The Smarts and the Fools

In my workplace, as well as in your workplace, there are two kinds of workers: those who love what they do and the others who love the small fonts of their paycheques. Or, in other terms, and respecting the same sequence, the fools and the smarts. In any company from any country from any system, the percentage of fools is way lower than the percentage of smarts. Is this good, is this bad? No clue at this point, but remains to see what could transpire from this (pseudo)analysis.

First off, let’s see what makes a fool a fool. Being passionate about what you do, and this is not applicable to the workplace only. A passionate man is a passionate man. You can see his mark on everything he or she touches. And if there’s something he hates he’s going to tell you right there, right from the get go. This frankness qualifies him as an outspoken person, and that’s the end of any pretenses that he or she could be political creatures. These people are not politically correct. They love what they do and they are convinced that everybody else loves what they do. Moreover, they would bet their yearly incomes on the rule that one loves what one does. In their minds the world is built on principia, the most logical and most fair of the premises. And if something goes wrong, there’s always a 3-step fix: 1) recognize the wrong; 2) discuss and agree on the solution of extirpate the wrong; 3) apply the solution. That’s it. That never works, of course.

What else is there about the fools in my workplace, and in your workplace? They do not care too much about the paycheque. It’s good to have it, of course, because paycheque means entertainment in all its modern aspects (from HDTV to cruises in Patagonia), and entertainment is just a way to recharge the batteries of their creativity. Creativity that will be applied back into the workplace, like a recycled investment. With potentially good results, I’d say, that would always materialize with one condition: if the smarts would all fall asleep, missing to watch the fools, failing to dart from their starting blocks to stop them from accomplishing anything good. But this never happens. The smarts are always alert and watching and also good athletes.

What makes a smart a smart? First off, a combo of missed ingredients: imagination, spontaneity, innovation. The plain truth is that all smart people are intelligent, without any trace of doubt (some of them very intelligent), but, with rare exceptions, the intelligence doesn’t go usually hand in hand with the creativity. For a simple reason: intelligence means preparedness to face any situation with a set of pragmatic, common skills, acquired during an eventless infancy. Well spread skills equipping most of the people who paid close attention to their parents when they were teaching them to play safe, aim low and be successful. Creativity is a wild run in the unknown, and the best partner you can get is brazenness. When it gets combined with  a touch of recklessness it gets sold as a deluxe package, highly productive, highly unsuccessful among common people leaving common lives.

The smarts love their paycheques, and the more they show their love, the fatter the paycheques become. It’s his secret practice of the Duh Paycheque deity’s cult that makes a smart a smart. Of course,  the workweek for such people is hell, this goes without saying. Of course the best place for them to hide are the big, stale organizations where, beside the fact that their number is getting bigger by the successful financial quarter, the workdays are planned in such a way that the professional innovation and dedication are considered work related infractions and punished with maximum severity. While the fools struggle with the wide spread creativity symptom, called otherwise inadaptability to the mediocre job requirements, the smarts are quite an adaptable race of achievers. They never get sick with doubt, and its more severe form, the need to challenge the establishment. They make it through the workdays avoiding the commitment, skirting the debate and planning their vacations. There are no better vacation planners than the smarts. Go to them instead of a travel agent. They know every single trick in the book, nobody can fool a smart. A smart outsmarts everybody, even another smart. When they talk about vacation, for a few moments they grow the wide wings of the fools, and their eyes fill with passion. It’s an amazing metamorphosis which, fortunately, is short lived. And yes, the smarts are the best politicians in any organization. They don’t speak out their minds because there’s nothing to be spoken out. They are quiet and in control, they look mannish and cool, because their thoughts are simple, devoid of any thinking substance or human emotion. When you don’t talk, you don’t look smart, you don’t look dumb, you look cool. And no cool guy ever made mistakes.

The smarts are the engine of our modern economy. The fools are hunted down more and more by a weapon that the smarts invented in order to survive and multiply: the process. Any respectable, successful, highly competitive company brags about its processes. These processes are solid shelters for lethargy and lack of creativity. They are the fortresses of rampant stagnation. Every smart will use them to hide from ingenuity.

The stagnation is more of a buzzword nowadays. Dressed up in a nice attribute that gives it a stance of irrevocability, the economic stagnation is the public agora for all the smarts in this world. They take turns to tell us what we must do, in order to avoid the professional advancements. And they will always remain politically correct, no worries there.

Excellent Job, Mate!

In one of my team's meetings centred on the topic of the "manager's appreciation" (believe it or not, the software development teams take sometimes the time to discuss about other topics that just .net frameworks or best design practices), I came up with the idea, on the spur of the moment, to inquire around the table about a simple choice:

What is it more important for you: the appreciation you get from your manager, who in spite of his technical background may not be totally aware of your professional prowess, or the praise you get from the senior developer who works beside you and knows very well how valuable you are?

Of course, most of the attendance jumped immediately at the low hanging fruit: the manager's recognition matters the most (I would have thought that they did that only to please me, till one of them mentioned that there is where your bonus is coming from, so the answer was no brainer, dude!), but a few of them acknowledged that being appreciated by a colleague who is good at what he's doing matters a lot for them.

Next day, I was pleasantly surprised to have one of my senior developers, let's call him Dwight (who, by his outspoken personality and straight way to communicate the unpleasant thing that in spite of the best treatment, that piece of software so much touted about is dying, has attracted the wrath of the higher management on him, and implicitly on me) has asked me for a brief meeting to follow up on pour discussion about the "peer's appreciation" with a concrete example. He came to my office to specifically praise Irene's stellar performance in VehiclesForUs, one of our main products, which is in its final QA stage before release. Irene is now fixing bugs, some of them critical, with an enviable speed and she proves reliable, thorough, precise, sharp.

And then I read this article in Globe and Mail which talks about a new research unlocking surprising secrets about peers' recognition. And the more I read the better I felt... I knew the truth revealed by the assumingly highly paid research all along, since my early years as a professional. The sparse "thank you for your work" that you get occasionally from your grumpy, young boss is less important than the "cool, man" brief statement you are rewarded with by your guru colleague, the insufferable swe-geek (from software geek, mind you) who's building dream code with the easiness others make an omelette. His praise would make instantly my day. Of course that wouldn't bring more change into my pockets, but would make me feel really good about myself, confident in my skills built with so much effort in years of enthusiastic, although hard work.

It all comes to that new level of motivation (the experts call it Motivation 3.0, to separate it from the classic Motivation 2.0 which is an elegant way to name the old "stick and carrot" approach) where you want to do something with your life that is both meaningful and enjoyable, and also a reason for being proud and maybe leave a bit of legacy behind you. And it's not about showing the others how smart you are, to get their votes of confidence, it's about feeling you are on the way you started to pave when you were young and restless, and the only dream you had was to go in a history book as the first guy who stepped on Mars (this opportunity is still out there!) And none of these dreams ever started with any material compensation. The word "money" had no place in the workshop of dreams. And, believe it or not, still hasn't.
This is good news for the corporations, of course, where the "money savings" is the sweet lullaby, but there's definitely more attached to the notion of "work" than the bare view of a corporate tower filled to the edge with grey cubicles and politically correct people, also grey to fit in the décor. After all, the beavers are not organized in business units. And they are not grey either...

Innocentia's Dialogues: The Networkist

Innocentia: I know this guy: good looking fellow, with a neat and sleek appearance, exuding health and confidence, dressed smartly, still non-provocative, avoiding two things: to talk too much and to talk too little. The kind of fella who leaves the impression that he enjoys the company of other people, listens to their heartfelt stream of conversation, but he is too cool to intervene and break the magic spell. And instead of commenting or providing feedback or saying a silly thing in or out of context, he reminds us through his cool attitude that the wise guy is more of a taciturn observer,  a gentleman who never says more than he should or not at all , and from this perspective he can grant a few smiles, crack a few light, innocent jokes, and bless our mob with his regal presence. He is a constant reminder to the others that there are only a few things that deserve to be taken seriously in this life, and unfortunately, all of them are deeds of the past, doings of great people, all dead now. And if you’d be tempted to argue his point you’d be deemed a “moron”, a term he never uses to call with or label anybody, although it pops in his mind many times during the casual discussions he has with his peers, at work.

Dubitus: This special individual with the looks of a diva and the charm of a soothsayer is a hunter of a special kind. A favour hunter, of the purest socialite breed. His daily mission is to constantly prowl for opportunities, a lion in the jungle without boundaries of the "could-be", collecting social connections like others collect stamps, throwing his invisible lasso at the unsuspecting victims, stashing their names in his bottomless hat with all his list of contacts. Working hard, being unstoppable at widening his already vast web of connections, his private network. This social predator is what I would call a “networkist”. The networkist is a  natural state of mind, a biological pre-determination, or, simply, a way to be. Nobody can become one if one's not born with it.

Innocentia: The networkist is a charmer whose hobby and deep seeded passion is juggling jobs, with the perfect gig being the next one. A restless character, he is a professional opportunity seeker, a job charmer who totally dismisses the competence as the prerequisite to acquire professional success. He doesn't need to add competence to his panoply of skills. That could actually become detrimental to his genuine nature that relies on his strong predilection for social foray, and personal adventure. The competent individual is most of times a distracting bore and even a pain in the ass, because he is obsessed by thoroughness, terrorized by the prevalence of quality, hopelessly entrapped in the bottomless pit of perfection, overjoyed to take good challenges only for the sake of overcoming them, over generous with  the time spent on wrestling cohorts of details, waiting only for a brief nod to unleash his creativity. Plus he demands from his co-workers what most of them hate the most: an uncompromising passion for the things well done..

Dubitus: A bad apple, if you ask me… A bamboozler in the making.

Innocentia: The networkist is an easy going fella. He is the pretty boy. The kind of person everybody loves and looks for him in a group of people discussing weather, during the lunch break. He speaks the language of everybody, and everybody feels at home in his presence. Being with him is like being with the older brother one hasn't seen for a while. The networkist is a flashy colorful, smooth and slippery chameleon. If the act requires, he can pose into anything, he can dress any clothes, including the ruffled ones belonging to a competent guy sweating up his solutions. How is he doing that? Easy: the networkist has a basic set of work related knowledge (they don't call that for nothing base knowledge), which he recycles dutifully in any conversation, in any written message, at any time of the day. By displaying both courtesy and knowledge, he ends up convincing everyone that he could do it, if only - this is where his mastery becomes evident -, if only the proper environment would be in place. Which means not now, not there. Everybody listening to him nods in agreement and nobody asks: And then when and where, mister? When and where are we going to find that ideal workplace where the people have everything they need to deliver and prove themselves, and if they don’t, it’s entirely their fault. Oh, the world we live in! The humanity! Most of the workplaces are just reasons for excuses, fortresses of mediocrity with thick walls of indiference. The networkist knows that reality so well. He’s so good at detecting and capitalizing on peoples' frustrations, their needs to hide behind gripe, to avoid commitment, to get away without doing it. The networkist enjoys the non-committal environments, he supports them with all his heart. If he is passionate about something, then that’s the non-action, the front seat of the spectator who waits for the cancelled show, knowing that that’s going to happen. His only aim is to always go around the issues, to run away of problems, to advance by skipping the commitment, to consolidate his position in the organization just by knowing the right people in the right places. Those people will support him when need be, will warrant for him no matter what, and they will even fight for him. Our boy, our dear boy! These people are going to be his army of active fans. His personal cheerleaders, his private team of salesmen with a single product to sell: his successful professional life. And what does he need to do to accomplish that? Not too much, you'd be tempted to say, by looking at what he says or does. Everything, a networking science pundit would reply.

Dubitus: But I...

Innocentia: The networkist is an easy going fella. The pretty boy. The kind of guy everybody loves. He speaks the language of everybody, and everybody feels at home in his presence. being with him is like being with the older brother one hasn't seen for a while. The networkist is a flashy, slippery chameleon. If the act requires, he can pose into anything, he can dress any clothes, including the ruffled ones belonging to a competent guy sweating up his solutions. How is he doing that? Easy: the networkist has a basic set of work related knowledge (they don't call it for nothing base knowledge), which he recycles in any conversation, in any written message, at any time of the day. By displaying both courtesy and knowledge, he ends up convincing everyone that he could do it, if only - this is where his mastery lies -, if only the proper environment would be in place. Which means not now, not here. Everybody listening to him nods in agreement and nobody asks: And then when and where, mister? When and where are we going to find that workplace where the people have everything they need to deliver and prove themselves, and if they don’t, then it’s entirely their fault. Oh, the world we live in! Most of the workplaces are just enforced reasons for excuses. The networkist knows that very well. He senses so well the peoples' frustrations, their needs to hide behind reason, to avoid commitment, to not doing it. The networkist enjoys the non-committal environments, he supports them with all his heart. If he is passionate on something, it's the non-action, the sit of the spectator that waits for a cancelled show. His only aim is to always go around, to leave and prosper by skipping the commitment, to consolidate his position in the organization just by knowing the right people in the right places. Those people will support him when need be, will warrant for him no matter what, and they will even fight for him. Our boy, our dear boy! These people are going to be his army of active fans. His personal cheerleaders, his private team of salesmen with a single product to sell: his successful professional life. And what does he need to do to accomplish that? Not too much, you'd be tempted to say, by looking at what he says or does. Everything, a networking guru would reply.
First off, he needs to display a pleasant stance, in any occasion. If he is naturally endowed with a well-proportioned and attractive body, the battle is half won. If is a man, he should avoid displaying the macho features: those end up intimidating, overwhelming, imposing, and this is the last thing a networkist needs, to intimidate people, to chase them away through negligent display of social power. Angelic traits are the best sale: those attract the fans, they make them feel comfortable because they think he’s an easy going, a dear, a lovable chap. The peoples' guy. He also  needs to dress neatly, and properly. Fancy or rebellious clothes may scare his potential networks, they may spawn the impression that he’s unreliable, superficial or simply tasteless. Main stream clothes, main stream hair cut, main stream shoes, main stream opinions, all these should do it. Then the smile, the permanent smile on his face. The sign of him being there for anybody who needs him, ready to listen, happy to oblige. The guy you can always rely on. If need be, and if the stakes are high, the networkist will ante up with the image of his own family: a good looking and pleasant wife, soft spoken and delicate, who’s always saying the right words, and a pair of two children, two angels nicely dressed, well behaved, not saying anything about those curly strands of hair falling playfully over their foreheads. Cute little darlings!

Dubitus: You made me really curious with your latest statements. I'm intrigued now... Why so much fuss about a bunch of trivial things? What’s required to become a successful networkist, beside a ton of luck cominde with two tons of s…?

Innocentia: First off, he needs to display a pleasant stance, in any occasion. If he is naturally endowed with a well-proportioned and attractive body, the battle is half won. If is a man we’re talking about here, he should avoid displaying the macho features: those end up intimidating, overwhelming, imposing, and this is the last thing a networkist needs, to intimidate people, to chase them away through a negligent display of social power. Angelic traits are the best sale: those attract the fans, they make them feel comfortable because they think they finally found their  easy going, dear heart, lovable chap. The peoples' person. He also needs to pay attention to how he dresses. Fancy or rebellious clothes may scare his potential networks, they may create the impression that he’s kind of a dandy, unreliable, superficial or simply tasteless. Main stream clothes, main stream haircut, main stream shoes, main stream opinions, all these should do it. Then the smile, that permanent, charming smile sculptured on the corner of his lips. Not authoritative or haughty, just warm, welcoming. The sign stuck on the door, saying “We’re open for business” for anybody who needs him, ready to listen, happy to oblige. The guy you can always rely on. If need be, and if the stakes are high, the networkist will ante up and throw on the table the image of his own family: a good looking and pleasant wife, soft spoken and delicate, who’s always saying the right words, and a pair of two children, two angels nicely dressed, well behaved, not to mention anything about those curly strands of hair falling playfully over their foreheads. Cute little darlings!

Dubitus: Plain clichés, nothing else. Lots of BS, if you ask me…

Innocentia: The networkist is everyone’s sweetheart, the champion of it all, he is IT. And not even you can negate that, right?

Dubitus: No, noo, nooo. You're dead wrong, lady! Like any other time you tried to persuade me, and you wouldn't even let me talk. Your so-called networkist couldn’t care less about his plain army of dumb cheerleaders: the more the idiots, the better. The rule of thumb is that in a bunch of morons there is going to be at least one to jump in the fire for you, the sacrificial network lamb. And let’s make the things clear, lady: I totally understand there's no fun in wasting one's time just to please imbeciles with power, who end up hovering excited around you, all buzzing like crazed up bees attracted by a big pile of sugar or something else melting in the sun. Of course he hates their noisy presence, their stupid, almighty self-confidence, their boisterous, in your face arrogance, their messed up thinking in bad need of resetting, their repetitive jokes which are clear signs of diminished imagination. But he needs them because among them, at some point in the future, he’s going to spot the fat, ugly face of the providential guy, the guy who’s going to help him to reach his goal. And what with those politically correct stances... He hates them from the depth of his guts. But they are his second nature. He's got to use them many times, like a tennis player practicing the same moves over and over, with his close ones, with friends, and relatives, and even with his wife, during those lengthy, boring, never ending week-ends spent indoors, watching tv, teasing the children, because not a single moron in his network had the good idea to call him over for dinner and chat. The networkist is a lonely wolf. But so is the world surrounding him. Half of it being populated by fellow networkists. And this is the biggest trap for them of all. In spite of the appearance which should point to the contrary, the risk of witnessing the networkists' extinction in some not so distant future is real. The loose around the networkists' necks can get really tight. Their disappearance can happen unexpectedly, can be triggered by an apparently insignificant event, some day, somewhere: a large neighborhood in the outskirts of a big city could end up being inhabited only by networkists, who are going to enter into dead lock relations. I need your help! No, I need your help! Because I forgot to mention a basic principle: a networkist can never be the object of a networking. He is nobody’s network, that is his true nature, and that's that. The disease of the "dead lock networking" will then spread to the city, then to the province, and the whole country may end up being engulfed by it. The death of the social networking could rival the extinction of the dynosaurs on a historical scale.

Innocentia: Did I tell you about this other guy? Very neatly dressed, angelic face, good manners, pretty good joker, I'd say having a touch of shoulda-woulda-coulda comedian in him. Nice family: remarkable house, remarkable wife, remarkable kids. Although no pets, he hates pets. Everything being remarkable with his life, except his own life. Incompetent and demotivated at work, he's been already proposed for a promotion. And I’m already fighting for him. Because I’m in his private circle of cheerleaders, I’m in his network. I will do whatever I can for this guy!

What is Work?

I’m going to start with a twist and replace “love” with “work” in some famous lyrics from eighties:

And I have a question!
What is work?
 What is work?
 Work-e-e-e-e
 Is it giving up?
 'Cause that's not how you raised me, yeah.

Does it  make sense? Totally. Actually it seems to make more sense than the original lines, written by  two guys (who gives a rat’s ass on their names now?) for a song played by Haddaway (now we talk!)

Now I will launch a debate with myself by raising questions and answering them. And in the process faking the surprise (Honestly, I didn't expect such a question...) You wish. Of course it’s going to be lots of bias here, because I pretty much know what I will ask and what I will answer, but my goal is to bring you in that place where you start thinking by yourself and launch your own debates. And sure, faking the surprise (Hmm, this guy I'm debating with is smarter that I initially thought...)


Is it work something we need?
Definitely. For multiple reasons. First off we need a steady income to cover our basic or less basic needs. If you have taken an early morning walk in the woods (and I do that a lot!) you will see the living creatures doing their daily job, the only job they'll ever have: looking up for food. That’s all they seem to do. It’s unpaid work that covers their nourishment needs. Late in the summer they start building nests or shelters for the winter, and that’s work too. Our needs are a little bit more sophisticated, and since we are past the point where we see food, we grab food (most of these actions being now under the criminal code of any country), we surrounded ourselves with a system of laws, procedures and regulations that allows the physically weak to feel strong and the strong to feel weak. Through our work we create wealth for ourselves and for others (including the community, they say.) With the income we get we pay for food, clothes, shelter, health, police, social services, environment and media poisoning, lower cultural standards and (very, very important!) the right to have undisturbed sex in the tranquility of our own bedrooms.


Do we like work?
The overwhelming majority of us says “no” and they have their reasons: work is tiring, challenging, boring, unfair, unjust, etc. They are right: work is all of these and more. Work is what remains after we filtered out through gradual elimination all the good intentions and dreams we had during our formation years. The workplaces hire common people, with average intelligence and skills, and a total lack of sense of humour. Everyone needs to work some place, right? Because everybody needs to live and reproduce her or his life in their offspring. And even if, by some miracle, you’d be able to put together in the same workplace a bunch of brilliant guys (why not geniuses?), the result of their work would be poor, if not catastrophique, for the simpel reason that they're going to hate each other to death. The personalities clash will be the norm. For these brilliant to genial guys the idea of "team" is still to be invented. For now all they know is “Me, me, me.”


Can we live without work?
No. Even the people who keep repeating that they hate work and they’d do better in a god forsaken island picking up tropical fruits (take for instance the Commonwealth of Dominica), they either lie or they fool themselves. Nobody can live without work, one of the reasons being that God created us as enterprising creatures. We cannot rest more than eight hours a day, we cannot spend more than thirty minutes looking up at the deep, blue sky, we cannot sit on a chair for more than ten minutes looking without purpose in a distant corner of the room: we have to do something with our hands or with our brains. If there's nothing to do, then start counting the sheep in your mind: "three million one sheep, three million two sheep..." That’s the way we are been built. Like the beavers, our soul mates when it comes to the idea of enetrprising creatures. While the beaver supports a well defined natural purpose, what we do is not necessarily good: could be total non-sense or plain evil, but even evil is the result of hard work.

Why do we complain about work?
Because it takes too much time of our day time. Most of us work at least two hours over the statutory eight hours of work. That makes it 10 out of 24, or almost 42%. If we subtract the 10 hours for sleep, showering, eating, looking for the car keys or the tv remote, we remain with a bare 4 hours for us, or 16.67%. And what do we do with those 4 hours? The lucky ones spend a portion of it on sex and entertaining (sex with wife or watching crappy TV shows), the rest only entertaining (watching crappy TV shows.) But let’s consider for a second the scenario where we to shouldn’t spend 10 hours working. What would we do with this time? Entertainment, mostly. Thinking about bad things and make them happen. Better being worked to death. Literally.

Carpoolers

In spite of what seems to be generally accepted, men commit faster at creating strong bonds and time enduring relationships with their male counterparts. In a work environment taken over in a ninety nine percent proportion by men fighting with each other like cockerels in a cubicle, a high percentage of the office male population gets soft on each other, attached to each other, sympathetic to each other, covering for each other, protecting each other, and if all these words are not (over)used to depict love stories, what else does? Carpooling to work is one perfect example of these time-proof love stories that endure the test of ageing, true, but could also end up in painful breakups.

The two buddies who carpool together have the chance to spend at least a couple of hours daily (depending on traffic) in the minuscule space of a sedan (under)built to save gas. The first couple of weeks are dragging through the boredom and sophistication of the formal exchanges...

“Who could have thought that Federer was capable of a comeback? At his age?
"Our boss, uh, a bit of a micro manager and control freak, eh, but who's that boss who's not?"
"Why do they need a specialized role on search engine optimization? You can have a smart business analyst take care of that!"
"Truth be said, my expectations were higher when I joined this company, and now... I'm not saying I'm disappointed, but a bit concerned of the direction, yeah..."
"Tennis is less of a sport and more of an expensive entertainment nowadays. It's like poker, only one that's fun to watch.”
"I read an article about the nowadays management crisis. It's funny: try to fit the behaviours of the managers you and I had with the five manager models they expand on. Ha, ha!"

Once the initial ice layer breaks, the two carpoolers in the cockpit of their tiny vehicle start sharing the stories of their lives:

“This boss is really pushy, eh? Have you seen how hard he gets on people? I hope that makes him feel good...”
“My wife is not a great cook, the only thing she does really good are mackerel with mayo. Man, that tastes great!”
“Federer, give me a break! How much money did this guy make? Tons, I’m telling you! Why not retire into one of those fancy Swiss castles and give the chance to a younger chap?”
“How many opportunists do we have in our department? Too many to count, eh?”
“My wife never picks up her cell. I keep telling her: why do we pay the money, are we a charitable organization or what?”
"Look at Harold: a pile of incompetencies. And always invoking the idea of the team: team must give me input, help me out correct my weaknesses. How did he get away with this bullshit for so long? He's been a manager for how long now: three, four years?"

The bond grows stronger and stronger and the two carpoolers grow into a living organism with his two parts moving independently, but still communicating through the invisible wires of a Borgs-like neural connections. At some point any little pet peeve of one becomes a personal affront of the other. And let's be clear about one basic rule: your carpooling buddy is never wrong or at fault, it’s only the crazy world out there who is unfair and mean.

*

The carpooling is a challenging business: day by day, season by season, either you're worried or just contemplative, either you're sick or healthy, either you are in the mood to talk or not, you have to carry on your little conversation that fits like a glove on the engine's droning. It must be something very similar with what the partners in a police cruiser experience: roam the streets and their lives around in that white, blocky vehicle and back up for each other when bullets fly around (mostly in movies.) The story goes that the loss of one's partner equates to the loss of one's family, maybe due to an atrocious murder, beheaded by a deranged serial killer. Carpooling love is not only happy days: sometimes there's an occasional cocktail of discomfort, annoyance and embarrassment…

“Did you watch Kitchen’s Hell last night?”
“Oh, I hate that show: so rude, so gross, it’s like having been made for mentally challenged people...”
“Really, you don’t like Kitchen’s Hell? I love it! My kids cuddle up on the sofa to watch it! My wife love it!”
“Hmm…  Yeah, why not? I should give it another try maybe… never say no, eh?”

and even, hmm… jealousy:

“We’re on our own next week…”
“Oh-okay… Any reason?”
“Well… I need to attend to some personal business.”
“Oh-okay…”

And when Friday comes and the carpool buddy who initiated the temporary breakup doesn’t say anything about getting back on track next Monday, the nervousness builds up, the stingy comments start to bite, the air fills up with un-told reproaches. The next piece  of conversation can happen on the long hallway, the one linking the conference boardroom with the washrooms, a pretty dense traffic area:

“Hey, hi! What’s up?”
“Good, good… You?”
“Eh, the usual stuff! Any plans for the week-end?” (Look at me I can’t ask him what’s the plan for Monday)
“Well, not sure… They say it’s gonna rain, I believe…” (Fending off the answer, you son of a bitch...)
“Eh, they’re wrong so many times… I wouldn’t worry too much. I’d worry if it rained on Monday.” (Take this, you little rascal. You wanna dump me, eh?)
“Yeah… Mondays are bad anyway.”
“Alright. See ya.” (Who gives a rat’s ass on this? You’re not my girlfriend, for god sake)
“See ya… Oh, by the way, are we getting back to carpooling on Monday?”
“You betcha!”

There are many couples of carpoolers in my company, and they walk around like partners in a police cruiser. But instead of guns and teasers they carry coffee cups in their hands. Many times they are getting so accustomed to their reactions backed up by so many funny moments in the past, that they put on good shows for the by-standers. “These guys are fun!” runs the comment around, and they feel good about it. Their couple is a successful one. The public stardom is theirs.

The most interesting case is when your direct manager is carpooling with one of your peers, because then there’s no easy way to point out at your colleague when he screws up. I tried that. I went to my manager and we had this conversation:

“There is a bit of miscommunication between my team and Problem Management Team…” (my manager’s carpool buddy is the lead of that team.)”
“How so?” replies my manager and his face contorts into something that resembles the changing map of twisters. At least a few of them will escape the gravitational force of its cheeks and will land with a heavy blow on my face.
“Well, we tried to raise an issue regarding the approach Problem Management team…”
“Do not say Problem Management team, say team!” he cuts me off brusquely
“Ah… okay. We couldn’t get any serious feedback from that… team… because…”
"Don't say that team, say our team!"
"We didn't get feedback from... our... team..."
“What do you mean by serious feedback? Are you implying that those guys do not do their job seriously, and it’s only you who does that?” I already feel lighter twisters landing on my face. I’m approaching at high speed to the very eye of a hurricane. "Back off, back off! Disengage and abandon ship!" screams my sense of self-preservation.
“Oh, yeah… No, I mean no. Bad choice of words, sorry!”

It is unavoidable that the day will come when your carpooling buddy is going to move on. He will find that amazing job which he had waited for and got prepared for his whole life. That stupendous job that’s going to be either a huge disappointment in half a year or the entry ticket to a professional comfort zone that many people call long-term mediocrity. Or entrenched mediocrity. Doesn't matter, it's all semantics. He will cheer and you will go through all the loss stages: disbelief, mourning, anger, acceptance. And maybe down the road another carpool buddy is going to show up. And maybe the time will come for you to scream from the bottom of your lungs: The carpool buddy died! Long live the carpool buddy!