tl;dr: In this post, Mark shares an incident where his new book's website was flagged as “inappropriate” by Traverse City Airport's Wi-Fi filter. He uses this example to delve into the pitfalls of overzealous filtering systems and discusses the broader implications of such errors for businesses and consumers alike. Mark relates this to Lean principles, emphasizing the need for balanced controls that mitigate risks without causing unnecessary inconvenience.
I'm at the Traverse City airport as I depart the excellent Michigan Lean Consortium annual conference.
Today, I learned that the audiobook version of my book, The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation, has been approved by Audible / Amazon, so it's available in both places now and also Apple Books.
Great news!! That took about two weeks after I submitted everything to them, as they predicted (it was nine business days, not the expected ten).
As I sat here waiting for my delayed flight, I started to bring up my website so I could make some edits to reflect this.
Well, you could imagine my surprise when the website was blocked by the airport's wi-fi system as being “pornographic.”
I certainly clicked there to see what this “re-evaluated” process would be. I filled out the form and apparently made a mistake in typing the verification code, as it made me try again. The second time was the charm.
As I'm writing this post, I'm waiting for this review. Much like an Uber trip, the estimated “5 minutes” is taking longer and it's been stuck at “2 minutes” for a while now.
I'll update this post with the resolution. Please check out the audiobook. It's not pornographic :-)
Update: It took about ten minutes, but it was changed to the “business” category.
But this doesn't take effect immediately, so it seems.
My workaround for this will be connecting via my phone's hotspot, I guess.
Update: I received an email saying, “The change usually takes less than 1 hour.”
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That’s hilarious. I think that they took the title of your book (very) literally, as in “Little Jimmy was a mistake”.