One Red Hot Country Mama!

Today is a different blog since I am doing it on my brand new 13" white MacBook and I am sitting at my kitchen table because I set up my wireless network today. I bought these things as a graduation present – ascending from my corporate life to my entrepreneurial life (my last office day is tomorrow).

So, here is a quick run-down of my shopping experiences.

Mac Store: Yesterday I walked into the Mac Store downtown Toronto (in Eaton’s Center) and talked to the first salesperson available. I told her exactly what I wanted (I did my research and I never go into these situations clueless), pointing at one of the many MacBooks available on display. She tried to upsell me a bit but after I said a firm no she cued up my order and I was ready to go. I grabbed a copy of Microsoft Office for Mac and a cute carrying case – 30 minutes from entering the store, I was on my way back to my car.

BestBuy: I went to BestBuy in one of those big box malls (on the Queensway) to pick up my wireless router tonight. I looked around for a while, and finally saw a big pile of the routers in the middle of the hall. I looked at the back of the box which depicted a bunch of different equipment. I walked around for a while trying to get the attention of one of the BestBuy guys until finally someone had time. I told him what equipment I had, and asked him if I needed anything else on the box image.

"Are you setting up the network yourself?" He asked and I said yeah. He scratched his head and started to speak slowly.

"Well, I don’t want to scare you or anything, but it isn’t easy. It’s not exactly hard, but it’s not easy either… you know? But, just so you know, there is a 14-day return policy and you can always call the Geek Squad if you can’t install it yourself".

I told him I was pretty good at instructions but he didn’t seem convinced. Yuck! So I was both insulted and my time
was wasted.  He likely had some preconceptions about me because of my gender and my looks. Well, what does he know. I installed it in 30 minutes, naming the network after my cat while talking on the phone to my friend about feminism. So there.

I’m not joining the Mac Cult any time soon, but if treating people with respect is part of the formula, I will make fun of them a little less from now on .

I have been preoccupied as of late with two men. Or – more specifically, two husbands of friends, who have left their young families, one with a baby only weeks old, and have decided to pursue lives with new girlfriends. I see my friends juggling everything – the shock, the kids, the learning to live with less while the husbands go on luxury vacations with their new, younger girlfriends. They have moved on with their lives, pursued new relationships and are seen as different people. Their old life has disappeared completely and cannot be found without real effort.

That is the thing with today’s atomized world. People can just stop their old lives and start a new, without publicly feeling the consequences of what they did. This article: How To Disappear Completely And Never Be Found
A Step-By-Step Guide To Leaving Your Old Life Behind is very much on subject. In seven easy steps you can leave your identity behind and start a new one. I also found this article about how Japanese people pay an agency to make them disappear to run away from debtors or old boyfriends: Running Away from your Problems at a Price.  Wow.

So – here is my fantasy. To see one of these guys at a nice restaurant downtown (he frequents these now), stand up and state in an inappropriately loud voice all of the things he did, the mess that he left behind him and the pain he caused. People would look at him with mouths open, because he looks like a responsible-business-man-nice-guy. At the end, I would throw a glass of ice water towards into his lap, strictly for my own amusement. His old life would be animated in front of everyone – the old life would be found. 

Obviously I am not going to do this. And… I struggle. I have never been married and I don’t have kids – so I can’t judge. I know that marriages work and don’t work… and no one is to blame. I also think that that people should be able to move on with their lives no matter what they have done in the past (certain criminals exempted). So – I think truly the best I can do is help my friends and their kids move forward with their lives as their husbands/dads have… and let the memories of their exes disappear completely with the rest of history in our atomized world.

It is quarterly goal setting time again… these posts are always different from my regular ones since they probably don’t have a context for most people – but I find the whole exercise very helpful .

"We are the creative force of our life, and through our own decisions rather than our conditions, if we carefully learn to do certain things, we can accomplish those goals." — Stephen Covey

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I get e-mails all the time from recruiters asking me become a Webtrends or Omniture specialist for the firms that they represent. But, rather than the technical skill of setting up the report suites, I have the interpretive and the creative skill of taking the findings from the reports and making them into strategic recommendations. A few examples:

• Finding what legislation users click on to see what is driving demand so future direct mail campaigns can explore those legislations – getting more bang for the direct mail buck.
• Seeing conversion by lead-source (eg. banner ads vs. direct mail) , facilitating future buying decisions. Cost-per-lead analysis can also be done – with the ability to compare against other sources (such as cold-calling).
• Seeing which link on the page leads to the most conversions (people usually think it will be at the end, when people are convinced by the copy, but actually it is usually the link closest to the top.)

So – really, these are interpretive, integrative, and creative skills… not the technical skills people are seeking…

Unfortunately, since interpretive, integrative and creative skills are more difficult to measure, sometimes they get ignored in the hiring process… which is a shame. I would rather have the big ideas from the report, rather than a nice report that never gets understood.

And we are supposed to be living in a world where creativity is more important than ever! How does this affect where you work?

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Yeah – I’ve been told I think too much at times… but coming from a family of intellectuals, thinking was the solution most problems. Research, analysis, conclusion, then action was the way to go in not just school but in life as well.  And – to stop thinking was to live in some sort of stupid existence… a blind, unobserving and unexamined life.

So – any problem I had, I would attack it in my favorite way… to think it through, devise a plan, then take action. But thinking can cause as many problems as it solves at times. The inner critic, for example, can create a lot of problems. Same with the desire to analyze people to death instead of just letting them ‘be’. Same with torturing yourself with different potential future outcomes. All thinking. It is funny that the thinking I thought was clarifying my life was actually obscuring it.

So… if you’re still reading this – you were right.