2008-06-03: So... what do *you* do?

I got married a couple of weeks ago. We and our guests planted some trees:

<font size=-1>Me getting married. Via the London Free Press.
Also note Peter, Luke, Ed, and Anna.</font>

But wait, I'm getting ahead of myself. The story goes something like this:

Erin and I got engaged shortly after she went tree planting last year. (I had been too lazy to get up early.) We thought it would be fun to have a tree planting at our wedding, so we set about trying to find a wedding site that would let us plant trees. Alas, there were none. But one of Erin's friends referred her to a berry farm out in the wilderness somewhere, which we visited and decided it would make a fitting wedding location. Sadly, they already had plenty of trees. We proceeded to the local coffee shop (there's only one) to discuss our strategy. I asked someone there, "So, let's say you happened to have a bunch of trees that needed planting. What would you do?" She looked at me seriously, thought about it for a second, and said, "How many?"

A couple days later, she set up a meeting for us with a local lady, Barbara, who happened to be planning to reforest some of her family's historical farmland with trees that originally grew in the area. (In Southern Ontario, many of the original forests were clear cut and converted to farmland, so a lot of the original species are getting pretty rare.)

We agreed that her land would be a great place for our tree planting, and she said she'd name it "Erin's Dell." She offered to pay for the trees. I said no, no, that's okay, we couldn't ask you to do that. Instead she formed a charitable foundation, got donations, and had the Ontario government match them so that Erin and I ended up paying nothing. She also picked the trees, hired a landscaper, got a local lady to bake fresh bread, and had everything ready for us the day we arrived.

Oh, also, it turns out that before she retired she specialized in public relations and marketing, so she could hardly resist issuing a press release. That's probably why the London Free Press showed up at our wedding (where our guests, by the way, were doing almost all the actual digging/planting work) and took the photo featured above. A couple of smaller local papers picked up the story as well.

So what's the point of this story?

Well, when you meet people, one of the first questions they always ask is, "What do you do?" Erin finds this question annoying, because it isn't the right question.⁽¹⁾

Ask yourself instead: if it weren't for her, how much of the above would have happened?

Footnote

⁽¹⁾ It's not actually the right question for me either. When I answer "I'm a Computer Engineer!" most people's eyes instantly glaze over and the conversation ends. That's not supposed to be the purpose of small talk, so I usually dodge the question too nowadays :)

Epilogue

And then our honeymoon in Salt Spring Island, BC, was almost entirely organized by Juli, my bus driver from high school. I am not making this up. <!-- end of entry 200806/03 -->

Syndicated 2008-06-02 18:34:59 from apenwarr - Business is Programming