Something Might Happen!

I have FohBoh to thank for this, my first foray into blogging. It's a culmination of a few things actually.

I love technology. I grew up with it. My first real computer was a time-sharing system. Dial up? Yes, but the "keyboard and monitor" were a clunky teletype system. On a good day you might even hear me tell some stories about DARPAnet. I've played with mainframes, minicomputers and PC’s starting with DOS 1.0.

I’d giggle inside my head when visiting friends and I saw their VCR’s blinking 12:00. The e-mail and chat I had grown up with was Prodigy and Q-net (the forerunner of AOL). I’m sure you get the idea by now – I’m a baby boomer who’s not afraid of technology. In fact that was my first business hat: Technology.

Enter a new word into my vocabulary: Convergence, in my case media and messaging. No problem, it’s all good. The result for me was a new hat: Internet marketing. I got busy in the dot com industry. Web sites getting eyeballs and luring VC’s to pump money into the business to get more eyeballs. Along with the internet and the dot com industry came web loging. What’s now called blogging.

“Blogging, that’s curious,” I said to myself. My mind made a jump to the song Diary from the pop/rock group Bread that I remembered growing up with. “You don’t put yourself out there like a diary for all to see, something might happen” my thought finished.

Enter hat number three after the dot com bust: people and food. Ah, the restaurant business. No day the same, challenges galore and a gazillion-and-one things to execute well every day. By hat number three my own personal journey moved me from a “data/techie” guy to “people/relationship” guy.

For six years I’ve been a QSR, guy, “grinding it out” everyday. (Yes Ray, I know I’m plagiarizing the title of your book, get over it.) I knew I could make the jump to Casual. I have the tools, the biz-skills, the people skills, and they’re all in my tool box.

But I knew I needed the “secret handshake” of casual if I wanted a job in their world: speak their language! Enter my web search and FohBoh. Equate what I know to the casual dining industry by speaking their “secret code”.

The customer’s experience still starts outside the restaurant and ends at the same place, but now its called sequence-of-service. Check. Front of house and back of house meet at an expo. Cool! I have two expos, apply the principles to the lingo. Is there anything special? Let’s see, another google and…volià! FohBoh.com?!

After surfing to FohBoh I starting reading posts. “Wow! I do know this secret code, and it's not a secret” I concluded. After a while I went from lurking – by joining FohBoh – to replying to a few of the discussions and reading more posts. Leadership is one of my mantras for excellence and I saw two posts in the Leadership Group, “Passion” and “Canes Love”. (Both of which are IMHO inspiring if you haven’t read them check them out.)

Well, I have a new gig and yes, it’s in Casual. I was able to make the jump. You know the routine. They make an offer, you accept, and then HR follows up. Today I received the HR follow up call. “Hi this is Amanda Vroom.” “OMG” I though, “the ‘Passion’ post author!” I let her know I appreciated her post. She did her follow-up and we hung up.

A few hours later I got a call. “Mark you’re on a blog.” “Nah, can't be”, I replied, “that’s the famous artist, not me”. Thankfully I’m about 800,000 hits down in a search. “No, you’re on FohBoh!” Sure enough I was – well really Amanda mentioned me. Oh no! No more anonymity. Arrrg. I knew it....

I knew it. FohBoh's a social-relationship site! Then it hit me, “a ‘diary’ ”, I thought, “something might happen!” That's the point. It did…I'm putting myself out here on FohBoh, and its all good!