Month: April 2021

This thing! Let me tell you about this thing. We live in a 2-bedroom apartment. Maggie uses one bedroom as her office, and we sleep in the other one. Since the pandemic, the garage has pulled triple duty as garage, storage, and Maggie’s personal gym. All of this has meant that my increasingly elaborate electronics hobby has been slowly taking over a corner of the living room, as well as more and more of the bookshelves. A few months ago I decided something had to be done, so I poked around online and found a rolling shelf unit that is sturdy and somewhat “industrial chic” without being completely institutional looking. The company, Heartwork, has each piece custom manufactured in NY or NJ and then shipped direct to the customer. So it took like 6 weeks to arrive. That was the middle of February. Unfortunately, when it got here, it was a hospital-style pale mint green, not the orange I had ordered. The *second* try, a couple of weeks ago, it was the right color but had been absolutely trashed by some forklift driver en route. Today was the third try, and it was successful! I’m clearly a dork, but I love it. It is exactly what I wanted. Throughout this absurd ordeal, the increasingly baffled and flustered people at Heartwork have done their utmost to ensure that things worked out well. In my day job I manage teams who manage complex systems at fairly large scales, and the first thing you have to understand is that things will go wrong. That is an absolute given. It’s all in how you respond when they do, how you communicate, and how you work together to resolve the problems. By those measures, this collaboration with Heartwork has been a success, even if it took more time and frustration than any of us hoped.

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This thing! Let me tell you about this thing. We live in a 2-bedroom apartment. Maggie uses one bedroom as her office, and we sleep in the other one. Since the pandemic, the garage has pulled triple duty as garage, storage, and Maggie’s personal gym. All of this has meant that my increasingly elaborate electronics hobby has been slowly taking over a corner of the living room, as well as more and more of the bookshelves. A few months ago I decided something had to be done, so I poked around online and found a rolling shelf unit that is sturdy and somewhat “industrial chic” without being completely institutional looking. The company, Heartwork, has each piece custom manufactured in NY or NJ and then shipped direct to the customer. So it took like 6 weeks to arrive. That was the middle of February. Unfortunately, when it got here, it was a hospital-style pale mint green, not the orange I had ordered. The *second* try, a couple of weeks ago, it was the right color but had been absolutely trashed by some forklift driver en route. Today was the third try, and it was successful! I’m clearly a dork, but I love it. It is exactly what I wanted. Throughout this absurd ordeal, the increasingly baffled and flustered people at Heartwork have done their utmost to ensure that things worked out well. In my day job I manage teams who manage complex systems at fairly large scales, and the first thing you have to understand is that things will go wrong. That is an absolute given. It’s all in how you respond when they do, how you communicate, and how you work together to resolve the problems. By those measures, this collaboration with Heartwork has been a success, even if it took more time and frustration than any of us hoped.