Dear Lady I Recently Encountered At An Event I Attended With My Son,

Hello there. You don’t know me, but I recently became fascinated with you and your particular brand of mania. We were in the same room the other night, attending a choir rehearsal for our children in which we had been invited by the choir’s administration to both observe what they were teaching our kids, and to find out important information and ask questions about the season’s progress.

I noticed you in the crowd, although I’m pretty certain that you never gave me a second thought. We were in that room for two hours while our children learned music, practiced scales, raised their hands to answer questions, laughed at the engaging efforts of the choir’s wonderful conductor and assistant, and merrily participated in an activity expressly designed to grow their minds and talents.

But I’m wondering if you caught any of that at all, because you were sitting there texting on your phone. The entire time. I mean seriously: THE ENTIRE TIME.

I’m a little embarrassed at how distracting you were to me, and how fascinated I became at your incredible dedication to the texting arts. At one point I estimated that your nimble fingers were flying across the keypad for four out of every five minutes. Even in the final part of the evening’s rehearsal – when the entire point of parents being present was being directly addressed by the group’s administrative officers – you continued to show no interest, no emotion, no engagement and no attention, other than that to which you paid your phone and its precious buttons and scrollbar.

It just occurred to me: perhaps you were taking notes the entire time, so as to recall later on all of the salient points that were shared, to jot down the exact moment that your child maybe raised his or her hand to triumphantly answer a question. But that probably wouldn’t explain why your texting even continued during the group’s break.

Or you must be a person of extreme importance and impact, and your two-hour absence from coworkers, family or friends is so unthinkable, so devastating in its ability to create a Not-You vacuum that the only solution would be your continued connection and presence via hastily-scribed, omnipresent, text-stream.

I’ve got it: you’re a brain surgeon, allowed a single night off the job to enjoy a night of children and music, yet instead you were disturbed by a final-hour call of desperation from another surgical team in the OR, you their only lifeline to stave off a tricky complication or mid-procedure anomaly. And your feverish texting just may have saved someone’s life.

Or it could be that same scenario, only you’re like the guy in the 70s Airport movies where you’re the only person who can help land! that! plane!

Of course, none of those guesses explain why you wouldn’t just, you know, not come to the rehearsal. Or step outside while you’re texting. Or maybe – crazy, I know – turn the phone off and put it aside, just for two hours, while your kid was nearby learning something pretty spectacular.

I enjoy being a connected guy. I take as much advantage as I can to monitor websites, RSS, Twitter, comments, email, analytics – I dig all of that. I understand the excitement, the motivation, the rush of real-time communication in a digital age. It’s cool, heady stuff. And you’re probably a far more important person than I am, with bigger responsibilities and expectations of your time than me, so I probably have no business making such assumptions.

But quite simply: I don’t get it. The most connected among us must be able – and must be encouraged – to put the thing down for more than a minute. We should never reach a point where our reliance on these tools creates a higher value on connecting online than a roomful of connections instead.

First of all, let me just say this:

*whew.*

That palpable sigh of relief is because, as anyone who has possibly stumbled across this site from my other blog might know, I’ve been looking for a new job since earlier this year when it became clear that my old position had been put in jeopardy by the state of the U.S. economy. With my saint-like wife and three ever-growing little boys looking on like orphans in a Dickens novel, I knew that securing a new job quickly and decidedly was not just a high priority, but a literal necessity – and I usually don’t like to use the word “literally” literally.

So I’m very proud to reintroduce myself to you as the new Director of Marketing at Alps Controls and their rather impressive e-commerce website alpscontrols.com. Based in Homestead, Pennsylvania (roughly 15 minutes east of downtown Pittsburgh), Alps Controls sells thousands of HVAC and building controls products to commercial contractors around the world. We have over 100 manufacturers of a wide variety of sensors, temperature control equipment, security access controls, leak detection systems, and a whole host of high-tech wizardry that I need to learn a lot more about.

I’ll be handling all of the marketing content on the Alps Controls website, including the creation and management of online video, sales and promotional content, advertising, posting to the company’s blog site (which, in short order, will be migrated to WordPress because I’m a WordPress snob) and development of other social media tools to increase interaction and communication with our audience.

It’s a terrific new opportunity for me, and after joining Alps a week ago, I know I’ve made a great choice. The company’s management has created an extremely employee-centric community with the entire team dedicated to success, cooperation, service and meeting our customers’ needs. I’m extremely excited to get working with all of them, and to discover new online tactics to help get the word out about our products, manufacturers, and terrific value of our e-commerce site.

Personally, I’d like to send out a warm thanks to everyone in my circle of family, friends and others who provided help, tips, leads, recommendations and all manner of assistance while I was searching for a job. It was a stressful handful of months that I wouldn’t much want to revisit, but – like tough times tend to do – I feel like I was able to learn not just a lot about myself, but about the people in my life who I love and value. Again, thanks.

Coming up next time: some plans for this blog, thoughts about my other one, and other future musings. Come back soon and we’ll figure it out together.

On Induction weekend this year – July 27-30 – it was an ideal time to be in Upstate New York at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown where they celebrated their annual Hall of Fame Induction ceremony and weekend-long festivities. This year Tony Gwynn and Cal Ripken Jr. are the inductees. And while you’re in the baseball state of mind, take a look at the Hall of Fame catalogs I’ve got in my portfolio.

Writing at the Marketing Profs Daily Fix blog, Gerry McGovern observes a trend that websites are putting a higher priority on their visual design than their usability. It’s true that Web users demand high levels of easy-to-navigate and usable content, but I’m not sure I’d agree that the most usable sites are necessarily ugly by definition. I’d suggest that successful sites emerge from a kind of online natural selection – if the combination of looks and usability are there, people will return and continue to find value in the site.

There’s no argument that online content is an information medium, but we mustn’t count out its power as a visual medium as well.