Eight Ways to Kill Your Blog: Numero Uno
1. Go on vacation. In Maui. For four days. Kill any interest you ever had in writing, talking and possibly breathing.
Fresh out of college in 1997, Trav took what we thought was a starter job with Western Wireless in Albuquerque. He’s been in the telecommunications industry almost ten years now. Almost as long as he’s been hoping to earn T-Mobile’s coveted “Peak Achievement” award.
Last May, he won it. This February, they flew us to Maui to get it. And I don’t think it would have been possible to spoil us more if they’d given us a pool boy I could name ‘Thomasito Jane‘ and a gang of roman slave girls to feed the macadamias directly into Trav’s mouth.
“Hmmmmm.” Robert Dotson, CEO, presents Travis Maas with T-Mobile’s top performance honor. The other guy…VP of Engineering. I want to say Wayne. Dwight? Neville. He’s Austrialian. I think. Has an accent. And a nametag. For clueless spouses like me.
Everything we could think of was taken care of for us. Food, drink, hats, sunglasses, sightseeing, even sunblock. It was a little wierd at first, the feeling that ‘other people’ were paying for our vacation. But then we got off a bus in La Haina where a crowd of beautiful, half-naked people draped us with leis, handed us drinks and suddenly…we were pretty okay with it. Allllll of it.
To which, hello? Devil? This is Jules. I’m cheap. Could you be a peach and never come knocking on my door? Thanks.
Spending four days in the wandering the jungles of paradise, drinking foofy drinks, swimming with the fishies, doing almost nothing for myself beside eating and walking – I came to understand why one of my eBay pals once returned from there three days overdue with a fully-formed financial plan for retiring the day she turned 40 and a moving crew booked for Hawaii the day after.
Fittingly enough, it was this self-same vegetarian friend who came to mind the night I parked my camera-happy tuchas five feet, front-row center for the unearthing of the Luau pig. Having never been to a Luau (or a member of a pig pit removal crew), I ignored 600 other people crowding around me. And the fact that we were about to dig up one very dead pig. Instead, I focused my camera angle on two really big dudes walking into the pit.
As they brushed the giant mound of dirt away faster and faster, an ever-increasing feeling crept up on me that I was, in fact, in the wrong, wrong, WRONGEST place to be. Flinging the last layers of bananna leaves off poor Herman’s chicken wire cocoon, I looked straight into his red, dead, upside-down face. Which let loose a great puff of air. And then peeled right off his bones.
No pork for me, thanks. EVER.
Speaking of scary things. Imagine you’re recovering from jet lag. Also, a hangover from steeply discounted BBQ booze the night before. Then imagine you’re at the 8am breakfast buffet, trying to bolster just enough awareness to know that when you hop on a 10am sightseeing bus so crammed full of people wearing pink (sorry – it’s FUSHIA) you won’t make the mistake of assuming it’s being driven by Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
You’re balancing mango juice in one hand, an omlette in the other when you reach for some pineapple. And you’re greeted by this guy:
Fun, no? That’s not the least of it.
You know how you always forget to pack that ONE thing on the way or coming back? Charger for your phone. Toothbrush. Underwear. I forgot my personal motivation. All of it. And I know exactly where I left it, too. It’s in the left hand bedside drawer of Kaanapali Sheraton’s room 321.
If anybody finds it, could you mail it to me? I haven’t got crap done for the last three months.
Related Links
Wikipedia listing for T-Mobile, U.S.A. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-Mobile#United_States
Maas Maui Photos on Jules’ Flickr Photostream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/maaspublications/512386038/in/set-1002791/
Quirky Guitar Dudes
No idea what the hell this show is about, but it cracks my shit up more every time I see it. I’d include a link to the show webpage for you…but I kinda like the mystery.
Flight of the Conchords teaser:
Update: It’s come to my attention that the sound on this clip is really, really low. There is sound, you just have to crank it. (Sorry!) To make it louder: Click that little speaker icon next to the video timestamp and pull it all the way to the top.
I Joined the eBay Blog Wiki
And I may just have to eat my words about execs being boring. There are some really good blogs on that list, and some serious resumes. The eBay Blog Wiki launched February 13 and was created by Shri Mahesh. I don’t know who he is.
In fact, the only name I even vaguely recognize is Lynn Reedy, who was still Senior VP of Product, Development and Architecture at eBay when I left in 2005. (After Googling her, I get the impression she’s no longer with the company. But the search results are just vague enought that I can’t tell for sure.)
Visiting all the blogs yesterday, I found that most of them offer information, insight and humor I really like. Some I had a hard time reading, either because they were written in another language or because they speak another language and write with odd grammar. Still, good stuff. I have quite a lot of new material to add to my Netvibes reader.
I especially enjoy Adam Nash’s blog, Psychohistory. It’s one of those blogs that suck me in with offerings of all sorts of randomly-related subjects. Reading it today, I rediscovered that old StumbleUpon account I started last year but forgot about when I had to remove the toolbar for one reason or another (I think it might have been because I upgraded to IE 7.0…or maybe it was because I had it installed on my Microsoft laptop and one day realized that’s a big ‘no-no’…or maybe it was because of that one time I dribbled jam all over the keyboard and my computer went all, “You lazy bugger! I’m covered in jam!” Could have been any one of those.). But! Now it’s back! I reinstalled the toolbar! And it’s all thanks to Adam. From whom I also learned that the design of the last state quarter has been released.
I find that story thrilling for the mere fact that as soon as he gets home from hockey practice, I can boast to my coin-crazy husband that *I* have seen the fabled last quarter design – has HE? To which he will say, why YES my wife, I HAVE. And I shall retort, Well! …Did you know the last one is HAWAII? And he shall shake his head and say, my dear, besides the glaring imagery and the fact that it was the last state to join the United States – I DID ALSO READ IT.
But one thing about the wiki strikes me as odd. There are 26 blogs listed, but I don’t think there’s a single other Customer Support employee on there AT ALL. And I find that a little wierd, considering how creative, prolific and vocal I know CS peeps to be.
Maybe they’re busy. Maybe they’re out of town. Maybe they just don’t know it exists.
Or maybe they don’t want to go advertising themselves because of dillholes like this. Adam Nash announced on his own private blog that *Dah Dah DAAAAAH* he’s moving on, and these folks took a five second pause before using the news of his departure as a vehicle for bashing eBay features, strategies and employees they don’t like.
Which, I’m sorry, totally pisses me off because A) I bet you a THOUSAND DOLLARS most of these people wouldn’t ever speak or act this way to anyone in ‘real life’, and B) the automatic assumption that every decision eBay makes is some grand evil conspiracy to take over the world and install swimming pools full of money in every employee’s backyard is so retarded I can’t see straight. This conviction that the ‘powers that be’ are trying to shut everyone down and put them in the poor house completely invalidates the cares and efforts of every single person at eBay working their ass off to make it a safer, better place. Because I know for a fact that they do care. That they DO work their asses off. And that none of it will ever be good enough in the eyes of people like this. And that really, REALLY bothers me.
So no, “tattered*primitives”, eBay does NOT have a “talk about us and die” form. It has the same standard “Dear employee, you’re working for a company that handles a LOT of information for a LOT of people. You’ll see things, learn things, and maybe even build things that will impact us, you and our customers. Some stuff is confidential and some stuff is just plain private. So be a dear and promise us some integrity” form I hear MOST companies have nowdays. Heck, I bet even bank tellers have to sign something like that. In fact, I HOPE SO.
And I hope some CS folks sign up for the wiki blog, and show folks that there ARE human beings on the other side of that screen.
