President's Message:
Crazy or Not, Ideas Come

by Debbie Kerr, President

I hope everyone had a great holiday; most people I talked to had someone sick at their house. I hope no one gave you sickness as one of your gifts. When I was talking to my brother about this, he suggested that the holidays should be moved to May or June. Putting religious beliefs aside, there is some merit to what he suggests.

The benefits to this would be:

• Cold and flu season would be over before people started going to shopping malls and meeting with family and friends.
• If you had a lot of people over, some of them could go outside. In fact, if you didn’t have enough table space inside, some people could eat at picnic tables.
• You could almost guarantee that the weather wouldn’t prevent you from getting to wherever you wanted to go.
• If you took two weeks off over the holidays, you could probably find more things to do, especially if you are not a skier.

On the negative side:

• Christmas in July would no longer be a very special sale. In fact, it would be a little late.
• Songs like White Christmas would have to be rewritten.
• The heat in the house could be unbearable after cooking meals for a lot of people over a long period of time.
• For the first year, Santa would have less time to get ready for Christmas. His being overweight and wearing really warm clothes would cause some serious problems. This last negative is not very strong because Santa probably already has heat problems when he is near the equator.

I am sure there are a lot more pros and cons that I could have covered, but I will stop here. You can add your own items when you need a break from reality.

Reason for my madness

I wanted to demonstrate, in a fun way, what happens when someone thinks outside the box. They often get laughed at, at least initially. Your first response to my statements might have been, “Do you have too much time on your hands or are you just crazy?”. It might be a little bit of both; I will let you decide.

Although I don’t put myself in the same league as the great inventors in history, your response to my holiday idea was probably the same as how people responded to the Wright brothers and Christopher Columbus. Without the Wright brothers, plane travel would have started much later. If Christopher Columbus had not proven that the world is round, we wouldn’t be able to talk about travelling “around” the world. We would, instead, be travelling “across” the world.

No mad scientist

You don’t have to be Albert Einstein to understand the benefits of thinking outside the box. While he does have a sort of crazed look, Einstein understood the benefits of thinking outside the box as is shown in his quotations:

• We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
• The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.
• Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction.
• Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.

Resolution

While people often make resolutions to lose weight or stop smoking, there is something a little easier that you can resolve to do. Make a promise that you will look at processes, interface designs, and your own thought processes in a different way. Always look for areas of improvement. In a slow economy, companies are always looking for more efficient ways to do things. When someone gave me feedback about something I did at work, they commented on all things that I did that were more than they expected me to do. I was supposed to write Standard Operating Procedures and, in the process, I identified problems with processes and incorrect configurations that, when corrected, would increase efficiencies.

Dare to think differently. Doing the unexpected may be the best thing you have ever done. If you have any ideas about what we can do to give you better value for your membership, I would love to hear from you.

If you have any suggestions or questions, please contact me at president@stc-soc.org. I am here to serve you, the members of this chapter.

About Debbie Kerr

In the 20 years that Debbie has been writing documentation, she has worked in a variety of industries: government, retail, software, and insurance. She is currently employed at The Economical Insurance Group in Waterloo, where she has stepped out of her traditional role of writing user guides and help files, and now writes a variety of specifications.

Debbie has been a member of the STC since 1994 and has been a council member for many years. For the fourth year in a row, Debbie has bravely taken on the role of Chapter President.