Listen, sometimes reasoning will get you nowhere. Sometimes people don’t want to listen to rational explanations, and sometimes you’re so stressed you can’t physically hear reason. Sometimes it’s Tuesday morning and all you want to do is kill everything.
If I were writing a book on management and I was only allowed two words, I would first fire my book agent, then I would write this: Bring cookies.
Look, it’s not going to make someone suddenly crank out magnificent work overnight, but it may just be the mood lifter they needed that day. I promise you it helps. If you’re asking your team to work through lunch or dinner, get them some food. If you’re asking them to meet at an unreasonable time, like Tuesday morning (I really hate Tuesdays…), bring coffee and donuts. You don’t need to guarantee it ahead of time, in fact sometimes it’s better as a surprise, but it just shows that you know it sucks and you appreciate your team being there.
When I was trying to round up people for a meeting at the agency–a meeting that was set for a perfectly reasonable time and was scheduled with plenty of notice–I still sometimes met with old Creative Director Grumblestiltskin. Or Copywriter H. Sassenpants. Or even Dr. Art Director Von Bitchenstein. Because who likes meetings, really. I don’t even like them, unless there are Gantt charts involved. Anyway, as I inevitably walked around the office encouraging people to please come with me to the meeting that their Outlook reminder was dinging at them about, I would say, “There’ll be chocolate!” And they’d begrudgingly follow, but they’d be slightly less grouchy once the chocolate was distributed.
Food also works when you’re trying to get work for free, and when you’re trying to meet new potential team members. People will show up if there is food, it’s a basic fact of human nature.
But what if you’ve tried reasoning to no avail, and your food has been long-consumed without any noticeable change in results? Then, my friends, it’s time to show them you’re serious. It’s time to illuminate the consequences of failing to meet your demands. It’s time for implied, thinly-veiled or even bald-faced threats.
It’s not a very entertaining way to start off, but oh well. I do try to treat everyone upon first interaction as though they have a brain and can use it. Despite how judgmental I am, I try to reserve criticisms such as, “Well, you’re an effing idiot,” or “How on earth did you make it out of middle school alive,” or “I’ve never met a talking potato before!” until after you do something that warrants such judgment.
Snooki, my dear, you've lost weight!
If you do a good job explaining why someone should do something, they’re much more likely to do it.
Do not say: Hey, you need to finish this mail piece in one week. I don’t care that you heard it won’t be in homes for two months. Just do it.
Do say: Mr./Ms. Designer, I know it seems like you have two months to finish this mail piece, but in fact it needs to be finished in one week because there is a really arcane government agency that has to approve it, and they can’t possibly be bothered to review it in under 45 days.*
You are much more likely to get someone to do what you request if they don’t think you’re making things up arbitrarily just to ruin their day.
Beyond explaining why you’re asking for things, another part of ‘reason’ is to see a task from both sides. I find it helps if you acknowledge off the bat the ridiculousness of your request, and to try and put yourself in the same crazy boat as the person you’re managing.
Do say: Listen, I know this is unreasonable, but we need to finish the script by the end of this week. The recording studio is not being flexible and is telling me the only times we can record the voice actors are either early next week or during the Second Coming.
Note the use of “we,” indicating that we’re in this together, man. And if you can find a common enemy, I say nail them right up. Better your whole team hate the recording studio scheduler than you.
We're in this together. I'm totally not going to let you stay in the freezing water and die.
Mostly it comes down to respect. If you’re managing creatives or anyone who is producing something, remember they are asked to do something pretty incredible: come up with ingenious ideas, words, images, code or whatever that fits a specific set of requirements in an amount of time that is usually not determined by them. However, if you find that reasoning is getting you nowhere, I have a few other tips you can try…
*True story.
Google, I will admit that this is a pretty crazy boat.
I have not been a manager for many years, but I feel like I’ve gained some experience when it comes to managing creative types in particular. They’re an interesting breed, and while I generally admire their ability to create under pressure, it is not in their nature to give one crap about deadlines or budget constraints. And that is how it should be–if you artists spent your days worrying about the timeline, you’d be too busy to be creative.
This is where I and my fellow producers, production managers, account executives and what-have-you come in. Our job is to take care of all that junk so you can do what you do best. One professor put it as “Make it as simple as possible” for the creatives to accomplish their vision. We do the cash flows, the Gantt charts, wrangle meetings, write contracts and nag nag nag because we care. Or we’re paid to care. Or we just want it to get effing done, dammit.
So, if you find yourself in that pleasant situation where you have to get people who are not inclined to be productive on a schedule to be…well, productive on a schedule, I present to you a series of tips that have helped me through it all.
Why do I use snippets at all, you may ask? Because how else will I know how many people read my blog in Pelotas, Brazil in the past month? (The answer is 3). But if it’s really annoying, I will knock it off.
Disclaimer: I started writing this when I was angry at someone for not meeting my expectations. Thank goodness I know so many awesome people who astound me in every way (you are one of them) to balance out the duds.
Most people probably don’t have a checklist of qualities they look for in a friend. You meet someone and they either become a friend or they don’t, we don’t often stop to think about why it did or didn’t happen. However, if you did stop you might come up with a few things that set apart those who made the cut… Here are a few that occur to me:
Remember AIM?
1. Picking up on sarcasm.
Example: When AIM was happening, back in the day, I used to get real tired of having to right “jk lol” after my sarcastic comments. I then decided the people who needed such qualifiers were just too much work.
Tangential to picking up my sarcasm is finding it funny when I’m occasionally really mean. Often when I’m really angry, or drunk (see the three stages of drunk Jennifer).
2. Common sense.
Example: When trying to set up a time to meet with some other graduate students by email, I suggested “let’s meet tomorrow at 11:30.” Let’s say it was on a Monday (because it freaking was). Graduate student number one replied shortly, “That sounds good.” Graduate student number two replied at 5am the next morning, “Ok, see you there.” At 11:30 on Tuesday, graduate student number one and I are sitting in the meeting room, twiddling our fingers. I waited patiently for an hour, and when number two didn’t show up, I asked him what gives. He replied, “Wait, I thought we said tomorrow.” I guess that one’s on me for not specifying that I meant tomorrow from the day when I wrote the email, not from the day you happened to read it. Because that makes sense.
3. Dependability.
Example: Just show up when you say you’re going to. If you can’t show up, please let me know before I get too far. And don’t make up some crazy reason about why you couldn’t make it: see number 4.
4. Not lying for no reason.
Listen, sometimes it’s perfectly acceptable to lie. You don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings, so you say, “Yes! You look great in that pink-leopard-print bodysuit. Your ass doesn’t look fat at all in those horizontal-striped parachute pants.” Or you don’t want to get in trouble for something, “No officer, I certainly did not punch graduate student number two in the nose. I was…I was…dead at the time!” But listen, don’t lie to me when there’s absolutely no reason for it.
Example: One of my old bosses had a habit of lying. About everything. And making up really elaborate lies too, so it was SO OBVIOUS. When all she had to say is, “I’m not coming in today,” and I would have been like, oh. Ok. You’re my boss, you don’t really have to explain it to me.
But instead, she said things like, “I slipped on the ice-covered stairs outside my apartment this morning and threw out my back. My neighbor had to come outside and carry me back up the stairs and into my apartment, it was kind of embarrassing really but now I can’t move.” Or my favorite, when she sent an email saying, “I have an oncology appointment tomorrow in Indy at 1pm and I’m not sure if I’ll be back in town in time to come back to work before 5pm.” Yeah, she dropped cancer in there. And no, she did not have cancer. She was a cancer.
She had so many great qualities. Jk, lol.
Whether you have an internal checklist or not, sometimes you meet someone for the first or second time and you have a really clear, clicky moment of, hey, I think we’re going to be friends. The first time I noticed my now fiancé as potentially a pretty cool guy, we were at our friend’s house. Our friend was trying to convince the gathered party that Coke Zero tasted exactly like normal Coke, and future fiancé said, “No it doesn’t! You’re crazy.” And I was like… alright. This guy is a winner. We can talk.
“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.’” -C.S. Lewis
Tangential to that last post on social capital, I wanted to share something else I learned from my social networking class. For our final paper and presentation, we were asked to keep a social network site diary–recording which sites we used, how often, and how. Yes, this was a graduate-level course.
I didn’t learn any great truths about my social network site usage (except that in comparison to the rest of the class, my paltry list of 164 Facebook friends is shamefully low), but I did start to wonder: in this world of social media, does the number of ways I am connected to a person have any correlation to the strength of our relationship? In other words, would someone be able to predict who my closest friends are by seeing how many times I’m connected to them online?
First, just because it’s pretty, here’s a look at how long I’ve been involved in various social network sites. There’s some debate as to what the definition of a “social network site” (SNS) is, but lets just say these are the ones I define as an SNS.
Pretty, no? Next I wondered how many “friends” I had on each site. Not surprisingly, Facebook outstrips all the rest. Surprisingly, I used to be a pretty big deal on LiveJournal. No, I’m not linking you to my old LiveJournal blog. It’s full of post-teenage angst and emoticons and early-aughts song lyrics.
Yes, quite. Finally, I gathered an absolute list of all my connections across all of the sites I currently interact with (nixing ye olde LJ), and ranked them by how many times I was connected to each person through social media.
Here’s where I found my answer: will the people with the highest number of connections be my strongest ties, my closest friends and relatives? Well, no. Although Fiance is the winner at 8 connections, it was not a hard and fast rule that a person in the “5 connections” group was a closer friend than someone in the “4 connections” group. It does seem that, generally, people in the higher connection groups are stronger ties than, say, people in the “1 connection” group. I probably don’t feel close enough to those people to seek them out (stalk them? creep them out?) on every social network site I find. But we all have friends who are anti-social media or nonchalant-social media, and whether they’re just on Facebook or nowhere to be found on the Internet does not mean we aren’t still friends. It just means that all my other cool online friends will never know they exist. And they won’t be able to see what I’m doing, thinking, reading, watching, smelling and thinking about doing or smelling at any given minute.
Although it doesn’t tie into the story, here is a bonus diagram showing the overlap between the three SNS within which I have the most connections. It is my favorite (don’t tell those guys up there).
Groovy. I tried to do it with all 9 SNSs but it was getting out of control. Circles wouldn’t have cut it. There would have to be some weird doughnut and giraffe shapes in there.
Do the strength of your offline ties match up with your online ties? One argument for calling these “social network sites” rather than networking is because these sites are first and foremost a representation of your already-existing social network, rather than a place to create new connections. What do you think?
Earlier this year I took a course on social networking sites, which was fascinating, to say the least. It allowed me to not only study the social media sites that seem to be taking over our lives, but opened my eyes to an academic study of personal identities and social interactions.
One of the most interesting things I learned about was the concept of social capital, which is an odd idea and kind of hard to define–but the more I think about it, the more intriguing it becomes. In a very basic sense, I would say that social capital is the goodwill that arises from and sustains our relationships with others. You could think of it as the favors that people do for eachother, either altruistically because they want to help the other, or selfishly, because they think it will benefit themselves later on.
I say it’s an odd idea because it feels weird to think of your relationships in terms of ‘capital.’ Social capital is regarded by some as literally capital–in the same category as financial, physical and human capital. You can trade money for a new weed wacker at the local garden supply store if you need one, or you can go to your neighbor and trade him your indebtedness to borrow his tools. If your relationship is a good one, he will let you borrow the weed wacker because he believes that at some future time he can ask you for a similar favor.
All this seems perfectly natural, but when you extend this idea of trading favors (dirty!) from that neighbor example to closer friends you might start to feel a little sticky. Your bestie might ask you to look in on her cat during her next vacation, which of course you’ll say yes to because, well, she’s your bestie. You just want to be nice and help her out. But wouldn’t you expect her to do the same for you? I doubt you’ll agree to catsit while consciously thinking, “Yes, very good, I will sit on your cat for one week because that means you’ll have to come with me to watch the Glee concert in 3D when you get back whether you really want to or not.” We don’t do favors or hang out with our friends just because we expect to get something out of it, do we?
This cat is...sitting?
Regardless of why we do things for friends, once you get over the slimy feeling that may come from thinking of the people in your network as resources, it can actually be an empowering thing. I, thankfully, have long played the part of dirty, soulless capitalist, most comfortable when covered in a warm, moist film of slime, so I got over it pretty quickly. Let’s say you want to go to a Florence + the Machine concert: who would you go with? You’re probably mentally scrolling through your Facebook friends list, thinking about which of your friends might like Florence and live music, would be willing to spend a few bucks on a concert, and would be tolerable for a few hours. I know I did, and I knew exactly who to call–roomie from undergrad. We went on the Fourth of July and it was so much fun! But she provided me with a service, didn’t she? She agreed to spend money and time on the concert so I wouldn’t have to go alone. Yes, she probably enjoyed it too (I hope!), but it’s not like we separately decided to go and happened to bump into eachother. She came because I asked her.
That wild yellow blur is Florence!
If you’re very lucky, you have a network of people who could help you out with almost anything. Want to see the newest Harry Potter movie? Maybe your kids will go with you. Want to try a fancy restaurant that just opened? Maybe your girlfriend will join you (maybe in exchange you’ll pay for her dinner). Want to just have a fun, casual night with lots of laughs? I’ll bet you have some go-to buddies with whom you can sit around and talk about nothing for hours.
If you extend your list of resources to your wider network, then we could get some really interesting things done. In social capital terms, your network is made up of strong ties (called “bonding” capital–your family, significant other, closest friends) and weak ties (called “bridging” capital–acquaintances, people you’ve met from work, 95% of your Facebook friends, to be honest). The Kelley School of Business was absolutely tyrannical about expounding the benefits of “networking” to their impressionable graduates. Everyone knows that most jobs are obtained by knowing someone who knows someone. While I hate forced networking events (absolute torture for someone like me), it is pretty incredible to think about all the people you know, all of their skills, all of their experience, and all of the people they know.
If you wanted to start your own business–be it a bakery or a technical consulting service or an event plannery–I’ll bet there are people you know right now who would be happy to help you. Someone could give you with marketing tips (ooh me! meee!!), or maybe someone could put you in touch with the local Better Business Bureau. Maybe you know an accountant (I’m sorry ), or a tech guru, or a burgeoning chef, or a guy who’s wife’s mother’s best friend is an investor who has been searching desperately for a local startup doing exactly what you’re proposing.
So, yes, it’s a little dirty to think of your ties as capital that you could use to your own gain. But like nearly all capital exchange, social capital is a two-way street, and besides that I believe most people in this world are generally ready and willing to help out people they like. Wouldn’t you jump at the chance to help one of your friends realize his/her dreams?
How about instead of believing that each of us is alone in the world, that like all great success stories we have to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps with sheer personal willpower and stubbornness and that indomitable apple pie-fearing American spirit, we imagine that we are surrounded by circles of people who can help push and lift and coax and threaten us up to what we most hope to be. Better go buy some boots with really long straps.
A couple of weekends ago, I was touring possible outdoor wedding ceremony sites with Fiancé and my mom. While standing under the tree which will hopefully be the backdrop of our wedding, my mom squinted a little, looked up, and professed, “That’s a good climbin’ tree.”
Beyond the amazing fact that my mom is 60 years old, give or take, and still thinks about climbing trees (a favorite pastime of her youth, even after she fell out of one and each broke a limb), I think it’s pretty incredible how she can see unique potential in otherwise ordinary things. From her I learned all my craftiness (in every sense of the word) and I’d wager most of my imagination, and for this I will be forever grateful. Being able to see a few bolts of fabric and imagine a great dress is something I almost take for granted, but the gift of seeing something not just for what it is, but for what it could be is a deep-seated part of who I am.
Tracy and I imagine taking senior pictures in this good climbin' tree
My eighth grade teacher said he hated the phrase “Well, he’s got potential.” Probably because it was most frequently used as a platitude to comfort worried parents. “My son, Jimminy, his report card last term had three F’s and a sad face drawn on a cow–is he doing any better, Mr. Pennyfarthing?” “Well, ma’am, no. He’s still getting a sad cow in English. But I do think he has the potential to move up to just a gassy cow, with a little herd work.” So, yes, it’s true that the word has lost some of its meaning through overuse (innovation, anyone?), but I think the concept is one essential to creativity and in fact to the very spirit of apple-pie-fearin’ America.
This capacity to see what could be is what makes us crafters so crafty, and you thrift-shoppers so thrifty. It’s what makes an entrepreneur able to see something that is missing from the market and think, hey, I could fill that niche. It’s what allows an interior designer to look at a sad white corner and envision a happy, cozy reading nook. It lets programmers and you computer-minded nerds view a problem as a challenge that can be solved with the right code, rather than just the last effing straw, man. Yes, it even gives really dedicated teachers a reason to see that the kid who just lit a wall poster on fire might one day become a contributing member of society.
I think it really comes down to faith–faith that some resource could become something much better than it currently is, and faith in yourself that you are just the right person to help carve away all that boring lameness and reveal the inner awesome that only you could see. How dull would it be to see everything just as it is? And maybe the power of seeing the statue inside the block of wood isn’t much, but, hey, it’s got potential.
Bonus: another photo from the archive, because someone asked nicely.
Anyone can see the potential for fabulousness here. This lady is goin' places.
Believe it or not, I used to be a hippie. Fact. Ask anyone who knew me in the mid-90s. When I was young, naive, unbattered by the winds of this cruel world, I thought that one small person could affect change if they just tried hard enough.
And then the system crushed that one small person. I fought the law and the law won. The man put me down, man.
It was back in 19diggity2, in what we called the 2nd/3rd grade split (a class half of smart 2nd graders and half of dumb 3rd graders–guess which half I was in), the year I was most rambunctious and full of verve. And vim. And…mouth. It was the one and only year that a teacher wrote “talks too much in class” on my report card. It was the year I chased boys like it was my freakin’ job. It was the year I incited my posse of no-good-niks to try and convince our teacher she had been fired on April Fools Day (we wrote her a card from “the principal” explaining that her services were no longer needed. The prinicpal signed it “Ginny” instead of Mrs. Principal or even Virginia, because I figured we were beyond formalities at this point. Ginny explained that she had some of our teachers’ students illustrate her firing card to soften the blow. Our teacher got us back by trying to convince us that our snacks that day were not, in fact, dog food.)
At the end of the year we got to go on a class day-trip, and our kind teacher–let’s call her Mrs. Pennyfarthing, cuz that sounds pretty funny–let us vote on the destination. The choices were:
The Children’s Museum (an awesome educational good time in the big city)
Aladdin’s Palace (an arcade in the local mall)
Some lame third choice
Now, when 7-9 year olds are let loose in this kind of poll, you can imagine what happened. 1 vote for The Children’s Museum and 29 for Aladdin’s Palace. Guess who that 1 vote for the fun and educational experience was? At this point, Mrs. Pennyfarthing realized that she’d made a huge mistake, and announced we’d be going to The Children’s Museum anyway. The class was riotous with outrage! But, like, a fairly well-behaved “riotous” because this was Catholic school, after all, and God and Santa were always watching.
Authorities: you've been put on notice.
I was not upset in the least that we were going on the field trip that I wanted, but the liberal young soul inside me was moved to action at the injustice of it all. I mean, if we were going to the museum no matter what, why the charade of democracy? We lived in long-haired Jesus’s own United States of America, and by God we had rights! By recess I had put together a petition stating that, “Whereas Mrs. Pennyfarthing asked the class to vote between three alternative field trips, and whereas the members of the class were given to understand that the outcome of said vote shall result in the class taking a trip to such a destination as chosen by the majority of ballots, the class demands the terms of the agreement be honored.” Or probably something more like, “We want to go to Aladdin’s Castle.” I dutifully went to all my classmates over recess, from the great monkey bars of liberty to the tall slide of equality and the sad time-out wall of oppression, gaining signatures of friends and foes alike, until everyone had signed the petition. I folded up the petition with an explanatory note, ran inside and placed it on Mrs. Pennyfarthing’s desk. Here I will remind you that I went through all this trouble despite the fact that I didn’t even want to go where the majority ruled. The majority was dumb. The Children’s Museum had dinosaurs and a carousel.
Of course, nothing came of my petition. I don’t think cruel old Pennyfarthing even mentioned it. So much for living in the free world. My little activist soul was crushed: the system had failed me. A few years later in fifth grade many of my peers were horrified to learn that the school’s Great Oak Tree would be ripped out of the ground to make room for the new middle school addition. That tree was legend, man. Shel Silverstein took one look at it and went to work on a great piece of literature (it was probably this Playboy article). Under it was the greatest piece of ground to play on, nevermind that its extreme shade and rising roots had killed all the grass. It shed amazing oak nuts that were…well usually full of maggots and disgusting, to be honest. We still loved it, and sad though I was to see it go, I knew there was nothing to be done. Sure, I priced out some handcuffs from the local party supply store as I envisioned a chain of young, righteous hands encircling the Great Tree’s trunk against a bulldozer (I don’t know why it wasn’t a chainsaw, I was 11, leave me alone), singing that song from Pocahontas or something, but I knew I wouldn’t even try. Nothing would stop that bulldozer with a saw attachment except a large sum of money that would cover a change in the building design.
And what may have become a great leader of movements was quickly deflected, and that small girl pursued a career in business and advertising. For although I couldn’t affect sweeping social change I could affect sweeping purchase choices. You would like a Swiffer. You would like both Swiffer dry and wet cloths, and you will think that brooms are so 20th century. Together, we can buy ourselves a better future! A cleaner future!
Last month I participated in College’s Greatest Weekend, otherwise know as the Little 500 at Indiana University. While out and about, we noticed a horrifying trend on the sorostitutes parading around town: neon-colored over-sized ’80s style tee-shirts over (of course) black tights, similarly neon-colored nylon baseball caps, and–I kid you fucking not–FANNY PACKS. This seemed to be a new low from the sheep who have brought us such fashion fads as Ugg boots, tights as pants, unwashed hair in giant topknots, and, well, generally looking like a homeless prostitute.*
College's Greatest Weekend for making bad decisions
This made me wonder, how do you make such hideous fashion choices? How do you walk past a mirror and not gag a little bit? Surely it must be a conscious decision to look so terrible–at least conscious on the part of the first few girls who did it, and then of course no further thought is required for the rest of them. Thank goodness. If they all thought for themselves I shudder to imagine what cavalcade of catastrophes would be defacing the streets of the beautiful city in which I live.
The claaawww chooses who will stay and who will go.
So here’s how I imagine it goes: You wake up one morning a sorority girl (like, OMG YAY!!1!). You stare into your closet, trying to decide what to wear. You systematically go through your best features, and pointedly choose to hide them. You similarly take note of the features you are less proud of, and decide to enunciate them. For instance:
I am a young woman living in a post-post-modern world.
Therefore, I will wear hideous clothes from that one decade my AI’s talk about where people made the worst possible style choices ever: the 1980s!
I fear these douche bags had something to do with it. I will tell you this is from a video about Little 5, but I am not linking to it. We can’t encourage this kind of idiocy.
Gross. I just threw up in my mouth a little. Moving on.
I have a shape!
Therefore, I shall hide this shape under a really long, unstructured shirt. I will look like a flat box, like the one my daddy sent me with my iPad. Unless I am putting on the Keystone pounds, in which case I will look like the box my daddy sent me with my refrigerator.
There are no sadder models on earth than Urban Outfitters models. Even when your shirt is smiling.
Great. What about my lower half?
Oh no! Problem area for most normal human females! (Also problem area for certain feline females who shall not be named. Pixel.)
Should I try wearing something that minimizes my sizeable downtown assets? Certainly not! I shall wear something so thin it’s hardly worth mentioning. It should be real stretchy too, so you can see every ripple, bulge, and possibly even my lady lips. That’ll keep the boys guessing.
Tights. Are not. Pants.
Almost there! I’m super duper excited about what’s happening right now.
OMG, is that why they call them feet?
I will therefore put them in goofy elephant foot-shaped fleece like my Nana wears in the old folks’ home.
No wait, Alasynne told me that is sooo last year. Let’s wrap them in an Ace bandage condom so that everyone will know about my total for reals concern about like poor people without feet and junk.
Awesome. Outfit disaster achieved. I look like total crap. Let’s go lick the underside of the bar at Sports! But wait, I totally need somewhere to put my fake ID. Since I didn’t go for the cargo tights, and I’m not wearing a bra…I know! FANNY PACK.
That Nike one on right is legit from the '80s. Too legit to quit, in fact.
Seriously, ladies? Seriously? How is this a rational decision? Is it a dare? Were you drunk-dressing? I fear, fellow upright citizens, that we are one slippery “Oh this is totally funny and hot” away from Cap-sacs. The Fannypack for your head. No really.
(Although this looks like a great way to get your cardio in while simultaneously drying your dog after a bath.)
Now, I’m not saying all trends are dumb, and I certainly have worn long tunic-y shirts myself, and neon outfits and fanny packs when I was 6, like, at the end of the ’80s. I just implore you to take a look in the mirror, take a drink of water to clear your Natty Ice hangover, wipe the smeared mascara away from your eyes, scratch the crust of vomit out of your hair, and ask yourself, “Is this really the image I want to present to the world today?” And if it is, then carry on. The world will label you as the kind of girl you can buy for a cigarette butt floating in half a bottle of Skoal to take you for a real good 18 minutes in the dumpster behind Denny’s off of Business Highway 37.
*Sorry for any sorority girls who do not subscribe to these fads and who might actually be contributing members of society. Please tell your sisters to MAKE BETTER DECISIONS.
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), or a tech guru, or a burgeoning chef, or a guy who’s wife’s mother’s best friend is an investor who has been searching desperately for a local startup doing exactly what you’re proposing.
