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.