The Salesforce Drug and Infection: Four Signs That You May Have It

You Dream Salesforce

This is the first and most common sign. Every have a dream that featured Salesforce? I certainly have. My first time was shortly after I started working as an Implementation Specialist. Part of my job was updating the implementation records in Salesforce with important information regarding each project and client. My first dream involved me paging through record after record updating my projects with “on hold.” I’m sure it was more of a work stress dream – but it’s first time my dream ever involved Salesforce. Now, I’ll dream of writing Visual Workflows, APEX and Visualforce – and occasionally beating Shawna Wolverton at Go Cart Racing. I always know I’m dreaming with that last one.

You Go Through Withdrawal

In 2012, my twin girls were born. I took 4 weeks of paternity leave figuring everyone else was taking 2 weeks per child. I thought this would a great time to help my wife, spend time with my new children and learn how to be a dad. Little did I know that no sleep and no Salesforce make Brian something something.

Add having to record every diaper change and every feeding for both girls in a small spiral notebook and something in my cracked. Next thing I knew I was opening a free developer org and created Babyforce. Built with the idea that I could share this feature with the world, Babyforce allows me to track every child’s various metrics. When was the last diaper change? What kind was it? How much has the kid eaten? When? What did they eat? Whose turn is it to get up and feed them?

Sadly, the success of Babyforce was held back due to a lack of a good mobile platform. Salesforce1 came out 2 years too late to get my wife to enter data via publisher actions. I hold out hope for ToddlerForce – coming soon.

Everything is a Salesforce Implementation

At the start of February my family went to Orlando. One of the parks we visited was the Magic Kingdom. You can see some thought about that here. I can’t say my first thought as I entered the park was about Salesforce. I’m not that far gone. My first thought was to complain about the traffic, having to pay for parking and wondering if my kids would ever stop screaming. The next thought was “I bet I could build this in Salesforce.”

I smartly kept this thought to myself, but as we walked around the park, I had a little Salesforce Schema Builder in my head creating objects, fields and relationships. Should rides be it’s own object? Maybe it should be more general like “Activity” and have Record Types for rides and restaurants. Should I just have one field to represent the length of time in line? Do I need a separate wait for FastPass holders? Could I use Salesforce1 and Publisher Actions to track the number of cars coming into the park?

Maybe it should be an app for visitors. For example, it could have a feature to let you mark where you parked your stroller. And if it gets moved to “consolidate for safety purposes” it would update the record so poor tired parents are in a mad panic dash that their stroller has been stolen. No, I’m bitter about that experience. Why do you ask?

Everything Becomes Salesforce

This is the big one. Everything starts to become Salesforce. I attending on writing a really awesome piece about migrating your Public Tags to Record Topics in Spring 14 with this awesome tool. Sadly, this post will have to wait since my immune system decided on other activities. I thought I had contracted food poisoning. In between bouts of activity I was googling and trying to determine if this was a virus that my family might get or food poisoning. It turns out it’s almost impossible to really know. According to the FDA food poisoning can occur and last over a wide range of times. The first thing I thought of? “Food poisoning must by a time based field update from a Workflow Rule on the Food Object.”

Yes, I’m truly a goner. What ways have you seen Salesforce infect your life?