And how few by deceit. — Noel Coward
By Blue Bronc, a Trail Mix Contributor
Something occurred last year about this time that set me curious and with a questioning of what is going on in this world. It was repeated this last Friday in another business exchange. I do not know if it is my generation and those earlier which caused the disruption to my value system. Or if it was my early religious experiences, which also affected me.
I drive a truck with a diesel engine. If you have one you understand the need to replace two batteries, not just one. As winter was approaching, or perhaps was knocking, it was time to replace batteries which barely made it through summer. I drove over to one of the big box discount stores and purchased two new batteries. Asked for the used batteries I said those were still in the truck and I would bring them back the next day. That was fine and I was not charged a battery fee.
As promised I showed up the next day with the two used batteries. As they were being transferred to a storage rack a comment came to me: “Thank you for your honesty.”
At first I thought nothing of it. I was happy not to have two nasty old batteries around. And more important I gave my word to bring them back.
But over the hours of the afternoon and since I thought of that comment and wondered why the clerk felt he needed to say that. Was theft that rampant? Were the customers of this store, and perhaps all stores, dishonest? It has been bothersome. A nit in the drawers.
A singular statement until Friday.
I placed an order with a gigantic online retailer last Saturday for a new mouse and a murder mystery novel. The mouse was to be delivered on Monday. Excellent. Monday, no delivery. Okay, a mistake was made but of minor consequences. Tuesday, delivery schedule was to bring a mouse and book to my door by eight p.m. Tuesday, no delivery. Wednesday, the delivery schedule was to be by eight p.m. No delivery after eight p.m. So I called the retailer and they could not get anyone at the delivery office to answer the phone. I cancelled the order.
Thursday morning there was a box in my door. It arrived, but was no longer mine. I did not have time to deal with it that day but I did on Friday. I called and it took a while for the customer service to understand that the articles were delivered and I would pay for them rather than send them back. In fact about thirty minutes of customer service trying to figure out how to accomplish such a feat as reopen the order and pay for it again.
Several times during this ordeal I was told by the CS person “Thank you for your honesty”. What? I had no idea that agreeing to buy what had been bought, cancelled and now paid for again required honesty. I do not understand. I find it hard to comprehend that honesty was what I did.
Put these two experiences together, along with the current discourse of our country from the election and I am still unable to come to any valid conclusion.
“Thank you for your honesty”. A phrase that is so unusual outside of someone returning a wallet without taking the contents, that it catches with me. “Thank you for returning these batteries” is what I expected first. The second time I expected “thank you for your order (even if it is the second time)”.
And now we have someone who might be the most dishonest person ever elected to be president leading by example. I do fear for these United States.
More Posts by Blue Bronc
“….why the clerk felt he needed to say that. Was theft that rampant? Were the customers of this store, and perhaps all stores, dishonest?”
bbronc, thanks for bringing this up. same kind of thing and almost the very same thought went thru my head not long ago. during one very long grocery shopping day and being rather hungry, I snacked on a sushi pack while perusing the aisles. at check out when the clerk noticed the empty container, she said as she scanned it “thank you for your honesty” or words to the effect that many customers chuck the empty before they get to the register (guess the ubiquitous cams see the perps). is this sadly an indication of rampant dishonesty or poverty caused hunger in our midst but is it also comfortingly a sign of compassion by Kroger and their kindly looking aside that the perps aren’t punished but pitied?
am more shocked by the dishonesty of rampant fake news and what can result there from like what happened yesterday:
wapo: N.C. man told police he went to D.C. pizzeria with assault rifle to ‘self-investigate’ election-related conspiracy theory
The popular family restaurant, near Connecticut and Nebraska avenues NW in the Chevy Chase neighborhood, was swept up in the onslaught of fake news and conspiracy theories that were prevalent during the presidential campaign. The restaurant, its owner, staff and nearby businesses have been attacked on social media and received death threats.
[….]
The restaurant’s owner and employees were threatened on social media in the days before the election after fake news stories circulated claiming that then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and her campaign chief were running a child sex ring from the restaurant’s backrooms. Even Michael Flynn, a retired general whom President-elect Donald Trump has tapped to advise him on national security, shared stories about another anti-Clinton conspiracy theory involving pedophilia. None of them were true. But the fake stories and threats persisted, some even aimed at children of Comet Ping Pong employees and patrons. The restaurant’s owner was forced to contact the FBI, local police, Facebook and other social-media platforms in an effort to remove the articles.
our post-truth era has dawned
salon: Academic witch hunts are back: The new McCarthyism, a sign of the stupidity of the post-truth era
A new watch list targets “lefty” professors. It would be sad and silly if it weren’t so frightening
the guardian:
In the era of Donald Trump and Brexit, Oxford Dictionaries has declared “post-truth” to be its international word of the year.
Defined by the dictionary as an adjective “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”, editors said that use of the term “post-truth” had increased by around 2,000% in 2016 compared to last year. The spike in usage, it said, is “in the context of the EU referendum in the United Kingdom and the presidential election in the United States”.
[…]
… “rather than simply referring to the time after a specified situation or event – as in post-war or post-match”, in post-truth it had taken on the meaning of “belonging to a time in which the specified concept has become unimportant or irrelevant”.
BBronc…. I’m glad you’ve found your writing bug again. Excellent piece.
I think your experience is born of living in a much more populated area than I do. Honesty in a small rural town is an expected norm. After all… we all know each other and know where everyone lives. But with that said, I do think you’re on to something regarding early religious experiences. Even though religion is no longer for me… I do tap into those early lessons drummed into my head of honestly, loving my neighbors, and trying to be a better person. The fact that our president-elect seems to have none of these qualities is alarming and disgusting. I do hope the press does it’s job… but I’m not holding my breath on those wimpy chickens.
Thanks for another thought provoker, BB.
BB
I have a somewhat similar situation. I’m old enough that even older women rush to hold doors for me. I, of course, step to the door, which is now open, and hold it for the kind lady. I thank her profusely, then invoke the image of my Mother, saying “If my Mom saw me fail to hold a door for a lady, there would be no peace in our family.” Of course, the situation repeats itself seven feet later as most entrances have double doors. At this point, I hobble through with a smile and thank you. Everyone is happy including Mom.
KumCho would have been 80-yo today. She would not have been happy about that. I would have taken her to our favorite Korean restaurant for a fancy lunch. Everybody would make a big fuss over her and she would smile until the next momentous date.
Happy Birthday KumCho! Ever in our memories. And thank you for the gift of Flatus.
Although born in Detroit then raised in Dearborn and Livonia, I spent a lot of time in small town Iowa.
The writers block has been breached. I am trying to write one thousand or more words a day in the novels.
Picked up a very nice pen at a consignment store yesterday. It is a fine pen for those who like the retractable style pens, ball point or other Pilot Vanishing Point fountain pen.
The joy of typing is back. There is something about the rhythm of the keys whacking the ribbon and paper that is fun to listen to. Getting back to basics is how to restart the spark.
BB, funny how people whose basic assumption about how one should conduct oneself is that they should be honest in their dealings with others are taken aback by being thanked for being honest. I don’t believe that honesty is as rare as all that – but neither is dishonesty. The ubiquitous cameras in big box stores (and everywhere, for that matter) are there for a reason, and it is in response to inventory “disappearance”.
Oh yes, one more thing. Roll Tide.
BB,
I know exactly what you mean about a fine pen. Thirty years ago when I finally completed my BA I rewarded myself with a Montblanc Meisterstruck. It’s a magnificent ball point in Burgundy and Gold with a barrel of sufficient diameter that I can grasp it firmly despite my arthritic fingers. Their refills are of similar quality.
I can put on an old T-shirt and jeans and have the distinctive top of the pen protruding from the collar of the shirt and not be considered under-dressed in virtually any surroundings; the pen creates the image.
Thank you for taking a stand against Speaker Ryan’s attacks on Medicare.
We have one more favor to ask: Will you forward this to 3 friends?
Ask them to join you in rejecting Speaker Ryan’s attacks on Medicare!
http://action.dccc.org/petition/ryan-medicare
Thanks,
DCCC
the new Yorker:
The Real Voting Scandal of 2016
Jill Stein can’t call for the recount of uncast votes, but there were clearly thousands of them as a result of voter-suppression measures.
By Jeffrey Toobin
…
This was the first Presidential election since the Supreme Court’s notorious Shelby County v. Holder decision, which gutted the Voting Rights Act. Several Republican-controlled states took the Court’s decision as an invitation to rewrite their election laws, purportedly to address the (nonexistent) problem of voter fraud but in fact to limit the opportunities for Democrats and minorities (overlapping groups, of course) to cast their ballots.
[….]
It’s difficult to count uncast votes, but there were clearly thousands of them as a result of the voter-suppression measures. In 2014, according to a Wisconsin federal court, three hundred thousand registered voters in that state lacked the forms of identification that Republican legislators deemed necessary to cast their ballots. (The G.O.P. likes some forms of I.D. better than others. In Texas, a gun permit works; student identification does not.) In Milwaukee County, which has a large African-American population, sixty thousand fewer votes were cast in 2016 than in 2012. To put it another way, Clinton received forty-three thousand fewer votes in that county than Barack Obama did—a number that is nearly double Trump’s margin of victory in all of Wisconsin. The North Carolina Republican Party actually sent out a press release boasting about how its efforts drove down African-American turnout in this election.
usatoday
“I had a lengthy and very productive session with the president-elect. It was a sincere search for areas of common ground,” Gore told reporters after the meeting at Trump Tower.
Gore added that prior to the meeting with Trump he’d met with Ivanka Trump, but that “the bulk of the time was with the president-elect, Donald Trump.”
“I found it an extremely interesting conversation, and to be continued, and I’m just going to leave it at that,” Gore said.
Gore had been scheduled to meet only with Trump’s daughter about his signature issue, climate change. Earlier in the morning, Trump spokesman Jason Miller said the president-elect had no plans to meet with the 2000 Democratic presidential nominee.
The meeting came the same day The Guardian published an interview with Gore where he said that the threat of climate change is too pressing for people to “despair” over Trump’s election.
“My message would be that despair is just another form of denial. There is no time to despair. We don’t have time to lick our wounds, to hope for a different election outcome,” Gore wrote. “We have to win this struggle and we will win it; the only question is how fast we win. But more damaged is baked into the climate system every day, so it’s a race against time.”
Flatus – a real pen speaks a lot about the user. Thoughtful, careful of history from the earliest scribes with ink stained fingers to the current writer, a person who knows how to write (illegible though mine is), carrying on a tradition and scornful of those who disdain beauty. I cannot begin to count all who have tried to convince me to give up my pens and use a ballpoint or rollerball. Bah to that notion. A real pen with your personal color is something those using other markers cannot do. We can make a black with a touch of red or Blue with a touch of black. Turquoise, royal blue, Air Force Blue, Detroit Lions Hawaiian blue and so on.
A pen user is distinctive and worthy of admiration for bucking a trend which is doomed. Those sticks with balls and rollers will fail, and the users will come back to the true writing tool.
Can you imagine if the Ink Spots had to change their name to the Ballpoint Ink Smears?
My sticks with balls and rollers run out of ink too quickly, but I have to admit that I love the way the Pilot G-2 .07 writes. And I do a lot of writing.
Alexandra Petri delves into the cabinet selection process in drumpf tower.
Just an update. I wrote just over 1,300 words today for Red Light on the Green Line. I met my goal of 1,000 words by writing a page during lunch and a page after work. Considering I currently have 14,000+ words for this work, today was a small addition of two scenes. I have about 70,000 words to go. I also wrote another two hundred words in background for biographies, locations and character arches which go to all the novels. Overall a nice day.
Oh and I added a little drivel here.
Oh, I carried a matched pair of Parkers–Gold fountain pen and a slim gold mechanical pencil. I used the ink cartridges most of the time because of their convenience. I did not give up on the pen. I gave up on the paper that others expect us to fill out. Stuff that is so absorbent that it soaks up the ink like a sponge without anytime for a blotter to intervene before the end product turns to ink splotches rather than the written word.
I had no such problem with my own stationery; I’ve always used quality stuff. But, others, finally, I had enough. No more. The ballpoint refills sold by Montblanc are cheap at half the price–three for twelve bucks. But, they will produce clear, fine lines with only the weight of the pen pressing them to the paper. No smear, blotch, splotch or stained pockets.
Five years ago today I thought I had lost my pen. I panicked. Frantic, I found a store in Texas that had a single burgundy pen left in stock. Because of time-zones, they were still open when I placed my urgent call. Three hundred? No problem. I needed my pen. The next morning I found mine wedged between the cushion and frame of my desk chair. The shop in Texas hadn’t yet shipped. They generously declined my offer to pay a service charge.
With respect & with great honor, Happy Birthday to KumCho.
Jackie Kennedy wanted people to remember JFK on his birthday, not death date. Didn’t happen; too bad her wish won’t come true. She had it right: Celebrate Life!
Celebrate Life!
Indeed!
Let us hope that Gore’s visit had some impact on Trump’s assessment of climate change.
The protestors in North Dakota only got the attention of the current administration when the veterans started showing up to stand with them. Maybe Al should’ve had a talk with Obama, as well.
Until the veterans showed up, the protestors were being treated horribly and the media only covered it a bit when they thought there might be bloodshed. They didn’t cover the reason they were there, though.
Jon Huntsman for SOS? I hope so.
A Happy 80th Birthday to Kum Cho.