"Never volunteer for anything," is offered as wisdom by the more cynical among us. However, like much repeated wisdom, it is… unreliable. I became aware of this in the Marines, of all places, where being the one to step forward—even if it was to volunteer to spend a day navigating the physically grueling "motivation" course (so named as it was normally meted out as punishment to "motivate" slackers)—typically resulted not in horror and humiliation, but in some kind of "attaboy," an adventure, a memorable experience, mayhaps a new skill, or some combination of these and other payoffs.
Between us, it's even better when you ask life to "volunteer" right back!
In early 1990, newly hired by California software publisher Borland International on the strength of my technical writing skills, I smoothly took up the strain of the murderous workload and put in the necessary hours to help launch new products for our business unit and develop presentations for Philippe Kahn, the company's CEO. When I found out Borland intended to have a presence at a computer forum to be held in Moscow that June, my reaction was, "Okay, I may be the new guy on the team, but I can help you in Moscow. How about it?" After a day or two of vacillation, I got the thumbs-up.
After all these years, some things still stand out about that trip.
It started out with a car breakdown on the highway on the way to the airport. As my wife confabulated with the tow-truck driver, I thumbed a ride from a guy wearing a nasal cannula, enthusiastically sucking oxygen through a tube. He drove his vehicle with the careless abandon of a man with nothing to lose, and no time to waste. The ensuing flight was... quiet.
The steely-eyed border and customs guards I had last seen in 1976 were still at their posts upon arrival in Moscow, but there were no more "floor ladies" on duty at the hotel. Those dour women—who typically had the demeanor and couth of stevedores—were ostensibly there to "serve" hotel customers, but their real job had been to keep track of who came and went, and when. Now, back in a USSR that had less than 18 months to live, the porter who brought my bag up to my room was overly obsequious, but asked for a tip in cigarettes. Changes were afoot.
Before our departure, the company legal department had nixed the idea of us taking our portable computers with us, so as not to run afoul of US export control regulations concerning the "advanced technology" of the day, specifically: computers equipped with 80386 processors. The conventional wisdom held that such processors were being scrounged by the Soviets to upgrade their ICBMs, or something. Upon arriving in Moscow, however, we found programming shops awash in 80386-based computers, bought from Pacific Rim countries. If such CPUs were being used to upgrade the Soviet nuclear arsenal, it wasn't being done by filching them from computers possessed by foreigners.
My duties were
ad hoc in nature, and improvisational in execution. I volunteered to sit in front of Philippe during his keynote address, listening to the simultaneous translation, where I would raise my index finger to signal him to slow the enthusiastic pace of his presentation whenever the interpreters started to fall behind his train of thought. Several times, I was asked to set up special requests, such as the one for a limousine to take Philippe and select guests on a midnight drive around points in Moscow, including Red Square.
I made a point of meeting and greeting conference attendees at the Borland booth on the exhibit floor, and when asked to, followed Philippe into several invitation-only receptions, to do some rudimentary interpretation. In the evenings, I'd help order dinner at restaurants.
As the conference entered the final day, my confidence in my spoken Russian, which I had not previously exercised for nearly a decade and a half, was solid enough to allow me to be so bold as to suggest that I stay behind in Moscow for a few days to provide in-depth briefings to our local partners and representatives about the company's newly released products. My suggestion was accepted with enthusiasm, and without vacillation.
It was, with the exception of the car trouble at the outset, a most successful trip.
* * *You might expect, after all of this, that I would have had a stellar career with my employer. In truth, I did well at Borland, and my tenure there was one of the best times of my life, but it eventually came to an end. As it happened, I got my walking papers three weeks shy of the day the Soviet Union ceased to exist.
After being let go from Borland, and faced with a choice between pursuing a position at Microsoft or striking out on my own, I chose the latter. In retrospect, I don't know if it was because I had learned the value of saying "Yes!" to life's challenges, or because I had developed the skill to ask life—that "poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more"—to reciprocate. Or maybe I had it in me all along, and I was just doing what came naturally.
In the end, do actions inform habit, or do habits inform action?
I don't think I'll ever know. But I don't think it matters. Curtains fall on all performances—be they scripted or grand improvisations. In the end, what matters most is what the player brings to the next audition.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
