Missives from the 6th Floor

…And it doesn’t seem to bother anyone

We generally like our apartment, but the lift in our building is utter crap. It’s slow at the best of times, and it’s been incredibly unreliable since we moved in. We’ve taken to keeping track of outages in our shared calendar, and have a steady stream of often increasingly irritated iMessages between us and the building manager.

Lift engineers – from two different firms – have been out countless times. Each time they’re reasonably prompt, and each time they leave the lift “works” again. Sometimes for hours, sometimes for days – it even went a few weeks between failures during the height of lockdown when no one was using it.

It’s possible all they’ve done is hit it with a hammer.

They keep saying “engineering.” I don’ think it means what they think it means.

Today it went out of service with Dawnise in it on her way out to the grocery store. Fortunately she was able to convince the doors to open. The lift had made it to the 5th floor – one whole floor down – and thought it was on 2.

The lift “engineer”‘s prognosis was “I think the drive is dead.” I’m no lift engineer, so I’m not sure what that means, but I expect it means this will be a prolonged outage while the they who are involved in these things argue about costs, try to source a second hand part, or bodge the clearly broken one back together, maybe find someone to replace it at a discount, and generally treat the whole thing as “someone else’s problem.”

In this case, I’m the someone else. And I’m well past sick of this problem.

A few months after we arrived we were watching a bit of standup comedy on “telly.” The comic, who’s name I forget, was a Canadian who’d lived in the UK for a decade or so. He summarized the situation as “nothing in this country actually works, and that doesn’t seem to bother anyone.”

When we were done laughing we looked at each-other and realized it was funny ’cause it was true – and since hearing it put that way, his punch line has become a regular in our daily conversation.

“Nothing in this country actually works, and that doesn’t seem to bother anyone.”

Try it. There’s a good chance it applies to whatever the country you live in, too.

It is what it is

As someone utterly incompetent said recently, “it is what it is.”

A month ago, I characterized London as “slowly creeping toward normal.” Today, London has been placed on the COVID “watch list” – which as far as I can tell means Boris and Co. will sit and watch as we cede the gains made in containing the spread of the virus.

It ended up taking just about a month to get my BRP back from the DVLA, and a few days later my provisional driving license arrived. License number in hand, I was able to schedule a theory test. I took the first available, which turned out to be over a month out – the 3rd Monday in October. So I’ve got plenty of time to forget (and review) the material. And, of course, I can’t schedule the practical exam until I’ve passed the theory test. This country could stand to learn a thing or two about pipelining.

Once I had my license, I reached out to a handful of driving instructors. Most of them were either on sabbatical or were fully booked. I ultimately booked an hour with one who was neither. We got on reasonably well, and he was good at pointing out habits (like palm steering) that I’ll need to suppress for the exam. Once I can book a test, I’ll book a test, and he and I will spend another couple lessons in his Kia before I sit it. At this rate, I’ll be lucky to have it done by Christmas.

At his suggestion, I took a couple practice “hazard perception tests.” They show you a video from the point-of-view of a driver, you have to click on the screen when there’s a “developing hazard.” Your score depends on how early you recognize the hazard and react. These tests were clearly not made for motorcyclists. My first attempts I scored nul points – each of my clicks was just before the scoring window opened. Of course that farm equipment traveling parallel to the road is a hazard, waiting for it to turn into my path seems counter-productive. So before taking the test I need to practice reacting later. Somehow that seems very British.

Life has otherwise found a routine. I’ve been running three days a week, though we’ll see how devoted I am as the wet winter starts. Dawnise does the weekly shop and I help her mule it home. With apologies to Casablanca, “she buys the food, I cook the food, we eat the food. It is fairly convenient.” Most weekends we visit our local cafe for brunch, and we read the news from America with a mix of frustration, sadness, fear and resignation.

I’ve continued keeping track of noteworthy COVID-related articles I’ve read, though there have only been a handful in the past month that have made the list. And I’ve posted a few other thoughts that haven’t been about “life in London” and so haven’t been sent to this list.

So I’d say we’re still doing well, overall. We’ve had some rough days, for sure – when it’s been hard to remember we’re both on the same team – but more good days than bad ones.

I’ve started, several times, to write something about the election, or American politics more generally, but each time I’ve tried I end up deleting the draft and walking away. I’m at a total loss about how to have positive impact on any of those issues, but it’s reasonably clear that shouting into the electronic void won’t change anything.

So we’ll vote (absentee, it’s much better than mail in voting). And hope that enough of the country agrees with our perspective to vote with us. And hope that the popular vote carries the day. The whole thing seems dangerously close to the definition of insanity.

Doing the same thing, expecting a different result.

Tit for Tat: American Democracy and the Prisoner’s Dilemma

It should come as a surprise to no one that the party in power in the US is pushing to install a new supreme court justice with haste – before an election they stand a non-zero chance of losing.

The fact that this same group vociferously and successfully obstructed a similar appointment four years ago is being broadly cast as “evidence of hypocrisy.” If it’s hypocrisy isn’t the point, the point is they understand the game they’re playing, and are playing to win. Call it (calling out?) hypocrisy doesn’t change anything.

The prisoner’s dilemma, in case you’ve forgotten, is a simple game with rules often phrased something like this:

You and a partner-in-crime are arrested. You’re kept apart, unable to communicate. You’re both told that if you both admit to the crime, you’ll each face 3 years incarceration. If you both stay silent, there’s sufficient evidence to convict on a lesser charge, so you’ll both face one year in jail. If one of you implicates the other, who stays silent, the silent implicated party will be jailed for 5 years, and the betrayer set free.”

To people who study games the window dressing (crime and jail) don’t really matter – what matters is the relationship between cooperation, betrayal, and rewards.

It should be evident that both players end up best if they cooperate and stay silent. But if one party betrays the other, the betrayer suffers no penalty and imposes a larger one on the one they betray. So for each individual player, betrayal looks like a better outcome than cooperation. The net result is that mutual betrayal is, in a sense, the most likely outcome.

A single play of the game is interesting as a study in trust and self-interest. And individual political outcomes are often intuitively understandable by treating them “roughly” as a prisoners dilemma. But what we should be thinking about are repeated plays of the game.

Implicit in the relationship between cooperation and self-interest, and often overlooked, is the equality between the actors. Betrayal from either actor penalizes equally. This equality means “if you hurt me, I can hurt you.” And so it’s fairly easy to convince ones self that if you’re playing the prisoners dilemma over and over against the same opponent, a good strategy might be to initially cooperate, and then “do unto them as they did unto you.”

Tit for tat.

Intuitively most of us would call this strategy “fair,” and it turns out to be both simple to describe and highly effective at achieving cooperation.

Tit-for-tat clearly isn’t generally possible in American politics, due to party power dynamics if nothing else – but I wonder how the party and partisans would behave if it was.

Always ask why

The family story (“legend” just sounds pretentious) is that one of my most valuable, and likely most irritating, habits was instilled and encouraged at a young age by my uncle Denis. “Always,” he advised, “ask why.” I’ve always imagined it must have caused my parents some consternation that his was a direction I chose to listen to.

Fast forward a bunch, and I’m working at one of the A’s in FAANG (the river, not the fruit). Like any large company, it has a culture. Some of its norms and customs have been instituted deliberately, others have accreted, all have evolved. Adherence to those customs is a large part what it means to “be one of us.” While I disagree with some of those customs, in the aggregate I think they’re positive. One such positive, in my view, is that we look critically at our mistakes, try to understand root causes, and to capture those observations and lessons in written form and publish them, so that others might learn vicariously. And part of that process is to ask the five whys.

The nuance, and the value, in the five whys approach is is asking ‘the right’ question at each iteration, stress-testing the answers, and following the chain of causality, even if – especially if – it leads in unexpected directions. When it works, the illumination can be blinding.

So what, I hear you ask? Well, I’m reading more and more in the “main-stream media” asserting that social media may just might be hurting us. What I don’t read much of, if any, is thoughtful analysis of the how and why. Mostly, the argument goes, it’s because they have all the data – and with enough data, “they” (whoever “they” are) can make us do what they want. Some sort of social-media mass hypnosis.

This, to put it crudely, sets off my bullshit detector.

I don’t think it can be wholly explained by Facebook, or Twitter, or Mark Zuckerberg and all the data they have about us. They have the data we give them. If an individual tends to engage with content that’s dishonest, narcissistic, misogynistic, xenophobic, or antiscience – the algorithms didn’t make them do it. The person is making the choices. Clicking the links. Clicking some more.

I also don’t think it’s Trump. Don’t get me wrong, he’s pathologically dishonest, narcissistic, misogynistic, xenophobic, and antiscience, but he didn’t create any of those things. And regardless if he was elected to office because of those traits or in spite of them, he didn’t invent anything. He tapped into something existing. Exploited it.

So the algorithms feed us what we show them we want – it’s just operant conditioning – and we’re conditioning the algorithm. Living in a filter bubble certainly doesn’t makes us better, more rounded, people – but feedback loops amplify an input signal. They don’t create it.

So where does that leave us?

If you’re one of those people, like me, who have concluded that social media is a clear and present danger to democracy, ask yourself why. And keep asking. Because you can’t fix a problem until you understand it, and I believe we need to fix this problem.

And, like that, it’s gone

Today is “Summer Bank Holiday.” I have, basically, no idea what that means – but I can’t help but think that it says something deep about British culture that the country all but shuts down on “bank holidays.”

“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” [1]

I also can’t help but notice – as the days grow slightly shorter, my morning runs cooler, and the afternoon light more golden – that in a few short weeks another Summer will officially be over.

The Earth made another voyage around the sun and all most of us got was this lousy pandemic.

I’m not sure why it matters to me. Dawnise and I rarely travel in the summer – we have no kids, so we’re not bound by the traditional school year, and Dawnise and hot weather don’t get along particularly well, so we usually do our traveling in the Spring and Fall.

Never-the-less, I feel like I’ve missed something.

Life in London is slowly creeping toward normal. More people on the streets. More people commuting to work. The response to the government’s “Eat Out to Help Out” scheme suggests that people are willing to set health concerns aside in return for £10 off their meal bill. The scheme ends today, so soon we’ll see how many of those discount diners remember how much they used to enjoy eating food they didn’t cook, and wasn’t delivered by a guy on a scooter, and keep going out for meals.

Even the theaters have started re-opening, though I’m unsure who’s attending the socially distanced shows. Sitting through a multi-hour performance wearing a mask is somewhere near the opposite of my idea of a good time.

In the midst of all this, and almost certainly because of all this, the case count across the UK is trending up. The hospitalization and mortality rates aren’t following, and while that’s clearly good news, it does raise obvious questions.

In more positive news, thanks to a roughly £1.9 million investment from the UK government, the Cambridge vaccine could be in trials ‘by autumn.’

In mundane news, my BRP is still in the hands of the driver and vehicle licensing agency (DVLA). A polite, but basically pointless, online chat asking when I might have my identity document back ended with “hopefully not too much longer.”

Good thing we’re not planning to go anywhere for a bit.

Craving change, seeking the familiar

I ‘ve been seeing familiar faces around town on my morning runs. Fellow expats from Luxembourg, friends from Seattle, even a friend from California I haven’t seen in decades. None of these people live here, or have any reason to be in London.

Of course, I’m not actually seeing people I know – just people who bear a passing resemblance. My subconscious is seeking the familiar – and when it can’t find it, it creates it. Patterns in the noise.

While part of me is looking for the familiar, mostly we’re drowning in it. We mark time with mundane tasks: the weekly grocery shop – elided this week in favor of delivery to resupply on some things heavier than we wanted to carry home. The alternating biweekly visits from the cleaning service and saturday morning “hoovering” of the apartment. Weekend visits to our neighborhood cafe for breakfast.

I expect Tim Hartford is right – I won’t likely remember many details about what I did during the pandemic.

From that perspective, work has been a welcome distraction. Between the changes brought on by the pandemic, and my moving onto a project predominantly based in Seattle, my work days have shifted to a “makers schedule.” Very different from the last two-and-a-half years. I have something of a habit of fixing foundational things that other people ignore, or work around, and there’s been plenty of opportunity for that of late. It’s not flashy or sexy, but making dozens of my colleagues more efficient and productive is, from my perspective, heavily leveraged.

After successfully feeding ourselves twice a day for just shy of six month, we’ve started occasionally letting someone else cook. We’ve Deliveroo‘ed an occasional meal from local(ish) restaurants. Adding Chinese and Indian to our rotation has been a welcome change, but I quite miss the “out” part of dining out.

In other “non-news,” there’s been no response yet from the DVLA regarding my license application. Despite it feeling like forever in fact it’s only been two weeks since I shipped them off my BRP and paperwork. The messaging on their website respectfully requests I leave them the hell alone until at least three weeks have passed. I email’d them anyway – and got the automated response I expected – “we’ll get to you in due course, now cool your heels and wait your turn.”

I hate waiting.

Papers, please!

I always planned to get my UK driving license. Not because we wanted, or expected, to own a car – but to be able to hire one and reach places transit doesn’t.

On our previous visits to the UK we’ve driven the length and width of the island, but for practice we sorta planned on taking a few car trips in the first year. While we were both permitted to drive on our Seattle licenses. Like nearly everything else, COVID threw a spanner in those works.

So as it turns out, things are starting to re-open in the UK and we’re just past the first anniversary of our arrival and not permitted to drive on our US licenses. So it’s time to take the tests and get licensed.

The initial application for a provisional license was easy – I hand them some basic information, paid the application fee, and at the end was informed that I needed to submit additional information and that “something would arrive by post.”

Said something arrived late last week – a form to sign, and instructions to send them a suitably sized photograph of me and the original – no copies accepted – of either my US Passport or UK Biometric Residence Permit. They’d send it back 2nd class post. Eventually.

The DVLA (Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency) – like any self-respecting government bureaucracy – scoffs at the idea of service level agreements, even during normal times.

And these times are not what you’d call normal.

Without both of those documents I can’t exit and re-enter the UK. So I spent a few minutes figuring out which one was easier to replace if needed (conclusion: they’re pretty equally a pain in the arse) and this afternoon posted my completed form and BRP to Swansea, special next day delivery, with an included special delivery return envelope.

And now, I wait.

And hope the universe doesn’t choose to answer the rhetorical question: “what would be so important that I’d risk traveling back to the US in the next couple months?”

When an errand feels like an adventure, and other thoughts

Long ago, nearly in the before-time, I bought a merino wool base layer from Mountain Warehouse. Since I was ordering anyway, I added a few speculative items to the basket, as did Dawnise. On arrival most of the speculative items were earmarked for return. As the UK was busily shutting down, we put the the stuff in a closet.

(queue time passing)

I thought of that bag, sitting in the closet, on our way home from brunch this morning and decided to see if I could still arrange a return. It was months past purchase, long past their official returns policy. For a while their website had a message about extending return windows, but the message was now gone. So, expecting at least a bit of an argument, I tossed the goods in a backpack and walked a mile to the shop.

Aside from my morning run it’s was the furthest I’ve ventured on foot in months, and in a different direction. A few blocks after setting out I felt like an intrepid explorer. Surely no one has been here for months! I thought. Only to turn a corner and find a few people sitting on benches in park. Hrm. Ok. Clearly someone has. By the time I reached my destination it all seemed almost familiar, and normal. I donned my mask, had a quick chat with the shop attendant who was more than happy to accommodate the return. I took a different route home, arriving just before a sudden cloudburst would have soaked me through.

And now I can tell Dawnise tales of far off lands she hasn’t seen in half a year.

So that was that.

In more serious news, it seems the federal occupation of Portland is extending to more cities, including Seattle. I keep wondering if, one morning, I’m going to wake up to learn our townhouse in the city is under siege. Or is no more.

These are not questions I expect to have to ask about a self-proclaimed first world democracy.

Memories of things to come

We ate dinner at a restaurant tonight. With friends.

It’s hard to describe exactly how unusual that was. And simultaneously how perfectly ordinary.

A good friend of ours has a problem that seems related to acid in her diet. She’s been adhering to a strictly neutral/alkaline diet for a few months, waiting for non-essential medical services to resume so she can get properly tested and diagnosed. Her doctor called with an opening on Monday, and to gather data she needed to eat something close to “regular meals.”

She wanted a steak & a glass of wine, and asked if we’d be up for finding a restaurant and eating with them. To my surprise Dawnise decided she was up for it.

A bit of searching this afternoon revealed that the Flat Iron and the Hawksmoor near us are still closed, and a bit more searching by our friend secured us a booking at Blacklock.

We got dressed. Dawnise did her hair and put on makeup and heels. I wore a proper shirt. And shoes. And a watch.

And we walked to meet them.

The restaurant took a bunch of seemingly reasonable steps – the doors at both ends of the large room were left open to the outside. Every other table was left empty. Our server asked about how close we were comfortable with her getting, and there were hand sanitizer stations strategically placed around the room.

The food was fine, but more important was we were out.

And there were moments, talking to good friends, eating food we neither cooked nor collected, that felt so… normal.

P.S. When we got home, the cats collected around Dawnise on the sofa, seemingly having forgotten that in the “before-time” the humans were not here as often as they were.