Tenth Blog-iversary

Today, Pink Slip is observing it Tenth Anniversary. When I first started out, the content was strictly business. Sort of. I’d written a business memoir, the eponymous Pink Slip, and my friend John told me I needed a blog. And Pink Slip was born.

In my inaugural post – “Blogger Manqué,”  September 7, 2006 – I confessed (and what’s the point of being raised Catholic if you can’t confess?) that, while I’d set the blog up in January 2005, it took me nearly two years to actually getting around to writing anything.

We’ll see where things go - I could just as easily slack right back into my blog-slackin’ ways - but for now I plan on using this forum to share my observations on the business world, filtered through my own often woeful but sometimes exhilarating experiences.

Perhaps to make up a bit for lost time, or perhaps because I hadn’t yet figured out how to set dates ahead of time, I wound up with three posts for Day One.

In addition to “Blogger Manqué” there was “Management Productivity Tool?”, which was about Xobni (that’s inbox, spelled backwards), which at that point in time was going to help improve productivity by monitoring how long it took people to read and respond to emails. I thought it was a dumb idea, but what do I know? The company manage to hang on until 2013, when it was acquired by Yahoo. Within a year, Yahoo killed the product, so maybe I do know something.

I also had a post, “We Regret to Inform,” which knocked Radio Shack for a lay-off the conducted via email. As we all know, the years have not be kind to Radio Shack. Still, they’ve managed to hang on. Wonder if they’ve gotten any better at layoffs? Maybe these days they just tweet it out.

As it turned out my concern that “I could just as easily slack right back into my blog-slackin’ ways” – i.e., do absolutely nothing – was unfounded. In short order, I got blog religion and was doing a daily weekday post.

This is the 2564th Pink Slip.  More than 250 per year over ten years.

Over time, I’ve branched out from strictly business to whatever interests me (or bothers me) at the moment. In general, I have avoided the third rail topics of politics and religion. As it has been observed, it wouldn’t take a genius to figure out my either. Religion-wise, I’m a an ex-Catholic/cultural Catholic atheist; politically speaking, baptized a Catholic, but born a Democrat pretty much covers it. And this may not be the year to ignore the political scene, so I may trumpet something pretty soon. Although I’m not too worried about Massachusetts, there’s just way too much at stake this time around to sit around pretending that politics doesn’t matter.

Meanwhile, I saw Florence Foster Jenkins over the weekend. Starring the ever-wonderful Meryl Streep, the movie is about a somewhat addled women who was a NYC socialite and patron of the musical arts in the 1920’s, 1930’s, and 1940’s. Although she had a terrible voice, Florence performed at her salon and developed a cult following, including Cole Porter and Tallulah Bankhead.

While watching the movie, it struck me that I’m kind of like a Florence Foster Jenkins of the writing world.

Oh, there are differences: I’m not bald and dying from the effects of treatment for syphilis. (Her fist husband was a cad.) I’m not a rich socialite. And I’m actually pretty good at what I love doing.

To switch art forms, I decided at one point that I was a Sunday painter writer. I enjoy it. I’m reasonably talented. And, if I’d focused on writing earlier in life, I might have made a go of it. But I didn’t.

So here I am, ten years on, blogging away. This is the tin/aluminum anniversary. Maybe I’ll open a can of soup later, and eat a plum out of my mother’s hammered aluminum fruit bowl from the 1940’s.

Happy Anniversary to me.