I can be a stubborn bastard.

After all, I am a Taurus and it’s what we do best.

And just like all the great people out there that suffer from this stubborn gene will know, we are the kind that doesn’t really like being told what to do, by anyone.

Now, this is not a good trait if you are married and especially if you are married with kids. However, nothing can beat the stubbornness out of you like having children.

From that very moment those beautiful children come into your world and open their eyes, your life is theirs and they dictate everything you do. Every single minute of every single day and that doesn’t stop, especially during the holidays.

You see we are currently about to embark on a family holiday to California and whilst I had dreams of living like Keanu in Point Break filling my mornings with nothing but going for a surf, chilling on a beautiful white porch drinking a cold beer, watching the swell before jumping on the board for another late afternoon session before the bonfire parties on the beach start.

Well, that won’t happen. There will be no surfing a pipeline equivalent like Mavericks for me, that is more like a pipe dream. Especially if my kids have anything to do with it.

You see they have two pages of activities they want to do. Two freaking A4 pages filled with 9pt text, from the top to the bottom.

It consists of going to at least 6 amusement parks, arcades and places filled with thousands of people and not one single surf session or surf beach on that list. 

By the way, never try the subconscious whispering in their ears whilst they sleep repeating the words surfing, surf lessons, beaches or chilling on a porch, it just doesn’t work. Trust me.

So besides the loss of my dream to surf in California, the one thing you will know about us Taureans is that we are not only a stubborn bunch but on the more positive side to us, we are very generous and we especially like making others happy, because that makes our lives easier.

Even if that means being told what to do.

So if the kids want to do things. We will do things. Even the two pages of amusement parks filled with strangers. 

Now, it was the endless list of activities from the kids that got me thinking of an idea that uses this exact idea of telling someone what to do and them having to do it.

That idea was for Tourism Melbourne called The Remote Controlled Tourist.

Firstly, they got people that knew Melbourne the best, the locals. Then they made sure they were not Taureans which means they were completely happy being told what to do.

They then strapped them up with POV cameras, microphones and an awesome neon helmet for safety reasons, it is the nanny state after all. Then for good measure, they loaded enough battery packs on them that could power a small village in Africa and used some fancy technical stuff that enabled them to live on the internet matrix style.

All there was left to do was to wait for people to tell them what to do via Twitter and Facebook.

As you can imagine that didn’t take long and in the 5 days of the project, people from over 158 countries and 4000 cities took to the power of the internet with over 9000 requests to the remote controlled tourists telling them exactly what they wanted to do and where they wanted to go.

The remote controlled tourists were sent into restaurants to try fancy dishes, attend cooking classes, some flew helicopters and a few of them even had to run the Melbourne marathon all in the name of discovery and all for strangers that wanted to see and do more of Melbourne in real time and from their point of view.

It worked and with over 80 hours of first-person footage and 2000 Instagram photos being taken during this time, this idea became one of the most comprehensive city guides ever created and in one of the most interesting and most talked about ideas ever done for a Tourism brand.

The only thing I wish they had done better was if they had done this in Los Angeles. This way I could get my kids to tell some poor sod to do all those amusement parks remotely without me, leaving me alone to attend to that cold beer on the porch before the next swell rolls in.

Now that would be a better idea.

I Wish I Had Done That.

Gary