Stumped

I have spent much of the last few days clearing land around the house, and most of the clearing has involved the removal of small to middling-sized trees and their stumps. It is, I can now say from considerable firsthand experience, very hard work. I mean, really hard. I mean, soaked in sweat, panting, drink three quarts of water and your pee is still yellow, hard work. Cutting down the trees is, of course, the easy part. It's getting out the stumps that can be a bitch (no offense meant to the ladies). But, I did actually look up "stump removal" on the web and picked up a few tips the most important being - don't cut the tree flush to the ground, knucklehead! Leave a few feet to act as a lever that you can wiggle, hang on, push, etc. Duh. Such a small thing, but SO important. I also bought my new favorite tool - a pickaxe. Sometimes called a mattock, it's a fabulously effective tool, with the metal pick on one side and an axe-type end on the other side.

Anyway, I am now at the end of another clearing-day, exhausted but cleaned up by a long shower. And I got to thinking about the farmers who lived here a few hundred years ago, and how they had to clear the land. And not just for five hours a day for a couple of days, they had to bust their butts every day they could, and they were pulling out stumps a lot bigger than I was with the same kinds of tools and maybe a team of horses and maybe, I guess, if they were lucky, some dynamite. Farm life had - and still has - its joys, but it is hard, dirty, muscle-wrenching work, even today with power equipment. Imagine homesteading some piece of land that needed to be cleared, plowed, planted, harvested, and you were on your own, and you couldn't just "do it next year" because you'd be dead of starvation, or frozen because you didn't cut enough firewood if you put it off. We often have a different kind of stress than those hardy folk had, and it can be debilitating if we let it. Luckily - and I know that I am lucky - I can take off a few days and physically exhaust myself without needing to do it day in and day out.

Customer Service

I'm pretty steamed right now, but I'm trying to do the right thing and not yell at people (those rare times I actually speak to a person) when I get them on the phone. The sad thing is, I don't really expect to get anywhere without expending a large amount of time and effort, and that leads to "customer service." It's a phrase that is used by every business that provides a service or product, usually embedded in the "mission statement" (and don't get me started on those). But it's an empty phrase, used almost as a talisman in the hope that by printing it, circulating it to staff, posting it in a store, or repeating it, it will ward off bad results.

"Customer service" cannot substitute for, well, customer service. Some individuals care, and try to help. Many are stuck in a corporate morass, and the only way out is for them all to take to heart the platitudes that are generated and ignored by those in charge.

Hey, It's Me

Who hasn't said that? I certainly have. Of course it's me, who else would it be? But it leads me to the whole issue of telephone etiquette or, more precisely, the lack thereof in today's world. "Hey, it's me," is fine, I suppose, when one is calling one's spouse or, perhaps, a child or parent (unless, like my secretary, you have 14 (!) siblings). But I notice the annoying tendency of people whom I don't know all that well calling the house and simply starting to talk, while I search the memory files to see if their voice matches anything remotely connected to a name. It's not right. It puts the listener in the position of having to interrupt and query the caller as to his or her identity.

The flip side of this is the person who doesn't listen at all when I answer the phone. At work I will answer "J- T- speaking," if I don't recognize the number or name on the caller ID (a mixed blessing I'll discuss later; and DON'T get me started on people who 'screen' their calls, grrrrrr...). After identifying myself, I'll often be queried as to whether I am someone else. I will respond no, I'm the person I identified myself as when I answered the phone. How hard is that to understand? It's a specific form of the disastrously prevalent condition that has plagued mankind since we began grunting: we don't really listen to each other all that often. I mean, I specifically state my name upon answering the phone, and the person listening asks if I'm someone else. This hasn't happened once or twice, it has happened many times. Sometimes the farce continues, and the caller asks if this is a particular office. I answer that it is not. They question me, wanting to make sure. Could I be lying? Is it a plot to keep them from finding the office they need? I respond, again, that it is not the office they want.

How often do we not believe what we hear? How often does this carry over into other things - our lives, our loves? How often do we wait, fidgeting, for the other blowhard to finish - for the love of God, finish! - so that we can finally begin talking and explain everything to everyone? It's hard to listen sometimes.

Schadenfreude

Really cool word, but a crummy emotion (enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others). There's a lot of it going around in New York State today, as the soon-to-be former Governor resigned effective this Monday due to a truly astonishing sexcapade involving high priced prostitutes, laundered money, secret trysts and who knows what else. It seems only fitting to many, as he was an insufferable, arrogant, self-righteous bully. Still, it does not do one any good to relish another's suffering. If there is one thing about the human condition that I know with absolute certainty, it is that we screw up. Every single one of us, more than once, will screw up big-time. And when we do, we will need the help of others to deal with the mess we have created.

To enjoy or delight in the failure or misfortune of another diminishes us. Perhaps, being human, we can't help it, but we can know that it is wrong, feel guilty when we do it, and try not to in the future.

William Buckley Didn't Yell (Except at Gore Vidal)

I never met him, but I did go to a lecture of his in the '70's when I was in college. He was witty, quick, brilliant, devastating when squashing some budding leftist in the audience - pretty much all of the things people who knew him say that he was. And I watched him on Firing Line from time to time, and marveled at his quick mind and grasp of issues. But I was also fascinated, then and now, by his ability to remain friends with people whose political, social or cultural opinions he opposed. It's an ability that so many of us lack.

What passes for social discourse often degenerates into the shouting matches that infest television or the one-sided jeremiads of the radio talk show hosts. And I think it has infected us all. There can be passion and commitment without anger or ad hominem attacks. There can be, but there usually isn't, and that's sad.

Thank You. You're Welcome.

When did the response to "thank you" become "thank you?" It seems to happen all of the time on radio and television, and more often than I like in real life as well. Some announcer interviews an individual and when the whole thing is over, says "Mr. X, thank you for appearing," and Mr. X replies "thank you." It happens so much that I find myself sometimes coming close to doing it at, say a checkout counter in a store. The clerk (sorry, "sales associate" - funny, they still get paid like a clerk...) says "thank you" and I stumble over "th - you're welcome." Because, after all, that is the proper response, yes? There are many variations, and I use them as the situation warrants: "you're welcome," "oh, it was nothing," "my pleasure," even, in very relaxed circumstances, some variation of "sure, no problem." And, very rarely, "no, thank you." But that's a special situation, as you can no doubt tell from the italics. Anyway, it bugs me, because the whole point of the "thank you, you're welcome" dance is to show appreciation on one side, and to acknowledge it on the other. Two "thank you's" essentially say "we're all equal here, yes you did something for me, but my letting you do it for me is just as important as your doing it..." or some such nonsense. It's egalitarianising (no, I don't think it's a word, but it should be) one more aspect of our society where everyone is "special" and we're all above average. Well, phooey. Social conventions exist for a reason, and that reason is to grease the operation of the otherwise cranky machine we call society. When they become bastardized, it should be for a good reason, not for some silly cultural equalization process that is for our own good. Thank you. And you're welcome.

How Much Don't I Know?

Every now and then I get to thinking (always dangerous), and what sometimes gets me going is a reference to some scientific or historical fact of which I know little or nothing. Like, say, the Great Siege of Malta in the 1500s.

The what?

I came across a reference to it and, not having heard of it and feeling, for the umpteenth time, that my education had been sorely lacking, I had to go look it up. Of course, one looks up things on the web at one's own risk, but that's a different post... Anyway, there is so much that I don't know, that I sometimes feel like the donkey who starved to death between two bales of hay. Unable to choose, he wasted away, poor jackass. Then I look at all of the time I have wasted in nonproductive ways and if I'm not careful, things go downhill fast. But sometimes I get to work and learn something, and that's a good thing. At least for me it is. I like to learn things, and my aged brain can still stretch enough to keep new facts in place. Some things come easy, some hard. But I do need to make the time.