We’re in the midst of a supreme drought.  Rainfall has been significantly below average for three years.  Since we live near a lake, its declining level is represented visually.  If you paced it off, the lake is probably down 60 feet on average, though one could argue there is no “average” in the world any more.  There are only massive peaks and troughs.

The dynamics of changing weather patterns seems to be evident storm after storm – more and more sustained and devastating in their impacts.  At the same time, longer periods of perpetually high heat and cold appear on the global map.

In the old days, we used to pray for rain.  Now we pray for the weather person to get his or her prediction right because when they tell us rain is coming, WE WANT IT, WE NEED IT.

Then we don’t get it, and we are disappointed.  It is interesting to watch our two younger kids who are still at home, with our eldest off to college.  Having moved around the country several times, when they were younger, they got used to periods where steady, consistent rain fell annually.  When you live in that type of situation, it becomes your normal.

Now, as we face day after day of relentless heat during the summer in north Texas, the household complaint becomes. “When is it going to rain?  I can’t wait for it to rain.  I wish it would rain for a month straight.”  If you polled the family, most of us would agree on how much we’d look forward to long, consistent, steady soakings.


Grey skies are great.  Bring on the lower temps!  We’re ready.


That’s why it can be so disturbing when the weather person is the one we need to pray for since they so consistently get our weather predictions wrong.  Just in the past couple of months, for example, they have gone on the record guaranteeing 1-3 inches of rain for our area three separate times.  It is not a good idea to guarantee anything, when you can’t follow it up.

This creates anger, frustration and disappointment.  On Monday, they will start with their “look for a weekend of showers.”  As the week crawls by, it changes in terms of percentages, and then by Saturday morning it becomes a “chance of rain” that night, “tapering off into the morning.”


By 6 p.m., they’d removed any rain at all from the weather report, citing some strange concoction of variables that allowed them to get off the hook.  Sunday morning arrived clear, and another weekend passed with no precipitation.

This happened three times locally over about a two month period.  Each time, the report on rain surfaced early in the week, was tracked for 4-5 days, with the full expectation that it couldn’t miss us as the storm system got closer and closer.  But it did.

So we continue coping with a three-year drought, and the knowledge that the weather people can’t do their jobs.  It’s a double whammy.

The worst part was that as the predictions got more and more “certain,” you actually begin to believe, “They have to be right this time.  They’ve been wrong the last two times, so it’s got to hit us.  The third time is a charm.”

Of course, it is not.  Adding tinder firewood to the blaze, the announcers also got more revved up with each passing failure, so by the third potential rainstorm, there was the possibility of six inches of rain, flash flood warnings and hail.  We got a light sprinkle for 10 minutes each, three times that afternoon.

We have to look at this from the inverse proportional angle: As the weather person gets increasingly certain, we should grow increasingly cynical about his perspective.  When he guarantees perfect skies, then we’ll get thunderstorms.  Count on that.  And pray for him.

If you are like a lot of parents today in the electronically connected world, you encounter the ignored message from your kids who have a smartphone.  Your voice mails to them don’t get answered.  If you send a text, you may not hear back, or they might respond in 1.2 seconds.  It all depends.

What you can count on is that sometimes they will ignore what you have to say or wrote.  And, you can count on this aggravating you.  When you want to hear back and know what is going on, and there is no reply, it drives adults nuts.

I hear this from many friends.  “I sent Jake three texts after the game last night to find out when he was going to be home and never heard back,” the wife exclaims with irritation to her husband.

It’s a common lament.  We’re not asking our children to send us a handwritten 750-word letters that could serve as a full length newspaper column.  All we’re asking is to let us know:  “Home by 10:20.”  Or, “Getting some tacos with Blake. Home after that.”

Those messages at least give us a sense of what is going on.  They also give us a ballpark on when the son or daughter will get home. 

Our frustration from the non-communication is the “not knowing” factor.  That leads parents to speculate, usually a negative fashion.  “What if he got in a car crash?”  There are other, more dangerous options, the ones we let lurk deeper in the recesses of our minds.  Those are the ones that make us worry and wonder, “What the heck is going on, and why won’t she text me back?”

I’m not sure our kids will ever figure out that parents don’t want to intrude on their kids’ lives (at least I don’t want to).  We just want some reassurance and awareness.

During a recent conversation with another parent who has teenagers at home, an idea was batted around that just might rectify this parental dilemma.  It holds its own perils, so be wary.

The next time your teenager calls your smartphone or texts you, just ignore it.  Make them sweat a little.

This could very easily backfire.   You can picture Blake texting Jake and saying, “Dude, it is so awesome that the rents aren’t responding to my texts.  I can do anything I want now.”  That would be troublesome.

But if your tactic had the intended effect of making your son or daughter exasperated with you, then you might just be able to take the situation to the next level and have a CONVERSATION about it.  “So, Kaleb, how does it feel when you want to know if it’s okay to go to IHOP after the football game and we’re not giving you an answer, so you have to come home instead?”

Silence.  Oh well, it was worth a try anyway. 

There are a few different ways you can apply this tactic to see if you get positive results.  One is to totally ignore the texts or voice mails and feign ignorance when they ask you about them.  “What text?  You mean you left me a voice mail?”  This might work once or twice, but your average teenager will pick this one apart quickly.

A second option is to immediately rub their face in it.  “So, how does it make YOU feel.”  Not a good idea.  You’re looking at teenager shut down if you go this route.

A third is tongue-in-cheek, “hope they get the humor” angle.  Don’t respond to their texts and when they ask why, reply, “I was doing the dishes and my hands were immersed in soap suds.”

They’ll know this is false, so they’ll roll their eyes, give you a look like maybe you have a brain after all, and might think twice about responding next time.  It’s worth a try.

Several weeks ago, the expense report nightmare surfaced.


The expense report debacle (in contrast to the nightmare) is when the company you work for changes how it processes expense reports.  You have to learn a new system, which means a new system must be properly installed, tested and functioning, which means you’re in for a debacle.


The nightmare is when it gets worse.  No longer just an inconvenience, instead, you feel your face heating up, your patience ticking down, and a reaction coming that is laced with anger and frustration.

The nightmare occurs because you can’t figure out what to do.  All you want to do is submit your expense report.  Do some addition and subtraction, write it down, copy some receipts, sign whatever document is necessary, and wait to get reimbursed.


This has been going on for years in businesses big and small.  It’s not hard.  People get paid on time. 

For some reason, it’s become a regular occurrence to tinker with the nature of the expense report and how it gets submitted.  Part of this plays out against the background of a world changed from paper to electronic processing.  Employees get that – companies are trying to put efficiencies into the accounts payable program, and the way to do that is to purchase software that does it quickly and seamlessly.


If only “quickly and seamlessly” were the truth.  For anyone going through a change in their expense reporting, you know this is not the case.

Instead, “slowly and messed up” is more regularly the case. My agitation over the recent submission was caused the inability of a receipt to be downloaded by the expense report software program.   This included:

·         Business Technology (BT) personnel took over my computer for over 90 minutes with no discernible fix (my time wasted, their time wasted).

·         The next day, another 45 minutes was spent with a higher level of expertise Business Technology person, with no further improvement.

·         After modifications were made to my computer, none of which I understood, when I got control back, 50-60 of my bookmarked business Web sites disappeared.  Ten to fifteen of those were password sensitive, so you can imagine what it took memory-wise to recreate those.  That saga continues.

·         50-60 other people in our building had the same problem.

Given the simple nature of the problem (downloading a scanned receipt), one would think there was a simple solution.   It seemed that way to the BT people as they tapped from one location to another, each time acting surprised when their modification didn’t modify anything.

False hope abounded.  Each time they tried something new, I thought, “This is it.”  Two minutes later, “This time they have to have it right.”  And so on.

You have probably been in this boat, so you know the fix isn’t intuitive, or people like you and I could go and make the fix.  When it is moved up the chain to BT, there’s no way we could solve it.

But, as also often seems to be the case, that wasn’t true.  It wasn’t me that solved it.  But it was simple.

I found a coworker in the IT chain of command.  He told me he would stop over at my office and knew what to do.  He took me to the page.  He showed me step one, step two and step three.  Click here, then there, then there.  Done.  The receipt downloaded.

How many people around the building were going nuts, and how much time and psychic energy had been wasted?  One step has been missed in the process and everything worked the way it should.

I stopped down the hallway at a coworker’s cube farm, “I heard you were having some trouble downloading your scanned receipts.”

“Yup.”

“Here, let me show you what to do.”  And all was good in the office again.

There’s a syndrome that I call “Tailing Off” that has become amazingly prevalent in electronically-connected societies these days.  It’s fairly easy to describe because you have either experienced it when someone does it to you, or you have done it to someone yourself.

It can happen through any information transmission, but is primarily noticeable through email or texting.  It goes along the lines of the following:

A communication begins between you and another individual.  It starts with one of you inquiring about an issue, stating a fact, trying to set up a meeting or date.  The other person replies.  This leads to some short bursts of badly typed words, incomplete sentences and bizarre abbreviations that either get autocorrected to make the transmission incomprehensible or totally intelligent.

These messages go back and forth in a burst of minutes, typically ending in less than half an hour.  When done, you sigh in relief.

You may have chuckled a few times or smiled to yourself at what your friend wrote or related to you.  You may be proud of how fully you laid out a plan to bring a new customer on board.

What didn’t occur though was “completion.”  As you were both tapping back forth, there was a date you were trying to set or a decision you wanted to make.  Looking back on the transmissions, this didn’t happen.

Instead, you got some happy talk.  Yes, you “planned” to get together or “talked about” making a decision, but someone left the ball hanging in the air.

This has happened to me more times than I can count, hence the “Tailing Off” syndrome mentioned earlier has been coined.  “Hey, Linda, you trailed off on me.  Set a date.”

Most recently, I had a text dialogue with a former coworker.  I passed on some information about how things were going in the office, she inquired about some other stuff.

The whole thing tailed off and I was left waiting for us to get together for a lunch meeting.  She asked for open dates; I gave them to her.  Then zero.

Probably I am a loser, because this happens to me a lot.  There is this delirious frenzy of tapping and sending, catching up with someone, giving little snippets of data, but then when it comes to step up to the plate, there is no follow-through.

I’m not sure why this happens.  Typically, I think the person who is leaving the ball hanging actually thinks that the issue at hand has been resolved and there is no more communication to go out.  The second explanation is that the next texting or emailing situation has taken over the current one, so your dialogue goes into the recesses of the brain of the other person, never to surface again unless you jog him or her with a note the following week.

“Yo, Brendan, been waiting 4 u at Wing Stop for 22 minutes.  R u showing?”

You don’t even need to be at the Wing Stop.   Just pretend like you are, and see if that draws a response regarding the fact that Brendan was supposed to set up the lunch.  Sometimes you can get away with this and your communication partner fumbles for an excuse, saying he’ll be right over.

“Tailing Off” is a growing phenomenon the past 3-4 years as the wireless handheld device has grown ubiquitous.  Our previous state of being tethered to a computer screen or laptop tended to keep us thinking slightly more linearly.  Now it’s no holds barred.

Stuff comes at you from every direction and because you keep your device ready most of the day, you feel lured in.  You forget to finish conversations.  You don’t follow through.  You tail off.

If you resurrect the electronic conversation, send a “whoops” note to your friend or coworker.  Start a new thread, so this time they can tail off on you.  Tag, you’re it.