Just over two years since I last wrote in this blog. For long months I suffered terribly at the hands of the Erinyes. They scourged me with sharpened punctuation marks, raging over the Ardor’s death from neglect. My neglect. I slumped and shambled my way back through a long walk of shame, withering in the silence of Calliope’s apathy. It will not be easy to make amends. I’d best get started.

A colleague of mine is leaving the job soon. His departure is definitely our loss, and it started me thinking about a common characteristic in some of the best folks I’ve worked with over the years. Hopefully I’ll have figured out how to put it into words by the end of this post.
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I’ve switched jobs again. Actually, I went back to my previous employer. That in and of itself is of no use to you, so I’ll skip over it. There are, however, some lessons from my now ex-employer that are worth learning if you want to retain your employees, or I suppose, if you want to drive them away in droves.
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Years ago, a few friends introduced me to a new use of the word “skating” to mean shirking one’s work responsibilities. One is skating when at work, seemingly productive, and deliberately accomplishing little or nothing. Note the difference from other forms of work avoidance, such as absenteeism. One of the best executed examples of skating was a guy helping clean a building. He spent an entire week with a bucket of soapy water and a sponge sitting and looking out a window. When someone came by, he wiped the sponge over the window a few times. When left alone, he went back to looking out the window.

I just left a job where I worked in a department of about fifty people. Some of them were the best with whom I’ve ever worked. Others were a questionable use of perfectly good space, light, and breathable air. Among the latter, I observed repeated and common threads that begin to form a pattern language of skating. I catalog a couple of them here not to encourage their use, but to suggest ways to detect and counter them.

Please keep in mind that the goal is to drive toward getting the work done, not to assign blame. I don’t care who shot John; I just want to make sure we don’t shoot him again.
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