A funny story has been circulating about a person who was offered a job at Cisco and then Twittered about how boring it would be…then was contacted by Cisco about it. Ooops!

Makes me wonder though… We all talk about “transparency” with Web 2.0.  And how the technology encourages, even demands, open and honest communication.  But in some ways aren’t we are forcing ourselves to keep things under wraps? I mean, if everything is “out there” for the world to read, find, search, archive do we really want to be transparent?

My Twitter @5691gerg feeds my Facebook status. My blog links to my Linked In profile. So, I need to be fairly conscious of what I’m saying where and who might be reading it.

For example, my wife reads my FaceBook (Hi honey!), one of the partners at the agency where I work read my Tweets (Hi D!), my cousins in Florida (Hi y’ all!) read my blog. 

All of these things are interconnected. I can’t be totally “transparent” or “open and honest.” If for no other reason than it simply wouldn’t make sense to the readers.

(I already have to explain the Twitter short-hand that appears in my FaceBook status to non-Tweeting friends. And, that’s only the friends who were comfortable enough to ask!) 

Sometimes I just don’t bother posting what I think because some of my “audience” won’t “get it” and I don’t want to alienate them with stuff that isn’t of interest or value to them. 

It’s not quite transparency then, is it?

Are we ourselves and do we really know?  -The Fixx

Sad news the other day reported in the New York Times - Sweden says “no” to saving Saab.

The old Saab 96 and 95 bring back so many great memories.  Both my parents and a few uncles had the old front wheel drive, four cylinder, four speed on the column, cars.

Learned to drive in my uncle’s 96. Shifting took getting used to… lots of revving and squealing tires. Even when going from first to second gear!

Took my first drivers license test in my dad’s faded tan Model 95 wagon. Shocked the DMV guy when I bucked away from the curb – he thought I had an automatic.

Actually shifted from first, going about 15mph, right into reverse in dad’s wagon.  LOTS of smoke. Didn’t tell him about that for years…. He had just changed out to a brand new engine – an industrial Ford four cylinder was an exact match?!?

Same wagon made a two week trip from NJ to Colorado and back – sang “we all live in a tan Saab-a-rine” to the Beatles Yellow Submarine. Visited Boulder, Black Hills of South Dakota, the Corn Palace, and climbed Pikes Peak. We used to turn on all the lights, radio, wipers each time dad left the vehicle. He’d turn the key and everything would come on – boy we were funny kids. 

The lock on the back door on that wagon broke so we used to yell, “You lock the back door?” every time we left the car. Someone would always reply, “Yea, I locked it.” You know, just in case there were any theives nearby….

Still more memories in more Saabs from my youth, but those are to top ones…  RIP Saab.

They (whoever ‘they’ are) say, “things happen in threes.” I had a somewhat odd series of three happen the other day – all within about 24 hours. All surrounding odd word combinations.

Others have certainly heard this term before, but it was a first for me… I saw a label in a car window that said, “partial zero emmission vehicle.” What? Partial zero? I thought zero was an absolute number. How can you have part of nothing? I guess that’s how we got into the financial mess our country is in now…

Then, I came across a Good Magazine blog post titled, “Better than it has to be Design.” It seemed like an odd word combination to me. I’d heard of a company, can’t recall the name, that had a similar tag line for a B-2-B product to the effect of “Better than it has to Be.”

As a consumer, I want to buy (or the designers who designed it to develop) a product that is great, the best even- not just better than it has to be… I want to be great, not just “better than I have to be.” But, then, that’s what branding (and personal branding) is all about, no?  

Interestingly, the Good blog included the AK47 machine gun as a ‘product’ whose design was “better than it had to be” which tied into the third odd word combination (and gave me this seque).

Number three was a Discovery Channel television show titled, “Explosions Gone Wrong.” Obviously, the title was trying to steal some cache from “Girls Gone Wild” (if cache can be stolen from that particular video series…sorry, no link provided. Find it yourself.)

Exactly how does an explosion go wrong? “Aren’t explosions inherently ‘wrong,’” I wondered? What is a “right” explosion? There are explosions in my car engine, my lawnmower engine…these are “explosions gone right.” Contained, controlled explosions with a purpose.

So, I guess if you are on the trigger end of an AK47, an explosion can go right (but then there are other legal, moral and possibly post traumatic issues to deal with there that I’m not prepared to deal with here….).

Some might argue that it’s simply semantics (is THAT an odd word combination? simply semantics?) and that there’s nothing odd about these three phrases I’ve written about here. But, maybe it is all a matter of perspective….

If you are shooting an AK47, for example, you better hope that the machine gun was built “better than it has to be” so that you don’t end up with an “explosion gone wrong.” 

However, if you are on the other end of the barrel – then you want it to be built ”not quite as good as it needed to be” so you will have an “explosion gone right.”

If you are marketing a car that has some – but not all – of the technology to make it a Zero Emmission Vehicle, why not call it a ‘partial zero emmission vehicle?’ Maybe it’s just that the engineers (or the lawyers and lobbyists) aren’t “better than they need to be?”

Glass half full or glass half empty? Your perspective on water can change depending on whether you are in the desert or tredding water in the middle of a lake holding an anchor, no?

Why is it that sometimes you hear an old song you know and then hear it again and again – all within a few days? All on different stations? All at different times? I’ve heard Cheap Trick’s Dream Police several times in the last two days. Why? Marketing?

Over the weekend I also heard Molly Hatchet’s Flirtin with Disaster. I haven’t heard that one in a while (since a late, boozey night with my cousin listening to old vinyl. And, even that was about 7 years ago….)

Funny how old songs make you think of things in a different way. Not that the lyrics have changed – I guess it’s just how they apply differently because you understand the context better or times are different or you (ahem, me) are older.

When I heard Flirtin with Disaster the other day it reminded me of our current economy and how we all need to pay attention to what we do with out time. It’s easy to get down and waste our time when we could be doing something to make our situations better.

Here are the lyrics I’m thinking of… (full lyrics here)

Been flirtin with disaster,
Yall know what I mean.
And the way we run our lives,
It makes no sense to me.
I dont know about yourself or,
What you want to be – yeah.
When we gamble with our time,
We choose our destiny.

When I heard (sang) it in the car, the first four lines tie in to the current economy, unemployment, collapse of huge companies and all that “newsworthy” stuff we hear about all the time. The next four lines spoke to me about doing something about it to keep yourself on top and not letting the whirlpool suck you under.

So, don’t gamble with your time. Improve yourself. Market yourself. We choose our destiny.