Susan's Scribblings the Blog

Simply put, office food is a curse. Ask any person who has been placed in charge of food for a workplace, and you will get that answer. It doesn’t matter the circumstances; when you buy food for an office, you are guaranteed to make at least one person unhappy.

I have worked a few jobs involving 24-hour operations, and they all revolve around what there is to eat. The pantries on every floor are crammed with machines holding snacks and soda, and our cafeteria wisely switched to an all-night convenience mart-style DIY model which should have food on demand anytime. There are times, however, when food has to be ordered from elsewhere for a big function, and that is where the Pizza Problem comes into play. I call it that after an old cartoon episode of Garfield and Friends in which the fat cat distracts a crowd by posing the question of what to have on a pizza. Nobody agreed on the toppings. In fact, it became quite a polarizing argument. People like free food, as long as nobody is averse to what is being offered. Recently I solved the problem of multi-serve coffee boxes getting cold or unused by offering up K-cups; somebody complained we had no decaf.

Food preference wars are just part of the issue. When it comes to ordering a large catering event, the first real obstacle to overcome is an accurate head count. We need to know how many people will actually show up in the building at a particular time, minus who may work from home or call out sick. This can vary by six to twenty people at any one time. Then the order must be fresh and hot, so we divide it by shifts, making two head counts and deliveries. We also have to consider serving two or more departments. You see where this is going, and math was never my strong suit.

No matter how many times we order from the local pizza place/caterer, there is always a glitch, usually involving how one is supposed to eat the food without sufficient forks, or they may supply twenty plates for sixty people. Counting is nobody’s strong suit.

Being one who likes to solve problems in advance, I bought a package of 300 plates, anticipating about 160 or so people. It was voted insufficient because, as the second shift staff pointed out, folks would use two plates; one to hold and one to cover. Should I bring plastic wrap? No, then they would stock up plates full of food to take home.

That’s another thing about office food: people launch themselves on free food like flies on poo. I don’t need to wait for a Black Friday store opening to see chaos: I can just unwrap a table filled with catered food and stand back for the horde to descend. Fortunately I have not seen anybody stuff ziti in their undies yet, but within minutes, a smorgasbord can be reduced to a toothpick and a twist tie, unless you want to lick spilled sauce from the counter.

So with a storm brewing, we mobilized for the weekend, and I ordered food and prayed that the last to arrive wouldn’t have to fight over the last bread stick. By Monday we will know how it went, but I’m sure there won’t be a single paper plate to be found.

Ten years ago, a new Barnes & Noble bookstore opened near me. Books are still relevant, because you just can’t hold an e-book the same way you can a real one. When the store opened, I also started a writer’s group. We’re both still going strong after ten years.

The problem with a monthly group or organization is that people have trouble committing to the schedule. Of course, all of life is based around scheduling, and the problem is not just with groups getting enough people together to meet. Even television schedules change at the last minute, although it’s usually when a big star has died and a network wants to devote time to a marathon run of a program in which they starred. Lately programs have been cancelled at the last minute because a star was caught being human (or, on occasion, sub-human). Music stars get sick and cancel tour dates, and some things like those mini workshops at your local craft store die before the first class meets. But I digress.

I wonder if a study has ever been done on the question of how frequently people give up on a scheduled event after the first one? I’m sure gyms have piles of memberships which started January 1st and fell by the wayside before February 1st. College course drops, church attendance (I have seen two churches go under just this year) also go on this list.

Maybe people really are not inclined to commit to anything. It would explain divorce, blown diets and such. What does it really take to commit?

For one, it takes a mature and stubborn sense of duty. That blown diet  or gym membership came from a premature sense of self-defeat. If the act of eating a donut is really more important than long-term weight loss, you don’t feel that sense of duty. If that popular program on TV beats out standing up at a piece of gym equipment, you feel no sense of duty.

For my writer’s group, I have a circle of people who are committed to the craft, but not able to attend monthly meetings. At least I do know they are out there working on their projects, in addition to being employees and spouses and dutiful children to aging parents and whatever else fills their days.

But it does get lonely sitting in the Barnes & Noble without a bunch of us together, in one place, talking about what we do.

We’re a scattered generation, going this way and that, rarely congregating to actually talk, because what we feel we need to say is put into an electronic message. Even when we are in a room together, the phones and computers are at eye level and we don’t engage. So we’re committed to them. I’m equally as guilty, with a presence on social media to which I commit time once a week to add this blog.

It would still be great to sit together and meet eye to eye and just commit to being engaged. That’s what I hope the next ten years brings us.

As Americans, we don’t stop to think about how strange some of things we do appear to other countries. That’s okay, though, because somebody else inevitably will do it for us. Author Alex Daniel provided a recent guide to some feedback about our quirks which puzzle foreigners (a link appears later). What we think of as “normal” strikes people from other places as quizzical.

For example, our flag-crazy culture has us displaying the red, white and blue in every conceivable corner of our homes, businesses and street light fixtures. That is apparently reserved for holidays or special events elsewhere.

We also have pharmacies which resemble convenience stores, whereas in places like Great Britain, one goes to the pharmacy (called chemists there, as Monty Python fans well know) and buys just pharmaceuticals and health-related supplies. In the average CVS, Rite-Aid or Walgreen, you can pick up frozen dinners, exercise gear and a candy bar or two, in ridiculous sizes. I saw a king-sized dark chocolate Kit-Kat® bar which almost made me go off my diet. My willpower prevailed, but my stomach protested.

In restaurants, our plates are over-packed with food the size of one meal and at least one more to fit in a doggy bag (something other countries don’t do), and we tend to walk around holding beverages. Not over there, folks. We also get free beverage refills, which is fine because we have no issues using public restrooms which have no true privacy barriers. Think about how easy it really is to see people engaged in number two through the gaps all around our restroom stalls, and note that other countries have actual closed stalls with walls and doors and no space around or underneath. And with no free drink refills, I suppose they pee more quickly with less full bladders to contend with. And the obesity rate is not the same as here.

Nobody said anything about whether their women’s queues for stalls are as long as here.

Other countries find our paper money boring and our coins confusing. All our bills are a strange shade of green, but in other places you have a few colors and sized to denote what you are carrying around (no problems for the visually impaired, which is a plus). A five-cent coin is called a nickel here, but that name comes from its historic metallurgy rather than its value, making other people scratch their heads. They pay one price for shopping: no figuring out and adding tax, which varies by a matter of miles, depending on where you are shopping.

We don’t take our vacation time, and we accumulate a lot (ask me and my office manager who is in first place for hoarding time), while overseas they take a week or more off for long extended holidays. However, for people with late shift jobs, they can find a 24-hour restaurant here in America, which is not the case anyplace else on average. Eateries close up and force people to go home and cook if they want to nosh at three in the morning.

When one goes to a restaurant overseas, the waiter brings your food and you don’t see him until you ask for the check, which could be an hour or two, or more, because people dine leisurely there. Here, waiters check on you frequently and will bring the check yesterday, which visitors apparently find as grating as having to tip, as service staff are paid much more and don’t rely on gratuities back home. We crank out diners so quickly, it boggles their minds.

Finally (for our purposes, as this is not the end of the list), we tend to advertise too much on television. Not only do lawyers beg us to be their clients for thirty seconds, but we are the only country outside of New Zealand that carries prescription drug commercials. Yup, fans of Cyndi Lauper outside the U.S. don’t get to see her psoriasis ad for Cosentyx®

Some of what makes us unique may be confusing to visitors, but then we haven’t figured out the concept of some foreign food, or driving on the left. It all works out: just try to bone up before you cross the border and you’ll be just fine.

https://bestlifeonline.com/30-things-americans-do-that-foreigners-think-are-super-weird/

A person who has just won a million dollars might cry for joy: I cry for joy when people are polite, because it just doesn’t happen often anymore, at least not when dealing with customers who are total strangers.

Occasionally I field customer emails, and more often than not they are about problems or complaints. A few times a week I have a compliment for coworkers or praises about how a service we offer was helpful to somebody. Unfortunately, the majority of emails wind up being gripe ridden paragraphs in which somebody is letting off steam. Often we are not the main problem, though, and I realize that. Folks wake up late, they ran out of coffee, all the kids have afflictions which leave them gushing at all ends, and when they get to us–a few numbers down the to-do list–they are not ready for something else to happen that they are not expecting.

This doesn’t mean, however, that passing on the bile is the best solution. When an email starts out with “Your website is the worst since so-and-so’s,” or “Your site is (expletive) and I want to (perform a senseless act of violence upon) your web designers,” it’s a sign that more issues than this are involved.

What has usually occurred is that the system imposed a security block after somebody has relentlessly hit a login key multiple times under the mistaken impression that keystroke number one thousand and two may just make the system give up and proceed to the next screen. But it is our web designers, in their minds, who have ganged together and decided to make our customers’ lives as miserable as possible. So much for preventing illegal access and identity theft.

Earlier this month, a customer sent a ranting complaint because they wanted to pay a bill which was late (actually it was due next month), ignored the answer provided and wrote back to complain about accessibility issues on our site. I mentioned that we do care about accessibility as well as security, and mentioned a free service as an example: the customer wrote back even angrier because I had mentioned “selling” something else. Since when is a free service selling? Selling involves money, doesn’t it?

After months of email vitriol, a customer finally wrote in with the following: “There seems to be a problem and I cannot log into the website. Can you assist me?” I put my pen down and stared at the screen for a minute. Was I the subject of a prank? No, it was a real, honest-to-goodness attempt to state a problem without being rude. If I were about a decade older, I could’ve packed up my cubicle and retired a happy woman. As it was, I was tempted to write back and thank them for being so nice.

This is not what we are coming to: it’s what we are allowing to continue. We have to take a breath and go back to how things used to be, when the red-faced customer whose blood is boiling over essentially nothing is the rarity instead of the rule. I and other customer service associates could do with more politeness. It brings tears of joy to the eyes.

My neighborhood had a new Target store open this past week; it’s a smaller, “curated” store which has nicknames such as “Son of Target,” Target Junior” and “Mini Tar-zhay.” It opened with no fanfare at all. Sign of the times, I suppose, but I remember when store openings were much different.

When our first regional mall in Cherry Hill opened in 1961, it was a major affair. Dignitaries were there. People wore nice clothing. They dedicated an engraved boulder (you read that right: a boulder with a plaque which still sits at the site). The mall, of course, had fountains and birds in immense aviaries, and to a child like me it was immense. Malls are still big, but people shop there in bum gear.

When the Target opened across the street from Cherry Hill Mall, on the site of a defunct RCA building, there were lines and special discounts and free donuts. It grew on a lot of us, and now is as essential as a gas station.

I don’t know what our mini-Target had. They opened quietly in a space which used to hold a Thriftway, a Super Fresh, a Clover, and a few long-forgotten stores of yesteryear whose names have been lost in their own dust. I only knew about it because the local paper announced it the next day.

Stores are having trouble because, as I’ve said before, it seems that we human beings can’t stand each other anymore, so we shop in private except when we need a loaf of bread or fresh underwear.

I’ll check out the new store eventually. It is, after all, bringing new life to a shopping center which was showing signs of inevitable decline, like a bleeding wound. Target, fortunately, is and sells bandages.

I’ve been in the dark on social media until just now. I’ve created a Facebook page to reconnect with my writing buddies and interested friends. I hope folks will read and become fans, in addition to sharing on the regular FB media. See you again on Saturday, and watch as I build the new page over the next few days (King games, you may not see me as often: I’ve moved on).

Clothing is still strange when it comes to care instructions, even after decades of change and adaptation. There is nothing that puts a woman off more than finding a nice article of clothing and finding the instructions demand drying flat. Or worse, reshaping before drying flat.

The most flat space any of us sees in today’s architecture is in the local laundromat, which has counters on which to fold laundry. Of course, users also sort dirty laundry on there, set their kids on there and spill bleach on there.

Not much thought seems to be devoted to the space one needs to do laundry, so why are clothes still carrying “dry flat” labels in them? The first answer that comes to mind is drying racks. I have a friend who substituted racks for her dryer because it has never worked right since she bought it, so she would rather let nature do the drying for her.

Some clothes are just to nice to pass up, so I can either break down and buy a drying rack, or I can gamble on throwing the “delicates” in a pillow case in the dryer on low and chance having them come out right. I don’t think that clothing should come with the same responsibilities one would take on with a pet or a piece of complex circuitry.

Or then there’s polyester.

I have mixed luck with cameras. Sometimes I get spectacular shots, but mostly I wind up with something unexpected. That’s probably why many people who buy cameras use just the automatic setting, because little or nothing can go wrong.

Then they forget to take the lens cap off.

Among my most epic errors; I once shot a sequence of the sunrise at Ocean City, NJ. I got home to develop the film (yes, it was in those days), and found that I had no film in the camera to start with.

Then there was the time I took my point-and-shoot Kodak to a concert. From the viewfinder I could see everything clearly, but the pictures that came back looked like I was in the next county rather than in row 65. Then there was the time I had an opportunity to take a photograph of actor Barry Bostwick and two of my friends with him. The place was crowded, and nobody was budging to let me back up and get everybody in the frame, so I wound up with a full head shot of him and about 25 percent of each of them. At least they were recognizable.

One time I was getting a shot of a family with a growing youngster, and I hiccuped and got a “Frankenstein” shot with the parents’ scalps cut off squarely on top.

Sure, the greats like Annie Leibovitz didn’t score cover-ready shots all the time, either, but in the years since I started taking pictures we’ve progressed to digital cameras, and they are just as complicated as the film versions.

At least, most of the time, you run a low risk of running out of room to store your photos.

A coworker of mine is a great photographer, and her camera and lens knowledge is out of this world. She prefers social settings like weddings, and equestrian events for her subjects, but she also catches the occasional woodland creature or landscape. She invited me to pick up her camera and check out the BIG lens that could make a flea at a half mile away seems like it’s about to kiss you on the lips. While getting it up to my eyes to look through it, I got an accidental shot of the building’s parking lot.

In all fairness, I haven’t been taking a lot of photos over the years, because life has gotten in the way, but I’m taking it slow and trying to get back some of my past joy in looking at the world around me and capturing moments. The other day I tried to grab a shot of some African violets, but the focus had other ideas; the picture looked like I had shot the flowers from the next county. I wanted a close-up, dang it, and the camera wanted some background in the shot.

You know you have problems when your electronics dictate what they will do for you.

So on to the manual for some troubleshooting. It seemed I was not in automatic mode, but I don’t know what mode I was in, so I had to go through an entire menu of adjustments here, updating settings there and saving changes in the other place, for a shot of a pot of flowers.

At least I can take my time renewing my skills at this craft, as violets don’t gallop away while you’re composing a shot.

I brought two Sharpie® pens to an event this past week; they were different from the usual type in that they were click pens instead of the usual type with caps. I figured that would be ideal because the caps would not get lost, but I got a surprise when I put the pens out and people tried to use them.

Everybody immediately tried to pull the black click mechanism off the pen, and when that didn’t work, figuring their fingers were probably slippery or something, they tried harder to wrench the two apart. That would be when I would say, “that’s a clicker pen,” at which they would stare at me as if I had brought up something entirely new.

I realized something at that moment: our ability to adapt to change has been severely compromised, and I think I may know why. We’re not setting any benchmarks or standards by which we can accept a norm and adapt it, change it or reject it. So the makers of Sharpie® apparently cannot save users the hassle of losing a removable cap by making their pens click instead. Nobody is going to look at the pens and figure it out; it just isn’t right and that’s that. One rejected product can send a company into bankruptcy, but by golly, let’s not go and try to make something better.

This is the same mindset that is affecting our societal norms and throwing our sense of right, wrong and appropriate counter actions into disorder. If we don’t know what to do with people, how do we know what to do with our things? We have no “scale of change,” or point values to assign to our sense of normalcy, so we’re making it up as we go along, and it is causing some crazy things to happen.

We are embracing who we are, for example, as long as some magical majority ruling makes it okay. So maybe some magical rule will make marker pens okay to click someday, but some people may not ever have the right to exist anymore. Our rejection isn’t just not using the product, but throwing away human beings just doesn’t seem like a viable answer.

For example, the Metropolitan Opera continues to produce the works of Richard Wagner, who had a reputation in his lifetime as an anti-Semite, and such behavior is not considered proper today, along with other discriminatory acts.  Jump forward to present day to conductor James Levine, who happens to be Jewish and grew to fame as a music master of the most famous operatic pieces, especially Wagner. Because of some sexual misconduct from his past and recently brought to light, he will likely never appear in an orchestra pit again. Nobody is talking about which is worse, but we don’t seem to be assigning the right actions to the wrongdoings.

We have been giving a scarlet letter treatment of sorts to all varieties of men and women such as CBS anchor Charlie Rose and Roseanne (who have dealt with the issues they faced differently and seemingly not to any public satisfaction). Whether the actions were recent or years ago, and whether they owned up to the accusations or not. The past sometimes makes the present stagnant, or it can sometimes change. Do we accept the past, change the future, or always stick to what we know? And how do we deal with perceived wrongs?

In the musical (play and movie) Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye adapted to change and accepted two of his daughters’ decisions to change with the times, but initially he rejected his third daughter for marrying outside the faith. She became, as Kevin O’Leary famously says, dead to him. Later, he relented. Slightly. We knew eventually he would accept her back.

So maybe somebody picks up that pen and examines it for a moment and thinks, Hey, this might work this way. Or not. I haven’t seen the company in dire straights because they put a clicker on a pen.

Sure, we can reject a pen, but we can’t keep on throwing people away because of their sins. Aren’t we supposed to punish the actions to redeem the person? Nathaniel Hawthorne must be whirring around in his grave right now. Shunning is akin to bullying, and we know how that goes in our schools. We should be above that. When somebody prominent goes astray, we need to address it and assign a program of reparation to it. Sure, it’s the prodigal son and the last minute change of heart at the end of every sappy sitcom ever, but rejection gets us nowhere. We still lose pen caps.

So why am I on a rant about this? I just heard that Disney has rejected the director of the next Guardians of the Galaxy movie, James Gunn, from it and future projects because somebody unearthed some provocative social media posts from his youth; though he owned up to how and why he posted the comments, we apparently must be a society free of past sins and ignorant of what it takes to grow a whole person. This from Disney, who produces films about growing and changing and owning up to who we are, who owns the Marvel franchise in which heroes are not perfect but can learn how to be better.

Nobody is perfect (myself included), and I’m certainly not going to stand on a soapbox and say that there are not some horrible people out there who probably do not fall into the “forgive and forget” category, but being stubborn about what we want things to be won’t change what we do or have done or what we can do now. Take a closer look at the pen, and at who we know. The solution is a better one than what we’re doing.

*(The purpose of this post is to prop open the door to discussion, and may not reflect the totality of opinions on the issues out there.)

I once had a nightmare in which everybody’s mouth was covered with duct tape, and communication was reduced to hand-held chalkboards (this was before cell phones, of course).  After reading about Papa John’s pizza founder John Schnatter resigning from his company because of  poor word choice, I wondered if we are truly reaching the point at which what we say, regardless of its volatility, has too high a price?

Of course, my viewpoint is that of somebody who endured countless verbal abuses at key points in my life, so words like “retard” have a sting not unlike the infamous “n-word” which Schnatter supposedly uttered in the alleged context of having heard that KFC’s own Colonel Sanders used it with impunity. Let’s look at that again: he said that he said the word and didn’t get into trouble for it, so the messenger who said he said it got shot.

Are you following me? I’m not: I think I missed a turn somewhere.

As an advocate of eliminating racism, bullying and abuse of all kinds, I don’t like to hear angry verbiage from anybody about anything, but we’re starting to make the very communication of those words into something akin to murder or cannibalism; if we were in the 18th century, putting the Lord’s name next to “damn,” one might be hanged. Imagine if the child in the famous story “The Emperor’s New Clothes” had been unceremoniously thrown off a cliff for verbally pointing out the naked sovereign.

We are not solving any problems by punishing discussions about our past misdeeds with public shunning. Unless our history books are lying about the whole tragedy of slavery and servitude in our country (and we know they are not), we need to talk about what causes the rift between our nation and do something about it. Banning one word from history won’t help solve the problem. And really, one can’t do it. The word is there, and it needs to be dealt with.

We’ve been down this path before, and I’ve said that we probably should redeem the man while punishing the misdeed; otherwise we wind up with more people on the outskirts of society than inside the circle. That’s separation all over again. We are supposed to be bringing our brothers together, instead of sending them away.

So now I don’t know if I can walk into Papa John’s and order a pizza anymore. There are wonderful employees in there who are in danger of losing their jobs without our patronage. They didn’t do anything wrong. But here we are stuck in that “if one, than all” mindset which snubs the group for one person’s errors. At least Schnatter resigned, rather than wait to be shown the door, but the issue still remains, along with all the other anger that seems to be permeating our daily lives lately.

So I’ve written my piece, and I hope nobody expects me to keep my mouth shut with duct tape, because we still have to talk.