On the eve of the Microsoft Data Insights Summit, I thought I’d finally write the story behind the picture I’ve included with this post. How does this story relate to the recent announcement around Power BI Premium? Well, I’ll leave that up to you to decide if it does, or if it’s simply a cute little story that involves my son Matthew (who has been bugging me to write about him on here).
A couple years ago, my son asked his sister Caitlin and I to play Monopoly with him. We happily agreed, and went downstairs to the family room. But we didn’t see the usual setup. Instead, we were greeted with what you see in the picture.
“What the heck is this?” his sister asked. “This isn’t Monopoly!”
“I know – now it’s AWESOME Monopoly!” he replied.
“Awesome Monopoly? That sounds stupid. I don’t want to play that.”
“C’mon, please – it’ll be fun.”
“No it won’t – it looks dumb. I’m going back upstairs.” With that, she turned and stomped out of the room, taking Happy Bear with her.
I winced. This had played out many times before, and the ending had always been the same. I glanced towards the kitchen, seeing if the tissue box was still sitting on the counter from an earlier incident. But it wasn’t needed – he just smiled, sat down and started re-arranging Batman to make room for me.
“She’ll be back,” he said. “You’ll still play with me, won’t you dad?”
“Um, sure. Awesome Monopoly sounds, um, awesome,” I said, not quite sure what I was in for.
He tried to explain the rules , and I’ll admit, they seemed pretty confusing the first time he explained them to me. I don’t remember everything he laid out, but one rule he mentioned during this initial explanation was if you rolled a 12 and landed on “Chance”, Batman got put in jail for a turn OR you had to draw a playing card.
“Buddy, I gotta be honest – I don’t fully understand some of these rules you’ve added.” I told him. “Do you think we could make it a little less confusing?”
“What do you mean? We haven’t even started yet.”
“Yeah, I know, but some of these rules . . .”
I didn’t want to push too hard, but at the same time, I couldn’t imagine the game going well if the Elf on the Shelf remained the banker for the entire game.
“Okay, new rule! We can always change the rules if we decide they’re dumb.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Yep – that’s why it’s Awesome Monopoly. We can keep making it more and more awesome together!”
I shook my head and laughed. “Sure, pal, that sounds fair. I’ll let you go first.”
We went a few rounds, me laughing and him asking me each time someone went how he could make it even more “awesome”.
“I’ll admit, pal, this is a lot of fun.”
“Yay – I knew you’d like it! Can you go tell Caitlin how much fun it is?”
“Sure.”
I nodded, left the room, and came back with her having agreed to play after hearing how it great it was (and Happy Bear even came back too).
“Caitlin’s back – woohoo!” He proceeded to run around the room and make sounds like a choo-choo train. “Yayyyy!”
The game played out, and any time someone thought of a way to make the game even more awesome, we talked about it, tweaked the rules and kept making the game more and more awesome! (My kids used to like to say awesome A LOT).
So what’s the moral of the story? It’s either –
1. Batman cheats
or
2. Power BI Premium = Awesome Monopoly.
or
3. Chris needs better blog topics
If you’re coming to Seattle for the conference, I’ll see you next week!
Christopher Finlan 
Awesome story, Chris 👌
We used to play monopoly quite a lot when the kids were younger so this brings back some memories.
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