This week the Boyink Headquarters have shifted 55 miles north here in Michigan where we’re staying at a lake-front cottage for a few days. While the plan was to use the internet connection at the cottage to continue working, the whims of technology were not in our favor. My laptop wouldn’t connect to the network, and the PC at the cottage has a habit of spontaneously rebooting. This isn’t the first time the so-called “working vacation” approach has failed. Thank goodness for the local coffee shops with free wireless connections.
At any rate, since I couldn’t work I decided to try fishing. I have to tell you—I know very little about fishing. All I’ve ever really done is the hook, bobber and worm approach and I’m happy to keep the experience on that simplistic level. There were some poles at the cottage, one was setup with the necessary tackle so my son and I went and dug up some worms. We spent an hour or so out on the dock, and managed to find a small “hot-spot” where we got nibbles and caught a couple of small sunfish (sunfish being 50% of the species I can identify on sight).
I cast the pole back into the hot-spot, and again got a nibble. I jerked the pole to set the hook, felt that I had a fish on, and handed the pole to my son as he had yet to reel one in. I noted that the bobber went way under as he reeled, but sunfish seem to be able to put up quite a fight for a small fish so I didn’t think anything of it. When my son lifted the fish out of the water, however, we were both amazed to see what I’m pretty sure was a large mouth bass hanging there instead. In a split second a couple of things happened - my son and I both started making some really excited sounds, I thought “boy we should get him back in the water and drag him to shore instead of hanging him there”, I went to grab for the pole, and then the fish was gone - taking our only tackle with it. The line had indeed broken from the weight of the fish.
My first reaction was what you’d expect - great disappointment for both my son and I over losing out on such a nice catch. But as I watched my son scramble off the dock towards the cottage to go tell my wife and daughter what had just happened, I had to smile as I realized we had caught something else that no brittle fishing line could take away - a great story. In the day and a half since that moment the conversation has turned back to it several times - and I’m (almost) glad the fish got away as I think it makes the story even better.
Mulling over it since - this one small event has renewed my belief that, for all of our concerns over the technology of the internet, at the end of the day it’s a storytelling medium. The great challenge - as people both with stories to tell and for those of us in business to build things that enable others to tell their stories, is to not lose focus on the end goal. Sure - design, fonts, colors, content management and a score of other things are important. But if at the end of a visit to a site a visitor hasn’t been the recipient of a fun, intriguing, engaging and memorable story then all of our efforts have been wasted.
Personally I’m going to try and do a better job of that here on Boyink.com. What that means, exactly, I haven’t figured out yet - better project overviews, better blog posts, a revision of the About section - anything’s possible…but I need to work on being a better storyteller.
Comments are closed, but you can read the comments other people left.
Simon Cox on June 30, 2007
Boyink (Author) on June 30, 2007