Ramblings of Narc

I don’t believe I’ve mentioned this here on the blog before, but I work what might be defined as the night shift. More accurately, I work eight hour “days” in the time zone of my (de facto) employer, who happens to be in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. What this translates to is a seven hour time difference (with the exception of daylight savings, where for one week we’re only SIX hours apart… but that’s another blog post), and it effectively means I work from 8 PM to 4 AM every weekday.

Why, yes, that does mean I work Saturday mornings. It also means I don’t work Monday mornings. No big difference, if you ask me.

Anyway, the major problem with doing all this is, as pretty much anyone who’s ever worked night shift will tell you: other people. More specifically, having to function in a world where pretty much everybody (that matters) works on a different clock than you do, which means they’re not going to think twice about calling you at 10 AM to ask you if the online order you made at 2 AM the previous morning was still valid, and if so, to tell you how long it’s going to take until delivery can be made. And they shouldn’t have to think about it, really, since you’re the edge case here and they have to optimize for the common cases.

But, what this also translates to is a situation where it’s very possible to not be able to sleep (or at least, not be able to sleep long enough), especially if, like me, you have trouble falling asleep again after having been woken up. Which leads me nicely into a very short story: last week.

Last week, the winter holiday period ended, and a lot of people went back to work. This effectively meant that the two online orders I’d made over the holidays finally got some human attention, and those humans were very interested in getting the backlog of orders cleared up. As a result, I got an average of six point something hours of uninterrupted sleep last week. Now, I know people generally tend to vary a lot in how much sleep they need, and I suspect I’m off to the side of the bell curve here, but I generally tend to need about nine hours of sleep per day, or else I get… slow. And being slow makes me cranky, because my brain isn’t processing information as fast as it should, and it pisses me off. To all the people who’ve ever had to deal with me in this state: I sincerely apologize for taking it out on you. I promise, if you weren’t sure, it was never anything personal. I like you guys, and I appreciate you all.

But that’s just one of the problems I’m facing, and if it were the only one, I could deal with it very simply (as I usually do, actually): by making fewer purchases, and lumping things together as much as possible. Unfortunately, the really big problem, as highlighted very nicely just now, are the neighbors.

Let me make a little aside here and explain my living circumstances: I live in a two bedroom apartment I share with my mother (for two simple reasons: 1 – she’d be basically alone now that my Dad is dead, and 2 – I don’t have to pay rent), in an eight-story building of over 100 such apartments (some smaller, most the same size), facing the back of the building, which is shared with three other very similar buildings (which creates an almost square enclosure — come to think of it: my house, let me show you it). We also have a high-school on the other side of the square (that C-shaped thing with partially shiny roof in the picture (it’s all shiny now, if you’re wondering)).

What all this adds up to is an enormous opportunity for noise. At night, when all the kids are home and (probably) asleep, and all the people in their respective homes are (almost definitely) asleep, it’s so quiet you could hear a pin drop eight stories below. During the day, on the other hand, it’s madness. Now, I’m happy to enjoy some pretty damn good windows (the physical kind, not the Microsoft kind), but even with them, if I haven’t made it to sleep by 6:30 to 7 AM, I’m going to have a hard time falling asleep with all the noise outside.

And that fails to mention the (very many) times the neighbors decide to do some home improvement. For the most part, once I’ve managed to fall asleep, it takes a lot to wake me up again. Unfortunately, most home improvement nowadays seems to involve some very loud power tools, especially drills, which not only make an incredible amount of noise when you’re around them, but which also make noise that tends to travel through the walls, because that’s what the drill bit is being applied to. The end result of this has been innumerable times that I’ve been woken up by the horrible noise of drilling, accompanied many times by a desire to use that power drill on the neighbor’s head. Unfortunately, this being Romania, that kind of activity is not as rare as someone from a civilized country might think it is. Instead, it’s almost a daily occurrence during the summer, and at least weekly during winter (WTF?). Sometimes I wonder how long it’s going to be until the building itself, having been drilled so full of holes, is going to crumble under its own weight. But I digress.

The conclusion of all of the above is that going against the “rules” of society, be they the simplest ones like what time it is, or the really complex pseudo-religious wars of abortion and gay rights and all that other stuff, is not for the faint of heart. It’s tough, in that it’s very difficult, and you may often be pissed off at the world around you just for being the way it is. But if you think it’s working, keep doing it. Just, don’t forget to vent once in a while.

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This has been another post in the hopefully long series of “personal experience” posts, wherein I detail the things I’ve learned and how that learning came about.

The previous post was Blogging For The Perennial Lurker, a somewhat meta expression of my experience as a habitual information consumer rather than producer.

The first post in the series is Recognizing Failures, explaining how to handle a potential failed project, and what to do about it.

I’m part of what’s believed to be the majority of Internet users — a consumer of information, for the most part, rather than a producer. Obviously, this blog is an attempt to shift my own personal ratio further towards the producer side, but I still most often find myself reading a lot rather than writing.

I would estimate that slightly more than 50% of my online reading is sourced from blogs, forums, or some derivations thereof, all of which tend to offer a relatively low barrier of entry to the process of commenting on the original article. And pretty much all blogs I’ve read that have said anything on the subject have stated that comments are a supremely important part of any such system (comment spam notwithstanding), because they allow the process of owning a blog and creating content for it to become a two-way interaction with its readers. I agree with this view, but I have some caveats to add:

• Firstly, I have often come across interesting articles whose discussions I would’ve liked to take part in, or about which I had some insights, or wanted some clarification. Almost invariably, skimming through the comments to such an article tended to show other readers had been there already, and already asked the same questions I was going to ask. What this implies is that for any given article, there are generally a limited number of potential interesting, on-topic comments that can be added. Beyond that point, the resulting communication, if any, is likely to be extremely repetitive, and a potentially misunderstood repetition of the previously well thought-out information at that.
• Secondly, as the logical extension of the above, when reading an older article from even a moderately successful blog owner, the likelihood of making a useful addition to the discussion tends to drop proportionally with the age of the article. Caveat to the caveat, though: if older posts have few (or no) comments, they are likely to contain plenty of hidden gems of discussion waiting to be uncovered.
• Thirdly, there are a lot more interesting people than you think there are out there, who think the same way as you do, whoever you are.

These are possibly common-sense observations, and potentially I’m repeating what a lot of people have already said, but that follows from my first point above. And the most interesting implication of all this is that, to be a blogger, one does not strive to write things that have never been written before — because that’s impossible. Instead, one acknowledges that there are other people who have expressed the same things they are expressing, and instead one tries to write successfully in the battle for popularity.

What this means, in this context, is that if you’re considering blogging as a hobby, with a goal of popularity — being read and written about — you should be looking towards:

1. Maximizing the number of potential interesting comments, thus giving your readers the chance to comment — giving them a stake in the success of your blog.
2. Writing a lot. I don’t want to add any quantifiers here, because “a lot” means different things for different people, and depends on too many factors to enumerate, but I will attempt to explain why: because every new post you write opens up a new series of potential comments, and reduces the average age of posts on your blog. Be forewarned, though: this is a diminishing returns function — the older your blog, the more new posts are required to reduce the average age. On the other hand, if your older posts are poorly commented on, new posts (and hopefully new readers that go with them) increase the older posts’ chances of coming out into the limelight and having their moment of glory. Which also has diminishing returns, of course.
3. I’m not sure what to do with the third point, honestly. Perhaps the rule here should be: be confident that, however poor your popularity might be now, there are people out there willing to read your posts and think about what you’re saying. At the same time, don’t forget that there are likely to be even more people who disagree; and more people still who don’t want to think about it. Don’t be discouraged by this! Accept it, and have your delete button/link handy for the inevitable flame-bait and trolling.

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This is the third of hopefully many “personal experience” posts, where I detail the things I’ve learned and how I came to learn them.

The previous post was One Is The Most Important Number, about not repeating yourself in software development.

The next is Living In A World Out Of Synch, a long ramble about working what is, effectively, “the night shift”.

Apparently, spammers’ botnets didn’t work very hard over this holiday season — I only got two spam emails between the 25th and today. Quite interesting.