Pandora’s Box, indeed

This blog may sound like an advertisement for the online radio website called “Pandora.” It really isn’t. They aren’t paying me a dime, but I wouldn’t mind if they did! However, it is a blog about musical preferences and why people like what they like.

If you’ve not heard of Pandora online radio, I’m actually surprised. It’s becoming more well known, and I’ve even seen car commercials that state one of the features on the vehicle is Pandora.

What makes Pandora unique is that it is a mixture of radio and your own personal playlist. When you get started, you type in the name of a musical group or song or genre. Pandora randomly picks a song based on what you chose.

And now for the fun part: you, the user, can give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. If you give it a thumbs up, the song will go onto a list that Pandora will play again for you at some point in time. Thumbs down? It won’t play that song again. Pandora will then select a song for you similar to the one you liked, based on something like 400 different attributes. The more songs you like or dislike, the more Pandora narrows down your musical taste.

Pretty cool, huh?

I’ve been listening to Pandora for years. It started in July, 2005, so it’s not all that new. I’ve been introduced to songs and artists I’d never heard of, but end up liking. Even more strange is that there are songs from certain artists that I love, and some songs from the same artists that I can’t stand. Can I explain it? Not really. It’s just that I connect with some songs more than others.

Most of my playlist is from the 80’s, though I have songs from the 70’s, 90’s, and heck, some from the 60’s. I’m sure if a human were to analyze my likes and dislikes, they would scratch their head. I’m sure some of the songs I’ve liked share the exact same attributes as some I’ve given a thumbs down to.

I’m actually a bit afraid to analyze deeper into why I like what I like. How does my taste in music relate to my other personality characteristics? Is there some sort of trauma from my life that makes me hate certain songs? If I define what features in music I’m drawn to, will I feel obligated to like music with the same features?

Pandora’s box, indeed.

The Mirror of the Soul

There have been a few moments in my life where I have literally stopped all activity and said, “Whoa!” (As in extreme awe.)

One of those moments was the first time I heard the song The Mirror of the Soul by Chris de Burgh. Yes, I’ve been a huge fan of his for many years, but time and again, some of his songs will transcend above the rest and make a deep personal connection.

I was working for corporate America when The Mirror of the Soul was released. The underlying message of the song resonated with me.

Back then, I directed political programs often and I came to know several of the politicians pretty well. I recall one time the Governor of Connecticut calling me by my first name when she came for one of her visits—it was almost surreal.

While there are some really good people who are honestly trying to make a positive change by becoming politicians, I’ll have to admit I met my fair share of them who were power hungry. Often their bluster and stubbornness on some issues where like little children throwing a tantrum because they didn’t get their way. It jaded me when it came to faith in many of our leaders.

In addition, I worked for a company where nothing was ever good enough. Everything I did was questioned, though our results were outstanding. It was always a matter of more, more, MORE! And of these people who strove for power, they were some of the most unhappy people I’d ever met.

The final lyrics from The Mirror of the Soul are: “All through the world, there are many others who always follow everything they are told by men with rules and regulations, using old superstitions and tales to assume control; But all their dreams of glory, all their schemes and stories, will come to nothing after all. Because a power greater from the world’s creator gave us love to light the mirror of the soul; Only love can light the mirror of the soul.” These words gave me hope.

And now, one of my dreams is coming true as my novel based on this wonderful song is set to be released in April. I only hope I can touch at least one person with my story the way Chris touch me with his.

Disclaimer: Mirror Of The Soul title and lyrics © Chris de Burgh, published by Hornall Brothers Music Ltd.

Interview on "The Good Word"

 

I had the wonderful experience of being interviewed on “The Good Word” radio podcast.

The interviewer, Nick Galieti, asked some fascinating questions.

During the interview, I talk about my anthology The Night the Port-A-Potty Burned Down and Other Stories as well as discussed my next book, The Mirror of the Soul.

In conjunction with this interview, I’m giving away two signed copies of The Night the Port-A-Potty Burned Down and Other Stories.

Here is how you can win:

Email me at author (at) jlloydmorgan (dot) com with the answer to the following question: What is my favorite baseball team? (The answer is given during the interview.)

I’ll randomly select a winner on March 23rd. You can listen to the podcast by clicking here.

Working off the clock

“Why aren’t you getting this?” would be a question I’d sometimes think, but not say out loud when training newer TV directors. At times, I’d get frustrated with those would kept making the same mistakes over and over. And then I realized something one day: I was measuring the employee based on what I expected of myself. Looking at the situation objectively, the newer directors were actually doing quite well. And it was unfair for me to judge them based on an unrealistic standard.

Granted, I was the Operations Manager and (this won’t sound very humble, I fear, but alas. . .) a darn good TV director. I’d been told by others I had a talent—a gift even. Before I left TV, the directors I worked with were very good—significantly better than most of the directors I’d worked with over the years.

When I left TV (in order to be able to keep commitments to my family) and started working in banking, I faced this same attitude from the other direction. However, my managers and leaders weren’t more skilled, per se, as much as completely “devoted” to their job. (Meaning that they had very little in the way of a life outside of work.) I’d learned that a work / life balance is not only important, but necessary.

Often it is the people who live for work that get promoted. In turn, they fall into the trap as I did as an Operations Manager—they expect everyone to be like them. The irony is that the average worker is often better at their job because they have balance; it lets them be more productive while they are working.

One way these out-of-balance managers manifest their addicted to work behavior is to ask / force their hourly employees to work off the clock. I saw this first hand when I worked at Albertson’s while in college. It happened at Cablevision when I worked there. (I never asked my employees to do that.) I’ve read stories about lawsuits against WalMart for the same practice. In each case, the company was sued, and lost.

I recall a time when I was on a conference call while working at a bank. Our leader asked us managers what we were doing to have our employees hit their sales goals. One manager said she told her employees they had to wear their name badges when they went to lunch and hand out at least three business cards. The leader praised her for the idea and said he wanted all of us to do the same. He even wanted us to track how many business card each employee was handing out each day during their lunch.

Unafraid to speak up when I feel something is wrong, I made it clear I thought it was a bad idea because the employees were off the clock during their lunch and we couldn’t, legally, require them to wear their name badge and hand out business cards. I got all sorts of “push back” (a term they used a lot at that job) because this was a great way for the employees to exceed their goals and make a bonus.

I didn’t budge. There are lines that shouldn’t be crossed. In the end, because I refused to do it, other managers joined with me and we stopped it from happening.

So when I read the reports from the WalMart spokespeople who state, “Only a small percentage of employees have ever been told to work off the clock. We can provide dozens of people who will testify they’ve never been told that.” My response? “Congratulations. However, telling even one person to work off the clock is one person too many.”

When in doubt, freeze it off

    

“Dude! What happened to your nose?” A middle grade student recently asked me.


Yes, it seems that some young people that age have very little in the way of tact. One of his fellow students said, “Shh! That’s rude!” I knew exactly what he was asking about.

On the bottom, right side of my nose is a divot—a smallish crater. It’s shown here in a very unflattering picture of my nose:

(Side note: when I took this photo, I labeled it “nose pic.”)

Why does it look like someone took a scoop out of my nose? Because someone did, sort of.

A couple of years ago, I had what I thought was a zit forming on the bottom of my nose. Growing up, I had acne pretty bad, and even now that I’m 40ish something I still get them time and again. I didn’t think much of it until it wouldn’t go away. Even worse, it would scab over, the scab would fall off and it would start to bleed.

I’d never experienced anything like that before, and so I decided to have a dermatologist check it out. After looking it over, she said, “Ah, it’s a precancerous lesion.” I think it’s a safe bet that no one wants to hear a doctor say the word “cancer” in any shape, size, or form. “Don’t worry,” she said casually, “We’ll just freeze it off.”

Perhaps I’m alone in feeling this way, but I don’t relish the thought of having any part of my body frozen off, for any reason.

A moment later, she came back with what looked like a can of WD-40. “Hold still,” she told me unnecessarily. The sensation was odd. At first, it felt akin to having an ice cube placed against your skin. And then, the pain began. I felt my eyes start to water and I grabbed the side of the examination table quite tightly.

“Wow,” she said. “I think you’re the first man I’ve done this to that hasn’t cursed.”

I looked at her with my watery eyes and said, “I just didn’t do it verbally.”

She and her nurse laughed. And then she gave me the instructions, “The area will scab over and then fall off. Don’t pick at it.”

“Got it. No nose picking.” She and her nurse laughed again. I handle pain with humor.

Sure enough, the doctor was right. The scab fell off on its own. However, in its wake, it left the crater I noted earlier—something I wasn’t expecting. It’s kind of under my nose, so it’s not glaring, but still, it’s not normal. I notice it every time I look in a mirror. But it’s part of me now.

So, how did I respond to the student that pointed it out in front of the class? I told him, “You know how Pinocchio’s nose grew bigger when he told lies? Well, as it turns out, when you say rude things to teachers, part of your nose may fall off. I learned this the hard way when I was your age.”

He didn’t say another word the rest of the class.

Teacher

Ms. White sighed when she noticed Billy drawing outside of the lines, again. He was the only one of her second grade students that couldn’t grasp the concept she was teaching.

She walked closer to Billy’s desk, noticing how Mildred and Richard, who sat on either side of him, kept their crayon marks within the set parameters. Richard’s face had a look of strict concentration and Mildred’s hands worked slowly while her thick, brown crayon filled in the bark of a tree.

Ms. White stood next to Billy, but he didn’t look up. Almost carelessly, he was brushing his purple crayon against the top of the paper—a place where he’d colored with his blue crayon earlier.

The assignment she’d handed out was fairly simple. It was a picture of a tree in a field, with mountains behind it and a grass plain all around. Aside from the sky area, each of the different sections had a small number inside it. At the bottom of the paper was a list of which numbers correlated with which color. Billy hadn’t colored in any of those sections. Even more frustrating, he was using colors he shouldn’t in an area that didn’t need to be colored.

“Billy,” Ms. White said to get his attention.

“Yes?” he answered without looking up.

“Did you understand the assignment?”

“Uh huh.”

“No, I don’t think you did,” she said, trying not to sound upset. “Explain to me what you are supposed to be doing.”

“You said to color the paper,” Billy said. “That the colors match up to the numbers on the bottom.”

“That’s right,” Ms. White said. “If you understand the assignment, why aren’t you doing it?”

Billy looked up from his paper. He didn’t appear mad or defiant as Ms. White expected. His expression was one of confusion. “But I am doing it.” He pointed to his paper. “See. Look. I colored.”

Leaning down, Ms. White pointed to the uncolored tree. “You haven’t started yet. All you’ve done is color the part you didn’t need to with colors you shouldn’t have used.”

Billy blinked at her. She could see him trying to puzzle out what she had just said. “You never said not to color this part or that I couldn’t use blue and purple.”

“Oh? So that’s it, is it? I have to spell out every little detail for you to follow directions?” Ms. White no longer tried to hide her frustration.

“I’m sorry,” Billy said. His voice started to quiver. “I like what I colored. But I guess it’s no good.” He set down the purple crayon and slumped back in his chair. He looked defeated.

Something about his tone and body language made Ms. White pause. She looked again at the night sky he had drawn.

It was beautiful.

Valetine's Day Fail

I’ve heard some people refer to Valentine’s Day as “Single Awareness Day.” Though it’s been over twenty years since I’ve been single, I remember feeling awkward on February 14 when I didn’t have anyone to be my Valentine.

On one occasion after I was married, I had that same awkward feeling. No, my wife and I weren’t having a spat or anything. We were living in Connecticut at the time and I was scheduled to take a business trip to Florida which would get me home on the evening on Valentine’s Day. However, a huge winter storm hit New England and shut down all the airports. My coworkers and I were stuck in Florida.

There were four of us, and we debated how to spend Valentine’s Day evening. We’d been cooped up at the airport and at our hotel all day, so we decided to see what there was to do in Jacksonville. One of the locals suggested an open air mall that was built on the edge of a bay. We decided to check it out—and it was gorgeous. We picked up a few things for our loved ones back home, but still had time to kill.

As the sun was setting, one of the guys spotted a bar that had an open view of the bay. I’d never been to a bar, and I don’t drink. The other guys knew this about me and said I could be the designated driver—even though we were going to be taking a cab back to the hotel.

My other three coworkers were all good guys. They didn’t follow my lifestyle, which many consider to be quite conservative, but they were still people I considered friends.

The drinks started to flow, I had Sprite, and I watched an interesting transformation happen. I’d never been around guys as they got drunk. One side effect was that I became the funniest man in the world to them. Anything remotely clever I said got them roaring in laughter. It felt a bit weird to be at a bar, but I had decided way beforehand I wouldn’t be drinking, and had made it clear to the guys, so I never felt pressure to join in.

However, there was one aspect of the evening I had considered. We were at a bar. On Valentine’s Day. And it was “ladies night.”

Soon, we started getting attention from several women—sometimes they were in groups, sometimes they were alone. All of us guys were married, so as soon that they approached, we’d flash our wedding rings to scare them away, though as the night drew on, and the other guys got more drunk, the more flattered they would get.

Some of the women got upset, one even said, “What are you even doing here if you’re not available?” I kept thinking about my wife and how much I missed her. I’d have taken a quiet night at home with her over the bar with all the single ladies anytime.

Eventually we headed back to the hotel. Though I didn’t have to drive, I did have to help them find their rooms once we got back to the hotel.

The next morning, we once again tried to find a way home. We ended up having to get a flight into Newark and then take a rented car to JFK airport. The trip home was miserable. We had long waits, crammed airplanes, and the uncertainty if we’d even make it home or if our flight would get diverted. But it could have been worse for me. At least I wasn’t hung-over.