Trafcom News

I said, “LET’S HAVE A NICE QUIET DINNER!”

On a recent Friday night, after a hectic week, my partner and I decided to eat out so that we could unwind, reconnect and just share each other’s company (and not cook!). Well, forget about quiet conversation. Three minutes into the evening, we realized that we could not converse at all because the restaurant was so noisy – the 1980s soundtrack, the din of conversation, the plates banging. To communicate at all, we had to shout at each other, which sort of ruined the idea of an evening out. We chalked it up to the nature of the restaurant –  a casual spot filled with 20-somethings and families. And we joked about inventing a headset/mic combo just for diners that would allow people to communicate at the table while blocking out everything else. (That’s what happens when two geeks go out.)

Several weeks later, at our favourite fine-dining restaurant in Oakville, we were fortunate to be tucked into a little table in the corner. Not too far away (it’s a small place), in the centre of the room, three couples held court at a round table. Two of the men were so boisterous that I was almost tempted to ask them to keep it down. (Giving them the evil eye didn’t seem to help). Compounding the problem, everyone else in the restaurant had to crank up the volume on their own conversations so as to talk over Big Mouth and Friend.

My partner and I wondered: Is it just us, or do other people think restaurants are too damned loud? An article in today’s Globe and Mail addresses this very point, going so far as to measure the decibel level in dining establishments in several Canadian cities.

Have you noticed this, too? Do you find restaurants are no longer cozy places to enjoy a quiet meal? With all the dollars spent on  fancy renovations, doesn’t anyone think about acoustics?

Help for Crackberry addicts

The recent Blackberry outage put countless users on edge. Yikes, they were unable to thumb through their email for, like, hours! As a communicator, I like this comical video, “A Cure for Blackberry Addiction,” on MyRaganTV (despite the error on the title screen– “effects” instead of “affects”) because it reflects a sad reality: our inability to unplug.

How to put your priorities straight in three easy steps

1. Spend the weekend with friends you’ve known for almost your whole life.
2. Scare yourself silly by traveling in a Beechcraft prop plane to get there.
3. Reflect on how fortunate you are to be alive.

Heidi's cure for Social Media Stupor Syndrome

What a great post by Heidi Miller, who says: "I've had a terrible case of Social Media Stupor Syndrome, with underlying Microblogging Paralysis. And it's not just me--it's an epidemic..."

Check out Heidi's post to discover the cure.

I hear you, Heidi. To me, there's nothing better this summer than stepping away from the keyboard and getting my hands dirty in the garden, or spending the whole day with a REAL person, not a virtual one!

You can’t undo hearing loss

Over the last week, I’ve taken the GO train (our commuter rail system) into and out of Toronto several times. On each occasion, I saw scores of people listening to MP3 players. Sometimes I even “enjoyed” their music, six seats away. Climbing the stairs from the subway to the packed streets of downtown T.O. at rush hour last night, I looked around and noticed that people were not turning off their MP3 players. The telltale white iPod cords were still snaking up to their ears. How loud do you have to turn up your player to drown out the sounds of the streetscape? VERY LOUD.

Maybe I’m becoming a little old lady, but I refuse to stick my earbuds in if I have to turn up the volume past the halfway point on my iPod nano. At the gym, I click the device off if the ambient noise of runners and weightlifters drowns out the podcast I’m listening to. While on the subway, I read. Walking on Yonge Street, I feel that I need to hear the traffic sounds to be safe. I’d hate to damage my hearing and get run down by an errant taxi at the same time.

I’m really concerned, especially for the 20-somethings who have 50+ years of ear-destroying listening ahead of them. Prediction: The hearing aid biz is going to get really big.

For some tips on saving your hearing, here’s a recent article from Wired. The money quote:

Like boiled lobsters, damaged ears cannot be returned to their previous state.

Your permanent record is indeed online

Last week, a 20-something friend asked for advice. She’d been invited to participate in a group parenting blog, and wanted to know if I thought it was a good idea. I know she loves to write and has her own personal parenting blog. My answer to her was: Go ahead, join in. Just be sure that you never write anything that you wouldn’t want a future employer to read.

I think this is sound advice for everyone. We’re continually seeing evidence that the Internet has become our “permanent record,” or a way for anyone anywhere to find out about what we are doing now, and what we might have done in the past. Last week, I read about a Canadian who was denied access to the United States because he experimented with LSD 30 years earlier. He was never charged with a crime. In fact, he wrote about his drug use in a peer-reviewed journal that appeared online. Apparently border guards are Googling us now.

My friend Dave Traynor pointed to coverage of this Canadian case as well as a young woman in the U.S. who was denied a teaching degree because of her My Space photo.

We’re all publishers now and it seems everything we say can and will be held against us. What do you think? Scary stuff?

MD skewers KFC’s site

I love the way Yoni Freedhoff, a physician specializing in weight loss, skewers KFC’s new Web site, “Bring Back Dinner.”

Family dinners are a good thing; who could argue with that? But what’s on the plate matters as much as the conversation taking place around the table.

Last week, after we heard about the big fat rats frolicking around a fast-food joint in Manhattan, my daughter said to me, “Mom, I’m so glad you didn’t feed me that kind of stuff when I was growing up.” So am I.

The deadbeat parents site

It doesn’t matter that the Ontario government Family Responsibility Office calls its new site Good Parents Pay. I think everyone will refer to it as the Deadbeat Parents site.

Ostensibly, the site is supposed to encourage the public to reveal the whereabouts of neighbours and co-workers who’ve fallen behind on their support payments. Of course it will also serve to embarrass any of these non-paying parents who are capable of embarrassment.

Here’s some unsolicited advice for fertile women in Ontario and elsewhere: don’t hook up with a guy who sports an alias.

Why I won’t give you my cell-phone number

Steve Crescenzo’s side-splittingly funny post about people with Bluetooth headsets glued to their ears reminds me of the huge divide between those who cannot function without mobile phones, and those who treat the little buggers as a necessary evil. I fall into the second camp. The first group craves constant contact. The rest of us like to control our schedules as much as we possibly can. I’m really busy, and if I had to respond to everyone all the time, without a break, I think I’d lose my mind.

Last Friday someone requested a meeting with me at four o’clock. When I told him I wasn’t unavailable at four, he asked for my cell number. HUH? When I say I’m unavailable, what makes him think that I would like to accept his call – when I’m not even in my office?

The only people who have my cell number are my kids, my kids’ schools, and my partner. That’s it. I don’t give it to clients, I don’t include it in my email sig, and it ain’t on my business card.

Here’s why I don’t give out my number:
1. I don’t want to talk to you when I’m driving my car. (As a pedestrian, I’ve almost been run over by cell-phone users at least half a dozen times.)
2. I don’t want to talk to you while I’m inhaling my lunch.
3. If you call me while I’m walking down the street, how do you expect me to answer your questions? I don’t have my calendar, my files or my computer with me. Can’t you wait a few minutes until I return to the office?

Where is it written that we have to be accessible 24/7? After all, I’m not carrying the president’s nuclear launch codes, and I am not waiting for a kidney transplant. I am grateful for both of these facts.

If you ask my clients and colleagues, they’d tell you that I am a responsive person who returns phone calls and emails promptly. What I never want to become is a person who has to have her phone in her ear while she shops for groceries, enjoys a walk on the lakeshore or eats dinner with her kids. No thanks.

What’s YOUR cell-phone policy?

Where the rubber meets the road for a win-win situation – or a lead balloon

The headline above was cobbled together from phrases featured in the Business Jargon Dictionary, a collection of particularly ugly and lame phrases used in business.

You’ll also find such gems as dehire (for fire) and hard stop (I can’t stand this one! Why can’t people say they have to leave at 5, instead of “I have a hard stop at 5”?)

The site is overflowing with ads, but it’s a fun read. And you might actually find it useful for decoding the utterances of certain colleagues or clients.