Tag: Potentially Good Advice

In the Cross Hairs

Interviewer: “So Frank, you have long hair. Does that make you a woman?”
Frank Zappa: “You have a wooden leg. Does that make you a table?”

A while ago, I described our west coast sales manager as a man with weirdly movable hair. It is movable, of course, because it has been simply plopped into place. A good stapler would have been of great service to Don and considerable relief to those around him. I once came close to stabbing that precarious postiche with a club sandwich toothpick. In 2012, an iceberg the size of Manhattan broke free from Greenland’s massive Petermann Glacier. The massive chunk of ice slid into the sea. The process is called calving. Well, Don’s head always looks like it is about to calve a wad of hair.

Henry works in Credit. Henry has blue hair. Well, at least the kind of indigo blue that you get when you comb in a clump of Kiwi shoe polish and rub to a perfect shine. I imagine that without the goop, his hair would be gray. I also imagine that if he washed out the indigo, his hair would fade to a peculiar shade of periwinkle. Which would look odd next to his olive Mediterranean skin.

A good stapler would have been of great service.

Dolly Parton once said that she was never bothered by dumb blonde jokes. First of all, she knew she wasn’t dumb. And second, she knew she wasn’t blonde.

Albert, who works in our Customer Care Center, does not have blonde issues. He does, however, have food issues. He is an eating machine. He surrounds himself with crinkly bags of Cheetos, piles of sunflower seed shells that make his desk look like a killing field, and leftovers from other people’s lunches. Not surprisingly Albert is… uh… lumpy. Today, Albert came to work with his head shaved. He is participating in a campaign to raise money to help kids with leukemia. There are men who look cool with their heads shaved. Like, say, Vin Diesel or Michael Jordan or the Dalai Lama. Albert does not. His head is oddly shaped and… well… lumpy. But – what the heck – he’s cool anyway.

So what is the lesson in all this? I guess it’s that you shouldn’t judge a head by its hair. Real or otherwise.

Q for Reason

Q was the name we gave our former head of R&D. Yes, it’s a little Bond, but it was also a play on his name, McHugh. I had written a story on him several years ago, how in his 60s he saw the end of his career rolling in with the tide of youth. “I am too young to start looking back,”, he told me once, “and a little too old to be looking ahead.”

Anyway, I was shuffling through old papers and I found what he called The 10 Q-mandments of R&D. Q had taped it to the door of his lab. The sheet was a bit rumpled and had yellowed over time. The remnants of Scotch Tape were still visible on the edges. I read it over again though, really, I knew it by heart.

He saw the end of his career rolling in with the tide of youth.

1. Question – Everything…in particular the status quo.
2. Quibble – The answers are in the details.
3. Quantum – Seek quantum, not incremental, improvements.
4. Queue – Set priorities, keep to them.
5. Quick – First to market gets the advantage.
6. Quiet – Loose talk gives the advantage away.
7. Quality – Not to be sacrificed for expediency.
8. Quixotic – Quirky doesn’t make it creative. And it’s not creative if it can’t be done.
9. Quit – Know when to walk away; failure should be avoided, not fixed.
10. Quagmire – Where you are when you don’t walk away.

I carefully pressed the page and slipped it and a protective cardboard into an envelope. I brought it to Whiny Baby and asked her to have it framed and sent to Q.

It’s about time.