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Fire Drills Are Foolish

From a safety perspective, fire drills are important. If your building is on fire, you need to know how to escape safely. Then there’s the other kind of fire drill, where high-pressure managers project their stress onto others.

Mood music:

I worked for guys like that. I’ve been that guy, too. Nothing good comes from it, and good people get hurt.

Example: In 2000, I was assistant editor of The Eagle-Tribune‘s New Hampshire edition. My boss made my brand of control-freakism look like a champagne party. I was warned about him when I took the job. One editor said I’d have to play good cop to this guy’s bad cop. Good advice, but I lacked the balls to take it at the time.

Instead, I gave in to my instinct to please my masters. His attitude was that all the reporters were children who needed their ears slapped on a regular basis, and he expected me to carry out his will. When he told me to take a reporter to the woodshed, I did, no matter how small the infraction.

Once a reporter was working on a story that wasn’t time sensitive, but there was a hole in the paper to fill on deadline, and he decided it would be her responsibility to fill it. Never mind that her husband was having major surgery that morning. He ordered me to call her and be tough. I did.

An hour or so later, the paper’s top editor called me to his office. My boss was there. He asked me what happened, and I told him. The NH managing editor sat there red faced. It was always red, but it was particularly crimson in the big boss’s windowless office.

It turns out the reporter had called to complain. How dare an editor call her early in the morning to give her a hard time about something trivial on a day when her husband’s life was hanging in the balance.

The editor agreed with her, as he should have. He told me to ease up. He didn’t want reporters to see me as the newsroom asshole. I said I’d keep that in mind and left his office, feeling like I had just been simultaneously stabbed in the side of the head and slammed in the gut with a brick.

To this day, it’s one of my biggest regrets.

I’ve had some outstanding bosses since then, and they’ve taught me a lot.

Three bosses in particular — including the current one and the guy right before him — practiced kind, calm leadership. For them, the key to getting the best work from others is to treat them with compassion and give them the flexibility to deal with life’s curve balls. A kind boss who lets employees deal with their shit — as long as it doesn’t irreparably damage the work at hand — helps the employee grow in heart as well as skill.

These bosses will be the first to tell you that making people leap over every damned thing is stupid. Put people through enough fire drills and the chaos will break them.

A good person doesn’t break other people. It’s simple decency. It’s a lesson that has been one of my biggest blessings.

Um, Yeah, I'm going to need you to come in on Saturday. Office Space

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Account Theft: The Worst That Could Happen Wasn’t Much

Because I’m a security writer by profession, one of my biggest fears is that online thieves will suck my bank account dry. I’ve seen it happen to friends and family, and I know how violated they felt. I’ve written too many articles about people I don’t know being victimized.

So when it finally happened to me, I was surprised by my muted, almost calm response.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/iJ3aVCvM0JY

When I signed in to the family account, I was perplexed to find a few hundred dollars less than I had budgeted. The second I called up the account activity, I knew.

Six transactions in a row, all from the same morning, for $50 apiece, going to Steampowered.com, a well-known entertainment and gaming site. No one in this house uses it, so it instantly raised my suspicion. A few years ago, before learning to cope with my demons, my response would have been panic and rage. I would have visions of the family living on the streets, destitute, with nowhere to go. I would entertain the idea of hunting down the thief and plunging a knife into their chest a few hundred times, and I’d be unable to focus on anything else.

Of course, I’d never actually attack someone that way, and family and friends would keep us off the streets if it really came to that, which it wouldn’t have.

But when the obsessed mind spins beyond control, the victim views all the worst-case scenarios as reality.

Here’s what actually happened:

  1. When I saw the suspicious activity, I called the bank.
  2. The bank immediately canceled my card and arranged to send me a new one.
  3. I went to the bank and went over the last month’s transactions with them in an effort to trace the point when someone successfully penetrated the account. I signed paperwork to get my stolen funds restored.

Within 20 minutes, I had done what was needed and went on with life.

I’m not perfect, by any means. I still entertained the idea of finding the thief and turning the tables. I still cussed up a storm for being inconvenienced.

But I’m grateful for the ability not to go over the rails as my younger self would have.

In recent years, particularly in moments like this, I’ve developed a game called “What’s the worst that can happen?” I’ll picture a bad scenario and play out the absolute worst things that could happen from there. In the end, the answer is usually not much. For this incident, the worst-case scenario was that the account would run dry and all the scheduled bill payments would fail. Then I would have been running up the credit card for handle current expenses.

Those thoughts fizzled pretty quickly, though. I knew the bank would replace the missing funds and I knew I was fortunate to have the resources to keep paying for expenses.

I also knew that I wasn’t a special snowflake. People are robbed this way every day. It’s become a fact of life and banking protocols have changed in response.

The worst that could happen? Nothing really, save for the inconvenience of a trip to the bank.

Before online banking, we all had to do that anyway.

Computer keyboard with a shadowed hand hovering over it