Evening Summit

Ian likes to touch base with me.

One conversation he tends to initiate involves asking me how things went at work today. It isn't just idle talk; he really wants to know. And I routinely answer, truthfully, that work was quiet today, and that's exactly how I like it.

Today, as is his wont, he called me into a room where he was sitting for an extended period of time, and sought to catch up. He asked me how work was today. I told him. Then he wanted to know about work over a larger time-frame - say, a month. I treated the question as covering roughly mid-December to mid-January, and told him that late-December was wonderfully quiet, with many people on vacation, hence affording a quiet office where I could get work done, and then that January is jammed-packed with activity - essentially people making up for lost time on vacation. Somewhere in all these statistics, Ian stopped me and asked, "Could you tell me something more specific?"

I told Ian that the hallmark of the post-New-Year's office renaissance is meetings. For me, five meetings in five days. Over 20% of office time, no less. Ian told me that the meeting of mine that he attended was really long, and he wanted to know if these meetings were of similar duration. I was quite astonished to hear that Ian had attended one of my work meetings. Then I remembered: he came by for the last ten or fifteen minutes of a meeting I was having from home, via Skype, with the team in India, around 7:30 a.m. our time (daylight savings), or 5:00 p.m. their time. That was a morning when he had gotten up early, and came down in his pajamas, found Daddy talking into a computer, took a closer look, and finally spent the remainder of the meeting resting his head on my side, gazing lazily off into the Skype screen, listening as I discussed technicalities of automation with a visibly touched, gently amused team of engineers.

That was the long meeting.

Ian then went on to tell me about the perception of meetings in Dilbert's organization. My brother gave me a Dilbert comic book anthology, among other things, for Christmas. Always a good selection... but I haven't gotten much time with it, because it currently "lives" in the back of Amy's minivan, parked next to Ian's seat. And Ian seems to be treating it more as anthropology than humor. He provided me with an excellent synopsis of the Dilbert-workplace consensus on meetings; that they spend most of their day in meetings, and spend those meetings complaining that they don't have time to do any other work because they're always in meetings.

I really enjoyed Ian's sociologist-from-Mars approach, both to my life and to corporate America via Dilbert. Being eight years old, he has virtually no idea how anything actually works in the business world, but he asks very focused, well integrated questions of me about my work life, and also thinks deeply and seriously about the ethos behind a source such as Dilbert, to attempt to synthesize a conceptual model of life in that other world called the office.

Finally, he asked me whether in my workplace, as in Dilbert's, our job is to generate ideas. Overlooking the nuances behind this summary, I said, more-or-less truthfully, that yes - it is our job to produce ideas to help our company sell things. So Ian decided to share one of his own ideas with me, and offered for me to bring it to work, where my company might be able to turn the concept into cash. The idea turned out to amount, more or less, to hydroelectricity. He said that you take some water and move it around, and it travels from one unit to another, and as it does, it produces energy, and there's some mechanism with buckets on some kind of rope or belt that captures the water to maintain some kind of constant motion.

I don't work for an energy company, so I'm not sure that anybody at work would have a direct application for Ian's innovation. But I'm very moved that he shared it with me, and that he's doing his very, very best, at his tender age, to make a contribution to my professional life and the well-being of my employer.

The only thing better than a man-to-man talk with an eight-year-old, is one involving technological advances.

(January 13, 2012)