The culture of most Ops groups is the same everywhere … and unique compared to the rest of IT. It is understood by 1 simple metric: have you been on call yet? New guys (and they were mostly, and are, guys) show up with an impressive resume, get through a decent interview, start to fit in, and then their name shows up on the rotation for “primary.” You have it for a week … 7 days, 24 hours a day, and you pray you don’t get a credential or a power problem, but you never know. It is hazing, in a gentle way … can you get through a week without asking for a lot of help? The first on-call is always a test…
It is ironic that our largest teammate turned out to be Roo, the smallest character in the 100 Acre Wood. He came to us from Nebraska, and was almost exactly what you would expect: big, fairly quiet, a huge smile always, and exceptionally easy going. Roo is described as a “cheerful, playful and energetic joey and the youngest in the group. He looks up to Pooh and Tigger like older brothers. Roo’s mind is a sponge, always asking questions and trying to understand the world around him. Unfortunately, Roo doesn’t question what he learns, and therefore tends to readily believe anything he is told.” After his first time on call, he came back with “That was AWESOME!” … to which we all looked … puzzled. On call … awesome?? And … Roo came into the team, like me, with an engineering degree…
… which in Ops is mostly looked at with disdain. The appetite for learning in Ops is voracious, but a classroom with an expert … yea, no. Can you actually DO it? Fingers on the keyboard, make it come together? The science of “computers” mostly doesn’t matter. Getting them to dance regularly, consistently, and reliably is the metric. There is a term for it now, Site Reliability Engineering … will it work across every condition it will face? Like power and credentials, the best plans go out the window with new conditions … and you prove it when you are on call.
Without Bob Crawford, we would likely never have heard of the Avetts, who, as I have said, were already legends in their own minds, waiting to be discovered. When they decided to be a real bluegrass band, they needed an upright bass player, and through mutual friends met him … in a parking lot. (You met him in renewing your Thanks, the close of the first Avett week.) They didn’t know he had just BOUGHT the bass, but the audition went as well as a parking-lot audition can, and just like that, he was in the band.
His first role was cheering the band into ACTUALLY doing it. Seth wrote that it took “… convincing Scott and Seth that a viable career in music would not magically show up at the front door, merely because they had wished for it and written multiple drafts of their eventual Grammy Award acceptance speeches. Crawford felt, bizarrely to the brothers, that in order to pursue a life in music, a person had to actually go out and play music. They took his word for it, albeit with a good deal of suspicion.”
Bob immediately started hustling and booking the band, and the brothers went along. He had hustled most of his life, so he was good at it, and they became an overnight sensation … 10 years later. Along the way he met his wife through the band and had 2 daughters, 1 of whom you heard about in that first week. His abiding faith drove him through that challenge in his classic hustle way, and yet, when you hear him talk about it, you know he has been through a life-changing faith experience.
Like Bob, Roo met his future wife once he joined our “band” … who literally COULD be Roo with her dimensions, a particularly short woman next to a particularly tall Midwesterner. They were the cutest and most unique couple. He brought fun to everything we did, with Nerf rifles, his contagious smile, and a positive attitude. He was also a walking sight gag, towering over everyone, then returning to the contractor cube we gave him, where his shoulders barely fit between the walls … which he named “The Urinal.”
I brought my youngest to Bring Your Kid to Work Day, and Roo hung out with him the whole day. I am convinced that is where my youngest stopped studying and set his eyes on Ops, where he is also thriving today. Books and teachers couldn’t hold a candle to “Watch this!” and typing away… He was a bright spot on any day, and it was easy to overlook how much that enthusiasm and support carried me while I was making the hard decisions … I still literally think “What would Roo smile at here?” more than 30 years later. They are there, and without them, the Owls, Rabbits, and even the Christopher Robins become too harsh, and miss the fun of actually BEING a team together.
They are the glue that is often lost … unless you see it, and realize, in their language, “This is frigging AWESOME!!!” Particularly when a team is separated from that fun, it is up to you to find a way to “allow” it back into sobering times … and cheer you and the team on. Roo, right in character, bet me I won’t get the team back together again, as we did for 10 years, every Christmas season. I have lost that Promise so far … but I already decided this week’s writing is going to end up as an invitation. They renew you, with a smile, on what is important…
As we reach the end of our time with the Avetts, and the characters of the 100 Acre Wood, I want a fitting close to both chapters. If you don’t see these characters, you’re not looking, and you don’t have the team you need … now, or in the future. Roo would say “You can do this!!!” … as would I, with my title of Minister of Encouragement. And being Sunday, you know faith is in here somewhere, and I see it in this song. You may not, but yesterday we thought about what happens the day before you die … and today, what do you envision is left behind as you finish your last acts on this earth? There is another Avett song, “The Curve,” that I almost used today. Its closing line puts the Lord in the passenger seat for the whole drive, and promises to meet you at the end of it. That is the picture of my Good Lord.
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: send the invitation. The 1 you have been meaning to send to the team that made you who you are. Today.
And if you don’t see it, well … No Hard Feelings.
