Morning Thoughts

Just took a walk around the neighborhood with my wife. I liked it. The temps a tad chilly, and I didn't feel like walking quickly, but it was a pleasant experience. Before she moved here, my wife lived near a state park in Delaware which had a large walking oval -- probably two or three miles around. Walking there was nice -- surrounded by trees, hearing the occasional bird, and no cars. Probably long since paved over.

Yesterday wasn't much fun at work. As things go, it wasn't terrible, but it wasn't fun. I had to spend a great deal of time dealing with audit stuff. As Toby in West Wing is wont to say, there's three hours of my life I'll never get back. Something about myself that I don't understand is why I get so tense when I have anything to do with my company's system for tracking audit issues. Even the phrase -- 'audit issues' -- strikes me like fingernails raked across a blackboard. Its not as if I'm 'better than that' (though that is how I think of myself, I know that objectively I'm not - I'm just a grunt scum). I just don't like it. I don't like the idea that people take action not because they think it would make things better, but because 'otherwise the auditors won't like it'. I rationalize that by thinking that they should be acting because their professional judgment says its the right thing to do, but truth is, I know that most people, including most certainly me, would act in a way that objectively might not be the best but which makes their own lives easier. We won't cut big corners... but we will cut corners. And the people we work for know this. So we outsource our conscience to a bunch of hired gunslingers, and we do what will make the auditors happy... even though thats a moving and malleable target.

Reading Michael Ruhlman's Walk on Water . Its a very good book. I am always impressed and deeply envious when people get to hang out with people of the caliber of the doctors in that book (not to mention, and write so incredibly well about it.) I have long since given up on the thought that I might ever actually work in a place like that -- not necessarily a hospital, but a place of intellectual achievement (and how presumptuous does that sound?) but I still find lingering hope of at least being able to be in their vicinity. I know that I don't like stupid people, and I suspect that part of that is because I might realize how much like them I actually am. I prefer to think that I'm like the bright, accomplished people, which of course I am -- if only at the biological level.