On Monday, my nine-year old, Maritza, mentioned that she wanted to make a video entry for Disney’s uRock contest. The submission deadline was Sunday. I promised that we would do it on Friday night or Saturday.

Now, there’s a long time between Monday and Friday, so while I try to keep my promises, I can’t say that I always do. On Friday night, while joking around with Maritza and Simone, we talked about the goings on of the week. Maritza had a strange look on her face, as if she wanted to say something.

She said that she didn’t.

I brought it up a few more times, and each time she insisted that there was nothing she was holding back.

I wasn’t convinced.

Later, I remembered and rushed into her bedroom.

“I’ve got it! I know what it is. You wanted to ask about the video, right?”

She confirmed my guess.

It seems that she was worried that I was too tired from work to help her with the video.

“We’ll do it tomorrow, for sure.”

I went into Simone’s room and announced my breakthrough:

“I told you. I knew that she wanted to ask me something.”

“Congratulations,” she deadpanned.

Highly tuned perceptive qualities are rarely appreciated by the masses.

On Saturday, we worked on the 40-second video – filming, editing, rendering, previewing, and reediting. It took us several hours to complete. Maritza had full creative control of the process.

You just can’t rush show people.

Enjoy the video!

Hedge words or phrases like “perhaps”, “maybe”, or “I don’t know” have been dropped from your vocabulary long ago. Who needs them? You have uncovered all of the answers.

The doubts and fears that limit the potential of the rest of us are no longer concerns of yours. You don’t just forward forceful arguments. No, that wouldn’t be nearly enough. There can be no room for debate.

Your opinions rise to the level of certitude because, after all, there is no question that you are right.

You believe that those who disagree with you are misinformed, ignorant, lost, or worse.

You believe that all nonbelievers – the good people as well as the bad – are doomed.

You believe in a Grand Plan, and you speak as if you’ve read the unpublished manuscript.

You know that yours is the only way.

How difficult life must have been for you before you knew everything.

I have a friend who is very into her religion. She spends more time in church than I do watching baseball, which means that she’s there a lot. I accompanied her to a service once. It felt as if I had been dropped into heavenly Hillsboro of Inherit the Wind fame. There was lots of enthusiasm in that room and some in attendance were even overcome with the spirit. I had never seen that in person.

The service went on for so many hours that I no longer worried about seeming rude by getting up from my seat, so I did. I had to. I went outside for a smoke.

I’ve known my friend for over thirty years, so what she believes and how she thinks are not secrets to me. She has her beliefs and I have mine, so we move on.

We’ve had only one real falling out.

One day, we were having one of those circular discussions that occur when one side cannot even consider what the other side is saying. The discussion nearly ended when I mentioned that one of us was going to hell, or at least purgatory.

Now, I’m not what you would call a true believer. I have my views of this life and the next, but I don’t stick to the company line. There are a lot of ifs, ands, or buts in my vocabulary and even more questions. If I know anything, it’s that my questions cannot be answered by anyone walking the earth.

I’ll just have to wait and see.

And pray.

I went on to explain that the problem with everyone running around insisting that theirs is the one and only true religion is the implication that everyone else is pretty much screwed – no matter how well they’ve lived their lives.

No god that I pray to would be down with that.

Last night, I downloaded the Godfather trilogy of movies which have been bundled by iTunes. I already own these movies on VHS, but the bundle was priced at $17.99, so the remastered digital versions were too good a deal to pass up.

As I watched the first of these films, it occurred to me that with all of the bravado on display: Sonny, Sollozzo (The Turk), Luca Brasi, Don Corleone himself, and many others, one of the most courageous characters in the movie was the easily overlooked Enzo the Baker.

A sense of gratitude prompted an unarmed Enzo to place himself into a dangerous situation.

“If there is trouble, I stay here to help you. For your father. For your father.”

Enzo stood in front of the hospital with Michael and played a dangerous game of chicken, as they bluffed the gangsters who had come to finish off the Don. His trembling hands gave away his nervousness, but he did his part just the same. This was not his quarrel, yet Enzo stuck his neck out when he didn’t have to. It would have been so much easier for him to simply walk away.

In a world of skepticism and self-interest it’s gratifying to be able to recognize and appreciate the many unsung heroes that are all around us.

Among these are the providers of child care who allow parents to make a living and those who care for our elderly. The people who perform these difficult tasks are heroes to the families who employ them.

You might say that those are just jobs, but they are more than that, and they should be valued accordingly.

If I do my job technically correctly, financial reports are in balance, but if I see my job in terms of how I can impact others, there’s much more that I can do. If the custodians of our very young and our very old perform their jobs in a caring manner, we’ll know that our loved ones are safe and secure, so we can turn my attentions to other matters.

In all of our interactions with others, we can choose whether to be detached or involved, closed or open, or annoyed or cheerful. The choices that we make determine how we view the world and how the world views us. Everyone can be a hero in his or her own way. Wearing a cape or a mask is optional.

There are many other jobs that fit into the unsung hero category: EMTs, teachers, police officers, and doctors. Those are the obvious ones, but there are other, more obscure, choices: road workers, waiters, maintenance workers, truck drivers, and crossing guards to name a few.

The list is endless.

Whatever it is that we do for a living, we can approach our days as if there is a little bit of Enzo the Baker in all of us. In all of our relationships, we can choose to take chances and not just play it safe. We can view our actions as interconnected bits that shape our experiences and the experiences of others.

Millions of heroes, each making small contributions, can be more effective than any single superhero, if superheroes actually existed.

So go ahead, step up to your next opportunity and show me your Enzo.

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Who are the unsung heroes in your life?
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Each time I play it, I experience six minutes and sixteen seconds of wonderment.

It’s funny that I would have been introduced to such beautiful music while watching a movie about contract killers for the mob. The movie was Prizzi’s Honor and the song is Ave Maria.

I don’t understand a word that’s being sung, yet I’m captivated by its splendor. The piano and the voice of the performer seem to have been created for this singularly beautiful purpose. I alternatively listen to two versions: one from the movie and a second version that has become my favorite.

Please sit back, turn up the volume, and listen as you read the rest of this post with me.

Listen here.

The music sets my mind to wander. I allow the sounds to take me where they may, as I type these few words.

I’m back at home with my brothers – running, playing, and laughing in ways that I haven’t done since. I’m thinking about tomorrow and the problems that will still be there when I wake from another fitful night. I’m thinking of snippets of life: love, sadness, joy, and heartbreak.

There’s a knock at the door and I’m brought back to the now. My daughter enters and places a plate on the desk – a skeptical eyebrow raised at my paused music selection.

“You like?” I ask.

She bites her lip, “Um”.

We laugh.

She leaves.

I press play.

I take a drag and exhale slowly. The smoke is wafted in its alluringly deadly dance. I watch it curl and dissipate and feel the sinfully pleasurable sensation of having mocked the Reaper one more time. He will win in the end, I know. But he won’t win today.

I’m holding her hand as she struggles not to push. Her grip is strong. Her nails are sharp. Freckles begin to dot her face in places where they did not exist before. One nurse encourages while another prepares. Her doctor instructs. I mumble as I try to repeat the pathetically useless words learned during six sessions of Lamaze. Her strong will is finally defeated by the pain. The scream is long and thick with distress. My knees feel weak.

I can’t really help her.

I realize that I’m no better than a bystander. There’s one final push, a gasp, then silence. The doctor hands me the scissors.

She’s taken away. The nurses hover over the child as she cries. They suction, wipe, measure, assess, and swaddle.

I can’t help her either.

They bring our child back to her mother.

The song ends and I’m back here with you.

Aren’t these wonderful gifts that we have been given? We have music that touches our souls, we can remember things so very vividly, we can choose what we do with our lives, and we can share the experiences of our lives with one another.

Be well.

If a tweet isn’t retweeted…

… does it make a sound?

Everyone who I have spoken with and everything that I have read about blogging can be distilled into a single, generally accepted truth: Content is king. Yet six months into my full court press of blogging, I’m beginning to doubt the veracity of that statement.

(This is a reprint of a post that I recently wrote for the Pocono Tweeup NING. Unfortunately, that NING is being taken down because The NING Network is now charging a fee for their services and also because the group’s activity on the NING was sporadic.)

While this Tweetup group is primarily made up of members who are seeking to harness the power of social media for business concerns, I would think that the rules, strategies, and implementations are applicable to non-business efforts as well. I’d appreciate feedback from my Tweeps as I provide an update of my efforts. Please share your experiences in the comments.

Finding Your Niche

By day, I’m an accountant, but what I really enjoy doing is writing. I write about life, politics, and people. This seems too broad a subject range to be crammed into a niche, but limiting the topics that I write about for the sake of conformity isn’t really a viable option.

I take great care to compose thought provoking blog posts, usually in the form of short essays, and I encourage visitors to participate in the discussions. What I have found is that once people spend a short amount of time on my blog, they tend to be repeat visitors – whether or not they leave comments. It’s a small, but attentive, group of people who are not known to me outside of my blog, as I tend not to push my blog on family and friends because I’m trying to assess whether my posts can stand up on their own.

There have been sixty-seven posts since January 29Th and they have all been new content and not simply reposting of Youtube videos and such. They have been topical, carefully crafted, and open ended so as to encourage continued dialogue.

Networking

The top non-direct traffic sources for my blog are as follows:

• Feedburner
• Google
• Twitter
• Stubleupon
• Facebook
• Youtube

Since my feed goes to my subscribers and Google visits are the result of keyword searches, I have found only marginal value in using the standard social media platforms for attracting visitors.

I have a number of longtime YouTube subscribers, but those numbers do not translate into blog visits. Twitter users tend to be less interested in viewing anything beyond the tweet, so links to blogs seem to be routinely ignored. Stumbleupon visits are usually hit and run and only a few seconds in duration, as those visitors stumble off to the next site in line. Facebook users appear to be more interested in Farmville or photos than anything else.

Support

Writing a blog is a solitary endeavor, so I look to myself for the drive to invest the requisite time to put out a quality site. But I realize that things may not change in the short-term, as my tagline reads: “Blogging, it’s just like howling at the moon, only quieter”. Consequently, fledgling bloggers eventually arrive at a junction where they contemplate whether the exercise is worth doing at all. This is where I am, today.

Looking to others for help is contrary to my nature. I’ve always been a bootstrap type person who is confident in my abilities. I’ve viewed success or failure as a direct result of my action or inaction. But I’ve come to learn that in social media, there are no lone wolves. Without the support of others, no blog can flourish.

I spoke of my reasons for blogging in this video that I posted to the new vlogging site, Let’s Vlog, in which I tried to encourage another fledgling blogger.

So the question for my Tweeps is what it has always been:

How do we leverage social media to attract new visitors, so that they can see what we have to offer?

She flagged me down from the side of the road.

It was early morning on a stretch of road that is rarely traveled on foot because there is no sidewalk. Sometimes people don’t have a choice. They walk because their car is in the shop or they simply can’t afford one. There are buses, but the schedules are intermittent.

I pulled over.

She was a teenager who appeared nervous as she looked through my open passenger side window. Before she could speak, an angry driver leaned on his horn and looked to be cursing as he swung his jeep around the fraction of my car that was still in the road.

I looked back at her and shrugged.

She thought that she was lost until I turned and pointed to the development that she was looking for. Sheepishly, she asked if she could make a call with my cell phone that I had placed on the seat.

“Sure.”

As she spoke with her cousin, a van pulled up alongside. The driver asked if we needed any help. I thanked him and said that she was just using my phone. He looked hard at me for a moment, then turned to her and waited for a confirming nod, before driving away.

She returned the phone, thanked me, and began to walk up the hill to meet her cousin who was now on the way.

As I continued my commute, I considered the stark difference between the two men with whom I had had those brief encounters.

The first seemed concerned only with getting to where he was going. The girl on the side of the road and I were nothing more than obstructions to him. He was inconvenienced – if one can classify the effort that it takes to make a quarter turn of the steering wheel an inconvenience – and he was upset about it.

The second driver witnessed an adult male and a young girl in an unusual place and decided to take a moment of his time to do something about it.

Maybe he was simply checking to see if we had car trouble.

Maybe he was suspicious of the scene.

The reason doesn’t really matter. What matters is that he stopped to assess the situation, and presumably, to help if he could.

As the father of daughters I am always worried about them. We cannot be with our children all of the time and we never know if or when they will find themselves in adverse situations.

Some people make an effort to help others.

Some people don’t.

To those that don’t I ask, “Do you know where your children are?”

My Mom was a yeller.

With the births of five sons preceding the delivery of the long hoped for daughter, she had a lot to yell about. It couldn’t have been easy raising five boys, although as a group we were relatively well behaved. But still, we were boys.

With no adult male role model in the home, we relied on Mom to teach us how to be men. It was a daunting task for her to be sure.

These were the days before a rap across the back of the legs with a belt or an ear pull were grounds for a visit from family services. As boys, we all pushed boundaries. Often the lines were boldly redrawn in very loud and unmistakable terms.

She was in charge.

Mom pushed us hard to do well in school because she knew that it was important. She also knew that there were other things that we had to learn. A childhood of living below the poverty line taught me lessons that could not be taught in a classroom setting. The streets of Bed Sty, the Lower East Side, and the South Bronx in the 60’s and 70’s were not places for the weak willed or the ignorant. If we weren’t careful, we knew that life could take a horrific turn in an instant. Tenement fires, idle youth in the streets, drugs, gangs, and crime were just some of the obstacles before us.

Mom stressed the importance of sticking together. She wanted to make sure that anyone who had a mind to mess with one of us was assured that they would have to beat down all five of her sons to get to the one. It worked in that this tact prevented more fights than it allowed.

We were lucky.

She’s mellowed some over the years, but she can still boom her voice over the noisiest clatter in a room to get our attention.

Mom succeeded in seeing us all safely into adulthood. This is a feat that required untold hours of work and a diversity of skills to accomplish, yet there’s really no place for this kind of achievement on a resume.

There’s something wrong with that.

Three days ago, I posted a video on YouTube about my experience with Pennsylvania American Water. At issue was a simple billing error that was exacerbated by the less than helpful response that I received when I placed a call to their customer service. I suppose that I should have been grateful that they answered the phone on a Saturday, but that was as good as it got on that day.

This is a story that just about everyone can tell because we’ve all experienced the frustration of feeling that our concerns were being dismissed. Customer service representatives often have scripts that they follow, which in theory, are supposed to quickly address the most common problems of callers.

But what happens when your problem causes the representative to diverge from the script?

Ah, there’s the rub.

I recorded this video after my problem had been resolved. It was just one of my regular vlog posts, with only 60 views as of this writing, but it seems to have reached the eyes of decision makers at the company.

Take a look.

This morning, I received an anonymous Email, ostensibly from a Pennsylvania American Water employee. Because it was sent to me and not simply commented on my video, I don’t feel comfortable quoting from the text, but I will say that it was a very nice Email that contained some very interesting information.

To the anonymous sender: I thank you for taking the time to send me that Email.

In summary, I was thanked for not lodging a complaint, and I was informed that upper management at the company had taken notice of my video. Also, employees are being coached on using common sense and logic when taking calls as a result. Finally, I was also assured that most employees at the company do actually care and want to help their customers to the best of their abilities.

You know what? I believe him or her.

Most people that I know do take their jobs seriously, and since we all have bad days, I know that people are not always at their best. I was frustrated with my situation at the time, but I didn’t want to cause a big stink or get anyone in trouble when I made this video. However, I am delighted that the video has apparently been well received and that the folks at Pennsylvania American Water are making an effort to improve their customer service, so that the next person in my situation can be spared some needless frustration.

Bravo.

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Have you had a customer service experience that went from wrong to right?  Tell me about it in the comments.

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Pick a day of the work week and someone will have something negative to say about it.

There are a lot of groans heard at job sites everywhere on Mondays, Hump Days gets us half way to the weekend, and Fridays seem to never end.

We often act as if the work week is something that is to be tolerated because the only worthwhile days of the week are Saturday and Sunday. Why do we do this to ourselves?

I’m not immune to lapsing into this type of thinking from time to time, but generally, I have a positive attitude about work and working. I’m fortunate to have an interesting job and I work with good people, so the experience, for me, is often engaging and stimulating.

There are many measures of success and the ways in which we can contribute to those measures are just as varied. Some measures are easy to recognize, while others are much less apparent.  Often, it is how we view our efforts in the workplace that can add texture to routine tasks and give us a sense of the positive effects that we can have on the broader enterprise.

Compiling data, modeling scenarios, management reporting, and interpreting results are all part of contributing to the making of business decisions. Having worked at many levels of accounting, from billing clerk through management during the last three decades, I’ve always found accounting to be interesting work.

Many businesses have seen declines in revenue during the current economic downturn. When these declines are coupled with rising expenses the job becomes more relevant. Accounting is usually considered to be an austere profession that is devoid of emotion, because the numbers tell us what we should do. But in reality, particularly for a small business, it’s difficult to maintain a detached view of the consequences of decisions because of the effects that those decisions have on people.

Even during good times, management decisions have consequences. The annual review of benefit packages, the construction of the appraisal process, the location of the business, the level of investment in technology, and many other decisions determine not only the profitability of the business but also the environment in which its employees spend a good portion of their lives.

When working for large corporations in similar circumstances, but at lower levels of accountability, the decompartmentalized structure of responsibilities made it seem much more like a numbers game. The ability to offer alternatives was limited and the response to those suggestions, when offered, was disappointing at best.

Long hours, constant churning of ideas – even during off hours – and the near maniacal focus on the well being of the business tends to be exhausting, but oddly the experience is also exhilarating.

Striving to find a way to “work it out” so that the business and the people who work there can both continue to thrive can be a bit daunting, but doing this type of work is also very satisfying when the result of one’s efforts can be measured both on and off of the Balance Sheet.

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• How do you view your job?
• What are the aspects of your job that get you energized?
• How do you measure success?

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Mine was the middle car of three traveling at about 45 miles per hour. We neared a single lane bridge like the one pictured below. In the opposite direction a lone car speeds up. The best that he could hope for was to squeeze in between my car and the one behind me.

Not much of a prize.

I had just crossed the bridge as the oncoming car whizzed by. Glancing at my rear view mirror, I could see it coming.

“Oh, no,” I mouthed. “Too close.”

The cars met at the bridge.

Bam!

Tiny pieces of glass and plastic flew into the air as their side mirrors vanished.

“What an ass!”

The vehicle behind me slowed as the aggressor’s car disappeared around the bend.

A nanosecond gained, and it only cost him a side mirror.

The car behind me turned around in the narrow road to give chase. I hope he caught him.

The aggressor has earned a butt-kicking.

My round-trip commute is over 160 miles each day, so I’ve seen a lot of strange behavior on the roads. Speeders, weavers, and tailgaters are the norm. Toss distracted drivers into the mix, and we are left with roads that are much more dangerous than they ought to be.

I don’t know what happens to some people when they get behind the wheel. So many of them seem to risk lives on a daily basis with little thought of how devastating a crash can be – for the innocent as well as the guilty.

A blown tire, an animal on the road, a heart attack – these are legitimate causes of accidents.

There should be another word for crashes that are caused by aggressive drivers doing reckless things. Calling these accidents makes them seem like unintentional happenings. In this case, the aggressive driver may not have intended to collide with the car he was cutting off, but he did everything in his power to ensure that they would meet at the bridge.

More than just negligence, that driver displayed a wanton disregard for safety.

If you have a tendency to risk your life on meaningless games of chicken, please, spare other drivers the experience of playing your idiotic games and find a sturdy utility pole to wrap your car around.

The rest of us want to live.