Bums on seats 2013: safety in numbers

Like lots of us at this time, I’ve been looking at the year past and considering how it went. I realise my creative work reached the eyes and ears of a number of people big enough to make it well worth the effort of having put it together.

I presented my poetry or performance on 14 live occasions and had text work in 1 exhibition, which led to about 425 people publicly coming to see Iain Morrison.

Looking at the blog results for the year, I can add in another 1,484 visitors from this WordPress. I don’t know how many people read my work in publication, but probably some did, as there are a few things out there online and in print now. If we say maybe 104 people read me that way…

…that would mean that in 2013, *coincidentally* 2,013 people paid some sort of attention to content I tried to communicate!

Now, in my previous life as a Front of House Manager, I remember learning a triangular diagram used to indicate the number of times a slight accident would happen (in a given context) in ratio to every really serious one. The idea being that you were encouraged to spot a pattern if several people had already cut themselves on a head-height rusty nail in the cleaning cupboard, say, and repair it before someone inevitably and distressingly gouged their eye out. The diagram looked a bit like this:

If I attempt to apply the diagram to the numbers mentioned above, in 2013 at least 3 people (you know who you are) had serious or possibly even fatal encounters with my words or actions. About 40 more of you got away as walking wounded, and over a hundred will have made it safely home only to find some sort of unexplained water damage to your carpets. The rest of you should keep your wits about you in 2014; you might not be so lucky this year.

On the subject of fun triangle diagrams I have known professionally, I’d like to have interpreted my audience stats further using Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (below). I haven’t worked out how to do that, however. Please feel free to think about it for me for a moment now.

Happy New Year! And wherever I see you this year, I hope it’s in the middle of the triangle.