See the Door Before You Open It

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

Serdar and I were recently discussing how certain opportunities open doors for people. I noted that sometimes its not opening the door, it’s seeing it in the first place. We can’t open the door until we see it.

(We also want to see the door before opening it in case it’s a bad idea. But anyway, I don’t want to over-follow this metaphor).

This idea of “seeing the door” led me to think about a few examples from my own creative and professional life I wanted to share to illustrate the point.

Creatively, as some of my regular readers know, I do surrealist collage art under a pen name (art name?). I got into this via small press zines, originally just to add some decoration, but quickly got very into the collagist style. Now I’m using museum images, researching art history, and creating some truly strange and wild stuff – and learning about graphics and imaging tools and making new friends.

I’d never have thought of doing this except for, well, a series of events. Now I can see how I enjoy unusual art and such. I have done graphics before, but did I expect to pick up playing Max Ersnt in my 50s? No. However it all makes sense, filling my sense of curiosity, of creativity, and a desire to connect via creativity.

I didn’t see the door until I tried something different.

Career-wise, let’s talk laboratories. As folks know I work in medical research and education as a Project Manager. I got assigned to work on a project to set up some environmental monitoring for a lab, and after some research, found there was other work to be done as well. Suddenly I’m down the rabbit hole on environmental sensors, chemical testing, and equipment so heavy it needs special tables to use – and I’m having an incredible time.

Plus sometimes I wear a Geiger counter at work or get my shoes checked for hazmat.

I’d have never thought that, say, things like liquid nitrogen or worrying about sensor condensation were a thing for me. Yet, I found the world of lab setups exciting and stimulating, a whole new world that called on my organization skills, social skills, and science skills. What started as a chance assignment and my own hard-headed dedication to researching project needs has started to define my career.

I didn’t see the door until I tried something different.

The ability to see the door is just as important as being able to open it. Maybe moreso since we can’t open it until we see it (and if we can’t open it we can learn how to or break it down). To see the door to something more you have to try new things, experience new things, and get educated.

This is why education matters, why new experience matters, why knowing there are unseen doors matters.

I’m in or approaching middle age, depending on who you ask – but I keep going, the above things make me feel alive. I have friends who are the same, always finding new doors, always alive. I have older friends and family who keep finding new things and they have that spark.

Keep finding doors. Keep setting up situations so you can find new doors.

Steven Savage

Alternate Steves: Conference Call

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

More on Alternate Histories through the eyes of Alternate Me’s. This comes from some past speculations on the internet, useful technologies, and vital functionality. In this case I wonder how conference calls/party lines could have been more widespread, giving us casual group chat long before Zoom, Teams, and so on.

Let’s meet an Alternate Steve who remembers the Conference Call Boom of the 80s and 90s . . . even if he missed the start.

I’m going to confess – I missed out on the Party Line/Conference Line craze when I was younger. Yes, I know, this is me, I’m the guy that has set up conferences. But Back In The Day it just didn’t register for me until I graduated college.

So anyway, let’s talk me in the 1990s. I’ve graduated from college and pending getting into graduate school, ended up working as an admin in an anthropology department. Pretty good gig and I figured I’d eventually go back to school to get into that PHD program. As you know I didn’t (even if I did get two more degrees).

One of the things people were talking about is Conference Calls, though everyone kept calling them Party Lines, an older name for shared phone lines. I think it honestly stuck because the term also got used by sex lines and so on. Boy did I work to call it “Conference Call,” and boy did people embarrass themselves throughout the early 90s.

Anyway at the time, I vaguely knew about Conference Calls and we all know the drill – people call one number or someone calls them and you all chat at once. It’s very standard now, but it exploded in the 80s and 90s – in ways that made perfect sense when you look back.

And in 1990 boy did I have to look back. I’m there in the office, suddenly having to catch up on all of this stuff that passed me by as I was A) in the dorms, and B) a computer guy.. I still remember sitting out a weekend with some of my co-workers to understand what was going on. And how I missed it.

You have to remember the 80s saw a lot of changes in communication. The Bell system got broken up. Compuserve and AOL were becoming noticeable. People met on internet forums in academic areas. And what happens when you’re a suddenly-regional phone company after a big breakup and you have a vision or just want money?

People are using computers to talk. But you are used to phones. So by pushing conference lines you sell phones, sell services, and get a leap on these growing services. Also some bigwigs use conference calls and you see them in movies. It was kind of a slam dunk, moreso in the business-obsessed 80s.

A lot of people claim to be the brains behind the Conference Call revolution, but I think it was more a thing of the time – everything came together. Certainly it did for us there in the office as we had PHDs and scientists who were MORE and more interested in figuring how to chat with each other without having to travel. I mean trust me, they wanted to travel (I had to do some of the billing), but you can’t rush back to the lab or something then.

Anyway all that happened while I was busy getting my degree and I only paid attention when I had to. I mean it moved slower than people make it sound because there was a lot of technical stuff, but to me it seemed fast. It had changed over four years.

So I kept learning.

Of course the Conference Call thing began creeping into many aspects of life and nerds like me were there on top of it. Sure they got pitched to business, then families, but I remember when TTRPG (Table Top RPG) was jokingly called Telephone Time RPG. Then there were writer’s roundtables, etc. Or the time I attended the Atlanta Fantasy Fair and someone did a panel by conference line, and that’s when things were definitely in full swing.

Am I saying that Conference Calls exploded even more because of enormous nerdery? Honestly, I kind of am.

I ended up staying on top of it way more than most because I worked in admin and I was a nerd. Despite missing all of it at the start, it became a pretty integral part of my life. When I moved to Berkley in the mid-90s, it was even more prominent there. People forget how cable companies and other infrastructure companies got in on the deal and how vital it was to academia.

Which, come to think of it, was also a huge bunch of nerds. Seriously, by the late 90’s I knew professors who “had to suddenly” give a class by Conference Call.

I think in a weird way the Conference Call revolution both drove and delayed the adoption of the Internet. You could do a whole lot with a line, and the fancy specialized phones that companies sold (at a big markup) that maybe you didn’t need the internet. At the same time the growing infrastructure changes led to interests in other changes. I wonder if videoconferencing like Ringer would have come about as quickly – or were they accelerated?

It’s funny now how we still use these lines. But they afford security, they’re easy to use, and they’re familiar. I get it, even if I didn’t at first.

The 80s and 90s was a time of weird technical and cultural ferment, and I could see Conference Calls getting a big boost. Certainly I knew the various zine groups and geeks I went to, cons I went to, were filled with people who’d have taken advantage of it. Considering how phone companies broke up and consolidated, I see it as a potential business opportunity.

Steven Savage

But What If It Wasn’t Worth It?

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

As I’ve mentioned a few times here, a friend once said she didn’t think any tech “innovation” in the last 15 years was worth it overall. Admittedly considering some of the innovations are supermassive web frameworks and electric vehicles that inadvertently catch fire, I sorta get that. But this brings up a larger question.

What is it we’re used to today that actually isn’t worth it?

This makes me think of my interest in Chinese history and philosophy. Watching Taoists and Confucians discuss good government, it was in context of feudalism, so it was “what if we feudalismed right?” Like maybe feudalism was part of the problem, even if some Taoists had a kind of “Anarcho-feudalism” in mind.

So how much of what we have today we think of is perfectly fine and normal is a bad idea we’ll need to get over? And I’m not talking the usual critiques of things like AI (which is easy), but other technologies and policies and the like.

Focusing America on the automobile is one that I think is a big mistake, even if I like having one. It’s led to racist zoning, sprawling suburbs, loss of public transportation, pollution, and the like. I’m not saying automobiles are bad, but man did we overdo it for various reasons.

Try to imagine if that hadn’t happened.

I’ve also wondered about the impact of parts of pop culture. Things I loved in my youth have become sprawling, money-sucking mega-franchises. Was it large company consolidation that we needed to avoid? Something else? Why is it now when I hear of anything Star Wars, Star Trek, or Marvel I just assume I won’t like it?

What was missed because we made another Star Trek?

In another case I definitely felt that too much of our world got driven by graphics. Systems get bigger, cards get larger, all so we can watch web pages that look like movies and play games that don’t look like games. A few years ago I found Team Fortress 2 (a fave of mine for ages) still runs off of CPUs and looks fine in its stylized way.

How many resources got poured into pretty? Maybe we just didn’t need as much photorealism?

I’ve also questioned office software. I mean I self-publish out of LibreOffice, which is basically Microsoft Word ten years ago. I’ve worked with tools that store enormous amounts of data no one cares about. Look I’m fine with graphics software getting more powerful (albeit again, needing the hardware) but otherwise? Not sure.

I’d like something that does its job with options, not has something that does so much more than anyone needs. Or maybe some software can be more modular.

Try asking what we’re used to now that kind of has flaws is something we didn’t need or needed less of?

Steven Savage