2025 Weeknote 51 : “Mediocrities everywhere: I absolve you.”

December 15 – 21

📆 My weeknotes capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, often focused on work, but with personal stuff, too. Learn more about weeknotes.

Professional weeknotes

• This week I hosted our 3rd annual PowerPoint Karaoke event, and it was both fun and funny, as usual. In this case we had 6 presenters and 4 winning categories, with little prizes for the winners (little NSFW sound-makers from Ozzy Man Reviews). 3 volunteer judges picked the winners. My role was to build the slide deck and run the slides—10 slides for each presenter, on a topic they’ve never seen. Highly recommended event for all kinds of teams out there!
• The bulk of my work is hiring these days. We’re in the final steps of hiring a Project Manager (and I’ll have more about that next week, I hope). And we’re searching for an Atlassian pro (that’s not going well, for various reasons). Plus now we’re searching for a full stack developer, which is just barely getting started. Interviews will stop for the next couple weeks, then pick up again in early January.
• I attended a couple 1:1 meetings this week where the manager and staff discussed some professional development matters using a performance rubric based on the job description. It was… a little unusual. We’ll be refining things in the weeks ahead, but it’s always fascinating to see how both managers and individual contributors think about professional development and their priorities.
• We finally had our “Chapter 1” session on Team Topologies this week, exploring how organization structures affect communication lines and how projects must constantly break those lines to get anything done. A good discussion. No more for 2025, though—we’re taking the holidays off and will come back in January.
• I attended a launch meeting for an internal software vendor review process. Basically, we have an agency that’s put out a public request for responses from vendors, they’ve gotten the responses, and there’s a sizable group that’s reviewing and providing comments. While the process appears to be well organized, I’m concerned that the formality of the process may have turned off some key vendors in the space (why bother responding to a complex and detailed submission process when the money you’d make on the deal is pretty limited?). I guess we’ll see where this goes.
• Meanwhile, I participating in some internal conversations around how to structure our work (and hiring and funding) around digital accessibility. It’s clear we’re going to have to provide centralized leadership for this countywide effort (mostly because no one else has volunteered to take ownership). So we’re quietly figuring out how to structure layers of teams to address all the stuff that needs attention. And it’s… a lot. We’re going to spend millions on this in the years to come. The only question is who’s going to call the shots and how many millions will it be?
• Our various teams said an early in-person goodbye to a few folks leaving by the end of the year. We’ll all be remote the next 2 weeks, so all the lunches and parties had to be this past week. Sad to see people go, but a little excited by the prospects of new people, new ideas, and new energy.
• Truth be told, our adoption of an organization-wide 3-day in-office hybrid schedule (starting January 5) has caused more trouble than I anticipated. My teams had already been at 2 or 3 days in-office, so it wasn’t much of a shock for us. But for other teams, it’s more impactful. Plus, we previously hired from other cities around Ohio, and… that doesn’t work when you’re in the office 3 days. That said, some of the departures are for other reasons, including what I suspect is the release of COVID-19 pandemic pressure in general. People are getting the itch to grow in ways we can’t sustain internally.
• With all that’s happened and is still happening, I am desperately looking forward to the next 2 weeks. Lots of folks will be out, meetings will slow, I’ll be mostly remote… I suspect I’ll have a shot at catching up on lots of stuff that’s been falling by the wayside for weeks or months. Plus, I have to design my complex meetings calendar for 2026—a monstrous task all by itself. So bring on the remote and slower work weeks!

Personal weeknotes

• My Flighty (app) “Passport” for 2025 was sent to me recently, and it’s been a decidedly domestic year for flying. Screenshot below. Next year will be different. We’re already planning a week in Miami in February and of course 3 weeks in Portugal and Spain in late April and early May for the Camino de Santiago (starting in Porto).
• My parents‘ assisted living facility lost power for a few hours on Saturday, so they headed out to a nearby hotel because they live on the third floor and the elevators weren’t working. Then my mother (with advancing vascular dementia) “escaped” the room overnight, unbeknownst to my sleeping solo caregiver father. He got her back, of course. Then they returned to their facility and… had no Internet. So… you know… a frustrating weekend for them and a further illustration of why 24×7 memory care is needed. Sadly, my father just can’t bring himself to do it.
  • Us kids are… deflated about the whole thing. We don’t know how to step in (and may not be able to legally anyway). So we wait. For a big enough crisis. Boy, is this not fun.
  • We can see what’s needed, and unlike many Americans, the financial situation for my father is good enough to allow him to pay for professional care. But the emotional baggage is intense, so… everything is frozen. He might be right that he can provide “better” care in some ways. But it’s inconsistent and incomplete and it’s ruining what’s left of his life, too.
  • I’m not sure “for better or worse, in sickness and in health” took into account the fact we all live longer and longer now, and face health conditions that stretch well past what marriage vows imagined or the lay person can handle. My father is being incredibly supportive—to his own detriment. Too bad my mother—now already effectively “gone”—has no idea of the sacrifice he’s making.
  • Related… no dates are set yet, but it does look like there’s a visit with my parents coming up sometime between Christmas and New Year’s, as my siblings may drive up. We’ll hopefully converge, say hello, and press for more changes.

On rewatching Amadeus

I watched Amadeus one evening this week for what must be the 20th time. This is a movie that hit broad VHS distribution while I was in college. I owned the LaserDisc, the CD soundtrack, the DVD, and now a digital streaming copy. It’s an Oscar-winning masterpiece that was a fantastic story to me at the time. But it hits differently in middle age—the pursuit of success, raw talent vs. political judgment, the “system” that demands respect, the business rivalries, the complex ways of making money, the pursuit of fame… some things never change. What was most surprising, however, were the added scenes in the director’s cut. The re-integrated scenes altered some character arcs, including making some of them considerably less likable. Salieri, in particular, comes off worse in this cut, although the added scenes do help make the case for Salieri as Mozart’s “murderer.”

Meanwhile, this movie introduced me to opera in the form of “The Magic Flute,” the comedic opera intertwined with Mozart’s “Requiem” mass in the last act of the film. Since first seeing the movie I’ve seen the opera live a few times, including the first time in Minneapolis decades ago (performed in English, which was just wrong) and most recently in Vienna in 2023.

I don’t generally enjoy opera that much, but this one has a special place in my heart. I would blast the Queen of the Night aria driving with the top down through warm Columbus summer nights in 2019, heading home from the hospital after spending hours with my wife in the ICU. The absurdity of the opera’s story, mixed with the lofty Freemason themes Mozart injected, caught me at a time when life’s absurdity and sublimity were hitting hard.

I should also note the joy I had in seeing Emperor Joseph II on screen again as the comic relief through much of the movie (played straight by the delightful Jeffrey Jones). My college friends and I quoted the movie frequently whenever we could make it fit: “Is it modern?” and “Oblige me!” and “Too many notes.” Yes, we were nerds. Living in the Honors student dorm. “Well. There it is.“

In the last week I also watched the 30 Rock episode “Succession” that directly mimics Amadeus and includes countless hilarious scenes, including the amazing Dr. Spaceman calling 411 to ask for “diabetes repair.” I know most folks prefer The Office (American version), but to me 30 Rock is my favorite workplace comedy, with Parks and Recreation a close second.

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