Last Night's Recognition at Our Regular Annual Gathering

Last night my workplace had its normal annual end-of-the-school-year gathering at the Dean's house on James Island.  The difference was this year they did a tribute of sorts for me because I am retiring in ten weeks.

It was a pleasant evening.  

The food was catered and excellent.  The wine was plentiful and the company, as always, was good.  

They said nice things about me, as is always expected at such occasions, and they gave me gifts, which were greatly appreciated!  They spoke about the first time we met or the time we did this or that.  As I looked around the room I thought to myself of how I have worked with many of these people daily since 2000, but I have only ever even gone to lunch with one or two of them.  One couple who was there came to a party at my house once many years ago.  The others?  Nada.  I've never really socialized with them even though we often say we are going to lunch or whatnot.  We never do.

Then I think of the people I worked with back in the mid-to-late 1990s and how we are all still in touch and have socialized on many many occasions and I ask myself why?  What qualities do these people have or don't have that make the difference??

I'm thinking the answer lies in my ability to trust them, and has very little to do with their qualities.

I have trust issues, and I am not very good at identifying people who are and are not trustworthy.

Years ago there was a woman who worked with me at my present workplace that I introduced to some of my friends and we all went out to a wine tasting at a local wine and cheese shop after work one day.  Then we had dinner at a nearby restaurant after the tasting.  The next day before lunch that woman had told everyone on our floor of the building (and maybe even across campus) that I was out on the town drunk the night before, which was a total lie.  This woman had as much to drink as I did that night out, and neither of us was drunk by any stretch of the imagination.  She was just trying to stir up trouble and perhaps even make me lose my job.  

This was when I totally stopped socializing with people from work because I trusted this woman and she betrayed me with a lie.

Trust issues.  Well founded, but still paralyzing.

When I retire in a few weeks, I will most likely never see any of these people again.  Does that matter?  Did their role in my life serve a purpose?  I wonder.

People fall in and out of our lives as they should.  They people our days with their attitudes and personalities and opinions.  Some serve as good examples.  Some serve as bad examples.  Some seem to have no real meaning at all, but still...there they are.  They serve their purpose and move on.

How will they remember me?  Who knows?  People surprise me all the time.  Does it really matter how they remember me?  Maybe.  One never knows what the future holds.  All things seem to be related as far as I can tell, and a ripple you made in 1970 can somehow travel all the way to 2017 and drown you with its force.  

Life is like that.

But I will remember a wish from last night.  Someone said they hope my retirement years are the best years of my life.  I wish that too, and I expect it will prove true.

Life is such an adventure!  I can't wait to turn the page and read this next chapter of my life.  It promises to bring many drastic changes for sure.  Let's hope they all prove wonderful in the end!

Developing Management SuperPowers: Alice's How-To Guide

Let's say you need to form a team to complete an important project.  The project has a deadline with no wiggle room, and you already have a full schedule.

DON'T PANIC!

Just follow these steps. 

This is a recipe for success.  Don't skip steps.

Here are the basic steps of developing management

First: Answer these questions.  Write the answers down.  Plan for success!  EXPECT success!!!

1. What is my goal?
2. What help do I need to accomplish my goal?
3. How do I effectively communicate my needs to my helpers? 
4. How do I motivate my helpers to become a team and accomplish the goal?
5. What tools (resources, people, etc.) will I need?
6. How can I inspire my team to excel?

NOTE: As a general rule of thumb, if your team is competent, happy, and engaged, your project will be completed with minimal stress.  Keep this in mind when answering the above questions.

Goal setting advice:

1. Be realistic.
2. Divide the goal into small manageable tasks that can easily be assigned to team members.
3. Have a deadline "Set in Stone."

Communication advice:

1. Know your audience!!!  
2. Use multiple ways of communicating.
1. Email, post, chat, phone, text, gossip if you must!
3. Always always always emphasize the positive.
4. Document everything!!!!
5. Listen.
6. Be empathetic but firm in communicating your needs.

Motivation advice:

1. The BEST way to motivate is to BE the involved, reliable, available, conscientious person you want on your team.
2. Share your successes and the successes of others! (Collaborate!)
3. Be positive! BELIEVE your team can accomplish the task!
4. Encourage and reward even small progress.
5. Analyze your progress and show your team their efforts are being acknowledged and rewarded. 

Inspiration advice:

1. Encourage
2. Acknowledge
3. Reward
4. Be human.  Be approachable.  Be involved.  Be enthusiastic!

A final word about Management SuperPowers.  The KEY to developing Management SuperPowers is attitude.  

• If you believe you will succeed, truly believe, then you will succeed.  
• If you are willing to embrace data driven change, then you are well on your way to obtaining Management SuperPowers.
• If you admit your flaws, are fair, consistent, trustworthy, and available, then you will soon become a Management SuperHero.

BE the type of person you admire.  BE the manager (organizer, employee, student, teacher, etc.) you want on your team. 

BE awesome!

Thomas's Childhood: A True Story

With Father's Day only a few days away, my thoughts have turned to my Daddy.  This morning finds me thinking about the few things he told me of his childhood.

First of all, let me emphasize that Daddy's name was Thomas.  He was never called anything else, not Tom or Tommy.  He was always Thomas.  There has always been discussion about whether he was Thomas Robert or Robert Thomas on paper, and his permanent records indicate either/or is true, but he always answered to Thomas.

Daddy was the firstborn child of ten siblings.  He was born in 1900.  Daddy used to tell me that when he was little all the roads in our hometown were made of dirt.  People still used horses instead of cars back then in the hill country of South Carolina, and Daddy said when the cars came along, about the time he was a young teenager, they scared the horses.  

Daddy said when he was little Blacksburg, SC was a boom town.  Someone had discovered gold, silver, and iron ore there and the railroad brought folks from everywhere to mine it.  The town's nickname became Iron City and it stuck.  You can still see businesses in Blacksburg today with Iron City in their names. 

Call it Iron City or call it Blacksburg, the name doesn't really matter. What did matter to my Daddy was he was not allowed to visit anyone in town after dark when he was little, because of all the rough miners who were there.  Daddy said there was a saloon on just about every corner and a church on all the rest.  

The iron ore, gold, and silver were all eventually mined out though, and the townspeople spent more time in the churches than in the saloons.  Most of the saloons  had actually closed by the time Prohibition arrived in 1920, and the town of Blacksburg was a much safer place to live. 

This is what the town looked like in 1916 when Daddy was 16 years old:

This is a view up Shelby Street facing the railroad. The store my father eventually owned and ran is seen at the end of the street on the left.  Daddy said he always wanted to be in business for himself, even as a small child.

You see, my Daddy's family lived in nearby Cherokee Falls, SC on the "Mill Hill." Blacksburg was the closest big town and Daddy always considered Blacksburg his hometown. He did not have good memories of his childhood on that mill hill in Cherokee Falls.

Cherokee Falls Mill was a cotton mill that employed families, as in father, mother, and children.  The family would live in mill housing up on the Mill Hill and work in the cotton mill. 

Daddy went to work in the Cherokee Falls Mill when he was six years old.  He said if you made a mistake or if you weren't working fast enough the mill foremen would whip you with a leather strap or hit you with their fists. 

The money the children made was given to the parents.  The rent for the mill housing was taken out of the pay before the pay was issued.  

It was easy to get trapped in a mill town.  The children did not have the benefit of an education, as they were forced to work from sunup to sundown from a very young age.  Many ended up spending their lives working in that same cotton mill and living in relative poverty while their labors made the mill owners rich.

Little Boys Working in a Cotton Mill

My Daddy, however, was very intelligent.  He taught himself to read and figure (His word for math.).  He said he had the equivalent of a third grade education because he was able to get his hands on third grade books to teach himself.  I'm not sure how he learned so much, but I do know Daddy ended up a successful business owner in the end.  I will say I seldom saw him without a book in his hands during my own childhood...unless he was working, of course.  Daddy loved to read.

In 1916 my Daddy's life changed.  Not long before Daddy's 16th birthday, the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act of 1916 was drafted by Congress to regulate child labor. 

The Act prohibited interstate or foreign sale of any goods or services that were produced by laborers under the age of 14 in a factory, shop or cannery and under the age of 16 in a mine.  Also, child laborers under 16 years old could only work from 6am to 7pm and not for more than eight hours a day and not more than six days a week.

Here is a copy of the Cherokee Falls Mill response to that bill.  The signatures are real and very disturbing to me, as I see more than one of my sons' father's ancestors' signatures among the rest.

Those wealthy men did NOT want to lose their gravy train.  Without the child labor they would lose major profits. 

Not long after the above letter was written my Daddy walked out of that mill, and he never looked back.  Daddy said to anyone who would listen, "I will NEVER work for another man as long as I live," and, you know what?  He never did.

Daddy spent his adult life self-employed.  He once owned a restaurant.  Then he owned a furniture store, but when I was little in the mid-50s, Daddy owned and operated Batchelor's Radio and TV.  

Daddy sold and repaired televisions, radios, and small electrical appliances.  He did a correspondence course to learn how to do that, as there were no schools around Blacksburg to teach him such new technology.  

If Daddy had lived past 1962, we would have been rich beyond our wildest dreams!  Daddy died, however, and we lost everything to the medical bills, but that is a story for another day.

My Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) Years

This morning finds me reflecting on my first years in Charleston, SC again.  

When skin problems drove me indoors in 1998, I was faced with what to do with my life yet again.  

Being a former public school teacher who no longer wanted to be in the classroom, I found myself gravitating to higher education.  When I was offered a grant funded job at the Medical University Library with RAPID (Rural Access Partnership for Information Delivery), I took it! 

RAPID was a partnership between the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) Library and the Lowcountry Area Health Education Consortium (AHEC). Its sole purpose was to to provide the best library services available to practicing Lowcountry health professionals.  We served 13 counties in the Lowcountry of South Carolina back in the late 1990s and 2000.  

We did a LOT of day trips.

I had to schedule and help present training sessions for medical professionals across all 13 counties. Generally one or more medical librarians attended these sessions with me.  

What an experience!  We visited some cities like Hilton Head and Beaufort, but we mostly did training in rural areas like Bamberg and Barnwell and Varnville and Branchville, etc.  

Back then the Internet was fairly new and access was dial-up, so we had to carry our own 100 foot telephone cord, a projector, laptop, power extension cord, and screen to do the training sessions.  This job is why I laugh when people complain about slow connections nowadays. 

The job did have frustrations, but I met so many people!  That was the best part of the job, the people.  The work itself was an awful lot to do.

My duties included maintaining the RAPID website, acting as writer, photographer, editor, publisher and distributor of the RAPID monthly newsletter, designing marketing and teaching materials, teaching medical professionals about Medline, PubMed, MedlinePlus, and Loansome Doc, which were all new at the time, and doing customer service things and reporting, etc.  

My favorite thing was teaching the difference between using "and" and "or" in a boolean search. 

The joke was, "I used to want a husband who is tall AND handsome AND rich AND kind, but at this point I'd settle for a husband who is tall OR handsome OR rich OR kind." See?  OR expands the search.  AND limits the search.

They tended to remember that.  😉

I had to use both Windows and Macintosh computers to do this job, and I had to be able to use Microsoft Publisher, Adobe Pagemaker, Filemaker Pro, Access, Excel, Netscape, Internet Explorer, Adobe Photoshop, Claris Homepage, Corel Photo-Paint 7, Microsoft Word, Photostudio and Powerpoint.

Needless to say, I learned a LOT, but it was also fun.  

Medical librarians are a fun bunch.  After the training sessions we did, we'd go out to eat lunch in little out-of the way mostly "Mom and Pop" type restaurants in the little towns.  Delicious! 

If you ever make it to Blackville, SC, go eat at the Amish / Mennonite restaurant, Miller's Bread Basket. You will NOT be disappointed!

In addition to wonderful food, we also discovered some quirky things in our travels.  Once when we were visiting Beaufort, SC in early 2000 to do a training session in the hospital there, we came across a "Cows on Vacation" art exhibit and couldn't resist taking this picture for our RAPID Newsletter.

Work Work Work. All I Do Is Work.

Later that same year (2000) the grant funding ended, so the job ended, and I went in search of yet another way to spend my life.  I found it!  But that is a story for another time. 

My Tour Guide Years in Lovely Charleston, SC

Charleston, SC is lovely.  It is one of the best tourist destinations in the country.  As I live my last year before retirement in this beautiful place, I can't help but reflect on my first years here.

I moved to Charleston, SC in 1995 when I was 40 years old. I didn't want to teach public school anymore, so I searched my soul to figure out what I would enjoy doing more than teaching.  I found it.

I became a Charleston, SC tour guide.  I drove a horse-drawn carriage and did historical tours in lovely downtown Charleston.  I drove for Old South Carriage Company because they paid more money than all the other carriage companies, and I needed $$$.
 

This is me when I was a tour guide in the mid-1990s.
The draft horse is a French Percheron named Flash.
Those were the days, my friends!

Doing historical tours all day long was like teaching students who actually want to hear you...paid money to hear you...and there was NO PAPERWORK!  Perfect!

At this point I should probably tell you that I was raised around horses.  From the time I was seven until I was grown, my mother rented out our backyard as a horse pasture, so horses were a big part of my childhood.  My gravitating to them later in life seemed very natural.

Now.  Charleston carriages are not pulled by regular horses.  They use gelding 2000 pound (on average) draft horses to pull those carriages, mostly Belgian Draft Horses and French Percherons, but there is usually a Clydesdale or two in the mix as well, and they use very "English" style driving as opposed to the "Western" riding and driving I grew up doing.  Learning to drive a carriage in the English style was a real eye-opener for me.  I loved every minute of it.

NOTE: One Charleston carriage company uses mule teams to pull their carriages, but I didn't drive for that company.  My experiences with mules in my childhood taught me that they kick and bite and sit down in the middle of plowing a row in the garden, so that company was not my first choice.  😉

Before I go further, I feel the need to mention that many people are concerned for the welfare of carriage horses in Charleston, as am I.  Let me assure you that those are expensive horses.  The carriage companies would lose major money if they had to replace even one of them, so they take the best care of their horses that they can.  

Each horse:

• has his temperature taken after every tour.
• is hosed down until he is cool and comfortable after every tour.  
• is bathed by the tour guides at the end of every work day.  (You haven't lived until a 2000 pound animal shakes on you like a big wet dog.)
• is given the best food.  
• has his stall cleaned daily.  
• is petted and coddled and spoiled by all who see him, and 
• works on a rotation schedule that gives him plenty of pasture time to run and play in the country out on Johns Island. 

The tour guides?  Well, let's just say they are not treated as well.

Charleston, SC tour guides are licensed and registered by the Tourism Commission. You must pass both a written and oral exam to be a Charleston, SC tour guide.  It is NOT easy to pass these tests. Here is an explanation of the process of becoming a Charleston tour guide.

They issue both Temporary and Permanent Licenses. The license I was issued is pictured below. 

As tour guides we worked very hard and we played very hard.  We were required to know where to go out to eat and what play to see and what plantation to visit, etc. etc. etc., so on our off days we oftentimes went out exploring together.  We laughed an awful lot. 😄

Friends for life...maybe longer!

Skin problems drove me indoors after a couple of years driving carriages in Charleston's semi-tropical climate, but I wouldn't take a gold guinea for those tour guide years. I'm the person I am today because of them.

For all you would-be travelers out there, let me tell you, Charleston is a wonderful place to visit.  Come take a carriage ride!  October, November, December, January, February, March, and April here will delight you.  July?  Eh...not my favorite.  😉