Today threatened great things – and it didn’t disappoint.
The wretched Tuesday bug had already caught me unawares, before even sunrise. Before I had chance to see Lord Sugar on the telly (I HATE telly) rant on about the benefits of bullying. Well, he didn’t call it bullying – he said it was ok for bosses to have a go at their subordinates if they were stressed out about people being crap. There’s nothing worse than crap, inefficient people in the workplace. Sadly there are more of these pathetic specimens at ‘work’ than there are perfectly primed, exciting and dynamic folk who really make our world rock.
Talking of insightful genii (don’t go following up on this. The plural of genius is genii – if you don’t believe me, read The Dictionary of Bob Booby, to be published by Harper Collins next year or whenever you finally forget about it) I must doff my cap and offer a tongue of gratitude to none other than my hero of the moment, Tod Maffin.
Tod, if legend is to be believed, inspired a legion of bakers to create a savoury-sweet treat that adorns breakfast tables of fat people in both the US and the UK. Which is nice, because let’s face it, anything that makes Americans make sense to us Brits is always a good thing. If rare.
This treat, then. What apparently happened is Tod was presenting a seminar of sorts to a bunch of confectioners (ConfAid, 2009). It was a ticket-only event and our light-of-hearing protagonist (not Tod) was unable to attend under conventional auspices. He was a member of the epicerie brigade, you see. He had no right to call himself a confectioner, aside from a packet of hairy bon-bons he had in the inside pocket of his moleskin jacket. That jacket spelt F A S H I O N. It was the meekest, cutest example of the work of a well-helmed couturier you could ever expect to acquaint with.
Our nameless tour de force somehow managed to pull off a stunt few have ever replicated in the ConfAid world. He played stowaway. In his moleskin jacket he cut the finest of figures, and in perfect fettle he managed to underswift himself into the convention as an accomplice of Mr Bento, the guy who invented those silver ball bearings that aren’t really ball bearings, but have a sweet taste and an unfamiliar odour and sit inside plastic jars on rickety shelves in sweet shops.
While Tod was presenting, our baker-warrior was taking notes on his festering pad. It was rancid having fallen into a vat of cherry oil only the day previous. Cherries, if you weren’t aware, have a tendency to stain the average notepad. What was worse, this notepad was made of linseed. On contact with linseed, cherry juice creates an explosion which literally blows the lines from notepaper off the page. This spectacle of teutonic proportions is at once terrifying and arousing. It’s a bit like watching that new film 2012 while expecting an enormously good experience.
Smoke was literally pouring off his pad as Bun Boy became increasingly enthralled by Tod’s captivating speech. Less speech, more rousing epic. Bread Ted saw a change of life. He was totally blown away, like linseed in cherry juice.
Rousing applause met Tod’s finale, whereby the daring diplomat of dynamism summoned a kayak made entirely of figs to the stage.
As dry ice pumped out into the audience, a metaphor for the universe-changing address, Croissant Charlie underwent an epiphany. “What if,” he thought. “What if..”; Baguette Bob was confuded, riddled out – and a stutterer. “What if I could in some way replicate this moment in dough? Produce a tasty shrine that would be passed from mouth to mouth, preferably not like apple-bobbing and certainly with more hygienic principles applied, to toast (deliberate gag entered here) the work of Tod.”
The baker winced with the might of his cleverness. “But how?” And then he remembered a vital piece of advice his dad proferred upon him one sunshiney day. “What would Alexander Graham Bell do?”
Erasing his thoughts of soft white batches, Baker Boy and Bento left the premises, the latter unknowing of the former.
Because of the remote proximity of oven lover to the stage, Tod’s surname had been misrepresented. The audio qualities of the room in which he presented were not optimal. Baker Boy had decided that Tod was Tod Muffin. And thus, a Muffin was born.
Now there’s nothing here of concrete proof that attests to the veracity of said story. I recite it only as it was told. But there’s a lot in there that you can believe in. ConfAid was brought on as a result of many in the confectionery business going through rough times. The dates match: muffins were only created in 1998, and ConfAid was already in full flow. It is decreed Tod’s presentation was a mesmerising podium pleaser entitled “Sweet times ahead”. The subject was reinforced by a series of slides that showed how, with the benefit of experience from other industries, confectioners at this event could experience game-changing emotions and create sweeping strategies for future growth.
And Tod? Today he caught me at an untypical low ebb and installed in me the very essence of awe. Coincidentally, just a short time after I’d swallowed a couple of Scotch pancakes. Baking product dissing aside, here’s what occurred.
I was reading a recent Six Pixels of Separation post by Mitch Joel. I like Mitch. Mitch reminds me of school days. Or rather, pre-school days when we were born. He has an astonishingly honest candour, a bit like a baby, and he also has no hair, which is another striking throwback to when we were just a few days old.
The similarities wither there. Mitch has fabulously clever thoughts that he – being quite the libertarian kind – chose to share with his disciples like you and me, for a price approximating zero. You could buy his book, for sure, but his newest thoughts are nothing-priced. That for me make him the finest of the bargain kind. I like Mitch Joel an awful lot. Not, it must be said, in a way that I like the girls, but then he’s very clever, so you have to draw the line somewhere.
Mitch told me anew about Tod Maffin and his new scheme, called CaseStudiesOnline. It almost blew my flickin’ mind! What Tod (who inspired muffins among the hard-of-skilled or dyslexic oven champions, perhaps) did was aggregate all the case studies online of, erm…
The case studies online of, er…
The case studies of social media strategies so you can persuade your boss why he should be using social media. And now. Before Buick, Barclaycard, Boots and Bonanza Stores, Idaho, strike forth with such commercial vengeance and capitalistic magnitude that you’re so far behind you ain’t even in their wake, dandy boy!
I was sidetracked back there because I was in the mistaken belief that CaseStudiesOnline would be about all types of case studies; maybe even reviews about luggage. But it wasn’t. But it doesn’t matter.
Imagine having all the case studies online you could possibly need to implant in the mind of your seniors the veracity behind social media effectiveness. That’s how awesome this is. And this is how awesome Tod is. I love Tod. I love muffins. I’m totally, like, in love right now!
As a side story I’m also very sad that ProBlogger has defriended 5,000 people or something in his Facebook account. Being totally unsociallymediaaware I hastened to this conclusion rather than reading his virtual oratory. He probably did it for a reason that makes complete sense but this is the danger of headlines, right? If I was retarded I would have surmised the situation using the first few words of his sermon. Which were Dear FaceBook Friends, I’m De-Friending Most of You [It's Not You, It's Me].