Mitt Romney, the Bully

In light of my bullying post from yesterday, this is why I don’t like Mitt Romney.  The guy could be a humanitarian, philanthropist, work in homeless shelters or orphanages, walk little old ladies across the street, whatever, but when I read this story a few months ago: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2012/05/mitt-romney-bully.html, I was instantly turned off.  I especially don’t like his response, specifically the part where he says, “You know, I don’t remember that particular incident [laughs].”

I’m sure you are fibbing about that, Mitt, just trying to CYOA for political reasons, and I’m sure you remember it quite well.  Unless, of course, you bullied so many students that they are all a blur to you.  But even if you really don’t remember this particular incident, you know who did?  John Lauber, the person you bullied.  According to his sister, it haunted him his entire life, up until he died of cancer in 2004.  Mitt, you came from a wealthy political family, and you used your influence and power to bully—no, torture—another student.  And you laugh about the incident now, saying you don’t recall it?  Come on, man.

If you, the reader, didn’t read my post from yesterday, I suggest you do.  Perhaps then you’ll understand why I would NEVER vote for Mitt Romney.  I may or may not agree with him politically, but any person who bullies another person and laughs it off like it was nothing should NOT be a leader, ESPECIALLY the leader of the most powerful nation on the planet.

A Bullying Pandemic - Stop It Now!

Twice in the past two days I’ve noticed cases of bullying in the workplace.  In one instance, a couple of people were being called out for wearing too much perfume and/or cologne.  In another, a person was being called out in the form of a joke for having an untidy work environment.  The first case was shared only between a few people, but the second was shared across the entire organization through an email.  Both were intended to be amusing.  The targets of their comments were not amused.

According to Wikipedia, "bullying may be defined as the activity of repeated, aggressive behavior intended to hurt another person, physically or mentally.  Bullying is characterized by an individual behaving in a certain way to gain power over another person."

October is Bullying Prevention Awareness month.  Most people think that bullying is something that only happens with children.  And really, children are the ones who are most vulnerable and really should be the primary focus of bullying prevention initiatives.  But I think most people who are bullies are that way their entire lives.  And the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) website agrees, citing, “children who are bullies may continue to be bullies as adults, and are prone to becoming child and spouse abusers.”  Bullies will leave high school, move on into college or the job market, and yet they’ll never “grow up” or stop with that attitude.  Their only desire is to take criticism or focus off of their own perceived inequalities and attempt to point out the flaws of others, hoping that their social circle will agree and give them that tiny amount of satisfaction.  And that microscopic amount of power they then hold over their targets is undeniably exquisite to them, like a juicy steak or a cold beer after a hard day's work.  They thrive on it.  Some even need it like an addiction.

I, like umpteen million kids in the world, was a victim of bullying in junior high school.  I was short, kinda pudgy, and I had a very small group of close friends who could be labeled (shout-out to my post from yesterday) as “nerds.”  In one very traumatizing incident, I was sitting at a table outside a restaurant at an amusement park with a neighbor and some of his friends, all of whom were older than me, and my neighbor accidentally spilled his Pepsi all over the table.  He then (intentionally) pushed that spilled Pepsi in my direction, dumping a huge portion of it onto my shorts.  I was furious, but I had no idea that the torture was only just beginning.  A few minutes later, as we met up with more of HIS friends, he declared that I had urinated on myself.  They began calling me "Pee Pee" because of this--all except two of them (thank you Apollo and Rich), but for YEARS afterwards I was called “Pee Pee” by my neighbor and all of his other friends.  In the hallways at school.  In public.  A few prank calls even.  It was absolutely awful.

One particular kid, Brian, was the worst of the group.  This individual must have had horrible self-confidence, because he bullied anyone and everyone he could.  He called me this derogatory name for years—all the way through high school despite the fact that I had grown 5 inches taller and packed on 50 lbs of muscle between 7^th and 11^th grade.  I guess he thought I was a coward or something and wouldn't stand up for myself.  He was a complete and total jerk.

Now let’s jump ahead a few years.  Shortly after I turned 21, I began to frequent a bar called Irwin’s that a friend’s dad owned.  I had a new group of friends who I’d met while in college, and their network of friends went well into the hundreds.  On one particular raucous evening, I was there with a bunch of my closer friends have a jolly old time, and I saw this Brian sitting at a table with a couple of dopey-looking girls.  He was hitting on them extensively, they looked pathetically amused by his attempts, and I decided that I’d try to be a stand-up guy and bury the hatchet with him.  I approached him, he turned to me, and I said, “Hey, Brian, how’s it going?”  His response was, “Hey, PEE PEE!” as he laughed and looked over at the girls, hoping they'd laugh with him.  They didn't.

I’ll never forget that night.  It was like a Western saloon where the piano player stops playing and everyone freezes, knowing excrement is about to hit the fan.  Irwin’s was MY hangout, and here he was disrespecting me in the childish ways he was known for.  And it was quite comical now that I reminisce.  I immediately had four HUGE friends behind me waiting to drag him out into the parking lot to beat the pulp out of him, but I just looked him straight in the eyes and said, “Brian, don’t you EVER call me that again.”  And then I just stood there, staring at him with the Devil in my eyes.  Waiting for his response.  Waiting...

He was laughing at first, of course, but the girls with him immediately got up and fled (they were apparently smarter than I’d credited initially), and yet it took Brian several moment to realize the predicament he was in.  I literally had to hold back one of my friends from punching him in the face—this particular friend was better-known throughout town as a person who liked punching other people in the face--and Brian knew him well enough to know that fact.  Brian panicked, and he started almost crying, repeatedly saying, “I’m sorry man.  Are we cool?  Are we cool?”  I just stared at him for a good ten or fifteen seconds, feeling the adrenaline pump through my veins as I debated back and forth with myself as to how I should handle this situation.  Finally I just shook my head and walked away.

I really am not sure what happened to him later on that night.  I know he left, but I seem to recall a couple of my friends jawing at him out in the parking lot, and I wouldn't have been surprised if one of them got right up in his face and gave him a piece of mind.

And then I ran into Brian in State College, PA several months later, and at this point I was going through my “body mod” faze and had several facial piercings and my tattoos on full display.  He was with a couple of friends and was getting on the parking garage elevator to ride up to his car, and I got on and stood only a few feet from him, towering over him, saying nothing.  The couple he was with got off on the second floor, and they must have known something was wrong with him because the girl asked if he was OK.  He just nodded and said nothing, the doors closed, and we both rode to the third floor in complete silence.  At one point I looked over at him briefly, chuckled to myself, but said nothing.  As soon as the elevator doors opened, he was gone.  If he had a tail, it would have been tucked between his legs.

I still see him from time to time.  He pops up on some of my social media friend's networks.  I saw him a couple of times at a local gym, although I don't think he noticed me there.  I don't know if I'll ever be able to forgive him for the years of torment he put me through, and I doubt he realizes how lucky he is in that I'm not a violent person.  It's kinda funny, because a recent, newer acquaintance of mine knows him well and said that he ALWAYS would try to pick fights with people at bars, and he'd always rely on his friends to bail him out if he ever got into trouble.  I guess he still hasn't grown up.  Very pathetic, Brian J.  Very pathetic.

Most kids these days don’t have the advantages I had.  I was smart—smarter than every single one of the kids who bullied me.  I was tall.  I lifted weights regularly.  I learned three forms of martial arts.  I developed a strong social network to support me.  Most kids these days don’t have that.  In fact, most kids have to put up with it for years on their own with no way of standing up or fighting back.  Some are lucky and can overcome the challenges of bullying, like Whitney Kropp of West Branch, Michigan, who was elected to the homecoming court as a prank (and not a very good one—reminds me of that scene from The Other Guys where Mark Wahlberg’s character learned to “dance sarcastically” to make fun of the artsy kids).  Anyway, if you don’t know about Whitney's story, you can read all about it here:  http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/29/us/michigan-teen-prank/index.html  Fortunately for her, the bullying situation went public, and the community got involved, but not until she was bullied for years prior.  All because she was different.  But she's apparently doing better, and that's great.  Great for you, Whitney.  My heart bleeds for you.

Bullying is a pandemic.  It’s universal.  I see and hear about it occurring in Vietnam through my in-laws.  Kids all over the world put up with it on a daily basis.  It’s a huge problem that often ends with very real and disastrous results.  Documented evidence suggests that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were bullied.  The same goes for James Holmes.  I’d be willing to bet that a majority of mass murderers were bullied at some point in their lives.  And we cry foul, asking where were these homicidal kids parents.  Not that I am in any way justifying what they did, but nobody asks where the parents were of the kids who bullied them.  There's a cause to every effect.  Maybe if people had treated them with dignity and respect, the horror they created could have been averted.

We, as parents, as adults, need to intervene now.  We need to talk to our kids about bullying.  We need to recognize when we, the grown-ups, are bullying.  Like that office employee who poked fun at his/her coworkers for wearing too much cologne and perfume, we need to recognize that something so trivial as that can create tension, aggravation, stress, etc.  Our kids and grandkids learn from us, and there’s no excuse for someone of any age bullying someone else.  Absolutely none.

Stand up the next time you experience a bully, whether you’re the victim or a bystander or a member of a social circle where one of your friends is bullying someone else.  Don’t let this pandemic continue to destroy lives.

Here’s some great info regarding bullying:

http://www.nctsn.org/resources/public-awareness/bullying-prevention-awareness-month

Labels Aren't Just Used For Nutrition!

I have a Zen Calendar on my office desk that I bought at 5 and Below on a whim.  Zen is pretty cool, although much of it is a little too mystical for my liking.  This calendar occasionally has some Taoist words of wisdom as well though, so that makes up for it I guess.

Today’s wisdom was great: 

I love this.  And here’s why.  The world is an awfully complicated place, and yet we are constantly oversimplifying in just about everything we do.  It more commonly happens within our relationships with people, but let me step back and explain this from a very basic standpoint first.  You have a pen on your desk.  Anyone who is reading this is now visualizing a pen.  Does your pen have black or blue or red ink?  Is it a ballpoint pen or a gel pen or something else?  Does it have a rubber grip, or is it a cheap piece of plastic?  There are quite literally thousands of different styles for pens.  Yet they all are explained away with one word?

Now let’s think about people.  Let’s lump all the fat people together, and I can do this because I’m fat. =P  Now let’s use some logic (flawed logic, but logic nonetheless) and say that all fat people are lazy.  Well, we could be correct with this statement, but that's rather unlikely.  I’m probably the last person you could ever call lazy.  I jog two miles a day four times a week.  I try to write 5000 words a day.  I work from 8:30 to 5, which routinely involves solving technical puzzles and riddles that would boggle most people’s minds.  In the evenings I entertain a three-year old.  I may be lazy in journaling what I eat and following dietary guidelines, but does that make me lazy as a person?  And what exactly qualifies a person as being fat, anyway?  I most certainly am fat, obese by doctor’s standards, so I’m not counting myself in this.  But if someone is, say, six feet one inch tall and a hundred and ninety pounds—right on the border of being overweight according to a standard BMI chart, is he/she fat?  I could point you to thousands of athletes who are six foot one inch tall, weigh well over two-hundred pounds, and would never be considered fat.  Fatness, to me, is in the eye of the beholder.  It’s a label.  And it’s not a very nice one.

I’m not going to go on and on about how people bully others with labels here—I’ll save that for another time—but you get the picture.  Labels are so misleading.  Except maybe when it comes to relationships—if a person says he/she doesn’t want to label a relationship with terms like “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” or whatever, chances are that person is looking to dump you as soon as someone with nicer, ahem, labels comes along.  Labels mean EVERYTHING in relationships.  Am I right?

But labels are pervasive in our world.  Try reading a technical journal some time, especially one relating to a Microsoft product.  You’ll read about things such as Active Directory, Hyper-V, group policies, DNS, NAT, blah blah blah.  I’m really quite shocked to see immigrants who learn English as a second language (ESL) then jump into the IT field and become successful.  As if English isn’t hard enough to learn alone, they then have to master technical jargon.  Add in a programming language, which can be just as mystifying, and it’s just all that more impressive.  No wonder so many people complain about immigrants taking all of our jobs.  Far too many of us have too much difficulty mastering English alone, and we were even born here!

Of course, we live in a now, now, now and a me, me, me society, where most people want things done yesterday and often only worry about their own concerns.  When speaking to people like this, you can’t exactly use a hundred different words to describe something simple like a pen.  But you can think with an OPEN MIND.  When the reverse happens—when they talk to you about a pen, or a fat and lazy person—you can understand that their labels are simply that.  Labels.  Utterly inefficient words used to describe something that is clearly a thousand-fold more complex.

The Wrong Way to Manage

I’m fired up.  I’ve been seeing this problem lately of other people’s inability to stand in someone else’s shoes.  Far too many people in this world can’t seem to recognize that others may have a differing point of view that may be just as valid as theirs.  More importantly, people don’t ever want to hear that they may be incorrect in their assumptions.

Today I was alerted to a situation whereby someone in a position of power had an issue with an underling.  The underling, apparently, had not done what he/she had been asked to do.  Rather than directly approaching the underling and asking why, this person performed the task his/herself, then admitted this to me, saying, “I want to see how long it takes for un-named person to complete the task.”

I’m sorry, but that’s not a good way to foster the potential in others.  It’s catty, deceitful, and wrong.  I’m not at all surprised by this situation today, as this person is a habitual micromanager and loves to illegitimize the work of others.  This person also repeatedly shirks ethics and moral obligations, but that’s a whole other story that I won’t get into now.

Why are people like this?  Why can’t people just approach a situation as reasonable adults, discuss the reasoning behind their conflict, and come to some sort of understanding or agreement?

I’m not saying I’m perfect.  My wife told me yesterday that we no longer had Hershey’s Syrup to make chocolate milk for my son.  I still checked our pantry anyway.  She derided me for this, but I could have sworn I saw some in there the day before.  What I saw was barbeque sauce.  Oops!

But I’ll at least admit my mistake.  I won’t play games, especially if I hold a position of power.  Games, after all, are for grade school children.

What Happened to You, New York?

With the exceptions of Boston and Baltimore, I’ve made numerous trips to some of the major cities along the east coast over the years.  It comes with the territory of having Vietnamese immigrants for in-laws.  They are always flying back and forth to Vietnam, going back to see their parents and siblings and other family.  And plane tickets are far cheaper when leaving from international airports like JFK and PHL, and somehow I always seem to get suckered into dropping them off or picking them up.  Well, not really suckered, but I have to complain a little, right?

This weekend was no different, and we made the 2.5 hour trip to Harrisburg and then the 3 hour trip to JFK to wish my brother-in-law farewell as he and his wife and daughter will be visiting for about a month or so.  We arrived in Manhattan at around 9 AM, ate dim sum at Grand Harmony in Chinatown, then met up with my in-laws at Pho Bang and had some goi cuon.  Yum yum!  From there it was off to JFK.

We parked behind my mother-in-law’s car to help unload, and I have to say that the TSA peons were complete a-holes Saturday morning.  Pardon my French…er, English.  My brother-in-law, who had polio when he was younger and is slightly hobbled, was struggling with their bags, and my wife’s parents aren’t very spry.  My brother-in-law’s wife was holding their 16 month old, and so it only made sense that I stopped there to help.  Yet those TSA nincompoops would not leave us alone, repeatedly telling us to move.  It didn’t matter that we were unloading from both cars either.  And it wasn’t even busy.  I understand that these guys have a job to do, but we were literally parked there for less than 3 minutes, and at least 3 times the one elderly, grumpy guy came past and told us to move.  I don’t think he quite realized that I was with them (because why would a big white guy be with a bunch of little Asian people outside of the Korean Airways terminal), but that didn’t matter.  Three minutes, buddy.  And we were literally parked there to unload, exactly as the sign stated.

We then drove around and parked and went inside to see my brother-in-law off, and luckily none of the TSA staff harassed us while in the terminal.  When we left, we took the Verrazano Bridge from Brooklyn to Staten Island and then made our way back through Jersey and into PA.  My wife’s parents, though, decided to stop back in Chinatown to do a little shopping.  We would have joined them, but we were tired after having gotten up at 5 AM for this little trip, and we’d already spent half of the morning there waiting for them to meet us.

One amusing thing to note—my son had fallen asleep just before entering the Holland Tunnel, and we woke him up in Chinatown, where he was extremely confused.  He’s accustomed to being around people who don’t speak English, and yet Chinatown is just so wildly different from anything he’s ever experienced.  I had him up on my shoulders as we walked past the fishmongers and little shops.  Considering I stand an entire head above most of the people  on the streets there, he had prime view of the wonders of Chinatown.  I must have heard him ask me, “Daddy, what’s that?” about a hundred times in the half hour or so we were walking around.  I can’t wait until WE make that trip to Vietnam!

Anyway, when my in-laws stopped in Chinatown on the way back through, my mother-in-law apparently jumped out of the car, intending to then have my father-in-law find a place to park (or just drive around the block over and over) while she shopped.  My father-in-law has lived and worked in NYC since he came to the US when he was 17, and so he is by no means a tourist.  However, as my mother-in-law got out, a parking cop spotting them and the PA license plate of their car, ran over, and issued him a ticket for “standing” in a “No Standing” zone.  He explained that he was just dropping his wife off, didn’t even have the car in Park, and was driving off, and yet the guy didn’t care.  He even mentioned something about them being from Pennsylvania.  And the ticket was $115.  Can you believe that?!?

That's the first time I've been to NYC and have witnessed jerks with badges.  I'm sure it happens a hundred times an hour, but I've never actually seen it.  And I mean, we went to Philly one time for my brother-in-law to resolve an issue with his green card, and after getting all the way down there (this was maybe a year or two after September 11, 2001), we discovered that they had implemented a policy where everyone needed an appointment—no walk-ins.  The guard at the door, Chazz, was a complete jerk to us, and after yelling at us that we should have checked it online (they’d just done this a year or so before WITHOUT needing an appointment), I asked for his name.  He kept asking “Why?  Why?” and when I began to write down the info on his badge, he got right up in my face until I asked for the name of his supervisor.  I called a little later and issued a complaint, and of course I was told they’d “speak with him” and basically blew me off, but that’s the kind of behavior I expect out of Philly.  My brother went to UPenn, I’ve been there enough, and there’s a reason they call it the “City of Brotherly Love.”  People are rude there.  It’s normal and expected.

But not New York.  In all the times I’ve been there in the past decade, I’ve never experienced traffic cops and TSA people acting like that.  Again, perhaps we were targeted for our PA plates, and if that was indeed the case, that’s really not cool.  Shame on you New York!

One more side note about our crazy weekend:

Yesterday was another brother-in-law's (my wife has 4 brothers) wife's bridal shower, and afterwards we met my wife at my brother-in-law's new house in Mechanicsburg.  Nice little row house with three bedrooms, a beautiful kitchen, two and a half baths, a garage, and an office.  We then left from there, got on the turnpike, and about halfway home we stopped at the Blue Mountain rest stop where I took my son in to use the restroom.  As we were sitting in the car waiting for my wife to finish up a call with Sirius XM, she looked up and said, "Look, James Franco!"  I turned, expecting to see the famous Spider-man actor, and instead I saw this hulking man with a beard--Franco Harris.  Still pretty cool to see him, but we laughed as I pointed out the folly of her observation.  Coincidentally, after taking my son in to pee, we were washing our hands right next to him, and when none of the towel dispensers worked and I told my 3-year-old to dry his hands on his pants, Franco Harris looked over at us, shook his head, and smiled.  I did NOT tell him I'm a big fan, but I think he knew by how often I kept looking at him.

Eww...Look at that Guy's Tattoos!

Tattoos are great.  I can’t have any more due to religious reasons, but I love them nonetheless.  If I could, I’d have half sleeves and ink on my shoulders and back and everything.  That’s just me.  I know some people don’t much care for them.  My wife is always saying, “Oh yeah, it looks great now, but what happens when you are sixty?”  And my response to that is, “Well, when you are sixty, you get it touched up or redone or removed.”  And I know that’s not the most difficult thing in the world to do.  I had a tattoo removed once—10 sessions at $200 a pop to laser that thing off.  That was almost a decade ago though, and nowadays they are cheaper and require fewer treatments.  I know some guy that had one removed this past year for only a couple hundred bucks—only a little more than the tattoo itself cost.

Why am I talking about tattoos?  Because Trev Gearhart is the owner of Ice Serpent Piercings and Tattoos, a fictional tattoo shop in my new novel, Terminal Restraint.  Trev is a big guy, covered in body ink, with long hair and a big heart.  Not unlike many other tattoo shop owners and artists I know.  And people judge him.

When I wrote Terminal Restraint, my number one goal was to tell a compelling story that my readers would enjoy.  That’s my number one goal always, really.  But in the back of my mind, I had several subtle messages that I wanted to get across to my reader.  And one of them was acceptance.  Acceptance of those who are different from you.

I know what it’s like to be different.  On the outside, I’m a Caucasian male in his mid-thirties living in Small Town, USA.  There are probably a million others that look like me on the outside.  I’ve even seen a few Ryan Doppelgangers around my town.  Get to know me though, and you’ll find I’m not quite what you expected.  For one, I’m in a mixed-race marriage with a biracial son.  I’m also a Muslim.  And unfortunately, I’ve witnessed and experienced hate and discrimination firsthand.

I was actually at a restaurant one time when an employee loudly said to another, “Look at that Chinese girl with that white boy.  That’s not right.”  We complained, but of course that guy was still there the next time we visited.  Now THAT’S not right.

I can understand the concept behind why certain people hate.  People don’t like things that are different.  When a particular person, say a woman in her fifties with two grown children and a husband who is a business executive, sees a person in his teens or twenties or thirties covered with tattoos and piercings, she’ll become a little reserved and will probably judge that kid as a miscreant.  She doesn’t understand how someone can poke holes in themselves or cover themselves in permanent ink.  Perhaps she feels it’s not right for religious reasons.  Maybe she thinks that person is into drugs and rock music and devil worshipping.  Who knows?  Oh yeah, by the way, that’s Trev Gearhart from my novel: a tattooed guy who loves loud rock music and is a member of the Church of Satan.  No, really, that’s him.  Seriously.  A bit cliché?  Possibly, but all written for a good reason and worthwhile reason.

The town I live in is predominantly white.  And unfortunately, the only African Americans most people see are the arrested ones on the news who have drifted in from New York or New Jersey to peddle drugs.  Some people in this town actually raise their children to distrust black people.  Racism and hate and intolerance is horrible, but when you are raised to feel that way from the time you were born, it’s hard not be intolerant.

Take another issue: gay marriage.  I really struggle with the reasoning behind the opposition to it.  I know people say that it’s not what God wants, and the Bible says that homosexuality is a sin, and blah, blah, blah.  But didn’t the Pilgrims come to America to avoid religious persecution?  Isn’t the freedom of religion one of the many principles this country was founded on?  So yeah, you may not agree with gay marriage because of your religion, but what right do you have in telling someone else—who possibly/probably does not share your beliefs—what they can do and who they should be able to marry?  That, to me, seems like religious persecution.  And anyway, it’s not like two gay people getting married has ANY ADVERSE EFFECT ON YOU.  Their marriage is not going to make your taxes go up or the cost of gasoline to rise or anything else.  Yet so many people are against it.

Really, I don’t think people are against gay marriage.  I think those people are just against gays, but it’s not illegal to be gay—it’s just illegal still in some states for gays to marry.  Now THAT is intolerance.  THAT'S not right.

Everybody the world over is different, but people instantly judge others based on appearances.  People may see me and think I’m just some big white guy like them or their husband or father or brother.  And I get judged as that.  This guy won't care--he's just like me.  And then they’ll maybe talk bad about other cultures or religions or whatever right in front of me.  I once had a coworker send a company-wide email making fun of the way Chinese restaurant workers speak.  Naturally I reported her to HR.  I also had another coworker send an email out blasting Muslims and the US government for issuing an Islam postage stamp.  I reported her to HR as well.  Neither gave any thought to the fact that I’m not just some big white guy, that I’m married to an Asian and that we are Muslims.  THAT'S NOT RIGHT.

My new novel is about a half-Asian IT guy who, after having what is thought to be a Satanic black magic spell cast on him, is killed and comes back as an undead monster.  My characters are diverse.  I talk about Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan, which is probably not what most people think it to be.  I write about rushing to unfounded and biased judgments.  It’s a book filled with intense action, but there is also a very clear message there: ACCEPT.

Do you accept those who are different from you?  Or do you judge them and instantly write them off?  Or worse yet, belittle them or utter hateful remarks when those people aren’t around?  If you’re one of the latter, I pity you.

Mind Your Manners, Son!

Not my son, per se.  My son is getting his manners down pretty well, saying “please” and “thank you” and “you’re welcome.”  He makes me a proud papa every single day.  That is, every single day he manages not to fall asleep during lunch and activities in daycare.  But that’s a different story about a kid that loves his parents so much that he hates going to bed at night.

The manners I’m talking about are the ones the majority of others on this planet seem to lack.  I mean, I’m thinking we all need a refresher course in how to treat others.  It’s like we all had the little angels and devils on our shoulders telling us how we should behave, except the angels all fell off, leaving only the devils to give us their evil guidance.  Because disrespect seems the norm, at least from this guy's perspective.  And I say, "Yuck!" to that!

Let me start with an incident that occurred a few days ago.  A person asked me to perform a very unimportant, IT-related task for her, but that task required about thirty minutes of my time.  She was incapable of performing this task herself, and it was my duty to assist her, so I did it.  I was extremely busy with other things, and I expressed this to her as politely as I could, but I still performed this task anyway.  I finished, received a “thank you,” and left.  I checked it off my list.  Yay!  Now onto more important matters, like saving the world from squid-like machines that use humans as batteries.  BUT...then I received a call from this person, a mere thirty minutes later, asking me to undo the task I’d just done for her.  No joke.  Now ordinarily I wouldn’t have complained, but this particular individual has become notorious for these types of requests.  Apparently the fact that I was supremely busy was completely lost to her, or else her own personal agenda was far more important than mine.  And that seems to be the case more often than not, I’m afraid.

We all have seen drivers on cell phones, talking or texting, driving erratically.  Check out my Twitter page (https://twitter.com/rastrohman, @rastrohman) to see a picture we snapped of a teenage girl texting while using her wrists to drive—I’m just amazed at how she managed to do this without killing everyone else on the road!  This seems to be an epidemic!  Worse than an impending zombie apocalypse!  People are so self-consumed in their own little worlds that they can’t even put down their phones for the 10 minute drive from work or school to home or whatever.

There’s a kid at my son’s daycare whose mother is ALWAYS on her phone.  She works on the other side of town like us, and we’ve followed her for MILES to the daycare watching her chat on her phone.  She’ll even frequently pull up to the daycare or, unbelievably, pull over a block away to finish her call—taking as long as 10-15 minutes before going to pick up her kid.  Really, lady?  Your call is more important than picking up your son?  We’ve rationalized her behavior by speculating at her profession.  Maybe she’s a crisis counselor talking someone off of a ledge?  Or perhaps she’s a doctor or IT person like myself, assisting someone with some medical or technical emergency?  I doubt it.  She’s just one more self-absorbed person, mindless to the world around her.  I don’t even think she realizes how often we see her chatting away on her cell phone as her son sits and waits for her.  Poor kid.

Random statement here, but I like to sleep with my bedroom window open, especially in the spring and fall when the air has a chill to it.  However, I live on a long, flat road with a private club for war veterans about a half a mile away, and many of the patrons of this club ride motorcycles.  Every night between 1 and 2:30 AM, these guys go ripping down the road in excess of 50 MPH (the posted speed limit is 25 MPH) on their hogs.  Now don’t get me wrong.  I love motorcycles.  I owned one a few years ago, and I plan on buying another when my kids are older.  But I’d never open up the throttle at 2 AM when people are sleeping.  Maybe on a highway, but never in a residential neighborhood.  That’s just freakin’ rude.  And Monday mornings are the worst for sleeping with my window open, because the garbage trucks do the same thing.  One of these days I’m going to go out there and snap a video of these garbage truck drivers doing 50-60 MPH in a 25 and send it to the company and the local police.  It’s not like I can sleep with their loud, obnoxious trucks driving by so fast anyway.  Manners, people!

Everyone has their pet peeves.  From a coworker with quirks to bad or obnoxious drivers to in-laws or lazy or insolent teenagers or whatever.  But did you ever just consider why we are annoyed so much by other people?  A majority of the time it’s due to a lack of manners.  People deficient in understanding how their own actions affect others.  People that hog up an aisle in a grocery store as they compare the prices of green olives or Ginkgo biloba vitamins.  People that go to public parks with their dogs and refuse to obey the leash laws.  People that constantly summon a waitress over because they need more ketchup/jelly/sugar/attention and fail to see the other patrons anxiously waiting for her to return to their tables to fulfill their needs.  People that just live in their own little worlds and don’t give a crap about anyone else.

I’m not saying I’m perfect.  I’m sure some random stranger has been pissed at me for driving too slow or taking too long to go at a green light when he/she was late for an appointment.  I’m sure my big body inadvertently blocked a grocery store aisle.  I’m sure someone was upset because they felt I was taking too long to perform a certain IT-related task (because I should be an IT fairy with a magic little IT wand, right?)  And hey, for all those people, I’m sorry.  I didn’t do it intentionally.  Because I really, honestly, straight-up try to have top-notch manners.  I pay attention to how my actions, however minute they may be, affect those around me.

Yes, I am conscientious.  When someone asks me to do something, I respond as soon as I’m able.  If I see someone approaching me in a grocery store aisle, I’ll move my cart over to the right as far as possible.  If I owned a dog, I’d keep it on a leash if we were out in public and people were around.  I try my hardest to pay attention to how I’m affecting others, and I rectify any issues before they even manifest.  I actually do give a damn.  But that’s just me.

Maybe all of those other people are just jaded.  Maybe they’ve seen too much selfishness in the world, and they’ve given up or given in and gone that route as well.  It’s a “me, me, me” world, and nice guys finish last.  Right?

Not me.  I’ll mind my manners until the day I die.  The question is: will you?

I Really REALLY Look Like an Idiot!

I love being shown the follies of my ways.  It’s like looking into a mirror and realizing that shave and trim I just applied to my facial hair, that Fu Manchu or goatee or whatever, just looks absolutely ridiculous.  Or when I’m shopping for new sneakers, and I go and pick out a pair that I like, show them to my wife, and she tells me they are “old people, orthopedic shoes.”  Or when I go outside to look at the blue moon because, after all, my wife said we had to go see it, then I come inside and say, "It's not really blue," at which point my wife makes fun of me for even checking the color of it in the first place.  I told her I thought it was a "bleu moon", because after all, the moon is made of bleu cheese.  Right?  And for the record, I knew a blue moon wasn't actually blue--until my wife had me questioning myself.

But in regards to being shown how foolish I am, I absolutely love it.  Seriously.  I mean, how else would I become better at life if I wasn’t shown my mistakes?  How could I ever improve myself if I just went along doing things without ever knowing how much of an idiot I am.  How could I keep myself from looking like an 80s cover band member living in a retirement home?

Yesterday my son and I were at the supermarket, and as I was filling up my truck with all of our bags of groceries, I heard this boom boom boom come storming in behind us.  I looked up, and the first thing I noticed was that the vehicle was the exact same make and model of my truck—only blue instead of silver.  Then I realized that the noise was actually a song off of a new album I just purchased that I absolutely love.  The band, In This Moment, is lesser known and of the metal/hard rock/industrial genre, and the song itself is one of the best on the album.  However, it’s not exactly appropriate for general listening audiences: lots of explicit words and stuff, if you get what I’m saying.

Now I don’t go driving around blasting my music with my windows down, driving in front of a grocery store where everyone walks and would be involuntarily subjected to hear this obnoxious and publically inappropriate music.  I had a friend once that did that constantly.  He’d roll his windows down and blast his music as soon as we pulled into the parking lot of the mall.  I was always so embarrassed to ride with him.  And I asked him why he did it, and his answer was something to the effect of “getting chicks to notice us.”  The problem is, he got married shortly thereafter, yet he continued to do it up until I last saw him driving around—with his two kids in the car.  And now he's not married.  Sad, really.

But I thought this guy in my truck yesterday had to be a young driver--like in his teens.  I mean, what adult does that, aside from my friend?  I like to listen to my music at a higher volume, but I certainly don’t drive with the windows down.  Maybe just a crack if it’s hot and the AC hasn't cooled the interior down enough yet, but never with all four windows all the way down.  Never with the intention of drawing attention to myself.  What an idiot...

The guy drove over to the gas pumps, and it would have been much faster and shorter for him to approach from a different direction, but apparently he NEEDED to let all of the supermarket clientele and staff know that he REALLY liked this song.  As I drove out, I looked at the guy and had to do a double-take.  It was like I was looking in a mirror.  Big guy, shaved head, beard, sunglasses, t-shirt, plaid shorts, sneakers.  Very VERY scary.  Not the guy himself, or ME (although sometimes I wonder if I'm perceived as "scary" with the way people act around me, but that’s a story for another post).  This was scary in that there I was, pumping gas, listening to loud and obnoxious music, making a nuisance out of myself.  It was like me if I didn’t have any common sense, I guess.  THAT'S scary.

There’s a guy I know—not really friends but we know each other well enough—and I’m always telling my wife how I’d love to be like him, but I have the sense not to be.  Tattoos all over, piercings, listens and plays loud rock music, has a fascination with monsters and scary things.  In looking at him, you’d know he was into that stuff immediately.  In looking at me, you wouldn’t.  He’s the me without the smarts to not do those things.   It’s a running joke my wife and I share, because every so often there’s something new and idiotic or dangerous that he finds himself involved with that’s ironically something I’ve mentioned “doing in another life.”  You know, a life where I have no family to support and bones that break and all that stuff that keeps me from doing those types of things?

But back to the guy in the truck yesterday.  I don’t know what his deal was.  Maybe he was insecure about something, so much so that he had to “get chicks to notice” him.  Because all the chicks I know LOVE a guy with a big truck and a big sound system.  That has to be on the list right above abundant amounts of chest hair and neck hair.  Am I right, ladies?  Anyway, this guy yesterday must have had some mental/psychological issue or another.  The song itself makes a blatant reference to a specific type of woman, and so perhaps he had an issue in his love life or with women in general and was trying to send a message.  Maybe he was actually trying to get chicks AWAY from him.  If that's the case, good job, buddy.  But I’ll never know.

I will know one thing though.  I’m so happy I saw that dude yesterday.  It made me realize how closely I've come to crossing the line of minding your own business and enjoying yourself to being a disruptive and obnoxious jerk.  The next time I’m driving by myself, I don’t think I’ll roll down the windows at all.  And I certainly won’t listen to my music at an inappropriate and deafening level.  Of course, if anyone ever sees me doing that, I guess I could always blame it on that guy.  But nah, I think I’ll just keep my entertainment to myself.

I'm Afraid of Americans!

The other day I had to help a coworker with a technical issue, as I do on pretty much an hourly basis during a typical day of work.  I cringed though when I saw this particular coworker calling me.  She’s a nice person who doesn’t bother me with trivial matters—and believe me, I see lots of eye-rolling, trivial, are-you-freakin'-kidding-me-you-couldn't-figure-this-out-on-your-own matters—but the reason I cringed when I saw her name pop up on my phone was that she’s been sick for the past couple of weeks.  So sick, in fact, that I’ve heard her coughing from my office on the other side of the building.

I resolved her technical issue without much ado, but I made the mistake of not using hand sanitizer when I returned to my desk.  I don't typically use hand sanitizer, but I always keep a bottle in the event I have to assist a person who is sick.  But as I said, I just forgot this time around.  Sure enough, that night I had a tickle in my throat.  Yesterday morning I awoke and felt like a zombie.  Caffeine didn't help.  Walking a mile at lunch didn't help.  I went through half a box of tissues the latter half of the day.  I popped a couple of daytime cold relief tablets and pushed through, but last night I just crawled into bed and stayed there for something like four hours, watching TV and zoning out.  Today when I got up, I actually felt a little better, but my nose was still running (never stopped all throughout the night, I swear), and my voice was raspy.

I hate being sick!

Then I woke my son up to get him ready for school.  He’s always a little temperamental in the mornings, but as I was getting him dressed, he seemed unusually belligerent.  Then he let out this hacking cough that, quite frankly, scared me a little.  Yes, I think I hugged him a few times last night, but I was careful not to let him share my food or drinks.  Still, in whatever interaction we had, he seemed to catch my cold.

I’m just amazed at how easily people can pick up germs and transmit them on to others.  This little virus travelled from my coworkers’ keyboard to my body to my son in the span of a little more than 24 hours.

The writer in me just can’t help thinking how vulnerable we are as species.  From a terrorist attack to an alien invasion, the easiest way to wipe out the human race would be to infect us all with some little nasty bug.  Turn us all into zombies or kill us all entirely.  It makes me want to wear a face mask like the people in China who were deathly afraid of acquiring H1N1!

On somewhat of a different note, I swear I’ve seen four or five car accidents in the past couple of months.  In one instance, we were sitting at a light with two cars ahead of us, the light turned green, the car in the front proceeded through the intersection, and a car in the perpendicular lane slammed into it, spinning it around 360 degrees.  Thankfully there weren’t any major injuries, but I watched that car speeding, the driver on a cell phone, and she just didn’t seem to see that red light at all.  A week or so later, a VP with one of my company’s clients was killed in a head-on collision where a truck crossed the center line and slammed into his car.  And just yesterday I saw two minor fender benders just ON THE WAY HOME FROM WORK!

I think I can understand why people are agoraphobic.  I’m just glad I don’t live in Chicago, where gun violence has increased 30% since last year.  Man, I’d never leave my freakin’ house!  Pizza delivery and UPS guys would know me on a first-name basis!

Let's wake up, America.  Put the guns away.  Put those cell phones away and pay attention while you drive. If you're sick, stay home!  And if you absolutely have to go to work, sanitize your work area and everything else you touch!  Please, let's think about how our actions may affect others.  Just this once?

How is Your Sense of Ethics?

What’s up with all the cheating lately?  Today I read an article about a teenage player in a Scrabble competition who was caught cheating by hiding blank tiles in his sleeve.  Check out the article here:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/48671693/ns/us_news-life/#.UCuc56GPWz4

And the Olympics had a Chinese badminton team throwing matches so that they wouldn’t have to compete against a more difficult team in the next round.  Likewise, a few boxing referees were suspended and expelled for various infractions.  In one case, a boxer from Azerbaijan fell to the mat six times, easily defeated, and yet the Turkmenistani referee refused to end the match and give the win to his Japanese contender.  In the end, the Azerbaijani boxer won by decision, although he had to be helped out of the ring.

Seriously?  This is the Olympics, people.

I shouldn’t be surprised.  After all, the best way to beat an opponent at a competition is to have an advantage over him or her.  Ethically-speaking, that advantage is in skill, intelligence, or athletic prowess, and the winning competitor has abided by the rules of the game.  But sometimes those rules have loopholes, and if that means winning a gold medal in the Olympics or going home empty-handed, we shouldn’t be shocked when people find ways to exploit those loopholes.  Or flat out cheat.

I can’t say I never cheated.  But in high school I never did.  I know some kids would write answers on their desks right before the exams were handed out, but high school studies were very easy for me.  I never cheated in high school because yes, it was wrong, but also because I didn’t need to.  I just used my brain and did well.

College was a bit of a different story though.  And I think it was the peer pressure that really made me cross those ethical boundaries.  After taking a few tests in one particularly difficult EE course, a lab partner of mine asked, “Are the formulas in your graphing calculator messed up?”  I had no clue what he was talking about, and then he scrunched up his face like I was joking, pulled out his graphing calculator, and showed me a list of about two-hundred formulas broken down by category that’d he’d entered into the device's memory.  He had the Law of Sines and other trigonometric formulas, chemical reactions, Fourier Transform pairs.  And I was honestly just dumbfounded.

Of course, my shock turned to compunction when other lab partners started laughing and showed me their calculators, which seemingly had even more formulas than the first.  And then even a TA came up to us and said he’d never have gotten through EE 330 without his stash of formulas.  In my mind I kept thinking this was just so…WRONG…but that night I must have spent three hours entering formulas into my calculator.  And then when I took my next exam, I think I referenced those formulas a handful of times, and sure enough I got a 96 on it.

I look back now and still think that was so wrong.  But considering that our profs graded on curves, and I was at the bottom end of the bell curve in several of my classes, I really had no choice.  I was paying a lot of money to get a piece of paper saying I was an educated man, and yet cheaters were robbing me of my money and education.

I remember one statistics class in which the professor actually encouraged us to use graphing calculators and even laptops with the Excel statistical package installed if we had them.  I came to my first exam with my laptop, pulled it out, and watched as twenty-nine other students stared at me, most probably thinking I was a nerd for actually bringing a laptop.  I was the first one to finish that exam though, and when I received my grade, I had 100%.  I’d even gotten the two bonus questions correct.  When that course ended, I recall stopping by my prof’s office to see my final grade.  He asked for my name and looked it up, and he was shocked that I had the third highest out of all 3 sections he taught.  His exact words were, “How did you do so well in my class, and I don’t even know your name?”  I just shrugged my shoulders and replied, “It helped that we were able to use calculators and computers.”  And I felt great knowing that I used the tools available to me to do well in his class.

There’s a huge difference between using technology as a tool and relying on it though.  In none of my other courses, especially the 300 and 400 level courses, did a professor allow us to use laptops or calculators to store formulas.  We were expected to memorize those formulas.  My EE grades may not have been as good as others, especially after having gone through one and a half semesters without using their unethical trick, but dammit I knew all of those mathematical formulas better than 90% of my peers.  Granted I can only remember maybe 10% of them now, but at least I actually LEARNED something.

The question is: how many of us would cheat to get ahead if given the opportunity?  Does money or fame or having your name in the record books trump knowing that you did this on your own without the assistance of a crooked judge or a computer or some other method of cheating?  Has our society become so obsessed with success that we are willing to throw out all of our morals and ethics to obtain it?

Of course, I’m the kind of guy who follows the rules to a tee.  I take all of my corrugated cardboard and newspapers to the recycling bins outside of Wal-Mart instead of tossing it in the trash.  I always use my turn signals and stop at every stop sign, even though I know people roll through the one down the road from my house like it’s not even there.  I cringe when I hear about people scamming stores that offer no hassle returns.  But that’s just me.  I was raised properly, I guess.

But what about everyone else?  Am I the idiot for not following suit—metaphorically speaking, not putting those formulas in my graphing calculator?  I’m not asking because I’m considering a change into the realm of the unethical.  I’m asking because I want to know if you, my reader, have a firm moral ground to stand on.  If you don’t, why is that?  Because you just want to have an advantage over everyone else?  Because having more money/power/fame is really all that is important to you?

The Right Way and the Wrong Way

Just about everything we can perceive and rationalize has a gray area to it.  As much as I am into Taoist philosophies and the concept of yin and yang, life is just never quite that simple.  Yes, there are opposites, but there’s a whole lot of middle ground between them that is always open to interpretations.  We have day and night, and yet there is also dawn and dusk.  We have tall and short, and yet they are just opposing ends of the bell curve when it comes to human stature.

One aspect that definitely does not have a gray area though is that of customer service.  Sure, you can have mediocre or average customer service, but really isn’t that just as bad as poor customer service?  I mean, if a waiter only asks you for one refill and then disappears for the rest of your meal, or if a person rings you up at a cash register and barely acknowledges your existence, are you satisfied?  Again, each level of customer service is open to individual interpretation, but you only ever tip well if someone has been spectacular at their job—or in the case of my family, has to clean up the mess of food and crayons that my 3-year-old has somehow managed to create on the floor underneath our table.  How does he do that anyway?  It's like that's his master plan as soon as we arrive.  Get stuff and get it onto the floor without Mommy and Daddy seeing.  He’s lightning fast, that’s for sure!

So I was listening to the radio yesterday, and they were asking retail and customer service people to call in with their rants about bad customers.  Sure, bad customers exist.  Some are just plain rude and have no right whatsoever eating out at an establishment or shopping at a certain store.  One spoke of a fast food customer returning and throwing a bag of food at her.  Another complained of a kid that created a mess on the floor under his table.  I hope that wasn’t us!!  But more often than not, those people complaining yesterday are the ones at fault.  Seriously.

My case in point, my family recently had a streak going of three separate incidents where we ordered take-out meals and the restaurant staffs screwed up our orders.  I'd say we order or eat out maybe two and occasionally three times a week counting weekends, and so three in a row is rather uncanny.  It started with a trip to Panera one morning, where the MANAGER (of all people) neglected to put the fat-free cream cheese into our bag for my wife’s bagel.  She lived with it even though we paid for the nonexistent cream cheese, but we moved on.  Oh well.  No big deal.  Really.  Although I do have to mention that my wife’s brother is a manager of a Panera in Harrisburg, and that restaurant seems to be a million times better than the one in Altoona.  I digress.  Anyway, we then decided to get pizza and subs from a local pizza joint near where we live.  We ordered everything, brought it home, and then discovered that our small pizza was actually a kid-sized pan pizza.  Both were listed on the menu, and the difference in price was negligible, but that’s not the point, is it?  Luckily my son wasn’t that hungry that night (it was being shared with others), so we moved on.  Oh well.  No big deal.  Really.  Two nights later though, we ordered a larger meal from TGI Friday’s, and that one was the worst.  When we got home, we discovered that we were missing literally half of our order.  All three entrees were completely missing their side dishes.  One was just a piece of fish nestled lonely in the little plastic container.  Seriously?  Oh yeah, my wife did get an extra side of corn on the cob, although it looked like that piece of corn had baked out in the Arizona sun for three days before being placed in our bag.  We called and complained over that order, and the manager did send us a few coupons for free appetizers and some other $5 coupons off the total order, but it left some of my family members a little angry not to mention hungry!

Now I’m a smart guy.  I don't mean to sound arrogant, but I’ll admit it.  I've got a lot of useless knowledge up in my noggin, and I tend to catch onto things quicker than others.  But I just can’t imagine that checking an order before sending it to the cooks or giving it to the customer is all that difficult.  I know these people get really busy, and sometimes they may have a handful of orders to deal with at a time, but it’s not like they are juggling chainsaws.  These places aren’t even fast food joints.  I mean, we ALWAYS check our orders when going through fast food drive-thrus, and really, when they have to deal with like fifty to seventy-five cars an hour, they are bound to have mistakes.  But these other places shouldn’t.  That, to me, is laziness or neglect for their job, and it’s one of the worst forms of customer service.  People have paid for their food and left, and what are they supposed to do?  Drive back and get it so that all of their food can be cold when they get home?  Drive back and have the place recook everything?  Oh yeah, like that wouldn’t invite a restaurant worker to leave a little spit surprise in the mashed potatoes.  Or maybe they should just go without?  Or, like we did, call and complain so that they can be sent coupons, when really now they don’t want to go back at all.

I’m talking quite a bit about the restaurants here, but my sentiments about bad customer service are pervasive.  Just today I met with a sales guy from a local IT company trying to sell some services to our firm.  We are a client with this company with regards to a large programming project they designed, implemented, and continue to host for us, and so I always give these people at least a shot.  We’ve had horrible issues with that programming project though (bad turnover of their staff, incompetent programmers, huge delays, etc.), and so our confidence in them is not very high.  But this guy showed up at my office and tried to pitch me on his services, and the entire time he’s there he’s touting his company’s high level of support and service and bad-mouthing the competition, which my firm uses.  The last time I met with this guy, a year ago or so, he gave me the same pitch, then came back with a quote twice of what we pay now to his competition.  Yes, two times the amount.  Yep, our costs now multiplied by two!  Really, guy?  I'm not that bad at math...

I’d also mentioned an incident a couple of weeks ago where we were having an issue with the program they'd designed for us and I wasn't able to get ahold of our usual account rep because she was on vacation.  I’d reached out to this particular guy and a couple of others, and one of the others responded immediately.  This guy hadn’t responded then, and he didn’t even seem to know what I was talking about when I mentioned it during our meeting today.  Yeah, OK.

So you just want us to shell out twice of what we pay now for what you say is a “better level of service,” and all we’ve seen from your company throughout the past few years is poor customer service and poor responsiveness?  Maybe that works on some people, but not on me.  As I stated earlier, I’m a smart guy.  Not to mention the fact that he completely insulted my skill level during his presentation by vastly underestimating my knowledge in certain products and services he was trying to sell me.  It was like he was trying to sell a $20 pair of shoes for $100 to my wife.  No, I don’t think so.

My little rant here is getting too long and losing the point—kind of like the movie In Time with Justin Timberlake that I watched over the weekend—and so I’ll wrap things up here.  If time is money, you've got a cool concept, but don't lose it by trying to save the pretty main characters even though they are constantly about to die.  No, seriously, if you are in customer service, don’t whine and complain about your job.  Everyone has some aspect of their jobs that get under their skin.  If you don’t, lucky you—play the lottery.  But don’t complain about your jobs and then not do them right.  If you are paid to serve food, make sure it’s all there, cooked to specifications, and please double check your work.  If you are paid to fix something, do it in a reasonable amount of time and make sure it’s fixed PROPERLY.  If you are paid to sell something, don’t try to pitch me on your track record when my experience with your track record is abysmal.  And above all else, smile and be nice to your customers.  Nobody wants to deal with a bunch of buttmunches when buying groceries or grabbing some grub.

That's How Customer Service is NOT Done!

Today was like a Polaroid picture of customer service gone wrong.  It started at McDonald’s, the one in Duncansville, PA, which has always been notorious for poor customer service.  I can’t count the number of times they’ve given me the wrong order, missed food, overcharged me, undercharged me, made me wait, etc.  I try not to go to this one, but sometimes a lack of time and/or a hungry tummy necessitates it.

This morning I arrived and saw a line of probably five or six other vehicles ahead of me.  When I pulled up to the ordering station, I gave my order and then sat for at least three or four minutes, waiting for the cars to move.  My order was $7 and some odd change for an egg McMuffin meal with a large sugar-free vanilla iced-coffee (570 calories for those wondering).  When I got to the payment window, the lady there didn’t even look at me, instead shouting “six oh four” at me.  I handed her the money, not quite sure how my meal had suddenly become cheaper, but she took it and handed it back and said NOTHING.

When I got to the food window, I looked at my receipt and saw one of the oddest orders I’ve ever seen.  Breakfast burrito - no sauce, cup of ice, large unsweetened tea w/ Splenda, and an apple pie.  Seriously, who gets that?  If your order is that complicated, you need to park and go inside.  It’s no wonder these people get your order wrong.  While in college, I worked in the computer room of a mail processing plant, and one of my coworkers would always go to McDonalds and do this crap.  He’d pull up to the window, start by saying he had two separate orders, give them mine (usually a number 1 or 3 or whatever with a Coke), then proceed to give his – a Big Mac with no pickles and extra sauce, a Coke with no ice, etc.  Every time he’d do this, I’d cringe and then inspect my food for human saliva before I ate it.  I stopped going with him after a while, deciding that it was in my best health interests to pack my own lunch!

Anyway, this morning the girl goes to hand me my food, and I tell her the order is wrong.  I tell her what I ordered, and surprisingly she has it right there and ready and hands it to me.  She utters a half-hearted “sorry,” and then I take it and go on my un-merry way.  I mean, it’s a good thing I caught the error; otherwise I would have been eating that other person’s strange meal.  As I mentioned before though, this isn’t the first time they’ve screwed things up.  The last time I was there, a week or two ago, I had to sit for over ten minutes while they made new hash browns.  They made me pull up to the little white line, and finally the scruffy-looking, tattooed, brute of a WOMAN comes out with two bags in her hand, then asks me what my order was, then tells me she’ll be right back as she delivers the bags to two other vehicles who were forced to wait behind me.  I sat there, wasting gas in my idling truck for another two or three minutes, and then finally she returned and gave me my food.  No “sorry” or “thanks” or “have a nice day” or anything.  When I finally got to my office, I opened my bag and noticed that they did give me an apple pie.  I’m not sure if this was done on purpose for making me wait or by accident, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if it were the latter.

So then I’m off to my doctor’s office for a routine lab appointment.  My appointment was scheduled for 8 AM, and I arrived at 7:52 AM.  I walked in, and the little kiosk to sign in was being used by this extremely loud and obnoxious older woman who obviously had never worked a touch-screen kiosk before.  I stood behind her, waiting patiently, only then to have the lab nurse come out and ask if everyone there had signed in.  Naturally a different woman who had arrived before me hadn’t, despite the HUGE SIGN ON THE WINDOW, so I was polite and allowed her to sign in ahead of me.

I don’t get my doctor’s office, who happens to be one of the bigger “Medical Associates” offices in the “Blair” county area.  They’ve installed these horrendous touch screens that they require everyone to use, and these touch screens are 1: unresponsive, 2: not programmed to clearly indicate what you should do, and 3: difficult for even me to read.  They require you to scan in your insurance card using an awful little card scanner attached to the side on a desk, and even after you scan them, the image takes 5-10 seconds to display on the screen.  Now I’m a pretty tech-savvy guy.  I’m the IT Manager of a small business, and I know more than the average Joe when it comes to these types of things.  But these kiosks even have confused me at times.

And so imagine being 50.  Or 60.  Or 70 or 80!  You get the picture.  Most people that go to the doctor on a regular basis are elderly.  These are the same people that take a half hour to vote.  How in the world are they expected to check in using these kiosks?  I mean, my mom uses a wheelchair when she’s out and about, and these things aren’t even low enough for her to use them.  Even if she were standing up, I don’t think she’d be able to figure them out.  You can pretty much assume that, if you get stuck behind anyone born before the time of microwaves (first sold in 1947), you’re going to be waiting about 15-20 minutes, especially if they are a first-time user.

So my appointment was at 8 AM.  I arrived at 7:52.  I finally got to sign in at 8:07.  I was called back by 8:10, and I was out the door by 8:15.  Fifteen minutes to sign in, 8 minutes until my blood was taken and I was on my un-merry way.  That, my readers, is BAD CUSTOMER SERVICE.  Where was the receptionist?  Oh, she starts at 8:30.  The lab opens at 8.  If you go to the lab, you MUST use the kiosk to sign in.

And then a little bit later today, I received an email from a technology company I’ve used in the past to outsource programming projects.  It’s a pretty big technology company for the area, probably the biggest, and it rhymes with “stink”.  Go figure.  In early April I requested a quote for some minor programming changes to a PHP system they developed for us several years ago.  I received a response that day from out account rep saying she’d get me something in the next week or so.  Nearly a MONTH later, in early May I still hadn’t heard anything, so I emailed our account rep again asking about it.  She finally responded TODAY.  Seriously?  I can’t even fathom taking nearly two months to get someone a quote for 16 hours worth of work.  I’d be fired in an instant.

I could go on and on and on and on and on about bad customer service, but I promise I’ll end here.  I just don’t get it.  Why don’t people take pride in their jobs or their companies?  Why don’t they pay attention to customers complaining and griping?  Maybe I should just stop drinking sugar-free vanilla iced coffees altogether.  But should I stop going to the doctor??

Running for the hills? Or running over people?

Jogging and running has become a bit of a passion for me.  Now mind you, I’m a big guy.  When you look at me, you don’t immediately think, “Oh, wow, that guy must be a runner.”  You are probably more likely to think, “Oh, wow, that guy could probably eat a whole large pizza in one sitting.”  I can’t eat a pizza in one sitting (not sure I’ve ever tried, though), but I can and do run/jog/walk about 10 miles every week.  I’ve been doing it for a few years now, less when the temperature drops into frigidity, but it’s become a regular habit of mine.  Yeah, I do eat poorly.  I love my wife’s chicken wings, eat McDonald’s sandwiches more often than I should, drink way too much Red Bull, and I have a horrible sweet tooth that I’m afraid I’ve passed on to my son.  So far my running hasn’t quite tipped the scales and made me a smaller person, but I’m working on it, and I know eventually it will happen.  Besides, I’m probably one of the fastest, healthiest of fat men that you’ve ever seen.

That being said, running, jogging, and walking are great all around.  I go during my lunch hour, and I usually get about 45 solid minutes to trudge around the half mile paved and shale roadway that surrounds a local park.  I start with a half mile warm-up of walking, then jump into a medium-tempo jog for about a half mile.  I’ll then spend the rest of my time alternating between jogging, running, sprinting short distances, and walking to rest.  I try to keep my heart rate up above 140 beats per minute (I have a Polar heart rate monitor and would suggest you get one if you are serious about losing weight).

Now this park that I go to a popular one, although of course it all depends on the weather.  When it’s nice and sunny out, lots of people can be seen in the garden area or walking their dogs or taking their children to the playground.  When it’s cold, not so much, which is when I tend to like it best.  I first started going to this particular park early last year, and one of the first things I noticed was the amount of people sitting in their cars and chain-smoking.  That’s right, puffing down cigarettes like they were Tic Tacs.  For weeks I couldn’t fathom why this park was such a hot-spot for people to go to chain-smoke, but then it dawned on me that a local high-school is a quarter of a mile up the road, and naturally smoking is prohibited on school grounds.  I guess being a teacher drives one to smoke a quarter of a pack in a half an hour.  I realize it’s a stressful job, but really?  At least get out and walk while you are smoking, Mr. Jones and Mrs. Smith!

Anyway, I guess I’ve become a regular at the park.  The groundskeeper sees me and nods his head as I stroll on by.  A tall, fit guy in his late sixties (a former gym teacher who smoked there, perhaps?) always says hi to me as we pass.  Call me eclectic, but I always tend to go clockwise around the track, whereas most people go counter-clockwise.  Why is it that people run counter-clockwise around tracks?  My thoughts are that I want to take the widest path possible, and so I stay to the outside.  I also want to walk against traffic so that I can see people driving at me and jump out of the way if they aren’t paying attention, and so I stay to the left.  Staying on the left and walking on the outside means I have to go counter-clockwise, but I rarely see others going the same direction.  I guess they just don’t follow my logic.  Regardless, I often pass other people, going the opposite way, and while I listen to music and am running at a good 5 mph pace sometimes, I try to keep at smile on my face.

Now I’m not a dog-lover, but I’m not a dog-hater either.  I guess I have a very neutral stance toward them.  I tend to like bigger, friendlier dogs.  My favorite is probably the golden retriever, as both a relative and an ex-girlfriend had one, and they were both beautiful, charming, and gentle creatures.  The one, Bracken was his name, would actually bring me his toy every time I arrived at the door, and when I was done petting him, he’d actually put his toy back in his toy box.  My soon-to-be three-year-old hasn’t even quite learned that trick yet!  I digress.  Anyway, if a dog is nice, and I’m not preoccupied, I’ll go play with it or pet it or whatever.  However, when I’m running, I’m rather preoccupied with making sure I don’t trip over my own two feet or get hit by a car or a flying cigarette butt ejected out of the car by a chain-smoker, and so I don’t really have time to play with dogs.  Yet, for some strange, only-dog-lover’s-know-why reason, the owners of these pets will let them roam without leashes, not discipline them when the bark, etc.  I can only imagine what is going through these poor creatures’ minds when they see me running towards them.  I’m a tank, barreling down the road at them, and most of these animals inherently want to protect their owners.  They most likely see me as a threat, and there have been a few close calls of dogs running up near me and/or barking/growling.  I can understand the need for these people to walk their dogs, and a park is a great place to do that, but they really need to read the signs that clearly say “Keep Dogs On Leashes.”  I mean, if a dog bites me, so what?  I’ll bite him back.  If a dog bites a child though, well, that’s a scenario I’d rather not imagine.  But please, folks, keep your dogs on leashes!

Which brings me to my next observation: kids.  This park has a huge, magnificent, glorious wooden playground that I would have just died to play in when I was little.  We’ve taken our son there several times, and while he is still too little to fully appreciate all of the nooks and crannies where he can hide and the rope bridges and tire swings and mini zip line and all of the sliding boards, he does love going.  And other kids do as well.  Which, of course, means field trips.

Now I’m probably like a lot of dads.  I love my son and would sacrifice anything and everything for him, but other people’s kids—not so much.  Don’t get me wrong, if I see a kid in pain or lost or whatever, I’m going to help him/her out.  That’s just the natural, humanitarian thing to do.  But when it comes to kids screaming, shouting, misbehaving—well, I’d rather not deal with them.  Unless of course they are funny when they are doing it.  Or they are under five and they utter a well-timed expletive.  Crap like that amuses me!

But today, when I was running in the park, this little kid and his mother just infuriated me to the point where my heart rate actually went way up, as evidenced by my Polar heart rate monitor (again, highly recommended if you want to lose weight or get fit).  I was just walking along, catching my breath, minding my own business, and listening to my music with the volume down low when I passed this group of people returning to their vehicles from the playground entrance.  As we passed, one little boy asked his mother, “Mommy, why is that man here?”  And her reply was, “I don’t know, honey,” in the most negative, poison-tongued tone that I have ever heard.  As she said this, she actually pulled her son closer to her, as if she thought I really wanted to kidnap her son.  Uh, hello?  I’m dripping sweat, listening to my music with my neon green headphones on, and just trying to stay out of your way.  Do I look like a kidnapper?  Do you really think I want to take your bratty son home with me?

I don’t know what impression I gave this lady.  Perhaps she was a Cowboys or Ravens fan and my sweaty Steelers offended her.  And I can understand a mother being overly-protective of her child.  But the amount of disdain she had in her voice was just utterly amazing.  I was actually in such shock that, upon my next lap, I searched for signs stating that the park was closed for some specific function.  I literally began to question whether or not I was allowed to be there, as if I was trespassing and breaking some law or rule and just completely unaware.

Thinking back now, if I had it to do over again, I would have stopped dead and said, “I’M FREAKIN’ WALKING HERE, LADY.  WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE I’M DOING?”  If only….

So finally, as I’m wrapping up my session today, all of these parents start to leave.  They go to their numerous minivans and SUVs, buckle their kids in, and then proceed to fly out of the park as if they were late for the last train out of Hell.  There are indeed signs (which I saw when trying to figure out if I were trespassing on some bat mitzvah or something) that specifically state the speed limit to be 5 MPH.  Driving 5 MPH is like barely driving, by the way.  If I’m running hard, and you are obeying that speed limit, I’m running faster than you.  Not these parents though.  Despite the speed bumps, they begin to fly out of there doing well over 20, probably even 30 MPH.  Slowing down just enough at the speed bumps to not destroy their exhaust systems.  As a funny digression, I once watched some young kid fly in and hit one going about 40 MPH—he ended up having to call someone to help him strap his muffler back on.  But anyway, WHY, PEOPLE?  Why must you fly past me, while I’m walking, doing 30 MPH?  Are you that lost in your own little world that you don’t see the massive man walking down the road toward you?  Or is it that I scare you so much that you’re afraid I’m going to try to open the door of your moving vehicle?  I’m not even looking at you!  I don’t care about you!  Just don’t freakin’ hit me!

So when I’m done with my laps and as I go to leave in my vehicle, this old man pulls into the parking lot where I parked, makes a quick U-turn, cuts me off, and then proceeds to just sit in the middle of the one-lane road, looking down at his lap at God-knows-what.  I sat behind him patiently for one, two, three seconds, then beeped my horn.  He looked up at me in his rear-view mirror, gave me this awful bitter-beer face look as if I had somehow interrupted his nap, and then finally turned so that I could go.  Sorry, guy.  I didn’t mean to use the public road that you were blocking.

So long story…uh…long, I love to run, and this park is the closest and most convenient for me.  I’m going to keep going there regardless.  But seriously, if you are one of the people that use this PUBLIC park and happen to be reading this (yeah, right?), please be kind and respectful to people who are jogging there.  That goes for people who jog on public streets, too.  Keep your dogs on leashes if they are outside and not fenced in, don’t drive fast near them, and show them respect.  Because you know, you may be a chain-smoker or fellow fatty like me, but chances are those runners/joggers are a lot more fit than you are, and if it comes to fisticuffs, I’m putting my money on the people that have the endurance and stamina to go a few rounds.  And if you keep it up, sure, maybe some of us runners will run for the hills—but chances are most of us are going to rather just run over you.

Violating the Ethic of Reciprocity - April 24, 2012

The Ethic of Reciprocity, aka the Golden Rule, states that “One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself.”

I hate to be a pessimist in life, because I think it’s a waste of time and energy and causes far too much stress, all of which are unquestionably unhealthy.  I’m the kind of guy that tries to make lemonade out of lemons, and if those lemons happen to be rotten, I’ll make them into compost and grow more lemons with them.  But when it comes to the Golden Rule, I can’t help but notice the fallacies of others.  Typically I’ll just attempt to ignore them, but I realized today that here, on my seldom-read blog, I have an outlet to share with the world (or the ten people who read this) my biggest pet peeve—people who wantonly disregard the Golden Rule as if it were less important than laws regarding jaywalking or removing the tags from linens that have yet to be purchased.  In other words, it’s like people just don’t care about others any more, and it drives me batty!

My first vignette is a subtle one.  The picture below is of a counter in a public restroom.



I won’t say where it is—although it is not at my home—but it is one I use fairly often.  Here you can see that someone has splashed so much water outside of the bowl of the sink that it has pooled around the edges of the counter.  The countertop is not big at all, and unfortunately it is the only stable, raised surface in the entire restroom, so if a person—say me, for example—has to place a gym bag or clothing onto this surface while changing, said person must wipe up someone else’s mess or risk getting his or her clothes wet.

This pool of water appears here about as often as I use the restroom.  I will not name names to protect the innocent/guilty, but I have a rather strong suspicion of who I think the culprit is.  I cannot fathom why he/she creates these messes (OK, I can, but I won’t go there), but I often wonder if his/her bathroom at home looks like this.  If that’s the case, well that’s fine and dandy—and gross, but this is a public restroom that others use.  When I use a restroom, I try to be as courteous as humanly possible.  If I get counters wet, I wipe them clean with a paper towel.  If I leave any sort of evidence, I make sure it’s gone before I leave.  I think most people tend to do this.  Most of us, I hope, abide by the Golden Rule.  It’s the ones that don’t that really irk me.

This example is quite paltry compared to some restrooms, and we’ve all seen them.  Water everywhere.  Bodily fluids and other unspeakables.  It completely perplexes me why people must be absolute slobs in public restrooms.  I’m sure many of us have had jobs where we’ve been required to clean a restroom, and it is utterly disgusting to have to wipe up someone else’s mess.  There are times when I go to use the restroom and see that someone has just totally obliterated a toilet in filth, and while it’s one of the most putrid sights one could imagine, those people aren’t even the ones that offend me the most.  Sometimes accidents happen.  Sometimes people play pranks or are just total dolts looking to get a rise out of others.  In cases like that, where there has been obvious attention put into the fecal matter at hand, well, to them I just say touché.  Nice one.  You’re a jerk.

No, it’s the people who unknowingly and inadvertently make messes that bother me the most.  You live in a society where there are other people—not just you.  For you to go into a restroom, use the facility, create a mess, and then leave without taking a casual glance at whether or not you left any evidence—it just proves to others that you’re an uncaring and insolent butthead.  It’s not difficult to clean up after yourself.  It’s not difficult to just glance back before you leave.  But no, somehow you just manage to ignore it.  It’s people like you, the ones who are seemingly unaware of the Ethic of Reciprocity, that make it very difficult for me to be a happy, go-lucky optimist when I have to deal with your inattention to detail.

As I’m sure this will be the first of many of these little posts, I’m going to leave you all with an obvious query.  If it were you who had to place items on top of this counter after I made this mess, how would you feel?  Not too happy?  No, I didn’t think so.