Erroneous! Erroneous on both counts!

This has little to do with this post--it just a picture of a building in the Old Market. Image via Wikipedia

I’ve already had an interesting morning. When I say “interesting”, what I mean–if you can follow the intricate language pathways to follow–is that it has been bad. In a meeting that has now taken the coveted #1 position as Worst Meeting I’ve Ever Had, not only was my own job ability mocked and ridiculed, but my publication–The Onion–as well.

Only a person of limited mental faculties would think that The Onion is, as the person with whom I met this morning put it, a “small and worthless operation”. In fact, I would go so far as to say that only a severely misinformed and moronic person would think that I am not particularly good at my job. Where then lies the hostility?

Despite my proclivity for writing about personal matters (in fact, I love writing about personal matters when they relate to books I’m reviewing or whatnot; anytime an anecdote can help my point or add interesting flavour, it’s fair game), this is not a post purely to vent. I have a lovely and amazing redhead-who-is-not-my-sister (amongst others, including my sister herself) to whom I can (and will, no doubt) exorcize my frustrations. This post, Dear Reader, is about ignorance. My inspiration for this topic came directly from my thinking about what went wrong at The Horrible Meeting.

A rather large part of my current position is client contact. You see, in order for a publication to make money, it must solicit advertisers (take notes; there will be an exam!). Much to the surprise of many, businesses typically do not seek out publications in which to run ads, mostly because–I find–business owners hate that they have to advertise.

Allow me a brief second to aside: There are very few businesses that do not, under any circumstances, have to advertise. It’s just a plain and simple fact that, after a certain point, a business of any kind needs to get their name out there. Examples of places in Omaha that don’t need to run ads, in my opinion: La Buvette, M’s Pub…and uh…that’s it. Maybe there’s one or two more, but aside from them, it’s a fact of life that one has to market.

In the interest of making contact with new potential clients, I am talking all day; every time I go anywhere, I could potentially be working. Going to bars and restaurants has the potential to turn from fun to work in .5 seconds if I see a business owner, or if someone recognizes me. I’m a pretty social guy to the outside world, but those folks on the inside pretty well know that there’s a nerdy, dorktastic homebody at my core. That said, talking to new people in social settings or in their own businesses is a fun, easy and natural-to-me way of making new client contacts. At the opposite end of the spectrum is just picking up the phone and cold calling a business. In doing this, not only is there a sort of art in getting to a decision-maker, but you oftentimes find yourself directed towards an independent agency.

Unpleasant or brisk interactions while doing this job are caused only by one of the following things:

• Being familiar with The Onion and disliking the content
• Knowing just enough about The Onion to know that we’re an alternative weekly publication, and going no further

Another brief aside: There are plenty of businesses whose marketing decision makers–agency or not–are aware of and even love The Onion, but their business simply doesn’t fit in the demographic. That is 100% fine with me. I understand if it’s not for everybody, and if you, as a marketer, are in possession of all of the facts and stats and demographic info and know it’s not a good fit, then godspeed. I have had extremely pleasant and rapport-building interactions with people and owners who get it and love it, but know it’s not for their audience.

The first bullet point there is one that’s almost impossible to overcome. If I speak to an easily offended or extremely conservative business owner who has no desire to overlook their personal objections to see how powerful the readership is, then that’s more a less an insurmountable brick wall. Despite the fact that I’ve been told that The Onion is “filth” and asked how I could “in good conscience publish this garbage”, I generally don’t hold any ill will, and in fact, I tend to set aside a little pity for the close minded. It’s interesting to note that one of a couple locations of a franchise as well known for their misogynistic approach towards wait-staff as they are for having an owl on their signage decided that we were too inappropriate a publication to distribute. How’s that for cognitive dissonance? But I digress.

The other bullet point is the one that most cheeses me, and is the one about which I write today–for it can be boiled down to ignorance. It’s been said that having no knowledge about something is bad, but having a little knowledge about something is dangerous, and that’s very true in this case. The person this morning, with whom I had interacted in the past a couple times, was not originally familiar with my product. However, the places which this person represents would be extremely (in my humble opinion) well served, marketing wise, by appearing in our pages. Their inability to look past any of their initial impressions is ignorance on the highest level. To this person, we are a fly-by-night, underground operation with papers printed on dad’s Office Depot Lasermax 5000, instead of what we really are, which is a nationally syndicated publication that also prints in New York, Chicago, Austin, Denver, Washington DC and Minneapolis–to name a few (and we also print in an extremely nice, modern facility).

Maybe we aren’t a good fit for their clients, I have to allow for that–but the fact of the matter is that, due to what must be stubbornness and what is surely ignorance, we’ll never know.

There are so many instances in modern life where people hold to steadfast, preconceived notions without so much as a nod towards the idea that those notions could be incorrect. For some, the act of being wrong or realizing they’re not as well informed as they could be is an invalidation of ones self as a professional and as a person. I’m definitely a person who likes to be right–I like to keep well informed, and I’m awfully stubborn if I think I know something that is challenged; I understand the mindset that causes such severe reactions as the one I suffered this morning. However, I’ve learned to see through that self-induced echo chamber thinking and realize that we can’t know everything. It’s why I love to learn, and it’s why I love to be taught. I long ago abandoned the idea that I know everything, and have embraced the truth that in the big scheme of things, none of us knows anything. It’s why I get so engrossed when the people in my life wax poetic about their passions and obsessions, and why I get all doe-eyed when I learn about genetic mutation.

Maybe it really struck home for me–dealing with that person this morning–because I saw for a second what I could have been on the track towards at one point: yelling at someone who was just trying desperately to allow for deeper understanding.

Despite how offended I was at some of the personal attacks on my own character and professional ability, I find myself in the position of hoping that that person simply learns how to learn.

(By the way: For whatever reason [probably because the movie is hilarious as hell] a lot of stuff from Wedding Crashers jumps into my head. For instance, the title of this post is brought to you by Vince Vaughn http://www.hark.com/clips/zbhjzpzqvm-erroneous )

On Death

This morning I was woken up by the sound of laughter. This occurrence is highly unusual, since for as long as I’ve been living here with my parents, I’ve had my weekdays fairly regimented with regards to mornings. 10am wake-up followed by a whole routine made up of stretching, coffee, eggs, television and showering. The fact of the matter is that lately I’d been waking up a few minutes ahead of the alarm, presumably my body’s way of telling me just how much it hates the sound of loud, static music. A partial possible contributing factor to my slightly early wake-ups is telemarketers, who seem to make a habit of calling immediately after 9am. To combat this, I decided a week ago to unplug the cable connected to the phone on the table right by the head of my bed.

All of the above has been a quick way to explain why the 4am phone call didn’t wake me, and why I was instead awoken by the laughter of my assembled family.

This morning at 4:25, my grandfather passed away. He was 87. We called him ‘Bop’.

It was quick, we were told. He was having trouble breathing for the first bed check at his nursing home, and then later on towards morning he stopped altogether. They attempted CPR, but the folks at the home were convinced that he was dead by the time he arrived at the hospital.

My parents got the phone call as he was being put on the ambulance, and they beat Bop to the ER. I learned all of this after the fact after several minutes of  in-bed listening to the conversation taking place in the kitchen several walls over. After listening a bit more and fully waking up, I ventured out to find my mother and more or less the rest of the Omaha-area clan, sans children.

“Bop’s dead, isn’t he?” I asked my mom. I knew the answer already. She nodded.

Everyone had been together since much earlier in the morning, and everything had slowed to a crawl as we waited for my dad to return from a hospital appointment for which he had been fasting (getting blood tests done or something of the like).

Today has been my first experience with the business and impact of dying, and it’s been altogether morbidly fascinating, emotional, frenetic and sad. However, everything is imbued with a sort of palpable energy. From the moment I stepped into the kitchen I knew everyone had their game faces on. It seemed so clear to me then how everyone knows what their role is whenever there’s a big life event like a death. Everyone has a purpose about them, and everyone is aware of the goal. But it’s in moments like that very first one, waiting for my dad to come back so we could go on to breakfast, that really speak the most.

Despite all being cut from mostly the same cloth–what family doesn’t have its own unique DNA to it, after all?–in these sort of ‘hurry-up-and-wait’ moments, you could really see how different people take things in. Some compensate to the point of overcompensating with humour, some withdraw inside, and others become even more terse and full of business.

I’ve had moments today, some of which are too personal for me to publish so openly, and others where I’ve been moved by everyone else’s emotion. Within the first few minutes of the day I didn’t think I would be all that effected. The Bop we children knew was never terribly open, and especially in these last years–the years where I’ve been a grown man–he has been more or less a shell of who I’m told he once was. That said, I’ve been intensely struck by the finality of death in a way I haven’t been before–oddly not even when a very close friend passed away years ago.

There’s also a surreality to a day that takes you from Village Inn to a now empty nursing home room to a funeral home to a lawyer’s office and then to a box full of photos older than your parents. All of those photos and letters contain memories: memories of love, memories of loss, memories of old friends, memories of children. These were insights into a person I didn’t know, but more than that, they were insights into being a human. They really shook me in an odd, almost (pardon maybe going over the top with language) existential way.

When I woke up I didn’t quite know how I would feel. I think I know now, after today, and I think I’ll know even more leading up to the wake and funeral: I want to gather up everyone I love and stop them from ever leaving. What I was exposed to today was not only the reality of the death of a family member, but the reality that what I might be afraid of more than anything else is losing the people I love from my life for good. How do people face that? How are my dad and his sisters dealing with not having their parents alive? I want to round up everyone I love and just keep them safe and near forever.

Is It Over? Part 2

Image via Wikipedia

On Monday I began talking about endings, and how I feel that, more and more, we are seeing a difference between endings and conclusions. I started out by examining long-form magazine and newspaper articles and how not all of the reading public continue past the bump. Then, I examined the small-bits-after-the-credits trend for big budget films, and how only an informed, insider audience would be able to take advantage of the added information those scenes provide. Today, I’m going to talk about this phenomenon in relation to America’s two favourite things to talk about these days: sports and politics.

I love sports. In fact, I’m enamored with them—I can’t get enough. Sports are the purest form of competition, and have a tendency to explain complex sociological, cultural societal narratives in very simple ways. In fact, Soccer is how I live my life. Yesterday, after a shockingly bad performance by the English soccer team I support, I had to take a short nap to keep myself from exploding. All of that because of a draw. That’s right, the result that got my grits enough to force me to slumber wasn’t even a loss.

And it’s the idea of the draw that brings me around to sports today. In what would be considered “regular season” soccer games, if the teams are level on goals scored after 90 minutes, the game is over. A draw is the result. In the sports we most covet here in the USA, a draw is almost never the case; American sports fans simply do not accept a draw as an ending nor conclusion. On Sunday, while at the gym, I became enthralled by the Oakland Raiders vs. Kansas City Chiefs NFL game. It was the 4th quarter and Oakland made some great plays and a field goal to even the score at 20.  I knew NFL games had overtime rules—as all USA sports leagues do (except for MLS, the soccer league)—but I didn’t know what they were. I was expecting some more excellent back and forth excitement! Instead, since the NFL’s rules are simply “first to score wins”, overtime amounted to simply trying to get a field goal. I was disappointed, but remembered a sports story from a little while back about draws in the NFL.

In 2008, the Cincinnati Bengals and Philadelphia Eagles played out the 17th tie in NFL history, a history which began in 1922. In 86 years of football, only 17 draws. And, apparently, fans hated it. To quote the author of the above-linked article:

Needless to say, ties are the worst and football fans detest them. NFL fans want a winner and a loser. There’s no solace in tying, only frustration. (http://bleacherreport.com/articles/82672-eagles-bengals-its-like-kissing-your-sister)

In case you’re wondering what the deal with the sister kissing is, that quote is attributed to Navy-team coach Eddie Erdelatz in 1953 after Navy and Duke drew a game (source).

The intense distate—hatred, if you will—of the draw game in American sports is at an odd contrast to the way people interact with their other media. Instead of simply accepting the ending (the end of regulation time), American sports viewers demand a conclusion. The same people who don’t read to the conclusion of newspaper or magazine articles and don’t sit through the credits for the conclusive scene simply cannot accept an a tie game. The difference has to do with equality. It seems to me that Americans simply cannot accept equality as an ending; one side simply, as a rule, must be better. One team or the other must be better for a conclusion to be acceptable.

And that brings us to politics—more specifically, the mid-term elections. Just as with the reader/viewership pool when it comes to media, there is a voter pool when it comes to the political landscape. According to Pew Research, 63% of Republicans and Republican-leaning news consumers use Fox News as their primary source of news information (in the interest of fairness: the report states “insufficient number of cases to profile MSNBC audience”). If we compare hearing a news story to reading a magazine article, that 63% are a portion of the voting pool who are not reading after the bump, not fact checking, not investigating on their own. Whenever there is a situation wherein a single pool of listeners, viewers or readers can consume the same media but have a different sense of the ending, there is an information flow problem.

Fox News is in the position of controlling the non-bump readers, and can not only give them a false conclusion, but can do so so convincingly, its viewers think they’re getting an ending. This last mid-term, Fox and its on-air endorsements and fear mongering convinced that 63% that they had heard all they needed to hear. To them, the conclusion to the story was to vote out the Democrats. And that’s exactly what they did.

Is it over? Part 1

Today I sat down to write and realized there were tons of things I wanted to talk about, but I didn’t want to be schizophrenic about this endeavor, so I thought it out; “What do these different topics have in common?”. Interestingly enough, it dawned on me pretty quickly. I want to talk about endings. More specifically though, I want to talk about whether or not something really is over when we’ve reached the ending. The more I started drafting my brain onto the computer, the more I realized I had a lot to say on the subject, so I’ve split the posts up for easier reading.

It seems these days that a specific event, film, show or anything’s specific ending isn’t necessarily its conclusion. In print, we have print articles that are often “continued online”, blockbuster movies have a trend of tacking on short bits after the credits, and then there’s the issue which kick-started this whole endings thought process, which is sports overtime. In addition, there are lessons to be learned about our current political climate buried on all of this ending/conclusion talk. Upon examining the above cases as a whole, I find myself wanting to draw a parallel through them that has to do with dedication.

I have exactly two magazine subscriptions: GQ and Esquire. I had never subscribed to anything before 2008 when I first asked to get GQ in my mail, but it seemed like a no-brainer since I found myself buying each issue from the newsstand, and the subscription price was miles cheaper. In essence, I am a dedicated follower not only of menswear and fashion styles, but of GQ as a magazine and a brand. While a certain percentage of my enjoyment in each issue does come from the style-watching and photo editorials, I also am rather fond of the celebrity interviews and journalistic pieces they often run, some of which have a tendency to get quite long. GQ’s tactic, instead of having a string of text-laden pages inside their image-heavy magazine, is to bump oftentimes half or more of the article to the back of the issue, with

Continued on page #

at the bottom. Years ago, when I was wee-lad working for my High School paper, I remember being taught about the notion that, the longer an article went on, the more readers you would lose, ending with some staggering statistic I can’t recall right now that deals with how few people will finish an article if there’s a bump. That idea speaks to the notion about endings—an article may, in fact, be done for that page, and a reader might be satisfied with that, but the conclusion doesn’t come until after that bump. All of this means that only the most dedicated and interested folks arrive at the conclusion. Even more interesting is not only the knowledge lost by those who don’t “Continue on”, but the knowledge gained by those who do. Suddenly, there are two distinct audiences for the same content.

The same applies in movies, specifically blockbuster “nerdy” ones. If you’ve taken a minute to click on one of those links to the left of what you’re reading to explore the bits about me, you’ll find that I fancy myself something of a geek, pop culturally. I grew up on comic books and continue my obsession with them to this day, and I live and breathe Star Wars when oxygen doesn’t suffice. Needless to say, I’ve stood in midnight lines to see the likes of Iron Man 2, The Dark Knight, most of the Harry Potter films and many countless others in the past and still to come (I can hardly contain my excitement for Tron: Legacy, or Captain America, The First Avenger!). For many films in this genre, there is a built-in club of exclusivity due to the fact that they’re based on existing pop culture niche works. It’s a simple fact that people love to be a part of groups, and nothing gets a group going (and paying for things) more than insider information—things which reward their being a part of that niche.

When Jane and Bob Public went to see Iron Man 2, they got a funny action film with explosions, Scarlett Johansson and Robert Downey Jr. And when the soundtrack started up and the credits rolled on, that was their ending. But to the insiders, those dedicated enough to their fandom to have the knowledge, there was more. Once we learned no animals were harmed during filming and saw the copyright information, we were treated to the conclusion: Thor’s hammer, Mjolnir, found in the desert. Those who stayed in their seats a few minutes longer now have more information the next time around—they know of Thor’s in-universe appearance much earlier, and they now carry that knowledge into the upcoming films. When it comes time for Iron Man 3 or Thor’s own film, some members of the very same audience will know less than the others.

In Part 2, I’ll be looking at overtime in sports, and how it differs from the consumed media ending/conclusion paradigm and I’ll  apply these ingrained principles to our post mid-term political climate. You better stay tuned!

P.S.: It would go against my nature not to at least acknowledge the inherent funniness not only of a paragraph like the above one in a bit about endings and conclusions, but of a “P.S.” at the end considering the meaning:

A postscript, abbreviated P.S., is writing added after the main body of a letter (or other body of writing). The term comes from the Latin post scriptum, an expression meaning “written after”^[1][2] (which may be interpreted in the sense of “that which comes after the writing”). (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postscript)

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UPDATE: Olbermann back on Tuesday

 

In my last post [Baseball analogy], I talked about Keith Olbermann’s suspension from his MSNBC show for not donating to political figures through the correct corporate channels. After a weekend of quite a bit of press coverage, not only did it turn out that MSNBC’s own Joe Scarborough donated $4200 or more to Republicans, but he was never censured as Olbermann was.

Those findings out, plus a public outcry from many viewers, caused MSNBC Phil Griffin to change his mind and return Olbermann to the airwaves.