2002-11-13 - 11:55 p.m.
I bought a bumper sticker the other day. It was the first one I bought since I drove the really decrepit old Plymouth Duster and I just had to have the sticker that said: Zero to Sixty in Fifteen Minutes. Occasionally something speaks to me. My car now has a small sticker on the back window that says: Partnership for an Idiot Free America.
I suppose it appealed to me because I am having kind of an idiot-intensive week. Sometimes those happen.....maybe it is the moon phase, or the fact that Christmas decorations are already up.
All the usual occurances: students who said they didn't mean to enroll in classes, didn't know they forgot to pay, never showed up, etc.. People wandering into traffic.
But one thing really amazed me. I received a letter from a big warehouse store notifying me that they were recalling boxes of a certain cereal purchased between June and September. And since their records showed that I had purchased this cereal they were telling me I could return it for a refund. There are so many things wrong with that.....
To begin with, it kind of creeps me out that they keep such detailed records on my buying habits. I hate the idea that I am just feeding some big statistics machine every time I go shopping, but it would be naive to think it is avoidable.
The reason they were recalling cereal was not that it was contaminated or defective, or some horrible thing. No, they were recalling it because they forgot to mention in the ingredient list that it contained milk and almonds. Hello out there in customer land. Are we all idiots? Almonds are large enough to see, they appear in the picture on the box, and presumably if you are allergic to them, you are not going to shovel them into your mouth just because they weren't on the ingredient list. And really, what minute amount of milk could possibly be in dry, flakey cereal? And don't you pour milk on it in order to eat it? The whole fiasco was completely unnecessary. If they felt some action was necessary, why not just give people a revised ingredient list? And why do they think I still HAVE a box of cereal I bought months ago?
It seems like the harder we try to idiot-proof the world, the more it backfires. Because people don't take responsibility for their own lives. They just leave it all up to someone else, and the only thinking they do is to decide who to blame when things go wrong.
And since I am complaining, I will just move on to my next subject: things disappearing. I called the Time and Temp number, expecting to hear the familiar deep male voice, giving a short pitch for a local bank, and then the time and temperature, with which we always disagreed. But yesterday a woman's voice came on first, saying that the time and temperature service would be discontinued on November 18th. This was not just any Time and Temp. They had their own entire exchange for over thirty years. It was one of those things you could always count on. And soon it will be gone. I guess I'll have to call on the 18th and hear it one last time.
I noticed recently that the nice old guys across the street car repair shop was closed. I have been taking my car there for years. I could just go in and say, "Fix it up" and they would check everything over and do what needed to be done. They never overcharged me or took advantage of my ignorance and lackadaisical approach to car maintenance. I trusted them and now they are gone, and I will have to leave my car in the hands of strangers. Sigh.
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