I am writing this on Wednesday evening. Almost twenty-four hours ago, Fruitloop, Fabrice and I were sitting around a Brida table talking about sleep. Fabrice explained how, during his military years, he learned to sleep almost anywhere: on the ground, beside a tree, inside a vehicle, sometimes for only five or twenty minutes. The important…
Maybe we are not tired of effort. Maybe we are tired of the grind, performance, and pretending everything good should be fun. We are talking about rest this month. That sounds simple enough, until you ask the awkward question. Rest from what? The usual answer is work. We have made work so central, so demanding,…
A Mayor’s Pen reflection on Australia, Brida, growth, usefulness, and looking from another angle When you grow up in Australia, you learn at an early age that the rest of the world thinks you are upside down. Maps do not help. Most maps place Europe somewhere near the middle and Australia somewhere near the bottom,…
Sometimes a sentence stays with you for years without you really understanding why. You hear it often enough that it becomes familiar, almost invisible. It settles somewhere in the background of your life, like a photograph hanging on a wall that you pass every day without noticing. Yet for some reason it refuses to disappear…
This month, The Pineapple is about balance. Unfortunately, balance appears to have left the building. The day began with good intentions. Those are often dangerous. I was working on the Brida ecosystem, specifically trying to automate part of our member-care process. The task itself seemed simple enough. If we could automate the Spud Toss, we…
This month’s theme is Balance. A few days ago, I found myself standing at the finish line of a 100-kilometre walk. I wasn’t the one doing the walking. That honour belonged to Fabrice. After hours of putting one foot in front of the other, he finally crossed the line, medal earned, challenge completed, looking remarkably…
I am supposed to write about Balance. Emotional Balance.Financial Balance.Relationship Balance.Health and Lifestyle Balance. All very sensible. All very grown-up. All very nice on a poster. And I keep looking at this word. Balance. Really? You open the bank app and close it again quickly because, frankly, not today. You tell someone, “I’m fine,” while…
There are moments when life loses its proper size. A small thought becomes a weather system.A simple decision becomes a mountain.A sentence someone said in passing moves into the mind, takes off its shoes, puts its feet on the table, and refuses to leave. Nothing dramatic has happened. Nobody has burned down a building. Nobody…
Brida — a space for people who have something to say Sometimes you only understand what you have built when you stop looking at the individual pieces and begin to see the pattern. This happened to me recently when I looked at the Pineapple archive. There are now more than 300 articles in it. And…
In Brida, Fruitloop and I run a highly automated system. Our standard advertising campaign is set up weeks in advance. Our routine processes are linked to the various tools we use. The Fruitbowl hums away in the background. Jaffelpuff does what Jaffelpuff does. Pineapples and Spuds take on certain invisible tasks. Most of the time,…
