How funny. Thank you to Mark @Britz for retweeting this yesterday for me to find. Not only are the recaps of Cluetrain and Wirearchy wonderful and always worth a refresher, but your last two bullets figured into my day today.

* _Love_ the story about the German bank tellers. I have just started a new job. Since it is so new, people want to know what I was doing before. My previous role was community manager, and before that it was customer advocate. The best experience I gained from being a customer advocate was understanding the end-to-end customer experience, from confirmation of order > how to login > where to download > how to open a support case > where to find patches > how to renew support. I quickly learned that very few people in the company understood the full experience and how all the piece were connected. This shocked me!!! And made me a bit snotty - I wanted more people to care. This experience was invaluable to me; I've become a stickler for understanding the customer experience.

* Today I tweeted, "Writing is hard. More specifically, sense-making is hard." I was working on my company's "What we believe" list of statements. Working to make them reflect our human-ness, to make them conversational, plain talk. Resisting the the pull to turn it into marketing speak and "Here's why we're great". (We *are* great, but that is for a different document).

It is so great to have validation that my commitment to plain language, to conversation, is the way to go. And I feel grateful to have a CEO who says, "Work on that [messaging] if it is fun, but don't spend too much time on it. Our customers will tell us what we are."

Deciding to join my new company was a very big leap for me. I did it mainly because of how drawn I am to the people in the team, and beliefs the company and our services are founded on. I love these reminders that I made a good choice.

As true today as it was eight years ago... thank you.