I have instructed my family to bury a phone with me . . . then call it.
If I answer, grab a shovel.
Management 101: How to Demoralize Your Top Performers Into Early Retirement
Sanders quit because Lions weren’t winning
Background
Barry Sanders, as you may already know, was a running back for the Detroit Lions — one of the best running backs ever.
It was shocking news — to the extent that an athlete’s retirement can be considered “shocking” — when Sanders retired in 1998 because, at age 31, he was at the peak of his career, and on the verge of breaking the all-time NFL rushing record.
Some Lions fans — to this day — still expect him to change his mind and play again.
What Sanders Said
Sanders has an “as told to” autobiography coming out, in which he says that he retired, not — as the above headline says — because the Lions weren’t winning (which they weren’t), but because of his realization that the management of the team no longer cared about winning.
Big difference.
Here’s what he says in the book:
“That realization trivialized everything I did during the off-season to prepare myself. It trivialized everything I dreamed about from the time I was a kid in Wichita . . .”
It’s very similar to something DeMarco and Lister said in Peopleware:
Most forms of teamicide do their damage by effectively demeaning the work, or demeaning the people who do it. Teams are catalyzed by a common sense that the work is important and that doing it well is worthwhile.
People want to do great work. People are dying for opportunities to do great work.
Thus spoke The Programmer.
Men Are From Mars, Chickens Are From KFC
A man and a 10-year-old boy bring home the evening meal: 12 pieces of KFC for $9.99.
“Get some plates,” his wife says.
“We don’t need plates,” the man replies.
“We’re men!” the boy explains.
Wife: “You’re going to make a mess.”
Man: “Of course we’re going to make a mess”
Boy: “We’re men!”
Break a Leg
One of my nieces in Australia — she must be 11 or 12 by now — fell off the roof of her house and broke her leg.
“What was she doing on the roof?” I ask my wife.
“Her mom told her she couldn’t play in the house.”
Nice. Or as they say in Australia, noyce.
Forgive Us Our Debts
I got an email today with the subject line “Even Christians have financial problems,” advertising “debt counseling from a Christian perspective.”
Where did the idea come from that Christians should be immune from financial problems? Jesus had to walk at night because he couldn’t afford a pair of shoes.
Talk about a guy with financial problems . . .
So Much Trash
On this date in 1851, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick was published. The book, considered by modern scholars to be one of the great American novels, was dismissed by Melville’s contemporaries and belittled by reviewers as “so much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature.”
Melville took bad reviews pretty hard and gave up writing fiction a few years later. He died in New York on September 28, 1891, at the age of 72, almost completely forgotten.
Existentialism in the Cafeteria
HOLDINGFORD, MINN. — Millionaire dishwasher Kathy Welle seemed incredulous as she stared into the TV cameras and explained why sharing a $95.5 million Powerball jackpot with 15 fellow Holdingford schools cafeteria workers wasn’t reason enough to quit her $9-an-hour job.
“And I don’t plan to quit my other job, driving a school bus for the district, either,” Welle said Tuesday. “What else would I do? What else would any of us do?”
Trick or Treat
In a last minute switcheroo, my wife decided to stay home and hand out candy while I went trick-or-treating with the kids.
I had six kids in my group: four 10-year-old boys — a mummy (my kid), two ninjas, and an evil baseball catcher — plus a hyperactive 6-year-old cheerleader and a 5-year-old Blue’s Clues girl.
The cheerleader was a dynamo — the first kid to every door — and if it wasn’t opened promptly, she’d run around looking in the windows to see what was the holdup.
The evil baseball catcher — wearing a chest protector, shin guards and a skull mask — approached every house by taking a running start and sliding up to the door on his shin guards, scaring women, small children and pretty much everyone else, because no one expected him to do that, and because it looked like he’d fallen and given himself a crippling injury.
“You won’t be laughing when he does that and some old lady has a heart attack,” one mom said to me.
But the highlight of the evening came when one of the ninjas got tired of menacing the other ninja and pointed his sword at the kinetic cheerleader, who swung her candy bag around and knocked the sword halfway across the street.
It was a big hit with the whole group because you rarely get to see a ninja schooled by a cheerleader half his size . . .
Overheard
“I beat the traffic this morning. I got here an hour and a half early, but I only had to get up 45 minutes earlier.”
“So you saved 45 minutes.”
“I saved . . . let’s see . . . (looking thoughtfully skyward) . . . 45 minutes!
I Don’t Care About Your Car
I don’t care what kind of car you drive, what kind of a deal you got on it, the gas mileage, how fast it goes . . .
Here’s why:
Why Great Novels Are Not Written by 10-Year-Olds
And look upon us, angels of young children, with regards not quite estranged, when the swift river bears us to the ocean.
And so, on page 243 of a 900-page novel, the 6-year-old Son referred to in the title dies!
“So what’s the rest of the book going to be about?” I wonder aloud.
“Your butt,” my son suggests.
A Tale of Two Dinners
I took my son out for dinner tonight. We went to Hof’s Hut, his choice.
I’ve been to Hof’s Hut twice in my life. The other time was the first real date I ever had with a girl. I took her to Hof’s Hut and a movie, where she fell asleep.
That seems like just last week, and yet this week I find myself married with a 10-year-old son, who orders off the grownup menu for the very first time . . .
Burning Down the House
I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and I threw them out the window in disgust. How, then, could I have a furnished house? I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the grass, unless where man has broken ground.
We’ve got a number of uncontrolled fires burning in Southern California. It’s raining ash out of a darkened sky in Orange County, where I live, although we’re nowhere near the actual fires.
I Hate to Look at Wedding Photos
For several years after I got married, I kept a wedding picture on my desk at work — not one of the “professional” photos, but a candid picture of my wife and me, taken by one of the guests.
A Brilliant Waste of Time
A colleague is internationalizing error messages for a login form. He can tell you that your password is wrong in 12 different languages, even though the users of the application all speak English.
“This is a brilliant waste of time,” he chortles.
“It sure is . . . if by ‘brilliant waste of time,’ you mean ‘waste of time.'”
If a Tree Falls in the Forest . . .
If by “sound,” you mean vibrations in air pressure capable of being interpreted as sound, then yes, it does make a sound.
If by “sound,” you mean CRRRRRRRRASSSSSH!, then it doesn’t.
A Perfect Murder
DURHAM, N.C. — A jury convicted novelist Michael Peterson Friday of bludgeoning his wife of five years in the stairwell of their Durham mansion.
Peterson says his wife fell down the stairs. Coincidentally, another female friend of Peterson’s was found dead at the bottom of a staicase in 1985 . . .
That is You
The earth keeps some vibration going
There in your heart, and that is you.
There’s a balance to be struck between providing a kid with some direction in his life, and thinking that he should like certain things because I like them, or dislike certain things because I don’t like them, or that he should do things a certain way because that’s the way I would do them, the danger being that even though my way is, of course, the best way, the way he does it is what makes him him . . .
Great Moments in Parenting
My son wants an Icee after roller hockey practice, so I give him some money and he skates off to the snack bar.
When I get there, the snack bar girl is giving him the Icee and his money back.
The Death of a Child
My nephew died yesterday in a car smash in Amarillo, TX, where he lived.
He was 10 years old, the same age as my son. He was my son’s favorite cousin.