Carl T. Holscher fights for the customers.

Month: November 2017

Fires

Running around fires makes you feel good because you’re solving problems and you’re busy. But you’re not solving problems. You’re dealing with the unsolved problems that caught fire and need your immediately attention.

If you were solving problems, you wouldn’t be fighting fires, you’d be watering down dry wood and putting matches away. Look for potential fires. Stop them before they start.

Defriended

I have been off Facebook for a few months now. I have thought about it for a long time. I am friends with a lot of people on the site. There are a few people who I 1) care enough about to follow their lives and 2) can only connect with them through Facebook.

Some people have blogs. Others I can keep up with on Twitter or Instagram. For the rest, I do miss keeping up with them and their hijinks with their kids.

And I haven’t found a good solution for them.

I want to reopen my Facebook account so connect with those few people. If I do, I am going to go through my list and unfriend most of the people there. (Unfriend is such a harsh word. And they use it purposely.) We are not Facebook Friends™.

My biggest problem with Facebook is the endless striving for more! More people, more connections, MORE FRIENDS!

When I deactivated my account, its first solution was to suggest that I connect with more people. As if that was the problem… Not enough friends.

If I reactivate my account, I am going to pair the list down to those few people. I know Facebook will continue to show me friends of friends and people they think I might like. And people who commented on a post they made one time.

I don’t care about their family members.
I don’t care about their friends.
I don’t care about their co-workers.
I don’t care about…

I care about the people I care about enough to friend. The End.

And that’s the problem with Facebook. There’s no money in it for them for me to keep my social network small. And that’s where we disagree.

Facebook is not important enough for me to fight that fight. It’s not worth my time to keep fighting Facebook’s interests.

Most importantly, I haven’t missed it. I haven’t opened the browser or downloaded the Android app since I deleted it back in October. It’s not a part of life I find missing.

Do I want to reopen that door?

Doors

My anger was a cage and the cage had no door.
Strangeness by Alex Armstrong

This should be how I describe my teen years. I was an angry guy with a lot of emotions and thankfully I found poetry and industrial music as a way to process them.

I often think about how close I could have come to really ruining my life with the fuel of rage. I am a big guy and I was then. At 6’5″ and north of 260 pounds in high school, I could have channeled my anger into something far darker than Trent Reznor, black lights and filling notebooks with words.

One day I found myself out of the cage, unsure sure of how I’d got there. Only one explanation accounts for all the facts. I had invented a door, and the key that fit in its lock, and let myself out.

That door had a name. It happens to be the same name as my wife. The key took longer to forge, but it was a fire my wife started and the perspective she provided allowed me to work the forge and smith a key that fit the lock of my anger.

This Thanksgiving, I am thankful for my wife, Annie. I am thankful for the perspective she brought me then and the love, support, affection and humor she continues to bring me now.

I do not know where I would be without her, but I’m sure glad she’s here.

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén