Do You Think You Are Funny

“Do you think you are funny?”

That was the title of a meeting invitation. Not from HR, but from a new Vice President, who was recently acquired as part of a corporate buying spree.

It was the mid 90’s. The internet was still a wild and crazy land of bubbling opportunity. Everyone was trying everything, nobody knew what the next big thing was going to be. The latest fad was e-greetings, animated greeting cards sent via email. Skip the post office and send your birthday wishes straight to Grandma's inbox!

Well my company wanted in on that action, they wanted to do it on the cheap, and they had an extra Vice President with no real responsibilities. So the call went out, via email of course, to find some folks willing to put in extra hours creating content for greeting cards.

The number of folks who answered the invite was surprisingly small. Perhaps they read the fine print between the lines, or maybe they just didn’t want to show up for a meeting after hours. The VP presented a simple offer. Write and draw greeting cards for all manner of occasions, suitable for sending via email. Do this work a few nights a week in addition to your regular job. It's a paid gig, but it can’t interfere with your “real work”.

It sounded like easy money, and to me it was. I thought up clever ideas, puns, short rhymes, anything that crossed my fancy. Typical greeting card schlock. I wrote the words, sketched out the art concept and handed it off to the artistic folks. My ideas were generally on point, but my art skills peaked in elementary school.

Eventually another team arrived. German Interns acquired during the same corporate buyout that landed the VP. They were responsible for all the technical aspects of the process. At first they tried to help with the creative part as well, but language and cultural barriers proved difficult for a primarily American audience. So I acquired a second responsibility. The after work hours I spent working, I also spent as a culture guide and local assistant.

The interns stuck together and rented a house as a group. I helped them get signed up for phone, water, and electric. Those things are difficult enough for young folk just out on their own, but add in being in a foreign country, it becomes a nightmare. This experience sent me down a new path related to cultural barriers. I knew about Christmas and Birthday and Congratulations. But what about other holidays, beyond what I had personally experienced. I spent time researching, asking questions. Do people send cards for Rammadan? For Holi? Turns out there are a lot more holidays in this big wide world than I had ever imagined.

As a youth I had read Mark Twain. Not just the popular works, but also the travel logs. They were amusing, but I wasn’t ready then to fully grasp everything they meant. Now, for the first time working closely with folks from a different culture, even though it was not radically different, I began to understand.

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.” - Mark Twain

That quote had always resonated with me. I thought it was wise, and a great motivator. But now I felt it below the surface. From then on, it became more of a life philosophy than just an inspirational quote.

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One weekend, I went on a road trip with the interns. We had a multiple hour drive ahead of us. One of them asked me,

“What are we going to see on the way?”

“Trees” I answered, considering we were driving through the Pacific Northwest towards the Olympic Mountains.

“Is that it? Anything else?”

It didn’t occur to me that it would be anything else. I had grown up here. Trees were everywhere. Driving for two hours and seeing nothing but trees and an occasional town was normal for me. And we did see trees. So many trees. But when they finally parted with the Olympics majestically rising on one side and the infinite Pacific on the other, well, “America the Beautiful” has never really been able to do justice to the glorious landscapes this country really has to offer.

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Alas; some months later the party finally ended. E-greetings, it turns out, was not the wave of the future. Folks were getting tired of email, and looking to find ways to reduce how much they received. The after hours work closed down, staff disappeared, interns returned to their homeland, and I was reduced to my regular old desk job. The work we had completed remained online quite a while afterwards, but not forever. For the next few years at least I could pop open a web site and see digital proof of my first time as a paid writer.

The emperor sits on his throne. In his lap is a wrapped birthday present. He opens it, and the present is empty inside.

“Dang,” he says “More new clothes”.