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Work is a social activity.  (Not like a party or a gabfest, though some people do seem to be confused about this.)  No matter how isolated we may be in our roles at work, the best outcomes usually grow out of processes that include collaboration with and feedback from others.  This first became clear to me when I founded and published Cryptics Monthly, the first online subscription-based periodical in the United States devoted solely to publishing cryptic crosswords.  (If you read that last sentence and thought, “What on earth is a ‘cryptic crossword’?” or perhaps, “What?!  A cryptics crossword magazine?  I’ve never heard of it!”, then you can probably figure out why it folded after less than three years.)  Constructing crossword puzzles is largely a solitary activity, and when you start an online publication you take on a lot of duties yourself, so it was easy for me to feel as if it were a one-man show.  But, besides the unalloyed brilliance of some of the puzzles constructed by our contributors, nearly all of the good things to come out of that enterprise were the result of multiple minds sharing and synergizing, and the biggest lesson I took away at the end was that I should have been more willing to reach out and involve others, right from the start.

I thought of this lesson a couple of days ago, when, walking past a string of food trucks parked a couple of blocks from my office, I saw an astounding attempt at memorable marketing.  Food trucks have become a lucrative and thus highly competitive business in cities like Washington, DC, where high retail rental rates and steady demand for quick inexpensive lunches have driven talented chefs and cooks to peddle provisions from parked panel trucks.  In a textbook illustration of marketplace behavior, the brutal competition among these vendors has forced them all to offer high-quality, delicious food, and now they have to resort to all kinds of tactics to try to secure a spot in customers’ hearts: exotic cuisines and odd fusions, eye-catching displays and decorations . . . and now this.  It’s a variation on the Letterman “Top 10 List” trope, usually a reliable if predictable foundation for pithy observations and sometimes even genuine wit.  But here it has become advertising gone horribly wrong – as if you were channel surfing and suddenly came across the Geico Gecko drunkenly molesting the Energizer Bunny.

Just look at that first line!  “Your is better than sub sex”?  It sounds like an outtake from The Hunt for Red October, but I think it’s supposed to say, “Why our sub is better than sex.”  And then the ten reasons – every single one of them contains at least one error of fact, taste, marketing, or typography!

  1. “If our sub is lousy . . .”?  They lead with the suggestion that there’s a chance their food will be awful?  Why not just write, “If our sub gives you a disease . . .”?
  2. Aren’t people usually supposed to share sex with a buddy?  At least someone they are on speaking terms with.  Now, if it read, “You can share it with several buddies,” that might have made sense.
  3. “Cooking time is few minutes” – what does that even mean?
  4. This one is actually close to making sense and being funny . . . so he made “at least” into one word.  Or maybe it started off as “Atl. East” – could be this guy is a fan of the Indoor Football League’s Atlantic East Division.
  5. I would not want to be this guy’s girlfriend.  “Shush!  No feedback!  I have no interest in how much you enjoyed it!”
  6. This one is actually close to making sense and being funny . . . so he stuck an apostrophe into “want”, making it short for “wa not”.
  7. He just recycled #2!  Although at least this time it comes close to making sense and being funny.  So he also misspelled “co-worker”.
  8. Hey!  People are trying to eat!  If you want most customers to put your cylindrical product into their mouths, don’t compare it to a phallus.
  9. HEY!  Trying to eat, remember?! 
  10. I’m hoping this is meant as a reference to monogamy, not a denunciation of experimentation . . . but in either case, “type” should be plural.

I can’t help but think that these are all the kinds of mistakes that would have been caught if the vendor had shared his list with a few other people — maybe a fellow vendor with marketing experience, or an old English teacher.  Only the very last line actually makes complete sense: “Our subs are always hot.”  And, really, it would have made a perfectly adequate slogan.  Why didn’t the vendor just use that?

I’ll never know for sure unless I ask, but it does remind me of when I was putting Cryptics Monthly together.  My sense of ownership had sparked a double-edged pride: because I enjoyed getting credit for the project, I was sometimes reluctant to seek out the perspectives of others.  Part of this was undoubtedly vanity, but a lot of it was anxiety: the fear that asking for help was an admission that I wasn’t really capable of making the best decisions on my own.  And part of it was ignorance, too: not recognizing that, in fact, in some areas I really wasn’t capable of making the best decisions on my own.

But we all have our weak spots, and enlisting the help and opinions of others to shore them up is a virtue, not a liability.  Self-sufficiency is important, too, but sometimes collaboration is how you get there.  So if, like me and my magazine or this chef and his signage, you are taking on something outside your usual bailiwick, err on the side of seeking out too much advice and perspective, rather than too little.  You will still have the opportunity to show judgment and leadership by taking responsibility for the ultimate course of the project.  But the rest of it — it actually is okay to share it with your “co worker”.