Susan's Scribblings the Blog

Author Archives: kayewer

• Makeup

  Posted at 4:53 pm by kayewer, on September 2, 2023

  Back in the days when cartoons were simpler and yet still funny, a common trope when making fun of the entertainment industry included when a character would call for makeup; somebody would appear with a gigantic powder puff and smack it upon the individual’s face, with a cloud of billowing white resulting from the assault.

  It’s been ages since I’ve seen a powder puff in the cosmetics aisle.

  Today’s selection of tinted coverage is immense, taking up a full wall at the local pharmacy. The lineup of the popular names–Revlon, Maybelline, Covergirl, MAC, e.l.f., L’Oréal–draw the eyes and drain the wallet with a variety of designs stamped into powders, bottles brimming with every skin tint on the planet, lip options of soft colorful columns or hard shaded sticks, all designed to produce a desired look.

  The shopping list for a store cosmetics run is mindboggling. Foundation comes in powder, liquid or paste, and requires an applicator which looks like somebody dismantled the tips of a kids’ foam bow-and-arrow playset. Concealer must also accompany the foundation to hide flaws. Blush also comes in powder or cream with its own applicator. The eyes require mascara thick enough to transfer onto a paint canvas with one blink, liner to make sure people know where your eyeballs are in relation to the rest of you, and shadows in palettes that resemble a psychedelic fever dream.

  Apparently no woman should be without her makeup face in public, and it requires the skill of an artist to apply it well. One must follow the planes of the face (or determine where they should be when absent) and use the correct product to conceal, beautify or illuminate the area to the proper degree.

  If you’re unsure of how to begin this process for yourself, simply watch any dramatic social media video. It has seemingly become a requirement for those creating content to do a bonus makeup application video at the same time.

  I don’t understand how it suddenly became necessary to discuss a breakup with a cheating boyfriend while outlining one’s eyebrows (I did exclude that from the list earlier) and dabbing foundation with the arrow tip foam applicator previously mentioned. Unfortunately I cannot guarantee that watching these videos will help you with your face type, nor will it recommend what products to buy.

  These videos are seemingly designed to give the posting person something to do with their hands while revealing how they found out about the cheating boyfriend. Usually it’s by employing private detective work and receiving intel from similarly well-tinted friends. And they still managed to look good doing it.

  I don’t find the makeup techniques empowering, and I’m sure that if men watch them, they are either put off by how much work is involved or appalled by how much women hide beneath the layers of stuff. Whatever purpose it serves doesn’t seem worth the effort.

  The most interesting makeup videos I’ve seen on social media are done by drag queens. I’m sure I’ll catch flak for saying so, but a woman can only enhance her looks so much, but when you take an ordinary male and transform them into a female so stunning that no actual female could accomplish it, that’s what I call Hollywood style.

  And they don’t use powder puffs, either.

  Share this:

  • Facebook

  Like Loading...
  Posted in Uncategorized | 0 Comments

• Food to Go (Crazy)

  Posted at 4:54 pm by kayewer, on August 26, 2023

  I’m at the age at which trying to enjoy foods can be hazardous to my health. The days of reckless candy consumption, cake and ice cream, or even a snack-sized candy bar, seem to be behind me. Not that I’m a big consumer of junk food; the past three years in particular have been nothing compared to what my eating life used to be.

  Before the office closed and we started working from home, food was everywhere I looked. People brought in donuts (or the boss told me to order them), and the cafeteria was bustling with folks devouring eggs and bacon or the oatmeal of the day. Lunch was a choice of dinner entrée or a platter with a sandwich and a side of fries or onion rings. The vending machines stayed busy at all other hours.

  Those are all rarities on my daily menu now. Except for the oatmeal. I have that daily in autumn and winter. I haven’t eaten bacon as a breakfast food in ages, although I have found a flaccid slab or two in the occasional burger.

  I broke down and decided to try a delivery service, so five days a week I prepare a two-minute meal in the microwave which is supposed to be healthier and portion controlled. The meals arrive once a week in an ice-packed box, and I simply move them to the fridge and take one out at dinnertime.

  The meals are tasty, hot and filling, plus I have not found any I don’t like. This either means that I have a tolerant palate for anything, or I don’t know good food when I taste it.

  I’ve never outright refused to eat a meal. Okay, one time the omelet my mother prepared was a bit on the softer side for my taste, and she was rather annoyed that I asked her to give it more of a cook, but it was just that one time. Even the Navy always met my expectations on omelets. I guess this means I used up my one complaint about food allotted me per lifespan.

  I wish those Karens I see on social media videos would realize they earn one complaint about food preparation per lifespan.

  Unfortunately, I had some blood work done at the lab, and the results came back that I still have too much sugar in my system. Gee whiz, I already gave up sugar in my tea, switched out several items for alternates with real and low percentages of sugar, and my summer cereal boxes all come with ten grams or less of sweet stuff.

  My doctor will probably tell me to limit dessert.

  Wait until I tell him what that will do to my daily life as I know it. I may need therapy.

  Another recommendation may be to change the diet plan for my deliveries, to something like the DASH or Mediterranean diets. Both are known to help older people get better numbers out of their blood samples. They’re also rather restrictive and a bit pricey. because anything good for you naturally costs more. My current service is reasonably priced, but I may need to spend more for healthier choices.

  Despite eating two bananas and a Greek yogurt a day, my potassium was still low. That’s not easy to build up, but not impossible. Unfortunately, foods such as spinach don’t come in meal delivery services, and watermelon doesn’t travel well. I added a salmon dinner to the delivery service to help boost my numbers.

  Snacking has been out of the question, so I don’t have chips, pretzels or popcorn at home, though I indulged in a bag of chocolate drizzle popcorn last month (I stretched it out to last all week).

  Here’s the kicker: the sugars you consume stay in your bloodstream and can be read with a simple test to find out what you’ve been doing for the past ninety days. That was vacation time, so yes I did have a few indulgences such as fudge from the boardwalk. And my blood told on me.

  Gives new meaning to the term “bad blood,” doesn’t it.

  So soon my primary doctor will read the test results and probably offer some suggestions. I’m willing to follow them, because nobody wants to find their healthy meter has suddenly expired and it’s the end.

  At least if I “checked out” in the cafeteria, somebody would say, “Must’ve been the oatmeal of the day.”

  Share this:

  • Facebook

  Like Loading...
  Posted in Uncategorized | 0 Comments

• Get Together

  Posted at 4:40 pm by kayewer, on August 19, 2023

  Has anybody else noticed that it has become harder to get a group of people in one place that does not involve an online meeting?

  This year is my high school class reunion, and it seems as if every five years the number of people involved dwindles. It doesn’t appear to be due to folks passing on as much as it is because of the logistics of distance. Nobody stays in their hometown anymore. Gee, is there such a thing as a hometown for anybody?

  It seems that everybody moves far away from where they went to school. A friend of mine has two children, both of whom moved across the country upon graduation (one half-way, the other to the opposite coast), and she sees them during the holidays when the families congregate in one place at least once a year. So it is with quite a few of the graduates, who in those days may have stayed put for five or ten years or so after picking up their diplomas, but then relocated elsewhere and lost touch. We still haven’t found a handful of people; it’s as if they moved to Mars or went into witness protection.

  I don’t have a problem with them finding me, because I’ve lived in the same home all my life (and the high school is a few minutes’ walk from there), so I’m easy to locate. That explains why nobody contacts me. I’m like that famous place in your home state; since you know where it is, you figure it’s always going to be there, and you’ll get around to it when you’re ready. My contacts have been limited to social media group messages. As long as I get them, I guess they know I’m still living.

  My hobbies over the years have also produced various circles of friends, and we also have trouble getting together. One of our groups had planned a big reunion which was interrupted by a certain worldwide problem. The last time we managed to do something as a group, we had a luncheon at Red Robin for five (out of a good thirty people). After so much time has passed, a few of us have mobility issues or can’t travel. I put the suggestion out there for a Zoom reunion. This would enable the movement challenged to be part of the action. We won’t have much longer to reconnect with some of us, which is depressing. The higher the numbers in your reunion, the lower the number of people you’ll actually get to see there.

  My mother went to one class reunion–her fiftieth–and I drove her there. She remembered every face in the crowd as if no time had passed at all. I felt privileged to experience the happiness she felt when people were genuinely glad to see her. The invitation came by snail mail, so I suppose they figured out who had passed on by which envelopes were sent back by the post office.

  Our world has become so out of touch that even reunions are suffering. It’s sad to think that the end of a long journey, such as twelve years of schooling, ends so abruptly that few care about the nostalgia of our lives while we shared them in those classrooms.

  It’s not as if we live forever. The memories die with us.

  Share this:

  • Facebook

  Like Loading...
  Posted in Uncategorized | 0 Comments

• Scarier Than Hell

  Posted at 5:00 pm by kayewer, on August 12, 2023

  I went to see a horror movie last night (The Last Voyage of the Demeter), so with theatres basing their pre-movie fare on the theme of the main feature (which was rated R), I fully expected the trailers to be terrifying as well. I wasn’t disappointed. With the exception of the live-action comedy Strays (featuring the voices of Jamie Foxx and Will Ferrell in a canine gang), my friend and I were subjected to an endless pummeling of our sanity with gut-punching promises of gore, killings and shock.

  In watching the movie I chose, I did so preferring the traditional movie monsters and tropes. Without adding spoilers, I can say that I got more good scares out of the movie, and nothing in the trailers convinced me to come out to see a majority of the movies they touted. The inhumanity in the way fear is exploited is becoming more extreme as people become numbed to the old methods. The trailers I saw leaned toward psychological horror, with an underbelly of the visceral, and I wasn’t particularly impressed by any of that.

  The first movie in the lineup was an unusual one called It Lives Inside. The premise is based upon an East Indian cultural demon and looks like it involves a spiritual haunting from which an afflicted person cannot escape. Worse than that, anybody trying to help the person is also targeted for horrible happenings. This one made me jump and cringe a bit.

  The Nun II movie is on the way. I never saw the other related ones, but it promises to offer similar jump scares, lots of blood and anti-religious frights. I knew it wasn’t for me, and the trailer didn’t change my mind.

  The one film I was already familiar with and knew was coming was The Exorcist: Believer, which appears to be a franchise update. Ellen Burstein reprises her role as Chris McNeil, whose daughter Regan (Linda Blair) survived demonic possession. She is called to a home to help a father whose daughter and a friend are seemingly possessed. This seems to be a tribute to the original move which was released 50 years ago. Having seen the original a few times, I may catch this on home release, where I can change the channel if it’s over-the-top disgusting.

  The big trailer was for Five Nights at Freddy’s. Having seen some of the licensed figures, I paid no attention because they didn’t seem at all engaging. Apparently this is a story of Chuck E. Cheese meets possession of some sort, with a security guard and his daughter meeting up with animatronics in an abandoned theme park which come to life, kidnap children and commit mayhem and murder. I sure hope this doesn’t spell the end for the pizza franchise (or worse, Disney).

  A less horrific offering but still with death and fear as a theme was an Hercule Poirot mystery remake, A Haunting in Venice. It delves into the possibility of psychics actually being able to summon the dead. The great Belgian detective is pushed to his limits as he attempts to unravel a séance connected Halloween murder in Italy. The Agatha Christie based story brings back Kenneth Branagh as the sleuth after a successful turn in Death on the Nile. This one is a possibility.

  I suppose my problem is that I don’t find the horror franchises which depict murder entertaining. And when I say murder, I am referring to cold killing of a human being by another. I sat through a couple of Nightmare on Elm Street movies, but they’re not at the top of my favorites list. Monsters and supernatural beings offer the safety of their implausibility, so watching a man/bat terrorize a ship’s crew didn’t faze me, in spite of barrels of blood. At least I was primed for it, having been amped up by the frightening reels of coming attractions rolled out beforehand.

  Maybe I should take up going to comedy shows. At least the pre-show acts would make me laugh, too.

  Share this:

  • Facebook

  Like Loading...
  Posted in Uncategorized | 0 Comments

• Line Up the Unusual Suspects

  Posted at 5:05 pm by kayewer, on August 5, 2023

  Sometimes the important news of the week is not worth repeating, and with politics and weather dominating the media, I looked elsewhere for inspiration. I found it in an article about a woman challenging the science behind the everyday queue in public places. She was standing with her baggage at the airport to check in and refused to move up when the line in front of her began to thin out. She replied to anybody who asked her why she wouldn’t tighten the line that it wouldn’t matter when she moved up, because everybody would get waited upon in the same order.

  This meant that a growing gap was creating space between the queue near the front of the line and herself with the others waiting behind her. Her intention, then, was to wait until the entire line ahead of her was gone, and then she would parade herself–dragging, carrying or rolling her luggage–up to the head of the stanchions and cordoning ribbons or ropes– across the open space to the counter.

  This is what is sometimes referred to as commanding a room, in which your behavior draws attention to your authoritative presence. But if you have no authority, you sometimes seem the fool.

  Two examples of this concept of commanding a room appear in the Harry Potter movies⁽¹⁾, when Professor Snape entered the classroom, magically shut the windows with a wave of his hand and bringing systematic bangs of finality, then intoned to the class softly, “Turn to page 394.”

  Perhaps the etiquette rules for behavior in the queue also appear on page 394 of Emily Post’s guidebook (yes, it’s still out there).

  Delores Umbridge was another Hogwarts example, but she used her stride (in pink high heels, no less) to make her point. People of every age are familiar with the sounds of footsteps approaching; my mother had an elementary school teacher with a wooden leg, whose comings and goings were particularly frightful because of the distinctive step of one limb and the clunking of the other. Prosthetics were heavy in the 1930s.

  This power play from the woman in the airport is certainly debatable. She apparently set herself up as a living challenge line for those behind her to dare step ahead of her (none did) and took on the role of gatekeeper for the rest of those waiting their turn. Everybody there was “next,” and quietly and politely adopted that role for however long it took for those in front to move up. The woman shunned that role and made the line, to observers, seem awkward.

  The placing of ropes and stanchions is designed to provide an orderly open-ended system for a specific purpose. The other airport users–staff and passengers alike–used the public walkways to move about, and those in line to check in were protected by clear lines of usage and boundaries. One commenter noted that the major problem would have arisen if her standing so far back began to cause spillage past the end of the queue design and into the public areas. Also, the staff at the airport and passers-by would normally have a clear idea of how many persons were waiting in line, and her defiance skewed that perception. It was not the speed at which people were served, since the next person is always the next person until the one ahead of them is finished with their business, but a queue depends upon a spatial order to operate optimally.

  One time I was pulling up to an outdoor ATM, and a large vehicle was there finishing a transaction. I did not move up behind their bumper to wait, but since no other cars were approaching at that moment, I stopped a good car length or two behind while I retrieved my ATM card. A driver moments later was pulling up behind me and swerved to move ahead of me, pulling up to the other vehicle. Obviously they thought I was being an idiot by not moving up. Instead, I knew they were an idiot for being rude.

  It’s all about giving reasonable space. And waiting one’s turn the normal way.

  ⁽¹⁾ Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)

  Share this:

  • Facebook

  Like Loading...
  Posted in Uncategorized | 0 Comments

• Wishes

  Posted at 5:12 pm by kayewer, on July 29, 2023

  Recently a nostalgia group posted pictures on social media depicting a local mall when it was first opened. I was not yet two years old, but the event was a major celebration; a countless array of stores under a huge roof, fully enclosed and climate controlled in any weather. The birth of shopping malls was a boom for the economy, and everybody in the family enjoyed the experience of shopping there.

  If I were to go back in time, I would like to visit the old mall. Back then, the act of reaching a destination was more pleasant than now. People drove the speed limit, and parking lots were navigated in a mannerly fashion. The men wore properly ironed shirts with ties, dressed in sport jackets and hats, and had their shoes properly shined. The women wore dresses and flats, and their hair was stylish and neat. Children behaved.

  The department stores anchoring the ends of the mall were bustling but orderly places to find practically anything by going to the department stocking them. Each department was overseen by an expert trained in the merchandise they sold. They wore uniforms or name tags. Entire drawers of hosiery for women were meticulously labeled behind the glass counter, and you bought your stockings by your foot size, not small, medium or large. Women also were gloves, sized to fit. Coordinated jewelry didn’t come in a stack of pre-boxed piles through which you rummaged to find what you wanted, but were brought out for you to examine and then lovingly placed in a box with the store logo on it and stamped cotton squares of cushioning inside on purchase. They also had the perfect sized paper bag for you.

  The store had an excellent restaurant for a quick lunch or full dinner, and a terrace overlooked the scene beneath, where fountains produced a joyous show of jets and rings of rhythmic water waves cascading into a round pool where seating enabled families to rest and enjoy the show or the passing crowds.

  Greenery was carefully attended throughout the walkways; some areas were landscaped over wooden bridges or under large wooden gazebos with benches. Overhead were large tropical trees, and overhead were huge windows allowing the natural light to bathe the inside.

  The smaller stores held a variety of choices; hats, tee shirts, home accessories, a bakery. Another throwback to simpler times was Woolworth’s, the classic “five and dime” store which also had a cafeteria and a spot to grab a hotdog and eat it while you strolled.

  A movie theatre was accessible from outside as well as in the mall itself. Arcades and barber shops took up residences in small stores lining corridors off the main path.

  On weekends and during holidays, the mall would add special events such as baseball card shows, interactive exhibits and the Easter Bunny and Santa. The information booth would become a gift wrap station in November and December, and even the most exhausted worker would offer a professional smile to the harried shoppers in line.

  Nowadays the mall has lost its original identity and seems more a utilitarian stop than something to anticipate. The same mall to which my parents took me as a toddler is still there, and some of the old feel remains, but only when you know where to look for it. I can shop there in jeans and a tee shirt, and I miss the greenery.

  But I can still remember when it was all there, and smile.

  Share this:

  • Facebook

  Like Loading...
  Posted in Uncategorized | 0 Comments

• Keep It Flowing

  Posted at 4:31 pm by kayewer, on July 22, 2023

  While I was on my way to my computer to post this entry, I was driving behind a vehicle from out of state. They were keeping to the speed limit and taking their time, being unfamiliar with where they were. The route we were traveling was a four-lane divided by a median for most of its length, but in the area where they were planning to execute a left turn, the median is broken by a double lane into which drivers can swerve and wait for the chance to turn without interrupting the traffic flow. These folks were apparently not used to such configurations, because they didn’t use it and waited in the left traffic lane instead. This meant I had to stop behind them.

  The first impulse for most drivers would be to honk the horn and jar some sense into them; my choice was to wait patiently for them to turn. We were, after all, in the left lane, which normally would be reserved for passing or making left turns (which in this case was either the buildings on the other side of that double-wide, or the main cross street a few yards away at the traffic light).

  Engineers worked hard to work out the way the traffic in that area would function the best, and our job in driving on that road is to consider how we can best keep ourselves and the other cars safely moving along. By my not tooting at the out-of-state driver, nothing major went wrong; it wasn’t as if there was heavy traffic into which I could have caused them to panic and cause a disaster, but I also didn’t throw them off by distracting them from where they were looking to turn. They were turning left into an unfamiliar entrance, after all, and I had no idea if this was their first time going there or not.

  It seems like a small thing, but life flows the best based on the small things we do every day. Stopping and waiting is a little thing that can mean a lot for somebody trying to drive in unfamiliar territory, or a person with mobility issues who should still be allowed to do some in-person shopping.

  When we reach a traffic light, we get to pause and stretch, while the drivers in the other direction continue on their journey and remain alert. Sometimes we can drive for quite a distance before a light stops us, but that pause is just as good for us as completing the journey.

  Right now we could use some more pauses and wait times. We all pause and move in turns, and it’s part of the flow of life as we stand still and watch the movement around us.

  Share this:

  • Facebook

  Like Loading...
  Posted in Commentary | 0 Comments

• Bus to Nowhere

  Posted at 4:54 pm by kayewer, on July 15, 2023

  I used to like taking the bus, and over the past decades I took more bus rides into the big city than I can count. Greyhound was the carrier of choice, with a history of service going back to 1914 when a Swedish immigrant named Erik Wickman started a short service to take iron ore miners on a two mile trip. He gained two partners and expanded the line into what we have known today.

  After major strikes, bankruptcy and several mergers and acquisitions, the company is now owned by a group that brought FlixBus to our area. Some time in-between the near total shutdown of public transit in 2020 and the present, the new company started paring everything down. This is where bus travel gets complicated.

  I used to ride from a terminal in a town about twenty minutes from me. It was a pleasant building, and the wait was always as comfortable as the ride. Near the end of its life, the terminal even picked up monitors updating passengers on departures and arrivals.

  The first thing to go was that bus terminal on which people depended for decades. It was abruptly closed; it was on the side of the turnpike, held a massive parking lot and was a hub to buy your tickets, get a cab, grab a snack or whatever you needed while going from one place to another. In the months when travel resumed, we stood forlornly in front of that terminal and looked inside, helplessly, at the huge potted plants which had been left to starve to death, their corpses on the floor like deflated party decorations.

  The location of the operation was not actually moved as much as it was treated as an afterthought, since people had to board and depart from someplace. Busses began picking up passengers in the rear parking lot of a hotel across the turnpike from the original location. There was no ticket counter–and, in fact, no staff–and no seating or restrooms. The only positive thing about the new spot was the overhanging protection of solar panels throughout the lot, under which passengers could park their vehicles and stay dry.

  This did not last long, however. As I noted in a prior post in the spring, I printed out my bus ticket in advance and brought it to the location to find that they had moved again and offered no information as to where they were, so I could not reach the new terminal in time to make my trip. The pickup and drop-off spot was moved, again, to a public bus stop hub some 15-20 minutes north, with no services and simply parking spaces and no clear place in which to queue up for departure. I was out the cost of roundtrip fare for something which was not my fault, as they refused me a refund.

  Folks in Philadelphia are now facing the same inconvenience. The original terminal was located on a parcel of land near a spot which is now being considered for a sports complex within the city (why they simply don’t keep all the sports arenas in one zone, I have no idea). It had a ticket counter, vending machines and restrooms. The new location also has no personnel, no restrooms and no seating. Passengers mill about on an area of pavement on busy Market Street with no sense of purpose or belonging. Nobody wants to ride with a company which considers its passengers to be of so little value. The regional paper scathingly called the change a disgrace, and I agree with them, as do many passengers who board there and used to transfer to the terminal I once used to connect with other destinations.

  So it appears that Greyhound bus passengers have now been abandoned. Nobody seems to care, and no future improvement seems to be in sight.

  I suppose I should look at train travel.

  Share this:

  • Facebook

  Like Loading...
  Posted in Commentary | 0 Comments

• Customer Chaos

  Posted at 4:45 pm by kayewer, on July 8, 2023

  For many of my 45 years working, I have worked in the complaint department in some capacity. Until about ten years ago, customers had usually been reasonable, docile, polite and easy to interact with. Once every few weeks or so, we would have a particularly difficult person call in, who proceeded to make everybody’s life miserable, and the entire story was often the topic of talk in the cafeteria (which has replaced the water cooler in the hallway as the place to congregate and share camaraderie).

  Today, the number of grumpy people outnumber the pleasant ones by a large margin. Our hundreds of call center associates working from home field an average of one grumpy call from what are known as Karens (or Darrens) for every dozen or fewer. It’s non-stop abuse for eight hours a day. Fortunately, only once did I bear witness to a serious threat to one of the call takers, and the result was an immediate visit to the customer’s home by a man in blue carrying a badge, bringing the status of our customer to a rather quick and embarrassing end.

  Fortunately, I moved on from the days when I took customer phone call complaints to email complaints, but that doesn’t make the job much easier to do. People still manage to be cruel, demeaning and rude in emails. Even when they misspell or use improper grammar, their messages are clearly meant to make the recipients feel bad about existing, for the simple reason that they, the customers, are in a bad mood.

  This is the one aspect of my life in which I am eternally grateful to all the bullies who made my school days a living hell, because my emotional callouses are too thick to be penetrated by most derogatory invective I see in emails every day.

  Sometimes the source of the problem is the complainer’s own doing. One email opened with, “Your website (obscene term for a love-related activity) sucks, because I can’t log in.” Upon examining the user’s account, I was pleased to politely inform them that they misspelled their email as a “dot con” instead of a “dot com.” If you misspell it the first time, I think you should have to misspell it always, just to remind you not to pick fights when there are none (just kidding).

  Occasionally customers suffer from what I call Rumplestiltskin Syndrome, named for the woman who received help from an imp in exchange for her first child and then forgot about the deal. This occurs when we offer customers a year’s worth of the moon and the stars for practically nothing, and when it’s time to pay at a later date, they forget how much we did for them and complain about not authorizing this or that, or the service costs double what they originally paid. It’s called half-price, discounted, free, limited time or “with your acceptance of this, you get that.”

  The offers are not fine print, either; it’s all laid out in regular type, in brief but clear English. Some people don’t complain well in their native language, however, which makes them angrier. A stipulation which says “new customers within three months” becomes “old customers anytime.” Poor translations like that have started military conflicts, but for us it’s a daily drag.

  I sometimes sit back and watch videos by Scott Seiss, a fellow whose sense of humor dealing with customers is a source of great relief for those of us who can’t use his witty comebacks. An example is when a customer asks to have an expired offer honored. His reply is that to receive such a bargain, one would have to travel back in time.

  The real challenges come when a customer actually takes a second to find out your name and then personalize what they’re directing at you. For every ten people who email back to say, “Thank you, Susan, for helping me,” I’ve had that customer who has gone off on a tirade to say, “Susan, you are (foolish, arrogant, a poor example of customer service) and *#@^# disgraceful because you won’t give me something that nobody should be allowed to get, and I’m going to keep harassing you until I crack you psychologically open like an overripe melon and destroy your sense of self, because your destruction will be a bonus to me when I get what I want (which won’t matter to me by tomorrow, because none of the tantrums I have truly get me anything which makes me happy, but I’m stuck in this loop and you’re the one going to share it with me this hour).”

  My advice to you when you are a customer is to remember that you are interacting with a real person. Our job is essentially to make you happy, so if you aren’t happy, let us know calmly, have information ready for us, be patient and listen to what we have to say. Maybe both sides can walk away somewhat satisfied. And no uniformed officer knocking on our door.

  Share this:

  • Facebook

  Like Loading...
  Posted in Uncategorized | 0 Comments

• Seat of My Plants

  Posted at 5:04 pm by kayewer, on July 1, 2023

  I had one half of the front of my home landscaped this past week. The pros did a fantastic job, and it looks much better than it has for years.

  My family has lived in the house for decades, and back in the early days we didn’t have much greenery in front, but the biggest plant was an out-of-control azalea bush. It eventually died and was dug out. My parents decided to replace it and line the front with ferns. The idea came from a few perennial varieties which grew happily and stayed green year-round on both sides of the steps leading to the front door. If those would last, why wouldn’t others?

  The variety they chose, unfortunately, grew like kudzu over the walkway, and by September they reached over three feet high and choked any semblance of order to our front. One positive thing is that the front was nearly always green.

  In the fall, the yellowed remains of the ferns would be ripped out and trimmed down with a weeder, but the network of roots beneath the soil was unbreakable, so pruning or thinning out was out of the question. The ferns became a nebulous, unwanted squatter.

  Until this past spring, when I gave the okay for landscapers to tear up everything and install new plants. They took out the ferns and dug down deep to pull the entire carpet of roots. The old clusters of perennial ferns remained on my orders. My attachment to them was too strong, and they brought joy to the front yard.

  This week, the crew came and added the new plants. I also found that I have a responsibility to water them daily for two weeks to establish their hold in the soil and keep the warranty valid. This morning, I set out to start watering, but I found that my new hose came with an attachment which doesn’t do anything gently, such as lightly sprinkling new shoots. This meant I had to go out for some accessories. I came out of the mega store (you know the one) with a hand sprayer and an extended wand.

  I’ve never used a wand before when doing anything in the yard, so it will be interesting to see how it works. For the next fourteen days, I will take on the role of the little old lady tending her garden early in the morning. It will be worth it for the plants to take hold and enjoy the rest of the season before going dormant in preparation for a resurgence in the spring of 2024.

  Plant ahead to plan ahead, I always say.

  Next year I may do the other half of the front. It contains the last of those squatter ferns and a crazy japonica with tendrils that project in fifty directions at once, but lovely flowers (in the local school district colors) and greenery come with them. By then, it may be time for the past to go with them.

  I’ll keep you posted.

  Share this:

  • Facebook

  Like Loading...
  Posted in Uncategorized | 0 Comments

• Feedback

  	Eden on A Good Rabbit Hole
  	Eden on Free Secretary
  	Eden on Getting the Message
  	Eden on The Unasked Questions
  	Eden on And Her Shoes Were #9