Monthly Archives: February 2012

Lessons from Bob Hoover

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At a recent aviation conference, legendary test pilot Bob Hoover was a guest speaker. He moves a little slower than he did as a test pilot but his wit and story-telling still came through. Among pilots, safety and learning are prominent themes, and Bob used the occasion to tell a story about safety and learning.

Seems years ago piston and turbine aircraft had the same size fuel hoses and a young line boy accidentally serviced his piston engine aircraft with jet fuel. This is similar to pumping diesel into a standard, combustion engine – It’ll run for a while but the the engine will die. Worse, diesel fuel can actually hurt engine components. It’s similar in airplanes.

In Bob’s case, he had enough fuel in the fuel lines to taxi out, depart and climb to almost 100 feet when the jet fuel caused his engines to quit. The airport (Brown Field outside San Diego) is surrounded with mountains which are probably the worst emergency landing locations imaginable. Bob drew on his skills and landed uphill, stalling right at touchdown, and pilot and passengers emerged with nothing more than scratches. Amazing!

Later, after he returned to the airport and found the extremely red-faced line boy. He looked at him and said “Tomorrow I’ll be back to fly and I’ll need my aircraft serviced. And when I do, I want only one person servicing my aircraft. And that person is you.”

Bob knew that of all the line boys at Brown Field, only one was guaranteed to have learned that jet fuel in a piston engine was something to be avoided.

Being different on eBay

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Anyone who’s ever bought or sold anything on eBay knows about feedback scores. Essentially, both the seller and buyer have the ability to judge the other party’s behavior in the transaction. A 100% score means the individual received positive feedback in 100% of their transactions – 90% means that 90% of all transactions received positive feedback. Average scores at eBay seem to fall between 98% and 100% indicating that buyers were generally happy with their purchases and sellers were generally happy with their customer’s payment. My score is 100% on 170-some odd transactions.

Historically, the buyer usually is first to provide feedback. If it is positive, the seller will reciprocate. If the buyer gave negative feedback (perhaps the seller shipped defective product), the seller might take revenge on the buyer even though the buyer did everything right – Paid promptly and went through the correct conflict resolution steps – and give the buyer negative feedback. I don’t like this “revenge” methodology.

My philosophy is to provide feedback when the other party satisfied their part of the contract. So, when selling, I give feedback (positive) the minute the buyer’s payment comes in. After all, they’ve satisfied their part of the transaction agreement and now it’s up to me to ship their item safely and quickly.

However, when I’m the buyer as I was three times this week, I expect the buyer to behave similarly and not withhold feedback until I provide mine. That leads to a completely befuddled seller some time …

Seller: Did you get your product?
Me: Yes, thank you!
S: Could you provide feedback?
M: Sure, could you since I completed my obligations to you over a week ago, and you only satisfied your obligation to me yesterday?
S: Is there a problem?
M: No, I just expect the same that you expect from me – PROMPT feedback.
S: Huh?

… and so it goes. Sure, I don’t get feedback from this seller, but it’s not as important to a little shopper like me than it is to volume guys. Maybe someday he’ll figure it out …

DIY Sushi

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Two Nigiri rolls in most restaurants runs $5 and up – I usually order Maguro, Sake and Hamachi and rarely does a lunch end up costing less than $20 . And I’ve on occasion paid more. But when you realize that one Nigiri roll is rice and less than an ounce of fish – Fish which averages $10/lb – The markup becomes very evident.

Around here we have a fish monger who will sell sushi grade salmon for $12/lb and tuna for $13/lb. Sushi rice (medium grain, not the normal long grain) is cheap, and the little rice vinegar to season it is equally inexpensive. Pickled ginger and wasabi powder can be picked up in almost any supermarket.

One drawback to DIY Sushi – Since you’re only using 3-4 oz per person, and most fish mongers don’t like to sell such small portions, it becomes a challenge to create plates with a variety of fish. Usually it’s Sake today, Maguro tomorrow and so on.

And my knife skills still need some work, but all in all, a sushi dinner for 20% of what the restaurant charges is nothing to sneeze at!

Email Foibles

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Regularly, I receive complaints from individuals who didn’t receive some mailing or special offer. 80-90% of the time I take one look at their email address and immediately recognize the problem – They’re using their employer’s email address for personal business. Wow!

In the personal email world, we rarely have any email filters (other than SPAM) and usually receive everything emailed to us. But the corporate world is different. Corporate IT managers work to ensure only work-related email gets to employees. My former employer blocked Facebook, Match.com, Yelp and a whole host of non-business sites. This is done for two reasons, to keep unrelated email traffic off the internal networks, and to prevent employees from wasting too much time on non-work activities.

Personal email doesn’t look like “work” to an IT manager. For starters, it frequently has misspellings, or long forwarding chains, or includes multiple pictures and icons – It just doesn’t look like business and it’s fairly easy to filter.

People who use their corporate email account don’t realize the potential problems they’re creating. When they leave the job they lose their emails and email directory, and I’ll bet even though they signed an email acknowledgement form, they still think IT would never snoop on their emails. Baloney, my former employer did. And I know another that flagged emails destined for outside the company that contained secret program names. We chuckled when the filter would intercept an innocent email containing the name  “Harpoon” or “Dolphin.”

Yeah, I know I’m whizzing into the wind. People are going to continue to use their faa.gov and ibm.com addresses for personal mail and nothing I say or do will stop it. But at least I feel better now.