canyonwalker

Spring Family Visit Travelog #5
At the house · Mon 30 Mar 2026. 11pm.

Being at my inlaws' house feels like being in a Family Circus cartoon. But instead of it being a circus before 4 young kids are running around doing who-knows-what, it's 2 adults who can't have even the simplest conversation without it turning into a farcical, hour long discussion with multiple interruptions and pointless dead end tangents.

Take, for example, a simple shopping trip. When we arrived on Sunday morning, I figured we'd need to buy some groceries for breakfast and lunch the next few days. Ordinarily my mother in law (MIL) shops really well for us, but right now she's really ill so it's understandable she didn't.

I proposed we could run out to the grocery store later in the day to grab a few things: bagels, smoked salmon, roast beef cold cuts, sliced cheese, maybe some sandwich bread. I brought this with the intention of (a) getting her buy-in and (b) finding out if anything on my list was unnecessary because there was some in the downstairs chest freezer. I thought it would be a 5-minute conversation. It didn't need to be more than a 5 minute conversation. But it took an hour. And the conversation was re-litigated multiple times in subsequent hours.

First, every single item of grocery involved its own detailed discussion. There was the right amount to by, the right brand to buy, the right condition it should be in, and the second or third choice brand if the first isn't available. Some of these points of discussion involved story-telling from that one time, some number of years ago, someone got the wrong thing. Then there was opening up an app on her phone to find a coupon for it. Heaven forbid we should fail to save sixty cents!

Every few minutes there'd be an interruption. Hawk would come in the room and ask MIL an unrelated question. Or FIL would ask a question. Of course, no question was a single question but instead another ridiculous "Who's on first?" game of Twenty Questions.

At some point after 30 minutes of trying to gain agreement on what to shop for, and again at 45 minutes, and then, too, at 60 minutes, MIL asked, "Are you making a list?"

"We've only agreed on two items," I said at the 30 minute mark. "That's not even a list."

After an hour I had started a list. Partly because it was obvious the discussion was going to circle the drain on "Are you writing a list?" until I said yes. So I made a list. At the end of an hour it was 4 items. 🙄

And then the shopping trip didn't even happen until the next evening. 🤦

And the craziness didn't even end with making, and re-litigating, the list. The four item list. Doing the actual shopping was like going to the store with a bunch of four-year old children running around trying to "help". Except there were no actual kids. Just my 80s FIL.

With 4 items on the list I expected we'd go in, grab 4 things, maybe look at one or two others, and leave. Especially as it was already 7pm, and dinner was waiting on us to shop and get home, I expected we'd be make this quick. But once in the store FIL had a 7-second attention span. "Oh, look, there's an item over there!" "Don't we need some of this, too?" "Hey, there's somebody I know, let's stop and talk." "I'd better call MIL and ask about this [the 5th call so far]" "Wait, let me check if there's a coupon [which will take 15 minutes because he doesn't know how to use the app]."

We finally got out of the store by 8:20pm. We'd been in there for over an hour. With our 4-item shopping list. I think we ended up buying seven items. That still works out to 10 minutes per item.

At my D&D game on Saturday, the players smelling a rat and interrogating the caravan leader wasn't the main event. It was only the precursor, though one through which they shifted the outcomes a bit. The main event came late that day (in game), when hobgoblins ambushed the caravan.

The group was ready for an ambush of some kind. After uncovering the head merchant's treachery they knew an attack was coming, they just didn't know when or where. Their magic wasn't powerful enough to discern that... and they weren't willing to try something amoral like torture to force the merchant to confess details. When the caravan's scouts saw a tree fallen across the road their Spidey Senses didn't just tingle, they shook rattles.



They were sure it was the start of a trap, they just weren't sure who would attack, or from where. ...Well, Herran and Leoghnie, the two riders out front, weren't sure. They boffed their Spot checks. But they knew something was afoot, so they signaled the caravan to halt.

Riding on some of the wagons 100' back, Kiarana and Ryuu-Han aced their Spot checks. Kiarana saw a figure with a bow hiding behind a tree 25' off the side of the road, and Ryuu-Han saw the tips of weapons poking up from behind a low rock formation 20' to the other side, presumably held by ambushers waiting to attack. Kiarana cast Spiritual Weapon and started attacking the covert archer. Ryuu-Han cast Mage Armor to protect himself.

Moments later the ambushers revealed themselves. Hobgoblins stood up from the rocks and emerged from behind trees, throwing javelins and shooting arrows.



I've mentioned before that I like to use visual aids in my game. Experienced players can visualize what it looks like when I say "A row of hobgoblins stand up from behind the rocks"... but not all players are experienced. I can speak a verbal description like,



But that sounds too much like Boxed Text, the bane of pref-fab adventure modules that players somehow always tune out until halfway through when realize it's Boxed Text and thus panic because that means it's important. I've rendered it here in a box so you get the idea. 🤣 But seriously, some players also don't work well converting words into pictures, a thing I know from my studies in educational and communication. So I use both words and the thing that helps many people visualize things better: pictures.



The first picture above is, I think, from one of the editions of D&D by Wizards of the Coast, the publisher. It's maybe 4th Edition? And the second image, the one immediately above, is a fun picture I found online with a bit of searching. I think it's fun because it helps convey OMG there's a bunch of hobgoblins swarming you! I adapted with labels (the high-contrast text I added) and printed them on 3x5 card stock. I keep the cards in a cardholder on the gaming table to indicate who's turn it is in the combat.

After the game I turned to AI to help illustrate some scenes from the attack. Here's an AI visualization in the same vein as when the PCs were interrogating the caravan leader:



I like how the AI remembered that the merchant was tied up in a cartoon-like bundle of rope. I had prompted it with, "Exaggerate how much the merchant is tied up, with a cocoon of rope like in a cartoon". Perhaps I should also have prompted it with "The wagons are pulled by horses, like every freakin' wagon caravan ever", because AI apparently thought the PCs' main character energy had them pulling the wagons by hand. 🤣

Now, the ambush wasn't just hobgoblins attacking from cover. The leaders who organized this ambush knew the caravaners could just take cover and shoot back, leading to something of a stalemate. So they added a few monstrous allies to shake things up.



Remember the worgs that attacked the campsite the night before? Two worgs rushed out here, to attack the horses pulling the wagons. And worse than the worgs, a dire wolf also bounded out from hiding behind the rocks.

Unlike worgs which are only marginally bigger and fiercer than wolves, a dire wolf is several times the mass of an ordinary wolf. It's bigger, stronger, meaner, intelligent, and evil. And with all those traits it bounded out of hiding and killed Herran's horse with a single massive bite.

Herran landed on her feet as the horse crumbled and rushed to save it from dying. A potion would do the trick. But even before she could pour the potion down the poor beast's throat, Leoghnie charged forward. She was not going to put up with this dire wolf nonsense. Too bad for the dire wolf, a huge mass of snapping, snarling muscle, it ran into the fight right next to the PCs' own mass of snapping, snarling muscle.

Leoghnie lit into the wolf with a massive, two-handed swing. She leaned deep over the side of her horse, clamping her legs around the steed's chest as she put both her shoulders into her attack. The horse screamed alarm at being so close to such a large predator, but it was trained for battle. As was Leoghnie. Her powerful attack tore through fur, muscle, and bone. The fearsome dire wolf stumbled, coughing blood. Herran, now back on her own feet after stopping her own horse from dying, stepped forward seconds later and finished it off.

Airlines and hotels have been sending me "The Year in Review" messages this past week. My gut reaction each time has been, "WTF?  2025 ended months ago!" But nope, it's only January 19. They're not that late. It only feels like 2026 began months ago because we've already had, like, three or four manufactured political crises in the US this year. (And that's just in two weeks. Sigh. It's going to be a long year.)

The 2025 travel summary that hit today made me laugh. This one's from a hotel brand family, Choice, that I seldom stay at.



Woohoo, in 19 years with them I've achieved Non-elite status. That means I've achieved nothing. I'm so glad they're trying to make me feel special about that. Way to go, me! 🤣

"I'd like to attend as a fly on the wall." It's a line I hear frequently, particularly in sales. People want to join a meeting to listen in and see what's happening— but not be recognized as a participant and certainly not be asked to do anything, including stating an opinion or answering a question.

Having a few "fly on the wall" non-participants generally works okay. But what if everyone wants to be a fly on the wall?



I had a meeting like that yesterday. My sales colleague and I began a sales meeting with a customer. As we opened the videoconference very quickly 6 people joined in. We didn't recognize any of them by name. And they all had camera off and microphone on mute.

We introduced ourselves and asked them to introduce themselves. Nothing. We prompted them with a simple question about how familiar they are with our software— software their company has licensed for several years. Again, nothing. I'd say "crickets", but there wasn't even a chirp. They all sat there silently like flies on the wall.

Ironically the day after a(nother) 6:30am meeting was canceled on short notice, after I'd already gotten up early for the day, today the opposite happened. A meeting scheduled for 9am was moved 2 hours earlier, to 7am, and I was only told at 7:45.

This was Day 2 of my all-day intensive training I traveled to Orange County for. My boss sent me a Slack message at 7:45am. "Hey, not sure if you saw the message, but [C level exec] said we're starting today at 7am."

Oookay. "Give me about 10 minutes to get down there," I wrote back.

I was already showered and dressed for the day— I had an 8am online meeting I was preparing for— so all I had to do was quickly pack my suitcase to leave my room for the day. And that was quick because I laid things out in order last night.

BTW, it turns out there was no message I could've seen before 7:45am. The CxO announced the change orally at dinner last night. The dinner I skipped because I was sick. There was no email update or slack message to the group. Just my boss reaching out to me individually 45 minutes late to ask me if I "saw" it.

Sheesh.

I'm late to the party for saying this, but the Democratic Party has really gotten its mojo back the past few weeks. Put this in the category of "better late than never". While none of it may be news to you, if nothing else it's a message in a bottle to my future self.

When Joe Biden folded his reelection campaign just over a month ago the Dems were in the pit of despair. Biden had been lagging in the polls for months, and his uninspiring performance at a debate with Donald Trump June 27 caused a few big-money donors to start expressing doubts about him. The craven mainstream media glommed onto the story and ran articles about it twice a day for weeks, as if his opponent Donald Trump weren't still saying outrageous and dangerous things the whole time, not to mention speaking in increasingly unintelligible fashion— but no, Biden was the one having his mental acuity questioned daily. The Democrats' already sagging campaign dropped into a tailspin.

There was a brief moment following Biden's choice to drop out where the same chattering class of political pundits who talked his campaign into the ground expressed uncertainty about whether his endorsement of Kamala Harris, his former running mate, would improve the party's lot. Much to everyone's surprise, Kamala Harris stepping forward as the presumptive Democratic nominee didn't just improve things, it electrified the base. Democratic voters who'd previously worn hangdog looks suddenly snapped and crackled with new energy.

Was Biden all that bad? Was Harris that much better? The answer is yes-and-no to both. Biden and Harris are close on policy matters, so there's little change there. And Biden's challenges with mental acuity were nowhere near as bad as the dishonest GOP or craven mainstream media might've led the average person to believe. But where Biden failed, and the whole generation of Democratic leaders around him failed, was that they failed to control the message.

Media Matters

The area where Republicans have been absolutely killing the Dems the past 8+ years is messaging. And within the realm of messaging it's not the quality— the GOP routinely claim things that are transparently false and/or contradict things they claimed even moments beforehand— but the quantity.

Republicans have been getting their message out morning, noon, and night, leveraging not just their friendly TV/radio/print media outlets but also social media. Meanwhile Democrats seemed completely out to lunch on the modern media landscape, exhibiting no apparent understanding of the power of social media, let alone even the the "24 hour news cycle" of cable TV— which has been around since the 1990s.

The "old age" problem the Dems have isn't old age per se but that so many of the party leaders— who happen to be old in age— campaign like it's still the 1980s. They've been unable or unwilling to adapt to the times. While GOPs have been pounding their talking points 4 times a day, Dems have remained aloof and refused to engage the issues. They seemed to expect the media to (1) come to them and (2) dig deep to sort fact from fiction for its readers/viewers. Hahaha, that's not how most of the media works anymore.

"Weird"

So, is Kamala Harris really that much better— at media? That's also a yes-and-no situation. Yes, she is more active in providing grist for the media mill than her predecessor, though that's a low bar to cross. But also "no" because it's not just Harris who's different. The party leaders have really woken up around her. With her choice of Tim Walz she picked someone who gets it.

Walz, for example, fired back at Trump's rhetorical technique of branding his opponents with insulting nicknames. It's low-brow but generally has been successful for Trump. Walz didn't even pick a particularly trenchant nickname. He simply called Trump and Vance weird. But that was enough. Just firing back with anything was enough. Weird stuck. It gave supporters something to repeat, and once people were repeating it the guileless media started repeating it, too. It's a simple example of a rallying cry that helps inspire the base and capture the attention of swing voters.

Two Nights in San Diego #3
Leaving a meeting - Wed, 26 Jun 2024, 4pm

Today was the main event I traveled to San Diego for: a six-hour meeting with a major customer. Six hours. When a customer spends that long meeting with you, a vendor, one of two things is true:

1. You are a key strategic vendor. The customer is willing to dedicate essentially a full workday to meeting with you because your solution is that important.


2. The people you're meeting with are bozos. They're able to spend a full day with you because they're not really accountable for anything important. The meeting makes them feel and look important.

Honestly today it felt a bit like both at times. 😅

I say that primarily because in today's meeting we had to review a number of concepts that we've already explained multiple times. It's like some of the people there haven't been listening. ...Actually I shouldn't say "It's like"; it is the case that some of the them haven't been listening.

Once we left the building my colleagues and I agreed that we should avoid trying to do Zoom/etc. meetings with these folks. They plainly haven't been giving us enough attention during such calls. We saw evidence of that today.... One guy asked the same question multiple times because he was reading something on his phone instead of listening to the answer. Another took another meeting during our meeting. He was on a Teams call, muted, while sitting in a conference room with us. A third guy complained multiple times that we "weren't answering his question", when really the problem was that he kept interrupting us while we were trying to answer it such that we could never finish.

So, being onsite with this customer today was enormously valuable... because too many of our remote meetings in the past have been wastes of our time trying to explain things to people who aren't actually paying attention well enough.

This week I'm involved in another technical training workshop. Yes, I attended a training workshop two weeks ago. This is another one. This time it's not about a new product of ours but a course to help my team bolster its skill on an important industry technology, Kubernetes. It's also being conducted remotely, so there's no travel involved— for good and bad. Good because it means no travel cost or time; bad because there's so much value in reaching consensus on sensitive topics and unscripted face-to-face conversations that simply can't happen on a big Zoom meet.

The meta-lesson in this training, though, isn't about the value of f2f vs. remote work. It's about how to plan how much time the training takes. Or, conversely, how little content it takes to fill a fixed time-box. Because this training, as valuable as it is, is running way behind schedule— which is, BTW, a very common problem with training.

On Tuesday, the first of three half-days of workshops, we got through less than 75% of the material planned for Tuesday. It took us until more than halfway through Day 2 to finish the Day 1 syllabus. Basically there's at least 1.5x as much stuff in this course as there is time allotted for it. In particular, the hands-on exercises are routinely running 3x as long as the instructors planned them to.

Part of the reason I make a point of this is that I've been on "the other side of the table" for training a lot. I've done technical sales enablement. It was as semi-official part of my job at a previous employer and an official part of my job for the first few years at this company.

Now, I'm not a "pro" at training. I don't have a college degree in it. I don't have formal training in it. It's a) an aptitude that b) I've spent time & effort getting better at.

I remember the first time I worked with a "pro" trainer several years ago at this company. We'd just hired him on, and I was meeting him over dinner the night before we delivered a day of sales training together in Boston. I'd reviewed his material on the flight out there.

"Tim, I'm concerned there's too content little here," I said. "We're booked for a full day tomorrow, but I think we could be done with this by lunchtime."

Tim just smiled. "It'll be a full day," he said. "You'll see."

I pushed back gently on that, asking him to elaborate. He did. Tim explained that he was allowing time for IT troubles to have to be resolved, extra time for break-out exercises, long breaks for sales people to catch up on their emails, and the ability to say, "Great! Everyone can go home an hour early," at the end of the day instead of asking everyone stay an hour late (as too often happens with training).

The next day happened exactly like Tim predicted. Everything he allowed for happened. People drifted in 15 minutes late. IT troubles caused us to start 1 hour after schedule. Allowing 2x to 3x the time for break-out exercises made them more meaningful for everyone. Allowing generous breaks for sales people to catch up on emails and keep in touch with their customers kept everyone focused in class— because if we didn't schedule generous breaks, sales people would just drop in and out on us, and we'd lose cohesion. And we finished comfortably before 5pm, allowing everyone to feel great about going home a bit early— or voluntarily stay a bit later to enjoy those unscripted f2f conversations I mentioned above.

So, what's the lesson here for trainers? Estimate how long the class should take, then add 50%. And either book a part day or be sure to include generous breaks— because the attendees all have "day job" responsibilities they need to address.

On Friday at work I walked out on a meeting. One of my colleagues, Mike, was being disrespectful by using antagonizing language, ignoring my point of view, and treating me like a servant instead of a peer. I told Mike I found his behavior disrespectful and didn't like it and wanted him to stop. All he did was snap back, "You're disrespectful." I told him I was done with the conversation for the day and walked out of the room. This all happened as I stood next to my manager, BTW. I walked out of the room, leaving my manager behind.

I was steamed about the situation. I had discussed the communication problem with my manager beforehand. I had showed him beforehand that Mike was being disrespectful in a written Slack message to me. He acknowledged that there's a pattern of poor communication spreading across our team (it's wider than just Mike) and offered to help mediate. I expected him to address it as it continued live, in front of him. But as Mike berated me further all he did was try to redirect to the underlying technical issue. I don't need my manager to help address a simple technical question. I needed my manager to address the improper workplace behavior.

My heart was pounding when I walked away. It's one thing to call someone out.... It's firing a shot, and once fired that shot cannot be taken back. But unlike calling out a friend or soon-to-be ex-friend (which I've done recently) the shots fired here have consequences on my job, my career, my livelihood.

I found a private spot and called Hawk. Fortunately she was able to take my call right away and offered words of encouragement. As a manager she deals with these kinds of issues— and unlike my manager she doesn't act like the right way to deal with repeated inappropriate behavior is to ignore it and hope it stops eventually. She helped crystalize for me two things:

— First, wrong behavior is wrong, and calling out wrong behavior is not wrong. When a person is behaving in an insulting fashion, the person being insulted has every right to call it out in a proportionate and workplace-appropriate fashion. "Mike, you're being disrespectful, and I don't like it. Please stop." In the mandatory workplace harassment training we receive every year they show roleplays of people objecting to bad behavior exactly that.

— Second, walking away from hostile behavior is legit. Mike was being insulting and was not acting in good faith to solve the underlying minor business issue. He was demanding I take his directions and badgering me until I agreed. When a colleague is being insulting and refuses to stop when asked, it's legit to walk away. The fact that doing so left a minor business issue unsolved until another day is not unprofessional. The unprofessional behavior is unprofessional, and the harmful consequences it causes (e.g., some little task left undone) are due to the unprofessional behavior, not the person targeted by that behavior objecting to it.

Hawk also suggested I make clear with my boss that I didn't just walk away in a snit, that I object to the unprofessional behavior he witnessed and that I find it unacceptable. Furthermore, "Put a deadline on addressing it," she suggested. Like, "This pattern of adversarial behavior is a serious problem. If I don't see significant improvement in 4 weeks I will have to consider external action."

I circled back around to find my boss, as much to let him know I hadn't left the building as anything else. And I emphasized with him the seriousness of the problem. I told him what we both heard was unprofessional, I reminded him how he agreed already he sees it as just one instance of a broader and pervasive problem, and I emphasized that I consider it a serious problem. I didn't put a deadline on action but I did make it clear that I consider the situation unsatisfactory and need to see significant improvement soon.

Talk about shots fired. I felt like I'd just given my boss a final warning.

On Friday I walked out of a meeting at work.

The situation was a sales colleague, Mike— I'll call him Mike because that's his name— and I were "discussing" the next steps we'd take in working with a prospective customer. I quote discussing because a proper discussion requires mutual respect. This interaction did not have that. Mike was instead hectoring me, assuming poor intentions on my part, focusing on trying to manage my time (when he's not my boss!), and not really listening to my position on the issues at hand but instead demanding repeatedly that I take a specific action he was ordering me (again, not my boss) to take.

My boss was in the conversation, too. He'd offered to broker the meeting when I showed him a string of demeaning things Mike wrote to me in Slack. I told him I found them unprofessional as was preparing to tell Mike that in simple, blunt terms. He suggested we call Mike together to "straighten this out".

My boss and I were both at the same training summit Friday. It was winding down by noon Friday, so we found a quiet spot out in the hotel hallway and called Mike on speakerphone. That's where Mike continued his hectoring, this time aloud, along with improper focus on criticizing how I am prioritizing my time at work. His criticism was not only inappropriate, BTW— inappropriate because, again, he's not my boss— but also factually wrong. I am actually already spending time on the category of things he told me should be my main job responsibility. I'm just not doing the thing he instructed me to do because I disagree that (a) it's the appropriate next step and (b) that's it's my responsibility... it's actually his as the account manager.

During the call I stated a few times, "Mike, you're not listening to me." When he continued criticizing my time management— falsely— and went back to hectoring language, I stated outright and simply, "Mike, you're being disrespectful, and I don't like that."

His response? "You're disrespectful!"

Really. His response was straight off an elementary school playground.

At that point I told Mike and my boss— remember, boss was standing next to me— "I'm done with this for today. f you can't be respectful toward me, find someone else to work on this project." And with that I picked up my bag and walked away.

What happened next: I regrouped and gave my boss a verbal warning!