Why your Employer of Choice Program Fails, Again

Pretty much every company I have worked for has gone through that phase where someone goes to a seminar or hears some speaker talk about being the employer of choice and being the best you can be or some other inane catch phrase.

Usually the CEO or HR director hears about it and listens to how great and wonderful it is and uses his executive power for the good of everyone and starts the program without any clue of what it really means and how to make this a positive impact to the employees and the company.

For around 95% of you within six months it has been forgotten or it simply failed and was left to rot next to the TPS reports, never to be seen again.

Why does this happen you ask yourself? If you don’t ask that question, please stop reading now. This isn't for you.

Simple, in short it is a stupid idea.

Don’t get me wrong, in some cases it works and it works really well. Those companies are also all of the case examples given and the other 95% of them are hidden away like last year’s dirty laundry.

Now before you click next or bail out on me, let me give some disclaimers and perspective.

First off, if you are in any level of management you need a healthy level of cynicism. I said a healthy level. If you have too much, you shoot down any new or progressive idea. If you have too little you accept anything new and shiny as the next best thing blindly running into the light with no regard for fact, reality or impact.

In theory if you have any common sense you should use it to evaluate everything that is coming down the road or will be implemented soon. Who are we kidding, no implementation goes 100% smooth but if you learn from your mistakes they tend to get better to the point where the problems or issues are negligible. This is growth.

Second point, you really are part of the problem or part of the solution. There is no standing by when someone is paying you to do a thing and ideally improve on that whenever possible. When you hit a plateau what you don’t realize is through entropy alone you are sliding back down.

A boss of mine a long time ago (Bill Specht) told me some fantastic advice that I try to teach everyone I can. It was basic; “Do at least one thing better today than you did yesterday and understand why.”

Brilliant.

The hidden subtext to that logic is to constantly evaluate what you do, why you do it and the tasks you undertake to get the results you are paid to complete. If you don’t like that version, than this works, activity equals tasks, tasks equal results, if the activity doesn’t equal the results you are doing something wrong or you are inefficient or clueless.

Back to the point. Long ago I worked for this rather large company that had a new program called Target 100. The essence of this program was everything should be at 100%. Employee satisfaction, 100%. Customer satisfaction, 100%. Employee retention, 100%. You get the idea. It sounded fantastic on paper.

So what did the company do? Pretty much the opposite of anything logical or anything that made sense.

They hired marketing people. They created focus groups. They created committees that would report to other committees. They had the CFO go to a committee of customer service staff so he could take notes on the results of the questionnaire from another committee and bring it to the executive management committee that would review the progress of all the committees and set up new agendas and tasks for them for their meeting next month and new questionnaires.

They made signs. They made banners. There were branded coffee mugs, shirts were made, stickers printed, flyers sent out, memos written and edited and re-written. They went crazy selling a product that didn't exist.

At the time I was lower-mid-level management and I just sat on the sidelines and watched and participated in my various committees. I was cynical and didn't know it until later.

We had bagel day, employee appreciation day, wear your Hawaiian shirt day. Monday was free coffee day. You get the point. We celebrated days. We celebrated Posters. We celebrated memos.

A few weeks into this the employee surveys came back glowing. People loved their job. Their boss was wonderful. The banners were printed and would shine like a beacon of hope. The coffee mugs were brimming with fresh brew and not that old cheap stuff they were buying for years before.

And then reality struck. Some rocket scientist decided to check the outcomes (I don’t officially want to say that was me, but it was me). For some of you this is sales, for some it is units moved, for some it is patient’s admitted, or calls processed, however it comes down to one thing or another. What was happening with production, efficiency and cost?

Guess what changed. Very little. The key metrics went up, don’t get me wrong. There was positive movement at the line staff level. But it really wasn't very much. Something that wasn't measured was not only the actual cost of this, which was a lot, not the extra time spent by management that could have been allocated to anything better, it was really the ROI on the short term versus the ROI on the long term.

Basically, to get a 04% improvement in things it would cost x dollars and require y commitment from management that would be OK, if, and only if the improvement increased or stayed the same and the cost and commitment decreased over time to compensate for the rollout of this panacea.

Fast forward a few months later. Performance not only went back to its original number, it was below it. No one in any of the executive committees could figure this out. What was wrong with the employees? Why did performance (or key metrics) get worse after the rollout of this program? It was viewed as impossible. The talk at the executive committees was basically that the employees were flawed as a group.

I laughed to myself for weeks about this. They missed the forest through the trees. No amount of committee meetings, banners, handouts or corporate cheerleaders were going to alter one undeniable fact that all of them missed.

When you looked at the entire program from the point of view of the employee this is what they saw.

They got treated really well for a while. Bagels and coffee were brought in. There were lots of shiny new banners. People asked them lots of questions. They were happy. Then it stopped. So they reverted back to their usual habits with just enough bitterness to equate to a reduction in performance for a short period of time that would eventually go back to where it was. Or there was a net loss of performance compared to the cost of the program.

Net of the story. The program failed for one reason and one reason alone. In the mind of the employee nothing changed.

Guess what. This is what most companies do. The colors may change, the bagels may be gluten free, the coffee may be a different brand and the banners may be written Comic Sans.

Some take-away points about why this failed.

1) The process wasn't about the employee it was about statistics, meetings, committees and questionnaires

2) Communication wasn't real. It was propaganda and cheerleading. People see through that really quickly

3) No amount of bagel, coffee or random handout is going to change anyone’s perspective much past that day

4) Management was burned out with all the required follow up and it was clear to everyone

5) The culture of the company didn’t change. So the program was destined to fail.

I could leave you with the reality of this and no advice, but that would be rather boring. I will try to summarize some advice on how you can make these types of things successful. Now it is up to you to figure out what you want. Success versus really nice Power Point presentations and shiny banners.

1) Any company that needs to advertise to internal staff that they want to be the best employer around and they start a program like this has missed the forest through the trees.

2) Communicate honestly with people. Stop the propaganda. Stop the news letters that are thrown away as soon as they are sent. Be honest.

3) If your senior management isn’t 100% behind this and willing to leave their ivory tower to go out among the unwashed masses, no program on the planet will work.

4) Get rid of negative employees. It doesn't matter if they are top performers, management or the director of HR. Get rid of them. Negativity is always much worse than you know.

5) Don’t be afraid to get rid of people that do not fit the culture, the corporate need, the customer need or whatever. You lose more by keeping them around then they are worth.

6) Reward people with genuine and honest appreciation when they go above and beyond the call of duty. For you senior management people, take someone out to lunch that you have never met that is a star employee once per month. Don’t talk, listen. You will gain more credibility here with the staff than probably all the casual days combined.

7) Don’t be a hypocrite. Your reputation is destroyed if you live in the Do As I Say, But Not As I Do World. You deserve your earned accolades, but keep them quiet. If you spent 01% of your bonus (or that equivalent of company money) on buying name brand bottled water for your employees (and not the cheap knock off stuff) and had it waiting on their desk in the morning with a card that said “Thank you” I guarantee you would get substantially more back than your 01% cost just in the performance improvement of your staff.

8) Walk amongst the people. Spend a few hours per month and walk around and talk to people. A great CEO from long ago (Arnie Robin) used to do this. He was loved by the masses and all he had to do was be friendly and listen.

9) Remember people like money, but are motivated by loyalty and will stay in a job they love for less money than go to a place that basically ignores them for a 10% raise.

10) Ask people that do the activity that equates to the task that yields the result that becomes a piece of your bottom line how to improve things. For the love of all that you are or are not, talk to the people that do the work every day.

An Ancient Riddle: Is it Red Meat or White Meat

Sometimes you need to find humor at work. Sarcasm warning.

So me and Dave (not his real name to protect his true identity) are installing computers in the area across the hall. In my new job as flunkie boy / clerical / mail merge expert / paper sorter / wanna-be-IT-guy, I get to do lots of stuff (read: because they pay me dirt and its the only job I can get that even pays this much).

Anyway, so Dave and I are installing computers, patching them up, loading software, deleting old dead accounts from the machines, removing roaming profiles that we don't know what they actually do to begin with other than take up ram and slow things down, and other related things that involve crawling on the floor, plugging in cables and avoiding the trash people let accumulate under their desk. This was clearly not our ideal job of loading those ultra spy web cams they advertise on the interweb to take secret pictures of supermodels that work in your office, but it is what it is.

When out of no where we over hear Bob say "Sorry, I gave up red meat for lent".

We both snicker a little at the ancient ritual and make some comment about sacrificing a virgin would be so much more fun. And by sacrifice I mean just attempt to find one, fail at that, then go get beers at a strip club and look at chicks would be a better ritual than whatever this lent thing was.

We get done with the first phase of the computer stuff and Dave says to me, "Dude, what is red meat and what is white meat?". I say, you know, I don't know, lets go ask Bob. Dave and I are thrill seekers as you can already tell. We are like Chuck Norris of the IT world.

We find an excuse to go ask Bob some inane question about computers and his departments needs for software which we have no intention of actually doing anything because all of these issues are decided by someone else to begin with. (sorry we have a cruel streak some days).

So we walk over towards Bob's general direction and drop the bomb "Bob, you know, I've always wanted to know what is the difference between Red meat and White meat?" we asked.

Bob being very proud of his convictions, and generally being a nice guy says, "well...Red meat walks the planet, as god intended it to do and White meat flies in the air or swims in the oceans". For the briefest of moments we pause at the pearl of wisdom just bestowed upon us. The sun shined brighter, the clouds opened up, the universe revealed itself to us.

We thank Bob for his time and input on the computer needs and slither back to our side of the building. We decided that Bob meant any body of water, either moving or not when he said oceans, because if not that would rule out lakes, rivers and fjords. And we cant have that. No one puts Fjords in the corner!

Some time passes and Dave says to me. Well didnt they call pork "The Other White Meat" (TM) in some advertising campaign a few years ago. I said, I believe that to be true. Dave says, but pork is from a pig, and a pig walks the earth, as god intended, so doesnt that make it Red meat?

We had a conundrum on our hands, and it could blow the top off of this whole issue. This was serious business now. We needed some serious answers. It was time to put our collective brains together and get to the bottom of this fiasco. We were on a mission. With our combined brain capacity, no problem was too small, or too large, but that doesnt matter. The mission was all that was important.

I countered, with chickens. Chickens, technically have wings, but they really don't fly. They kind of flap around, but they walk the earth more than anything else. We both decided that perching in a tree did not constitute flying, so clearly chickens walked the earth, as god intended. Or at a minimum used to fly and either got lazy and decided to walk and their wings stopped working or god punished them. Regardless of the religious ramifications or our personal dogma, we declared that chickens walked the earth, as god intended. Which in turn requires they be red meat.

Clearly this was a problem. Chicken is either white meat, dark meat, or buffalo wings with lots of hot sauce (and ideally served by 21 year old college females in Orange shorts, but that is another story all-together). We were taken aback by this new perspective. Chicken is Red Meat. Which was tantamount to saying Soylent Green is People. How can this be...

Dave, being the ever quick one replies to my chickens with Ducks. He says, they fly, they swim and they walk the earth, as god intended. So what are they?

Wow, that one stumped me. Is their meat color determined by a majority percentage of which domain they spend the most time in. And from there, if they migrate, from one lake to another does the flying time during migration really count towards flying, because their intention is to go to another lake to swim. We briefly mentioned Canadian geese, but decided that if we cant nail down ducks, there is no way we can get to canadian geese. There could be ramifications with international law for even attempting to involve the canadian geese. Immigration reform did not account for Canadian geese. We didn't want to mix our religion with our politics, especially at work.

After many long seconds of contemplation, we voted that ducks swim the oceans (or lakes to be specific), which would make them white meat and flying was an incidental aspect of their need to be in the oceans (or lakes). And walking was only a by product of getting out of the water to eat so they could go back in the water. The closer for ducks was the aged analogy "like water off a ducks back". Clearly, ducks swam the oceans and were thusly white meat.

This seemed to be a huge problem as we had previously thought of chickens and ducks as equals in the grand scheme of things. It was a sad day when we realized that was no longer possible. Segregation and discrimination was also part of the animal kingdom. We hung our heads low with shame.

Well, not to be undone, I said Manatee. Dave said, sorry, clear cut answer, white meat, swims in the oceans. I knew in my heart, that manatee (the sea cow) should be red meat, but the logic would not break, they swim in the oceans, hence, they must be white meat. We didn't even go into the part where the manatee is truly an aggressive creature and attacks recreational boaters just trying to have a good time.

Dave gleefully dropped the bomb, Platypus. I was like a deer in the headlights, stuck in a space time continuum, the matrix was failing, blood leaving my head, i felt faint. They swim, they walk, they lay eggs. My god (no pun intended), what are they. I was stumped. Even Dave didn't know what the answer was. It has probably taken scholars hundreds of years to figure this out, but since Dave and I only had 10 minutes before lunch, we went into overdrive. We decided that the sole determining factor for the platypus must be flippers. No one in their right mind would walk the earth, as god intended with flippers, so by default, they must be white meat.

It was approaching lunch, and we had successfully wasted a solid 15 minutes and felt proud of our vast knowledge base of world facts, animal husbandry and theology. Later in the day we would attempt to resolve other creatures to ensure they were properly categorized. We had to have answers. This was one rock that would be overturned and the light of the truth would shine on it until it relented.

It was issues like this that upper management paid us what they did so we would gleefully return each and every day and crawl under desks to check cat5e cable and remove viruses from the accounting guys computer.

Our short list for future discussions included

Emus
Penguins
Those crazy monkeys in Japan that sit in the hot water springs with snow on their head
Those lizard things on the island where that Darwin guy went that swim and walk the land
Lobsters and crabs (because they don't swim, they walk)
and snakes

epilogue: We still haven't figured out snakes, because they have no feet to walk the land, and they can swim and some actually live in the oceans.

Work Stories, or how to survive in middle management without going insane.

---(from 2007)

So in my new job I need to evaluate a few departments to see if they are doing what they are supposed to do.  I kind of like doing this, it’s like getting paid to solve problems.  The downside is you have to then actually deal with the people that are the cause of most of the problems.

Three ways to figure this out what a given person or department is actually doing:

1) Walk around and get an idea of how it looks and what they are doing.

This one works only so much as people are on their best behavior when I walk around and go back to facebook when I am gone.

2) Ask the supervisors and managers what is going on.

Kind of like #1, this one only works part of the time because as soon as I walk away, they go back to facebook, twitter, pinterest or something even less interesting.

3) Ask the department that does report writing and data mining for statistics of what people did the prior day.

I like this one because I know the system, I know how to write the code to get the information. I can read the code and ultimately it provides more objective information on staff performance.

So I do #1 and #2 a few times and get what I expect. Smiles and lies as I like to say, smiles and lies (mind you I am somewhat cynical).

So to get the reports done I send an email to the person in charge of the report writers and say I need a report of all the "Stuff" people did yesterday.  In this scenario stuff is like moving the dreaded widget from the left conveyor belt to the right conveyor belt.  The code is pretty easy to write, but time consuming enough that they have dedicated people that do.

So I send the email out and the day starts with the glass being half full.

Dear report writing manager, please get me a summary of the people in department x and all the stuff they did yesterday (I will omit the technical jargon, it’s really boring).

No response for a few hours.

I walk over to the office of the manager in charge of the report writing people, she isn’t there. I am told she is gone for a while, with no definition what-so-ever as to how long “Gone for a while” actually means.  No big deal, I’m management, so I’ll just forward the request to the person that actually does the report and copy all the people that need to know, including the manager that is gone for a while on an extended coffee break; she loves her coffee. 

Seems pretty basic in my overly simplistic mind.

I forward the email to the guy that does the report writing.

Dear guy that does the report writing, your boss isn’t here, can you run me a report of the stuff for the people in department x for what they did yesterday, as you know this information is only good for one day.  Thanks, signed me.

He responds, sure, I’ll get on that. I respond thanks again.

Life is good I say to myself.

An hour later the person that is in charge of that department sends me a terse little email, she evidently just got back from her second coffee break.

Dear Dickhead {not my real name}, please send all report requests to me directly. I don’t want to bog down the people that do the reports.  I need to evaluate all requests and prioritize them.

I respond, sure, you weren’t there and I need it for a report for our mutual boss and a few others (and I have the right to get it without having to ask permission is kind of a larger unsaid truth).

An hour goes by.

I get my report, it isn’t really what I asked, it’s half of what I asked.  It answered the question of how many widgets were taken off of the left conveyor but didn’t say anything else. It’s half valid, so it’s worthless to me.

So I respond back to the guy that sent it to me, and copy all the other people he copied. I say:

Dear guy that writes reports, can I get the other half of the information I asked, thanks I really appreciate your help.

A few minutes later I get a terse little response from the manager of that department

Dear f*cktard {again, not my real name}, as I stated previously, please send all report requests to me directly to review.

I'm not so happy about this one.

I respond:

Dear person that runs the report writing department, I copied you as you can see, I simply asked to get my original report completed nothing new here, as you can tell by the email history below.

I sense a disturbance in the force coming...

She responds

Dear Asshat {you know the drill, not my real name}, If you don’t want my opinion, or that of my staff, please let me know, so I can document this appropriately and follow up with the director of the place that both of us report to. We will have your information tomorrow at 9:00 am thanks (and I think there was some hidden text about me dying in a fire she omitted, not sure).

By tomorrow the stuff from today will be outdated, so I will need a new request and she knows that.

I decide that I don’t want to get into this battle and I just begrudgingly run the thing myself.  I learned a valuable lesson this fine day, never underestimate the power of angry people that are in charge of the report writing department.

Right after I got done I made sure to change her entire coffee supply for the next three months to de-cafe since I was in charge of that and she wasn’t.  A wry smile was seen as I left for the drive home.

Yellow rooms

Since as far back as I can remember, I don't like being in yellow rooms.  And when I mean yellow, I mean pretty much every shade and hue of yellow. 

I get this strange sense of unease and prefer not to be in them.

It isn't really a big deal, it's more of a preference. 

The odd thing about it is I don't know why. 

I haven't had any traumatic experience in a yellow room, I was never held hostage by pastel terrorists nor have any oomph-loompas threatened to withhold candy from me if I didn't spend an hour staring at yellow walls. 

Hence, I assume it's aliens or the CIA or the Russians that caused this. 

Politics, the New York Times and the Clintons

Politics - Disclaimer

Forgetting the New York Times article (link below) is a little slanted, they are still on point.

http://nypost.com/2017/04/22/why-cant-the-clintons-just-go-away/

I don't like the clintons and never have. I really don't like hilliary and never will. She is arrogant and has a sense of entitlement that is offensive to my common sense. She was not owed the presidency. She lost because of her abject narcissism.

She has functionally never held a non-public service job and is worth a billion dollars now, and as a democrat, I would like to know how. Seriously, I would like to know how.

You want to know something, I want to see her taxes for the past ten years. It will never happen.

But that isn't the point. The point is simple.

Stop re-electing the same people over and over. You want to know why we are in the mess we are in. Its because we, yes WE keep putting the same exact people into power. WE refuse to change what WE do and WE don't like the outcome of OUR decisions.

It truly has become our insanity to stay in an abusive relationship with someone that doesn't love us and constantly cheats on us and steals our money in the morning and promises us that they wont do it again tomorrow, and we are easily conned.

I think this of both republicans and democrats. It is just the same thing at the end of the day, regardless of who we elect. I wont lie, cheat or steal, and guess what...

So, stop. Seriously, just stop voting for the people that are not the other other people. It is beyond stupid at this point.

Get out of the idea of blame for a moment and look at cause and effect.

Example, and probably a lame one. I hope you get the point.

There is a problem in Flint Michigan. It has been there for 20 or 30 years or more. The presidents have changed. Congress has had a few minor swings, but ultimately is the same.

The local government has remained a democratic controlled entity through pretty much the entire tenure and people keep electing the same person, same people, same demographic or same party.

And the problem has gone unanswered. And it isn't a new problem

Yea, blame the president, but which one... It isnt the presidents fault in Flint. Not one of the presidents over the past 20 or 30 years.

The bottom line is the people sold themselves to an ideal. To a promise. To a solution that only worked in theory, but never in practice, because it wasn't a solution, it was a series of blaming someone else as a full time job.

It was a constant circular firing squad of who's fault is it and lets talk about fault and blame and talk about a solution, but focus on blame. Because that means the elected officials dont actually have to do anything.

Guess what, nothing changed. And now its actually bad and will cost the rest of the country a billion dollars to fix.

You want to know what the difference between a CEO and an elected official is. Simple, a CEO can get fired for not doing their job, a politician realistically cant.

The government needs to be run by people that are accountable, not by people that make a living off of talking about fault and blame.

My opinion, fire all of the politicians and hire new ones in Flint.

Now extrapolate that to congress.

We need term limits or we need to be ok with the problem that we keep re-electing year after year.

If you dont like your abusive relationship you leave.

You have free will.

If not, take a double shot of the koolaid and go back to keeping up with the cardashians.

I like kittens

Clarification

If you weren't certain about what I post:

1) Fake news as often as possible, I post based on the title or picture, with an emphasis on extra fake, kittens and scantily clad women

2) If you don't know, then it is sarcastic, if you do know, take it really seriously

3) Irony is a wonderful thing, unless you are scott

4) I may go back to lists, because I can.

5) Need more kittens, boobs and generally speaking, scantily clad women with kittens.

Double standards

I am still not a big fan of trump. I doubt I ever will be. Lets make that clear.

But assume for a moment, every time you make a negative or critical comment about him, his policies, what he says, what he does, how he acts or conducts himself that you have a problem with his actions.

Assume, someone calls you a racist.

Now you get how a whole lot of people got treated when doing the same exact thing to obama

Popcorn

Mom: Do you need anything at the store
Me: No.

Mom: Are you sure?
Me: We don’t have any popcorn, and I know how you like it. So if you buy some I will make it.

Mom: What kind?
Me: Just plain, uncooked, corn kernels. Not a brand, not a type, Nothing special about it. Corn Kernels, for popping...

Mom: Who makes that?
Me: Well kind of no one. Its just uncooked popcorn. Not packaged or sold with flavor or anything else. You know, just raw corn kernels.

Mom: Why don’t I buy the pre-made stuff?
Me: Well you can, but you like it when it is cooked better. You don’t like the fake salt and butter taste.

Mom: But then you have to make it…
Me: Yea, but it’s the way you showed me to make it as a kid. We played with boiling oil, in this archaic kettle kind of thing with open heating tubes set to nuclear temperatures. That’s how we made it.

Mom: Isnt that dangerous?
Me: Well if it is, it was a hundred years ago when you showed us how to make it. Either way, get the one you want. Its for you.

Mom: What happened to the corn popper we used?
Me: Well it either got lost in time, or child protective services took it away when the raided the house because you let us use something that is probably banned in a hundred countries now because it was so unsafe.

Mom: You're not funny
Me: That's odd, child protective services felt sorry for me and laughed at my jokes after the raid...

Mom: So, you just want corn then?
Me: Well yes and no. I want corn kernels that are intended to be put in oil to pop, hence the term “Popcorn”. I dont want anything packaged or pre-made. It defeats the purpose.

Mom: Ok.

A few hour later…

She bought some off brand of Orville Redenboker, Gluten Free-Organic-Low Salt-Dairy safe Buttered, Environmentally concerned, low MSG, High Vitamin C, Pop corn in multi packs.

Mom: I got you the low salt popcorn, you need to cut back at your age.

Me: {Blinks}

Banking for little people

I drove by a bank on my way to some random thing I was doing and saw a sign that said

"No fees, free checking, free savings account"

I thought, wow how incredibly generous of them. I give them my money, and in order to qualify I need to do a direct deposit from work, and I have to maintain a $5000 balance and I can only write ten checks a month and there is a charge if I use any ATM that isn't theirs, and I cant use their ATM more than ten times a month.

All of this when I give them my money, that they realistically give me nothing in return for because the 0.025% interest isn't paying off my vacation house in Belize anymore.

And they can invest in anything they want without my say. They can fund sub-prime loans, or send the money to Uzbekistan as part of their portfolio, regardless of the risk to my money and if I don't like that, well suck it up Francis.

All of this so I can do what again?

Which translates to letting them be a fee based clearing house to pay my bills.

I use USAA and love them, because they dont do any of these things.

Vegetable Based Sarcasm

First off, there are for the most part two kinds of people.

1) Those that like artichokes, and
2) People that still live in the dark ages of eating paint chips and watching nascar, and,
3) Scott

So the question being, and its multi-part, so please use a #2 keyboard and reference your work on all problems

1) Do you steam the artichoke, or are you putting it directly in water and boiling it?

2) When you do whatever you do in #1, do you cut off the tops of the artichoke first, or leave the leaf tops attached?

3) When you are doing both #1 and #2, are you putting the artichoke stalk down or leaf top down?

For the sake of legal issues being addressed and liability, I am assuming you are cutting the stalk down to the base prior to cooking.

Bonus question, and its rhetorical:

4) Technically you don't have to boil or steam the artichoke, you can barbecue it, but since I have never done that, its like the moon landings, since I cant personally figure it out, thus, it must have never been possible. If you do barbecue it, please explain how to be awarded the bonus points.

Moving along:

Once cooked, what, if any are your condiments of choice

Typically this also falls into two basic camps

1) Mayonnaise, or
2) Melted butter

For the most part I vote for the mayonnaise. But I have some flexibility there.

If however, you use miracle whip for an artichoke, or for that matter anything else. Please seek immediate psychological help and do not go near sharp objects, petting zoos or anything flammable.

Random

Mongol General: Conan, What is best in life?

Conan: Crush your enemies. See them driven before you. Hear the lamentations of their women.

Mongol General: That is good! That is good.

Since this is both on the internet and it's a direct quote from a real person, I thought I would add some more, alternative facts.

This is not fake news.

1) Pizza that is so hot that it almost burns your mouth, but it doesn't.

2) Coffee served by a barista that smiles and doesn't look down on you for ordering something boring.

3) Winning another argument with scott over the technical details of a vorpal weapon.

4) Squirrels that walk towards you when thy hear the secret 'food is on its way' noise from the old human male.

5) Cats that fall asleep above you on a hot summer day.

6) Hitting all of the green lights on a major street.

7) Canadian women's Olympic curling team members.

8) Completely inappropriate text message you get (I love technology).

9) Doing the right thing when you think no one notices. And then you find out someone noticed

Endings and beginnings

Seems like they just occur at the same time. Somewhere is an analogy of a Viking snake myth eating its tail that comes to mind. 

Or perhaps it's just the Tears for Fears lyric "Nothing good happens without some pain."

I don't really know and I am truly the last person I would ask advice from at this point.

I know there is all of the wisdom to be said about its my journey and people, places and things will come and go, it does not however make it any easier. 

And so it begins

Even a small step in that direction proves better than sitting in the basement, both literally and figuratively.

There simply comes a time for action and that time is now.

mg