Dopp Juice Archive

My family sells bridges. Real ones. The kind you drive your car over. This is where I come from.

My dad was an engineer. When he and my mother first got married, he was working at a company that manufactured bridge parts. Several issues with authority later, he struck out to start his own small bridge sales firm (“small” meaning the kind that goes over the sort of river you would swim in). When a town’s bridge needed replacement, my dad showed up to evaluate the situation, give them a quote, oversee the transaction, and take a commission. The company was called Dopp & Dopp Associates.

Meanwhile, my mother started a sister company called Bridge Pro, where she sold parts to large bridges (“large” meaning the kind that goes over the sort of river you would drown in). She was, of course, the only woman in the industry. Combined, my parents dominated the entire east coast in bridge sales.

Major perks: Both of my parents worked from home while I was growing up, and they let me play on their 40 MB hard drive Macintosh Classics. I was installing software when I was three.

Major downsides: Every time we drove by a bridge we had to stop and look at it. Vacations and business trips had little division between them.

Time went on and my dad was diagnosed with a terminal illness. He passed his business to his brother before he died, and Dopp & Dopp is alive and well today. My mother remarried to the man who builds the bridges, so this means my step-father is the owner of a bridge construction company. Having exhausted her interest in bridge work, my mother finally traded in her galvanized steel sampler packs to become a minister.

I was told all my life that I was going to become an engineer and take over the family business. When I refused, they compromised, and said I would go into marketing and take over the family business. I refused this notion, too.

Recently, it dawned on me that I did go into marketing. And some of the work I do is considered engineering. And all of my vacations are business trips.

But the icing on the cake? I was hanging out with Deb Schultz recently — a fellow social media consultant — and she brilliantly summed exactly what we do:

“We’re connectors. We seek out people who are different from us. We’re bridge people.”

Last night I stayed up later than my body wanted me to, doing little more than refreshing my inbox. Click. No new mail. Click. No new mail. Click. No new mail. Click. Junk mail. Click. No new mail. Click. Letter from a friend. Read. Keep as new. Click. No new mail.

It’s an addiction. Responding takes energy, but just checking to see if I’m being thought of only takes a click.

Having just returned from 11 days out on the East Coast in quasi-vacation mode, I’m behind on my inbox. There are about 50 messages that I intend to reply to, many of which could be handled in less than two minutes, but I don’t want to do that. I want to sit with each one and give it my full attention. I want to respond with as much time and focus as I would if I were looking the person in the eye. Many of these emails come from people that I can’t easily grab a coffee date with, so I want my response to genuinely convey my appreciation for them and my commitment to our relationship. Two minutes is not enough for that.

As a result, those emails sit in my inbox unanswered for days because I’m not ready to redirect my attention. I’ll usually flush that folder to zero about once a week, giving everyone the lengthy responses I believe they deserve, but let’s face it: seven days is not a quick enough response time for most people to feel loved.

While I was clicking refresh on my inbox last night, I was also refreshing my twitter application, looking for other lost souls who were awake at 1am and trying to feel less alone. But twitter shocked me out of my daze when it stopped giving me tweets and started giving me error messages:

Twitter returned a "bad request" error. This happens when you exceed 70 requests per hour. Avoid running other Twitter applications or refreshing too frequently.

Am I really that bad?

For someone who resents the idea of responding to emails in less than two minutes or five sentences, I sure do adore a communication platform that limits me to 140 characters or less. Why? Because with Twitter, I can only type 140 characters, and people can only type 140 characters back to me. It’s the extra lite version of blogging, email, and phone calls, and therefore I am not able to use it as coffee date substitute. Sense of responsibility removed.

Let’s take inventory. I have 205 friends on Facebook. I have 124 friends on MySpace. I have 117 professional contacts on LinkedIn. I share my most personal writings with my 113 closest friends on a private network. There are 109 blogs in my “always read” folder. I follow 56 people religiously on Twitter. I realize that these numbers may seem low compared with some social media hounds, but here’s my commitment: (with the occasional exception of blogs,) these are all people I actually care about and am genuinely connected with. My networks are valuable to me and I fight to keep them that way. Because of this, those numbers seem absurdly high to me.

Meanwhile, I habitually leave the ringer off on my cell phone because I can’t stand small talk or interruptions. I also haven’t been available by instant message in over four years. If you need my attention immediately, I’ll respond to a text message (direct twitter messages have the same effect — but you have to be one of my Religious Fifty-Six for that to work). If you need my attention within an hour or two, email is best. But if I don’t feel like your email requires an ultra-quick or immediate response, it might get circulated into my “respond when I have adequate time” folder, and we already know how that works.

The exception to all of these is always work. I’ll answer my phone for clients and contractors. I’ll respond to their emails right away. I’ll even use instant messaging if it’s for the good of the project. You can see where my priorities are.

But when I’m not being paid for fast responses, I like to handle things in batches. I don’t do dishes as they get dirty; I wait until my sink is full and then I throw on my ipod and dance around my kitchen until it’s clean again. To me, that’s far more satisfying. I’m one of those focused passionate types who’ll naturally spend an entire day only walking, reading, writing, researching, coding, blogging, talking with a friend, or staring at the ocean. And if I’m extra lucky on those days, I’ll remember to stop and get lunch before 4pm.

Timothy Ferriss, in the Four Hour Workweek, recommends only checking and responding to email once a week, and using an autoresponder to let people know that this is how you function. Unnecessary emails and obsessive data hunger fall away.

I could see this working for a world traveler, but for a computer-bound web worker? Would that even be possible?

Or would it be embracing my natural system and ditching compulsive behavior?

This thought is so radical I think I need to go browse my inbox for awhile for comfort…

I’m thankful that I can still pull out my New Hampshire plaid shirt and rock the farmer-girl look when green beans and sweet potatoes are hitting the table.

I’m thankful that two years ago, I spent my first Thanksgiving in San Francisco roaming the streets alone, seeing the holiday from a completely different perspective. I’m equally thankful that this year, I’ve had more turkey dinner invitations than I could say “yes” to. Much to my surprise, I’m attending four of them (one of which is being described online in mouth-watering detail). I’m thankful that this means I’ve made friends in this city, many of whom I’ve started calling “family.”

I’m thankful that my family of origin is healthy and safe and doing well. My mother, a minister, doesn’t have to work today. Neither does my step-father, a business owner. All five of their children are off in different cities sharing thanksgiving meals without them, and they are home, quiet, feeling immensely thankful to be home for once, and to be able to be quiet.

I lost a grandfather this year –a big man of few words who always carved the Thanksgiving turkey when I was growing up. I remember his large, calloused carpenter hands. They built things for us. They carried us. They were rocks.

I still have five living grandparents. Five. I have a lot to be thankful for. And somewhere in New Hampshire, there is an 8-year-old girl who thinks her Cousin Sarah is the most exciting person in the whole entire world, and I take that responsibility very seriously.

I’m thankful that I found the tech industry (or maybe that the tech industry found me). I spend every day in awe that there is a community and an economy that values all of my skills, embraces my independent style, and pays me well enough to live in this (expensive) beautiful fairytale land of a city. I accepted a position at a new firm yesterday. My gratitude and excitement are uncontainable.

And I’m thankful I didn’t wake up this morning with a Surfer Dude next to me. And I’m hopeful that if he figures out how to spell my last name and decides to google me, he’ll forgive me for my recounted perspective on our evening.

Please remember the pilgrims today, and vow to be much more sincere and respectful than our country’s origins teach us to be.

Cheers!