You might do a double-take when you see these street signs in Port St. Lucie, Florida, which is somewhat fittingly named for the patron saint of people with vision problems. There’s a block in this town where the street signs have had misspelled names for years: Cresent (instead of Crescent) Avenue, Granduer (instead of Grandeur) Avenue, and Aubudon (instead of Audubon, as in the bird guy) Avenue.
When an uninhabited tract of land became incorporated as Port St. Lucie in the 1950s, the newly-formed city hired a guy to hand-paint its signs. A combination of what passed for education in the area, his “enjoying a few beverages” during his lunch break, and the Florida Effect led to the initial hilariously wrong spellings on the street signs, and “Not My Job Syndrome” likely led the signmakers after him to repeat his errors.
…and it’s the perfect face for that account. In a single picture, it captures the essence of Florida Man: a regret-tinged “so it’s come to this” sort of moment that results from a poorly-made choice, unconsidered consequences, with optional intoxicants and nudity, occurring in the life of someone from the Sunshine State.
A still doesn’t capture the existential dread as well as video (with music added for a little emotional underscoring and dramatic flair):
While Christie isn’t from Florida, the decision to abandon his campaign, his principles, and his dignity was likely made while here — a terrible decision that has turned him into a meme — is as “Florida Man” as it gets, and that’s why I think he should be its new face.
In case you don’t get it, I’ll provide an explanation. Better yet, since it’s going to be that kind of election, I’ll let a cute YouTube personality do it for me:
Although this was released in December 2014, nearly a year after my move to Florida, I was unaware of the above ode to Jacksonville, Florida until yesterday, when my friend and Jacksonville native Hampton Catlin posted it to Facebook. Shot at Jacksonville Landing, a terraced open-air shopping mall by the St. Johns River and overlaid with tourist brochure photos, the video is acoompanied by some unremarkable elevator jazz, and then drowns it with out-of-sync vocals that sound like karaoke night with your co-workers who’d staved off stage fright by downing a few rounds of sickly-sweet shots (most likely buttery nipples, and they couldn’t stop giggling while placing the order):
According to a December 2014 article in the Florida Times-Union titled Video, song promoting Jacksonville draws negative reviews, it wasn’t put together by the city, the local chamber of commerce, or even a group of local businesses, but some amateurs who wanted to share their civic pride. The ringleader behind the effort is Laurence Walden, whom they describe as “a veteran entertainment professional who once was a producer and director of theme park shows at Disneyland”:
He’s lived in Jacksonville since 1999 and said he thought the city needed a theme song.
Walden said Thursday that he used Broadway show tunes as an inspiration for the music for the song. He used his own experience in Jacksonville as the inspiration for the lyrics which tout everything from the Jaguars to the Beaches to the arts and other cultural scenes and beyond.
“I wrote it about nine years ago,” Walden said. “It’s a theme song, not a pop song. … It appeals to a diverse audience.”
People who are not Walden have described said appeal with comments like “That is more than cringeworthy. It’s tragic,” and “I’m sure there was good intention, but that was bad.”
A far better song about Jacksonville is Duval Ditty (a nickname for Jacksonville, which is in Duval County), released 4 years earlier in 2010. It wins on every front, from the tune to vocalists who can keep time, to better dancing, to not showing generic chain businesses you can find outside Jacksonville, such as chain hotels and grocery stores, which were featured in the Jacksonville, Florida video. It’s even more impressive when you find out that it was made by students at Jacksonville’s Paxon High School.
“I’m most concerned with the kind of person they are, their character. I’ll ask questions like, ‘Tell me about the greatest successes in your life.’ What I’m looking for is whether their view of the world really revolves around others or whether it revolves around them. And I’ll ask them about their greatest failures in their life and see whether they own them or whether they were somebody else’s fault.”
“One thing I’ll do sometimes is to meet someone for breakfast for the interview. I’ll get there early, pull the manager of the restaurant aside, and say, ‘I want you to mess up the order of the person who’s going to be joining me. It’ll be O.K., and I’ll give a good tip, but mess up their order.’”
“I do that because I want to see how the person responds. That will help me understand how they deal with adversity. Are they upset, are they frustrated or are they understanding? Life is like that, and business is like that. It’s just another way to get a look inside their heart rather than their head.”
“We’re all going to make mistakes. The question is how are we going to recover when we make them, and are we going to be respectful to others when they make them?”
It’s a good trick, and for those of you who are interviewing for jobs should be advised that it’smakingtheroundsinanumberofpublications, which means that it may be used a little more heavily for the next few weeks.
Office Depot CEO Steve Odland remembers like it was yesterday working in an upscale French restaurant in Denver.
The purple sorbet in cut glass he was serving tumbled onto the expensive white gown of an obviously rich and important woman. “I watched in slow motion ruining her dress for the evening,” Odland says. “I thought I would be shot on sight.”
Thirty years have passed, but Odland can’t get the stain out of his mind, nor the woman’s kind reaction. She was startled, regained composure and, in a reassuring voice, told the teenage Odland, “It’s OK. It wasn’t your fault.” When she left the restaurant, she also left the future Fortune 500 CEO with a life lesson: You can tell a lot about a person by the way he or she treats the waiter.
A plagiarizing CEO’s million-dollar mistake
An actual photo of former Raytheon CEO Bill Swanson and a waiter, posed for USA Today.
You might think that it’s CEOs all the way down, because the article points to a book that Raytheon gave away, titled Swanson’s Unwritten Rules of Management, written by then-CEO Bill Swanson. It features 33 rules very home-spun, down-to-earth-sounding maxims for managers, number 32 of which is “The Waiter Rule”:
32. A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter, or to others, is not a nice person. (This rule never fails).
According to the New York Times, 17 out of the 33 rules in Swanson’s book– for the math-challenged, that’s more than half — were lifted verbatim from The Unwritten Laws of Engineering. As punishment, Raytheon froze his 2006 salary at its 2005 level and reduced his restricted stock award by 20 percent, which an anonymous insider said cut his compensation for that year by about a million dollars.
It doesn’t end there. The first of the rules that Swanson said were his was “Learn to say ‘I don’t know.’ If used when appropriate, it will be used often,” and it’s a word-for-word copy of one of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s “Rumsfeld Rules”, which appeared in a 2001 Wall Street Journal article (the original’s no longer online, but the rules were reposted here).
And finally, the Florida connection…
As for the Waiter Rule, it turns out to be wisdom that Swanson likely lifted from a Florida Man.He’s one of Florida’s wisest men, but he’s still a man who lives in Florida:
In Dave Barry Turns 50, a book published in 1999 and that I suspect I will be given at least once on my 2017 birthday, he includes this pearl of wisdom:
If someone is nice to you but rude to the waiter, they are not a nice person.
And there you have it: a little bit of Florida Man-related news that isn’t embarrassing. Happy Leap Day, everyone!
Recommended Reading
Want to waste some additional time online today? Take a look at this entry from TV Tropes:Nice to the Waiter.
Kirk Kelly, a man on Tampa’s most wanted list, was pulled over by police in Tallmage, a town in northeast Ohion, at a traffic stop at 3 a.m.. The cops became suspicious when he provided two fake IDs and used his brother’s name, and one of them mentioned using a mobile fingerprinting device to identify him. Hearing this, Kelly, who wasn’t handcuffed at the time, chewed the pads off his fingertips.
It didn’t do him any good, since the photo above shows that Kelly has a distinctive set of tattoos, including some that clearly mark him as a Tampa thug, which were used to identify him. In case you were wondering, he has a nationwide felony warrant out for drug, weapons and racketeering charges, and Tampa police believe he sold guns that were used in multiple murders.
You might do a double-take when you see these street signs in Port St. Lucie, Florida, which is somewhat fittingly named for the patron saint of people with vision problems. There’s a block in this town where the street signs have had misspelled names for years: Cresent (instead of Crescent) Avenue, Granduer (instead of Grandeur) Avenue, and Aubudon (instead of Audubon, as in the bird guy) Avenue.
