Pow! Right Between The Eyes! Andy Nulman's Blog About Surprise

What I (Re-) Learned This Week: The Curse of Scotch Tape

Here's the first repeat "Best Of" post.  It ran last year, March to be exact, but it's since become one of my--pardon the pun--sticking points.  Keep seeing it and it keeps making me madder.  P.S.  Life is good if THIS is one of my pet peeves.

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It was a gorgeous spring weekend, and I spent most of it walking downtown... which is why today I come to you with the confession that I hate Scotch Tape.

Yes, a strange confession.  But not without justifiable explanation.

In countless store windows, I saw Scotch Tape support crookedly-hung, crudely-made messages of "We're closed for inventory," "Washrooms for customers only," "Please ensure door shuts tightly behind you" and the like. 

In restaurants, I saw Scotch Tape repair ragged and battered menus, and affix daily specials to others in slightly better condition.

In elevators, I saw Scotch Tape cover up a hole where a basement button used to be, and trace the crack in a mirror in an effort to keep it from cracking even more (and from passengers to slice their fingers, I suppose).

What's worst of all, on my way into the office this morning, I saw Scotch Taped signs all over the front door windows of our now-defunct museum building next door.  Oh the horror, the horror...

In a nutshell, and with all due respect to the 3M Corporation, I think Scotch Tape sends an awful message.  It's inelegant and used with reckless abandon.  It improves nothing.

Frankly, when you see Scotch Tape on just about anything, you know that something's gone wrong.  Even worse, it usually means things have passed the point of no return.

Now I know that everything can't always be perfect and pristine, and that fixing things is part of the creative process. 

But the way I see it, when Scotch Tape is used as a repair tool (or as a means of presentation or communication), what's really being said is that at best, "Things are beyond the state of repair," or at worst, "Hey, we just don't give a shit anymore."

On a literal basis, Scotch Tape (as well as its brethren Masking Tape and Duct Tape) may be an eyesore and the embodiment of throwing in the towel, but figuratively, the message is even sadder.

In other words, I know of too many people and too many businesses who use Scotch Tape metaphorically. "It costs too much," or "It takes too much time," or "I don't have enough energy to change things the way they should be going, so I'll cover up the problem with some Scotch Tape (which, being transparent, makes this even more pitiful) and hope it holds until somebody else is responsible."

There's always a better way. Signs can be hung a myriad of less obtrusive, more graceful and eye-pleasing ways.  Menus can be replaced. So can elevator buttons, glass and mirrors...and people who are reluctant to do things better and more imaginatively.

So, the lesson-du-week:  if you're relying on Scotch Tape, you've probably already lost your grip on things. 

What I Learned This Week: A Mime on Red Bull

At three separate occasions over the past two weeks in the office, certain people we deal with at Just For Laughs were described as "All Talk/No Action."

In all types of business this archetype is a pain-in-the ass, but because showbiz is a business of many promises made and relied on, this type of behaviour is even more aggravating...and damaging.  

Making live shows and television shows are hampered by what I tend to call a 3-D Domino Effect; in other words, something small tumbling here today rapidly festers into something chaotic and potentially catastrophic somewhere else tomorrow.  

That said, when someone makes you a promise, you'd like to put it behind you and depend on it as you go about building the fragile house of cards that is the ecosystem of show business.

No wonder we're so disdainful of those who re-neg, or just as bad, never deliver on their supposed words of honor.  Now, no names (sorry gossip mongers!), but suffice to say that a few people made our lives much more difficult since the arrival of August, with its tight post-production TV schedules and mad pre-production of our Sydney, Australia and Toronto events.

During the aforementioned separate occasions, we discussed the behavior we long for; in other words the opposite of All Talk/No Action. I mentioned that when I was at Airborne Mobile, I had a sign printed and hung over my door so that any time someone entered or exited, I would be forced to read it.  The sign read:

Never Promise More

Than You Can Deliver;

Always Deliver More

Than You Promised

This spawned the need for an icon, a prototype, a mascot for someone who is All Action and No Talk, the antithesis of our nemesis.

And that, in turn, spawned this week's learning--the creation of our new hero, one who embodies the behavior and reputation for all of us to aspire to:

A Mime on Red Bull

Long may he (or she) live!

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By the time you read this, I'll be on some safari in a distant somewhere of Kenya.  Amazingly, I am taking a vacation of two weeks, and instead of going radio silent, I've decided to re-publish two of my favorite posts from the six years that I've been doing this.  

With over 1,000 posts to choose from, it wasn't easy to pick just two, but I chose a couple whose lessons were re-learned over the past month, so at least there's a relevance.

And with that, I now board my flight to Nairobi via Istanbul to enjoy a new adventure or two...and perhaps a couple of new lessons for us.

What I Learned This Week: There's Something in the Air

Disneyland, take a back seat.

I’ve just come back from a visit to the REAL “Happiest Place on Earth.”

It’s called Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC to members and fervent followers).  I’ve been there twice, in two cities—Montreal and Toronto—over the past week.  Nowhere else and never before have I experienced a happier group of employees and shoppers congregated in one area, feeding off each others' passions and knowledge in a pulsating, glowing snowball effect of euphoria.

From the floor staff to the checkout folks, everyone was ebullient.  Even greater still was the buzz amongst those waiting in line, who all seemed to be chomping at the bit to get outside and put their purchases to use.  As Thunderclap Newman once sang, “There’s Something in The Air.”

I wish I could understand it.  Jeez, even more so, I wish I could fully partake in it.   But at least it was the source of this week’s learning.

Now I ain’t the most “outdoorsy” type which is why I've never really been to the place, but I had to stock up on a couple of items for a safari trip to Kenya, and MEC seemed like the best spot to do so.  I was right…for reasons other than the $81 plus tax worth of goods I purchased.

First of all, from two different obsessively helpful people, I received the equivalent of two complete Masters dissertations in a $25 flashlight and a $46 knapsack (marked down from $90).  Amongst other fine discoveries, I learned about the lumen power of LED, and why hidden backstraps and multiple handles may be best suited for a guy who will probably never again bear the burden of a knapsack once he returns home from the Dark Continent in September.

I got this type of detailed product explanation a few weeks ago.  But that was from the guy who sold me my new luxury coupe.  You expect this type of attention when you’re laying down the equivalent of a good year’s salary on a car.  But it’s quite the pleasant shock to get when the aggregate total of your purchase wouldn’t pay for a passenger’s side rear seat winter mat for said new car.  And truth be told, the customers at MEC seemed way happier than those at Mercedes-Benz.  Go figure…

I tried to figure.  So I decided to test MEC against two other “Gold Standards” in customer-centric retail on Saturday—Lulu Lemon and the Apple Store.

The former had equally-as-chipper sales people, helpful beyond the pale, yet despite being in the same family as MEC, the customer base didn’t have the same buzz.  Maybe yoga karma makes a different noise.

The latter was jam-packed with people as usual; all served by young, energetic, uber-knowledgeable sales and service staff.  But once again, the customer sensibility didn’t hold a candle to the MEC rapture.  Perhaps the fact that about a third of customers were there having some sort of problem attended to, and that the very nature of technology brings up more questions and stress than the great outdoors, made the Apple visit efficient and enjoyable, but not euphoric.

So what did I learn?  Like the proverbial tree falling in the forest not making a sound unless there’s someone there to hear it, a truly great retail experience is something completed by both customer and store. 

As hard as a store tries,

as great as a store may be,

there’s an intangible

"je-ne-sais-quoi" gap

between a great retail experience

and an experience, period.

Is MEC any better than Apple or Lulu Lemon or Mercedes-Benz?  Probably not.

So what’s the difference?

Wish I knew.   I could make a mega fortune.

Guess I just gotta get out more ;)

What I Learned This Week: The Changing Conceit of Permanance

After a month of obsessive focus on all things Just For Laughs, I opened my eyes differently on my way to work last week, trying to once again see the forest for the trees.

What I noticed over the five days may not actually produce this blog’s most profound post, but I found the learning intriguing nonetheless.  So here we go.  If you like it, I’m happy; if you don’t, blame it on the fatigue. 

On my brief drive to the office, at the corner of Sherbrooke and St. Urbain streets, beside a red light I always seem to hit, sits a majestic building (that's it above). This building houses this province’s Office de la langue française (if you’re a Quebecker, you know what I’m talking about; if you’re not, you don’t want to).  I know that this building houses said office because a sturdy, yet transient, blue sign affixed to the wall next to its front door tells me so. You can spot it just above the burgundy car. 

Yet above the front door, literally carved in stone, are the words “Ecole des beaux-arts,” words that demark the building’s original raison d’etre and occupants (it was a fine arts school). The Quebec flag on the building actually juts out from it.

In a city as old as Montreal, you see this frequently—ornate, artistic, “hard-coded” descriptors/branding of heritage buildings, engraved in cement, stamped in brass or twisted out of wrought iron.  Not all of ‘em are hoity-toity throwbacks to the high life either.  Case in point is the city’s Parisian Laundry, an old clothes-cleaning factory with another doorway-topped, engraved sign that has been resurrected as an art gallery called, well, Parisian Laundry. (That’s it down below.)

So what went through my mind was wondering what went through their minds—the builders, that is—so many decades ago.  These people had a headspace, almost a conceit, of longevity and permanence; their structures, and their structures’ purposes, would live forever.  Go tell the builder of the elitist art school that one day his mighty edifice would be home to an awkward agency that would harbor complaints about the use of the English language and the size of printed English words and he would think you were from another planet.

Despite the previous sentence, this is not a political rant, but a social one.  These days, “naming rights” on stadiums and buildings are big business, but the corporations or causes they represent can be altered in a day or two. Replace the big, glowing neon sign on top, unscrew a few things and screw in a few others, and voila—a new identity and a new intent.  Our current buildings have become mere shells, fleetingly taking on the personality of their tenants until the next ones roll in. 

Indelible branding hasn’t entirely vanished though; it just seems to have moved from buildings to people.  I can go into a whole separate discourse on the tattooing (more than a quarter of the entire American population has at least one tattoo, and that’s a stat that is six years old), but the point is that perhaps we consider ourselves more eternal and built to last than our buildings are. In other words:

The conceit of grandeur

and living forever

has become personal.

To put a button on this post, every morning, directly across the street from that building at Sherbrooke and St. Urbain, at that red light I always seem to hit, I come across a group of homeless Native Canadians.  Nice guys down on their luck, they are usually through their first beer when we trade a few words and they hit me up for some spare change.  

And wouldn’t you know it…in one way or another, they’re all sporting some sort of tattoo.