omar's coming!

A quick follow up to our Wilmington trip. Wilmington has its issues like any number of older East Coast cities, but it also has a great vibe. In particular, the North Market Street area that is home to the Grand Opera House where we saw our show, and the Queen which hosts Wilmington’s World Café Live shows. There are also loads of restaurants, a great bookstore, and any number of new shops and cafes opening that are clearly tapping into what appears to be a new growth area. It is also not white – yes, people white. You learn quickly in Wilmington that it has a history of culture and music, a lot of which falls under not only rock and roll, but blues, soul, and a questionable claim to Bob Marley. As I was writing some Yelp! Review – yes, I do those – there was a review for The Grand from two days after we were there. Here is an excerpt:

“I am saying this because this venue has no parking what so ever. We witnessed several open air drug transactions as we looked for parking.  I was afraid to park my car and walk blocks to the door in broad daylight.  I can only imagine how scary it would be in the dark at night.”

He gave it one star. And they turned around and went home, eating their tickets.  I passed this nugget along to X who immediately dropped something along the lines of, “What? I felt perfectly safe and we there at night.” And then the coup de grace on this guy, “What exactly does an ‘open air’ drug deal look like?” Well, it looks like non-white people on street corners, apparently. Or, it looked like this, and this guy was all in the know on drug deals. Open air drug deals – MULTIPLE open air drugs deals. During the day!

Come to think of it, it’s probably time to go back and watch the entire run.

pivot

I am so tired of mindless meeting speak. Most of my co-workers know this fact because of how much I laugh and rail at their attempts at fitting in with pathetic vocabulary. Every single person here works this amateur vocabulary into everything they say. In this job a lot of the vernacular comes from the military but there are enough non-military folks that oftentimes business lingo hops over the moat. Yesterday morning, in a two sentence opening by one person, I wrote down the following phrases: pillars, stovepipes, lanes of the road, fidelity, cart/horse, and show the math. Stunning. I’ve been particularly harsh on the users (and it’s everyone) of “lanes of the road,” it may be the most overused phrase since “it is what it is.” Which, by the way, makes you sound like a moron.

My game for the next month is to try to get everyone using crazy terms that I’m going to simply pull from (almost) thin air: One phrase per week that I’ll use at least once a day in our various meetings and strolling discussions. I’ll have to be careful because anything too random will signal to the lemmings that it’s not a serious phrase. At the same time, it has to have some pull to those unable to actually speak normally; my first thought was to try out ‘widdershins’* but I don’t think it’ll do anything but make people wonder, “Right, I see your point, but let’s go widdershins around the table. Bob?” I think I’ll have to grab an idea from the world of traffic and somehow make it work, I'm contemplating some version of either 'on ramp' or 'off ramp'.

Any suggestions are welcome.

*** I'd never heard of, or used, widdershins until X brought it up last week. Fantastic word.