Yesterday was my last Saturday before about 2 straight months of travel. So I did what any good college football fan would do… watched 9 hours of ball.
Search results for: “good news”
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To Be Like the Postal Carrier
Working from home reveals all the daily routines that happen around your house while you’re typically away.- 3 different garbage trucks come on Friday. (Garbage, recycling, yard waste. Though the later two come on a secret schedule which lives on our refrigerator.)
- An elderly woman picks through everyone’s recycling to get cans and bottles.
- Our neighbors gardener comes on Wednesday.
- UPS comes in the morning and the evening.
- FedEx comes in the afternoon.
- Amazon.com has their own delivery service, that comes in the afternoon.
- Once a week the Schwan truck comes.
- One neighbor gets daily food delivery and another has a daily home healthcare visit.
- Once a month a volunteer drops off the neighborhood newsletter.
- Each Thursday afternoon a guy drives by and tosses the Penny Saver onto our driveway, which is conveniently timed with garbage day.
- Utility workers read meters and check connections and all sorts of things.
- At some point each week a utility worker climbs the power pole. Or checks it. Or parks in front of it to eat a snack.
- Speaking of snacks, it’s normal for contractors or cops or other workers to park in front of our house to eat a snack. Our house must make people hungry. (Or a good place to hide from your supervisor.)
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What Teenagers are Watching on YouTube Right Now
YouTube is the #3 website in the world behind Google and Facebook. A YouTube visitor is likely to visit 14 different videos each day and watch 24 minutes.
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Why You Should Delete SnapChat
I’ve been engaged in various forms of social media since AOL chat rooms in 1994. And I’ve never seen a more dangerous application targeting teenagers, specifically girls, than SnapChat.
The premise of SnapChat is simple. You take a picture, send it to a friend, and they can only see it for up to 10 seconds before it’s deleted.
And that’s where the lie begins.
I want to be blunt. My goal for this post is to motivate you to delete SnapChat from your phone.
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Why Blog Comments are Necessary
“I don’t comment on blogs anymore. I don’t see the point.”This has sadly become more the norm. To put it politely, engaging with blog content has morphed from leaving comments and engaging with the author to liking or sharing on social media and only engaging with your own self-cultivated audience.
And the world is worse off as a result.
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The Chick-fil-A Effect
The Set-Up
I’ve been busy lately. Between traveling a lot and catching up from traveling a lot I’ve missed many important details.
On Tuesday afternoon guys from my high school small group started texting me, “What are we doing tomorrow night?” Then I got text from my co-leaders, “What are we doing tomorrow night?”
I kept thinking to myself, “What are they talking about? We’re going to meet at the church, play some volleyball, eat dinner, and have small groups.”
So I looked at my texts from Brian and it turns out that, and I still don’t know why, last night our small groups did outings instead of the normal routine.
Cool. So I need a plan. And I’ve got no plan.
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In Social Media You Are the Product
What’s going on behind the curtain at your favorite social media site? Facebook announced Tuesday that it had started a small test to let advertisers and agencies use Facebook Exchange (FBX) to serve retargeted ads — specifically called “Page post link ads” — to your News Feed, which, of course, is Facebook’s prime real estate. These ads take into account people’s browsing behavior outside Facebook, as captured through cookies, with the aim of offering up messages about products they’ve already shown interest in.
Queue Facebook User Privacy Freak Out
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The Three I’s of Working with Teenagers
Sometimes you come across statements about teenagers that are just so over-the-top that you have to laugh.
Today the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) announced that the teen birth rate is at an all-time low. (More on that in a minute.) But in the press release there’s this hilarious statement from Dr. Jill Rabin, a OB/GYN from Hyde Park, NY:
“It’s important to remember the three I’s when you’re working with teens. They think they’re immortal, invincible and infertile. We have to convince them otherwise and dispel the myths, and the message needs repetition.”
Ah, generalizations. Aren’t they fun?
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Running an Online Store: A Family Business
We’ve got a little sale going at The Youth Cartel store, having fun with this fiscal cliff silliness in the news. If you’ve seen stuff that we’re doing and wanted to check it out, this is a great time to do that while saving a little money. Discounts start when you buy $20 in stuff. And the discounts get better with the more you spend. Pretty simple and fun.
Running an Online Store
I started the Cartel store a little over a year ago and it’s steadily grown. At first we had spurts of orders, like when a new product released or something like that. We’d have 20 in one day and then none for several days. Now we get 5-15 orders per day during the week and 1-2 on weekends. It’s not a lot but it is a part of every day. With our publishing line growing in 2013 I expect we’ll see that double again.
Literally, when you place an order, the McLane family takes it from there. (It doesn’t go to some third-party company to get packed up by people in a warehouse. We’re a family business.)
I print the order, one of the kids goes to the hallway closet, finds the books, and packs the order. They bring it back, I weigh it, and print out the postage label. Each day I either schedule a USPS pick-up or I drive the days orders over to the post office. Sometimes I make a morning and afternoon run to the post office.
On top of that, we keep the books on the store, manage the inventory, purchase shipping supplies, and we’ve develop relationships with our various suppliers.
The Kids are Learning
My goal is always that the kids will eventually fully run the store. It’s well within their capabilities to pack and ship orders. (And at $.50 per box it’s a nice steady stream of income.)
This week, I added to Megan’s duties as she’s now in charge of keeping inventory, updating a Google Docs spreadsheet, and alerting me of things which are low so I can re-order them. She gets it. Supply & demand. She pointed out that we need this sale to work well because we have too much of some books.
Next, they will learn how to weigh packages and print shipping labels. And after that I will teach them how to re-order shipping stuff themselves.
Here’s the thing: They do a great job. I consistently get good feedback on our orders. And people love getting the little toys/treats Megan and Paul stuff in the boxes. And they really like contributing to the family business. It’s fun for them.
It cracks me up a little when people quip about child labor laws and all that stuff. (We’re totally legal, by the way.) To me? It’s the other kids that are missing out. We’re having a blast with it and I love seeing the business grow with their capabilities. Heck, I’m looking forward to one of them coming up with our next great idea!
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3 Mini-Rants for a Wednesday
Mmmm… nothing like hormone-induced gigantic turkey for your families pre-Black Friday festivities. - Don’t shop on Thanksgiving! – This year, in a sign of pure greed, many retailers will open up their stores for pre-Black Friday sales. Target stores nationwide will open at 9:00 PM on Thanksgiving, basically destroying the holiday for their employees. Their employees started a petition to keep Black Friday on Friday. Last week I got several emails inviting me to “secret sales” where I could get Black Friday deals right now. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Making low-level employees work on a holiday so you can make extra money is wrong.
- We all pay taxes! It is true that lots and lots of Americans don’t pay federal income taxes directly. But I’ve had it up to my eyeballs with people saying that most people don’t pay taxes. We all pay taxes, lots and lots of them. And while most of the readers of this blog won’t write a check for federal income taxes we pay taxes in lots of seen and unseen places that our more affluent neighbors don’t. We all pay sales tax, property tax, payroll tax, state income tax, tariffs we don’t see, taxes added into the goods we buy like gasoline. Then there are the taxes we pay not in money, but in situations beyond our control. Can someone in the working poor pay to send their kids to an elite school? Nope… so that’s a tax on them. Can the working poor afford the best access to healthcare? Nope… so that’s a tax on them. What about the best nutrition? Or social access to powerful people. On and on and on. My point is simply that we all pay taxes!
- There’s more to church leadership than preaching! No, really. The more I get to know folks in a lot of contexts the more I realize that what you do off the platform is what makes you a leader in the church. And if you look away from the org chart and walk around seeing who is actually leading, almost all leadership (People leading others where they wouldn’t go by themselves) is happening outside of the preaching person and outside of the paid staff. I’m not talking about redefining what leadership is in the church… I’m talking about recognizing who are the leaders in your church. How can you go to a church, see all that goes on, and say… “Oh, this is ____’s church.” Gimme a break.
OK, I got those off my chest. Time for a second cup of coffee.
