There’s a learning lesson in today’s world on how not to forget phone numbers. Put them in your phone right away. It’s taken me a long time to learn this. And I still don’t do it consistently.
 
When cell phones were just starting to become ubiquitous, I remember meeting someone at a professional meeting. He didn’t want my business card. He asked for my phone number, pulled out his cell and tapped in my contact information. Bam, done.
 
It didn’t even register with me what he’d done. I remember thinking, “Okay, that’s unusual.” Typically, at that time, you’d take someone’s business card and slide it into your wallet so you could pull it out later.
 
Last week, at a session on changing business culture, I ran out of business cards. I’d handed out a few and was down to my last one, when one of the attendees said, “Here, let me take a picture of it so you can hang onto your last card.” I guess that’s the evolution of the business card from 10 years ago to today – going from tapping the information into your phone database to taking a picture to input it.
 
What I’ve struggled with is the behavioral change. In those types of networking sessions, you need to REMEMEMBER, “The information should go quickly into my phone.”
 
If it doesn’t, then you lose it. In the old days, you’d lose the card and the contact. When it got to tapping the information into the phone, you needed to immediately remember to do so. During those days I would find myself saving more and more numbers and never sitting down back at my office or home and spending time inputting the information of new colleagues. It seemed unimportant.

But the reality was and is that it’s important. If you don’t capture contact information of someone you want to stay in touch with, you ain’t gonna stay in touch with that person. So, you need to stay on top of it and get that stuff inputted.
 
I’m getting better at this, but it often still seems like a trivial task and I get more wound up into the conversation with someone new, what she or he is talking about, and the whole concept that “this is someone new I’m meeting and if I want to stay in touch, then I better write down their contact information” gets lost as I listen intently to their story. One of those weaknesses if you’re a good listener – you can forget the follow-up logistics.
 
The past year or two I’ve made a much more concerted effort when I come home from meeting a group of new people to check their cards (I’ll still a card guy) and tap in their contact information (I still don’t take the picture of their cards) immediately into my phone. It appears I’m not a photo-taking person, but at least I’m slowly getting more responsible on the old school front.
 
I try to stay up with technology, but often seem a step behind. Can you send me the YouTube video? 

​The buckthorn must die. That’s become apparent the past year in the woods around house.
 
An invasive species, the ornamental shrub was brought to North America in the early 1800s to serve as a hedge divider. Kept short and trimmed, it grows thick, providing a shield from your neighbors. The thorns create a barrier as well, stabbing anyone or anything attempting to get through the hedge.
 
The problem, of course, like any invasive species, is that once released it grows like a wildfire in a tinder dry forest. It takes over, choking out big, historic, majestic deciduous trees. Buckthorn sucks up the water with its roots, and prevents the water and nutrients from getting to the other trees. This infestation slowly causes your bigger trees to choke.
 
This year, we saw this happening in the trees surrounding our house. Over multiple months, my wife Debbie and I debated what to do. There are options to kill the buckthorn, none easy. They take a lot of time or poison or continued cutting of the shrub until it exhausts itself trying to grow.
 
Early in the year, our thoughts focused on goats, and bringing them in to chow the buckhorn down. After examining that option from multiple angles, we realized it didn’t make sense, as the goats would have to be penned from area to area and leashed, while anything you didn’t want to have them eat would have to be fenced for protection from their ravenous appetites.
 
Deb tried cutting much of the buckthorn down herself with a power blade, taking on section by section of our woods on a weekly basis, rationing herself to two rounds of gasoline in the tank before retiring the tool for the day. Progress was made, but not without a lot of sore muscles. It was a dent in the infestation, but not a victory.
 
We talked about applying Roundup to Buckthorn stumps after cutting it down, but didn’t want the poison on our land. Then we saw our neighbors bring in a guy with a grinder tractor that plowed through all the undergrowth, ripping it all to leave behind wood pulp on the forest floor. The buckthorn undergrowth disappeared, and views through the forest opened up, not something we necessarily wanted, so we continued to be stymied about what to do next.
 
Finally we agreed to pursue the tractor grinder and hired the guy in to rip through our woods. It took a day. Bush after bush fell. The scent of freshly ground wood permeated our land. Views opened up to our neighbors, and though we like our privacy, we found ourselves accepting the newly-opened vistas through the tall remaining trees.

Fall is now here. Leaves are changing and dropping to cover the forest floor. We’ve grown to like how the woods look these days. Deb has shredded some of the buckthorn missed by the grinder tractor. Some of it will insidiously sprout again next year.

We’ll be ready. There will be more chopping and swinging a sickle, using the power blade, running the lawn mower over the shoots that sprout at the edge of the woods by our driveway.
 
The work will keep us busy and sore. We’ll be challenged. We expect the battle to continue. “Death to the Buckthorn” is our cry.

​Last week I decided to capture how many email scams come my way on a weekly basis. These are not “spam” emails but “scam” emails. You know someone is trying to dupe you.
 
Spam is different. Those are follow-ups from previous products you’ve bought, or someone legitimately trying to fix your web site but emailing you with no previous connection to you, or perhaps it’s even a sale item on something similar you’ve purchased in the past. Those make sense, even though you won’t respond to 99.9 percent of those inquiries.

No, the scam email is trying to steal your money or get your social security number. It’s a version on the Nigerian network email from years ago telling you you’ve won $1.37 million (always good to give an odd dollar figure, because then it sounds legitimate) if you’ll only send your name, drivers license number, social security number, and phone number to a designated email address. Goodbye life savings!
 
I get scams sent to my in-box, but mostly they end up in my junk folders, which I check periodically just in case something isn’t junk. I totaled those numbers up from the past week. Here’s the breakdown:
Monday: 4
Tuesday: 5
Wednesday: 4
Thursday: 8
Friday: 5
Saturday: 1
Sunday: 4
 
The scammers must snooze on the weekends, like we do. More come in over night (another indicator the email is a scam) than during the day. They peak more during the work week (from my unofficial sampling), coinciding with when a businessperson would expect you to be more approachable on a legitimate offer.
 
If you’re a person who wants to know the difference between scams, spam or a legitimate business propositions, here’s a sampling of scams:
 
“Dearest loved one, I write you with sinseerist intentions of marriage proposal.”
 
“Greetings, I represent a multi-asset, multi-capital financial investment firm and we are looking for clients who have a minimum of easily accessible one hundred thousand dollars in cash that you can quickly wire to get you in on this can’t miss deal.”
 
“Your email password is about the expire. Click here to access your email, and send us your password so we may connect with you and get your account back online.”
 
“Recently, I lost my cousin overseas, and he died with $479,000 in his account. He left you in his will and you stand to receive half that amount if you click here or our web site and enter your personal data to receive your pay out.”
“Your bank account has been hacked.”

There are many more versions of the scams. I received them in Korean, Chinese, French and Arabic this past week. That’s another red flag.
 
My wife wonders why I get so many. I figure her spam filter is more powerful than mine. I’ll be looking into that at some point, but don’t worry right now because my mental filter allows me to chuckle at the asininity of the approaches.
 
Don’t click is the best advice. Anyone you don’t know who asks a leading question or one that causes your spider sense to tingle or wants you to give away ANY type of personal information should be ignored. Flush that email. If that doesn’t work, change your filter.

​It’s hard not to using technology for directions. From the invention of GPS, to apps like Waze, the entire concept of figuring out how to get someplace in your vehicle has transformed over the past 15 years or so. I’m not sure someone starting to drive today even knows what the headline of this column -- “Old School Directions” – means.
 
“Dad, you mean you used to drive into a gas station and ask a local person how to find an address?”
 
“Yup, son, that’s the way we did it back in the dinosaur days of 2004.”
 
This past weekend, a friend from high school drove down to meet me so we could ride together to our high school reunion. We’re both throwbacks in different ways to older approaches of looking at and solving problems.
 
When we connected and agreed to drive together, I shot him a text on how to get to our house, which doesn’t appear on every app for some satellite-related reason. He didn’t bat an eye. “See you then,” was the response.

We didn’t communicate for a week. I sent him a reminder. “Got it,” he replied.

That Thursday evening, within 30 minutes of expected arrival, he drove down the gravel driveway to our house. He cheated a bit by printing out the Google map to bring along, but he basically navigated the old school way, following my directions, knowing the route beforehand, and hitting all the landmarks in the proper order.

It was heartening, and in some ways a connection because we had this similar approach to finding out where we were going, and we both minimize our reliance on technology. Instead we use our visual senses and memory, important qualities we’re losing these days by over-reliance on technology to make decisions for us.
 
A couple of jobs ago, I worked with a guy who I think was 28 at the time. Great guy, a lot of fun, tech savvy. He relied on Waze to get up in the morning and tell him what to do.

One time we tried returning to a customer’s location from the previous day and as we left the parking lot of our business, he asked me whether to turn left or right. He’s so completely blanked on where we’d been the day before (and relied on Waze to “tell” him where to turn) that he had no idea of the very first step out of our parking area.
 
He’s gotten a bit better about paying attention and coming to recognize his surroundings, but his first instinct is still to trust technology and let it make the decision. I understand that draw – it simplifies your life and let’s you focus on other things.
 
At the same time, there is much lost. The simple act of sending directions to a friend to help him find your place produces a certain joy as we explore the world. You know how to get somewhere. It’s a developed skill. It shows you know a tiny slot of land on this vast planet.
 
Our high school reunion included a lot of other great memories. Connecting with my buddy to start got us off on the right foot, a small sense of accomplishment. And don’t get me started on my joy at seeing several maps folded up in his car as we set off.