Information

Sheila

I don’t suggest starting from here, these articles are a series, best read in order.
I’m sorry this article took a bit longer to publish, it’s one that I needed to take extra time with. I plan to get ahead again when I have some down-time in August and September. It might be every other week for new articles until then.

If you read the “About” information, then you know that Examining Competence is dedicated to my dear friend Sheila. She passed away several months ago. I had long planned to write about this topic and had started a bit of outlining. But losing Sheila made me serious about it. The world lost so much when we lost her. Though she was loved and respected by many, and her loss hit us all hard, I don’t think she or many other Competent folk are ever quite seen by the world as clearly as they deserve. These people are lynchpins. Keystones. They do so much heavy lifting in the difficult parts of what we need to live in the world. So I’m going to take my time telling you about Sheila in particular. She’s another person who could illustrate any facet of Competence, and as I start this article I haven’t yet decided which it will be.

Starting with some context. The last timeline article wrapped up my undergraduate years. When I finished my undergrad I moved to North Carolina to attend UNC’s School of Information and Library Science. At the time, Dean and I were long-distance dating (he finished undergrad two years before I did, and was wrapping up his MS in Computer Science as I finished my BS) so he came with me. He jumped out into the tech boom of the early 1990’s as a contractor at IBM. I started at the best grad school for Library and Information Sciences in the country. (I had the far better end of that stick)

I dove into school, was convinced that I would take the world of “library automation” by storm. I had transferred some credits, and took as many classes as I could, so in the end I had the choice of the Library or the Information Science degree. I chose the IS. I was in almost the first graduating class for that degree, and if I recall correctly, there were maybe four of us? I focused on database design, because I was fascinated by databases and what then was considered “big data.” (Such small baby data by today’s standards.)

The foundation I got at UNC SILS has served me well through almost thirty years in IT across more job roles than I can even remember. A good degree will be durable, not perishable. UNC’s SILS is almost unique in the field, in that it its graduate programs are academic rather than professional degrees. (Though they surely do prepare people well and thoroughly to enter Librarianship and other information professions.) The value of that is learning theory and principles, systems of knowledge that can support a lifetime of growth. The focus isn’t on skills (though practical activities and specific classes do make skills happen.)

By starting with theory, builds the ability to understand information in a broader context and to be able to dive into specifics whenever you need to. I think that’s always colored my view of technology. Anything we do is temporary and takes place in context. IT is “Information” first, and technology second. Tending information from cradle to grave is a calling.

Study at UNC ignited that calling for me. I have a weird passion for information management. Still not so much for technology, which I’ve always regarded as a means to an end. Some of it is nifty, some is misery, but it’s the functionality I care about. While I was in school at UNC I worked as a sysadmin. I was also an officer in both the American Library Association (ALA) and American Society of Information Science (ASIS) student chapters.

For all my study, I am not much academically inclined. I love to learn things from people who are the most knowledgeable (and usually the most connected to the information). I would rather do almost anything other than citation-based writing. This foundationless series of articles illustrates my position on citing, which is “totally essential if you use others’ work” and also “nope.” So rather than risk borrowing uncredited, I write my essays on this and other topics out of whole cloth. I did a cursory glance at “the literature” in this case to see if anyone had obviously written what I intend to write, and found nothing. But I only did it to save myself the effort. If someone had written on this topic making the points I planned to, these articles would be one tweet “see [author]’s work.”

Once I determined that no one had written precisely what I intended to I could dispense with building on existing knowledge and run with a narrative style of nonfiction instead. So you can guess that my Master’s paper is nothing to write home about. I did appreciate the rigor of doing research and writing it properly. It made me completely sure that I didn’t want to go on for the Ph.D. (not that anyone was asking me to).  It’s good to do things you don’t enjoy to see if you might develop a taste for them. I have not.

So my second year, planning to finish the MSIS and leave, I needed to find someone to take my officer position in ASIS. A professor pointed me to a promising first-year, Sheila. 

I recall waiting in the Bandido’s on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill, a little alleyway basement gem of a restaurant. When Sheila arrived, I noticed first her dangly skull earrings. Then her grin. I was pretty sure I would like her. It turned out that we had a lot in common: games, movies, humor, an introvert guy at home. That whole “information science” thing. She even had a genius partner (Sam) just as I did. But what she had in far greater measure was a degree of competence that puts her in the top tier candidates for ”most competent person I ever met.”

I think of myself as lazy (though there’s some objective evidence to the contrary, people who know me well will agree), but I can get a lot done through efficiency and min/maxing. Sheila was just massively productive. She both worked hard, and worked well. While I was “not an academic, more of a hands-on type,” Sheila was Ph.D. material from day one, while ALSO being a doer. She was happy (or at least willing) to take that officer position off my hands.

So let me describe Sheila a bit. After more than twenty-five years of friendship, I ought to be able to describe her very well indeed. But what I know is that I can describe only the Sheila who intersected with me.

I was always aware that Sheila had a lot more going on, and sometimes I’d become aware of the other Sheila-facets in some way, but the Sheila I knew was such an entire person, with rich knowledge on so many things, and able to enter discussion deeply on all of them, that I never have quite believed in all of the other Sheilas I factually do know existed.

I’ve met some other friends of hers, and they are mostly quite different from me. With different deep knowledge areas, and different pop culture interests, different personalities. And they had their own deeply engaged relationships with her. Sheila was just more of a person than people usually are. Bigger somehow. Representing more of the best of humanity. More knowledge, more wit, more humor, more generosity, more energy, more optimism. Certainly she was more well-read than the average college professor. Or the above-average college professor. Or the college professors who pride themselves on being the best-read ones. Sheila ate, slept, and breathed information.

Sheila could also multitask. She was, for example, a beader and a knitter. She would listen to TED talks, and podcasts, and audio books, and watch movies and TV while accomplishing things like making “pussy hats” for every woman she knew when it became clear we needed ones that weren’t pink. Though her volunteer knitting was much more varied than that. If someone or some organization needed a knitted thing, safe bet that Sheila made a bunch of their inventory.

When I knew her at SILS, she was a shining star in the Database specialty. When she finished her coursework and was ABD (all but dissertation) on her Doctorate she moved to Boston to be a professor in another IS program at a University there. When Sheila put her ferocious mind to something, she was the brilliant best at it. I was in the same school, working on the same discipline, and I was good at it. I left after two years and was a very credible Oracle DBA and systems admin. I could manage difficult critical systems well. Sheila could tell you absolutely everything known about databases at the time. She was involved in the profession. Speaking, publishing, helping, teaching.

If you are the right sort of gamer, this will resonate with you. If not, hopefully it will make sense. In games where you “roll up” a character, there are constraints built in to try to make sure that characters are not overpowered for the game. Watching the progress of Sheila’s adult life made me suspect that the Universe puts in constraints on superpowered people as those games do on characters. In the games, if you’ve got two or three maxed skills, you’re going to have some unwieldy weak ones. Sheila had so many maxed skills, and it seemed to me that her constitution score is where she paid for them. Like, maybe she forgot to roll that one at all.

Back in the early days we used to joke that the only way Sheila ever took a break was by getting sick. That her body was enforcing a little rest when she couldn’t be bothered to do it. Looking back, it seems we were a little prescient.

While Sheila was professing up in Boston, she started having serious migraines and some other neurological oddities. It turned out that she had lesions on her brain. that eventually caused a level of debilitation that forced her to give up her career. A career that those of us observing it knew would someday be described with terms like “a titan of” or “revolutionary.” All gone. When she wasn’t in pain, she could do anything, but when pain is so frequent, blinding, and unpredictable, work simply isn’t an option.

You would think that someone whose self-image was so tied up in useful effort who found themself unable to control their pain or perform a whole lot of life functions would be 1. not cheerful and 2. not productive. In fact, if you know many people with chronic pain, you might find that they are often better at handling life’s challenges with a good attitude than are people unused to misery, and that they become super efficient to make the most use of the functional time available to them. Sheila was the Olympic-tier poster-person for both of those things.

When I talk about Competent people and their hallmarks, a more abstract way of considering it is “what is it that makes a person able to get difficult things done?” We’ve all known folks who hit a little obstacle and decide that their goals are too hard. We know plenty of people who can handle obstacles up to a point. That describes most of us really. We all exist on a spectrum of ability/willingness to address obstacles. Even the most Competent hit obstacles that cannot be surmounted, just perhaps those are bigger ones. Eventually constraints might pile up to the point where further progress is out of the question. But I think Competent people are really interesting when they’re at that “wow that’s so many constraints” point. I think we can learn about getting things done by watching people who do it when far past the point others would stop.

Which is what books and stories about heroes are about really, right? People who keep going when others wouldn’t or couldn’t. Sheila was like that, but I think “hero” rings wrong describing her. To be certain, she would have laughingly refused that label. But she gracefully agreed when I called her competent. She took pride in that. She had no choice about giving up her career, because to be a professor you have to reliably show up to teach classes (or at least at the time, that was the form education took. Show up in person, teach class.) She kept on longer than most would, but her physical constraints stopped that forward progress. It stopped THAT forward progress.

What Sheila did THEN is what’s interesting. She put time and effort into removing the constraints. If her medical condition prevented her from useful activity then by all that was holy she was going to solve it, or at least manage it. And with years of persistence she did do that to a great extent. Enough that she could then volunteer. Paid positions require showing up in ways Sheila couldn’t. But volunteer positions can be more flexible.

Sheila and Sam moved back to North Carolina to be near family, and for Sam to take a better job. Sheila became a powerhouse in a local League of Women Voters. She put her formidable knowledge and skill and will into forwarding that organization’s goals. She learned how to lobby and registered as a lobbyist and she showed her ass up at the state Legislature with skill and grace and utter persistence. Talking to people many of us would consider hopelessly entrenched in wrongheadedness. The advantage of being unable to work is time. So she poured her time into making our democracy stronger. With good effect.

Sheila used many of the skills we’ve talked about to be a good lobbyist. Understanding the goals and needs and motivations of the people she talked with, to bring up shared goals and help them see other motivations they might not have considered. Sheila in a sense “used every part of the animal.” She had to change goals, but she maximized absolutely every skill and resource available to her to make forward progress on new ones. She planned resiliently for things she could usefully do under almost any circumstances.

And those circumstances occurred. Sheila was diagnosed a few years ago with quite advanced cancer. Her skill managing her earlier debilitation was immediately put to use working on that. She wrung every drop out of the best oncologists available (which, given where she lived, were quite good oncologists indeed). She was determined to win against a disease that rarely takes prisoners. And she continued, through constant rounds of chemo, surgeries, setbacks, and pain, to have a “we’re going to turn this around attitude” and she never gave up her volunteering. She read, and knitted, even when her hands started going numb with neuropathy from the treatments she was still always busy. She suited her tasks to her energy, she optimized, and she made progress.

But so did the cancer. That zero in her Constitution score caught up with her. Even going into Hospice she was determined it would only be a rest from treatment that would let her recover enough to try a new treatment. Not a blind delusion, she also planned for the other outcome, but she always knew to keep her eye on the ball to the exclusion of allowing other thoughts to interfere. In the end, she was herself to the last. Brilliance, humor, all of her. But the cancer won.

I think it’s taken to this point in the writing to know which essential characteristic Sheila most embodied. Parents hear a lot about teaching our children “resilience.” In the many years I knew Sheila, she had big goals, she made huge progress toward them, but she had insurmountable obstacles. Her health cost her both completion of her Ph.D. and her career as an Information Science professor. She worked on many things for the League of Women Voters, but close to her heart was the push for our long-denied Equal Rights Amendment. She passed away with it all but enacted, and just sitting, hoping for an act of Congress. She was determined to defeat that cancer, and it took her anyway. She never gave up, only changed direction.

Sheila could have had easier goals. She could have limited herself. But Sheila would never do that. She pushed herself for her entire life to achieve the most important goals, the ones she was best suited for, pursuing her passions, giving generously, relentlessly practical but optimistic. In that Sheila, I think was different from folks who leap for the unrealistic, like actors and other artists who know their chances are slim but who leap anyway. Sheila’s Competence put her in the right places at the right times doing the right things. She made incredible progress, though no one will ever raise a statue for her. She wasn’t Susan B. Anthony, but she was like the suffragists whose names we don’t know but who made the progress that eventually got us the vote.

Sheila embodies the principle that Competent people keep going. Even when it seems as if they can’t. Sheila inspired her friends and colleagues. Her voice will always be in my head when I think I can’t make progress, saying “have you thought about trying…?” Even when a goal slips out of my grasp for good reason, other goals will still exist. Even ones I’ll never see fixed in my lifetime (climate change comes to mind) I can put what I have into moving the needle. Most suffragists never got to vote.

Competence isn’t defined by achievement of end goals, though that’s a nuance it’s hard to parse. As much as this reductionist view of Competence seeks to tell you what it is, you still have to know it when you see it. Someone who fails at a lot of goals might not clear the Competence bar. But progress against resistance is a fair measure. Someone who achieves goals swimming in a shallow pool measures differently than someone swimming in shark-infested waters. But the people who keep swimming regardless are people to learn from. Sheila was a dear friend, and I’m so fortunate to have had the opportunity to learn from (and marvel at) her.

Thank you for reading.