~Thursday~ I caught the 8:15 city bus with Hello Outdoorsy Driver at the helm. Sitting in my vicinity was a white guy in a wheelchair, a black guy sleeping, and a black lady two seats in front of me with a serious updo.
A little bit down the road, the wheelchair guy’s phone rang: “I’VE BEEN TELLIN’ YOU. YOU NEED TO GO TO GEICO.COM RIGHT NOW AND GET YOURSELF SOME INSURANCE! DO IT RIGHT NOW. ‘CAUSE IF THAT THINGS BREAKS, WE’RE GOING TO HAVE TO REPLACE IT. GO DO IT NOW.”
A good-looking young black guy got on at Marcom & Gorman with a white dress shirt on, black dress pants, and white tennis shoes with three black stripes on them. In spite of the shoes, I think he just pulled it off, although I might have been a slight bit biased by how nicely those slacks caressed his ass. But I digress…
I had two work meetings today, one from 10:00-11:30 in a building across the street from ours, and another from 1:00-2:30 in a building across campus.
The 10:00 meeting contained about a 20-minute discussion on a topic to get some feedback on a recent extremely unpopular management decision. Here are three take-aways for me from the incident that I’m tucking away should I ever manage again (albeit not very likely at all), but that might also apply to unpopular decisions in general (which I’m sure to be involved with in the future).
- Asking employees’ opinions about a decision after it’s pretty much been made isn’t effective; they need to be included from the beginning. It’s interesting to me that it seems easier to remember to bring customers in on decisions that are going to affect them, but it’s not a natural inclination to do so with employees.
- When you want to get an opinion on a decision that’s pretty much already been made from your employees, particularly on an emotional issue, you want to start off by explaining all the considerations that have already gone into where we are now, and you need to be clear on what part of the decision, if any of it, is yet negotiable.
- Asking for input, and then belittling it, is never effective. And people will talk about it later. And remember.
My second meeting, across campus, was an education session that I didn’t really expect to learn much from, but surprisingly, and delightfully, I did garner a few gems from it.
On the way home, in a rare occurrence—I think it’s only the second time, if ever—because it was so crowded, I had to take the very back seat on the bus.
After dinner, I went to the gym, where I did 10 minutes of stretching (trying to work out some sciatica that I haven’t had since my knee surgery a couple of years ago, but is now back, and about which I’m not pleased), 200 (10 sets of 20) ab crunches, followed by an upper body workout.
After a shower at home, I drove by the Cameron Village library arriving ten minutes before closing, in time to pick up a book I requested, and which was going to be taken off hold tomorrow. It’s The Help, which is our next book for the Mostly Social Book Club, and my first reaction to it was what I asked the librarian, “Is this the large print edition?” It was way thicker than I thought it was going to be (TWSS!), and it wasn’t the large print edition.
I proceeded down to Helios, where I intended to work on my blog, until possibly going to Trailer Park Prize Night (TPPN) at Flex, about which I was still waffling. The first thing I did there was to enter the information from a dollar bill I recently received with a Where’s George? stamp on it:
Shortly after that I spied @abbyladybug across the room, and she mouthed that she’d be over to say hello in a bit. There’s three things you can count on when Abby’s in the house:
- The fun factor is going to be kicked up a notch.
- Photographs, in some way, are going to be involved.
- There’s a pretty good chance you’re going to meet someone new through her.
All three of those things happened tonight, and I had the pleasure of meeting @nugo, a quality human being, who is also good friends with @hughlh. @nugo’s name is Ogun, and two other things I’ll say about him are that 1) he’s interesting, and 2) he’s a Christian who “gets” it.
Abby asked the barista—who was having fun using a bottle opener on the beer bottle caps by yanking them as hard as he could in such a way that when they came off the bottle they bounced off a vent hood hanging from the ceiling, and for which he “scored” when he caught them on the rebound—to take off the handle of one of the beers on tap, and not long after that, I found it looking all coy getting caught reading my blog, the little hobgoblin:
I did end up going to TPPN, where as expected, I caught a rash of shit from Alex about not returning his phone call last Thursday. All understandably so.
I left right when the show started at 12:30.