Who am I and what have I done with my pick-up?

Jayleigh has been wanting me to write a post about what I have been able to haul with my little appliance car. You see when I was thinking about replacing my old 95 Corsica, I tried to talk myself into getting an SUV or mini-van. When I thought about utility I figured that a mini-van would be the best for hauling people or stuff around, but than I had to admit that I would not really have that much use for it most of the time.

When I also considered factors like gas mileage, the cost of the vehicle, and the cost of insurance I decided I wanted a 5-door hatch back. I looked around and did not see too many choices to pick from. GM had the Vibe or Aveo and Ford has the Focus. I liked the dependablity of the KIA Optima that we bought used in 2002. I checked out the Spectra and Elantra and decided I liked the size, styling, features, and safety ratings of the Elantra best.

I have had my Elantra since November of 2004 and so far it has been a great little car. It is not great for road trips over 100 miles each way. The suspension and seats and road noise are just not that comforting and cushioning.

On the other hand with the wide opening hatch and the rear seat that folds down and reclining front seats, I have been able to haul some pretty respectable loads:

A 5 foot long by 30" high by 20" deep 3-door cupboard unit
A disassembled twin bed including under bed drawer dresser
Twelve 1 x 6 x 8 foot boards
Five 2 x 4 x 8 foot boards
Five pieces of 8 foot drywall corner bead
4 rolls of 100 square foot laminate floor underlayment

The loads of boards are not maximum amounts, it was just all I needed or bought and brought home on the specified trips.

With some of this stuff I have even still had room for one passenger as long as they sat behind me in the driver's side rear seat. Sure an extended mini-van would still be pretty cool for hauling those 4 x 8 foot sheets of drywall or isoboard underflooring, but come on how often are you going to do that?

Another fun thing about having a hatchback these days is that kids think it is very novel when I open the hatch. Kids under the age of fifteen do not really remember the days of hatch back Chevette's, Citation's, Omni's, and Escort's. They think that it is pretty cool to have a hatch instead of a trunk.

I greatly appreciate my little appliance car, especially when I have to fill it up with gas, which is not nearly as often as it would be with a van or truck.

Negotiations

This from another assignment for my Global Management class about negotiations.

I have not had very much experience with negotiating in business, but as I think about it I have done quite a bit of negotiating in my personal life. I have two examples to describe in this report. The first is of a time when I had a successful negotiation in planning a vacation. The second is of a time when I was negotiating and did not have a successful result.

Two years ago my mother wanted my wife and I to travel to Florida to see them while they were there for the winter. My wife did not particularly want to spend vacation time to visit with my mother and her husband and she did not want to fly to Florida or any where else. I did not want to spend a whole week with my mother and her husband either because no matter where they are or who they are with they always act the same way, not granting much consideration to hosts or house guests.

This is how the negotiations worked. My mother invited us to fly down to Lantana, Florida to visit with them and to either go to one of the theme parks or go fishing on a charter boat.

I told my mother that Jayleigh, my wife, did not want to fly at all.

My mother made a counteroffer that she would pay for us to fly down to West Palm Beach Florida.

I responded that we prefer to take road trip vacations and that if she would give us money equivalent to the airfares from Michigan to Florida we could use that money to be able to drive down.

My mother was disappointed that we would not have as much time to spend in Florida if we drove instead of flying, but she agreed to do it that way. My wife still did not really want to go to Florida, but I told her that we would visit my sister and her family in the Charlotte, North Carolina area and we could also spend time with my wife’s aunt and young cousins in Charleston, South Carolina.

My wife agreed to do that. In some ways that negotiation was more successful than the trip itself. We only had two days during that vacation where we were not traveling, but we were able to spend some time with friends from Williamston, Michigan that had traveled to Florida to go to Disney World and an extra day with my sister when we were driving home.

The unsuccessful negotiation that I can recall involved a job interview that my friend helped me get; in fact this was the same friend that I saw in Florida when we were both on vacation. My friend works in designing, installing, and managing computer networks, he knew that I was looking to move out of the helpdesk environment and increase my level of compensation.

During the interview, the soft skills or people skills required for the perspective position were given to me, and my experience and business knowledge and skill level matched up well to those requirements. Then I was given the basics of the technical requirements necessary for the position that they were looking to fill. They were looking for some one that could design a network and then both implement it and support or maintain it.

I was a pretty savvy user, but I was not prepared to work at that kind of computer networking. If that was not enough to drive me out of the pool of potential candidates, then I clinched it when I asked for about a twenty percent salary increase over my current salary. I felt that this was justified, because the new job would have meant a longer commute, and much work to learn the skills that I needed to have for the new position. Plus the compensation structure at the new company would have locked my salary in at the hiring level for at least a year and probably longer.

On the other hand if I stayed in my existing position, I knew that I was going to be up for a compensation increase in less than six months. The new company was not looking for someone that was going to need quite a bit of on the job training. I was not really looking to leave the job that I already had unless the new company made it truly worth my time. Neither one of us wanted to budge in our expectations so the interview process came to a halt and I stayed in the same working organization.

In a successful negotiation it is likely that the parties involved are going to need to come to a mutually satisfying compromise to resolve the issues. Without give and take negotiations will fall apart and no resolution is likely to be reached. Without negotiations involving listening as well as speaking, you are more likely to end up in arguments and misunderstandings and less likely to solve any problems.

Out of this week I found the points about negotiating techniques very interesting. After the report that I wrote about my negotiation history and an argument that I had with my wife yesterday, it came into clearer focus.

In my successful negotiation about taking the vacation to see my mother in Florida it worked out because we were able to come to a solution that satisfied the interests of all parties. My mother was not able to dictate how we traveled or how much time we spent with her just because she was partially funding the trip or just because she is my mother. We were able to travel on our own schedule, spend time with both my mother and other friends and family that we also wanted to see, and we were able to escape Michigan winter weather for nine days.

In the job interview that I had representing an unsuccessful negotiation, I undercut the negotiations by assuming that since my current job had been willing and eager to provide training to prepare me for a position than I had some right to expect this other company to do the same thing. Also since I knew that I had recently received a raise to a level one percent below what I deserved in my current position and the new job would have kept me at my hiring level of compensation for more than a year, I thought I had a right to put down a desired salary that was about twenty percent more than my current salary. This resulted in the perspective company exercising its right to not hire me.

Tuesday night my wife and I had an argument because my wife felt like she had a right to my attention when I was supposed to be done working. I work from home. I felt like I had a right to finish a few last odds and ends of work and reports without being bothered about going for a walk with her and the dogs. Then it became about power, my wife had the power to leave because she has her own car and she wanted something to eat, and I had not made anything.

I had the power to choose not to make supper and the right to get to my work for class. We also showed each other that we had the power to be insensitive, not listen to each other, and yell at each other.

The argument was only resolved when we set aside our desire to show each other that we were right and that we had power to hurt each other. When we stopped and listened to each other and calmly talked to each other about our day and our feelings and plans then we appreciated each others interests. Our interests were actually pretty much the same, we wanted to get certain things done, like school work and grocery shopping and spend time together. Then we both felt like we could not understand why it had blown up into such a big conflict.

Transitional Experiences

This entry is from something that I wrote for my Global Management class. It was written in response to an assignment to write about a personal transitional experience. If you read between the lines here, the key to surviving this experience was the prayers of our Christian family and God's Holy Spirit carrying my wife and I through it all.

F. Serious illness or death of a beloved that leads to major lifestyle changes

I am going to bend the transitional experience regarding a serious illness or death of a beloved that leads to major lifestyle changes a little bit to fit my experience. I have not had any experiences of my own that relate to the other situations. When I was a child I had problems breathing through my nose and problems with my permanent teeth in my top jaw not having enough space to come in. After six years of orthodontic work with various appliances and braces it was clear that something else was still wrong and had not been corrected. At my last appointment with my childhood orthodontist, he told me that after I stopped growing I would need to have surgery to correct it. I had progressing problems with my teeth and temporomandibular joint.

So I grew into adulthood with this jaw/skull problem. I worked for six and a half years spending most of that time as an assistant manager making minimum wage scale income and going to college. I did not have very good health insurance at that time and I did not think that my problems were all that bad. After I started working with my current company and my problems worsened to the point that I had to limit what I ate to softer foods I started to work on getting into treatment to help. I also started to suffer from sleep apnea. My health issues were getting worse and worse.

At work, I was on a fairly fast track moving up to being a team leader and then after a re-organization in leadership I was appointed to another half promotion as a service delivery coordinator. I was working long hours and commuting about a hundred and twenty miles per day for work. I was earning bonuses and great performance reviews, but my health was declining and my marriage was not doing very well either.

By the time I started another round of orthodontic treatment my teeth had gotten so badly out of alignment, my jaw so painful, and my sleep patterns so interrupted that it was affecting every facet of my life. I went through another three years of braces and two pretty major craniofacial operations to correct my class three case of mid-face hypoplasia. After the first surgery I was out of the office for twelve weeks with a rigid-extraction-device bolted to my head and attached to my top jaw through an orthodontic appliance. For six weeks my wife and I turned nuts on threaded studs connected to that appliance to move my top jaw forward a millimeter or two each day until it had been moved forward about two-thirds of an inch.

My doctors were in Chicago so the surgeries meant week long stays there, with my wife in a hotel and me in an intensive care unit. These were followed by thirty-eight trips from Durand, Michigan to Chicago and back in something like twenty-two months.

I kept the position that I had with EDS through all of this, but my working position changed. I stepped out of leadership and took a job in Flint instead of Troy. For that twenty-two month period everything outside of my treatment and recovery was little more than background noise. After the first surgery, and eight weeks of recovery, I worked from home for a month before I was called by my manager and told that I had to come back to the office to work because my team mates wanted to take vacations and one of them was going to have total knee replacement surgery on both legs.

After the second surgery I was off for five weeks before I returned to working in the office. Both times it was a little premature. Add to all this, the fact that after each surgery the appearance of my face changed due to the changes in the foundation of bone that supports the soft tissue.

Coming out of this experience I experienced re-entry shock not just at work, but in pretty much every area of my life. It helped to be able to return to a role at work that I was familiar with, something that I could do almost in my sleep. I was able to reconnect with my co-workers. I was able to share my feelings about going through surgery and recovery with my teammate that had his knees replaced. I went through feelings of anticipation about getting back to work.

I felt like a spectator when I first got back to work when I did not have a load of projects and had a bunch of email to review and catch-up on.

I slipped back into the participation stage as my work load built up again and into the shock stage when things at work got tougher and more stressful. I would feel like my customers had their priorities out of order when they would push and nag about some order for a new server, because what did something like that matter when I was still healing from those operations.

Eventually I did become re-acclimated to my regular work life, but my experiences did change my priorities in the sense that people trying to escalate requests and high pressure projects no longer seem like such a big deal when compared to the things in life that really count.