We finally got a new car, and money for the old one (which was totaled). Our new new Subaru is a Forester. It has this bizarre feature that holds the brake when you slip the clutch so you don't roll backward. I don’t care for that feature. Otherwise, pretty good car.

I had a dentist appt last week — the first in two years. I kind of forget about my teeth because they never cause me any trouble.

The seller accepted our offer. If the inspection goes as planned, we’ll close on January 8.

The dentist replaced a filling. Or should I say “the filling,” as I only have one. They used some kind of laser instead of a drill — no novocaine, and no pain other than a few zings when something metal touched the tooth root. I was up all night fretting about the novocaine. I hate novocaine.

I more or less quit drinking. This saves like $40/month. Also I’ve lost a little weight, like two or three pounds.

I've been working a lot lately. The workload at Mercy Corps is two or three times what it might be at a creative agency. So a team of basically one designer and one developer can accomplish as much as perhaps 2 – 3 designers and 2 – 3 developers — that says something about the ROI of creative agencies.

It’s too early to tell if it’ll be a boy or a girl yet.

I invented a new workout based on the training methods employed for the crew of 300. Nowhere near as intense, obviously, but the gist is: no isolation, lots of free weights, do something different every time I go in, and every exercise works at least two muscle groups and my core. I’ve put probably an inch around each bicep for the first time in a decade.

I had my eyes examined — again, first time in two years. My eyesight is holding steady at “bad but not quite blind.”

I thought our camera was broken because we dropped it in the ocean. I rinsed it out with fresh water and let it dry for a week or so and whaddya know, it works. Still haven’t taken any pictures yet though. Too busy.

My trick back is feeling a lot better lately. Maybe it’s the new 300 workout?

When you take a day off from the office to get work done you ask yourself a few questions. Questions like:

• Why is my home — where my fun dog lives and where I keep the beer — a more work-friendly environment than my office?
• Are my neighbors watching me work?
• Why is it noon and I’m still in my underwear?
• Exactly how much peanut butter have I eaten?
• Maybe I should do this every Thursday?

Like, for example, we found an apartment. In, um, Lake Oswego. Yeah, everyone has that reaction. But really, it’s better than you think. It’s like a small town. Kind of a snobby small town, but still. We are 500 yards from a river and 100 feet from a lake and Bismarck can swim in both of them.

And my commute (oh, yeah, I have this new job ...) is an eight mile bike ride through a forest.

And it’s exactly halfway between the places we work (Wilsonville and Lair Hill).

And they have a good farmer’s market. And bike shops.

And have you tried to find an apartment in Portland lately? Everything’s for sale and nothing’s for rent.

Hey, I don’t have to defend this decision.

So yeah, the new job. I’m a (actually “the”) web designer at Mercy Corps. This is so amazingly sweet and so utterly fortuitous.

Many cosmic events conspired to keep my jobless for a month yet simultaneously offered me several opportunities. I took a job with a software company like four weeks ago and yet the deal was bungled by the company wooing me ... I mean, they actually hired me but couldn’t finish the hiring process because of boneheaded bureaucracy (and whew did I dodge a bullet there when you think about it). And that opportunity kept me from snatching a really tempting tempting opportunity with a former employer...tempting because a) they offered me a lot of money and b) it would have meant really returning to where I was before we went to China, and you know what they say about going home again.

So working at Mercy Corps is really sweet for me on a cosmic level. The Mercy Corps vibe is good. “Good” in a Matthew 7:16 way, and “good” in a “generous employer” way. It’s like drinking a tall glass of milk.

Someone recently asked me for some businessy advice about working in China. Specifically, about team dynamics and the decision-making process. All four regular readers of 大黑狗 can probably guess my opinions on the matter, but this presents a golden opportunity to wrap them all up.

First, the usual disclaimer: this is a huge topic and my experiences are limited. I’ve only been here a year, I work in IT for an apparel company, and Xiamen is kind of in the sticks. All this might be different elsewhere in China and in other industries. Also, China is changing very rapidly. My advice will probably be obsolete in a couple of years.

As for team dynamics and decision-making, I can only offer my experiences:

• My work is much less collaborative than in the U.S.
• My Chinese coworkers are uncomfortable doing tasks they haven’t performed previously.
• A lot of work is “borrowed” from other sources (usually competitors). This is so common that objections to the practice are literally incomprehensible.
• Many people see their jobs as paying bills, not vocations. Westerners tend to read this as a lack of craftsmanship, personal initiative, or pride of work.
• The ladder of responsibility is much more hierarchical than at US web companies. I have a boss and I have subordinates. In the US these people would all be my peers.
• I am called upon to solve many problems that are outside my domains of expertise.
• I can’t delegate tasks as easily as in the U.S. — I need to break large tasks into many small tasks.
• The Chinese work ethic favors long hours over efficiency. Doing tasks quickly/with few resources is seen as subverting the need to fill 60-hour, 7-day work weeks.
• Most decisions require extensive consensus-building.
• Language barriers flatten conversations; there’s not a lot of horsing around or tangent-chasing. The barrier is easier to cross in writing than in conversation. We frequently write while we talk.
• Documentation is looked upon as kind of “cute.” I keep a large pad of newsprint on my desk. When we’re working through a problem we’ll map it out in writing. The sheet of paper becomes the only document necessary to start work. p.s. I love this.
• If I didn’t force them to do so, no one would test anything.

An example is in order:

We’re redesigning a shopping website. Let’s say I want to add a GUI widget that allows users to browse to other products without having to reload the page. I know this can be done but we’re not familiar with the technology.

With a Western team I can propose the solution in a brief or electronic document. A coworker will implement a competent (but probably not perfect) solution from scratch or using open-source libraries. They will see this as an opportunity to grow our collective capabilities. The important part is: I can ask someone else to take on a high-level problem, confident they will return a workable solution. Successive iterations, building on a well-understood codebase, are usually just tinkering and optimizing.

When I propose this to my Chinese team, they roundly denounce it as impossible. I find a competitor’s website that does exactly what I’m proposing. A subordinate copies the code and graphics from the competitor and tries to shoehorn it onto our site; it looks bad and works worse. When I point this out, no one sees the problem. I need to break down the code and research the technology. I divide the solution into many small problem domains (graphics production, different code components) that I then delegate. Throughout this process I must make frequent unscheduled “check-ins” to ensure everyone is actually working on the problem. Successive iterations usually involve trashing large bodies of previous work and starting over.

It’s hard to say one approach is better than the other but, I’m certainly used to working in a certain way. That way involves lots of trust and collaboration, with well-paid coworkers who all regard each other as equals, in a legal/ethical/social universe that punishes sloppiness and intellectual appropriation. In that cultural universe, labor is expensive, so we take great care in what we do and reward ourselves for doing it quickly. But it’s also a cautious universe. Every step is mapped out in some Process somewhere, and requires documentation and foresight. Nothing is impossible but everything is expensive.

In my other cultural universe, the profound cheapness of human labor swamps almost all other considerations. Work gets done off-the-cuff, using templates provided from elsewhere. The consequences for failure have historically been dire, so undertaking a task that may fail could literally mean life or death. Extensive consensus helps dissipate culpability. Everything is cheap and many things are impossible.

There’s an old IT saw that goes: “Fast. Cheap. Good. Choose two.” In the U.S. the two are usually chosen for you; in particular, I have a lot of trouble sacrificing “good” so the only free variable is “do you want it fast or do you want it cheap?” In China, “cheap” is chosen by default, so I have to ask “do you want this good, or do you want it fast?” And since “fast” is usually off the table, that leaves one choice. Which is really hard for my personality (i.e. craftsmanlike).

For most of my tenure in high school, I didn’t “get” high school. I didn’t get the cliques, the sports, the clothes, how to manage classes, none of the John Hughes drama stuff. Until the second semester of my senior year. Like someone flipped a switch: “hey, here’s how high school works.” Suddenly it didn’t suck, I could totally navigate the weird social/cultural currents of high school. Ironically, this happened at the exact moment high school ceased to matter for me. Then I graduated.

(For any high schoolers reading this, here’s the key: almost none of it matters. It doesn’t matter if you’re popular or get good grades. Try not to get arrested or flunk out, and score well on your SAT. The rest of the time: geez, enjoy yourself.)

The same thing happened in college. At least with college, I had one full year (my senior year, natch) of really getting how college worked.

(For any college kids reading this, here’s the key: don’t date the same person you dated in high school. S/he is a wonderful person, I’m sure, but college is all about becoming something you didn’t know you were, and staying with your hometown sweetheart prevents you from growing up.)

This pattern (the last-minute getting-it thing) isn’t usually the case with me. Usually I start out strong (at a new job, for example, or on a really long bike ride), and fade to a plateau. I’ve learned to manage my energy in such a way that I know my energy will perpetually decline, so despite which my performance, in toto, remains excellent.

China (and Ports) is like high school. This week someone threw a switch and everything is humming along smoothly. At about 200 miles per hour, sure, but humming nonetheless. Just like high school: I didn’t “get it” until the point at which “getting it” was no longer necessary.

This is gonna be a really busy five weeks.