Go back… Go forth… Go rhino!… And Eddie would too, if he could…
Now me and J. came up with this really specific approach to problem-solving at the office, that was in a golden age back when we were office-buddies & worked together a long time ago. Well, a year or two back.
We had it sprung up from this inside joke about the way rhinoceroses would supposedly strike out after a fire, say, according to the myth, whenever they see bushes on fire they- whamm!- would go at it, one-track mind and hide like a battletank, and quell it by stompin’ on it.
So J. and I- now picture us manning our Lotus Notes inboxes- would watch those incoming e-mails like they were the evil aliens from Space Invaders. They’d pop up, we’d zero in, and blast ‘em all to smithereens. That’s the way it went.
In a crazy kind of way it was a game for us. Objective was to keep that inbox clean. Any e-mail left meant a case or problem left unresolved and we couldn’t have it.
When things were slow it was pretty much a “first come, first served” basis, no secret as to the MO. But whenever things got rough we’d unleash the RHINO within. Here’s how it worked:
Suppose it’s one of those days and the Space Invaders monsters are pouring in, one after another, all at once, way faster than you can handle them. So what we’d do was, we’d pinpoint the timebombs going off, anything that was metaphorically on fire (and sometimes borderline literally) and yell Go rhino! to each other. And always, always with a smile.
Picture Batman during the Long Halloween story, that bit in the end when he’s gotta go against all his foes all at once and he tackles Solomon Grundy first because Grundy topples whole buildings with his bare hands…
J. and I would just like Batman strike at the bigger stuff, go at the bigger boys, go after those bits that nobody really wanted. Us? We loved the nastier, scarier, downright more terrible stuff. We’d go where nobody else would go, we’d plunge headfirst against the eye of the storm keeping nothing to the wall- While everybody else would be looking for the perfect wave, pinned down to their day in the sun- we’d be cheering for the shadow of the storm to loom closer, we’d live to see the sky tumbling down on our heads. We were utterly careless about being over our heads, there was a strange, quasi-suicidal beauty in tackling problems so much above our then-current capacity. Utterly irresponsible, and fearless of being fired.
The way we saw it then, and I think the way we still see it now, is that the world is so much more fun when you bite a lot more than you can chew.
Some people will tell you not to try to embrace the whole world at once. That’s not my pitch. I’ll take a cue from my buddy Friedrich Nietzsche and label them naysayers. People that believe in holding back.
My advice is, go and embrace whole star systems all at once, because if you don’t push to surpass your arm’s reach then you’ll never get to surpass yourself.
Now even better than Zarathustra and his übermensch- Ever heard of this guy Eddie Aikau?
He was this Hawaiian lifeguard from the 1970s whom as surfer would, in a nutshell, go after those waves nobody else would, that nobody else dared to.
He died in ’78 when rowing for help after a boating accident and became a legend after his own right and to this day the legend says, Eddie would go.
Well me and J., we would go too.
And we will go, still.
Just watch our dust.
We had it sprung up from this inside joke about the way rhinoceroses would supposedly strike out after a fire, say, according to the myth, whenever they see bushes on fire they- whamm!- would go at it, one-track mind and hide like a battletank, and quell it by stompin’ on it.
So J. and I- now picture us manning our Lotus Notes inboxes- would watch those incoming e-mails like they were the evil aliens from Space Invaders. They’d pop up, we’d zero in, and blast ‘em all to smithereens. That’s the way it went.
In a crazy kind of way it was a game for us. Objective was to keep that inbox clean. Any e-mail left meant a case or problem left unresolved and we couldn’t have it.
When things were slow it was pretty much a “first come, first served” basis, no secret as to the MO. But whenever things got rough we’d unleash the RHINO within. Here’s how it worked:
Suppose it’s one of those days and the Space Invaders monsters are pouring in, one after another, all at once, way faster than you can handle them. So what we’d do was, we’d pinpoint the timebombs going off, anything that was metaphorically on fire (and sometimes borderline literally) and yell Go rhino! to each other. And always, always with a smile.
Picture Batman during the Long Halloween story, that bit in the end when he’s gotta go against all his foes all at once and he tackles Solomon Grundy first because Grundy topples whole buildings with his bare hands…
J. and I would just like Batman strike at the bigger stuff, go at the bigger boys, go after those bits that nobody really wanted. Us? We loved the nastier, scarier, downright more terrible stuff. We’d go where nobody else would go, we’d plunge headfirst against the eye of the storm keeping nothing to the wall- While everybody else would be looking for the perfect wave, pinned down to their day in the sun- we’d be cheering for the shadow of the storm to loom closer, we’d live to see the sky tumbling down on our heads. We were utterly careless about being over our heads, there was a strange, quasi-suicidal beauty in tackling problems so much above our then-current capacity. Utterly irresponsible, and fearless of being fired.
The way we saw it then, and I think the way we still see it now, is that the world is so much more fun when you bite a lot more than you can chew.
Some people will tell you not to try to embrace the whole world at once. That’s not my pitch. I’ll take a cue from my buddy Friedrich Nietzsche and label them naysayers. People that believe in holding back.
My advice is, go and embrace whole star systems all at once, because if you don’t push to surpass your arm’s reach then you’ll never get to surpass yourself.
Now even better than Zarathustra and his übermensch- Ever heard of this guy Eddie Aikau?
He was this Hawaiian lifeguard from the 1970s whom as surfer would, in a nutshell, go after those waves nobody else would, that nobody else dared to.
He died in ’78 when rowing for help after a boating accident and became a legend after his own right and to this day the legend says, Eddie would go.
Well me and J., we would go too.
And we will go, still.
Just watch our dust.
posted by 186282mps at 7:33 AM
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