But what to do about those nasty cables hanging out the back?

My ever inventive dad found a thin board, painted it the same color as the wall, and nailed it to the back of the table. The back crossbar, conveniently positioned at the top of the white baseboard trim, hides the seam. The cables and the board are completely invisible, from almost anywhere in the room.

Think he could get a job at Apple?

I have a few responses.

1. Sometimes you need to work hard, even when you are working smart.

Creative work rarely goes from good to great without some hard work. This doesn’t mean that every job needs to take 500 hours, but some just do. And the ones that only take 5 minutes often take only 5 minutes because you’ve worked hard at similar tasks years ago and now they come easy.

There are plenty of other legitimate reasons to work hard, even when you’re working smart: your partner is out sick, you made a mistake, someone else made a mistake, you’re on a roll, etc.

2. Who wants a 4-hour work week?

I have no interest in a 4-hour work week, I love my job. I work in a comfortable office with people I respect and care about, doing projects which are enjoyable.

If the idea of a 4-hour work week is attractive to you, you’ll probably have better luck at happiness by looking for a better job or looking to make your current job more enjoyable than by searching for a way to get rich quick, get other people to do your work for you, or whatever other snake oil this book is selling.

(It seems like the easiest way to achieve the 4-hour work week is to write a book about the 4-hour work week. Except that someone already did that.)

3. Working smart is not a bad idea.

Of course it’s not. But it does mean different things to different people and professions. For me?

• Regularly asking myself if I’m going in the right direction and knowing when to start over and when it’s time to push further
• Knowing when good enough is good enough and when it isn’t. (* story on inside of box)
• Knowing when shortcuts are going to end up taking me longer to fix than doing things the right way from the beginning
• Knowing when asking others for help will save time and when it will cost time
• Knowing when doing something today will take half the effort it will take tomorrow, and when it will take twice

I learned (and am learning) most of this stuff through experience gained while working hard, as most people probably do.

Hard work is not necessarily a virtue and certainly not for everyone, but some people (myself included) enjoy it. We may change our mind someday, but in the meantime, skip the lecture and let us get back to work!

—

* In my college summers, I used to work light construction with my father and uncle. One morning my uncle gave me a tiny closet to paint, and left me be.

He came back a few hours later to check up, shocked to find me still in the closet, sweatily struggling to get the paint strokes to all go in the same direction. He boasted about how he and my dad used to compete for who could get more apartments painted before lunchtime, and then he told me my closet was fine as is.

I protested and pointed to the uneven brush marks, when he smiled as his eyebrows arched upwards.

“I have just the thing to fix that.”

Then he reached up and pulled the little string hanging from the light bulb in the ceiling and the closet went dark.

I’ve never been much interested in fan fiction or the fiction that inspires it, but there’s something about these characters moving in this medium that’s startlingly powerful. Both Mad Men and Twitter derive their stories and interest mostly from small revelations between carefully or carelessly controlled public and private personas (be it through multiple accounts or stolen dog tags). Like all fan fiction, the Mad Men on Twitter extend and bend the story beyond what’s possible in the stingy one-hour-a-week, one-way format of a TV show. But because Tweets are text and Twitter is a social space, @trudy_campbell and @harrycrane are able to avoid the visual dissonances that can befall a fat Batman at a comic book convention or a kitschy dinner theater performance at Disney’s MGM studios.

Within hours of @bettydraper’s email, I was following a dozen Twitterers in her orbit, including her daughter, her rival, her husband, his coworker, and his past. I followed as they converse with each other and us from 1963 – flirting, skirting, throwing dinner parties, and pouring gimlets, all using a technology that wouldn’t be invented for over forty years and whose only purpose is to capture “what people are doing right now”. @_PeteCampbell effortlessly closes the gap between his now and ours, simply by ignoring it.

Some of my favorite tweets:

“@ken_cosgrove I’ve got a stiff one for anyone who needs it. The Prosecco’s almost gone anyway. @Paul_Kinsey? @_PeteCampbell? Who’s ready?” – Sal_Romano

“Mrs. Draper is a cold, cold princess. Not much better than mom. I’m all alone.” – glen_bishop

Some articles:

• i am @bettydraper (Including dirt on her rivalry with @betty_draper
• Confessions Of A (Fake) Mad Man by @don_draper
• A Marketing Move the ‘Mad Men’ Would Love
• AMC decides to allow fans’ ‘Mad Men’ Twittering
• There’s Alka Seltzer in my Scotch (In which I trash Mad Men and AMC. What can I say, in retrospect, Season One was a necessary mess ;)

These guys are headed to New York next month for the US release party. They worked their butts off on this one, and it shows in the writing and design. Wish them luck!

For now, the NYAB site is basically a clone of TAB in purple, but already we’re starting to see a development wishlist accumulate that will inevitably pull NYAB in its own direction, making it a better, more native site for New York, and hopefully improving TAB as well.

In the course of consulting work, I’ve seen local web teams improvise design tweaks and add ons to meet the needs of their users, slowly tugging at brand coherency, until one day the global office wakes up, and squashes often useful sites and features in the name of uniformity. This always seemed silly and heavy-handed, but as an outsider I had no emotional attachment to the established visuals and voice that were being defended. Eventually NYAB may grow to the point where some design and development happens independent of Tokyo, and I hope that when that time comes I have the judgement and humility to known when to hold on, when to let go, and when to encourage.

The green Infobar was sold out at Bic, so I moved on to Eiko’s W53CA, flagging down a rep. Before escorting me to his 3-card Monty table, he kindly warned me of the three or four “optional” programs I would be *forced* to sign up for, regardless of which phone I chose or where I bought it.

This was the first trade in I’d done since phone numbers were decoupled from carriers, and little did I know how absurdly complex the process had become since then. In this rant, I won’t even get into the different minute and packet plans, since they’ve been around long enough to be beaten on by more knowledgable critics than me.

Full Support Course vs. Simple Course
As far as I can tell, by buying the phone at the discounted price, I automatically signed up for Full Support. They are essentially supporting you by giving you a ¥21,000 (USD200) discount on the handset’s invisible retail price, but *locking you into the carrier and the phone for 2 years*, with penalty fees if you change either. Additionally, Full Support is the gateway for the standard diner menu of minute/packet plans, whearas the Simple Course, offers just a few cheaper plans with no prepaid minutes or packets.

Full Support is clearly nothing more than a tactic to scare beloved customers into sticking with au, now that they are no longer locked in. It seems to also be a replacement to the tiered handset pricing scheme that made new phones progressively cheaper the longer you held on to your previous one.

Call Designation Discount
This “discount” option costs ¥300 a month. It allows you a 60% discount on calls made to any three phone numbers. I guess this would allow certain people who call the same numbers all the time to select a cheaper plan with less pre-paid minutes, but even then it’s hard to know if the numbers would work in your favor since au doesn’t send detailed call records with your monthly bill.

I was forced to sign up for this option, but canceled it the next day. At worst, I’ll be charged the first month’s ¥300, but I’m sure there are plenty of customers who forget to cancel, and will now be short pocket change for a night of Karaoke once a year.

???? (Waiting song)
Ever call a friend on Docomo and hear some lame melody trying to make love to the dial tone? That’s Machi-uta, and it’s come to au at ¥300 per month.

I was forced to sign up for this twisted spawn of a focus group gone wrong wrong wrong. I canceled the next day.

Safe mobile support
This is essentially Apple Care for au, at, you guessed it, ¥300 per month. Five year repair warranty, discounted repairs on stuff not covered by warranty, discounted replacement costs, two free batteries over four years, and extra points. It’s actually not a bad deal for anyone who use a single handset for 3+ years, but for the rest of us, it’s just another sleazy fee.

I was forced to sign up for this too. I canceled the next day.

Everybody Discount
No it’s not the next Japanese dance craze. A few years ago, there was a “Wari” (discount) war between carriers, starting with a couples discount, followed by a family discount, then a students discount, second handset discount, a discount for the elderly, the left handed, and finally, gas station attendants with leap year birthdays. Au then decided that it’d be easier if they just gave a discount to *everybody*, but generously decided to keep all the other discounts, probably to take the sting off the second mortgage you take out to pay off all those ¥300 yen fees.

Believe it or not, Everybody Discount doesn’t cost anything, but is only available if you lock yourself in for two years. Wait, didn’t they cover that with Full Support?

In Conclusion
For all the convenience the mobile phone industry provides me, it has few competitors for my disgust. I’d like to believe that their convoluted games were forced by some genuinely unavoidable industry-specific economic factors that I’m unaware of, but deep down I suspect that they’d rather nickel and dime profits out of their customers with useless add-ons and devious pricing schemes than earn it through good ideas.

Postscript on the green infobar
Undeterred, I hit Ito Yokado yesterday, where I’d seen the model in stock the previous week. It was still available, but alas, only available to new customers. Apparently, after 6 years and $6000 of loyalty to au, I’m only worthy of grey or red & white check.

Update: This post used to include the Japanese terms for these crazy plans, but Wordpress chewed them up when I upgraded to v 2.7. Unfortunately, (or fortunately?) I don’t remember what they were called

AQ is a Tokyo-based, multilingual web and graphic design office I co-founded.
dryfishbutterfly is an instrumental rock band. I play keyboards.
Tokyo Art Beat is an art and design event guide. I volunteer design and copywriting.
Hitotoki is a narrative mapping website I co-created with Paul and Craig.

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