B r a i n C l e a r

Sorting through life one thought at a time

Tag: technology

  • Apparently I’m an Electromagnetic Disturbance

    It started Tuesday, just as I was about to drive home from work. Apple CarPlay wouldn’t connect. My car is a 2018, and I use an adapter to make CarPlay wireless. It can be a little wonky, so I unplugged it, plugged it back in, tried restarting my phone. Nothing. I finally played my audiobook through Bluetooth and drove home.

    A reasonable person might have left it there for the night. I went straight to Google and spent two hours troubleshooting in my garage.

    By bedtime, I was still thinking about it. I grabbed the bedroom TV remote yes, there’s a TV in the bedroom, I know, sleep experts everywhere are shaking their heads and pressed the button. The TV wouldn’t come on. I tried the other remote and got a screen asking me to log back into everything with a QR code or a password.

    Absolutely not. I had reached my troubleshooting limit. I put in my earplugs and went to bed. (The earplugs are because my Frenchie sleeps beside me. If you’ve heard a Frenchie sleep, you understand.)

    I woke up at 3:30 a.m. and couldn’t fall back asleep. Naturally.

    I go into the office three days a week, and Thursday wasn’t technically one of them, but skipping it meant a mandatory Friday instead, and Thursdays are usually quiet. So in I went anyway.

    I booted up my computer. No internet. Which meant I couldn’t connect to GlobalProtect. I asked a couple of other people if they were having trouble. Nope. Just me. So “I restarted the computer I had just started”

    That was number three. At this point I was beginning to wonder if I was the problem. Not in an emotional growth kind of way. In an am I interfering with electrical signals? kind of way.

    Apparently three glitches in two days wasn’t enough to make me leave the car alone. That night, I spent another hour in the garage trying to get CarPlay working. Still no luck. I went to bed hoping that, at the very least, everything would stay quiet until morning.

    Then, at 2:20 a.m. the fire alarm went off and scared the living hell out of me. It announced a problem in the “Family Room.” Except I didn’t have anything called Family Room in the app. Now I was awake, startled, and trying to solve a mystery in a room that apparently only the smoke detector knew existed.

    It turns out the detector can have one name in the app and a different name that it says out loud. “Family Room” was its default callout name. I still don’t know what set it off possibly dust but at least I know which room it was talking about. At 2:20 a.m., that information would have been helpful.

    And the car? After all the adapter troubleshooting, the problem appears to have been the cable. It could charge, but it wasn’t transmitting data. I got a new cable, and CarPlay came back.

    Which means the actual culprits were: one bad cable, one confused smoke detector, one TV demanding my life story, and absolutely nothing to do with my personal electromagnetic field. Disappointing, honestly. For a few days there, I almost thought the universe was trying to tell me something.

    Yogi Tea says: Not every signal is a sign. But every sign is also, technically, a signal.

  • Vendor Speed Dating

    A couple of weeks ago, a woman reached out to me on LinkedIn about an invite-only event: leaders from the data and AI world, sitting down for roundtable discussions on data strategy, AI, and where the two are headed.

    “Blending peer perspectives with real-world approaches,” the invite promised.

    Sounded interesting. Totally up my alley.

    I noticed they specifically weren’t inviting salespeople.

    Now I know why. 😂

    Walking into a room full of strangers and making small talk is not exactly my idea of a good time, so I was hesitant. But the subjects sounded too good to pass up, so I went.

    I got seated with two other people, one from Microsoft and one from HP, both at companies about the same size as where I work. We hit it off immediately, mostly by admitting we’d each almost bailed, and then by discovering we all wore Oura rings.

    None of us knew what was coming.

    There was a stack of papers on the table. It looked like we were supposed to rate something. I didn’t think much of it.

    Then it became clear.

    Speed dating. Basically.

    Except instead of asking what you like to do on weekends, they ask about your data architecture. And instead of deciding on a second date, you’re deciding whether your company needs their software.

    Eight vendors. Every 10 to 15 minutes, they rotated from table to table. Pitch their product, ask about our problems, explain how they could fix them.

    Yes, I realize this is also known as a sales pitch.

    Luckily, the woman from HP had an actual use case, so I mostly sat back and watched vendor after vendor take a swing at solving it.

    Ding. Next vendor. Ding. Next vendor. Ding. Next vendor.

    This went on for a couple of hours, after a full workday.

    Here’s the thing, though. I’d spent all this time before the event wondering if I’d be out of my depth. Would everyone else know more than me? Be more fluent in AI strategy and governance and all the impressive-sounding stuff?

    Instead, I noticed something I didn’t expect: we are all trying to figure something out.

    People from massive companies were stuck on the same kinds of problems, fishing for the same kinds of answers, sometimes just sitting there letting someone else do the talking, same as me.

    That was worth more than anything any vendor pitched.

    A bell rang for dinner. I’d made enough professional connections for one evening.

    I left.

    No dinner, no new software.

    Just slightly less impostor syndrome, a funny story to tell at work, and a few new LinkedIn connections.

    I’ll take it.

  • Life as an Analyst

    The truth is, we spend most of our days trying not to follow every interesting rabbit hole the data puts in front of us.

    Someone asks for “just a quick number,” and three joins, two CTEs, and one existential crisis later, we’ve found it—along with four other numbers nobody asked for but that we now can’t stop thinking about. We tell ourselves we’ll ignore them. We do not ignore them.

    Case in point: I sat down last Saturday morning to look at one weird number. Four hours later it was afternoon, I still hadn’t finished, and nobody on earth had asked me to work on a Saturday. That’s not dedication. It’s curiosity… with questionable boundaries.

    I’ve always loved puzzles. Crossword puzzles, logic puzzles… it doesn’t really matter. I don’t even mind asking for a clue now and then. The fun isn’t knowing the answer. The fun is figuring it out.

    That’s probably why I became an analyst.

    The truth is, half our job is explaining that correlation isn’t causation, while the other half is secretly hoping it is—just this once. It would make the story so much cleaner.

    People think analysts spend their days building reports and dashboards. We do. But what we really do is ask questions.

    Why is that number different? Why did it change? Should those two reports match? What happened here?

    Every dataset tells a story. Our job is figuring out what it’s trying to say.

    We build dashboards that we genuinely hope will help people make better decisions. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they’re opened once, admired for thirty seconds, and never seen again.

    The truth is, nobody actually wants the raw data. They want the one number that confirms what they already believed walking into the meeting.

    We know this. We give them the number. Then, gently, we show them the other numbers.

    This is called being thorough. It’s also called hope.

    Every “quick question” is a Trojan horse for a two-day project, and we say yes anyway—not because we have to, but because we’re curious like that. Somewhere between the fifth JOIN and the sixth GROUP BY, this stopped being a job requirement and became a personality trait.

    We don’t fix the data because someone asked us to. We fix it because leaving it wrong feels like leaving a picture frame crooked on someone else’s wall. It nags at us until we fix it. Or maybe that’s just me.

    I didn’t finish that Saturday problem in one sitting, by the way. I came back to it Sunday. I’m still a little annoyed about it.

    Maybe that’s the real job description nobody puts in the posting.

    Not “Proficient in SQL, Power BI, Tableau, SSIS…”

    Although yes, preferably someone who can also remain reasonably calm at 11 p.m. when a package fails for reasons the error log refuses to explain.

    No.

    The real qualification is curiosity.

    Someone who can’t walk past a number that doesn’t quite fit without wondering why.

    The most honest conversation in any company happens in a footnote that says, “Excludes outliers.”

    Almost nobody reads it.

    We read it. We wrote it. We know exactly which outliers were excluded, why they were excluded, and we probably have strong opinions about whether they should have been excluded at all.

    That’s the quiet, slightly obsessive, deeply curious life of an analyst.

    Chasing the number nobody asked for. Straightening the picture frame nobody noticed was crooked. Following one more rabbit hole than we probably should.

    Because every unexpected number tells a story. And every story begins with someone curious enough to ask one more question.

    Our minds aren’t wired to stop at the answer. They’re wired to wonder what else we might be missing.