Tape, Glue Stick or Rubber Cement?

At this point in my life, I've been in the workforce for twenty-five years and have witnessed wondrous technological advances.

The fax machine, for example, was still making its awkward debut when I was indentured (I mean hired) by the Moore County Citizen News-Record to work as a newspaper reporter. To say budgets were a little tight at the Citizen would be like saying Ted Cruz is only slightly power hungry. A nickel didn't get spent without full consent of the managing editor, the editor-in-chief and my Mother giving written approval in triplicate. Consequently, the pricey thermal paper of early fax machines was a highly coveted item. You didn't dare scroll a superfluous inch of it unless you wanted to be violently chastised by the office controller.

When the fax machine started clicking, whirring, buzzing and bleeping to life, all activity in the office skidded to a halt. We stood around the fax room -- yes, the fax machine had its own private room -- like extras from "The Music Man" waiting for the WellsFargo wagon to start a comin' down the street.

"A fax came for me! I got a fax! Did you get a fax? No? I did!"

These days, the fax machine is looked on as a quaint and nearly irrelevant relic of bygone days, like the PalmPilot or handwritten thank you notes. The fax machine barely lasted as long as the lifespan of a really healthy cat.

Since 1990, workplaces have moved from clunkily networked computer terminals all linked to an outdated mainframe and one overworked laser printer, to everyone having their own laptops routed via wifi to dedicated Bluetooth printers. And if you needed to touch base with someone back then, you couldn't pull a smartphone out of your pocket for a quick video chat. You reached in your pocket for a quarter and found a pay phone.

Now, I'm not one of those curmudgeons who bemoans the loss of carefree, technology-free days. I like my smartphone, and my laptop, and my Bluetooth printers. I love carrying around eight days of music on a single device and being able to watch Harry Potter movies on my iPhone while traveling by plane from Raleigh to Columbus. If anything, I'm wondering why all processes and functions haven't embraced the advances of the past few decades.

Perhaps my greatest hope is to see technology impact the way I submit monthly expense reports, specifically the turning in of receipts.

At the beginning of each month, I sit at my desk and gather scraps of paper of various sizes that should match up to all the purchases I made during the previous month. At least one is usually missing, and sometimes five or six. In twenty-five years, I've probably submitted only one expense report for which I managed to find all the corresponding receipts.

Once gathered, I take out a pair of scissors and trim the excess edges from the receipts.

Why? Because when you have to tape all those little receipts to sheets of printer paper, you want to get as many on one sheet as possible. Why, you might ask, is it necessary to tape all those little receipts to printer paper and mail a huge bundle of papers halfway across the country? Because the expense report accounting process is stuck somewhere between Byzantine and kindergarten finger painting lessons. Even the antiquated fax machine is too high-tech to be part of this process.

In a day and age when my son can FaceTime his friends using a smartphone connected to high-speed internet via wireless router while sitting on the toilet, it amazes me that I am required to complete an important administrative task for which I have to make a choice between tape, glue stick and rubber cement.



© 2015 Mark Feggeler

Linked-In, Looked-Around, Logged-Off

Several years ago, I joined the online service Linked-In. Everyone else was doing it, so I figured why not jump off the same bridge?

For those of you not familiar with Linked-In, it's basically a semi-functional, constantly changing, over-promised/under-delivered social network for business people. Think Facebook, only without videos of dancing babies and talking dogs, and absolutely no Candy Crush Saga. Linked-In enables you to keep up with all the people you worked with years ago, all the people you work with today, and all the people you wish you had worked with over the course of your career instead of all those other people you're linked to.

Not only are everyone's business accomplishments listed out for you to see when you feel so inclined, Linked-In is kind enough to send you emails -- sometimes five a day -- letting you know that Sally Whatshername got another promotion and Willy Givakrap now has three professional certification acronyms after his name.

There are passive sales pitches of all kinds from every self-employed (read "unemployed" or "unemployable") would-be consultant with a laptop and a copy of "Business Plans for Dummies" at his breakfast table. There are total strangers requesting linkage to you for no other reason than to make themselves appear more important than they really are. There are associations and groups that will want to count you on their rolls without offering you much in return except off-topic discussion forums moderated by the Linked-In equivalent of a crazy cat lady. There are people with one-thousand, one-hundred and seventeen "connections" who post comments every three hours and others with seven "connections" who started filling out their profiles in 2007 and never managed to get back around to completing them.

But it isn't simply a one-way street. There's more to it than posting your resume and spouting your accomplishments. Thanks to the recommendations feature, you can help others spout about their accomplishments.

Presently, I have three recommendations on my profile, only one of which I didn't have to beg for. I would have more recommendations, but I'm not really one for reference-swapping with people I don't really know. Not that I mind someone lying to give me a leg up, just so long as they don't expect me to lie about them. I do have a phony baloney reputation to protect, after all.

The latest viral enhancement to Linked-In is the Endorsement feature. It's perfect for people who want to say something nice about someone else, but don't want to take the time to put that sentiment into words. Kind of like buying a Hallmark card, only with a click of a button you can verify that one of your "connections" is an expert in some random field of knowledge.

I have been receiving a substantial number of endorsements lately. There are endorsements for my sales acumen, my crazy-mad revenue management skills, my in-depth knowledge of hotels, my vast motel sales experience, and many more. Some of these endorsements came from people who might even know what they're talking about!

Just today, a person with whom I haven't worked for years endorsed me for a skill she could not possibly know I have in a field of expertise that has nothing to do with any position I've ever held at any job I've ever worked. Mixed emotions flooded over me when my third Linked-In email of the day announced her vouching for my noteworthy, and previously imperceptible, abilities. I thought long and hard over whether or not I should I accept the endorsement.

Oh, what the heck. Like anyone will ever try to verify my hang-gliding skills...



© 2013 Mark Feggeler

The Benefit of Being Downsized

Since 1990, when SUNY Plattsburgh decided it’d had enough of me and awarded a diploma with my name on it just to get me to leave, I’ve worked for 12 distinct corporate entities. That’s an average of one new employer every 1.9 years.


In fairness to me, not every one of those new corporate entities involved a job change. For instance, I was employed by three different corporate entities in the same year while working as director of sales of one hotel in Durham, NC. The hotel’s first management firm was bought out by a second management firm which was, in turn, let go by the hotel ownership which created its own management firm. Simple, right? That’s the kind of year you keep your butt out of the wind and hope nobody more than one level above you knows you even exist.

Having worked for 12 distinct corporate entities, it’s easy to categorize them by degree of enjoyability. On a scale from 1 to 5 (1 being “Made My Spirits Soar Like an Eagle” and 5 being “Made Me Pray for the Sweet Release of Death”) the breakdown is as follows:

1. Made My Spirits Soar Like an Eagle = Two Companies
2. Put a Little Spring in My Step = Three Companies
3. No Impact on My Life Whatsoever = Three Companies
4. Caused Me to Reconsider My Stance on Assisted Suicide = Two Companies
5. Made Me Pray for the Sweet Release of Death = Two Companies

Of the bottom two, one was particularly bullying and disrespectful to its employees. You know something’s wrong with your place of employment when you enter the office each day amazed at the fact none of your coworkers has been arrested, or at least investigated. Abuse of power, conflict of interest, unethical business practices, unjustifiable business expenses, questionable investments – the place was a training ground for all of the things you shouldn’t do when running a business if you want to avoid jail time.

Amidst the humanoid detritus that mostly ran this soul-sucking company were a handful of decent people struggling hard to remain decent. Every now and then, one of them would fall victim to the corporate axe, or worse, divest themselves of the virtues that made them decent and join the scheming backstabbers in their game.

I thought, naively, I could remain impermeable to the never-ending parade of injustices perpetrated at that company. “I am one of the decent people,” I would tell myself.

The problem was the decent people huddled together in a cowering mass to bitch and moan about the backstabbers. We became an underground army of gossipers, whisperers and kvetchers. Even when the backstabbers weren’t giving us something to bitch about, we could pull from a vast catalog of past offenses to rile our indignation. We were unhappy, dissatisfied, bitter as tonic water, yet convinced we could hold on to our humanity in spite of every effort of the backstabbers to break our spirits.

Near the end of my sentence, I ran into a former coworker who had been fired some months earlier. He was one of those pleasant, honest people who knows what needs to be done and how to lead by example to motivate others to help him achieve it. I had felt poorly for him when he was let go. He had been wronged, which I expressed to him as we spoke. He smiled contentedly and gave me one of the best pieces of advice anyone has ever given me.

“Mark, get out,” he said. “You think it doesn’t affect you, but it’s corrosive.”

Not long after that brief encounter, I was restructured out of my job. The powers that be called me and six other people into a meeting after lunch and gave us two-hours to clean out our offices. It was the first time I lost a job, and it was frightening, but looking back at it now I am able to appreciate how much of a gift they gave me.

Like an abused pet, I had come to believe I deserved the treatment I received at the hands of those soul-suckers. What was I, anyway, other than a simple drone scurrying this way and that at the whim of its queen bee? Had they not restructured me out of the organization, I might never have moved on to better things.

© 2013 Mark Feggeler

The Rise & Fall of Netflix?

It's like watching an episode of "The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin" without the irony.

A simple summary of that iconic 1970s British television show would tell you it is about a middle management man in midlife crisis who does everything he can to ruin his career and his life, only to end up becoming wildly successful and, therefore, even more miserable.

I don't know if Netflix CEO Reed Hastings ever watched "The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin" on Britcom night on PBS back in the eighties, but it seems to me like he's copying straight out of Perrin's playbook. The main difference is Hastings appears to be succeeding at failure.

I've worked for companies that pushed dramatic rate increases at inopportune moments without proper justification. Guess what? Not once in all those instances was it ever received well by the clients. Guess what else? Business declined.

In order to keep the combined DVD-by-mail and internet streaming service we were receiving, Netflix demanded a $6 monthly increase. Okay, $6 is not much money and we could easily afford it. However, all things are relative. That $6 represented a 60% increase from the $10 we had been paying. If all of our monthly expenses were to suddenly increase by 60%, we would have a serious discussion about luxuries versus necessities.

To make matters worse for Netflix, their selection of online movies ready for streaming sucks. No fancy alliteration or silly puns required to describe it. It just sucks. And how could it not?

Let's say you own the rights to a popular movie that has enjoyed a reasonably successful theatrical release and faces the prospect of up to a year of fairly strong DVD and pay-per-viewing sales before falling away into obscurity. Wouldn't you wait until your movie started slipping into obscurity before licensing it out to an online streaming service that can probably offer only a fraction of the residuals realized from those other sources? So long as my movie continued to sell a dozen copies a month through iTunes at $9.99 a download, I would probably choose to hold it back from Netflix.

So, what does that leave for the Netflix streaming customer? Crap that nobody in his right mind would bother spending money on anywhere else. Crap that bombed in the theater or vanished from the collective memory decades ago. Crap that doesn't sell on DVD, or iTunes, or Amazon. Crap so bad pirates don't even bother bootlegging it. Crappity, crap, crap.

Sure, every now and then a gem of a movie rises to the surface, but it only serves as a harsh contrast to the poor quality of all the other choices.

And what does CEO Hastings choose to do in the midst of this PR poop storm he's created? Issue a non-apology apology to all Netflix customers in which he unsuccessfully tries to affect humility while justifying the increased fees and announcing the further separation of the company's two services. Seriously, are they just making this up as they go along?

Taking a Wall Street darling and devaluing it by 50% almost overnight. Publicly forecasting an expected net loss of 600,000 customers over a three-month period. Taking one of the most recognized names in the home movie industry and purposefully disassociating it from the very service that made it a household name.

Reginald Perrin would be proud.




© 2011 Mark Feggeler

Backpack Revolution!

I'd seen it a few times during recent travels.

I'm lugging my 37-pound, black leather, businessman computer bag through the airport terminal, one shoulder hanging a good four inches closer to the ground than the other, when I'm overtaken by some idiot in a business suit and long coat with a college book bag strapped to his back.

Sure, I might be struggling with curvature of the spine while he skips along at a jaunty pace, but I look more professional. People will see me and say to themselves: "What a professional businessman." They'll see him and say: "Class was over twenty years ago, Skippy. Sell the book bag and get a briefcase."

Secretly, however, I envied Skippy.

He made it to his connecting flight free of pain. He carried his evenly distributed load on his back, freeing his hands for more important tasks like carrying a vanilla latte or a pretzel. And if he needed to relieve himself, he didn't have to worry about finding a urine-free spot on the men's room floor to place his bag. All he'd have to do is unzip and let it fly!

Meanwhile, the retractable strap from my bag cut into my shoulder. The bag bounced awkwardly around my waist and nearly decapitated a small child who got too close. In the plane, the puffed up monster barely fit into the overhead compartment.

During my last trip to Ohio, as more and more backpacks passed me by, I reached for my computer bag and felt an uncomfortable tugging sensation in my left forearm. It hurt for the remainder of the trip and several weeks afterward. During a routine physical, my doctor suggested I likely pulled something lifting the computer bag. That was all the excuse I needed.

Just a week or so later we were in Target and I purchased a Swiss Army travel backpack with a laptop pocket, and a media pocket, and a pocket for my pens, and a pocket for notebooks, and a pocket for miscellanous items, and two side mesh pockets for drinks.

All pocketed out, I transferred my business travel items from the computer bag to the backpack. Walking this morning through RDU Airport, then Charlotte Douglas International Airport, and then Columbus International Airport, I felt liberated. I breezed by stodgy old travelers with their antiquated brief cases and computer bags like a dart.

At RDU, I carried a bagel in one hand and an orange juice in the other. At Charlotte, I carried my notebook in one hand and a pen in the other. And at Columbus, I entered the men's room and relieved myself without having to put my bag down in a puddle of pee.

Change can be good.



© 2011 Mark Feggeler

72 O'Clock?

I woke up several times the other night in my Richmond, VA, hotel room. This is not an uncommon occurrence when I'm on a business trip.

For starters, I am a homebody and don't really like traveling without my Lovely Wife and kids. Okay, maybe sometimes I do enjoy traveling without the kids, but not without the wife. Even on those few occasions when she is the one traveling and I have our comfortable king bed all to myself, I tend to lay awake for hours in the flickering glow of the television. After almost sixteen years of marriage, there is something unnatural about trying to fall asleep alone.

So, this past week in Richmond, as I closed the notebook in which I scribble passages for the book I'm writing and turned off the lights in the hotel room, it came as no surprise that sleep initially eluded me. My mind reviewed the day's events and I realized, among other things, that I had forgotten to pack deodorant. I don't know about you but I need deodorant. Without it, my armpits become incubators for unnaturally potent odors, even on the coolest of days. Since mental notes to myself never seem to take hold, I turned on the light and wrote "buy Dry Idea" in the notebook, then switched the light off and tried again to fall asleep.

Sooner than is customary, I found myself in dreamland. Even as I began to dream, I recall thinking how strange it was for me to be asleep so quickly. Before long, though, I was awake and looking around the room trying to figure out what city I was in and what time it was.

The trouble with working for a hotel chain that has only one product is the tremendous consistency of the room decor. This is a great selling point for our frequent clients because it means they know what to expect from each of our inns. For me, however, a founding father of attention deficit disorder and a strong candidate for early onset Alzheimer's, waking up in essentially the same room whenever and wherever I travel is a disorienting experience.

Am I in Ohio? Maybe Maryland? This couldn't be the April training in Tampa, could it? No, that was months ago. The October meeting in Columbus? No, no. It isn't October yet. I'm going to Annapolis for a military travel fair. That's in September. This is September, right?

And if not knowing where you are isn't bad enough, figuring out the time is another troublesome task. When I'm traveling, I live in constant fear of oversleeping. Think about it. You've just driven two-hundred miles to meet with an important client. Do you really want to screw it up now just because you didn't hear the alarm clock?

Wiping sleep out of my eyes, I struggle to find the bedside clock. There it is, facing the other way because the light had been shining in my eyes when I was trying to fall asleep and I turned it away from me. Unfortunately, I am comfortably positioned in the very middle of the king bed. If I move around too much to reach the clock, only to find out I still have hours to go before it's time to get up, I might not be able to get back to sleep.

So I look around to find the microwave clock. There it is, clear as day. It says "72."

I rest my head back down on the pillow and prepare to slip away, until my brain finally catches up with my eyes. I could almost hear the conversation between them. My brain questioning my eyes, doubting them, asking for confirmation. Begrudgingly, my eyes open again and, sure enough, there are the big yellow numbers. For what seems like long enough for a minute to pass, I watch and wait, wondering if I will witness the change from 72 to 73. Guess what? It never happens.

Eventually, I'm awake enough to realize what I am looking at is the thermostat on the air-conditioning unit next to the bed and not the microwave clock, so I sit up to search for the real thing. This pattern repeats itself two more times before it's finally close enough to morning to just go ahead and get out of bed.

When I'm finally showered and dressed, wearing a watch whose battery died at 11:26 the night before and gathering a ream of printed directions because my GPS had been recalled the previous week (seems people don't like their GPS bursting into flames due to an overheated battery) I head out for my first call of the day -- Target, to buy deodorant.


© 2010 Mark Feggeler

It's remarkable how little one has to say about anything after a day spent driving an eight-hour round trip, six of those hours with a relative stranger trying to make small talk in a very loud car. While my driving companion was pleasant and did his fair share to keep conversation interesting, the lags started appearing around hour four. Being a business trip, all work-related topics were exhausted within the first hour. Family, parenting, vacations, food, travel -- all of the safe topics -- followed in order, both of us consciously drawing them out to avoid the inevitable.

Hour 4. This is the point at which, if traveling with a familiar friend or family member, a long and happy silence would kick in. Music volume increases; minds shut down; scenery passes. The conversation has an opportunity to recharge, possibly restarting with an off-the-wall statement or question related to some shared experience.

With a stranger, no matter how skilled at conversation, this typically does not happen. Firstly, a pause in the conversation becomes awkward, as though we are telling each other: "I have entirely lost interest in speaking with you." To avoid a potential breach of etiquette, we both draw up meaningless topics not worthy of discussion just to avoid the pause, or we rehash bits of conversation from previous hours. Secondly, we have no shared experiences to discuss, not really anyway. Despite both being parents, I don't know his kids and he doesn't know mine. I don't want to hear more than a handful of stories about his kids and he doesn't want to hear more than a handful about mine. We both eat food. We both have favorite foods. But beyond knowing he likes an ethnically diverse menu and I prefer Italian cuisine, we really don't care too much about each other's dietary preferences. Besides, for a guy that says he enjoys foods from all continents, so far he's eaten only chicken caesar salad two days running for lunch.

By the time I leave him at his front door I am spent. I have nothing left mentally for the wife and kids and it shows.