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OK, OK! I’m going, I’m going!

Where, you ask, am I going? So kind of you to ask! I’m going to Disneyland SOBCon ’07, of course! What the heck is SOBCon ‘07, you say? Well, if you’ve been living under a rock for the last two months, then you really want to check this out, my friends.

It’s a chance for up to 250 rock stars millionaires bloggers (and/or other ’sundry’ types - which is how I qualified) to rub shoulders with the likes of Liz Strauss (Successful Blog), Chris Cree (Success Creeations), Phil Gerbyshack (MakeItGreat) and a veritable plethora (new word from my word-a-day toilet paper) of other famous, infamous, and otherwise notorious bloggers for a shindig you won’t soon forget!

It happens May 11 & 12 in Chicago, U.S.A, planet Earth, Sol System, Universe 1.

SOBCon ‘07 even has its own blog, so be sure to add it to your RSS reader to keep up on the latest news. Folks, if you’ve ever thought you might like to take your blogging up to the “next level” then it’s time to step up! This is the opportunity you’ve been searching for.

Normally, when something like this comes along, I usually just sigh and settle for just wishing I could attend, but something happened recently that changed my mind. This time I won’t be left out in the cold rain and foggy dew, forlornly pressing my nose against the glass, watching all the beautiful people having the time of their lives… Nope, this time I’m going to be right there with ‘em!

And, although I meant to register sometime “soon” (translation: probably sometime before May 10th), Starbucker issued a challenge on Sunday that I just couldn’t pass up, especially since it’s a chance to receive a $100 discount off the normal $350 conference fee!

Best of all, this opportunity is open to everyone! (Such a deal they have for you!) Here’s all you have to do (cut and pasted straight from the Starbucker himself):

1. Write a unique blog post explaining why SOBCon ’07 will be even more outstanding with you attending – be honest, be clever, be unique, be an outstanding blogger. Use words, use pictures, tell a story, write a report, make a list.
2. Link back to me and the SOBCon ’07 blog, so I’ll know you have post for me to see.
3. I’ll come to your post and leave a comment. In the comment, I’ll leave the secret link… if your post hits the mark in #1 above (which I’m sure it will!)

Actually, Starbucker, that’s only two things I have to do, and one thing you have to do, but why quibble? (Sound of hands rubbing together) So in response to your question, “Why will SOBCon ’07 be even more outstanding with me attending?”, I’ll respond with the following illustration:

Now, c’mon, how can you argue with that? Besides, admit it - haven’t you been wondering what I really look like?

You know, it would just be absolutely finer than a frogs hair if you would subscribe to my RSS feed!

Sometime back in February, it finally hit me (sound of dull thud): Hey, I’m a writer!

Now you’re probably saying to yourself, “Well, of course you’re a writer, silly – I’ve been reading your wonderful, popular, A-list blog for months now!”

Yes, but… well here’s the thing. Up until then, I never really thought of myself as a writer. Oh, sure, it’s something I always wanted to do (something along the lines of being a spaceman, or climbing Mt. Everest… or keeping my hair), but it’s always been a sort of “pipe dream” thing that never quite made it over the hump to “goal” status. I suppose, to be completely honest here, I never followed my own advice.

In the spirit of giving credit where it’s due, I blame Liz Strauss. Ever since she wrote 7 Traits that Writers Have in Common (this post has 152 comments – how does she do that? I’m not jealous, Liz. Really. I am awed!), I discovered that if these are the common traits of writers, then by gosh, I must be one! How did that happen? (Once again, echoes of yesterday’s post.)

But you know who truly cinched it for me? (Sorry, Liz, it wasn’t you – but you helped!) It was my life and joy, my partner in crime, Mrs. MZM. (I really mean that. Nowadays, whenever anything unusual or weird happens, she turns to me and says, “You should blog that!”)

Now, you have to understand, Mrs. MZM is not exactly a technology buff, although technophobic isn’t the right term either. It’s not that she’s afraid of it; she just doesn’t really, um, like it. Can’t say I blame her, considering my recent bout with technology, but what it means is that she’s what you might call a “late adopter”.

So even though I’ve been writing here at the Zone since June of last year, it was only last week when she finally started reading it. (Luckily she didn’t start with my very early posts, when I really didn’t know what I was doing! Not that I know now - I’m just more experienced at it.) I happened to be in Illinois at the time, and during one of our evening phone conversations, she startled me with these words, “You know, you really are a writer!”

Lemme tell ya, folks, hearing those words from the Love Of My Life was like, well, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature! It’s one thing to have friends or even total strangers tell me my writing is good. And for me to believe it myself is another. But for the one who is the most familiar with me, the one who is literally the best part of me to affirm it – well, that’s just the cat’s posterior meow!

So, the good news is, I guess that Great American Novel can’t be too far away.  What’s more, I even have the title for my first book (comment #4, and thanks, Roger, I love it!):

Poke it with a Sharp Stick!

I’m taking pre-orders now, folks, just make the check out to (sound of blunt object hitting back of head)…

p.s.  Just so ya know - I didn’t intentionally try to set a new record for how many self-promotional links I could squeeze into one post (6) - it just happened that way!

You know, it would just be absolutely finer than a frogs hair if you would subscribe to my RSS feed!

Why are weird things are always happening to me?

Some years ago a friend and I participated in an “gimmick” road rally. In a nutshell, each team was given a set of very specific driving instructions. To make a challenge, there were clues on signs along the way that would help determine the next destination.

Now before you conjure up images of people madly speeding about town, looking at everything except the road (and at high speed, no less) - it wasn’t that way at all (honest). There were average speeds  to hit along each stretch because the final wrinkle was that for each leg there was a specific time to hit; taking more or less time cost points.

It was a beautiful Spring day, and luckily most of the rally took place outside of town on farm roads, back roads, and country roads. (That should give you a clue - alas, there are very few of those kinds of roads left around Houston any more.) 

So my pal and I took off with a set of instructions that looked like a bad translation of Shakespere’s Hamlet into Pig Latin: Follow road 2745 east for .7 miles, CAST 37. (CAST stands for “Change Average Speed To”) What farm animal is shown on the billboard on the left? It was stuff like that, all day long (with us wondering, “to turn or not to turn”).

On the fourth leg (there were six total), we started off merrily enough, but eventually (and through no fault of my own - that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!) we got totally and completely lost. I’m not talking about just a little lost here - we were so lost, we weren’t even sure we were on the same planet! Yep, that lost.

After what seemed like ages, we ended up driving down this long, straight road for what must have been 5 miles or more without seeing so much as a cow, much less another person. Finally, I’d had enough, and decided to just turn around and try the other direction.

We’d gone just a little of the way back, when suddenly we came upon the leg’s finish line! What the heck? Where did that come from? I mean, it seemed like we’d just passed that exact spot not 15 minutes earlier!

We looked at each other and decided to just take our penalties on this one and consider ourselves lucky someone came along and found us. I was starting to visualize my picture on a milk carton…

As it turned out, the sixth leg got everyone even more lost! We were supposed to meet for dinner at a pizza joint (which almost everyone found), and while chowing down we all waited to hear who won the prizes.

Now we had no illusions about winning anything - we just wanted to have a good time anyway, but after the first, second and third prizes were given, they called us up to the podium. We thought it was to have a joke at our expense about having the longest leg time, or for getting totally lost.

Would you believe it? We won the “puctuality prize” for that fourth leg: we finished it exactly on time!

So I gotta ask you, have you ever accomplished something by, well… accident? Surely I’m not the only one in the world this has happened to? (Yeah, yeah, I know - don’t call you “Shirley”.)

I mean, it’s probably not the weirdest thing that’s happened to me (what’s scary is that I really can’t identify the actual weirdest thing; there are so many to choose from!), but it ranks right up there.

What about you? Have you started out with a clear goal in mind, did everything you could to accomplish it, and after trying and trying and… well, you gave up, only to find the goal was achieved anyway, and you have no idea how it happened?

Do you dare answer this? What’s the weirdest thing that ever happened to you?

You know, it would just be absolutely finer than a frogs hair if you would subscribe to my RSS feed!

Over the years, many questions cross my mind that just don’t seem to have answers (actually, lots of strange stuff crosses my mind, but that’s, er, another story). I’ve searched high and low, but these are things that just seem to defy all reason.

Someone out there, please! If you know the answer to this one of life’s little mysteries, please, I beg of you! Don’t leave us hanging, share it with the rest of us!

There is much to be said about brute force!

Are you old enough to remember when televisions were black-and-white, and “color” was something you did in a book with a box of crayons? Remember when TVs were still made with tubes, and the term “solid-state” referred to the Christmas fruitcake? Remember when the picture got fuzzy, or static poured out of the speakers during your favorite episode of Leave it to Beaver?

Do you remember what sure-fire, super-duper, high-tech method your father used to fix it? Yep, a good sharp whack! (Ironically enough, one of my favorite innovation sites on the web is Roger von Oech’s blog, Creative Think. Roger (in case you have been living under a rock) wrote A Whack on the Side of the Head.)

So here’s the thing…

I have this fancy PDA (an HP IPAQ) I bought a few years ago, and recently the thing has decided, for no apparent reason, to “lock up” every now and then, or forget everything it knows, or fail to connect and synchronize. You wanna know what sure-fire, super-duper, high-tech method I found works best to correct it?

Poke it with a sharp stick!

Seriously, it’s even in the instructions: pushing a sharp pointed object into the reboot pinhole is what recovers it (almost) every time.

Doesn’t that seem just a little bit… regressive?

You know, it would just be absolutely finer than a frogs hair if you would subscribe to my RSS feed!

I had to cringe when I saw Roger von Oech’s post advising us to Change Viewpoints. To be sure, changing viewpoints is definitely a great tool for shaking those stubborn creative cobwebs loose.

But here’s what it made me think of…

It was Thanksgiving weekend, and I was about to take my first run down the mountain (this was back in the ‘70s). I hadn’t been snow skiing in several years, but I was ready as I could be, with weeks of muscle-building and aerobic workouts, the right clothing, goggles, and gloves, and plenty of warm-up exercises that very morning. I had even deliberately chosen an easy slope for my first run, just to let my body loosen up and “remember” how to move.

A simple push of the poles, and I was off! The crisp invigorating air, the beautiful clear day, the swish of the snow under my skis - life was pretty much as perfect as it could possibly be. Ok, time for the first turn. A quick shift of weight, reposition the arms slightly, gently touch the snow with my left pole, start to carve a perfect turn – uh, hey! What-? Drat-!! Oof! Snap! Pop! Ouch!!!

I didn’t quite break anything, but when I fell, I definitely heard the knees audibly pop. All I could do was wait for someone to eventually stop and ask if I was alright. After about 20 minutes, the Ski Patrol finally arrived.

Now lemme tell ya, my friends, if you’ve never had the singularly unique experience of riding in a Ski Patrol’s rescue sled (and God bless the Ski Patrol!), then Bubba, you ain’t lived! It’s simultaneously thrilling and terrifying. (It was reminiscent of that scene from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where they have to jump off the cliff to escape a posse – and Butch turned out to be deathly afraid of heights. Let’s just say the folks downhill could hear me comin’ from a looooong way off.)

First of all, the whole reason you’re strapped into one of those babies is - you’re in pain! And the ride down the hill isn’t exactly, um, smooth. Then of course the view is something like the picture on the left. You have to control your natural desire to “know where you’re going” because you’re on your back and going downhill headfirst.

Yep, loads of fun.

Needless to say, my wonderful, long-awaited Thanksgiving ski trip was ruined, and I spent the rest of it with my right leg in one of those cute little inflatable casts. Extensive after-action analysis (believe me, I had plenty of time to mentally review it) revealed the root cause of the accident (and it didn’t help that it was partially totally self-inflicted!)

The first problem was, I had adjusted my own bindings too tight. (Hey, no problem – I can adjust them myself, he said.) Second, instead of going around, I had tried skiing over a few blades of grass sticking up through the snow (for those of you who don’t know, it’s sortof like trying to ski over sandpaper instead of snow). As a result my skis snagged, and I tumbled. Then, when the bindings failed to release, my right knee twisted into a creative shape it was never designed for.

Anyway, that was a long time ago, and somehow I survived the weekend. In fact I’ve even been skiing since then, just to prove to myself I could still do it. Of course, you don’t have to tell me twice - now I let the ski shop do the binding adjustments.

Oh, and I learned one more thing: when it comes to snow skiing, there’s a familar phrase that captures the essense, the sum totality of knowledge, the very profundity of being:

Keep off the grass!

You know, it would just be absolutely finer than a frogs hair if you would subscribe to my RSS feed!

This week I am in the state of insanity state of Illinois, which in the wintertime is often referred to by us Texans as the “frozen north” - except today the temperature was a balmy 72 degrees farenheit! It’s mighty decent of you folks to turn on the heaters for me - I always knew Midwesterners were good people.

I’m visiting a client’s facility in Morris, Illinois (almost universally referred to as being outstanding in my field - get it? I’m out standing? in my field? oh, never mind). It’s something I have to do on occasion when new projects are just getting off the ground. No biggie, but I managed to have a few random thoughts I wanted to put down while they were still fresh.

The Joy of Hotels

I don’t know about you, but I’ve stayed in my share of hotels. Some (like the time we stayed in the Embassy Suites in downtown Austin for four months) were fantastic; some (like the Holiday Inn I’m in now) are… not so great.

My co-workers and I were eating breakfast at the hotel restaurant yesterday morning, when I heard the two waitresses suddenly let out with a short scream. I turned around just in time to see a rat scampering across the middle of the dining room floor! One co-worker, in an amazing display of discrete propriety, jumped up and shouted, “It’s a rat!” So much for discrete.

A few minutes later I was riding up the elevator with another patron and made a comment about the critter. His response? “Oh, it was just a little field mouse, and he was just lookin’ to find a way back outside.”

Really? Well, I don’t particularly make much distinction between rodents - they’re all vermin to me, especially when they go traipsing through my dining room! Needless to say, this particular hotel is off my Christmas card list…

People We’ve Known

That same evening at dinner, we spent a fun couple of hours swapping stories about various people we’ve known throughout our careers. Let’s see… there’s the guy that had 10 kids, who used to come to work two hours early and sleep in his car, because it was the only peace and quiet he could get. Then there’s the fellow that used to hold down two full-time jobs for different companies in the same building. (If I hadn’t actually known the guy, I would have classed this as an urban legend.)

Inevitably we reminisced about how life was like in engineering offices back in the “good old days” (back in the ’70s, or ’80s - or any other time that isn’t “now”). I remembered that one mark of a good drafter was his or her ability to shoot rubber bands across the room and hit a target at will.

But What About You Me?

Inevitably we got around to talking about strange and goofy (and worse) bosses we’ve known. You know, the ones Bob Sutton (author of The No Asshole Rule) has made a career blogging about?

What made all these people stand out in our memories, even after (in some cases) quite a bit of time had passed, was that some of their character traits were.. well, let’s be nice and just say they were distinctive. Unfortunately most of the things we remembered didn’t exactly paint them in a positive light.

It does make me wonder, though. What will the people I work with remember of me twenty years from now? (Assuming, of course, they remember me at all!) Will my co-workers remember me as a good project leader? Do our clients remember me with a smile (or better yet, a positive comment like, “he’s a good man”)?

OK, how about this one? Will the people who read my blog today remember me years hence with a pleasant feeling of nostalgia? Will they be glad they dropped by the Middle Zone? Will they be proud of having contributed (if they’ve left a comment or ten) to something of value?

Just a thought.

You know, it would just be absolutely finer than a frogs hair if you would subscribe to my RSS feed!

Sorry, folks, but I’ll be out of touch for a few days and won’t have regular internet access this week. In the meantime, here’s a little something for you to ponder. Study it well, there could be a quiz…

It’s a story that’s been bouncing around the internet for the last few days (Google had about 800 hits today); perhaps you’ve seen it?

In 1986, Mkele Mbembe was on holiday in Kenya after graduating from Northwestern University. On a hike through the bush, he came across a young bull elephant standing with one leg raised in the air. The elephant seemed distressed, so Mbembe approached it very carefully. He got down on one knee and inspected the elephant’s foot, and found a large piece of wood deeply embedded in it. As carefully and as gently as he could, Mbembe worked the wood out with his hunting knife, after which the elephant gingerly put down its foot. The elephant turned to face the man, and with a rather curious look on its face, stared at him for several tense moments. Mbembe stood frozen, thinking of nothing else but being trampled. Eventually the elephant trumpeted loudly, turned, and walked away.

Mbembe never forgot that elephant or the events of that day.

Twenty years later, Mbembe was walking through the Chicago Zoo with his teen aged son. As they approached the elephant enclosure, one of the creatures turned and walked over to near where Mbembe and his son Tapu were standing. The large bull elephant stared at Mbembe, lifted its front foot off the ground, then put it down. The elephant did that several times then trumpeted loudly, all the while staring at the man. Remembering the encounter in 1986, Mbembe couldn’t help wondering if this was the same elephant.

Mbembe summoned up his courage, climbed over the railing and made his way into the enclosure. He walked right up to the elephant and stared back in wonder.The elephant trumpeted again, wrapped its trunk around one of Mbembe’s legs and slammed him against the railing, killing him instantly.

Probably wasn’t the same elephant.

Now, before you get your skirts all in a tither, Snopes.com assures me this is a hoax. In fact, it’s actually a slightly brushed-up version of a previous hoax story that made the rounds a few years ago.

So why does a story like this get passed along so easily? Well, because it’s a great example of a sticky story! It illustrates many of the six principles in Made to Stick, don’t you think?

Take a look at the elements of sticky stories and you’ll see what I mean.

1. Simplicity - A simple concept that’s based on a well-known children’s tale, Androcles and the Lion. Most people are probably familiar with that story (or one similar from their own culture), and the plot is easy to grasp: man helps animal; animal helps man. (At least he did in the original. In this version - not so much.)
2. Unexpected - The ending is certainly unexpected when you’re already familiar and expecting the one from the children’s tale!
3. Concrete - Notice the details: 1986, Kenya, Northwestern University - all real places and dates.
4. Credibilty - What gives this story credibilty is the logical way it hangs together. You just “know” it could have happened this way.
5. Emotions - An integral part of the story is the “bond” formed between the elephant and Mkele.
6. Stories - Need I say more?

Put all those elements together and you’ve got a story people will believe no matter what facts you throw at them. Now that’s the power of stickiness!

Do YOU know any sticky stories? Care to share them?

You know, it would just be absolutely finer than a frogs hair if you would subscribe to my RSS feed!