Still Waking Up

The Seven Habits of Ineffective People:

1. Answer every phone call and email as soon as you get it. Drop whatever you are doing. You can always come back to it later (if you remember).

2. Attend every meeting you are invited to. If you don’t go, the meeting will be a failure. Whatever you were doing at your desk is less important than participating in a discussion.

3. Have a chair ready for anyone who comes by your office to talk about their weekend (or their dating life, or their new sweater…)

4. Always have someone to blame for your problems. Remember – victims always have an excuse for failure. If you aren’t a victim, you’re part of the problem.

5. If you have some spare time at home, waste it on mindless entertainment. Only workaholics spend their free time investing. You’ll probably have a secure job until you’re 75, so why worry about extra income? Starting a business might give you a return years from now. Entertainment gives a return right now.

6. Education is for teenagers. You were done school a long time ago. Your diploma helped you get a job, and now that you have a job, why learn more?

7. If you feel like doing something, always check to make sure it meets someone’s needs other than your own. If you think you might step on someone’s toes, then don’t do it.

Oh, and the 8th Habit:

Never delegate. Remember, “If it’s to be, it’s up to me.” Who can you trust anymore? Nobody can do it as well as you can!

Everyone has their personal space. And so does my car. And I don’t appreciate when that space is violated.

Some cars have alarms that go off if you stand too close. It’s sort of like that alarm when you stand too close to a person, except the car alarm is much louder. My car doesn’t have that. But the car still has its space.

Now, I recognize that most parking spots in Calgary are only wide enough to park a bicycle comfortably, and getting any kind of 4-wheeled vehicle in there is pretty tight. The people that designed the spots forgot that most people like to open their doors when entering and exiting their vehicles. Without any open doors, however, most cars will nicely fit into the space provided.

But since most of us need to open doors when parked, you would think it’s a good idea to leave some space whenever possible. Like, when you park in a lot that is almost empty, you can leave a space between you and the next car. This is very similar to the rule of urinals. (Guys, you know what I mean.) When you can leave space, it’s more comfortable to do so. That way, we can all open our doors wide, and get in and out of our cars without struggle or hardship.

If this is obviously the case, then why does everyone like to park so close to my car?

Case study #1: Furniture store parking lot, early evening. The lot was nearly empty. It was a nice night, so I didn’t mind a short walk. I parked well away from the door. I liked the idea of returning to my car, swinging the door open all the way, and getting in comfortably.

It was not meant to be. I returned to my car half an hour later to discover that someone else had parked right next to me, way out in the middle of the empty lot. And on the driver’s side, too. It was like they did it on purpose.

The same thing happened last night. Not only right next to my car on the driver’s side, well away from the restaurant, with empty spaces all around, but also so close that it was almost impossible to open the door without bumping into the offending truck. And their driver’s side was next to mine, so presumably, the other driver had purposely parked that close to make it difficult for themselves and for me to open doors. A perfect lose-lose situation.

Why?

What is wrong with my carma?

What core negative belief do I need to release?

What is wrong with this universe?

One of my favourite Far Side comics shows a flock of geese walking down the road. One of them looks up in the sky and sees another flock flying. The caption: Hey, look what they’re doing!

Last weekend I went shopping at Community Natural Foods for some healthier meals. I looked at a little plastic box of spinach, and I noticed a label: This package is made from corn.

Corn???

It looked like normal clear plastic to me. And yet, it was as if someone out there had read my post about “No More Cheap Plastic” and had come up with a simple solution. Corn.

The great thing about using corn is that, with global warming, pretty soon most of North America will be “the corn belt.” By 2020 we’ll probably be able to grow the stuff in Fort McMurray. Then we can stop mining heavy oil because we’ll be able to run our cars and package our food with corn.

Another thing I saw this week:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8iSYMkFO2A

You may have seen it already. When heavy storms blew in on the Dutch coast, a hundred horses got trapped on a small island surrounded by rising water, only a hundred metres away from the mainland. Eighteen of them drowned. The fire department tried to rescue them by boat, but the water wasn’t quite deep enough, so the boat got lodged on the sand when the horses weighed it down. The nation watched, and wondered how it would work out. Small boats carried hay out to them to keep them alive.

A few days later, the waters receded to about chest level. But having watched 18 of their compadres drown in that water, those horses weren’t about to venture out. They stayed on the island. The island was barely big enough to accommodate them.

Then four of the local women tried something different. They got on horses and rode them across the water to the island. The trapped horses looked over and said (not out loud) “Hey, look what they’re doing!”

The women rode back and forth in the water, and let the trapped horses figure things out for themselves. Then the women turned and headed back for the mainland. A hundred horses followed them eagerly.

I found it inspirational, not because the solution was particularly courageous, but because it was simple, creative, and took a little leadership.

In that story, I saw what we can do for our fellow human beings that are each trapped on their own little islands of fear and doubt. So many people get surrounded by the rising waters of debt, or alcoholism, or abuse. People get stuck on small islands of jobs they hate, relationships that don’t work, and lives that grow intolerable.

People need leaders. People need heroes.

In what area of your life do you show leadership? What is something you do well that you could help others with? What is something you can do to be a hero?

It doesn’t have to be hard.

“Now I go outside,” he said.

“You see?” My new Venezualan co-worker opened his duffel bag to show me the contents. “Scarf, mittens, hat, long underwear… I have to change every time I come in, every time I go outside…”

“Welcome to Calgary,” I replied. To me, this is becoming normal – as much as you can call -30C in November “normal.”

“This is crazy,” he continued. And he looked at me with such pathos in his eyes, as if he was telling me that his wife and children are being held hostage by guerillas.

“I come from a town where it is 35, 40 degrees every day. When it goes down to 26, then it is cold. This, here, is not just cold, it is… I don’t know…”

“I have to buy all these clothes,” he continued. “I have to buy a scarf, mittens, ski mask… Do you know how hard it is to buy ski mask in Venezuala? They look at me, they ask – Why do you want ski mask? They look at me like I’m some kind of criminal.”

“This is a test, right? This is some kind of survival test? To see if I can take it?”

That must be it.

Today is the coldest November 28 in history for Calgary. It’s -29C out there. The Venezualan guy in the next cubicle must think my employer is pretty sadistic to have hired him and convinced him to move to Calgary. “It’s great,” they told him. “You’ll love it here.” He gets off the plane and next thing he knows he has to scrape his breath off his scarf.

But really, it’s not so bad. It should warm up to a balmy -23 today. Here’s hoping.

On a totally unrelated topic, I hear that Al Gore is going around telling everyone that global warming is a scientifically-proven fact now. There’s no escaping it. The world is becoming unbearably hot.

Okay. It’s not that us oil producers here in Calgary have our heads in the sand. It’s not that we’re trying to avoid the fact of global warming. It’s not even that we think it’s a good idea for the world’s climate to change. It’s just that we wish we could have a little of it – just a little – here in Calgary.

While the polar bears are floundering around in the warming waters of the high arctic, we’re freezing our noogies off down south here. Why should everyone else get the warm weather? Take us, please! We would be willing to sacrifice about five degrees centigrade on the high side so that Florida doesn’t turn into a desert. Let the polar bears have their ice back. Take ours. There’s enough on my car to float a 500-pound bear for a week.

Environmentalists would have a much easier time convincing Calgary’s oil barons that global warming really exists if we actually experienced some for a while.