I was on vacation last week, a staycation where I didn’t go anywhere or do anything fun (No, seriously, as things go it may have been the worst week of my life personally, absolutely horrible. The only redeeming quality was I didn’t have to work while things were going to hell, and that was on purpose, the vacation had been scheduled on purpose to land there.). I’ve had several vacations this year and last and all of them, by Friday I was already dreading going back to work to the point where Saturday and Sunday were spent not enjoying the final two days of vacation but trying to decide how to hurt myself juuuuust enough to get medical leave from work without actually being hurt so bad my quality of life was impaired… I was really hating the job and going back to work.

Not this time though. This time, in spite of how absolutely horrible the week had been,  and I can’t stress enough just how horrible it was, By Sunday night I was talking to my roommate’s brother and commented, “You know, usually by now I’m miserable about having to go back to work and now… I won’t say I’m looking forward to going back, or really excited to go back, but I’m ready to get back. God knows I’ve got lots of work to do at the house, with the new move and all, but I’m OK with going back to work too. I’m glad.”

On the way to work this morning I called my boss and told him my revelation, that I didn’t dread work any more. He laughed and said he’d noticed the same then after he dropped a rung on the ladder (we both sort of did at the same time for similar reasons and I hope it works out for him as it was my idea lol) that his tension headaches had vanished and his outlook was more optimistic and he too was not dreading work any more.

The biggest worry I had about my drop down the corporate ladder was that once it was a reality and I was going to walk in those doors as the store manager and not a District Manager I’d have a sort of buyer’s remorse kind of thing where I got what I wanted but suddenly… suddenly it doesn’t look as good out of the box as it did at the store. I wasn’t feeling that. There was no nervous anticipation either. I wasn’t scared of what was coming. I knew, and know, what’s coming, a lot of work and some long hours but it’s all stuff I’m not only good at, but that I’ve done over and over again in bigger towns, bigger stores, and stores that were worse off than this one. This one’s not really bad off so much as it is… was… comfortable. Things had settled, and not in a good way. There’s a saying the difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions and this store was certainly in a rut I’m ready to de-rut it.

So, while personally things hit the fan in a huge hairy, ugly way that I’m not ready to blog about yet… maybe in the future I will, but right now things are still a little fresh, work is going well and looking like it’s going to go better and better. I’m looking forward to it, and that is a new feeling for me lately. I’m glad. I could really use the bright spot.

In District Management I was always having to rely on other people to a huge degree. As manager of a single location  I’ll be able to be more hands on, more able to know the things I’m interested in because I’m the one that my boss will be looking to to know things. I’ll still have direct reports, 4 of them now, but the distance between me and the information is so much shorter as a manager when compared to District Management. My ability to affect the changes I want will be much easier than before.

Part of the issue for me as a District Manager was communication. We had Sharepoint, faxes, conference calls, weekly meetings, phone calls, text messages, and all the face time I could squeeze in when you consider the 400 miles between some stores. But with all that there were times when communication wasn’t happening. I was too far away from the people I needed to be talking to, the front-liners. That was part of it. Another part was the filtering happening. Another part was I would say something and my managers would hear something else, then they would say what they thought I meant and the Sales Associates would hear what they thought the managers meant I meant. It was like a horrible game of telephone. I would say “Please make sure you smile at the customers when you’re talking to them,” by the time it would get to the Sales Associates it would be “And if you come to work crabby just stay home. Leave your problems at home.” Which isn’t at all what I was saying. Sure, that’s a great idea, but really, all I wanted was the employees to smile more. (That’s just an example. If any of my managers are reading this wondering when I said that it’s just an example, relax… although, smiling more is never a bad thing.)

So. My work was becoming more than what I did. It was becoming who I was. That’s true for a lot of managers. I think in some ways it is what makes a good manager into a great manager. The problem was… and this is a big one… I didn’t like who I was becoming, not as a person or as a manager. The joy was no longer there for me. When my phone would ring it was always something that made my skin get a size too small. Everything was an irritation. It got harder to find the things that made me love my job and I took vacations to try and find the joy again, to recharge my batteries, but it wasn’t coming back. I kept taking vacations that I didn’t want to come back from. Not just for a few more days, but ever. The problems were too big. I was too unable to fix them because I felt I was too far away from them and I felt that the job was too big for me. When I started as a DM I had 4 stores. When I stepped down I had 11. Somewhere in between those two numbers is the right number. I may have been able to do 11 more easily if I’d had stronger managers in some locations, but I couldn’t find them. I had too many places where I was getting by on what I had and didn’t have the time or resources (from above) to put into getting the warm bodies replaced. I had too many people who were adequate. They kept the stores opening (mostly) and they kept the shifts covered (mostly.) But if I felt I needed two weeks to get an extended stay hotel and really work on a store I was told that wasn’t in the budget and it wasn’t the way to do things.

So… too often problems remained unfixed and that was killing me. If I couldn’t fix the problems and was required to leave band aids on them… I couldn’t keep doing the job badly. So. I quit it. I stepped down. I tried to do it for a year longer than I wanted to. Maybe my heart wasn’t in it the last year and maybe I wasn’t trying as hard as I could. Maybe I was only going through the motions the last year. I really am not able to judge. I was too exhausted to try any harder though.  Years of that and I’d quit getting any satisfaction from my job at all. All that was left of the job was the comfort of a steady check in an economy that was anything but reliable.

What do I hope to gain out of stepping down? Honestly? A break and some satisfaction from my job again. Throwing myself into fixing one store, really fixing it. From the floors to the doors to the customer service will be something I know I’m good at, something I know I can do. I hope to get back in the habit of success and not just the habit of exhaustion. The old job had killed any feelings of success in me. I felt like a consistent failure and wasn’t enjoying things any more. That’s no way to live. It was to the point I had to change what I was doing or quit. Life was happening all around me. My friends were all having lives without me and I’d hear about it on Facebook while I sat in a hotel three states away. So, I went back to managing for some time back home, with my friends, doing a job I know I can do and doing it in a store I know I can change and turn around. I’m ready to have some fun again at work and I’m ready to have some successes.

If you’ve made it this far in the series thank you. I’m going to finish this series with a quoted twitter post from a friend of mine Chris Kasten from Denver, CO. I think he groks what I am talking about. His post summarizes where I’d been before I walked away from it all and stepped down.

My startling realization of the day: It is way too easy to confuse comfort for satisfaction.

– Chris Kasten on Twitter.

Anyway. I donated the book without reading it. I’m glad I didn’t put my name on it. There. I said it.

Here’s the thing. With Little Brother I knew what the problem was. I knew there had to be some resolution. I had some characters I cared about to focus on and I knew the desired outcome and what I didn’t want to happen to them. I was engaged in them and in their story. In For the Win there are a lot of characters. I haven’t really cared about them much at all. I can’t remember the name of the one I cared most about so that’s no good. And the problem? The problem is life isn’t fair. That’s the problem in the story as I saw it. How is that going to be fixed? It’s not. Life ISN’T fair. I’m three-quarters of the way through the book and I shouldn’t do the review until I finish the book. It’s unfair of me to review it before I’m done with it. The thing is. I’m done with it.

I can close the book right now without knowing what happens to any of the characters in the story and I won’t wonder about it later. The book is about the economies in online games. I LOVE online games. I won’t lie. I even bought gold once in Everquest (EQ). I played Everquest 1 & 2, World of Warcraft, Asheron’s Call, Star Wars Galaxies, and another one… I can’t remember the name. I didn’t play long. I played a lot of them. EQ for years! I was guild leader of a decent guild that’s still around I believe, years and years later. I invested five years in that game. Loved it. I got the economy. I understand it and how it worked. Cory didn’t want to step on any IP toes (Intellectual Properties) when he was writing the book so the games are weirdly named, Mushroom Kingdoms and things like that… that’s fine… I get it. Don’t want to incriminate an existing game and get them breathing down your neck.

Except he put them as products made by Coca Cola. Really? You dodge one bullet by making up weird game names, but then you invoke one of the most iconic names in the world as the parent company? It made the made up game names more distracting. Had he simply named them Megacorp it would have been less distracting to me. It really jerked me out of the book, the made up names interlaced with real parent company names served as a distraction, a focal point that shattered my immersion into the book-reality.

Last thing, and this is something I wouldn’t notice in a hard cover book. Cory did this in Little Brother and I read it in dead tree format and listened to it in Audiobook and I didn’t notice it. Each chapter starts with a dedication to a book store. That’s cool. In a novel I can skip that part. In the digital version, reading it on the kindle it was harder to skip, scanning was an issue so I wound up reading more of it than I wanted to. That’s a limitation of the kindle more than of the book. Here’s the thing though. I don’t care. I know that makes me a jerk, but reading about why a particular book store is special to someone is like listening to a guy on the bus explain to you why Freebird is the ultimate in anthems and it really means a lot to him “because of the really wicked shit I was going through when I heard that song for the first time you know what I mean man?” I do know what you mean man… and I still don’t like Freebird! My favorite southern rock song is The Three Great Alabama Icons by Drive By Truckers. (I grew up from ’68-’81 in Southern Alabama around the time the writer’s of this song were in Northern Alabama.)

I love book stores. There’s an excellent used book store in Southaven, Mississippi that I miss deeply, but unless you’re IN Southaven you don’t care about it is my guess. And if you are, and you’re a reader… you probably already know about it. They did a pretty brisk business.

Would I recommend this book? No. I wouldn’t, and I’m sorry about that too. I love Cory Doctorow’s blog and many of his other books. Seriously, Little Brother is in my top 5 and that’s saying something! But this one… it just missed on too many things. I didn’t care about the characters, the gaming part didn’t ring true, 3/4 of the way through I didn’t know what I was supposed to be reading/caring about. I didn’t know where he was going. I didn’t know where the characters were going, and I just didn’t care. And on a stylistic note… what the hell was with the chin waggling? Dear Lord!?!? Everybody was waggling their chin all the time. It was so distracting every time it would happen I’d look up and look around. I’ve STILL not seen anybody waggle their chin except for one guy, in India I think while watching Eat, Pray, Love. I’m not sure he didn’t have something in his teeth.

If you read the book and finish it and the ending of the book is worth it… can you shoot me an e-mail? I’ll finish it and edit this to reflect my mistake in stopping too soon as well as issue an apology for reviewing a book I didn’t finish.

Priorities.

We pay attention to the things our bosses pay attention to. Sure, the memos from the office and from our boss may talk about things like improved customer service, better cleaning, more consistent branding, and being friendlier, but what do the bosses talk to us about when they come to the store? What does the office send follow up things about? What are they looking at? What gets us in trouble? What are we accountable for?

If they talk about the customer service part of things only at employee meetings, but then the rest of the time we talk to them harp on us that our paperwork isn’t legible or how many widgets a week are we cranking out then we have to assume that customer service is something we talk about, but widget cranking is the important bit. If we get in more trouble for forgetting to fax a piece of paper whose information is already available on the computer somewhere else than we get into if we’re rude to a customer then it’s obvious where priorities are. They’re on the paper.

If the District Manager calls and expects the person answering the phone to drop everything, including the customer they’re waiting on to help them with whatever special project they’re working on that tells the person answering the phone that the customer is second to the DM. That’s the slippery slope we start down as DMs when we get full or ourselves. I tell my employees all the time, please, if you’ve got a customer put the phone down and wait on them. I’ll hold while you help them. I don’t even mind holding! What I mind is if I hear they’re doing both because then they’re doing neither very well. I’m not a fan of multi-tasking.

So, when you’re working the store and 12 boxes of who knows what comes in and you start ignoring customers to get the product checked in and put out you’re doing exactly what you have to do to keep your boss off your back. It says right in the rules & regs or policies & procedures, that we’re not to leave product sitting around un-checked in. The problem with that is… the trainees see that. The Sales Associates see it. Then they assume that their work, their assigned tasks, their widget polishing, or gadget alphabetizing is the same as receiving all those boxes… something that’s more important than the customer. We teach them that by what we do, not what we say. None of us say, “ignore the customer to get your work done,” instead, we do it while saying not to.

I ask that we hit the floor and offer to help customers periodically and get an amazing amount of push-back. It makes me mad to have Sales Associates tell me, “customers don’t want us to talk to them.” ARGH! When the SA’s say that I don’t want them to talk to me! That’s for sure lol. Don’t just stand behind the counter and wait for them to come to us but a lot of people do exactly that, saying, “Well, I’m polishing widgets, or ordering gadgets” so I don’t have time to wait on the customer. And that’s just not true! It’s so frustrating to me to see it. That’s when I go do it and then go back to what I was doing. I try and show, by example, that you can indeed stop doing something to go help customers. Helping customers shouldn’t be an interruption to your ‘real job.’ It should BE the real job!

I can tell you now, after having met with, visited with, and talked about priorities with the new bigger than big shot that priorities need to be customer first. Your new DM is that way too. We’ve been “getting better” for a long time now. It’s time to “get great” at it! Not just at employee meetings, but all the time. It’s what I intend to do in my new job to increase sales. I hope it works immediately. One of the areas we can continue to grow and beat the competition is outstanding customer service. I don’t mean to say that it’s not better today. It is. But better isn’t good enough any more. It really is time to get great. It’s also an area where first impressions are hugely important. If a DM walks in and sees customers on the floor and people checking in product or polishing widgets or whatever, and never talking to the customer they’re not going to know that you JUST got back from making the rounds, offering to help them all, and helping them. They’re going to only see that the customer is being ignored right now, at the moment they turned on the live surveillance cameras or walked in the back door. We have to not just make sure we are providing great customer service, but we actually have to look like it! Not just to the cameras, but to the customers.

When the customer walks in and sees us busy behind the counters and a floor full of people they immediately think we’re too busy to help them. If we all shout the greeting at them without looking up at them and making eye-contact that doesn’t mean anything. Shouting our greeting with offers to help before they’re even in the door all the way may meet the letter of the law in regards to greeting customers but it’s not the intent. It’s not a greeting or welcome that is meant. It’s a pro-forma going-through-the-motions greeting that is as insincere as it sounds, and as someone who’s heard lots of them… There are a LOT of bad sounding greetings out there.

I hear people now clamoring that the product must get checked in, and their store sees hundreds of people a day and how the heck do I expect them to pretend to sincerely greet each and every one of them? The thing is I don’t expect you to pretend to be sincere. I want you to feel it. I can’t make someone like customer service, but if you don’t you shouldn’t be doing it.

There will be the occasional customer you DO have to fake it with. The man with the nervous tick where he ALWAYS coughs into his hand before reaching into his pocket to get his cash. That guy, I have to pretend to like him. I don’t like him. I don’t like him at all! He makes me sick, sometimes literally as well as figuratively. But I greet him like I’m happy to see him because he’s my customer and I want him to stay my customer. The lion’s share of the customers, I am glad to see. And I never mind a break from receiving product to talk to customers. It’s a break from the receiving. I’d rather wait on customers than work on receiving product any day of the week. I was a shipping clerk at a warehouse for a year or so. It was so boring I quit. The other end of that, receiving clerk… not my cup of tea at all. I’m in this job for the customers. If you’re not then maybe it’s time for you to consider a different job too.

The sweat comes in when I’m not working. When I’m just me and I’m dumped into a social situation where I know the people who invited me but nobody else. I’m awful at those things. They’re exactly the same as the work situations in numbers of people or how well I know them… but my comfort level is off. Suddenly I’m no longer chatty or friendly or smiling. I’m stand-offish, and could just as easily stand in a corner, sip a drink until it’s gone, find the host, thank them for the invitation and sneak out the door after having “made an appearance.” What I’m describing isn’t rare either. It’s really normal social behavior for me. I don’t know why it’s so different. I’m confident, social, affable, and outgoing at work functions. Throw me in with non-work people though and I’m an awkward self-conscious wall flower.

Podcasts. I really like podcasts. I drive a lot for work so I listen to a lot of them. One of my favorite episodes was from Lisa B. Marshall, the Public Speaker from Quick & Dirty Tips. She talks about how to talk to people. She talks about her Mom starting to talk to people in line at the grocery store and how mortified she was by it. I’ve started trying to do this. It’s a little thing, a silly thing, a safe thing. Nobody gets better at something without practicing it so I’ve been practicing my chatting people up out in public with strangers. That way if I botch it I won’t embarrass myself in front of people I know. My hope is that this will help when I get to the next social function I attend that’s not work related. With the practice under my belt, and the confidence of having done this before in non-work related venues I’ll be able to do it a little better with people I will probably see again, and hopefully for more than just “making an appearance.”

So, if you’re shy or reticent to just jump into a social setting give this podcast a listen. Then, most importantly, practice it on people you’ll never see again.

I’d like to say this, in an open letter to all my direct reports. All of you with whom I worked directly over the past 3 years as a District Manager. Thank you. I’ve had a really good time working with you. We’ve come so far from where we were when I first got here and you’ve done a ton of work. Our customer service is head and shoulders better than it was before. I believe our facilities look better, and our merchandise is better presented and displayed. None of that is because of anything I did. It’s because of the work you and your crews have done. I got here just as the economy was preparing to do unprecedented things and while there have been store closings none of them were mine and that’s a testament to the hard work you and your employees have been doing.

We’re not done. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us and I want you to know that your new District Manager will notice things I missed and that’s OK. Don’t ever feel disloyal to me when he sees something I messed up or dropped the ball on! I make mistakes! He will prioritize things differently from me and things I didn’t care about may rate high on his import-o-meter. Don’t feel like you have to cover for me or like you should throw me under the bus either. LoL. I still work for the same company he’ll be able to phone me and say, “Did you really say to hide all this product in the bathroom until they had room to put it out?” I’ll not only tell the truth but I’ll know which of you it is making that one up! You know who you are you back-stock addict!!! But seriously. I’ve worked directly with your new DM since 2005 and I enjoy working with him. He’s been a great boss to me and is a helluva guy in real life too. Even when we disagree on things he’s respectful and he listens. We talk about it and then I do it the way he told me to. LoL. Remember, with him, as with me, sometimes we’ll be crazy, let us… do the crazy thing and let’s watch it together!

The main point I’m trying to make here is we’ve done a lot together. We’ve come a long way together. You’re going to hear that we’ve got a long way to go yet. You’ll hear we’ve got a lot to do yet. Don’t let that invalidate all you’ve done! You HAVE done a lot. But that was then. Keep those accomplishments in your heart and in your mind as real accomplishments. They count and they matter. But we’re not going to stop there. We’re not going to dwell on them. We’re not going to hold them up as trophies and say “We’ve arrived!” Where we’re going isn’t a place. We’re going on a journey so don’t expect to “get there.” Don’t think that one day you’ll walk in and be perfect and we’ll all have a week or month or year to put our feet up and relax. That day will never ever ever come. Don’t look for it. When we quit trying to improve we’re done. Our competitors won’t rest so we can’t either.

We’re not moving forward chasing the competition. We used to be. Not any more. Today we’re moving forward and are pulling ahead of them. I believe some of the new hires made recently are part of that sea-change we’re feeling. I’ll talk more about this in future posts. We’ve gone from the best we could be under doing things the old way to a new level… a level of we’re going to start doing things a new way now, a different way, with different approaches to some of the same problems. Hiring from outside the company for a leading position? That’s crazy talk! They don’t know anything about us! How can they possibly lead well? Really? That’s not even a real question. Sure, there are specific things about our company that a person wouldn’t know off the street but we’re in retail. We’re in customer service. Anybody who has a solid background in that is going to bring things to the table that we need there. Things that weren’t our primary focus years ago. I’m honest enough to realize that our attention to the customer was primarily in how much he’d leave at the counter. That used to be enough. It’s not any more. I once attended meetings of DMs and it was day TWO of the meetings, after lunch, before any of the speakers even mentioned the word “customer“. I know because I was waiting for it, listening for it. That was years ago. It’s not that way now. More on this later.

I said working with you has been good, and it has. Some of you never called or bothered me. Some of you managed your stores just fine with no bugging me at all. You just clicked along on your tracks like a mining car hauling stuff into and out of the mines. Others of you felt like I’d forget to pay you if you didn’t call at least twice a day. If you ran out of a product that you thought was selling well my phone would ring immediately after you noticed it. If I didn’t get back to you when I said I would my phone would ring. Most fell somewhere in between those extremes. Seriously. I preferred working with the pests. You made me a better DM by holding my feet to the fire. You expected more out of me and made sure I did what I said I was going to do. Those of you who said, “Oh, he must be too busy. I’ll ask him next time I see him or next time he calls me,” frustrated me so much.

As a manager, my best advice for you is please, advocate for your store. Be a pest for your store. Work hard to make sure your new District Manager doesn’t forget your store. Don’t be the place that the DM goes to rest. Be the place that he goes to get stuff done. Be the squeaky wheel that gets the grease. Hold his feet to the fire. If you don’t fight for your store who will? Seriously. If your new DM thinks you don’t care enough to call and bug him to take care of your store… what’s that tell him? I tried to call and touch base with people on a regular basis. Some of you knew that and used that as a reason to not call me, and that’s great. That’s what that communication from me to you was for. But don’t put aside important things waiting for me to come to you.

Don’t do that to the new DM. Maybe he won’t call as often. Maybe he’ll get busy and forget for a few days. Don’t do it. If you need something ask for it. If you don’t get it ask again. But don’t stop asking. That’s my biggest failure as a DM in this area was those of you who weren’t big enough pests. I should have either fired you and replaced you with people who would be a pest for their store, or I should have managed somehow to convince you that you had to make sure I paid attention to you and your store. Obviously firing is not the best choice in that situation.

Advocate for your store. Be a pest! The owner of the chain was recently in the stores with me and said to one of the managers in front of me, “Keep being a pest. Keep making sure you get what you need.” I was so glad he recognized that she was one of the pains in my butt. She is and was a great manager and the owner knew it. It says good things for a manager when the owner knows you’re a pest and encourages it. All of you should learn from that example. All of you should advocate for your store to your new DM. You should be pushing him, not him pulling you.

PS: When I say be a pest I hope you know what I mean and don’t call him for stupid things on Sunday nights or his time off just so he hears your voice. Some of you do that to me to this day… and you  know who you are lol… being annoying isn’t advocating for your store.

I was recently talking to my mom about reading Young Adult fiction. I’m a fan and I’m 40. She’s a fan and she’s 32. We both read it not because it’s the extent of Harry Potter our reading ability. We read it because we enjoy them. Young Adult fiction is often fun. is fun to read. The Percy Jackson books are fun to read. There are others. They’re fun. “Oh,” says the adult in the seat next to me, “what simple books, like candy for the brain! Such a fast read. I much prefer Hodgens McStuffystein’s book about the travails of the Indians along the Trail of Tears as told from the point of view of a louse. You really MUST read the 12 volume set! It will change your perception of…” What? Really? That’s what I want to do in my few minutes of time to read while eating my breakfast or before I go to bed after a long day at work? No! I want to have fun! I want an adventure! I want excitement! I want fun! I want laughter! I want pain and suffering that I KNOW will turn out OK!

I’m a fan of games. I have an xbox 360 and I like it a lot. I have a Nintendo DS handheld gaming unit and I like it as well. I play games for run. Nope. They’re not typically all that edifying. I don’t believe the skills transfer to real life either. The only exception to that is after years of playing Diablo back when usenet was usenet and fan-fic was cool (and less slashy). I made some great friends back then and have them to this day, and stay in touch and everything… met them in real life and all that. You’re wondering what skill I learned in that game that transferred to real life? I can bash a barrel with the best of them! All I have to do is SEE the confounded hoop ringed demons and I’ll start itching to bust them to pieces! (OK. I’m back now… sorry… a flashback to an inside joke took over my keyboard.)*

Where was I? I just got back from typing the footnote, you’ve GOT to read it, and follow the links to some of my early stuff. 1999… I’ve been online for a long time you youngsters. Show me some respect!

Fun. Mur’s podcast chapter was about games being fun and about fun being something we’re evidently supposed to grow out of at some point. I haven’t grown out of having fun yet. I get looks sometimes, and I have people think I’m younger than I am, and it’s not because I look younger, God knows I look every day of my 40 something years… but I hope I don’t act it yet. I hope that I’m responsible and get my bills paid on time (I do.) but I hope also that I remember not only how to have fun but that it’s OK to have fun. You see people having fun when they have their kids or grand kids with them… using the kids as an excuse to let go and have fun but we don’t have to do that as adults. We’re allowed to enjoy books, games, movies and life without having to make up an excuse for having had fun. Fun is the reason we do things. It’s not something we should be ashamed of or hide or try and make an excuse for it. If you haven’t had fun today fix that. Do something fun. Not just that you like, but something that makes you grin from ear to ear, giggle like a kid, and when you’re done look up at your adult self and say, “Let’s do it again!”

*Inside joke funny. I made up a pseudonym BKDaemon in 1999 (And the female version in July of 99) to post provocative posts about barrel bashing in alt.games.diablo. He, BKDaemon, even figured in some fan fics I wrote. The thing is… someone in real life took the name, probably by accident, surely not to rip me off, that’d be ridiculous, but someone else out there is using the name to write fan fic lol. A fan fic character I wrote is serving as a pseudonym!

(As an aside I think some of my writing constipation has been that I’ve been taking this thing too seriously and haven’t been having the fun with it that I should have. I don’t mean every post has to be a galumphing romp through the buttercup strewn wabe (two points if you put the reference in the comments), just that I can relax a little and post. No, they won’t be all home runs, and no they won’t all be literary masterpieces, but they’ll be better than silence… at least I hope they will be.)

Yours,
Rich G.

It bugs me that I don’t have people trying to take my job. I’ve wanted my boss’ job for years. Well, not now. I don’t want it any more, my boss’ job I mean. So. His job was recently on monster.com which was pretty alarming for him to say the least since he still holds the job. (Let’s just say things are a little weird on the job front… it’s one reason I’ve been sort of quiet on here.) Here’s the alarming thing about his job being on craigslist and monster.com… nobody from within the company is asking for it. He’s as high as they go and nobody wants it. That to me is a huge red flag that something’s weird. Why wouldn’t people want more responsibility, power, money, acclaim? Me? I know why I don’t want it, but that’s more a personal thing for me. I’ve been on the road traveling for work since 2000 and that’s 10 years of windshield time. I’m ready for less travel, not more.

Sure there are applicants from outside the company trying to get my job and his job… but if nobody from within the company wants it.  Who should be worried about that? His boss? The HR department? His direct reports? The CEO? Nobody? Maybe it’s fine that nobody wants to move up. Maybe that means everybody’s happy where they are and is in their perfect job at their perfect level of ability. That’s possible. It’s not something I’m thrilled about though. I wish more people wanted it. I wish more people wanted my job. I love my job. I’ve had it for a lot of years and even when it is so frustrating I go for a run and sweat out my frustration and stamp out the things that make me crazy by pounding the trails I still enjoy going to work. I still enjoy the challenge of it. I still enjoy making a difference for my employees and making sure they feel taken care of and that they’re proud to work for someone who cares about them and cares and notices the good that they do. I really like that part of my job. I love that I’ve got people who talk about their people using words like “pride” and “does her best” and “extra mile.” That’s totally different from what it was when I got here and employees were literally crying and packing their stuff up because they’d always been told the “new broom sweeps clean” and they’d been managed by fear and threats.

So, why don’t they want my job? Why doesn’t anybody want my boss’ job? 

The movie wasn’t all four seasons of the cartoon from Nickelodeon. It was just the first season and it was about an hour and a half long. So obviously some story lines were cut out and some side stories were cut. The actors looked like themselves so that was good. The scar on Zuko, the Fire prince’s, face was barely noticeable. That’s the only quibble I could find in the actors. Their acting was… good enough. Aang had a pouty lip. I guess there were two things and they were physical attributes. Seriously, his lip was always pouty looking. He looked like he’d been punched in the bottom of the mouth or maybe stung by bees or something. OK, crap. There were three things. Uncle was skinny and serious and didn’t seem as funny as wise, funny uncle had in the cartoon. That brings me to my biggest difference in the movie vs. the cartoon.

You know how Aang is 12 and an airbender? You know how airbenders are supposed to be pranksters? Fun-loving people who appear to not take things terribly seriously? They’re fun, funny. Couple that with Aang being 12 years old and you have a recipe for funny cartoons. Hiding behind ppl as they look for you, playing jokes on people, hide & seek, that sort of thing. A big part of my enjoying the cartoon was enjoying the youthful enthusiasm of the airbender. There was a lot of laughter and joy. The joy of life and living. That made it fun to watch. It made the character likeable and someone you wanted to see turn out OK. Not just physically, but mentally. You don’t want to see his joy of life hurt. In the movie though. M. Night Shazamalamadan decided one of the things he needed to cut was all the funny, fun, jokes, or joy. There were exactly two scenes that MIGHT have been reminiscent of the sort of fun-loving antics of cartoon Aang that made the show fun to watch.

You know how Katara’s brother, Sokka, and how he’s there primarily for comic relief? Always hungry, tries to eat the Appa The Flying Bison and Momo, the bat-lemur. Falls a lot? Twice he did something funny, and both times it was to fall victim to Katara’s bad water bending. She got him wet once and froze him into a block of ice once. Also, Uncle was never funny. Never did any funny stories or witty things that had a point. Just sort of a physically fit, taller, very thin Yoda. All serious trainer uncle, no funny uncle that liked to drink tea.

The bending effects were only meh. They did LOTS of the movements and motions and then something would happen really quickly and be over with. The effects were cool but too short. They could have been longer, not necessarily more spectacular. The end fight where Aang finally did his thing using the ocean to fight of the entire fire nation army by himself. That was cool. It was also done in the avatar state, also cool, and with a minimum of jumping around and arm waving… which is as it should be. For him to knock back two guys he did like 15 seconds of tai-chi, maybe tai-kwon-do… I think water was Tai-chi… movements, swung his arms around, and did a no-hands somersault just as an example. Lots of build-up, for not enough pay off. If it’d taken that long to bend the elements they should have had their butts handed to them by any relatively quick fighter. They’d be knocked out before they bent anything. (Don’t get me started on how all the earth benders ever did was pull rocks out of the ground.)

I’d give it 7.5 out of 10 stars. I enjoyed it. I liked the actors. I liked the story. I wish it hadn’t been as dry. I wish it’d been funnier. At least some funny. He was tortured. He was sad. He was grief-ridden… he wouldn’t have been any fun to be around. I hope they make more. I hope Aang (whose name isn’t pronounced the same in the movie as in the cartoons for some reason) has lip reduction surgery. Maybe they could put some of his lip fat into Uncle so he’d be fatter. A skinny Uncle was distracting.