As previously indicated, I am planning a road trip in September. My team, ever observant (and irreverant) took it upon themselves to schedule a final staff meeting yesterday to help me with my preparations. I have to admit, I did think it odd that my team wanted to get together a final time and expected perhaps a roast and toast type of occasion, but I didn’t really expect what actually happened.

I was greeted by the team wearing these, custom buttons:


A little background, in July of 2005 we instituted a weekly 30 minute call to closely monitor our financial state (sales and spend,) employee state (hiring and attrition,) customer state (escalations and bugs,) special requests (capital etc.,) and any other operational business the entire team needed to know. Each person on the team was responsible to know the current state vs. targets and forecasted state for the end of the quarter on each item, flag discrepancies, and note “get well plans.” This was something of a change from business as usual and made people pretty darned uncomfortable at first. We didn’t do so well in our first quarter missing by about 25% on our forecast accuracy (underspend) but improved rapidly to greater than 90% accuracy in Q2, and greater than 99% accuracy in quarters 3 & 4. I would close each meeting with “Thank you for your fiscal responsibility.” When getting the buttons fabricated the vendor asked “is this for an accountant’s retirement?” which was apparently answered “something like that….”

I was then given a choice to review the silly stuff or sensible stuff. Since we all like to laugh, I went silly of course. The theme of the silly stuff was “pimp my ride.” No road trip is complete without some flair (an Office Space reference) in this case, bumper stickers:

Left-side tailgate:


Right-side tailgate:


Center bumper:


Left-side “Bad Girl:”


Whole effect:


Of course, on any roadtrip it’s important to have clothing, amusement, and hydration/elimination management systems…..

Clothing, An original “What’s SWUP Doc?” t-shirt and a Buzz Off Hat


Amusement, the classic book “Think and Grow Rich” and a Megabloks Dune kit


Hydration/elimination management systems, Mike Hard(ing’s) Lemonade and TravelJohns


Not only was I surprised, I was touched and had difficulty not splutting water out my nose laughing. Also, due to an offhand comment at a recent lunch, a very useful and thoughtful sensible gift was presented, a receipt and card scanner. I have thousands of business cards in a box to scan, so this will be helpful and since it’s so portable, I will take it along with my laptop for receipt scanning. That way I’ll be prepared for my weekly BUC call during the trip. We have to maintain that fiscal responsibility!

Receipt scanner


Connie, Kevin, Subodh, Denny, Eric, Nancy, Tammy, Klarissa, Martin, Judy, Kathy, and Peggy, thank you for everything.

Meatspace coordinates: N37.32.4 W122.30.9
Ohio State’s 2006 record: 0-0
Tune: Meditacao by Nara Leao

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