August 31st, 2017 
admin 
Credit: John Egan
Have you ever left an energy conference and run into a life-sized Pikachu Pokémon©? How about coming face to face with a Star Wars stormtrooper©?
I recently encountered those and many other colorful characters, most of whom I didn’t recognize, when the energy conference I was attending, HydroVision International, was ending while Denver Comic Con was starting.
Credit: John Egan
Both events shared the same space, in the Colorado Convention Center, for a few hours on a recent Friday morning.
The co-location of those two very different events helped explain the 150% increase in parking I had to pay for that one day—from $12 per day to $30 per day. Apparently, Batman© needed the space to park his Batmobile©.
Talk about two really different ships passing in the night: 3,000 hydroelectric experts were exiting the convention enter while roughly 115,000 comic-book character aficionados were starting to stream into it. Each member of each community was immersed deeply in their own world. Each a bit insular, even quirky.
Credit: John Egan
As I took in the performance art that was Comic Con, I realized our industry’s stories aren’t quite as colorful as the Batman creation myth, or the back stories that inform the Riddler©, Penguin© or Mad Hatter©, villains Batman and Robin© opposed on a weekly basis in the campy 1960s TV show (right). So be it. That just means we have to try harder.
Part of the title of this post came from Robin’s fevered expressions whenever he or Batman were threatened by the vile villains in Gotham City. In fact, there’s a website that catalogs all 368 of Robin’s “Holy ….!” exclamations from the “Batman” TV series. You can’t make this stuff up!
When I write or speak about utility communications, I tend to focus on the “message” part of the communications process, i.e., which words should be used and which ones should be avoided in order to achieve a desired result. Like this 
