(My “Content and Coffee” tour is resuming after a brief respite. Below is a description, from article, originally posted on Linkedin in April 19th 2017. )
Both are long-time friends with great ideas about creating, managing, publishing, and curating content, who happen to like coffee (what are the odds?). Glad to be working with both of them on the West Michigan Content Strategy Meetup.
A couple of weeks ago, I completed an engagement as a SharePoint administrator. I’d contacted a few friends (some of them are actually former colleagues and clients!) about “catching up” over coffee. Then at our content strategy meetup last week, and talking to members, the idea evolved into a listening tour where I learn, and document, as much as a I can about all forms of content.
I’m planning some more stops in West Michigan, Detroit and Chicago in the next few weeks, and possibly Whipple Ohio (the quality and volume of happy content there is stunning).
I’ll also be making a nostalgia trip to the East Coast later in the year, so I’d be up for content talk at Fenway Park, or in Bar Harbor, or at the Delaware Water Gap. I might even be talked into Glastonbury, Connecticut.
Let’s talk! I’d love to hear more about content tribulations and triumphs from all of my content friends and friends to be.
If you don’t like coffee, that is not a showstopper. We can make it Content and Skimmed Milk, Content and Sushi, Content and IPA, or Content and Onion Rings.
Because everything goes with content!
If we can’t meet in person, let’s talk via phone, Skype or your favorite communication vehicle. Please contact me here and we’ll make arrangements.
My son’s school held an event last week where parents were invited for coffee and conversation with the school principal. Some of the discussions were specific to the school, though many were more-universal topics: dress codes, athletics, standardized tests… for all of these there were clear next step for action.
Heavy-backpack syndrome was also brought up. There were a few soft recommendations, but no action items.
I entered parenthood a little later than most people do, but I’d been reading about backpack burden for many years. Until my son entered 6th grade last year, this wasn’t a proximate issue. In 7th grade now, he is a strapping young man, bigger and taller than most of the kids his age. His backpack, replete with books for 6 classes, change of clothes for sports, a water bottle, and homework projects, causes him pain in his neck, back and arms.
Not severe pain, but daily pain. If you’ve suffered carpal-tunnel, or other repetitive-stress injuries, minor stress on a regular basis can become a debilitating condition.
His current daily load, weighs in at 30+ lbs. To read that term (30+ lbs) that might not sound like a significant burden. So think of this it way, imagine yourself hauling around two of these all day:
(Source ehow.com)
When the backpack burden comes up in conversations with schools, some talk about the future: when all the materials will be digital and the kids will just need to lug around a tablet.
Some teachers and many parents, prefer to talk about the distant past. Back when they lugged a heavy backpack. I always grit my teeth during the “in my day” rants, which soon decay into tales of a 15-mile walk to school: barefoot in the snow, uphill both ways and they “didn’t complain!” Sounds to me like they’re complaining now, about events that years, or decades in the past.
The fact is that is students’ backpack burden is a problem that has been discussed for generations with seemingly little effort to provide solutions. Because it doesn’t directly effect those in positions of power, the adults.
It’s not enough for adults to talk about, or hear about the problem. Change will only happen if there is first-hand experience with the burden.
Thus I propose this empathy-building exercise:
For one month, school staff, and parents would be asked to lug around 25+ lbs of dead weight in a backpack and walk with it for at least 5 minutes, every hour. This should be repeated 5 days each week.
Provide a mechanism for participants to provide feedback and solution proposals, and establish deadline by which the feedback will be published.
Escalate the challenge to district leadership and establish deadlines for the superintendent to evaluate and propose solution scenarios.
If solutions involve significant policy changes, or costs, then the challenge should be made to state and federal lawmakers. Change will follow.
By the time, I entered 4th grade, in upstate Massachusetts, I had played one year of Little League and was somewhat interested in watching the Red Sox on Boston’s NBC affiliate, as long as there was not a Godzilla movie on Channel 56. Though that year, I stumbled across a baseball book that had been abandoned by one of my older brothers (who were 9 and 15 years my senior). It changed everything for me,
The book was gloriously full of history and statistics, through the 1961 season. 1961 is one of the most-hallowed seasons in baseball history. There is a lot written about that season, if you’re curious, Billy Crystal can explain:
Spoiler alert: Roger Maris breaks the home run record.
My family moved to the Orlando area when I was a teenager and I became less interested in baseball, because there was no “home team” in Florida. I still liked baseball, but it had lost its obsession status.
When I started college, it was intriguing to see pictures of Roger Maris’ record-breaking swing in a few bars around Gainesville:
(Source USA Today)
I later found out that Maris owned and operated an Anheuser-Busch beer distributor. I periodically saw his sons wheeling kegs of Bud Light, Busch, etc. into the restaurant where I worked: a high-volume breakfast joint famous for its voluminous biscuits ( curiously had a full bar and a full Chinese food menu).
Though I never thought that much about beer distributors until I was called on to change kegs in the middle of a busy shift. Then I blamed them for everything that was evil in the world.
Changing kegs was always a pain in the ass. Getting the key to the beer-storage room, toting the keg to the bar cooler, and swapping it out for an empty one, that was always ensnared in the clutter of barrels and knots of rubber tubing.
All the while, dirty dishes were piling up, milk dispensers needed to be changed, ice bins were empty, and vomit was accumulating on the men’s room floor.
One fateful night, my boss, with his Boston accent shouted “Squawt, foah-get about that table, weah outta Budwise-ah, go change that keg!”
Budweiser = Roger Maris.
The beer cooler was in its usual disastrous state. I had to untangle many lines and move several kegs just to get at the empty. I didn’t have time for this, but I never did.
I hissed as I unsnarled the tap lines, and grunted with each keg I lifted. I was trying to hoist a keg over several others when I felt a familiar pang below my belt line.
It’s well-known fact that when I suffered my second (annual) hernia that night, my screams, of “FUCK YOU, Roger Maris!!!!!” probably could be heard for miles. I’m sure that there were reports of tremors being felt in Micanopy and Archer.
John, the manager, who had asked me to change the keg, bolted into the cooler, and yelled, “Who the f*** do you think you ah? Do you kiss yoah mothah with that mouth?”
Then he asked, “You OK, kid?”
I explained what happened and my self-diagnosis. He responded, “Oh shit, not again!”
He seemed only mildly surprised by who I was accusing.
“You blamed Roger Maris! That’s OK with me. If youah going to blame somebody it should be somebody who played foah those fuckin’ Yankees.”
I didn’t have the heart to remind him that Maris also played for the Cardinals, when they beat his beloved Red Sox in the 1967 World Series.
Soon after, I was on the operating table for the second time in a year. The post-surgical pain didn’t seem as bad at the previous year’s hernia. Perhaps it was because I was going to eventually receive a workman’s check, which would take the sting out of the missed paychecks.
I now look at that decades-ago injury and realize that I need to address a couple of things.
First, the tap lines that I was trying to disentangle when I sustained my injury included many brands of beer. I have no evidence that Maris’ distributorship was any more, or less, responsible for the tear in my abdominal wall (and dangling intestine) than any other.
Second, I was not even lifting an Anheuser-Busch product when the injury occurred. Therefore, it was unfair for me to cast aspersions against the Maris, or the Busch families. I hope that they will both accept my sincere apologies.
You are hereby absolved.
Given my Irish-Catholic roots, it is difficult, physically excruciating in fact, for me to let go of a grudge.
Though as time has gone by, I’ve come to appreciate the delicious irony of the fact that when I realized, that my intestine was breaking through my abdominal wall (again), I was lifting a keg with a label that was clearly labeled as Lite.
I use to think of myself as a pretty good writer. I was a mass communications major and my courses in journalism, advertising and writing for broadcast, instilled habits of language clarity, brief sentences and abundant whitespace.
These habits were annoying to some of my liberals arts professors who seemed to cling to the days of yore, and actually used “whereas” “inasmuch” and “shan’t” in their own communication.
In a discussion of my progress on a term paper, a professor advised me that he understood the US Constitution very well and that there was no need to for me to “dumb down” my explanation of appellate decisions for his benefit.
There were also professors who resented my short sentences and paragraphs.
I’ve always had problem with the concept of “dumbing down” content.
The practice of crafting content that is more consumable, and available to a wider audience seems like a savvy strategy to me. It’s more like you are “smartening up” your content.
Likewise, if you succeed in describing a complex topic in easy-to-understand terms, don’t ruin the moment by saying it’s a “quick and dirty” explanation. “Succinct and elegant” is far more appropriate.
There are myriad reasons that I’ve identified that have kept me from writing in recent years. Though I think the one that looms largest is that I seem to have drifted far from my habits of clarity and brevity of earlier in my adult life.
A lot of recent my writing seems bloated and rambling. The act of editing something such beastly drafts dampens my enthusiasm for writing. Hell, it dampens my enthusiasm for enthusiasm.
I’m trying to be a good writer again. There are a many areas in which I can improve, but I’ll begin with a promise that nothing that I write going forward will be dumbed down, or quick and dirty; at least not intentionally so.
