November 10, 2017
Dear Everyone:
I had a meeting this week with a company we’ll call “Popsicle”.
That’s not its real name, of course; but it’s no sillier than
anything else.
Nearly 20 years ago, when I served as the Project Manager for a team
looking for a new
software product, I got to know the president of a small software
firm. He told me about
searching for a name for one of their products.
When he suggested they name it after his company, his
patent attorney
openly laughed in his face.
The lawyer suggested that the software president and his team sit down
with a dictionary and a thesaurus, picking out possible names that they
liked. Then he told them to
cull the list down to about a half-dozen.
Only then would the patent attorney begin spending time
researching whether or not that name had already been
trademarked.
Gone were the days of naming your brilliant collection of codes
after characters from
The Lord
of the Rings and
The
Chronicles of Narnia.
The people at “Popsicle” make
robots and have
recently decided to branch out into
Records and
Information Management (RIM).
I have no idea why.
Yet.
Apparently, their robots are very good at taking a box of hardcopy paper
records and running them through a
scanning device.
From there, according to their thinking, it’s just a
hop-skip-and-a-jump to automatically classifying documents and applying
retention
to them. Just off the top of
my head, I’m thinking their coding includes a lot of “fuzzy
logic”.
Anyway. At our last
ARMA Chapter Meeting, “Becky” brought
“Nikki” with her. “Nikki”,
who is apparently a recent college graduate, is a “Product Manager”, a
term that means whatever you want it to, at “Popsicle”; and is more than
interested in “hosting” a future Meeting at her shop in the back of
Hayward.
In the meantime, she is scouting for “Records Management Experts” to
interview about RIM. As an
actual expert, and since I don’t have to go to work anymore, I
volunteered to be interviewed at the “Popsicle” shop.
This proved to be very interesting, indeed.
Once I found the place, it turned out to be a very large
warehouse-sort-of-open-space-with-walls-and-a-roof.
Apparently, this is the California version of the “traditional”
loft for startup companies.
As I opened the door to what I presumed was the entrance, I was
confronted by a round reception desk occupied by a larger-than-life
cardboard cutout of
Darth Vader. Beyond that
was another entrance to another reception desk occupied by a real, live
person who asked me to sign in, both on paper and electronically, while
she alerted “Nikki” that I had arrived.
“Nikki” started with a tour of the rather enormous space, most of it
empty for now. It was so big
that they had racks of brightly-colored scooters for employees to use
getting from Point A to Point B.
There was a fully-loaded kitchen; meals supplied for everyone.
An exercise room; a video-game room; a ping-pong table.
A few conference rooms.
Very few offices.
Most of the employees worked in a space called “The Pit”, which
consisted of lots of open desks.
And she did show me where the “robots” work, in enclosures that
look a lot like portable closets.
They can be set up in any configuration necessary for the
client’s particular project.
Following the tour, we sat down in a conference room and “Nikki” asked a
lot of open-ended questions like, “What do you consider the greatest
challenge as a Records Manager?”
That’s easy: Getting anyone
to listen to you and pay the slightest attention to RIM.
Basically, I chatted for about 90 minutes on all-things-RIM.
Then I asked if “Popsicle” had a RIM Program of its own.
“Nikki” and a colleague-glued-to-his-laptop-the-whole-time
admitted that they had a “Retention Policy”, but neither was sure if
they had an actual Retention Schedule.
I also offered to send “Nikki” referrals to several RIM consulting firms
that I know in the
Bay Area
and that was that.
In other news…
Oscar Season
has begun.
This is when the studios bring out the films that they hope will garner
nominations and, ultimately, revenue-enhancing awards from the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS).
To that end, witness
Victoria and
Abdul, a pleasant bit of old-fashioned fluff based on a true
story, which is Hollywood-ese for “ever so loosely based on some real
people that really lived a really long time ago; to be taken with a very
large grain of salt”. In
this case, someone claims to have found the long-lost diary of a man
sent from India to
England near the end
of the reign of
Queen Victoria, to present the Queen (and “Empress
of India”) with some token of importance.
Judi Dench plays
Victoria as an aging monarch, surrounded by a phalanx of servants and
courtiers, each jealously guarding their individual fiefdoms.
The one who comes off the worst is Victoria’s eldest son,
“Bertie”. Known later as
King Edward VII,
“Bertie” (short for Albert), is depicted as sycophant with nothing more
to do than frequent the gambling houses at Monte Carlo.
In fact, he was employing what would later come to be known as
“shuttle diplomacy”, striving desperately to hold Europe together up to
the beginning of
World War I.
Victoria is old, isolated and bored.
Enter
Abdul,
played by Ali Fazal,
who was chosen for the honor based almost entirely on his height.
Victoria promptly adopts him and his family, as a sort of pet, to
the chagrin of the establishment.
They enjoy a number of charming interludes.
That’s pretty much it.
But remember that Dench won the
Academy Award for playing
Queen
Elizabeth I in
Shakespeare
in Love nearly 20 years ago.
Dench pointed out that she spent barely a quarter-hour on the
screen. Sometimes that’s all
it takes.
Or so the studio hopes. The
other hopefuls are lining up, so
Victoria… probably won’t be around for long.
It’s certainly worth the price of popcorn, if only to check out
the set decoration, costumes, hair styles and jewelry.
Love, as always,
Pete
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