Live 2 Learn

In February, my company held a conference in San Francisco. I am responsible for designing and delivering the conference and the audience is the VP population of my employer. There are 130 VPs who come from all over the world so the conference is expensive and important - in other words, it's a risky part of my work responsibilities each year. This year for a "give-away" for the participants of the conference we ordered beautiful crystal three-sided pyramids that could act as a paperweight - each side had a graphic from the conference to reinforce the key conference messages constantly for participants. The pyramids are about five inches tall and weigh four pounds each. The top of the pyramid and each corner of the base are very sharp points. When we got the mock-up several weeks before the conference we joked that in addition to reinforcing learning the pyramids could be used as a deadly weapon. At the end of the three day conference most of the pyramids were left o...

Last week I had to travel to Mississippi for my Aunt Virginia's funeral. I haven't traveled in a while (2 months) because we are under travel restrictions at work but it hadn't been long enough for me to forget my friends at the TSA and their restrictions to make us safer. :-) So I got to the airport with plenty of time to spare and things were going smoothly until I was third in line to walk through the magnetron and send my stuff through XRAY. The line stopped because the TSA person staffing the XRAY saw something suspicious in a bag and stopped the belt. It must have been serious because when he signaled that he needed assistance all three lines were stopped - not just the one I was in. TSA agents stepped in front of the magnetrons and turned their back to the people in line (I think this is kind of strange don't you - shouldn't they turn and face the people in line in case something is up?). If a terrorist was trying to pull something they could knock the T...