Could fairy tales be the next big trend in American pop culture?

In movies, books, and television, over the past decade we’ve had our fill of witches and wizards, vampires and werewolves, and zombies. Each tied in to our national zeitgeist. With Harry Potter, we yearned for magic when the dot-com bubble burst and 9/11 struck. With Bella, Edward, and Jacob, we yearned to be immortal and powerful in the good times mid-decade. And with many nameless zombies, and we’ve felt a material, economic, and spiritual deadness as the economy spiraled downward in the last 2-3 years and we realized that the “hope”  we voted for in the last election was empty, leaving us limping along mindlessly among the masses.

Just as our nation’s spirits couldn’t get much lower, perhaps our next cultural trend will signal a return to childhood innocence, and an expectation of an eventual happy ending. I foresee a coming trend of fairy tales in pop culture.

Here’s my triangulation:

·         This week saw pilots of two new shows in the fall TV line up: ABC’s “Once Upon a Time” and NBC’s “Grimm.” Both shows put a modern spin on the classic fairy tale genre, and boast promising links to previous obsession-worthy shows (Grimm’s writers previously worked on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the first 30 seconds had me screaming unexpectedly, with an awesome karate-chop-the-monsters scene soon after. “Once Upon a Time” has ties to ABC’s “Lost”, with clever application of my favorite Lost symbology, including the opening eye, magic numbers, and even the Smoke Monster!)

·         Among top Halloween costumes this year, Rapunzel makes an appearance on the list of popular pop culture costumes, alongside of names more frequently in the headlines this year,  like Lady Gaga and Charlie Sheen, as described by this Mashable infographic

·         Moviegoers in 2012 will have TWO all-star adaptations of Snow White movies to choose from: “The Brothers Grimm: Snow White” starring Julia Roberts, or “Snow White and the Huntsman” starring Chris Hemsworth (hot off the sets of “Thor”) and Kristin Stewart (Bella!) in the title role

·         This weekend’s NYT Artsbeat describes an upcoming revival of Sleeping Beauty from a leading London ballet company

Curiously absent from my list is anything from the world of popular literature. Even among the precocious new genre of “paranormal romance,” Amazon’s bestseller list is still topped by teen fiction about witches, vampires, and zombies…which makes me think, maybe I should go write one for myself!

This morning I had an unsettling experience that ruined my Saturday morning.  Hulu took away my Glee!

With a busy schedule at work and school, I don’t have a lot of time for TV. There are a few shows I still like to follow, but I seldom watch them when they air. Last year, I was able to keep up with most of my favorites through Hulu. What a great online service! It hosts my favorite shows—and hundreds more—and lets me watch them any time I want, with a limited number of ads, which are often targeted and therefore interesting to me. I was a loyal customer, at least during the TV season.

So this weekend, with an unusually light schedule and plans to mostly spend time at home learning to put a little weight on my broken foot again, I was looking forward to catching up on TV. Last night, I watched the first two episodes of Glee, and this morning, just as my coffee was brewing and I was ready to settle in on the couch to watch the latest one, after the first 2-3 minutes of the episode, I got this message:

FAIL!

What a disappointment! I have been a loyal Hulu customer since it first launched, and I made plans around using it today. I’ve been using Hulu for free all along, and now, with no warning, they want me to pay? Forget that! Hulu sucks!!!1!

As a product manager who has spent most of her career working on free/unpaid online services, this is more than just a nuisance. It’s a cautionary tale for marketers.

We know from decades of market research that customer satisfaction is all about setting expectations, and then exceeding them. Hulu set my expectations for a high-quality, free, always-available online video service. When it changed those rules, my expectations were disappointed, leading to extreme dissatisfaction with the brand and with the service.

Further, this disappointment hits where most consumers feel pain first—in the wallet. That makes it especially egregious, because it undermines the value proposition. I think of the value proposition as “what you get for what you pay.”  In Hulu’s case, the “what you pay” part changed, while the “what you get” does not, leaving me as a consumer to find the service a lot less valuable.

And then there is the way the service change was communicated to me as a customer, which was just brutal. No warning, no advance notice…just drawing me in to the first few minutes of my show, and then WHAMMO brining my episode to a screeching halt. It felt like extortion! Want to see more? Surprise! Pay up! This is just lousy customer relationship marketing, and makes me even less inclined to give them my hard-earned dollars.

I know, from following the industry, that there are some tough dynamics at play in the online video space. Hulu isn’t the first content provider to experiment with monetization models. And even as online advertising spending increases and technology improves, there’s still pressure for content sites to make money, somehow…

So what can we learn from this?

1.       First, for product marketers who work in innovation, it’s important to have your monetization model worked out before product launch. Yes, you want to attract lots of customers as soon as possible, to generate buzz and to charge premiums for advertising. If mass-market advertising is the model you’re going with at launch, your customers will expect you to stick with it for the life of the product.

2.       If you must monetize differently, provide net-new value or functionality for the paid offering. Hulu is on the right track by considering access to the most recent episode to be a key benefit to paid customers, but their tragic mis-step is that it was free before. That left me with the perception that they took something away from me as a loyal (unpaid) customer, and doesn’t make me trust that they’d have anything valuable and new to offer me if I became a paid customer.

3.       It’s critical to message change to customers in the right way, at the right time.  Hulu disappointed when they told me that they’d changed their policy only after I was engaged in usage.  Lots of products change policies and feature sets; it’s important to have customer communication mechanisms that can unfold a thoughtful narrative that properly sets expectations, puts a positive spin on the changes, and honors the customer relationship.

So, will I tune back in to Hulu next week, when this episode becomes free? Probably not. I am that annoyed…and they did me the kindness of telling me that it’s also available on FOX.com. Whether or not I’m schooled on the dynamics of online video content partnerships, going to another site will give me the feeling that I’m not using nasty ol’ Hulu anymore. And luckily for Fox, my loyalty to Glee is greater than my loyalty to Hulu. Just as long as those kids keep on singing!

For a long time in my career, I couldn’t talk about what I was doing at work outside of the office. But today, I’m not just talking about it…I’m blogging about it on the Office Web Apps team blog!

And there’s quite a lot to talk about today, too! The updates described in my post on the team blog represent months and months of work by a ton of really talented people. It’s an honor to get to represent them, and our product:

Office Web Apps - You asked, we delivered: new Web App features now available

On the Office Web Apps team, we are committed to improving our products based on your feedback. Since we launched the Web Apps just over a year ago, we’ve been listening to you, and today we’re releasing new features based on what we’ve heard…(read more at http://blogs.office.com/b/officewebapps/archive/2011/09/29/now-announcing-new-features-you-ve-requested.aspx

I am especially proud of this update, because it exemplifies the hard work we do at Microsoft to listen and respond to customer feedback. With lots of good ideas for what we could do with a product like ours, it’s been exciting to see the team rally around the data and analysis that helps us understand what our customers would most like to see from our product.  

It’s also been exciting to watch the product grow over the first year-plus of its life. It doesn’t seem like that long ago that we were first making plans for collecting feedback in the pre-beta offering. It’s been fun to use the product I’ve helped develop in a lot of real-life scenarios, too…which I hope to blog about soon!

Posting a recent assignment for school—for our Leadership seminar, we were assigned to be completely honest for 2 days, and then write about it. From this assignment, I learned that my usual commitment to integrity means that I am as ever honest with others…but it helped me discover one area where I’m not always honest with myself:

BBUS 522

September 25, 2011

Honesty assignment

Being honest with others is easy when you’re by yourself. In the absence of interaction with other individuals, there’s no one to deceive, no diplomacy to be brokered, no rules to be obeyed save for those you set yourself. Functioning for large portions of the day with limited social interaction, there’s little opportunity for dishonesty. For my two days of assigned honesty, when I was home from work recovering from an injury in solitude, the biggest lie I had to struggle with was “I’m fine.” It was a lie I told myself.

Earlier this summer, I hurt my foot. I was running from a late meeting at work to a last-night-before-it’s-due cram session for school, and a hasty miss-step on some uneven concrete made me lose my balance. As I stumbled, my overloaded backpack, which was stuffed to the seams with books and papers for both work and school, pulled me down hard. So hard, in fact, that the resulting fall both sprained and broke my left foot, unbeknownst to me. I dragged myself to the cram session, limp-hopping on one foot, and stayed there working with my group until just past midnight. “I’m fine,” I reassured the group, when they first noticed my injury. And again, a few hours later when I rose for a stretch, and then realized I couldn’t put weight on my foot, I brushed off their offers for help, saying “I’m fine. Really…”

But I wasn’t fine. My foot continued to swell and ache, so I made myself a doctor’s appointment. Limping and hopping into the waiting area, the receptionist leapt up to bring me a wheel chair the minute she saw me come limp-hopping through the door. “I’m fine,” I told her, but I let her help me into the wheelchair anyway. I didn’t like getting wheeled around from waiting area to examining room to X-ray station and back, but the results showed that I’d needed it. I had fractured my 5^th metatarsal, an injury known as a “Jones fracture” which is notoriously hard to heal. But I didn’t realize that at the time. I was certain I’d be just fine.  

I was determined not to let my injury slow me down, at first. I finished the summer term with strength—I showed up to take the final with my shiny new crutches, and my study group  received an A+ on the paper we completed the night I fell—and then I took off for a week’s vacation with family and friends on the East Coast. But vacation wasn’t as relaxing as I’d hoped; Mother Nature was conspiring against me. The week I was on the East Coast, I experienced an earthquake, a hurricane, and some pretty significant travel difficulties. When I boarded the first airplane of my trip, a retired couple seated next to me watched me struggle, and were amazed that I was traveling all that way with an injury all by myself. I didn’t understand their reaction. “I’m fine,” I told them. “I might be a little awkward, but I can do this, I’m fine.” By the end of my trip, I knew I was beyond awkward, and I had a much better appreciation of the concern they’d expressed.

My first week back at work was difficult, too. My job requires me to attend about half-a-dozen meetings on an average day, and in between meetings I do a lot of “hallway diplomacy,” which is my term for “managing by wandering around.” But wandering the hallways of my building, which has over a quarter-mile of hallways on almost each of its 5 floors, can be pretty exhausting with a broken leg. And of course, sympathetic co-workers kept kindly asking me “What happened to your foot?” and “Are you okay?” My constant answer was “I’m fine.”

Then, on my third day back at work, a very small car fire in the garage of my office building set off the building’s fire alarms, and I had to evacuate down all 5 flights of stairs on crutches. I didn’t try to do it on my own—my manager and a teammate supportively stood beside me as I limp-hopped down. I was exhausted by the time we reached the bottom, and as my co-workers looked at me gravely with concern, I reassured them that “I’m fine.”

But I wasn’t fine. When I returned to my doctor’s office in more pain than I had initially, new X-rays revealed that my fracture was 3 times worse than it was before. The doctor told me that my foot was still capable of healing naturally, but only barely; any worse injury would mean I’d need surgery, and I was also at risk of the break interfering with an important nerve. To address it, he told me that I would need to stay entirely off of it until my next check-up, and that I was to stay home to ice it & elevate it for 2 weeks. I assumed that if I did that, I’d be fine.

But 2 weeks went by, and I’m still not fine. I made it through those home-only 2 weeks, barely, and have hobbled through the start of fall classes. But after a few days back in the office, I’ve found myself unable to keep up my previous pace, and my manager encouraged me to spend the rest of the week at home again, working on independent projects. It was during those days at home that I chose to do my honesty assignment.

The first day of the assignment was no problem. I focused on my independent projects, kept up with work email, and dialed into a few mission-critical meetings, and never once had cause to question my personal integrity in my business dealings. I had no problem with the assignment in class that night, either. I maintained my high standard for honesty in my interactions with my classmates, and the only time I felt a twinge of dishonesty was when discussing a reading: I had told a friend I’d read Good to Great years ago, but when we discussed the chapter, I found I had almost no recollection of the material and wished I’d re-read it before class. And one other thing: When my classmates asked me how I was doing, I had to fight the urge to tell them, “I’m fine.” 

The second day was a hard day, but not because of the honesty assignment. I was struggling with my injury, and feeling the pain of frustration, limitation, and isolation far more than the pain from the healing bone. Even the little things were wearing me down, like how dirty my house had gotten since I hadn’t been able to sweep or scrub for several weeks, or how hard it was to eat a meal, since I can’t cook or even put food on a plate to carry it to the table with crutches.

That afternoon, a few friends called, texted, and emailed me out of the blue, with offers to help if there was anything I needed. When they asked, I felt the usual, overpowering instinct to simply say, “I’m fine,” but because of the honesty assignment, I knew I couldn’t do that.

It wasn’t easy to be that kind of honest. I like to be the one who offers and provides help and support; I’ve been learning lately that I don’t like being on the other end. This assignment taught me that, while I have no problem living and speaking honestly and conducting myself with a high level of integrity in my work and social interactions, I have a hard time admitting to myself when I need help, and an even harder time expressing that to others. 

The last night of the assignment, two friends from church came over to my house. They helped me tidy my home, swept my floors, prepared some food, and even put it in single-serving baggies that I can carry to the table with my crutches! Another friend took me to lunch the next day, and another stayed on the phone with me for hours that evening while I talked about what I was feeling. I am grateful for their help and so blessed by their caring and service. I know that, with support and friends like these, soon I’ll be able to say “I’m fine” again soon, and mean it.

As if it isn't bad enough that I am visibly in pain and struggling to get around on crutches or a roller aid, everyone--and I do mean everyone, friends, colleagues, strangers, everyone!--feels entitled to an answer to that question.

And I don't even have a good answer.

"I broke it." It's just too embarrassing to repeat time-and-again that I tripped on some uneven concrete, fell really hard (in front of a bunch of strangers) and ended up with a sprained ankle and a fracture in the bone, in the 5th metatarsal on the left.

I didn't even realize I had a 5th metatarsal on the left, but I certainly do now! Apparently it is a really important bone for walking, and it's notoriously hard to heal since it won't heal properly if it bears any weight. Which I found out the hard way, when the fire alarm went off at work during one of the rare moments that I was seated in my 5th floor office. I went down all 5flights of stairs on crutches as best I could, with a lot of help from some awesomely patient co-workers. but increasing pain later that day told me I'd done something wrong, and a return visit to the podiatrist revealed that it was 3x displaced from where it was before, and that if it gets any worse, I'd need surgery. So I was prescribed some different medications (I'll save my adventures with pain pills for a different post), a new form of therapy, and strict orders to stay entirely off of it, stay away from stairs, and of no work/working from home for 2 weeks, to give it time to heal.

I am now 1 week into that 2 week healing time...and it is much, much harder than I thought it would be! It is no fun being stuck inside your house for the nicest weekends of the year! It's torture knowing that I'm missing out on some great hiking, concerts, and adventures. and I also miss my friends, and my job, my hobbies, and junk food, too! But one thing I don't miss: people asking me, "what happened to your foot!"

Sent from my iPad

According to my Marketing textbook (A Framework for Market Management, 5^th Edition via Kindle ©2012) holds up P&G’s Old Spice Guy as a successful integrated ad campaign that “paid off.” But did it?

The textbook makes no claims on ROI, and cites only reach + awards from other advertising bodies as proof of success. But I remember articles like this one, “How Much Old Spice Body Wash Has the Old Spice Guy Sold” from Ad Age last summer, citing flat share growth and growth from coupons alone for this product.  

Which leaves me with just two questions:

·        Are there any more recent sales numbers for Old Spice, beyond those spun so negatively in last summer’s critical views?

·        Are there—or should there—be other measures of a campaign’s success beyond ROI tangibles like share & profit?

A classmate of mine recently asked for pointers on getting started with Web Analytics, the field of BI that looks at what customers are clicking on and searching for on the web to help improve sites and experiences. There is a large market for experts & practitioners of web analytics because it helps marketers assess ROI and improve on digital marketing assets, which makes it a hot career field for people who excel at both business and math.

Here are the resources I pointed him to:

·        Not surprisingly, the Web Analytics Wikipedia page has a thorough overview of the field, including key terms and topics to be familiar with

·        Find lots of good resources on the Web Analytics Association website

·        Web Analytics Demystified blog, written by Eric Peterson, author of a book by the same name and one of the leading thinkers in the field

·        Occam’s Razor blog, written by Avinash Kaushik, author of Web Analytics An Hour A Day, and another industry leader

·        Video archive from eMetrics, an industry conference on the topic

·        Quora is a great place for question-and-answer dialog on web analytics (or any field): http://www.quora.com/Web-Analytics

Others? Leave a comment!

Every now and then again, I like to start my work day with a “personal offsite.” Going to a different location helps me to think about work projects from a different perspective, and the change in venue helps me to think outside of the box to come up with big new ideas, too.

Today was one of those days. As I switch gears to take on a new focus in my job, I went to the top floor of Microsoft’s Lincoln Square building in Bellevue for an early start to this morning, and I was inspired by the view!

(And yes, I did this photo editing in PowerPoint 2010 with Picture Tools. Effects used include Crop to Shape, Picture Effects Soften Edges by 5pts, Picture Effects Glow by 8pts with custom color selection)

I just got ordered some shoes from Zappos. That in itself is not blog-worthy; I order stuff online all the time.

What made this particular shopping experience notable for me was the way in which I spotted these shoes: in typical Zappos fashion, it was an excellent customer experience, built on some cutting-edge technology. We’ve been talking about Zappos a lot in my MBA classes (for example, we were recently assigned this reading). This experience also touches on another theme we’ve discussed in class, Customerization, or “operationally driven mass customization with customized marketing.”

Here’s the customerized marketing experience that got me to buy from Zappos:

1.      On a site I was browsing, I saw the Zappos ad on the page. The ad caught my eye because it featured images of shoes that I really liked. In fact, I noticed that they looked a lot like shoes I had been looking at on Zappos last week, but didn’t buy…and these were even cuter!

2.      I noticed that there was a link on the ad to learn more about why I was seeing it. Of course, I couldn’t resist clicking to learn more! Not only was I impressed that Zappos would dedicate precious ad copy to showing me the technology, but I was also both entertained & educated by the target page, which does 3 key things: it explains this individualized ad platform in an accessible way, makes it easy to opt-out, and has  a light-hearted and fun voice. And the opportunity to provide feedback through two separate points on the page was another nice touch, too.

3.      Meanwhile, back to the shoes…because I liked the looks of the shoes in the ad even better than the ones I was originally shopping for on the site recently, I clicked through to look at them. Of the 3 that were featured, I liked these best of all. As demonstrated on this page, Zappos does a lot of things right in terms of e-commerce, including good page design, lots of available pre-purchase information, and plentiful customer reviews, including advice on choosing the right size from the customer survey results displayed directly on the page.

4.      Even though there were some negative reviews, I was sold by the video demo, which gave me the ability  see them in action, just as if a real-life sales person was demonstrating them to me.

Zappos’ easy purchase process, free return policy, and reputation for customer service also made it easy for me to make the decision to purchase these shoes from them. And the fact that these shoes are  on sale didn’t hurt, either.

Ultimately, beyond the purchase process, the thing that counts the most will be how well I like the shoes when I actually get them and try them  on my fussy little feet. I’m pretty picky when it comes to shoes, of course…but it’s also a good reminder that even with the best targeting/marketing/site design/customer service, the most important factor in the purchase process is the quality of the product itself.

I categorically dislike cold weather, sports that go fast, and falling down, so I’ve always figured that skiing wasn’t for me. But certain skiers in my life seem to enjoy it so much, I thought I must be missing something. So when my group at work made plans for a team-building event at The Summit at Snoqualmie ski resort, I thought I would give skiing a try, especially since the group was offering a free lesson with a professional instructor as part of the event.

The team building began before the event even started. The greater Seattle area has been experiencing some snowy weather patterns recently, and while there’s no more snow in most regions, the mountain passes have still been getting quite a lot of snow. The teammates I was carpooling with tuned in to the weather to hear accounts of 20”+ of new snow fall at our destination, and we noticed that the roads leading to the area were covered in snow and slush. We debated turning around and not risking the dangerous roads, but after putting chains on the tires, the experienced winter drivers in our group were confident we would make it just fine.

And we did. It was slower going and took about an hour longer to reach the ski resort than we thought it would, but we made it there just in time for the fun to begin. Snowshoe relays, snowball target practice, and digging for tokens hidden in snow drifts made for fun team building competitions, and I enjoyed rooting for my team…mostly from inside the warmth of the lodge!  After all, the snow was still falling, and it was cold out there!

But as the scheduled time for my lesson approached, I suited up and braved the cold to venture over to the equipment rental area. For the first time ever, I stuck my feet with double socks into big clunky ski boots. I struggled with the clasps to fasten the boots shut, and then struggled even more to stand up and lumber across the equipment rental hall to pick up my skis. I had no idea that walking in ski boots would be so hard!

Clumsily, I dragged my rental skis across what seemed the interminable distance between the rental area and the ski school meet up area. What a cruel thing to do, I thought, to make newbies like me figure out our own way across all that snow before even starting a lesson! I must have looked miserable slogging my way over, because a mysterious snow-suited co-worker (it’s kind of funny, how my unique co-workers all look the same behind ski goggles, masks, and scarves!) skied up to me and chatted with me for a few minutes to encourage me and tell me that no matter how today’s lesson went, I should definitely try it again, since the conditions were great if you like powder (I nodded as if I knew what that meant) but probably not the best for learning.

I thanked him for the advice, and continued on my way to the ski school area. It was hard work moving through all that fluffy snow, and I was out of breath by the time I made it up there, but I made it on time! And then I stood there, collecting myself as I waited…and waited…and waited.

Finally, someone came over to speak with me. “Are you the only student today?” he asked. “I don’t know,” I replied, ”I know some of my teammates were looking forward to the snowboarding lesson, but there’s a lot of accomplished skiers in my group, so I may be the only beginner!”

“Well, we’re running a bit late, let’s give it some time and see if anyone else shows up. And don’t worry, you’ve got a good instructor,” he said, introducing me to a man named Michael. Michael’s features were hard to make out beneath his snow gear, too, but as we waited, we chatted, although I think he may have been quizzing me to see what kind of a learner I am. He must have figured out pretty quickly that I’m not exactly a gifted athlete, because when we began he spent a lot of time explaining the mechanics of skis and skiing, trying to help me understand the theory instead of the practice, before we even put my skis on.

Of course, it turns out that putting my skis on was a lot harder than I thought it would be! The snow had been falling fast all day (remember, at least 20” of fresh powder had fallen that morning) and the snow was damp and sticky, which meant it clung to my boots and got packed in around the springs. Eventually, we cleared the snow out of the gear and I managed to get my boots to snap in the skis, and the lesson began in earnest.

Slowly, I learned to take tiny mincing baby steps in the skis, to move the big long boards on my feet in parallel, and not cross them over and trip. I learned to turn in circles, and walk with my weight carefully balanced on my downhill leg as I mincingly made my way uphill.

We minced our way over to the “magic carpet,” a teaching tool that I suspect was meant to easily take beginner skiers to the top of the bunny hill, but which I never really mastered. With all the snow built up yesterday, instead of just stepping on to the uphill contraption like any other moving sidewalk, I had to ski down a short but steep slope to get on to it. Of course I fell the first time!

Once I figured out how to stand back up in those awkward skis, I regained my balance and rode to the top. I even made it off okay, and took about five steps forward before I fell again. At this point, I started feeling really, really sorry for my ski instructor.

Lucky for me, he knew exactly what he was doing. He showed me again how to step sideways to go uphill, and then he showed me how to spread my legs wide and point my skis together as I started to step downhill. When he did this, he took about 3 steps, and then he eventually started to glide, very gently, very slowly, down the almost-non-existent slope.

I can do this! I thought to myself as I took one step, two steps, three, all very awkward and pidgeon-toed, continuing to step, step, step, but no gliding. “That’s alright,” my instructor said. “My skis are freshly waxed, but this snow is pretty sticky, so it’s hard to glide in these conditions. For now, just get a feel for the basics of balancing and moving on the skis.”

We continued to work on these basics for what seemed like an eternity, but was probably more like an hour. Up the magic carpet, falling on the magic carpet, mincing steps to get off the magic carpet, and then gently step-step-stepping my way down the bunnyhill as I learned to balance and move on skis. Finally, just as I thought we were almost done, as the temperature dropped and the snow fell faster, and my leg muscles were starting to shake from exhaustion, my instructor skied in a different direction and then announced, “Now, come over here…you’re about to make a big breakthrough.”

We skied (or I should say he skied, I minced) over to where the snowboarding class was lined up, beside a little hut with chairs swinging past it. It was snowing pretty hard at this point, so visibility wasn’t great, and I couldn’t see where the chairs went after about ten-twenty feet. Ah, I thought as we stood there, this must be the practice chairlift, where they teach you how to get on and off of the chairs. I watched as my teammates in the snowboarding class queued up, hoped gracefully onto the seats, and rode what I assumed was to the top of the next bunny hill to learn the next procedure.

So as my instructor talked me through, I queued up just like my teammates did, and when the chair came up behind me I sat back in the seat…and then watched in horror as we rose into the sky, ten, twenty, thirty feet above the mountain! “Are we going to the top?” I asked my instructor, trying to control the fear in my voice “And where are the seatbelts? What’s holding us in the seat right now?”

“Just gravity!” my instructor laughed. “Don’t worry! Look around you! Aren’t the tree tops beautiful?” They might have been beautiful, but I couldn’t be too sure, because my eyes were shut. Every time I tried to open them, instead of beauty, all I could see were my unsupported skis dangling in the air, high above the other skiers – wait, actual skiers, not just learners?—and the only way I could keep from panicking was to close my eyes and pretend that I was somewhere else. “Just tell me when I need to pay attention, okay?” I begged my ski instructor. I didn’t want to look until we were almost to the top!

Finally, with snow falling furiously all around us, he gave me a gentle nudge and explained how to get off. I gripped his hand with a death grip as we slid together out of the chair and into the snow…and didn’t fall down! I took a deep breath and he showed me how to move out of the way for the next set of people in the chairs behind us—except there was no one behind us. It looked like most of the team had called it a day and had gone in to the lodge.

With a rising sense of panic, I looked down the hill. It was a really long way down! And I hadn’t even learned to glide! “Is there really only one way down?”  I asked, incredulously.

 ”Now, don’t let your head get in the way on this one,” my instructor consoled me. “Remember, you went down that little hill about 4 or 5 times already. This one is only about 30 times longer than that little one.” I tried not to calculate the time it would take me, at the previous rate, to make my slow and mincing way down.

That was when we first heard it. Crack! Rumble, rumble, rumble, all around us, like a slow roll of thunder across the unseen horizon hidden behind the furiously falling snowflakes. “What was that?” I asked my instructor. “Don’t worry about it…” he said, just come this way.” We kept moving slowly, I was determined not to give in to my shaky exhausted legs that were cramping as another group of snowboarders whisked by us. And then another crack and rumble, and then the chairlift stopped moving.

And then we were flanked by two red-jacketed members of the ski patrol. “Avalanche control,” they said. “You need to get off this mountain now.”

“It’s her first lesson,” my instructor explained, probably unnecessarily, as I nodded along and just kept stepping slowly. The ski patrol members muttered to one another, and then muttered into their radios as they looked worriedly up at the mountainsides around them.

The next thing I knew,  I was being strapped into a contraption behind a snowmobile. “What a ride you’re about to enjoy,” my instructor said, optimistically as ever as he helped me remove my skis.  “Not many people get to ride in this toboggan, unless they’re injured!”

“Yeah,” agreed the snowmobile driver, as he showed me how to use a tarp to shield my face. “This mountain is capable of holding 4,000 skiers, and we’re the only ones on it. We’ve got to go right now.”

And so, I went down the mountain much like I went up, eyes shut tight against the cold, and more importantly to fend off fear. When we finally arrived safely at the bottom, I was relieved to see that none of my co-workers were standing outside to watch my inglorious arrival. They were all—ALL—inside the lodge, despite the approaching end time of the event.

After I turned in my skis and boots and thanked my instructor and rescuers, I joined my co-workers at the lodge to find a party in full swing, and no one looked like they were even thinking of leaving. “No one’s going anywhere anytime soon,” my co-workers told me, “there was an avalanche not far from here, and it dumped a bunch of snow on the roads. They’ve shut down the pass in both directions!” They pointed me to a window where we could see the highway, and sure enough, there was not a single car on it.

The state DOT kept the highway was closed until about 8pm, and then we all convoyed together slowly down the icy roads, I was back home just before 11 that night.

Here’s the Seattle Times’ coverage of the event that kept us all out late yesterday:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/theweatherbeat/2014356912_i90slide01m.html

Avalanche closes westbound Interstate 90 over Snoqualmie Pass

Posted by Susan Gilmore

Heavy snowfall, high winds, poor visibility and spun-out vehicles continue to block westbound Snoqualmie Pass from Ellensburg to North Bend. But eastbound lanes reopened after avalanche control work was completed.

About noon, an avalanche about 10 feet deep covered all three westbound lanes of Interstate 90, just west of the summit (milepost 51). The high risk of avalanche danger, in addition to the spun-out vehicles and the heavy snowfall, caused the Department of Transportation to close the pass in both directions.

“Our avalanche team is assessing the risk for more avalanches to occur and it is likely that they will need to do avalanche control work in several locations before we can open the highway,” said Todd Trepanier, DOT South Central Region Maintenance Engineer.

He said snow is falling 2 to 3 inches per hour, with a forecast calling for continued heavy snowfall for the next 36 hours.

So, with an eventful start like that, will I try skiing again? My ski-fan friends tell me I have to give it another whirl, and they reassure me that skiing takes a good 2-3 tries before it really gets fun. And my co-workers reassure me that yesterday’s conditions were not typical, that I should try it again when the weather is different...Or at least when there’s no avalanches!