stuff123

How to Handle Poor Attendance in the Workplace

Every teacher has heard this one at one time or another along with a myriad of other lame excuses for not doing what was assigned. If you are going to come up with an excuse, make it more believable than this one. The problem with providing an excuse is that it is ultimately a lie and your forget which lie you used the last time you got in this kind of predicament. Just how many grandparents can one person have? Managers in the business world catch on after a while when you have gone to your 28th funeral for a grandfather, grandmother, uncle, aunt, etc.

Telling the truth is a lot simpler in the long run. You don’t have to remember it because the truth isn’t made up. It’s just simply the truth. Having beeen a manager of people in my working career, I found I got real tired of “the dog ate my homework” approach to poor attendance. One particular case was an employee that made a habit of not showing up for work on Fridays. The truth seems that he would party on Thursday night and not show up to work because he just stayed out too late and didn’t feel up to working. He also drove in a co-worker so now two people wouldn’t be at work on Friday.

So to rectify the situation, I took the approach of the first time was a friendly discussion regarding the importance of showing up for work. The second instance resulted in a verbal warning. The next instance resulted in sending him home along with his ride without pay and a written warning that the next time would be the last.

This may not seem fair to the other worker but the rest of the workers in the department were unhappy with the poor attendance of the first worker and needed to be supported with actions that showed this would not be tolerated in the long run.

So when the culprit showed up on a Monday morning after missing yet another Friday (without calling to say he wouldn’t be in. He even had his mother call in sick for him), he was told by me that he was given plenty of chances to correct the problem and now is no longer an employee of this company and he should leave the premises. Yes, he threatened legal action (which never happened) and he was smart enough to not ask for a reference.

Another person I know (in a completely different business) used this technique when someone called in sick. He would give them two days off with no pay and told them to rest up and get well and come back to work when you are feeling better. The second time this happened he gave them the week off with no pay and very quickly the problem stopped.

There will always be schemers out there trying to avoid work because they just don’t feel like it. The important thing to remember is that you must show those that take their job seriously and have exemplary attendance that they are not mistreated by allowing others to get away with bad business practises. It isn’t cruel. It’s just plain fair and those reliable employees will appreciate it.

No it’s not the name of an old time Motown group. (For interests sake, that is an early picture of The Four Tops that I borrowed from Jango.com and played with a little)

What I’m referring to is an attitude that seems to be out there and something that I think we need to revisit both at school but primarily at home. What triggered the story is a conversation I had with a friend while playing an online game. I refer to him as 109, even though he has let me know his real name, because we had a conversation about warplanes somewhere in the game and he mentioned that the Messerschmidt Me109 was his favourite WWII warplane. The following quote is his comments about the younger crowd out there which we were discussing at the time. It may help to know that 109 is of German descent and living in the USA and is proud of both heritages except for the Nazi war machine.

It just shows you the general mentality of todays society.
“Me, Me, Me!!!!”
Everybody walks through life with their elbows sticking out without regard of whom they might bump out of their way.
I hate it!
It is like that everywhere you turn.
“I am entitled to this and that and forget about the rest.”

Obviously, 109 is referring to the lack of mutual respect that seems to run rampant in today’s society and sadly very prevalent in a lot of  our youth.

And we discussed the need for ways to improve that scenario and that was to reintroduce some basic learning skills primarily at home and not expect the school system to take the place of a child’s primary teacher—the parents.

My advice to any parent would be to stop chasing another Bimmer and spend time with something of value—your children. Help mold them into a worthwhile member of society and keep them aware of how to deal with bad influences like the so-called cool guys hanging out at the local mall.

Take the time to teach them the 4 R’s - Reading ‘Riting ‘Rithmetic and Respect. And some parents take that very seriously and they should be commended for that because their children aren’t making the news for some criminal act or taking something from others that doesn’t belong to them.

To become  a master at anything, you must first learn the basic skills required in that discipline. In this case, the discipline is just called life.

Rochester policeman shot by 15-yr old and his mother claims he is not a monster . If he is not a monster then just what is a 15-yr old doing with a gun and hanging out with other bad kids. He obviously shows no respect for authority. In my day, we showed great respect for all policemen and recognized that they are doing a very difficult job in protecting us from danger.

Mom needs to do a reality check. I only hope the officer will fully recover. It is a tragedy that cannot go unpunished.

After reading the adjusted story, 109 came back with this comment.

When we grew up there was school, homework, chores and then play with friends. If there was any daylight left because once the street lights came on we were supposed to be at home and safe.
I was privileged since one of my chores was walking the dog after he had his supper and in spring fall and winter it was dark at that time.
So I could make the occasional stop at a friends house since I had about an hour time to walk the dog.
When I was 14- 15 years old I build model air plains and mounted blinkers on my bike. If we saw a cop we would greet them and be polite. This was standard. We would greet the people our parents knew even if we did not really know their names. We would make room for older people, hold doors open and asked them if we could help if we saw them struggle with bags at the store or with a stroller on a set of stairs etc.
Never would it cross our minds to speak ill to anyone since word of that would have reached our home before we got there ourselves.
But I guess now I sound like someone from the 50’s even though I am talking about the 70’s.
It is just all to sad that one has to be fearful stopping at a red light in the city not knowing if you get robbed or shot while waiting for the light to change.
Personally I am not one who is worried about such things since I have been in active war zones in my life and dogged many of bullets as well as fired them at individual targets with precision.
However, I am worried about those innocent people who get in the line of fire over turf and drug wars of uneducated (by their own choice) thugs with no respect for life who possess not one ounce of integrity, credibility, honor or self respect.
Sometimes I wish one could be still active on a roof top with a trusted friend fitted with a scope and take care of some of the problems that plague our cities and even now the smaller towns and rural areas.
I know it would be highly illegal to do so, but one can dream without acting on it.
I just feel that people who choose a life of crime have forsaken any and all human rights and or rights in general since they do not respect the rights of their fellow human beings and as such should be dealt with accordingly.
Sorry, I am rambling.

And I would have to disagree with the mention of rambling. I think that is called caring. 109 obviously is very passionate about the subject. He wasn’t at a loss for words, now was he.

I know he is not alone in his thinking regarding the use of force to match force, the punishment must fit the crime and other deterrents for major crimes. We have also become too forgiving for our own good and there are many out there taking advantage of that kindness.

They need to understand that this will no longer be the case. Go directly to jail or some other place that is always quite warm.

I am a big fan of World War II warplanes like 109, but I can’t decide if the P51 Mustang or the old beast of the P-47 would be my favourite. If you believe in a previous life, I would think that I could have been a pilot in that terrible war. The planes have always fascinated me starting with building models in my youth. Maybe that is part of learning respect at an early age.

Hobbies taught me things of importance that set a pretty good foundation for me later in life. I guess technology is part of the problem but only because of how we use it. The Internet can be a valuable teaching tool. Maybe you could sit down with you children and learn something together. Start with the song, Respect—Aretha or Otis. They are both classics.

I used to pull into the same empty parking lot and make sure that I parked my car in the front row on Church street. The northeast entrance was how you got to enter Maple Leaf Gardens if you were on official business with one of the many teams that played there in the mid-1970’s. If it was game day for the Maple Leafs, or the Toros or the Toronto Marlboros (nobody called them that, it was just the Marlies), you had to make sure you could still get out of your spot before the crowds started to arrive.

You never really knew how long you were going to be in the building because there were visiting teams here as well that wanted to see you. I was working for Cooper Sporting Goods at the time as Professional Team Sales Representative. It never ceases to amaze me that even today, I can talk about my experiences with men and boys of all ages about some of stuff that happened at that old building and other arenas throughout North America. And they want more.

The only dressing room in North America that I couldn’t enter was the Leafs. the team in my hometown. That was because of the bozo that owned the team at the time, Harold Ballard. He acted like he was everybody’s friend but the truth is he really didn’t have any that I could see. He just paraded around and preached to everybody and they of course said yes sir no sir because he signed their cheques. But that’s not what I’d like to share about the days at Maple Leaf Gardens.

I made a friend through Facebook that used to live in Ontario and now lives in British Columbia. Andy is his name and we got to chatting back and forth about today’s Leafs and about yet another goalie that couldn’t live up to the standard that Johnny Bower set. I joked about we need to get Johnny out of retirement and eventually the subject of Johnny playing couldn’t happen because he wouldn’t wear a helmet. Well, that isn’t true.

Johnny wore the helmet we gave him with the “Tretiak” mask, as we called it, in practice sometimes when he had to put on the pads because one of the incumbent goalies of the time didn’t show up to practice that day. Rumour has it that too many brown pops had something to do with it. Johnny had a lot to do with getting Mike Palmateer to wear the helmet and cage combination.

And I was lucky enough to have the great honour of returning a favour to my favourite goalie of all time-Johhny Bower, everybody’s grandfather as MW, my friend calls him. Goaltenders of that era didn’t wear too much equipment like they do today. So when Johnny got off the ice, walked across the hall and changed in the scouts dressing room (even Johnny didn’t go in the Leafs dressing room), I was able to see what he wore.

I was in shock. I said Johnny, you can’t go back on the ice wearing that stuff. His arm pads were something that you wrapped a baby in to keep the child warm. No extra plastic. No wing extensions. Nothing. His chest protector was the same one I bet he wore in Cleveland. A piece of leather sewn onto a peice of felt. No extra wings on the shoulders to make you puff up like they do in lacrosse.

So I took the arm pads and chest protector back to our Custom Pro Shop and showed them to our “Pop” Kinesky, Norm Widdis and said make something better for Johnny. He can’t go back on the ice wearing this @#$%. Norm was a master at creating something out of just an idea. He and Dave Dryden worked beautifully together on a lot of goaltenders innovations for the time.

Believe it or not, in those days, the teams actually had to buy the equipment and not directly. It had to go through a sporting goods outlet. It was a company policy and since Cooper was the dominate supplier of the time, everybody did it. But Norm and my boss, “Shelly” all agreed that this one was not going to have any charge attached to it.

How do you expect a legend to pay for something like this. So it was with great pleasure that I showed up the next day and handed Johnny his new armpads and chest protector made with all the latest materials and innovations of the day and also handed him his old equipment that Norm used as the template for the modern upgrade.

I don’t remember if there was any discussion regarding payment for the equipment because there was going to be no bill anyway. Consider it our thanks for what you have done for the sport of hockey and the memories that we will all have of your outstanding efforts as a member of the Toronto Maple Leafs. No one could poke check like Johnny.

We also were more than aware that if there was a bill that it wouldn’t be authorized by that guy upstairs. They have a phrase for that, but I’m wise enough to not use it.

Instead, the next time you watch a Leaf game, think of the greatest goalie to wear a Toronto Maple Leaf sweater sweeping the crease with his stick just before the start of the game. That’s what I want to remember about Maple Leaf Gardens. Raise your brown pop and repeat after me. “To Johnny Bower, everybody’s grandfather.”

In Facebook, you see it all the time. People joining different groups about all kinds of different things. Thousands of people in each, attaching their name to various banners.

I have never been much on groups but I loved being part of a team. A lot of people will say that a team is also a group but there is a big difference between the two. Groups are intended to align people under a single banner and they spend a lot of time talking about the cause or goal. A team is similar but the difference is they work together to actually do something about it.

A group embodies the true meaning of one of my favourite sayings— “They are like old men and sex. They spend more time talking about it than doing it.”

A team adopts the genuine spirit of one of the best advertising slogans I can recall—Nike’s “Just Do It”

My personal memorable teams involved a few football teams that I played on and a group of young men in their first year of university living in a residence called Edwards Hall. Throughout the year, we banded together in numerous actions ranging from frosh week rebellion against our residence executive. We dropped them off in a farmer’s field (20 miles away or so) in the middle of the night to find their way back to the residence like they did to us.

We peppered a nearby men’s residence’s balcony with locally purchased eggs as retaliation for crimes against some of the hall members’ girlfriends. The opposition dumped garbage cans of water on innocent passers by from that same balcony. We had numerous house parties that made Animal House feel more like a home movie made about our time in Edwards Hall.

But a visit to one team in particular gave me another look at what makes a team as opposed to a group. It was in Montreal while visiting the Montreal Canadiens. I was based in Toronto and used to visit Maple Leaf Gardens 4 or 5 times a week to conduct the business of providing team sales support to the Maple Leafs, Toros and Marlboros on behalf of Cooper Sporting Goods.

The Leafs were more like a group. In fact, it was the only dressing room in North American hockey that I was not permitted to enter as per the owner’s instructions, Harold Ballard. The trainers were always very embarrassed by this, especially after knowing I had just left the numerous visitor’s dressing rooms throughout the building and also the Marlboros dressing room right across the hall.

The Canadiens dressing room in the old Forum was charged with energy. The time was somewhere in the middle of their 4 year run of winning the Stanley Cup. It may have been the first or second season but that isn’t important. You could sense the confidence and shared in all the good natured fun that took place. The status lines between so-called Superstar and front line players really didn’t exist. They were all quite talented, but it is how they worked and played together that made it obvious that they worked together mostly as one unit.

They had techniques that weren’t dissimilar to my university residence experience to deal with non team players. I watched two players drink from another players coke that was chilling in an ice bucket awaiting the return of the other player from his shower. Upon his return the bottle was magically full again and the smiles of getting even were on all the other players because they were all in on the prank.

It was hard to follow some of the conversations because they were switching back and forth between English and French as if they had developed some new language called Frenlish. Most often the sentence was punctuated with group laughter. I now understood the meaning of what a team does to stay loose. Team chemistry is very difficult to develop and is much easier to destroy. Harold Ballard was very good at the latter.

It struck me as quite strange that I had to leave the room to talk to their starting goalie and go into his small and private dressing room to talk to him about the new designs of equipment that his brother worked so closely with us to develop.

Yes it was the Dryden brothers, Ken and Dave. Ken was not much of a team player while Dave was almost the total opposite. I guess their future careers reflected that. Ken became a lawyer and Dave taught school and worked at different levels in the educational system. Ken was more comfortable behind the scenes while Dave was in the middle all the time.

Some years later, I was at a conference where Ken was the guest speaker. He talked about his book, The Game. It is a very good book about hockey. I don’t remember the finish of his speech. Someone nudged me when it was time to clap.

This just happened to be the perfect way to help explain what I’d like to do with BozosBrigade, which is a small team of people formed to firstly play games and secondly to help me write some fun stories.

The games’ part makes it easier to research the game tips side of Stuff123, a blog I write about stuff (go figure). Things that happen in life as I see them. It’s so much easier to find out how the games work when you have enough people in your team/crew/horde/tribe.

Some are even actually communicating with me which is what I’m really hoping will result out of all the games—a kind of Internet family, if you will, doing what families do best—share. Buying 6 casinos at a time isn’t the best part. It’s the people in the team that I find more fun.

And I’d like to write stuff about that sharing experience. So this one is about fishing which was triggered by one of the newest members I recruited (I’ll explain the recruiting thing in a couple of other stories, later). Specifically, the news feed that you get on your home page about friends status.

MF : Learn from the past, Live for today and Look to the future..
JC :Nice
AJD: It sounds OK, but what if the fish aren’t biting?
MF: Crack a cold one, lay back and relax and wait, they’ll come back on the bite.. Thats what fishing is all about
AJD:At last! Some one who understands fishing!
me: Some people use dynamite. It’s quicker. They don’t understand that the fish isn’t the real prize.
JC: Poor fish

I chopped out all the timestamps and pictures and changed everybody’s name to initials only, because I do believe in people’s right to privacy, but they are sharing this stuff with me because they accepted me as a friend.

At least MW did, after I attacked her in Warlords (lol). She was good natured about it and I was “Spot on” about my gut feel regarding her personality and how interesting she must be.

You can tell a lot from a picture. Just ask the police investigators. They use Facebook a lot for the bad folks, so you might be more careful with who and what you post in pictures in the future. Not that your bad (lol).

If I feel a picture is in order for the story, I will always ask permission. I have a story right now in draft form that I though was real nice—family values. Had a number of pictures of members of BozosBrigade and nice families. I asked their permission and since it went 0 for 6 in the reply column, the story gets shelved or rewritten with no pictures or some other pictorial way to handle it.

I think I understand. They want to protect their family. I learned something about these people. The pictures didn’t lie. Family is very important to them.

OK. So here’s the fishing connection.

When I was a little “Bruce” my dad would take us fishing. It was a pretty long drive to take three kids on but we weren’t there to have fun. We were there as part of the crew to bring home the catch. My dad saw fishing only as a method to increase the family food supply. And I know why.

He came to Canada when he was 13 from Poland. He didn’t know anybody. He worked in logging camps and with dam building construction crews in the deep woods of northern Quebec. They used to throw a stick of dynamite into the nearby lake near the outhouse drain pipe. The fish would congregate there because minnows would be attracted by the stuff that went into the water and the food chain would be completed with a stick of dynamite that was intended for a pile of rocks for the dam. They had no choice. The grocery store was a long ways away.

So my dad never learned the joy of fishing. Sitting on a dock or in a boat watching the little critters nibbling at your worm. The sense of excitement when the bobber plunges beneath the surface. The pleasant aromas in the air. The sound of water lapping up against the boat, the dock, the rocks. The feeling of the boat rocking while you fall asleep that night in your bed. It takes hours for that joy to disappear. And you sleep like a baby.

I don’t fish anymore. I like to look at the little critters more now. But I think I might go out fishing again.

I might just leave the hook bare.

Yah. It does feel kinda’ good.

You see lol a lot on Facebook.

That’s why I like to visit it.

I’m not too sure you can still do this today in Toronto what with all the buildings and lights and stuff. It doesn’t seem to get cold enough for natural ice rinks anymore.

We used to dress up in our hockey gear at home. Some were more fortunate than others. They had shin pads and some guys even had real hockey pants. Then you’d take your old worn and chewed up skates and line ‘em up side by side and spear the blade of your stick through the opening of those tube blades that some players today only know from old hockey footage.

Then you’d sling the whole mess over your shoulders like Freddy the Freeloader from the Red Skelton show. You’d truck 10 or 20 blocks to a local park and slide down the hill to join the game in the open air natural rink that they made each winter. Sometimes you even took the bus. You were on a road trip. You’d put your skates on in the local building or outside the rectangular boards that surrounded the hockey rink. You just threw your boots somewhere near the boards and hoped you’d remember where you put them.

You never worried much about the puck not being frozen. Wait long enough and mother nature took care of that and a lot of your various body parts. The game would go much like it did in “You wanna’ play in or out? ” except now we’ve got blades on. And usually a lot more Johnnies show up. Fifteen a side, no problem. Nobody rides the bench. Most of the time we played under the lights and the only reason we would stop is that somebody would turn off the lights. Otherwise, nobody would know to stop. We all would have ended up being human popsicles.

Every so often the game would stop because the puck was getting stuck in the two or three inches of snow that we would build up on the not-so-even ice surface. Everyone would jam their sticks into the the nearest snowbank (another puck eater) and we would all start a new game—the human Zamboni. Everyone would find a shovel or the big scraper blades that the municipality would provide. Sometimes it took two Johnnies to push that big blade. We were all one team now.

And if we were really lucky, the local custodian would come out and give the surface a flood with a big fire hose. No problem, we just moved to the pleasure skating rink right next to the boarded rink. You had to jam your stick into the snowbank again because no sticks or pucks were allowed on that rink. You’d practice skating backwards where  most of us looked like stumbling giraffes and windmilling stuffed bears. Some guys wore way too much stuff.

And after a bit, we’d all assemble at the edge of the opening at the end of the boards where the big tractor could drive through and wait for the custodian to say “OK boys the ice is OK now.” I think he got to the second K before  he was surrounded by a whole bunch of Johnnies doing their warmup.

And then everybody would take a spot on the same teams we had before and two guys would be Davey Keon and Henri Richard. Another Johnny would act as temporary referee and get ready to drop the puck but either Davey or Henri would stand erect and say “Just a sec. I gotta’ shift my cup”. He’d dig down deep like a junior Al Bundy and take care of business and bend over centre ice. Johnny 3 would drop the puck and the game would continue.

And there would always be one bozo in the group that broke the golden rule—no raisies. He would say I was going for the top corner while the poor guy he just fired the frozen black thing into was rolling around in pain screaming “Ow Ow Ow” like some sort of vocal machine gun. There was no top corner. The posts were usually two of the rubber boots that were left on the outside of the boards.

It was always a guy who didn’t have shin pads on. The one’s we could afford always went flat because they more like pressed cardboad over felt.

And the one guy would apologize to the other and say “Sorry man, I won’t do that again. Are you OK. I didn’t mean it”. And the other guy would say “That’s OK, I’m much better now” Especially after both of them rubbed the wound to “make it better”.

And it would start all over again, but not until one guy says, you guessed it.

“Just a sec. I gotta’ shift my cup.”

Something that we used to do as kids, here in Canada, is that we would go find our road hockey stick, worn out old tennis ball (the one in the picture is almost brand new—still got lots of hair), ball glove (in case you were going to be the goalie), home built hockey net (wood & potato sacks) and truck all the gear over to local schoolyard. Nobody used the cellphone or emailed a text message. They didn’t exist yet. You just showed up in the playground. You waited for the game to start. So you shot the worn out old tennis ball at the net.

Sure enough, a Johnny 2 would show up and say “Can I play?”. The answer was always yes.

It didn’t matter because after a while you’d just switch.

You did that long enough for Johnny 3 to show up and you went through the same questions. Now if Johnny 4 showed up, well then it was a whole new game. You got 2 teams and now you have to decide who’s gonna’ pair up with who and which one is gonna’ be Montreal and which one was gonna’ be Toronto.

If you didn’t have a second hockey net you got creative. You used the nearest wall, found a rock, a piece of wood, one of your rubber boots. It didn’t matter what you used as posts. You agreed on the rules and you negotiated whether it was in or out. You did this for 5 or 6 hours and the score was probably 824 to 810 but nobody knew the score. It didn’t matter. The game is what mattered. Making new friends was the reward. Not how many guys were in your mob/horde/team/crew. We all took a break and went home for dinner.

And when dinner was done, you trucked all the gear over to the local grocery store parking lot and started it all over again. Stores closed at 6:00 back then and they chained the parking lot access so there were no cars in the lot. They had lights. Once in a while, they even repaved it. It was our Maple Leaf Gardens, our Montreal Forum. We used to negotiate back and forth as to which one it would be.

Everybody was their favourite hero. Sometimes you had to negotiate because you couldn’t both be Johnny Bower.

The tool of choice was your favourite hockey stick and if you used it as a weapon against one of the other players, the decision of the two teams was swift and close to final. You were no longer allowed to play the game until you apologized for your bad behaviour. If you didn’t apologize you were sent home crying because no one would give you the ball. You were dismissed from the tribe.

They weren’t cruel. If you showed remorse they would invite you to play and the game would continue. All is forgiven.

Where did it all go wrong?
How did we forget how to play?
How did we forget how to seek out new friends?

There’s no better way to get me to stop writing than iTunes, other than maybe a trip to The Favourite Reading Room. Music is such a great escape. I prefer it to the television even though I like to watch sports shows.

And I started thinking about all those favourite lists that everybody comes up with. How can you have just one? There’s just so many good options in the world of music.

I’m always up for a challenge so I thought I’d try it and maybe come at it a little differently, in keeping with the philosophy of Stuff123.

“America the Beautiful” was playing by Ray Charles with Leon Russell on the piano and I have to believe that was Billy Preston on the Hammond B3. At least , someone who was influenced by his style. So the list might start with this one.

Most Inspiring Song Written
America the Beautiful Performed by Ray Charles

Most Goosebumps Given in a Live Performance
Gladys Knight at The O’Keefe Centre circa 3 or 4 years after Moses’ university graduation

Best Drum Solo Performance
Skip Prokop at the CNE Bandshell during the fireworks display. The rest of the band stopped playing (Lighthouse, a significant Canadian band in the 70’s). It went on for maybe 15-20 minutes. It was truly amazing. (Woh. iTunes is on shuffle. What plays at the end of the last sentence? Lighthouse. Some stuff you just don’t make up.)

Singer Most Capable of Singing in an NHL Hockey Arena Without a Microphone
Patti Labelle (Patti Labelle & the Bluebelles then) performing Over the Rainbow. They were an introductory act for The Rolling Stones. I would have been happy if Patti just did the rest of the show. Ticket was something like 8 bucks. Of course, you only made $1.25/hour at the grocery store then. They’re up to like 4 bucks now, arent’t they? Walmart’s only paying $3.75? That’s OK. I don’t shop there for that reason.

Singer Most Capable of Generating Enough Power to Light Cuba
Tina Turner especially in the early days as The Ike & Tina Turner Revue. Ike was just scary.

Best Story Teller
Harry Chapin, who will always be best known for popularizing the phrase “It Sucks”

Best “Evening With A Friend” Live Performance
Smokey Robinson in one of those big hotels in Las Vegas. Here’s a tip for the guys reading this. Go in with 7 women. Before they figure out you’re the 8th member of that party, you get to sit right up front. The story about him stealing his guitar player of 25+ years from Diana Ross’ band in her first audition with Motown (Hitsville of course then) was stuff you only told good friends. Natalie Cole was a good opening act, as well.

It’s a search inquiry that you can find in one of the many reports you can do run on your blog if it is hosted by today.com. It’s quite a remarkable and useful system. Along with the search inquiries, you can measure what sites they come from and page inquiries. You get a read on what posts gets more attention than others and where they come from and also the specifics of what the user is looking for.

This one speaks volumes to me. It’s not just a statement relating to this game. It’s a statement about this little guy/gal’s social skills or, more correctly, lack of same. And you never know, it could be an adult asking this question that doesn’t know how to make friends easily.

Let me answer this inquiry about the game first and we’ll get that out of the way. This is how I see it.

Mafia Wars is one of the early games from Zynga so it doesn’t work the same way as the newer releases when it comes to adding friends. You can’t search Facebook the same way you can in Pirates and Football, etc. It might be that Mafia Wars may have been written for MySpace first and didn’t address this need like the newer releases.

I can’t figure out how to use MySpace and I can’t add friends in Mafia Wars. I don’t know how you find worthwhile friends in MySpace. I don’t see why MySpace is so popular. I think it’s terrible actually. Facebook has so much more to offer. I just don’t bother wasting much time on it. I just use the second copy of Mafia Wars to test some theories and then shut it down for a day or two.

To add players to your games read Adding Players . It will get you started on the road to growing your mob/horde/team/crew. Warlords and Hammerfall RPG are two other games that will allow you to grow your groups. The last two don’t use game names. They use your Facebook name.

Now here’s the meat in this sandwich.

Little Johnny here has been let down by his parents. They forgot to teach Johnny a simple fundamental in life. Friends don’t just show up at your door and join you to play. Not unless they are already friends.

You have to go out to the playground and make new friends. You have to take some chances that most of them are going to be good friends and only a few will be a waste of time. In this case, the playground is Facebook.

Something that we used to do as kids, here in Canada, is that we would go find our road hockey stick, worn out old tennis ball, ball glove (in case you were going to be the goalie), home built hockey net (wood & potato sacks) and truck all the gear over to local schoolyard. Nobody used the cellphone or emailed a text message. They didn’t exist yet. You just showed up in the playground. You waited for the game to start. So you shot the worn out old tennis ball at the net.

Sure enough, a Johnny 2 would show up and say “Can I play?”. The answer was always yes.

It didn’t matter because after a while you’d just switch.

You did that long enough for Johnny 3 to show up and you went through the same questions. Now if Johnny 4 showed up, well then it was a whole new game. You got 2 teams and now you have to decide who’s gonna’ pair up with who and which one is gonna’ be Montreal and which one was gonna’ be Toronto.

If you didn’t have a second hockey net you got creative. You used the nearest wall, found a rock, a piece of wood, one of your rubber boots. It didn’t matter what you used as posts. You agreed on the rules and you negotiated whether it was in or out. You did this for 5 or 6 hours and the score was probably 824 to 810 but nobody knew the score. It didn’t matter. The game is what mattered. Making new friends was the reward. Not how many guys were in your mob/horde/team/crew. We all took a break and went home for dinner.

And when dinner was done, you trucked all the gear over to the local grocery store parking lot and started it all over again. Stores closed at 6:00 back then and they chained the parking lot access so there were no cars in the lot. They had lights. Once in a while, they even repaved it. It was our Maple Leaf Gardens, our Montreal Forum. We used to negotiate back and forth as to which one it would be.

Everybody was their favourite hero. Sometimes you had to negotiate because you couldn’t both be Johnny Bower.

The tool of choice was your favourite hockey stick and if you used it as a weapon against one of the other players, the decision of the two teams was swift and close to final. You were no longer allowed to play the game until you apologized for your bad behaviour. If you didn’t apologize you were sent home crying because no one would give you the ball. You were dismissed from the tribe.

They weren’t cruel. If you showed remorse they would invite you to play and the game would continue. All is forgiven.

Where did it all go wrong?
How did we forget how to play?
How did we forget how to seek out new friends?

Down for Maintenance

Sorry, we’ll be back in a few.
Estimated Downtime: 5 minutes
Everything will be right where you left off once it comes back.
Reason: The database is slowing down for some reason, so we are increasing the ram - should go real fast

- Dennis

I think it has a lot to do with number of players, Dennis.

That was what popped up on my screen while I was in one of the stores figuring out how to best spend my new found loot. I was shocked. No other way to put it.

To think that someone is bright enough to recognize that the players of his game are important enough that you keep them informed of what’s happpening. I’ve never had this experience from any of the other games I’ve played on Facebook. In fact, most of them don’t even acknowledge your existence. Too busy looking at the Ferrari catalogue, I think.

And he even signed it.

I emailed Dennis back. The end line was “What are you trying to do? Be successful (lol)”

Good on you, Dennis. It’s called Excellent Customer Service. He knows the priorities. Ram first, the Ferraris will still be waiting when he has time for them. He can have one for each day of the week. Even get that ugly yellow one.

OK so now I’ll start the story I was originally working on when Dennis so “rudely” interrupted me (lol)

Young Boar dropped a Log

It took me about 2 or 3 minutes to regain my composure. Maybe it was the time of day or night. I just couldn’t stop laughing. You see, when I was younger, maybe Dennis’ age (I’m guessing he’s not too far along in his life’s journey) the term dropping a log was what you did when you went to your favourite reading room. The one that took a lot more time.

Dropped a Log aka The Favourite Reading Room aka Let Me Go Think About That (which isn’t written yet but is a great title, I think)

Shows how tough writing game copy really can be. And you have to be careful about words in the context of their international significance. I can’t even imagine writing Hammefall RPG copy in another language. The world sure is getting tiny.

Originally this was going to be nothing more than Hammerfall - Hints 2. Yes hints not tips. Remember, I’m not going to spoil the surprise. So here’s a few.

Backtracking

It’s a good idea to retrace your steps. It’s called experience and you might find out something you didn’t already know (Oh, I didn’t now that)

Battling Monsters

Learn how to bounce around in “attacks spells food/heal” options. That will help reduce your frustration. It worked for me.

Gold or Drops

Maybe alternate your quests between drops and gold. You need both so you might as well spread it out evenly.

Sell or Buy

Carry as much as you can. Resist the temptation to sell unless you are short when it’s time to go to the store. Only sell items that are easy to replace like extra weapons, water, food energy, mules or old horses. If you need to sell other items, try to keep 3 in your saddle bags. It seems to be a good number in the game.

Here’s some hints specific to areas in the game that I have encountered so far. They are almost as much fun to write as the game itself.

• You will not succeed until you can count 1-2-3 a lot of the time.
• Come here you sneaky little varmint. Must I do everything? Probably. I think I will feel better. Not you again.
• Woods and rocks and rocks and wood. Do I sleep or eat? I guess it doesn’t matter which one is first, but I must do both before I build. Do I have to deal with those 2 bozos again? Only if i need more stuff, I guess.
• Dance with the bear to get the tool to go away a way for a while and dig. Don’t come back until you can afford the price of admission to go in another direction. But dance with bear at least once more. You need to be extra strong.

I don’t think I gave away too much. I’m thinking they call that added value.

Have fun. I’m having a blast.