Do you remember Andy Rooney?  He used to do commentary on 6o Minutes.  Big, bushy eyebrows.  But the thing I will always remember is when he would ask “Did you ever wonder….?” and then go into some offbeat topic.  My question is when did people stop thinking?

  1. When you are walking in a busy airport, don’t just stop.  Would you just stop your car in the middle of a busy highway?  Of course not. Same at airports—there are other people walking and you inconvenience everybody by simply not moving to the right.
  2. In the same venue, please walk on the right.  I don’t know why we do, but we do that in this country.  Plowing headlong into someone walking against the flow is not how I want to start my day.
  3. When someone is scheduling a meeting and asks 25 people if they are available, think long and hard about whether using “reply to all” is a smart move.  I know I don’t want 24 emails letting me know every meeting people have planned on the days in question.  I would rather wait for one email reporting the results of the inquiry.  Think before hitting send—does everyone really need to know the information I am sending? By the way, the answer is “no” more than 99% of the time.
  4. Don’t tell me what “the client” wants us to do if you never talk to the client.
  5. If you are a vendor and calling me unsolicited, make your first sentence really good because if I am not interested by the end of that sentence, our conversation is over.
  6. If you’re a vendor and ever call my cell phone unsolicited, you don’t even get the first sentence.
  7. I really don’t care how special your product is.  Really.
  8.  When you take a deposition, think about whether the witness’ 23 prior jobs all need to be explored in detail?  Is what they studied in college really important?  I am trying to remember whether any of  these facts have been the subject of testimony in any of the cases I’ve tried or trials I have observed.  Can’t think of any.
  9. There is nothing funnier (on one level) or sadder (on another) than watching a lawyer who has never tried a case trying to follow the instruction to object frequently.
  10. It is hard to understand how you can be in a service business if you don’t like to serve your customers.

Perhaps I will think of more things I think I think sometime soon!