Nothing Goes Wrong (Or Right) At A Rest Stop

Every rest stop has the same map behind the same scratched plexiglass, and the YOU ARE HERE dot is always rubbed down to a pale smudge by a few hundred thousand thumbs.

Think about what that sign is admitting. A rest stop is the only place on the whole drive that has to tell you where you are. The vending machine hums the same hum in Wisconsin as it does in Ohio. The hand dryer roars like it took the job personally. You park, you go, you’re back on the road in eleven minutes or less, and nothing about the place comes with you, which is exactly what it was built to do.

Pull off into a town you’ve never heard of and nobody needs a map. The town tells you itself. A hardware store that also sells fishing licenses and fudge. A diner whose coffee tastes like it was strained through a gym sock, which you will describe to people for years. (That was on our way to Eau Claire…) The town never promised you a good time. It promised you a time.

I pull into a lot of rest stops at work. Check in with this person. Update the status on that line item. Turn the dot green. (I promised you a separate riff on “just checking in” a while back. Consider this the down payment…) They’re built exactly like the real ones. Same format everywhere, success measured by how fast everybody gets back on the highway, and by Friday nobody can name one thing that happened at any of them.

A status update is the plexiglass map. It tells you where the project is and nothing about what it’s like to be there.

Both stops can cost the same in lost time. What separates them is ownership. A rest stop belongs to nobody, and a town belongs to somebody. Every status check-in asks the other person to pull off into your rest area: your tracker, your three bullets, your format. The town version is you getting off at their exit.

The work doesn’t change. Every place worth visiting still has a bathroom (I scrub the ones at Garth’s Brew Bar myself, early, before the day job, and nobody has ever driven across town for them). The update still has to happen. Only the route changes. Instead of asking where the landing page is, ask to watch it get built for ten minutes. You still leave knowing it’s mostly done. You also leave knowing the image uploader fights them on every file and they’ve been too polite to say so, which is the kind of thing a status field has no box for.

Sometimes you take the exit and the town is a bust. The project is in worse shape than the dot said, or the person is quietly annoyed with you. Good. That’s the gym-sock coffee. Nothing ever goes wrong at a rest stop, because a rest stop never promised you anything.

If you lead people, this compounds… A team that only ever sees you at the rest stop learns what a visit is for: refuel, report, leave. Then they go build rest stops for your customers. The quarterly review with the same twelve slides. The renewal email that shows up right on schedule like a blue sign. No customer has ever told a story about the time their vendor touched base.

Next year the four of us fly out of Madison, rent a car, and string three cities together in whichever of Vermont, Maine, Florida or Texas wins the family vote that’s under way right now.

Somewhere between city two and city three, somebody small is going to need a bathroom immediately, and the blue sign will be closer than the town. The blue sign is always closer. That’s the only thing it has ever had going for it.

Stay Positive & Guess Which Exit We’ll Be Taking