Complained to a Fellow

On January 25 I wrote that I left the house by 830 and caught a Mission street bus and headed south to have coffee with an acquaintance a café. I told her about her supervising board representative’s email and how she had rejected my discussion.

We discussed our her live’s.  She told me about her connections to a planning agency and a tech outreach organization and mentioned a good person to talk to. SHe told me about her previous jobs and I mentioned a mutual friend. She told me that she considered herself to be a program manager but like me wanted to stop using fossil fuel - her reason for her most recent position. She had gone on bike tours had had an injury and only recently had fixed her bike to get back onto the riding.

I got some more coffee and we discussed the email I had sent to the board person. My acquaintance said that they had planks. One of them was an audit - her associate was administering to that. They gave people sheets and then they go out on rides and fill out the sheets.

I told her about my ideas. I told her that you can use data to identify different groups of people. Then you can go and find individuals who might want to help the group. An example was that one might have a corridor where people live. Census data or commerce date describes who lives there and it is possible to find one representative opinion leader and would represent those people.

We talked about 24th street and also her wonky board members. She said that her perspective as a small business person was that things like the central subway we're only going to make things worse for business people. At her old job she had utility trucks going through and cement cutter is in the way. Eventually she said that she went and offered them menus.

I assessed that we agreed the MTA had a tin ear. She noted that if Twitter can take payroll taxes off of their bill then why can't other small businesses? Here she told me that her husband sometimes has a hard time finding parking in the mission and it's possibly because the MTA didn't take the time to show him.

We discussed useful information for grant writing. She told me that her board was learning how to write. She told me that the transit center was also kind of new. I listed off the top two granting organizations. She told me one foundation was actually the focus of a current grant writing push .

She told me that every grant that you write needs to have some sort of equity and or environmental element to it. A vision her board member had written provided both an environmental and an equity element. She wasn’t certain that equity was the best term. I told her about my experience with an equity person in DC that I had known.

This is where we started to wind things down. I told her about the a survey group. I described my Career. She mentioned the utilities commissions.  I told her I needed a project management job.  After this I told her that the next thing that needed to happen was some sort of connection between the context on the ground in the state of research. I told her that a bibliography would be the best way to go. I said that an academic research would probably do best to have some sort of community relationship.

We had talked for about an hour at that point. I had kept notes throughout. While getting coffee I had complained to a fellow customer about the parking lots in the area. My acquaintance and I caught the bus to 16th and I said bye to her.

This series of experiences are conversations that I have had with knowledgeable people about my career or job interests. This Interview Series is meant to describe the basic elements of an interview and how I have gone about participating in one.