The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

And in the end (London residency day 12)

Three hours from the financial accounting mid-term, with images of balance sheets dancing in our heads, we're just about done with the first CCMBA residency. The last 12 days seem like 12 months. Many of us haven't left the hotel since Tuesday, except for dinner or a run near St. Katharine's Docks.

Six hours from now, we'll be done with the residency, and thinking about next week. Right now—back to the books.

Securely stupid (London residency day 11)

I learned a valuable lesson yesterday: when you lock your computer to your hotel room desk, and you put the cable-lock key in your pocket, you have to remove the key from your pocket before sending the slacks down to the laundry.

This realization crept up on me over a very quiet 90-second period that started when I looked in my room safe for the key and didn't find it there.

I won't keep you in suspense: housekeeping found and returned the key this morning. This is good, because I had no idea how I was going to fit the desk in the overhead compartment on my flight home.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch... (London residency day 10)

The U.S. Postal Service finally plans to sell the Old Post Office building in Chicago, which they abandoned more than 10 years ago:

One of the biggest real estate auctions in the city’s history is slated for Thursday, when the U.S. Postal Service is to sell the Old Main Post Office.

And even though the postal service is planning an "absolute auction" — meaning the building is to be sold regardless of price, with a suggested opening bid of just $300,000 — the question remains who will step up for the roughly 279,000 m² building at 433 W. Van Buren St., which straddles the Congress Parkway and has been vacant for more than a decade.

This is the same building into which the Postmaster for Chicago ploughed $1 million to renovate his own office—about 6 months before the USPS moved out.

The results are in (London residency day 9, part 1)

We got our official team MBTI profile back this morning. It turns out, I was wrong on one person's Sensing-iNtuitive axis; we're really ESTJ ESTJ ESTJ ESTP ENTP INTP. The balance of Ps and Js is good; the unanimity of Ts is not; and we're acutely aware of the issues surrounding the 5:1 E:I ratio.

But that's all for tonight, when we work out our "team charter," the list of expectations and guidelines for how we'll work together from now until April, when Duke recomposes all the teams. Now, half of the class are taking a cruise up the Thames while the other half go on corporate tours. Photos to follow this evening.

The tide is high (London residency day 8)

We go in and out of classrooms all day, every day, and along the way have watched the Thames' noticable tides. We're just a couple days past the New Moon, meaning it's spring tide. Today the BBC weather centre predicted a 7-meter (22-foot) spread at London Bridge, just upriver from our hotel.

Here's low tide, around 10 this morning, from the hotel:

Now high tide, about 4 this afternoon:

Here are side-by-side comparisons of Butler's Wharf:

This happens because this far downriver the Thames is actually an estuary all the way to Teddington Lock, well past London.

One notices these things when one has a break in a 4-hour financial accounting class.

Dinner break (Day 7 continued)

I walked across the Thames for dinner tonight—my first time out of the hotel in almost two days—and had a lovely risotto al fresco. On the way back I snapped a photo of the hotel where we've been imprisoned stayed for the past week:

For good measure I also took another gratuitous photo of Tower Bridge:

Because, really, you can't have too many photos of something that cool, right?

Meanwhile, back home (London residency day 7)

As sleep deprivation and other physical assaults continue here in London, and as we begin a five-day sprint through all of Financial Accounting, I pause to note one of the bigger news stories from back home in Chicago. No, not the Cubs sale to the Ricketts family or United's and American's shared panic; I mean the alligator in the Chicago river:

A 3-foot-long alligator was caught in the Chicago River last night and is en route to a more suitable home, according to a spokesman for the Chicago Commission on Animal Care and Control.

Animal Care and Control called the Chicago Herpetological Society, which sent two people in a canoe last night to set traps for the reptile.

All right. I can deal with that. Moving on...

InterCultural Edge (London residency day 5 and then some)

It's 1:10 am London time, meaning I will enjoy no more than six hours of sleep tonight (including thirty minutes drooling on the breakfast table). Because I'm running on fumes, and therefore no longer playing with a full deck on the top floor, I have decided to post the assignment that kept me up so late.

(The essay that follows refers to the InterCultural Edge, an experimental tool for evaluating cross-cultural interactions out of Duke's business school. Otherwise I hope it stands on its own. Also, it's important to understand that the assignment was to post the essay in the program's community blog. I inferred from this a license to use a much less formal style than I would ever use in a business essay. I will report the accuracy of this inferrence sometime later.)

Imagine a crowded commuter train at the end of the working day. You’re tired, you’re on your way home, every seat is taken. You find a seat that has, instead of a person in it, a large, heavy, malodorous, aluminum-framed backpack. The kid across from this monstrosity grasps the situation after an uncomfortable moment and stuffs the backpack in the luggage rack overhead. All is well.

You open your newspaper, the train pulls out of the terminal, and you settle in for the hour-long journey home. Ah, good: your football team won, your shares have gone up, and—

—A large, heavy, malodorous, aluminum-framed backpack lands on your head.

On your head.

Heavy. Backpack.

It hurts. It knocks your glasses clear off, tears your newspaper in half, and for good measure falls bounces off four other people, just missing horrified kid who no doubt feels as shocked as you do but doesn’t have your torn newspaper, bent glasses, or bump on the head.

What do you do?

Before answering, some more context: You are going from Victoria Station to your house in West Sussex, a well-to-do semi-rural area of south-west of London. You are British. You were brought up a Certain Way. You don’t Do Certain Things. You have a Stiff Upper Lip. (You also have a Headache and Blurry Vision, but that’s Irrelevant Right Now.)

What you do, therefore, is this: you apologize to the shocked-but-suspiciously-uninjured American kid while he struggles, panicked, to put his backpack somewhere it won’t hurt anyone else.

Yes, you apologize, quietly and politely, to your assailant. For good measure, and despite your throbbing head, clearer vision (another traveler has unobtrusively returned your glasses to you), and anticipation of new challenges reading the Times, you help the kid wrangle the backpack to a different luggage rack, one that is actually wide enough to support it.

Many years later the kid grows up and, after taking the InterCultural Edge Survey, has a tool to describe what happened and why he found it so odd.

(You can stop imagining now.)

The above describes my first trip to the U.K., right after I finished college. I had heard about British stoicism and watched a lot of British TV in the U.S., but until then, I had never seen it in person. Watching my backpack fall on the guy horrified me; his reaction shocked me.

See, I grew up in Chicago and went to school in New York. In either city, had my backpack fallen on someone during rush hour, I could reasonably have expected being cursed out, sued, or beaten up, possibly with my own backpack. In New York the other commuters might even have held me down while he pummeled me. So why had this person apologized for having the temerity to sit under the thing while it fell on him?

ICE doesn’t explain the incident, but it does provide some vocabulary around it. The gentleman and everyone around him wanted to diffuse tension, avoid conflict, avoid disagreement, and avoid letting their feelings guide their behavior. In sum, they showed a preference for the “Reserved” communication style.

Of course, at the time, their reactions made no sense. I spent the four years immediately preceding the trip in a city not particularly associated with avoiding conflict or restraining feelings. New Yorkers typically tell you what they’re thinking, when they’re thinking it, and without caring if it starts a conflict, because to them, conflict means you’re “getting everything on the table;” they tend toward the “Expressive” communication style. Chicagoans, while more reserved than New Yorkers, stay firmly within the “Direct” style. (These are generalizations, of course. People in both cities range from Reserved to Direct to Expressive, sometimes in the space of a single day.)

In England, people seem to prefer the “Reserved” style. This comports with the popular understanding in the U.S. of British people generally, and of English people specifically. People on the Reserved end of things want to keep interpersonal interactions smooth and painless. Where a stereotypical American would argue with the statement “When I disagree with someone, I avoid direct conflict,” a stereotypical English person would nod politely. In the same vein, an English person might say, “I avoid clear-cut expressions of my feelings when I communicate with others,” while a New Yorker might counter, “When a heavy object lands on my head for no apparent reason, I swear like a sailor.”

I never found out what happened to that guy. I got off the train before he did, and he didn’t seem interested in getting my address or calling a lawyer. Possibly this is because he had a severe concussion, but none of the people around him chased me down the platform either. To this day I imagine him returning home with messed-up hair and bent glasses, answering his wife’s “What happened?!” with a quiet, “Oh, nothing, mustn’t grumble.”