Category: Online Work/Life

[NOTE: I don’t usually write about politics on this blog, but the communications issues this year are fascinating me.]

I’ve started listening to iTunes playlists in my car rather than turn on the radio and hear the latest Donald Trump story.

I’ve stopped reading Facebook because my timeline is full of friends’ comments about the latest Trump story.

Folks, he’s won. Not the battle for the presidential election, but the war for the eyes and ears of America. Love him or hate him, he’s all we’re talking about. I haven’t seen a story on Hillary Clinton’s plans, policies, or speeches since that lovely Democratic convention a few weeks back.

The Democratic Party and the Republican Party are playing a traditional game of lacrosse. Or perhaps polo. Something obscure.

By contrast, Trump is playing NFL Football: Good Trump vs. Bad Trump, and most of what’s happening on the field is an over-the-top half-time extravaganza.

Guess which contest has the big viewing audience? And all the advertisers?

Even if Trump loses badly in November (or quits the campaign before election day, which I believe he will) he has changed the face of  political communications in America.

Not for the better, in my opinion, but probably irrevocably. History books will talk about this campaign — though whether there will be many educated people left to read them is a whole other question.

 

 

The news this week is bad numbers for Twitter. Really bad. The number of users has gone flat. Financials are trending steadily downward.

I have now identified the Twitter icon as a Norwegian Blue and I suspect he’s not “just resting.”

I sure hope the financial analysts aren’t spending too much time with their spreadsheets and databases on this one. They’ll know immediately what’s wrong with Twitter if they just try to use it.

Its user interface is, and has always been, one huge hot mess.

While Facebook encourages you to friend just friends, Twitter culture encourages you to follow just about everyone, short of people engaged in human trafficking. Friends of friends of friends of celebrities. They all follow you back. But is anyone listening?

Once you’re in with this crowd, it’s chaos. Loud, ugly, nasty, and even, somehow, smelly. (Don’t ask me how an online experience can be smelly, but Twitter somehow manages to stink.)

In order to gain any control whatsoever over the chaos on your page, you have to assign your followers to lists and then view the smaller, supposedly more focused, lists. This makes perfect sense — right up until you try to do it. Then you encounter Twitter’s abysmally designed list-assignment process. It’s first obscure and then, once understood, it’s prohibitively cumbersome.

The simple fix of assigning the 80 or so people you actually want to hear from to a “hot list” turns out to be anything but simple. Twitter won’t let you alphabetize or otherwise sort your full list. (You’d have to use one of those third-party Twitter management apps from companies you’ve never heard of. Oh, yeah, let’s give one of them access to my Twitter account and reputation.) Even if you do fight your way, individual by individual, through the underbrush of their list-assignment process, you can’t set Twitter to open to your “hot list”— you still have start at your gigantic list of lists and select the list you want…bored yet?

I sure am.

Talk is cheap, and Twitter is the evidence of it.

Back in 2006 when Twitter emerged, I compared using it to the experience of walking past the watercooler in your office, hearing some interesting gossip, and throwing in your own clever comments.

Today the experience is more like shoving your way through a crowded subway station at rush hour, hearing snippets of small-group conversations about obscure topics, interspersed with blaring ads from vendors. As of a few weeks ago, we’ve got billboards (pictures) too.

How did it get this way? I can only conclude that none of the leaders at Twitter actually use their own service. (Their personal assistants probably email them a daily list of Tweets that mention their names.)

So, Twitter, let me know when you fix your lame UI. But don’t send me a Tweet. You’ll have to find me over at Facebook. Maybe LinkedIn. Perhaps Google+.

I’m not pining for the fjords.

 

 

 

Thank you, Jane Hawkins, for giving a home to our foster feline, Mr. Cat (now Merkle) who needed to live in a one-cat household.

Thank you, Kaylee, for 12 years of being such a cute kitten — and a challenging cat. Your sister Zoe misses you, though the new cats (more on them shortly) keep her company.

Thank you, Susan Powter, for helping me start 2015 off with personal yoga training via Skype. I hope you’ll offer Skype training again.

Thank you, Kat Richardson — not just for your Greywalker series and its brilliant conclusion,  Revenant — but for giving back to the Seattle writing community so generously through the Waywords at the Wayward writing sessions. Carving out Tuesday nights for writing made all the difference to my writing this year.

Thank you, neighbors Jerry and Gayle, for exchanging cat-sitting services with us — and for forgiving Sheba our deaf white cat when she bit Jerry!

Thank you, Danielle, for coming reliably twice a month to help us dig out from under the cat hair and clutter!

Thank you, John Simmons Chappell, for taming my hair every few weeks and sharing home remodeling tips.

Thank you, Sheba, for being such a fascinating cat for 18 years. A deaf white cat, you learned sign language, loved to cuddle, and kept our countertops clear by throwing anything we left on them onto the floor. I sold my house in Wallingford and moved to a dead-end street in Ballard in 2001 just so you could safely go outdoors once a day.

Thank you, Patrick Swenson, for organizing the Rainforest Writers Village retreat while teaching, publishing, and writing fiction (like the The Ultra Thin Man).

Thank you, Joe Hage, Josh Freedman, Peter Krause, and Pete Frickland, for sending great writing and editing projects my way.

Thank you, Charlie Hamilton and Barb Rowan, for your brilliant web design and project management work. It is a joy to collaborate with you.

Thank you, Arlin Robins, for rescuing Tinkerbelle, Mr. Tippy, and Perdita in Northern California and sending them to us in Seattle. Especially after Mr. Tippy bit you.

Thank you, John Hedtke and Marilyn Maurer, for driving down to Cottage Grove from Eugene with cash for the mobile mechanic who took apart the dashboard of my car to get Mr. Tippy out after the cat wrapped himself around the steering mechanism.

Thank you, Rossoe Oil and Gas Systems, for taking apart the cold air system of our heater so we could hunt for Mr. Tippy when he disappeared in the ceiling of our basement.

Thank you, John Hutchison and Hank Graham, for helping us tear apart the walls and ceiling looking for Mr. Tippy — especially Hank, who finally discovered Mr. Tippy three-and-a-half weeks after the cat vanished.

Thank you, Seattle Animal Control, for rushing over to help us try to get Mr. Tippy out of the ceiling after we found him. Sorry he was utterly uncooperative.

Thank you, Kier Salmon, for finding Mr. Tippy and for helping us finally get him out of the ceiling. And for being so understanding when he bit you.

Thank you, Animal Medical Center of Seattle, our 24-hour vet, for rehydrating Mr. Tippy and assuring us that he’d be perfectly fine (he was).

Thank you, Aurora Veterinary Hospital, for helping us get Tinkerbelle, Mr. Tippy, and Perdita caught up on their shots, and for being very flexible about scheduling when it took us 6 months to capture Perdita and bring her in.

Thank you, King County Metro, for selecting my poem “Letter of Conjugation” for the Poetry on the Bus “Writing Home” series.

Thank you, Bundoran Press, for publishing my story “Grief” in the anthology Second Contacts. It was my first (of three) semi-pro fiction sales this year.

Thank you, Viable Paradise friends, for beta reading, critiques, Google writing hangouts, meet-ups at conventions, and sharing you own writing triumphs and woes in 2015.

Thank you, Northwest Folklife, for four wonderful days of music, dance, and volunteering. We loved getting to close the festival Monday night!

Thank you, Liz Vogel, for organizing the writers workshop with me at Fourth Street. And for all the cookies!

Thank you, Clarion West, for the summer public readings. And the parties…

Thank you, Bruce Durocher II, for being such a class act. You, and your film criticism, are sorely missed.

Thank you, Sasquan Con Com, for running a superb convention under difficult circumstances that ranged from Sad Puppies to forest fires and smoke hazards.

Thank you, Gustavo, for getting me back on the track with Zumba classes. You are an inspiration.

Thank you, Jeff Lemkin, for all of the great conversations and meals. You are at once dauntingly intellectual and refreshingly down-to-earth.

Thank you, Mom (and Dad), for underwriting the systems work on the drainage, heating, and natural gas systems at the house this year. Not glamorous, but those improvements are really making a difference.

Thank you, Quality Plumbing, for coming to our rescue when other plumbing companies wimped out. You quickly replaced our somewhat arcane (high recovery) hot water heater.

Thank you, Diabolical Plots, for the Submission Grinder — the online system many of us use to track our fiction submissions to magazines and anthologies. And thank you, Cynthia Ward, for the excellent Market Maven newsletter about speculative fiction markets.

Thank you, Home Owners Club, for posting my humor columns on line this year.

And thank you, Tom Whitmore, for being there with me for all of this.

 

 

 

 

“What would you like to see happen?”

Ask yourself that question. Chances are you’ll look into the distance and, unless you are irredeemably cynical, a glimmer of something highly satisfactory will catch your eye.

Now try asking that question to someone else. The results can be magical, as I’ll explain.

A few years back, when I was doing PR in an old-school, corporate environment, I arrived at work early one morning to find that someone had left a bomb on my chair. It was a page ripped from our latest newsletter, with a paragraph circled in red ink, and the following message scribbled in the margin:

“WRONG. Call me immediately!”

It was signed with the initials of Madame X, our fearsome director of finance.

My heart sank and my blood pressure soared. I picked up my phone but had the sense to call not Madame X but the manager of our customer service department. I confided in her what was going on. (I remember that I was so nervous I was afraid to sit down in my chair.)

“Yep, that’s Madame X, all right,” the customer service director said with a sympathetic laugh. “Don’t panic. Here’s what you to do: When we hang up, call her. She’ll come storming over to your office, stand in your door way, and give you hell. Whatever you do, don’t interrupt her while she’s talking. Don’t argue, don’t apologize. Just listen. When she stops talking, look her in the eye and say. “OK. What do you want to see happen?”

“That’s it?”

“Yup,” the customer service manager said. “She’ll tell you, and then you just do it.”

I followed her directions. Madame X appeared in my doorway so fast I thought she’d been teleported into the building. She did, indeed, give me hell.

As she was talking, I had visions of her asking me to resign or demanding that the entire 16-page newsletter be reprinted, with a correction, and sent to our thousands of clients. I had to stop myself from offering up one of those solutions as she ranted along for 10 minutes.

But when she stopped, I looked her in the eye and said, “OK. What do you want to see happen?”

“Oh,” she said, looking surprised. “Well, actually, nothing. I just wanted you to know how I felt.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well. Thank you. It was helpful.”

Madame X left, looking a bit stunned, and I sank into my chair for the first time that morning. When I recovered, I ordered flowers for the manager of customer service.

Since then, I’ve used this technique dozens of times in really sticky situations. The results have been nothing short of miraculous. In many cases, what could have been a destructive argument transformed instantly into a problem solving session. In other cases, the person just wandered off like Madame X. (It’s worth noting that Madame X later became a friend of mine.)

I’ve been meaning to share this technique for quite a while. What motivated me to write about it today was that I tried it recently and it failed to resolve the situation. My conclusion from that failure was that this is a tactic that works better in person than it does in email. But a 99% success rate isn’t bad.