Reflections on a Robbery

Posted on February 24, 2012 by

Forgive the indulgence of an almost completely personal post. But, you know, something happened, and writing is a good way to deal with it.

The something: two days ago, at the gym, my bag was stolen. It had my phone, wallet, and keys.

First reflection: Getting robbed sucks. I don’t recommend it.

After 36 hours, though, things are a lot better. First off, the bag was recovered–the guy stole my phone and my (small amount of) cash, but left my keys, cards, and clothes in a bag that he chucked somewhere on the property. So the whole event is a lot more finite now: I canceled all of the cards last night (before the bag was found) and changed all of my passwords, so I think the damage will be constrained to the property loss–basically, the couple hundred bucks to replace the phone.

There’s also some perspective: A few other people had things stolen, including one person who lost their car. So my victimhood, while real, is relatively minor.

I’m not going to claim that all is wonderful and perfect in my head after this incident. It’s a violation, and that has an effect on your mental state.

But…

The fact that this happened doesn’t mean that we’re living in a crapsack world. It just means that something bad happened.

I think there’s a tendency to assume that since something bad happened it justifies any action that you might take, no matter how bad. That idea has dominated some of my personal dealings in the past few years, and it’s dominated the national political discourse for at least a decade.

It’s lazy and it’s wrong.

I’m not saying that I plan to go through life pretending that this didn’t happen or couldn’t happen again. I’ve pieced together how the thief did it, so I know the loopholes that he exploited, and I can make sure that in the future they don’t still exist. I’m also not saying that I have renounced anger in general. I’m mad at this guy. If someone offered me him tied up and a large stick, I doubt I could resist taking a few whacks.

(I’ve heard that some teach that

But there is a line. I’m not going to assume that everyone I meet is bad like this guy. From there, it’s not even a step to thinking that since everyone is bad, there aren’t any rules of decency or humanity that apply. I think it would be easy to justify stealing, or much worse, if you first convince yourself that the person you’re doing it to deserves it. And if you convince yourself that all people deserve it, that step is already done.

And it’s factually untrue. The business where this happened, for example, has been behaving in a very human way, rather than endless referrals to a ‘customer service’ line. Or to bring this somewhat on topic: In my volunteer gig at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, I see a lot of the good side of humans. The annual Bugapalooza event is especially great–it brings in huge crowds, many kids, who are incredibly enthusiastic. They come in with some knowledge, but they’re eager to absorb more. Some of the most in-depth and intriguing questions I get throughout the year come during that day.

I guess what it comes down to is this: There is bad and good in life. The bad will find you on its own, while the good you have to seek out. Don’t do the bad a favor by seeking it out as well.

Posted in Personal, Miscellaneous | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

A Note to Any Potential Employers

Posted on February 22, 2012 by

This is a massive longshot, but it’s the only likely option. My phone (and some other things) was stolen today. So, if you got my resume, Googled me and got here, and have reached the conclusion that you want to talk to me more… try e-mailing, instead of calling, because the phone is in the hands of a thief.

Posted in Miscellaneous, Personal | Leave a comment

Innovation and Conversations About Status

Posted on February 20, 2012 by

One bit of professional reading for my current position has stuck with me for a few weeks. It was a couple of blog posts about change, and specifically, about the notion that people who resist change can have genuine concerns that need to be addressed.

Which is, of course, objectively true. And yet, unsettling as well; it came from someone who I’ve long considered a strong proponent of innovation and change and all that. But that’s not the real issue.

The real issue (and it took several days of mulling for me to realize it) is that the post start from the supposition that this type of conversation is about what the conversation’s words are about.

In short: A lot of conversations about new stuff are not so much about the new stuff, but about the relative status of the participants in the conversation.

It’s hard to know how extensive this phenomenon is. I only know about it from observation in my own experiences. And I can’t offer much evidence apart from those experiences. But looking back at those experiences with the perspective of several years… It’s the only explanation that I can imagine, for example, for debating in 2005 about whether the internet is something worthwhile for a magazine to tap.

It is, incidentally. I think that was evident well before 2005. But plenty of arguments against it were made, and they wound up successful. It took 4 more years before we had a functioning web site. And none of those arguments proved remotely legitimate.

Another examplette, one that’s even wobblier: A few years ago, my employer had a president who made quite a bad stir by making some rather disparaging comments about the “blog people.” Fast forward to the present day, and said president was spotted commenting away on one of those blog people’s blogs.

Now, the president is a senior member of the profession, and the blog he was haunting is also written by a senior member. So I suspect (admittedly, completely without evidence to back this up) that there are generational factors at work: When the president was attacking the blog people, was he actually attacking the existence of blogs, or was he just declaring how valuable and relevant he was? And when he granted his seal of approval to his contemporary’s blog, was he recognizing the value of blogs, or just saying “You’re a person I consider valid.”

It’s unfair, of course, to claim to know the thoughts of others. And yet, I’m convinced that this type of thing happens in the workplace.

So how do you determine what’s about work and what’s about social status? That’s a tricky question, and I don’t have an answer. Some of it involves the work environment; some places catalyze status-based discussions in a way that others don’t. But I don’t have a foolproof plan for identifying specific instances.

What do you think? Share your ideas in the comments.

Posted in Miscellaneous | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Link Dump Sunday: Pre-President’s Edition

Posted on February 19, 2012 by

Ah, President’s Day. What passions dost thou inflame?

OK, not much, although I do get the day off, which is quite nice. So here’s the link dump:

Center for the Future of Museums has a well-done essay on science museums having to face the choice of tackling topics that can be politically radioactive like evolution and climate change. Should museums potentially alienate their audiences with those topics, at the threat to their futures?

I wasn’t able to comment due to the captcha system on the blog, so here is my reaction: I’m not thrilled to admit it, but I’d fall more on the pragmatist side than the idealist. While not in a museum setting, I have experienced a few audience revolts against things that were and are correct, and the results can be devastating for an institution and especially the people who are doing the work.

That said, I don’t think that “Our community won’t accept this” should be a final assessment for a museum. Instead, “Our community won’t accept this now” would be a more positive approach, followed by asking what we can do to create an environment that is more accepting of information about those views.

Evolution and climate change are especially tough; public discourse about them has almost nothing to do with science and everything to do with culture wars. So, in a community that is culturally hostile to those topics, how can a museum create a space where they can be discussed on their scientific basis? Does it require going back to the basics of science–what is a theory, how are they tested, and so on? Or perhaps focusing on scientists as people, rather than an abstract group that’s so much easier to demonize?

I’m not sure what the answer is, but I think that’s a worthwhile place to start.

The rest of the link dump:

At Know Your Own Bone, some very worthwhile research: People go to museums for the experience, and more importantly, the experience of going with people they care about. Sell appropriately.

From The Awl, some good advice on dealing with ungood people at work.

From Beth’s Blog, a report on a panel about reporting the impact of social media to stakeholders.

From Treehugger: Bees have long been known to dance to communicate with each other. Turns out they also use it as a warning to other animals. Or as Treehugger puts it: “Giving the finger” to hornets.

Posted in Link Dump, Marketing | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Scenes from a Volunteer Mixer

Posted on February 17, 2012 by

This is the Laflin Building.

Laflin Building

It’s a fairly prominent facility–it’s in Lincoln Park, facing one of the major roads that boarders the park, and pretty much alone. The building once held the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum; in the late 1990s, the museum traded it with Lincoln Park Zoo for the museum’s current location, and the zoo now uses the Laflin Building for offices. I’ve seen it plenty of times, but never been inside until yesterday.

The occasion? A mixer for volunteers at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, the Zoo, and the Chicago History Museum.

It was a great time, organized by the Nature Museum’s fabulous volunteer coordinator Jill, as well as the volunteer coordinators at the other two institutions. (Who I’m sure are also fabulous, although I really didn’t meet them.) Nothing too complicated; a bit of food, a bit of conversation, some very cool historical photos from the three institutions, and a surprisingly cutthroat trivia game. (Which my group, ahem, won.)

It also gave an opportunity to learn about some of the other institutions — one of the zoo volunteers talked and shared photos from the enrichment activities they create for their animals. Also, my co-volunteer Claire won a stuffed panda.

Claire and stuffed panda

There was talk of naming it after me, although that may have just been party chat.

Obviously, this event didn’t have anything to do with marketing. But there are a couple of applicable lessons that, while not shockingly original, are worth repeating. One is the value of meeting new people. The other, the value of showing–rather than just telling, or claiming–people you appreciate them.

Posted in Miscellaneous | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

CodeYear, and Coding for Marketers

Posted on February 13, 2012 by

My favorite session at the becoming-less-recent conference of my employer’s that I attended was a surprise, since it wasn’t actually even part of the schedule. It was a hastily-assembled meet-up for people doing CodeYear.

CodeYear is a free online JavaScript course. Presumably it will last the year; every week, participants get notified of a new lesson to work through. It’s got a fully web-based interface; you type the code in a box on the lesson web site, and it evaluates it for accuracy before you can move on to the next part of the lesson.

I’m enjoying it a lot so far. There’s a cool factor–getting a free class in something technical and hopefully useful is nice, and the idea of doing it with almost 400,000 other people is unique. Even though that 400,000 figure is probably the number of total sign-ups rather than actual participants, it feels good to be doing this as part of a crowd.

It’s hard for me to gauge the class’s effectiveness. While I’m not a programmer by trade, I’ve taken enough programming classes that none of the concepts that have been introduced so far have been foreign. Some people at the meet-up said that the class was quite difficult for them, but even that’s hard to gauge: Is it because the teaching method isn’t all that effective or that the subject is difficult to wrap your head around.

I could come up with a bunch of other quibbles too. We’re learning the language, but we haven’t yet learned anything about implementing it outside the CodeYear interface. The lessons give step-by-step prompts, so we haven’t yet done a lot of algorithm creation. The lessons are short, and it’s easy to speed through, getting the right answer without fully understanding. Are any of these critical? It’s hard to say, at this point. My hunch is that they are all, at least, overcomeable.

One thing that I at least strongly suspect is the value of communities that have grown up around the class. My employer has an online group (which grew out of the meet-up) for its members to discuss and get help with the class. There are more generic ones as well–CodeYear even hosts a forum for just that purpose. I think that the lessons are pretty well written, but they do have the limitations of written lessons: Sometimes, you just need a human’s help to figure out a foreign concept.

How does this matter for marketers? Communications people and sciencey-technology-mathy stuff frequently don’t go together well. (I seem to remember that when I was in college, the journalism school changed the math requirement so that there was a class below algebra that would qualify for graduation.)

That’s too bad. Even though I’m not a programmer, viewing computer systems as something that I can manipulate to my own ends, rather than something that’s foisted upon me and never works right, has paid dividends. In my current position, I inherited the administration of the magazine’s Drupal-based website, and my only training was about an hour with the departing administrator. Anything I did, I had to figure out through exploration. My programming experience didn’t directly help with that, but without having some sense of how computers think (or, rather, don’t think), I wouldn’t have had anything close to the confidence to do that, and I probably wouldn’t have had as good a sense of the experiments that would likely be safe and effective versus the ones that would destroy the site.

From the other side, looking at colleagues who don’t have the comfort with computers that I do. Frankly, I shudder to think of what opportunities they (and the publications they have worked for) have lost because of their distaste for the computers on their desktops. Again, coding wouldn’t directly affect this, but I can’t imagine someone being frightened of or spiteful towards the internet when they know that they have power over the box they use to access it.

Ultimately, I don’t know that CodeYear is a must-do for marketers or for anyone. But the price is right, and the prospect of learning something new ought to excite anyone with a bit of curiosity and the time to devote to it. For me, it’s certainly enough to press on.

Posted in Marketing, Technology | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Link Dump Sunday: February is Hard Edition

Posted on February 12, 2012 by

I hit the wall this week. My current project at work is a biggie–a package that essentially combines 14 different features. This week things hit the wall: nothing too tragic, just reaching a point where my non-work time also had to be pretty non-thought time. So, yeah, I haven’t been terribly engaged this week.

Enough whining: Here’s some cool stuff that I did find.

From Mission Paradox, an essay about respecting the attention that your audience grants you. Specifically: If someone is subscribing to your email newsletter or your YouTube videos, it’s important to give them something to educate, inspire, or entertain, rather than just sell them something.

This is What a Scientist Looks Like is a new-ish tumblr that aims to challenge stereotypical perceptions of scientists. That annoys me no end when librarians do it, because I think their strategy and intensity is poorly thought out. This site is, at least, understated, and focuses on scientists being unique people rather than on the stereotype.

And a horribly cheap laugh: Rude Birds by Habitat, by Stephen Wildish. When you’re stressed, animals with slightly naughty names are great for a laugh.

Posted in Link Dump, Marketing | Tagged , | Leave a comment