Secret Club: Luv Ya Bye

Our lives are enriched by our passions.  As we become interested in something, we learn more about it.  If it’s a practice, as we do it, we become more skilled.  It’s fun to share these with others, and sometimes they also become intrigued.  I call them ‘Secret Clubs’.  As you share your passions with others, it’s an invitation for them to join the ‘Secret Club’.  Secret Clubs aren’t about keeping people out, it’s about inviting them in!

I’ve written about Secret Clubs before; the Coffee Roasting Club, the PDX Carpet Club.  I’ve also written on Family Lexicon, those expressions that everyone in your family, or some other group, share because they refer to a shared experience.  Sometimes these can come together, like in the case of the Luv Ya Bye Secret Club.

During my tenure at the City of Carlsbad, I had the good fortune of working with a lot of great colleagues, a number of whom I’ve kept in touch with.  Some relationships were natural; they were in Building, Planning and Engineering, or Public Works or Stormwater.  And some came through peripheral dealings, like in IT and HR.  But someone who I always enjoyed interacting with was Kristina Ray in Communications.  She loved her job, was passionate about the work, especially grammar and AP Style.  Because of my interest in hand-written notes, I sometimes offered free consultation on design of city note cards.

As a director, I spent a lot of time in meetings.  One of the great advancements of the time was an application that when someone left a voicemail on my office phone, I would get a transcribed text of the message.  This allowed me to monitor my voicemails even when I was in a meeting at another location, to scan for emergencies or things I could take care of before heading back to my office.

I was sitting in a meeting once, actually in a conference room just outside of my office, when I got a text that Kristina had left a voicemail.  As I scanned the message (I forget what it was about), I was surprised to see that it ended with “Luv ya, bye.”  Now I was fond of Kristina, but didn’t feel, at least from my end, that our relationship extended to the ‘luv ya bye’ stage.  So as I sat in the meeting, I tried to think of possible explanations.

I hit upon a reasonable explanation.  I’d had the experience of leaving a longish voicemail, and my mind already going off on the next thing I was going to do, or forgetting who I was leaving the message for.  So I figured Kristina had been leaving the message, and thinking of something she needed to tell her husband, and had inadvertently thought, by the end of the message, that she was leaving a message for him. 

When the meeting ended, I went back to my office and listened to the actual voicemail.  It said nothing like “Luv ya bye”!  It was a case of transcription error by the app!  I told Kristina about it the next time I saw her, and we both got a good laugh over it.  From then on, until this very day, we tend to end missives to each other with ‘Luv ya, bye.’

On long hikes when you end up having extensive, free-wheeling discussions over days and weeks, this story sometimes comes up.  People are invariably tickled by it, and ‘Luv ya, bye’ often becomes a group bonding expression.

I hope you get some invites to Secret Clubs, and invite some others into yours…