Saturday, June 25, 2005
04:48 p.m.
Reputation

  At the end of our sixth grade year, I was having a conversation with a classmate named Kindra Ramaker, probably about the next year where we would go to High School and start to do things like dating and going to dances and developing other social skills.
  When she made the comment to me about how being a school crossing guard leader has ruined her reputation, I quipped back, “What reputation? We're twelve years old!”
  The remark solicited a few laughs, and a snicker from the teacher, who then told me what I said was not very nice. At that moment, I had really hurt Kindra.
  When we kept our random communication lines open through High School and by emailing each other in college, and that's when I finally took the opportunity to apologize and ask for her forgiveness. She laughed, because she had forgotten all about what happened (Which is only partially true, because when I brought it up, she did remember it happening.), and in her own way she has forgiven me.
  28 years later, I have not forgiven myself.

  Reputation is fundamental to our social life. Through gossip, we decide who to trust and we often elevate those who decide who is important enough to cast opinions on who to trust. Creation of an intimate society, often a subculture, means everyone knows everyone and everyone's life becomes an open book.
  What the Baby Boomers don't understand, the X-Generation is struggling to understand, and the Y-Generation completely understands and accepts is that you, the individual must constantly work on developing and keeping your reputation. In the current and coming society, computer chips have gone from expensive to dirt cheap, food and food byproducts have become so cheap they are wasted, and the service industry is following the trend lead by consumers who want cheap service rather than good service.
  In such a trend, money becomes less and less important, and reputation becomes the new currency.
  So how do we build our own reputation, if it is to become our new savings account? Like power, reputation will abhor a vacuum and come to some of those who take it and use it. Like trust, reputation will be given and taken away on a whim, unless a longer relationship is built first. Like legacy, reputation will be handed down like an inheritance. And like a gift or a tip, reputation will change for better or worse how individuals will feel about themselves.

  About sixty years ago, a young researcher at NASA developed a design for a flexible wing. Francis Regallo had certainly inherited a legacy of knowledge from inventors leading back to Leonardo Da Vinci and Otto Lilienthal (Killed in 1896 when he crashed his glider, the Wright brothers borrowed heavily upon Lilenthal's designs.). Regallo had the power that NASA gave him through the use of models, resources, wind tunnels and the fact he was in the immediate vacinity of some of the world's best and smartest researchers and inventors.
  When NASA administrators finally decided Regallo's reputation was great enough to study his work and trust in his designs, they took the space program beyond dropping spacecraft into the ocean and started to control the crash by making crafts like the space shuttle into a glider.
  Twenty years before the first shuttle was shot into space, Regallo and his wife worked in their garage trying to make the flexible wing design work on a much smaller scale. Regallo was a man who wanted to fly, but was turned away by the Army and Navy Air Corps, and he was forced to rethink his life to make his dream come true.
  What he developed in his garage was the sport of hangliding. And it has grown to become a fairly low cost sport, where anyone who has the courage to throw their body off a cliff, can learn to fly.
  Reputation gave Francis Regallo, and his wife the power to change the world. They used very few resources to make their dream a reality. (Early hanglider models were reportedly made from the living room curtains. So Mrs. Regallo must have been a very understanding woman.) But the key to this story is that because of NASA culture of being an open book where it continually shares its findings with the rest of the world, an inventor, his idea, and proof that the idea works are available for the rest of the world. Regallo's reputation became his currency. I wouldn't doubt that if he were to walk into a bar full of scientists, he wouldn't ever have to buy a drink. Heck, I'd buy him a drink.

  Today's most recent generation is growing up and accepting a society where people talk outloud to themselves in public, carry on conversations in one hand while facing and conversing with others in person, excuse themselves mid-sentence to carry on what is most likely an unimportant conversation with somebody who isn't there, speak and write only in sentence fragments instead of using proper grammar, usage and punctuation, and find that if products and services are easy to come by, well then other humans are probably also a “dime a dozen” and life is cheap.
  If these things are happening, and the acceptance of street thugs buying handguns and 50 cents worth of bullets to “pop a cap” in somebody doesn't scare the heck out of you, think for a minute about how popular gangs, their symbols, their lyrics, and their style has influenced the young people of this newest generation. That influence and that culture is still here, and it is here to stay.
  With one word or one sentence, I can offer constructive criticism or destructive criticism toward a big group or corporation, a small group not unlike my own, or another individual. And on each of those levels I can elevate or try to destroy any of them by adding to or taking away from their reputation.
  Of course, when it comes to doing this, I am an infant or a toddler of this new era. I'm trying to understand this theory of reputation as currency, so I am often spending or giving away money I don't have, forgetting to save or invest the money I make, or even forgetting that other people can live on or choose to live on less money because they don't hold it as important as other things in their life.

  Almost a decade ago, I was issued my first cell phone. Because of my job, chasing down politicians, hurricanes, wildfires and the occasional cruise ship mishap throughout Florida and the Southeast, this little device became the lifeline and the thorn in my side between our crew and our managers in Minnesota.
  Since handheld cell phones were not quite as popular as today, social norms did not yet accept people talking to themselves in public. Text messaging was still a thought, so people didn't yet have to accept that people are allowed to stare at their hands for any given reason.
  I remember on a rare occasion how I would forget about these social taboos, and people would get angry or upset with me because I had either violated their space or interrupted their conversation.
  Since then I have been riding a thin line, between adapting as best I can to this new world by learning everything I can about the new technology and language, but also declaring that I will not sacrifice my quality of life or my freedom just so I can become a more efficient component to the machine. I'll even go further than that, and say that I won't sacrifice anyone else's quality of life or freedom to make them a more efficient component to the machine.
  However, technology and human nature marches forward and we can all benefit from these new tools and this new knowledge. So with reputation as the new currency, I intend to do what I can to convince others that good or bad, their existence is beneficial to me. And their existence is beneficial to the rest of the world.
  Let me tell you, that isn't always easy. I've been scratched many times, just like a youngster trying to feed a barnful of cats. But I've also found that the essentials of life, which are food, water and shelter must be purchased. So to say that money, or the new world currency that I am theorizing as reputation, will be the only way to survive.
  Everyone needs encouragement. A kind word, a nice gesture or the giving of an award of recognition will be the tips for the wait staff and the grants and inheritance money for people to live their lives.

  When Keith Weiss was looking to fill a position in Florida, he allegedly bumped into my former News Director Steve Goodspeed at the annual RTNDA (Radio and Television News Director's Accociation) meeting and told him that his name had crossed his desk, on my resume. Before he could even ask any more, Keith said Steve told him, “Hire him. That guy can do anything.”
  That blew me away. And although I thought myself undeserving of his acclaim, as I heard this months later after I was hired, it reminded me a lot about who I am and why I do what I do. And I have been determined to never let Steve down. From the moment I left his employment in Duluth, I always wanted to make Steve, John and my other former coworkers proud of me. And hearing this acknowledgement served to further my drive and ambition.
  In so many ways, I have furthered my reputation, and spent my reputation on trying to build up others, constantly walking that thin line between the guy everyone wants to be with and the cocky or arragant guy who wants everyone to live in his Utopia (When I know full well that living in another person's Utopia is living in your hell.)

  My dad was seemingly ahead of his time and gave me constant, tedious lectures about the story of the “Big Man on Campus” and how this character was only deserving of his title if he could continually support all of the people he came in contact with on his campus. The shy and the downtrodden needed good and positive human contact just as much or more than the popular kids. This character didn't allow race or creed or status to determine who he could associate with or how he decided to communicate.
  And although my dad bored the heck out of me and drove me crazy with these tales he was weaving, and I always wanted him to stop doing this, the fact is that the idea became so engrained in my mind that it comes naturally and flows from me every day, like it or not.
  I spent a lot of time with my dad when I was young, working in his glass shop, going out on service calls, spending a lot of time around other adults and picking up on their speech patterns. So small parts of his communication and actions have become my own. I work very hard to repeat those that I admire, and I work very hard to not repeat anything I didn't like or I thought was a mistake. My dad is human, and so therefore he made a lot of mistakes. We all make mistakes.
  My dad's reputation as a diver and swimmer is largely unmatched. His reputation as an antique dealer and appraiser has become very high. And his reputation as a father is high because in an era of shrinking family sizes, he and my mom raised four good children. Parenthood is, after all, one of the world's most noble professions.
  The currency of reputation is enough from things like these to keep my dad going. And while I respect that, I can't live like that. I also have a big problem when somebody tells me I should live like that. And I have an even bigger problem when I forget or don't stop myself from telling others that they should live like me.
  So, while a large share of people accept me for whom I am, there are others who don't understand me or even hate me for the way I communicate and the way I act. And for a person who lives a pretty good life based on the currency of his reputation, having someone misunderstand me or hate me feels a lot like getting your pocket picked or having somebody clean out your bank account. I continually experience the former, my dad seems to experience the latter.

  In this always moving, always on, always open world it has dawned on me that being in the middle of things by maintaining space or being a media provider has become an extremely important and daunting career. Being a producer or a consumer is often much easier, because at any given time it seems you can just stop what you're doing and take a break when you get ahead.
  As the middleman mentality disappears and the coop grows strength, my career changes from that of receiving this and sending it there to installing, maintaining and operating the devices and networks we use to move the products and services from the producers to the consumers. I often get excited when I get to be a producer or consumer, and there is nothing I'd rather do that surround myself by these types of people, but at the same time it doesn't appear that those things are my calling.
  Being in the middle used to mean a person had to also be a filter. When the consumer wanted to tell the producer that the product or service was crap, my job was to lay down a smokescreen or be a spin doctor and find my own way to let the producer know in the best way I saw fit that in the future they would have to improve or the consumer would look elsewhere.
  Now, moving into the maintenance side, I have to be a blind eye and ear and yet make sure that not only do I have to make sure that the producer hears directly from the consumer that what they are producing is crap, I have to make sure that I've made those communication lines are as clear and easy to understand as possible.
  People are going to have to be pretty thick skinned to survive this new era. And people like me are going to have to learn to tune a lot of it out, otherwise we are going to feel like somebody capable of reading everybody's minds and every room, where every public space is going to be so crowded and noisy we won't hear what anyone is trying to say.

  How do we learn to say we are sorry when we are having trouble understanding the one thing everybody else seems to understand? If we have trouble keeping up in this new, always on, always moving world where our biography must be completely open and we must be completely honest, will we ever be forgiven for falling behind and failing to understand?
  Forgetting doesn't mean forgiving. And failing to understand doesn't always mean saying you're sorry. So if we don't take the utmost care in the way we interact with one another, I'm afraid that the world will be watching and listening.
  Setting aside all the doctrine and dogma being spewed out by every major religion, think about the world for a moment as a collective “God” figure. Knowing the world is watching just might put the fear of god in me. Well, that being said, that isn't why I do what I do. I simply try to live by the golden rule: “Do onto others as you want them to do onto you.”
  When it comes to that idea, I am also an infant. I'm trying and learning, but wow am I making a lot of mistakes.


Derrick   My friend Derrick Sheller called to say that he asked his girlfriend to marry him and she said yes.
  They are allegedly in the San Francisco Bay area, and Derrick's plan was to ask her while they were aboard a hot air baloon. I have yet to hear if everything went as planned, and I'm sure there will be a great story whatever happened.
  I wish them all the best as they go on this new journey. They are two great people.