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S6 E4 - 11:6:23, 10.33 AM | Otter.ai

S6 E4 - 11:6:23, 10.33 AM

Lee Skallerup Bessette1h 11min

Lee Skallerup Bessette

00:01

Hi, everyone, welcome to another episode of the other things ADHD podcast,

Aimée Morrison

00:07

the old things ADHD podcast, Now, occasionally publishing

Lee Skallerup Bessette

00:15

sporadically, intermittently, intermittently. Just get this bizarre sad, it's just gonna be like all synonyms for the next hour

Aimée Morrison

00:24

have also names for oops, yeah, we're

Lee Skallerup Bessette

00:27

back and then, and then I'm going to leave on vacation and we will we'll probably and then I leave on vacation and then it's going to be December and then it'll be next semester and we'll be like, Hi, we're back. It's February. I'm setting expectations, right, I just

Aimée Morrison

00:43

will say intermittent rewards is the way that people build addictions, right? Intermittent rewards are the hardest to quit. Yeah, like the sociological and animal behavioral research, right? It's like if the rat presses the lever, and every time there's a pallet, and then you stop the pellets, the rat gives up, right? really soon. But if you press the lever, and at random intervals, a pellet comes out, the rat will continue to press that lever for ever, hopefully, we are full of a listenership of rats, who will continue to press the button update podcast feed for the intermittent reward of occasionally hearing from us.

Lee Skallerup Bessette

01:20

And I know from the emails in the DMS that yes, in fact, we do that that is our entire audience. Which we really appreciate we'd love you for it. And we are probably the exact same way. In that sense, although I only tend to listen to podcasts that come out regularly only because I don't go deep diving into the rabbit hole of like, occasional podcasts than that sense or, or, or it's an occasional series where I'm like, Have they all been published? I'm just gonna binge listen. I binge listen to podcasts in the same way I've binge watch television shows. It's it's bad.

Aimée Morrison

02:04

I've watched almost all of the Netflix comedy unstable, with like, John Owen Lowe and Rob Lowe playing a father and son. Yeah, five episodes in a day and a half Well, ironing and then when I should have been doing other things, so like relatable. Yeah,

Lee Skallerup Bessette

02:22

no, I am currently because I really want to actually know if this has come up a lot in this podcast, which is shocking. Since it's an important part of me. I'm a huge Star Wars nerd. And so I want to really watch her soak up, but I never got into all of the animated series that needed to be watched in order to fully appreciate it. So now when i So I'm watching the Clone Wars cartoons, which will then move into the Rebels cartoon, just so I can watch this one series and have it resonate.

Aimée Morrison

02:56

We I don't know why you're not recording Star Wars podcast with my husband, because I heard exactly the same story from him. I really want to watch this new series, but it's based on the cartoon and I haven't I got to binge those. I got to get through all of this stuff. So I can watch the thing I want to watch. I'm like, well, as long as you're enjoying it. Yeah, what it's just like taking it on like a grim task, right? Gotta get through all these cartoons and like right now that's relatable to him. So maybe you guys should do a podcast to

Lee Skallerup Bessette

03:25

capitalist his nerd out about that because there aren't enough people talking nerding out about starkel

Aimée Morrison

03:31

I mean I don't have a retort that anyone want to reward an intermittent retort. That's me. Yeah.

Lee Skallerup Bessette

03:42

Yeah. No, no worries. It's a It's that time of year men that were brought to oh my god, this is a little bit of an aside, but fuck the time change this weekend. Like, you just you get into a routine and you're finally said and then it's just like yeah, we're taking an hour away from you. And you're just like you're

Aimée Morrison

04:04

getting an extra hour in the fall. Yeah. Oh, we are getting an extra hour extra hour. What do you bitching about oh my god, you know how to feel about this goddamn Chang Chang Singh. I'm so mad at you right now that I'm chewing an ice cream cone. I'm supposed to be muted, but I'm interrupting myself having a snack while reporting the podcast as they don't to start with me. Did you know that the coast of Maine and Thunder Bay are in the same time zone. We do know that for part of the summer. The sun comes up at like 7:40am in Maine and like 3am in Thunder Bay Do not blame the time change a time changes shifts who has to go home in the dark from the western edge of the timezone to the eastern edge of the timezone. The real problem is capitalism and clock time and the bureaucratization of the sun going up and down to suit somebody else's needs which is actually leads us God dammit. Not from a side quest but into the topic for today. Okay,

Lee Skallerup Bessette

05:06

good. All right, good. I did it. Or you did it. I did it. Your prime, you're kind of. Yeah. But you are kind of primed for that. So I maybe I didn't realize I had touched such a hot button. But I did. And I just yeah, I'm sorry. I just,

Aimée Morrison

05:23

I'm just tired. Well, that's fair. So the topic for today, which is highly topical for me, if you will, I'm just gonna be puns today. Like last week, it was French and it's gonna be bad puns is that I am noticing increasingly, that the pandemic realities of doing everything online and with very little support staff and with like duct tape and twine has been extended in most arenas of life into a series of cost cutting measures that are conflating some roles that didn't used to be the same role. largely what work that used to be provided by support staff is now meant to be done by other workers, right? Like things that also used to be, you know, used to go into a classroom and teach. And now you have to like go into a classroom and teach but also you have to create a website, right? is adding more and more tasks that are novel, but also increasing the amount of like web forms that people have to fill out? Or the example that I have, that's absolutely enraging me today, I will just lay it out for people is I have a doctoral candidate who is going to be defending I could not be more proud of this candidate. They have worked incredibly hard to produce novel redouble exciting work. We've been working closely together on this for many years now blood, sweat and tears for all of us. And we managed to get all the committee members to say yes, and we made a generate a list of possible internal external examiner's we've got an abstract written, submitted everything to the graduate office where normally that's the part where I like, wipe my hands on my pants go well, that's great. I'll see you at the defense. But no, no, what's happening now, like just for people who don't know, we think of a dissertation defense, the way these things used to go, there's an external examiner who comes from a different university who is an expert in the field, so sort of do field level quality control. And back in the day, people used to invite external examiner's and they would fly them to the university put them up in a hotel for two days. The dissertation defense might or might not be public. But often the external examiner might stay and do a talk and part of a visiting speaker series, there would be coffee and cookies at the defense the defense would take place in one of the nicer board rooms there would be room for like the audience or not. And then everybody would go out for dinner after we'll go celebrate you don't do we don't do any of that. Yeah, anymore. So now it's like nobody even offers I've been an external a bunch of stuff. Nobody even offers to bring you anywhere anymore. Right? So now we get external examiners who are like clearly sitting in their own kitchens, multitasking on other things in a T shirt. Well, thank Can you hear me now? Your screen sharing froze, your screen sharing froze, there is no catering. There is no meals, there's no visiting speaker. But for a while there, at least the university was booking all of the technology, right? They would send a tech guy who would manage all the setting up of like virtual lobbies and waiting rooms and kicking people in bringing people back or somebody's microphone is not working. And a recent change in the Faculty of Arts where I am, there was not announced it was just sort of launched. And I know why because people would have freaked out is now there's no tech guy to like, I got an email. Congratulations on your student finishing, you know, he we picked a time and a date. It's going to be virtuals though now the supervisor and then there's three paragraphs of text about what I have to do. I have to choose the platform teams, they suggest or zoom, and I need to have either a lobby or a waiting room in whichever one I choose. It's sometimes easier to set this thing up on Zoom. They say, Well, if you know how to do it, why don't you do it? I have to send invitations to everybody who's on the committee. Great. I know who they are, I also have to send one to the relevant administrative staff members both in my own unit and in the Faculty of graduate studies. I have to make sure I invite the tech guy who I'm not to contact unless it's an emergency. And since we can't just put an open link on the web because of the Zoom bombing and stuff. I have to be ready I have to solicit and receive a list of invitees that the candidate or others wish to participate in then I have to send them individual links as well. And then while the dissertation defense is happening, I have to do all the tech support. Listen, no, absolutely not. I mean, the the university always appoints a chair to these meetings. At a chair who is not involved in this defense or any way they just come in, they run the meeting because there's a recognition that this is a high stakes, intellectual and administrative event. So somebody needs to make sure the rules are being followed. And it can't be the committee. The committee is busy participating in the defense, right? Yeah. So we still have a chair that the university appoints. But somehow the supervisor of the candidate is going to spend the entire meeting, making sure the screen sharing is working, and no one is zoom bombing, or there's somebody in the waiting room that needs to be let in or somebody's talking and they're still on mute. Absolutely not. This is the kind of thing that makes it impossible for me to do my job. Right. I am a professor, what I'm supposed to do is be good at supervising my students. And I am I'm actually quite good at it. Right. What I'm not good at is booking multiperson meetings and setting up the technology. And then doing follow ups with people are getting RSVPs and running a waiting room, right? So you know that I knit during meetings, because I need something to do with my hands so that my brain can focus, right? Yeah, if I'm running the tech support, that's my brain trying to focus on to Yes, at the same time, and I guarantee you, I'm going to get snarky, and I'm going to get anxious. And I'm not going to do a good job of either thing. And this is a very, like niche example of dissertation defenses and like the downloading of like, what used to be somebody's job, right was part of a staff members job to do this. And now it isn't. So this is part of like downsizing. But it is also taking me out of something I'm quite good at which is my responsibility, my paygrade my job description, and then leaving me to trip over my own feet and break my nose by falling on my face was something that isn't my role, my expertise, or my ability, and I think many of us are probably stuck in this zone right now, where post pandemic, we find we have a bunch of different job duties and a bunch of supports that used to be there are not there anymore, and that were meant to be responsible for it. And I'm betting people are feeling some kind of way about it. Lee Yeah. Do you have any experience with this?

Lee Skallerup Bessette

12:09

Oh, my God. So for me, it's not so much. It's not so much staff. But it is around, like my role as a parent. Right. And so during the pandemic, of course, we all know everything moved online, right? And post pandemic, the people are back in class face to face, my kids go to school every day, and all that kind of stuff. But all of the work is still online. And it is the most libertine system because and I know that this is a frustration in in K through 12. But also higher education because you are. So there's two sides of the coin in higher education. Everybody's like, you can use the LMS you cannot use the LMS you can decide how you want to use the LMS you want to use modules, do you want to use the Syllabus tool, just want to throw all your files willy nilly into the you know, into the into Canvas as files and hope your students find them. Good Good luck with that. Whereas, you know, K to 12 it's a little bit more regimented. But in a way that is labyrinthine. Right. So like one of the biggest frustrations right now is with with my son and homework, and he has to submit homework twice. Anything that he does, he has to submit it twice, once to like once to like say it. And so I'm getting emails from, from his teachers saying like, I can see he's done the work, but I can't grade it. And I'm like, why not? Like well, he has to submit it again.

Aimée Morrison

13:48

Yeah, so now you have a bunch of emails that are actually about the process of something that's already been completed, right. Yeah. So the semantic activity. He's done the homework. Yeah. And he's submitted it but now using the teacher have to email each other because she can't open it because he clicked an insufficient number of buttons. I cannot imagine a more time wasting activity than Oh, yeah.

Lee Skallerup Bessette

14:10

And, and then and of course, being neurodiverse and I have a lot of empathy for this for a long time. That's why I didn't use SpeedGrader right? I didn't have students a in Blackboard is trash anyways. But for me if I didn't have a stack of papers next to me out of sight out of mind, right, so there's so many papers. Yeah, I love a stack of papers too. And so like, we've talked about, like physical lists and all that kind of stuff. Well, you know, how do I know if I'm missing homework? I was like, well, it's somewhere in school ology, where I don't, I can't really find it. I don't know. And so, you know, I'm looking at it's like, Did you so now it's like, did you just not do it? Did you not submit it the second time? Is it Do you even know where it is? Is this something that took place in class and was a physical thing that you have to like, physically make up and you know, again, And time is, it's we're in the time you want me and so it could be last week and already it's like, I don't remember.

Aimée Morrison

15:06

Yeah, I think that absence of physical cues is is kind of important. And the fact that there's like, on the one hand, like, here's an either or. Okay, yeah, on the one hand, like you're describing the loosey goosey ness of like higher ed, right, and the way we get to use our tools, and then the kind of strictures of the K to 12 system. And both of those are good and bad, right? The the strictures help a parent navigate something that is like, frankly, bullshit, right? Like, get the homework done, handle homework and like whatever it shouldn't be, like 10 emails back and forth vote change the permissions on the Google Doc or like, I can see it, but they can't grade it, it was submitted, you have to redo it, like nobody can can fix what was clearly a simple clerical error, like, great. And then the other thing is, there is a push for more standardization for everybody that that produces, you know, like, so it's funny. We're also having pushed on us now, this new system that can automate creating your syllabus as if syllabus is just a nothing document, right? Like, a syllabus is not an intellectual activity, I guess I'll just use this thing. And it's going to pre populate all the dates of your students other assignments in it. So you can see like, listen, that's not my problem, right? Or it's got all the text in it that you need. I'm like, No, listen, minor rhetorical documents, I've had my accessibility statement go viral two or three times, and I wrote it for my students, right? They're like, No one makes a giant syllabus bank that everybody at the university like can look at. I'm like, also, I'm writing for my students now for the whole university. Yeah. And at the same time that the, like, standardized, standardized all this stuff, it's gonna make your life easier, but what are they freeing up my time to do to book fucking zoom meetings for dissertation defenses that are not my job. So it feels like the administrative apparatus of like standardized tools in the name of efficiency is dumping on to non academic staff roles, the intellectual labor, of teaching and learning, and then downloading onto faculty members, the administrative work of like the nuts and bolts of the web forms, and like making sure the grading is working, it's like, a very mixed up soup of shifting roles and shifting of agency. And I think you raise a really important point right away to about like, the stack of papers effect, which is the same, I always tell people to give me a stack of papers, because then I can see them. You can also see if I'm making progress, and then I found them out on the floor. And like, yeah, so I can suss out where the average is going to fall. And I can't do that, virtually. And there ought to be options still, if we don't get standardized have to death that some people can print them out on paper. And some people want to look at them virtually, like we have systems for evaluating graduate applications to our programs where you cannot print them out. Oh, yeah, you're not allowed. And the software does not allow for it. But like, some of these applications, and job candidate applications, too, are like, you know, anywhere between 12 to 40 pages long and the interface on the web tool that they give you turns every smart quote or smart apostrophe into diamond shaped question mark. And it's all in like, Times New Roman, eight, and the text exceeds the size of the box. So your sidescrolling like, I think a lot of people have difficulty reading in that kind of environment. But like, Listen, I have ADHD, right? I need this to be easy, I can't have like a keyhole view into a 40 page document and have any hope of keeping my place in it. Right. So there are a lot of ways in which our working environments in the name of somebody else's convenience has introduced brand new barriers into our capacity, like not just to flourish, but like to get the bare minimum done, right. So things like having to fight with your son's homework site, just is going to frazzle your mood and frazzle your temper about a task that like nobody should have to do. Yeah.

Lee Skallerup Bessette

18:58

And, and it and it shuts him down. Right. It's like, well, what if, because he can do the work. But if you're gonna make it hard for him to do the work, he's gonna be like, fuck you. And just, you know, and again, that's a very neurodivergent sort of attitude. That that he does have, like, there's, you know, and it's all that's always kind of been his personality, too, right? But, but it's not that he gets frustrated about the thing and just gives up because, oh, this is too hard. It's this is unnecessarily hard. And therefore I'm not going to do it. Right. Like that's the sort of difference between like, you know, so it just gets frustrating, really easy and that kind of stuff. So some of this is some of this is executive functioning, and that's, and that's where a lot of the times like I'm at a loss, because I don't know these systems, right? So I'm struggling to learn them too. And I I'm trying to maintain my own level of frustration. I'm trying to, like, you know, you know, encourage him to be proactive and to be more independent, but at the same time, I'm like, he can't explain the school ology to me. No, right, which is the learning management system, which is, but sometimes they're using something else as well. And that's the other thing is like the overwhelm of the sheer number of tools that they're using. Or it's like here at school ology, but then you're going to find the link to this other site where you have to do the assignment in the classroom, you're like, yeah, no, it's Yeah. And then, you know, the automated grading system that even if you enter in the answer, right, it'll still mark it wrong, because it's like it the character, it's like, a Mac. So like, Ark or Anjali is

Aimée Morrison

20:46

a Nemes. About Yeah, where you see on the screen, grab that, like, your answer is exactly the same as what's in the answer. Yeah, wrong. The answer is this. And you're like, Bitch, please. That's

Lee Skallerup Bessette

20:56

what I want. Yeah. Edie? And like it just there. There is this sense? Both my kids where it's just like, This is nonsense. So I'm just not participating in it. And you're like, okay, but you have to because you know, that you know, enough not to fail this class, right? Like, you know, all these things. Yeah, I know,

Aimée Morrison

21:15

I know. Do you hear yourself, but I do, too. You say to to no Rotarian kids, I know can fully well see that this make work homework that is also not important is made 100 times worse by a submission system that takes longer to us, then it took you. I do homework. Yeah,

Lee Skallerup Bessette

21:33

I will grant this and at least my kids system is that one of the things that came over from the pandemic that has stuck is and we've talked, we've talked about this in our own, like, your course prep and stuff is that they have really streamed down a lot of the busy work.

Aimée Morrison

21:48

Well, that's good. Work. Yes. Using school ology. Yes. Yes. Free time now? No, no, it's not like we took away the busy work so that you can like go outside and touch some grass, right, we took away the busy work, because we understand that our submission software is incredibly time consuming, counterintuitive and difficult to use. So the damage has been transferred from like, a make work worksheet activity to something, I don't even know how this is possible, even less valuable, right? Which is using the automated submission system three times and then not being sure it went through and then your mom gets an email from a teacher, then your mom comes to yell at you. And you're like, but I tried. And then teachers like, I don't even know how to do it. And my mom was like, what?

Lee Skallerup Bessette

22:27

Yeah. And I'm just like, what are we because we, you know, we're figuring out we have, we have calendar notifications, we have alarms that are on our phone, and all that kind of stuff. And I'm like, I know in the LMS that we use, you can sync your calendar to your your so you can take your Canvas calendar, and subscribe to it on your Google Calendar, because we're also Google school, right? So all of your assignments gets populated onto

Aimée Morrison

22:54

there. Right? I'm having a panic attack right now. Just listen to you. But like, it's okay. You can sync your calendar with LMS and then set up automated reminders. I don't want to do any of that. I know you like That's right. My experience is pletely different.

Lee Skallerup Bessette

23:09

No, I know. But it's sort of like if I can devise a process that I can sit down and sort of logic my way through not because I like to do it. But I know that if I set it up once and I set it up properly, I'm good to go. Right? Like that's that's like the that's sort of my sort of thing where it's just like, if you're going to ask me to fill out the form every time I want to see a calendar, then I'm not going to do it. But if you tell me do this once and do it in these steps and do it correctly, and then you don't have to worry about it anymore. And you'll just get calendar notifications, I'll be like, yes, that is worth my time to invest in. Right. So it's kind of like yeah, it's annoying and like, you know, I hate doing it. But I know again, it's that sort of like what can I do to prepare you? You know, right? I know at the beginning of every single academic year, I've got to sit down for two painful hours and just populate the damn calendar. Listen, right? But I also know that like we've got it now that we're all in agreement that this is like the sort of master calendar everything that's done and then the rest I know that the rest of the semester will go much smoother than if I was just trying to like run around like with my hair on fire.

Aimée Morrison

24:23

Right now I can't do that because I don't have a master calendar and I don't want one things nothing's right and and like so what you're offering there is like I'm you know, still reading my Oliver Berkman books that I'm not following the advice and right like you are trying to find a hack to make something ridiculous and impossible. Just as ridiculous but less impossible. Right. And I'm more stuck. I guess I'm more like a couple of your kids. Probably both of your kids. Definitely one of your kids. I see you Cassie. I don't Don't do it. It's too stupid. And it's, it's too hard. And I resent you having to use whatever spoons I have for my executive function, which is like trying to book nail appointments with my sister every third Saturday and not booked something else at the same time, as that I can get her to call she calls from and then she sends me the calendar invites and I put them on my calendar, it's my calendars up a school's calendar right then Yeah. So like, here's another one I, I write reference letters for my graduate students, right. That's part of the intellectual labor of my job. Everything requires reference letters to have any personal touch. And yeah, you know, when you go through it, you to write it, I have to look at the student's transcript, I have to review the things that they've submitted to me, I'm like, oh, did you take a course with me all this stuff. And when I write for my graduate students, I updated every year with the new things they've done. And I like shift my antigens around and I try to customize it for the thing. And that usually to create a new letter, it takes me often like, I would say, more than an hour and a half, because I've to do some document collecting, right and email checking and asking for things. And it just it's an executive function nightmare. And then when I get that one done, that's the stuff that I build the next ones out of, and usually every time I'm doing a next one, it takes me another hour. Yeah. Okay. So it used to be, you had to put them in an envelope and mail them. And that was a struggle for me, I did not like that. And then for a lot of them for a long time you printed out the document after you had filled it out. And you handed it in to the graduate secretary in the department, and she would add it into the file. And that was better for me. Yeah, another like, oh, you can submit it online, directly. And I'm like, oh, but you have to get the E invitation. Yet the student giving you the link and some of these things, you get the invitation and your letter. Now there's 10 More drop down boxes you have to do before you can submit your letter, so everything was already in your letter in the form you filled out, you have to reduce that you also need to create an account. Yeah. And that account has to have a password. And then they're going to email you the confirmation link to make sure that it's really you and then you have to like accept or decline. And now we're like 50 clicks in. And even if it goes well, I have spent at this point, just as much time trying to submitter yeah, as I spent writing it. So it literally doubles the burden of reference letter writing for be it for no use at all, like no use at all like so the institution, these jobs where you're not sort of on the clock, billable minutes. This is not efficient work. But the idea is, we're just going to feel like we ourselves are somehow doing it wrong. And we're not going to say well, that's another hour and a half. I'm not doing research. Yeah. Because that you know, these things don't count for you if you do them well writing letters and submitting them. But it's a moral imperative to submit a letter that you've already written for a student, right? And the university just assumes you're going to eat that extra time out of your personal life. Right. So the latest one that I had was I wrote one for a student and I tried to use the shirk site. So in addition to creating a password and

Lee Skallerup Bessette

27:55

a logo, don't even start about the shirk site, I had to reset my

Aimée Morrison

27:59

password because of course, I already have an account every time I submit a letter every year, there's an account, do you think I know what my password is? No, don't tell me to use a password manager, I'm just trying to write a reference letter. And then you have to do a bunch of dropdowns there that are constitutional data collection, like you're a data entry clerk from hell, right? Because it doesn't have the AI they can scan the thing that you submitted know who you are, right? You have to fill it all out yourself using drop down boxes, and then you have to paste your letter into a box. And then it tells you too many characters. Yeah. And then the site crashes. Yeah, it crashed every day, for a month. And I over three days spent two hours trying to submit this letter. And then I left the country. And I just sent the letter to our graduate secretary. And when I can't do this, like it's not possible the site is broken, I leaving the country and they write me back into like, there's no way for us to do it for you and the candidate can't submit their application unless your letters already in it. So they're completely tying somebody else's ability to submit their documents to the reference letters already being in the file, which is like a huge fail point. And this caused me so much stress to write so many emails, and nobody's like, we'll try it like this. And I'm like, listen, sync my calendar, try it like this. For me, the main point here is nobody should have to do these tasks, right? Because they are not value added and they take so much time out of everybody and I think it's going to require neurodivergent people to fight back because I honestly will have a breakdown over this about trying to book this dissertation defense and manage all the tech about trying to submit reference letters to a site that again feels like trying to use ticket master right like you get through or you get halfway through and the little spinny wheel starts and all the business you just spent like an hour doing the drop down boxes for got erased when the site crashed and you have to start over so I'm trying to manage my rage and like stuff my other work around it like had to quit one because like I had to teach given myself an hour to do it and lay out went by I was like shit, I gotta teach right now abandoned, and then all my stuff got erased another time I don't think we're pushing back sufficiently on this. Like there's two, two neurodivergent responses. The first one is like, You're not the boss of me, and I'm not going to do it. I'm going to rage quit everything. This is stupid I can't use the other one is, I'm a bad person. Everybody else is probably better at this than me. It's just it's so simple to do this. I did the hard part already. This is supposed to be the easy part. What's wrong with me? And I think both are like, examples of the social construction of disability, frankly, I'm over it. Yeah,

Lee Skallerup Bessette

30:34

I guess I'm somewhere in between, where now I'm just like, it's kind of like resignation, but I want to put a qualifier word before that. I'm just like, neurodivergent resignation, where it's like, this isn't my fault. But I also can't rage quit this. Cuz. So I'm just gonna like, I don't know, put on a podcast. And or like, I don't know, podcast, do something fun, get some gummy bears. And just like, and I think this is also where Twitter would come in handy, because I would live tweet all of this stuff, usually, and have a very sympathetic audience. And so that was like, at least if I were entertaining people with this, like that sort of feeds some dopamine inside to help me get through this non dopamine activity. But I've also like, and it was, it was so bad. I actually had to call someone on the phone the other day.

Aimée Morrison

31:38

Oh, my God. Nightmare. Yeah. So I am

Lee Skallerup Bessette

31:41

trying to for my and again, this is this is like, on the one hand, I get why right I coach swimming. And there is a lot of hoops you have to jump through in order to be certified to coach swimming, right? A lot of the times when you're when you're coaching a volunteer coach, and this is partly partly why most if not all swim coaches aren't volunteer, we're paid. You know, it's one of the it's one of the few sports on like, you know, the we're a little kids are involved, where it's like a parent can just be like, I coached you know, I played soccer, I can coach or like I did softball, you know, in, in swimming, we've got to get the background check, which is pretty much universal here. Now for coaching youth sports, right? Volunteer or not, you gotta get the background check fun. But then I also have to have CPR. And then I also have to have lifeguard not full lifeguard certification, but like lifeguard certification light, I also have to do like, a whole bunch of online trainings. Through USA, swimming around safe sport and Concussion Awareness, and like good coaching and all of that. I don't know, like, okay, it's annoying, but

Aimée Morrison

32:56

that seems like yeah, actually. content related. Yes. Yes. Still related, you probably should know CPR, you're gonna take a class and someone's going to teach you and yeah, a background check for working with youth seems reasonable. That's actually

Lee Skallerup Bessette

33:10

the easiest part of it. The background checks actually, like super simple, you know, or else, because what they found out is that if they made that part hard, no parent would ever volunteer for anything. Well, listen, I'm

Aimée Morrison

33:23

saying that's all I'm saying is that they make that part hard. No one will do it is not something employers or schools normally take on. It doesn't matter how hard it is, you're compelled to do it. Yeah,

Lee Skallerup Bessette

33:33

no one's sewers. So I had to register for a water safety training. That's what it's called. So there's an online portion, and there's an in person portion, and the Red Cross, you can just, you know, you pay your your 12 bucks, and you get your water safety course that you have to move your way through. But the Red Cross site was down. And so every time I tried to purchase it, it was like purchase failed, but it kept showing up as pending on the credit card. Oh, boy, so great. So I'm like, I need this course. Because I need to be, I need to be in good standing in order to be able to coach I actually am still not in good standing. And I wasn't allowed to go to a swim meet last weekend. Because they were they were cracking down. And they had us as our head coach that there was a hit list. And I was on it. And I was like, oh, Lord, okay, but we're getting it settled. But But again, I had to I had to you know, and of course, USA Swimming has changed their entire site. And so now I don't know where to find anything anymore to be able to, like take the correct courses to make sure that I'm doing the right thing in order to get certified. This is exactly what I'm talking about. And then red cross site goes down and and I'm getting so they're like, Well, if you continue having this problem call, so I'm like, Oh my god. So I was like, Well, I guess I'm calling then. And it all gets sorted out now. I have to go do an in person, the important person section of it this weekend,

Aimée Morrison

35:03

I hope you'll get a real trainer because I just read a big expos A about the Red Cross swimming because they don't actually run anything anymore. They sell licenses to teach to people who may not even be qualified. And they're just basically like a franchise operation. Oh point. So that whatever you know about swimming, you're probably more qualified than that. Well, this isn't

Lee Skallerup Bessette

35:26

for swimming. This is it's for this one CPR. So you know, and we all had to do the online course ahead of time. So if the instructor doesn't know what they're talking about, I'm going to be like some of the online course said. I mean, basically, the online course is like, here's here are the standards for CPR. Now, here's how you have to be positioned. Here's what the signs and symptoms you need to look for. And then the in person stuff is here's a dummy show me you know how to do it. Yeah. That's basically what the in person part is, is because you can't practice this part for the online. So you show up for two hours. They're like, here's an adult dummy. What do you do? Here's a child, dummy. How do you do a different? Great, thank you. Okay, good, right.

Aimée Morrison

36:07

So and that's probably the important part, too, is like, yeah, like, when I did my CPR training, it was all in person. But like, you know, three hours or something was like, you know, first aid, you probably had to do a yoga teaching, right? And it was first aid and CPR rolled into it, we did all of it in person, and then we got our certificates. Great. So what you wind up doing is spending much more time trying to get into an course that it's only going to be two hours online, right? So you are spending much more time trying to arrange the thing, and doing the thing. And listen, when people are saying they're too busy. And they don't have time and they don't have work life balance. A lot of it, in fact, comes down to this nonsense of how impossible you know when your credit card keeps showing up with a pending transaction, and the website is down. But it won't actually give you the course you need. And you can't just say, I know there's a course offered, I'm just gonna go on no flyer, because I couldn't sign in the online way that like, Okay, we'll catch you up later for like, no, like, you cannot do the thing until you go through this stuff that is broken. And it takes much more time than you thought it was going to do. Like I'm really agitated today, I can hear like trying to cut you off and be like Lee, no, stop accommodating yourself with this, you don't understand how much I'm suffering. But like, this is actually the point that I that. I feel like, every new thing that I'm being asked to do, that is not a faculty role, or that has like, cut some staff member out of a task that they used to do, and downloaded it onto me to do poorly and then get yelled at and have to apologize to people, like every email I send because you know, I don't like sending emails on emails I have to and they all start with. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. The website was down. I couldn't do it. I'm so sorry. I can't open the documents. And I'm so sorry. It will not let me create a login. I'm so sorry. The letter will not go through the way it is. And I don't know why I'm so sorry. I didn't get that calendar invitation. And I'm so sorry. I missed my own students defense because I didn't set up the Zoom correctly. Right. And I'm apologizing for a bunch of stuff that are not actually I'm not failing at the actual job. Yeah, my job right. Yeah, I'm not failing at the actual parenting of parenting, like I'm failing at the ever increasing metastasizing layers of online paperwork that is almost impossible to complete for neurotypical people. But incredibly difficult for actually doing cognitive behavioral therapy to stop having panic attacks about this kind of paperwork, right? Like the art department coordinator who used to we give her all our piles of receipts like on the form we like right out on the triplicate form in pen and list all our receipts and I get all my receipts, even here's a great look go through, but now I have to do it in concur. And then I do it wrong 45 times and it'll get sent back with error messages. And then I have to go sit in her office and she fixes it for me. And I'm like, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I don't see how that's any faster than the way that we used to do it, especially since she tells me that 95% of the claims that everybody submits, gets sent right back, right. Like, why is everything so much harder? In these ways? When it is like for me it is actively disabling? I got so rattled about the reference letter that I couldn't submit, of course, because you have a lot of work because I was so upset that I couldn't I was upset that I had to do it this way and that I had to keep hitting refresh and trying to get it done. And then when I actually didn't even manage to get it done. I was really angry that I'd wasted an hour and a half trying to do it. And then just I was so out of sorts, right I had a strong emotional reaction to it that didn't get anything done for the rest of the day. Right. And that's that's my disability talking right there. You know other people will be like that was hard. I'll try again later. I'm like, I'm not going to try again later. People like well try again tonight at Your API when it's like, I don't work at night, because if I do, I can't sleep. And I'm sorry, I can't do that. I'm sorry, I didn't manage. I'm sorry, I'm going on vacation, like on a week that I have booked for vacation, right? So I'm constantly apologizing for things. And when I try to raise this with people like, well, I'll just help you with that. I'm like, no, like, I shouldn't be doing it. You shouldn't be doing it. It shouldn't be this hard. So I'm really, really struggling with all the parts of Professor ng that have just turned into an outrage, of technical problems, downloaded administrative tasks, and the creation and remembering of passwords. Like, even if I people send me invitations all the time, you know, Can you review this paper do a peer review on this article? And I'm like, sure. They don't send me the article to like, go to this website. Yeah. Yeah. Create an account, right. I'm like, No. And I'm like, God, I hope this is a new one. Because usually I click and it's like, login. You're already a member. Like, I'll try to create an account. They're like, Nope, you already have an account. I'm like, Well, shit. And then I put in the same email address and click forget password. Like, we don't have an account or that Yeah. And I'm like, No, I'm like, forget it, I can't, I can't do it. If it takes me 30 minutes to find a way to use the website to say, I will accept to do this review. I'm not going to do the review. I'm just not. And then I feel like a bad person, right. But I get so upset when I fail at those things, or I get so upset when I succeed, and they take longer than the task I'm agreeing to, would have taken me that I get so upset, I can't work for the rest of the day. And like, I think we're still in a phase where everybody's like, we can do better. Like I can get better at this. It's probably me, I'm gonna fix it. I can learn to manage this. But like, maybe it's too much like maybe this is ridiculous. But there doesn't seem to be any way to push back against this. That isn't like saying to a teacher, we're not going to submit it like that anymore. Like because my husband will say to me, well, it's not the teachers fault. I'm like, Yes, but nor is it mine. Right? So like, I don't understand why like, I can be gracious and generous to the teacher. But I can say like, maybe you take it to the principal or the school board, because this is not going to be possible for us because it is not possible because we keep trying. And it's not possible. Anybody's like, Oh, it's just a web form. Right? So I guess I feel really upset. And I also feel really gaslighted. And I sort of feel like it's a Stop hitting yourself scenario where Yeah, I know, I'm really good at teaching. And I'm really good at research. And I do lots of stuff that's like high value. But like today, I went to a meeting where when I tried to load WebEx again, it was like, No, you have to install all these updates first, and I'm on the verge of going to be late for this meeting. And then I can't see the documents because it logged me in as a guest, not as a member. And then like 10 minutes later, when everybody showed up, and we got all of our stuff sorted out, it turned out one person who had to be there had not even been invited. So we had to reschedule. There's like Let's reschedule using teams instead of WebEx. Because that way, the Meeting CHAIR can see what everybody's schedules are, like, just kill me, right now, just like that is sort of emblematic. And I don't know, like, I don't know if any of our listeners struggle with this kind of thing. But if you do is not just you. And it's like another one of these scenarios where people will say, but you're so successful, right? Oh, a smart girl like you, Amy and I am really good at the stuff that I do. And I'm like an assertive person and I take on leadership positions. And it probably looks to many people like sour grapes, entitlement and foot stamping. When I'm like, Why is there no staff member to set up the Zoom call for the defense, when we used to fly people here and pay for them to stay in hotels, right? And they're like, Amy, like, Don't be such a prima donna, or whatever. Right? So I find it really hard. And probably some of our listeners and good probably you too, because you're so competent at so many things that are supposed to be like the actual value and content of the thing that when you get tripped up and want to complain about like the Byzantine or impossible or enraging or time suck bureaucracy around the task is that people think you're being petty or entitled or privileged or dismissive. And it's not that like the tasks I don't want to do that staff used to do require skill. Yeah, right. It's insulted skill. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker

44:16

it's skills we don't have. Yeah,

Aimée Morrison

44:18

right. Other people have those skills wants, like, I don't want to do the work that staff is supposed to do. It doesn't mean I'm better than them. It means they know how to do stuff that I do not know how to do, right. And so when these tasks get downloaded, it's like the university also saying anybody can do it. Right, which is insulting to the staff members whose like, main parts of their job used to be stuff like room booking event, organizing and cat herding, and making sure the lights stay on and everybody shows up at the right place at the right time. And nobody's flight comes in a day after they're supposed to be here, right? Like, that takes hard work to do that. And that was their job. And they applied for those jobs and they enjoyed those jobs and they were well compensated for those jobs and they knew what they were doing and they felt so cessful and now that person doesn't do it, it's been downloaded onto me. And I'm terrible at it. And I hate myself. And I also make a lot of mistakes that keep me from doing the things that ostensibly I'm just setting up the parameters to do. Yep.

Lee Skallerup Bessette

45:14

Oh, yeah. And I think that that's it is it is this shift away from certain types of expertise to others. And the, you know, there I see two sides of the the, like, the the staff expertise is, on on the one hand, it is this idea of the staff know, the Byzantine inner workings of this institution. Right. Which, on the one hand, you know, it shouldn't require somebody's who's been there their entire life to actually be able to get anything done, like Rue that that shouldn't shouldn't be. And, and especially that, and again, like I have a lot of, I do, obviously have a lot of thoughts about this being, especially on the on, sort of the pseudo staff side, professional staff is, like, all us is this idea, though, around just the hiding, or the lack of transparency around the inner workings of institutions, right to like, exploded outside of higher education. And, and it's something that that that again, I think there is a possibility for faculty to push back because it's not ever something that they like. There is a there's a recent book, and it's something that I've been interested in as well being in this sort of dual role is in what is it higher ed for good? It's a new collection that just came out of open source, I swear, I will put it in the higher education for good. Oh, it's open as a tab. Excellent. And there is. And there is why Emery Scott and Brenda Clark grave. My both know, is who cares about him for that, too? Yeah, who cares about procurement. And that's where all of this like who made the decision to school ology, who made the decision around concur? Who made this and, and so, Alan Liu was actually what I was the Emma on the modern languages Association, committee for Information Technology, which is kind of an outdated name for it. But one of the things I Luke came in, wanting to think about, and I agreed was this, like, you know, we think about higher education in terms of technology, just in terms of the learning management system, and all of those things that take place in the classroom, like, do we use Zoom? Like, do we have Blackboard or Canvas? Do we use iClickers? Or pulled everywhere? Or like so it's very, what can I do in my classroom sort of thing? Right? And what can I use in my classroom for like, specialized disciplines, but the larger infrastructure behind all of that is something like what email services do we use? Are you a Microsoft school or a Google school? Which often the but but it makes a difference? Right? It makes a difference in terms of your day to day operations? Do we use concur? Do we use GMs? Or do we, you know, what are all of these various massive enterprise solutions that our organization is using or even the decision around the LMS? Who decided about school ology who decided that they have to do a plagiarism checker every time which forces everyone to put everything in twice? Who, you know, like there? Are these these larger questions where these decisions were made? And I'm saying this in the passive voice, because in a lot of cases, we as an organization, as members in that organization, do not know who it is or how and I think that that's where your frustration lies, is you don't know who to push back on? Because your department secretary

Aimée Morrison

49:17

but do so the ration

Lee Skallerup Bessette

49:19

isn't necessarily like we could say the it's still a system and not a someone.

Aimée Morrison

49:25

You don't know how many emails I have sent to big weeks. Oh procurement. This process. This is like one of my other bugbears is that software determined for the use of end users is only ever purchased by managers who don't use it right. So that what gets sold is the utility of a given software's tools for managers needs. It can generate reports but it can only generate reports because now everything has to be selected from a drop down box where Normally, people could type three words now they have three credit three screens of drop down boxes or their own data entry clerks, right? And so they're like, it's some combination of it's cheap. We have people here, the people who have to maintain it, or like, I'm familiar with that software, and the managers are like, ooh, surveillance, right? It's never, they usually bring in end users to be like, let's try it out and see what you think, oh, that's what we're going to have to give you more training. So like the end users can be this garbage, it doesn't do what I want, or like I keep asking for Desire to Learn to be oriented such that people other than the course instructor can add material to the course site, which is why I have to create 400 Google Docs every year and embed them in my Learn site, because there is no way for students other than using discussion tools to contribute any content to the course it because like, nobody cares about that, right? The people who run it like I can tell you how many minutes each one of my students spent looking at each page on the website, but I cannot get them permission to add content to a student area on the content pages, like it's just not possible. So it's not the priorities of the people who use the software that are consulted, it's the priorities of the people who are purchasing it. And secondarily, they consult with other layers of administration who would be charged with maintaining it right? It is really about finding the cheapest solution that just offloads work that is assumed to not even count as work right onto people who didn't use to have to do it so that it's wasting my time, which is not accounted for in a way that I would be compensated for or have other tasks removed from me. I'm just supposed to literally eat that cost, right? It's the spoilage it's the seam allowance, right? But it's it's me and everybody else who's like, Oh, this is supposed to be more convenient. Like, oh, I can get all my grading done and submitted at 9pm. Like, except you have to do it at 9pm Because you had so much bullshit work in your day that you didn't get a chance to do it before five, right? Like, so it's not like, Well, isn't that convenient? Like it's any 60 hours a week whenever you want. But now 30 of them are filling out. Web forms that then somebody's just gonna say you filled out a wrong date on this one. You did it in day, month, year, not month, day, year. And like, what couldn't you fix that? Oh, it has to come back to me now. Right? Yeah. Like, oh, yeah, no, I

Lee Skallerup Bessette

52:10

like even just, I took a sick day. But I had to cancel it. Because I knew immediately I'm like, should I enter that in wrong? Because they give me what kind of leave Are you taking right now? And they give me 40 choices of which I should only be able to do to.

Aimée Morrison

52:28

Right? Right? You don't have permission to use the other ones, but they're still there. But they're still there. You can click on Yeah. And that'll be like, wrong. And I'm like you let me do it.

Lee Skallerup Bessette

52:38

Is this because I have like unscheduled leave times scheduled leave time? And I'm like, Well, I'm in the system like what's? So I put like unscheduled leave time because I just got sick and it wasn't scheduled, like what am I? And

Aimée Morrison

52:51

then existential, listen, if a staff member would do it was doing this, they would know what those words meant. Yeah. Right. You would call him

Lee Skallerup Bessette

53:00

every time. I'd love this about this system just makes me laugh. Every time. You're like, I choose this day, I won't leave for this day. It will always throw up an error message and be like, Oh, no, you can't do that until you click a box that wasn't available until you get the error message. Oh, that's like we get everything we

Aimée Morrison

53:22

do now. It's like you are you have to vote in this election in the Faculty of Arts for like, large Yeah, click here to vote. And you click it and it brings you to a page that has a big red box on it that says Access denied. And then underneath it in tiny knot box, and in a tiny font. It says click here to login. Like why does the landing page yeah have to be so awful? Because like then people because then you get this reply all nonsense. Oh, yeah. People like the link isn't working. It says Access denied. And then somebody will write back to the whole list thing. Okay, so here's what you do. When you get there. It's gonna say this. Don't freak out. If you scroll down the page and like eight point font in white text on a white background, you'll see a tiny thing that if you click on it, like login here, I'm like, why don't you just change the fucking page? Or just send that

Speaker 1

54:11

link? Yeah, you got to click on a link, you

Aimée Morrison

54:15

know, you have to know you can't know you. There's no way you can go right through to the voting that's going to bring you to the login page. Okay, right. The login page is the one that generates the error message first. That's the only page you can land on. I was like, Who designed this because it's confusing people. And then it's resulting in like 10 more emails to the listserv. It's like we have a work day like to find our tax documents. That's our like, HR software. Yeah, tax documents. They send it but the email is three screens long and has a PDF attachment with images in it because like your T for slips are here that's like our income slips and can't Yeah, yeah. To get to it. And then there's like, literally, a list a numbered list of nine things you have to do to find your horse open every year. I'm like, listen, I I'm good at computers. And then I go to workday. And I'm like, surely I can find this. It's a tax slip on an HR website, right? Yeah, surely to God, once I log in, I can find my own tax slip, lead. No, every year, every year, I in a rage have to go back to my email. And then I even have to print the email out. Okay, I can look at the email and like, try to click the things on the screen at the same time, because like, it'll be like, don't click on the thing that says to your profile, click on the thing that says your account and then within your account will be another button called by profile, but it's different from the profile that you can see on the main page. So don't think you're looking for your profile. You're looking for your profile, the version of it that lives under the tab called my account that is not in the main menu, but it's underneath your avatar. Why? Yeah, right. Well, I the same thing instructions. Yeah. Did it wrong? Yeah.

Lee Skallerup Bessette

55:49

I had I had the same experience with Workday when I was trying to find what my base salary was. Yeah. And I'm like, it'll be in my profiles, not my profile. It's

Aimée Morrison

55:58

not in your and it was the under benefits and compensation. Yeah, no, no, I'm

Lee Skallerup Bessette

56:02

not paychecks. Yeah, that's that's just and, uh, yeah, I. Yeah, I thought that. I think, like, that's, that's the that's the kind of, not kind of that is the really frustrating thing with all of these systems is that

Speaker 1

56:22

if you know, you know, what, if you don't know, you're fucked. Yeah.

Aimée Morrison

56:27

Well, and the further complication on this is like, if you know, you know, well, that's what staff used to do. They do. It was not Byzantine to them, they can do it. Like they could tab through stuff with their eyes closed. But not only does that staff expertise get erased, because now everybody's doing their own stuff. But they redesign the software, because they know they're sending it to people who don't know what they're doing. So they added like a ton more guardrails around stuff. Yeah, to keep you from accidentally writing a $1 million check to your newspaper from the university account, right? And in so doing, they make it even more complex. Yeah, then it would have been if staff was handling it, but you're still the person who does not know what you're doing. And now you have a version of the website, that's harder than what the staff who are experts are using, right? It's like this idea that we're just going to put guardrails around this and make it so foolproof. You can't do anything wrong, but what they wind up doing is making it so that you cannot do anything, right? Whether Yeah, yeah. So it's like, it's sort of doubling down, it's like, well, we know you guys aren't experts, we want to make sure you don't like accidentally fuck this up really hard. So we're gonna add 50 extra steps to everything that'll help you do better.

Lee Skallerup Bessette

57:36

And that'll help you to, ya know, it'll totally, it made it this is making me think of, there's an article that I really liked. It was a community college, and they were like, We deleted 12,000 pages from our website. Because students, I mean, and again, understanding who their students were. And what they were looking for is that the students couldn't find anything. And I mean, faculty usually can't find anything on their own website, either. But but, you know, it's, it's the the less is more sort of sort of approach that I hope that more will start trickling down into, like, all of our lives that less is more like I'm trying to,

Aimée Morrison

58:24

I just, it's weird. I just had a conversation about this with one of my colleagues, like, it's a little bit about this, like new syllabus software they want us to use or like, oh, yeah, it was find it too confusing to read your syllabi. So we've simplified it. And I thought, well, you know why all of our syllabi got a lot longer and more confusing, was because admin had said, now you have to add all of these. So before we had comprehensible short syllabi, and I was like, no, no, no, no, no, you need all this stuff that it never like, Wait, that's too much, don't worry, we got a standardized tool, but it still makes too much, right. And one of my colleagues is in charge of, of designing the, the sort of learn shell, the the CMS shell content for a course that we put hundreds of students through every semester, they're all non majors. And it seems like every iteration, they're just adding more and more because students get more and more confused about things, right. And it's like, well, we have to explain everything. You know, every time student asks a question, we're like, Well, the next iteration, we're gonna put something about that in here, right? And it, I think it doubles down on an unhelpful thing, which is, it's actually making the website itself and the content a lot harder to parse, because there's just so much more content in there. Yeah. And by responding to student confusion as indicating a bad design infantilizes students, and also doesn't teach them that some things will create questions for you, and you should ask somebody, right. So instead of being like there's a way I can design this course that no student will ever have a follow up question. Think about this is a fool's errand, you're gonna manage to do it. And even if in some, like platonic ideal, you managed to do it. Is that student ever gonna have that experience again? For the rest of their life? No, no, absolutely not. Absolutely not even things like, it should be simply like, here's a set of instructions to bake a cake. And you're like, I understand this, right? Yeah. Oh, no. Now I'm going to add, like 10 more instructions, which many people will not need. But even people who do need it will be buried so much deeper and all the other instructions that you've added for different people who had different questions about stuff. That is going to take like three weeks to parse the recipe to bake a half an hour cake. Yeah, right. Like,

Lee Skallerup Bessette

01:00:37

it's like sewing. It's like sewing instructions and sewing videos. Yeah, right. Like sometimes. Sometimes, like, some of them are so bare boned. I'm just like, wait, you must have skipped steps somewhere because it looks like leave. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry. What? The other times I'm like, I always forget how to do the to do bias finish, because I'm like, I can't want it. How do I didn't didn't do this?

Aimée Morrison

01:01:03

It's like origami with fabric, man. Yeah, yeah. And so

Lee Skallerup Bessette

01:01:08

it's, it's literally a five minute process. Right? Like, once I just need to see it and be like, Okay, here's the color. here's the here's the thing, or like a yoke, right, turning a yoke and everything like that is okay. How do I I just need to see it. How does your chin work? Yeah, exactly. I just need like, Oh, look. All right now I know. 45 minutes. I'm like, What are you talking about for 45 minutes for bugging yoke. And I'm like fastball, password, password, password, password, password, password password, and ended up like

Aimée Morrison

01:01:41

this. Give me the transcript. I need to know what minute to jump to. Yeah,

Lee Skallerup Bessette

01:01:44

exactly. And like, and that's just too, so. So. So there's gotta be a balance, right? We have to figure balance. And obviously we're not in it right now. Clearly. Yeah. In terms of in terms of how we are, what if,

Aimée Morrison

01:01:59

what if you're like you're reading a sewing pattern, you're like reading the instructions. And it's asking you to do something you don't quite understand. And you're like, Okay, well, that's on me, probably people understand. I'm going to look it up now. Yeah, but you open up a web browser. But before you open up a web browser, you had to authenticate using a device that's at your office, you have to go to your office. And then once you do that, it's going to ask for biometric scan. And then before you can use Google, it's going to ask you to answer some security questions and enter your password to let you find the sewing video. And this sewing video is going to make you go through a web tutorial first, on how to use the scrolling to like it. This is the stuff I'm talking about. Is that that India? Are

Lee Skallerup Bessette

01:02:40

that's a really good analogy. I think. I think that's perfect. I think that that maybe I should edit it and put that part first and then the rest of it. So like, but it's so

Aimée Morrison

01:02:51

long to get to it. Because we're trying to figure because it's such a hard problem. To name right. So you need that sewing pattern. Perfectly clear to everybody, because then it would have been 100 pages long. Yeah. Right. But when you are like yeah, it's okay that I don't have to do this, like this pattern. It's not its job to tell me exactly like what a Tinder is, or whatever, like, I'm gonna go look it up. And but when you want to look it up, you should be able to look it up without going through 400 difficult, unnecessary data, collecting surveillance, hoops and tracking, just to be like, I'm trying to solve my own problems right now, right? Because all these tools like oh, you get to do your own Concur expenses, you get to get your own tea forest. It's supposed to be empowering by cutting out the middleman. But like the digital middleman that goes in there is so much harder to deal with, than the original middleman ever was. So like they're selling it to us, as you get more agency, you get more control. But if you don't have it, right, it's just produced another huge series of tasks in between you and getting the thing done, except that the barrier now is not a human who only works 830 to 430 that you have to get your tax slip from. You can do it anytime you want. But it's going to take you an hour and a half. Yeah, right. That's not freedom. No.

Lee Skallerup Bessette

01:04:09

No. I think that's a good place to end it. No, no, no, it's I don't know. That's good. And it's, you know, that's, that's why we also make our podcasts free.

Aimée Morrison

01:04:21

Because they're meandering. I can leave people with something funny. No,

Lee Skallerup Bessette

01:04:24

no, I was No, but I was gonna say Because oftentimes, when a, we if I were to do advertising, we'd have to set up some sort of payment system. Which again, passwords, websites information. Yeah, yeah. You know, filing type, all that kind of stuff. Or two. If we go with the straightforward way, which is just like, subscribe to us on Apple podcasts. We'll give you bonus episodes. Actually, Apple would still need to know how to pay us but, but then we're also relying on our listeners to be able to go through all of those steps back to know exactly what it's

Aimée Morrison

01:04:59

like. This is why I don't check the email. So I'm not adding one more email account to my email account. Now, since you were talking about selling, I was in fact Googling something today I'm trying to figure something out. And I was looking up different techniques for sleeves and I found some SEO chat bot content masquerading as an article about how to sew sleeves and it's quite lengthy. But you want to know what the headings are in this thing? Yes, yeah, headings are absolutely wild. So they are the first four section headings number one, how to sew sleeves. Question mark. Number two. What are sleeves? Question mark? Number three. What is sewing? Question mark? What does sewing sleeves mean? Question more. Listeners cannot see that. Lee is choking. Lee is laughing so hard that no air is coming out. But like, Have you ever heard garbage in your life? It's like, Let's repeat the word sewing sleeves as many times as possible. And it's doing that like student filibuster thing where it's like, I'm just gonna run out the word count. And I'm gonna be as vague as I can get away with and that way you won't know if I say something wrong.

Unknown Speaker

01:06:29

Yeah,

Aimée Morrison

01:06:30

like there's a bit that actually says, Oh my God, this like just gets funnier and funnier?

Unknown Speaker

01:06:37

Because I'll put it in the show notes. Oh, yeah. before.

Aimée Morrison

01:06:39

Before you can learn how to sew sleeves. It's important to understand what they are. sleeves are a type of garment covering which extend from the shoulder to the wrist. It's up on my on my Twitter, but I will send it to you like I was like and you know, it was the Top hit in Google. It was the one that like auto completed that lets you just click on it before you even finished your search term. Yeah, mark my words within 18 months. The entire internet is going to be nothing but chatbot generated SEO bait. So you're only going to ever have to be on the eighth screen of Google to find content. I found it you There you go. So we can end on a laugh because

Unknown Speaker

01:07:24

yeah,

Aimée Morrison

01:07:26

I'm sorry about all of this today full of righteous anger that may be off putting but let's all have a good laugh about how chat bots

Lee Skallerup Bessette

01:07:33

Oh, it's got a whole how to sew elastic. How to sharp resume River. Yeah, how to fray the bottom of jeans. I like I'm just gonna click on how to make sticky bras sticky.

Aimée Morrison

01:07:45

Yeah, what? Before you start making sticky bras sticky, it is important to know what stickiness is. stickiness is the quality of making things sticky. What even is sticky

Speaker 1

01:07:58

history sticky bras how to make a stick for us. Oh my God hear you step by step.

Aimée Morrison

01:08:02

Listen, I was just making it up and yet I have not even as good at being careful as the actual article itself is so let's keep human writers somebody sticky. I just was it like drop your ice cream cone in it? Is that how you make a sticky bra sticky again?

Lee Skallerup Bessette

01:08:22

Because what are some ways to make an adhesive bra last longer? They used adhesive? What do you do? Sticky bras and sticky anymore? How can I improve the stickiness of silicone sticky bras?

Aimée Morrison

01:08:33

I just want to say the word sticky 50 times. Sleeves sleeve it's like my sticky bra is not sticky in the way it used to be. Because it's a sticky bra that I expect to be safety

Unknown Speaker

01:08:46

up Can I remain in a sticky bra sweating.

Aimée Morrison

01:08:49

How can I oh my god that feels existential too. How can I even remain in this sticky bro? Like Britain in the European Union How can I even remain in this sticky economic zone? What do you mean that's not a location you would say in English? Okay, we should probably let people go before we start a whole second podcast on like why AI shouldn't be allowed to write anything?

Speaker 1

01:09:14

Or, or maybe it should because it's so fucking funny.

Aimée Morrison

01:09:18

And that'll be our next episode. Yeah, let's leave them wanting more like you're not even ready to say goodbye to you just quit this podcast without saying goodbye because now you're in this like aI sewing hole you can't even like your how to wash graphic tees. Listen everybody Leah's not even looking at me anymore. Lee is just smiling at her computer monitor that she's not recording the podcast on she has dipped out of this conversation. She's like, I don't need the rest of you now I have this website. Rabbit Hole we could we would have a lot more time for these kinds of websites if we weren't so busy filling out our fucking webform God dammit.

Lee Skallerup Bessette

01:09:57

Yeah, seriously this This makes it easy to recreate a website makes everything else hard. Wow afterwards. Right, all right. Well, we're gonna try to hopefully I leave in two weeks for my vacation. We'll we'll try hopefully to get one more in before we go try. We'll try. We're not promising

Aimée Morrison

01:10:14

technology work.

Speaker 1

01:10:16

Yeah. I took care of that for you though. I

Aimée Morrison

01:10:19

take care of you. And that's the only reason we do this lease. I know Hollander invites. You read the email, you set up the technology. Yeah, you're and

Lee Skallerup Bessette

01:10:27

I edit. I'm using Skype. Right now I edit the podcast. I have my workflow. It works. I love it. Yeah. All right. So you can always email us at all the things adhd@gmail.com There's our website. All the things ADHD? No

Aimée Morrison

01:10:46

password required.

Lee Skallerup Bessette

01:10:47

No password required. Um, yeah, no password required. always free. All always, always an open tab on my computer. Because if it closed, I don't know if I ever find it again. Even though I said every Yeah,

Aimée Morrison

01:11:02

I had to google it. I know what it is. Oh,

Lee Skallerup Bessette

01:11:05

I told you that right. Like the Why are I don't know. Like, we don't have images anymore. Because Canva changes your interface. And I think I was using Canva but I don't know what account I was using in Canva to make the graphics and now I can't find them anymore. And I can't figure out how to so it's like we don't have graphics anymore. Sorry.

Aimée Morrison

01:11:23

That's the whole topic of our episode today. Yeah, yes. libbed it right there. Yeah.

Lee Skallerup Bessette

01:11:27

Yeah, except, except it's not required of my job to

Aimée Morrison

01:11:33

know it's like a simple task. There was no tool was gonna help make easier like, Oh, well. I guess we can't do that anymore. Yeah. Oh, well.

Lee Skallerup Bessette

01:11:39

It was it was fun. It was fun while it lasted. All right, bye, everyone. Bye

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