What My Dog Nose ...

Welcome to My New Blog

This is Katie. Like most border collies, she's pretty darned smart. She has a nose for news, among other things, and she's going to advise me as I comment periodically about common sense in everyday life.

No, not common scents! I'll leave those to Katie (did you know a dog has more than 220 million olfactory
receptors in its nose, while humans have only 5 million?) I'm referring to good sense, which seems all too lacking nowadays.

Katie knows where the squirrels in our backyard hide and never barks up the wrong tree, unlike humans. We see silly, even stupid, things all the time -- drivers chatting on their cell phones while their cars mosey along the interstate at 40 mph, customer service reps who don't listen to the problem, telemarketers who begin their conversation with "how are you today?"

So stay tuned here. Perhaps as this gets off the ground you will offer your own examples of brains disengaged.

Happy reading. Or, befitting this form of communication, blog on!

I'm Just, Like, Tellin' Ya

As a reformed journalist, I hang out a lot nowadays (virtually, usually) with sales training experts around this country and elsewhere. Katie "nose" a good person when she finds one, as do I, and one of the good guys is my friend Paul Castain.  He owns a discussion group on LinkedIn called Sales Playbook.

Paul doesn't permit spam in his group and he starts great discussions. Right now, he's got his minions fired up over this question: 

Are there tired and clichéd sales (and other) phrases that need to go?

They're having a ton of fun with that one. Some of the offerings:

• "It is what it is."
• "At the end of the day." 
• "What keeps you up at night?"
• "How are you doing today?"
• "Do you hear what I'm saying?"
• "To tell you the truth" (or "Let me be honest")
• "Just calling to check in"

Common sense dictates you avoid these phrases.                        

Uh oh. Now I'm doing it!

It's About Time

We all love to complain about those phone trees, which ostensibly are about routing us to the correct person or department. They invariably seem to take forever and wear out our number-pressing fingers as we work through the various levels

Here's a new twist.

I called our health insurance company to check on one facet of coverage for my son. After moving successfully through four levels of the phone tree, I heard "please call back during normal operating hours. Our hours are 8:30 a.m. - 5 p.m."

I looked at my watch. Hmmm .... 4:30 p.m. Must be a mistake.

So I dialed back in, worked my way through the levels, and heard the same message.

OK, something's amiss. This time I found an emergency number, called, was re-routed, and then solved the mystery. I'm on Mountain time. Although my health plan is based here, based on my selections in the phone tree I'd been routed to the Central time zone where it was 5:30 p.m.

If that office serves multiple time zones, wouldn't someone think of clarifying that on the record
ing? As the esteemed philosopher Homer Simpson says: "D'oh!"