Found an old piece of video that reminded me of some of the fun and challenging things I did at TVBLOB, Fabrizio Caffarelli’s second startup, including:
Software interface and interaction design: Developed feature requests into step-by-step schematics of UI states and behaviors , worked with engineers to ensure correct and coherent implementation, worked with marketing and graphics team on graphic look-and-feel. Edited UI language directly in Java resource files (via Eclipse). Tested and refined usability, general testing.
Customer support process: designed custom web applications and SalesForce materials and processes to integrate with company’s custom back-end systems.
Managed, wrote, edited, and translated technical documentation for TVBLOB’s software and hardware. Provided technical input, copy editing, and translation for marketing and other materials. As part of documentation, I also did instructional videos like the above.
In 2004, I attended a talk by Margaret Heffernan at a business women’s club in Milan. She was launching her then new book, The Naked Truth, and one of the key lessons she shared was that we all should be striving to earn “walk-away money” – the amount of money you’d need to safely walk away from any job or situation, while still being able to support yourself for as long as needed.
“Walk-away money” is the polite phrase; it’s also called “fuck-you money.”
Translation for my non-Aussie readers: “Doing it tough” is an Australian expression that roughly means “to do something that is hard” (sometimes willingly, sometimes not), as in: “Melbourne has been doing it tough with lockdowns.”
The Gregg-Straughan household also knows a thing or two about doing hard lockdown: we did it for eight months last year. We as a family started sheltering in place before it was in any way required where we lived (the California Bay Area), because I have pre-existing conditions that probably make me more likely both to catch and to die from the COVID. I still have close ties to Italy, so I was aware early on how dangerous this virus was.
So was my daughter – she was lobbying her university in New York to switch to online learning weeks before they finally decided to. Later, when things got truly horrific in New York, the dean apologized to her for not having taken her concerns seriously earlier!
When I got my first non-temporary job in the US, I had health insurance, but I soon started to experience the pains of for-profit healthcare. I was recently returned from study abroad in India, with lingering exotic health problems requiring expensive testing, which I had to pay up front and then wait to be reimbursed. This was a recipe for disaster when I was living paycheck to paycheck.
The insurer was slow to pay, and I was short $300 to pay my rent. After a fruitless phone call to hurry them up, I started crying in the office – I had no other resources. My manager personally loaned me the money to tide me over. Which was very kind of him (thank you, Larry!) but it was absurd that I’d needed it.
When I was growing up in Bangkok 1967-71, one of my favorite places to go was the Saturday-Sunday Market. It was big even then, with sections devoted to food (the smell of dried fish raises warm memories for me), housewares, clothing, and live animals. I don’t know now whether any of those animals were intended for eating, but many of them were there to find homes as pets. Over the years, we tried out parrots, white mice, hamsters, fish, and of course cats and dogs.
We stayed mostly on the mundane end of the pets spectrum, but others literally went wild. It was something of a fashion among expats in Thailand in those days to keep gibbons as pets. We never tried this, probably because my parents observed others’ experiences: it is hard to raise a wild gibbon as a pet. I have seen one instance where it went well: the gibbon was treated as part of the family, eating at the low, traditional Thai-style dining table with them, with table manners at least as good as anyone else present. More often, pet gibbons became uncontrollable and bitey and had to be got rid of.
