have to put my untamable signature in.)

Touch—when you want to be sure—then tap.

It’s feedback.

It’s “feel that”.

Let It Snow

It snowed pretty hard today, so after work this evening, we went out to our driveway to shovel. Occasionally, throughout the day, you could hear the city plows in the streets and see the private snow removal trucks clearing out driveways. 

Snow removal is a very different problem to solve than other outdoor maintenance. A lawn can be mowed a day or two earlier or later without much impact, and fertilizer or aeration can easily vary by a week or two. The weather has to be accommodated, in any case, but usually during the warmer months the timing isn’t terribly critical. This is not the case with more than 1 or 2 inches of snow, especially if there are to be especially frigid temperatures shortly afterward. Pretty much everyone needs their driveway or parking lot cleared out within the span of a few hours, residences and businesses alike.

It makes me wonder: when we finally go back to the office a couple of days each week, would a group of us be willing to take up shovels against the snowy sidewalks and parking lots? For the benefit of a faster response than the snow removal service, the fresh air, the exertion and maybe even camaraderie?

Adjustments

When you’re cutting up vegetables or meat and you need to adjust to get a different angle or position, you can move three things:

1. the knife

2. the food

3. your body

The knife moves, of course, as you make the series of cuts along a piece of food. Some small adjustments can be made, but mostly you want the knife to stay in the same area—where your grip is sure and your hand and wrist are comfortable. Where you can confidently control the knife; where you can make smooth and efficient strokes. Think of working your way down a carrot.

Moving the food instead of the knife is necessary when you’re finished with one piece and grab another (duh), or when the cut requires a knife angle that you can’t easily or safely accommodate. Think of dicing a potato or an onion.

Moving your body is usually reserved for big or awkward tasks that don’t lend themselves well to moving the food. But it’s not because you need to change the grip on the knife, necessarily. It’s more likely because you need to see the food better and it might be simpler to move yourself than move the food. Think of moving around to cut up a pork shoulder or getting yourself over the top of a large squash to slice it in half.

Knife, food, eye. Put another way: tool, problem, perspective.

A Chance Encounter

This year, all of the meetings have moved from a conference room to a laptop screen. When things get back to normal (whatever that is), I assume that many of those meetings will move back into a conference room.

What if, in the meantime, the conference room changed? In fact, what if the conference room changed frequently?

We’re used to the long table and the chairs and the screen at one end of the room. But what if we took it upon ourselves to change the physical space that we meet in periodically? What if, instead of chairs and a conference table, there was suddenly a bunch of high-top tables for groups of 4-5 people to stand at? What if there was a long, low table and cushions on the floor for sitting on? What if there was no table and just the cushions?

Granted, there are obstacles to this, both cultural and logistical. You’d need space to store the extra furniture and who among us (Westerners, anyway) wouldn’t feel a little indignant at having to sit on the floor?

But the variety of sitting and standing postures that we (again, I mean mostly Westerners) so desperately need to regain a little mobility and flexibility would increase. There would certainly be a little discomfort at first, but a little discomfort might also encourage everyone to honor the scheduled stop time for once.

And it just might be fun to see what the meeting room looks like when you arrive this time.

The Mother of Invention

Sometimes when you need to solve a problem of organization or material handling, looking at the items you can get in a grocery store or a big box store is helpful. I’ve already extolled the virtues of trays, but there are more!

Need something cheap to hold a lot of little parts in a single layer? Try a rimmed baking sheet. Need to make sure all those little parts don’t slide around everywhere? Put a silicone baking mat on top of the baking sheet. Food storage containers excel at keeping cables and partially disassembled assemblies in one place without losing anything. (And they usually stack!) Need to run some experiments on how various materials respond to certain solvents? Throw them in some canning jars. (Well, there were canning jars last year…)

(This goes both ways, of course: the line between scientific equipment and cookware is completely blurred now as well, with sous vide machines, vacuum sealers, dehydrators and other gadgets.)

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but hospitality and food service are its midwives.

Look Around

Squirrels, birds, chipmunks: they all look around a lot. They move—quickly—then stop and look around. For many animals, this is life and death stuff because the cat, coyote and hawk are also looking around. They do it a little differently because they’re predators. They look differently in both senses of the word. Their movements are more fluid, and steady and they are, let’s say, carefully shopping instead of trying to get through a haunted house.

When we look around these days it’s often on-line or maybe in the fridge. We don’t examine our surroundings like either a chipmunk or a bear. We behave as if we literally inhabit a separate world.

This is OK until it isn’t. I was preoccupied with a thought one day as I stepped out from between two cars into the street. Another car was coming down my side of the street, but I didn’t realize it until I felt the turbulent air on my left arm as it passed by.

There are other reasons to be observant and watchful these days, unfortunately, but it’s a habit that can be developed without too much fuss. I would make an analogy with driving: you simply glance up from your phone every so often and… NO!!! Please put your phone down while you’re driving! As I was saying, just like when you’re driving, you cultivate a relaxed awareness of all the traffic around you: just noticing the cars, the people, the bicycles and how they’re moving. Just looking around like you have a casual interest in everything that’s going on.

One more example: if you’ve ever seen two farmers talking you may have noticed that they stand facing roughly 90 degrees to each other. There are a couple of reasons for this. They can keep an eye on the fields, the weather and the roads. A tremendous amount of Midwestern conversation is driven solely by the current and forecasted weather conditions, and it’s considered polite to wave when you see a neighbor on their way into town. (The continuous examination of the landscape during conversation might also be to avoid making prolonged eye contact and the subsequent awkwardness.) But the farmers might also be displaying a behavior from our heritage: scanning the savannah for weather, neighbors and danger.

Mise en place

It’s French for “putting in place” or “everything in its place”, and the most popular context for the phrase is in the kitchen. It’s a form of preparation that involves getting all your ingredients and tools (and maybe a glass of wine, if it’s been that kind of day) together before you begin setting things on fi... er, cooking.

It takes some of the excitement out of cooking, because there’s a lot less running back and forth to the pantry, looking for spices or realizing that you’re out of clean ramekins. (Ramekin is a weird word, so I had to look it up: we use it to refer to a little circular dish-thingy. The French, from whence the word comes, use ramequin to refer to a small amount of cheese toasted or baked with breadcrumbs, eggs and seasoning in the little dish we call a ramekin. I have yet to discover what the French call the little dish that they bake ramequin in. With nonsense like this, it’s amazing that we can actually translate anything from any language. Seriously...)

Anyway, pros take this pretty seriously because pros don’t mess around. With proper mise en place there’s less of a chance of being unprepared or surprised and things seem to go a lot smoother and faster. Which probably explains why I’ve been so resistant to using it until the last few years. I didn’t grow up in the French culinary tradition. I grew up in a tradition of Minnesotan Norwegian Lutheran casseroles—or “hot dish”—on my mom’s side and German farmers who could weld tractor parts together with swear words on my dad’s side. Stoicism, yes. Elegance and refinement... less so.

My excuse for not gathering together the necessary items beforehand has perennially been that I’m in a hurry, I have to start right now. Never mind that I do NOT write code this way. I don’t even pack for a trip that way. I wouldn’t paint a room that way if I only had an hour. I guess some things do need to be taught in context, or perhaps I’m just a little slow.

I remember watching the Food Network what feels like a loooong time ago. A couple things stand out about those episodes: the chef putting a dish in one of the ovens and then taking the finished dish out of a different oven after the commercial break is one example. “Ah, yes, the magic of television!”, I laughed to myself.

But the other was this: all of the beautiful ingredients magically waiting for the chef in neatly arranged glass bowls and ramekins, waiting for their expert hands to deftly make an omelette or a croque en bouche or a grilled cheese sandwich with pickles. And I sat there, watching, thinking “Well, yeah, it would be nice if someone got all the stuff together for me ahead of time!”

Yeah, dumbass, it would, wouldn’t it?

Efficient Exercises

The deadlift is a powerful activity because nearly every muscle in your body is exercised in order to move the weight off of the floor until you’re standing straight up—especially when the weight gets heavy.

Making soup (most cooking, really) is a powerful activity because all 5 of your senses are exercised: touch as you chop vegetables and stir the pot, taste (obviously), smell (also, duh...), sight (does it look like there are enough carrots? Have they turned that really bright orange yet?) and sound (how hot is the pan?).

Writing is a powerful activity because it exercises your creativity, judgement, style, vocabulary, sense of structure and it encourages clarity.

I think part of what makes these activities interesting is how much of us is engaged in them simultaneously.

If you have to break some eggs…

What’s the difference between an omelette and scrambled eggs? Order. Tidyness. Clear boundaries.

If you try to make an omelette and you screw it up, you can quickly pivot to scrambled eggs: throw in the filling and mash the whole mess around in the pan. Voila! Scrambled eggs. Have you already put the filling on, tried the folding maneuver and it didn’t work? Same thing: apply violence to the omelette and you’ll get scrambled eggs. Nice recovery: treat yourself to a 5th cup of coffee.

Going the other direction is not so easy—impossible, I’d say.

Having a fallback plan that works with an increase in chaos is helpful. If the original plan doesn’t work, there might be something almost as good you can make from the mistake. But it’s important to figure that out ahead of time, because not everything is so easily rescued. (This idea works waaaay better with cooking than with baking, by the way. Baking requires a ridiculous amount of order and structure and should be considered a delicate activity.)

P.S. Some technologies are like this: out of order escalators become stairs (RIP, Mitch Hedberg), dead electric toothbrushes become toothbrushes with giant-assed handles and a broken scissors becomes a matching set of letter openers.

Walking and Talking

Last Saturday we went to a farmer’s market that is set up in a parking lot. It was busy and we had to park in another parking lot just up the hill. It had rained a bit, off and on that morning—much needed rain.

There is no sidewalk between the two lots, but over time people (possibly lazy) had trod a rather direct path down the hill to connect them. The path was clear but narrow: punctuated by rocks and stones of various sizes and bare dirt which had turned slippery from the rain.

None of this is unique or interesting, of course, except that it’s less frequent in the city. It was just unusual enough compared to my normal homebound routine for me to have to pay attention to where I put my feet and to notice that I was doing so.

We talked a bit as we picked our way along the path, remembering trips to the Boundary Waters, noting that somehow our feet, legs and pants were getting disproportionately wet and dirty, discussing lunch plans and how we were going to cook and freeze the sweet corn we just bought.

There’s a lot going on there—looking, stepping, talking, listening—all at once and all more or less automatically. It’s two of the things we humans seem to be built for and they’re extraordinarily complicated, requiring a great deal of effort from our brainparts. And yet walking and talking are so fundamental to human behavior—they are at once both completely mundane and borderline magical. It’s probably also not a coincidence that being able to do them simultaneously is quite practical.

The idea that our excursion down the hill (and back up) that day was “coordinated hunter-gatherer behavior” is laughable, but it had the right elements—the same shape. It’s uniquely human and we shouldn’t simply give it up. A nice set of cement steps and landings wouldn’t necessarily make it better. And maybe taking the long way through the parking lot, down the street and into the market isn’t better exercise: maybe sometimes the shortcut is.

Trays: Unsung Heroes of the Home

There could be other simple technologies that are more overlooked and under appreciated, but it’s hard to think of one. Trays belong in the pantheon of simple machines, along with the lever, pulley and screw, but somehow Archimedes missed it.

Trays embody one of the principals of luxury: they enable us to more easily enjoy food and drink in settings that aren’t the kitchen or dining room table.

Breakfast on the porch? Bring out the coffee, juice, bacon and pastries on a tray—done! Lunch in the shade of a tree in the backyard? On a tray, complete with lemonade. Drinks on the patio? A tray will carry the two-drink minimum for the evening along with pretzels and a cheese ball. S’mores and whiskey by the campfire? A tray gets it done efficiently and you won’t drop the chocolate in the dark and lose it or spill the whiskey.

DO NOT SPILL THE WHISKEY!

Trays: allies of the hands; steady and stable; useful and versatile.

An Exercise for the Reader

If you’re in the mood, try this to see if you notice anything:

Stand on a carpet, area rug, yoga mat or wherever you feel comfortable doing something weird for a couple minutes.

1. Get down on the floor and lay on your back.

2. Get back up to a standing position

3. Do this 3-5 times on each side

I’m fairly comfortable with this kind of thing, and yet when I did it my abs seemed to notice I was doing something a little out of the ordinary. It’s work standing up and laying down on the ground repeatedly. My cats thought it was extremely interesting. Seems like a very unsexy, pedestrian sort of exercise: boring. But I can’t help thinking about what it must be like to not be able to bend and flex enough to get on the floor, or more importantly to get back up...

Principles

One of my guilty pleasures is watching the Great British Baking Show. It’s delightful for a lot of reasons (British accents, pastry porn, etc.) but there are some interesting lessons, as well.

The contestants get advance notice of what they’re baking for 2 of the 3 challenges each week, and 1 of the challenges is unknown until the day of. So, for 2 of the challenges they can plan and practice. They can tweak their recipes and prepare special tools—really get things worked out ahead of time.

But something always goes a little wrong: maybe the tent is really warm that day and their stuff melts or won’t cool properly. Maybe they just get distracted and fall behind their schedule. Maybe they forget a step.

This is where it gets interesting. This is where you get to see who really understands the fundamental principles of baking and how well they understand their particular recipe and plan: How do you recover? Can you save the effort you’ve put in or do you have to start over? Do you still have time to start over? Can you ditch part of your plan in order to save the rest of it? Are there any shortcuts or substitutes that won’t ruin it?

And the first, deepest, most important principle of baking (and oh, I don’t know, everything else): don’t panic, see the situation clearly and formulate a new plan with what you’ve got.

Postmodern Movement at Work – Still Standing

The benefit of working at a standing desk isn’t that you’re standing. It’s that you’re not sitting still.

When you stand, you’re constantly shifting your weight back and forth from one leg to the other. You might rock back and forth from the balls of your feet to your heels. You might arch your back once in a while. You might reach backwards with your arms or even overhead occasionally just to stretch. You might twist because you feel your hips, neck or back stiffen up. You might flex your knees a little because they’re stiffening up, too. If you’re like me, you might even crouch down once in a while to alleviate some of the tension that your tight hip flexors place on your lumbar spine. You might notice your posture and straighten up or re-align.

If you’re sitting down, your body is at a standstill. But it’s really hard to stand perfectly still.

(Nerd note: when you’re standing, your body is constantly solving the inverted pendulum problem. Your body doesn’t have to solve shit when it’s sitting down.)