Caliente a-hoy?
I could see my Mexican driver try to decipher my mangled Spanish. We were driving from my hotel in Mexico City to the training facility where I would be teaching a Microsoft Exchange class (in English) this week. The hotel insisted that I allow myself to be driven by one of their drivers. Actually, it didn’t take much convincing. I discovered one of the best ways to stay safe while traveling outside the US was to listen to the locals.
The driver apparently decided he must not have heard me correctly. Without taking his eyes from the road he asked,
Que?
I don’t speak Spanish. If people ask, I tell them my most useful phrase is ‘Hablo muy feo.’ It’s intentionally bad Spanish grammar that means literally ‘I speak ugly.’ But, I figure you get better by paying attention and practicing. So whenever I travel I try to get by with a phrase book and 3 years of high school French.
I knew I was getting the syntax wrong, but I decided to plow ahead.
Caliente a-hoy?
Yes, it was the exact same phrase that he’d just failed to understand. I could see him think on it for another few minutes. Finally, he turned to me and with absolutely no trace of an accent he asked
Do you speak English?
Why yes. However could you guess.
What were you trying to say?
Ah. . .I was trying to ask if you thought it would be hot today.
Ah! That was why you used ‘caliente.’ But, ‘a-hoy.’ What was that supposed to mean? That’s a word that American sailors use in cartoons, right?
Yes, I guess it is. I was trying to say ‘Today.’
That wasn’t it.
Yeah. I figured that out.
The word you were looking for was ‘hoy.’ And the h is silent.
His English was nearly flawless so I asked him,
How did you learn English?
By practicing with Americans. If you pay attention and practice you can pick up languages quite quickly.
He really was a nice guy. I learned a couple important lessons. The obvious one is that appearance are just that, an appearance. I wouldn’t have guessed when meeting him that he was fluent in two languages. And upon meeting me, he might have assumed I actually knew a little of a language before trying to use it. The second lesson, of course, is that the h is always silent!
I had an opportunity years later to try out more of my language skills when my wife, oldest daughter and I went to Colombia to adopt three girls, aged 10, 8 and 6.
Colombian Flag
My Colombian daughters spoke no English and my Spanish was not much improved. Fortunately my wife spoke passable Spanish, and my 16 year old spoke “sister.”
We spent three weeks in Cali, Colombia during the adoption process. One night during dinner I was trying to tell the girls not to play at the table. What I managed was
No fumar a la mesa.
The girls about fell off their chairs. The word I was looking for was ‘jugar,’ to play. ‘Fumar’ means to smoke. I’d just warned my pre-teens not to light up during dinner.
Yep, I speak English. At least slightly better than I do Spanish.
(Photo credits: flags.net)
Rodney Bliss is a blogger, author and IT consultant. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife and 13 children, who have all learned to speak English better than he will EVER speak Spanish.
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(Photo credit: Karen Griggs)
What is it about high school that sticks with us for decades? I don’t mean what did we learn that we remember, I mean that for many of us the actual high school experience is memorable.
Last weekend in Lacey, Washington a group of people got together, some after traveling hundreds of miles to go back to high school for a few days. Yep, it was my high school reunion. Timberline High School, class of 1983. Our graduating class was about 350 people and maybe a third of those made it back. Since this blog is supposed to be about business, I couldn’t really waste your time by talking about a reunion. But, it did get me thinking about the lessons we learned in high school and just how applicable those are to the business world. Often, not at all.
After 30 years, most of the stupid parts of high school are past. We have graduates who run television studios and guys who are out of work. We’ve got guys who went to college and those who didn’t. Lots of kids, or no kids. Some married right out of high school, some never married. A few who recently got married because they were finally allowed to.
Here’s my top five ways business is different than high school.
1. The geeks are now running the world
Bill Gates is every geek’s hero. I worked for Microsoft for a decade and saw him at company events. The guy was worth a billion dollars and still looked like the pencil neck geek from HS Electronics class. The guys who were mocked and ridiculed in high school went on to learn computers and business. They founded companies that now employ some of the very people who used to make fun of them. (Oh, and they now pay people to pick out their clothes.)
2. Looks aren’t important. . .they are critical
A bunch of us changed our Facebook profile pictures to our high school pics this week. Here’s mine.
(Photo credit: Cairn 1983)
Graduating in the 80’s we all wanted the feathered hair. I’m slightly embarrassed to say that as a senior, I spent way more time on my hair than I do now. I think I spent more time than my daughters do now. But, in business it’s not as critical to have just the right hair style.
What it’s been replaced with is the need to dress the part. I worked with some brilliant engineers who were excited when the company relaxed the dress code and they could stop wearing socks with their sandals. They didn’t care. They were engineers. And they were brilliant. But, sales? Marketing? CxO? Startup entrepreneur? You will be judged by your looks more than you ever were in high school.
Your company has a uniform, even if it doesn’t have a dress code. Violate it at your peril.
3. The answers don’t exist in the back of the book
I remember working on a really difficult problem around how to implement WordPerfect Office. Basically, I needed to strip the autogenerated reply routing information when a message got replied to. It was cutting edge back in 1991. I spent hours and hours reconfiguring my lab and pouring over network traces. I remember thinking, “I’m willing to take partial credit if I can just take a peek at the answer in the back of the book!” I eventually figured it out, but high school and college had a point at which you could ask for help. In business, help is available, but if you are going to be one of the best in the world at what you do, expect that at times you will have no where to turn.
4. You don’t get to start each year with a clean slate
I survived rather than passed certain classes in high school. My advanced math class was one that by the end of the semester I didn’t really care what my grade was. I realized I was never going to be a mathematician. Once the class was over, I thought, “I’m never going through THAT again” and I went to take more writing classes.
But, in business, especially if you stay with a single company, your reputation is the culmination of everything you’ve done, and it’s your failures as much as your successes that define you. I was working for a company and had a terrible review. (Fire, Comics and Change) I thought, “Maybe I’ll just put it behind me and change departments.” My mentor convinced me that it would be best to work through it. It took months, but eventually I corrected the mistakes and reset people’s perceptions. Some people change their jobs every time things get challenging at their current one. But, I can tell you from experience you learn more from your mistakes than from your successes. If you want to be a better employee, figure it out and fix it. There is no end of the year party where it all gets forgotten.
5. The teachers don’t give grades
I couple of weeks ago I wrote about a Microsoft employee straight out of high school. (Make Them Be Nice To Me.) The point that Brandon didn’t realize was that in business you have trainers, and you have mentors and they will certainly teach you things if you will learn. But, the concept of “the teacher” is really best left in high school.
Occasionally as a manager I had two employees come to me with an issue they couldn’t resolve. It’s an awkward position for a manager. Mostly I focused on who was ultimately responsible, in other words, if things suddenly went sideways, who was going to be called on the carpet to explain it?
There have been times when I’ve needed to go to my manager when I had a conflict with another team. Most often I went with a plan. Often he agreed (Sometimes You Need To Punt.) Other times he didn’t. But, just because he had a bigger office, didn’t mean that it was his job to arbitrate the high school drama.
I loved high school. A friend asked me if I had the chance would I want to go back.
Not a chance!
Rodney Bliss is an author, blogger and IT Manager. He graduated in the top 50% of his class of 350. He’s proud that most of his 13 children are aspiring to greater academic achievements. He lives with them and his lovely wife in Pleasant Grove, UT.
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(Photo credit: freerepublic.com)
Comedian Ron White tells the following story,(Language warning behind the link)
I flew all the way from Flagstaff, Arizona to Phoenix, Arizona because my manager doesn’t own a globe. On the way there, we lost some oil pressure in one of the engines, so we had to turn around. It’s a 9-minute flight…can’t pull it off with this equipment. Everybody else was panicking, but I’d been drinking since lunch, so I was like,
“Take it down, I don’t care. Hit somethin’ hard, I don’t wanna limp away from this.”
The guy sitting next to me is losing his mind; apparently, he had a lot to live for. He turns to me, he says
“Hey man! Hey, man! Hey, man! If one of these engines fails, how far will the other one take us?”
“All the way to the scene of the crash! Which is pretty handy, ’cause that’s where we’re headed. I bet we beat the paramedics there by a good half hour.”
I estimate I’ve flown close to a million miles in my life. I’ve been to some exciting spots; Japan, Singapore, India, mainland China, Fargo, ND. I’ve had my share of hard landings, “sudden loss of altitude” events and other terrible travel stories. They don’t bother me. I’ve worked with guys who fly more than I do. I’ve discovered that the true road warriors, the guys who can pack in 20 minutes and sleep through the worst turbulance typically aren’t nervous flyers.
Of course, that seems obvious. You wouldn’t be a doctor if you fainted at the sight of blood. You wouldn’t be an IT consultant if airplanes made you nervous.
When we first formed the WordPerfect Swat team (How I Saved The EPA, Don’t Tell Pete), we pulled the best engineers from several different groups. The SWAT Team was WordPerfect’s on-site support group. We were all young and inexperienced. Just how inexperienced became clear when Steve had to make his first cross country flight from Utah to New York.
Two days before the trip he approached our manager
Chuck?
Yeah, what’s up?
About that trip on Friday. . .is there any chance we could take the train?
Steve had never been on an airplane before. They upgraded him to first class. The next time I needed to go back East I asked. Nope. Apparently the upgrade was for travel-virgins only.
Today Steve thinks nothing of jumping on a plane to see one of his many consulting clients.
And IT Consultants are technical. We understand the technical details that go into designing an airplane. . . oh and most of the ones I hang out with don’t drink.
So, why are we so confident? It’s not that we have any more trust in the plane than our fellow passengers. And, unlike Ron White, it’s not that we’re drinking ourselves into a stupor. As computer consultants we tend to look for problems and solutions. If a problem doesn’t have a solution it’s not really a problem, it’s a worry. And we aren’t the type to worry about what we can’t control.
And that’s the key word: Control. Sure the plane might crash and we certainly hope it doesn’t, but if it is going to crash there’s nothing we are are going to be able to do about it from seat 12E. Might as well assume it’ll be fine and sleep through it.
Rodney Bliss is a blogger, author and IT Consultant. When not on a plane he lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with is lovely wife and 13 children.
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Elder Bliss, how do you think the past 3 weeks have gone?
Pretty good, I think.
What do you think of the other people in your district?
Oh, they’re all great.
How do you think they feel about you?
Ah. . .
The look on his face told me that whatever I answered, I was probably going to be wrong.
They hate you.
What? Why?
Because you’re being a jerk.
Really? How?
He went on to explain in kind but clear terms how I had completely alienated everyone that I was working with. It was one of the worst days of my life. I had no idea.
I was 19 years old and at the Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah learning American Sign Language and how to be a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the Mormons.
My biggest problem was that socially I apparently had zero skills. I realized that I constantly demanded to be the center of attention. I seemed to always assume I was the smartest person in the room. At one point, we were learning the sign for headlights. You put both hands in front of you with your hands in fists. Then, you open your hands to form the shape of two headlights.
Some people in the room weren’t getting it. I, of course, either already knew it, or understood it immediately, it didn’t really matter.
Here, let me try it.
The instructor was too shocked to really say anything as I took over his class. (My fellow students still didn’t get it, and I viewed that as one more example of how superior I was.)
I wasn’t intentionally trying to be obnoxious. It might have been better if I were. Unfortunately, I was one of those “natural” jerks, who don’t really have to work at it.
Elder McGhee, the instructor who pulled me aside that day, saw something that no one else did. He saw a frightened young man, desperate to prove he belonged. He saw someone worth spending some time on. He was probably only four or five years older than I was, but in terms of experience he was an adult and I was a child.
What do you suggest I do?
I don’t know that there’s really anything you can do. I just wanted to let you know because I knew you’d probably prefer hearing it from me than from one of the other missionaries.
I really appreciate it. . .I’m going to change.
Elder Bliss, no one can change that much.
We had another five weeks at the MTC before we headed out to various locations around the United States. I’ve always been a doer. Now that I recognized the problem, I put together a plan for fixing it.
First, I apologized to everyone. Then, I quit talking. . .literally. I decided that I would practice sign language 24 hours per day. Now, you can be just as obnoxious using sign language as you can using English, or just your actions can be annoying. So, I also looked at how I was treating others.
I acknowledged that I didn’t know sign language nearly as well as I thought I did, and there were other people who were willing to teach me if I’d just let them. I became a very attentive student.
Missionaries are housed in dormitories, and eat in a common cafeteria. You are literally with your fellow missionaries 24 hours per day. I started asking the other missionaries about themselves. . .and I really listened. I only told about my own background if someone asked. Otherwise, I shut up about it.
There were twelve missionaries in our group who were learning sign language. I did the math. That meant that in a 60 minute hour, I shouldn’t be talking more than about 5 minutes. That was hard.
I also looked for opportunities to help others. Not in the obnoxious “let me take over for the teacher” kind of way, but as missionaries we were doing language study, and scripture study, and LOTS of memorization. I made sure they knew that I was always available to be a willing audience if they needed to practice.
For five weeks I did that. . .and I never once asked “How am I doing on not being a jerk?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. Finally, the day arrived for us to head out “into the field.” Elder McGhee pulled me aside on our last day.
Elder Bliss, I’m surprised.
Oh?
I told you I didn’t think anyone could change that much. I was wrong.
I appreciate you making the effort to help me.
I helped you learn ASL. The relationship stuff you fixed on your own. There’s a group of 4 of you going to Chicago. I’ve suggested that you be the travel leader. Your fellow missionaries agree.
I often wonder what my life would have turned out like if Elder McGhee hadn’t pulled me aside that day. Would I have figured it out on my own? How many years would I have wasted being a jerk before I finally clued in?
I’m glad I didn’t need to find out.
Rodney Bliss is a blogger, author and computer consultant. He’s still fluent in American Sign Language and lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife and 13 children.
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By 6:00am I was ready to kill the guy who made that safety announcement.
For the safety of yourself and your fellow passengers please do not accept packages from people you don't know.
I estimated I had endured nearly two dozens of those warnings in the past 6 hours. It would have totally ruined my night’s sleep were it not for the fact that I was sleeping on the floor, in my clothes, under a bench at gate C3 in the Atlanta airport. “Annoying Man” was just one more many things that made it a tortuous night.
Fortunately, all that would be over soon. I had decided to sleep at this particular gate because that’s where my 6:30am flight to Charlotte was taking off from. Twelve hours of travel the previous day, a night on the floor, no shower or shave. I couldn’t even claim that I would be more cheerful after my first cup of coffee. . .I don’t drink coffee.
As I stretched the kinks out of my back I checked the departure board. My flight was moved to another gate. Instead of gate C3, it was now departing from gate Cx? I’ve travelled a lot. I’ve never heard of gate Cx. I wandered over to the WAY too cheerful information booth person who seemed to have no qualms about setting up shop in my makeshift bedroom.
Can I help you?
Yeah. The board says my plane is now departing out of gate Cx. Can you tell me where that is?
That means it’s been cancelled.
There was probably a correct response. but in the state I was in, I had no idea what it possibly could be. I stared at her blankly, kind of like people condemned to eternal purgatory probably do.
Do you want me to reschedule you on a later flight?
That had to be the stupidest question I had ever heard. If she had followed up with “Please don’t except packages from stangers” I might have gone right over the counter at her.
Well. . .sure. I mean, I’ve already slept in these clothes once, so that’s probably a good idea.
Well, there’s a chance we can get you on the 8:30 flight.
How good a chance?
50/50.
I’ll sit in the aisle.
If not, there’s definitely room on the 10:30 flight.
I was supposed to be at the Microsoft offices in Charlotte at 9:00am for the start of the class. Pretty sure I wasn’t going to make it.
I shuffled to my new gate and tried to avoid falling back asleep for fear I’d miss the boarding call.
I made it on the 8:30 flight and I didn’t have to sit in the aisle. I was so wiped out that I was asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. . .well, that little thing on the back of the seat they call a pillow. Without Annoying Man telling me about the dangers of accepting packages from strangers, I slept like a rock.
I woke up as we started to make our descent. I’m not sure if it was a twisted sense of humor, or if the flight attendants were as tired as I was was, but as we started to descend they came on the intercom.
On behalf of your flight crew, we’d like to welcome you to Atlanta’s international airport.
I really was in purgatory.
Fortunately, we really were landing in Charlotte. And even better, my bags arrived with me. I was honestly surprised that they’d managed to arrive on the same flight. As I went to pick up my rental car I realized my next problem.
I’d never been to Charlotte before. I had no idea where the Microsoft offices were. This was in the days before smartphones and Internet cafes.
I can handle this. I’ve flown all over the world. I’ve found my way around cities where I didn’t speak the language. Surely I could track down the Microsoft office. Asking the guys at the rental car desk was useless.
Then I had a thought. Corporate Travel had booked my hotel. I was staying at the hotel where all the Microsoft visitors stayed. Chances were that someone at the hotel could direct me. Of course, I’d never been to this hotel before either. The hotels provided little 3×5 cards at the airport with directions. They were very convenient. They were also wrong.
I suppose they might have been considered correct if you already knew how to get to where you were going. But no problem. I was an Eagle Scout. I considered myself pretty good with directions and a map. I was pretty sure I could figure it out.
I couldn’t figure it out.
I found myself driving along the same stretch of road in front of the Charlotte Coliseum, over and over.
(Photo credit: bigbluehistory.net)
I was close . . .I think. The street numbers indicated the hotel should have been right next to me. But even in my tired, unshaven, slightly smelly state I couldn’t have failed to recognize a Marriott Courtyard. It just wasn’t where it was supposed to be.
At the end of the street the road turned the wrong way and I did a U-turn and tried it again.
On the third, or it might have been the fourth trip down the street I finally admitted defeat. I figured, “My wife’s not here, I can ask for directions.” I pulled into the next parking lot with the intention of throwing myself on the mercy of the receptionist in one of the many office buildings.
I nearly ran over the curb. The sign said,
Welcome to the Microsoft Corporation - Charlotte campus. Please check-in with the receptionist in Building J.
I staggered into the classroom about 11:30, to a surprised instructor and some confused looks from students.
Sorry I was late. It’s too much to explain. I’m gonna go take a shower and shave and I’ll be back after lunch. Can one of you point me to my hotel?
I was off by over two miles.
This is part two of a two part series on my worst trip ever. Part one explained the dangers of listening to 6 hours of Country music.
Rodney Bliss is a blogger, author and IT Consultant. He no longer goes to Charlotte. He lives in Pleasant Grove, Utah with his lovely wife and his 13 children.
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(Photo credit: Underconsideration.com)
This is the captain speaking. We’ve been informed that Atlanta is experiencing a severe ice storm. No planes bound for Atlanta are being allowed to take off. Because we are already in route, we have been given permission to land.
So, if it’s not safe for a plane from Houston to land in Atlanta, what makes it safe for a plane from Seattle to land? This trip had been plagued from the start. I won’t say cursed. . .I’m pretty sure that people die on cursed flights and I didn’t want to jinx us.
It was a a fairly typical trip when I booked it. I was working for Microsoft as an Instructional Designer, meaning that I designed courseware. I was on my way to Microsoft’s offices in Charlotte, North Carolina to watch one of our instructors present my latest course for the first time. My flight from Seattle had a layover in Atlanta because I was flying DELTA, which stands for:
Dang
Everything
Leaves
Through
Atlanta.
I got to the airport early, checked in and even scored an exit row seat. (My Road Warrior Skillz were working!) The flight boarded on time at about 8:30 am. We settled in and I turned on the on-board Country music channel.
Just about the time the pilot is supposed to say, “Flight attendants please take your seats,” he came on the intercom and said,
We’re going to have a slight delay. It seems our air speed indicator is not working properly. Fortunately there’s one that can be flown up from Portland. It means we’re going to be stuck here for at least 90 minutes.
I actually wasn’t too disappointed. Just a month earlier a plane in Florida had made a crater in the Everglades because their ASI malfunctioned. I thought, “It’s too bad this is a McDonnell Douglas plane. If it were a Boeing plane, they could probably run one down from Everett in 20 minutes.
Two hours later we pushed back from the gate, and took off into the beautiful blue skies over Puget Sound. I settled back into the Country music channel. They were spotlighting Reba. Did you know it was actually her mom who taught her to sing?
Half way to Atlanta we got the message about the Atlanta ice storm. We watched the sun set from 30,000 feet. The last images were of an unending sea of clouds.
(Picture credit: Seth Wilkinson)
Folks, this is the captain again. We are currently over the Atlanta area and as soon as we get a hole in the clouds, we’ll be landing. It might be bumpy, so please stay in your seats.
For an hour we circled.
The Country channel was on a loop and after four times through, I knew everything about Reba that I cared to. I don’t remember what time we were supposed to land in Atlanta, but clearly we were WAY over due. Even if they hadn’t closed the airport all connecting flights were gone. We were the only thing left in the air.
Folks, this is the captain again. We’re running out of gas. We’re going to stop at a gas station in Birmingham and top it off.
Okay, he didn’t actually say that. It was probably something appropriate and designed to not scare people into thinking the plane might fall out of the sky. But, it felt like that.
So, off we went to Alabama. We’ve now been on this plane for 10 or 11 hours. We’re tired, we’re hungry, and let’s face it, we are starting to stink just a little. Apparently Birmingham didn’t have an ice storm problem and we landed just fine.
Don’t bother to get up folks, we’re not going to pull up to the terminal, we’re just going to get some gas and head back to Atlanta.
A couple of people immeadiately hit their flight attendant call buttons. After a hurried conversation with the flight attendant, and a message relayed to the captain.
Ah. . .this is the captain again. Apparently some of you were planning on making Birmingham your final destination today. So, we’ll be moving to another gate that can accommodate a plane our size.
A short taxiway ride later and a handful of very frazzled passengers collected their belongings and fled the plane. What was even more amazing was that they were replaced with an equal number of new passengers. Apparently some people REALLY wanted to go to Atlanta.
I’m not an aircraft expert, but is it normal to have to turn off the air conditioning in the cabin to fuel the plane? No wonder McDonnell Douglas couldn’t compete with Boeing. All our fellow passengers got a lot more colorful smelling as we simmered in our juices for 20 minutes while they fueled the plane.
Back to Atlanta we went.
Finally, there was a break in the clouds and we made a remarkably smooth landing. Have you ever walked into a high school late at night when there is no one around? Yeah, the terminal was kind of like that. We all got in a long line to reschedule flights. When it was my turn I picked the earliest available flight to Charlotte, 6:30am. No problem. I’m pretty sure I would have no trouble making it to the airport on time.
Then we got in another long line to pick up a blanket, a pillow and a small bag of toiletries. All the hotels were full, of course.
What’s this?
It’s a food coupon for dinner.
Which restaurants is it good for?
Anything in the airport.
It’s 12:30 at night, what’s open?
Just Dominos.
Well, then wouldn’t it be more accurate to say it’s a Dominos coupon?
Oh, it’s good all day tomorrow as well!
Excuse me?
(Photo credit: mydominosvouchers.com)
I ate my slice of pizza and curled up on the floor under the seats at gate C3, where in six short hours, hopefully a plane would put me out of my misery.
I’m all for safety, and I think we are each responsible for helping keep everyone safe. But, seriously was it necessary to blare
FOR THE SAFETY OF YOURSELF AND YOUR FELLOW PASSENGERS PLEASE DO NOT ACCEPT PACKAGES FROM ANY UNKNOWN PERSONS
every 20 minutes all.night.long? There were no passengers. There were no packages. The airport was closed. I got a full night’s sleep in 20 minute chunks.
Tomorrow couldn’t get worse than this. . .could it?
This is the first of a two part series on my worst ever trip. Tomorrow, I’ll explain how I didn’t kill anyone and why that was noteworthy!
Rodney Bliss is a blogger, author and IT Consultant. When he’s not on a plane, he lives in Pleasant Grove, Utah with his lovely wife and 13 children.
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“Self-publishing means no more convincing gate-keepers. Now you need to convince the Signal-Boosters instead. Expect this to be VERY SIMILAR!” ~ Howard Tayler (Award Winning Author of Schlock Mercenary)
How to increase your blog’s exposure by 50x in a single day.
Most days I use this blog (www.staging.rodneymbliss.com) to talk about leadership and business. Today I want to talk about the blog itself a little bit.
I’ve been a writer for over 20 years. I’ve written books for traditional publishers. But, today, the world has changed.
Bloggers are writers, of course. The Internet has opened up the opportunities for writers to go out and find a niche. But, bloggers are also self-publishers and self-editors. (Being your own editor is like a lawyer who represents himself, you end up with a fool for a client.) But, there’s no getting around the publisher role. We write with the hopes that someone will read the feeble efforts we make. But, unless you are writing for a branded site like NYTimes.com, or Forbes.com (my brother, Richard is one of their bloggers) you are pretty much on your own.
My blog gets pushed out to my LinkedIn profile, my twitter account (@rodneymbliss) and my facebook account. In addition, there are a couple dozen people who’ve registered to get emails from WordPress when I update. I am grateful to all the readers and especially those who reply, or who choose to repost, retweet, or otherwise help me promote it. All of that increases the reach. But, there are a group of people whose influence is so extensive that a single mention from them can make a huge difference to a blog. These people are called Signal-Boosters.
Let me show you what a difference a Signal-Booster makes. Look at these view stats from the past couple of weeks on my site.
My blog got signal-boosted last Thursday and Friday. In this case it was from my friend Howard Tayler (Giving Your Product Away For Free Is a Business Plan?) as a thank you for help I gave him a few weeks ago. Hopefully some of those people will like the blog and come back.
So far this is a pretty simple model. Find someone popular (Howard gets over 20,000 hits per day on his www.schlockmercenary.com site where he blogged about me.) As a self publisher, a Signal-Booster is like the publisher and the distributor all rolled into one.
Getting a signal-boost like that does three important things for a writer. First, it validates what I’ve written. Blogging can be a lonely business in that without a true editor, I’m left to decide for myself what I think is blog-worthy and what isn’t. If I pick good topics and write a compelling headline, more people come read my stuff. If I pick wrong, they stop coming. But, I think EVERYTHING I write is good. A Signal-Booster, especially if they boost a single blog entry says,
“THIS! This is worth sharing.”
Secondly a Signal-Booster promotes a blog. A friend joked “I’ll just bake cookies for the Signal-Booster!” But, that won’t work. The only reason Howard is a Signal-Booster is that he has attracted an audience who trusts what he says. If I write terrible content and then bribe him to promote it, eventually his audience starts ignoring HIS content.
The third thing that a signal-boost does is it looks really cool. If I’m used to pulling in 50-60 views per day and all of a sudden I get 650 like I did last Friday, it’s like watching your favorite team go on a scoring run.
There’s a downside to Signal-Boosters. I’m a numbers geek. A signal-boost screws up trend lines. This is a problem I’ll take. But, it is hard to see if minor tweaks I’ve made are having an effect. They get totally washed out with the signal-boost.
Here’s a chart of the visitors and views from the past several weeks.
I got signal-boosted on Week 16 and Week 21, by Howard and several other people who thought the content was especially compelling.
Week 16: Racist Programs and Assaulting Servers,
Week 21: Datacenter CSI: The Day The Servers Died
Week 23 was a series I did on “Leaving WordPerfect and Going To Microsoft” but was not signal-boosted that I noticed.
The important point from a blogging standpoint is that dark blue line. It’s the number of visitors. The light blue is the number of views. As you can see last week’s signal-boost pushed the number of views to the highest I’ve ever had. But, the number of visitors actually was not as high as previous weeks. The lesson is that the people who came, looked around a lot more. The Signal-Booster got them to the site and they saw enough compelling content to stay and look around.
There’s lots more that goes into a successful blog. But, for bloggers who are trying to increase their reach, it’s not enough to just write well. Sometimes you need a boost.
Rodney Bliss is an author, blogger and IT manager. He lives in Pleasant Grove, Utah with his lovely wife and 13 children.
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(Photo credit wikihow.com)
Brandon was a jerk.
He was hired by Microsoft right out of high school. There was no doubt that he was brilliant. But, at just barely 18, he had a lot to learn about business.
Krista Anders, (What Would It Take To Make You Love What You Hate) was teaching a Microsoft Exchange NTP or New-to-Product course. Unlike the 3-day Network Monitoring course that everyone loved, the NTP course was 2 weeks and you pretty much just endured it. The course took you through the Property-Page-Crawl. That’s where you hit every.single.feature.on.every.single.property.page. It was as boring as it sounds.
New Messaging Support engineers first endured two weeks of Windows NTP followed by our two week Exchange class. By the end theoretically you were familiar with every aspect of Exchange. In reality, by the end you were seriously reconsidering your career choice.
Writing it was not my proudest moment.
Anyway, to break up the monotony, at various times during the course the students did labs where they “attacked” each others’ Exchange installations. Students quickly mastered these labs and used the skills at other times during the course. You might try to hack your fellow students Windows Server and schedule it to shut down right in the middle of the lab. Typically this hack was accompanied by a Server Broadcast to the target system saying something like,
"This is your server. I'm tired and think I'll take a little nap."
There were numerous other pranks to play as well, sometimes your coworker’s test email installation would suddenly start sending dirty messages. Brandon knew all the class hacks and more, and he wasn’t afraid to show it.
There’s a fine line between pranking your coworkers enough to coalesce as a team and pranking them too much so they pretty much want to throw you off the third floor balcony. Brandon had never learned about this line. His fellow classmates were all older than he was. Many of them came from established careers at other companies, similar to how I came from WordPerfect.
At first they made allowances for his youth. Then, they attempted to ignore him. When he continued, they finally came together as a team. . .to oppose him. They pretty much shut him out and shut him down. Eventually Brandon got tired of being excluded. But, he’d pretty much blown up every possible bridge. He was on his own lonely island.
Finally in desperation he approached Krista during one of the breaks.
Krista, can you help me out?
What’s the problem?
The rest of the class hates me.
Yeah. I don’t blame them. They’re pretty sick of your pranks.
Well, I’m sorry now.
So, what do you want me to do?
Make them be nice to me again.
Let’s get something straight. This isn’t high school. And I’m not the teacher. You broke it, you need to fix it.
There are more ways than one of being smart. They don’t really teach you that in high school. I’m not even sure they teach it in college. Welcome to the real world.
Rodney Bliss is a blogger, author and IT Manager. He’s been in the IT field longer than he can remember. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife and 13 children.
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I hate cubicles. Not for their unending sameness. Not because they tend to surpress individuality or anything like that. I hate them because most of them force you to sit with your back to the hallway. I hate to be startled by someone coming up behind me without me hearing them.
David Ladd, my first manager at Microsoft did it all.the.time. He’d suddenly appear over my shoulder and bark
Rodney! Are you working, or are you just screwing around!
The funny thing is, he was doing it for my own good. And to this day I appreciate it.
You may remember that Dave was the one who recruited me when WordPerfect was doing layoffs. He’s the one who saved a position for me when WordPerfect threatened legal action if I took the job before 6 months was up. I owed Dave a lot.
I also explained to Dave My Manager From Hell experience.
Look, it’s nothing about you, but just realize if you say, “Can I see you in my office” it’s going to freak me out a little. Just giving you fair warning.
Dave was a big guy. He tended to bellow at times. Other teams were a little bit afraid of him. But, what I learned from him is the “burnt marshmallow” management technique: hard and crusty on the outside, soft and gooey on the inside. Dave was one of the most loyal managers I’d ever been around. He explained my job and then left me alone to do it.
Except when he was practicing his own brand of “management desensitization” therapy on me.
It took me nearly three months to realize that in Dave’s mind there was not a wrong answer to that question.
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We were going out to a nice restaurant. . in Fargo, ND. (Yes, THAT Fargo, but they hate it when you quote the movie to them.)
I was spending the summer in Fargo converting a large hospital from Microsoft Exchange to Novell GroupWise. We had an entire group of Novell consultants. I was the migration expert, but we also had a directory guy, and a project manager, and a couple of guys who I never did figure out their exact roles.
We’d fly in Sunday night, put in four ten-hour days and then fly home Thursday night, spend the weekend with our families and then do the whole thing again the next week. The hours were tough, but the money was good.
When you are working and traveling that much, there’s not time to do much else. . .except eat. I discovered my fellow consultants liked to eat. I mean REALLY liked to eat. They spent time scouring the restaurant guides and took great pride in tracking down the best local restaurants. The fact that we were all on expense accounts meant that no restaurant was off limits.
And Fargo had a surprising number of nice restaurants. After a couple of weeks as we were finishing up for the day they said,
Rodney, it’s your turn to pick a restaurant.
Food has never been a big deal for me.
I don’t care where we go.
No, really. You pick.
Whatever you guys want is fine by me.
No. You HAVE to pick.
They were pretty adamant about it and made it clear we were not going to eat until I picked a restaurant. I looked around the group, but they were united in their decision.
Okay, guys. . . Burger King.
After a moment of stunned silence,
YOU don’t get to pick anymore!
Ironically, I actually would have been perfectly content with BK. It shared a parking lot with our hotel.
Photo credit: cityoffargo.com
Rodney Bliss is a blogger, author and IT Manager. He’s been working in the computer field longer than he can remember. He lives in Pleasant Grove, Utah with his lovely wife and 13 children. . .and you can occasionally find him at the local Burger King.