Writing for life

My wife is mad about Prince – and she’s been so supportive and understanding while I’ve been immersed in this Digital Marketing book project, that on the spur of the moment I decided to see if I could snag a couple of tickets for his upcoming concert in Croke Park.

Off I went to Google.ie to search for Prince Ireland. The first entry in the results page that was for Prince concert tickets was this one, from a crowd in the Netherlands called worldticketshop.com. All of the right bells and whistles were there… verified by Verisign, SSL secure server, etc. – but the cheapest tickets on offer were for €265, which seemed a bit on the steep side.

This was going to be more expensive than I’d anticipated… or was it?

I went to Ticketmaster.ie, which of course is where I should have gone in the first place, and bought two tickets for €66.50 each (and before I’m labelled a cheapskate let me just say that I looked for the the €89 category, but it had sold out, and the higher priced tickets seemed a bit on the extravagant side – so we’ll be a little way from the action, but hey, we’re there for the music, right?). Total cost for two tickets including Ticketmaster’s do f**k all fee handling fee (who are they trying to kid on an automated website with e-mail ticket delivery?) €145.70. Or about €120 cheaper than one ticket from Worldticketshop.com. Sorted.

What this really illustrates is that you need to be careful what you search for on Google, and shop around before you buy. Searching for Prince Ireland returned a few results for books from Amazon.com, followed by the rip-off worldticketshop.com site. Had I searched for Prince Tickets instead, two of the first three organic results returned would have been for Ticketmaster.ie.

So buyer beware – and remember that Google’s results are only as good as the queries you throw at it.

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Dustin the turkey came unstuck in Serbia tonight, as Norway plucked the final place from under the thoroughly stuffed puppet’s nose.

Thank God!

I’ve always been a dustin fan, but I couldn’t believe Ireland actually put forward a puppet to represent the nation — even if it was the Eurovision. It was always a joke… and a bad one at that.

Dustins losing Eurovision entry

To be honest I couldn’t care less about the Eurovision — but even as a blow-in I do care deeply about Ireland’s international reputation. My daughters are Irish to the core, and while there’s a lot that can be improved upon, there’s also a lot to be proud of in this fine nation. Entering a stuffed turkey in the Eurovision isn’t one of them.

So it’s “Irelande, Nil Pointe”… and all the better for it.

Now maybe Dustin can focus his energy on something useful… like running for Taoiseach!

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Published in the Evening Echo on 12/05/2007

We’ve all made mistakes in interviews. We’re only human after all, and no matter how careful or diligently we prepare, a stray question slipped in here or there can throw us.

We know all about researching our prospective employers; we know about preparing for key questions ahead of time; we know about projecting a cool, calm, professional exterior, regardless of the turmoil we feel inside; we know about having clever questions prepared in advance. We know all of these things, and yet occasionally we stumble. No matter, we pick ourselves up, metaphorically dust ourselves down, and we carry on. Nine times out of ten we get away with it.

But not always. Sometimes gaffes are so dramatic that they defy any attempt at recovery.

Surveys are ten a penny in the careers and recruitment world. Dig a little and you’ll unearth umpteen surveys a week, revealing this or that nugget of largely pointless insight into the latest trends in this or that industry. Many are worthless, a few are valuable, and then there are the ones that warrant a look for their pure entertainment value.

Careers website Careers.com released one earlier this year. They surveyed more than 3,000 HR professionals across the US, and compiled a list of the ten most outrageous job interview blunders; if you want to sabotage your chances of landing a job, why not try one of these?

• The candidate answered their mobile during the interview and asked the interviewer to leave her own office because the call was a “private”.
• The candidate told the interviewer that, if offered the job, he may not be in a position to stay for very long, because he was expecting an inheritance when his uncle died – and his uncle wasn’t “looking too good”.
• The candidate asked the interviewer for a lift home after the interview.
• The candidate sniffed his armpits on the way into the interview room.
• The candidate refused to provide a sample of her writing because all of her writing had been for the CIA, and was therefore “classified”.
• The candidate told the interviewer he was fired from his last job for beating up the boss.
• When offered food before his interview, the candidate declined, stating that he “didn’t want to line his stomach with grease before going out drinking”.
• A candidate for an accounting position said she was a “people person” not a “numbers person”.
• One candidate flushed the toilet in the middle of a telephone interview.
• The Candidate took out a hair brush and started to brush her hair mid-interview.

Of course, these are extremes… most interview mistakes aren’t nearly as bad. The most common ones cited in this survey were dressing inappropriately (51%), badmouthing a former employer (49%), appearing disinterested (48%), arrogance (44%), insufficient answers (30% percent) and not asking good questions (29%).

So, if you have an interview lined up, and feel compelled to attend, but have already decided that really don’t want the job, you know what to do. Simply take a leaf out of your American colleagues’ book. Study the list above for a inspiration, apply a little imagination of your own, and you should be able to come up with some spectacular ways to fail at interview. Good… or should I say bad luck!

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Ah America — leaders of the free world — a model for other governments to emulate… or perhaps not.

Pretty unreal stuff — and the scary thing is, most of it’s utterly believable.

Kind of makes you wonder about the much touted public/private partnerships the Irish government’s so fond of, and just how much priorities get skewed when you outsource public services to commercial entities out to make a fast buck.

Outsourcing the Government on Yahoo! Video

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As I boarded the plane I couldn’t help but reflect on just how tacky the whole flying experience has become. Back when we all used to think flying was something special, I remember thinking that “Airbus” was on odd choice of name for an aircraft manufacturer. Surely associating air travel with something as commonplace as a bus couldn’t be a good thing.

Looking around the plane I’d just boarded I suddenly realised that the people at Airbus were in fact visionaries. They had seen the future, and thanks to Michael O’Leary et al, the prophecy inherent in their name has come to pass. The lurid blue and yellow plastic of the plane’s interior, plastered with advertising, confirmed my suspicions that these days the bus is a classier way to travel.

Still, it was a pleasure to be travelling alone. It’s not something that happens that often, and the freedom to read a newspaper, grab a coffee and a sandwich, even just pay a visit without having to worry about anyone else is liberating. You don’t realise just how preoccupied you become as a parent until you’re away.

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Published in the WOW! supplement of the Evening Echo 12/03/2008

Henry Kissinger, America’s National Security Advisor during Nixon’s presidency, once remarked that “ninety percent of politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation”. Surveying the Irish political landscape today you’d be hard pressed to disagree with that assessment. We’ve got tribunals coming out of our ears, accusations of corruption flying left, right and centre, a government that nobody really trusts, and an opposition that’s basically woeful.

Did our esteemed government win the last election on the merits of their own policies? Did they cruise back into power, perhaps, on the back of public confidence in their performance? Or did they endure purely and simply because the electorate baulked at voting for even more unpalatable alternatives?

The competent politician appears to be an endangered species in Irealand today. Try picking one out the next time you catch a glimpse of the sparsely populated Dail Eireann on the telly. It’s a task that seems to be much harder than it should be, given that these are the people we’ve selected to represent our best interests at the very pinnacle of public office. Isn’t that disturbing?

So you have Bertie, Brian and Co. sitting pretty, knowing that they don’t really have to excel to retain their primacy. All they need to do is perpetuate the general perception that they’re a wee bit better than the alternative “team” across the floor of the Dail. Let’s face it, that’s hardly a tall order at present, is it? Continue Reading »

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I spotted this over on Maryrose Lyons’s Brightspark blog; it’s an article on the New York Times website highlighting use of the much neglected semicolon. The New York City Transit public service placard, which extols the virtues of not leaving your newspaper behind when get off the trains, says simply:

“Please put it in a trash can; that’s good news for everyone.”

It’s great to see the rarely used little punctuation mark getting such a prominent airing, though I doubt the exposure will trigger an explosion in usage among New York commuters, more’s the pity.

I was amused to see that the article had been amended. It seems the New York Times originally left out the crucial comma (shock, horror) in the punctuation of the book title “Eats, shoots & leaves” by self-proclaimed punctuation pedant Lynn Truss.

Just goes to show, punctuation is something even the best in the business can (and do) get wrong.

Technorati Tags: punctuation,semicolon,brightspark consulting,Lynn Truss,pedant

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“Working it” column published in the Career Moves section of The Evening Echo on 03/03/2008

What do you really want out of life?

Sounds like a simple enough question, doesn’t it? But it can be surprisingly tricky to come up with an answer. Have you ever really sat down and thought about what your really want from your career, your family life, your social life?

It’s easy to come up with a set of things you’d like to one day aspire to in all of these areas. “Wouldn’t it be nice if…” scenarios are ten a penny. Setting real personal goals that transcend the inevitable conflicts that arise between the different elements of our lives, truly prioritising what we want to achieve is infinitely more difficult. Which of course is why so few of us manage to do it effectively… myself included.

What does that mean? It means we tend to lack clarity and focus – or if we have clarity and focus, that we’re probably applying it in the wrong direction: excelling at something that’s not moving us towards where we ultimately want to go. Instead of taking control and driving things in a way that will deliver tangible results, we react to the world around us. We might be very good at what we do: great managers, outstanding parents and exceptional partners; but ultimately unless we know what we want out of life we’ll never achieve it.

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“Working it” column published in the Career Moves section of The Evening Echo on 11/02/2008

I’m a natural sceptic, and nothing triggers that scepticism more than the swathe of self-help books that seem to weigh down the shelves of the business section in every book shop I venture in to. How many of the people who invest in these tomes actually use them to bring about real change?

Self help is an enormous industry, and has spawned some of the most “successful” self-styled gurus on the planet. With their audio programmes, seminars, books, courses and coaching services these people have become successful and wealthy beyond belief by offering others the hope that they too can achieve their own form of greatness both in their careers and in their personal lives.

But how effective are they? If these programmes, books, tools and philosophies are so great, then why aren’t there a a million Anthony Robbins (…or insert the name of your preferred self-help guru here) clones out there harnessing their “Personal Power” to achieve unlimited success?

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Published as an opinion piece in The Evening Echo on the 06/02/2008

Take a human being and scratch away at the thin veneer of civility, and before long you’ll reveal the true nature of the beast beneath. For all our trappings of a sophisticated society, culture and civilization, at our very core we’re driven by a much more basic set of rules. The instinct to secure the resources we need to survive; to protect ourselves, our families and the members of our particular “tribe”.

Every now and then you’ll notice our thinly veiled tribal roots bubbling to the surface. It happened last week, when former Archbishop of Dublin, Cardinal Desmond Connell, secured a temporary injunction to prevent a State inquiry into clerical abuse from accessing Church documents. This was in spite of a promise by current Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, to allow the inquiry “open access” to church files.

To the layperson this turn of events is incomprehensible. It flies in the face of reason, but then the urge to protect members of one’s “tribe” is a base human instinct that can sometimes by-pass reason, common sense and even common decency.

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