the life and times of Allan Chen

1. Birth (you gotta start somewhere)
2. Go to elementary school, spend the afternoons running around like idiots.  Do things only idiots would do.
3. Go to middle school, be mean to each other
4. Spend high school first feeling lost, then concentrating on getting into a good college
5. If you’re luck enough to get an admissions officer to take pity on you, you head off to that good college, and learn about life
6. Start a career.  It need not be high up, it need not be the career for the rest of your life.  But hopefully get into a job that could lead somewhere.
7. Move up the ladder.  Challenge yourself.  Get noticed
8. Perhaps pick up an advanced degree to really let them know that you’re serious
9. Achieve a management level position (or whatever it is that you “want” to do in life – maybe it’s being a top-level consultant)
10. Keep moving around, be more successful, transition from a mode of ambitious drive to a calmer mode when you’ve reached the first of hopefully several major career points
11. Retire, die happy.

This is a pretty basic sequence of events, of course.  But it’s also roughly what I want to do in life.

My question is:  are there ages that are associated with these various waypoints?  Can one not move from one step to another, or perhaps gain respect at particular steps, if one is too young?

We all hope that the answer is “no.”  That we live or at least work in a meritocracy and we will be rewarded for our hard work and achievements.

But lately it seems that I can’t get respect from others.  Lately I feel like just a kid being treated as such.

Tons of fun.  And it sure does feel unfair.

In the age of 140 character tweets, super-bloggers that post just a few paragraphs at a time (hey, Paul Krugman – for a Nobel Prize winner, I really wish I could get more from you than a link to someone else’s article and a few nuggets of commentary), and facebook status updates that are at most 2 sentences, the power of e-mail seems to have lost its luster.

E-mail has never had a very good rap.  Between viral forwards, the fact that its a transport mechanism for viruses themselves, and its quick reputation as “merely” an electronic replacement for written letters, and you don’t get very far.  Plus, there has always been this issue of “tone.”  Yeah yeah, we have all written an e-mail where we meant one thing, and the reader has gotten something completely different at the other end.  Often, that misread has been a big one – you write what felt like a nice, diplomatic missive with a simple question, and the recipient takes offense and all hell breaks loose.

Twitter and Facebook status messages don’t have to deal with this, for the most part, because they are so darn short.  How can someone take “feeling down today” the wrong way?  There isn’t even enough text there to misread.

Obviously, this is leading to a personal situation, so read on…

(more…)

I was staring at the box of 24 or however many bottles of Arrowhead water we recently bought at Costco while eating my morning yogurt, and noticed the big graphic that said:

“Eco-Shape!  Less Plastic, Better for the Environment.”

This struck me as very intriguing.

1. Can a shape be eco-friendly?  Does it fit better into recycling bins?  Does it take up less room in landfills?
2. Do bottles with more plastic take more…energy to recycle?

First, if the point is that it takes up less room in landfills, then Arrowhead has some dark development and marketing teams.  If it takes more energy to recycle a thicker plastic bottle than a thin one…I think maybe that needs to be addressed.  We’ve been recycling plastic for decades now and it turns out that we could have saved energy all along just by making bottles with thinner walls??