Lori Newton twittered or tweeted about having iPhone craving as being irrational. I can understand the craving but it is not irrational.

When the iPhone appeared last July in Canada it was a foregone conclusion that I was going to get one. It was getting painful carrying the iPod Touch and the Motorola cell phone at all times and having to use the two devices to do some simple things. The question that loomed is how would this device help the credit union I worked for? We are a Mac credit union and it was pretty clear that it would fit in well with what we were already doing.  So all of the staff, that means everyone, got an iPhone. I didn’t realize then that it would be an exceptional fit. It was one of the better decisions we have made. As part of the compensation for working for the credit union the only charge would be to pay for those services that you use outside of work i.e. data roaming when in Europe, ouch.

What have we learnt? Well first of all anyone that has left the credit union wants to keep the iPhone and have the service transferred to themselves personally. When I have asked the person what they wanted to do there was no hesitation in stating they were keeping the iPhone. People really like this device and have found so many pragmatic uses for it. It is addicting. Secondly this device has given us an unbelievable opportunity for communication amongst ourselves 24/7. We have the ability to easily, and that point must be stressed, easily, call or email or SMS each other. No one finds a simple SMS an intrusion to get an update on some pending manner. A telephone call can be viewed very differently. Sometimes a call is just a plain pain in the neck. The synching of your contact information with your desktop adds another easy solution of finding the number to call and knowing who has called you. Having something this small and connected to the Internet either by wifi or 3G is another huge plus. By the way our plans included data transfer maximums. No one has come close to their data limits. Why? A lot of the time you can connect via wifi, much more than you think. But watch out when traveling, it gets unbelievably expensive to use American or European networks. There seems to be more apps than one can imagine so if there is something specific you probably will be able to find it in the App Store. 

One hears about Apple fanboys and the zealous cult following this company has. I wouldn’t put my view of Apple in those terms. It would be summed up in something simple like ‘a happy customer’. In today’s marketplace with so much lipservice for product and service it feels pretty good to just be happy about something you use all the time. Try the poll.

I don’t usually get upset with bad service but today it was worse than bad.

I was at Chapters in Metrotown Burnaby BC to buy a book on baking. I had taken 4 books from the shelves and was looking for a place to sit to review the books. Every seat was taken. Every person in a seat had a single book that was being read. It didn’t look like they were going to give up their seat anytime soon. There was a lot of space on the side by the shelves so I sat down on the floor and began to look at the books. If I am buying a book on a subject I want to review it to get the right one. Within a minute an employee came up to me and said I couldn’t sit there, company policy, and I had to go to the far end of the shop to sit. I was about to tell him there was no space but he walked away. I picked up the books and wandered through the shop, once again no place to sit. I came back to the bookshelf area and put the books back. No luck in finding the person who originally told me I approached another person stating my problem. All that I was cited was it was company policy and sorry. I left the store not buying anything.

Chapters really didn’t want my business. No one that spoke to me wanted to help or discuss the problem. It was like a take it or leave it attitude. Sorry but with that type of service you couldn’t give me the book for free. You really need a few lessons on customer service. No way I am going back there. 

When economic times get tough business is going to have to get better in so many ways to survive. It will probably be difficult to a large business like Chapters to key into this given their size. It will take a lot of work to change such a haphazard attitude towards service. Gook luck Chapters. Time to get better acquainted with someone else.

Woke up this morning with a very bad cold. Thought I could get to work but didn’t even make it to the bathroom. With ample medication I am now mobile to some point.

Jen Lowther has written an interesting post on 10 things that will not make me follow you on Twitter. They are all pretty good but I had to disagree with #8. I think protecting your Tweets allows you a greater degree of choice in who follows you. I have had numerous requests for someone to be a follower but when I quickly glance at the home Twitter site or their blog most get turned down. Why? There doesn’t seem to be anything in common between us. Why would someone in Serbia who is 20 years old and looking for a husband follow me or a used car salesman in North Carolina? Both had thousands of followers so what is their real purpose in amassing this many followers? It just seems to be somewhat prudent to have this function setup rather than spending time gleaning your followers list every few months.

Handwriting Game

Originally uploaded by muempress

This seems interesting. Thank you Lisa.

I was off for a few weeks with the family at Christmas. Got to work early to get things and order and that was the first mistake. You never really learn do you. Those 2 weeks or so mean that when you arrive you actually have 2 weeks or so of stuff that needs to get caught up. It doesn’t matter when you come in there is enough there for more than those 2 extra hours. The really neat part of coming back is all the people that need to see you right now and after you talk to them a bit you wonder why they have come to this conclusion. There are so many adept people here you really didn’t need to talk to me. Is it a gender thing or what?

The snow is melting which is a real blessing to my back, arms and legs. The neighbour next door had to start using our snow shovel as he broke his. That is what happens when you have to shovel every single falling snow flake. Great guy but his sidewalks and driveway were just too clean. On the other side this neighbour did the easiest thing, minimal snow removal as they headed south for the holidays. He maybe shoveled 3 times. Toro used to sell small electric snowblowers years ago. If there is a Father’s day present in sight it will be something like that.

Next up seeing if there is something coming out of Macworld that will make life simpler. Doesn’t seem like anything important except the myriad of upgrades. It would be much better to sometimes just fix certain things so they work instead of giving us upgrades. But then I could be using a PC.

One of my very favourite songs is ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes?’ by Sandy Denny. It has a haunting melody and wonderful words. When you listen to it there is the sudden question again about where has the time gone. It seems that way when Advent begins and Christmas is soon to be upon us.

It has been busy this last month, no let me put it another way, it has been flipping nuts. Busy at work, busy at volunteer positions, busy on credit union system work, and whatever else can fit into 24 hours. It doesn’t seem to slow down. Someone asked my recently about email and how we ever got along without it. One could say the same about a fax machine or a photocopier. These technical beauties have only speeded up what we start to where we finnish. The work is the same, the time to complete is measured not in days but in moments. Our time to reflect on any given subject is not done without effort and our work ethic creeps in so quickly if we think we are reflecting excessively. More gets done but the engine, us, remains the same. Maybe that is why music is such a relief. It does breakdown that invisible inertia that causes us stress. It stops us, if only for a few moments, to reflect in another dimension. If nothing else it gives us the must deserved break without any guilt.

Tomorrow I fight off the historical boxes of ‘stuff’ in the storage room to find the Christmas tree. No crowds to fight, no saw to cut the trunk, no needles akimbo, just true plastic and lights, ornately assembled and stowed away in the ‘original’ carton somewhere in the basement. Ready to quickly give one a hernia because of its weight, it will be dragged upstairs to its holy place in the corner of the living room, close to a wall outlet. Within minutes of plugging the lights of the tree into the electrical grid, Christmas will dawn, sans pine smell. Once again the magic of the season will start. Usually we never put the tree up this early. We are still the old ‘keep the tree up until the 12th day of Christmas’ types so putting it up this early is creating some new family history. But when Fleming arrives from Saskatoon on Tuesday and Nils from Copenhagen on Wednesday it will be the key sight when they step in the front door. That part of Christmas, being with ones’ family, then begins. There is more, always much more, about Christmas. Before you know it though you will be asking yourself, where does the time go?

I am sitting at the Vancouver airport waiting for William to show up at Gate 77 for our flight to Chicago-Indianapolis. Everyone is looking forward to the Symposium which will definitely prove to be a winner. If all conferences were like this it would be a real joy.

The financial crises continues and has me worried on a number of accounts. First banking problems do not get ‘fixed’ by a quick infusion of funds. For those who were around in the ’80s it took time to crawl out from that financial hole. Problems tend to be systemic and are not fixed that easily. When you deal with money and lending, trends tend to be the norm of the day, not instantaneous solutions by simple costly cash injections. Problems in this industry tend to be like tips of icebergs, it takes time to see the whole picture. Secondly the culture of our society in the last 25 years has been one of spending and borrowing. Saving has taken a very low priority. When I hear the ‘experts’ say that the economy will seize up with lack of credit facilities it makes one wonder how much equity there can be when everyone is leveraging what they can borrow for continue. Where is the equity equivalent here? You don’t need to borrow or borrow so much when you have some sort of saved cash reserve. That seems to be the problem, saving or building equity doesn’t happen overnight. It needs to be a way of doing business and a long term approach.

Today I was at the Doxim seminar at the Waterfront in Vancouver. Jeffry Pilcher was there and delivered his 11Cs of Breakthrough Branding.

I don’t know how many presentations I have sat through in my lifetime. Does anyone? With 30 years in business though it is in the hundreds. Every once in awhile you attend one that puts the others to shame. Today Jeffry’s was in the Top 10. The material was great, the presentation was awesome and above all, the passion about the subject was real. It was outstanding.

The most interesting C for me was Culture. He spoke of how it had to permeate an organization from top to bottom. He gave examples of how this was done. To me culture is like the heartbeat of company. Without it even the best of plans and intentions will usually amount to nothing. The easiest way to find out is have someone who has never visited your branch come in and sit and watch the activity of the staff and the interaction with the member/customer. Ask them what they thought. They will tell you very quickly what they observed and what they felt. If it is there people will notice it. You don’t measure culture, you experience it. Jeffry brought this to play in what he said. It was neat.

If you ever get a chance to attend one of Jeffry’s speaking engagements don’t hesitate. You will not only learn something but he will put into words and patterns what you probably have been thinking about all along but just weren’t able to articulate it as well as this gentleman.

I promised this 2 days ago. Here is a quick look at the internal workings of Currency with the mastermind Tim and mastermindette Nala. If you ever go for lunch out there this is where you need to go.

Every single day we take a lot of things for granted. What we have eaten, our homes, our vehicles, what we do for a living, everything that makes up our ordinary lives. We just consider most of what we have as similar to everyone else. Just your typical ordinary person living a pretty unexciting life.

We continue in this realm with our family, friends, acquaintances and people we work with. We take the good days with the bad days and have a basic enjoyment of existence. Then we sometimes doubt what we are doing and think we need some authenticity in our existence. We look at life from our own viewpoint and neglect to consider that everyone around us has a unique and different viewpoint, not exactly our own. Life goes on.

I have always had a strong religious belief and don’t attempt to proselytize anyone. A key condition of each person is their free will and no one should be above trying to diminish that aspect of anyone’s life. That is theirs and theirs alone. We establish our own ‘moral compass’ from what we believe, how we think and sometimes how we were brought up. It has been important for me to pay attention to this though most of the time it becomes the most neglected. You tend to be viewed by what you do, not what you think or believe.

The recent Gonzo banker award has brought out some very kind remarks by people who I have the highest regard for. When your peers make the most positive statements about you, well you just are a little overwhelmed. It is something we don’t hear very often and I for one am guilty of not telling others what a positive influence they have been in my life. Sure we have our ups and downs and we all get those bad hair days. That’s life. We really need to seek to understand and voice those unique qualities we see in others. We really need to make sure that we tell that to them. It’s a quality of human existence that makes life really worth living. My deepest appreciation to all of you.