Email subject lines ~

There's so much spam email flying around it's incredible. It's kind of sad and disappointing to watch email have descended so far, but I get it. It's easy to automate and easy to flood people with useless information trying to part their dollars from them.



Distractions, grabbing that attention, pulling us away from what we thought we were going to go and do or look at or read.



I remember I had a manager at work who was big on the military method of subject lines. Every subject line had to have a prefix in front of it followed by a colon and he wanted only four prefixes. INFO, COORD, ACTION, and a couple of others that I don't even remember.



What was funny is I had read articles about that method years before. I really liked r concept but nobody used it outside of the military and I didn't get very many military emails so I didn't know if they even used it. But he told us to go forth and use it.



Nobody else on the team did except for me. I loved it. Now I had a way to tell people very clearly about my email. This email is just information. This email is calling for some sort of action. This email is coordinating something with you.



It didn't go over very well when I started sending the manager emails with those prefixes. He did not like being told he needed to take action on something. But I was right and he did.



I have a friend who, when things are leading up to a big event, he starts putting "please read" as the prefix to his email subject. The first couple that I got I just deleted. I finally opened one up and it really didn't have anything that pertained to me in it. I told my wife this guy needs to understand. I automatically filter anything that says "please read" as nothing I need to read.



She and I talked about it. She didn't understand. So I told her if someone has to beg me to read their email then all of their other emails I don't have to read. I probably don't have to read this one either.



Clogging the system with useless information. What's funny is another person on the same staff that my friend is on sends out very meaningful emails full of information about the entire year of events. Not just tidbits of information shared one at a time with a subject line of please read.



One benefit is any email that starts with "please read" usually gets filtered by my systems and put in a folder where I never see it.



But anything that starts with INFO: or COORD: or ACTION: ends up marked as important and right in front of me.



Hilarious.



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Meat run ~

I recently went on a meat run to Walmart. It's funny to go into the chest freezer out in the garage and find it almost empty. We don't eat as much meat as we used to, but we do like to buy it and cook it.



In summertime I like to grill chicken and pork. We don't get steak very much, but we enjoy ground beef in the form of hamburgers quite often. Although we have been enjoying ground turkey and turkey burgers more often than beef.



But I went out to the chest freezer this week and found that we were almost out of stuff. So I made a Walmart run. I went in the morning. My hope was to find some discounted things with the yellow tags on them. And I saw quite a few of those. Steak is still outrageous and so I didn't buy any of that. But I bought a bunch of other things.



I remember growing up when we would have the very occasional time of going and eating dinner at Grandma and Grandpa's house next door.



Grandpa would brag about how he had pulled steaks out of the freezer. I always wondered about that freezer and how he had so many steaks in there. And the steak always tasted good!



But I like keeping meat in the freezer so that when we want to have something we just go to the garage, open up the chest freezer, and pull some meat out and defrost it, and have at it.



Good stuff.



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Fake eyelashes ~

One of the sad trends that I am watching is the way young ladies use fake eyelashes.



I understand the desire for the beauty of the flashing eyes. But I see so many young ladies with eyelashes that are just outlandish. They don't even enhance the beauty, they just look outrageous.



I see ads for magnetic eyelashes. They show how you can superglue a magnet to your eyelid and then connect eyelashes to it so that you have this beauty enhancement easily accessible to you.



That just seems wrong. And then when I encounter someone with obviously fake eyelashes, all I can think is how sad, you're beautiful without them.



To me, it's akin to shaving your eyebrows and then using a tattoo or a pencil to draw in clown eyelashes or eyebrows. It just doesn't seem right. And that's the thing, we're so balkanized and split up that people are doing things that just really don't seem right.





Weird.



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Custom mobile phone mount ~

Before mobile phone mounts became cool to have in your car and everybody just kinda used them willy-nilly and all that I actually rigged up my own mobile phone mount.



I bought a mobile phone mount that the phone could sit in. It clamped onto the phone. Then I bought a metal strap, cut it, and curved it so that it would velcro to the dash sticking into the crease between the dash and the windshield. Then I bent the end of the strap so that I could velcro the phone clamping device to this piece of metal sticking up.



It was funny because people thought it was ridiculous that i wanted to look at my phone while i was driving. I did it because i had a gps thing that i was capturing waypoints with and I enjoyed watching the waypoints that i had captured before scroll by as i drove.



I had a couple of older friends that rode with me and said, "You know, that looks a lot like a sword sitting on your dash and if you're in an accident that could impale you and kill you." I just laughed and said "yes i know, just like the steering column could do that and just like the engine could do".



I now have nice supposedly military-grade suction cup devices that stick to windshields and discs that you glue to your dash. They do okay and it's nice to be able to move it around and put it where i want. But i tend to find a spot and just leave it there.



Fun to think about and remember...



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Social media thoughts ~

I recently saw a headline that said that Gen X and Gen Z feel like social media is damaging them. I paused after I read it and then I skimmed the article and decided it was silly because social media is optional.



I know, I know, you would argue that social media is required in today's day and age. But it's not.



I used social media for quite a while. I used it to expand my church's reach. I offered online groups and encouraged community through that venue.



I did that for several years and it was quite successful. But as I watched each different social media platform come online and get invested with marketers and then watched the users that were infected with the idea of earning money off of their friends and people that they didn't know start marketing themselves, I just had to shake my head.



It's so sad to watch. People say you have to be on social media in order to be connected. And I disagree If you work the phone and you work your text messages and you reach out to people outside of your circle you can connect with lots of people just fine. Social media makes it convenient, and then In that convenience the marketers have your attention.



Oh, by the way, here's an ad for a product that you may not necessarily support nor be interested in but we're gonna show it anyways. And in amongst your posts. Anybody looking at your stuff gets distracted and off we go.



They've won the attention game.



Anyways, I'm not against social media. I still use it on a very limited basis. I try not to post about products or anything. I just share. me. And that's what I feel like social media was all about until the marketers got involved and everybody felt like they had to emulate the marketers and all that.



Oh, well.



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Second guessed and left out ~

I spent a long career adhering to rules and being second-guessed on every one of my decisions. The last half of my career I was in management and I was second-guessed even more and left out over and over and over.



Now that that career is over, I'm sensitive to these things. The stress and the trauma of always being told that I was wrong and being told that I made a wrong decision and put lives in jeopardy and caused people problems makes me get very defensive very quickly.



Over and over, I was proven right in almost all of my decisions at work, even the ones that I didn't like and nobody else liked, I was right for what I did. My delivery wasn't always great, but I was right.



Now I'm finding that I slow down and I don't really share my decisions the way I did. I just kind of let things go and smile when they turn out the way I thought they would.



It seems that many people are intimidated by someone who can make quick decisions and be right. It's not fun and it's not a great way to live, but I sure enjoyed it. And I'm really good at it. And I like who I am and what I do.



When I get second-guessed and left out nowadays I don't put up with it. I move on to something else and put that behind me. Just like my career.



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I Enjoy Thomas Sowell ~

I have read a couple of books by Thomas Sowell. He's an economist that also comments on things. Over the years he's written a lot of really good stuff and has a lot of really good quotes out there. Many of the quotes are memes that float by in my streams.



The books that I've read by him were usually compilations of columns that he wrote for newspapers. I enjoyed them and I got a lot out of them. My favorite chapters were the columns that he titled Thoughts on the Passing Scene.



In those, he would just shoot off one-liners for an entire column or, in my case, chapter in a book. Those comments were inspirations for me and my style of writing. I'm not as erudite as he is, and I'm not the best raconteur.



But I learned a lot from him. And even though the way I passed economics classes in college was to find the biggest guy and then sleep on the desk behind him during lectures, Thomas Sowell's ideas on economic policy are sound and he explains them well.



Check out "Barbarians Inside The Gates" by Thomas Sowell:

https://a.co/d/16Nr8CX



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