I Miss My Mind the Most of All

The image above is a good example of a portion of what I do at work. That graphic is referred to as a "spotlight". I am given the details of products that are being announced, and I have to come up with some snappy phrase that will catch our Web visitors' eyes and make them want to learn more about this product.

I work with this terrific design god named Ed, who has become like my fourth son, after Scott, Tyler, and Ty's best friend Chip. As I'm forming the words for the spotlights, I'm simultaneously trying to think how my words will fit with images, and trying to make things easy for Ed to browse the stock photo site and find good photos to make our point.

Yesterday I was working on a new page of resources—white papers, analysts' briefs, IBM documents that will help the visitor learn more about our storage products. I wanted to suggest to Ed various education-related themes he could search for, such as a pair of glasses laid on an open book, a library shelf, or a microscope. Only I couldn't think of the word for microscope. Okay, so I'm a geek, not a nerd (with no insult intended to you science types), and a microscope isn't in my bag of tools, but really! Microscope. I knew it ended in "oscope" but I couldn't get the micro part.

So I sketched out a very rudimentary microscope. Then I turned to my officemate, a 30-something who still has her brain, and asked her what it was. She laughingly set me straight.

Is this how it starts? With something as simple as "microscope"? I'd better step up my daily crossword puzzles.

On the other end of the spectrum, last night when I was playing for the little elementary-school cuties in the CYT musical theatre class, one of them, seeing my badge hanging around my neck, asked me where I worked. I answered, "IBM". Her response? "What's that?" What? Really? Someone who has never heard of IBM?

I said it was a company that made computers and that they introduced the PC. Another little girl said, "You mean the laptop?" Ouch. These kids know what my iPod Nano is, but they don't have any knowledge of computers other than laptops.

And here I salute my sons, who both work in the computer industry and who credit their success in their field to those $100 IBM PCjrs I got them at an IBM "fire sale" when they were about nine and ten years old.