Tales from My First Job (part 3): A Hole Other Story (or, I Guess It’s All for the Asbestos)
This week I’m celebrating the anniversary of my first full-time job. Several (long, painful) months after earning my MBA at Ohio State I took what I thought would be a pretty cool job as marketing director for a regional shopping mall in Columbus, Ohio. It was not fun.
Related story: I asked AI an unusual question: “Is there a formal word to describe a large expanse of undecorated wall space in a shopping mall?” AI had some fun answers, like “blank wall,” “neutral canvas,” and even “bulkhead.” I love them all!
It reminded me of my shopping mall marketing director days. My mall had a huge, blank wall, high up near one of our anchor stores (none of the wall, the store, or the mall itself exists anymore—progress!).
One of the first things I noticed when I started at the job was a dozen BB gun pellet-sized holes in that neutral canvas. When I asked my maintenance director about it, he explained there had been an event at the mall shortly before I started there, one that include a lot of helium balloons. Some balloons got stuck way up there. Naturally, his guys shot them down with BB guns, leaving the holes in the bulkhead as a souvenir.
Why didn’t we just let the balloons fall on their own? BB guns!
Why didn’t we fix the wall? Asbestos!
If we touched any part of that bulkhead, we’d have to replace that entire blank slate and bringing it back up to code would come at a huge cost. So, we left the undecorated wall space (and the problem) alone—literally hovering above us.
Even when things go wrong or just strange, you can always learn from the experience:
- Quick fixes can lead to bigger problems. Bigger, more unsightly problems.
- Avoiding problems doesn’t make them disappear. They often get bigger and more expensive.
- Think about the consequences. Creative solutions aren’t always practical, and while shooting down balloons with BB guns may seem creative, but it wasn’t the most practical or thoughtful approach.
How about you? Has digging for more information ever made you wish you had just stopped asking?
See you tomorrow!