One rainy Saturday night five years ago, I made my way to a friend’s birthday party in North London. Across the room I caught sight of a girl I hadn’t seen since my school days.
As luck would have it, she introduced me to her best friend, and the two of us got talking, eventually moving to the bar. A shared love of languages revealed itself and, because I was working on language start-up FriendsAbroad at the time, I presented my business card.
Two days later, I received an email and three days after that, we met for dinner. The moral of the story is about the power of following up. This networking thing really does work you know. Verity and I got married this month.
Married life brings changes, some more subtle than others. Once engaged, I began to notice targeted adverts on Facebook for wedding suppliers and, ominously, credit cards.
No sooner had I changed my status to ‘married’, than I began to see adverts for Sky Television and weight-loss programmes. I’m hoping that this is not a warning of things to come.
Another post-marital dilemma for couples is what to do with the wedding dress. Freecycle.com is just one place online where you’ll see brides-to-be finding dresses. Unlike eBay, no money changes hands.
The idea of giving such an item away seems shocking to some. But the alternative for many is to have their beautiful garment grow old in a box.
A wise man once said that you can learn more about someone in an hour of play than in a year of conversation. So when the World Entrepreneurship Society’s Rebecca Harding asked me to engage a room of budding entrepreneurs recently, my first instinct was to head to Hamleys. Would you believe that they don’t even sell balloons? This may have something to do with inflation.
Anyway, I ended up tracking down not only balloons, but also hundreds of coloured balls, the sort you might find in a pit at a funfair. After the event, it seemed a waste to throw them away, so I considered using them to conduct a social experiment.
Perhaps I would write an email address on each ball and scatter them around the city? In the end, time ran out and, defeated, I placed them outside with the rubbish.
As an afterthought, I attached a piece of paper, encouraging passers-by to give the balls a happy home. Returning 10 minutes later, the box had gone.
A colleague writes a well known blog. This year, he has been travelling a lot, giving him little time to keep in touch with the hundreds who write to him. Then one day, he decided that he had reached the point of no return.
His mountain of messages was in danger of crushing him. He pushed the big red button. He declared what is known as ‘email bankruptcy’. Issuing a mass apology to his contacts, he said that anyone who had anything important to write to him about should start again. And with that, he deleted thousands of unread emails.
Today, hiding inside his trashcan might be dozens of pieces of treasure. Like a magnet, he has been attracting nuggets of information for years. Should more companies start ‘freecycling’ their inboxes?
In a month when both Peter Jones and Martha Lane Fox are looking for a new assistant, will a high-profile entrepreneur ever take the plunge and put one of their inboxes online, for everyone to read? Peter’s Open Inbox? It might just work.
