I’m writing this post in Hawaii, also known as paradise. It’s awesome. I’m only here for a week and I’ve been encouraged by my good boss to work as little as possible. But not working is sort of impossible for me. I love my work.

This is a lovely place to be, since there have been times in the past when I didn’t love my work, but couldn’t not work because I had to support my kid and I was still struggling to get my writing on the map. Now I’m in this delightful position where I get paid well to do what I love. And if I wanted to, I could take time off.

This morning, I did the same thing I do when I’m home and not on vacation. I read the New York Times. Reading the Times is a great metaphor for how my work life and leisure time intersect very regularly these days. I read the paper first and foremost because I am a news junkie/journalist. But it also happens that reading the paper yields great ideas for the work I do.

For example, today I found a piece about a woman named Alison Link, who is — no kidding — an expert on leisure. More interesting still, she works with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated folks. Sounds a little odd unless you think about it for a minute — imagine getting out of the big house and suddenly having lots of time on your hands and plenty of freedom but no work. Idle hands do the devil’s work and all that. The article reports, “Though Ms. Link works primarily with at-risk populations, she says that we can all improve our quality of life by paying more attention to leisure habits.”

Link offered up the story of a busy executive who found that if she could just work in a few minutes here and there of leisure time even during her busiest days, her overall happiness was going to improve. We’re talking really little things like walk to work, or call a friend who makes her laugh, or just go to a coffee shop for fifteen minutes here and there.

I flipped this scenario on its head for my own purposes. For me, the majority of vacations I’ve taken have either involved visiting family (which can be hard work) or being on a working vacation. The latter is nothing I’ll complain about — National Geographic Traveler has sent me on some pretty wild adventures. But in the end, I do have to pay really close attention, take notes, and report back.

So now, here I sit, on a vacation vacation, and what am I doing? Work. But just a little. I squeeze in an hour or two a day to think about coworking, or redraft an essay I wrote months ago in hopes of sending it to an editor to consider. I make some notes for a novel I want to start writing this fall. And I come up with to do lists for when I get back.

Does this make me an uptight workaholic incapable of ever truly relaxing? Maybe I’m in denial, but I don’t think so. Doing a little work keeps me grounded and connected. (And also gives my boyfriend, with whom I am spending eight days in 24/7 close contact with, a nice break.) Doing work settles me, so that I can fully enjoy myself when I am doing leisure activities (today I sat on the beach, my legs buried in black lava sand, and played with rocks for hours on end).

I think this relates, at least in part, to being an independent worker. Those of us who make it working on our own might appear to have slack schedules and limited discipline. That, I promise you, is smoke and mirrors. Yes, you might see me out walking in the middle of the day when other people are heading into their fifth meeting at the office. And it’s true I can go to the grocery store while a lot of others are sitting in rush hour traffic. But really, I have to figure out not only how to get all my work done, but to balance it with the leisure stuff, too.

When I first started writing for LaunchPad Coworking six months ago, a lot of things made me very, very happy about the gig. One is that Julie, like me, doesn’t spend much time differentiating between work and play. As with my newspaper reading, there can be a healthy overlap — maybe one of us meets someone at a party who would make a good interview or maybe one of us, as I did recently, came across an item while I was out on a personal errand that we might be able to use in the café.

I remember, when I started, how Julie and I were discussing that book, The 4-Hour work Week, which was selling like hotcakes, apparently being snapped up by overworked corporate types fantasizing about cutting back. We ascertained that this was just it — a fantasy — and that a lot of those folks interested in the book probably didn’t really want to cut back, or at least not to four hours a week. They’d be lost without their work. And even the book’s author apparently works an awful lot, but he refers to preparing for lectures and other work related activities as non-work.

So while real work and real leisure probably can be separated out by some people, and while surely both are important, I hold that a lot of how we perceive what we do lies in the framing. Technically, it’s work for me to sit here and write this post. Only really, it’s not. I’m taking a breather from hiking into canyons to see waterfalls and drinking fresh juice from a coconut with a hole poked in it. But I’m also having fun with it so it doesn’t sully my vacation.

Maybe I can start coworking with Alison Link — she can keep helping out folks who want to use their leisure time right. And I can help the folks who need to rethink when and where to work, and even how they define that word.

One of the many, many things we’re excited about is the kick-ass network we’re going to have at LaunchPad Coworking. Apparently some very forward thinking people decided to cover downtown Austin with fiber-optic cable back in the 70s. Since then much of it has been sliced and diced, but a little sleuthing on the part of Carl De Cordova, our IT guru, revealed that 800 Brazos is fiber-ready.

We’re going to start with a 10 Mbit connection — both upstream and downstream. This is wired connectivity — everyone on the coworking side of LaunchPad will have their own network connection, and all the meeting rooms will have one or more connections. You’ll also have powered ethernet connections, which means you can easily hook up a VOIP phone to any workspace.

This is some serious speed. You can upload your HD video all day long if you’d like, and it won’t slow things down a bit :) And if necessary, we can up that speed to as high as 100 Mbits on very short notice. We can even do that for just a day or two at a time!

And of course there will be wifi everywhere too. Not just your run of the mill coffee shop wireless, either. Even the free wifi in the cafe will be way better than we’re used too, because we’re installing 4 commercial grade points of presence.

The details:

• Cisco 2821 router — a mid-level enterprise router
• Catalyst Active gigabit ethernet switches (aka 1000BaseT)
• Cat 6 cabling to support power over ethernet — all home runs
• Cisco 2106 Wifi controller with 4 PoP antennas — this lets us shape the wifi for maximum performance.
• Cisco ASA5500 firewall
• Cisco Metro ethernet 3400 — to handle the fiber to ethernet handoff from Time Warner Business Class.
• 2 Apple XServes

Needless to say, we will be incredibly fast and reliable :)

The other day I went to one of my favorite Austin coffee houses, Epoch Coffee. I was there for a meeting with with one of our developers. It was a professional meeting. You know, the kind involving professionals.

At the next table sat a man with his infant daughter. She was very well behaved — the only noise emanating from her stroller was the occasional, delightful giggle.

It was dad I had the problem with. As I sat discussing schedules and deliverables with my colleague, dad picked daughter up out of her stroller, laid her down on a vacant table, and proceeded to change her diaper.

Change her diaper! A soiled diaper, which was clear from my position. He changed her diaper… on a table where people eat. No mat. Did he wipe off the table afterward? No.

I’m not sure I’ll go back to Epoch, much as I like the place. It’s not Epoch’s fault. But geez… what was this guy thinking?

I should have said something. I didn’t. As I mentioned, I was having this professional meeting, and I was trying to pay attention.

I’m so ready for LaunchPad Coworking to be open. Coffee shops are just not cutting it for me.

I’m happy to announce that we’ve officially signed our first cash investor — my dad, Augie Gomoll. Both my parents have been huge supporters of LaunchPad Coworking. My dad has eagerly examined all the drawings, all the plans, and every blog post. He even follows me on Twitter, and more recently, FriendFeed.

I was visiting family in Wisconsin this past weekend, and my dad and I signed the subscription documents. Before we did, he got dressed for the occasion in his stylin’ LaunchPad Coworking Tshirt, shown here.

Thanks, dad. I love you.

In a special section of the New York Times dedicated to the state of business travel, there’s a piece about “right brain” meeting rooms. The idea is that, since the right side of the brain controls creativity, if you give people fun spaces to meet in, they’ll be stimulated. This, in turn, means better meetings.

Bruce MacMillan, chief executive of the trade association Meeting Professionals International is quoted in the article as saying, “Hard wooden chairs don’t do it anymore.” And Stacy Evans, an executive administrator for Cisco Systems, says “People tend to shut down if they can’t get up and move around. We want them thinking. When they move around, they think.”

The spaces described feature right-brain inspiration ranging from pillows to Jenga games to hammocks to pogo sticks to tai chi exercises. I have to admit when I read this I was reminded of when, back during the height of the high tech boom, I took a contract job with a local software developer the day before the company IPOed.

Accustomed, prior to that, to either working in restaurants or writing at home, alone, in my dumpy rental cottage, I was initially impressed. There was the ping-pong table, the kitchen full of free Name Brand Snacks and fancy beer, the video games. It was hip to work there. Later the term “golden cage” entered my vocabulary, but I didn’t stay at that job long enough to feel imprisoned.

So when I read about how companies are now doing what they can to make meetings and workplaces exciting, part of me applauds the effort. And another part of me has a cynical reaction. Sometimes it feels like Americans are wildly silly with these efforts. There’s China, over there, filled with slave labor working with lead paint. And here we are, figuring out which kid games we can bring in to the boardroom to cheer everyone up.

And then I think about coworking. There is no doubt that by now, after six months of studying and commenting on and working to create a cool coworking space in Austin, I have heightened awareness about coworking. And, too, I am highly prejudiced in favor of coworking spaces and think everyone should try out this coworking thing.

While I think making these right brain spaces is better than continuing to have gross meetings in sterile quarters, there’s a contrived air that we won’t have. Whatever right-brain happenings occur will be genuine and organic, created by the community of coworkers, not handed down by over-eager HR managers telling people how to be creative, or allowing creative within carefully rendered parameters.

Our coworkers, like coworkers everywhere, will have the freedom to bring their right brains to work and share them with everyone else. If they want Jenga, they can bring their own damn Jenga. Right brain is not a trend or a phase in coworking. It’s a way of life.

As we continue to bring you thoughts, insights, joys and challenges from our coworkers around the country, today we offer an interview with Eva Schweber, Chief Cat Herder and David Kominsky, Rabbi of CubeSpace in Portland, OR. In an act of brilliant coworking, the two co-answered my questions.

Spike Gillespie: When did you get started?
CubeSpace: We started seriously chewing on the idea in September of 2005, incorporated two months later and opened our doors for business in October of 2006.

Spike: What inspired you to start?
CS: Both of us have spent significant time as a consultants working from home. Eva is very good at staying focused at home, but was frustrated on those occasions when she needed office resources (e.g. large copiers) because the errands could suck up a lot of time. Eva also is not good at disconnecting from work (it is the flip side of being so focused) and never really had true downtime.

David is kind of the opposite. He was always more likely to find other things to do (gardening, laundry, dishes) until a deadline loomed large and he would work frantically to get it done. As a rabbi, he also needed a private space to meet with people, so we ended up renting him an office space that he rarely used except for meetings because there was no one else around and he got lonely.

We knew we were not alone in these challenges, because increasingly, we kept having the same conversations with people about how they wanted more community, and more resources, but didn’t want to go back to working for a company. We started playing with ideas, and came up with a very skeletal form of CubeSpace. The details have all been (and continue to be) fleshed out by the requests we hear from our members.

Spike: Since you started, can you describe how the experience has gone for y’all — has it been a nice, smooth ride/rise? Or did you hit a lot of bumps?
CS: Oh, it has been a very bumpy ride, but in a fun way. I think the most surprising challenge has been how difficult it has been for people to really understand CubeSpace. We are constantly struggling to refine how we explain who we are and what we do, but really people need to come in to the space to really get it. I love watching the light bulbs go on over people’s heads when they walk in, but it constantly surprises me how long it takes someone from the first conversation (either with one of us or with someone who has been in the space) until they actually come into the space.

Another challenge has been how hard the work has been. We both went from being freelancers with very flexible schedules to being tied to CubeSpace a lot. We can’t afford enough staff to give us reasonable work hours, so we pick up the difference. It means that we are often working from before 7 in the morning until after 9 at night.

Spike: What sorts of adjustments have you made?
CS: We discovered that there was less use of the quiet area than we expected, and that people kept asking for a larger meeting space than we had available. So during the summer of 2007 we cleared out about 20 cubicles and created a big open space. Most of the time, this space gets used as an extension of the quiet area: because people in the quiet area tend to be, well, quiet, the lack of the sound damping of the cubicles doesn’t matter so much. People enjoy working in the bright open space. In the evenings, especially, it often gets used as a large meeting space, for everything from computer user groups to company parties. That’s been the single largest change in the business since we’ve opened.

Additionally, we have learned a HUGE amount in the past 2 years and we are constantly tweaking what we offer and the best way to get the word out. We always listen to our customers and make adjustments based on their suggestions.

Spike: What’s your business model? Do you have anchor tenants? Are you for profit?
CS: Technically we are for profit, but we have not yet managed to sustain profitability (although we have had glimpses). Our business model is essentially offering a workspace community on demand or on and ongoing basis without any requirement of long-term commitment. We have a diverse business community ranging from freelancers, to small companies in growth stages to large corporations who have distance or telecommuters based out of CubeSpace. We don’t have anchor tenants, but we definitely do have members or companies that make up more of our revenue than others.

Spike: Y’all have actual cubicle spaces, right? I know that some people in the coworking movement seem to eschew the idea of cubes, as if this were something to be gotten away from. Will you comment on this and tell us why you decided to go with cubes?
CS: We went with cubicles for the same reason they were invented in the first place; they create a sense of privacy, while still allowing in natural light and some background noise (more on that in a minute) and are easy to rearrange as needed.

Some of the advantages of cubicles are that they create a focused workspace with few distractions. We find it easy to bring distractions into the places we work. To paraphrase Yoda, the only things to distract you in the cubicles are what you bring with you.

Cubicles have gotten a really bad reputation because they are often used badly. Who wants to be in a gray cubicle farm with beige walls and no soul? Who wants to hear all of the overly personal details of the family members on the other side of the wall? Absolutely no one.

We are not a cubicle farm. We very carefully chose lower cubicle walls in order to maximize access to natural light. We offset the noise issues by installing a pink noise generator. We then divided the space into “quiet” and phone cubes, so people who need to really concentrate don’t get the background noise of the people around them. However, the quiet area is the most under-used of our spaces because the phone area is so quiet that people go in there for the noise.

We do have an area of CubeSpace where people can work at tables by windows sans cubicles, but that is also not fully utilized. About 80% of our members choose to locate in the phone cube area. That is also where all of the requests for permanent cubes are located, so I guess when done right, cubicles are not the evil, soul-sucking devices that they are perceived to be. The devil really is in the implementation.

Spike: Is running the space your full-time job, or do you also cowork in another area? If the latter, what else do you do? If not, what did you used to do?
CS: Yes and yes. As I have already mentioned, CubeSpace is an incredibly time consuming job. And yes, David and I have still maintained some external work. David has been working as the interim rabbi (on a part-time basis) for Temple Beth Sholom in Salem, OR. Eva continues to take on small management consulting projects and, in fact, has folded her consulting business into CubeSpace in order to both better serve our customers and to create a vehicle for our members to join CubeSpace in bidding for opportunities.

Spike: What else do you want to tell me about CubeSpace?
CS: We have built an incredible community at CubeSpace and for that I am incredibly proud. We have members who have moved on to other positions or gotten their own office spaces who still come to CubeSpace for events or just to say hi. We have one member whose young daughter just finished a month of daily radiation treatments for a brain tumor who would come in just for hugs and support even though she wasn’t working at CubeSpace during that period. The fact that we have a community that extends beyond the time frame when people are paying to be there means a lot to us. It means that we have been successful in what we set out to do.

We’re using 37Signals Basecamp to manage all of the LaunchPad Coworking startup project — software development, web site development, architecture, design, marketing, IT, finance, pricing, sourcing, and (soon) construction. We love Basecamp :)

What follows is an update from Tina Rosenzweig regarding the ridiculously convoluted permitting process she’s managing. It’s copied directly from a Basecamp project thread:

When LaunchPad Coworking opens, we’ll be the first official coworking space in Austin. In the meanwhile, independent workers — those who work alone and those who join together through Jelly or other informal groups — find community spaces in a catch is as catch can fashion. Which often means they gather in cafés around town, of which there are plenty, in all flavors from informal and grungy to sleek and stylized.

Walk into any coffee shop and you see it — plenty of people flying solo, fully engaged with their laptops and cell phones and iPods, seemingly oblivious to those around them. I do this myself, often enough, angling for conversation with baristas when the need to feel non-isolated strikes me.

I was curious how coffee shop owners view the growing trend for folks to use their spaces as casual offices—good for business, bad for business? Joshua Bingaman, who owns Progress Coffee with his wife, Sarah, agreed to sit down and chat with me about how he views his space, his patrons, and changes that have occurred in the four years since he opened up a groovy place inside what once was a dilapidated East side warehouse in Austin. Interestingly, he’s not hugely concerned with providing all WiFi all the time. In fact, there are some days he’d prefer to be without it.

Spike Gillespie: How did you get started?

Joshua Bingaman: My wife and I moved here from San Francisco where I’d had a retail shoe and clothes store. I wasn’t planning on opening a café. We kept going to cafes in Austin that had more of a darker, danker feel, a little musty. That’s fine — to each his own — but in San Francisco there were some cleaner, classier places that weren’t overly hipster. We were wondering where could find a place like that to go pre and post movie and couldn’t find it. I fell in love with the east side and intentionally found a dilapidated warehouse to build out. I wanted to lean less toward gentrification and more toward development. I wanted to create something like Dean and Deluca meets Austin meets San Francisco with a little New York City thrown in. I wanted to go organic and fair trade but not charge extra or be in anyone’s face about it. Originally I knew it would take people a second to realize we were modeling after a European concept — we used to have one offering per day from local farms. We didn’t do [regular] coffee, we did Americanos. People were like “Where are the breakfast tacos?” They didn’t catch the vision. We had to break some peoples’ habits of going to Wendy’s. We started to introduce them to more gourmet options — turkey and local jam with local mixed greens instead of Schlotsky’s, cheese plates and nice wines.

Spike: What was your clientele like and how has it changed?

Joshua: A lot were coming in from offices, there were some business meetings. I thought I really need to reach out to the community. The wireless thing we didn’t do in the beginning. I wanted Progress to be a place where people came and communed and had espressos and wine. My wife and I had spent time in places in Europe where they had one beer on tap, one wine in a carafe, you can get an espresso and a cheese plate of local cheese. We thought that was so cool. It didn’t work.

So we got wireless and coffee but we still wanted to keep the concept and the character of the place. We’ve seen an increase in computers and people working in here. It’s hard when we have lunch or brunch rush and one person is taking a four-seater table for four hours with one cup of coffee. You’re hardly making any markup. We’d have a line out the door and all of the tables were full. We had to unplug the router. It’s been an issue.

The more Progress is well known, the more students come in. We’ve intentionally not sought them out but we’re cool with it when they come in and buy lunch. And there are three clients we have, I can name their names, they come in seven days a week, get coffee and breakfast work through lunch, buy lunch, buy beer at happy hour. Is it their office? Yes. Are they supporting the business? Yes.

Spike: So offering wireless is a liability?

Joshua: We’ve thought of changing the password hourly or daily or charging for the connection. What I do like [about offering wireless] is the creativity from people making deals here, like the realtors having access and looking at stuff online. I do want people here so [the independent workers on laptops] are a cushion or a backdrop. But when there’s a band playing and there’s 5 or 6 customers on laptops — we aren’t here as workspace then. When weekday lunch really picked up we were turning the wireless off from 12:30 to 1:30. There was a reaction because some people want to come in and work through lunch so I had to bend — even my manager, when he comes down and has a meeting, needs to get online. Wireless is a blessing and a curse.

Spike: What do you think about coworking spaces?

Joshua: It’s interesting what LaunchPad is doing. I’ve had a few people approach me about the space next door — I have 3,000 square feet. I like the concept because it might detract some of the people like the guy who gets one iced coffee, sits for eight hours and takes up the most bandwidth.

I went to a café the other morning, a place I love. There were 13 tables, 26 chairs and 18 people on laptops. The only thing I heard in the whole café was the espresso machine. I felt like putting a 9mm in my brain. There’s a community of people with a desire for relationships — I walk through and look at the screens. I felt like going around and closing their laptops and being like Jesus and saying “Hey let me introduce you to the other people.” My wife and I were in Germany over Christmas in a really small café. People were shoulder-to-shoulder and back-to-back having their beer and their cheese. The talk and ambience was deafening. Community was vibrant and exuberant and growing.

I experience that and want that here and come in sometimes and there are fifteen people on laptops and it’s sad. I am starting to not fight it but I want to go backwards. I almost want to go for old school. We want names of patrons known, orders known, hugs given. You can’t force that but you can create the setting for it. Still, you’ve got to bend with the times — it’s a struggle. Even with our router off, there are eighteen routers within a hundred yards.

Photo by John Anderson/Austin Chronicle

We started searching to partner with a coffee roaster and supplier months ago. As with other parts of this process of creating the perfect cross between a coworking space and a café, the search was thorough and the goal clear: find not just “the best,” but “the best for LaunchPad Coworking.”

Julie has talked before about not just tracking down people who know how to do their jobs, but people who are willing to share their knowledge. The idea is that, just as coworkers who will use LaunchPad Coworking stand to learn from each other, we want to learn from the people we’re working with to create our space.

Which makes RC Beall an ideal fit. RC, who heads up Texas Coffee Traders, might as well have a Ph.d in coffee. He’s been in the coffee business for over 25 years, and he’s a lifelong student and educator on the topics of fair trade and organic coffee, the economics and politics of coffee, creating the perfect roast, and best brewing methods.

To spend an hour or so touring his 14,000 square foot warehouse on East Fourth Street and hearing about the adventures he’s taken around the world in pursuit of great beans is to walk away with the equivalent of a double espresso shot of knowledge. The experience is intense, concentrated, and eye-opening and, what with the roasters roasting away, smells awesome.

Back when RC started roasting in 1981, he was one of only 40 roasters in the U.S. roasting good coffee. A decade later, he was one of only a hundred. These days, thanks to what RC calls the “tremendous entrepreneurial spirit of small roasters,” he’s got lots of company in the business.

RC just got back from a trip to Ethiopia where he went to visit with coffee growers. He also spends a lot of time in Monteverde, Costa Rica. “My favorite place is at the origin, visiting the people who pick the beans and seeing how it’s processed in the middle of nature.”

The Texas Coffee Traders warehouse is divided into various spaces. You walk into the retail space, with countless espresso machines, sundry coffee-related items, and goods — including beautiful hand-woven baskets — that RC has brought back from his travels. The roasting room features hot air roasters, which RC likens to hot air popcorn poppers, a technique that prevents bean scorching. 40-50 different kinds of coffee are roasted daily in small batches ranging from 8 to 60 pounds, with “a couple of hundred thousand pounds per year,” moving in and out of the warehouse, which is decorated with old coffee sacks from around the world, each a work of folk art.

The olfactory leg of the tour is, perhaps most enjoyable (tying with the cappuccino they hand you on the way in the door), with RC teaching whiffing techniques (don’t be an aroma hog and inhale too hard, too fast) and explaining the differences among the various roasts — light, Vienna, French, and Italian — and how achieving the roasts is just a matter of degrees.

We’re looking forward to getting to know RC and his team more as we push toward our grand opening this summer. Tomorrow, RC and Tina will visit 800 Brazos and strategize the café side of LaunchPad Coworking. At some point, we’ll head over to the warehouse for training, which RC notes is important on par with using great coffee. A knowledgeable barista is more likely to be a dedicated barista. And we’re sure our team will get a great education down at RC’s warehouse cum Coffee U.

When I got the invitation to attend the BiG|idea luncheon at the Hilton in Austin, I was psyched. I had never heard of BiG Austin before. They’re an organization that supports and provides micro-financing for very small startups, with a focus on woman- and minority-owned businesses. They’ve been around since the mid 90s. I’ve been an entrepreneur for longer than that, so how did I miss them?

I was particularly interested in the micro-financing aspect of the group. I was familiar with Kiva (they’re awesome!), which provides super micro-loans (like in the hundreds of dollars) to entrepreneurs in very poor areas around the world, but I’d only recently heard about efforts to provide this sort of funding (in this case $15K - $50K) for small local startups.

So I accepted the invitation from Kevin Dykes and Charles Dykes of Forest for the Trees to sit at their table for the awards luncheon. There had been a business plan contest. Hundreds of startups entered, and the three finalists were to be introduced at the luncheon, asked several questions (they wouldn’t know them in advance) and ultimately the audience would vote on the winning plan.

Sounds cool, doesn’t it?

The crowd was interesting. Several hundred people attended — the event was sold out. The crowd was diverse in age, race, and gender. I was really getting intrigued, and looking forward to learning more about this organization.

Once everyone was seated and a VIP introduced another VIP who introduced another VIP and so on, there was… a prayer. Bowing heads and everything. “Whether you worship Jesus Christ or Allah or Yahweh…”.

Not a good sign.

The first contestant got introduced. Her first “question” was: “OK, you’re at your company picnic, and there’s a dance contest. Show us what you’d do.” Cue the disco music.

And she danced.

I was speechless. Did that woman at the microphone really just make her dance? What the hell does this have to do with a winning business plan? The emcee had just been talking about how hard it is for small startups to be taken seriously. Yeah, so let’s make ‘em dance — that’ll help!

Another question: “You have three applicants for a job — the tin man with no heart, the scarecrow with no brain, and the lion with no courage. Which one do you hire, and why?”

Huh? How about NONE OF THE ABOVE!

Another question involved George Bush and broccoli, and then there were the standard “who’s your role model” and “what’s your motto” questions.

Then… the 2nd and 3rd contestants came up. Two more women. And with the exception of one custom question each, they all got the same lame questions.

And they all had to dance. I kid you not.

I don’t know who won the competition. I left. I was appalled. I was embarrassed for the women. I was disgusted with BiG AUSTIN.