Narrator: There once was a fearless knight who’d earned a reputation for slaying dragons. Indeed, it was said that no dragon could defeat this knight and while he was on duty, everyone was safe.

Then one day, the knight came under new management.

Manager: Sir knight, I shall have your attention.

Knight: Who are you that I should give my attention toward?

Manager: I am your new manager. And I think we shall be great friends.

Knight: I don’t need any friends. I need help fighting dragons.

Manager: Very well then. I think I shall begin helping you by analyzing your method of work. It appears to me that you are doing things inefficiently.

Knight: I’ve killed more dragons than anyone.

Manager: Yes, yes. And I acknowledge your success. But I am compelled, as your manager, to inform you that you are not using your time as wisely as possible.

Knight: I’ve killed more dragons than anyone.

Manager: Such is duly noted, sir knight. Yet there are ample periods of time when you kill no dragons at all. I have seen these gaps in your schedule and we shall work together to make you more productive!

Knight: I’ve killed more dragons than anyone.

Manager: Tisk tisk. You obviously don’t understand how to reach your full potential, sir knight. I have made a schedule for you so that your productivity is increased. These gaps in your schedule shall be filled with killing more dragons.

Knight: Have you ever killed a dragon?

Manager: Well, I almost thought about going to knight school to kill dragons but I have found myself a fair student of efficiency and productivity.

Knight: So, according to this schedule, I’m supposed to kill dragons all of the time.

Manager: That’s for maximum efficiency and productivity, yes!

Knight: No rest time. No strategic planning. No creative research. No collaboration with other knights. No time to celebrate a victory with the people.
​
Manager: None of those things are killing dragons. We must focus on the goal of killing the maximum amount of dragons. The more dragons you kill, the more dedicated you will appear to the king. There have been cuts lately, I will remind you, so it’s no time to falter on dedication.

Knight: I’ve killed more dragons than anyone.

Manager: Don’t worry, sir knight. Soon you’ll be killing dragons all of the time and you shall earn the respect of the king and all will be well.

Knight: I’ve killed more dragons than anyone.

Manager: And you shall kill even more!

Knight: No. Probably not.

Manager: What?

Knight: I quit.

Manager: You cannot quit! What will you do?

Knight: Find a king who wants a knight who kills more dragons than anyone.

At some point we all have to pick two. Because all three is not an option.

What always concerns me is the fast and cheap scenario. I'm a writer, so being cheap always came naturally (some writers are wealthy ... but that's the same as saying some high school football players make it to the Super Bowl). 

Being cheap can happen out of necessity. Being fast? Turning around a product faster than anyone else? That was an early lesson for me.

Most of my managers have been men. Older men. When I was just out of college I remember working for these guys (most were in their 60s) and how they smiled at my youthful energy. They often took the time to teach me lessons that took them years to learn. This was one of my favorites:

• Don't rush your work. No one gets paid extra for turning in things early. (Unless you've negotiated that in the contract.)

There are exceptions. Sometimes a client will request rushed work. For that they pay extra and they also agree to the situation being rushed. That makes them a partner in the situation. They acknowledge that things are unusual and the quality of the work may not be what it might be in usual circumstances.

I kept turning in work early ... these old guys got suspicious. These old guys knew that rushed work was a liability that would cause more headaches down the road. They would tell me to go back and check my work. They would insist that I was cutting corners in some way to finish so quickly and that I needed to start from scratch on my project to make sure it was done right.

Finish early every now and then?

No problem. They would reward you with some time off.

Finish early every time?

Big. Red. Flag.

Real estate brokers don't get paid extra when the transaction closes early. But they will get sued if the contract was rushed and something was left out.

Construction contractors don't get paid extra if the building is finished early. But they will get sued if something was not constructed properly.

Attorneys don't make more money when the case is closed out early. But they do risk litigation if something was not reported properly.

Turning things in early to impress people ... that only puts you at risk and shows you're not dedicated to quality work. Take the time to agree on a deadline that lets you do your best work. You can still be cheap, but being cheap and good will help you sleep at night. Cheap and fast will run you broke.

All at once, the scooters were gone.

But it wasn't always that way. I can remember just a few months ago when the scooters arrived, landing here and there on every street corner. At first, no one knew what to do. When someone took one out for a spin, people pointed and stared. Then, after a few weeks, they were everywhere, buzzing through streets and sidewalks.

Before you knew it, finding an available scooter was fairly difficult. So more arrived. Then another service. At their peak, you could choose from two brands of scooters to zip around this 200,000-person, Southern town ... a city in the oil and gas belt where pickup trucks outnumber cars and people complain when the price of gasoline gets too cheap. 

But they disappeared.

Today, not a single scooter can be seen. It's as if they migrated from the winter storm to find some warmer place to live. And that's not too far from the truth.

A friend in the local cigar shop was quick to tell me the story. He said the city asked the scooter services to withdraw temporarily. Apparently there were concerns over safety. That seemed to include, in his description, the safety of riders, pedestrians and motorists. An agreement was struck for the scooter services to discontinue until Louisiana state government could determine a set of laws designed to increase safety.

His story seemed legit. What he didn't know, before relaying the news to me, was that I had heard a similar story just days before. None of the riders were using a helmet. They were riding (illegally) on sidewalks. And, in a town where motorists still honk and curse at bicyclists when they're on the road (because many motorists here still believe bicycles don't belong on the street), there was some discussion about whether scooters had the right to be on the roads at all.

This whole scenario is typical of South Louisiana "progress" ... if that's the operative word. Something new comes along and you can almost hear the complaints from barber shops and salons across the city. This is especially true when it comes to transportation. Some of the most prominent neighborhoods, after all, were built without sidewalks. That was an intentional cost-saving measure that was not seen as a detriment (the conventional wisdom was that sidewalks invited people to walk in your neighborhood ... people who weren't your neighbors). So in this Southern setting, any transportation beyond firing up an automobile is looked at with suspicion.

Perhaps one of the best examples is a story of a woman who decided to begin walking to the health club. After all, she lived only a few blocks away and, since she was going to exercise anyway, it made sense to walk there as a warm up.

Note: This woman lived in one of those Lafayette neighborhoods built, from the ground up, with no sidewalks. And yes, the health club (one of the largest in the nation) is located smack-dab in the middle of that neighborhood with no sidewalks. That's right. She was going to walk as a form of exercise and transportation, to a place of exercise, through a place that was intentionally built to discourage just such a thing.

She walked to the health club, worked out, then walked home. It seemed uneventful. That was, until her husband called her. He said that several friends saw her walking and were worried something was wrong. They asked if her car was broken. They warned him that it's dangerous to walk in that part of town (yeah, one of the nicest neighborhoods in town and it's "dangerous" to walk there ... not because of crime, but because it doesn't have sidewalks). A few of them said she was crazy for thinking she could walk anywhere.

Whether it's electric scooter riders, walkers or cyclists, anyone who attempts to transport themselves in anything but an automobile will stir the rumor mill in Lafayette, Louisiana. And that's what we're left with, these days.

There was a time when you walked through this town (and many others across the country) and noticed people reading the newspaper. Printed. Large-format. Newspaper. Those days are over. Now, also like towns across the country, they're looking at a screen of some sort. And that screen, be it a phone or tablet, has access to even more news than ever before. And there, in the competition for space on the screen, appears headlines about the president, congress, foreign governments, cooking, exercise, and whatever Oprah is up to this week. Noticeably absent from the screens? Local news.

When it was in print, local news dominated the available space. National news was important, but it almost never came first unless something incredibly significant occurred. And the rumor mill existed but was put in check by the paper. It commented on the conversation of the day. It cemented the facts by going to the source. It solved discrepancies between hearsay transfers of second-hand accounts. 

Today, the national news does a far better job of competing for screen space. That's because the organizations who build the primary platforms for sharing news want to sell advertising for large audiences. It's an economy of scale situation. The local news still exists but now their updates take up a much smaller percentage of our screens than they did in print, our in-boxes are so full the newsletters have gone to junk or become ineffective, and the postal mail is just a repository for advertisers.

So what's left of local news? The rumors.

Then this happens: One person comments that the scooters are gone. Another person, a few days later, tells a story that it's all about safety and new state laws. And, if you're in-box is full, your social media feed is full of political yelling and screaming, and you read and watch mostly national news from a news app or news page, then you've just stepped back in time to word-of-mouth local news. The rumor mill was always there. Now, for some towns, it's all that's there.

When local news struggles for any attention, what's left is the rumor mill. There's no cemented, end the discussion fact-checker to be the true determination of what's going on. Our local environments are fundamentally different without the dominance of local reporting. If it's drowned out by national conversation, the local conversation suffers.

And when you're walking (or taking a scooter) to the health club to exercise, if you hear someone blow their horn, you can bet that the story they'll be circulating around the city won't be that we need more sidewalks, or that walking is good exercise, or that alternative forms of transportation might actually reduce traffic congestion. No. It'll be about anger and calling people crazy for trying something different. You know. The stuff rumors are made of.