As I sat here on the computer doing actual company work (for reasons that will be explained later) a few more dry and dusty ideas blew through my mind.
Thinking back about my comments on the 'enigma' person earlier it occurred to me that it might be a bad idea to broadcast my innermost thoughts to everyone on the planet. I mean seriously, someone could take my "Smells like the Holy Spirit" song idea and make a boatload of money. OK, more seriously, you could take someone's blog and use it to manipulate them. I don't mean in the sense of saying, "On 11/12/06 you said you hated the color pink and now you claim to LIKE the color pink. I think that makes you a LIAR, Mr Sullivan!" but in the more subtle sense that this thing is a very sensitive barometer of my attitudes about work and life and ... well, almost everything else. But then I think that it would be a stupid amount of effort to go to because I'm easily manipulable. You don't have to deviously trick me into doing much of anything; it's in my nature to just do what I think is in a person's best interest and generally that starts with servicing your direct requests. I don't know... clearly on one hand writing this much stuff down could be a REALLY bad idea. I could find out later that Publisher's Clearing House decided to skip my house because I made an off-color comment about Ed McMahon, for example.
Closely related to that is the idea that somebody's going to read themselves into something I write and get really cranked off about it. Some day my mother's going figure out how to get on the internet and read about the day Grandpa died and she's going to be completely fricking mortified. Now is that because I chose to do something to intentionally piss her off? No, of course not. My goal is to represent the truth as I see it before a couple of days pass and suddenly I can't remember it anymore. So if you see yourself echoed in these posts somewhere then take that as the compliment that it's intended to be. You were important enough to stick in my mind long enough for me to find my way back to the computer and interesting enough that I found it worthwhile to write about you. If you find yourself on here and you're not pleased by what you see then consider yourself incredibly, INCREDIBLY lucky. In today's world of half-truths and white lies it's impossible to get an accurate picture of how you really look to the outside world. I'd give anything to know the utterly candid truth about my own life, all the way from the people I accidentally cut off in traffic to the people who think I'm an ass because I don't come to their holiday parties.
Tonight between the hours of 9pm and about 11pm I did some work for one of our clients. Why, might you ask, did I do this at such an hour? Would not 9 in the morning have been just as effective? Why would I blow my entire evening doing work for a client? Well, I'll tell ya why in a simple concise nutshell: The customer was pleasant. Yup. That's it. When we met with them today, they had taken the time to review what we'd given them and they'd prepared their feedback and they delivered it to us politely and respectfully and there was no bickering about the sales process or dissension about what was wanted and what wasn't. They just told us in clear and distinct terms what they wanted and frankly that was such a refreshing circumstance that it was a joy to help them. Yeah, you heard me. Even though the work itself was utter tedium, work that a well-trained chimpanzee could have done it was still a happy experience because one had the keen sense that the customer would get it, be grateful and we'd all be happy. One tends, I think to forget about the importance of clear and achievable goals in work. It's all very well to say, "This department needs to bill $500,000 this month" but if that's as clear as the goals get then how do you achieve them? What do you put on your TODO list each morning to produce your share of $500,000? "Collect $10,000 in aluminum cans for recycling"?
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