A nice to have rainy day

Last Monday we had a rainy day.

Many of the places that I have lived that would not be a big deal.

When we lived in Nova Scotia, rainy days were pretty common. In fact I can remember a rainy month or two. There were even times when I was in Atlantic Canada that maybe we should invest in an ark.

If you work hard outside, a rainy or even snowy day can be a welcome change in your routine especially if you have been living in the Southeast this year, where rain has been very scarce.

Here along the Southern Outer Banks we have been lucky this summer with enough rain to prevent any problems. Fifteen to twenty miles inland, people have not been that lucky.

Still we haven't had any days that I remember since spring when it rained for a whole day.

I took advantage of the recent wet weather and cleaned out a lot of papers. I will not proclaim that cleaning out papers is a lot of fun, but I will admit that it is something you have to do.

Otherwise you can be overwhelmed with paper. The idea that a paperless office is just around the corner seems to have receded somewhat.

It appears to have died under the weight of paper.  Some of my past when I was a real estate agent  seems to be all paper. From faxes to contracts, I appear to have been swimming in paper.

For a while I tried to get away with using my Macintosh for real estate. My twenty years at Apple left me pretty comfortable with a Mac but unfortunately no company makes a forms generation package for NC real estate so I ended up buying a Windows machine. You have be able to generate all that real estate paper at a moment's notice.

If you think paper has disappeared from the business world, just try buying a house. It will be good for the economy and will convince anyone that we have a long way to go before we can dispense with paper.

In addition to giving me a chance to clean out my papers, the rain has helped to keep my tomato plants going. I did not have any idea that these three plants would last so long and produce so many tomatoes. We will be eating tomatoes from our three plants well into January.

Unless tonight turns out to be very cold, I fully expect to pick my first December tomato tomorrow. Once I have done that I am going to pull up the tomato plants, and watch all the green ones turn red in January.  I doubt there will be much more tomato ripening weather anytime soon so I can get the vines out of here before it becomes cold outside.

New beginnings at Thanksgiving

I am not surprised at how often we hear about life changing decisions at Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving is one of the few times of the year that modern families manage to get together.

With distance often playing a factor, people sometimes use turkey day as an opportunity to bounce ideas off their families.

A good Thanksgiving holiday can be an easy informal atmosphere where people can view new ideas in the positive light of a good holiday meal and some great friendship.

Whether the decision is a new job or moving to a new area, Thanksgiving is not a bad time.

When I first was hired by Apple in Canada, it was just after American Thanksgiving. We had to find a new home in Halifax, Nova Scotia. We actually moved on Christmas day in a blizzard.

It was not an ideal time, but there is no great time to move. We managed to survive by clinging to our holiday traditions and by taking advantage of the holiday friendliness of our new neighbors.

Last year at Thanksgiving, we were having our first holiday on the coast. This year we might having one of our last ones in the mountains, but at this point, we do not know.

We'll go forward one step at a time and keep to our traditions no mater where we live.

I would rather be trying another path during the light of the fall than the darkness of January.

Still time for fishing

Surprisingly the real estate business has been pretty business the last few weeks. Still a fellow has to have his priorities straight.

I have managed to sneak in a little fishing. Tomorrow, I am hoping that it is warm enough to spend a little time focused on it.

That could perhaps be a challenge since according to the weathermen the eastern part of North Carolina is one of the colder places in the country tonight. The cold weather is here a week or so earlier than last year.

The forecast for cold weather got me to build a little tent out of blankets for our tomato plants. I am amazed but we are still getting tomatoes in quantity off of our vines.

The exciting thing is that they are delicious. I figure this is a huge victory for home grown produce. If I can get through the month of November, that will mean that we have enjoyed homegrown tomatoes for five months.

We might see enough of the green ones to get us to January. We got local hot house tomatoes for an additional two and one half months.

Having great tomatoes over seven or maybe even eight months out of the year, means that meal planning is simplified. We can always make something around a tomato.

It is strange to be thinking about tomatoes when Turkey Day is just around the corner.

We lived in Canada for over sixteen years, and the one thing we missed the most was Thanksgiving Day.

While Canadian Thanksgiving is in October, it pales in comparison to American Thanksgiving.

That special Thursday in November starts my favorite time of year. It is a time when we all get together. It is above all a time for family and for renewing connections.

This year will be special for us since our son will be able to come. Last year when I wrote about Thanksgiving in Truly time for turkey, I was saddened by his absence.

With any kind of luck, I'll catch some fish to eat before we have to get serious about turkey next week.

Nice fall evening on the shore

We were checking out some listings to show tomorrow on this first cool day of fall.

The sky was very clear and intensely bright as we drove from Cape Carteret towards Swansboro.

As we pulled into the parking lot behind Clyde Phillips' Seafood, the sun was just getting read to set over Swansboro.

There were a couple of other photographers already in the lot. I thought about telling them there was a rental fee on my trained sea birds, but I let it go as I headed over to my favorite spot on the western most White Oak River bridge.

I never tire of taking pictures from the bridge.

I snapped a few shots of the sun on the water and headed back to the car. I took this shot just as I got back to the car.

There is something about the time just after sunset that clears up a lot of the mistakes and problems of the day. It is one of my favorite times. You can beat the colors that you see then.

Sour Grapes

Our society has changed dramatically this century.

The new church is that of the corporation.

While many will deny their worship of the corporation, you can understand it best in their reaction to those who have been excommunicated from the corporate church.

There are still people at Apple who will not talk to me because the company got rid of me. Even more surprising, Apple people continue to be afraid to either send or receive an email from me. From that you might guess that I committed corporate murder.

Most of these corporate worshipers have little understanding of their new religion. With little questioning, they assume the decisions coming from the CEO, the nominal head of the church, are law that supercedes any law of the land. Their salvation is their job, and they will do almost anything to retain that salvation. They will not question the law.

Before I go farther with this metaphor, I need to make clear how I have worked in a corporate world so the differences between religious fanatics, and those who come to the church to fulfill their own needs can be made clear.

First off I believe in the power of teams, and the right of each individual to have a chance to prove themselves in an environment designed to further the goals of the corporation with maximum efficiency. I believe that each member of the team will in their own self interest drive the performance of others in the team if the compensation plans are constructed properly.

I do not believe in mixing friends and business. While some people whom I have hired have become friends, I have never hired anyone because they are a friend.

Individuals in my ideal corporate world need to be empowered to do everything needed to achieve the goals of their corporation while living within the framework of the corporate environment and not violating the outside world's ethical standards.

Those are lofty goals and only work when a manager can become a leader and is willing to take the flack for his team so that they can get their jobs done.

It has been my experience that corporations know what they want done, they just don't know how to go about it, and often they are willing to trust their fate to people who talk a good story, but really don't know what they are doing.

As a salesperson, and a sales manager my job at Apple was to sell computers. Most of my career it was to sell computers to the enterprise for a company that openly claimed to not be interested in the enterprise.

I was very successful in my nearly twenty years at Apple. I captured both manager of the year and account executive of the year in my career. I finished second in the world once. My wall full of sales awards includes numerous national and regional awards. The record shows that I and my teams over achieved quota for all but a few years in the twenty years I was there. Every single performance review that I have is a glowing one. There are no negative ones.

In my last role at Apple, I was director of federal sales. I worked my way into that job through almost unbelievable odds. I was given a defunct part of Apple's business the US federal government, one rep for each coast, one system engineer, and my area associate. It was expected that we would fail. The federal revenue for Apple had been dropping precipitously for seven consecutive years.

The thing is that we didn't fail, in our first year we grew our business over 60% at time when Apple continued to loose market share, and other enterprise teams were falling flat on their face. We got a few more resources the next year, and again grew the business over 60%. We were the darling of Apple, invited to present to other teams on how we created success in the middle of failure with so few resources.

Just as we were hitting our stride, a whole new team of managers were brought into Apple to fix the field sales team. My manager who before the coup had sixty people reporting to him ended up with me and my small team as his only reports.

All of the managers brought in came from Adobe and all were under forty years of age. None of them had experience selling hardware, and few even knew one end of a Mac from another.

The Vice President who took the helm even shared with us that he had been brought in to fire the Apple field sales team and fix the sales process.

After a year of trying hard to be helpful to the new people, my manager left after he got put in a job with no reports. He was one of the most successful enterprise sales people in the history of Apple.

In the space of the two years after my manager's departure, I got to report to four different managers, none of which had ever worked for Apple or even used a Mac.

One of those managers was apparently given the job of driving me out of the company. My team of very successful veteran sales and engineering people who had grown to twenty by this time were treated like new sales reps just in off the street.

They were assigned quotas which even sixty percent growth couldn't achieve. I was not allowed to speak in forecast meetings and was even told at the national sales conference that my team was going to publicly spanked and taken behind the woodshed for a whipping.

In a year when Apple couldn't ship G5 desktops in Q4 we were awarded the Plunger award for not shipping G5s in Q4.

The gory details aren't worth repeating except that I stood up and complained about the unfair treatment of my people who during that year did not receive correct commissions for over nine months.

The manager that took us to the woodshed left in January of that year. I got another manager in March. In June during an operations review, he complained that our growth of over 60% was falling short of our over 70% quota growth. I was asked to prepare a recovery plan.

The morning I was told to present the recovery plan, I was called and told the presentation would be in a hotel instead of our office. When I showed up at the hotel for the presentation, there was an HR person present, and I was placed on leave so an investigation could be conducted into my conduct.

Of course anytime something like this happens, you know you are already toast. Even as someone over fifty being fired while doing a great job, there was little I could do, so I headed off to a new non-corporate world.

Doing it the way Apple did it, cost me most of my retirement options which had been given to me but had not vested, but that is the high tech gamble and at this point water under the bridge.

The real sadness comes from the dismantling of a very successful team. One by one my managers were forced out. All the sales people but one are now gone from federal sales. They have all been replaced by ex-Oracle sales people.

How they are doing, I don't know and really don't care. I haven't seen any huge federal successes for Apple but perhaps they're keeping them secret.

This story isn't an unusual one in corporate America. It demonstrates who you know is more important than how well you do your job. You could write plenty on those who tacitly help get rid of people who are successful only so they can look successful. It is not worth the time.

Corporations are full of those types of people who unfortunately will do whatever is asked to keep their job or make more a little more money. They have to live with themselves so that is probably punishment enough.

The corporate church thrives on cronyism, money, and the willingness to say whatever upper management wants to hear and ignore any other values that might have been learned in life.

While truth is valued outside the corporation, saying the right thing and having the ear of the top dog is the most important thing in a corporation.

I certainly do not regret leaving Apple. I was lucky to have survived with my values intact. My career at Apple confirmed to me that I am the type of person that I knew I was.

One manager once told me that I was too much of a Boy Scout, and he could never count on me to lie when I needed to. I'm actually proud of that.

Having survived Apple, I feel much greater reverence for the "Honor, truth, duty" motto from my military high school and the "Veritas" that adorns my college diploma.

I escaped the corporate church with soul, and I continue to sleep well after a hard day's work.

So if that is sour grapes, then they actually taste pretty sweet to me.

Why we congregate

This weekend the town of Swansboro, NC had their Mullet Festival.

It is one of those events where people from the area and some from the outside the area get together. In Swansboro's case, the festival is held on the waterfront along the shores of the White Oak River.

We come together for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that we enjoy the stimulation of other people. In a world where we are increasing isolated, there is some comfort in being in a friendly crowd of people having fun.

We enjoy seeing other people, browsing craft booths, eating fair food, and listening to music. People have been doing this for thousands of years in one form or another.

During the Mullet Festival we got to listen to Jackie Gore, the father of beach music. While it made working our real estate booth a little challenging, it still was a treat.

Getting together in a group like we did at the Mullet Festival reinforces the thought that we are not alone, and that there are other people out there interested in what interests us.

Sometimes being in that group can show us behavior that is acceptable in our communities. New ideas get to spread. New products are shown, and people get to renew their ties to the community. Seeing people they may not see on a regular basis lets us a backup safety net.

A festival is a healthy event for a society. Going to a festival on a Saturday afternoon is far better than sitting at home watching a football game.

Our time at the festival gives us time to size up our neighbors, our friends, and even our enemies in an environment where behavior is relaxed. It is far easier because people are making an effort to be friendly.

It is good for everyone that we have a healthy dose of festivals here in Coastal NC. There pictures of many area festivals, pig pickings, and celebrations at my coastal photo archive.

Near perfect weather on the Carolina Coast

Much of this post was written in 2007.  We have been through many spectacular fall since I took the picture in the post.  I even had a remarkably similar wonderful evening on the beach almost seven later.  It inspired me to update what I had written a little.

If you have never been to North Carolina's coast, and you can sneak away right now, you will never regret that decision.

In fact if things are a little rough, and you need to have your cares vanish for a weekend, going to the beach in October might be just the ticket to a different outlook on life.

Since it was impossible to resist, we went for a walk on the beach this evening. The water temperature on the Emerald Isle beaches is still 81 degrees Fahrenheit. The air temperatures over the next few days are predicted to be in the mid-seventies. It doesn't get much better than that.

There are no crowds, the weather is perfect, the seafood plentiful, and the prices for lodging are cheaper. It is the best time of the year on the beach. We have the same pleasant temperatures in the spring, but the water is cold then.

It was so nice on the beach, I had visions of a pitching a tent, but I know the Emerald Isle Police would frown on that.  However, I suspect that I could snag a campsite over on the Bear Island part of nearby Hammocks Beach.

While it seems this be abnormally nice weather, my experience since I wrote the first part of this seven years ago indicates that great fall weather is almost a birth right here on the North Carolina coast. Certainly there is no reason not to enjoy it. This is a great time and place to renew your soul. The beauty and serenity that you can find on an October beach evening here along the Crystal Coast will make a difference in how you see the world.

Here's my quick Emerald Isle Travel Guide to help you plan your vacation. 

Update- If you need more advice try our book,  A Week at the Beach, The Emerald Isle Travel Guide.  It was updated in the summer of 2014 and I am happy to report that seven years after I wrote this post, the fall weather is still great here on the Southern Outer Banks.