A long ride

I am a circuit rider.  In the way that our culture leaves so much out of names and descriptions, I am really a nonprofit technology circuit rider.  Before the term became popular around five years ago, I was a nonprofit technical assistance provider specializing in strategic planning and database development.  No matter, but I do tend to pay attention to names and actions, and how the two reinforce or dissemble.

Most of my workdays have a balance of structure and variety.  I leave my house at 6:35 every morning.  I pick up my commuting partner and drive to the train station.  We call the forty-minute train ride “study hall” because some days we work, some we sleep, and some we talk.  Because the process is reversed at the end of the day, I end up with a first and last period study hall.

In between the train rides I work at my desk, teach, and travel around Chicago solving technical and procedural problems in the nonprofit community.  My first circuit is a fixed circle to and from work.  Within that frame there are dozens of smaller orbits, vectors, and epicycles.  Some projects take years to complete, others are done in a few months, and many are nothing more than questions and answers to discrete problems.

I like to think that my daily rides are like poetry: a fixed structure that contains a range of ideas and emotions.  Some people see the meter and rhyme, some the words, and some the ideas.  I’m pleased when the problem is solved and the agency can discharge its responsibility to civil society.  If the solution is elegant, so much the better.  If the agency can leverage the solution into new practice- if it creates potential, I am very pleased indeed.  The structure of go to work, solve problems x through y, go home offers a vast and boundless field for disquisition and reward.

I learn a lot.  Seeing the same problem expressed different ways in different types of nonprofits exposes patterns of practice and language.  In response I’ve developed a set of tools.  Some tools are nothing more than verbal responses that cut through the emotion and ambiguity of organizations unable to describe their problems.  Other tools are database modules and templates that demonstrate a possible solution.  At the most common definition of tool, I have code snippets that do useful things.  As the situation arises, I reach into my figurative tool bag for ideas, templates, and leverage.

About ten years ago I started developing tools to manage the business of my employer.  Nonprofits have memberships; they send students to classes, they engage in consulting projects.  The desktop database tools were primitive, and the first generations of the system were, ah, maintenance intensive.  Over time, we reengineered the business, refined the data model, and brought new database tools to bear.  Eventually, the system became a template for Management Support Organizations (MSOs); those nonprofits that help other nonprofit manage more effectively.  Some MSOs are like my employer, and have a major technology component.  Most don’t deal with technology at all.  Through luck and happenstance our MSO database had a national market.

Which brings me to my overnight rides.  Most of my trips are one or two nights to serve on a review panel or make a conference presentation.  Implementing the MSO database can take two or two and a half days.  My longest ride involved back-to-back implementations in southern California.  In December.

My long ride started at 8:00 am on Sunday morning when I left the house for the airport and ended the following Sunday at 11:00 pm when I returned.  In between was a mental orgy of concentration and contemplation – and the compunction to write about it.

Airports are good place to think.  Part of it is surrendering responsibility for your body to the airline.  Once I’ve checked in at the gate they have to take care of me.  I can think or work or daydream.  That Sunday I watched CNN’s coverage of the Florida recount court battle and visualized the week ahead.  My flight to San Diego was direct and the weather was good.  I was able to work on my laptop for part of the flight.  In San Diego I caught the shuttle to the hotel, which was out by a general aviation airport and industrial parks.  When I asked the shuttle driver if there were any bars around, he paused, and then said that there was only a topless bar a couple of blocks from the hotel.  My primary motivation to going to a bar is human contact and good beer: topless bars tend to come up short on both.  After a call home I decided to take a walk.

I like walking around downtowns – even on a Sunday.  Shops and restaurants that I might visit later; interesting people.  It fills and calms my mind.  Occasionally, I end up in environments like industrial park San Diego.  I first debated about sneaking into Dr. Tan’s Chi Recovery class being held in one of the ballrooms, but decided against it.  I decided to walk toward the blimp hovering over Chargers Stadium a few miles away.  I walked twenty minutes out and twenty back, eventually circling through a residential neighborhood.  I took comfort in the few people I could see working in their garages.  I never got near the blimp, and finally turned my back on it.  My own Chi now exercised, I could take a nap.

Sunday nights in hotels are bad.  They’re lonely, there’s not much happening, and the food in the restaurant tends to be poor.  I had a salad and calamari, and the calamari was awful.  I went to the hotel bar, and while they had good local beer, they served it in a shot glass.  I was the only patron.  My room was nice enough – a high-end dorm room, really.  As I read the room documentation I discovered that everything was billed.  If I wanted to watch a movie I’d have to pay; phone calls cost 15 cents a minute.  The only thing lacking was the 25-cent magic fingers box.  No matter, I was asleep by 9.

Monday morning I was up by 4:30 am.  To me, still on Chicago time, that was sleeping late.  I checked my email and got caught up on Usenet.  At 6 I went to the now open Starbucks and got a Latte for breakfast.  At 8 I went out front and waited for my ride.

The MSO office was on the other side of the airfield.  I’ve been in a bunch, from converted mansions to office buildings to universities.  They all share a wonderful clutter and energy and excitement.  San Diego was all of that.  For that first day we settled in the combination library resource room.  I found a network port and started to work.  For the next 9 hours my universe was my computer, the restroom 10 feet away, the coffee pot 20 feet away and the conference room, where we had lunch, 15 feet away.

The close proximity of everything made it easy to fall into the problem.  To me, these kinds of days are a wonderful combination of the GRE, a trashy novel, and a pas de deux.  It’s like the GRE because there are a set of small, challenging, problems, some of which are solvable, and some of which the only answer is “none of the above.”  The goal, through concentration and time management, is to solve as many of these problems as possible in the time available.  It’s like a trashy novel that you can’t put down because it’s such, for me at least, an incredibly engaging experience. And it’s like a pas de deux because it requires the continual partnership of someone at the MSO who understands the business and the data.

Our task that Monday was mostly the data – importing names from a file created by their outside mailing house.  Overall, I disagree with the contention that the nonprofit sector should pattern itself against the industrial sector.  I think that what we do is much closer to agriculture.  What we do is seasonal and requires cultivation (and not to mention the tons of middle men, but that’s another essay).  The data we were dealing with had definitely been in the granary too long.  We had about a ten percent duplication rate, and lots of inconsistency in organization names.  The data model we were copying the data into links individuals to organizations, so the import ended up creating multiple versions of the same organization.

Registrations for training were stored in a commercial database, but along the way the decision had been made to create multiple versions of the data – one copy per year.  While this could create some inconsistency in names year to year, it wasn’t an insurmountable problem. Until we discovered that course codes were not consistent year to year.  I tried to reduce the problem to a GRE-like question, but there didn’t seem to be any syllogism or algebraic expression that could model what appeared to be a random sequence.  We huddled on possible manual solutions and decided to only import one year of registration data.

I met with their hardware volunteer, a retiree from the microwave industry.  He gave me a tour of the network topology and insights into technical infrastructure.  But mostly I worked on the mailing list import, mapping the single source table into a half-dozen tables in the new system.

After work I was dropped off at the mall – the only public space available by shuttle to the hotel.  I ate at a restaurant that I later found to be part of a national chain.  I shopped for trinkets at local versions of national chains: generica.  Back in the hotel the euphoria of the day began to fade, and I mainly puttered in getting ready for tomorrow.

Since this was night two of seven nights away from home, there was no laundry to triage.  I have a number of friends who travel, and I’ve learned from them to carry the minimum amount of clothes necessary to look nice, and still get everything into one carry on.  One friend takes old underwear, which he throws out as he goes along.  Another wears soup friendly ties, and has developed techniques for cleaning them midway through a trip.  My contribution to the art is a nice vest.  It can be worn with the mandatory jacket or by itself.  It’s another layer for warmth and is another set of pockets.  For this trip I’d decided on a corduroy sports coat that I’d picked up in Oklahoma City a few rides back, two pair of the ubiquitous khakis so popular among geeks and a mix of polo and dress shirts.  I was ready to morph to any situation.

On Tuesday I again awoke at 4:30, and repeated the rituals of the day before.  Overnight I had reflected on the problems of importing the registration data and devised a plan to delete the previous day’s import and do a better job today.  Other than that small retreat we made significant advances.  At lunch I mapped out the rest of the ride – with data now imported I had to demonstrate ways to collect new information and make what the have work for the time being.  The afternoon was spent surfing the data and creating reports that reflect their view of the universe.

Viral marketing is a big buzzword right now.  I like to think of part of my work as viral strategic planning.  By giving an organization a tool that addresses a problem, an opportunity is created to use that tool to reengineer basic business practice.  I’ve been in hundreds of meetings with managers trying to elicit database requirements from strategic plans and environmental maps and whatnot.  Most of those projects never happen, mainly because implementing a plan drawn from abstract high-level policy is just too daunting. I had thought that when I started this MSO template initiative I would create a practical first step that people would then rewrite to their own needs.  What I found was a willingness to use the tool with simple modifications, and worry about bending it to strategy and policy later.

On that Tuesday I planted those seeds of more comprehensive measures of need and progress.  What they saw was a tool to manage day-to-day customer relationships, what they have is the potential to cultivate those relationships at a much higher level.  At least that’s the hidden agenda.

That night I walked to a Chinese restaurant near the hotel.  Afterward I did the packing ritual: dirty clothes into plastic bags, clean clothes folded.  Everything packed or ready to be packed.  Wednesday morning I was up at 4:30 and started into work on the table and field documentation.

A couple of my Internet Mentors and I had written an application to document all of the tables and fields in an application.  I used that tool on the database, and then set out to annotate how things were being used for this implementation.  User interfaces change with scary regularity, but with the table documentation you know what’s what.  If my daily problem solving was like the GRE, this bit of documentation was more like finishing a term paper.  I was able to get it done by 7:00, but some sections lacked the comprehensive narrative the deserved.  No matter, it’s enough for me or any other competent programmer to find their way through in the years to come – the database equivalent to as-built blueprints.

My ride met me in the lobby and settled the hotel bill.  A big phone connection charge, but no movies at least.  I’m still pretty cheap about spending other people’s money so, while not entirely frugal, I don’t expense a lot of extras that maybe I should.  The morning went smoothly; I got to meet their database consultant, who will be managing the system in the future.  Good geek bandwidth, and we had a healthy discussion of the merits of single-valued keys against composites.  It is comforting to find another human who understands the complexities and elegance of what you’ve done.  Comforting enough that, once the pretty pieces are displayed, you can reveal the hacks and compromises that are part of every system.  I felt that we’d done a good job, and even took time to take a break with another staff member who, like me, had lived in Tallahassee.

We had a relaxed lunch in a Mexican restaurant in the Old Mission district.  If things had gone badly I would have worked at the office until the last possible instant.  As it was I was dropped off at the airport well ahead of my flight.  Mentally relieved and empty, I sat in the familiar seats in the commuter terminal and listened to CDs on my portable.  I’ve collected a group of fetish pieces that I’ll play over and over.  This trip it was Vaughn Williams and Bartok, but I’ve been known to listen to Joey Ramone sing “I wanna be sedated” ten or twelve times in a row.  Nothing but the classics.

My flight was delayed, but with the layover in LA, it wasn’t going to affect my arrival in Santa Barbara.  I was checked in, so as far as I was concerned, everything was at peace.  There were mild showers, so when I finally walked outside to the plane, the runway was wet, the sun was just starting to shine on the hills across the way.  With my trench coat under my arm and my bags in tow it looked and felt like a movie.

The flight to LA was beautiful – out over the Pacific in the late afternoon.  The clouds over the ocean where like torn pieces of silk in five or six shades of blue and gray.  The sunlight and waves danced in delightful little patterns.  It was glorious.  The ocean and sky blends of color shifted to brown a few miles from the LA coast.  I’ve always been concerned with boundaries, from the cut-off point for records in a query to how architectural moldings turn a corner.  Crossing that boundary from the Pacific to LA was sharp and distinct and moved me from my idyll back to the real world.

The commuter terminal in LA is nothing more than a bus stop.  Since it was just a 15-minute stay over I just stood and paced slightly.  The walls were decorated with formulas about, I began to realize, fluid dynamics and the physics of flight.  I’d actually worked with some of these formulas years ago in school, but now I could just pick out the Greek letter rho, and references to viscosity and speed.  I smiled at my mind’s desire to discover meaning behind wall decoration.  Geek.

The flight to Santa Barbara was much shorter, but in the now failing light of day, visually much more intense.  In that 30 minutes in the air I became much more reflective.  Staring into the setting sun out over the ocean the blues and grays now had streaks of red and gold.  What, in a short ride, I would just file away as another happy memory, became an increasingly compelling need to organize my thoughts through writing.  But not tonight.

The landing coincided with sunset.  My contact had the flu, so after a quick dinner, she took me to my home for the next four nights.  And this time it was a real home.  A friend and benefactor of the agency had loaned them the use of a five-bedroom home in the hills overlooking the town and ocean.  It was quite a shift from the hotel rooms that I’m so used to.  There was a refrigerator filled with beer.  There was a goody basket of fruit and cheese and other treats.  There was coffee.  Along with the sofa, DVD/stereo/big-screen TV I had everything necessary to support my kind of life.

Exciting as everything was, I still went to sleep around 9:30 and woke up at around 4:30.  There was no phone jack in the living room, so I went upstairs to the office, which also faced the ocean.  I was able to watch the sunrise and get a fair amount of work done.  When I needed to stop work and think I would explore the house.  In the laundry room there were two pair of satin panties hanging by the washer, apparently left by previous houseguests.  I made up both innocent and extravagant stories for how they got there.  Later I named them the twins.  My ride to work was scheduled for 7:30, and I had to keep a fairly swift pace to get everything done.  My laptop was just telling me that it was safe to turn off when I heard the car in the driveway.  We went out for breakfast/coffee (I already had a healthy caffeine buzz on) and on to the office.

This was Thursday, but it was a lot like Monday.  The same database, the same problems, even, to a degree, the same room layout.  Southern California nonprofit management centers seem to share the same floor plans.  There’s a large library/resource room and a rabbit warren network of offices and file/coffee rooms.  I suppose it has something to do with the way programs expand without enough funding to relocate.  Whatever, I was starting to have a bit of deja vue.

Their network consultant was there, tweaking the DSL connection.  The source database was stored on the only remaining Mac in the Center.  I received one copy on a Zip disk several weeks before.  We tried to attach their DOS Zip drive to first my machine, then anything in the Center, but to no avail.  There was a problem with making a SCSI Zip talk to parallel ports.  I started to worry.  It was certainly possible to get most of the data files from the Mac to their new PC home.  However, some were just too big.  Mentally, I went down the list of options: a null modem connection and xTerminal or FTP, compression, export to ASCII, segmenting the files so they’d fit on a floppy.  I didn’t like any of them because they were all outside of my time budget.  There’s nothing like the possibility of losing a half day in a two-day project.  We had a brief huddle and decided that it would be best to use my older copy of the data and manually adjust for the small amount of drift.  We were in business.

The source data in this case came from a donor management application.  Names and address were pretty straightforward.  Course registrations were stored as gifts.  It was an interesting challenge.  Because everything was in a single database there were few duplicates among individuals.  Unfortunately, there was some creativity in how gifts/registrations had been allocated – data were close, but close don’t count for a lot in database work.

As in San Diego, we ate lunch in the Center, with the discussion running from practice to lifestyles and back again.  The afternoon was more sifting of data into the new system.  It went well.  By 6:00 everyone was tired and staff had commitments after work.  I was dropped off at the end of State Street at the Pier and we arranged a pick up at 8:00.  I wandered out the pier and bought more trinkets.  I also stopped for a beer and oysters.  The oysters were huge, with a micro brew that complemented them perfectly.  I finished and began my walk up State Street.

It was a cool night and all sorts of people were out walking.  Some were bundled in jackets, others had sleeveless tops.  I’d been told about the Frontier Ahead outlet store, so made a point of stopping in.  The clerk was very huffy and told me that they’d be closing in three minutes.  In two minutes I came across an Italian wool sport coat that fit perfectly.  The fact that it was marked down from $300 to $30 cinched the deal – I was going to finish my walk with a shopping bag.  Record shops, new age crystal and incense stores, all sorts or stuff.  I bought a 25 foot phone cord so I could sit on the sofa at my house and connect to the outside world.

At 8 we met at Joe’s bar, just as I was finishing the local delicacy: tri tips.  We talked, went to the house, had some drinks, and I was alone again by 9:00.  TV and sleep.  The next morning was the same ritual of up at 4:30, work and wait for sunrise.  My ride was ill, so there was a little coordination with getting to the office.  I wore my new coat, and as a joke left the price tag hanging out the back.  It was an easy-going atmosphere.  We started in on customizing the application to the specifics of local business practice.  Name tags and sign-in sheets were crafted to look more familiar.  Labels were renamed to make more sense.

We broke at noon for fast-food sushi.  Things were going well.  The afternoon we did some get-acquainted training with live data.  Nothing makes people more appreciative than seeing data in one place that had been, the day before, largely inaccessible.  Not everything was in place, but enough to make sense to everyone.  The training focused on how to find things, and also pointed out the cleanup to be in the future.  The training also pointed out little problems for me to fix.

That night we went to a classic 1960’s steak house.  Booths and martinis, then back to the house.  In his day books, the photographer Edward Weston writes about his need to get up early, drink coffee, and write.  Saturday was my seventh day of getting up at 4:30 without an alarm – I was starting to feel a lot like Ed.  The intensity of the ride was starting to get to me, and in addition to planning the day, I started to memorize the week.  It just sort of happened.

At the Center I worked on documentation and little fixes.  They had a lot of smart human stuff to do, but the structural integrity of the data was sound.  At lunch we even went out, and, like the ending lunch in San Diego, it was even a Mexican restaurant.  Three of us took a drive around the more scenic parts of the Santa Barbara coast line.  I got a much better feel for the area than in most of my rides.  We stood at the shore for a while and watched a wedding at one end and khaki-clad corporate troops at the other.  Out in the Pacific the dolphins were jumping.  We stopped for carryout Italian and went back to the house, witnessing one of the most beautiful sunsets I’ve ever seen.  The sky was crimson, but quickly blended with the blue and grey of the hills and sea.  We tried a couple of pictures, but they didn’t really capture the expanse of what was happening.

We ate and talked on the patio.  There was a band competition at the school in the valley; the sound worked its way up to us.  Everyone left, and I had my last night in my house.  Mostly I watched DVDs and drank wine.  I did laundry and, getting a little punch and wine drunk, began talking to the twins whenever I changed loads.  It must have been the last day, and no technical agenda that gave a second wind.  I wrote a little bit about the ride and posted it to the circuit rider mailing list.  I watched another DVD.  I got ready to go home.

Packing for the return felt strange.  I was in a house, not a hotel.  All of my laundry was clean.  It felt like getting ready for another trip, no home.  I stripped the bed and did the household laundry; the twins weren’t as talkative.  Other than a lot of recycling, my house was about the same as when I arrived.

We went for a drive in the hills past stunning views and the beautiful homes of the rich.  We stopped at a Buddhist temple as services were beginning.  It reminded of the Quaker meetinghouse that was next to my Grandparents when I was a boy, only with Volvos instead of buggies or Fords, and incense.  There was a gift shop, and I bought some interesting trinkets.  We ended up at the beach again for a brunch of Mahi Mahi and chips and a smoothie.  I felt fully acclimatized to California now, and my flight was in an hour.

My return was through LA once again.  It was a short, pleasant hop from Santa Barbara into the funnel of LAX.  The ten people on my inbound flight became about 20 on the shuttle bus from the commuter terminal to terminal 2.  The shuttle had to wind its way along the jetway, and we ended up in a long line of 747s.  I felt like I was in the movie Speed, only with a lot of time stopped, looking up at the pilots.  When we got to the main terminal I joined several hundred more people around the departure gate.  From the small implementation team and the isolation of my house (it will always be my house) I was rejoining humanity at an ever increasing rate.

The “Los Angeles Brewing Company” was across from my gate.  I had an hour, so went for a beer.  Everything was Sam Adams.  On a ride to Boston some months earlier, I’d sat in a bar overlooking Sam Adam’s grave, so I was pretty sure it wasn’t a local brew.  No matter, it was dark and hoppy – I was happy.

For the last half hour before boarding I stood and tried to stretch.  After boarding I napped and chatted with my seatmate.  He was a web developer and had once worked for a data conversion software company whose product I used.  A little work and a little talk: study hall.  The pilot kept us updated on a storm that racing to meet us back in the Chicago.  At one point he said that there would be 3 or 4 inches by the time we touched down.  As we got closer, he said we’d probably beat the snow.  When we finally landed the ground was clear, but the airport was ringed by snow plows.  The next morning, when I left the house (my real house this time) at 6:35 for the train, there was 8 inches of snow on the ground.  At six that night there would by 16.  No matter.