I met my wife about six months ago, which is strange, because we’ve been married for 14 years. It turns out that she’s been living a double life, and I had no idea.
Now, before you go hating on Meredith thinking she did something nefarious, you should know that I too had an alter ego. While we thought we were both bringing our full selves to the table, on the boat we discovered that we weren’t. We learned that we were very different people when at work, with unique ways of getting stuff done.
So why didn’t we notice these split personalities before moving onto the boat? Part of it is occupation. Meredith is a flight nurse. Not only is she a flight nurse, but her specialty is high risk OB (HROB). If you don’t know what that means, don’t feel bad, I didn’t either. The gist of it is that she’s a superhero flying around saving the lives of women with high risk pregnancies. As I am neither a woman, nor have I ever been pregnant, her work self just never had much of an opportunity to show up in our personal lives. I was in software, and the only time my work personality came into our personal lives was when an electronic device was acting up. Even then, interactions with that side of me were limited to “go ask your dad, he’s the computer whisperer”.
In addition to occupation, the other reason our work personalities had never met was compartmentalization. That’s a fancy word for: we divided up all the chores pretty cleanly between us on land, and let the other get their work done as they saw fit. So, how each of our GSD (Get Stuff Done) selves went about GSDing was a bit of an enigma to the other. As long as the lawn got mowed and the kids were fed, our pink tasks and blue tasks got magically completed in a vacuum. That allowed us to spend the rest of our time focusing on just being together as a family.
Side note: GSD is a term from my work that Meredith will likely hear about for the first time when she reads this. Occupation and compartmentalization.
On the boat, there are no work lives. The boat is our home, car, and occupation. Keeping it floating along happily, and keeping the crew healthy and happy, is everybody’s job. The idea of our GSD selves not overlapping is laughable. There are very few purely pink or blue tasks, and everything exists in some shade of purple. Can you imagine if only one of us looked at the weather and knew a storm was coming? (we tried this. It doesn’t work. Do not attempt at home).
When we moved onto the boat and realized this, our work personalities were a little pissed. They were no longer needed, and had been unceremoniously fired… but not informed of it. We didn’t realize that there was no room for them until the dinghy broke. ( In hindsight, the dinghy breaking isn’t very remarkable or uncommon, but the first time it happened we didn’t know that.)
The dinghy hangs off the back of our boat, hoisted off the water by two crane looking things called the davit. Hanging from the davit are two blocks (pulleys of sorts) that connect to the dingy via a very small u shaped bit of steel called a shackle. On one dark and stormy night (literally. It was dark, and there was a tropical storm), we heard a loud bang. Loud bangs are something you rarely want to hear on a boat, especially at night in a storm. Upon investigation, the pin that held the shackle in place on one side had broken, and the dinghy was now hanging half in/half out of the water. I was able to rig up a temporary solution with some spare bolts I had on board, and we went back to sleep.
Several weeks later, again in bad weather (this time during the day), we heard a now familiar loud bang while we were underway. The shackle on the other side had snapped in a similar fashion, and Meredith and Jade (daughter) had to quickly cut some lines to prevent the dinghy from getting submerged and turning into an anchor. Work Meredith was not pleased. “What is going on with the dinghy davits Work Greg”?
In my life in software, everything that I built, I built for the first time. There was no “right” answer, just some that could be considered better than others, based on opinion. If something was broken, I tinkered (debugged) with it until I got it working. If I got in a total jam, that’s when I might call up a coworker and see what they thought. So, that’s how I was approaching the dinghy problem. Trial and error.
It went a little something like this: Well, both bangs happened in a storm, so that probably has something to do with it. I wonder if there are different types of shackles? What if I just use a regular bolt instead of a U bolt? Maybe I could just beef it all up with some more lines (rope) and we’d be good? It always happens on the side with the motor, so maybe the weight has something to do with it. I think I’ll try the regular bolt and see what happens.
On a helicopter saving lives, there is no time for trial and error. They know exactly what to do, and do it immediately, or somebody could die. If for some reason they do not know the answer, they call for medical direction from somebody who does. Stat.
Meredith reacted with calm and cool. “Greg, you don’t know what you’re doing. Call Jamie before you make it worse”. (Jamie is our lifesaver of a mentor/coach on all things boat).
Who was right? Well, we both were (but Meredith was more right). Tinkering got the job done and got us back underway, but for a long term fix I needed to call for help. From one photo, Jamie figured out that the previous owner of our boat had failed to wrap the shackles with seizing wire. The incessant vibration of the boat underway had slowly loosened the pin holding it in, causing it to fail. Without calling an expert, I never would have figured that out. Well, maybe not “never”, but we probably would have lost the dinghy while I tinkered.
The dinghy is a good illustration of how our occupations have taught us to approach individual problems, but what about how we prioritize what projects to work on? In Meredith’s job, she would always start with the most critical thing on the list, and move down the line until she was done. That’s how people stay alive. It’s not so cut and dry in my world. In software, we usually start with the most critical thing, but if we always just work on the tough stuff, people will burn out. To give our teams time to be creative and relieve the stress, we work on some of the fun stuff alongside the critical stuff. “Sure, go ahead and see if you can get that new feature you’ve been noodling on working after you get the security issue fixed”. That’s where innovation happens, and that’s why there’s cool software out there. If Meredith did that in the chaotic environment of a helicopter, people would literally die.
Here’s an example:
Greg: This trim around the edges of the helm is really gross. I’m going to clean it up. I’m not sure how I’m going to clean it, because nothing seems to work (see example 1, “debugging”). The internet says either acetone or sanding should do the job. It’s hard to work with while it’s still installed, so I’m going to pull it all down and sand it inch by inch. It’ll take weeks, but it will look great when it’s done.
Meredith: WTF. The engine’s broken, why are you sanding the trim?
It’s easy to see from these examples that Meredith’s approach is more appropriate by far, and that she is the superior intellect in our relationship. I promise that I’m not just saying that because she is my editor and reads all my posts before publishing.
In actuality, we’re both right, and we’re both wrong. We’re not building software or saving lives. We’re trying to get accustomed to our new lives on our 15 year old (that’s old for a boat) floating home. It’s our home, so we want it to look nice and be comfortable…but we also want it to keep floating and functioning.
We have learned more about each other in the last seven months than in the last seven years. It’s a bit like being newlyweds again. Well, newlyweds that live in a tiny floating apartment with three kids, a dog, a cat, and absolutely no privacy.