ocracokewaves

The Early Years

Me at my Aunt Mollie’s House in Yadkin County

Sometimes I think my life is a little like a Rubik’s Cube puzzle which I have been trying to solve for as long as I can remember. There are times when the puzzle pieces have been close to alignment. Other times, especially in the early day, the puzzle has almost felt like it was broken. Throughout the journey, there have been lessons learned, some opportunities seized, and more than a few missed.
Some of my first memories are of the home in Yadkin County where my mother and I lived until I was three years old. For some reason, never explained to me, my mother and father chose not to marry so mother and I lived in a home that my father and mother had helped my Aunt Mollie and Uncle Austin build. It was a cozy red brick two-story home set on a plot of land in the middle of corn fields at a cross roads that came to be known for the junk my Uncle Austin collected.
That I was well protected in my early years is safe to say. In a sense I had three older sisters, daughters of Aunt Molly, who watched over me when they were not driving school buses or chasing boys.
One of the earliest things that I can remember is taking apart a door lock in that home. I cannot say whether or not I got in trouble, but I distinctly remember the pieces of the lock in my hands.
While I did not grow up to be a locksmith, I am proud that I learn how to use a wide range tools including a welder and an acetylene torch. The ability to work with my hands has served me well, and I suspect there is some significance in finding tools in my hands while living with my Uncle Austin who was a genius with his hands. He was one of those men who could build something out of nothing. A junkyard was like a shopping center for him.
Finding that kind self reliance in Yadkin County, North Carolina just a couple of miles from where my mother grew up on a small mill pond comes as no surprise. The rural south of the fifties was a place where making something yourself replaced many of the things for which there was no money even if you could find it. Sears Roebuck was as good as it got.
It was a place where people milked cows, had chickens, and grew huge vegetable gardens. The produce from the gardens was canned and frozen in staggering quantities. Each fall when the weather cooled, hogs were killed, sausage was made, and hams were sugar cured for later use.
While Yadkin County was a protective cocoon for me, it had been a straight jacket for my mother, Blanche. Her mother died when she was eight, and as the eldest daughter she was cooking for the family well before she could even lift a heavy frying pan.
She attended the one room school within walking distance of the mill pond where they lived, but she never graduated. After her father remarried, there were sparks between her and the step mother who quickly became afraid to tangle with my mother, Blanche.
Blanche, who was destined to be the matriarch of our family, left home in her teens and went to live in Mount Airy over twenty rutted miles away.
In a certain sense it was my mother’s determination that pulled the whole family out of the red clay of Yadkin County. She brought clothes, toys, and whatever was needed from the big city of Mount Airy to her sister’s family who managed to live near the location of the old mill pond their whole lives.
That rural North Carolina of my youth was a place where Sunday afternoons in the summer were spent under shade trees eating homemade ice cream, peach when it was in season, and watermelon.
Even after we moved to Styers St. in Lewisville just across the Yadkin River, we came back to my Aunt Mollie’s almost every Sunday. In a way it became the home place, because the real home place on the mill pond had burned down many years earlier. Walter, my grandfather and a miller, had moved away from the mill pond and started a small dairy on the main road when he remarried.
While I was an only child, my Aunt Mollie had six children including one daughter Sue, who was as close to a me as a real sister could be. I was only a year older than her. Sunday under the shade trees was a time when we kids ran and played in the yard. Family news was passed from one to another, and I am sure more than a few problems were discussed by the adults.
It was a time when children were sheltered. When someone became pregnant, code words came out. She was labeled PG, but as children often do, we figured it out. I can only remember a couple of exciting Sunday afternoons. One Sunday a pressure cooker that was being used improperly exploded and sent its lid through the ceiling of the kitchen and left beans everywhere. I also remember my Aunt Mollie cutting the head off a chicken and the headless chicken running around the yard. I guess we were easily entertained.
In those days, there was no television to watch. The teenagers listened to records, and the rest of us played games outside.
Our move to Lewisville was a move of independence. Blanche, my mother, was determined to raise me as a single mother. Our home in the village of Lewisville contained a small beauty shop where she worked long hours to support us. My father, John, a furniture manufacturer, would visit once in a while on Saturdays, but it was years before I figured out that he was my real father.
Lewisville was a great place to be a kid in the fifties. We had a general store that was within walking distance. It had a cooler of small sodas that were ten cents each when we moved. I think it was my first experience with inflation. Living in the country we had been next to RK Brown’s General Store where sodas were only a nickel.
The great attraction of Lewisville for me happened to be the fields and woods that bordered our home. It was a wonderful playground for a youngster. We built forts in the fields, dammed small streams, and became experts with BB guns and eventually pellet guns. There were some fishing ponds within biking distance, and even church and school were within walking distance.
At a very early age I became a fisherman for life. Maybe it was that first catfish my Uncle Henry put on my line when I was barely able to hold a rod. I managed to make fishing a big part of my youth. It was a good life with backyard football seamlessly becoming backyard baseball as the seasons turned. In the summers we played until dark and then wandered home. No one seemed to worry about us even when we were running behind the mosquito spray truck on our oiled dirt road.

Still Using Macs

Years ago the kind of computer you used could stir some serious passions. The world was in two camps DOS/Windows and Macintosh. There were people who were afraid of the Macintosh and the ease of use that it represented. Computers were supposed to be difficult. Taking away the hard work meant that anyone could do it, not just those who had invested years in learning how to make computers work for them. In the early days, people believed that knowing what to do with a DOS command prompt made them superior.

Apple lost the hardware desktop war for a myriad of reasons which are beyond the scope of my article. Even the resounding success of the iPhone did not matter a lot. Only 41% of iPhone users also use Mac. A lot more use iPads but that is a different story. While DOS users did not all end up on Macs, Microsoft to its credit came banging on Windows until on the surface it looks enough like a Mac that there are no longer religious wars about computer operating systems. The Mac user interface one, even if the plumbing under the Windows version is a lot more complicated.

The difference between a Mac and Windows machine is still huge but it is not something that you can explain in a sentence. Unfortunately, most people have decided Windows is good enough for them. However, among those of us who still really need desktops to churn out serious work, the Mac enjoys a serious and dedicated following.

While I did work for Apple for nearly twenty years selling Mac in some of the toughest markets, anyone who has read some of my writing or my book about my Apple sales career, The Pomme Company, would agree that at times I have been one of their toughest critics. I like to think that I have seen far more Macs than the average person and just maybe I have a better idea of where Apple needs to apply resources to make the Mac experience even better.

I am still not particularly excited about Apple, the company. While they arguably have some of the best computers, their products are marketed as elite products with only those living close to Apple Stores really getting the kind of support that users sometimes need and certainly pay for in Apple’s case.

There is a case to be made that We Are Lucky to Still Have Macs, because Mac revenue is dwarfed by other parts of the company. It’s not the Mac’s fault that they are not on more desks. It has a lot to do with Apple, the company, and the decisions made over the years to not grow their share of the desktop. At times it was like, we have a great product but we really need to keep it a secret. We don’t want it to sell in the enterprise because Steve would be unhappy.

I hesitate to call it poorly-conceived marketing that focuses on just one part of the country but that is close to the truth. If you are near a blue-voting metropolitan area, you likely have an Apple Store close enough by to be practical. If like me you have lived near Roanoke, Virginia, the North Carolina coast, or west of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, you likely have rarely seen the inside of an Apple Store except on visits to the big city. I hate to think the kind of support people in the fly-over states get.

I have suggested Apple hire Apple user group coordinators across the country where it does not make sense to have a store, but given that Apple would have to part company with some of its pile of money to make that happen, I think the chances are close to nil. The money would hardly register a blip on Apple’s horde of cash, but I am not going to worry around it very much because those of us who have been using Macs for years know how to get by the challenges that Apple throws in front of its non-metropolitan users.

About the only place that I get to see Macs is in our local Costco twenty-five minutes away. Unfortunately choices there are usually limited to lower-end configurations with minimal storage or RAM options. Either one of those limitations would keep me from buying there since Apple like other manufacturers has been on the no-upgrade path for years. While I call myself a rural user because there is a twenty-acre soybean field across from our subdivision and lots of other farming nearby, there is a two GB fiber connection to our house which my Mac Studio could handle if Calix could deliver a router with 2GB output ports. There is no shortage of computers and technology in the house. I even have a 12 TB Network Attached Storage device (NAS) next to my desk. My home office is better equipped than the Reston, Virginia, Apple office I had when I was director of federal sales for the company.

It is fair question as to why I am still using Macs. Would you still drive a Ford if Ford threw you out the window after 20 years? Apple defenestrated me in July 2004. I bought an aluminum PowerBook G4 the next month- it died thirteen months later. Fortunately, I also bought a Dual G5 tower that December. It lasted from December 2004 until January 2023, an admirable run for any computer. I started using Linux in 2004 when I also started using Windows.

I have seen plenty of Windows computers over the years and my dalliance with real estate means that I ended up using a Windows machine for most of that job. I still use Windows because my current job requires the use of ArcGIS Pro and it will only run on Windows. For a good ten years, I did most of my photo work almost exclusively on Windows. It is only in the last six months that I have switched back to the Mac for my photo work. Apple finally decided to no longer tie your data to a single Mac and I got tired of Lightroom on Windows being unable to figure out two monitors being used at once, Windows has also become something of a pest. It wants Teams to launch anytime it isn’t running and it is also quick to try to get me to do something I have no interest in doing. The first rule of operating systems is to not get in the way of the user. Windows has never done that and certainly does not do that in its most recent incarnation.

Besides photos, I maintain a number of websites. I got used to Mac web tools at the dawn of the Internet. They have continued to mature and get better. They kept me using a Mac when I was doing most of my work on Windows

I have been using Microsoft Excel since it was Multiplan. That means I have a lot of years with it and it is still but default spreadsheet but I have grown to appreciate what you can do with Apple’s Numbers. Most of my books have been written in MS Word, but the number of pages composed and complexity pale in comparison to the reports that I have done with Pages in the last twelve years.

Perhaps the straw that broke any loyalty that I had to Word is Word’s propensity to screw up its own mail merge documents. It is tremendously frustrating and time-consuming to have to go looking for dropped addresses in a list of one hundred twenty addresses. I have wasted a lot of time recovering from those Word errors. While Apple’s Pages does not do mail merge address labels, LibreOffice which runs on the Mac does them flawlessly without dropping any. Apple’s Pages is a pretty good page layout program.

I recently wrote an article, The Best Mac Ever. In it I declare the reason the Mac Studio Pro is the best Mac ever because it just works. I doubt anyone is going to switch to a Mac because of this article or my experiences. However, remember the Mac has to be a pretty dang good computer for someone like me to keep using it.

I don’t remember serious computer user switching over to the Mac ever going make to Windows. The only thing that is better on Windows is search. If you are like me, you probably have a Windows machine doing little or nothing that can run a search for you while you keep working on your Mac.

Mini-Monopolies Are Not Your Friend

Our rural area in Davie County, NC- Rural with 2 Gig fiber

I have made my living in the broadband world for over twelve years. I spend the time at my day job analyzing broadband in counties across the United States.

While there are publications that would disagree, I can confidently say that most of you might at best have a choice between two providers. Sometimes it is between an expensive provider and a lousy provider, one with high costs and terrible customer service and the other with dead slow or unreliable service.

All this results from the broadband world being cut up into little fiefdoms. Competition to broadband providers is “I am going to lock up this subdivision before you have a chance to wire it.”

Competition in the broadband world is rarely here are three services competing for my business, I will pick the one that best suits my needs.

Many of us for years have believed that community-run, open-access fiber fixes this problem. The challenge is that sixteen states won’t let communities run networks. I have used the road analogy many times. We don’t build different roads for UPS, FEDEX and Amazon Prime. We build one road they all share it.

In broadband each provider builds their own network. They like to do that because it locks the customers into them. If we built fiber once, there is plenty for them to share but what mini-monopolist wants to share customers.

If Amazon Prime had to build their own roads, it would be a more expensive proposition than today’s sharing of roads.

Our company has built open-access networks across the country. Some have been running successfully for over a decade. They all have multiple providers competing for customers.

The problem is that now the federal government is throwing bucketloads of money around. Many local governments who are tired of being beat up by their citizens over broadband just want broadband to go away. They know they need a network but they don’t want to go through the difficult process of figuring out how to come up with a long-term solution that fixes both availability and competitive pricing.

They opt for what I call the “Westshore Homes Model.” I came up with the name from the home remodeling outfit that promises your bathroom remodel will be easy and done in a day.

A current Internet Service Provider hears the city/county wants a network. They show up, “We will build you a network, and you don’t have to worry about the details. Just trust us.”

The government jumps into bed or perhaps better out of the frying pan into the fire with the Internet Service Provider (ISP). The ISP applies for funding with their new government partner. They get money and build another leg of their mini-monopoly. The only problem, you and I are financing their profits.

Sometimes you run across a situation where there is competition and government money has helped foster that competition. I live in one of those places.

A situation like mine where I have a choice between telephone coop built fiber, cable and other technologies while living in a very rural setting is not what I usually see in my studies.

While I work for a fiber company, I have nothing against cable companies. In the absence of a lot of open-access networks, cable competing against fiber is what keeps pricing competitive.

In areas where there is only cable or only fiber, you run the risk of someone taking advantage of the situation. Having both around usually fixes that.

I will make one prediction. In ten years, someone is going to ask why did we spend so much government money creating mini-monopolies to carve up the world?

The government is helping Big Telecom squeeze out city-run broadband is a great article from the Verge that tells the broadband story better than I can. It is a good education on the problem.

Below you see that same rural area with fiber to the home (FTTH).

Below the first map are state maps showing broadband availability.

All in on Cattle

Our red Angus bull, Yellowstone, with a small part of the herd- 1981

My first cattle were purchased in the summer of 1973, when we were living in the two-hundred year old post and beam house along the Bay of Fundy in the village of St. Croix Cove. I laugh when I tell the story that our cattle got mixed up with a dairy farmer’s herd and I barely knew enough to separate the two herds.

It did not take much farming on the North Mountain of the Annapolis Valley to figure out that there had to be better places to make hay than a slope that was often covered with fog during the haying season.

I was looking for a new place to farm when I met my wife, Glenda, on a blind date while visiting my mother back in North Carolina. I guess the theory was that a beautiful North Carolina girl would keep me in North Carolina. It did not work and the beautiful North Carolina lady headed off to Canada where we even explored Newfoundland as option for our next farm.

Finally, in the summer of 1974, one year after we got married, we found our farm. It was in the rolling hardwood hills north of New Brunswick’s provincial capital, Fredericton. It was a good place to make hay with much warmer summers than Nova Scotia. It also had winter weather that tended towards snow instead of rain, snow, rain, snow, and finally freezing rain which was typical of the Nova Scotia coast.

When we moved, we sold our first cattle and started fresh. We probably had a couple dozen in the herd that first winter. I was still learning and I got talked into tying the mature females in the barn that first winter. It was the first and last time that we would do that. After a trip to Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta to buy some better brood stock, I was convinced the cattle would be better in the woods than a damp barn. For the next eight years we ran our cattle outside in the winter. For the last few years, we calved an average of sixty cows per year.

The important statistic is that we never had a vet on the farm for a calving problem or a sick calf. We were heavily mechanized using a round baler to put up 300 t0 400 large round bales per year.

The large framed Angus and big bulls that we imported from the west turned out to be pretty popular. We had a good spring trade of selling performance tested yearly bulls. Our cull bulls were sold for beef at twelve months of age.

As we had got several daughters from our original feedstock, we started selling them for breeding stock and replacing them with their daughters. It was a lot of work and lots of promotional work. Yellowstone, our giant red Angus bull from Montana was a show stopper for most people.

In the fall of 1982, we dispersed our herd. Interest rates had risen to 20% and according to the Provincial farm board, we were too successful to qualify for a government-backed two percent loan. I always thought it was because I was a young American with too many new ideas for them to swallow.

In 1974, when I started farming in New Brunswick, I was one of a handful of farmers using round bales to put up their hay. The Provincial Agriculture people told me round would never work in New Brunswick’s climate.

Unfortunately the statistics were on my side. I fed two hundred head of cattle with them for over eight years. I was also told that running the cattle outside would never work. We built two large barns designed around the theory that a cow could have its calf outside in the snow and spend a night or two in a barn before the cow and calf went back outside. Yearlings had a large pole barn to run into during bad weather. We never lost a calf to a cow calving in the snow.

When I went back to New Brunswick forty years later, I found my two barns still standing, almost everyone using round balers, and very few cattle farmers. I guess that shows how effective agricultural experts can be in destroying cattle farming when they put their minds to it.

There have been lots of things that pushed farmers out of beef cattle but having clueless agricultural experts certainly didn’t help. I have often wondered if would still be farming if I had gotten the two precent provincially-backed loan.

My son and I walking through the herd during the summer of 1981

The Heat of Summer

***Our former home just off the White Oak River, near Swansboro, NC***

Some of you who aren’t used to heat will likely get a taste of it this summer. From 2006, until 2021, we lived on the North Carolina coast where heat is part of the life. Our house and large yard are pictured. Except for the last three years, I did all the mowing and trimming. Until like many grasses, the centipede we had thrives eat and can come close to needing to be mowed more than once a week. Any Bermuda grass absolutely needs more than weekly mowing. We had a nice patch of Bermuda in the middle of our yard.
Fortunately, heat has been part of my life for many years. There are few things we learned to do before we had air conditioning. Also the way we work has changed a little since the proliferation of heat pumps.
I grew in the South in the fifties. We did not get our first single room air conditioner until I was about ten years old. It cooled our living room and kitchen and that was about it. Still it was a miracle because it gave you a cool oasis where you could seek refuge on the hottest days. My bedroom was too far away to get any benefit so on really hot nights I would sneak into the living room and sleep on the sofa.
Heat was part of your life back then, shade trees were to be treasured and the deep dark woods were our friends during the day in summer. At night it was cool enough to play capture the flag in our yards.
The first thing you learn about heat when you grow up is that for outside work, you have to work early or late and find something else to do from noon to four or five pm.
When we moved back from Nova Scotia to the states in the late eighties, we spent our first two years in Maryland. I didn’t work outside much but I wore a suit everyday. It was a dash from the air-conditioned car to a similarly air-conditioned building. I could hardly wait to get home and switch to shorts.
By the time we got to our mountainside in SW Virginia, I was used to heat and I went back to mowing our yard. Seventeen years in Virginia was not enough serious heat training for our move to coastal North Carolina.
We lived on a coastal river in Carteret County which is mostly water. Heat did not come early to Carteret County because it took a while for all the water to warm up. When the real heat arrived in late June or July, it was serious heat. I did a lot of boating, hiking, and kayaking and I learned never to be far from a bottle of water. Sometimes I would freeze a bottle and carry in my kayaking tackle pack. It was a lifesaver a number of times.
The biggest challenge was mowing a big yard like ours in the heat. The best planned days sometimes get offtrack, and you end up mowing when you should be cooling in the air conditioning. There are things I learned in coastal North Carolina that are of value anywhere you have to face heat.
Our garage which had a good cross breeze when the back door was open was what I called a transition zone. It is never a good idea to charge out from a chilled house directly into 85F heat and start pushing a lawn mower. I alway puttered around in the garage until my body started getting accustomed to the heat. Then I would put my straw hat on and start mowing. You are always better pacing yourself than racing with yourself. When I felt myself getting really hot – the kind of hot that sends the message – “Well you’ve done it, this is nearly as hot as your body can get without shutting down,” I would head back to our porch or garage and request some ice water. I would always drink my water outside in the shade or in the garage but not in the sunshine. Real heat means that you have sweated so much your clothes are damp if not wet. Going inside and getting chilled in air conditions just makes it harder to finish your job.
Once you’re done, you cool off outside in shade but still in the heat. When you’re not longer about to incinerate, head inside to the shower.
On the NC coast the water lines are so shallow that in the summer, cold water is pretty warm. I could tell it was the peak of summer when I could shower without any hot water.
They say take off clothes to stay cool, but on the Carolina coast, our uniform ten months out of the year was shorts and t-shirts. I wore shorts mowing but pulled on some leg protectors when I switched over to weed eating.
There were times in early summer when I would take a quick shower, switch to bathing suit and head to pool. Until mid-July the pool water would be cool enough in the mornings to feel good.
By the end of July or early August, the outdoor swimming pools offered no cooling and were often empty. I have even heard of people dumping bags of ice in a pool in an attempt to cool it. I always figured it would take a chunk of an iceberg to really make a difference.
Most of the summer, you could count on the ocean retaining its cooling power. I used to joke that the one sure way to get the heat to drain out of your body was to head to ocean, get about waist-deep in the water, then turn around and face the shore while a wave hits you between the shoulder blades. Usually that will do the trick. Of course in the summer time by July, you should plan on wearing something on your feet to get across what can become very hot sand. Even with it only being ten minutes to the beach, it was easier to find an easy chair under a fan and relax after a shower.
The only good thing about heat at the coast is that remnants of it make for a very pleasant fall. I have many memories of kayaking in November and even December when the air was cool but the water kept you warm. Aside from the odd dangerous hurricane, fall is the best time to go to the beach.

Customer Delight

Last fall we had a wall built. I was amazed at how well the company did their job. They had the right tools, everyone knew what to do and they were done in the three days and left no mess. I asked the owner if he ever did any advertising. He told me that he has never advertised. All his business comes from customers telling others about his great work. Who do you think will get my recommendation, the company that built the wall or the pressure washing company that never came back to finish the job?
Everyone one wants customers that are excited about their products and services. Executives want customers to be delighted but we also want them to tell others about how good our company is at delivering what we promise.
Few people write something like this.

From the day we arrived in Mocksville on Feb.1, 2021, every interaction that I have had with your employees has consistently exceeded my expectations.
David Sobotta

Certainly even fewer people write that about their Internet Service Provider like I did. When I see employees that have customer satisfaction in their DNA, it is well worth the effort to encourage companies to treasure those employees.
In our very wired world where customer interactions take place in a mix of places from online to telephone calls and in person, you have to build a culture that values customers as something more than revenue. That is a challenge when many of the people coming into the work force are not enamored with making a phone call or even talking to someone that they do not know. The challenge is to get new workers to see the big picture of how all their actions reflect on the company. Treating customers well can improve customer satisfaction but also the bottom line.
Back in the day of rotary and pay phones, it was not unusual to make a phone call and not be sure who was going to answer the call. You needed enough conversational skills to get through the person who answered the phone to the one who you really wanted to get on the phone. It is a skill that many are missing today.
I have trained fresh out of college interns to make effective calls. By coaching them and using a script the first few times, they can learn to do a great job. It is far better to jump with them into the fire as opposed to throwing them in the fire and assuming they will figure it out. I had friends in the technology world who were willing to be pretend customers. Do practice sales calls with someone you do not know is a great way to get on the right track. Some of my pretend customers were people who I had also trained years earlier.
Talking to customers is a learned behavior and when you get good at it, you want to continue doing it. It also helps to new employees who might be technology savvy get some perspective on how their customers view technology. After the Macintosh was introduced by Apple, I was fond of making sales trainees learn how to use and sale the Apple IIe. I often introduced the training by saying you cannot appreciate how easy it is to draw a circle on the Macintosh without figuring out how to do it on an Apple IIe. Today I would probably make sure sales people could get a picture from a real camera to a smartphone and explain what they have done.
With automated online signups, the opportunities for good phone calls are diminishing but they are still there and should not be ignored. Writing a good customer response email is also something that seems to falling out of favor to automated responses. I am not a fan of automated responses or customers never being able to reach a real person. The easiest way to lose a customer is a phone tree with no real people.
An enthusiastic customer is worth their weight in gold but how do you measure that and take into account the not so enthusiastic customers?

In 2003, Fred Reichheld, a partner at Bain & Company, created a new way of measuring how well an organization treats the people whose lives it affects—how well it generates relationships worthy of loyalty. He called that metric the Net Promoter Score^SM, or NPS®
https://www.netpromotersystem.com/about/

You may have never heard of NPS but it is likely that you have answered, “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our business to a friend or colleague?” That is the classic NPS survey question and it is used to create a metric that shows what customers think about your company, its products and services. It allows companies to find under performing areas and fix them.
When it comes to customers that love companies, I feel fortunate to have spent a couple of decades at Apple. Apple would not be here today if its customers had not become extensions of its sales force. Customers loved the products so much, many were on a mission to convert friends and colleagues using MS/DOS and later Windows. However, one of the maxims about Apple for the balance of its early years was “love the products but hate doing business with the company.”
For many years at least in Higher Education, Apple’s revenue was sustained by a tiny higher education sales force that rarely numbered more than 125. They were responsible for institutional and individual sales all across the United States. The higher ed sales reps were so enthusiastic about their products and their customers that they held the whole thing together even when Apple ran through a set of horrible products or pulled stupid contractual stunts.
The Apple case makes it clear that in order to have delighted customers over the long run you need both enthusiastic customers and dedicated employees committed to their customers.
I worked at Webmail.us before it was purchased by Rackspace. Rackspace is mentioned as an example of the success of NPS in some publicity that I seen. Our goal at Webmail was to deliver fanatical customer support. I am pleased to see Rackspace still using the term and by the way, I love my Rackspace mail. Give me a few minutes and I will outline why.
We achieved fanatical customer support by aggressive training of sales and support people. We also gave them the resources and support to excel at their jobs. If you have ever had to change your MX records at your hosting provider or transfer your domain, you realize how complex a task that can be. We solved the problem by creating detailed step by step guides on the web that a new employee could click on and read to a customer when the need arose. We did the same thing for customers, we had guides for Rackspace email to work with every conceivable client. We were aggressive about testing on every platform.
Today I was researching some Internet Service Provider pricing. As is often the case I ran into some web pages that did not work properly. I had one that I tried on two browsers on a Mac and two on Windows before getting it to work on Chrome on my Pixel 6 Pro. Can you imagine how dissatisfied a customer experiencing that would be?
I did a stint working the retail floor in the early days of the computer revolution. I learned early that it wasn’t really the product features that would complete the sale, it was what the product would do for the customer that would get them to buy it.
Our challenge with many of the new sales and support people is to get them to understand they need to convey an understanding of what the product can do and how buying it from their company will make the product even more valuable.
I go back to my post on QR codes being required to register at North Carolina DMV offices. We need to explain key technologies like QR codes to people walking out the door with new smartphones or they won’t be very happy with their expensive smartphones or with the company that sold them when they try to get their licenses renewed. It only takes a couple minutes to make sure someone knows how to use a QR code. It might well be the gem of knowledge that keeps the customer excited about the experience with your company.
Apple’s Genius Bar was a brilliant idea. More companies need to embrace it. I can almost guarantee it will improve your NPS. Imagine a genius bar for smartphones. It would be swamped with customers eager to be convinced your company really understands their products.

Haying Stays In Your Blood

**Hayfield Near Farmington, North Carolina, April 22, 2023**

Of the over fifty years that I have worked since I graduated college, only a little over a decade was spent farming. I did grow up in North Carolina in the fifties and sixties when everyone we knew had gardens, some had chickens, and even a few had a milk cow. It was not unusual to see hog killings in the fall and to receive some fresh country sausage as a gift.

The land was what gave life to us all, and where we go when life is gone. The land was at the center of all, and how could understand anything without first being on the land?
The Road to My Country

I felt that I had to go back to land. I was a little shellshocked after the sixties, four years in a military school and another four in the funny lights of Cambridge. I bought an old farm in Nova Scotia the summer that I graduated from Harvard. The skies in Nova Scotia were like the ones I remembered in my youth.
The urge to work the soil was strong even though I did not grow up on a farm. The immersion course we got in farming was intense but somehow we thrived for over a decade. We might have stayed on the farm if interest rates had not hit twenty percent in the early eighties and there were better local opportunities for our children. We dispersed our cattle in the fall of 1982 and sold the farm three years later after I spent a couple of years working in the city.

Farming has stayed with me all these years, even during my years in technology. It was only a year or two ago when I was driving from our home at the coast through the Virginia Mountains to headquarters when I saw a field of grass down. It was well on its way to being ready to be becoming hay. I had to stop, roll down the windows and enjoy the smells and remember all the good memories.
It was not unusual for our “team,” Harvey and I to put up sixty tons of hay in a good day. Harvey was in his sixties when I bought his farm which he had farmed with horses. We sometimes cut hay with two nine-foot mower conditioners. The big fields Harvey would rake with our twenty-one foot rake and the small fields with a ten-foot rake. I would bale with the big Vermeer baler and one of the 105 HP International tractors.
You could start cutting hay in the morning while the dew was still on it. Raking the hay before noon was okay, but I rarely started baling the hay until the afternoon. Large windrows that the tractor could barely straddle helped me churn out a nearly 2,000 pound bale every five to ten minutes depending on how much turning had to be done. When the hay was rolled up, we left it in the field until we had time to haul it back to the farm in the fall. Our hay farm was a couple of miles from where we kept the cows. We also cut hay all around the area wherever we could strike a deal with the owners. Before our children came, my wife even used to rake hay.

On a good day, making hay was something that gave you a feeling of accomplishment. A good crop of hay started with clearing the field of brush and rocks, applying lime, then working the ground, planting the grass seed in an oat cover crop, and sometimes fertilizing the fields in the spring. It doesn’t sound like much but it was lots of back-breaking work and sweat.

There were bad days making hay. Our mowers in those days had cutter bars with blades riveted on them. If you hit a rock and broke a blade, you had to stop and replace it. There are few things dirtier that replacing a blade on a mower conditioner cutter bar that has been collecting bugs, seeds, and dust for ten acres on its platform. If you didn’t itch from something that got on you, just remembering all the bugs would make you itch. The worst thing is when the equipment broke when you had hay ready to bale and wet weather was on the way. You try to forget those days. Getting hay that was ready to be baled dry after it was rained on is not a lot of fun.

There were some great memories from those haying seasons. Sometimes I would stop for lunch and my wife and the kids would show up with a real lunch. While my wife and I ate lunch, the kids would pick red raspberries on the rock piles. There were no snakes so it was as safe as it could be. Few of the raspberries they picked made it to us but they were so plentiful you could pick all that you wanted in a few minutes. The hay farm was high on a ridge and you could see for miles. There were no places any nicer on a summer day in the hardwood hills of New Brunswick.

It should be no surprise that I stopped recently to look at a field of grass (pictured above) that needed cutting. It is the last week of April here in North Carolina. There will be no thoughts other than my dreams of cutting hay in New Brunswick, Canada for another couple of months.
If I am lucky in the next two to three weeks, I will get to smell some curing hay in our rural area. I can hardly wait because it is still in my blood.

Love Where You Are Planted

I got sent off to boarding school at the ripe old age of fourteen. It was six hours from home and was a military school. I was pretty miserable for a few months. Then it dawned on me that there will be times in your life that you will have little control of where you are. What you can control is how you choose to react to the situation and your location.
Four years later when I got in my car and drove the twelve hours by myself to Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I was determined to make the best of it. I had never been there, but I planned to push my limits.
As a married adult, I have lived in eight different homes in two provinces and three states. At least one was a little insular but we managed to find good people in all places.
From 2006 until 2021, we had a home on the North Carolina coast. It was on the water and had stunning views. I am a photographer so I was in paradise with all the water and big birds. I had a wonderful time. When we got ready to move, our friends started asking what beauty could we possibly find to compare all the scenery at the coast.
I simply smiled and said I am confident that there will be lots of things to capture with my cameras. That has turned out to be the cast.
When you have lived in a lot of places, you probably figure out quickly that there are no perfect places for those us not in the ranks of the super rich. We bought our current house during the pandemic-fueled housing boom. We are very pleased that it has turned out even better than we expected.
While I don’t have great egrets, great blue herons and otters at my beck and call, I do have beautiful forest and fields that remind me of where I grew up.
That is no real surprise because we moved back to the area near where my mother’s family settled in 1790. When I was wandering the hills and forests of the area in the fifties, I was living on Styers Street not far from Styers Ferry Road which happened to be named for my great grandfather who ran a ferry across the Yadkin River. So this is home, but it is more than that.
This is one of few rural areas in North Carolina where you have modern services and are within a few minutes of about everything that your consumer heart can imagine. On top of that we are blessed with farmers’ markets all through the summer.
After years of tolerating faux beach grass, we are now living where our yards don’t feel squishy when you step in them. We have a real backyard that is unlikely to ever flood. It is big enough for us to have a small garden.
Settling into an area which was not far from where I grew up is one of the most pleasant moves that I have ever made. I am just a few minutes from one of my grade school fishing buddies.
I laugh when some of my northern friends talk about North Carolina’s humidity. The thing is when we moved from the coast to the Piedmont, we took a serious step down in humidity. Summer humidity is very real across the South, but there are degrees of it and the marshes along the coast can feel like you’re being swallowed by the humidity.
Here in the Piedmont there is fall and spring. If you have ever lived on the coast, you know that both fall and spring are very subtle. Here in the Piedmont they are a riot of colors.
I wonder if I have enough time left to try living in the desert?

We Find Our Farm

An aerial photo which a super-imposed elevation of our old farm with picture of the house, a barn, and some cattle. — Tay Ridge Angus Aerial Photo

While we were still working on our old farm house the winter of 1973-74, we were also trying to find a place to move where we could have more success farming. When I look back on it, I am amazed that we found a place which was forgiving enough for us to take what little we knew about farming and have a run at being successful. Still I wanted to work the soil.
We looked in several places in Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island without much success. We took a trip to New Brunswick from St. Croix Cove to deliver Sophie, the goat, and to lend a hand moving to my college roommate and his wife. Mostly my job was to upgrade the electrical panel in the old house that they had purchased.
The trip there was quite an adventure, the Saint John River was flooding and as I have said many times, the only way we made it through the flooded roads was staying in the wake of a tractor trailer that was in front of us on the Trans Canada highway.
This was well before cellphones and the Internet so you might say that we were flying blind but we got there, delivered Sophie, and on the first weekend in May after surviving a night in my roommate’s newly purchased and almost flooded old house, we had a look at a nearby farm that would become Tay Ridge Angus.
It was a spur of the moment decision to look at farm near where my college roommate had found his old farm. It was the first weekend in May. There was still snow on the ground. A rational person would have said snow in May, no way.
My wife and I have talked about it a number of times, but we were hardly on the farm when it was clear that it was love at first sight. The farm had a lot of sheltered areas where cattle could be kept in the woods during the winter. There were plenty of streams and brooks for water, and the land matched the soils that I hoped to farm.
We finally came to an agreement with owner that carved off a couple of acres on the front of the farm so he could build a new house and have a garden spot.
It would take a few years, but Harvey, the previous owner, would become the main help on my farm which he had farmed mostly with horse-drawn equipment. He would transition from raking with a converted horse-drawn rake to a double one that was over twenty feet wide. It made the Vermeer round baler that I built the farm around very happy.
After one winter with a few cows housed in an old barn, I transitioned to cattle running in the woods and calves born on the snow. It turned out to be a wise decision. In the seven years that we farmed there, we never had the vet on the farm. Even Harvey came to believe that cattle were healthier outside and that in spite of what the Dept. of Agriculture said, round bale hay worked for them.
In hind sight, there are a lot of things I might have done differently, the first being to have kept our herd smaller. A lot of things and cows are one of them, you have to learn the hard way, having just a few cows is a hard lesson to learn. We eventually got to two hundred head. It was too much work and required too much equipment. However, that was the dynamics of farming then, get big or get out. The second is that I would have tried harder to get a government-backed 2% loan. We tried once and were turned down.
The twenty per cent interest rates on our operating loan killed us while our neighbors with 2% loans did just fine. We could have built a third bard to store our hay and save a lot of waste. However, with no government loans, we crunched the numbers, weighed the options and decided going to work in town was the better of the two. We had a very successful dispersal sale. We sold our cattle in the fall of 1981. I went to work helping people market their cattle but quickly moved to selling computers in the fall of 1982 and by the fall of 1984, I was working for Apple which turned out to be a career of nearly twenty years which came with a good dose of magic before my wings melted.
Still, I would love to relive those years on the farm with the knowledge and skills that I have gotten since then. However, I doubt the old body would hold up to all the work that a farm, even a modern one, requires.

We Should Have Stayed Angry About Computers

New Mac Studio on my desk to illustrate the purchase of a new computer — New Mac Studio, my favorite mouse, my LaCie SSD work backup drive with my Cherry keyboard

I bought a new Mac Studio just before Christmas and just wrote an article about getting my wife a new Mac Book Air. There was a time not too long ago that people were passionate about technology. Just after I left Apple, an article on my Applepeels blog could generate twenty thousand or more hits in less than twenty-four hours.

If I said something negative about Apple, even the slightest criticism, I would get comments that would make you hair stand on end. If I praised anything that Apple did the Windows’ diehards would attack with the same fervor as the Mac zealots. When I wrote for ReadWrite just eleven years ago, I had people write horrendous things about me when I hinted that Apple was anything but perfect.

Now people seem to have gotten over technology to the point that no one cares what kind of computer you use or even what type of smartphone you have. I suspect people still line up for the latest iPhones but no one has attacked me personally for using a Pixel Pro 6. I suspect announcing that I am buying some new Macs will bring a yawn if anything.

It seems all the anger and partisan fighting is now reserved for politics and life choices. I wish we had stuck with fighting over technology.

Somehow it is easier to get over someone attacking my computer choice than someone attacking me because I believe that we should not ban books or the teaching of real history.

When you attacked my computer, well it was a computer. When you attack my thoughts about books, you’re attacking me and it makes it difficult to get along with you.

For almost twenty years, I worked at Apple and many of my relatives and even friends chose to use the Windows platform. I even recommended that some of them buy Windows machines because there was a time when most people needed some support when they bought a computer. There were just not enough Mac people around to provide even the most basic question and answers on using a Mac but there always seemed to a self-designated Windows expert not far away.

During that all those year- decades, not a single person stopped speaking to me because I used a Mac. Today, there are people who won’t speak to me because I have said our former president should be held accountable for his actions which I find treasonous.

The funny thing is that computers are truly at the heart of our lives in 2023, both individually and nationally. I remain convinced that we do not pay enough attention to computer security at home, in business and especially in government. When I was director of federal sales for Apple, I practically had to drag Avie Tevanian, Apple’s head of software, to a July 2004, Congressional Hearing on computer security.

Today, Apple’s focus appears to have changed and security is something they care about enough to make it a priority on their products. For that reason, Tim Cook, who was briefly my boss, should be proud that I bought a Mac Studio (I have been nagging for this product for years) and even more excited that I moved my wife’s computing to a MacBook Air just because of security.

For many years, I argued to the federal government that having all of our computing resources on one operating system, running on a single processor family was a horrendous idea. It still is and diversity in computing is just as important today as it was in 2004. I consider my self a computer expert and I weighed the odds and went with a Mac because I thought it was more secure.

So next time you want to charge after someone’s political views, take a time out and consider the question, “What would happen if someone got all my passwords?” Think about how best to solve that question and you might not have as much time trying to control how someone else acts or thinks or does with their body. I can assure you that not one among us is going to have a good day if hackers get your info.

If you are interested enough to want to know more about my recent Mac purchases and more of the history behind it, this is the link to the post.