Left Click Or Right Click

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

This week I spent fifteen minutes finding a bug.

Records were dropping out of a data pipeline somewhere between where they started and where they were supposed to land, and nobody could say where. Finding it meant tracing the path through somewhere between twelve and fifteen thousand lines of code.

I could do that by hand. It would take days. Instead I put an AI tool on it, worked through it with the thing, and had the answer before my coffee got cold.

In 2003 I did not know what SQL stood for. I could not have told you what a data pipeline was, because the phrase wasn’t in general use. Artificial intelligence was something from The Matrix — machines that were coming to take over, not something that would help you find a dropped record on a Tuesday.

My title has the word “data” in it. The job is mostly defining the rules for how a system is supposed to work and then governing it by building consensus with people — running the state of the data about the way you’d run the state of a country. It is not a glamorous line of work. I’d have to look up when a job like it first existed anywhere.

I’ve spent a lot of this year saying nobody ever laid the path out for me. Not at the church, not at the gallery, not in the wilderness stretch after.

But I don’t think anybody could have laid this one out.

There was no one in 2003 who could have looked at a twenty-five-year-old with a sociology degree and pointed him at a job that didn’t exist, using tools nobody had built, in a role that wouldn’t exist for another decade. The people around me then couldn’t have gotten here either. It wasn’t a place yet.

A map to a known destination is geography. A map to an unknown one is prognostication, and nobody owed me that.

Except I keep thinking about Randy.

Randy was an adjuster at a place I worked in my twenties. He’s the reason I got that job — he knew they needed somebody and he put my name in.

I was the most computer-literate person in that building, which tells you more about the building than about me. So Randy would come to me with questions. Do I left click or right click? I’d tell him. Next time, same question.

I was still answering that question ten years later.

I loved that old man. He was good people, and I mean that. But somewhere in there I remember thinking, buddy, at some point you have to learn how to click your mouse.

He had the thing I say I never got. Somebody right there, patient, glad to help, for ten years. He just never asked a question big enough to take him anywhere.

So it’s two things at once, and I’ve been saying one of them.

Nobody could have mapped me to this job. That part is true and I’m going to stop treating it as a grievance.

But the terrain under my feet was always well understood by somebody. Why a gallery calls the people who already bought from it. What the volunteers at that church were actually offering me. What an editor does. None of that required foresight. It was ordinary knowledge, sitting in the room, that I either wasn’t given or didn’t know how to ask for.

I don’t know how to tell which of those it was, from here.

The twenty-five-year-old wanted to write songs for a living.

He’d be disappointed by the office. Not by the problem-solving — he’d have liked that part, he always liked figuring out what was broken. But the fact of an office, every day, doing something with a title he couldn’t have parsed.

He’d have been wrong about the songs, though. I’ve got an album out. Eleven tracks, written and recorded and released, in a year when the day job was going fine.

Nobody mapped that either.

Excellence Knows No Age

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

We watched Down Periscope tonight. I’ve loved that movie for thirty years and it holds up — silly and sweet at the same time, which is harder to do than it looks.

I quote it more than I should. There’s a scene early on where the captain is meeting his crew, gets a look at his new executive officer, and says something about him being a little young for the job.

Rob Schneider straightens up and says: excellence knows no age, sir.

It’s a joke. It’s also true, and I’ve thought about it more than a comedy line probably deserves.

My son is in the middle of a painting challenge right now — a series of watercolors, a different theme each time.

He showed me the collection tonight. Spread out, all of them together.

They’re good. Not good-for-his-age good. Good.

I’ve never had any interest in painting, but I’ve always drawn. I still doodle while I think — always have, half the margins of my life are covered in it. And what I put on a page is not in the same category as what he puts on one. He draws it, then he paints it, and it’s finished, and I’m looking at it.

I’m thirty years older than him and I’m not close.

Here’s the thing I noticed about myself tonight, standing there looking at his work.

Nothing in me wanted to compete with it. Not a flicker. I was just proud of him and glad to be looking at it.

And I compete with everything. I keep score on myself constantly — I’m not as far along as I should be, I haven’t had the success I wanted, I still haven’t found the groove in half of what I’m doing. Writing included. I run that tally in the background most days.

But not with him. I don’t grade myself against my son and I never have.

Which makes me wonder who I think I’m grading myself against the rest of the time.

The honest answer about the writing is that I haven’t been at it long. Not seriously, not the way I’ve been at it this year. I’m early. Early looks like failure if you compare it to someone who isn’t.

He’s early too. He’s just been early at the right thing for longer, and he practices, and it shows.

He put them all back in order when he was done showing me.

Ok, So Now What?

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

There was a papasan chair in that upstairs office. I’d hauled it up there myself.

Toward the end I’d go in, shut the door, turn the lights off, and sit in it. Not praying. Not thinking, particularly. Just sitting in the dark in the middle of a workday, numb, in a building full of people who had no idea I was up there.

What I remember turning over in that chair wasn’t how do I fix this. It was where do I go from here.

I found out over the next eighteen months, and the answer was: five jobs.

I had a sociology degree I couldn’t do anything with. My wife worked while I applied for things and didn’t get them, and after a couple of months of that I put on the best clothes I owned and talked my way into selling art at the Thomas Kinkade gallery in the mall.

I knew nothing about selling. I knew nothing about Kinkade. The paintings were pretty.

The model was this: a new piece would come out, and we’d work a list of everyone who’d bought before. I still remember most of the script. Hi, my name’s David, I’m with the Thomas Kinkade Gallery — we know you’re one of our loyal customers and we wanted to say thank you. Tom’s got a new piece in. Based on what you’ve bought before I really think this one’s a fit. Can I get you to come down and see it?

At twenty-four that felt like the stupidest thing I had ever been asked to do. I didn’t have the money to buy anything in that store and I was supposed to stand there talking about the work like an expert who loved it.

I never made a single call. Not one, the whole time I was there. I sold a few pieces to people who walked in the door, and the rest of the time I wrote poetry in the back.

I lasted under two months.

Pizza Hut next. Assistant manager, about six months.

They made an enormous deal about management trainees putting in forty-five hours a week — and then didn’t always schedule forty-five hours, and told you there’d be trouble if you didn’t hit it anyway.

There was also a thing at closing where you’d estimate how long your final tasks would take, clock out with that estimate, and then stay and finish. One night I clocked out about thirty minutes long and the district manager came by and I wasn’t there.

He accused me of cooking the books and fired me the next day.

That one was on me. I put the number in and I left before the number said I could. I wanted to go home; it was midnight. But it was my hand on the keypad.

Then a month spraying lawns in Oklahoma City. Weed killer and pre-emergent. That was the shortest one, and it ended for reasons I’ll leave alone.

Then February 2004. My mother had been quietly watching for anything I could do, and a friend of hers worked at an insurance adjustment firm that needed an office manager. That’s the job I’ve written about before — the one where the owner eventually offered me a dime.

Youth pastor to art salesman to Pizza Hut to lawn spray to office manager. Eighteen months.

Somewhere in the middle of that, I sat down and started writing a book called Okay, So Now What?

I still have the opening. It’s about being sold a lie — a degree that was supposed to guarantee a career and didn’t. And the diagnosis in it is correct, which is the part that gets me. Twenty-four years old and I wrote: I never sat down and planned out what I was going to do. I took the blame cleanly. I didn’t blame the university, I said the choice was mine.

Then I wrote this: This book is not as much for you as it is for those of you out there who are just like I was, clueless.

I was unemployed. I had no plan. I’d been fired twice in a year. And I sat down to teach other people how to plan their lives.

Here’s the part I didn’t understand until much later.

I’m forty-seven now. I could deliver that Kinkade script today with a completely straight face, because now I know what it’s for. It’s not a lie. It’s an invitation to a person who already likes the work, offering them a thing they’d want to know about. Every business that’s ever sold anything does some version of it, and the ones who do it well are doing a service.

Nobody ever told me that. Nobody said here’s why we call, here’s what it does, here’s the person on the other end and what they get out of it. I was handed the script and pointed at the phone, and because I couldn’t see the why, I decided it was beneath me and wrote poetry in the back of a store I was failing out of.

That’s the pattern. Not laziness. I’d have run through a wall for someone who explained the wall. I was headstrong and certain and completely willing to work — and utterly unable to move on anything until I understood what it was actually accomplishing.

Nobody came alongside me. Not at the church, not at the gallery, not anywhere in that stretch.

The kid in the papasan chair should have been keeping a journal. He wrote a manual instead.

I’ve spent this year trying to do the work rather than theorize about it — documenting what I’m going through instead of teaching from the far side of it. It took me until my forties to work that out. Turns out I got the posture wrong the first time I ever sat down to write something for other people, and then didn’t notice for twenty-three years.

I could still be saying the sentence I was saying at twenty-four. That if somebody would just lay it out in a way I could act on, I’d go and do it.

Nobody is coming to lay it out. I make the plan or there isn’t one.

I am not twenty-four anymore. There are times I have to remind myself not to think like he did.

Three Hundred Dollars

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

The summer after my freshman year I called my grandmother from a pay phone and asked her for three hundred dollars.

I was already on the mission trip when I made the call. The arrangement had been seven or eight hundred for the summer, some of it up front — except none of it came up front. It all came at the end. I could not make the leaders understand that college students still have bills that show up monthly whether you’re at camp or not.

Mine were a credit card minimum payment and a Sprint phone card, and the phone card was because I kept calling a girl in Oklahoma City from that camp. She’s been my wife for twenty-seven years.

I called my mother first to ask whether Grandma would even consider it. She said, for you, I think she probably would.

So I called Duncan.

She got quiet. Not upset — the kind of quiet where somebody is taking in what you’ve just asked and has decided not to react until they’ve finished thinking about it. Then she said, that’s some money.

She was right. She was a nurse who’d raised four daughters, married to an oil man, and they had means. She’d never once spent like it.

She didn’t mail it. I had to come get it.

So I told my leaders I had bills to pay and drove ninety minutes from Davis to Duncan, and she put cash in my hand at the house she’d lived in my entire life.

I told her I’d pay her back at the end of the summer. I told her she had my word.

The check came in August. I was in Edmond by then.

I drove back down to Duncan — a weekend, knowing me. I called first. I’ve never been a man who shows up unannounced.

I put the bills in her hand and told her thank you.

She said thank you too. And she got a look on her face I have never been able to name properly — pleased and proud and satisfied, all of it at once, all at the same time.

Grandpa was out mowing, I think. I stayed long enough for pie or brownies or cake, whatever she had, and visited a while, and drove back to the city.

Thirteen years later she was dying at home, in that same house.

A few weeks out, I arranged to come spend a morning with her. She sat in her sitting room with her legs kicked out and her pain medication beside her, and we talked for a good while. Two of my aunts were there. I made breakfast for all of us, and I got to show off a little, and I told her about my family — my son was five that year. He’s eighteen now.

At some point my aunts stepped out and it was just the two of us.

I told her I loved her and that I was thankful for her. I read her a letter I’d written for her.

And she watched me the whole time with that same look. The one from the money.

That was the last time I saw her.

I’ll be forty-eight before long, and I still miss my grandma and being looked at that way. She loved me. I love her.

She never said a word about the three hundred dollars.

I Knew The Guy

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

In my twenties I worked with a man who got fired over something he said. I’ll leave it there — it was his to carry and it isn’t mine to publish. Today it would be called an HR violation.

We both worked for the owner of the company. A client told the owner the man was careless and unkind, and that put the owner in a spot. Ultimately it cost the man his job, because the alternative was losing the client.

The owner started to adopt the client’s story. If that version was all I’d had, I’d have believed every word.

But I knew him. He was one of the sincerest people in that office and he was kind in ways nobody was keeping track of. He’d also grown up somewhere that hadn’t taught him where the lines were in a place like that one, and he crossed one, and it cost him his job.

I never argued that he shouldn’t have been fired. The mistake was real. What I couldn’t do was accept that the mistake was the man, because I had information the story didn’t contain.

Almost nobody else in that building did.

That’s the part that stayed with me. Not that the man had done wrong. That it got repeated as if it were all he was. The client, the owner, the office.

They weren’t being cruel. They had one account, from one person, delivered with authority, and no reason on earth to go looking for a second. Five people repeating it wasn’t five sources. It was one source with five mouths. From inside, that feels exactly like confirmation.

Here’s the thing I’ve noticed since, and it’s worse than plain repetition.

You’ve probably heard that “blood is thicker than water” is a butchered version of an older line — the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb — meaning the bonds you choose beat the family you were born into. Great story. Sounds like a hidden truth somebody’s been keeping from you.

It appears to be invented. The covenant version traces to a couple of authors in the nineties and two-thousands, neither of whom cited a source, and it doesn’t turn up in older texts at all. The actual proverb has always meant what you’d expect: family runs deep.

So the correction is the distortion, and the people passing it around are certain they’re the ones who saw through something.

That’s the sharper trap. It isn’t repeating what everybody says. It’s repeating the thing that let you feel like you’d stopped doing that.

I carried a misquoted Bible verse about money for most of my adult life and never once went and looked at it. When I finally did, one word was missing and it changed the whole meaning. I’d been wrestling with a sentence that was never the sentence.

Decades. Never checked. And I’d have told you I was a careful person.

There’s a live version of this running right now and it comes in a matched pair.

One crowd is selling seven prompts that will change your business. I use these tools every day and I read the prompts — they’re vague, overgeneralized, and will get you back something that sounds intelligent and says nothing. That’s the grift.

The other crowd has decided the whole thing is a bubble and none of it is real, and they roll their eyes and feel superior about it.

Both are handing you a conclusion you didn’t build. One says it’s magic, one says it’s nothing, and neither has any interest in you going to look. If you looked, you wouldn’t need either of them.

I still think about the guy sometimes.

There are people who worked in that building for years who never knew anything about him except the worst afternoon of his life, told by somebody else, and there was nothing in it that was untrue.

It just wasn’t him.