Have you noticed that? Not only will things always go wrong, they conspire to do so at impossible times.
It is Friday before the Fourth of July weekend. At 5:15 in the morning, I awake in a stupor to the sound of the air-conditioning pounding away.
Grope for my $720 glasses. Can’t find them.
Lift the dog off the bed, let her out, shut off the AC, stumble to the bathroom. Sitting there I think…huh? The seat here sure is warm. Thass odd. I turn the thermostat down at night so I can sleep, then turn it up to 85 in the day. But just now it’s only barely day. By the gray light of early dawn, the thermometer on the back porch reads 98 degrees.
Stumble back into the bedroom. Search for my glasses. Can’t find them.
Bloody hot in here. Stumble into the hall. Thermostat says 82, but it’s set for 78. Shit. That means the AC’s on the fritz.
$ $ $ $ $
Speaking of $$, I still haven’t found the glasses. Search all over the house. Can’t find them.
Finally take the bed apart. Find them under the covers. Miraculously I was so tired I didn’t move last night and so never rolled over on top of them.
Check e-mail. Message from Apple: that worthy corporation’s mail & server account has come due. That’ll be $100 for service I can get free from Apple’s competition. But everyone I know has that address. Do I really want to deep-six it?
Probably not.
My radically reduced budget is already about shot. I really need an air-conditioning bill and an exorbitant bill for Cadillac e-mail service to come up in the same month.
That’s not all. I’m sitting here and realize the traffic ticket that came to me after my son was snapped by the traffic cam in the speed trap on State Route 51 said the registration on the car comes due this month. In Arizona, the cost of registering your car is exorbitant. Although it drops as the car ages, it’s still gunna be a $100 bill, plus another $30 for the emissions testing rip-off: a $130 whap upside the head.
Three expensive, unavoidable hits in freaking JULY, including an air-conditioning service call on a holiday weekend (!), at a time when power bills are through the roof, water bills are through the roof, gasoline prices are through the roof, and I have no income.
A week or so ago, Financial Samurai posteda thoughtful article on the importance of recognition in motivating workers, especially as they move upward through the organizational hierarchy to take on greater and greater responsibility.
He touches on an issue that was presented to me some years ago. While I was an editor at Arizona Highways, I was sent off to take a seminar in motivating creative workers. To boil a daylong talkfest down to a sentence or three, the gist was that creative people are motivated less by money than by recognition of their skill and talents. It was claimed that graphic artists, writers, and editors feel a great deal less validation from promotions, nice offices, and raises than from awards (whether from inside the organization or from trade and creative groups) and verbal commendations from management.
Well. I recall thinking that sounded like a good excuse to pay creative workers less than accountants, circulation managers, and ad salespeople—as though those folks never engaged any kind of creativity in their jobs. What I took away from the seminar was that all workers thrive on generous recognition of excellence: that positive feedback on good work is more effective than negative feedback on efforts that leave something to be desired.
Weirdly, that idea was recently reinforced by, of all people, a dog trainer.
Motivated creative worker
Cassie the Corgi and I were attending an agility training class. The trainer was trying persuade everyone that the key to convincing a dog to do what you ask is effusive praise. In the middle of his harangue, he stopped and said, “How do you feel when the boss says to you, ‘Great job, Joe! You really did exactly what was needed!'” He mimed a handshake and a pat on the back.
“That makes you feel like doing the same thing again, right? Maybe even better the next time.
“But what if he just grunts ‘Nice work there’?” He made like a guy walking past the cube, waving a coffee cup in the air. “How does that make you feel? Not so enthusiastic about the job.”
You don’t have to be a boss (or a dog trainer) to profit from this advice. One obvious application is to customer service reps and sales clerks. Ever think about how you behave affects the way they feel about their jobs? Imagine having to put up with some chucklehead who can’t even make eye contact while she yammers on the cell phone as you’re toting up her grocery bill. What must it feel like to be on the receiving end of a call from a customer who has just spent ten, fifteen, or more minutes listening to infuriating Muzak, advertising, and “we value your patronage” pseudomessages while trying to get a simple answer to a simple question?
We can “motivate” all sorts of employees around us. Even though they’re not strictly “our” employees, they’re our employees in that they’re trying (in theory) to please us with various products and services. It’s in our interest to motivate them, because happy employees provide better services and may even go above and beyond the call for us, in one way or another.
Here are some ways to build better morale and promote better service among the employees we run into every day:
• Refrain from yakking on your cell phone while the checkout clerk is charging up your purchases (that is so rude!).
• To keep the edge out of your voice after navigating an endless phone tree, turn on your speaker phone so that annoying ads and muzak aren’t pumped straight into your ear. Try not to take out your frustration at having to fight to reach a human on the human being who finally does answer the phone.
• Thank people for their efforts, even if they’re just doing their job.
• When people do something you like, compliment them on their professionalism, helpfulness, or special effort.
• Even if the person is doing just an adequate job, compliment him or her on something or make some empathetic remark. Recently a tired-looking bank teller perked right up when I observed that her manicure looked lovely.
• When a talking machine asks you to comment on a telephone representative, say “yes” and leave a positive comment—most people only comment when they’re complaining, so these devices serve mainly to add stress to an already stressful job.
What strategies do you use for getting the best out of the people around you?
Did you read wherewhooping cough has been declared epidemic in California? It’s an entirely preventable disease that kills little children. There’s an easy way to keep your kids from getting miserably sick or even dying from this disease: vaccinate them.
Sadly, Americans have for some years been resisting calls to immunize their kids against diseases that were once common scourges. Somehow folks have absorbed the idea that immunization is dangerous to kids, and that magically nothing bad will happen to children if they are not vaccinated. Despite solid scientific evidence to the contrary, some parents persist in imagining that childhood vaccines cause autism. Despite the indisputable fact that because of vaccination we no longer need to fear smallpox and polio, or typhus, tetanus, typhoid, cholera, diphtheria—horrible diseases that devastated populations—people have allowed unfounded theories to frighten them to the point of putting their children at serious risk.
Vaccines do not kill children. Whooping cough kills children. While it is true that the older version of whooping cough vaccine had some side effects, occasionally severe ones, the “acellular” type now in use does not bear much risk; in either event, the disease itself has always posed a greater threat to children than has vaccination.
Vaccines do not cause autism. No one knows for certain what causes autism, but it pretty clearly has something to do with genetics; removing thimerosal, the vaccine preservative alleged to have caused a purported rise in cases, has done nothing to reduce the rate of autism diagnoses. One thing you can be sure of, though: viral and bacterial diseases do cause death, long-term physical harm, and mental disability.
Why have Americans become so superstitious? Where do people get ideas so misguided that they are led to put their children at risk, in a country where universal education is required? Shouldn’t an educated populace be wiser and more aware of the facts?
One reason is that we are being blitzed with propaganda for so-called “alternative medicine,” an approach that, more often than not, amounts to snake oil. A friend of mine, hearing of the continuing pain from my three-month-old shoulder injury, gave me a large bottle of pills that, while legally required to be called a “nutritional supplement,” were sold to her as an anti-inflammatory. She remarked, in handing the stuff over to me, that although her friends had assured her it’s highly effective, it hadn’t done anything for her.
This product costs around $100 for a bottle of 800 pills. One is supposed to take six tablets a day—that’s considered a “maintenance” dose.
When I looked up the product on the Web, not one skeptical word about it appeared in page after page of Google results. High on the lists of results were blissful songs of praise to the stuff. We learn, to our mounting joy, that the product is a cure-all. Not only does it ease your aches and pains, it reduces the occurrence of injury among athletes; lowers blood pressure; lowers cholesterol; prevents strokes and heart attacks; treats pancreatic cancer, breast cancer, multiple sclerosis, and hepatitis; eases the pain of rheumatoid arthritis; supports your joints (whatever that means); and aids digestion.
A miracle.
The research supporting these claims? Minimal to none. The buzz about the stuff is emanating from purveyors of vitamins and dietary supplements, the product’s manufacturer and distributors, naturopaths, and various other “holistic” practitioners.
Try to find solid clinical studies of this product, and you come up blank. Some “research” is quoted here and there, but when you examine the sources, you quickly see it’s bogus. The NIH and FDA have done nothing, as far as I can tell, to look into the product, whose sales in Germany are second only to aspirin. Adding tags like .edu to a Google search does nothing to bring up anything resembling actual science.
Adding “scam” and “snake oil” to the product’s brand name will bring up a few reports showing that the stuff does nothing for MS—but even with that search string, the results are full of sales pitches and ecstatic testimonials.
That notwithstanding, when the pain flared up a few days ago, I tried the pills. True to standard snake-oil claims, the product was said to cause few or no side effects, although its manufacturer notes it can cause an upset stomach and diarrhea.
Well, yes. It made me good and sick to my stomach but did nothing for the pain.
Lordie. We need to get out of Woo-Woo Land, both politically and intellectually. Part of the reason so many people subscribe to Woo-Woo is that our healthcare system is so poor. In quality of healthcare, the U.S. ranks at the bottom among developed nations. If you can’t get access to a doctor, you can’t get enough of her time to get diagnosed and treated effectively, or you can’t afford the treatment, you naturally seek alternatives. Unfortunately, many or most of these alternatives are unproven, ineffective, and sometimes downright unsafe.
Equally unfortunate, the products are aggressively marketed by profit-seeking entities (imagine the worth of a product that can sell like aspirin!) and touted by practitioners who may sincerely, if naively, buy into the hype. They’re making a great deal of money from alternative products and treatments. And when you try to look into the facts, you’re run around in circles—probably because there are no facts, only unsubstantiated claims and anecdotal stories, all of them coming from folks who have already bought into the propaganda.
The predictable result of weak science education is…well, exactly what we have. Ignorance leading to epidemics of preventable diseases that kill children, and a population of gullible consumers prone to wasting their money on highly profitable, untested nostrums.
Well, it’s past time to have the hideous Mexican fan palms cut back. In the late spring and early summer, these towering poles sprout long, husky rods packed with billions of brittle, sharp, pointy little flowers. These they shed all over the ground and into your pool, along with vast quantities of hard, BB-sized seeds designed to break pool equipment.
Every year, anyone who has a palm tree has to get the thing cut back. Otherwise the mess becomes intolerable. And they harbor insects. Right now they’re feeding the birds with legions of flesh-pink caterpillars. Cockroaches also love palm trees.
Some wise prior homeowner took it upon himself to plant four Mexican fans plus a desperately thirsty queen palm right next to the pool. Most guys charge $45 a tree to do the nasty, dangerous job of trimming them (every year at least one man is killed trying to do this job). That would be $225 that I don’t have.
Gerardo put up one of his pals to do the job. They not only cut back the four Mexican fan palms (I decided to leave the queen, because I can’t afford to trim all five trees), they also did some degree of “skinning”: cutting off the frond stumps often left on the trunk. When they’re left on there, they drop off in every high wind, and so all summer and half the winter the homeowner gets to pick them up out of the yard and off the street. They only charged $165. Couldn’t afford that, either, but it’s a lot better than two and a quarter.
It is incredible that the men will work that hard for so little pay. It takes several men to do the job: not only the athletic, tough fellow who climbs up the tree and hacks back the heavy, thorned fronds, but a man to spot him on the ground and another to pick up and haul the debris falling out of the tree.
The palm tree is one of the messiest, nastiest plants anyone could possibly be misguided enough to introduce into a yard. Mexican fan palms are particularly egregious, because they make neither shade nor edible fruit. It’s a critter that Easterners and Midwesterners think is quaint and exotic, so when they move here, they stupidly stick the things in the ground. Only after a few years do they realize what a monster they’ve adopted. An expensive, messy monster.
My neighbor Terri was grousing about having to get hers done, too. Like everyone, she’s feeling broke, and the annual cost of palm-tree grooming strikes her as onerous. Every year, the natives inveigh against palm trees, and every year, those of us who’ve inherited them with a piece of real estate consider chopping the darn things down. Terri remarked that she thought it would cost too much to have hers taken out. She did pay a lot to get rid of the rickety eucalyptus, which was threatening to cave in her roof.
I don’t know what it would take to remove a palm. For me, the problem is there’s only a few feet of room between the pool and the block wall along the lot line, which is where my trees reside. If they’re taken out, what on earth could take their place? A shade tree would need a lot more space—crammed into that tiny strip, it would quickly heave the wall and probably would break through the pool, too. It’s hard to picture what could tolerate the heat and cramped space, and without the palm trees, the pool area would look mighty bare.
Houses are sure expensive to own. Mine has been quiescent for awhile—just a couple of minor plumbing bills over the past year. But still, there are the regular costs of ordinary maintenance: trim the trees; cut back the palms; drain and replace the stale, mineral-thick pool water; get the yard guy in here to beat back the weeds every couple of months; touch up the paint; maintain the central heating & cooling unit; maintain the pool filter and pump.
As usual, the fronds dropped into the pool. As usual, the palm tree guys broke one of my aluminum pool wands fishing heavy, ungainly fronds out of the drink. And as usual, they left an ungodly mess in the water.
Gerardo helped me clean out the pool—he ran the hose bonnet and got out all the pieces of junk that would choke the pool cleaner. And then some: he really went above and beyond the call of duty, retrieving almost all the small stuff that settled to the bottom. Offered to pay him, but he wouldn’t take a dime.
So now the pool is cleaned out, Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner has swept up the last of the litter, and the water has been hyperchlorinated, turning the thing into a puddle of Clorox. The stains from the seeds, dust, pollen, and flowers that sifted into the deep end have bleached away. And maybe by this evening or tomorrow I’ll be able to go swimming again.
You may recall that not so long agoI was agonizing over whether to buy a little Shark upright bagless vacuum cleaner, shortly after having bought a Eureka model that I grew to loathe more with each use. Well, I finally capitulated and bought the thing at Costco, where I paid about $20 more than Amazon is now charging (at the time of the purchase, Costco was underpricing Amazon).
Mwa ha! Click for link to Amazon!
This is a terrific gadget! I love this machine!!! Best vacuum cleaner I’ve ever owned, and by golly, when you’re a survivor of the Pleistocene you can remember dragging a leaden Electrolux on sled runners around the house. You can, that is to say, remember owning a lot of vacuum cleaners.
What I like about it:
• It’s wonderfully lightweight. Easy to push around and easy to maneuver.
• The brush head thingie on the bottom is narrow enough to get between the bathtub and the toilet and to weasel in between furniture legs.
• The suction defies belief! This thing is astonishing. And when you run it along the baseboard, it picks up bits of debris and dog hair all the way right up to the wall. The hose is as effective as the floor vacuum part. If it gets ahold of your leg or your hand, it gloms on like a lamprey eel. Check out how much dog hair it sucked up in just one vacuuming adventure:
Cleaned this out before starting to vacuum!
And Cassie isn’t even shedding much—there were no major dog dunes on the floor when this housecleaning episode started.
• It does not blow dog hair up into the air as you’re moving around the tiled floor. A miracle!
• It has a generously long attachment hose to begin with, and it comes with an extra length of hose.
• Its attachments are sturdy and intelligently designed. The crevice tool is very long and slender, letting you get deep into narrow spots.
• It has a good long cord.
• It runs pretty quietly, especially in the “bare floors” mode.
Possible drawbacks:
◊ I thought I’d prefer a model that uses bags, having emptied the dirt out of altogether too many old-fashioned vacuum cleaners. The Shark, however, is easy to open and clean out, and so far I haven’t ended up with the dirt all over me instead of inside the trash can.
◊ The cylindrical canister that houses the dustbin and motor is bulky, obviating rolling the vacuum under the bed or other furniture.
◊ It doesn’t have a lot of space for onboard attachments. IMHO, that’s a good thing: I’ve always hated having to haul all that junk around the house willy-nilly.
On reflection, I realized I seem to have accumulated quite a few Shark gadgets. When my ancient Rowenta warhorse iron finally wore out, I bought a cheapo Sunbeam, which worked fine but got way too hot around the grip. After burning my fingers on the thing, I picked up a Shark steam iron. The price assuredly was nothing like what a Rowenta costs, and yet it works just about as well. The stainless-steel is good and tough—so far it hasn’t scratched up at all—and you get a lot of control over the amount of steam emitted and the heat levels. I would call it very comparable to the Rowenta at a far more reasonable cost.
Then there’s the Shark floor steamer that I finally found to replace the beloved old Bissell steamer, a gadget that could not be beat—never has been, never will be. Shark’s steam mop comes pretty close, though. If you have a lot of tile flooring, this is the contraption to own. With no stinky, toxic chemicals, it steams the dirt and grease right up. You end up with your floors clean, with no eau de dirty mop perfume in the air after you’ve finished the job.
Its only drawback is that the pad that comes with is almost useless. It’s too thick, and it doesn’t stay attached. And they only give you one. I’ve solved that problem, however, with those microfiber rags you can buy in the automotive department at Costco and, presumably, at auto parts stores like Checker and Auto Zone. I just clip one on neatly, using a couple of clothes pins. These things are highly washable, and because you can buy a great stack of them, you can switch them out as you move from room to room (my entire house is tiled), giving yourself a clean mop head at all times.
I was mildly surprised when I realized my house had been invaded by a school of sharks. Since I’m kind of picky about the gadgetry I use for cleaning, it must mean the Shark products are OK. Maybe even a little better than OK.
Make that “handyperson hint.” 😉 For the first time in recorded history, a piece of the junk that’s hoarded in the garage actually came in handy! It just became part of a hand-crafted fancy-Dan paper towel holder. A frugal fancy-Dan paper towel holder: today’s out-of-pocket was nothing.
Trying to find places to stash the Lifetime Supply of Costco Paper Towels, I had one roll left over and realized the hated plastic paper-towel holder over the washer area, installed and abandoned by Satan and Proserpine, was empty. Problem is, like all cheapie grocery-store plastic paper-towel holders, the thing won’t hold a roll of paper towels, especially if you have the temerity to try to tear a towel off the roll. Every time a roll of paper towels falls off, it tumbles into the utility sink below, which is often full of water. That’s why the thing has been empty for a long time.
True Junk
Out of the blue, a lightning bolt of inspiration: if a person had a pair of those wooden curtain rod hangers, the kind that come with 1970s- and 80s-style wooden dowel curtain rods, said person could attach them to the wall, cut a piece of curtain-rod doweling to fit, scoot it through the towels’ cardboard tube, and…well. You get the idea. Not to say voilà!
Interestingly, I happened to have a pair of pretty ugly wooden curtain rod holders, stashed inside a dusty shoebox under a hoard of old wooden curtain rings that somehow just never quite worked out.
Not only that, but an old wood-dowel curtain rod, part of the didn’t-work-out project, was collecting dust atop the garage cabinets. And I also happened to have a saw…
The holes that Satan drilled and countersank in the drywall were not far enough apart to accommodate a paper-towel roll between the inch-wide curtain rod holders. But there’s a lot of electric and plumbing where the plastic thing is hanging. So I decided to use the screw hole he’d put on the right side, which really is dangerously close to the pipes that go to the sink, and then drill new holes on the left, where I think (hope) there are fewer obstructions.
Attached the wooden hanger things to the wall, leaving plenty of room to hang the roll of paper towels.
Sawed off 20 inches of the doweling (could’ve made it shorter but am not going to do it over again right this minute). Drilled a hole in the center of the newly cut-off end. Removed the finial from rod’s long remainder and screwed it into the new hole. And…
It works! The paper towel roll fits, exactly as promised, over the dowel. To reload, all you have to do is unscrew one of the finials, take off the empty cardboard tube, slide a new roll onto the dowel, and reattach the finial. Not bad for a garage, eh?
Don’t ask about the wiring draped over the washer faucets! It’s better than the Romex Satan had draped back and forth across the garage door opener chain!
This was strictly a spur-of-the-moment job. If I were going to make a paper towel holder for the kitchen, I’d set the curtain-rod hangers closer together, so they’d just clear a standard roll. And then I’d cut the rod so that it would fit more snugly.
Sometimes I’ve wished I had a paper towel holder in the bathroom. It occurs to me that you could replace the metal hardware-store towel rods with lash-ups like this for your bath towels, and then add a matching paper towel holder. Depending on your decor, of course. And your ambition.
that I finally found to replace the beloved old Bissell steamer, a gadget that could not be beat—never has been, never will be. Shark’s steam mop comes pretty close, though. If you have a lot of tile flooring, this is the contraption to own. With no stinky, toxic chemicals, it steams the dirt and grease right up. You end up with your floors clean, with no eau de dirty mop perfume in the air after you’ve finished the job.
