A Christmas miracle
I’m no good at giving presents. I can’t help it. It’s not in my genes. But I do see what people who’re good at it do. They make mental notes of any frustration or hint on the part of the future recipient. They probe subtly. They drop hints themselves. As for me, I don’t have a clue. I’m so inept, you might as well drop me in the middle of the shopping center on December 24, ask me to go into the first ten stores I encounter, and buy at random. Which is pretty much what I do every year.
My problem with presents is that they don’t involve co-creation. Here is the process I’d like to follow. I’d want a facilitated discussion with the people I’m supposed to buy presents for, and ask them to share with me what their life is like and where their passions lie. I’d also have a bunch of store representatives there – someone from Nordstrom who knows my wife’s sizes, one of those blond hulks from REI who can tell my daughter what kind of tent she needs to withstand bear assaults, and a geek from the Apple Store to discuss with my son what’s new in three-dimensional chess software. Somehow, they’d work it out among themselves. I’d be good at moderating that dialogue. I‘d gladly underwrite the flow of goods resulting from this highly efficient co-creation platform.
Absent that, I’m pretty much lost at sea. My wife tells me I’m supposed to pick up what people want from living with them, even without a facilitated discussion. She coaches me subtly, like when she says: “I understand Dan Brown has a new novel out, available at the Burlington Barnes & Noble for $12.00 in the best-seller section to the right of the cash registers.” When she decrypts the original message for me on Christmas morning, after discovering I’ve inadvertently offered her the same waffle-maker from Crate & Barrel as last year, I have to protest that her co-creation signals are too weak to be perceived by structured guys like me. “You have to tell me to light up my Christmas receptors,” I tell her. “How am I to know otherwise?”
Not only does she think I’m bad at picking up demand signals, she thinks my supply signals are even worse. “Don’t you ever see anything in a store or on the Web and think: this would make a nice present for such-and-such person?” I smile embarrassedly, because, no, I never match anything I see with a person who’d like to receive that merchandise (except for the waffle-maker which made me think of how lovely it would be for her to make me some waffles on a cold winter day, but somehow she didn’t think that was such a good idea).
Miraculously, the Christmas present co-creation platform I had dreamed of has arrived in the form of the Amazon.com Wish List. The smart guys at Amazon have figured out that a wish list should extend beyond the boundaries of the Amazon store itself, so they let you earmark anything you see on the Web, place it inside your Amazon Wish List, and they’ll get it for you through the regular Amazon buying process. My daughter introduced me to it. “It’ll be helpful in your work,” she said,” but feel free to buy something on my wish list to get a real experience of the thing.” And so I bought her the Stone (Granite) Mortar and Pestle, 7 inches, 2+ cup capacity from Import Food Thai Supermarket for $32.95. You may wonder what’s so co-creative about that. Well, I had a choice of items. For example, I decided not to buy her the Contemporary Stainless Special-Value 16-Inch Roaster with Nonstick Roasting Rack from Calphalon because at $124.97, I thought it was a bit expensive for a test (even at $115.99 used). Also I’ll be darned if I ever buy her the V955 Vector High Performance Radar Detector (Black/Silver) by Beltronics that’s also on the list, which reminds me I want to have a conversation with her about her driving habits.
As for my wife, she was impressed I’d even know what a pestle is. “I travel a lot,” I explained, smiling enigmatically.