Happy Anniversary To My Favorite Mistake

This is a story of failure. Or at least, it would be a story of failure if I believed in such a thing, which I don’t. I believe in learning. This story is one of the clearest illustrations in my life of why that distinction is important, and why when you screw up, it’s not the end of the world, even if it may feel like it in the moment.

Let’s take you back to February 14, 2020. It’s a date that will forever live in infamy, and also famy, in my brain. At the time, I was holding down a job as the Director of Social Media for Buffalo Wild Wings, an American sports bar chain with over 1300 locations worldwide. This wasn’t a dream job, but it had enough of the things I enjoy in one (the ability to be creative, relatively good work/life balance, friendly coworkers) that I didn’t harbor any specific itch to do something else.

When I took over B-Dubs social in 2018, I began the process of setting our strategy for the brand’s voice, which was, in a nutshell, that of a sports fan sitting at a bar watching a game with their buddies. Picture that scene, the kinds of conversations and jokes being shared - that’s what we were going for. 

We started down that path, and over the course of time learned some significant lessons. Number one, we learned that sports fans are incredibly sensitive, and when we would crack wise about a team or situation, sometimes we would ruffle some feathers. We always meant it in the spirit of healthy competition, but intent rarely counts on social media. Everything is subjective, and as you may have realized by the Year of our Lord 2025, people are quick to get outraged on the socials.

In mid-February 2020, two things happened that had the sports world buzzing, both involving professional teams that bent the rules trying to gain a competitive advantage. In the first, Major League Baseball finished an investigation into a cheating scandal by the Houston Astros (in which the ‘Stros were, to paraphrase former Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, guilty AF), giving them an extremely minor punishment, despite it plausibly playing a major role in the team winning the 2017 World Series. Baseball fans were pissed.

Soon after that, UEFA handed down a punishment to Manchester City for flouting financial fair play regulations, banning them from participating in the European Champions League for two years. Two years! The audacity!*

*This would eventually be reversed. Just like in real life, white-collar criminals never pay a significant price. Except Aunt Becky from Full House, I guess.

Seeing this, we commented on it on Twitter (RIP):

I won’t bore you with a complete distillation of our social media strategy, but let’s just say we were trying to speak to how most fans were feeling at this time, and as you can see by a quick glance at the vanity metrics, this performed quite nicely. The post got such positive reaction, so quickly, I was compelled to send an email to my team to congratulate them on a job well done. This was EXACTLY the kind of thing we wanted to be doing on Twitter. Timely, relevant, humorous. Way to go team!

I left work that afternoon feeling pretty good about myself. In addition to this small piece of social media gold, we also launched a separate project that day, working with our executive chef’s team to create spicy candy hearts from scratch with B-Dubs-inspired V-Day messages (UR Spicy, for example) that we sent out to a bunch of influencers for fun. I was good at my job! Or so I thought.

I picked my kids up from school and we went to play in the park for a little bit, and as we got in the car to head home, I got a call from our company’s crisis PR person, who had a simple question for me:

“How do we want to handle the Houston situation?”

Ummm, Houston situation? What Houston situation? It’d only been an hour since I left the office, how could there already be a situation in Houston? But such is life in social media - one minute you’re congratulating your team on their excellent work, the next the entire city of Houston wants to burn your business operation to the ground. Reasonable people, those Twitter folks.

Apparently, while I was at the park, some Houston fans saw our tweet and took graaaaaaaaave offense to what we said about their beloved Astros. To be clear, we didn’t say anything directly about the team; our intent was to lampoon the job Major League Baseball was doing (no one gets upset when you make fun of any league’s corporate structure). But, we were obviously addressing a situation featuring a team they cheered for, and who were we, a run-of-the-mill sports bar chain, to call them out?

The snowball started rolling downhill pretty fast. One Astros fan took a video of themselves slicing a Buffalo Wild Wings gift card in half* that by early evening had garnered over 3 million views.

*Someone purchased that gift card, we already got the money, so cut it up to your heart’s delight. You’re only hurting yourself here, but hey, do you.

By Friday night, we had a full-blown PR meltdown on our hands. Houston hated us, in unison declaring they’d never eat at our establishments ever again, and our restaurant operators in the area were calling into the home office to inquire, specifically, what in the absolute fuck were we doing?

You know what? They were right.

To be clear, I don’t think we did anything wrong, exactly. But if I owned a Houston B-Dubs and the entirety of my customer base was declaring on social media they’d rather fellate Jerry Jones while getting a Cowboys tattoo on their forehead than step foot in our establishment again, I’d want some answers too.

We spent the entire weekend going back and forth with the highest levels of our leadership team trying to decide how to handle the situation, and I felt like absolute shit. I knew we’d stepped in it pretty bad. Or rather, we felt the notoriously fickle wrath of social media marketing, where many people sit around waiting for an opportunity to yell at someone for doing something they don’t like. And we served them up a pretty spicy hot wing.

I am hard on myself when I make mistakes, and I’m even harder when I feel like I’ve let others down. I was spiraling. All the familiar self-doubting questions started to seep in - was I bad at my job? Was I finally being exposed as a fraud who didn’t know what he was doing?

I thought there was a solid chance I was going to get fired. I’d made mistakes in the past, but this was probably the biggest one, or at least the one with the biggest financial implications*.

One time when I was working for the Hawks we announced on our website that we’d re-signed a restricted free agent before it was actually a done deal, and the NBA fined us $25,000. It wasn’t my department’s fault, we were just following the internal orders, but sufficed to say the higher-ups weren’t pleased. I was called into our GM’s office and told if it happened again there’d be repercussions, and then he made the throat-slash gesture. Good times. 

Monday morning I went to work feeling a bit like a dead man walking, but when the entire week passed and I still had a job, it seemed perhaps I might be safe.

I was rattled, to say the least, but I tried to get my focus back on the task at hand. And then the pandemic started. 

In early May, I got a call from my boss telling me they were doing some restructuring, and specifically that restructuring included excising me from my position. 

Was it because of the Astros tweet? I can’t say with 100% certainty, but there are some facts that support the theory. First of all, OF COURSE IT WAS.

Secondly, as part of the logistics of my exiting the company, I was sent a separation letter, which ironically was dated March 12. Now, it’s possible that was just an oversight by the HR person who sent it to me and they had just copied a previous person’s termination letter, but I don’t think that’s the case. I think I was set to be let go on March 12, which as you may recall, was Day Two of the Bad Times, only they had to postpone it until people could figure out what to do with a pandemic. This timing ended up being incredibly fortitous, as it turned out, and not just because I snagged a few extra paystubs.

I began to explore other potential jobs, but I had lost my taste for social media. This was now the second time I’d found myself out on my keister* despite doing work I was pretty proud of. It seemed my point of view (and tolerance for acceptable risk) was out of balance in a mostly conservative corporate culture. This was a Learning Opportunity.

*The first was with the Hawks. That’s a different story for a different time.

It started to dawn on me that perhaps I was meant to do something else. But what could that be? Fortunately, though unexpectedly, the answer was staring me right in the face. 

Like most of us, I was just trying to keep a shred of sanity in the early days of COVID, and so for fun I had began hosting a silly gameshow on Facebook to pass the time. It started to gain traction, but was still just a side project to distract from the events taking place all around us.

When I got let go, all of a sudden it provided a potential avenue to explore, only it would require me doing something I never thought I’d have the guts to do - going out on my own. 

For many years I’d toyed with the idea of working for myself, but truly never thought I had what it took. I wasn’t organized enough, wasn’t determined enough, just not good enough all around. It’s amazing the things you think are true until experience teaches you differently.

In hindsight, pissing off Astros fans turned out to be the best thing I ever did, because here I am, five years later, still doing Who Knows One?, and not only that, but I’ve begun dipping my toes in other waters like podcast production, expat consulting, and I haven’t even blinked at the notion of starting a new venture.

There’s a fascinating sliding doors scenario I think about often - what would I have done had B-Dubs not given me the ax? Would I have seriously quit a job that paid me 40% more than I’d ever made before (and that’s not including profit-sharing and bonus) to pursue hosting a virtual game show? I’ll never know the answer, but my hunch is not a chance.

So to recap, I had a huge screw-up at work, one which REALLY sucked and made me question my value as a human and employee and eventually (likely) led to me getting canned, but had it not happened, I likely never would have pursued working for myself, which in turn provided me unprecedented flexibility, the kind which made it much easier for my family and me to consider moving abroad, a dream I’d wanted to pursue since I became an adult. None of that happens if Astros fans weren’t so goddamn sensitive.

There is no such thing as failure. There’s only learning. And you never know what lessons will be most valuable to you, even if they are painful ones.

Happy anniversary to the best mistake I ever made. May I continue to make more, and may I continue to learn from them as much as I have in the past.