"Hedtke's Law" and proper attribution

I was off at the STC conference in Atlanta this past week. It was a lovely event and the photos I took can be found at my Flickr website. Two of my all-time favorite people got their Associate Fellow credentials and I got to see any number of other old friends as well.

At the Board meeting on Friday, no less than 4 people pointed out to me that "Hedtke's Law" (identified as such) had become part of Board canon. Hedtke's Law is something I kept saying while I was on the Board when dealing with people who are too 'nice' (the nose should wrinkle when you say it). 'Nice' is ineffectual, unable to do anything, because you're worried that someone, somewhere will be offended. You may be able to put a name and a face to that somebody, but the idea that SOMEBODY will be upset would completely prevent the STC from doing a lot of things in the past that should've been done to the betterment of the members or the Society as a whole. (And fuck that noise, btw.)

I have no patience for people who don't want to get anything done because they're in mortal fear of offending someone, when, in fact, they're there to get something done. When confronted with this ineffectual thinking--of which we had an awful lot at the time--I kept saying this:

"If it doesn't offend somebody, it couldn't possibly interest anybody."

I said it so often that this was dubbed "Hedtke's Law," and it's a very flattering legacy for getting the STC turned in the right direction. (There's a corollary to this, too: If you're the one offended, it's just your bad luck that this time it was you.)

But I really need to set the record straight on one point: I didn't write this. My old friend, Allyn Wolfe, was responsible for saying this some 35 years ago in the pages of Red Garters, a Craft magazine that he edited. (His editorial policy was, similarly, "I shall continue to provoke everyone within my reach!") It's a profoundly great statement and, although I'm getting the credit for saying it, I want it stated for the record that it was Allyn who came up with this in the first place.


For more on Hedtke's Laws, click here.

"Hedtke's Law" and proper attribution

Quote du jour from Atlanta

Made it to Atlanta without any problems. I've been attending some meetings already but haven't been tagged for a lot of assignments at the STC (and I'm reasonably thankful for that!). I'm doing a zillion things on the computer this afternoon and I have a quote to share with you:

I dream of a world in which chickens can cross the road without having their motives questioned.

I'm glad to be here and getting things done for the STC, but I am still gacking at the idea that morning comes three hours earlier on Eastern time.

Quote du jour from Atlanta

Debriding the office

No, there shall be no photos, as it's rather ugly work. But I am debriding the office, which is a layer removal job. It's working out nicely: I've sifted a huge stack of magazines and put the ones that I don't need into a box. STC magazines are sorted and in a box. (I'm not reading them at the moment, but they're at least neat and tidy.) Piles of mail is in the box for shredding and I've got about 20 Yule cards that I haven't opened yet. And there's floor and desk space opening up.

Best of all, I'm pulling all the bills together for putting together taxes for 2008. That'll be nice to get done.

Debriding the office

Telling the dumbest joke in the world

I was reminded by a "punchlines-only" blog forum elsewhere of something I hadn't thought of for a while. It's a story about the dumbest joke in the world.

---

In August of 1996, when I was dating the former g/f, I had been at her house and I was leaving late in the evening. She was standing on her porch and I said "Wait, wait, wait, I have a joke to tell you."

"Okay," she said, "Tell me your joke and then go home."

"Two carrots are walking down the street," I say. She looks at me with this look of "You're telling me a joke about carrots?!??" (Trust me, I've seen this kind of look before; I was unfazed by this from her.)

"So, they're walking down the street and they get to a crosswalk. One of the carrots starts to cross against the light--"

"Carrots are crossing against the light??" she says.

"--so one of them starts to cross the street against the light and the other carrot says 'Hey, that's not safe,' and the first carrot says 'Hey, I can see for blocks and there's nobody coming.' The second carrot says 'I dunno; I think I'll wait until the light changes,' and the first carrot says 'Suit yourself.'

"The first carrot makes it halfway across the street and a truck comes screaming around the corner on a left-turn and BLAM! There's carrot juice everywhere. They rush the carrot to the hospital and they're operating on him in emergency surgery. The other carrot is pacing back and forth and back and forth in the waiting room. Five hours later, the surgeon comes out and says 'You a friend of that carrot in there?' and the carrot says 'Yes, I am.' The surgeon says 'I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that we saved your friend. The bad news is that he's going to be a vegetable for the rest of his life.'"

At this point, I crack up. This is, after all, one boffo joke and I do tell it well if I say so myself. It's really funny stuff. Said former g/f is laughing some and looking a bit shocked. (Bless 'er, that was a bit easy to do sometimes.) I go home. She did say later that she was appalled that I was telling her a joke about two carrots and tried to claim that she was laughing only because I was laughing so hard. A-hem, yes, well, I didn't believe this for a moment, but I also knew that she'd hate to admit that she'd actually found a joke that dumb to be funny.

Fast forward a couple months. I'm spending the night over there and she's going to drop me at the airport early in the morning. I'm heading out to speak at my first STC regional conference elsewhere in the country. I'm going to be well-received, I know, but I'm still really quite nervous because I knew virtually nobody there at that point except for a few folks that I'd only met at the STC annual conference in May. We're snuggled up in bed and I'm expressing my nervousness about this appearance and the g/f is bolstering my courage.

"You make friends easily and they really want you to be there and you'll be a hit, so don't worry."

"Well, that's true," I said.

"You'll be able to tell them stories, too."

"Yes, that'd be fun!" I said, brightening.

"And you can always tell them the joke about the two carrots," she said. I made a noise of assent, further cheered.

We were okay up 'till that point, but then she ventured onto the really thin ice: "That's got to be the dumbest joke in the world."

"Oh, no, it's not!" I said with great alacrity, followed by "Three strings walk into a bar--"

"You know a joke about STRING??!?!?!?"

"THREE STRINGS WALK INTO A BAR," I said loudly, and I then proceeded to tell her the three strings joke. (I repeat it here only in case you've not heard this but that's not the point of this whole anecdote.)

Three strings walk into the bar. They sat down and they didn't get waited on so the first string walked up to the bar and asked for three whiskies. The bartender said, "I'm sorry, we don't serve strings in here." The string walks back to the table and and tells his friends what the bartender said.

"I've been here before and gotten a drink; I'll take care of it," said the second string. The second sting walks up to the bar and politely asks the bartender for three beers. The bartender says, "I thought I told your buddy we don't serve strings in here." So the second string walks back and and tells his friends what has happened.

The third string says "I come in here all the time. Let me take care of it." The third string unravels one end and then unravels the other end and then ties this big hairy knot in the middle and sorta wobbles up to the bar and says "Gimme three whiskies!" to the bartender.

The bartender looks him up and down and says, "You a friend of those strings over there?"

"No," the string replies, "I'm a frayed knot!"

...And at that point, having delivered the punchline, I was careful to go absolutely deadpan.

There was this second or two pause while the punchline registered with the g/f and then she exploded laughing. After a few seconds of this, the outrage that I'd conned her with what, indeed, was probably the world's dumbest joke, hit her hard and she started growling loudly at me. Then the laughter would hit again. Then the outraged growling.

The laughter and the outrage seesawed back and forth about three times, at which point, she started losing control of extraneous things like her bladder and she leapt out of bed and ran to the bathroom, still alternating between laughing and growling. I heard her peeing in the other room, still laughing and growling.

By this time, I was laughing myself to the point of near unconsciousness. A moment later, there was a flushing noise from the direction of the bathroom, and a large, handsome naked g/f came tearing out of the bathroom and leapt on the bed on top of me and started slamming my shoulders onto the bed, screaming at me "OOOOOH!! OOOOOH!! I am so angry with you!!! You told me a joke about string and I listened to it!!!!"

I was laughing so hard that I couldn't have defended myself against, well, even three strings, let alone a really pissed, muscular woman who outweighed me by about 40 pounds and was slamming me repeatedly into the mattress. I just hooted and laughed until she ran out of steam. I'm frankly rather surprised under the circumstances that I still got laid that evening.

She dropped me off at the airport and I flew off to the conference. Yes, it was wonderful, and we ended up in the bar the first night swapping stories. I told them the whole saga that I've written down here. It was a huge hit and I made friends I've kept to this day.

And for the rest of my years together with the former g/f, people would occasionally meet her and say things like "Oh, you're the one he told the story about the three strings to!"

Telling the dumbest joke in the world

I got quoted!

I wrote an article for the STC on the benefits of membership in the organization. It's a good article, based on the idea that being a member pays off heavily. Well, what the heck, the STC picked it up and used it for a marketing piece to recruit membership from the ranks of other organizations: the IEEE, mostly, where there's plenty of room for people to belong to two different professional organizations.

Thursday, I found out that my letter has been getting a little buzz: a marketing specialist is quoting it as an example of Really Good Marketing.

Far out!

I got quoted!

Pittsburgh

I did a speech in Pittsburgh on Monday. Nicky Bleiel, a wonderful person I know from the STC, had me out there to talk about documentation planning and estimating. I could remember bits and pieces of the terrain from when I lived there 40 years ago. The place has certainly improved some since then: the steel mills are shut down, the air's breathable, and there's a lot of technology. But no matter what, it all looks really tired and run down. It's a large Eastern city, so I suppose that's unavoidable, but it was just kinda depressing. It's not a place I'd really like to live, although the business and social and cultural opportunities would be fabulous.

There are some great people in the chapter out there besides Nicky. I had a chance to chat with a lot of the people who'd showed up for the presentation before we got started. And I ended up spending hours talking to Alan Houser about FrameMaker and FrameScript technology, the STC, and the occasional joke. I'm hoping to see more of the both of them at the STC Conference (assuming I have a spare moment--ha!).

One odd and interesting thing, though: as Nicky was driving me to the place where I was speaking, we saw a flock of wild turkeys. I wouldn't have thought that I'd be running into wild turkeys in Pittsburgh, but there you are.

Pittsburgh

I'm not running for office!

In the last year or two, I've had a flattering number of friends in the Society for Technical Communication tell me that they really, really, really would like to see me run for the office of 2nd VP. For those of you who read this who aren't familiar with the STC, you get elected for 2VP, then you accede to 1VP, then President, then Past-President, then your debt is paid and they strike your chains and you are freed. I've been on the Board for almost two years now and I'm happy with what I've been accomplishing on the Board itself and very unhappy with what I've been able to devote to being a regional sponsor (but I have to say that that's life, sadly; being on the Board hasn't been an easy task the last few years). It's been worth it, though; I've had a hand in helping the STC survive and bringing it into the 21st Century at last.

But the thing is that, while I think I might be a good President, while I think the STC would benefit from my being on the Board, while I think that it would be worthy work... I ain't gonna do it. I am not planning on running for 2VP next year when I'm up with my term as Director. It's a lot of work, there's no money involved, and there's not a lot of glory, honor, or fame. Furthermore, almost everyone who's President has either suffered significant financial losses because of the lack of time they put in to their jobs or has seen their primary relationship blow up--a disturbingly large percentage of the Presidents in the last decade have had this happen to them during their tenures in the Presidential chain. Most importantly, I keep having this feeling like time is running out and I'd rather not spend another four years of the rest of my life obligated to the STC. I'm sure I'll be doing committee work here and there for people--I really want to support Mark Clifford's presidency, for example--but I'd like the freedom to say "No" occasionally.

The biggest problem I've been having is that I tell all these people who are so flatteringly trying to get me to say "Yes" that I'm really not interested, and they don't believe me. They think I'm being coy and that my denials prove that I'm planning on running. No, I'm not that subtle, kids; trust me on this (but it's nice that you credit me with that kind of gamesmanship.) If I were thinking about running, I'd tell you.

I'm sure that there is some combination of factors that could really happen (as opposed to the "someone'd pay you a million dollars to do this," which isn't going to to happen for this job) that would convince me to run and maybe even feel good about it. But I can't think of any combination and I'm even less convinced that there'd be such a combination that the Babe would feel good about it. When I told her today that people just don't believe that I'm not running, the Babe said "You do like being married, don't you?" Exactly my thought, too.

I'm not kidding: I'm not running. I'm sure I'll be helping out on the Board, but someone else is going to have to run for 2VP next year, because I've got other things I'm thinking about doing.

I'm not running for office!

At the STC SoCal Awards Banquet

I was one of the presenters at the Society for Technical Communications SoCal Awards banquet this past Saturday in Irvine, CA. It was a really nice event, held at a restaurant that did not serve the usual rubber chicken dinner. I caught up with several folks I've not seen for quite a while. I also got to see my co-workers dressed up to the nines, which was fun. A very pleasant evening all 'round.



Me at the STC SoCal Awards Banquet, March 3 2007.

At the STC SoCal Awards Banquet

A long week of travel

Well, for a person who was in the hospital two and a half weeks ago with a heart problem, I'm certainly back to normal.

First and foremost: the cardiologist says that the tests are all normal. The nuclear imaging test was very good. Nothing is wrong, there was no damage and no heart attack, no coronary artery disease, nothing!. There was no apparent reason for my heart to kick up… it just did. But all I need to do is show up and talk to my GP and have her keep an eye on me.

I was incredibly disappointed to miss the STC Board meeting, which from all reports was indeed as dramatically progressive as I'd expected it to be. When I signed up with the STC Board last May, I'd have given us no better than even money of being in a recognizable and viable shape within 5 years. This year, I'd put our odds at 10-1 in favor of continuing survival. Things have changed and massively improved. We have a new Executive Director who was introduced at the conference in Las Vegas. And there have been lots of positive changes to the organization that will become increasingly visible over the next year. I'm particularly interested to see what the new conference format is going to be like. (Note for STC members: are you as tired as I of having gone to the Same Old Conference for the last 10 years or more? Things are going to be completely different in 2007 in Minneapolis from what I'm seeing.)

I was also greatly saddened to miss seeing a number of old friends at this conference. They missed me, too. One person even volunteered to play the banjo and sing strange songs to pretend she was me, which I'm sure would've been much more attractive, certainly.

Well, there'll be a hot time in Minneapolis in 2007, I guess.

My heart was decreed to be "normal" (and if there's just one thing in your life that you'd want to be normal, I'm betting that your heart would be right at the top of the list for what you'd like that one thing to be). I'm reminded of Clement Freud's comment about 30 years ago that he'd only voted for one person in his life, a man who'd been institutionalized at one point and then had gotten out, which required him to pass a review board of three psychiatrists who gave him a certificate of mental health. Clement Freud said that it was something to be able to vote for a politician who had a document proving he was sane.

Sunday, May 14th, was the Mother's Day concert at the Unitarian church. We sang with Byrdsong again (see the listing for the December concert to get an idea of what we did), doing a largely English Renaissance program this time--Wm. Byrd, John Dowland, and many others.

The concert started at 4:00pm. We kept going until 5:15pm, then we were done. The Babe and I took off straight for the airport, which is across town and out a bit. En route to the freeway, I dropped the Babe off at her acting class, then kept going. I got to the airport in plenty of time for a 7:45pm flight, schlepped my bags in to the airport, and got on a flight to Ontario, CA, to see my client in Lake Forest.

The problem is that Ontario's about an hour away from Lake Forest. The only reason that I went to Ontario instead of John Wayne Orange County airport is that You Can't Get There From Here. Eugene is so off the beaten path, there wasn't anything in the way of flights that would get me in to Lake Forest by 8:00am on Monday the 15th and still allow me to leave late enough to sing in the choir Sunday afternoon. It took a lot of work to find a flight into some area airport that I could then drive from, but I finally got something. Cost me extra money out of my pocket, but it was worth it: I'd have hated jacking up our choir director, who's truly a great guy.

I rented a car from Hertz this time and I may be doing this again. The service was wonderful, the car was fine, and I had absolutely no problems getting everything squared away. Which was good, I might add, because I was doing all of this at about 1:45 am Monday. I drove from Ontario over to Santa Ana without any great problems: the roads are nice and clear at that time of night. At one point, I looked down and discovered I was doing 95mph, which was disturbing--the California Highway Patrol is not forgiving of people flouting the laws so dramatically. I stayed at 80 or a little less all the rest of the way, but there was one idiot in a new pickup truck (pretty much a redundant statement, I grant you) who passed me doing at least 100. I kinda hoped he'd draw fire in case there were CHP patrol cars out there.

The four days I spent at the client's were fine. My boss is great. The products are very exciting. And I think I can do all of this in the time I've got. Mind you, I've also got a fair amount of work to do for Symantec doing training, but I've got my schedule set up so that I think I can manage this just fine.

I wrapped up Thursday afternoon and hit the road for Ontario directly from the client's office. I made it to the airport in plenty of time (good) and didn't even have bad traffic to deal with more most of the trip (better). The flight from Ontario to Las Vegas was uneventful. When I got to Las Vegas, I had a couple hours to kill until my flight took off. I fed money into the slot machines, which killed some time. Several of us were watching a chap who was making $200 last for quite a awhile on the dollar slots. Someone else came by and watched him for a few minutes, then figured he'd give the dollar slots a whirl. He dropped a $20 into one of the machines, hit the button, got three 7's and won $160. He said "I'm stopping here!" and cashed out and left. "What a prick!" we all said, with a smile.

I finally got home at 4:00am. Susan the Wonder Child picked me up at the airport (bless her!) and I curled up in bed for a few hours. We were theoretically getting an offer from the people for whom we'd been cutting a special deal for the house, but apparently there are some people you can't always do things for. They wanted a much better deal than they were ever going to get (including $15,000 off the sale price of the house and a few other things), so we told the realtor "No." (This was the gist of our response, anyway.) We cranked the price up to something reasonable and still cut them a deal, but I'm annoyed that their realtor couldn't pick up a clue: I'd told her that if they wanted a realtor and they wanted to pay her a commission on what we'd set up as a direct sale deal, then that was Not My Problem. Doesn't that sound unambiguous? I also told her that there was no room for a commission out of our pocket because we'd already given them the lion's share of the money on the direct sale, so our price was it. Nowhere in there did I say "And this is subject to negotiation." They were told that we were going to be away and if they wanted to respond or lock anything in, they had a very tight time frame… but we heard nothing by the time we left, so the house is officially On The Market.

Meanwhile, though, our new house is progressing swimmingly and it is truly a Thing Of Beauty, so I'm increasingly excited. There will be photos of all this when I'm not stuck with a 42K dial-up connection on-board ship, as I shall relate.

The Babe and I ran around, packed, did laundry, did errands, got the house straightened up for showing to people, and headed off to the Eugene airport at 3:00pm Friday. Our flight took us from Eugene to Medford, then to LA (without changing planes, thankfully). In LA, the plane was half an hour late, but we had had an hour to change flights, so we thought "Hey, no problem!"

Well, this was wrong. We flew to LA on Alaska and then transferred to an American flight for Miami. Where do we catch it? Oh, that's in Terminal 4 (we were in 3), so catch that shuttle bus. We did. It was rather alarming to see that we're on the runway. We knew this because there were signs that said "Yield to planes" and a couple of times we did. We finally got to the American Eagle terminal but we were then told that this wasn't it; we needed to leap on a second bus to get to where we really needed to go! Oy veh, time was running short.

But we got there in time, got on the plane (which was horribly cramped) and flew to Miami. I've had more comfortable flights, but we got there and didn't crash and we were on time, so WTF? The Babe's brother, Steve, and their cousin, Ruth (who lives in Miami), picked us up at the Miami airport and took us back to Ruth's townhouse. We hung out for a while and talked about the last week, then we all went back to bed.

We lunched with several other relatives at a nice Cuban restaurant in Miami and then headed off to the ship. Steve and Andy had already done an express boarding thing online so they just breezed through. We had had no time and hadn't gotten to it and so we had to stand in line. The process wasn't bad, though, just a bit tedious…and heavy, as I was carrying my shoulder bag crammed full of stuff, the laptop, which is terrifically heavy, and the garment bag carrying the tuxedo and the banjo. They gave us credit card sorta things that tied to my credit card (which the Babe had reminded me to phone so they knew to expect charges from the Eastern Caribbean and not freak out) and also provided identification and were also our door keys. And with that, we walked up the gangway and boarded the ship.

A long week of travel

Just stuff

Life's pretty good today.  I'm working on a magazine article on government purchasing of laptops and PDAs, doing some research so I have a better understanding of the facts.

I got back from the STC Board meeting in Atlanta, which was very productive, and am finally rested up and recovered.  Most of it was just getting rid of the last bits of this cold, which kept me coughing and snurfling all through the Board meeting, much to my embarrassment (and probably the annoyance of my fellow Board members--I'm sorry!).  The Babe and I were very glad to see each other again.  I hate being away from her.  I've been feeling really exceptionally goopy and romantic and it was wonderful to be back where I could see her once again. 

Susan reported that BC had also been missing me while I was gone: he'd rowdle around the house and sound plaintive.  He's back to fine health as best I can tell and his fur is growing back on the large shaved patch on his side.  (BC is asleep on the warm part of the top of the monitor at the moment.  Yang joined him right after I typed that.  Here's a picture of the two of them; they immediately started striking photogenic poses.)

Just stuff

Good to be home once again!

My flight from Atlanta departed at 9:55PM Sunday evening and didn't get home until about 2:15am Monday. Oy oy oy! But I'm back on the West Coast and, as Elisabeth Knottingham has said, my bed is the most wonderful object in the universe since matter condensed out of energy after the Big Bang.  And the Babe was here, and that makes it even better. 

I spent part of the day sleeping.  I'm going to go off to bed now, actually, even though it's early.  I'm just acclimated enough to Eastern time that it feels like it's after midnight.  I'll get back to reality quickly, I imagine. 

Good to be home once again!

Notes from the STC Board meeting

Here in Atlanta on Friday morning at the pre-Board session on educational issues. It’s lovely that the hotel has given us a really ~nice~ plate of cheeses along with the more typical breakfast fare. And I just went to get a little fruit: being in Atlanta, we apparently have access to decently ripe cantaloupe and honeydew in January. (Oh, gawd, ripe strawberries and blackberries and raspberries, too!)

I’ve been suffering this cold for some days and was still whorfling heavily yesterday, but as the day wore on, I was feeling a good deal better. This morning, I actually felt almost well. Hurrah! I figure I’ll be in even better shape tomorrow. It’d certainly be nice not to have to blow my nose or clear my throat every 5 minutes.

The Atlanta Hyatt hotel where we are is a very good hotel, although being not so keen on heights, I’m not happy with the completely open “airshaft” style of the hotel. I hug the walls a bit when I’m walking from my room to the elevator (which, as luck would have it, is diametrically opposite the elevators… which are themselves the open glass “outside” elevators so you can see going up and down).

It’s a trifle frustrating that, where we are in the International Ballroom downstairs from the lobby, there is no wireless connectivity. We’re under too much metal and concrete, so I have to wait until I get upstairs to make any connections. I’m also less than pleased that this is an open wireless network, completely unsecured: I feel nervous about doing things online because there’s just no telling who’s snooping my passwords. Hell, I felt kinda chary about entering my credit card information on the form to start all of this up. Hmmmm….

We’re discussing what we like and don’t like about the conference right now. I’m pleased that I’m not the only one with some of my concerns and there is a shared view of the kinds of things we can do better. I am also enormously buoyed by the opportunity we’re seeing for change and progress now. I know we’d never have managed this a year ago, but I think that things are going to happen now.

Notes from the STC Board meeting

How to be immortal

A prefatory comment here: This is a speech I gave not that long ago to a group of writers and technical communicators in the Society for Technical Communication. While some of the examples in this speech are pitched to writing, it doesn't really matter. You can be immortal anywhere. And while I don't normally worry too much about saying this, I want to make it darned clear that this piece is copyright 2000 by me, John Hedtke. I'm proud of this one and I don't want it passing into the public domain. So there.

---

I'm going to tell you how to be immortal.

There are several ways.

The first is to live forever. (So far, so good for the lot of us, eh?) The next, which is pretty similar, is to avoid dying. (I think we're all aces on that one, too.) Inasmuch as both of these methods take time -- forever is going to take a while, after all -- I have a method that may be a little faster. It'll still take a while, but when you're immortal, you can afford to take the long view.

(By the way, one of the nice things about immortality is that the opportunity to be immortal is open to everyone. Everyone can be immortal if they want to. This is not a zero-sum game. Everyone can win.)

I'd like to add that, as I present my method to you, there will be several references to concepts developed in Roman times. This proves two things: one, the Romans had a great deal of the way life works figured out several thousand years ago, and two, the time I spent in college wasn't for nothing... it cost thousands of dollars.

The basis for the third method of being immortal is doing your part of the Great Work. If you haven't heard that term before, the Great Work is a mystic thing—you're never absolutely sure that this is The Thing you should be doing, but it'll usually fall into the categories of "I think so" and "It'll do until something better comes along." The difference between our jobs and the Great Work is the difference between vocation and avocation: what we do to keep the cats in canned cat food and what we do to make the world a better place.

There's more to it than this as well: If each person makes their contribution to the Great Work, it brings us to the Roman concept of communitas, the health and well-being of the community. Communitas is not a zero-sum game, either; the greater the communitas, the better the members of the community will be. In fact, communitas is the antithesis of a zero-sum game: if one person wins, then everyone wins! Not only does the Great Work make everyone's life that much better, but it's something outside yourself, a vital element of immortality.

My contribution to the Great Work seems to be helping people get jobs. (As a way to participate in the Great Work, it's not bad; I encourage you to give it a try yourself.) Someone comes to you in need, sometimes rather desperate need, and they need to find a job. The people who most frequently ask me about finding jobs are new folks. We've all heard (and all asked at some point in our careers, so we should remember what this feels like) "How do I get started?" and "Where can I get experience?" We've got some stock answers for this: training, certificate programs, and so on, but we're not usually very good about this: we, after all, are looking for folks with 2+ years experience, some Word and/or FrameMaker experience, a technical background, but surely someone down the road might be able to, uh....? The people who have that 2+ years of experience don't usually need our help a tenth as much as the new kids. The new kids are the ones who need us the most.

I've always felt that helping someone get a job was the best thing you could do for them. Lots of things go into this: coaching them on interview skills, helping them structure their resumes to sell themselves more effectively, getting them up to speed on a new software package that's The Hot Thing, providing internship opportunities, even teaching them basic "Dress-for-Success" skills. You can also give them the hand up that they need by putting them in contact with the person who needs someone with precisely their skill set. They take your advice, they get the job they're after, and voila! They're no longer in need. They feel good and so do you. All of this takes a lot of time and energy, but that's okay; this is my personal contribution to the Great Work and I like doing it.

Keep in mind that nobody ever got where they were in life without someone, somewhere giving ‘em a break they didn't rightly deserve. We need to ask ourselves "How do we pass on what we know and what we believe and what we think should be done?" We're award-winning writers and editors and artists; now that we're so cool, we need to pass it on and complete the cycle.

There are a lot of different ways to extend your energy in the STC to help people get a leg up, including:

Being the local job coordinator

Volunteering to be hospitality officer or a hospitality deputy

Hosting a picnic for the new people in your chapter at your house

Posting job information to the chapter job line and the newsletter

Sponsoring an internship at your company

Teaching a mini-seminar on a special skill

Teaching people to write good resumes

Helping someone assemble a portfolio

Hiring someone for a very small contract assignment for which their experience is a large part of the pay

(As a matter of fact, you might even consider judging in next year's competition—you'll have a chance to share your experience with your peers and it'll give you one more opportunity to interact with people.)

What you do doesn't have to be done in the STC; it can be in almost any venue. (I know, that's nigh unto blasphemy with this group, but it's true.) Go talk to a class of wannabe writers—I've talked to English and writing classes in high schools about the joys and wonders of being a freelancer and a non-fiction author. Even Creative Writing classes will be interested. You can be the treasured memory of some high school student's junior year. Volunteer to be a job contact for your college through their alumni office: Lots of people who are in college are interested in asking questions of people who are working in a field that they're interested in.

Helping people get jobs has an immediate payoff: both of you get a good feeling right away. Suppose you've been doing this for a while and helping people get started, move up, and move on to new jobs and experiences. Three, four, five years later, you'll be looking for a job yourself. And the people that you've helped find a job are out in the community working, possibly not at the same job, but they're launched on their own careers and moving ahead. The people you helped in the past can tell you about jobs that they now have to offer or positions they've heard about from peers. And if nothing else, they can provide references about what you've done for them and others in the past. You get to network a lot and meet a lot of great people. That'll feel good, too.

When you're immortal, it brings a lot of other things into perspective and we're able to identify what's important and what isn't. Our jobs aren't the important stuff. Here's a case in point: At one point a few years ago, I'd added 5 books to my bibliography in about 15 months and I was talking to my agent about the difficulties I was having juggling my rather pressing book schedule and the need to spend time in my relationship. My agent clarified things for me by saying "You know, when they're lowering you into the ground, nobody's going to be saying ‘Wow, that Hedtke! He got all his chapters in by May 31!'" The stuff we pump out during the day is what we do and how we pay the bills, but it's not the really important stuff.

As a matter of fact, the things we do in our jobs tend to be of extremely limited value. We're in a profession that makes what we do transient and even ephemeral. The things we write and draw usually have a lifespan of maybe a year or two; sometimes even less—a mere moment to someone who's immortal. For example, when I was starting out in this business many years ago, I did documentation for tax preparation software. I knew that my writing was of finite value: after tax day on the 15thof April (which is another Roman concept, by the way, for those of you taking notes), none of it would be of interest to any but a handful of late filers. (I see a few of you here tonight.) The value in this regard of the things we do in this regard is building a corpus of work and experience, but the value of individual old pieces is pretty small. At this point, I've got over 7 million words published, in the form of 24 books and about 100 magazine articles and heaven alone knows how many manuals and online help systems since 1984, and, like the chambered nautilus, all but the most recent simply serve to show how much I've grown.

What is important is what we do when we're immortal. We have an idea that the future is something we can see, sort of. If we just squinch our eyes up enough and peer into the sunset, we'll be able to see what's going to be happening. The Romans, you see, believed that the future creeps up on you from behind. No matter how much you looked over your shoulder, you could never see it. Anything you see in front of you is just going to be a pale shimmery reflection of what's coming at you, sorta like trying to navigate when you're driving at high speed by watching road haze on a hot day. And that's why we're so frequently surprised by the future: we can't see it. So it's a good idea to start working on being immortal now because no matter how much you may want to, you cannot start being immortal if you're dead.

20, 30, 40 years from now, I hope that you all will have careers full of satisfactions, awards, and recognition. This will be wonderful, but your true measure of fame, your success in life, your immortality, is measured in how much you have helped other people and are kept alive for it in their memories and hearts.

And that brings me at last to the real secret of becoming immortal: decades from now, you're going to be remembered by dozens, hundreds, possibly even thousands of people who you've been able to help get a new job, break into a new career, or publish their first book, and thereby start the cycle all over again. They'll remember you fondly for the help you provided without strings, the energy you added to their lives, and the opportunities you gave them. You made a difference.

That's immortality.

And it doesn't get any better than that.

How to be immortal

It's been a week since I last posted!

Well, it's been quite a week! After my last post (a week ago), I spent most of the week at the STC conference in Seattle. I stayed at the Sheraton in Seattle, a hotel I've always enjoyed. Most of my time was taken up with Board meetings of one kind or another. When I wasn't doing Board meetings, I was doing grip-and-grin and face time. The biggest problems were finding a breakfast with actual protein for under $20 (the Sheraton is phenomenally expensive) and getting up in time to find it before the Board meetings.

My duties on Saturday evening were actually quite light and I was able to slip off to the monthly Vanguard party and see a lot of old friends from years and even decades ago. It was held in a gorgeous old Craftsman house on Capitol Hill--I was looking at a lot of things and getting ideas for our house (which is contemporary Craftsman).

Sidenote: I miss Seattle, darnit! I'd really like to live there again, but I don't have the half-million bucks or more to buy the house I'd like to have.

But despite having too many morning people there, it was rather nice. There wasn't anything particularly unexpected about what went on at the Board meetings (I've been on a Board of Directors before), but it was the kind of situation where I listened a lot and tried to get as much context and history as I could. The Goddess of Goodness joined me for the banquet and looked faaaaaabulous in a black dress with white scalloped edges and a lot of pearlescent sequins. The next Board meeting's coming up in September in Denver (a lovely town).

Wednesday night, I went to dinner with a bunch of friends. In the course of swapping stories, I heard one that I must pass on... but there's a back story to it, as follows:

The former g/f and I went to Vegas over the Christmas weekend, 1996. It was a pleasant little vacation. We saw Rita Rudner, a stand-up comedian I’ve always liked. The funniest joke she told during her act was “Hypnotists are really big in Las Vegas right now. [They were—we’d seen ads for at least three different hypnotists.] The best hypnotists around are Siegfried and Roy. They come out on stage and say ‘Hi, I’m Siegfried.’ ‘Hi, I’m Roy.’ And then they just stare at you. And for one brief moment, you’re utterly convinced that they’re heterosexual.”

But I digress from the back story. So, anyway, while we were there, we were mungeing around downtown and stopped in at Bally’s late at night for food. It was maybe an hour before Christmas Eve officially started, so there were perhaps half a dozen people in line for the restaurant in this huge marble foyer that was designed to hold maybe 150. There were these two young guys in their early 20s talking animatedly behind us in line. They were spouting numbers, letters, and acronyms, and talking about Igor. I first figured that they were role-playing gamers, D&Ders, or computer gamers of some kind and that Igor was a player character of their’s. I rapidly came to understand that they were chess players: one of them was carrying a large folding chessboard and I realized that it was chess moves. One of them was reading from a book of games and saying “...So {move, move, move, move, move} produces an ending that’s only so-so, but if he’d instead done {move, move, move, move, move}, he would have had a much more impressive finish.” Okay, but the phrase “But Igor would do....” kept coming up and I couldn’t figure out what was going on.

Things became clearer when Igor showed up from the restaurant, a tall, slovenly, and really bombed Russian who asked where the professor was (I gathered that everyone was down in Vegas for some kind of chess tournament and being squired about by a professor). The two guys said that the professor was down on the casino floor--we were upstairs--playing blackjack. Igor was telling them about his great love and admiration for the professor and proceeded to pull a folded piece of paper from his pocket and started reading them a poem he’d written to this effect. There was the careful waving of the index finger on the free hand to emphasize the passages and he swayed back and forth slightly during the process. The two guys managed to defuse him and he shambled off downstairs in search of the professor, whereupon the two went back to talking about chess games.

Now, I didn’t come up with this line, it’s an old joke, and you’ve all probably heard it before, but it was the perfect application for it: I leaned forward to the g/f and said in a low voice, “You know, I do so love hearing chess nuts boasting in an open foyer.”

She didn’t like it at all.

A person could go their whooooooooooooole life and not have a setup like that. The Gods were very good to me that Christmas season.

So, as the looks of horror and gasping noises were dying down, Brian McCaleb said that he had a story to share. He wasn't trying to top mine, he said, but it was definitely in the same genré:

Many years ago, when Brian was in college, he had a Dodge van. It was the same Dodge van we all knew: a big, clunky box that had the engine sticking up between the driver's and passenger's seats. (I had been riding shotgun in one of those about the same time as Brian's story and even leaning on the engine cover when it blew two rods right through the oil pan. Exciting stuff!) It was the night of Brian's first date with a woman named Glorietta. He was showing her all the great things he'd done to trick out the van. They climbed into the front, he stuck the key in the ignition, turned it, and nothing happened. Drat! He pulls the engine cover up and peers in. Glorietta, from the passenger seat, said "What's wrong?" Brian looked up and responded "Sick transit, Glorietta."

My punchline may have a classic charm, but Brian's is multilingual and much more elegant. Personally, I think he takes the prize.

After dinner (nobody pummeled us), I went back to the hotel and dropped a few things off and then had a chance to get out and see an old friend. We stayed up talking until 2:00am. It was great but I stayed out waaaaaay too late, as I had to drive south in the morning. I headed back to the hotel, caught up on email for an hour, and fell over, knowing that it was going to be a long day.

I picked up a couple friends on the way out of town and dropped them at SeaTac Airport. It wasn't significantly out of my way and it gave me a chance to spend a half-hour with them when we weren't being surrounded by people. Packing up the car was a challenge, as I was travelling heavy and they were, too, but I was able to get us squeezed in with a truly amazing quantity of luggage in the back of the Subaru. It'd have been hard to do this for hours on end, but it worked for half an hour well enough and I do so like spending time with these two.

From there, I hit I-5 south. I discovered that the rack of cassettes I'd grabbed didn't have tapes in all the cassette cases, so my music selection was seriously limited, but I survived. I caught up with a few phone calls, listened to music, and bombed on down the road.

I almost ran out of gas around the Jefferson turnoff (exit 244), so I turned off to find a gas station. Silly me: there isn't anything until you actually get to Jefferson, which is 6 miles to the east. It was a very pretty drive and downtown Jefferson (pop. 2580 as of July 2002). Downtown Jefferson and the trip there and back is actually pretty enough to merit a sidetrip from the freeway just to see it... but the gas station was all the way on the far side of it, which had me quite worried that I'd not find one in town and be in deep kimchee for sure.

Suitably filled up, I headed south again. I stopped in Lebanon for a break, grabbed coffee with an old friend who I'd never actually met face to face before (we'd always been in vastly different parts of the country until just recently), and got home. After emptying the car and getting a quick sandblast--it was a very long, hot day--we curled up and watched "ER" and I fell asleep.

It's good to be home again.

It's been a week since I last posted!

Friday am

It's Friday am and I had just a moment to post.

Getting out the door and on the road proved to be quite problematic. The Last Thousand Last Things kept biting me. Finally, I was almost packed up and ready to go... and I dropped the cell phone into the toilet! It was a clean toilet, but cell phones Don't Like Water. I grabbed it out quickly and stripped the battery off but no good--it was dead. BLEAH!!!! The Verizon rep said that I might be able to get it back, but not sure. It was possible that we could dry it out--that'd take a day or so just to see if it worked--but if I can't get it to come alive again, he said, there wasn't any way I could recover my (colossal) phone book. Uh-oh...

I was thinking about not having my cell phone to get in touch with everyone and vice versa while I was driving up and *then* having to find a Verizon store to get a new phone and activate it and THEN having to re-enter the 250 phone entries in there right now. {shudder} However, I got a suggestion a while later to try a blow dryer to get the water out. And lo! it worked well enough to get the phone alive. Suffice it to say, without describing the rest of my travails, my phone book was safe and all is now well. I'm buying the phone book software for this phone asap.

I made it to Seattle okay but it's a looooooong drive. Got up about 5:30pm to Seattle and visited Elisabeth at her store, the Seattle Teacup. Wonderful to see her once again and she really is looking amazingly less stressed than when I last saw her, which she attributes to having gotten out of the writing business entirely. :) I bought a number of gifts there, restocked my tea, and then headed south to Uwajimaya to meet up with Brian and Fong and Raymond.

Raymond is now nine months old and is even cuter than the pictures we saw of him a couple weeks ago, although it was hard to believe that that was possible. :) We picked up a whole range of sashimi and headed back to Brian and Fong's house in Burien and made a huge sushi dinner, which his parents were able to join us for. I really like his parents; they're wonderful people. Very late in the evening, I moseyed back north, checked in to the hotel, offloaded vast quantities of stuff from the car (when you drive, you can travel heavy--I did), and eventually went to sleep.

I'm now going to leap around and try to grab everything and head out for my first meeting du jour. Oy veh.

Friday am

I'm in pre-game

Tuesday afternoon: I got the book proposal done and off. I have an interview article to dash off tonight and I have client work to assemble. And there's packing for the STC conference and cleaning the car and doing some bills and picking up the dry cleaning and my new business cards, too! Oy.

I'm in pre-game

Sunday night

Lessee: had a 3-hour STC conference call Saturday am from 7-10 (oy). Covered a lot of good info, though. Moved Susan into her bedroom--exhausting. Had to do a choir thing Saturday night--I enjoyed the singing.

Sang again today at church. Still tired from all the toting and lifting from yesterday. Got a bunch of planting done in the backyard: eight planter boxes cleaned out and full of impatiens, the last barrel with six-packs of lobelia, snapdragons, and marigolds, and a bunch of tomato plants. My bush peas are coming up nicely and the sweet peas are showing their heads at last. Huzzah!

And I'm enjoying new episodes of the Simpsons and Family Guy and researching podcasting on the net.

Sunday night

Posting on the fly....

I've got a moment or two so I figured I'd add something to the blog.

The yard guy's here at the moment mowing and the like, so I'm not going to go out and plant until after he's gone--too noisy. The peas are breaking ground in a lot of places, though the sweet peas up against the fence may have been slowed or killed by an application of casoron granules a couple months ago for weed control. I hope not--sweet peas are gorgeous additions to the garden. I'll give it another week or so and if necessary, replant. The yard guy's going to bring by a bunch of large pots (that trees are shipped in) and I can use those for some container planting of tomatoes and melons. I think it's going to be a good year for melons.

Dick the Amazing Handyman (and a really nice next-door neighbor, too) came over yesterday and the day before and repainted a section of wall that we'd made some changes to and sanded and stained some new floor boards. I need to hit the floorboards with a little fine steel wool, but it's looking pretty nice!

Been getting a bunch of things set up for being the STC Region 7 Director, mostly downloading files and reading them. Going to be a ton of paperwork. I'll need to dedicate a couple file drawers just to this, I'm sure. Oy.

I'm baking a couple chickens and a bunch of large potatoes for dinner and the house smells wonderful.

I'm reading Lawrence Block's "The Burglar in the Closet." I got turned on to this series a few weeks ago and I recommend it for pleasant, light, fresh mysteries. They're written in first-person and have deal with the quiet adventures of Bernie Rhodenbarr, a burglar who runs a bookstore by day.

Posting on the fly....

Election results: Region 7 Director or actually just "Director"

Got the news that I was elected to the position of Region 7 Director in the Society for Technical Communication. For those of you who aren't aware of the STC, this is a fairly big dog deal. I'm on the Board where I can wield ruthless power and so on... except there's no power to wield and no-one on the Board is ruthless--they're actually all very devoted to making the organization a better place, even though there is some difference of opinion on how to get there. But the common motivation is key: everyone's a volunteer (oh, there are minor compensations for some expenses, but it doesn't begin to add up for the amount of time you spend on the job to do it well) and everyone is spending all this time because they believe in the organization. That gives us all a basis for agreement.

The title of the job I signed up for and was actually elected to was "Region 7 Director," the director for the Rocky Mountain Belt, the PacNW, Western Canada, Alaska, Singapore, Rebublic of China, and Tokyo. It's always been true that directors were representatives to every member in the organization, but the sponsorship duties had them focusing on their respective regions. A referendum was passed in this election that makes all of us just "Directors" without any regional focus at all, so the job title's changed even though most of the job has not.

Election results: Region 7 Director or actually just "Director"