Happy? Sad? Both.
June 12 is a bittersweet day to me.
THE BIRTHDAY PARADOX
In a room of 23 people there is a 50% chance that two of them will have the same birthday. In a room of 75 people that chance increases to 99.9%.
I won’t go through the math. (I barely followed it, but you can find it here.)
With 365 days per year, there are bound to be significant events happening on the same day. There are bound to be births and deaths on the same day. And that’s what this post is about, fictional births and real deaths. The birth first.
June 12, 2000 – The birth of Schlock
In this case, Schlock refers to the popular web comic Schlock Mercenary. Howard Tayler posted the very first Schlock strip on this date 17 years ago. And in an amazing feat of consistency, he has posted a comic every day since then. He hasn’t missed a day in nearly two decades, 6,209 days in a row.
Many years ago, there was a contest that a group of web comics put together. Everyone threw $100 into the pot and the last person standing got the money. Each comic had a published update schedule. Some posted weekly. Some twice or three times per week. Others, like Schlock Mercenary posted daily. You got to stay in the pool until you missed a scheduled update. Last one to miss an update, got $600.
I remember that Howard declined to play. At that point he had an impressive streak of nearly a decade under his belt. He declined for two reasons. First, he didn’t want to bet on failure. He didn’t want to root for other cartoonists to miss an update. More importantly, he wasn’t playing a game. He was building a brand and a business. He didn’t hope he’d never miss a day, he expected to never miss a day. He assumed that he would be successful and didn’t want to play around with the expectation of failure.
The most impressive “non” miss that I remember was that one day the data center that housed his server literally blew up. An entire wall was destroyed in the explosion. Howard quickly switched to a backup system and was only a few minutes later than his normal updates.
Howard is a large part of the reason I write every day. He and my brother Richard, were my first two readers. Howard has inspired numerous people to keep plugging away, constantly trying to improve, and constantly trying to deliver more than your readers expect and eventually success will find you.
It speaks to Howard’s professionalism that if you go to the Schlock Mercenary site today, you won’t find any announcement commemorating 17 years. It’s just another day with a funny comic. Seven years ago, a couple of us planned a surprise party for Schlock’s 10th birthday.
Howard wouldn’t have thought to make make a big deal about it himself.
June 12, 2009 – A Death
He died eight years ago. It could have been forever, it could have been yesterday. Like many sons, my relationship with my father was complicated for many reasons. Not the least of which that he wasn’t my dad for the first 11 years of my life…or 14 if you count differently.
Lloyd V Bliss had a hard life. He left home when he was 15. He nearly died in a car crash. He had multiple marriages. He was a fur trader, a circus employee, assistant to a governor, a professional gambler and had numerous other jobs. It’s difficult to count the number of children he had. There were kids from each marriage and step kids and then adopted kids. Not sure which ones count. He didn’t much care. I was one of those step-kids that became an adopted kid.
He taught me to fish. He helped me earn my eagle scout award. He gave me an understanding of how to love your spouse. I gave my first born son his name.
There’s even a stronger tie between my friend Howard and my father Lloyd. The LDS Church has a ceremony that honors our ancestors and symbolically binds them to us as eternal families. My father passed away before we could perform this sealing. Howard acted as a proxy for my father in the Salt Lake temple.
I was asked to give the eulogy at my father’s funeral eight years ago this weekend. It was the first time I’d been asked to fill such a task. How do you squeeze a lifetime into a few short minutes? Especially about someone who had their share of secrets? (What do you mean he ran away and joined the circus? How come I never heard that story before?) I did the best I could and I think he would have been embarrassed by all the hubbub.
I miss him every day.
June 12 kind of sneaks up on me every year. The summer starts and then one morning I wake up and I think, “Oh yeah, that’s today.” It’s not surprising that important and memorable events will pile up on the same day. The calendar only gives us 365 days to have these events on. Today I’m happy for my friend, whose comic is more popular than ever. And I’m sad for the loss of my dad. I’d split them off onto separate days if I could. I guess we do have February 29th as an extra day every four years. . .But, then again, it’s Howard Tayler’s birthday.
Happy birthday, Schlock. RIP, Dad.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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I was eight years old at the time. Looking back, thought I was older. But, the faded writing on the back of the blue ribbon from Faribault County Fair ribbon is dated 7/18/73, the summer of my 9th year. Faribault County is located in Southern Minnesota, near the Iowa border. So, I must have been eight.
The most remarkable thing to me now, looking back, is how disspationate I feel about the whole thing. I had a pig that year. I was a farm kid and I was enrolled in 4H. I was given a piglet to raise. He was absolutely mine. I fed him. I cleaned his stall. I took him for walks. In fact, the walks were very important.
Did you walk your pig today?
Not yet.
You need to get out and take him for a walk.
My step-dad was a farmer. He was the son of a farmer. I knew this because his parents lived just down the road on the next farm. He was probably descended from a long line of farmers. I loved living on the farm. We shared a party-line phone. We had a barn, a grain silo, and acres and acres of farmland. We raised corn and soybeans, chickens and hogs. I remember one time complaining about the smell the pigs made. My grandfather corrected me.
That’s the smell of money.
And that summer, one of those pigs was mine. My brother, two years older, also got a piglet. We were expected to care for our pigs and present them at the fair in the fall. One of the memorable things from that summer is that I never named my pig. The surprising thing to me is that I don’t even remember it being a discussion. He was my pig and even at eight years old, I was expected to be responsible for him, but I never thought to name him.
At one point that year I adopted a baby chicken. It was a runt, much smaller than the other hatchlings. I was devastated when the dog got into the garage where I was keeping the chick and killed it. The chick had a name, but the passage of decades has faded the memory. But, not the pig. He was just a pig.
If you’ve ever read the book Charlotte’s Web, you have some idea of what going to the fair is like. It was the high point of the summer. I still remember winning a zippo lighter at the carnival. (It was the 70’s.) But, mostly I remember taking care of and showing my pig. Every animal category has it’s own criteria. With pigs, we took them to the show ring in groups of 4 or 5 kids. We were judged on how clean the pig looked, how well behaved he was, and of course, what he looked like physically. That’s the reason the walks were so important. It exercised the pig and turned fat into muscle, but it also gave us as kids a chance to learn to work with the pig. The pig should be willing to obey our commands. We had a short stick, like a yardstick that we used to tap the pig on the shoulder to get him to turn one way or the other.
While the pigs were in the arena, they were being judged by both the people handing out the ribbons and by another group of men. They were being evaluated by the hog buyers. The pigs were weighed and then the buyers offered to pay us for the pig. I don’t remember how much my pig weighed, but I do remember the amount offered by the buyer was $345. To an eight year old, that was a lot of money in 1973. It would be a lot of money to an eight year old in 2017.
I remember my step-father coming to tell me what the buyers were offering. I don’t remember if he had to convince me, or not. I do remember that I sold my pig. The animal that I had raised from a piglet was headed off to the slaugthter house and I don’t remember shedding a single tear. I think that’s why I didn’t name him. He wasn’t a pet. Our farm had hundreds of hogs. We sold them every year. At eight years old, I understood that sending pigs off to market was part of being a farmer. I remember I was excited because my brother and I both earned blue ribbons and a couple of kids from a farm down the road, who’d been in 4H forever and bragged about it, only earned red ribbons. I used the money from the sale of my pig to buy a new bike.
We only lived on the farm for a year. My mother and step-father split up and we moved from the mid-West back to Washington state. I was nine by that time and I was embarrassed by the tears I shed. I loved the farm life and have often thought about how different my life might have been had I grown up on that farm. It’s a time in my life that I look back on with fond rememberance. Even 45 years later, I occasionally let myself feel a tinge of emotion about that period of my childhood. But, none of that emotion is for the pig.
He was just a pig.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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Both were very close to me when I was a child. I made the decision in both cases to end their lives. In one case it was gutwrenching, one of the hardest things I ever had to do. In the other case it was easy, almost a non issue.
I was 16 years old. Old enough to drive. With my older brother recently leaving on a mission for the LDS Church, it was my dog. I’m not sure how much time other people spend naming their dogs, but we hadn’t give much thought to naming ours Tuffy. It was because as a golden retriever mix, his hair was somewhat whispy. It had tufts. At least that was the thought behind his name. I don’t remember when we got him. My mother married when I was 11 and it was sometime after that. I just remember him always being there.
We’d moved a lot prior to my twelfth birthday. In fact, I attended 5 different schools in the 5th grade. Moving to Olympia, WA at 11 represented a stability that I hadn’t experienced before. We moved and we stayed. My mother married the man who would later adopt me and we stayed. We got a dog and he stayed.
It’s important for a boy to have a dog. I feel bad that allergies keep us from having a dog now. My sons are spending the summer taking care of their sister’s dog. My dog went nearly everywhere with me as a boy. My first job was working at a horse stables just a half mile from my parents’ house. Tuffy attended with me. We lived in an area with many trees, forests, lakes and ponds. It was a great place to grow up and Tuffy was by my side daily.
And then he started to have a problem with his skin. It wasn’t too serious at first. His back would get a little irritated and he’d bite at it as if trying to catch tiny bugs. Baths helped somewhat and we assumed it would clear up after we started treating him for fleas. Instead it got worse. The vet thought perhaps it was an allergic reaction. He suggested we try brewer’s yeast in his food. He wouldn’t eat it. He continued to get worse.
We realized it was time to start talking about ending his suffering when he got to the point he couldn’t walk from my bedroom at one end of the hallway to the living room at the other, without stopping to scratch and bite at the soars on his back.
He was my dog. So, I’m the one that made the sad drive to the vet’s office. I handed his lease to the doctor, gave him a final hug and numbly walked back to my car. Even now, 40 years later I can hear his questioning bark as I left that day.
Woof. Where are you going?
Woof, woof. When are you coming back?
Woof, woof, woof. . .don’t leave me here.
Dogs can teach boys a lot of things. They can teach responsibility. They can teach companionship. They can teach the value of friendship. The hardest lesson that they teach is how to say goodbye. How to look at someone you love and cherish and know that you have to let go. Nothing goes on forever. And growing up means learning about death and dying.
Tomorrow I’ll talk about another animal that I was close to, that I spent time with daily and I made the decision to end his life. But, I had a much different reaction.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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Walter is dying. It might be days, probably weeks, definitely not months. He’s old for a dog. He’s 12 and up until a couple years ago he had a hard life. My friend Steve adopted him. Walter was abandoned and Steve attempted to find a home for him. While searching for Walter’s permanent home, he stayed with Steve. Eventually, Steve realized he had already found Walter’s permanent home.
Steve is one of those facebook friends. He’s a professional comedian. He travels most of the year. Walter became his travelling companion. Steve created a “Walter poop list” to track the states that Walter had been to. Steve kept his social networks updated with the stories of Walter.
I don’t have pets anymore. I grew up with dogs. But, we have kids with allergies so we don’t have dogs at this point. I tell a joke about people who “adopt” a pet. It’s always seemed more like buying a dog. And yet, as I watch my friend Steve deal with the impending end of life for his companion, it’s easy to see that Walter was definitely adopted.
I had child nearly die at one point. The doctors told us later that 15 minutes more and it would have been too late. I was never so emotionally naked as I was that night in the hospital. I hope to never have to bury one of my children. And it’s why my heart breaks for my friend.
Shortly after we started adding to our family through adoption, one of my brothers-in-law said,
I could never do what you’ve done.
What do you mean?
I just don’t think I could love someone who wasn’t related by blood as deeply as my other kids.
You weren’t related by blood with your wife, were you?
Blood may be thicker than water, but love is thicker than blood. Those who are adopted are loved just as deeply, just as passionately. Often more so. When you adopt, you choose to love. It’s not natural. It’s a conscious decision. You have chosen to include another living being in your life. And the choosing makes that bond a deliberate one and a strong one.
I’m convinced that Steve loves Walter every bit as much as I love those I’ve adopted. As a professional comedian, Steve tells a joke about parenting. His take is that it’s easier to have a baby than it is to order a pizza. Getting pizza is a choice. Adopting is a choice.
Unlike my child who had 108 degree fever and nearly died, we don’t choose to end human lives. Steve is left with a gut wrenching decision that I will never have to make. He choose to love Walter and make him part of his life, and he will ultimately have to choose to end that life.
Dogs are magical. They provide us with companionship, service and love and ultimately only ask for the same in repayment. Steve recently asked his fans to stop inquiring about Walter. A very public person, he’s asked for a little privacy while he goes through the process of saying goodbye. He’ll let us know when it’s over.
Walter was abandoned before he found Steve. Please take care of your pets. Spay and neuter them. Adopt from shelters, don’t buy from puppy mills. And when it’s time to say goodbye, send them off to God in as little pain as possible.
RIP Walter. Go run in the green fields of Heaven, for that’s ultimately the final destination for all dogs.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2017 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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It was a casual fling. Sure, we hooked up, but just for a couple of hours. I didn’t want a long term relationship. The car had other ideas. It has committment issues that I inadvertantly triggered. It really wanted us to be together. . .FOREVER!
I was in Shreveport, LA last week. A not uncommon experience. I rented a car. And like most rental cars it had a Bluetooth option. I don’t often use the Bluetooth option in rental cars. There’s privacy issues, but in this case, two of us were travelling together and sharing the car. I didn’t want my phone answering calls while we were both in the car. My coworker felt the same way. On Wednesday we drove from Shreveport to Dallas for a Texas Rangers game. A baseball game is typically 3 hours long and it’s a three hour drive from Shreveport to Dallas.
Right now, there are two groups of readers thinking about that last sentence. There’s a group who are not baseball fans who are thinking “Who would drive six hours just to sit through a three hour baseball game?” And there’s another group thinking, “So, who were they playing and did you get there in time for batting practice?”
The game started at 7:05pm. We were in our seats for the first batter. Well, we were in “seats.” A Wednesday game between a couple of teams that are playing mediocre baseball wasn’t a big draw. We snagged a couple of closer seats on the third baseline upper deck. It was a pretty good game. I saw a batter beat out a dropped third strike and eventually come around to score. Don’t see that alot.
Knowing we had a long drive back to Shreveport, we opted to leave at the top of the 8th inning with the Rangers holding a one run lead. As we got back to our car, I offered to stream the rest of the game from the MLB app on my phone. Naturally, I connected my phone to the car stereo system.
It was surprisingly easy to link my phone to the car. It’s Bluetooth address was RADIO. The Rays eventually came back to tie it and won in extra innings. We were well on our way to Louisianna by the time the final out was recorded.
It was at this point that I realized I had entered a toxic relationship. I went into my phone’s Bluetooth settings and UNpaired my phone. And the car freaked out. It immeadiately asked me if I wanted to pair again. I laughed about it and clicked No.
It wouldn’t take no for an answer. After a few minutes I got another request.
I dismissed that one as well. I didn’t think much about it until the next morning when I got into the car to go to the site. I got another pairing request. My car had become a really needy former girlfriend.
Do you want to hook up again?
No.
We were great together. Are you sure you don’t want to hang out some more?
No.
Are you sure. Remember when we listened to baseball together? That was great for me. I thought we had a good time. I don’t understand why you don’t want to PAIR again. We were should get back together. Do you want to?
No.
It became a little freaky. I tried removing all traces of the RADIO Bluetooth device from my phone’s memory. But, while I might not remember it, it sure remembered me.
No. I really don’t want to talk to you anymore. Please forget this number and don’t call me anymore.
But, it was persistent and relentless. RADIO was convinced I should really hook up with it again. Finally, in desperation, I disabled Bluetooth completely. That thankfully, stopped the harressment. I had to remember to renable Bluetooth to work with my headset when I got home. There are now no traces of stalker RADIO left in my phone.
At this point I normally wouldn’t give it a second thought except that next week I have to go back to Shreveport and I’ll be renting a car.
(The Rangers were playing the Tampa Bay Rays and we caught the National Anthem, but not batting practice.)
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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Can you see?
Sort of. It’s all blurry but I can just make out that guy’s lights. Of course, the lightening stobe-light makes it hard.
I was driving West on I-20 outside of Dallas. a coworker and I had spent a week in Shreveport, LA getting our site ready for an expansion. It was Friday and we were trying to get home. You might think it’s odd to leave Shreveport by car for Dallas. That was odd to me too.
I love the South. During our week long stay I had amazing food. We had boiled crawdads one night.
Well, I had some. My coworkers took one look at the plate and refused to even attempt one. We had some amazing fried catfish during a day trip to Vicksburg. We had grits for breakfast and some of the best BBQ I’ve ever eaten for lunch and dinner. The people in Shreveport are universally friendly and happy to see you.
The trip was a huge success. We moved our project along significantly. When we arrived I was worried about our ability to meet our committed launch date. As I left, I knew we were on track to make it. The trip was perfect. (I even got to go to a Rangers game in Dallas one night.)
We were both ready to go home on Friday.
Unfortunately, the weather wasn’t cooperating. Thunderstorms over Dallas threw American Airlines schedule out of whack. Our 6:25pm flight was initially delayed to 8:00pm. And then it was cancelled. Shreveport is a small airport. You can fly to Dallas on American or to Atlanta on Delta. That’s it. With the problems in Dallas, soon all flights out of Shreveport were cancelled.
So, what’s our options?
The soonest I can get you on another flight is Sunday.
Mind you, this was Friday. Since I was coming back in a couple weeks, I didn’t want to spend the weekend chilling in Shreveport. My coworker was checking the American Airlines website and offered a suggestion.
It looks like our Dallas to Salt Lake flight is delayed until 11:00pm.
Yeah?
We could drive. It’s only about three hours.
It was 7:00pm. By the time we rented a car, drove and returned it, we’d be cutting it close.
Even if we don’t make it, we’re more likely to find a flight out of Dallas to Salt Lake sooner than a flight out of here.
That cynched it. We called and got corporate authorization to rent a car, threw our bags in the back and headed west. About 60 miles from Dallas we hit the rainstorm that had delayed the flights. If you’ve ever heard of rain coming down in sheets, it was like that. Except that we were getting not just the sheets, but the blankets, pillows and comforter too. I’ve driven in some nasty weather, but nothing like this.
Windshield wipers have three setting: intermittent, slow and fast. Even at the fastest they were not making more than a dent in the rain. (Okay, that metaphor is maybe not the right imagery.) If we hadn’t been racing the clock, I would have pulled over and waited it out. One thing was certain. It was obvious why they’d delayed flights out of Dallas. A duck drown trying to fly through this soup.
The band of weater lasted about 10 miles. As we came out the other side it was like stepping out of the shower. We sped back up to 80 and raced for the airport.
As often happens, we needn’t have hurried. as we returned or car the website said that our flight was now delayed to 11:30pm. By the time we got through security and to the gate, it had been pushed back another hour. We finally boarded about 15 minutes after our original flight was scheduled to have landed in Salt Lake City. As it was, I finally made it home at 4:00am Saturday morning. The point was, it was Saturday morning, not Monday.
Nope, a cancelled flight doesn’t have to be the final answer. Not this time.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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Maybe it was the sappy Hallmark movie on the hotel TV. Maybe it was looking at the calendar and seeing a lot of travel in the summer. Maybe it was missing my kids, and my lovely wife, of course, from being gone for the week. Whatever it was, it got me thinking about the age-old question that all parents suffer with: Am I spending enough time with my kids? If I spend more quality time does it make up for less quantity of time?
First off, I have no idea what the right answer is. For much of my early life, my mom was a single parent. We spent a lot of time with babysitters. And yet, I don’t remember it being particularly neglectful. My wonderful mother may have made it a priority. I know that taking care of her kids was really important to her and she often worked multiple jobs. But, we didn’t miss out. After the time I was about eleven, she married my dad and we were your more or less typical dual parent family. It was great to spend junior high and high school with the same group of friends, the same house, the same family. It was nice.
My lovely wife and I will celebrate 30 years together this winter. And yet, in many ways, my kids have dealt with disruptive issues that I never had to face. Throughout my career I’ve had jobs that travelled a lot and some that didn’t travel at all. My kids, all teenagers now, understand that dad’s job helps pay the bills and travel is part of dad’s job. That understanding doesn’t necessarily help me not feel guilty about being gone.
I guess for me, and my current job, there’s no choice. I can’t do the quanity piece at times, so I have to focus on quality. I just hope it’s enough.
That sounds maudlin even to me. It really is time to go home.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2017 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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Do you think Derek Jeter is a first ballot Hall of Famer?
Absolutely.
Based on what?
He had over 3000 hits and batted over .300 for his career.
It wasn’t that high, was it?
I was sitting in Globe Life Park in Arlington Texas with a coworker and fellow baseball fan watching the Texas Rangers play the Tampa Bay Rays. Mark is a New York Yankees fan. I’m a Seattle Mariners fan. We’d just driven three hours from Shreveport, LA to watch a baseball game. After the game we were going to have to drive three hours back to Shreveport to be at work the next day. Six hours of driving for a three hour baseball game seemed like a worthwhile tradeoff.
Mariners fans typically don’t like the Yankees. In fact, most baseball fans don’t like the Yankees. There are entire websites devoted to hating on the Yankees. There are certain teams, (Boston Red Sox and New York Mets) where wearing Yankee gear to the game could end up in a physcial confrontation. It’s probably safe to say the Yankees are the most hated team in baseball and possibly one of the most hated teams in all of pro sports. I describe them as the Darth Vader of baseball teams.
Part of the reason people hate the Yankees, is that historically they are simply a dominate team. The World Series has been played for 113 years. Out of that century-plus of baseball championships, the Yankees have been involved in 40 of them. The Yankees have won 27. The team with the second highest number of World Series wins is the St Louis Cardinals with 11 wins in 19 appearances. Less than half the Yankees totals.
Despite what General George Patton quoted to the 3rd Army, Americans DO NOT love a winner. Dominate your sport too much and other teams, and their fans will hate you for it. Just ask football’s New England Patriots, or soccer’s Manchester United.
The other reason that people hate the Yankees is all that winning has bred a certain arrogance. My friend Mark is a great guy and our baseball “rivalry” is all in good fun. But, many fans, and especially players are arrogant and rude. And it seems to happen the most on the Yankees team.
And the Yankees are absolutely essential to baseball’s success.
I mean that. The Yankees, as much as they are hated and vilified, are good for baseball. And it’s what makes them the Darth Vader of baseball. The first Star Wars movie (now called Episode IV: A New Hope) saw Darth Vader as the epitome of evil. He ruthlessly killed those he disagreed with. He blew up planets. He was a very, very bad person.
And yet, he was essential to the success of the movie. Without a great villain, the movie wouldn’t have been very interesting. It’s the bad guy that makes it fun; even when we are rooting against him. That’s the Yankees. They are the bad guys of baseball. They are powerful and attempt to crush all those in their path. And they are hated for it. And yet, without them, there wouldn’t be nearly the interest in the sport. The New York Yankees logo is one of the most recognizable emblems in the world. Rappers and rock stars, construction workers and couch potatoes: They all will buy and wear Yankees gear even if they don’t know an infield fly from a can of corn. It’s the fact that the Yankees are so loved by people from New York and so hated by everyone else (including people from New York: I see you Mets fans) that drives interest in the game.
The great thing about cell phones is that you can look up trivia answers at the ball park. As the Rays and Rangers slugged it out on the field I checked my friend’s comments about Derek Jeter, former Yankees captain.
- .310 career batting average
- 3,465 career hits
Definitely a Hall of Fame worthy career, even if I hated to admit it. Probably about what Darth Vader would hit.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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We’re in Shreveport on business any good restuarants around here?
Well, there’s a Mexican place over by the WalMart. And there’s a Cracker Barrel.
Every place has something they are known for. My home state of Washington is known for salmon, apples, and world famous dungeneus crab. I’ve often bragged about the salmon to my coworkers. There is really no compare between fresh Pacific salmon and Atlantic salmon.
My coworker grew up on the East coast but he lives in Utah now. He recently travelled to Seattle on vacation. He called me around dinner time.
Rodney, I’m at Anthony’s, that restaurant down on the waterfront.
Yeah, it’s a nice place.
I have to say that all those times you talked about how great the salmon was, I kind of thought you were were sort of a snob about it.
And now?
I ordered the salmon.
The same coworker and I are in Shreveport, LA this week. We are expanding our operation and I’m here to check on our progress. Actually, I’m here to help the client check on our progress, and my friend is here to do a security assessment. Tonight was our first night. In town and we asked the front desk at the hotel for recommendations. I’d been to Shreveport before.
Isn’t there a place a couple miles east of here that has crawfish?
Crawdad Kitchen? Yeah, they’re fantastic. Great food.
Have you ever eaten crawdads? Crayfish? They are served boiled. But, if you are used to boiled potatoes, or corn on the cob, or hard boiled eggs, it’s nothing like that. Crawfish are boiled in cajun spices, and while corn and potatoes are added, they quickly take on the spicey flavor of the crayfish.
Crawdad Kitchen serves lots of different types of food. It serves burgers and fries, shrimp and salad, and of course, lots of cajun food and boiled crawdads. You buy them by the pound. I ordered one pound with a couple potatoes and some corn on the cob.
My coworkers ordered the chicken salad and the shrimp. They didn’t even want to try one. What a shame.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2017 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
Tell your friends about this!
LOOK! I’ve got better things to do than sit on a phone bridge for four hours while your help desk refuses to give me a ticket!
Yesterday was Memorial Day in the United States. It’s a day for remembering soldiers who died. My dad was a reluctant soldier in the age of the draft. He’s been gone six years. My uncle just passed away last November. It’s my first Memorial Day to honor his service in the Navy. My family has a long history of military service, going back to the battles of Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill in the Revolutionary War. I’m proud of them and all the men and women who died while serving, or who passed after their service was complete. We salute you.
Memorial Day is also the unofficial start to summer. Families gather for backyard BBQs. The kids are out of school, and people have the day off. Well, most people do. I do. . .unless something breaks. Something broke. It was okay though. It didn’t seem like it would take a long time to fix. My phone rang at 9:45am. Our family BBQ was scheduled for 1:00. Plenty of time.
If you’ve read my scribblings for very long at all, you’ve no doubt noticed a pattern. I talk a lot about scouting and a lot about broken systems. Sometimes, like last week, I combine the two. Don’t misunderstand. My systems are not extremely fragile. In fact, they are extremely robust. The thing is, I have thousands of agents across multiple states. We service millions of calls on dozens of lines of business. It’s a very complex system. It’s part of the reason I have a job. And, as I’ve said numerous times, I love what I do.
However, it’s not always convenient. Like yesterday. What makes it bearable is the processes and the routines that we have in place. When I get a call about a system outage, I have a well defined script that I run through in my head. There are three or four questions that I ask right off.
- When did the issue first start?
- How many agents are impacted?
- What error did the agents get?
- Have you opened a ticket with the client?
I then make a call to the client. Sometimes they are aware of the issue, sometimes they aren’t. I then get on a conference call with my team. At this point, they typically have all the information we’ll need to troubleshoot the outage. If it’s a client problem, I need to be able to tell them how many of my agents are impacted and the ticket that we’ve opened with their help desk.
I generally don’t put my life on hold when I get into these calls. I have multiple phones and multiple headsets and they all have mute buttons. I’ll simply ask my questions, relay the answers and then go on about my day while waiting from the engineers to find and fix the issue. The fact that it’s a routine is what makes it work. Yesterday, for example, I was setting up tables and chairs, getting the BBQ grill ready, even starting to cook the hamburgers and hotdogs, all while on the phone with my team and making calls to my client contacts.
I’ll be honest. I didn’t want to be on that phone call. I had family that I only see a couple times per year who were coming to our house for the holiday. I wanted to be able to devote my full attention to my kids and grandkids. But, it’s my job, so like it or not, I was on the phone. The problem was not everyone was following the script.
My agents call into the client help line when we have an issue with the client tools. They are supposed to get a service ticket number.
Rodney, the help desk said they are aware of the issue and they are working on it.
Okay, there should be a Major Outage number. Ask them for that number.
They said it hasn’t been escalated to a Major Outage yet. They are still researching, but they don’t have a ticket number for us.
Tell them that you your IT guy is really mean and he will yell at you if you don’t get a ticket number.
Sorry, they said that they cannot give us a ticket.
That was false. It was 100% wrong. The problem was I was talking to a supervisor who was talking to an agent who was talking to a help desk analyst. And it was the help desk analyst who wasn’t following the script. The problem is that my contacts literally cannot escalate my issue without a ticket number. I could tell them my building is on fire and if I don’t have a ticket number, they can’t do anything with the calls.
I was furious. But, who do I get mad at? It does me no good to yell at the supervisor. And it’s not my agent’s fault. So, we waited. I continued preparing for the BBQ and the client continued to research the issue. Eventually, my contacts we able to get the right teams involved, hours later. They found the problem relatively quickly. The issue had to do with the holiday schedule. Not something we would have been able to prepare for. They quickly made a slight change to reroute some of the calls and marked the issue for follow-up later this week.
So, instead of a couple of hours on a call that would have ended in plenty of time for me to get ready for the BBQ, I spent 4 hours on the phone and got to greet my guests and cook the dogs and burgers with a headset stuck in my ear. Before we wrapped up for the day, I expressed my frustration to my client contacts. Perhaps a little more forcefully than I have in the past. They promised to follow up with the help desk analyst.
Pretty sure whoever that poor help desk analyst is he ended up having a worse holiday than me. After all, he had to work yesterday.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2017 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved