This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

Consider this to be a bit of a respite from never-ending stories about the omicron virus.

Or, consider what follows to be mostly irrelevant.

And, to achieve this, forgive me for writing about myself. 

Rather than big thoughts this morning, I have remembered when my colleagues and I achieved “firsts” during my professional career.

For some reason, I thought of these firsts as I waited to go to sleep – and, you might add, thinking of this kind of stuff should produce sleep.

So, here goes.

IN CONGRESS:  When I worked in a congressional office 40 years ago, ours was the first to acquire a Wang Word Processing System.

That is significant because the office of Oregon Congressman Les AuCoin was one of 435 such offices in the U.S. House.  So being first meant something.

Of course, as we obtained the Wang system, we had no idea how to operate it, but, in short order, figured out at least one huge benefit:  As we wrote letters for the congressman’s signature, we no longer had to use multiple pieces of paper and carbon paper and, if we made a typing mistake, all we had to do was delete it and move on.

No more hard erases on the paper and the carbon.

For us, that was huge as we cranked out hundreds of letters every day, not to mention the media releases I wrote as the congressman’s press secretary.

Today, of course, there are no more Wang Word Processing systems, having been replaced by many other more capable machines.

IN OREGON STATE GOVERNMENT:  When I came home from Washington, D.C., I moved into a management position at the then-Department of Human Resources, an umbrella agency that is no more.

In the director’s office of the agency, we were the first state employees to be given individual computers, albeit ones that stood on our desks, not a laptop such as I am using to produce this blog. 

Having computers made our work much easier.  Today, many years later, almost every state employee has a computer.

IN THE LOBBYING AND PUBLIC RELATIONS FIRM WHERE I WAS A PARTNER:  The achievement here was to acquire “blackberries.”  Remember those small machines?

The worth of them for us was that, wherever we were, we could view e-mail messages from clients.  If we were walking around the Capitol to meet with legislators, no problem – we had easy access to e-mails.  If we were out to lunch with a legislator, again no problem — we had e-mail access. 

And, for me, if I was on the golf course, where I did some of my lobbying work, I was still connected.

Consider the change today.  All of us have phones that give us all kinds of messages on the go, including e-mails and texts, not to mention just the routine phone calls.

Speaking of blackberries, did you notice this story last week?  Blackberry devices running the original operating system and services will no longer be supported, marking the end of an era for the storied device that catapulted work into the mobile era.

The story said this:

“Waterloo, Ontario-based BlackBerry Ltd., the company formerly known as Research In Motion whose signature handset in the 1990s came to embody working on the move, said handsets running its in-house software ‘will no longer be expected to reliably function’ after Tuesday, according to its end-of-life page.”

In all these firsts, do I think of myself as a leader?  No.  At least not alone.  Only in this regard.  In each of the examples above, I worked with colleagues and, together, we were able to plow new technology to make our work better.

Note the word together.  Good stuff like this doesn’t result from the work of one person; it results from a team effort.