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The computer crashed — Mikal’s Response

Friday, April 16th, 2010

My computer crashed last week.

What a frustrating experience! I back up every week, but unfortunately, it crashed on the morning of back up day. A week’s worth of work, gone in an instance.

I’m not one to cry, but losing a week’s worth of writing is just about the worst experience in the world. I’ve lost more than that in prior crashes, but I felt worse about this one: I’d been doing everything right!

Luckily, I’m also pretty handy with computers, so I was able to recover most of my data. It took four hours, but I recovered almost all of the work I’d done over the past 7 days.

What a relief!

I’ve started a new policy: a daily backup. I don’t ever want to lose more than a day’s worth of work.

In fact, I just kicked it off, so data is copying in the background. I’m feeling much better about …

As I was finishing that thought, the walls start shaking, and I hear a loud rumble. I start to get up to go to the window, when the window suddenly started moving towards me!

I scrambled back, under a table, vaguely remembering that was the safest place in the case of an earthquake. I had no idea what was going on, but it seemed like a better idea than staying in the middle of the room.

The rumbling slowly stopped, the crunching of the broken wood fading into silence. I slowly crawled out from beneath the table.

As the dust settled, I slowly started to make out the shape of a large dump truck. A small yellow sign faded into view through the dust:

“Watch for vehicle when backing up.”

Now Hiring….Potatoes?

Monday, April 12th, 2010

While driving the other day, I saw one of those signs that made me look twice.

Not because it was a clever advertisement, but because it was so strangely worded.

Here’s the first sign I saw:

Now Hiring...Potatoes?

Now Hiring...Potatoes?

If that wasn’t enough, the other side showed an even more disastrous (and funny)  message:

Now Hiring...Pansies?

Now Hiring...Pansies?

Okay, so it’s easy to laugh at these types of problems.  But how do we avoid making the same mistakes?

If you think about it for just a moment, the original intent of the message is clear.  The person who created the message wanted to communicate that the business was hiring, and that they were selling potatoes or pansies (after all, it is the right time to plant them in our area).

A simple message, gone awry. Why is it so easy to misunderstand the message?

A big part of the problem is the fact that the words are all in the same font, and that they are too close together. A better approach would have been to hang a banner advertising they were hiring, and using the main sign for what they were selling.  Anything that separated the two would have been better.

Another part (especially in the second sign), is the alternative meaning of the phrase, “Now hiring pansies.”  To many people, this would also mean “Now hiring cowards.”

Probably not the intended message.

This also serves as a warning to all writers:  after you write something, take a step back and look at the big picture.  When you look at your work as a whole, are you sending the wrong message?

Back to the signs above, it’s certainly possible that the owners did this on purpose.  After all, it did capture my attention, which is the point of any advertisement.

However, this is often caused by simply being focused on the little messages instead of looking at the big picture.

Don’t let this happen to you.  Always have someone else read over your work before you submit it for the world to see.  You never know what else you might be saying.


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