Susan's Scribblings the Blog

So many people are exercising their free speech about the deadly school shooting in Florida, that I have decided to not chime in and just listen. It’s very educational to hear what people have to say about what was or was not done, and how to prevent such a tragedy from happening again.

The problem is, they keep going over the same things over and over, and that is why the problem never gets solved.

It’s tough to have two months with most of their days falling on exactly the same date twice in a row. February and March are like twins, only March came  three days early. Our calendars are so mixed up already, with Daylight Saving and some February months having a leap day (and some years having a leap second), no wonder we’re always confused. Fortunately this February has been relatively mild weather-wise, and March promises to be even better. So the trees will be starting to blossom, and daylight will last a bit longer, and we have three extra days to enjoy March. It doesn’t make getting through February any easier.

I don’t own a microwave, nor do I have a slow cooker. This means I prepare everything in real time, I guess. There are a lot of handy devices out there, including fast cookers which are not microwaves. None of them make sense to me. I guess I have finally arrived at the stage in my life at which new technology is a mystery.

The slow cooker advertises that you an make a cake or cook a whole chicken. I always thought of it as a pot roast machine. Just throw in the meat and vegetables and a few other things you supposedly have in your pantry, and set it before you go to work. If your house doesn’t burn down, you have an entire meal ready when you return home. And the roast tastes like vegetables and the vegetables taste like the roast. Same flavor for everything. I can’t imagine a pot roast cake.

Now you can buy slow cooker liners to speed up your clean-up time. Put everything inside the liner and set up your cook time as usual. Heaven knows you need to make up in cleaning time what you used preparing the stuff all day, that all tastes the same. Plus I’m sure the roast would also gain the taste of plastic.

The new fast cookers, such as the much-touted Instant Pot, can prepare a pork butt in 90 minutes. Back in our parents’ day, the pressure cooker was a kitchen staple, but you used it on your burner and worried about exploding lids yielding to the strain of rubber gaskets surrounding iron pots. Today the pots are electric and regulated, and you can even make yogurt in it.

Make your own yogurt. No more waiting for ten for ten dollar sales at the market? Just throw in some curds and whey and some fruit and you’re ready to go?

The prep time is half the battle. Fixing your pot to do the chore takes as much time as it would to zap a dinner in the microwave. Which I still don’t have.

The misuse of service or support animals on flights went over the rainbow this week; a rainbow of peacock feathers. Some doofus decided to try claiming a male peacock as a support animal and bought him a seat. The airline, United, bird poo-pooed that idea.

I have friends with animals, and they are all supportive pets, but they have no real training and won’t save somebody’s life in the event of a PTSD flashback. Those friends also leave their companions with a friend or home when they go out.

Our problem nowadays is that we are behaving like three-year-olds. “I WANNA BRING MY PEACOOOOOOOOOOOOOCK! I can’t live without him. I’ll die mid-flight.” There are servicemen and women out there who could die mid-flight because of trauma they endured that many self-aggrandizing numbskulls wouldn’t understand if you spelled it out for them.

So, such people who have no respect for the sacrifices and lives of fear experienced by people who really need support animals should be taken away from this place and put on the battlefront at that place.

In life, we don’t always hear somebody admit to a fault. We have become so desperate for perfection that we deny ourselves the learning experience of admitting we make mistakes. Sometimes people even resent the fact that somebody admits to being imperfect, as if it’s a crime to be human.

That is why a customer service wish coming true for me this week made such a difference. I have always wished that, just once, a customer who has filled an email with gripes and bile would find it in their heart to admit that it might not have been human error on our part, but theirs. Often when we fix a problem, we simply don’t hear from the customer again. We never do find out what the cause of the problem was.

Late this week, a gentleman (and I use the term with the utmost regard) emailed us to say that he realized he had made a mistake which was preventing him accessing something on our website. He had tried to log in with a stray character in the field; a mere slip of the finger when entering a piece of login information which made all the difference. He went on to say that he admits when he is at fault. Now that is a real upstanding person.

Reminds me of a fictional admission of wrong in the movie Dirty Dancing, in which Baby’s (Jennifer Grey) father admits to having misjudged. “When I’m wrong, I say I’m wrong,” he said.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t have to wait decades to hear such an honest apology from somebody who started an interaction by putting the blame on the second party.  “It wasn’t you, it was me,” still works in society. Let’s keep it in mind.

As humans, we try hard to be or seem smart, but we miss the mark sometimes. I recently read about a customer complaint to a travel agency, stating their displeasure at not finding a sign posted at the site of a hot air balloon ride, to warn that people who are afraid of heights should not ride. Perhaps they thought it rode on a track.

I had a customer complaint about privacy issues and filling out an opt-out form. The description is in the name (you are choosing the option not to do or receive something), but the person noted a lack of instructions and wanted to know if checking off the boxes in the selections meant they were giving their consent to receive such offers or not.

Another person grumbled that the page link sent to them lead to nothing. It actually required scrolling down slightly to the desired area, but it took three back-and-forth communications to point it out. When we didn’t hear from them again, we had to assume they figured it out.

Such “d-oh!” moments, one would think, would warrant a thank you at least, but I have yet to get one. I suppose it can be hard to text with egg on one’s face, but we are all human and err quite a bit, so that shouldn’t matter. If you learn something from the mistake at the end, it should be worth the flush of shame for a second or two. Once the help works, say thanks, folks, and move onto the next in the endless stream of life’s complications.

We humans have plenty of hangups, even when it comes to intelligence. We all compare ourselves to who is dumber or smarter than we are, and whichever way we go, we tend to feel contempt at times because of what we do or do not know. Being smart, however, has its rewards when applied properly.

I had a few opportunities to apply my analytic mind to situations. They may not be big situations, but taking a moment to figure something out is rather cool. It’s the reward of sentience and humanity doing its most good. Here is one.

I was handling a backlog of requests for email responses (because I’ve been hauling food for the past two weeks, as previously noted). One email came up for somebody whom we will call John Q. I was supposed to email him at Yukon, which had an email designating it an educational address. Of course there is a Yukon territory which has a college, but when I tried to send the email, it bounced back. I tried checking the official record, but the student had not recorded the email to refer back to. Then I looked at the home address, and it hit me: the student was at a kind of “Yukon,” but it was the University of Connecticut, known as “U-Conn” for short. The email went out with no problem.

I wonder what would happen if two students from Connecticut and Canada met and had this culture shock of two “Yukons.” If they’re educated right, they’d know the difference.

I have come up with a way to curb my cravings for junk food, but it isn’t one that just anybody can take up themselves, as it requires specific job skills and circumstances which create a psychological aversion to those very foods.

That is what happened to me when I became a food runner this week.

Four days before the New Year, I was tasked with assembling an assortment of snacks to help the 24-hour work crews at my office over the weekend. This meant a BJ’s run to that mecca of super sized merchandise and abundant quantities for the hungry office phone staffers, who know what keeps their body clocks ticking.

Actually, it took two runs. I have a mid-sized car, and it only holds so much. So does one of their huge carts, unless you come with a friend and a second cart. It was just me, one cart and one car, and no budget. As long as they eat, have it to be eaten, is the motto under such circumstances.

Everybody was taking phone calls to help customers with extreme cold weather issues, including me. When they put folks like me on the phones, you know they need help. Eventually, however, necessity won, they took me off the phones and had me don my related duty hat.

You quickly learn in a customer service office environment that related duties are the most intense of any you ever trained for. That’s why they don’t train you on those.

So there I was, doing seat-of-the-pants shopping for food at the big wholesale club. It’s hard, because the only time you seem to get feedback is when something you got them doesn’t fly. We found out that one department does not like hot chocolate, because nobody drank it. You can’t even survey something like that. Well, you could, but I found that my department is a little slow when it comes to using email voting buttons. But I digress.

So I bought stacks of 400 plates and packages of cups the size of a nine-month-old, boxes of pastries, dried fruit pick-me-ups and natural clusters of grapes. Napkins and brownies. Granola bars and cookies.

Then came the soda.

Even though I am not Catholic, I decided to try giving up soda for Lent last year; that Saturday I had to argue with McDonald’s because they would not substitute a shake for a soda, so I was stuck that early into the trial. Since then I have had soda twice more, and both times at Mickie D’s. But every time I go on a food run, there I am carting around two-liter bottles of the various concoctions by the armfuls.  Yesterday, on what I hope is my final food run, I carted off 14 bottles of Coke and Pepsi from Acme, along with bottled water, chips and mustard and mayo for sandwich trays this weekend. My bill said I saved 30 percent with the sales I took advantage of. I also didn’t touch a drop.

But between the two-day BJ’s run and yesterday, I had to order catering every single day. We are talking about vast 20-person trays of ziti and meat slathered in sauce and Parmesan cheese, cool green salads, garlic rolls (mmmmm) and waterfalls of soda.

My daily routine became dividing up quantities by department, ordering, finding who in management had money left on their corporate card, signing, tipping, stacking food on a trusty mailroom cart (which became my companion for four straight days and lived in my cubicle), elevator rides and trips through the departments to distribute and set up, then scan receipts and move to the next order.

I have seen and smelled a variety of food this week. Normally I would sample some, but I didn’t touch any of it. Which goes back to the concept of a diet which may work.

I was so tired of all that food, that I didn’t want it. I consider myself cured.

See you next time. I’m enjoying a long holiday weekend after an exhausting post-Christmas rush at the office.

I don’t like to get philosophical or depressing during the holiday season, but right now there are people who will spend the next two three-day weekends in exile, alone and ignored. We tend to think that some people deserve isolation for a particular reason or none at all. That is not how to repair what is broken.

On the contrary, we need to devote more attention to them, not less.

But we are a throwaway world. The minute a food wrapper no longer holds its cargo, we drop it just anywhere, often when a trash receptacle is nearby. We drop our electronics and furniture by the side of the road to be picked up and taken who knows where. Culturally we also put people aside. We beat them, we bully them, we shout evil words at them and try to pretend they do not exist. But they do.

Often we are scared of such people. Fear lies at the root of everything we reject. We beat them and shout evil words like ammunition to prevent their intrusion, and we pretend they don’t exist in hopes of them disappearing. They still remain.

Ignored people, like things, don’t just go away. They are always here somewhere. They need attention. The victim of abuse and their perpetrator need to talk and work out the problems that lead to their encounter. All the abuse victims deserve compassion and a voice and justice, but also their abusers have issues which need addressing. Celebrities like Louis CK have come out and said that, yes, abuse happened, and they did it. It helps to know the mindset, the background and the back story, leading to a decision to do something that deviant. Instead of throwing away what we fear, we need to face it and examine it and restore balance.

Nobody should be alone. We can’t ignore ourselves.