It's not my job
What I'm Up To Personally, and Professionally.
Hello Professionally Curious One!
As you can tell by the lack of Friday posts the last few weeks, I haven’t been posting much.
There really isn’t any “Professional Curiosity” going on in this timeline that I can share. It’s a combination of big bets that take too longer to pan out to be a relevant story, to a lack of professional curiosity at the smaller, less energy intensive stories.
So I’m going to shift gears a bit and go for different angles, and see what I like. After all, I’m writing for purely selfish reasons, and if my needs from writing aren’t fufilled, I’m not going to sustainably do this.
Enjoy the journey.
Allen
Past Publications
What I’m Up To
TL;DR: TV, Games, Consumer Consumption, and Stupid Finance
The Things:
First off, Javier, congrats on the offer and for negotiating your salary up.
Foundation, the most influential Sci-fi that essentially influenced everything in Sci-Fi you know debuts it’s season 2 and um it’s okay.
Finished For All Mankind Season 3 and while it had a lot of beautiful moments and excellent lessons in organizational leadership, the TV showed strayed very far from what was introduced in Season 1 - instead of the environment creating the hardships, it was individuals creating problems on other individuals filled with very dumb drama. It did have a beautiful moment of “I hate that guy” to “I understand how lonely that dude is and now I feel bad”.
Past Lives is a fascinating story of the difference in realities being “ordinary” vs “being not-ordinary” is, as witnessed by the same protagonists over the course of 24 years. A slow movie that captures the subtle differences between Asians in Asia, versus Asian Migrating to America.
My new favorite personal finance app is Rocket Money and it’s because uses Plaid to connect to all your banking, loans, and retirements, and it’s pretty damn easy to classify things as necessary, and premium is as low as $4 a month, which is less than the cost of one boba (wow I hate this timeline).
I recently expanded my cat care with two Pet Libro Smart Fountains that I can 100% over recommend; their pet feeders however are one more fuck up away from me returning them for good for the 3rd time.
I picked up an Away Travel Bag and I will let you know if I like it as I have a bit of travel over the next 6 months. There’s this 100 day trial period for the suitcase and I will know if it’s worth it after 2 trips: a 1 week domestic trip and an international 2 week trip.
On a decent discount I picked up Amazon Echo Dot 5th Gens and they have some incredible speakers and they integrate with my security system. It’s a shame that they bug out playing Audible quite often and they are not powered by USB C.
At the recommendation of Philip, another cat owner, I picked up a Tineco Floor One S5 Wet Dry Vacuum Cleaner by using all the reward points I have accumulated plus a decent sale (it was $325 at the time of purchase). It has a janky post-use clean up process but it has S-tier (this means better than A+ y’all) floor cleaning results, with minimal effort, and one water tank can cover 1500 square feet with 60% battery left to go.
Also Chase Ink Business Preferred is offering 100,000 sign up points which I totally jumped in on because I have way too many work expenses (not my own) to throw on it and a couple flights. One of the origin stories on my point collection spree originated when Bruce mentioned the ridiculous way he accumulates points…and now I’m that guy too.
And if you like to manage cashflow, Amex has a 0%, no-cost, 12 month plan-it feature for those big purchases that quite literally puts a transaction on to a payment plan and if you like to park your money in high-yields and preferred to accumulate as many gains in the market as you can, this feature can be very handy. (don’t do this if you have no idea what any of this meant or don’t appreciate yields)
Also subsidized date ideas: If you and your SO have Amex Platinum, you get $15 uber-eats credit each renewing each month; on the last day in the evening, before that current month expires, you also get the next month’s credit for a total of $30 each. Furthermore, you can use your $30 balance to do a pick-up order somewhere and go picnic or dine outside. You can increase your savings by using any of the Capital One cards to get a free Uber One. I discovered this on my pursuit of handrolls but my reluctance to wait in a long line to dine-in. Also yes I have an Amex Platinum and usually it gets better travel rates during mid-peaks than open fairs or corporate travel programs.
Shutting down my Amazon FBA Account - it’s been a good 1 year (admittedly I clearly forgot about this thing) and it now has negative returns. Apparently it takes 90 days to close it down.
Getting on my soap box: A Password Manager will change your life in the most boring way and you need to get one. I use 1Password and it has great access controls for various instances (like multiple clients each with their own version of 1password), has integrate 2FA QR Reader so you don’t need to use a 2nd app like Google Authenticator to login, and has vault/collection/list sharing with timed expiration so you can share all kinds of confidential stuff with others without too much hassle.
Speaking of boring stuff, these are my choice of paper towels. Much wow.
And since I discovered the Parlor back in June, I’ve dined there 6 times.
I went down a nostalgia trip buying Diablo 2 Remastered (after binging Diablo 4), played World of Warcraft (you can get to level 15 in 1 hour wtf), rebooted SWTOR (that was a mistake), and playing an intense amount of Starcraft 2 Co-Op after buying the Nova Pack.
But Allen, none of the above doesn’t really describe what you’re up to.
I mean, if you want me to talk about work I can.
Here’s What I’m Professionally Up To
It's not my job
Professionally speaking, I recently stopped myself from doing more, and in the process, I may have burned a vendor relationship with a SaaS company.
Here’s what happened:
The Company is experiencing a growing operations pain point in procurement (a decent sized contract renewed and no one knew about that)
I predicted that these kinds of issues would arise, and I’m versatile and fast responding enough to know how we can mitigate these issues, and with who
While going through RFPs and almost getting to a point of signing, I realized: Hey wait a minute, this isn’t my job.
And no one else wants to make it their job (so now its an undesirable, unprioritized problem)
I’m the finance guy, not the procurement guy. I’m not going to take on the procurement problems unless I get the resources (my own pay plus the budget plus the credit).
So I just stopped and am going to let the problem fester, because while it is a problem, it’s not my problem; and making it my problem only creates unsung hero problems. I’m not in the business of unsung heros.
Well that’s not true, I’m not going to let the problem fester, I’m just going to manually solve for it with my current operational capacity in a down-stream team manner and while yes we can expend resources to solve the problem upstream, there is no compelling reason to add another job to my vertical as…it’s not mine (or ours).
A couple lines of text I wrote a year ago allowed me to negotiate $18k off a bill
And in the more boring accomplishment, I argued down $18k off a $120k bill by.…
*checks notes* ah yes, I checked my notes.
That’s right I checked my notes.
In a classic move of cover your ass PTSD, I had written out the “Facts” and “observations” into a document and “archived the project” when we filed. It was a quasi retrospective, quasi “I bet we’re going to argue about invoices later, better write my thoughts out today”.
A lifetime later, I was surprised with a “We’re going to talk to the vendor about the invoice in the next 1 minute- they are in the lobby - what can you say?”
So I checked my notes.
I had things like specific date, what was received, what friction it caused, and how much more work that caused me and how it pushed the deadline out as a result of the rework.
That proved quite useful.
To be fair I wrote these notes for a completely different reason. Glad I wrote it.
This Other Thing
I am trying to get back into writing more, and I realized my pieces and thoughts were too long, and too heavy. So I’m taking a page off shit-posting Twitter by doing short tactical thoughts where I can.
Here’s the first version of that:
Tactically Short Thoughts Tuesday (#1)
Lessons Pondered This Week but it’s Tuesday? I could solve that problem, but is it my job to solve that problem? I place a premium on how an experience is delivered, not what is delivered. I could say we should reward outcomes over hours, but if my business is based on hours, what are the outcomes?