Comments On Comments

Glenn Fleishman wrote this little GEM in Jeff Jarvis' comments over at BuzzMachine. Wow! He was reacting to a long thread from this post where there were some contentious comments posted.

If you're new to reading blogs -- this will prove to be the "Dummy's Guide to Blog Comments" and quite eludicating. If you're not new to blogs, you'll want to give Glenn a nice big hug and a kiss next time you see him. Hosannah!

He also deals quickly with the good reasons many of us don't bother to have comments on our sites.

This was an interesting thread because it shows the best and worst aspects of commenting. I typically see seven kinds of comments on my blogs:

1. Intelligent, germane remarks, which may be supportive or critical of what I have posted or, if a link, to the story in question.

2. Expansive remarks that provide more detail about the subject in question, often from the principals (cf. Mena, above)

3. Discussions that form in the comments section that are germane and useful to the discussion at hand (everyone in this thread)

4. Off-topic remarks or poorly written remarks that don't extend and expand on the comment.

5. Ad hominem attacks, rudeness, stupidity. (These posters always claim, when confronted, to not be exhibiting this behavior; viz., above.)

6. People who don't understand that the comments are for specific articles and post totally weird things, like requests to order books or sell stuff.

7. Comment spam.

Categories 4 to 7 led me to turn off comments altogether on my blogs until a better solution existed. This includes wifnetnews.com, which often generates a large number of good posts in the 1 through 3 category, even when they're totally critical of my point of view (but not rude or attacking the site).

The biggest problem I've found is category 4. People who cannot recognize their own tone are often wily enough to be able to register, enter obscured text, confirm their email address -- these are the folks that moderation solves the problem of.

I really want an integrated system that requires verification of a post (so the TypeKey solution provides me a mechanism of verification) and moderation of a post (so that I as a site operator can choose whether a post is in categories 1 to 3 or 4 to 7).

I've run mailing lists for years, and when I was running the Internet Marketing discussion list back in 1994-1996 (Jeff Bezos and many other folks who were evolving companies were members), I ran it moderated. I would have problems with posters every few weeks in which someone wanted to post every damn thing they thought of. I would reject, and sometimes explain.

These folks would scream bloody murder at me. Fine, I would reply. If you want an unmoderated forum, then you should create one. I will even link to it and promote it as a forum in which moderation isn't the key. And you know what happened: a couple people started an unmoderated forum and it devolved into useless nonsense and spam within a couple of months.

Meanwhile, my list grew from 1,000 in the first week (in 1994) to 7,000 by 1996 when I shut it down because the conversation had become tedious and useless. I did promote some new lists that formed, none of which lasted longer than a few years themselves.

The point (I've meandered) is that moderation is a good thing and validation of an identity is good thing *for the people running sites*. They may not be the best thing for people who want to post comments. In which case, the way the blogosphere works is that you post comments on your own blog, and TrackBack, Google, RSS readers, and other tools link your ideas to the offending post.

Posted by Glenn Fleishman at March 20, 2004 03:41 PM

Give Me A Break

Interesting Business Week story about the head of ad agency Young & Rubicam, Ann Fudge. Here's the link via Yahoo News. Notice that most of the criticism of her leadership style hinges on the fact that she was SANE ENOUGH to take a break and do a sabbatical of a few years. And it was between jobs, not even while she was at Y & R, so I find it incredible that anyone has the nerve to criticize her taking time off at all -- what business is it of theirs?

Well, I'll tell you. They're making it their business. It's a backlash against women executives I think. It's part of a wave of women changing the corporate workplace and a lot of senior male executives do NOT like women rewriting the rules. Rewriting the rules and winning by those new rules.

From a male point of view I can understand they feel they've been killing themselves all these years, why should women waltz in and get top jobs without the same sacrifice. But GUYS, don't you hear what I'm saying -- you've been killing yourselves, LITERALLY -- and we don't want you to! We want you all to stay alive, stay with us, work with us, have fun with us and take a page from our book of life balance. Men need the changes women are bringing to the workplace even more than women!

A surprising number doubt -- quietly for now, anyway -- that a woman who openly hugs fellow execs and values her life beyond the workplace can raise Y&R to new creative and financial heights. As one senior executive puts it: "I just don't know if someone who can spend months on a bicycle has the 24/7 drive we need." Even outsiders wonder about the fire in her belly. "Does Y&R need a General Patton or a well-rounded, solid business leader?" ponders veteran consultant Richard Roth, whose firm helps clients find the right ad agency. "Ann certainly represents the latter." Fudge laughs off the innuendo. "I really love doing things differently from the norm," she says.

Going To The Chapel

Get a load of this AP wire story about why Bush is having trouble with the Marriage Initiative -- it's all the fault of that pesky New York Times.

"We are conservatives -- we do believe that government ought to be limited," Wade Horn, assistant Health and Human Services (news - web sites) secretary for children and families, said in a telephone interview.

"But healthy marriages are good for children, good for adults, good for communities. When something can be shown to be a social good, government should not be neutral."

Horn said he has been striving for the past two months to disentangle the marriage initiative from the gay-marriage debate. He traced the entanglement to articles in the New York Times in mid-January that -- in his eyes -- gave the impression Bush's marriage plan was a new, election-year initiative aimed at placating conservatives upset by gay-marriage developments.

Walk In The Woods

Had a nice walk in the woods today with my kid. I love to borrow his eyes for a few hours and see things the way he does. We walk, we talk about nothing, he points stuff out. I love to see his world. It's a beautiful, funny, unexpected place, full of excitement and new ideas. Being "king of the hill" on the top of tall piles of old snow is especially fun. You stand higher than the low branches of a tall tree.

Also dropping big gobs of pure white snow into grey slush puddles and watching the white snow turn grey, sucking up the dirty water just like a ball of snowcone ice sucks up blue raspberry syrup he explains. We did that for a long time -- very entertaining.

Nestful Of Little Blue Robin's Eggs

Anything to push spring into arriving. My kid and I are eating a nestful of little blue robin's eggs. That is, we're eating a nestful of little blue robin's egg malted milk balls. Very delish. These are cute too.

My Ass Deservedly Kicked

So Joe Territo over here, is kicking my ass about writing that holier-than-thou blog post this morning about how I get up at 5:00am, work out and write by 7:00am on a Saturday all because I'm not drinking. What a stupid Miss Goody 2-Shoes I sounded like, he's right. If he could see what a lazy bum I can be most of the time.

Thanks for the blog post, Joe.

Congrats To Esther

CNET's bought Edventure -- Esther Dyson's company -- which is very cool. Congratulations.

We all hope this means she'll have more time to be brainy and hang out with all of us and blog, but we all suspect, au contraire, she'll only be busier.

It's A Blog World After All

Fast Company's Jena McGregor did a cool piece on blogging this month. It features our number one pal, Robert Scoble. I'm quoted in it too, although I must say, I sound like a high school cheerleader who's barely mastered English. Well, I guess I was channelling my inner and outer valley girl the day Jena interviewed me.

Corporate America is jumping onto the blogwagon for many of the same reasons all those journalists, brooding teenagers, and presidential campaigners are already on board. Unlike email and instant messaging, blogs let employees post comments that can be seen by many and mined for information at a later date, and internal blogs aren't overwhelmed by spam. And unlike most corporate intranets, they're a bottoms-up approach to communication. "With blogs, you gain more, you hear more, you understand where things are going more," says Halley Suitt, who wrote a fictional case study on corporations and blogging for the Harvard Business Review. "Even better, you understand them faster."

I guess what I meant to say is that blogs let you feel the pulse of a market very early on and sense the way trends are developing and where they are headed. You can't afford to ignore blogs anymore.

Thanks so much for the mention, Jena. And yes, Scoble, you are a powerful dude!

Sullivan Says

Andrew Sullivan has an interesting piece today about the Medicare prescription drug program.

Imagine for a moment that there is a Democratic administration in the White House. Now imagine that at a time of soaring deficits and a looming social security crisis, the president endorses a huge new entitlement program for seniors, designed purely for electoral purposes. Now imagine that he deliberately low-balls the costs of this program, to the tune of something like 30 percent. Would Republicans be outraged? You bet they would. Now imagine that the official designated to provide accurate costing figures was told that if he released the real numbers, he would be fired. Now stop imagining. It appears that all this occurred in the Bush administration over the Medicare prescription drug program.

Bush's Bait And Switch

Arlie Hotchschild of UC Berkeley has written an interesting piece about why blue-collar men are voting for Bush and have the most to lose at his hands. In this interview, she comments on this ironic situation. When she looks at those who say they will vote for Bush she says:

The surprise is that the people most hurt by Bush's policies are his strongest supporters. We know that there have been 2.5 million jobs lost in his presidency. He's kind of got a "bleed 'em dry" approach to the non-Pentagon part of government spending. He's not doing anything to help blue-collar workers learn new trades, or get a house, or help their kids go to college. He's loosening the Occupation Health and Safety regulations. The plants the guys work at are less safe. His agricultural policies are putting small farmers out of business. So we have to ask: why would they vote Republican?

And some more directly from her essay, Let Them Eat War:

For anyone who stakes his pride on earning an honest day's pay, this economic fall is, unsurprisingly enough, hard to bear. How, then, do these blue-collar men feel about it? Ed Landry said he felt "numb." Others are anxious, humiliated and, as who wouldn't be, fearful. But in cultural terms, Nascar Dad isn't supposed to feel afraid. What he can feel though is angry. As Susan Faludi has described so well in her book Stiffed, that is what many such men feel. As a friend who works in a Maine lumber mill among blue-collar Republicans explained about his co-workers, "They felt that everyone else – women, kids, minorities – were all moving up, and they felt like they were moving down. Even the spotted owl seemed like it was on its way up, while he and his job, were on the way down. And he's angry."

But is that anger directed downward – at "welfare cheats," women, gays, blacks, and immigrants – or is it aimed up at job exporters and rich tax dodgers? Or out at alien enemies? The answer is likely to depend on the political turn of the screw. The Republicans are clearly doing all they can to aim that anger down or out, but in any case away from the rich beneficiaries of Bush's tax cut. Unhinging the personal from the political, playing on identity politics, Republican strategists have offered the blue-collar voter a Faustian bargain: We'll lift your self-respect by putting down women, minorities, immigrants, even those spotted owls. We'll honor the manly fortitude you've shown in taking bad news. But (and this is implicit) don't ask us to do anything to change that bad news. Instead of Marie Antoinette's "let them eat cake," we have – and this is Bush's twist on the old Nixonian strategy – "let them eat war."

Paired with this is an aggressive right-wing attempt to mobilize blue-collar fear, resentment and a sense of being lost – and attach it to the fear of American vulnerability, American loss. By doing so, Bush aims to win the blue-collar man's identification with big business, empire, and himself. The resentment anyone might feel at the personnel officer who didn't have the courtesy to call him back and tell him he didn't have the job, Bush now redirects toward the target of Osama bin Laden, and when we can't find him, Saddam Hussein and when we can't find him... And these enemies are now so intimate that we see them close up on the small screen in our bedrooms and call them by their first names.

... Whether strutting across a flight deck or mocking the enemy, Bush with his seemingly fearless bravado – ironically born of class entitlement – offers an aura of confidence. And this confidence dampens, even if temporarily, the feelings of insecurity and fear exacerbated by virtually every major domestic and foreign policy initiative of the Bush administration. Maybe it comes down to this: George W. Bush is deregulating American global capitalism with one hand while regulating the feelings it produces with the other. Or, to put it another way, he is doing nothing to change the causes of fear and everything to channel the feeling and expression of it. He speaks to a working man's lost pride and his fear of the future by offering an image of fearlessness. He poses here in his union jacket, there in his pilot's jumpsuit, taunting the Iraqis to "bring ‘em on" – all of it meant to feed something in the heart of a frightened man. In this light, even Bush's "bad boy" past is a plus. He steals a wreath off a Macy's door for his Yale fraternity and careens around drunk in Daddy's car. But in the politics of anger and fear, the Republican politics of feelings, this is a plus.

There is a paradox here. While Nixon was born into a lower-middle-class family, his distrustful personality ensured that his embrace of the blue-collar voter would prove to be wary and distrustful. Paradoxically, Bush, who was born to wealth, seems really to like being the top gun talking to "regular guys." In this way, Bush adds to Nixon's strategy his lone-ranger machismo.

More important, Nixon came into power already saddled with an unpopular war. Bush has taken a single horrific set of attacks on September 11, 2001 and mobilized his supporters and their feelings around them. Unlike Nixon, Bush created his own war, declared it ongoing but triumphant, and fed it to his potential supporters. His policy – and this his political advisor Karl Rove has carefully calibrated – is something like the old bait-and-switch. He continues to take the steaks out of the blue-collar refrigerator and to declare instead, "let them eat war." He has been, in effect, strip-mining the emotional responses of blue-collar men to the problems his own administration is so intent on causing.

But there is a chance this won't work. For one thing, the war may turn out to have been a bad idea, Bush's equivalent of a runaway plant. For another thing, working men may smell a skunk. Many of them may resent those they think have emerged from the pack behind them and are now getting ahead, and they may fear for their future. But they may also come to question whether they've been offered Osama bin Laden as a stand-in for the many unfixed problems they face. They may wonder whether their own emotions aren't just one more natural resource the Republicans are exploiting for their profit. What we urgently need now, of course, is a presidential candidate who addresses the root causes of blue-collar anger and fear and who actually tackles the problems before us all, instead of pandering to the emotions bad times evoke.

Storage Unit

Dervala, as usual, is up to interesting things and even more interesting ways of writing about her life than any of the rest of us. She visits a storage unit where she stowed all her old clothes and things from when she was a dotcom hottie in New York before her world wide wanderlust hit. Interesting to hear her reactions to her old high-heeled city duds when we usually imagine her dressed down in a simple Lara Croft safari suit, cutting through jungles as she brandishes her machete :

Later, after work every evening, I unpacked boxes, littering the small apartment. My clothes smelled musty. I could hardly believe I owned so many pairs of knickers. I marvelled at my trousers, at all these skirts. I kept finding lipstick, bottles of Clarins Eau Dynamisante, expensive moisturisers. High heels. Hairdryers. It was like unwrapping cast-off presents from a glamorous older sister who didn’t know me as well as I wished she did.

Ten Years Out

The post I did about what we'll be doing ten years from now ("Eyes On The Prize") seems to have taken on a life of its own. I'm find it resonating throughout my days, not leaving my attention since I wrote it earlier this week. It keeps coming up.

I talked to my friends last night about it -- what we all want in the next ten years -- all of us thought about how important OUR HEALTH is and reflected on how one small injury, say to your back for instance, can mess you up royally and affect many other parts of your life in a negative way. We all wished one another continued good health and keep returning to how important some kind of exercise is.

Even on the mornings I do a very simple yoga videotape exercise routine -- not very challenging, just a way to keep your "hand in the game" so to speak -- I'm realizing there's a lot to it. A way to keep your body in alignment, your muscles in shape, your spine tingling, this is perhaps a lot more important than ever. Just this small effort can keep my emotions in balance, my body in shape and flexible, all of which helps me keep a lot of other things in my life in order and in perspective.

I'm getting to a place where exercising in the morning and writing in the morning are my two DON'T-GET-IN-MY-WAY goals. If I get those nailed by 7:00am, the rest of the day is no problem. But it brings me back to another subject. If I drink wine or beer at dinner or stay up late the night before ... well, it throws off the morning and it's just not worth it. Thinking about renewing my "We Quit Drinking" goal of not drinking anymore. Even a little (and I don't drink much at all really -- a glass of wine once or twice a month) isn't worth it. It throws my routine off for a few days. I've been having a lot of interesting conversations about it with a wide range of people. I'll blog about it soon.

Obsessive Early Bird

Okay, yes, maybe I'm a little obsessive about getting up early, but it's the only time around here when no one is bugging me. The only voice I hear is the one in my head. An odd one to be sure, but sometimes I like to listen to it. It knows a few things.

Tea Please

Made about 300,000 cups of the stuff yesterday as I was fighting the good fight of

Germs: 0
Halley: 1

and thank goodness I scored. One more cup this morning should do it. Darjeeling straight up -- black, no sugar, no cream.

Four Fifty Three

I am in bed looking at the alarm clock which says, "4:53" am and I'm feeling lazy and need to get up and get cracking. Got next to nothing done yesterday but fought off a cold that was trying to take me out. I guess that's a fairly substantial accomplishment in this swirl of snow and slush and cold called Almost Spring. We Bostonians need a purple heart, a gold metal and the red badge of courage to have made it through this week of non-stop snow and disheartening cold.

Things To Say To Women Revisited

I love it when people improve on my silly lists of things about men and women. Thanks to Ghani for setting me straight over at Mischief To Data:

Ghani's Ten Things to Say to A Woman (or just Ghani) to Get Anything You Want:

1. "Honey, have you lost weight?"
2. "Do you want me to go pick up the Chinese?"
3. "What do you think?"
4. "I remembered that you liked both orchids and lillies, so I got you both."
5. "I'm so proud of you."
6. "Hey, I fixed your toilet seat."
7. "Do you want me to beat them up for you?"
8. "Take off your clothes"
9. "I don't know how I got so lucky to be with you."
10. "No -- let me take off your clothes"

Philip Larkin

This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

--April 1971

F-ing FCC

Don't miss Jeff Jarvis' coverage of the new political screamer -- the other HOWARD. The F-ing FCC will end up getting Howard Stern elected president if they aren't careful.

Dickinson

[Poem for today my friend Matthew just shipped over to me. I like it so much.]

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant--
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind--

-- Emily Dickinson

Spring Snow

What on earth is going on? Has it been snowing on and off for four days now? Admit it. It has. And this morning, there is the most delicate, tiny tissue papery falling of baby soft soap flakes, with an innocence of a maternity ward full of newborns, so painfully sweet and new this snow in its loveliness. But what is it thinking?

It's acting perfectly Christmas Evey and it's March 19th!!!! Someone tell the director to call out "Cut!" and turn off the phony Hollywood snow machine. This can NOT be real. This is Christmas in Connecticut and chestnuts roasting on an open fire, instead of white-out dropping on a 1040EZ tax form, which is more in keeping with this pre-April calendar. Ask an accountant to show you a spreadsheet -- no snow spreading out on their bleak landscape forms.

Trapped inside a snow globe they just keep shaking up. I want to dive for cover -- under covers. This winter's trying to make one tearful last stand -- as if to say, "didn't I do a good job, aren't these flakes just fab?" The poor dear has been so bitterly cold this year, she never got a chance to show her stuff. Okay, do your thing. Dump your flakes, but please, be done soon!

Who's Been Touching My Tools?

I keep coming back to this interesting idea about people swarming in different areas of a software application -- and how developers will innovate around that activity. It was from the piece on Groove. Listen to what Ray Ozzie is saying -- I think it might be fascinating when applied to a number of applications.

I see the swarming around tools a bit like the women swarming around tables at Filene's Basement. There's something about someone else picking up the fuscia blouse and WANTING IT that gives it value. Ever seen how women shop and if one is gazing longingly at a garment, sudden every other woman wants it. I have to remember to ask Ray if he's been hanging out at Filenes.

"If you found a tool within a space, that was very important to you and [if you] really wanted to be notified when something happened, you could optionally set a mode on that tool to send a notification when a change is made.

We found that started to cause some swarming around those tools. When somebody made a change within a tool within a space, you'd suddenly find a bunch of other people coming to that space immediately. In Version 3 we added features that suddenly make swarming pervasive. It's just so cool. There's a new automatic mode that all tools in all spaces are in by default. It watches?do you pick up this tool a lot, do you really care about what is going on in this dialogue?and notifies you more proactively for the things you care about and doesn't notify you for the things you don't seem to care about."

"Then we added taskbar and audio alerts that let you know when data has changed in a space [and] audio that lets you know when people enter a space to look at stuff that you might care about. The Launchpad lets you see visually who is in a space, the number of people in a space."

Seriously, in terms of a wide range of software -- like many of the social software tribal apps -- Friendster, LINKEDIN, etc -- it might be very cool to know what parts of the application are getting heavy use? If everyone on Match.com is doing a certain survey, wouldn't you like to know that? Wouldn't that make the value of that applet increase?

In a way, isn't that what blogging does -- it says "this is hot, this is interesting, everybody's reading about it now, everybody cool is writing about it now." And we swarm over certain ideas.

Chapter Three: How To Ruin A Perfectly Good Salesforce -- version 2.0

Chapter Three: And Another Thing -- version 2.0

[A few readers emailed me after I posted the first version of this chapter saying, "don't post half a chapter -- I hate that -- finish it and THEN post it." I understand their thinking, but maybe I want to use this as a place to experiment. Added a new front to this chapter. Everything after the ----- line is same as before.]

After the announcement that I was the new boss, we all sat there a bit stunned, especially the two men who were now reporting to me and then my cell phone rang and I saw a familiar number. It was only 11:30 in the morning, but I knew what the phone call was about.

"I need to take this -- and I'm in San Diego this afternoon -- I'll see you all Monday morning," I said, in a rather queenly way, getting up to leave and then I was in the elevator in minutes. Someone had taught me that there's no time like the present to start acting like the boss.

I flipped my phone open in time to catch his call.

"I'm heading home," I told him.

"Sounds perfect," he said, that nice slightly Southern accent. My gentleman caller.

I wanted to be out of the building fast, in my car, music on, leaving the beach and Santa Monica behind, traveling east to the Fox studios lot, hang a louie, left onto Motor.

Motor Avenue was a pretty old palm-tree-lined wiggly street that ran between the Fox lot and Sony Pictures -- a crooked arrow shot straight from Century City to Culver City -- lots of fun to drive in a sporty red convertible Mercedes like mine.

I was actually mad at this new French boss -- miffed, annoyed, vexed -- about getting promoted. It was hard to explain. It was just so -- well, in some ways -- just so smart of Francois to do it. Which is what made me angry. I was having a big wave of "Who the hell is this guy anyway?" He was proving to be more than I bargained for.

And another thing.

He noticed my purse. I had taken the new Louis Vuitton barrel bag in the spring colors with me that day on sales calls and it was on the banquette next to me in the restaurant when he tried to seduce me. He's French. I suppose that's how he knew. Most people don't know and the ones who ask about it, I lie to them and tell them it's "not a real Louis Vuitton, those cost a fortune" and I tell them it's a knock-off and they usually go for the idea.

But he knew.

It wasn't a knock-off. It was the top of the line. Not a $50 vinyl look-alike bought with cash from some Nigerian with a folding table in the shadow of a building in Century City with the legal secys flocking around. It was the real thing -- a nice $3500 bag they were happy to put on "his account" and wrap right up for me.

So that meant he knew I had a few secrets. Things I didn't share with the people at work.

And he probably saw my shoes. It was like a European to know good shoes. And I had very good shoes. I dressed down all the other parts -- plain jackets, simple jeans, nice skirts, hell, half my wardrobe was Issac Mizrahi's great new line for Target. But my bags and my shoes were the creme de la creme.

I put the French guy out of my mind when I turned the corner into my driveway and pushed the remote to open the garage.

I made it to my house before him -- which was always best. I was out of my clothes, shoes, bag on the credenza, music switched on-- Nat King Cole that he liked so much -- as I took my last stitch of clothing off. I was lying in bed naked waiting for him. I really needed to talk to him. I was glad he had called. He liked to spend the whole afternoon doing it. Me too.

By 6:00pm, he had to leave and I wasn't good at letting him go this time. I was clingy -- not my thing -- he laughed at me. Kissed me again, for the 400th or so time. We'd torn the sheets up. He had a lot on his mind, me too. It was rough house sex but also sweet and tight and wonderful. I let him go -- his lovely wife who still hadn't learned enough Latin to know what fellatio meant -- had Friday night dinner plans for him. He turned as he got out of bed, took a look at me, we grinned like very bad kids at one another, sharing the same idea for a moment, and then he let me make him a little late for supper.

I drove down to San Diego late that evening. There was no use even trying to get out of LA on a Friday night heading south until before say 10:30. I was visiting my sister, her husband and their four nutty boys. My insane nephews.

--------------------

So I was the boss. Boss. Hmmmph. What was Francois thinking? It was the Monday morning I was really going to start running things and my stomach did not feel so good about it. I got my standard latte at the Starbucks on the corner, at a much earlier time than usual, the streets were really empty at 6:20am.

I even looked different -- serious suit on today. I knew the two guys I had to manage would be half out of their minds and male egos this morning. First day with our old mommy manager gone, first day with me in charge. I couldn't forget the look on their faces when they heard Francois announce that I was the new Regional Sales Manager. They could have been looking at The Bride of Frankenstein, the way they looked over at me, their eyes widening in terror. Thanks guys, that much needed vote of confidence.

I was in early to interview a new saleswoman. Someone Francois knew through an old colleague. That made it tough to say no to her if she were the least bit good. Also, we needed another person on the team fast. I was inclined to hire a woman, not a man, to replace me. It seemed right. Only tricky detail was she and I were both named Sally -- that might be a little strange. What was I going to call her Sally2 or the "other Sally" or the UnSally?

I flipped on my computer at 6:45am.

My instant messaging started to flash right off. It was the big boss back East.

It said, "Alors, ca va?"

I typed back, "Why do you think I speak French?"

"Parce ce que vous etes tres intelligente et les femmes intelligentes parlent Francais," or "Because you're intelligent and intelligent women speak French."

Actually I did speak French but I didn't want to let him know that, "Whatever ... " I typed. "Sally's coming in soon, gotta go."

He was back, "You'll love her, she's great. Just wanted to say BON CHANCE on your new job and I've got numbers to review with you at 10:30. The competition is kicking your ass out there. You need to fix that for me."

"Gotcha," I im'ed back.

There was a glass conference room which was part of the suite we rented, shared by all the tenants. It was more like a big gold fish bowl, the way it was set up right by the elevators and everyone could see inside as soon as they got off on the 18th floor. It was probably the most interesting part of the office. You could see into the room to check out who was meeting and beyond it, it looked out on the Pacific Ocean which was a pretty spectacular view on about 360 days out of 365.

I hadn't grown up in LA, but I'd lived there long enough to know you could see some pretty amazing people in this town on a regular basis. So I wasn't thrown off too much when I saw a very beautiful person, but I just wasn't prepared for this Sally when she took her nice long-legged stride out of the elevator and made her way to the receptionist desk. I was waiting there because the offices really weren't even open yet. She was very, very gorgeous. Cameron Diaz cute and Jessica Simpson pretty and Reese Witherspoon sweet.

"Ut oh, actress," I thought to myself. The younger actresses were smart enough to do jobs other than waitressing these days, but that might make it tough if she wanted time off for auditions and all that.

The resume looked good. She was warm and funny and didn't miss a beat with even my tough questions. I liked her a lot. Around about 7:30, Bill Sanders came in and I gave him a quick wave, not intending to invite him into the conference room, but he came right on in, obviously wanting to meet the new Sally. he was pouring on his understated charm and when she turned back to me, he made a very small THUMBS UP gesture for me only.

By 7:45, Bryce had arrived. I saw his grumpy face change radically when the elevator doors opened. It was as if he wanted to show me how annoyed he was with me becoming boss, but the woman sitting on the other side of the conference table turned the frown around fast. I ignored him, knowing he'd come bounding in like a big eager puppy anyway, no way to stop him.

He was laying on the charm thick as I introduced him. I managed to throw him out fairly quickly, but within about five minutes, both of us noticed that the men suddenly had all these errands which required them going past the conference room and taking a peek in.

"They seem to be a little interested in our conversation," Sally said to me. They were to my back, but she could see them from her position in the room.

We both grinned.

"Do you need to go ... I know you're working now, I think we're done. I would like you to come back though and meet with Bill and Bryce."

"No problem. What about at the end of the day?" she offered.

"I'll have to check with them," I said.

She nodded towards the window. "They're both right there."

"Give them a wave, they'll melt for you. You must be used to this stuff."

"Men are kind of obvious that way, aren't they?" she said to me.

They came into the conference room and were more than willing to interview Sally at 4:00 and 4:30.

[Notes -- added the beginning and back story to the narrator Sally's history. Need to get the end part going. More tomorrow. ]

The Magnificent Seven

Wait a minute, I thought the seven dirty little words were:

1. shut-up
2. peepee
3. fudge
4. cooties
5. coo-coo bananas
6. phoney-baloney
7. tough nougies

I guess I've been hanging out with the wrong crowd. These tough talking 3rd graders have really let my morals erode. I fear for my life.

News Aggregators Most Groovy

I was really intrigued by Steve Gillmor's piece here in EWEEK about Groove and especially liked what Ray Ozzie said about news aggregators vis-a-vis their new release.

Q: We've often talked about the Groove opportunity to integrate RSS aggregation and routing features. Where does that stand with Version 3?

We learned a lot with the RSS aggregator work that we're working on in-house. It's very easy for us to bring sets of feeds together from multiple interested people to look at. The only part that I don't think we've nailed yet is what happens when the useful information can only be seen when you're not looking at the summary—when you click the links, do you then have to go out to the site? People haven't packaged those sites in a way that they can be taken offline.

When I look at your site feed, the URLs in the summary point at HTML pages; they don't point at MHTs (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension HTML [MHTML] format), self-contained blobs that I can pull down. I would have to do a deep crawl of your site in order to pull down all the content into that shared space. Unfortunately, the Web standards people have not done a good job yet at, [is that when] given a URL, how to write a method to pull down the MHTs.

Q: The model I'm looking for here is the ability to capture an RSS feed that contains the full text or an XHTML rendering of it. And it would also solve some other significant issues related to RSS aggregation and authoring—namely, multiple machines, where Groove file-sharing enters the picture.

What we've done in Groove—not in the packaged product, but we've definitely done a few versions of it [that] our customers have used—is Groove aggregation. That same Groove aggregation technology works across your machines. If you read something on one machine, it gets marked read on the others. And it can aggregate multiple feeds, and so on. There are so many aggregators out there. I don't know whose is going to ultimately gain the most market share. But we have done a bunch of experimentation on that, and I look forward to, at some point, either we or one of our partners releasing a good group aggregator. That's a pretty obvious, useful application.

Ten Things You Can Say To A Woman

A friend asked me for some advice about long-distance relationships and wooing a woman. I sent him this list of "10 Things You Can Say To A Woman That Will Get You Anything You Want."

1. "I miss you, I want to spend some time with you."

2. "How are you doing? How's it going for you?"

3. "Tell me when I can see you."

4. "I don't want to be apart from you anymore."

5. "I don't think I can last ... waiting to talk to
you until tonight."

6. "I was thinking of you last night, just as I was
falling asleep, I wanted to dream of you."

7. "I wanna kill all the other guys in your office
who get to spend time with you every day and I don't."

8. "You look good enough to eat."

9. "I hate knowing I have to wait even an hour before
I can see you."

10. "I love you." (Classic, but always nice.)

Eyes On The Prize

The notion of keeping your "eyes on the prize" is about setting a big goal and not losing sight of that goal despite the many winds and storms that blow through your life. The words are probably best known these days as the title to a documentary on Civil Rights and express the idea that once the movement was focused on goal of freedom for people of color, they knew they had to dig in, keep that goal in mind -- keep their "eyes on the prize" and not let anything throw them off their path.

Here's some background on the series. And here's a class curriculum a teacher developed to teach his class about the series. He quotes from the "traditional civil rights song" where the phrase comes from. It's a powerful idea:

I know one thing we did right
Was the day we started to fight.
Keep your eyes on the prize
Hold on, hold on

Today I want to think about what really matters. I want to think what my goals for my life are in the next five to ten years. I want to set those goals and keep them in mind in all the small things I do today. What I do today will decide what I do in 2009 and 2014. Feel free to play along with me.

Write down how old you'll be in 2014.

Write down the town you want to be living in 2014.

Write down who you want to be living with in 2014. (If you want to be married or have a partner, but don't know that person by name yet, try writing "I'll be living with someone who cherishes me and wants the best for me." If you want kids, make up some names, first thing that jumps into your head.)

Write down what you want more than anything by 2014. (You might want a college degree. You might want a house. You might want good health. You might want to have published a book. You might want to be the CEO of a company. You might want to have a job that's fun and easy and connects you to people you love to see everyday. You might want to retire with a lot of money in the bank.)

Don't write anything else. Reread what you wrote.

Think about your goals. Living with people who love you will make you much healthier and happier. Living with as many friends and as much family as possible actually makes you the most healthy and safe. This will have a lot to do with WHERE you live. If you've made a committment to a certain town or location, the more you invest in that place, the richer your life will be. I've moved a bunch and I know this. You may not like where you live and if so, then you need to make a decision to move soon. You need to start investing your next 10 years in a place you like, because the investment will pay off.

Are you living with someone who loves you? This is a big deal. If you're living with no one and you want to live with someone, you'll start changing that TODAY. If you're living with someone who doesn't love you enough, or doesn't like you at all, you need to start changing that THIS MINUTE. You don't have to make a radical change. The only radical change you need to make this minute is to FACE the fact that you are not being loved properly. Give yourself permission to think this. A good way to think about this and change this is to see a therapist. If you've never done that, try it.

Talk to your best friend about these goals today. Call them up, set a date to talk about this. Help them think about their goals. Eyes on the prize.

If your goal is to be married and own your own house, you're going to think about what you do EVERY DAY that gets you closer to this or further away from this. Maybe you make choices that keep you away from meeting new people. You have to change that. You might hate parties and going out. Unfortunately, you'll have a higher likelihood of meeting a new person OUT of the house and so you'll have to try going out more, not turning down invitations, not saying no to stupid stuff you usually turn down like company parties, ballroom dance lessons, going camping, all the odd events you figure you'd NEVER do in a million years.

And you want to own a house, so you have to think about what you can do today to get closer to that goal. It might be setting up a savings account. It might be NOT spending $3.50 on a cafe latte. It might be finding out about getting a real estate license. It could be a lot of things that get you closer. How many things are you really doing towards the goals you say are important? Ask your friend to help you think through it. If you're doing nothing towards the goal, you need to sit yourself down and figure out why you're sabotaging your own efforts. Maybe you don't really care about this goal and need to admit it.

If you have your two goals in mind and something happens in your day --- you're living in New York (and loving it) and your boss calls you in to talk about a great opening in Texas -- you keep your eyes on the prize and know that this isn't for you, never will be and so you waste no emotional energy or time thinking about something that's OFF your path.

Say you have a goal to get married and your former girlfriend or boyfriend calls you up because they've just broken up with someone and they're lonely -- they try to talk you into going out with them -- and you know it will be FUN and you know it might even be kindof SEXY but you also have to admit it will get you away from the goal of getting married, not closer, because you KNOW you don't want to marry them and they don't want to marry you -- so you don't waste any time on it. Eyes on the prize -- you're thinking every day, does this get me closer?

They're thinking of getting you into bed tonight so they don't feel lonely. You're thinking 2014. You don't slip into "kindof sortof yeah sure okay" going out with them. You tell them you're busy. You take the time and energy and put it into something else that gets you closer -- you don't have to call ten new people on an online dating service -- you might go to the library or a book store and check out books on relationships. This is better than spending the night with your ex. And if you see someone nice at the library or book store, ask them a question -- talk to them -- ask them anything. Tell them your watch is broken, ask them if they have the right time. Anything will do. Don't expect it to go further. Just do it so you can come home and think, "Hey, I did something great today! I didn't fall for the old boyfriend/girlfriend. I went to the book store. I talked to that cute person ahead of me in line at the cash register." That's a good day's work.

Eyes ... on ... the ... prize. Have a fun day.

The Love Of Your Fate

"Nietzche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life, the idea came to him of what he called "the love of your fate." Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, "This is what I need." It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment -- not discouragement -- you will find the strength is there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow.

Then when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now." -- Joseph Campbell

Snowball Fight

It snowed on and off all day and it's STILL SNOWING now at 5:30pm -- nearly 12 hours since I posted the last "It's still snowing." So I wonder how they will measure this snowfall. It's been snowing for more than 24 hours. It did stop a bit around mid-day, but it's really snowing solidly again now. And it's supposed to snow Friday. Trying to get all this snow out of its system, I guess. By the weekend we're looking at 50 degree temperatures which means we'll be having a big MUDDY MESS on our hands.

Off to get my son out of the neighborhood snowball fight and back home for dinner.

Wish me luck. I've already got a snowy pair of damp jeans on from getting hit by the local kids in various places and one wet sock.

Charlie Rose

In case you wondered, I didn't realize they listed who is going to be on ... but without much notice I might add. Even Oprah can give you a more nailed down calendar.

Movies Now

You know this list of movies in theatres now makes me think we've all slipped deep into THE DARK SIDE. Doesn't anyone fall in love and laugh anymore? All these psycho killers, qu'est-ce que c'est?

As I Wrote

As I wrote the post below, the little piano practicing girl ended her practicing. We're all happy about it. My heart is lifted at least 5 notches. I can breathe freely. Thank God she did not choose the violin.

Little Girl With A Blue Piano

There's a little Asian girl, no bigger than a tiny doll, in the house next door who practices the piano in the afternoons and there is something sad about it. She sounds a bit tortured in her clumsy fingering. She sounds like she'd like to be anywhere else in the world. She is simultaneously heavy-handed in her plunking and tenative, as if to say with every note she attacks "can this possibly be the right one?" I get the feeling her shoes don't even brush the carpet below her as she sits reluctantly on the piano bench. The music haunts me. I want to rescue her and give her a pink soccer ball to kick freely up a green grassy hill and help her run far far away from that blue piano.

Dean For The Duration

Interesting goings-on at the Dean camp. Here's the press release:

"SEATTLE--Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, M.D., will launch his
new political organization tomorrow with speeches here and in San Francisco.
He will then travel to New York City on Friday for an announcement speech there.

The schedule for tomorrow is as follows:

Thursday, March 18, 2004

Seattle, Washington: 9:30 a.m. PST at the Westin Hotel,
Cascade Ballroom,
1900 5th Avenue

San Francisco, California: 6:00 p.m. PST at The Palace Hotel,
Ralston Room,
2 New Montgomery Street

The above events are open to the press and the public. A link to the
live stream for the Seattle 9:30 a.m. PST, Thursday, March 18 event will be
provided on the Dean For America homepage, www.deanforamerica.com.

Across the country, grassroots supporters will also be hosting events to
mark the new organization, and showing support for Dean and the Democratic
Party. Some examples of events already planned are:

* In Asheville, NC, supporters will host a living-room social to
discuss the Governor¹s speech.

* In Griffith, IN, Dean supporters are gathering to discuss new
plans for grassroots action.

* In Cincinnati, OH, a community is ringing in the new campaign
over food and refreshments

More information on the new organization will be available tomorrow at
www.deanforamerica.com."

Chapter Three: How To Ruin A Perfectly Good Salesforce -- version 1.0

Chapter Three: And Another Thing -- version 1.0

[Good news is -- I wrote yesterday and started this new chapter. Bad news is -- it's all over the place and a mess. Read it ONLY if you want to see what the "raw version" looks like and then I'll be rewriting it and posting the next version. Notes at the bottom are all the places I need to fix it. It's one of those weird writerly things. You know where it's not working, you just have to figure out how to fix those broken parts which is not so easy. The thing has an architecture -- it must work within the whole book and hang together properly as the third of ten chapters, but it must have an inner consistency and appropriate shape and arc to work as a chapter too.]

So I was the boss. Boss. Hmmmph. What was Francois thinking? It was the Monday morning I was really going to start running things and my stomach did not feel so good about it. I got my standard latte at the Starbucks on the corner, at a much earlier time than usual, the streets were really empty at 6:20am.

I even looked different -- serious suit on today. I knew the two guys I had to manage would be half out of their minds and male egos this morning. First day with our old mommy manager gone, first day with me in charge. I couldn't forget the look on their faces when they heard Francois announce that I was the new Regional Sales Manager. They could have been looking at The Bride of Frankenstein, the way they looked over at me, their eyes widening in terror. Thanks guys, that much needed vote of confidence.

I was in early to interview a new saleswoman. Someone Francois knew through an old colleague. That made it tough to say no to her if she were the least bit good. Also, we needed another person on the team fast. I was inclined to hire a woman, not a man, to replace me. It seemed right. Only tricky detail was she and I were both named Sally -- that might be a little strange. What was I going to call her Sally2 or the "other Sally" or the UnSally?

I flipped on my computer at 6:45am.

My instant messaging started to flash right off. It was the big boss back East.

It said, "Alors, ca va?"

I typed back, "Why do you think I speak French?"

"Parce ce que vous etes tres intelligente et les femmes intelligentes parlent Francais," or "Because you're intelligent and intelligent women speak French."

Actually I did speak French but I didn't want to let him know that, "Whatever ... " I typed. "Sally's coming in soon, gotta go."

He was back, "You'll love her, she's great. Just wanted to say BON CHANCE on your new job and I've got numbers to review with you at 10:30. The competition is kicking your ass out there. You need to fix that for me."

"Gotcha," I im'ed back.

There was a glass conference room which was part of the suite we rented, shared by all the tenants. It was more like a big gold fish bowl, the way it was set up right by the elevators and everyone could see inside as soon as they got off on the 18th floor. It was probably the most interesting part of the office. You could see into the room to check out who was meeting and beyond it, it looked out on the Pacific Ocean which was a pretty spectacular view on about 360 days out of 365.

I hadn't grown up in LA, but I'd lived there long enough to know you could see some pretty amazing people in this town on a regular basis. So I wasn't thrown off too much when I saw a very beautiful person, but I just wasn't prepared for this Sally when she took her nice long-legged stride out of the elevator and made her way to the receptionist desk. I was waiting there because the offices really weren't even open yet. She was very, very gorgeous. Cameron Diaz cute and Jessica Simpson pretty and Reese Witherspoon sweet.

"Ut oh, actress," I thought to myself. The younger actresses were smart enough to do jobs other than waitressing these days, but that might make it tough if she wanted time off for auditions and all that.

The resume looked good. She was warm and funny and didn't miss a beat with even my tough questions. I liked her a lot. Around about 7:30, Bill Sanders came in and I gave him a quick wave, not intending to invite him into the conference room, but he came right on in, obviously wanting to meet the new Sally. he was pouring on his understated charm and when she turned back to me, he made a very small THUMBS UP gesture for me only.

By 7:45, Bryce had arrived. I saw his grumpy face change radically when the elevator doors opened. It was as if he wanted to show me how annoyed he was with me becoming boss, but the woman sitting on the other side of the conference table turned the frown around fast. I ignored him, knowing he'd come bounding in like a big eager puppy anyway, no way to stop him.

He was laying on the charm thick as I introduced him. I managed to throw him out fairly quickly, but within about five minutes, both of us noticed that the men suddenly had all these errands which required them going past the conference room and taking a peek in.

"They seem to be a little interested in our conversation," Sally said to me. They were to my back, but she could see them from her position in the room.

We both grinned.

"Do you need to go ... I know you're working now, I think we're done. I would like you to come back though and meet with Bill and Bryce."

"No problem. What about at the end of the day?" she offered.

"I'll have to check with them," I said.

She nodded towards the window. "They're both right there."

"Give them a wave, they'll melt for you. You must be used to this stuff."

"Men are kind of obvious that way, aren't they?" she said to me.

They came into the conference room and were more than willing to interview Sally at 4:00 and 4:30.

[Notes -- Flesh out, it's all bones right now, mostly "stage directions" and plot and dialogue, no descriptive language, no poetic considerations, no thought or inner monologues or character development. Needs more "show not tell" plot points about how the two men react to the new Sally. How the new Sally is a mega babe and the men like her, but she's actually bi and after the other Sally. Competition in their region is a much bigger problem -- introduce that idea. French boss and Sally do NOT get along. Need to change first paragraph to be slow and more narrative, more description. Biggest problem -- do we really give a shit about this character? I don't yet. Remember to add the crack by Bryce about calling her "Bossy Sally" and the new woman "Mustang Sally."]

Un Macho Alfa

Wow -- someone linked to me in Spanish and translated my Alpha Male lessons thusly:

En el mismo orden de cosas (quizá), encuentro las lecciones para ser un Macho Alfa en el blog de mi querido Bacchus. Vayan leyendo, que ya hablaremos de ésto mañana.

Wearing Of The Green

Okay, who's Irish around this joint anyway? Oh, yeah, Dervala ... let's see what she's up to. And maybe there's a MeetUp for Irish Green Bagel Eaters and Green Beer Drinkers.

Snow Day! Snow Day! Snow Day!

No school! No school! No school!

Do the early morning PJ dance! Yahoo!

And it's STILL snowing!

How great is that!

Fiction Flirtation

Lately I've been flirting with fiction and what better seduction is there? I'm getting excited about finishing "How To Ruin A Perfectly Good Salesforce In 10 Easy Lessons" which I started a bunch of months back. If you haven't read it or want to refresh your memory, I'm re-posting it below.

Chapter One: How To Ruin A Perfectly Good Salesforce

[Here's a re-posting of the story I started last year and will be finishing in the next few months.]

Chapter One: Focus Group

Bryce was just about the worst combination of tall, handsome, blond, charming and married you could imagine. But he was also a killer salesman and our manager knew how to send him in for the kill. He'd been salesman of the year about five years running here in the LA territory and there wasn't any chance of that letting up any time soon. As long as our manager left him alone to use the Santa Anita racetrack as his conference room, the most expensive LA restaurants as his closing dens and every other man's wife as his "network" it seemed the sky was the limit. His boyish charm was in full throttle still at 39, but there was a feeling the playing field was about to change. We'd all heard the rumors about this new marketing manager being brought in from Europe to HQ in New York to shake things up.

When I got there in the fall, there was a motley assortment of sales talent we called "the team" but there wasn't a whole heck of a lot of teamwork going on that I was witnessing. I'd been a saleswomen for about 10 years by then and they brought me in as a senior salesperson -- a woman -- to bridge the gap betweeen Bryce Bennington's high octane testosterone selling style and the quiet, extremely elegant mild-manner rock-solid-technical knowledge sales strategies of William (never Bill) Sanders. At 45, William had been through it all, was unflappable, the classic 42 Long, and had deep and respected industry contacts that were unassailable and a multimillion dollar deal gravitas any salesperson would envy. When this man handed you a Mont Blanc, you signed on the dotted line without missing a beat and you knew he was giving you the pen for keeps and you wanted it.

I'd been there about four months when we all got called into a Monday morning meeting by our manager. Mary Carpenter. Mary was a great manager, a perky blond in her late thirties, still very pretty, but wonderfully momish now. Lately I got the feeling she seemed ready to throw in the towel -- just stray remarks about her kids, husband, laundry got me thinking that. As a mom of three boys, there was nothing Bryce could throw at her that she couldn't throw right back at him. And she and William were a terrific team, they'd worked together at IBM before this current salesforce, so they were like two ice skating champs, ice dancing their way across the rink to a peppy waltz, never missing a step.

I should have known that third kid at home, now only about 9 months old and her husband's promotion to a new position in his law firm would spell disaster. It was a rainy January day in LA that all Los Angelenos dread. Two weeks after Christmas -- my tree was still up complete with little surfboard ornaments. A cold (45 degree) slanting, pummelling rain was hitting the beach as I drove in from Redondo. There's no coat in your closet that would keep you warm and dry enough. Your suede shoes are in grave danger. Everyone's cranky.

"Okay, first of all, big news out of New York. The new marketing manager, Francois Granger, has a plan you'll all want to hear. Conference call in about 15 minutes," Mary said.

"I'm not calling anybody Francois. What kind of frigging name is that anyway?" Bryce jumped in.

"Down, Bryce, down," Mary said. "And one other important piece of news, I'm leaving."

"Holy Guachamole!" Bryce was up in a flash, grabbing his blond locks, with a big "oh my aching head" gesture of intense pain.

I could tell by his reaction he really hadn't seen it coming, but with the slight shift of William in his chair next to me, I sensed that he had known for a while.

"Mary, tell us the story," William said in his Easy Listening Radio Station voice. He was really a very attractive guy, but solidly married in the opposite way Bryce was -- you never even considered flirting with him, but instead went to him for fatherly advice and were always glad you had.

The rest of the room knew what was really going on -- Mary leaving meant a battle royale of the Alpha Males about to take place. Bryce and William would be up for the slot and it would not be pretty to watch what happened to the guy who lost. I was too new to be considered and the other three were too junior.

She explained her husband wasn't just being promoted, but being asked to go to HQ in New York and they were moving by end of February.

The conference call time was approaching so there wasn't much time to talk about who would be taking Mary's place. There was six weeks to worry about that, but I got the sense from her switch to the topic of Marketing that there was bigger smoke going down in that area, with this announcement from Francois Granger.

We dialed in and Mary went about the diplomatic stuff, welcoming the French guy, introducing us, making the usual stupid jokes about LA and the beach and the rain.

Granger began a long, almost incomprehensible presentation about the new direction marketing was taking. To say he had a heavy French accent was an understatement.

Bryce was clowning around from the beginning and Mary made sure the MUTE button was ON, so as to avoid any embarrassments.

He was saying something about "Focus Groups" and the way he pronounced "Focus" sounded a bit like something rude.

At the end of the call, we all made happy horse shit noises (as Bryce liked to call them) of "thanks, welcome, we're eager to be working with you" and hung up.

Bryce launched into a mildly hysterical white board parody of the speech drawing out a diagram and labeling all the internet boxes "ZXTML" and pronouncing it with a phoney French accent.

"Since you lousy lazy-assed salesmen know nothing about Zee XTML, I shall demonstrate zee way zee French do it. Zee XTML is more fun zan a barrel of Maginot Lines! And zee Marketing guys here in zee headquarters know better than you silly salespeople who actually spend zee time visiting zee customers. We don't need to talk to zee customers! We do not need to talk to zee salesmen! What we need is a good FUC-US GROUP! "

"Bryce, cut it out, " Mary tried to stop him, but had no energy for it.

He went on "Yes, boys and girls, if there's any thing Marketing knows how to do to salespeople, it's how to FUC-US!"

This made the room instantly erupt in laughter and I remember thinking it would be a classic moment for all of us. It was a moment in time we'd all refer back to as things began to change. There was no doubt things were about to evolve. If you asked me that day, I would have put money on William being our new manager by March and Bryce having a lot of trouble with that. But it was still January and I was no tarot card reader. Mary managed to calm the room and get us back into the work day and on our way out to see clients, or even off to some dreaded paperwork, whether it be the loathsome wrangling of expense reports, or worse, some form of reporting our sales activity.

By four we were all in the bar downstairs at the Chinese restaurant, drinking stronger than usual drinks, playing with our little pastel drink parasols, flirting a little, whining a lot and wondering what was headed our way. The subject of conversation was an old standard. How marketing sat up in the war room making maps, sticking little pins into the different quadrants, making decisions for salespeople who had to do the real dirty work. They poked a little pin in a map of LA with a red paper flag attached to it but salespeople were in the trenches doing the real heavy lifting -- not wielding a push pin but rather thrusting a bayonet into the belly of the prospect, to bring in the bacon. Bryce was explaining why this was the reason marketing people didn't know Jack and salespeople couldn't help hating them. It was another of his "real men are in sales and everyone else is a wimp" storylines.

On the drive home I found myself laughing out loud at his great pantomime of Francois's speech on focus groups and wondering if there ever was a simple way to get sales and marketing -- oil and water -- to mix. There might be something really valuable about getting a conversation going between the two. We might all make some money out of the deal. Nah, I thought as I turned into my rainy driveway, too good to be true.

[This is a fictional account of a fictional salesteam. What's that thing they say, "any resemblance between real live people and these people is no good reason to sue my ass" ... you know what I mean.]

Chapter Two: How To Ruin A Perfectly Good Salesforce

[Here's a re-posting of the story I started last year and will be finishing in the next few months.]

Chapter Two: Can I Get That In Writing?

So we were all in a bar again, this time in Century City, mobbed with entertainment lawyers and accountants who were concentrated in that part of town, just on the edge of Beverly Hills. I didn't drink that much until I joined this salesforce. The "we" was Bryce Bennington and William Sanders and me. Like I was trying to explain, there was no mystery to a salesforce in Los Angeles having such a perfect surfer dude blond babechasing specimen of male meat such as my friend Mr. Bennington. He was the consummate flirt and had no end of energy for explaining to any woman floating my his lair -- barstool, I should say -- that sales was all about seduction. Bryce had beer. I was vodka and tonic. William was scotch on the rocks.

Speaking of seduction we were talking about the new Head of Marketing -- a Frenchman named Francois Granger -- who some how got wind of us making fun of him in the conference call the week before and was about to descend upon the three of us to accompany us on salescalls. Surely the most dreaded activity in the world for free-ranging cowboy and cowgirl salespeople -- dragging the guys from HQ into your accounts to meet your customers. But after we yucked it up about how Marketing never knows anything about real live customers and avoids them like the plague and shoots their wad and budget on setting up idiotic one-way mirror focus groups, this new guy, we were all calling him Frenchie, or at least Bryce was -- called our bluff and was taking us up on our dare to actually visit real customers.

Bryce finally shut up about which customers to take a Marketing Guy to and which customers NEVER to take a Marketing Guy to. It was one of those things not-so-good salespeople did on a regular basis to cover their asses -- only parade the guy around in front of your best customers. I tried to do the opposite. William and I agreed.

William was six years older than Bryce's bubby beach boy 39 (going on 13), but came across as about three decades wiser to my mind. He was very East Coast, buttoned down, serious and I have to add, seriously handsome, also seriously married. He might have been the only salesman I'd ever met so far that didn't try to hit on me within the first month on the team. Bryce was a boy babe too, but such a hot tamale, you had to handle him very carefully. I'm a nice looking blonde, no movie star I'll tell you, but a cracker jack salesperson (thanks to all these great people -- mostly men -- who showed me the ropes throughout my career). Bryce had tried to get into my pants ... let me see ... a few times, well, ... maybe 4 times, no ... well, there was the sales meeting in San Diego ... I don't remember. It's just Bryce was one of those guys you have to keep reminding "We're at work, dear! This is not a Roman orgy!" He was an eager puppy. I actually kindof liked him, but I would never information let that spill.

"But check out the schedule, I don't get it." Bryce said.

There was everything riding on this visit -- William and I knew it. Bryce was no dope, he should have figured it out, maybe he was just playing dumb.

Our manager was leaving the company in a month and these two Alpha Males were going to have a bloody battle to be promoted into her slot. This visit would probably have a lot to do with who won, who lost. I was a senior saleswoman, but new to the company -- only there 4 months by now. I wasn't really a contender.

"Look at this, he has an early meeting with us in downtown LA. Cool. Then he takes off with you William to see three customers in your territory -- hits Beverly Hills, Century City, Manhattan Beach, Redondo, the Marina, but drags Sally along. Then he comes down to Orange County and San Diego with me the next, again, he drags Sally along for the ride. Then he's got Sally all to himself in Burbank, Westlake Village and the rest of the Valley."

Bill gave me an UP eyebrow.

"Come on, Bryce," I said. "He wants me to be Little-Miss-Notetaker. I get to tell him my version of the all the calls, tattletail on you guys, since I'm not in the running anyway."

"So we better treat you really FINE, girl. Bartender, bring her anything she wants!" he said pounding on the bar and then cozying up to me. I whacked him away.

William was looking at his watch. He had little league games and bbq's with the family and all that happily married stuff the other two of us kind of envied but often made fun of.

"I gotta take off," he said seriously. We said our goodbyes to William and he headed out.

Bryce and I finished up quickly and headed home. I was wondering about this Frenchman, but wouldn't have to wonder for long, since he was appearing the next morning at the ungodly hour of 7:00 am for a meeting with us. I was chanting "Francois, Francois, Francois" in the car on the way home to try to get "Frenchie" out of my mind and mouth, hoping not to slip and refer to him that way.

He was there before us the next morning. I recalled he'd been in the San Francisco office and had flown down the night before. He reminded me of someone. Some French actor. I think it was that big beefy roundish one named Gerard Depardieu. But he was a little thinner than that guy and he was funny as hell. We all warmed up to him pretty quickly. He even made fun of himself. He had good ideas. We didn't want to like him. But we found we were liking him a lot.

The sales calls with William went off like clock-work. Still, he had done the same thing Bryce decided to do, only trot out the accounts where everything was perfectly pleasant. Boring, if you ask me. Then off to San Diego and Bryce really did a fine job as well. Most of his customers adored him anyway. We all had lunch in a Burger King off the 5 Freeway and Francois, who told us to call him Francois, not Frank or Frenchie or French Guy or Frog (he'd heard them all), launched into a pretty hilarious story about mixing up words in English when he first started in sales with the parent company in the UK. So that was it, he had started in Sales -- no wonder we liked him.

Then I had him all to myself to drag over to Disney and Universal and Paramount. Sounded exciting, the big LA movie studios, but it was actually a number of grueling meetings with the IT guys and all their issues with our software. The first meeting was rough. The next, the guy chewed me out, but then signed a renewal contract -- the only contract Francois got to see anyone close during his visit, I was happy to realize. And then the last meeting. Well, I took him into the lion's den and let him hear one really difficult customer bitch and moan for a solid hour. We left there on a really unhappy note, the guy telling him our user interface basically sucked and they were ready to rip it out and put in the competitor.

We ducked out of the building and leaned against a wall, trying to catch our breathe, "Whoa," Francois said to me. "You wanted me to see the real thing I guess."

"You bet," I said.

"We better take a break. It's nearly 5:00 anyway," he said looking at his massive gold watch. He was quite the snappy dresser, had I mentioned that? It was a hot day and we both needed a break.

By this point we were over in the Valley near a nice little French restaurant on Ventura Boulevard, so we ducked into the bar there for drinks. We got a small booth in the back and talked over the calls. We were drinking red wine. Just as I suspected he wanted to know what I thought of Bryce and William. I hated being in that position. I dodged it a bit. I spoke about both of their strengths.

"Right, right, but tell me about their weaknesses," he urged. I wondered if he was testing ME all of a sudden.

"Tell me about YOUR weaknesses," I said, noticing and kind of NOT noticing that I was getting DRUNK.

Weird how that moment can slip up on you.

And suddenly you think. "Hey, I'm sitting here with this good-looking French guy that I WORK WITH and I'm getting drunk and I'm flirting." And some part of your mind is saying -- "this is NOT a good idea." Problem is, your body is saying, "Go for it."

And he says, "I have a weakness for women, but many Frenchmen do. We have a bad reputation I'm afraid." looking innocently off into the crowd.

"Is there any food around here. I really need some food."

He orders for us -- something French -- it was probably something disgusting like calves intestines smeared on French bread with a piece of goat cheese on top.

The food helped a little. But then he ordered more wine.

My girl alarms are now sounding in my head. The sirens are loud and fearsome. If I were a firestation, my little firemen would already be jumping out of their beds, into their pants and boots, sliding down the pole, getting the hell out of there fast. Unfortunately, the alarms were getting drowned out.

He reaches over to take my hand. I yank it back.

"Hey," I say, "Aren't you even going to tell me you have a mean old wife who doesn't understand you and never wants to have sex and all that?"

He bursts out laughing, "Is that what they all say?"

"Well," I say, "well, most of them!" I'm freaking out like a girl scout losing her cookies.

He's grinning. "I don't think Europeans tell that story. At least we French guys don't."

"I really should go," I say. I stand.

"No problem," he says putting money down on the table. "I'm sorry, I'm tired, I don't know what I was doing."

"I mean, I can stay, if we just talk business." I say. I sit.

We sit. He pulls back. Thank God. He acts like he's all business. It's good. Not really. I'm still drunk. We talk about something dry and boring to do with the semantic web, I have no idea what the hell he's talking about. I am in that bad place where now that I can't have him, I really, really want him.

I stuff food in my mouth to keep it busy, to offset the wine. We actually manage to talk our way past that tricky moment. He tells me some great things that are happing in headquarters. They are really trying to support the salespeople. They are really beginning to get it. I tell him one of the worst things anyone can do to a salesperson is act like headquarters knows more about the customers. No one knows more about the customers than we do. He agrees. We're getting sobered up, it's going to be okay.

He tells me he'll take a cab back to his hotel, I don't need to give him a ride. I appreciate it. Both of us had probably imagined how nice it would be to make out there in the car alone together. And if that happened and then I have to drop him at his hotel -- well, best to avoid all of that. His hotel and my house are in the completely opposite directions anyway, so it makes sense.

He is polite out in the parking lot. It's a beautiful night. I fumble with my keys, dropping them. I look like an idiot. He bends down to get them, hands them to me. I'm not so drunk anymore thanks to the food, just nervous now. I tell him to have a good flight home. He is leaving the next morning at the crack of dawn. He kisses my hand goodnight. Kisses my hand?! Talk about French! Nobody does that. He says good night, turns, goes over to the cab line and jumps into the first one, heading back to his hotel. I'm looking at his butt. It's cute.

I turn away fast. Don't look, I think to myself.

I get in my car in gear. I take a deep, deep breathe and thank the universe once more for letting me squeak out of that one alive. At home, I'm so hot, I call up an old boyfriend I keep in reserve for just such evenings. We have an understanding. He's a good guy. Very good.

A week later, the word comes down. We're all on the edges of our chairs as the conference call gets going. Whichever guy doesn't get the promotion will probably leave and that's bad for all of us, no matter who gets promoted.

Bryce is sure he has the promotion. William is sure he has the promotion. I think it will be William and Bryce will have some temper tantrum and just quit. Francois announces that I'm the new Sales Manager for the region. They report to me. None of us can believe it. They looked as shocked as I do. They don't know the half of it. "Hey guys, she was the only one who got me a signed contract, remember? And I'm sure she's the only one who can handle the two of you and I don't want either of you leaving. I need you selling."

"Go team," I think to myself and break out in a sweat.

Never Know How This Life Might Work Out

You're fired. You're a millionaire.

The Reign In Spain

Lots on Spain tonight and so check out Matt Gross and Glenn Reynolds and Jeff Jarvis in particular.

Terrific Concert

Our church is sponsoring this concert. Ray Greene is one of the most amazing singers I've ever heard. This will be a terrific concert.

GOSPEL CONCERT
RAY GREENE
with
INNERVISIONS
featuring Athene Glover and Donald Sanders

A well-known Gospel and R&B vocalist, Ray has hosted the House of Blues gospel brunch and his music has been featured on national television. This concert will be a preview of his tour to the southeastern United States in support of his new album.

SUNDAY MARCH 28 5:00 PM

Pilgrim Congregational Church United Church of Christ
55 Coolidge Avenue
Lexington, MA

Suggested Donation: $8 advance purchase / $10 at the door
Children 12 and Under ~ FREE

Snacks will be available for purchase at intermission.

Call (781) 862-0357 weekdays from 9:00-1:00 to reserve your ticket.
Directions at www.pilgrimcongregational.org

Terrorism + Elections = Whole New Ball Game In Spain

Very interesting results. How swiftly things can change:

With 99 percent of the votes counted, the Socialists soared from 125 seats to 164 in the outgoing 350-seat legislature. The ruling Popular Party fell from 183 to 148. It cannot try to form a coalition because it has no virtually no allies in the legislature, where it had enjoyed a majority and was often accused of riding roughshod over opponents.

Dirt Later

Wanna write about dirt later and why cleaning up the house and battling with dirt is daunting. Do we know DIRT WINS IN THE END? Do we know that "ashes to ashes, dust to dust" is the bottom line.

Yesterday Fan Mail

Not fan mail really, but a "fan meeting" kind of. I had a meeting late yesterday afternoon with a friend who really reads my blog and actually remembers stuff -- that always makes me laugh. And after complimenting me, he mentioned how much he hates my song lyric posts! This made me roar.

I'm sure lots of people hate them -- but can I remind you -- this is MY blog and sometimes I want to post stuff that only means something to me.

Words Tumbling Here

Cleaning house before my friends come over for Sunday lunch. And I am on all fours -- on knees on hands -- on elbows even, finding badly behaved letters falling off my fridge making a tumble of words, as I scoot around on my kitchen floor trying to get it in shape.

I remember my mom on a million kitchen floors -- on all fours, seems the only way you can really see what's going on on your kitchen floor. What are all these scuffs and lines and streaks and some tiny Daytona 500 has been going on here and you just have to get down there and scrub it all all the tiny car tire tracks.

More errant letters -- a pink florescent "H" and a green life-guard-jams "S" -- my floor, my life, I'm finding yesterday's nice bright red nail polish manicure and a scrub brush a killer combination when it comes to sticky crud removal.

And the words ... I'm thinking about this life and some might look into the surface of a pond to find themselves, but I can find a lot of words on my kitchen floor. I need to shine it up, so I can look into this domestic pool to see who lives here.

Ugh, who lives here? Just someone with a kid who likes to spill ketchup and other sticky things down the side of this fridge.

Those pretty girls in nice slacks who wield the newest most clever sponge mops in TV houses, seem to know something I just don't. They iron their pretty girly pink cotton blouses and do their hair all to ready themselves to glide these sponge mops elegantly across their kitchen floors, never down on all fours with their cute hind quarters in the air. They are as far from the mop head as they can be. They never get mussed up, but it seems highly unlikely that they know the first thing about their kitchen floors. They are mannikins.

I, on the other hand, have to wonder if I am fighting a losing battle as I wipe one spill, scratch away one black scuff mark, only to find 15 more.

I fight on. I'm a mess with wet knees in flannel pjs. My floor is getting ... somewhere.

Scrub, wipe, scrape.

You have to believe you can make a difference. I even swept the damned thing and vacuumed before washing it.

Wait ... .light at the end of this tunnel.

Aha -- success, this thing is getting a little shiny -- on the fridge the letters cling -- order reinstated -- I'm the monarch of this floor.

I lay back -- crazy girl -- but it's clean enough to eat off, surely to lie back on. MY FLOOR. Sun's coming in the window -- the floor looks great -- but, hell, those windows need washing.

Garters

Always handy on the wedding day.

Wedding Cake Toppers

Maybe you and your motorcycle baby need one of these?

Getting Married In Las Vegas

Just in case you wondered. You never know when the spirit might hit you.

-- No Blood Tests are required.
-- There is no Waiting Period.
-- The Marriage License Fee is $35 (cash only)
-- Both parties must be present at the Marriage License Bureau, 1st Floor, 200 S. 3rd. Street - 702-455-4415
-- The Courthouse hours are: Mon-Thur 8am to Midnight and Friday 8am continuously until Sun. Midnight

Who Am We?

I mean, "who are we?" I mean, "who am I?" I think that's the question any really good book makes you ask yourself. The book I'm reading describes the heights of wealth and the life of a real estate and frozen food tycoon as his kingdom crumbles, along with the life of an out-of-luck working stiff. We leave his mansion and sexy second trophy wife lying beside him under a $750 duvet to wake up later with a blue-collar frozen food picker driving to work in one of his factories. This guy, who only wants to save his few pennies to buy a cheap condo for his wife and two kids, nearly gets killed in a factory accident only to be a hero at the last minute saving himself and a co-worker, then gets a pink slip in his paycheck later that day, out of a job all because the tycoon has done such a scandalous job of financial mismanagement of the company. Good book.

A Novel Idea

I've been slurping up a most delicious new novel and had forgotten how satisfying they can be. The time between getting my first cataract surgery and my second left me in a bit of a mix-up with my eye glass prescription and I had to wait out the two eyes both being fixed to be able to read without tiring my eyes. That meant I wasn't doing much book reading, something I really really missed. It's wonderful to have this simple pleasure return.