When I searched on iStock for "email" and "silly," Bigfoot on a Laptop came up. How could I resist?

Every now and then a friend points me to some massive missive I wrote them ages ago and waxes nostalgic or ironic about its contents. It seems I’ve written some pretty epic emails, a few of them practically have LOTR-style soundtracks.

Most recently, I was served up a beast from 2005 wherein I let off a little post-MA job hunting steam with a silly list of faux employment priorities. Given where I am in my career now, I thought it was hilarious to read what 2005 Liesl was jokingly looking for in her first “real” job.

Excerpted below in order of importance:

1. Kitsch Value.
No joke, I actually just applied for a proofreading position for Harlequin romances. My interview preparation will consist solely of earmarking the words “bosom” and “shaft” in my thesaurus.

2. Vacation Time.
“How much vacation time will I get?” is the very first question I ask in an interview. Answer usually generates prolonged sulk and desire to move to Europe.

3. Location
Namely proximity of work place to bouncy castles and/or derelict warehouses. A busy gal’s gotta get firearm practice in somehow.

4. Sexual Harassment Policy
Preferably weak to non-existent.

5. Dress Code
Ultra-casual: if I can’t wear My Little Pony flannel PJs to work, I’m not interested. Also, crossing my fingers for “Naked Fridays” (see item 4 above.)

6. Free Indoor Parking
I may not own a car, and I can’t even drive, but I need underground parking for illegal solicitation, loitering and shady political dealings.

7. Flexibility
Management that won’t complain when I decide to upgrade my cubicle to a hot tub with built-in entertainment unit and mini-trampoline (also, if there’s space, a sliding desk).

8. Salary
I refuse to accept anything that is not paid to me in cash, in a brown paper bag.

9. Benefits
I refuse to accept benefits that do not fit in a brown paper bag.

10. Office Supplies
Infinite stock of company branded brown paper bags.

…and then I go on to bemoan the dehumanizing experience of unemployment and drift into an in-depth study of the idiosyncratic germophobia and karaoke obsession of my then-roommate in Toronto.

It’s neat that there’s this prolonged period during which emails to friends are the best chronicle of my life. But now with social media, I’m not doing as much of the one-to-one longform messages. There are plus and down sides to this I suppose, but regardless (and as the period between my last blog post and this would not-so-subtly suggest) I know that I need to get back to some more writing.

Oh, I never did get an interview at Harlequin, but thanks to Roget I still know plenty of synonyms for “bosom.”

No, that’s not why I’m jealous today. It makes me somewhat annoyed that my softer skill discipline doesn’t lend itself to cool, Google or Facebook sanctioned competitions like hackathons. So as I told Dimitry Zolotaryov over at WebIT, I think a PM-athon is in order.

But let’s face it boys and girls, such a thing would probably consist of a track and field type obstacle course involving thrilling activities like the following:

1. Speed ballpark estimating

Making up numbers faster than you can count.

2. Phone tag tug of war

Congratulations, you now owe me a call!

3. Synchronized emailing

Blitzkrieg replying is an artform.

4. Hunting for resources

Is your SysAdmin on a smoke break, gone for lunch, working from home or hiding under someone else’s desk?

5. 15K PowerPoint presenting

Only one can survive this marathon boardroom long distance endurance event.
 
6. Competitive motivational nagging

Panel judging awards points based on strictly regimented criteria.

7. Downhill cost control

Wrangle that budget into shape!

8. Critical path jumping

Timeline too aggressive? Do you REALLY need specs? Make a few experimental changes to process and hope for the best.

9. Freestyle synonyms

For such turns of phrase as “How Long?”, “When?”, “Deadline” and “Change order”.

So what are you waiting for, PMI: let’s get on this!

Of course, considering it’s an opt-in, global survey, last year’s results are rather skewed (respondents are heavy on the male developer side, for example). But over time, this project can only help us better understand the differences in approach, corporate structure and hiring practices for web-related fields across the world, so it’s in our best interests to spread the word across digital disciplines and industries.

More data will make this survey a more accurate representation of the people who make websites (or those who consult/write/engineer to make them that much more awesome). So if that’s what you do, whether you’re a writer, developer, PM, designer, consultant or jack/jill-of-all-web-trades you should take five minutes to fill it out.

Sweden's number 2 export: body paint. Number 1: thumbs ups.

I for one think the Swedes are commendable for their efforts to fight the inevitable extinction of natural blondes. If we were to map the human genome on an actual map of the world, Sweden would presumably be one big dollop of topographical recessiveness.

Maybe I have a soft spot for the country because a close friend from my time in Ethiopia was half Swedish. She taught me a little, though now I can only remember “Jag måste pinka” (I need to pee) and “Ost” (cheese). Admittedly, that is all I would ever need to survive for months on end in Sweden itself, but I felt the need to learn a little more… Maybe it would make me feel more connected to whatever mystery developer of years past left those telltale Swedish imprints in our code.

So I decided to look up “fail,” which according to Google Translate is most likely “misslyckas” (which is funny enough as it sounds: I wonder if they have a misslyckas blog?) but my hands-down favourite of the supposedly 22 different translations for “fail” is definitely “GÖRA FIASKO.”

Any culture that has 22 different ways to fail must try awfully hard.

Liesl: Why does the secret police always travel in threes?

Intrigued coworker: I don’t know, why?

Liesl: One can read, one can write, and one keeps an eye on the intellectuals.

Intrigued coworker: Is this your new project management philosophy?

After a good laugh, it got me thinking about the way we approach and often categorize “talent.” At HTC, for example, our office is in a nice open concept loft space. But there is a short wall, about waist height, separating the strategy/account team from the “talent” (developers, designers, etc.) Sometimes when we have a question too mind-bogglingly complex to ask via IM, we’ll discuss over the wall, in a Wilson-from-Home-Improvement-style exchange that usually clears things up pretty quickly (or leads to long, interesting email exchanges about development/design philosophy).

What I’ve realized I appreciate most in my coworkers, is that they all bring so much to the table, often skills that they technically don’t need for what they do (seriously, many of them can read AND write). We also all have unique points of view (POV), and often debate usability, information architecture, design, etc. to the benefit of the final product. At the same time, we all have our go-to areas of expertise, and when things get really busy, it’s easy to forget our coworkers’ POVs inform the totality of a solution, and we proceed to box everyone up in their particular niche. You have to: it’s crunch time.

But, particularly when in the planning phase, it is nice to know that I’m in the midst of a bunch of intellectuals, and that we can all keep an eye on each other to stay in the game.

For someone else, I can see how when looking over my bio my career path may seem more “road less traveled” than corporate ladder. And it is in contemplating a thorough answer to “Why not The Arts?” that I decided to start this blog. Because I know from personal and professional experience how much Arts grads in general, and theatre grads in particular, are capable of bringing to the web industry. I think we bring a unique perspective to the process, so I thought it was high time I should help to prove, discuss and document it.

So, Why not “The Arts”?

The Simple Answer:

My love of theatre always stemmed from a greater love of all media, so I never think about my journey as ‘changing course,’ per se. To me, it has always seemed a perfectly logical extension of my interests and skills. I get excited to read about updates to Google’s search algorithms, CMS trends or usability just as much as I enjoy reading Wired, AdAge or Direct Marketing. Partly because I genuinely enjoy my work, but also because an arts education prepares you to be passionate about you do. That’s what’s great about us arts types, we really dig research and when we get into something, there’s just no stopping us.

The Fun Answer:

I’ve worked for Arts institutions before. Some people really enjoy the environment, many of them are friends and former co-workers. But it wasn’t for me.

I realized that one of the reasons I started my own theatre company was because I enjoy making theatre like I enjoy scuba diving. A fun, expensive hobby that I love talking about, planning over the course of months and years, and executing at my own pace in my own time. But just as I wouldn’t want to put in a full workday under the sea (for a start, my dive computer would probably explode), it is a little known fact that working in Arts institution can also cause a wicked case of the bends…

Symptoms of high nitrogen levels in the arts careerist

For me, the only cure was a hyberbaric, high pressure web work environment, replete with bigger budgets and great accountability. For some, it’s law or medicine or other agency work.

As I mentioned earlier, I love all media, which is precisely why I’ve studied and worked in the fields that I have. But as I see it, much of the truly innovative, exciting things that are happening in media right this minute are in the digital space. And I want to be a part of that.

Just try explaining that to the dude who looks at your CV, raises an eyebrow and says “Ethiopia, huh?” or, my personal favourite, “Where do you FEEL like you’re from?”

Cultural relativism can be a powerful force for good in the right hands, but it can take a while to learn to see past the frustrations. It has certainly taken me many years to understand that the limitations of a society are part of a greater package, and that appreciating the possibilities is more important than identifying what is better elsewhere.

The true TCK learns that many of those amazing things we appreciate about a place or a cultural are not wholly transposable to another. But elements of them are, and as our Global Village grows, the ability to appreciate multiple approaches to the same problem or grasp conflicting points of view for all their worth will become more and more important.

• Intermedia: An Art History course on performance/video art, experimental music, and the art scene throughout the 20th Century. I read Kurzweil for the first time and wondered what Socrates would think of mobile devices, given that Plato claimed in Phaedrus that he thought literacy alone would wreck our memories.

• The History of Early Film: If you’re thinking silent era, that’s what I thought too. But no, the era we covered looked at pre-silent era film (before 1915). As in “man gets hit over head by mongoose.” It’s a little like grainy YouTube before the evolution of shot-countershot. Reading about an infant medium spreading its wings (and taking down institutions in its wake: goodbye magic lanterns!) brings so many ideas to the fore on art in the age of digital reproduction…

• The History of Communications – Pre-Electronic & Post-Electronic: Why wouldn’t newspapers suffer in an age of web 2.0 community-building when part of their rise was in capitalizing on nationalistic “imagined communities”? The internet renders your audience if not “real” then, at the very least, not quite as imaginary. Also, learning Bell wanted “Ahoy hoy” to be the official telephonic greeting finally made me understand why Mr. Burns uses it to answer his calls (he is awfully old).

• CyberReligion – Technology, The Internet & Religion: Religious studies course for which we were told to “use the internet as [our] primary text” (well, that and our 400-page reader). More Kurzweil, Baudrillard, McLuhan, it was all about researching the experiential phenomenon of a new medium rising in our midst. From religious ideation similar to when people equated hearing a disembodied voice over the phone to a quasi-religious experience (almost like listening to God himself) to inevitable and gradual mundanification.

HTC Insights

Over the past year, we’ve been fielding many calls from clients who are interested in enhancing existing Web strategies and developing new measures to maximize the return on their marketing investments. So HTC (my company) decided to pool together some tips, suggestions and advice to get some cost-effective ideas out there.