Tag, you're it!

I grew up playing a lot of games that required no formal organization and little or no equipment. Kids spent a lot of time out doors back then. In the winter, you were sledding, skating or building forts. For the rest of the year it was DONKEY, kickball, dodgeball, jumprope, circle games (like Old MacDonald and Lady in the Castle), Simon Says, statues, Red Light Man, Hide and Seek, and tag (and it's offshoots, frozen tag and stoop tag). 

As far as I know, although it looks like jump rope may be on its way, none of these games have gone pro. Other than tag.

Yes, there's now something called World Chase Tag, which has its tagline - hah! - Don't Get Caught, and which is "dedicated to the promotion and enjoyment of the most played and universal sport in history: Chase Tag™. (Personally, I've never heard tag called Chase Tag, but if you want to trademark something, you probably couldn't get away with just plain Tag.)

World Chase Tag is definitely not your someone's-backyard-on-a-summer-night game of tag.

World Chase Tag™ is the world’s leading Competitive Tag organisation. Over the past three years we’ve gone from casual Meetups in Hyde Park to international events which have received hundreds of millions of views. Our tournaments are contested by the best Parkour athletes and Ninja Warrior competitors from around the globe and our footage has featured on ESPN, Fox Sports, Channel 4, Fuji TV, CBS, BBC and many more.

"Parkour" and "Ninja Warrior" are pretty much all you need to know if you're wondering whether you can brush off your childhood skills and qualify. It gives me a headache just looking at them. 

How does it all work?

While the basics of tag remain the same -- one person chases an opponent in an attempt to touch them with their hand or "tag" them -- the league has introduced some rules to make it more exciting.

The "Chase Off" format -- the sports' most popular format -- is played by two teams with two teams consisting of a maximum of five athletes.

A match consists of a predetermined number of chases -- usually 10-16 -- which are 20 seconds in length. 

A Chaser and Evader -- one from either team -- compete, with the winning athletes staying on as the Evader. The loser is replaced by a teammate who becomes the Chaser.

A team is awarded one point when their athlete successfully evades their opponent for the entire duration of the chase and the team with the most points after the chases wins the match. (Source: CNN)

And the game doesn't just take place any old where. It happens on a 12M x 12M Quad that includes a bunch of interconnected platforms that the Chaser and the Evader scurry around at breakneck speeds. For me it would be more breakneck break neck, but that's why I'll never be a professional tag player.

Whenever I see something simple and just plain fun get codified and all ruled-up, I'm a bit torn. But if you're really good at jumping rope. If you're really good at Frisbee. If you're really good at tag. And you're competitive and want to make more than a game out of it, have at it.

Just us (little) chickens

I don't eat a ton of meat, and most of the meat I do eat is chicken. Even then, I don't eat nearly as much chicken as the average American consumer, who scarfs down 93.5 pounds of chicken per year. I have no idea what my consumption is, but I do know there's no way I eat nearly eight pounds of chicken per month. Two pounds a month? Maybe three?

I do consume chicken in the home, and have two excellent recipes (sesame chicken, and a spicy, peppery chicken dish). I also have a pretty darned good recipe for chicken salad, but it's a big pain in the butt to make - and isn't all that discernibly better than the pre-fab chicken salad from Roche Brothers. So...

One of my favorite dishes is chicken paprikash, a soup known in our family as goulash. I rely on my sister Trish to make this, and she does an excellent job. Her approach is superior to that of my mother in that she doesn't add in any of the yucky chicken bits. Goulash features farina dumplings which I think are delish, but which have been compared to lead weights.

So, I'm a chicken lover.

I've never had Popeye's and, sadly, the nearby Popeye's (near Fenway Park) closed recently. There is a Popeye's at Northeastern University, so maybe I'll pop there for a sandwich on one of my walks.

There are no Chick-Fil-A's nearby. Boston has resisted them because of their stance on gay rights - and donations to organizations seen as anti-gay. But the company has backed off a bit, and I think that one will be opening somewhere around here pretty soon. (A few years back, the company also went after an organic kale farmer in Vermont for using "Eat More Kale" as their motto. I can't remember how that was resolved. Nothing could get me to eat more kale, but I did buy a tee-shirt.) I once tried a Chick-Fil-A sandwich in the Dallas Airport. It was pretty damned tasty.

Whether the sandwich comes from Popeye's or Chick-Fil-A, there's a looming shortage of the prime ingredient.

Little chickens, whose quarter-pound breasts fit perfectly inside a bun, are proving essential to the war effort. In the process, they’re getting harder to come by.

A shortage of the smaller birds derailed the Popeyes challenge to reigning champion Chick-fil-A last summer, and most petite poultry are sold in grocery stores, not in chain restaurants. Now the supply will be further tested as more competitors jump into the fray. McDonald’s Corp., the world’s biggest restaurant chain, is testing new fried-chicken sandwiches in four U.S. cities with the added pop of MSG, a controversial flavor enhancer it says it doesn’t use in its national menu. Wendy’s Co. is going all in, spending $30 million to beef up its chicken supply chain. (Source: Boston Globe)

As anyone who's bought a chicken in a grocery store in the last couple of decades knows, chickens have been supersized. In 1925 - admittedly before I was buying chickens - the average broiler was a scrawny 2.5 pounds. Today, the average broiler weighs in at 6 pounds.

But consumers, it seems, want the tastier, more tender, smaller birds. And the chicken sandwich folks want them because they fit better on a bun. But with the shortage, all this is coming at a cost. Little chicken breasts "recently reached triple the cost of breasts from a “jumbo” nine-pounder, a historically wide difference, according to Russ Whitman of commodity researcher Urner Barry."

So, while Popeye's and Chick-Fil-A, McDonald's and Wendy's, play chicken sandwich war with each other, you may be asking where KFC fits in all this.

Last year, they introduced something called the Cheeto Chicken Sandwich. Much as I love Cheetos, the thought of eating a sandwich where fried chicken, drenched in Cheeto sauce, sits on a bed of Cheetos is, well, just the opposite of the KRC parent brand's name. That's Yum. To me, the Cheeto sandwich sounds Yuck. 

Anyway, looks like it's about time for the chicken producers to stop fattening up their stock and downsize a bit. 

EXPERIENCE IS EVERYTHING? Kinda, sorta...

Last Friday, I went online and bought tickets for a couple of Red Sox games. Tickets for the game I was most interested in - the Patriots' Day game - were going on sale at 10 a.m. And at 10 a.m., I was ready to pounce. But so was everyone else in Red Sox Nation, so I had to wait a bit.

Years ago, the Red Sox used to call this The Virtual Waiting Room. And The Virtual Waiting Room was the ante-room to hell.

After one particularly hellish wait, I did a Pink Slip screed about the experience. This was in December 2006, a couple of years after the Red Sox had won their first modern-time World Series. They were coming off a not-so-great-season (they finished 3rd in the AL East) but were still flying high off of the 2004 feel-good - make that great - season. They were still everyone's darlings (at least in all of New England if you subtract out the NY Yankees part of Connecticut). And it was really tough to get tickets. (Maybe people were prescient and figured 2007 was going to be another banner - not to mention trophy - year.)

Anyway, The Virtual Waiting Room was just terrible, and I didn't hold back. Among other things I had to say:

Just how long have I been with the Red Sox? A lot longer than [then Red Sox GM] Theo Epstein's been alive. And long enough to not only remember when Ted Williams' head was attached to his body, but to have seen him hit a home-run in his last season. (July 1960, Red Sox beat the Indian 6-4. We sat in the bleachers. You could look it up - the score, not whether or not we sat in the bleachers. Of course we did.) And as an old-timer, I wish that getting a ticket weren't the equivalent of gearing up for the Oklahoma Land Rush or the Running of the Bulls. Okay, in the Virtual Waiting Room you don't get trampled, but that's about the only positive I can think of about it.

Well, things have gotten better (ordering tickets) - and worse (the team, at least last year's edition). The Red Sox are still pretty popular, and taking yourself out to the ballgame at Fenway Park is still fun, but it's no longer quite as difficult to get tickets. They've won a few more World Series - 2013, 2018 - and we've gotten a bit jaded.

When you enter the ticket-buying area, here's what pops up:

EXPERIENCE IS EVERYTHING

Sit back. Relax. And stay right here for your chance to start your next great experience. We’ll do the work for you. In an effort to get tickets into your hands, the system selects true experience seekers like yourself at random to enter the site and purchase tickets.

IMPORTANT: No need to refresh. No need to go back. No need for multiple browsers.

You know, sometimes I'm embarassed to have had a career in marketing. Oh, I was in business-to-business (B2B0 technology, or techie-to-techie (T2T) which I'm pretty sure I coined. (And which no one other than I ever used.) So I didn't have to fluff things up about the overall "experience." I was a marketer in the great era of The Solution, when everything was a solution to something and the marketing was supposed to focus on benefits. The trouble with this approach is that pretty much every tech business application touts the same benefits: make money, save time, save money... You could look at websites and come away not knowing whether their appliction was used for accounting. Or customer service. Or logistics.

I always resisted this approach. While business people did want to know about the benefits (augmented with some faux return on investment analysis that, fortunately, no one ever looked back on once they'd actually used your product) so that they could sell interenally to get the beancounters to sign off on it, someone, somewhere in an organization - especially on the tech side - was going to know just what the application was for. As my friend V - one of the smartest and savviest marketing people I've ever known - was famous for saying, "There's always someone who's going to ask 'but what do it do?'" Indeed.

And everytime I cited a benefit, I insisted on coupling it with a point on how, exactly, the product helped achieve that benefit. Just wanted to keep things honest.

Anyway, I marketed, hmmmm, solutions, not experiences. (As an aside, at one company, we were pitched by a marketing consultant who was going to help us rebrand our product suite. Their suggestion: The Final Solution. I had to point out that this tagline was already taken...)

But now, it's all about the experience.

And when it comes to going to a ball game, I guess I am a true experience seeker.

But how does the system know that I'm a true experience seeker, and not someone who doesn't really give a hoot about baseball. Oh, I guess these folks are experience seekers in their own right, but I wish there were a way that they could divvy experience seekers up into a couple of groups - true experience seekers and whatevers - and pick more and more rapidly from the true believers group.

As it turns out, it was plenty easy to get tickets for a couple of games. I got great seats for the Patriots' Day Game - much my favorite game of the year, even though, in order to get to and from Fenway Park, you have to claw your way through crowds watching the Marathon, as the route goes near the park. Last year, getting home was a nightmare. We had to walk way far out of our way, as all the streets anywhere near the finish line were blocked off. It was cold and rainy, too. Plus the Red Sox, giving us a definite foreshadowing of how rotten the season was going to be, stunk up the place.

But back to 2006, before I knew the baseball fans were experience seekers, the Red Sox actually responded to my screed.

I got an email from the then VP of Marketing for the Red Sox Charles Steinberg, and in the thread, I could see that Larry Lucchino (then President and CC) had been copied and responded via Blackberry (remember when Blackberry was a solution? or was it an experience???).

Here's Larry:

Get back to her please and tell her we are determined to make. It better

And here's Charles:

...we must understand the path of the experience that this writer has published for the world to read....

For the world to read. (I like that...) And there was that early use of the word experience.

The upshot was that I got to work directly with someone in marketing to buy tickets for a few games without enduring time in the Virtual Waiting Room. The person I worked with turned out to the son of someone I went to high school with, of all things.

Even though the Red Sox sucked last year, and are starting out a bit rocky this year - they had to fire Alex Cora, their manager, who has been caught up in a sign-stealing scandal - I'm looking forward to being a true experience seeker a couple of times at Fenway.

As for Larry and Charles, they're now emeriti with the Boston Red Sox, but are running the Red Sox primo minor league team, which next year is moving from Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to Worcester, Massachusetts. Where they will operate as the Woo Sox. 

I will be doing some true experience seeking there, for sure. 

Mr. Peanut being killed off? I wouldn't bet on it.

As brand icons go, Mr. Peanut has enjoyed some rather enviable longevity. It - I almost wrote "he" there - has been around since 1916. Oh, it's - I almost wrote "he's" there - not the oldest brand mascot out there. The Morton Salt Girl ("when it rains, it pours") has been around since 1914. For once and for all, this answers the age-old question: which came first, the peanut or the salt?

Other "test of time" icons include the Campbell Kids (1904) and the Quaker Oats Man (1877). But some seem to fade away. I know that Bucky Beaver went the way of Ipana (a toothpaste that was brieflyl popular in the late 1950's). But is Speedy Alkaseltzer still a thing?  The Jolly Green Giant? (There was even a Top 40 song by the Kingsmen about the Jolly Green Giant. The Kingsmen were apparently quite versatile. They're the group that also brought us the mystery  lyrics - rumored to be ultra-dirty - "Louie Louie.")

As for Mr. Peanut, I like peanuts as much as the next guy, but I've never been all that enamored of Mr. P. There's something just plain creepy about those long skinny legs. And I suppose the shell is supposed to be clothing, but there is something weird about the entire look. Not Porky Pig only wearing a jacket weird. But plenty weird.

Anyway, the rumor is that we may not have Mr. Peanut to kick around for much longer. 

Kraft/Heinz, maker of Planters, the brand Mr. Peanut reps for, is dropping some pretty large hints - Brazil nut large, not peanut large - that, come Super Bowl Sunday, Mr. Peanut will be killed off. There's even a Twitter account ("The Estate of Mr. Peanut") that has confirmed that Mr. Peanut is a goner, having died in a fiery over the cliff crash. No word on whether any body parts could be salvaged, whether Mr. Peanut was able to become the center of a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup or chopped up in a dish of Kung Pao Chicken. Just that Mr. Peanut is dead.

Kraft Heinz is obviously trying to create some Super Bowl buzz, with the brand manager announcing that she's hoping that "fans tune in to Mr. Peanut's funeral during the third quarter of the Super Bowl to celebrate his life." (Come on, brand manager, surely Mr. Peanut is an "it".)

These days, it's not enough for an icon to just be iconic. Today's advertising imperative is that the brand mascot creates some buzz - a lot of retweets, maybe even a meme - on social media.

Inc. is not a big fan of Kraft Heinze taking this "absurd" approach to social media:

...there's literally nothing more manufactured than a pre-planned marketing campaign featuring a tweet announcing the death of a made-up brand character just to generate buzz for a pretend funeral for said character.

 .. in a world where brands are increasingly defined by their most recent engagement on social media, the temptation is to generate as much buzz as possible by doing outrageous or extreme things. I'm not sure how else to describe the fake death of a fake mascot, but this is where we are.

Well, tsk tsk. But when I looked - last Thursday - the tweet confirming Mr. Peanut's passing had gotten 111K likes, 27.5K retweets, and nearly 9K comments. (I glanced through a few of the comments, and my fave asked the question "Open or closed shell funeral?") Many commenters professed (or tweeted) their sadness (#RIPeanut), while a number were happy to see Mr. Peanut roast in hell. Harsh!

So if Kraft Heinz was looking for attention, bravo. They've gotten plenty of it. And going into the third quarter of the Super Bowl this coming Sunday, the buzz may well be with them. 

Me? I've watched too many cartoons and soap operas to buy that Mr. Peanut's dead. I've seen too many times when Daffy's bill gets slapped off, his feathers get blasted off, only to have Daffy appear miraculously intact. Too many "identical twin" died soap operaa episodes. Nope. Mr. Peanut is NOT dead.  It - I almost wrote "he" here - will miraculously appear at its - I almost wrote "his" here - funeral to inform us of its - I almost wrote "his" here - survival. If Mr. Peanut does survive, I'm hoping it - I almost wrote "he" here - has the deceny to put some pants on.

75 Years after the liberation of Auschwitz

By the time the Russian Army got there, most of the surviving prisoners had been evacuated, forced to march west to other concentration camps in brutal winter weather when they were ill-clothed, ill-shod, ill-fed, and - it goes without saying - ill-treated. Those left behind were even weaker and sicker than those who were sent on the death march. There were only 7,000 of them. Many didn't survive liberation. Overall, more than 1 million people - most of them Jews - perished at Auschwitz.

I follow the Auschwitz Memorial on Twitter, so I know that today they're observing - I almost wrote 'celebrating' - the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. A number of survivors will be gathered there. Given their age - the youngest would be in their mid- to late-eighties - this is likely that last time that survivors will take part in any such memorialization of the Holocaust.

Most of what the Auschwitz Memorial posts are pictures and brief biographical snippets of some of those who were at Auschwitz - those who died there (most of the little bios) but some who survived.

And so we learn of little Shlomo Harschel, a 4-year old Dutch Jewish boy murdered in the gas chamber. Of Margot Rothensies, a German Jewish student deported to Auschwitz in 1942, when she was 20. She "did not survive." Neither did Feiga Tabakman, a hatter from Gdansk. She was 27. Bakers. Bookkeepers. Lawyers. Restaurant owners. Teachers. Clerks. Doctors. Boxers. Sales representatives. Tailors. Artists. Little kids, babies. Anne Frank's mother, Edith, died of starvation at Auschwitz, a few weeks before its liberation. A few months earlier, her daughters had been transported to Bergen-Belsen, in Germany, where they died of typhus in February or March of 1945. So near and yet...

I've been to Auschwitz.

We walked under the Arbeit Macht Frei gate. We walked through the barracks. We walked through the museum.

For me, the most heart-wrenching thing in the museum was a child's apron. A little white apron, made of heavy cotton, with pretty patch pockets in a red and blue flowered print. Maybe for a three or a four year old. Hand made. I thought about the mother, older sister, grandmother, aunt lovingly making that little apron...

I've read a lot about the Holocaust - history, fiction, survivor accounts - but top of the list of the ones that stick with me the most would be the diaries of Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness. Klemperer was a "privileged Jew", his privilege by way of a WWI Iron Cross and his marriage to a Christian. In February 1945, one of the last Jews in Dresden, he had at last been called up for deportation. Then there was the Dresden firebombing, which enabled Klemperer to escape and survive. He kept a daily diary from 1933 through 1945, and if you want an accounting of the lobster-in-the-pot-of-water way in which madness and evil completely took over Germany, this two-part work is for you.

For Auschwitz-related books, I'd recommend If This Is Man by Primo Levi, who was at Auschwitz on the day of its liberation. (Levi also wrote the brilliant Periodic Table.) And Tadeusz Borowski's short story collection, This Way to the Gas Station, Ladies and Gentlemen. Borowski was a Pole, non-Jewish, who spent time doing forced labor at Auschwitz. Having survived the war, he killed himself a few years later by putting his head in the oven and turning the gas on. His short stories are breathtaking. (Levi died in his late sixties after a fall. His death is disputed: it may or may not have been a suicide.)

For a symbolic understanding of the Holocaust, I'd recommend Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. I know that this memorial is controversial, but to me - like the Klemperer book - it evokes how it happened. When you first approach, it's light and open. There may even be people perched on the blocks. But the further into the memorial you go, the darker it gets, and the more difficult it is to easily extract yourself from it.

Just a few thoughts on a day when it's not a bad thing to think about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, the 20th century's great cautionary tale...

"Daddy's Favorite"

On my mother's recipe card, she has written FRUIT CAKE, but it was always called "Daddy's Favorite", and I made it the other day.

I made it because tomorrow is the 49th anniversary of my father's death, and I've been thinking about him more often lately because of this.

I made it because my brother was coming over to dinner the other night.

I made it because I really like it.

In terms of serving it to my brother, I could have saved myself the trouble. How did I not know that he didn't particularly care for it? I knew my sister Kath likes it, and that Trish doesn't. I guess I just assumed the Rick was a fan because he doesn't have a particular sweet tooth, and "Daddy's Favorite" (despite the 2 cups of sugar that goes into it) isn't especially sweet. And because Rick - although he's a blue-eyed blond (okay, he's gray now) and my father was black-haired with hazel eyes, and although Rick is a lot taller and bigger in general than my father was - is my father's spit and image. (Oddly, both my brothers look exactly like my father, though they don't look anything alike. Go figure.)

I did make it up, dinner-wise, by serving meatloaf. My mother's recipe, more or less. She used Saltines crushed to crumbs using a rolling pin; I use pre-fab breadcrumbs. Also, I used the pan she used for meatloaf - an aluminum rectangular baking pan (the same one I had earlier used to bake "Daddy's Favorite") - because in our house, mealoaf wasn't really a "loaf". It was cut in flat squares, like a lasagna. Like a cake. Like "Daddy's Favorite."

The meatloaf was quite good. "Daddy's Favorite" even better. I put half of it in the freezer, but have been enjoying the rest as a grab and gulp, or with my tea. I gave a couple of pieces to a friend who came by the other day.

"Daddy's Favorite" completely hits the spot, and that spot is made even better because I used my mother's hand-scrawled recipe, her mixing bowl, and her aluminum baking pan.

There is nothing like seeing something in the handwriting of someone you love who is no longer on earth to get you going. (When I come across something my husband has written - especially if it's in his famous red ink - I still tear up, even six years after Jim's death. Jim, by the way, was a big fan of my mother's meatloaf. I can't recall where he stood on "Daddy's Favorite.")

I don't know the ur source of the "Daddy's Favorite" recipe, but I do have a theory.

A few years ago, I was in Ireland with my sister Trish, her daughter Molly, and our friend Michele. We were in Galway while Molly was finishing up her semester abroad. One afternoon, when Trish was helping Molly move out from her student digs, Michele and I went out for a walk and came across a little artist gallery-tea room. We browsed a bit and, since the day was gorgeous, decided to sit outside and have a cup of tea.

Barmbrack was on the menu.

Now I've been to Ireland many, many times, but had never had brack, so I decided to order it to have with my tea.

And once I took a bite, what to my wondering mouth did appear?

Turns out "Daddy's Favorite" is barmbrack. Who knew? Not me, for sure. And those who might have known - my mother, my Aunt Margaret, my grandmother - are long gone.

Anyway, I'm guessing that the "Daddy's Favorite"/FRUIT CAKE recipe likely came to my mother by way of my father's mother by way of her mother. So I'm thinking it's Ballymascanlon, Co. Louth barmbrack we're talking here.

If you want a nice little cakey thing to go with your tea, here's the recipe:

1 lb. raisins
Pour 2 cups boiling water over raisins. Cool.  (Underlining is my mother's.)
Add 2 tpsp. baking soda to the raisins and water.

Mix:
2 cups sugar
2 tablespoons shortening. (Not specified, but I use Crisco, as my mother did.)
2 eggs

Add:
Raisins and water. Mix well. (Here's my mother's aside - verbatim: I usually add first the water and hold the raisins until I have added the flour. I followed my mother's instructions.)

Add:
3 cups fluor. Mix well.
1/2 cup walnuts.

Bake for approx. 1 hour, either 350 degrees or 375 degrees depending on your oven.

Use 13x9" greased and floured pan.

My notes: I baked at 375 degrees, but this was more due to using a metal pan (vs. glass) than anything to do with my oven. It was ready a bit before one hour.

I'm about to put the kettle on, and have myself a piece (or two) of "Daddy's Favorite."

I will think about my father.

For a number of years now, my sibs and I, when talking about our father, have said things like "if Dad had lived he'd be dead already." Which for a number of years now would be true. If he were alive, he'd be 107.

But how rotten, how cruelly unfair, that he was only allotted a stingy 58 years. That he was sick off and on (progressive kidney disease) for 7 years before he died. That he left my mother in a heap of grief, and 5 bereft kids  - 23, 21, 18, 15, 11 - who'd been fearing his death each time he ping-ponged in and out of the hospital during  those 7 years - without the wonderful, decent, generous, quick-tempered, hard-working, wickedly funny, imaginative, feisty, story-telling, athletic, backwards-skating, vibrant father who loved his children fiercely. When my father died, we felt like orphans.

My father never did make it to Ireland, but he was a tea drinker, and I like to think of him, sitting in the front yard of that little gallery-tea house in Galway, ordering his cup of tea, ordering a side of brack. And lighting up when he recognized his grandmother's recipe.

We only heard my mother's side of the conversation, but if my father was away - he was a salesman, and traveled on business; and in the last 7 years of his life also logged plenty of hospital time - my mother's last words to him before she hung up were always "I love you, too, kid."

Well, he wasn't kid to me, but "me, too." Still miss you after all these years...

More fun with career damage!

Yesterday, I posted about two young GM engineers - lunkheads, both - who lost their jobs after they took a couple of the Corvettes they were working on out for a 100 m.p.h./120 m.p.h spin.

There are, of course, a lot of different ways to damage your career.

Another one popped my way last week by way of Twitter. I don't follow Bradley P. Moss, an attorney who focuses on national security issues and has plenty of things to say about the whistleblower and Trump. But some tweeters that I do follow do follow him, so there he was, showing the world a couple of email threats he'd received from one Eric Ziegler.

Now these sorts of attacks are pretty common Twitter fare. But when folks send over-the-top attacks - as in you're a liberal so you are "pretty much fucking deranged in the head"..."can't wait to see you die from a mental breakdown" - to those that they have political disagreements with, they tend not to use their corporate email and signature.

Not Eric Ziegler. Say it loud, say it proud. I'm Inpro's Director of Corporate Development and General Manager of their Charlotte office. And I, apparently, approved this mesage, and its followup, which were vile, moronic, and vaguely threatening. Wonder what Ziegler has in mind when he mentions "a cure to eradicate"? Inquiring minds of the liberal persuasion sure would like to know.

Moss clapped back at Inpro Corp, as did a number of Tweeters. Here's Moss's clap:

I understand your company has hosted events for the president, and I certainly don’t begrudge anyone their political views. I simply want to ensure you are aware this is how one of your management team is using his company email: to send me hate mail (Source: Twitter)

Anyway, when I first saw this, I went to look for Ziegler's LinkedIn, found it, and then figured I could come back again for another look. Ah, no. When I went to find it the second time, alas, it was removed. So I figured Ziegler had gotten - at minimum - his wrists slapped.

After all, his company may be big Trump supporters, but they do claim a philosphy that suggests that this is not the sort of behavior that the company - which is headquartered in Wisconsin and makes "stuff" like window, door and wall treatments, bathroom stalls and elevator interiors that go into commercial buildings - would welcome in its employees. 

Because our employees are such an instrumental part of ensuring that success, we hold them to a high standard of conduct. Inpro has no tolerance for hateful acts, discrimination, unethical behavior or any other forms of misconduct that does not reflect our corporate philosophy and values. We constantly work to foster a culture of service, respect, innovation and responsibility. We are committed to the ongoing pursuit of these values in our actions with our customers, employees and anyone in the communities we serve.

We are grateful for those who have worked with us and who have had the opportunity to let us demonstrate our culture firsthand.

I can't imagine that any company would condone Ziegler's behavior. Unlike the two knuckleheads I wrote about yesterday, who may have had a lapse in judgment and just given into that temptation to zoom around in a Corvette, but who may be decent individuals, Eric Ziegler's mini-screeds suggest a person with character flaws, a toxic jerk who I can't imagine anyone would want to deal with.

Both of the GM employees who took the Corvettes out for a high-speed spin were fired. Their resumes suggest well-educated, high-skilled guys - engineers who'll probably get picked up somewhere. They just won't be working at GM. A career speedbump, but likely not fatal. Nor should it be, IMHO.

But what about Eric Ziegler? Other than the disappearing act for his LinkedIn profile, did Inpro actually do anything? Did he lose his job?

A closer look at the company, and one finds that the chairman is also named Ziegler. And there are a couple of other Zieglers there, too. Common enough name. Sort of. I'm guessing Eric Ziegler has got friends - maybe even a dad - in high places in the organization. Which is generally a foolproof strategy if you're going to behave like a fool. 

Moss says that he wouldn't ordinarily "out" a-holes who send outright nasty and quasi-threatening messages. But when this guy used corporate email, and included his credentials in the note, well, that was a bit too much for Moss. 

I suspect Ziegler gets to keep his cushy job and cushy title, courtesy of daddy dearest. (Who, I suspect, gave sonny boy a cheerful-earful about his stupidity.) But would you want to do business with this guy? I sure wouldn't. And I bet there are plenty more like me out there. Supporting Trump may not be a dealbreaker, but this level of toxic douchebaggery sure is.

Those careers probably will come back from Dead Man's Curve. But still...

I came of radio-listening age in the great era of teen car songs, most sung by the same blond dudes who also ushered in the great era of teen surfer songs. (Think Beach Boys and Jan & Dean.) 

Where to begin? We had 409. Little Douce Coup. Little Old Lady from Pasadena. Fun, Fun, Fun. GTO. Shut Down. The Theme from Route 66 (still a pretty good piece of instrumental music; I'm glad they never added any cornball lyrics about two guys tootlin' around the country in a Corvette to it). Dead Man's Curve.

It's the final two on the list that I'll thematically combine in a little career-damager (if not killer) of a story on two GM engineer who just couldn't help themselves when it came to testdriving the 2020 Corvette Stingray.

Ah, the Stingray. The ultimate fantasy car of teen automative life of my girlhood. At least I imagined it was. Personally, I didn't have car fantasies, although at 12, I did have a crush on George Maharis, one of the two fellows tootlin' around the country in a Corvette. 

Anyway, Engineers Alexander Thim and Mark Derkatz took the newest Corvette out for a spin last week in Bowling Green, Kentucky, home of the GM plant where Corvettes are built. They both ended up under arrest.

Thim was driving a red Corvette that reached a speed of 120 mph, according to the citation. Derkatz was in a white Corvette that was clocked at 100 mph.

The posted speed on the road was 45 mph.

They were charged with reckless driving, racing on a public highway and driving more than 26 mph faster than the posted speed limit. (Source: CNN)

GM was pretty tight-lipped about the incident. "Aware... ...safety ...priority ...no further comment."

But I looked up the lead-footed fellows on LinkedIn, and Thim is "currently looking for an engineering job...Previously worked at General Motors launching the 2020 Corvette." Derkatz's listing still has him as a part of the "Corvette Electrical Launch Team", focusing on "issue resoluton." Perhaps Derkatz was able to resolve his career error issue because he was only going 100 m.p.h., while Thim was clocked at 120. But more likely, he's been bounced, too, and just hasn't updated his LinkedIn profile quite yet. [Note: after I wrote this post, I checked back and saw that Derkatz has updated his LinkedIn profile and resume to reflect that his tenure at GM ended in January 2020.]

There was more info from the local media, which reported that the incident took place at 11:20 p.m. on Lovers Lane, and Krim and Derkatz admitted that they'd just come from an establishment called Cue Time Cocktails and Billiards. And they both had booze breath. (The citation doesn't say they were DUI-ing. Just that they'd been drinking.)

What were they thinking? Sure, even though these guys aren't from my age cohort, I'm sure it was ultra-exciting to get behind the wheel of a 'vette. And once they got there, just couldn't resist putting the pedal to the metal. 

But taking the company car out for a spin like this? Yikes. Talk about a colossal error in judgment. I hope for their sake that at least they had permission to be sporting around in those 'vettes. If they wanted to drive that fast, they should have done it at an off-the-road facility. Of course, since they're not test drivers, they might not have been allowed to whip around that fast in a car that retails for $60K.

Both of these guys are young (Thim 27, Derkatz 30), so there's plenty of time for their careers to bounce back from this lap around the Bowling Green version of Dead Man's Curve. Maybe some day, this will be yet another 'things that happened at work/things that happened when I was young and stupid' to tell over a couple of beers at a backyard cookout. But still... What a couple of bone-heads. 

-------------------------------------------------------------------
And here, for your listening pleasure, the Theme from Route 66. 

Kerrygold Abu!

When I was a kid, there were always small cans of Carnation Evaporated Milk in the larder. I'm not 100% sure what it was used for, but seem to remember my parents using it for coffee creamer. And my mother may have used it in some recipes. 

What I do remember about it was the Carnation Evaporated Milk came from contented cows. Or so we were told in Carnation ads.

What, exactly, a contented cow is, I couldn't tell you, but I'm picturing a dopey-looking, cud-chewing Holstein meandering around a pasture on a balmy, sunny day, until it's time to sashay into the barn so that Mr. Green Jeans can milk her.

Anyway, I don't remember anyone taking Carnation on for false advertising.

Kerrygold wasn't so lucky.

They weren't claming that the cows whose milk is used in their butter were contented - although, aside from the rain, I would imagine that Irish cows are plenty contented. The Kerrygold claim to fame was that their cows were grass-fed. 

I guess that whether cows are eating grass or not is a lot more provable than whether or not they're contented, contentment being pretty much in the eye and mind of the beholder. So there's that basis for a suit. But a fellow in California took legal umbrage to the grass-fed claims, and brought suit against Ornua Co-operative (which produces Kerrygold), saying that he'd been:

...“misled into purchasing Kerrygold products due to false and misleading advertising.” For several years, he bought Kerrygold dairy products, sometimes at a price premium, with the understanding based on product advertising that cows used to generate the milk for the products were only fed grass...“Rather than disclose the use of non-grass feed, as other partially grass-fed competitors do, Kerrygold deceptively implies that its products are derived from cows that are fed only grass,” (Source: Feed Navigator)

The plaintiff said he never, ever, ever in a million years - or something like that - would have bought Kerrygold if he'd known that those Irish cows were also gulping down soy, corn and other grains. Guess it wasn't enough that Kerrygold butter tastes great.

Ornua argued back that they never said that their cows eat nothing other than grass. And they've got a point. You may be what you eat, but just because you're a meat eater doesn't mean you're exclusively eating meat. Same goes, I suppose, for grass. And cows.

Admittedly, Ornua may have been implying that their Bessies and Bossies - or whatever they call cows in the Old Sod - were supping exclusively on the green, green grass of Ireland. But you can also argue that it may just have been a case of the plaintiff inferring.

Anyway, the judge in the case dismissed the suit, leaving Ornua contented. 

As for the plaintiff, he did want to turn it into a class action suit on behalf of all those duped by Kerrybgold - include me out - so maybe he thought that there'd be a few bucks to come out of the suit. But you do have to wonder what his game was. What damages did he incur? Why tie up the courts? Why not just stop buying Kerrygold, write Ornua a letter asking for a refund (or save the overseas stamp and email them), blast them on social media? A suit seems pretty frivolous.

Me? I'm always contented with Kerrygold, the butter of choice chez moi. Unlike blandly whitish American butters, Kerrygold is buttery yellow. And it tastes like, well, butter. What more can you ask for?

MLK Day 2020. (Bald is beautiful.)

MLK Day
It's Martin Luther King Day, and Pink Slip is observing it by partially taking the day off.

What will I be doing?

Although it's a day when volunteering is encouraged, I'm sitting this one out. I volunteered on Saturday. I'm volunteering tomorrrow. And on Thursday. So I'm good. (Obviously, I didn't give up virtue signaling for MLK Day.)

Kerri Greenidge, author of Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter, will be talking about her book at The Boston Athenaeum, and I'm going to that. Until I saw an article on Trotter (and the Greenidge book), I wasn't at all familiar with the man, other than being aware of a Boston public school that's named after him.

Trotter was the founder of The Guardian, a black newspaper that achieved a national readership, and was an all-round activisit. Among other things, he led protessts against the spectacularly racist D.W. Griffith film, The Birth of a Nation. (You know, sometimes cancel culture is a good thing.)

Anyway, a writer friend of mine is introducing Greenidge, and I'm sure her introduction and Greenidge's talk will be great. And I'm happy to be doing something to honor Dr. Martin Luther King.

(As for The Athenaeum, founded in 1807 - and just up the street from where I live - it's one of the oldest independent libraries in the country. I'm a member, but don't do anywhere near enough hanging out in this beautiful and completely quirky place. (Note to self: start spending an afternoon or two a week at The Ath...))

For our next topic:

Bald is beautiful
My husband was bald. So was my father. As are both of my brothers. I'm good with bald guys. Bald is beautiful.

That said, I'm just as happy that male-pattern baldness affects, well, males. (Thank you, testosterone.) But that said, there's no reason why women have to have more hair than men, other than that it's what in our culture we're most used to. There is such a thing as female-pattern baldness, but, until old age, that's less common.But most women as they age will experience some hair loss over time. (Another note to self: check the bathroom sink.)

Then there's alopecia. Actually, male- and female-pattern baldness are forms of alopecia. But when we think about alopecia - if we think of it at all - we're likely thinking about total baldness - head, eyebrows, eyelashes.

Alopecia is an autoimmune condition, and affects both men and women. But African American women may be more prone to it than others.

One of those African American women is Ayanna Pressley, who's a member of Congress from Boston (and the most low-key member of The Squad, which also includes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib). Pressley's's not my representative, but I'd be just as happy if she were. But in 2018, I wasn't all that happy with her. She primaried and took out Mike Capuano, perhaps the most progressive person in the House. Would that she'd primaried and taken out my Congressman, Stephen Lynch, who's more of an old-school lunchbucket Democrat rather than a progressive. But it was Pressley's time, and she beat Capuano and won handily in the general.

Late last week, just in time for MLK Day, Pressley revealed that she has recently lost her hair due to alopecia.  Here's a link to the video where she made her announcement - definitely worth a view, as has a lot to say about her hair specifically in reference to herself and her identity as a black women. And here are her "before and after" shots.

I told you bald is beautiful!

What would Mr. Whipple do?

Two upfront statements:

1. I'm not going to say that I wouldn't use Charmin toilet paper if it were the last roll of TP on the face of the earth. Of course, I would use it. The toilet paper I absolutely would NOT deploy if it were the last roll of TP on the face of earth would be Quilted Northern. That would be on the basis of their execrable ads, in which cartoon bears dance around singing "my heinie's clean." Especially the execrable+ ad in which the cartoon bear parents debate whether to pick their cartoon bear son's briefs up off the bathroom floor.  Then cartoon bear son saves them having to touch "it" by prancing in singing - you guessed it - "my heinie's clean."
2. I don't think Procter & Gamble's all that serious about the suite of toilet-related tech products they introduced at the recent Consumer Electronics Show. At least I don't think they are...

Anyway, I always enjoy reading about the weird and useless stuff that gets showcased at CES. And writing about it, too. (If only someone - that would be Google, which owns Blogger - could come up with an app that let me have consistent fonts in my posts. And don't suggest Word Press. I use Word Press for one client and one volunteer gig. It is admittedly better when it comes to fonts, but I've found that it brings other problems with it...)

Among the weird and useless stuff on display at this year's CES was a stunning trio of weird and useless stuff intended to deliver a "better bathroom experience from start to flush."

First up, the RollBot.

This is a robot that can be summoned up from your smartphone and roll on into the bathroom with a new roll of toilet paper. Now, there have been plenty of situations in which I have been caught out without there being any toilet paper available. 99.99% of those times have been in public restrooms, where I've found myself in a tp-less stall and end up searching through pockets and pocketbook in hopes of finding one scrunged up but still marginally usable piece of used Kleenex. And/or hollering to anyone around, in hopes that the woman in the next stall can hand me a couple of squares of toilet paper under the opening. 

The other 00.01% of the time is when I've been in the woods, or somewhere else in nature, and have just had to go. 

In neither of these situations would it do any good to Bluetooth up a delivery robot. Would it leave my home and find me - using built in GPS, no doubt - in a restaurant or on the Snail Trail in Provincetown so that it could deliver the goods?

Really and truly, is there anyone out there who doesn't have a spare roll or two of toilet paper in their bathroom? Or a fallback box of Kleenex?

And if you do insist on a robot, wouldn't it make more sense to have a general-purpose one that could not just fetch toilet paper, but could do a lot of other fetching as well. Special purpose toilet paper delivering robot? No need.

And yet of all the Charmin ideas, this seems to me the most viable and, ahem, useful.

That is, when compared with SmellSense. 

The predictive SmellSense is an electronic sensor monitoring system that allows users to plan ahead and check how the bathroom smells without having to experience it yourself. It's calibrated to detect carbon dioxide found in a "toot" or "two." SmellSense notifies via a GO/NO GO display on the status of the stench. It lets you know when you can go in without an offending nasal assault. (Source: Tech Republic)

As with the case of the missing toilet paper - although perhaps not as pronounced - most of my close encounters with bad smelling bathrooms has been in the public realm. In a home setting, you can usually rely on family and friends to give you a bit of a warning. Or figure it out for youself pretty quickly. 

So that leaves places like gas station restrooms. Are they going to install these? I think not.

Sometimes you just have to hold your nose and take care of business. 

If someone's going to improve public restrooms, they should have an claxon horn start screaming if somone pees on the seat or tosses a tampon (used, of course) on the floor and leaving it there. Or outlaw all Porta Potties, other than the upscale ones with multiple stalls, sinks and flushable toilets. 

And jeez Louise, if we end up with sensor-based systems to do our smelling for us, will the nose become a vestigial organ?

Whoever it is in the Charmin division at P&G, they must be having some fun for themselves. Thus the V.I.Pee which promises concertgoers:

... a "premium" experience "enhanced with Oculus Rift S VR" to transport a GOer missing out on any moment to the front row, "to never miss a beat on the seat." Joining the event virtually "right where you left off before the call of nature rolled in," making the bathroom "the best seat in the house." 

So, how is wearing Oculus virtual reality headgear going to do anything about the cleanliness, godliness, and rank smells that come with being in a public restroom? Do you just hang outside waiting for the SmellSense to give you the go ahead? Which will never happen in a Porta Potty, which is the faciliyt of choice for outdoor concerts. (Not that I attend (m)any.) Not to mention that SmellSense wouldn't warn you about the pee on the seat and the floor. Yuck on yuck!

Anyway, I'm guessing that Charmin was just having a bit of fun, tech-style. 

The Mr. Whipple ads were the first one that made me dislike Charmin and resist all calls to squeeze the Charmin. (I grew up in a Scott house, and I've maintained a lifetime worth of brand loyalty.) No, Charmin's not as bad as Quilted Northern, but none of these tech gadgets are going to get me to change my mind (or my toilet paper.)

Talk about a golden parachute

If you look at it one way, Dennis Muilenburg's career at Boeing was spectacularly successful. Thirty-five years ago, he started working there as an intern. Through luck, pluck, true grit, hard work, inspiration, perspiration, and no doubt some measure of at least a couple of the other things that go into the sort of career-building that elevates someone to the highest reaches in an organization - things like politicking, bootlicking, bullshitting, credithogging and backstabbing - he became chairman and CEO. 

Then, oopsie, a couple of Boeing Max 737's fell from the sky - resulting in the deaths of 346 folks - and all of a sudden it seemed that Muilenburg wouldn't be playing out his full career with the company. Not that he was directly responsible for faulty designs, poor quality assurance, anti-safety pricing practices. But it all happened on his watch, and he did preside over the cost-cutting and schedule-accelerating initiatives that resulted in plenty of dubious (and it turns out dangerous) decisions, and he did some pretty sketchy pressuring of regulators to let the Max 737's stay in the air (theoretically: the problem was they weren't staying in the air), so...

The first sign that those two crashes would be costly to Mueilenburg was his "decision" in November not to take his bonus - a forgone goodie-bag that was worth about $14M.

But there's costly and then there's costly. 

It may have been difficult to give up that $14M - end of year expenses are high for everyone. And it must have been tough being shown the exit door of the company you've been worth your entire adult life, which is what happened to Muilenburg: he was forced out. But once the first of the year rolled around, it emerged that while he was shoved out that exit door, the plane really hadn't left the ground yet, there was a bouncy castle for him to land on, and the parachute he'd been given was worth $62 million. (Sadly, he did have to forfeit a $14.6 million severance package.)

So it's no surprise that:

Family members of crash victims told The Washington Post they are “sickened” by Muilenburg’s payout, saying he presided over a profit-obsessed corporate culture that led the company to cut corners. (Source: Wapo)

The overall amount set aside for the families of the 346 victims is $100 million. Which is not a whole hell of a lot less than Muilenburg's walking away money, once you throw in stock options worth $18.5 million, bringing the payday to $80.5 million. 

The $100 million is the fund that Boeing has set aside for victim compensation. Litigation may result in payouts that up this dramatically, especially when you judges and juries start taking the Muilenburg package into consideration. 

Boeing has "listened" to what the devastated families have to say.

After reviewing the families’ comments, Boeing spokesman Mike Friedman said: “We are truly sorry and offer our deepest sympathies to the families and friends who lost loved ones in the accidents of Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302."

Well, ain't nothing going to bring back the folks that died, but I'm sure their families could live without Boeing sympathies. Or with Muilenburg's, either.

In a video posted on Boeing’s website April 4, Muilenburg said: “We at Boeing are sorry for the lives lost in the recent 737 Max accidents.” He added “I cannot remember a more heart-wrenching time in my career with this great company.”

I'm sure that this all was heart-wrenching for Muilenburg. He's probably a nice guy. A smart guy. A "good" guy. Who in a senior position - with the notable exception of the current occupant of the Oval Office - wouldn't be heart-wrenched at the thought of the outfit they presided over having responsibility for the deaths of so many people? 

But while his heart may be wrenched, his wallet is intact. He's now financially set for a very, very comfortable life. 

In responding to the Max 737 debacle, Boeing's made a number of missteps. Here's hoping that Muilenburg's golden parachute is the end of it.

What's the Catch? I don't think there is one...

With so much of technology these days, whenever I hear about a new app, my reaction is generally "why". As in "Why are the best minds of this generation wasting their time solving problems that don't exist?"

But when I heard about Catch, my reaction was "Great! What took you so long?"

I worked in the "gig economy" for many years. I became a freelancer after many years in corporate. I had savings, a 401K, COBRA to ease me into covering my own health insurance...

But for someone just starting out, or relatively new to the game, figuring out how to figure out how things work when you're a company of one can be daunting. Enter Catch:

The startup’s focus: helping freelancers and gig-economy workers who don’t have benefits deal with the headaches of taxes, health insurance, and saving for retirement. (Source: Boston Globe)

Tagline: Benefits for people without benefits.

I like it. 

I also like their story. 

Catch was a struggling Boston/Cambridge startup, with one product (their system), ten employees, and 5,000 customers. But when they went looking for $5M to grow their company to the next level, they were getting zero traction with the Boston VC community.

“Andrew [Ambrosino] and I were nobodies,” [Kristen] Anderson [co-founder] wrote on Twitter recently. “No Ivy League. No previous exit, or failures of note. Great VC firms dragged us along.”

The duo were hoping to raise $5 million for the startup, Catch.

“We were turned down or ghosted by at least 50 VC firms,” including local investors such as Matrix Partners and General Catalyst Partners.

Even though there's a ton of money (much of it insane) out there, attracting capital has always been tough, even back in the day when investors weren't looking for unicorns that were going to earn them billions and before crazy ideas were more likely than sane ideas to become unicorns. At one point in my career, I worked for a small company, and we scrounged around for a while before we found someone to buy us. Admittedly, we were a bad-ish bet, but we were asked to make a number of pitches and almost got to the altar once or twice. So I know something of what Anderson and Ambrosino were going through.

And then they decide to apply to Y-Combinator, a born in Cambridge but now San Francisco-based outfit that specializes in providing small amounts of seed money - and training and guidance - to startups in their earliest stages. 

Applying was something of a Hail Mary: the founders were seriously thinking of shutting their company down.

And they had a well-thought out exit plan that wasn't based on screwing their employees:

“We’d already done the contingency planning of shutting down the company,” Anderson told me. They didn’t want to leave Catch’s 10 employees in the lurch, without a final paycheck and some severance. 

What's not to love?

Catch - because it alreayd had product, employees, and customers - didn't exactly fit the Y Combinator bill. But they were accepted, even though they're "tougher to get into than Harvard or Stanford."

Being asked to participate in Y Combinator doesn't guarantee success, but the program has a good track record, and being blessed by them does pretty much guarantee that companies will get a serious look from VC's. 

For Catch, the immediate payoff wasn't the $150K they got from Y Combinator (which got YC a 7 percent stake). It was the "seal of approval" that enabled them to secure $850K worth of life-saving money from some individual investors. 

The longer run payoff was being able to turn down a Boston VC firm that came through with a $3M offer, and forge a deal for $5M "from a group of California and New York venture capital firms."

Just after that, TechCrunch, the blog of record for the startup scene, wrote a piece calling Catch “one of the hottest Y Combinator startups.” At a dinner at the Four Seasons in San Francisco, Anderson was introduced to a VC who called Catch “the belle of the ball.”

Many of the Y Combinator startups end up staying in California, but Anderson and Ambrosino were committed to keeping their team in Boston. Anderson also appreciated that:

"There isn’t the rock-star status for founders in Boston that there is in San Francisco. It was very humbling. But it’s also one of the reasons I love being here. It reminds you that you’re not as good as you think you are. You’re here to do the work.”

Sounds like the Boston I know and love.

And that work? 

The latter half of 2019 involved “a lot of really unsexy, laborious work” on agreements with insurance companies and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services so that Catch could offer freelancers and sole proprietors health insurance in 38 states.

Excellent!

As for the Boston VC personality, there is something of a downer downside:

“Everyone in Boston, including VCs, starts with the premise of ‘Here’s why this won’t work. I’ve got 14 reservations about it,’ ” she says. “I’m hoping that Boston can suspend a little of its disbelief more, and let some portion of its founders succeed."

That sounds like the Boston I know and love.  (I am, after all, the one who wrote the risk analysis section of every business plan I ever worked on.) But I'm sure hoping that these founders succeed. They're local. And Catch sure beats yet another app that helps you animate cat videos.

All work and no Playmobil

Off-site. Kick-off. Team-building. Whatever they called it, I always had mixed emotions about these corporate events. On the one hand, you're given a "GET OUT OF OFFICE FREE" card. Sometimes covering a few days. If it was the annual sales kick-off, it sometimes involved a trip. Bermuda. Las Vegas. The Cape. Sure, a sales kick-off likely involved my trying to provide product information to a bunch of bleary-eyed salesfolks who'd been up partying until five minutes before my preso. Which was never much fun. And it was a bit of time away, and before the advent of email and laptops and mobil phones, you had no means to keeping up with your real work back at the ranch. So it was a break of sorts. 

On the other hand, any group event that dragged you out of the office was likely to involve some sort of ridiculous exercise or another. Naturally, much of the time at these meetings was spent writing stuff on flip charts - mission statements, vision statements, strategies, tactics, goals - only to see the flip charts rolled up tightly, secured with a couple of rubber bands, then hauled back to the office, where they sat in a corner somewhere until someone decided to toss them out or take them home and use as a DuraFlame substitute. 

But there was almost always something or other to get the creative juices going, or do some self- and/or team-exploration.

I went to one sales kick-off where we took a mini-personality test and were then grouped by color code. Not surprising, all the home office folks fell into peripheral categories: HR, was I recall, Orange; Finance was Green; and Product Management and anything to do with thinking and planning was Blue. I was part of Team Blue. The bulk of the attendees were sales people. And they all landed in the Red, or, as they announced, FLAMING RED category. With a few exceptions. We had one guy in the Blue section who was from sales, and was pissed off and miserable that he wasn't in FLAMING RED. Have at it, my friend. 

I'm not sure what identifying us by color coding was supposed to bring about - probably something having to do with 'it takes all kinds' - but all I remember is the FLAMING REDs jeering at the rest of us home office Orange, Green, Blue folks for being pussies. 

A year or so later - another company, another offsite - we took the Myers-Briggs personality assessments. I was an INTJ (borderline INTP). As very few people are INTJ's to begin with, and with INTJ's being something of a real rarity among women, this test confirmed what I had suspected all along: I'm an oddball. 

What else have I done at these events? Helped write and perform a company cheer (as part of a group that I can guarantee had zero experience with cheerleading). Sat back to back with a complete stranger to share innermost thoughts. (I cheated.) Escaped from an escape room (barely: I was teamed with two others and it turned out we were the biggest over-analytic wonks in the overall group, taking way too much time thinking things through while other teams just jumped into action). I tried (unsuccessfully) to build a helicopter out of Tinker Toys. (My team's rendering of a chopper was an abject failure. We were apparently the only team that didn't have the foresight to include a closet Leonardo.)

This Tinker Toy exercise came to mind when I read about Playmobil's efforts to get into the corporate market by bringing out a product called Playmobil Pro:

— “an innovative modelling system for professionals,” as the company had described it. The idea, apparently, was to bring Playmobil figures into offices so employees could creatively “role play” or “find new business solutions” or “visualize stakeholders” or “bring theoretical discussions to life.” According to the sales materials, the same toys you loved as a child now “can also be used by adults in the frame of a professional context to aid in prototyping, project management, creative workshops and much, much more.” The kit was developed in cooperation with such organizations as Deutsche Bank, Adidas, Daimler’s Joint Think Tank and the Barcelona School of Management. (Source: Washington Post)

Deutsche Bank? Do you suppose they suggested Playmobil figures who could do money laundering?

Anyway, in bringing out Playmobil Pro, Playmobil was trying to get a bit of Lego's piece of the action, as they've had a corporate system of their own for quite a while:

For at least two decades, Lego has been finding its way into corporate settings, and a whole methodology called Lego Serious Play has emerged. A corporate trainer, called a certified Lego Serious Play facilitator, brings a pile of Lego into a conference room and guides a team of employees through building exercises meant to spur new ideas and, according to the Lego website, “unlock imagination and innovation.”

Guess that Tinker Toy exercise I did twenty years ago was a knockoff. Maybe I would have done better with the helicopter if there'd been a Tinker Toy Serious Play faciltator there.

It should go without saying that, when I started reading about this, my eyes rolled into the back of my skull. 

But then...

Turns out that, unlike the Lego system, which I would have been wooden (plastic?) and terrible at, I rather liked the Playmobile Pro concept:

The Playmobil Pro kit has:

...drawers for figures, costumes, accessories, sticky notes and pens. Instead of the usual colorful Playmobil figures, the ones in the kit were completely white — without skin, hair, clothing colors or facial expressions. “The classic Playmobil figure has a smile, and maybe that’s not always great for business,” Seeger said. Earlier tests with an array of skin and hair colors had immediately seemed problematic for group dynamics across many different countries. “It quickly became apparent that plain white figures would distinguish Playmobil Pro,” he said. The kit comes with erasable pens that allow people to personalize the figures by drawing on them.

Plus costumes and accessories. And there's no trained facilitator making suggestions. It's more or less, a "here you go" approach, with folks using the figures to apply to whatever problem it is they're trying to solve.

Not that I have any desire to get back into a corporate setting, but take those characters and turn them into something? This is a writer's dream. 

And not that any of this - Lego abstractions or Playmobil little people - is necessarily going to make anyone anywhere make better business decisions. But as an off-site exercise, playing with Playmobil sounds like fun. Beats sitting back to back with a complete stranger and fibbing about deep, dark thoughts.