Susan's Scribblings the Blog

I was on the PATCO High-Speedline this afternoon and found a panhandler in the aisle accosting riders for a buck if they could spare it. The fellow had one of those horseshoe-shaped nose piercings, which made him look like a pair of silver snotters were dangling from his nose, and a gemstone was gleaming from below his eye socket.

So the guy who could afford body jewelry wanted a handout.

Sorry dude, you can pawn the bling and learn to get your priorities straight (as in staying healthy first by getting some food, and looking bling-y later). Nobody was reaching for their wallets.

Sure, some folks out there would say give the kid some change. We’ve all had those rebellious stages, after all, and he might really be out of luck. However, choosing jewelry over food, clothing or shelter is not a responsible way to exist.

Some of this body jewelry is just too strange, such as gigantic O-rings in people ears. I can just imagine the wind roaring through those holes. I can imagine the massive, saggy earlobes when those things come out, and the staggering plastic surgeon bills to restore order when the kids are ready for the job market.

When I was young, ear piercing was a masochistic rite of passage for only the really brave or stupid. One post in each ear, and that was pushing the envelope.  Usually by the time the sales clerk broke out the implant device to shoot the earring into the lobe, panic (and some nausea) had already set in), and faces turned green and scrunched up with awe and terror as a poor victim got zinged. Some sadistic parents had tiny posts introduced into infants’ ears because it was a cultural thing. My folks didn’t subscribe to that sort of stuff.

If you don’t have piercings, it’s hard to imagine having them; if you have them, you probably feel naked without them. They’re just extras, though, and the rest of one’s presentation in the social circle doesn’t often suffer for a lack of jewelry, but for overdoing it.

I’ll just stick with a watch.

My job has me wearing many hats; sometimes I have to deal with customers on the phone when they are probably going to be in a bad mood. I want to thank everybody I talked to this week, because except for one person who grumbled about an issue of policy, everybody was nice, polite and made it easy for me to do a job which is not my regular one.

If the world handled all hardships this way, we would all be a lot happier most of the time.

Another year is in the can. I’ve been looking back at my posts the past year to see what idiocy I’ve been publicizing, and I guess I’m no better or worse than the next guy.

I started the year talking about snow, and we had more than our share to start with. That sucked. So did online games (difficult Windows8) and movie trailers for just about anything with a hint of action in it. I brought up the murderous activity of cyber bullying, dressing decently even if you’re going to Wal-Mart, jeans at work every day and trying to work with tech support.

In 2014 I got a new clock radio, a new television, a new cable box (thanks to Brutus the Cable Guy, who did what Cletus the Cable Guy did not do: replace the #@! box) and a new DVD player, so it appears that my entire electronic family died at about the same time, and none could live without the others. I also got a battery-operated clock because the new-fangled cable boxes apparently don’t have clocks.

And yes, I did manage to write a bit. A group for which I read actually liked a quick chapter intro I rolled off in record time one afternoon simply because I wanted to get it written down and I had twenty minutes to spare. Since then I have expanded it and hope to have a full chapter completed soon.

A friend gave me a needle felting kit for Christmas, so I can devote time to my felting in 2015 as well as my crocheting.

2014 introduced my mother and me to the Chapman Stick (a musical instrument). We also spent over 80 hours without any television when it went on the fritz. The dry sink in the kitchen hit me in the eye, and I injured my shoulder somehow and was in pain for nearly two weeks: fortunately the doctor says it’s just a mishap related to a type of bone spur and it shouldn’t happen again.

Here’s hoping that 2015 does not start out like it did last year, because I don’t want to have to write about snow again any time soon.

We wish people Merry Christmas, but we know it’s not that way for everybody. Still, we try to make one day in the calendar seem better than the others, and we set aside time for humanitarian good deeds and such, but the world will go through the same tumultuous 24 hours on Christmas Day as any other.

Births and deaths go through the same paces. People will get into mishaps at home and on the road. Stores will run out of milk and bread (especially those that don’t close on Christmas). And people do go to work on the holiday. I happen to work at a 24-hour operation, so somebody will bring food in to the workers (and they get overtime). I have the day off, but the day after is Friday, so I’ll have double the work (and don’t mention what has to be done on January 2).

Hospitals and police departments and 24-hour operators deal with some horrendous stuff on holidays: no wonder they eat, drink and smoke too much on average.

Some people will still have the same problems on Christmas that they had the day before, and on the day after Christmas, some seasonal employees will find they have been fired.

We close out another year of 365 days with much the same situations in place as the year before. It may not be merry, but you can predict that some things never change. All we can do is try to make a few bad situations better. Wish somebody a peaceful holiday: sometimes that trumps merry.

Life is full of exercises in bad timing. My company decided to institute a new timekeeping software program now. There is no time like the present, the old saying goes, and there is never a good time to get people used to new software, but it’s the end of the year and we have two holidays coming up. Just when everybody is on the same page with a routine, the rules change.

The timekeeping gods are dancing a jig now.

Also, the decision was made to start using the new software at the start of a new pay period, which for us starts on a Saturday. This means that, for the majority of us who do not work Saturday or Sunday, we will start right in with a new way to account for our daily hours first thing Monday morning. I’m anticipating lots of spilled coffee and four-letter words shouted at the height of desperation.

Either that, or a manager will come around and tell us that the software crashed the system over the weekend.

In addition, we can’t sign in until we receive our logins and passwords. Usually new logins are complex URLs which take up two lines of type on your computer screen. Passwords are born as a string of unintelligible garble which you must change into something you won’t forget the minute after you devise it. Having gone through family names and birth dates and names of pets from 1965 who were alive ten household moves ago, most password reminders now ask us for ten characters for a new password. Even a birthdate only contains eight. And what if you gave your kids and pets names of only five letters?

You might try stringing together four-letter word patterns with an exclamation point at the end for your “special character.”

I often have to dig deep for passwords, because my life is dull and missing exciting things I could use for passwords. That must be why the most common passwords are 1234 and such. Who has the time to figure out a new password before you’re one minute late clocking into the new time clock system?

We don’t appreciate people in law enforcement enough, and it seems that Ferguson, MO, demonstrates that all too well. Police officers are somewhat like the parental figures in grown-up society, and we are known to treat them with that same degree of grudging tolerance, with occasional outbursts of outright hatred because they try to keep us in line. We know that we need police officers, but when they do their job, we cringe. The people in Ferguson are shown and heard on news media in acts of civil disobedience and justifying it because an officer shot a suspect who died of his wounds. I’m including a link to an article which, I think, describes the incident in the most neutral and thorough terms from the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/13/us/ferguson-missouri-town-under-siege-after-police-shooting.html?_r=0

It seems that police officers are often treated like domestic workers: they clean up messes nobody else wants to handle, and they’re looked down upon for doing that job. Really, think about the last time you greeted and asked after the well-being of your workplace’s domestic staff, who clean your break room’s gunky sinks and wipe poo and other indescribable fluids off your toilet seats. Don’t you usually just “leave them to their job” and ignore them unless the sink still looks a bit grimy? Now ask yourself when you ever greeted a police officer and thanked him or her for going into filthy crack houses to stay the hand of a tanked-up addict holding a weapon from hurting his wife and kids, or standing in a row of ten or so officers against 50 riled up citizens who want to burn down the town’s beloved businesses?

These folks do a tough job that no average person would or could do. They train to run into the line of fire, stand between two sides in a domestic abuse standoff, negotiate in dangerous situations and take matters to task when they get out of hand. They run themselves ragged guarding our civility and trying to keep the peace, but the only time we remember them is when they pull us over for speeding and we cuss them for giving us a ticket. We don’t mind the misbehavior, just getting caught.

And even though Ferguson seems to want it to be so, the race card doesn’t even figure into what happens when an officer makes an arrest: the officer is wrong, even when it’s Satan himself getting handcuffed, because somebody always jumps in and plays the joker card of police brutality. Maybe we need robotic law enforcement like in Robocop to calm things down.

Sure we could go on about how unfortunate it was that the dead man in the Ferguson case, Michael Brown, wound up being shot after an alleged robbery, or we could talk about karma, fate, the hand of God, misuse of power, Jean Valjean and Javert or any such story to make facts sound more palatable, but human free will is tough to deal with, and cops are human beings tasked with a great responsibility to try to balance that free will for the good of all. It is impossible for people not to misbehave, and it is impossible for officers of the law not to have outcomes like this on occasion. They try to avoid it, but it will happen. What we might want to do is remember that crime and justice are two parts of our existence that don’t always come out the way we want them to, and the best we can do is let police officers do what they must do and behave ourselves.

And occasionally thank them for their service.

And say hello and “How are you?” to your office domestic staff.

We are used to lines, though we complain about them. The season for lines is coming fast, which means an increase in the pairs of sore feet and acts of impatience.

Last weekend I was out and about and found myself near the new location of Carlo’s Bakery–the family pastry business run by TLC television celebrity Buddy Valastro–which just opened in Marlton, NJ. I pulled into the shopping center, hoping to drop in, but the line went out the door about 100 deep at 3:00 on a Sunday afternoon. Of course this was about 24 hours after the grand opening. What was I thinking? So I did the only logical thing I could do: on the way home, I stopped at the local fourth generation bakery with no line.

Some people feel that, if a store has no lines, they’re not popular. Some folks in my office rag on me about my Windows® computer, and the fact that people are milling about the Apple® store by the dozens on a slow day, while customer associates at Windows® are drawing lots to see who will have the privilege of serving any walk-ins. I believe that sheep and cattle stand in line at the abattoir, so I’ll wait off to one side until they come get me.

At the start of each month, the grocery stores are packed with lines of people who just got paid on the first day and are stocking up with food for the next 30 days (or 29 if it’s November). I have images of cellar freezers crammed with fish sticks and pizzas and racks of ribs or club-sized trays of chicken drumsticks. The carts are straining from the loads. What ever happened to the weekly grocery trip?

Of course some lines have lessened, like at the movies or concerts, when all you have to do is log on and find out they’re electronically sold out as of two minutes ago.

Other lines start too early and grow ridiculously huge, like the people who have already camped out outside stores like BestBuy® for Black Friday deals.

On customer service phone lines, occasionally the wait with hold music is more torture than standing in a Black Friday queue at the cashier. If yours has only two recorded tunes with which you must wait for the next available representative (neither of which is identifiable), it can seem like you’ve camped out two weeks in advance at BestBuy®. Phone lines should have at least three recordings of hold music. And no country, please.

When I’m waiting my turn, I often think about what I have accomplished so far in the day. It sometimes makes the delay less painful. If it’s the first thing I’ve done that day, I remind myself that I awoke in the morning, there was breakfast in the kitchen and my digestion is healthy. Then the person behind me bumps into me, and it’s back to reality.