What I'm thinking

Support Systems

Women having dinner

About a year ago, maybe a bit more, I popped an e-mail to three of my closest women friends, who hadn’t met each other, and asked them if they wanted to get together once a month to share celebrations and provide support for the various challenges we were facing.

I didn’t think much of it; just that it might be a helpful thing to hear an outside perspective on things that might feel overwhelming if you think on them too much.

In the past year, two of us have left jobs that were stifling despite intense reservations/excuse-making only to find MUCH better jobs almost immediately; one of us finally left a relationship that was incredibly unhealthy for her. I’ve inadvertantly managed to connect one friend who was just starting to deal with chronic pain with another friend (in the same group) who has been dealing with it for years.

I myself have brought my business to an entirely different level, while not only maintaining but improving my physical and emotional health - something I wasn’t able to do a year ago. I’ve gotten help and support with my business, advice on my sales process from an expert at client management, and I’ve lost 26 pounds and counting.

None of this, I’m convinced, would have happened as quickly or as well if we hadn’t been there, month after month, talking through our lives and sharing our unique perspectives. Every time I start to feel a bit crazy, a bit like I Can’t Do This, these women remind me that yes, I can - and in fact, I’ve already done it several times.

I don’t have time to say it often enough, but I’m truly grateful for the perspective and support these women have brought into my lives. And to anyone reading this, I highly recommend starting one yourselves. It’s amazing what can happen when people just get together and chat.

 

Please consider the environment before printing this post

The other day saw a very interesting and heated debate over a hot topic on one of my green business lists - the addition of that little line at the end of e-mail signatures that asks you to “please consider the environment before printing this e-mail.” Or it says to “Think Green! Don’t Print This E-mail!” Or it says any other of a seemingly endless number of iterations of this single thought: don’t waste so much paper.

While I understand the idea, and appreciate it, my objection to these lines is a few-fold:
  1. It assumes that I, the reader, am going to print this e-mail, even if it’s just a quick confirmation on something. I’m not.
  2. What if I actually NEED to print the e-mail? The only things I print are receipts, directions, or e-mails that have significant history information related to projects I’m in the middle of at the zen kitchen. This is a total of about 10-15% of my e-mail. Everything else gets deleted or put into a folder. Should I feel like I’m somehow not “considering the environment” because I need paper records of these things? 
  3. While e-mail signatures can be a truly helpful marketing tool, we seem to have reached an age where signatures have gone completely out of hand. People are busy, and while an e-mail signature is a great way to give people the basic information they need to check out your business and contact you, adding a bunch of stuff to the end of your signature dilutes your message, clogs their e-mail and, if they DO need to print it, adds to the amount of paper they need to print. How is that “green?”

Finally, while the issue of office waste is definitely vast, it’s been my experience at least that much of that waste isn’t because people are printing their e-mails. In some cases yes, high-level executives will have their assistants print every e-mail - either because they don’t “get” the e-mail system or because the assistants vet their e-mails and print just the important ones. But this is a systemic issue, and telling the assistants (the people actually printing the e-mails) not to print isn’t helping anything - they don’t have a choice. Further, if an executive truly doesn’t “get” how e-mail works, how will seeing that little line at the bottom of a printed page help? Wouldn’t it be better to have a conversation and show him how e-mail works? Or better yet, have the assistant vet all the e-mails according to importance and then let the executive view it? 

The point here is that, in the 10 years that I spent in various capacities at offices all over New England before starting the zen kitchen, the tremendous amount of paper waste I saw rarely came from e-mail. Rather, it came from:
  1. The endless number of forms that were often required to get anything done (the average office I worked in had at least 5-10 forms to fill out depending on what you needed done, and they were always looking to create more forms for things)
  2. In the case of design studios/ad agencies/art departments, printing a new iteration of a brochure/layout/etc. *every* time they made a change to it, no matter how minor. In some places, you even had to print multiples, which would be distributed among various people in the organization. I once had to print out a new 12*18 sheet for a layout edit that included adding a comma. Really. Nothing more - just a comma. 
  3. In the case of mortgage/banking companies (where I worked as an admin assistant before deciding to become a designer - way back in ‘97-’98), it was filling out a 15-page thick pile of forms just to get a loan package started, then having to make two copies of each package, copies of the related documentation, etc.
Notice, please - none of this involves printing e-mails. So who is that line really helping?
 

an ad campaign gone too far?

A friend recently pointed me to a series of illustrated ads for Burger King that she found disturbing. While the comments on the Idea Sandbox (great site, by the way) had a lot more to do with the apparently sexualized nature of many of the ads, I don’t know that I necessarily mind that. The illustrations are amusing, very detailed, and I find them kinda funny.

What I wonder about is this: what is their thing against onions? And why do they seem to obsess about pickles so much?

Out of four ads that I’ve seen (there are a couple of holiday ads I didn’t check out), all of them involve onions either as evil dictators (see the Sniper ad) or as victims of humiliation and/or murder (see the Airport and Halloween ads). And the pickles, somehow, are the aggressors in all this. What are they saying about pickles?

All silliness aside, I don’t know how I feel about this campaign from Burger King. I’ve appreciated the up-front approach it takes to many of its in-store campaigns; for example, the taglines on their packaging, noting what an amazing experience you’re going to have eating this burger, is always a fun read. But many of their other campaigns, including this one and ANYTHING involving The King, just leave me cold. I guess it’s a good thing I don’t like fast food.

 

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