Archive for August, 2011

If you have not seen the movie “Up” you should.  There’s a scene where there are dogs at a dog park and they have collars that enable them to speak English to humans.  In some ways it’s very touching – it’s as if they have always wanted to communicate with humans and now they finally can.  There’s a video of that part of it on YouTube here.    The hitch is that they are still dogs, so while conveying their true feelings to humans, they can still be distracted by things like squirrels.

So I was talking with my friend Michael about how many people at work get distracted by so many things that they should not be focused on, and we agreed that it would be funny, and useful to call those “squirrels” in a work setting.  Michael then went so far as to suggest that he should have squirrel stickers to hand to people to let them know that even if they are talking about something with amazing potential (which is often the case), it’s still a distraction from what we really need to accomplish.

So I decided to make those squirrel stickers for Michael, because I think it’s a fun way to make a great point.

I have never had stickers made before, so I did an internet search in my browser (though I really wasn’t browsing – I was actually intent on buying something, but that word choice is the subject of another rethink blog) for stickers. Zazzle came up and I went to their site and to their credit, they have a pretty good user interface and their sticker-maker technology is good.  So I uploaded my squirrel image (below) and placed the order and paid extra for overnight delivery – knowing I needed it on August 31. 

So on August 30, I went back to the order confirmation e-mail I got to check on the status of my order and to my amazement I learned that my order had been cancelled.  After a little back-and-forth with customer support, they claim they sent me an e-mail explaining that the order was cancelled for some policy reason that they didn’t / wouldn’t explain. 

Michael (who loves thousands of miles away from me) was to be in town on August 31 and I intended to give him his squirrel stickers and Zazzle completely failed me in my attempt, and worse, they made no effort to remedy the situation, let alone explain it.  They need to do some serious rethinking over there or they will be out of business.

I was angry, but I was not about to give up.  There’s a Kinkos (which I guess isn’t called Kinkos anym0re – I guess it’s FedEx Office).  I went to the Kinkos at the Washington State Convention Center and they took good care of me.  I had my stickers in less than three hours and it was less than Zazzle was going to charge me.  Hooray for Kinkos!

Squirrel!

-Ric

Last week I shared this photo with a number of people and it got a lot of laughs.

As I thought about it more over the weekend, there is a rethink message in here as well, some better than others.

The fact is, we get bombarded with images and messages these days and more often than not images come with messages telling us how to interpret them.  Even though it’s really obvious in some cases what the messages should be (like with the above, we know it’s for a hand dryer), because there is no text under this hand dryer, someone added their own commentary that, out of context, actually makes a lot of sense.

I tend to steer clear of politics on this site, but it’s a glaring illustration of this point.  People losing jobs, houses, and healthcare are the statistics we are shown, and different groups offer their own explanation of these fact-based images and often the explanations have nothing in common.

Corporations do the same thing.  When news is better, or worse, than expeced, corporations often offer a “narrative” or “talk track” to share with reporters, shareholders, and Wall Street to help explain the “images” or facts of their financial results.   Some corporations even go so far as to manipulate their financial results in hopes that the numbers alone will tell a particular story that is in line with how the corporation wants to be perceived.

So be skeptical of both the images, the numbers, and the words that go along with them.  Just because they seem to make sense, it’s worth taking a second look to see if the description has little or nothing to do with what the image, or the numbers, really mean.

My next blog will be back in the more conventional vein of this site – where I recently tried to change a flight online, it didn’t work so I sent them an e-mail and their response was to expect it to take up to a week for them to get back to me.  The flight I am trying to change is in two days . . . Alaska Airlines needs to do some rethinking in their customer support arena.

-Ric