Because CMEpalooza was, is, and always will be an event free to any and all who want to partake in our events, it has typically been considered to be “education for the masses.”

Certainly, among the primary intents of our approach has been to educate those who are unable to take advantage — be it for financial, logistical, or other reasons — of the live educational opportunities that often pop up in the CME calendar. Every now and then, we’ll hear from organizations who coordinate special “CMEpalooza Days” to encourage their teams to watch our sessions, either together in conference rooms or individually from the comfort of their homes. Traditionally, we read these stories as “That’s kinda neat” anecdotes, but we never considered doing anything more with them.

But during our exhausting multiday planning meeting for our upcoming Fall event, we talked about collecting some of these stories to share with the CME broader community. Why? Certainly, shameless marketing and to give us fodder for future blog posts, but also to encourage you to think creatively about ways you might be able to make Palooza day a time of internal collaboration for everyone on your team.

Over the course of the next few weeks, we’ll be using this space to highlight some of the organizations who have made Palooza day into something special for their team. Some folks keep it simple; some are more thoughtful and comprehensive. Maybe you’ll like what these folks are doing. Maybe you’ll think it’s all a bit silly. You do you.

If your organization does something special for your team on our live CMEpalooza days that you’d like to share, please let us know via email (click here for Derek’s email — he likes hearing from strangers. Be sure to write him many paragraphs about the latest book you are reading). I bet he’ll even agree to feature your group in one of our short video interviews.

I was on the Gram the other day (mind you, I don’t have my own account, but I “borrow” my wife’s from time to time to lurk) and saw another one of those pesky abbreviations that threw me for a loop.

“TLDR We’ll be open by the end of September ”

Muttering to himself: WTF does TLDR mean? IDK. SMH. NVM.

My 15-year-old son would be proud of me.

Now, of course, I barely even know what any of these abbreviations stand for — I stopped trying around the time of LOL — but I do like to be able to understand what people are trying to tell me, so I looked up “TLDR.” And got pretty darn angry.

TLDR = Too long didn’t read

Basically, it’s Internet slang for lazy people. My apologies if anything more than 2-3 paragraphs seems like too much effort for you, but I’m not going to spoonfeed you the highlights like a small child. A good story (or a good blog posts) takes time to tell. It’s not a let-me-cut-to-the-chase kind of thing. Maybe that seems too harsh. Tough noogies.

Quick aside: Here is a list of “great literature” I was forced to read in high school and college that should be labeled as TLDR (or maybe, too boring didn’t read). There are probably more but these are the ones I remember best.

• The Scarlet Letter
• Oliver Twist (sub in the Dickens book of your choosing)
• Beloved
• Romeo and Juliet
• Fahrenheit 451

Anyway, back to the point of this post. I hate TLDR. Maybe it’s because Derek and I spend a lot of times on these posts and we really, really want you to read every word so that we don’t feel we are wasting our time. Maybe it’s because I like to read good writing. Maybe this is my “get off my lawn you whippersnapper!” moment.

But hey, whatever it is, I promise that I will never give you a TLDR “out” atop one of our Palooza posts. Which reminds me that we actually have a few newsworthy items to share:

1. CMEpalooza Trivia Night is back for the third consecutive year at the Alliance Industry Summit (AIS). This year, it will be held from 6-730 pm on Monday, September 14, in the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Research Center at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

Thanks to our event sponsor, Academic CME, there will free food and drink as well as cash prizes for our winners. Because of the truncated nature of AIS, the focus of our questions will be a little bit different than in previous years. We will only be able to cover one block of presentations with our questions, so other rounds will focus on things like the Almanac, the ACCME, and other related topics. Plus, we’ll have our usual wildcard questions that align with our personal interests. And musical interludes. And dad jokes.

Please come.

2. We’d like to rev up our Ask Us Anything advice column in September, but that really depends on you. There have been a few items trickling in, but we need more. So if you have a personal or professional conundrum that is particularly vexing,  drop a line in our virtual mailbox. We have saved jobs and marriages with our advice. We’re that good.

3. Did you know that Derek gets $100 every time someone books a vacation to Iowa using code WARNICK? Yup.

IYKYK

If you were to ask 10 people to think of an adjective that best describes me, “kind” would not be a word that ended up on anyone’s list. Other 4-letter words, sure, but “kind”? Not so much.

Don’t get me wrong – I have my moments. For instance, when I see someone in and around my neighborhood who looks like they are clearly lost or confused, I will often step in to ask them where they are trying to go and point them in the right direction. It still bothers me that I sent someone the wrong way by mistake 3 summers ago. Totally accidental, Mr. Belgian Tourist, I promise!

No, I am not your classic “nice guy” who is going to go out of my way to help out a stranger or stop in the middle of the block to chat with the new neighbors (but Derek absolutely would!). Which perhaps is why it amazes me that I have fallen into an industry where kindness to relative strangers seems to be an unspoken prerequisite.

Certainly, we have been privy to this in CMEpalooza over the years, not so much when we reach out to people to take part in our sessions since they hopefully feel that this is something they benefit from on a professional level, but moreso when we need some sort of technical or specialized advice on the side. Virtually without exception, people go out of their way to be kind and offer whatever help we need. Often, their help goes far beyond what we expect. We’re paying back some of these “super helpers” (or burdening them excessively, depending on your perspective) by inviting them along for the ride during the upcoming anchor session of CMEpalooza Fall entitled, “Ask Us Anything: Live Rewind.”

(I could use this time to remind everyone to drop a postcard in our virtual “Ask Us Anything” mailbox if you need any personal or professional advice, but that’s not the point of today’s blog post)

In the last month, I was twice reminded of the inordinate kindness of my colleagues. Every now and then, I run into an issue in my non-Palooza duties that has me stumped. Perhaps I’m flummoxed by the non-response of a supporter, or a faculty member has ghosted me for weeks and weeks, or there is a new project I’m working on with some weird innuendos that I have never before encountered. It happens to all of us. Ideally, we have a rolodex (remember those?) of professional colleagues to whom we can reach out to get the answers we need. But there are times when we need specific information that only a select few people in the CME world have access to. These are the times I ran into recently.

I emailed reticently – I’m paraphrasing here – “You don’t know me, but I work in CME too and I’ve got a problem I’m hoping you can help with. Pretty please?” And you know what? Both times, these total strangers not only came to the rescue but they volunteered to talk me through all of the issues I was having and helped to identify some that I hadn’t thought about. Some of them sent me documents and templates that they had created to help keep them on track and encouraged me to use them as well instead of building something new from scratch that likely would have taken hours. Why? What was in it for them? Kindness. That’s apparently what people do around here.

“So tell me neighbor, it looks like you help getting up on that ladder. Anything I can do?”

(Nah, I’ll let Derek handle that one. Just doesn’t feel right yet.)