Speaker 0 | 00:09.606

All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today we have Michael Horn on the line, IT Director, oh sorry, Director of Information Technology. I interchange those a lot. At First Mile, multiple hat where comes from a background of software development. That means you must have some kind of personality. Regardless, welcome to the show, Michael.

Speaker 1 | 00:37.906

And you gave me this,

Speaker 0 | 00:41.627

like, you mentioned this really insane idea to me. But shouldn’t it be insane? We should call this a sane idea when we are talking about a philosophy, a work philosophy. And that work philosophy was unlimited. PTO. Now, and before we even get into, you know, why a software developer would end up in information technology, I mean, usually we kind of lock those guys up in the back room. But, oh, you know, I just, you know, unlimited PTO sounds like this. It actually does sound like an idea a software guy would come up with. But please explain this because that’s, to me, very exciting. And I think everyone would love to have unlimited PTO.

Speaker 1 | 01:27.784

Okay, so from a software developing perspective, it also fits several other departments. But really, when you’re paid to get a job done and not just put in hours, this works perfectly. So, you know, when you’re, you know, if you’re familiar, say, with the agile methodology, you know, you got a two-week scrum and say that, you know, 80 hours.

Speaker 0 | 01:55.355

Uh-huh.

Speaker 1 | 01:56.252

And so, you know, maybe, maybe you have finished your 80 hours in 60 hours.

Speaker 0 | 02:01.857

Okay.

Speaker 1 | 02:02.837

So does that mean now you’re rewarded with more work or are you rewarded with time off?

Speaker 0 | 02:08.182

It’s kind of a good point because people might purposely work slower.

Speaker 1 | 02:14.407

Yes.

Speaker 0 | 02:16.349

You know, human, human, sometimes this is just, you know, human desire and human natural inclination, right? You know, the. I don’t know, is it right?

Speaker 1 | 02:26.172

You know,

Speaker 0 | 02:26.492

and then it was dog or hierarchy of needs or whatever it is, you know, but anyway, keep going.

Speaker 1 | 02:32.315

Yeah. So then also, you know, you get the, the, the rare crunch time, you know, when you’re say, uh, you know, you’re putting in your 40 hours a week and it happens to be Tuesday. Right. Um, you know, do I, you know, kind of send you home and then expect you to come back in on Wednesday or take PTO. Um, you know, so, you know, I’m, I’m expecting you to come in late and stay, stay late, but, you know, not, not, um, uh, allowing you to take time off. So what you’re going to have, so what’s going to do there is you’re going to have people who refuse to stay late and all they’re going to give you is nine to five and that’s all you’ll ever get from, right. But if you, if you say, if you say that, um, you know, Your time is yours. You’re expected to get the job done. And on those days when it takes longer to get the job done, I expect you to stay. If it’s 3 o’clock and you have nothing to do, do it here.

Speaker 0 | 03:38.978

Yeah, I’m assuming you might get accused of being a meritocracy. And the only reason why I say that is because I have been accused of running a meritocracy before in past lives. Because I really do love the idea of… results are what matters, right? Results is what matters. And I know that if I paid someone to do a job, I want the job done. And this comes up when I want a room painted, for example, in my house, and I’m not comparing IT to paint work, right? Painters will charge by the hour. I like to pay by the job. Look, just give me a price for the whole job. I need the job done. I need it done really, really well. I don’t care if it takes you a week or a month, but I need the job done well. And what I don’t want to do is pay you hourly if it’s going to take a month and there’s another guy that could do it in a week and do it just as well. Right. And then from the,

Speaker 1 | 04:38.178

you know, from the consulting world, right, there’s the difference between pay by the hour, pay by the job, you know, and one, one favor, you know, so pay by the hour favors the consultant, pay by the job favors the company. Right? Seems pretty simple. Yeah. So the one common denominator there is… the job is well done, right? So if you are paying by the job, you know, and then somebody rushes through and rushes through and does a crappy job and they expect to get paid, that’s, you know, that’s not what we’re talking about.

Speaker 0 | 05:20.352

How do we translate this a little bit further and a little bit clearer? Is there timeframes? I mean, is it unlimited PTO within a 90-day period, a rolling 90-day period? Is it a per a job type of thing? I mean, I can see in the software world, in the software development piece, we have a goal we’re trying to obtain and a result we’re trying to make happen. Okay, I get that. But in IT, in a systems admin role or maybe just an IT director’s role, maybe it won’t work for system admin because they’re running a help desk or they’re taking care of tickets or they’re serving end users. And, you know, what a… unlimited PTO work in that situation? It might not work in that situation, but for a CTO or CIO or a director of information technology, I think it could work. Does it work across the kind of across the entire organization? Like where do we draw the line?

Speaker 1 | 06:09.718

Yeah. So, so people who are, you know, they’re answering phones, right? So help desk or CSRs, um, you know, I, I talked to some of the people here and you know, that it may not work there. Um, you know, cause you know, what is your performance based on? Is your performance based on number of calls you take per day?

Speaker 0 | 06:30.410

Um, I don’t know, but I know that if you make the tickets go away, I know, I know that if we’re handling X number of tickets and you, and we have X number of system admin people or people or ticket help desk people. And I know that if some very creative person on that team finds a way to make tickets disappear, I might not mind letting him go home at three o’clock every day.

Speaker 1 | 06:52.824

Well, yeah, yeah. Maybe, maybe the, you know, the idea is, you know, if you’re doing, you know, if your goal for the day is a hundred tickets and because of your knowledge, because of your skill, you’re able to do those hundred tickets by three o’clock. Have a nice day. Right.

Speaker 0 | 07:11.257

Just make tickets disappear. What if it’s, I’m running the numbers, you know, I mean, honestly, like seriously, what if the guy’s smart enough to say, Hey, I’ve been evaluating our department. And I see that we have a number of tickets that come in due to this silo. Well, I’m going to improve that silo and make it disappear. And it might take me a little bit of extra time. So I’m going to put in that extra time. But once I’ve put that time in and the tickets have disappeared, I would like to not work as much. Right,

Speaker 1 | 07:46.216

because what’s the ultimate metric, right? Satisfying the customer or making tickets disappear, right?

Speaker 0 | 07:52.604

Now, the problem is you might work in a cost center. You might report to a chief financial officer, maybe, just maybe. And how do you justify that argument to them?

Speaker 1 | 08:09.591

I think there you would say, you know, the person that I’m sitting next to who did the same 100 calls by 5 or 6 o’clock in the afternoon. uh, we’re, we’re, we have the same value. We’ve given the same value to the company, but my, you know, my job ends at three and their job ends at six. You know, we did the, the, the same work, you know, the same value. So why should they care?

Speaker 0 | 08:38.229

Well, we might have to put in a little bit of, because he, I don’t know, because, because the point of a business is to make money. That’s why, um, you know what I mean? And they’re a number culture. Uh, so we might have to say to them, this person’s more valuable than another person because they saved us money here. They saved us electricity here. There was other, I don’t know, a hard costs and controllable costs that we were able to make a difference in because of this, because now we’re handling less tickets, which means end users can be more productive. We need to show some kind of measurable results, I guess.

Speaker 1 | 09:10.372

And then maybe the, maybe the reward is to, you know, pay that person more and then expect them, okay, instead of doing a hundred tickets. today, you do now 150 tickets, but we’re paying you more. Fine. You know?

Speaker 0 | 09:24.384

I just really don’t like the a hundred ticket a day analogy, I guess. And the only reason why I don’t like that is because I want to make tickets disappear. You know what I mean? Like what if tickets disappear? But yeah, no, I mean, I, I totally get it. The, okay. So unlimited PTO, have we put that into practice anywhere?

Speaker 1 | 09:44.203

I know. We have not here, but there are several companies that do that. I know Zappos is one. I should have written it down. Some of the big three, I believe, are doing it. Um, so yeah, it’s, it’s out there, it’s out there in the wild and, uh, they’re getting pretty good traction on it.

Speaker 0 | 10:07.240

Now, what do you think about burnout people? What do you think about workaholics? I’m a workaholic. The problem is I have to shut off sometimes. So I didn’t have a problem leaving the working world. Like some people say, I don’t know if I could work from home. I don’t know if I could do this. I’d be too distracted. I would be wasting time. I’d watch TV. That’s not how it works for me. For me, it’s a hard time shutting off. It could be 1 o’clock in the morning, and I’m still answering emails and replying to people, and an idea pops into my head, and then I’m in front of my computer writing some article or doing something.

Speaker 1 | 10:41.818

Great. Yeah, so the other piece of this is mandatory vacations.

Speaker 0 | 10:52.021

Now you’re really warming up. Yeah. Mandatory vacations. Okay,

Speaker 1 | 10:56.342

go ahead. So the other piece of that is, you know, yeah, you get the workaholics that, you know, typically in America, only about a third of people will actually take their vacation day. So that results in quite a bit of issues as far as, you know, burnout and, you know, workplace stress and things like that. So mandatory vacations is actually… a standard, but it’s a security practice that a lot of companies, well, some companies have instituted specifically for their security posture. Why is that?

Speaker 0 | 11:46.806

Psycho breakdown? I mean, how is that? No,

Speaker 1 | 11:49.568

no, no. Because if… It prevents collusion and prevents fraud. So say you’re working on a sensitive system and you know that somebody is going to be in there looking at your code, you know, week a year or a year, then you’re less likely to be injecting things into it. You know, the analogy works a lot better in the finance department. So. You know, if you make, you know, we’ll say the controller go on vacation and you have somebody take their spot and kind of looking over their books and things. And in the meantime, yes, exactly. In the meantime, you turn off their email access, you turn off their phone access. So they do not have access to work. Then you can prevent those sorts of things.

Speaker 0 | 12:48.310

Interesting.

Speaker 1 | 12:50.351

But also it promotes cross-training, right? So it forces…

Speaker 0 | 12:57.115

And equal treatment. And equal treatment. And numerous other things. Exactly. I mean, there’s like numerous, numerous other things that roll downhill from this. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 13:08.081

And one of the things that I thought was real interesting was it enables you to build and identify leaders. So for example… If it’s the, you know, the CTO that has to go on vacation, right? This is a mandatory across the entire organization. CTO has to go on vacation. Therefore, somebody has to step up and take his place for a week or two weeks. Then who do we pick, right? Who’s kind of the natural? Hey,

Speaker 0 | 13:38.391

man, this is how Tom Brady became who he was. Think about it. What were we going to do in that Super Bowl where Drew Bledsoe kept getting hit in the head and kept getting knocked out? What were we going to do? I don’t know. Last minute, we got to throw in this guy, Tom Brady.

Speaker 1 | 13:55.165

Who the hell is Tom Brady?

Speaker 0 | 13:56.946

Yeah, exactly. All right. Throw that guy in.

Speaker 1 | 13:59.548

All right. Now,

Speaker 0 | 14:02.210

he’s the best quarterback of all time. I can say that because I’m from Massachusetts, and I don’t care what anyone else says. And I’m not even a football fan, but that’s kind of how we roll around. Yeah, that’s mind-blowing, actually. Simple, but actually quite mind-blowing. Because, yeah, people do hold things to, and especially in IT, especially in IT, where people may hold on to their job a little bit tight. They may hold on to systems and passwords a little bit tight. They may know that… If, well, if they get rid of me, you know, everything crashes, everything’s going down.

Speaker 1 | 14:46.220

Right. And then, and how does that affect business continuity? Right. What if that guy, you know, has, has all this tribal knowledge and he leaves or he gets hit by a bus, you know? How does that affect the business? So this has major impact on positive business continuity as well.

Speaker 0 | 15:08.029

I’m really into metaphors and similes lately. And the more that I speak with people, the more they pop up. Tribal knowledge is one that pops up. Collusion really isn’t one, but I’m just going to throw that in there because I like, let’s just use collusion. Maybe that’s because Trump was using it. There’s been no collusion or something like that. Again, no political, this, I, you know, I haven’t, the show has gotten to the point now where I’m, I actually am working on a disclaimer. The show, anything on the, anything that anyone says on this show does not represent the political views of whatever. I don’t know what that disclaimer is, but I actually, I’ve actually gotten to the point now where I’ve been told I have to have a disclaimer. I haven’t come up with it.

Speaker 1 | 15:48.356

There’s still not been day for any political campaign by anybody.

Speaker 0 | 15:51.617

Yeah, exactly. You know, we do not represent any football, you know, whatever, you know, and whatever, all that stuff. But anyways, all of these points, I mean, we could probably go on all day long about mandatory vacations and why the benefits of that is huge. And the fact that only a third of America takes vacation, if we could just force that third of America to take vacation, how could that actually improve? How could that improve the economy? Oh, absolutely. It really is a work smarter, not work harder. And how would that improve company morale in general? So, you know, to identify new leaders for people not to get really selfish and hold things close to their chest or whatever that saying is, you know, that’s huge. And eliminate trivial knowledge and other things that are, you know, really honestly big red flags.

Speaker 1 | 16:50.123

Right. And so, you know, the concept there with the mandatory vacations is you don’t have the guilt of taking a vacation. Well. You know, you can just pass it off as, well, you know, I got to, so might as well go to Paris, you know, take that, that trip that I’ve been wanting to go to Paris, you know, because I have to. So, you know, other than saying, well,

Speaker 0 | 17:09.560

you know,

Speaker 1 | 17:09.900

they need me there and I can’t take time off and yada, yada, yada, you know, you end up just being able to do things that you wanted to do because now it’s, it’s culturally acceptable.

Speaker 0 | 17:22.650

Yeah. I just saw the yada, yada, yada episode last night on Seinfeld while I was at the pizza shop. for anyone out there that you know pop culture anyways uh yeah you’re gonna get some viewers to go huh do you know when i looked at when the first episode of seinfeld when do you think the first episode of seinfeld came out was do you know 80s probably isn’t that crazy it was the 80s that’s how long ago it was i was like

Speaker 1 | 17:58.631

40 years ago.

Speaker 0 | 18:00.972

July 5th, 1989. That’s crazy. Some girl said to my daughter at the baseball game the other day, like, what do you live in the 1980s? Because my daughter told her she sews. Like she has a sewing machine. She’s like, what is this, the 1980s? That’s messed up. Okay. Mandatory vacation, PTO or unlimited PTO. Is that really possible on limited PTO?

Speaker 1 | 18:32.036

I think so, because you think about who you’re accountable to, right? And also, you know, one of the pros here is that the company instills trust in their employees. And, you know, you’re still accountable to get the job done. So kind of in the agile world where, you know, you’ve got to… you have your team and you’re accountable to your team, you’re still accountable to them to get the things done that you had committed to get done. So that doesn’t go away.

Speaker 0 | 19:06.590

I’m totally okay with it. I told him recently. Keep going.

Speaker 1 | 19:13.092

The performance ratings don’t go away, so you still need to perform. You know, there’s always going to be the times when, you know, especially, you know, you’re looking now with the coronavirus where, hey, I got to take a week off because, you know, I’m just sicker than a dog. Well, hey, I don’t have any PCOs. So that means I got to come into work. No, you’re not coming to work. You know, just take your PCO and we’ll deal with that later. But I think it ends up helping the company.

Speaker 0 | 19:49.147

It’s definitely got to be measured. It’s definitely got to be measured and controlled somehow. There’s got to be, like you said, performance ratings, things like that. Because I do know that I did recently tell one of my… I don’t like the word employee. I just don’t like that. Partner.

Speaker 1 | 20:05.815

Can you say minion?

Speaker 0 | 20:07.596

Minion. I don’t know if he’s minion either. I think I’d prefer to say headcount. No. One of the headcount. Employee number one. I would like to, I mean, I basically told him, I said, look, when you get to this, this is the goal. This is what we’re trying to do. This is the number. I don’t care how you get there. I don’t care how much time it takes. to get there. All I know is that if you get there and you maintain that number, I don’t care if you’re working one hour a year, I’m paying you $200,000 a year.

Speaker 1 | 20:42.483

Absolutely.

Speaker 0 | 20:43.583

I don’t care because I know what that number equals. I know what that number means in profitability. I know what that number means in efficiency. I know what that number means as far as all kinds of how it flows through to the bottom line. And maybe that’s where, you know, the cost that maybe that’s how, where finance comes into play. But the goal has to be very specific. There has to be no, it’s a numbers game. I mean, at the end of the day,

Speaker 1 | 21:13.231

it’s all about bringing value to the company.

Speaker 0 | 21:15.512

Right.

Speaker 1 | 21:16.272

And, and you know, we do, we, you know, we don’t want to bring in less value. Right. But you know do we need to bring in more without paying for it? You know, I don’t know.

Speaker 0 | 21:29.792

And in a technology world that can be done more and more and more. I still don’t understand why we have to have these massive call centers when so many people can work from home. Look, if you’ve got the QOS, if you’ve got the latency and the jitter down and you can work from home and you’ve got a headset on and a soft phone, I don’t care where the heck you are. I don’t care if you’re in Bali with a surfboard leaning up against the, up against your screen. Once you’re done with your job, fine, jump out the door and go, you know, go hit some waves.

Speaker 1 | 21:58.616

Well, yeah, you know, I mean, that’s a, that’s kind of another, another, you know, topic of discussion about remote work, but, but yeah, you know, you, you, you think about, you know, would you rather have a call center in downtown San Francisco, right. And have all local people from downtown San Francisco, or would you rather have one from, you know, having people all over the world in different time zones and, you know, and, and because of cost of living all over the world says that you can, you know, pay people. But there should be no technological reasons why you should be able to work.

Speaker 0 | 23:04.209

Especially when it comes to education and tutoring and stuff like that. I’m a homeschooler, so I never thought I’d be a homeschooler. I never thought I’d be married. I never thought I’d have kids. And that’s just a side lesson, a side lesson for everyone out there listening to. Anything that you ever said I will never do will happen to you. Well,

Speaker 1 | 23:21.823

and also… Okay. And it’s also proof that some of those geeky IT guys can actually find a vein.

Speaker 0 | 23:30.292

And, well, I can handpick really good teachers. Because let’s face it, I mean, your kids will vastly surpass you in general knowledge very quickly to the point where you can’t teach them anymore if you’re homeschooling. And if you could handpick your teachers for your children, ones that you know, like, and care about and care about your kids and they get one-on-one time with them. Yeah, you pay for it, but you’d be surprised at how fast people can excel. And the only reason I’m saying that is because I read, I wrote a bunch of kind of little blog articles in my email list the other week, a couple months ago, actually back in November, December, when I was in Egypt. I stopped to see one of my kids’teachers in Egypt who teaches via like Zoom. And I know I don’t, I just stopped just, you know, I’ve never been to Egypt. Let’s see what this is like. And he lives in like this ridiculously poor, like one of the poorest sections of Egypt in a village. And I’m like, I cannot believe that this is my kid’s teacher and he’s teaching from here via zoom technology. Wouldn’t even know that you can hear in the background, horns beeping and stuff, but it doesn’t put it into perspective until you’re actually physically there. And you’re like, wow, this is unbelievable. And. The cost of living is ridiculous. It’s just on another level, super cheap. It’s like, you know, they use pounds. So it’s like one American dollar to 16 Egyptian pounds. And I could probably go there with $10,000 and live like a king for the next five years.

Speaker 1 | 25:05.216

Oh yeah,

Speaker 0 | 25:05.416

exactly. Make any difference.

Speaker 1 | 25:06.676

Honduras and you know, the Central America and yeah.

Speaker 0 | 25:10.158

I was still doing podcasts. No one knew. They probably knew because I told them. They probably knew because I told them, but Zoom’s got, I mean, where all their pops are and the way they do it, it’s really, really good. And I mean, I did my other, my, my other work, you know, you know, the phone system consulting, internet pricing, you know, running numbers, doing everything. I did everything. And I don’t think you would have noticed. So, and I’m not. And everyone hates when I bring this up because not everyone has that ability to work anywhere. And some people, we all have different jobs and everyone needs different things to do. But I think it just goes to the point because there are a lot of jobs where people can work from home. And you can, you could put performance ratings on it. And you could mandatory, make sure people take vacations and mandatory PTO and all that. There’s a lot of flexibility that, you know, that. we’re probably not, we’re not taking advantage of. And that’s obviously proven when you said a third of Americans don’t take vacation.

Speaker 1 | 26:07.005

Right.

Speaker 0 | 26:08.506

So that’s me trying to link this all together.

Speaker 1 | 26:13.767

Oh, and, and, you know, kind of a, another, another concept, this is kind of close to my heart is, is, you know, you think about poverty in America and say things like the, um, the native American community. Right. Where the local jobs aren’t there because of various reasons. However, you know, if they are allowed to do some of these high tech jobs from their homes, you know, they don’t have to go find places where jobs are. They can just, you know, work from wherever they’re at.

Speaker 0 | 26:57.384

It’s about education. Yeah. And it’s about being educated and knowing it.

Speaker 1 | 27:01.847

Exactly.

Speaker 0 | 27:03.168

Knowing that it’s available there. Um, and that’s a huge opportunity for anyone out there listening to, you know, provide that somehow as well. Um, but absolutely. Um, that’s actually a huge opportunity for somebody. Anyone could pick any, uh, could pick, could pick any type of like poverty stricken group. That’s, you know, for whatever reason, you know, demographics alone. Um, make a big difference there. And I can speak to that very truthfully because Telecom has probably one of the worst customer service has the worst customer service, at least one out of like three Americans or something like that say that Telecom has the worst customer service in the world or in America. Why is that? Because you’re calling a 1-800-GO-POUND-SAN toll-free number and quite frankly we could do a lot better.

Speaker 1 | 27:56.576

Oh yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 0 | 27:58.236

Um, so, okay. So what else we got other than PTO and mandatory and mandatory vacations? I think that’s enough, but I mean, really, do you have any other main philosophies?

Speaker 1 | 28:11.460

Yeah. I mean, it’s not all, um, you know, roses and, and honey and roses, you know what I mean? So there’s, there’s some things that you have to, um, consider as well. There’s some, there’s some positives. So, you know, one of those things is, you know, PTO is a reward, right? So So say you have a milestone that, you know, at four years, you know, you get pumped up from two weeks to three weeks, right? Well, now you don’t have that. So you got to think of other ways to reward longevity, right?

Speaker 0 | 28:41.292

The ultimate meritocracy. That’s what we’re calling this.

Speaker 1 | 28:44.895

Yes.

Speaker 0 | 28:46.076

Okay,

Speaker 1 | 28:46.316

so what?

Speaker 0 | 28:47.958

Money, Starbucks gift cards. What are we doing?

Speaker 1 | 28:52.092

Um, you know, that’s, that’s interesting. You know, you think about, uh, you know, money, money’s always good. Um, you know, I don’t know anybody that would say, Hey, you know, I’ve been here for four years, you know, here’s a, you know, X number of bonus, right. Yeah. Um, ownership or stock, you know, it used to be, yes, stock options, options, ownership, you know, it used to be the, you know, here’s a lot, you know, you, you, you know, graduate, you, uh, I retire with a Rolex or whatever, you know, and I mean, I. I’ve seen, you know, plaques around here that, hey, you know, you’ve been here for five years. Here’s a certificate. Okay. Right.

Speaker 0 | 29:29.841

Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 29:31.582

You know, the other one is, you know, about overlapping days. Right. You know, you need to make sure that the stuff that’s scheduled. So, you know, you might be able to say, you know, you’ve got scheduled TTO and unscheduled TTO. So maybe, you know, you’re going to. If you’re going to be expected to be completely off the grid, okay, then I want you to schedule it, right? We can make sure that you’re not in the scrum, that you’re not on the schedule, that you’re whatever, right? Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 30:04.594

yeah.

Speaker 1 | 30:05.496

But if you’re, you know, if it’s unscheduled. then I would expect you to probably be available on your phone within an hour’s notice or something like that, that we can call you or we can, if need be, right? But so for those overlapping days when you have scheduled DTO, then you need to make sure that, of course, that you have the headcount, the planned headcount to cover what you need to do.

Speaker 0 | 30:41.709

You just made me think of my father growing up. My father’s a doctor, and doctors go through a very rough first part of their career with medical school, and then residency, and the phone ringing at 2 o’clock in the morning. That’s just what that reminded me of. I don’t know if there’s any link there to that, but how it would work in healthcare, where you’ve got something that’s much more… I don’t know if people like to say not-for-profit, but I don’t necessarily believe that healthcare is not-for-profit. But even though… Oh,

Speaker 1 | 31:14.518

healthcare is absolutely not-for-profit.

Speaker 0 | 31:16.659

That’s what I say, but, you know, when you go to argue with all my family, it’s a little, you know, no. It’s, it’s, it is…

Speaker 1 | 31:25.123

It used to be non-profit, but I think it was Nixon who, who made a law that said that they could be non-profit.

Speaker 0 | 31:34.027

Yeah, in other words, like… It’s structured in a way to look like, you know, it’s anyways, that’s not the point. The point is that can be tough in first responder jobs. My brother’s the fire chief of the fire department, you know, and I just feel like, you know, he’s never, every time we go to sit down and have dinner, it’s like, oh, a guy cut his finger off in a wood splitter. I’m gone. Or there’s an accident or this, that. The wood splitter one’s really true, by the way. It’s on the scanner. It’s on the finger. People.

Speaker 1 | 32:06.380

I think the answer there is early and strong retirement, right? I mean, if you’re expected to be on a fall 24 hours a day for 20 years or 10 years or whatever, and you survive, right? I mean, you look at a lot of these high-stress, high-risk jobs. You know, they say, well, yeah, you know, you put in your 10 years and you’re going to be able to pay full benefits. Yeah, because, you know, you’re either going to burn out and not continue for 10 years or you’re, you know, going to get killed doing the job. And so we don’t have to pay you. But, you know, you make it through there, then, yeah, you know, I think you deserve it. I think you should expect it. Yeah. But I think the last one to consider here, the last con is about blackout periods. Maybe, you know, you. say, you know, no planned vacations from November to January 1st or something like that, right?

Speaker 0 | 33:08.686

Yeah, gotcha. Yeah, because you’re in retail or something, you know, whatever, depending on that. Or, you know, if you’re in accounting, you know, during tax season, you know, don’t think about taking your time off there. Exactly. Gotcha.

Speaker 1 | 33:21.777

Great,

Speaker 0 | 33:23.398

great. Yeah, it’s perfect. Hey, it has been outstanding to have you on the show. We didn’t get to talk much about… you know, history and first computer growing up. Uh, we talked to all of them. We alluded, we, we alluded to people not knowing about stuff, you know, from the 80s, yada, yada. Come on to 128,

Speaker 1 | 33:40.980

come on to 128 for my 16th birthday.

Speaker 0 | 33:47.123

Oh, that says, uh, well then now that dates you, um, again. And, um, but anyways, man, it has been, uh, it’s been a pleasure, uh, having you on the show. I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of people that have questions about this. Um, so if you want to get ahold of Michael Horn, find him on, on LinkedIn, search, I searched Michael Horn, uh, you know, first mile, first mile. There’s no space between first and mile. Um, and you’ll find him there. So, sir, thank you so much. It has been a pleasure.

Speaker 1 | 34:17.442

Thank you. And have a good day.

Speaker 0 | 34:27.537

Thank you