by Sarah Morgan on August 9, 2010
I got my oil changed this weekend, and at the end, as always, they warned me that I would get surveyed.
Note: Honda makes wonderful cars. They make wonderful dealerships. They make wonderful service departments. They hire wonderful people. But holy hell, they survey you to death. Every time I see them, they survey me. Then the dealership calls to survey me again. Then Honda of North America calls to survey me. Honda: I have a lot of opinions, but even I do not have enough opinions to make all this surveying worth your while.
Anyway. When I paid, the cashier warned me that I’d be surveyed, and cheerily informed me that “anything less than excellent is failure for us”. And then when the dealership called to check on me, they, too, told me that I’d be getting another call, and again reminded me that “anything less than excellent is failure”.
I’m not yet enough a curmudgeon to take these issues up with people making minimum wage and reading a script, but honestly, this makes me nuts. Anything less than excellent is failure? This is the problem with our country today: we’ve come to believe this, and we’re raising generations of kids who believe it too, and I think it’s garbage.
Because if anything less than excellent is failure, when you try something and are terrible at it, you should give up. And you shouldn’t get praise for working your tail off if it didn’t produce a perfect result. And heaven forbid young impressionable children are allowed to experience anything other than being excellent, because that would obviously be the worst thing in the world.
My oil change was perfectly fine. But I wasn’t fed grapes, and they made me watch the Today show, and I didn’t get a mint left on my dashboard. But I was perfectly satisfied until they started harping about excellence.
Isn’t good enough ever good enough?
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by Sarah Morgan on August 7, 2010
I can’t stand Davidoff Cool Water cologne.
It’s got nothing to do with whether or not it actually smells bad. Not really. To me, it smells like a kid who sat in front of me in high school who was mean to my friends. He’s probably grown up to be perfectly nice. People tend to. But I still hate that smell.
Then there’s some other cologne. Abercrombie & Fitch Woods, I think. It isn’t that it smells very good. I don’t think it really does. But it has… nicer memories.
Anyway.
I had some conversations this week about smells. There are some you love, some you hate, and some that just mean a lot. Smells are memories, and they’ve got such strong emotions attached to them.
That’s been making me think about the things you choose to smell like. I realized that you could chart out your life by the scents you wore. It’s a personality history in little bottles.
Here’s mine, as much as I can remember. The theory works pretty well for me.
Love’s Baby Soft (I think there was a law decreeing it My First Perfume)
Coty Vanilla Fields (…for years)
Elizabeth Arden Sunflowers
Clinique Happy (…and years)
Carolina Herrera
Vera Wang
Marc Jacobs
Thierry Mugler Angel (…and years)
…and lately, I’ve been switching among Burberry Brit or Jo Malone Vintage Gardenia in the summer, and Burberry London or Jo Malone Nutmeg & Ginger in the winter. But mostly the Vintage Gardenia.
I’m going to look a lot more carefully at people’s dressers and sink vanities, now.
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by Sarah Morgan on July 29, 2010
The phlebotomist who waxed lyrical about Taber’s Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary, and went positively into raptures about the possibility of getting her own copy for Christmas.
The historian who finds out what people centuries ago snacked on, or what kind of shoelaces they wore, or what kind of curse words they used.
The pet-store clerk who spent 10 minutes lecturing on Labrador puppies, flushable cat litter, and how to help a shedding gecko peel off its skin, all while demonstrating the latter with infinite care.
The trainer who never loses an opportunity to educate people about healthier choices.
My coworkers, who make – and laugh at – puns in interventional cardiology terminology.
The chemical engineer who, while cooking an amazing meal, who will describe the viscosity of a sauce both in terms of its taste and in terms of its molecular structure.
I love these people. I need these people. The world needs these people.
The world needs people who care passionately about things. People who light up like Christmas at the chance to talk in detail about the things they care about. Crazy things. Silly things. Obscure things, ridiculously complex things, recklessly dangerous, utterly mundane, seemingly unimportant things. The world needs people who throw their hearts into what they do.
The world needs geeks.
Otherwise, how would the rest of us learn?
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by Sarah Morgan on June 26, 2010
So here’s where I get all reminiscent. Recently I was watching a Powerpoint presentation, and the presenter made us laugh by saying “ding!” when he wanted the person over by the computer to move to the next slide.
See, he was imitating the noise that filmstrips made in school. In the 80s. Filmstrips. Oh, look it up.
I didn’t go to school until fourth grade, but even still, it made me wonder – how many of my school memories don’t happen anymore? Like…
- hoping to get chosen to clap erasers
- the way ditto machines made purple-inked copies
- not being allowed to have a Trapper Keeper because they wouldn’t fit in the desks
But then I kept wondering. What about the other stuff?
- inventing silly songs at recess
- ruining your Keds falling in the stream
- trying to get all the way around the living room without touching the floor
It seems like there’s this awful combination that’s always growing from one generation to the next, where adults both demand more of, but at the same time coddle their kids. They’re safeguarded and told what to do next and everything is safe and purpose-driven as they’re shepherded from one organized activity to the next every moment of the day. It was more like that for me than for my parents and it’s more like that for kids now than it was for me.
Safety and education is good. But isn’t also good to learn how to amuse yourselves?
I wonder what kids’ memories will be of today – and if they’ll have any of the anarchy and exploration left.
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