The Saddest Story

Let me tell you the saddest story I know. After I finish, you can tell me if you still think it’s inappropriate for the season – but I don’t think you will…

Many years ago, now, I happened to be working in a large office on V-Day, and one of my co-workers had been trying to work up the courage to ask out a woman from another department for nearly as long as I had known him. As far as I know he had no reason to assume failure; there was no great gap in age, rank, social status, wealth, education or relative attractiveness, and the woman in question wasn’t seeing anybody at the time. But my co-worker was (and presumably still is) painfully shy, and had been unable to even to speak with her beyond some occasional light banter. Consequently, nobody in the company knew he had a serious thing for this woman – not even the sort of office gossips you would expect to trade in that kind of information. I only know this story because he told me about it after the fact…

Anyway, for reasons unexplained (and probably inexplicable) my co-worker decided to have flowers delivered to the woman on Valentine’s Day with no note on it, not even a “Guess Who?” He settled on something nice, but not too showy, and planned to watch the delivery, wait for the usual round of admiration and speculation from the other people in our office, and then at the right moment fess up to being the guy behind the gift. I think it gave him an out – if the woman in our story was offended, outraged, disgusted, put off or whatever, he could just fade into the crowd and never admit to knowing anything about the situation. Whether you choose to see this as unfortunately timid or endearingly bashful is up to you, of course…

Unfortunately, in the event, it turned out that the woman receiving the flowers wasn’t quite as broken up from her ex-boyfriend as my co-worker had believed. She (quite logically) assumed that the flowers were from her ex, asking for another chance, and called to thank him. Her ex-boyfriend, who apparently hadn’t wanted to break up in the first place, seized his opportunity with both hands (whether or not he accepted credit for the gift wasn’t clear, but wouldn’t have mattered in the long run) and took the occasion to re-start their relationship. In hindsight, my co-worker admitted, he couldn’t blame the guy; he says he would have done the same thing, given the chance…

Would this story have come out differently if he’d had the nerve to put his name on the delivery? Or just go over to her desk and take credit for doing so? We’ll probably never know. Even if the gift-giver in our story made it through the day with face unslapped and actually got to date the woman he had the crush on, there’s no reason to believe that anything would have come of it. But I told you this story just on the off chance that somebody out there reading it (assuming anybody is reading this) is planning a similar stunt today…

I can’t tell you if your equivalent of this gesture will get you the person of your dreams, or a short but savage beating at the hands of a jealous boyfriend, or just a bill from a florist and a sad story for one of your associates (it would be a bit of a stretch to call him a friend) to blog about decades later. Maybe your story will turn out differently, and maybe you should drop the whole idea and try something else. But whatever you do, whatever it takes, find somebody to love. They’re only words on a computer screen, and you’ve heard them before, but you’ll be a poorer human being if you don’t take them to heart…

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone...

Alternatives

Yesterday’s post about what to get a man for Valentine’s Day led several people to ask me what, in fact, I did recommend they get their significant other for the big day, if not Special Occasion Sex. Let me hasten to assure everyone reading this (assuming that anybody is) that there is nothing whatsoever wrong with Special Occasion Sex; on the contrary, if your plans for Thursday included any form of intimate activity that does not involve actual criminal acts, then by all means go ahead. And, in fact, if that is what you believe to be the best choice for your significant other on that occasion, I wouldn’t dream of telling you otherwise. I am merely pointing out that the reasons for giving someone a present and the reasons for sleeping with them aren’t always congruent – and sleeping with someone only because you can’t think of another option is probably not the best idea…

For the most part, men in this culture haven’t been socialized into expecting anything in particular for this occasion – many of them believe that V-Day is nothing more than an occasion on which the right combination of gestures, words and expenditures may result in a form of reward that they will enjoy. Thus, they may not be expecting anything from you, and almost any form of gift will suffice – although, as noted in previous years, presents that represent alterations in their lifestyle or behavior that you would like to see are likely to be unsuccessful. With that proviso, the average man will be quite happy to receive the same type of gift you would give him on any other occasion…

By contrast, women in most Western cultures have been socialized into placing importance on V-Day, and specifically on tokens given to them as an expression of love by their significant other. This often becomes problematic in the case where one partner is committed to celebrating the holiday and the other is not. Fortunately, this means that a man attempting to purchase a present for a woman on this occasion has a great deal of leeway; the only really fatal errors would be those cases in which his significant other finds his choice to be inappropriate. And while no hard-and-fast rules exist, it’s probably fair to say that anything you wouldn’t purchase for any other occasion will also not suffice for this one, meaning that anything too cheap, too expensive, too cutesy or not cute enough, too personal or too impersonal, too elaborate or too casual, etc., will still not suffice…

The point which in my estimation gets overlooked much too often is that this occasion does not, or should not at least, occur in isolation from the rest of your interactions with your significant other. Months or years of previous experience should give you some idea of whether a pink stuffed animal holding a heart-shaped object with a holiday-appropriate slogan on it is a suitable gift, or if a package of personal lubricants isn’t. If you seize on this occasion to make a grand, romantic gesture that is perfectly reasonable – but you should probably be prepared for the possibility that you may be wrong, or that you may have chosen the wrong gift, the wrong price level, or just the wrong person to give it to…

But that’s a story for another day…

Mixed Messages

I was reflecting on whether or not to write a Valentine’s Day post again this year (is it a tradition, because I’ve done them so often before, or just a recycling of old material?) when I saw an ad for KY products that attempted to address the time-honored question of just what does one get a male significant other for Valentine’s Day in the first place. As you might expect, the company was advising the viewer that what her significant other wants most would be sex, preferably with the assistance of one of the many fine KY brand personal lubricants. Clearly it’s a tongue-in-cheek ad, intended to be funny and just sexy enough to cut through the clutter of incessant television advertising. But watching it, I couldn’t help but feel that there were several problems with this approach…

First of all, the company is perpetuating the old stereotype of men being obsessed with having more sex, along with the implication that women are almost equally dedicated to have as little sex as possible. As always, I will leave moral and philosophical discussions about whether such stereotypes are sexist, elitist or generally detrimental to our society to those better qualified to have such discussions, and simply point out that this is a problematic message for a company that specializes in selling products that facilitate sex to be promoting. Just like any other company, KY needs to convince as many people to make use of its products as it possibly can, not just on February 14, but at all times, and reinforcing the popular belief that half of the population should want to avoid the primary activity in which your product is used does not seem like a strategically sound choice…

Even worse, though, is the possibility that the other half of the population might take the same message to heart. If male customers accept that what their significant other wants most is to avoid having sex with them, it would logically follow that they should offer her a night (or a selection of nights) without any demands (or even requests) of a sexual nature. One could easily imagine a variation on those novelty “coupon books” that offer coupons good for various sexual activities, only in this case they excuse the woman presenting them from such activities at her discretion. At which point, KY is not only missing out on opportunities to sell its products, but also eliminating any chance that their male customers might buy something on the vague or distant hope of using it…

Personally, I’ve always found the stereotype to be annoying, if not outright insulting, because of the remarkably low opinion of all human beings it of necessity perpetuates. Not all men are monomaniacal perverts spending all of their time focused on sex, or such miserable partners that no same woman would ever want them – and, by the same token, not all women are frigid, conniving manipulators who exploit that weakness in their counterparts in order to get what they want by participating in an activity in which they derive no enjoyment whatsoever. In fact, I would argue that neither of these things are inherently correct, and that most of the people who conform to these behavior patterns are doing so because they have been socialized into doing so by elements of the popular/media culture in which they live…

Now, I’m not claiming to have any better answers for KY, let alone for human civilization in general. None of my degrees are in marketing or advertising, let alone psychology, sociology or anthropology. I’m just saying that perpetuating behavioral stereotypes that influence people to avoid using your product may not be the best way of selling it…

All Over Again

Anyone who had Internet access in 2009 probably remembers the curious case of Dave Carroll, and how United Airlines both broke his guitar and then stonewalled him about paying for his repair bills for the better part of a year. The You Tube music video he made about the experience (“United Breaks Guitars”) got over a million hits in about four days, dropped United’s stock price by over 10% (a hit of about $180 million USD), and raised a huge amount of public awareness for Carroll and his band – and for Taylor, the company that made the guitar in question. It also answered the question – if anyone was still not clear on this – of why good customer service, public relations and loss prevention are important. You would probably expect that any company not run by people with the intelligence of squirrels would have taken a $180 million lesson to heart; however, if you’ve been reading the newspapers or this space, you would already know that this was not what happened…

About a year later, Mr. Carroll, now on a speaking tour about his experiences with United, had to fly on that airline again – whereupon they promptly lost his luggage again. It’s highly doubtful that this was a deliberate act of revenge; given the company’s original response to both the loss claim and the video (which has been viewed over 12 million times as of this writing) it seems unlikely that they could have successfully organized that sort of vendetta against a single customer, even if it wouldn’t have been idiotic of them to try. But even if United didn’t learn anything from this experience (the company says it did, but I have my doubts) you still might reasonably expect other companies within the industry to learn from someone else’s $180 million mistake – except that doesn’t appear to have happened either…

According to a story appearing on the Yahoo! News site, a musician named Dave Schneider was traveling from Buffalo to Detroit on Delta Airlines when he was told he would have to check his vintage 1965 Gibson guitar – despite the fact that he offered to buy an extra ticket for the instrument, and despite the fact that Congress passed a law last year making it possible for musicians to do just that. And, sure enough, the airline personnel managed to get the Gibson caught in a “mobile service elevator” at the gate, smashing its case and doing about $1,800 worth of damage to the instrument itself. The airline then repeated United’s second mistake as well, stonewalling the musician for months before the story turned up on line and was remarked (and mocked) by millions of scruffy bloggers world-wide…

Now, I’m not suggesting that every musical instrument checked by an airline is going to be seriously damaged; I’m not even suggesting that this is something that happens more than once every three or four years. What I am suggesting is that if I am taking responsibility for property worth in excess of $10,000 – and especially if I am doing so in defiance of Federal law, public relations, and all common sense – that I would take better care of it than if it was a $2 trinket from K-Mart. And if I ran any kind of transportation company I would have a better policy for lost, damaged and stolen luggage than “stonewall them for a year or two and hope they give up and go away…”

The truth is that world-changing business developments don’t always have thousands of jet engines, millions of viewers, or billion-dollar IPOs. Whether they meant to or not, Dave Carroll and United Airlines between them have changed the way we look at air travel, property damage, customer service, and public perception – and it’s past time everyone else who does business with the general public should have started paying attention to those changes…

So They Must Change Me…

It has been said (by people wiser than me, let me hasten to assure you) that the world’s only constant is change; that the only thing we can be sure of going forward is that we can’t be sure of anything going forward. This has certainly been true in my experience – if you had asked me, twelve months ago, to tell you what I would be doing now, preparing lesson plans and exercises for the four sections of Management 409 I am scheduled to teach at Michigan State this coming semester would have landed somewhere between walking on the moon and being elected dogcatcher. Which is to say, rather less likely than winning the Nobel Peace Prize or finding a cure for the common cold. But when I reflect back over the past year, and a few of the ones that came before that, I can’t help thinking that generation gap that results from civil, cultural, or technological change is almost as universal…

Consider, if you will, the people who persist in the belief that e-commerce is a passing fad, and that if we all stick our fingers in our ears and yell “LALALALALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU!” loudly enough it will all go away. It may seem unique to this current time – and indeed, it would be difficult to name anything quite as dramatic as the sea change that our society has undergone over the past two decades. But if you think back (or ask your tribal elders, in the case of you younger geeks), you may recall that VCRs were another “passing fad” that turned out not to be. Recording television programs and movies and viewing them when YOU wanted to see them led directly to current technology such as DVRs, on-demand cable programming, downloadable audio and video files, file-sharing sites and even things like You Tube and Twitter – not exactly ephemeral trends…

If we go back a little further, cable television was considered a fad when it first appeared – who would pay for television when you could get it for free over the airwaves? In the 1970s (and into the 1980s) there was (briefly) a generation gap between those who loved having dozens of entertainment choices and wanted their MTV, and those who longed for the days of Masterpiece Theater and newscasters who were more widely trusted (and respected) than any government official…

I wasn’t around for the appearance of television itself, but my parents told me about the time when the first sets came onto the market, and the people who disdained the new medium sneered about how a broadcast program you could see would never live up to the imaginary landscape created in their generation’s radio dramas. My grandparents told me about a similar gap that appeared between fans of the original motion pictures and those with synchronized audio tracks – the so-called “talking pictures” or “talkies” that changed everything following World War I. And my grandfather, who was born in 1904, told me about the disdain his parents’ generation had for moving pictures, which would never live up to the power of live performance…

This is not to say that every new technology will evolve into something that changes our world forever. Digital Audio Tape (DAT) never really caught on as a mass-media format, and neither did DVX (single-use DVDs that self-destructed after you watched them). More to the point, perhaps, audio CDs are on their way out, slain by the iPod and downloadable content, and the iPod itself is showing signs of being made irrelevant by its own descendent, the iPhone. People who cling to the CD will most likely end up in the same role as those who cling to vinyl records, reel-to-reel tapes, and wax recording cylinders, what is less obvious is that people who insist on clinging to the current technologies will most likely end up in that same place…

As we move forward into the New Year, the only thing we can be sure about is that the world will change, and we will have the choice of changing with it or wondering why none of the products, services or media we want to use are still available and why everyone keeps referring to us as “Luddites.” I can’t tell you where I’m going to be on New Year’s Eve 2013, or what I’ll be doing at that time; the only thing I can more or less guarantee you is that whatever happens next won’t be anything like what we expect it to be, and that no protest we make is going to matter. In the end, it doesn’t matter if you believe in change; change believes in you…

In a few hours it’s going to be 2013. Let’s be careful out there…

Everything Old is New Again

I’m always amused to find stories that indicate that for all of the talk of tradition, learning from the past, and trying not to repeat the mistakes of previous generations, no one can actually remember anything and the same old mistakes keep right on being made. There’s a lot of that going on in the news right now, since it’s a Presidential election year in the US, and a lot of the usual empty promises are being thrown around, but there was a story in the news this week that confirmed my belief that follies of this type are not limited to Americans, let alone American politicians. Apparently, some folks in Canada are trying to revive the Avro Arrow project of 1958…

You can find the original story on the Toronto Star website if you want to, but for anyone who isn’t particularly interested in the history of aircraft, the Arrow was a supersonic interceptor designed by Avro Canada during the Cold War as a counter-measure to Soviet strike aircraft attacking over the North Pole. Similar in concept (if not entirely in design) to the Convair delta-wing interceptors of the same era (the F-102 and F-106), the Arrow was an impressive piece of technology that would have equaled or exceeded the performance of all contemporary aircraft and would not have found a worthy opponent in Soviet service until the arrival of the Tupolev Tu-22 “Backfire” bomber nearly two decades later. However, like any other piece of cutting-edge technology, building a fleet of Arrows and working the bugs out of them would have been an expensive undertaking, and the Canadians elected to purchase a fleet of McDonnell-Douglas F-101s instead…

In most respects, that choice worked out very well for the Canadian Air Force. The F-101 turned out to be ideal for Canadian defensive requirements, and its adaptability for high-speed air-to-ground and very high-speed recon missions could only have been a plus. The downside – purchasing defense equipment from a foreign source, stunting the domestic aerospace industry’s growth in defense (and particularly supersonic) programs, and outsourcing all of the jobs involved to the US – remained a source of bitter contention for some years thereafter, but the loss of the actual aircraft doesn’t seem to have harmed the country or its national defense. It was a bit surprising to find a story about reviving the program as an alternative to the F-35 Lightning II turning up on one of the news aggregation sites…

Up until now, Canada has been one of the members of a constantly-shifting group of nations who intend to purchase the F-35, originally known as the Joint Strike Fighter, along with the United States Air Force. As with the F-16, F-18, F-15, F-5, F-111, F-101, F-104, C-130, A-4 and far too many other designs to bore you with, this arrangement should make it possible for a whole range of countries friendly to the US (or at least hostile to people we don’t like) to purchase cutting-edge war planes that they could never afford to develop on their own, while at the same time helping the American companies that produce the airplane to recover the cost of their R&D efforts and make more money into the bargain. Unfortunately, the F-35 has been delayed by technical problems, plagued by cost over-runs, and has thus far failed to live up to all but the most basic claims made for it – which is making it easy for people in Canada who oppose the project to come up with alternate suggestions. It’s just that this one was loony enough to raise eyebrows in anyone who has ever studied aircraft, history, or business…

For its time, the Arrow was a remarkable piece of engineering, and could have proved useful as a counter-measure to Cold War-era long-range strikes. But reviving the program now would mean producing a machine designed before the parents of most of its pilots were born to perform a mission long since made obsolete against an enemy who no longer exists. As an appeal to nationalists, voters who don’t particularly like Americans, or the Canadian domestic aerospace industry, this stunt might make sense from a political standpoint. And there is some precedent for it – the US has revived the U-2 and SR-71 aircraft for service, if not new construction. But the Arrow was cancelled in 1958 because it didn’t make military or economic sense, and today it represents more of a point of national pride than anything anyone would actually want to take into battle…

That doesn’t mean that someone won’t try it, however…

The Ethics of Wikipedia

Anyone who works in Education at any level has probably got a few stories to tell you about students using Wikipedia as the primary source – or occasionally the only source – of information on a report or writing assignment, even though the site’s occasional issues with the truth are widely known. The editorial board does its best, but given the number of volunteers contributing to Wikipedia there will inevitably be cases where personal bias of a political, philosophical, religious, scientific or spiteful nature results in errors being accepted or retained as correct. This has resulted in some embarrassing – and potentially actionable – mistakes, and has come close to knocking the site off the Internet more than once…

Probably the most outrageous of these errors are the cases where an artist or scientist is denied permission to edit the entry about his or her own work, on the grounds that they are not a credible source on things they have created. This came up again this past week, when American author Phillip Roth was told that Wikipedia did not consider him a credible source regarding the origins of a book he had actually written. Roth responded with an open letter about this fiasco in the New Yorker, and somebody was apparently willing to accept that article as a second confirmation of story – possibly because the magazine would have hesitated to run the open letter if the allegations it contained were not verified – because the Wikipedia entry has been corrected…

Now, the point has been made several times that this policy isn’t as farcical as it sounds. Without some kind of independent fact-checking there would be nothing to keep a discredited scientist from changing the facts of a Wikipedia entry to indicate that his theory had been right all along, for example. We’ve already seen cases of political parties and candidates altering both their own entries and ones about their opponents in order to improve their chances of election, and there’d certainly be no reason to suppose that authors, filmmakers or commercial firms wouldn’t alter information about themselves in order to increase sales, regardless of the truth or falsehood involved. Unfortunately, there have also been cases where one or more Wikipedia editors have allowed their own personal biases to cloud their judgment, resulting in citations of scientific research being deleted in order to uphold a personal or political point…

Clearly, Wikipedia has a responsibility (legal and ethical) to try to present the most accurate information available, especially because despite all evidence to the contrary, people at all levels of age and education are going to take what they read on the site as absolutely correct. In cases where scientific fact is in question, or the details of an event (public or private) are in dispute, it’s hard to argue that a second (or third) source of confirmation is a bad thing. But when an artist presents his or her actual thoughts about a work, or a scientist provides his or her actual data and calculations, it’s even more difficult to say that an editor who can’t possibly have an understanding of that work that approaches that of the person who created it should have the authority to override (or delete) the opinions of the creator. This leads me to an ethical question that is not as simple as it initially appears:

Does Wikipedia (or any other online source) have an ethical responsibility to allow the creator of a specific work of art or research to have the final say on the meaning and interpretation of his or her own work? If so, how are they to prevent edits made for self-serving purposes, and particularly ones that intentionally distort the facts? If not, how are they to prevent edits that directly contradict not only the original work but also the creator’s efforts to correct the entry? In the case of any disputed fact the editors could certainly request third-party confirmation of basic facts, but this will almost certainly result in cases where the editors and their subject matter are at odds with yet another set of bias and belief. Or should the site allow all information that isn’t directly contradicted by other available sources to be entered, possibly with notations where the disputes occur, and allow visitors to the site to make their own decisions?

It’s worth thinking about…