NetWORKing Zones

As I drove across Ohio and Pennsylvania during vacation, I hit quite a few miles of "orange barrels."

There are two mysteries to me.

The first being: even though I was traveling on a week day (Thursday) on my way out, 90% of the work zones were not being worked on. Why? (Interestingly, on the way home, July 7 and 8, (seemingly an extension of the US national 4th of July holiday) there were lots of active zones. Hm-m-m, no work during the work week, and lots of work on Saturday and Sunday.)

The second part of that mystery is, how come we can't have a two-tiered approach to work zone speed limits -- a slower one for active work zones and a little faster for those that are inactive?

The reason I ask is that if I tried to go the posted speed, I felt like I was having a conversation with the driver behind me because he or she was trying to get into the back seat of my Mini.

Now, where there were people working, I wanted to go the speed posted, but again, I felt like a hazard with the vehicle (and more times than not it was a BIG truck) seeming to be only inches behind my bumper.

As I was pondering this dilemma, I got to thinking about how this parallels networking. You see the cars and trucks behind me were in it for themselves. They wanted to go as fast as they wanted without thought of any other driver on the road. Thoughtless networkers do the same, passing out cards at abandon, interrupting people to do so, talking about themselves only. Ivan Misner, Chairman of BNI, has named that behavior as scorched earth networking.

Getting what you want without concern for others.

So I guess we all need to slow down, both for the construction zones this summer and for the networking events we'll attend all year.

What's your take on all this?