Archive for September, 2007
The table
So Barbara and I have been wrestling with furniture salespeople these last couple of weeks, trying to get the thing we envision for our offices at Vague Innovation. We frittered away a bit over a week with somebody from Michigan Office Interiors (no link deserved, because they really don’t rate very high on knowing trivial details like, oh, what they actually can and cannot build).
It’s not complicated. But it’s not fuzzy cubicle crap, and it’s not melamine, and it’s not that clichéd Eames-era ripoff stuff, and Herman Miller doesn’t sell it. So it’s nearly impossible to find, and damned difficult to arrange from off-the-shelf parts.
We’re even flexible about design vocabulary: it needs to match some other chairs we’ve ordered — where “match” is an aesthetic and design pattern operator, not a color thingie. It needs to look like it’s from the 1940s. But from an industrial center, a working engineering or lab firm, so it’ll either be graphite steel, or aged oak. Not aluminum, not plywood, not steelcase square-cornered Bauhaus crap, sure as hell not Ikea, not Industrial Midden, not particle-board Sauderware, not tubes, not plexiglass, not lateral files, not mesh, not green-and-orange, not Amish, not Craftsman, not Executive leatherette-and-mahogany.
If it’s steel, it will be gray sparkly office furniture colored, rounded, and heavy. Two 40-inch bookcases, facing out, supporting a fitted eight-foot long gray countertop with rounded edges, the same width as the cases. That’s it! If one wants to get fancy, then one of those bookcases could be a locking two-door storage cabinet, like from a lab.
If it’s oak, then it should look like pared-down efficient cheap but sturdy lab furniture. Like library tables, or the things you may recall from very old schools. Planked oak, with an apron. Same dimensions, same supports, although here they’d want to be oak bookcases, simple, square-cornered, succinct.
Every little nubbin of oak these days is the Wrong Color. Every little scrap of metal these days is the Wrong Color, or the Wrong Shape, or perhaps the Wrong Size.
And so we set out to work (Cf. above) with a “custom” office furniture place that could “do anything we wanted”… and we encountered seven (7) distinct cases of “Woops! We can’t get it in that shape/color/texture/finish….” The Formica we picked was discontinued; the bookcases came in only other finishes; the two end supports were one inch different in height; you can’t stick aluminum bases on those stools; you can’t have that fabric on the back… &c &c &c.
And everything, from everywhere in the fucking world, is exactly “three weeks” from being done.
And as it happens, that’s the thing that I hate most. I can shop. I’m good at shopping. I am a patient man, as many folks will tell you. But when everything is at least three weeks away, no matter what — including a piece of furniture (a chair I haven’t mentioned) from an actual furniture store, bought straight off the catalog page — is three weeks from being “ready”, that makes me think one thing: lean.
When everybody’s lean, and has no inventory, then everybody has to wait that minimum three weeks’ lead time for absolutely every thing in the world. Unless it’s weird stuff, of course; that takes extra.
Everybody’s lean, without being at all agile. They’re anorexic.
And that’s frustrating.
links for 2007-09-24
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One is reminded of the sinkholes of northwest Kentucky….
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I wish Google bothered to punctuate. We’re scanning another copy, and will send it through Distributed Proofreaders soon, but in the meantime read the page scans from Google if you like….
More from Gerald Stanley Lee
Scanning a copy of The Lost Art of Reading, by Gerald Stanley Lee. Google has already scanned one, but mine will be better.
When one considers that it is a literal, scientific, demonstrable fact that there is not a single evil that can be named in modern life, social, religious, political, or industrial, which is not based on the narrowness and blindness of classes of men toward one another, it is very hard to sit by and watch the modern college almost everywhere, with its silent, deadly Thing-emphasis upon it, educating every man it can reach, into not knowing other men, into not knowing even himself.
and (testing Google Books and its txt-selection tool a bit):
The test of civilisation is what it produces—its man, if only because he produces all else. If we have all made up our minds to allow the specialist to set the pace for us, either to be specialists ourselves or vulgarly to compete with specialists for the right of living, or getting a living, there is going to be a crash sometime. Then a sense of emptiness after the crash which will call us to our senses. The specialist’s view of the world logically narrows itself down to a race of nonentities for nothings. And even if a thing is a thing, it is a nothing to a nonentity. And if it is the one business of the specialist to obtain results, and we are all browbeaten into being specialists, but one result is going to be possible. It is obvious that the man who is willing to sacrifice the most is going to have the most success in the race, crowd out and humiliate or annihilate the others. If this is to be the world, it is only men who are ready to die for nothing in order to create nothing who will be able to secure enough of nothing to rule it….
Emphasis not needed. But you can tell what sentence I would have bolded, maybe.
links for 2007-09-23
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planning ahead
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WHAT YEAR IS THIS? My god — that means there’s still time!
Notes on departing the 2007 University of Michigan Entrepalooza Workshop
Sigh.
First off, I note that the 2007 website was until yesterday titled “Entrepalooza 2006″. Because why, exactly?
Also:
- In what sense is it a good thing that there are 320 unclaimed badges at the table, most of which say “Ross School of Business”, and at least three of which have “speaker” pennants dangling from them?
- Sam Zell stands up there and describes the structure of a useful and interesting sale of his company, and there are no comments or questions from the audience at all?
- There are multiple breakout sessions, and the place is jammed with supposed entrepreneurs, and the whole thing is free. Chairs in the hallway are fucking empty during the sessions?! What does that say: that the speakers are really absolutely kick-ass? Or maybe something about the culture of business at Michigan?
I’m reminded of the four or five Writers’ magazines you see on the newsstand, still. “You can do it! Keep at it! Buy our magazine: subscribe now!”
- That same one again: Where were the conversations?! They were scheduled at 7:30am and after the speakers were done. That’s not how it works: you—young entrepreneur you—have something important to tell people. Find them, and tell them right fucking now. Or they will leave early.
- I will not deign to mention that coffee and cake are not what all of us want. No fruit, no Coke, no me. Woops, I did.
Still alive
Please stand by. Expect to see three additional sites with blogs: one for Coscience.org-related nonprofit science-for-free material, and one for Vague Innovation, LLC-related for-profit agalmic consulting work, and one at WhatMightHappen for futurist interviews and monographs.
But today it’s a trip to the hospital for my Mom for a “simple” procedure, and some basic errands. Soon.
-ish.
links for 2007-09-19
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“I MADE YOU A FISH-GOD CULT… BUT I EATED IT”
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via Garrett Scott, Bookseller
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local
links for 2007-09-18
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via Danny Yee. Takes me back, that does….
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via: Danny Yee
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also via: Danny Yee
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and again via: Danny Yee. Thank you, Danny.
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via Cosma Shalizi, who for whatever reason fails still to have a del.icio.us account, AFAIK
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Saw a crow the other day with flashy white palms on his wings. Central blazes, essentially. Not as weird or mistaken as I thought. But very very startling.
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Man does not like IA.org
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