Technology, The Future, Uncategorized, work

New Horizons

57 Comments

On July 1,  my agency,  along with all the other State-run Human Service Centers and the State Hospital are switching to a new electronic record system. It is totally different than our current system, which we have had for about 15 years.  There is anxiety and uncertainty leading up to the start date, especially since many aspects of the system are still being developed. It will be a good change and will reduce some paperwork demands.

Change is hard, though, especially for people who pride themselves on doing things correctly the first time.  We have to accept we will do things wrong for a while until we master the system.  Some of my colleagues are panicking. Some are just resigned to the inevitable chaos. I just want it to start so we can get a new normal.

What changes are hard for you?  What have been some big changes in your life?

 

 

57 thoughts on “New Horizons”

  2. yesterday i had to defend my business model to the guy who is backing the finances from china
    amazon is an interesting model to understand
    on some things you cannot make financial sense and on others you build the business by making no profit for the starting portion of the launch to get to the top of the list at which point you start making steady ongoing income.

    remember when amazon first began and many people thought the banks were crazy to work with a company that didn’t make money at first in order to get to the point where they would be in a controlling position and competition with wall mart and target

    that is the vision i am embracing right now

    instead of having a guy in china who has to put up all the product, i am talking to companies about simply selling their goods on amazon for them and charging a % to do it

    i am enjoying my new schtick. it really is a marvelous business model.

    i have companies i am discussing this with ask why they have never heard of this before

    i am the new model

    i enjoy it

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  3. re clyde’s comment
    my mom had an art teacher who got paralyzed on 1/2 his body by inhaling oil paint fumes in poorly ventilated studios
    he switched from painting with intricate brush strokes to painting with pallet knives
    i love his work with pallet knives

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  4. i broke my foot badly and walked funny for a couple years after that. while walking awkwardly i broke the big toe on the messed up foot. before it healed up i broke it again. it is now locked in a straight position and will make it a factor in running and other functions that you don’t think about until you realize you can’t do that anymore
    i hate it when that happens
    i get it clyde
    condolences

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  5. The news today reports a 30 year old man was ordered by a judge to move out of his parents’ home after he wouldn’t leave. Change is really hard for some people!

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      1. Wouldn’t it be nice if life came with guarantees that assure us we will have six months to deal with anything challenging? Consumers in our society have rights that don’t necessarily apply universally. I can go back to the store to return a lawn mower that won’t always start. If I choose the wrong woman to share my bed, things are trickier. I’ve known folks who experienced buyer’s remorse with their choice of profession. They can’t get in a customer service line to say, “This law thing isn’t as much fun as I thought it would be. I’d like back the money and years I spent in law school. And I need six months to figure out what I’ll try next.”

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    2. Wow, that is resistance—you have to wonder about the entire family though if they have tp go to court to launch this guy.

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      1. He said that for the last 8 years he was never expected to become independent or contribute to the household.in any way, and it is unfair for them to ask him to do so now without more notice. He is appealing the judge’s decision.

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        4. Our next door neighbor’s 50 year old son is in a similar situation. Tommy never left home, and his parents allowed him to live in an addition they had added to the back of the house intended for a family den. Over time he has lived there with three different “girlfriends,” and fathered six children with four different women. He has never held a job, but has pretty much usurped their back yard and large garage and turned it into his own private illicit car repair/drug dealing business. When I say that he never left home, I mean that he has never paid rent anywhere else (not that he paid any at home either), but has repeatedly spent extended periods of time in the Ramsey County jail and workhouse.

          His mother passed away a little over two years ago, and the father at the age of 82 is failing. Last fall, Tommy was finally kicked out of the house and no one seems to know where he lives – if anywhere. None of his siblings want to have anything to do with him.

          We have witnessed this situation evolve over the 39 years we have lived here. We have known Tommy since he was a kid who was doing poorly in school until he dropped out of high school. Three of his own kids are also drop outs, and two of them have been diagnosed with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, something that Tommy is seemingly proud of because it gives them a legitimate reason for their failures.

          He now has three grandchildren who are as ill equipped to make something of themselves as Tommy. It seems like an unbreakable cycle; a sad and frustrating situation.

          Liked by 1 person

    3. I read the escalating texts his mom wrote over the weeks they tried to get him to move out. She offered to help him find a place, furniture, part of renting, car insurance. She gave him three deadlines, worded as firmly as she could. I could tell that these parents had done a poor job teaching boundaries and self respect with this kid. He kept calling their bluff. Until.

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  6. Rise and Shine Baboons,

    Selling my practice was a big change and required letting go of the entire business. It was hard to let go on my end, then difficult to watch the buyers make serious errors. A lot of the trial and error was unnecessary. Now when they ask for help or information I say no and let them flail because they are so rude. Big change. Hard change.

    The finances of moving from business income to hourly income has been hard, too, but it is stabilizing.

    A wonderful change this year is the population of rabbits eating my flowers is vastly reduced. I get to enjoy my flowers.

    tim, the middle toe on my right foot has arthritis. It does not bend. Argh. Is this an EP affliction?

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    1. I had no business to sell since I practiced solo and had a home office. Since I never networked or advertised much (a national registry got me maybe 2-3 clients a year), my client base was like a roller coaster. Going up a few, down a few, up a few, year after year.

      Then the number went down and didn’t come back up. Converging with this downturn was the requirement that I earn 40 CEUs and pay for license renewal and malpractice insurance. I’d kept putting off getting the CEUs for two years. The costs would’ve been about $2500. Having only 2-3 clients at that point, it made no sense to put out this much money.

      I simply let my license lapse. I had such passion and energy for this work that, had the Universe not shaped this ending to my career, I’d have happily continued it into my 80s. It was never a full-time job to begin with. I didn’t have to pay overhead or commute, and the paperwork, since I didn’t accept insurance, was minimal all those years.

      It was difficult to fade to grey. I missed the lazar-focused, intimate and productive relationships much more than the money. The saying; “If you love what you do, it’s not work” applied to me for 30 years. It’s been hard to not feel relevant. It’s been hard to not be using the decades of accumulated skills and wisdom doing this kind of work had brought. It’s especially hard knowing how many hurting people there are who could be healed while I sit idly by.

      Perhaps the hardest part of retiring is that I didn’t choose to retire.

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      1. jacque
        this was for you
        cb
        2500 is nothing can you re up or is it too late?
        accept insurance and pay someone to bookkeep for you

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      1. Not a great app. Yahoo has one that is much better. The weather channel app always cites the wrong barometric pressure which irriyates e since I watch that carefully for arthritic reactions and migraines.

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        1. Thanks for the tip. My weather app is too feeble-minded to remember what town I’m in, forcing me to correct it about twice a week. Yet when I moved my weather app simply could not comprehend that I no longer needed the forecasts for Saint Paul and/or Happy Valley.

          Interesting that weather causes your arthritis to flare. I have two types of arthritis, neither of which is affected by weather.

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        3. Also, with my eyes I struggle to read when the words are printed over anything but a solid color. This one is not so bad. The other three out print over a map, over art!, or over s picture.

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  8. Our new record system means a totally new way of documenting our contacts with clients. When our current system came online 15 years ago, you would have thought the world had ended. Quite a few people retired rather than start using a computerized record system.

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    1. When I was office manager for the consulting group, the Pres wanted me to go to online scheduling. This was 1995 and they were still getting the bugs out, for one thing, but I just knew computer scheduling and I wouldn’t get along. I dug in my heels and got my way; I still do all my scheduling with something made of paper, and an erasable pencil.

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    2. I feel sorry for IT workers. When management decides to alter information management, IT workers have to tell workers their habitual computer practices have to be changed. There are still many workers who are inherently spooked by computers. They survive by keeping things simple and never changing habits. And, man, do they hate IT folks.

      I remember my mother. She never drove to Minneapolis (from our home in Wayzata) except to go to Dayton’s. She knew one way to get to Dayton’s, and as long as she could follow that route she was good. When the city did road work and knocked her off course with a detour, she was totally lost. She ended up near the airport, sobbing with frustration. I remember her pulling into a gas station to ask “What town am I in?”

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      1. I’m not as sympathetic to IT folks as I used to be. Of course, being married to one didn’t help. But a lot of them can be condescending with us PEBKACs (problem exists between keyboard and chair – a well known IT joke). At my company I’ve always thought that any time they are about to send out some kind of instructions, they should run them through a non-IT person to make sure the instructions make sense. I’m considering relatively savvy at my company (for a PEBKAC) but I almost ALWAYS have questions that are generated because they haven’t written something clearly.

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        1. Or because they take for granted that their audience have a certain level of sophistication. I have a pretty rudimentary understanding of technology, and it is very easy to overestimate what I know and use terms that are meaningless to me.

          I think that’s an easy problem to understand. Trying to teach Hans certain cooking skills, I’m discovering how much of what I take for granted is foreign to him. If I tell him to julienne some vegetables, he has no clue what I’m talking about, and will invariably come up with some creative solution that I hadn’t anticipated. If I ask him to cut an onion in half, he’ll not cut it from top to bottom as I always do. I think we’ve all seen the joke about the woman who asked her husband to peel half the potatoes only to find that he had interpreted that to mean remove the peel from half of each potato.

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  9. The hard changes are the ones imposed by others. If I initiate the changes, they’re (usually) just fine. .Another factor is whether it’s gradual or sudden. If I know about a change ahead of time and can prepare, it’s a much smoother transition than a sudden change.

    The biggest and hardest change was of course Joel’s death, and the suddenness of it. The easiest changes have been most of my moves, since I initiated and planned for them. This last move took longer to adjust to than we thought, but we’ve now adapted… been here in Winona for almost two years!

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  11. I remember now Bath and Bodyworks. 15 years ago they marketed to men. I liked the soap and the deodorant, which had a slight scent. Today it would not work, but it did then. But that store markets to women, so it changes products. Men do not like that. After only a few months I could no longer buy those products.

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  12. Got an email from Best Buy that my computer is ready. Said to make an appointment by hitting a button. But I had to have my Best Buy password. Did not know I ad one. I could hit another button to get a new password. It said to enter the code sent in an email. Never got the email. So called had to enter ticket number. Did not know it. Finally found it. It was rejected. Human communication is dead.

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    1. I called the local store and did not button push to get to Geek Squad, is that there name. Pushed other buttons and Found a person who scheduled an appt for 1:40. But they were helping some one else because the people there help people. I got my computer at 2.
      I wrote this as part of change. Maybe 20 something’s dont find this all cumbersome.

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      1. Not exactly sure I’m understanding this correctly, but I think you saying that you’re back in business with your fixed computer?

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        1. Not going into how fixed and unfixed it is now. They took out things I listed to [be left in. but I think I can download them all. It will take me 8-10 hours I think. And just found out an itunes function is missing.

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        3. Reading through, realized have not said, that, yes, the guys, very nice guys, did fix THE issue. Computer is running as it did when I first got it, and it is fast when operating right. They gave me simpler solutions, better programs for some things. One of the fixes was to take out all the unwanted stuff and all the Windowsoffice bits and pieces. They did not seem to have read the list of programs to leave in. The left me in fact with no word processing. But probably wise to load Open Office clean. I expected that to take awhile. Took only about 15 minutes. See how fast it is.
          They also told me the last Windows 10 update has caused some issues, which they fixed. My issues started before that.

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    1. Not one of your better ideas, tim. Anna should not be expected to run interference for whatever individual issues baboons might have with Best Buy’s customer service. I wouldn’t want to be put in that position, and I can’t imagine that she would either.

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        1. Anna can see all of these posts and knows as much about NS’ situation as the rest of us. If she’s so inclined, she can take whatever action she thinks may be helpful. She could contact NS and ask additional questions; she could simply copy and paste his above comment, or she could ignore it. I guess it would just never occur to me to ask anyone to run that kind of interference on my behalf. Just my point of view, and I may very well be in the minority of this. Just my five cents worth.

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  14. When YA went away to college, that was rough for me. Took a few months to stop fixating on my living alone. Then of course she came back and then I had to get used to THAT!

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  15. The new recycling carts in St. Paul have been hard to get used to. I have to wheel the cart out to the street. Now there is a new plan for garbage pickup. They may change my pickup day. I would find that very hard to adjust to. Arby’s took the Junior size roast beef sandwich off their menu. Wish they hadn’t done that.
    I wish the Twins had kept Torii Hunter. He was so talented!
    I don’t like digital TV. I keep having to rescan to get channels back. What was so wrong with analog TV anyway? It was so much easier. I miss Barack Obama, too. And I will never get used to Pluto not being a planet anymore. That’s just wrong.

    Change is hard.

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    1. Rescan channels back? Don’t get that. My HD works the same as any other channel. Sorry.
      I don’t think its a very big deal, but Sandy wanted it and loves it. And very nice with DVDs.

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