By Any Other Name

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…” –Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

One-hundred and fifty years ago, without even knowing it, Charles Dickens encapsulated what social networking has become. It does provide the best of times; finding old friends, keeping touch with family, seeing weekly picture updates as a grandchild grows up somewhere across the country.

And, it is the worst of times. People being fired for Facebook status updates, on-line social stalkers, identity theft.

But in what should be an age of wisdom with unfettered access to more information in .29 seconds than Voltaire, Socrates, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, and Einstein had access to ever in their combined lives, we continue to prove this the age of foolishness, at least, social foolishness.

Luckily (insert sarcasm HERE), technology providers are finding new and inventive ways to help us shoot our own eyes out. Microsoft has released the Outlook Social Connector for Microsoft Office Outlook. Basically, this connects all your Outlook contacts to their information on Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and more. You’ll see status updates, comments, messages and alerts from the social networking sites all in one place for your contacts. Cool for you, but also remember the flipside. Now your boss, co-worker, neighbor, stalker, vendor, customer, and crazy Aunt Sally can all follow your social doings in one place without even having to try.

For some (this guy included) this raises the question of privacy and Big Brother and how much is too much? How “connected” and transparent do you really want your life to be? For many like myself we try to keep two separate identities in the social space; one business appropriate, the other inner-circle friend appropriate and “never the twain shall meet.” (Rudyard Kipling, The Ballad of East and West) However, this is becoming more and more problematic as advances such as the Outlook Social Connector spider out and aggregate material on the fly.

Your best defense? Don’t be stupid. Sounds easy enough, yet a week doesn’t pass where you can’t find mention of someone getting fired or not getting a job because of what information lies in the social aether (yes, this is the correct traditional spelling used in this sense). Use the rule of thumb I was taught as a child. Don’t do anything you’d be embarrassed about if your grandma read it on the front page of tomorrow’s paper. So, don’t post without thinking. Mistakes can follow you forever, just ask Monica Lewinsky, Roger Clemens or Tiger Woods.

Also, use your knowledge to set up as good a firewall between your two personas as possible. Know what Facebook is publishing publicly and control it. If you don’t care, trust me, they sure as heck don’t.

Remember, this information never dies. Digital copy is around forever. Just because you delete it doesn’t mean it’s gone. It could be days, months or years before it shows back up, but it can and does.

I began with a famous beginning, let me end with a famous ending. Just know information, like plague bacillus, never disappears for good.

“He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.” - Albert Camus, The Plague

A Time to Laugh

So, we’ve had a rough time of it lately folks. The economy is in the crapper and our illustrious political leaders can’t even agree on what color it is we see in the toilet. The stock market plunge not only cost people their jobs, but for some it has pushed out that all too righteous reward for 50 years of hard work called “retirement.” If you aren’t yourself laid off you certainly know more than a handful of people who have been. Around our offices we’ve lost not just co-workers, but friends and mentors. At home, families sit around the kitchen table deciding on whether to cut little Jimmy’s baseball league or little Sally’s dance lessons; and sometimes both. Vacations are postponed and cancelled, the little fixes around the home have to wait, and for some, the local food pantry provides a vital pathway, if not an embarrassing one for some, to continue to put food on the table. We are in a recession and it sucks all around.

I’ve thought a lot about this as many of you have. What should I be doing differently? What is the answer for America? Am I the next one to be tossed out into the cold, fighting for the few open positions out there? Amidst all this and the echoes of “biggest recession since the 30s” resonating in my head, I asked a pretty simple question. Why the hell don’t we ask our grandparents what they did in the 30s? Too obvious for our government to do, I know, but for our own personal situations why not? Unfortunately, I am no longer blessed with any of my grandparents, but I know exactly what my grandmother (may her memory be a blessing) would say. How? Because we talked about it, the tough times, what it was like and what she did. What would she say now? You need to laugh. Every single day, no matter how bad it is, she said there was always something you could find to give you a good laugh. And she lived this. Even at the end when things were bad, I have a great memory, my last of her, of the family in the living room laughing. She had moments of clarity, and what shone through was her humor. So there, with her sick and unable to even stand, the family was momentarily whisked away on the wings of simple laughter. The family squabbles were set aside, the warmth pushed through the cold chill of eminent death in the air, and the giddiness of laughing like children overtook a group of adults in their 30s, 50s, 60s and one in her 90s. What we laughed about is irrelevant, and honestly, my memory to keep locked away for those tough days when I need it.

Laughter won’t cure illness, it won’t restart a seemingly lifeless economy and no, it can’t prevent wars. But what it can do is to rekindle a spark of hope. It can magically take us away from our troubles, if only for a fleeting moment. It can, in the end, renew the spirit to give it enough for just one more day. And day by day and laugh by laugh we get by. It isn’t the endgame we should relish, but rather, the little moments that get us there one day at a time.

So in this spirit, and that of George Carlin and Lenny Bruce, let’s laugh at what we shouldn’t. I’ve lost employees, mentors, and good friends from my job to layoffs as most of you have. But hey, there’s always a brighter side to it. Or at the very least, something to give us a spark of laughter, if only for a moment or two.

Top 5 reasons work is better since the layoffs

1) Three words, “front row parking.”
2) You now have at least 6 months to blame everything on someone who was laid off. “Yeah, that report… uhh… Jack was working on it. Boy, he must’ve screwed it up before he left.”
3) More coffee for the rest of us.
4) Lines in the cafeteria are shorter, and the servers are much nicer now too!
5) Not only are your chances of winning Buzzword Bingo greater now, but you have a full list of new words to use (RIF- reduction in force, right sizing, rethinking the paradigm, doing more with less, resource reallocation).

Keep smiling folks. And don’t be afraid to put up your list of things I missed above.
--J.R.

Canada y'all?

OMG! It is everything I can do in a very important customer meeting to NOT laugh. The customer I’m meeting with is leading the meeting right now and he has a very usual Texas drawl like most of us. Subtle, almost unnoticeable to most of us, but would stand out to Northerners.

Then, like a thunder bolt through the room, a crash in the middle of calm, BAM! a Canadian accent sneaks out in a word or two. Surely I heard this wrong. Nope, there it is again. OMG… “schedule” comes out with the Canadian “ou” and sounds like “ske-duel” with that “ou” thing in the second half. I’m dying here folks… a Canadian redneck; who knew? Now if only I can figure out how to get him to say, “This schedule tool is like a boot stuck in the Canadian mud.” :)