So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Adieu...

Someone once said that parting is such sweet sorrow.  I don’t know about sweet, but there’s certainly lots of sorrow.  I’ve known it was coming for quite some time, but it finally happened yesterday.  I said good bye to a dear, dear friend forever.  It’s officially the end of my relationship with my blackberry, and I’m going to miss it.

Many people have said that I should give it a week with my new phone and I’ll forget all about my blackberry.  They say that the iPhone is so much more in so many ways, but I just can’t see it.  I’ve entered the withdrawal stage, and it’s not pleasant.  I’m so programmed to feel that little red light, it's like my pulse, and as if attached to one of those heart monitors in the hospital, my little red pulse has stopped blinking. Flatlined. Forever. 

My first blackberry was made of stone.  It weighed about 6 pounds, and you couldn’t break it.  It came with a hard plastic holster, and in those days, wearing your blackberry on your hip like a six shooter was super cool.  I had that blackberry for a number of years, until the metal frame around the screen came loose and started to scratch up my face.  That was the first time in my life that technology started fighting back.  With your black plastic holster that clicked every time you moved it around, the world knew that you were awesome.  That things were happening in your life that you couldn’t be separated from for even one minute.  I was always anal about what was happening at work when I wasn't there, and now, finally, I had something that allowed me to take the edge off that terrible stress.  

Then I met Curve. I never loved you and you never loved me, but like all good couples, we powered through.  I never wanted anything bad to happen to you, but I sure wasn’t sad when your little nasty trackball fell out.  What made me sad was that it was a condition that could be fixed.  Our relationship after that was touch and go until you mysteriously got dropped into the toilet.  Sayonara, Curve !

Oh Curvy, you almost caused me to fall out of love with Blackberry

Then came the Bold.  You, I loved.  Maybe I loved you because you weren’t a Curve.  I loved you because you didn’t have the stupid trackball, but rather, a sleek and sexy trackpad.  The plasticky curve you were not…you had some presence…you were so, I don't know, bold!  Where I didn’t really care what happened to my Curve, I was devastated when, as I was climbing out a window onto my roof, your beautiful brilliant screen was pierced by a nail.  Sad on one hand, but on another, the nail pierced you and not my leg.  You may have saved me from a horrific tetanus shot (for a big boy, I’m unnaturally afraid of needles). I was sad to see you go.

Good-bye Bold, Hello World.  Blackberry World Phone, that is.  You came to me when I started a job that, thankfully, wasn’t long-lived, and frankly, I wasn’t sad to see either one of you go.  You may have had the ability to connect me to the world if I had decided to trek through Botswana, but you were missing some important stuff.  Once you’ve had a camera on your phone, it’s pretty hard to go camera-less, and If I've got a phone that lets me travel the world, I probably want to snap the odd picutre. I know it’s silly, but you just get used to having it there.

And the best came last.  Ahhh, the Torch.  Lots of folks disagree with me, but I have loved my Torch since the moment I laid hands on it.  It has presence and it has weight, but not too much weight.  It fits my hand beautifully, and I like how it looks.  A lot.  We’ve been together for over two years, and with the exception of sometimes giving me some attitude, and occasionally going to sleep when it’s not supposed to, I've loved it.  For two years we’ve been inseparable.  We’ve been from one end of this country to the other more times than I can count and we’ve pretty much covered the continent together.  You’ve been my only lifeline to my family when I’ve been away and lonely, you’ve kept work information flowing like digital intravenous, and you’ve kept me company when I’ve been stranded in airports and train stations, and even on the side of the road.  

I'd like to think my blackberry is going to be sad to lose me too.

I always said I’d never give you up, and here I am, giving you up.  I feel like I’ve let you down, when you’ve never let me down, not even for one second.  It's true...when your red light was extinguished for the very last time yesterday I felt sad.  Genuinely sad.  I’m about 22 hours into life without my blinking red light, and I feel lost without it.

Thank you Blackberry for always being there for me.  I’m going to miss you.

10,003 A very sweet number!

Woohoo! I just checked the blog, and today, Guess What Happened At Work Today had its 10,000th visitor (no prizes, no balloon drop, sorry). I posted my 50th entry the other day, and today, we're at 10,003 visitors!

So a huge thank you to everyone who's been reading, and thanks for all the encouragement and feedback (even the 'constructive' stuff). So onward. I really appreciate the folks who've 'starred' in the posts, and I mostly appreciate not being sued.

One of my favourite comments was received recently..."I love it when you post new stuff, especially when it's not about your blackberry." Oddly, the posts that were specifically about my insane relationship with my blackberry are the most read and shared. And my mother-in-law, possibly the most faithful reader of this blog, and who I happen to adore, got a huge kick out of the brown shoes blogpost.

Anyway enough of that. Thank you for your support.

____________________________ 

A really short post today:  

As a VP of Sales and Marketing, I really appreciate companies who spend the time to be creative and funny in their advertising. Last week I saw a commercial that I thought was the best commercial I have seen in a very long time, and from a place I never would have expected it to come from.  Kmart.  Enjoy.  Don't pee your pants.

Click here to see what may be the funniest commercial ever.

   

I Fought the Bed..And the Bed Won.

If you’ve been following along, you know that I spend a huge chunk of my life on the road.  Airports, car rentals, hotels.  In fact, I’m writing this blog in my hotel room, as I often do.  I’ve been at this travel-thing for a long time, so I’m pretty good at it.  True, I’ve become a bit of an airport diva, but it’s really more about getting where I’m going faster, easier, and as comfortably as possible.   I can handle pretty much anything the travel gods throw at me, and I usually don’t get too twisted out of shape.

I can now say, after four nights in the Radisson Calgary that I have met my match.  The travel gods have thrown a curveball that I just don’t know how to deal with.  This curveball is called the “Sleep Number Bed”.  Whoever thought it was a good idea to install this new hellish torture device in a hotel should be shot.  I’m in my 40’s, and I’ve stayed in more hotels than the average guy, and I’m used to sleeping in lots of different beds (that sounds a little trampier than I meant it to), and I can’t figure this bloody thing out.

In theory, the sleep number bed is a good idea.  The mattress is full of air, and with a remote control, you control the firmness of the mattress.  Good idea, right?  Well, I dunno.  Clearly these beds are made for 2 people, because you can control both sides of the bed.  For example, if my lovely wife likes a firm mattress, and I like it a little softer, we should be able to be happy, and our marriage will be safe because we both get the bed we want, and we’re still able to sleep together.  

Looks delightful, doesn't it?

Try sleeping alone in one of these contraptions.  I jumped into it on Sunday night, and selected my personal sleep number.  Who knew I had a personal sleep number.  So I set it to medium. Apparently I like my bed the way I like my steak.  Who knew?  It seemed relatively comfortable and it never occurred to me to set the other side of the bed.  At some point during the early part of the night, I rolled over, and it felt like I fell into a hole.  I rolled off my medium-firm side of the bed into some über-soft pit of despair.  I seriously dropped off my side and fell into the other side.  That was a rude awakening.  In the dark of the night, I’m trying to scramble back up onto the medium firm side of the bed, and I’m having difficulty scaling the ledge.  I had to get up, walk around the bed, and get back in.  So not cool.  

Now, it’s 1:30 in the morning, and I’m seeking out the remote control so I can blow up the other side of the bed.  I set the passenger side to the same firmness of the driver’s side and waited for the magic to happen.  If  you’ve never slept in a bed with a built-in compressor, it’s quite an experience.  It clunks as it fires up, and then, like the air machine at the gas station, it starts blowing air, and you can feel and see the mattress rise.  Fun times at 1:30am.

Notice the freakin' ledge

You would think that when you set the left side at 65 (that’s medium) and the right side at 65 that the bed would then be level and that the firmness would be consistent.  You would be wrong.  For four nights I’ve been in a battle with my bed.  I wonder how many other people in this hotel are having the same battle.  I’ve blown up the bed, I’ve let air out.  I’ve drained both sides of the bed and maxed both sides out, and I can’t make this bed level.  There is a ledge in the middle of it that’s become my nemesis for these last four nights.  I’ve been trying to manage my bed, and I’m pretty sure that your bed is not something you should have to manage.  There were times where I almost resorted to sleeping on the floor, but instead, I just slept in the hole.

For years and years the hotel chains have been competing on the basis of the comfort level of their beds.  Westin has their ‘Heavenly Bed’, and it is heavenly.  Sheraton has the Sweet Sleeper bed.  Sweet enough.  In a bold stroke, Marriott has the “Marriott Bed”… kind of braggy, but still comfortable.  None of those beds have tried to kill me.  I mean you may get drowned in a sea of pillows on the Sweet Sleeper bed, but it’s comfortable.  The Sleep Number bed?  Not so much.

The way I see it, you go to a hotel to sleep.  It’s bad enough when you have to fight with your bed, but when your bed fights back, it might be time to find somewhere else to sleep.

It's Reality. Seriously?

Every Sunday night, I get the blues. Then I get in a fight. I’m not blue because I have to go to work on Monday morning, and I’m not fighting with my wife or my kids. I’m blue because I’ve just been stuck in a two-hour train wreck called The Apprentice, and I’m fighting with the crazy-haired freak on the screen called Donald Trump. And for the last two weeks, I’ve been yelling at the losing project manager.

If you haven’t seen or heard of The Apprentice, you’ve likely just arrived from your home planet, or you’ve been stuck in a North Korean prison for the last bunch of years. I find Donald and the crew highly entertaining, that is, until the last ten minutes of the show, when whatever shreds of ‘reality’ quickly dissolve in what’s called the ‘boardroom’, where the only certainty is that, ‘… someone WILL be fired.’ 

That’s really the only thing you can count on when you invest two hours in watching the show. In it’s current iteration, Celebrity All-Star Apprentice you’ve got a bunch of C, D, and E list ‘stars’ coming back for their second kick at the Apprentice can. As an avid consumer of pop culture, I find it hard to call someone I’ve never heard of a star, much less an ‘all-star’. I mean we’re talking about aging Playboy bunnies, models, and lesser-known siblings like La Toya Jackson and some lame Baldwin dude.

 

Seriously.  Who the hell are these people?

So I watch shows like Celebrity All-Star Apprentice with one eye on the entertainment value, and one eye on the work aspect, since the show purports to be about work and teams and that kind of thing. Whatever. This show is to work as Taco Bell is to fine dining. And just as I enjoy the odd late-night cruise through the Taco Bell drive thru, I enjoy Sunday nights with the Donald. Trouble is, they both give me gas.

If I’m anal about the work part of the show, it drives me bloody insane. For the sake of entertainment, let’s set aside the crazy antics of the team tasks every week. There is no way that any of those tasks even look a little bit like work. Even when it’s not Celebrity Apprentice (although I’m sure the Donald has completely given up on the real nobodies, and now favours the celebrity nobodies full time), the tasks don’t resemble anything like actual work or actual work locations, so I’m focusing on Donald himself and his pretend boardroom meetings.

In the last two weeks, Donald has commented on Lisa Rinna’s reduced lip size (your lips look better smaller, Lisa), and on somebody’s boobs. I have chaired a thousand meetings in my career, and I’m fairly certain lips and boobs have never come up. At least out loud. He regularly comments on how beautiful the women look, and he’s been known to talk about how he could never be gay. I get that it’s the Donald, and that it’s TV. But reality it’s not. At least not any reality that I’m a part of. I’m pretty certain that even in the US, Donald would be getting his ass sued every single week for the smack he talks.

Speaking of smack talk, have you seen this prize-winner, Omarosa?  OHEMGEE!  Omarosa is a treat. This bitch will take you down before breakfast and have your body eaten up, digested, and crapped out before lunch. If ole Omorosa acted this way in any company, she’d be done, and this is her third time back at the Apprentice. She’s a ‘celebrity’ because of her three visits to the Apprentice, and nothing more. And she’s evil. She doesn’t stab you in the back. She doesn’t even stab you in the front…she stabs you right in the face, and smiles while she’s doing it. 

Omarosa.  Not afraid to bust out the tears to take somebody down.

For three seasons, they’ve called her every name in the book, sent her off on obscure magical mystery tours to get rid of her, and plotted her demise. She’s a menace. For the last two Sunday nights, she’s been at the root of my 10:59pm discontent and outrage. Let me explain my dissatisfaction. For two complete episodes, Omarosa has been her usual self, and her team went on to lose the competitions on both episodes. In both episodes the project managers identified at various times that Omarosa was their problem…their weak link. But Omarosa the bully, on both occasions had the project managers scared shitless, and when required to bring their poor performers back to face the music, both opted to let Omarosa go free, and both brought back their stars.

I’m sure there were millions of other people screaming at the TV on Sunday night, and it was good to hear Donald and his flunky kids berate the project managers for their lack of stones. Then the Donald, knowing that the project managers were just cowards who were afraid to engage Omarosa, duly turfed them both. Bye Bye,  La Toya. Bye Bye, Claudia (whoever the hell you are).

I hate myself for loving this show. As mad as I get, I know that I will be back there next Sunday, and the Sunday after, judging the project managers for their bad decisions and the Donald for his HR violations and his propensity to create hostile workplaces and fantastic entertainment at the same time. Reality?  I dunno. Good TV?  You betcha.

You Gotta Laugh...

I love work. There, I said it. Lots of people don’t get it, and I’ve given up trying to explain it. I’ve had great jobs, and a really shitty job, but, I love work. For me, it’s about the people. I have worked with some freaking awesome people in my career. Rockin’ bosses, great peers, and I’ve been lucky to have the very best people working for me. I’ve also worked with a couple of losers. Big time losers. This blog isn’t about the losers. It’s about somebody that I worked with for a short time who continues to make me smile every time I think about her. This is about Margaret.

Margaret and I were a very unlikely duo. Margaret is a petite, whispy little thing, and I’m, well, whatever the opposite of petite and whispy is. We looked painfully mismatched when we were together. Margaret is a wife, mother and grandmother who brings a boatload of life and work experience to the table. I, on the other hand, was a prissy young manager with a thimble full of life experience. I think it’s safe to say that she could easily look down her nose while staring up at me. So I’m not exactly sure where or when it was that I discovered Margaret’s awesomeness. She was good at her job, and her team liked her, but that’s not where her awesomeness came from. It’s because she made me laugh. A lot. It’s also from the fact that she had absolutely no trouble telling me like it was, and calling me on my bullshit. To me, that’s awesome. I managed her remotely, so a lot of what we did was on the phone.

One morning I was on the phone. She could talk. Blah, blah, blah. This is not what made her awesome. If it could be said in 5 words, Mags could say it in 50. During this conversation, I zoned out and went to the happy place I go when I’m not paying attention. I’m not sure how long I was gone for, but it was bliss. I was gone. Like really gone. At some point, something snapped me back to attention, and still the incessant blah blah. With that, I looked at the phone, and hit the key to delete this never-ending voicemail message. I was wondering why Margaret’s voice wouldn’t stop, and she busted me…”What the hell are you doing?  You’re trying to delete me, aren’t you?  You think I’m voicemail, don’t you?”  To that I responded that she was rambling and I thought it was a voicemail, to which she responded, “For Christ’s sakes Sean, you called me.”  And with that, Mags became totally awesome.

For some reason, Miss Margaret didn't appreciate being deleted.

Another time, I arrived to visit the team. I had this little sweatbox of an office where the temperature hovered somewhere between Sahara and Hell. I arrived at work tired, and not at my best. My first order of business was a meeting in the sweatbox with Mags and two other team leaders. It took about 8 minutes of all the nattering, together with the crazy heat, and the lack of sleep the night before to lull me into slumberville. I put my head back, closed my eyes, and I was out. Not just in my happy place, but in dreamland. Gonzo. I haven’t the foggiest idea how long I was out, but at some point the three team leaders noticed I was sleeping and decided to make me pay.

Margaret, the most petite of all of them, hopped up on my desk, crawled across, got right in my face and clapped her hands like she was killing a fly in midair. It was a tiny office so I was wedged between my desk and the wall, and that’s a good thing, because I was so startled that if I had jumped up, I would likely have killed poor Margaret. Mags and the two other team leaders were on the floor, tears rolling down their cheeks, in hysterics over me being about 8 seconds away from a coronary. I would love to say I learned my lesson, but later that day, when I was out for lunch with the three musketeers, I nodded off at the restaurant. I still haven’t lived it down.

Months later, I got a call from Margaret’s husband. He was calling to say that Margaret wouldn’t be in for a couple of days, and when I asked why, his response:  “She fell in a hole”. Now imagine my response. Remember that I’m not well known for my diplomacy. I was in full roar before I even thought to take a minute to find out if she was really hurt. Turns out she was hurt, and it took a while for Mags to get back to work. Apparently she opened some hole in her floor to access a crawlspace, and forgot it was open, and backed up, falling ass over tea-kettle into this hole. The whole thought of Mags stuck in a hole makes me laugh even to this day. That is if I don’t think about her injuries. (She recovered fully, by the way, I’m not that heinous.)

I'm sure it's not nice to laugh when people fall in holes, but I laughed.

I’ve gotta laugh. That’s my motto. Work is serious, but you don’t always have to be serious at work. Luckily, I’ve got a bunch of Margaret-types in my work life today (although nobody has fallen into a hole, at least that I know of), and they are why I jump out of bed ready to rock and roll every day. But there is only one Mags. I miss working with her, but when I really think about it, if we would have kept it up, we very well may have hurt each other.

Working Virtually? Yahoo!

This week, Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo decreed that all her employees would begin working from the office later this year, and that the work from home experiment was over and that it wasn’t working out too well for Yahoo. Interesting, but I’m not sure it’s really the news story that it’s become. A CEO made a decision for her company that she feels is the right thing to do. Good for her. Who cares?  I don’t get why it’s such big news.

Marissa, all smiles...Before the entire world decided to voice their opinion

But it has made me think of my own work-from-home experience. In the past 15 years, I’ve gone through many phases of virtual work. I don’t love working from home. It’s not my thing. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the flexibility, but the thought of getting up every morning and retreating to the basement isn’t exactly awe-inspiring. Let’s just say that on a couple of occasions, one as recent as last week, 4pm arrived, I was still in my lounge-wear (read: pajamas) and I wasn’t at all sure whether I had brushed my teeth that day. The experience doesn’t motivate me.

In my early work from home days I spent a lot of time on the phone with my colleagues in the US and the UK. Lots of conference calls. Listen, conference calls are not my favourite thing on my best day, so add to that the inherent distractions of your own home. I have the attention span of a gnat, so I’m not exactly an engaged conference call participant when conditions are optimal. Now imagine me, cordless phone propped between my ear and my shoulder, trying to participate while taking out the garbage. Some people just shouldn’t work from home. In addition to finding my own ways to distract myself while on conference calls at home, my lovely daughters absolutely loved to pick up the extension and introduce themselves to my ‘friends’ in the UK and the US. That’s cute the first time. Mildly humourous the second time, and by the third time, career limiting. I now pay for a second line for my home office.

As my children have grown, they’ve become yellers. My lovely wife and my beautiful daughters communicate with each other at a volume that approaches that of a ZZ Top concert. If I’m working from home, I now make sure that there is no way that I am on a call at 3:30 when the masses arrive home from school, because I’m sure for the people on the other end, it sounds like I’ve just been invaded by North Korea. I now have a sign that I post up for all to see that says “I’m on the phone”. It doesn’t work. Turns out that screaming kids and howling dogs don’t take time to read.

Dogs don't read?  What?

We also had some operational challenges to overcome when I began to work at home. In the beginning, I’d be working, and Laura would call down to the basement to advise me that she was running out and that she’d be gone for a couple of hours. That left me in charge of the kids, who in those days, couldn’t really fend for themselves. Before I’d have a chance to object, I heard the minivan exit the driveway. On the bright side, I’ve had the benefit of a tremendous amount of 5-year old input into my strategic planning documents and sales presentations.

She also expected that I would be responsible for some daytime chores, like laundry. It was bad enough that my desk was jammed in a dark corner adjacent to the laundry room, which has no door, and I had to deal with the sounds of the laundry all day, but now there was an expectation that I was going to become an active participant in the process as well. I got so frustrated that I did what any normal work from home dad would do…I outsourced. I found somebody that would pick up five laundry bags from us every week (one for each of us), wash, fold, put it back in the bag it came out of, and return it to us the next day. The best $50.00 a week I ever spent. That went on for almost one blissful-laundry free year. I don’t know what happened, but it ended. I think I went back to work in the office.

Outsourcing the laundry.  It's a good thing.

In the course of my working from home career, Laura has gone from one end of the spectrum, where I’ve been an additional set of hands to help her, to the opposite end of the same spectrum where I simply don’t exist, and as such, she doesn’t offer to make me lunch or even tell me when she’s coming and going. The pendulum has now settled somewhere in the middle, and it’s working great. We even go out for lunch together sometimes. I’m still not wild about the idea of working from home everyday. I need the office, and the contact with the folks I work with. I think, though, that sometimes the office wishes I would just work from home.

 

Big Dreams vs Business 101

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Well, it just happened. I had a conversation with my daughter about work, a conversation I know my father had with me. And I’m sure I’m just as frustrated as he was. In the case of my father and me, I was making an argument for dropping math in grade 13 (yes kids, we had grade 13 in the old days). I was trying to convince my dad that as a big time journalist, I wasn’t going to need math. There was no math beat at the Globe and Mail, and being up on my calculus wasn’t going to help me get, or keep a job. I’d just be so much better off if I could take Italian. Or better yet, a spare. Somehow, I won the argument and calculus got dropped. Sweet victory.

Haley, my delightful, beautiful, and smart teen-aged daughter is about to enter high school. I was there when she popped out, and I can’t believe that fourteen years have passed by and we’re already talking about grade nine. She got her class option selection form last week, so it should have been a wonderful week spent planning her future, right?  Wrong. It’s been yelling, fighting, door slamming, and the occasional crying fit. And that’s just me. She’s been quiet and huffy, but if truth be told, it’s not that much different than normal. She is a teenager after all.

Haley wants to be a marine biologist. That career idea came to her on a visit to Sea World a bunch of years ago, and it was reinforced on a visit to Peggy’s Cove the next year. Then we went dolphin seeking in South Carolina, and most recently, whale watching in California. The kid wants to work with marine life and I’m a proud dad. Haley’s as sure at age 13 that she’s going to be a marine biologist when she grows up as I was at 16 that I was one day going to be the CBC Bureau Chief in Moscow.

In high school, all I could see in my future was me reporting, Live, From Red Square.  We know how that panned out.

So I gave up on math. And science. I worked my ass off, and got into Journalism school. I traded calculus for a spare period, and when I hit university, I even took Russian to help me get that Moscow gig. As it turns out, I despised J-School. I hated it the minute I walked in, and I hated every day of it thereafter. The idea of four years of journalism school made me want to jam knitting needles into my eyes. Russian was a bust, my professor, Gennady Orzornoy, promised me a C if I promised to never take Russian again, and I took him up on that deal with a heartfelt ‘Dah!’  Dasvidaniya Russian and J-School, Bonjour French and Political Science!

I’m not a journalist, and I have haven’t regretted it for one single moment. Had J-school worked out, I’m convinced I wouldn’t have the life I have today. Everything would be different. It might be good, but it wouldn’t be the same, and I wouldn’t trade what I have. Besides, newspapers are dying, and as it turns out, I only have a face for radio, and a voice for silent movies.

So imagine, over breakfast, trying to convince a 13 year-old future marine biologist that perhaps a credit or two in business might be a good thing. Without trying to kill her dream, I’m attempting to help her to realize that the world of work doesn’t always turn out the way you think it’s going to when you’re thirteen. This beautiful creature, who should be an amazing realist blend of a glass-half-empty mother and a glass-half-full father is absolutely convinced that there is no place for a business course in her sea-loving future. She’s viewing her future through her Shamu-goggles, where she’s wearing a wet-suit and riding a dolphin.

How many of us are doing today what we thought we’d be doing when we were going into high school?  I doubt that not taking a grade nine credit in business will stand in Haley’s way of a career on Bay Street or Wall Street if that’s what she ultimately decides she wants to do, but I also know it won’t hurt her either. I would love to take a poll to see how people are where they thought they would be…Are they doing the jobs that they thought they’d be doing, and the ones they thought they were preparing for.

I’m not doing anything close to what I thought I’d be doing, and for the record, it doesn’t make me sad one bit. In fact, I’m thrilled. But if I would have been a little more open to the possibility that the journalism gig wasn’t going to pan out, I might have stuck with calculus. And maybe physics. I hear physics conferences are a riot.

 

Click here to see the funniest physics conference ever.