Frivolous Friday, 07.31.2009: Brought to you by the Crazy Idea Factory

So, I'm sitting at Peaberry's on its final day of business, thinking that what La Crosse needs is not yet another coffee boutique, but a Kinkos that serves coffee, sandwiches and offers wireless access. Not the caffinated equivalent of a bar, with music too loud to hold a conversation, but a place set up with dampers (such as call center cube farms use) to keep you in your own bubble. Heck, if the real estate's cheap enough--which it should be for some years to come in a lot of markets--why not throw in the conference room version of Japanese capsule hotelling for those who want even more quiet?

I mean, how many startups are all-but-launched in a Starbucks or Caribou Coffee or other coffee shop? Someone needs to find right business model for startup incubators disguised as coffee/copy shops and run with it.

How not to generate new business, Part II of the T-Mobile version

Look, I'm not trying to carry on a vendetta. There are far too many better windmills at which to tilt. But you can hardly blame me for being distinctly unamused to discover that @TMobileDeals had decided to follow me after I posted last night's blow-by-blow account of how impossible T-Mobile made it to become a Sidekick Prepaid customer.

I can certainly understand deciding not to click the URL for the full rant. Don't think I don't know how tiresome I am when I'm ranting. But you'd think that the title alone would be a big tip-off. Apparently not. The "award winning customer service" strikes again...

How not to generate new business, the T-Mobile version

So, I had the unwelcome news that Sprint--they of the appalling customer service reputation--is buying out my prepaid mobile carrier, Virgin Mobile. Which would amount to survival of the fattest, except that Sprint's reputation seems to be catching up with them. Which in turn means that two companies, rather than one, will eventually crash and burn. Three, if you account for Helio being bought out by Virgin Mobile not so long ago. Go, capitalism. [wry look]

Thus, I'm in the market for alternatives. Tracfone's phones are decidedly un-sexy, even for frumpy ol' me. (a QWERTY keyboard, generous texting plan and web browsing are absolutely non-negotiable). T-Mobile looked somewhat promising, and a pre-paid plan to go with a cute little Sidekick phone seemed to fit the bill. (Scroll, if you will, to the bottom of this page to see that I'm not making this up. Yep, you see that it says "Unlimited domestic email, texting, IM and Web browsing" with $0.15/minute calling, right?)

Except that their website made it totally impossible to actually purchase a Sidekick plus a "Sidekick Prepaid" plan. Here, verbatim, is what I typed in their pre-chat questionnaire:

Why does this website make it so difficult to 1.) Buy a Sidekick and 2.) Sign up for the prepaid $1/day plan? The prepaid plans list that as an option, but nowhere do I find it, not even with the search feature.

When I pick the Sidekick and try to select a prepaid plan, the website just sends me in circles. I want a phone with a full QUERTY keyboard. I text and browse waaaay more than I talk. I'm looking for an alternative carrier now that (sucky) Sprint is buying Virgin Mobile.

Don't you think it would be a more viable business model to make it easy for me to send you money for a service I have come to value? Just askin'...

That generated a "no answer found" result, and gave me the opportunity to chat with a live representative. Except that this required a valid account number. Which I, as a prospective customer, don't have. Never mind that I'd selected "No" from the drop-down list in the pre-chat list that asked whether I am an existing customer.

The second time through the process, I faked it with my existing number and a bogus quartet of SSN digits. At the time of writing, I'm #80 in the queue. Ten minutes later, it's down to #60. At twenty minutes, I'm at #48. At thirty, I've clawed my way to 41st place. At forty, I'm averaging almost one place per minute, clocking in at #32. Fifty, I'm knocking on #26's doorbell. After a full hour, I'm 21st in line, and with that I lose my admittedly morbid curiosity to confirm that T-Mobile's [cough] "Award-winning customer service" is, in fact, a Darwin Award.

Mind you, I've been occasionally banging around the T-Mobile website the whole while, even going through the motions of pretending to add a Sidekick to my cart and running the advertised "$1/day" Sidekick plan to ground. No dice. It is simply not an option. I begin to suspect that I'm party to an experiment rather like the rat in a maze, except that there's no exit and the walls move like the trash compactor in Episode 4.

For the life of me, I can't remember the name of my Macroeconomics prof. from back in the tail end of the Reaganomics Decade--you know, the one engineered by the guy who just lost $13 million of his own money alone and barely escaped an SEC prosecution. Otherwise, I'd look her up and ask her to remind me again how capitalism is "the most efficient system for allocating goods and services."

Would you work for stickers?

After seven years on the high school and college speech and debate teams, it seems odd to remember that I had extra lessons in kindergarten, seeing a part-time speech trainer to correct the lisp I acquired by losing my two front teeth nearly simultaneously.

A sunny-tempered, individualistic child of six would not have worried overmuch about the lisp, at least not until too late. She was in it for the foil star-stickers placed beside her name in the grade-book if she made it through the lesson without a slip-up.

Obviously, people who work need to pay the bills. But beyond that, what motivates people is as different as the people themselves. No news flash there. That being said, why are fringe benefits too often served as a single Hobson's Choice happy meal, rather than a la carte?

Delegating upwards

Most folks already know this, but problems aren't created equal. Even problems that are--all other things being equal--equal really aren't. At least not in terms of getting themselves fixed. In a perfect world, we would just do the right thing out of hand. In a merely improved world, we would soberly weigh the cost-to-benefit ratio with a full accounting of human factors. But in this particular world it so often seems to boil down to who loses the most face by admitting the problem vs. who loses the most face when the problem becomes public knowledge.

In such cases, the surest way to fix a problem that you don't have the tools to fix is to make it the problem of someone who both does have those tools and who also has some skin in the proverbial game. (I can gratefully say that I've never had to work in a situation that's forced me to break something more thoroughly in order to guarantee that it's fixed.)

Finding ways to delegate problems up the food chain rather than downward is, I would argue, among the top ten problem-solving skills you'll ever learn. It's also a good cure for the folks who like to create cozy little sinecures by making themselves "indispensable" (and, inevitably, bottlenecks).

At work, three of the lynch-pin people are out for the whole week, which leaves our alpha-geek plus your faithful blogger to figure out what these folks "just know." And I will have to be out of the office most of Friday as well. I'm looking forward to seeing what procedural changes and mandatory cross-pollination/documentation will come of this.

Of loss-leaders leading to losing

One of the reasons I prefer to watch most movies on DVD is also one of the reasons I don't watch TV anymore: Commercials. But my husband and I are Harry Potter fans, so we dodged the crush of its pubescent fanbase by waiting until today to take in the series' sixth installment.

Now, I understand that TV can only be freely available because it's commercially sponsored. But the fact that my eyeballs being pimped to advertisers when I've paid for the content brasses me the heck off. As it should brass off any consumer. Sure, you can time your arrival and choose to skip the advertisements, at the cost of losing your shot at the best seats.

That and the perennially overpriced refreshments can't help but make me wonder if the movie itself isn't in fact what's called a loss-leader--i.e. a product/service deliberately priced at or below cost so as to generate traffic, and make up the difference on add-on sales.

Kindly humor me and assume I'm correct in that surmise, because I think there's a larger point to be made.

Okay, I understand that cinemas are facing stiff competition from DVDs and content on the internet. But, to my thinking at least, the proper response is to focus on emphasizing the added value--i.e. the social dimension of going to the movies--rather than setting up an environment where the patron darned near hears "CHA-CHING!!!" every time s/he walks through the door. If I want to feel like a wallet with legs, I'll go to a casino, thank you very little.

How about installing seats with arms that flip up for couples out on date night? How about club cards that give loyal customers first dibs on screenings of highly anticipated movies after so many swipes? How about pitching highly discounted Friday afternoon viewings to local businesses as performance incentive/reward programs? How about having the DVD of the original movie available for sale the sequel/prequel is being shown? How about "theme" showings (by no means an original idea on my part)?

The other route, of course, is to go a bit higher-end, which means not just showing any-old-garbage that the Hollywood factory cranks out. Granted, I'm a snob, but killing time by looking at the posters/displays for upcoming movies almost set off a facial tic at a couple of points. Oh, yeah, I'm gonna believe that some anorexic-looking chick can fire a fully automatic weapon in each hand and not be on her backside a second later when Newton's third law kicks in...riiiiiiight...

The reason I'm dispensing (completely unsolicited) advice to an industry about which I know next to nothing, is that once in a great while I do actually want to see a first-run movie on the big screen, and I'd rather prefer to preserve that option. So I'll be presumptuous enough to assume that the rest of America is like me in that they go to movies for one (or more) of four basic reasons:

1. Because other people are going, too (either as a group of friends or as part of a date)
2. Because the movie might actually be worth the time spent watching it
   
3. For the general ambiance (for historical/community-based theaters)
4. To kill time
   

$5 buckets of popcorn and blaring ads play into none of those motivations. Neither, in general, does being open at one in the afternoon on a Tuesday in the middle of winter.

I'm probably talking out of my ear here. But that doesn't contradict the fact that flat screen TVs are growing bigger all the time even as their cost shrinks. And for the price of two or three tickets, you can pick up the DVD. Not to mention that being mistress/master of the remote means that you can always rewind if some fool's cellphone (or mouth) goes off at the wrong time. Oh, and the popcorn from the kitchen is much cheaper even with real butter on it.

Even if this post is merely another manifestation of a typical American consumerist entitlement mentality, the central point stands: If you don't truly understand what it is you're selling, your business model is doomed.

Test anxiety in the real world

I discovered test anxiety later than most, the result of an infatuation with my own (highly over-rated) bookishness and relatively low hurdles. I paid for it early-on in college when faux-cleverness wasn't enough to compensate for lack of preparation. Sometimes--perhaps oftentimes--there's a rather sizeable difference between being clever and being prepared. So I have learned to hedge my bets by over-preparation. In the process, I've turned myself into a problem-solving automaton on Math tests and an oversized Pez dispenser of memorized minutiae on standardized tests. It works well enough for the "education" I'm paying for these days.

This week, the "education" was a little different.

Today's test involved two pages of multiple choice questions, one page of True/False questions, plus a few revolvers and a live ammo., courtesy of the La Crosse Gun Club's "Women on Target" handgun safety course. Apart from passing a driver's license exam, I've never taken a "test" that carried so much possibility for real-world mayhem. I'd used rifles for target-shooting twice before. But that was when I was twenty and immortal...as were those around me. Paintball was no help, as it carries the triple-assurance that the guns have safeties, barrel-guards and can't kill anyone. Worse, when we handled unloaded guns on Thursday night, I discovered that I'd picked up a baaaad habit from paintball, namely curling my finger reflexively around the trigger. That scared me.

In short, over-preparing wasn't an option, and neither was my competitive streak which drives it. Friday evening involved a certain amount of soul-searching, because the stakes were so high.

Fortunately, the folks who offer this training can and do over-prepare. Which makes it so much easier to stop freaking out and do what actually matters--namely shut up, listen, ask questions until the answers make sense, and, for pity's sake, focus.

All in all, it went rather well. I was twice reminded to keep my finger outside the trigger guard when I had the .22 pointed down in the "loaded but not yet firing" position. I found that I'm absolutely unfazed by the bang of a gun and its kickback, at least for .22s and .38 specials, and that the shockwave of a .44 magnum going off like small cannon next to me is only somewhat distracting.

But, of critical importance, absolutely no one was hurt, unless you count a few hammer-bites on the thumbs that are the wages of gripping a pistol too high. Although I can't help but think that those are almost a rite of passage, a form of symbolic scarification in a tribal initiation ceremony. ;-)

And it's all thanks to folks who make it as safe as possible to learn things that can't be learned any other way. Big ups to the La Crosse Rifle Club (and the NRA education programs that back them up) for that.

The takeaway from this, believe it or not, is not self-congratulation. While learning a modicum of gun safety can easily and literally be a matter of life or death, it's also probably moot because I'll likely stick to archery for target practice "therapy." No, the take-home is that Corporate America could learn quite a lot from the folks who hang out at the clubhouse out on North Chipmunk Road. Basically, there's only so much of practical use that can be picked up from schoolwork and seminars. The rest, particularly in I/T, is picked up on-the-fly. Hopefully you won't break production systems or whack live data while you're learning the useful stuff.

But the responsibility for setting up that "over-prepared" environment is definitely not that of the rank and file I/T folks. Sure, you can have every right to expect your people to be self-teaching (and I hope you'd have the great, good sense to fire anyone who walked in claiming to know it all). But if the only available "lab" is live systems, the fault for any mayhem rests directly on management. In other words, the folks who couldn't budget the money or person-hours to make it safe to learn from mistakes--much less the resources to rectify them before they become disasters. Bottom line: If those you count upon to be self-taught live in a perpetual state of test anxiety, you can kiss real problem-solving, not to mention any hope of innovation innovation, goodbye.