LOVE IT OR HATE IT, THE CAPS LOCK KEY IS A THING. AND IT’S DEFINITELY ONE OF MY THINGS! OR MAYBE ABOUT A HUNDRED OF MY THINGS…

THERE ARE PEOPLE OUT THERE WHO GET FULLY CHEESED OFF AT THE CAPS LOCK KEY, NESTLED NEATLY ON THEIR KEYBOARD’S HOME ROW BETWEEN THE TAB AND SHIFT KEYS.

THERE ARE ORGANIZATIONS DEVOTED TO THE KEY’S ERADICATION. GOOGLE EVEN BANNED IT FROM THEIR LINE OF CHROMEBOOK LAPTOPS, REPLACING THAT SPACE WITH (WHAT ELSE WOULD YOU EXPECT FROM, GOOGLE?) A SEARCH BUTTON.

BUT EVERY DISPUTE HAS TWO SIDES, AS SHOWN BY A SIMPLE GOOGLE SEARCH FOR “TURN CHROMEBOOK CAPS LOCK ON”, WHICH RETURNS 114,000 RESULTS.

TO ME, THE ANGER TOWARD THE CAPS LOCK IS REMINISCENT OF THE HATRED DIRECTED TOWARD THAT OTHER ICON OF EARLY PERSONAL COMPUTING: THE COMIC SANS TYPEFACE.

BUT THAT WASN’T ALWAYS THE CASE. BACK IN MY CONSULTING DAYS, EVERY NEW CLIENT PROJECT MEANT SETTING UP A NEW LAPTOP, AND THE FIRST THING I DID WAS REMOVE THE CAPS LOCK KEYCAP. AT THE TIME, HATING ON THE CAPS LOCK KEY WAS JUST ONE OF MY PERFORMATIVE WAYS OF GETTING ATTENTION.

BUT SINCE THOSE MACHINES WENT BACK TO THE CLIENT AT THE END OF EACH PROJECT, I HAD TO HANG ONTO THAT KEYCAP, PUTTING IT BACK IN PLACE WHEN THE LAPTOP WAS RETURNED TO THE CLIENT.

AROUND THAT TIME I ALSO USED TO HANG OUT IN THE I.T. SUPPORT OFFICE, AND ONE DAY SPIED THEIR BOX OF BROKEN KEYBOARDS. HAVING ALREADY ESTABLISHED THE HABIT OF POCKETING AND SAVING CAPS LOCK KEYCAPS, I STARTED LIFTING THEM FROM DEAD KEYBOARDS, FROM MY OWN HOME COMPUTERS, AND ANYWHERE ELSE I COULD REASONABLY GET AWAY WITH IT.

AND SO, A COLLECTION WAS BORN.

Array of CAPS LOCK keys

SINCE I STOPPED WORKING, I NO LONGER GET AS MANY OPPORTUNITIES TO GROW MY CAPS LOCK COLLECTION.

BUT PERHAPS MORE IMPORTANTLY, MY QUIET HOME LIFE DOESN’T NEED THE IDIOSYNCRATIC, PERFORMATIVE BEHAVIOR THAT I RELIED UPON FOR ATTENTION BACK WHEN I WAS WORKING DIRECTLY WITH OTHER PEOPLE.

IN FACT, AS I TYPE THIS POST, THERE ARE CAPS LOCK KEYCAPS STILL FIRMLY AFFIXED TO MY BOTH MY MACBOOK AND MY WIRELESS MECHANICAL KEYBOARD, WHERE THEY’RE LIKELY TO STAY…

… UNTIL I’M DONE WITH THOSE DEVICES, OF COURSE! ONCE THEY’RE NO LONGER BEING USED, THEIR CAPS LOCK KEYCAPS WILL JOIN THE SCORES OF OTHERS HOUSED IN MY PERMANENT COLLECTION.

Of all the places I’ve worked, the one I’m most proud of was Sapient, one of the first and most successful Internet consulting agencies of the Dot-Com Bubble.

And probably the thing that I’m most proud of about Sapient is the list of amazing and noteworthy clients I got to work with, including National Geographic Magazine, Verizon, JP Morgan, Staples, Vanguard, WorldCom, Wells Fargo, Cardinal Health, and many others.

But one client and project will always stand out in my memory: HomeLink and OfficeLink, BankBoston’s first Web-based banking sites for individual consumers and small businesses respectively. And because of that, I’ve retained a not-small pile of memorabilia.

Why does that client stand out? Because I was already a HomeLink user! I had been using the first iteration of HomeLink for a few years already, back when “online banking” meant installing the bank’s dedicated software, which used your modem and public telephone lines to connect directly to the bank’s systems!

In 1997, the bank wanted to scrap the old dialup system and create secure, online banking websites for home and business use. They came to Sapient to design and build it, and Sapient assigned me to the project, since I had already accumulated fifteen years of experience programming Internet-based information services.

Before I go on, don’t let the company names confuse you. When I first started using HomeLink, I was a customer of BayBank, who had licensed the dedicated dialup software from Citicorp. But in 1996, BayBank merged with the Bank of Boston to become BankBoston, who wanted to offer HomeLink via the Internet. They were in turn bought out by Fleet Financial, which became FleetBoston; which was in turn acquired by Bank of America in 2004. But unlike the company name, HomeLink survived all those mergers.

Now let me share some of my archaeological exhibits, beginning with the old BayBank days, back when I was a dialup modem customer, years before Sapient got involved. First there’s this branded mousepad and 3½” HomeLink install diskette (version 1.0c)!

HomeLink mousepad and install diskette

Tho my favorite memorabile from the old BayBank system is this screen capture from the installation program, where a really mediocre drawing of the greatest Boston Bruins player of all time says, “Let’s log on,” while a huge disclaimer reads, “This is a fictional situation. In real life, Bobby Orr is not authorized to view your account information under any circumstances.” Effin’ priceless!

Bobby Orr wants to log on to your account

Moving on to Sapient’s design and development of the new HomeLink, here’s a couple of Sapient “design center” signs. We used these to direct client staff where to go when they arrived for design sessions and development checkpoints, and I kept dozens of these from my old projects. Note how the eventual OfficeLink site was originally named “BusinessLink”.

HomeLink design center signage

Finally, here’s some marketing materials that BankBoston produced for the new HomeLink rollout, along with a demo CD-ROM.

HomeLink marketing flyers and CD-ROM

The client engagement began with the design of the consumer banking site. As that transitioned into the development phase, the design of the small business site kicked off. I joined the latter team, and did requirements gathering and user interface design for OfficeLink, but once those plans were signed off, we all rolled into a single, unified development team. I was on the project for about a year.

This was the best example of doing development on a product where I was already the intended end-user. As such, I was immensely proud of my contribution, the site’s rollout, and its long-running success in the marketplace. And it still stands out in my memory, even amongst all the other prestigious clients and projects I worked on.

As it spread across Asia and the rest of the globe, Buddhism changed and adapted to the local cultures it encountered; however, Buddhism’s core goal—freedom from suffering—and its core method—contemplative meditation—have perforce remained constant… until recently.

Thus it’s understandable that the 20th Century Westerners who went to Asia would come back with a unique version of Buddhist practice that ought to work better for those of us brought up in the West than the original article. The hybrid Buddhism that we inherited from them had been distilled down to the essentials that would most appeal to educated middle class White people like themselves.

That meant discarding inconvenient concepts and practices such as reincarnation, myths & deities, miracles & supernatural powers, ritual & chanting, merit-making, the more esoteric states of concentration practice, karma, renunciation, non-duality, and non-self. That’s how American Buddhism became divorced from Asian, and enabled a diminished “secular meditation” with all the uncomfortable bits filed off.

Triple productivity after 4 days of meditation!!!

That decision made some sense, as several parts of devotional Buddhism are at odds with our Christian heritage or directly contradict universally-accepted scientific laws. But the stylized meditation techniques that have gained such popularity in the American mainstream have also lost sight of the actual purpose and point of meditation practice.

The most facile example of the trendy “Mindfulness Movement” is Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program. Obviously, learning tools to cope with stress is a Good Thing, but I can’t help but be saddened by how much got lost when the goal of meditation was reduced from the “eradication of the root cause of human suffering” to “just help me get through my day”.

It’s as if everyone in Asia had been inoculated with a one-time permanent cure for diabetes, but we Americans have shortsightedly continued carrying blood testing kits and syringes filled with insulin, only treating the symptoms of the chronic disease as they arise day after day.

Another painful example is how big business and professional sports have co-opted meditation as a cheap tactic for “guaranteed career success” and “enhancing peak performance”, promoted by well-heeled management consultants and wealthy athletes like Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, and Derek Jeter.

I’ve participated in several sittings and talks run by prominent performance-oriented meditation gurus, and always felt deeply uncomfortable. Because at their core, these programs and prescriptions are diametrically opposed to what Buddhist meditation is all about. Whether it’s vanquishing your business or athletic rivals, these techniques are designed to promote selfish desires and goals which reinforce the ego.

In contrast, Buddhism guides the meditator toward the understanding that no worldly attainments can ever provide deep or lasting satisfaction; toward relinquishment of personal desires; and toward freedom from our unexamined enslavement to the insecure demands of the ego.

All too frequently, I hear proclamations from people publicly known as meditation experts that completely set my nerves on edge. In their own literal words, meditation can: lower stress levels, help you drop all distractions that may interfere with winning, enhance peak performance, aid in the reduction of how chronic pain affects the mind, help you cope with the aftermath of a disappointing performance, strengthen your drive, boost your belief in yourself and your ability, build your athletic identity, improve sleep patterns, speed recovery time, enhance endurance, aid in proper fueling, and help control oxygen.

I’m sorry George, but the Buddha had a far more important and fulfilling goal than “speeding recovery time”, “building his athletic identity”, and “controlling oxygen”.

Through tireless self-aggrandizement and promotion, many of these business and sports meditation gurus have grown rich and famous as a result of dispensing their advice. I’m going to leave that contradiction aside however, as it’s too obviously hypocritical to waste time discussing.

Attending these completely secularized meditative self-gratification programs is kind of like taking classes at a prestigious cooking school, but disregarding everything except how to microwave a frozen burrito. It’s such a waste! Buddhism has a larger mission and so much more to offer than empty self-affirmations and greed-reinforcing self-talk.

I’ve also observed that when teachers introduce meditation practices to naïve Westerners, most of the reported short-term benefit is due to peer pressure or the placebo effect. For the practitioners I’ve known, their initial months of meditation were uncomfortable and challenging before things settled down and the practice started producing its slow, gentle results. But Americans have been sold a persistent fable that meditation will produce immediate and noticeable relief; so that’s what people report, after just a few minutes alone with their unruly internal dialogue.

For all these reasons, the majority of Americans think of—and relate to—meditation as if it were just another self-improvement project: a way to be a far more powerful, unshakeable, invincible you.

While there are undeniable positive side effects of long-term meditation practice, it’s not about building up, improving, or perfecting the self; it’s about letting go of the self, and liberation from the tyranny of the ego.

And the ultimate goal of Buddhist meditation—which the Western mindfulness movement has completely forgotten—is the freedom and well-being that results from the eradication of suffering in our lives: something many self-proclaimed “meditation experts” have a vested interest in perpetuating and profiting from.

Sometimes one trolls one’s archives and finds a gem. Here’s a little ditty I wrote a few years back and then promptly forgot. When I rediscovered it, I LOLed. It’s dedicated to the Consultant. I think you’ll be able to figure out the tune.

Oompa, Loompa, doom-pa-dee-do
I have a perfect puzzle for you.
Oompa, Loompa, doom-pa-dee-dee
If you are wise, you’ll listen to me.

Who do you blame when you project is late,
Timelines have slipped and the client’s irate?
Give the team a day off to catch up on sleep;
Blame the delay on client scope creep!

Oompa, Loompa, doom-pa-dee-da
If you are greedy, you can go far.
Climb over clients, coworkers too,
Like the Oompa Loompa doom-pa-dee-do!

[Oompa, Loompa, doom-pa-dee-do …]

What do you get when you’re on daily rate?
Just never mention the steak you just ate!
Same for the sushi you happened to eat…
Just never turn in a detailed receipt!

[Oompa, Loompa, doom-pa-dee-do …]

What do you do when your sales guy’s a slug,
Closing a deal where you firm is a sub?
Competitors makes you feel like a jerk;
Go make them look bad and steal all their work!

[Oompa, Loompa, doom-pa-dee-do …]

What do you get when you drink in first class?
Puking on planes is a pain in the ass.
Pray to the gods on your final approach
That your next leg you can upgrade from coach.

Oompa, Loompa, doom-pa-dee-da
If you are greedy, you can go far.
Climb over clients, coworkers too,
Like the Oompa Loompa doom-pa-dee-do!

Huh. I was sorting through an electronic pile of refuse when I came across this little gem I wrote. Not sure how long ago.

Core values: corporations who think they’re important love them. Little do they know that in most cases they’re actually the kiss of death.

Think about it. When corporate leaders formulate a list of the company’s core values, they rarely think about how their employees actually behave; usually they’re thinking of how they *wish* their staff behaved. Even the guys and girls in the corner offices who are aware that there’s a difference between the two shrug it off, thinking it should inspire their workers and give them a lofty target to aspire to.

But when you are a worker bee and every day you see people violating the “core values”, then you come to have a lot of disdain and even contempt for that list and the people who dreamed it up it on their two-week Caribbean offsite. That attitude rapidly spreads throughout a company, and very effectively de-motivates even the most bushy-tailed college recruit.

What’s the alternative? How about taking a good, honest look at your company culture before etching those lofty values in brass? Make your values descriptive, not proscriptive. Maybe you’ll wind up with a core value of “We try to help our clients, even though they frustrate the hell out of us sometimes”. It’s not exactly a call to excellence, but at least it’s accurate, and that’s a lot less harmful than when a veteran shows the plaque to an eager and gullible new hire and says, “Yeah, we really don’t do that shit. Some manager just made those up.” I remember finding one such brass plaque at my first job, discarded on the floor in a storage closet.

In consulting, probably the single most important thing you learn is to manage people’s expectations. You always strive to under-promise and over-deliver, because doing more than someone expects makes you look like a hero, and doing less than someone expects causes doubt, mistrust, and contempt.

What surprises me is that senior managers never apply that expectation management lesson to corporate core values. Most companies set lofty, unattainable values that they never live up to, ensuring that any employee who believes in the core values winds up disappointed, crushing any enthusiasm they might have had. While the “leadership team” sits in the boardroom and wonders why they have morale issues despite the awesome core values the company stands for.

So if your company starts talking about core values, take a very careful look at whether they’re descriptive or wholly proscriptive, because the latter are guaranteed to cause trouble.

Two more nuggets from life as a consultant.

It’s probably not a great idea to draw attention to yourself by BitTorrenting at the client site. Nor is it good form to give your computer a name that includes profanity. Combine them and you might have to own up to it when the client IT staff publicly ask, “Who here has the computer called ‘Little Bitch’?” No, I don’t make this stuff up, people…

At a company update today, a manager spoke about ramping up our new accounting personnel. “It’s gonna take a little time for them to get immersed and catch up.” But I swear to god that what I heard was “It’s gonna take a little time for them to get immersed in ketchup.” Kinda blew my chunks on that one. I guess the old consultant hazing practises are still alive and well!

Funny how someone can get through consulting craft class, and still give a website walk-thru to a client CEO with “strippers Boston” sitting prominently as left over input in his browser’s Google search toolbar.

In December I spent a couple weeks in Columbus Ohio, scoping out a new project for work. But things got kind of quiet after that, so the holidays made for a nice little break.

However, you knew that would end. The consulting business usually picks right up again in January, and I was quickly staffed to another project, since the Columbus gig didn’t need my specific skill set.

So yesterday I flew to the client site. Did I mention that it’s on St. Thomas, in the US Virgin Islands? Yeah. That’s a good 500 miles further south than Miami, yanno.

The flight from San Juan to St. Thomas was particularly interesting. I’ve been on small planes before—most notably when I commuted from Boston to Scranton Pennsylvania in 2006—but this one took the cake: an eight-seat Cessna 402. It was the pilot, me, and one of my coworkers, and we sat right behind the pilot. Others who have taken that flight have been allowed to sit in the copilot’s seat! I got some real dramatic video footage of takeoff and landing, which I might share later, and we had a great view of the islands, since we never climbed above 3900 feet during the 30-minute flight. When we de-planed, it felt like we ought to have tipped the cabbie for the ride. The van we rented in St. Thomas could hold more people than the plane we arrived in! Really!

At least in theory, it’s a consultant’s dream to work the winter months on a Carribbean island. And, to be honest, what I’ve seen of the island so far is nice: beachside bar at the hotel, huge looming mountains just inland, swaying palms, and 80° F, of course. Nice change from last week in Boston, when it was just 7 degrees, or -9° F if you take the wind chill into account. Fun. I will conveniently ignore the fact that today Boston set an all-time record high of 66° F. Figures!

On the other hand, I am and have been sick as a dog. I could feel a cold coming on all last week, and it really took control Friday night. I spent the weekend shooting golf ball-sized balls of crap out of both my lungs and sinuses. I travelled anyways, since I thought I’d turned the corner on this thing, but the four-hour flight from Boston to San Juan was a major trial. The cabin temperature was kept at a steady 95° F, which meant I spent the whole day fighting nausea. And last night my throat hurt so badly that I couldn’t swallow, which limited me to about three hours’ sleep. Euhh. Zombie Ornoth. Hopefully tonight’ll be better, but indications aren’t good so far.

The other negative is that the project seems like it’ll be pretty strenuous. Euhh. But so far, so good. If I was healthy, this’d actually be pretty fun.

Photos and more stuff will be forthcoming, I’m sure, but give it time.

Frequent topics