Hugh Hollowell

Hughism: Most people take a sample of one.

I once knew an older gentleman who had been fairly successful in real estate. He had bought apartment buildings over the years, leveraged them well, used the rents to pay down the mortgage and now had a large income stream every month that surpassed his needs by a considerable amount.

The excess he put in a safe in his office until he had enough for his next down payment. I am not kidding. He put it in his safe. At any given time, he might have had $25-30,000 in the safe. Earning NO interest whatsoever.

I recommended he put the excess cash in laddered CD’s so he could have the safety of the bank plus relative liquidity. He said no.

Why?

It seems his father had his life savings in bank CD’s and lost everything…in 1933. Thus, this guy had told himself that because of this experience, he was never going to trust a bank with his cash.

Never mind FDIC insurance, never mind the Great Depression. None of that mattered to him.

Based on a sample of exactly one.

While this is admittedly an extreme example, the same thing happens all the time.

A customer comes in your store and writes a check for $12; it bounces. The bank charges you $10 for the trouble and worst case, you never see this guy again. Thus, you put up a sign saying NO CHECKS and offend other customers and lose sales. Over $22.

A teenager comes into your shop and slips a candy bar in his knapsack; you see him as he runs away. Now you have instituted a NO knapsack policy, requiring customers to check their bags at the door. Over a candy bar.

I sell a lot on eBay. In any given year, some 40-70% of my income comes from eBay. I have performed thousands of transactions over the years. I have been stiffed by customers maybe 4 times, for a total loss of less than $50. All the fees of which I have been reimbursed by eBay when I filed non-payer bidder. So I am out zero cash, right?

This is why I laugh when I see warnings like this in an auction listing.

You MUST pay me within 5 days or I will leave you negative feedback. These prices are NOT negotiable, do not ask. I only take PayPal, so don’t ask for anything else. I ship every Tuesday and Thursday, so pay quick to get in the next shipment. If you don’t want to pay extra for the insurance then I am not responsible if your item gets lost in the mail. Thanks for looking and Good Luck Bidding!

When you read this, do you feel like the seller is hoping you have a great experience? I don’t. I think the seller is convinced I am a thief who is going to try to wheedle them down on price and then make a false insurance claim. Then they tell me “Good Luck Bidding!” More like, Good Luck Buying.

More than likely, this seller once had a check from a customer bounce, so they went to a NO CHECK policy. Then they heard that their friend Joe had heard about a fake money order someone on eBay got ripped off with, so now NO money orders either. Now they only take PayPal, leaving huge amounts of money on the table and scaring potential bidders off.

The sample of one. Most people make decisions based upon it.

It is why customers do not come back.

It is why bad decisions get made.

Can you think of any more examples where bad decisions are made based on radically insufficient data?

I suppose we have all had the experience of a door irrevocably closing, such as…

• An old lover marries
• Someone you love dies before you tell them how you feel
• The restaurant you carried your first date to closes
• They tear down the house you grew up in

Yesterday, a door closed for me. In all honesty, it was already closed but I did not have to face it until yesterday. And I was the one who pushed it shut.

I hate that sound.

…to say thanks for all the votes of support and confidence you have all sent me. I am fine, just working my tail off on quite a few projects. I have some big announcements coming up, so stay tuned.

See all ya’ll later in the week.

I am an email addict.

I belong to a ton of industry forums, several Memphis area mailing lists and have all the usual business email, orders, and so on. In all, I have some 100-200 emails in my inbox, every day.

The one thing that strikes me is how many of them are simply… unreadable.

Here, in no particular order, are things people do in email that drive me frickin’ nuts.

• No capitalization (you are NOT e e cummings)
• No subject and verb (That is what MAKES it a sentence)
• No punctuation or improper punctuation.
• Lack of subject and verb agreement.
• Misuse of There and Their and Insure and Ensure.
• Use shorthand. Is your life so incredibly busy that you can not spare the 3 seconds to write “See you later” rather than “c u ltr!” ?
• No paragraphs.
• No spell check.
• Forwarding me pictures of Jesus with a note telling me if I am not ashamed of Jesus I will send this to 5 -10 friends or to my whole inbox.
• Subject lines like : Question or Let me ask you or What do you think? (Maybe you could elucidate what the subject matter is?)
• Using one sentence where three or more are preferable.
• Using three sentences where one would be better.

Update: Using ALL UPPERCASE LETTERS!

I could go on, but it fascinates me that people who graduated high school (and many have degrees) can not turn out a readable paragraph.

When the urge strikes me, I write short stories. Mostly they are drawn from my life and events I have witnessed; however, they may be slightly embellished and the names changed to protect the guilty.

********

Our preacher was from the old school; he believed in hard preaching, potluck dinners and the Democratic Party. However, lately there had been some grumbling from the congregation about Brother Gene, with some hinting he was out of date, and the Sunday attendance (and worse, the Sunday offering) was beginning to suffer.

Being a good Methodist, he was a subscriber to The Advocate, the house organ put out by the Mississippi Conference of the United Methodist Church, and one day, he saw an ad for an upcoming conference that would put the sizzle back in your sermons, or so the ad said, anyway.

He was gone over the 5^th Sunday that month, leaving us in the hands of a young Seminarian from Emory University. The story of that weekend is one I am not yet ready to tell as some key players in that story are still alive and are given to litigation – it not costing them anything since their oldest child is an Old Miss Lawyer.

Anyway, Brother Gene came back from the conference all recommitted and glowing with piety and Vitalis. That next Sunday he was just waving his arms and almost vibrating with the power of the Holy Ghost and whatnot, going so far as to introduce some new songs (I hesitate to call them hymns, as by definition you can not clap along to a hymn) that were definitely not in the approved Cokesbury Hynmal.

That Sunday, after the hand-clapping music and the new liturgical dancers that he brought in, he called the children up for the children’s sermon, which in our church took place a few minutes after the offering hymn and before the main sermon, where the preacher would call the children up to the front of the church and gave a mini-sermon, relating to the main sermon, but somewhat more simplified.

The scripture reading for the day was from the Gospel according to Mathew, the beautiful story of the first miracle performed by Jesus, namely being the turning of water into wine at the wedding in Canna. The children all gathered around his feet as he sat on a chair kept in the closet off the stage for just that purpose.

As he told them about the turning of the water into wine, he illustrated it (the conference had emphasized the use of visual aids) with 2 pitchers, one clear (showing it to be half full of water) and one made of yellow ceramic.

He held the clear one (with the water) in his right hand and poured the water into the yellow pitcher in his left, while telling how the porters in Jesus’ time had poured the water into the jugs, then he told how they had poured it into a glass (he then poured the yellow pitcher back into the clear one) . . .

“How in the hell did he do that?” one old farmer exclaimed from the back of the room.

Apparently, the yellow pitcher had some Kool-Aid placed in the bottom of it, for when the water was poured back into the yellow jug it had turned bright red, thus drawing oohs and ahhhs from the children and the expletive exclamation from the previously mentioned farmer.

“Just how in the hell did he do that?” the farmer repeated, now on his feet and scratching his head.

One of the children, his back to the congregation, turned his head over his shoulder, rolled his eyes at the idiocy of the question, and said “It’s a miracle”.

A story I learned a long time ago that has influenced my life heavily.

Once upon a time there was a king who had a pet donkey. This donkey was his pride and joy and the donkey followed him everywhere.

Now, this king had a trusted adviser who had failed him. In fact, the crime the adviser was so serious, that the king had sentenced him to death. After the adviser received the sentence, he bowed his head and then a thought popped into his head. Raising his head, he said to the king:

“Oh Sire. You are wise beyond words and I accept your decision. It is a pity, however. I have only recently learned the secret of how to teach Donkeys to talk. Had I but 12 more months, yon Ass could speak as plainly as you or I.”

The king said “I do not believe you, but I have nothing to lose. You have 12 months to live in the castle and teach in the stable. At the end of that 12 months, if the Ass can talk, you will go free and additionally, I will reward you beyond measure. If, however, as I suspect, the donkey cannot talk, then you will die the most horrible, most prolonged death I can imagine.”

The man was set free. When he arrived home and told his wife, she called him a fool.

She said, “You had the chance to die quickly and painlessly; now you will die a horrible death and bring shame to us all”.

The adviser said, “Nonsense! I bought 12 months of freedom. Much can happen in a year. The king might die. The Donkey might die. I might die. Or… the Ass might talk!”.

Imagine I own a house on the beach.

It is a nice house, with a beautiful beach view and wide screened in porch just perfect for late night conversations. It is a large house; I have a trusted staff that runs it for me in my absence. I have left detailed instructions on how I want the house run and further, I showed the staff by example when I built it exactly what I wanted done. I said “do this” and “do it like that”.

Being as it is a very nice house, you want to stay there when you go to the beach. I tell you no problem, my house is your house. I further explain I am not there right now to run it but James my Butler is and he will take care of everything.

You move in and all goes well… at first. And then one day you find you are missing $20 from your purse. You are convinced James took it while you were out body surfing.

The next day, James tries to grab your butt while you are walking down the hall and you have noticed he is eyeing your 13 year old daughter a bit too much when she is swimming on the beach.

James has now made your life at the beach not fun, but a bad dream. You feel like you cannot stay there and while you know instinctively that I would never have knowingly put you into this position, you can not help but be a little mad at me for not knowing James was a bad guy.

So you leave. And you do not just leave, but you tell everyone up and down the Beach that whatever you do, do not stay in my house, because James is a rotter. Over time, though, the message gets distorted. It is no longer James that is bad, but the story now is it is the house that has problems even though I fired James quickly. Over many retellings, It is not James that is the bad guy but me, the owner of the house.

Maybe James did not start off as a bad guy. Maybe he was just a bit bent and when he suddenly was in a position of power it went to his head. Perhaps he just could not handle the responsibility. Either way it really does not matter. James has hurt both the reputation of my house and me and because of him, many, many people will be afraid of me and my house and will never know the comfort and joy of staying there.

Now what do I do?

Just a note to let all of you know I survived my whirlwind trip… I literally stepped off the bus about 2 hours ago. After I catch my breath and wade through the backlog that is my inbox, I will tell you all about it. Until then, be well.