Dear Guy, It really ticked me off this morning when I arrived for my Zumba class to see you, walking up to the studio with your wife/girlfriend/sister/whatever and then pulling up a chair right next to the studio door. It was highly unusual, to say the least, that you didn’t just drop her off and then leave. I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you are a really nice guy who just cares about the interests of your wife/girlfriend/sister/whatever and decided to accompany her since you had nothing else to do for that hour. I’m not suggesting that you had sleazy motives at all,…
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An Open Letter To Customer Service Representatives
Dear Customer Service Representatives (specifically those of you who manage customer calls for your company’s 800 number), I understand that you field all kinds of calls from all kinds of people in all different kinds of moods every day, and I know that you have a tough job. However, when I have to explain my problem five times in order for you to get to a place where you stop interrupting me to offer solutions that have nothing to do with my needs because you didn’t let me finish, it’s annoying. It’s also annoying (to say the least) when, in response to one of my complaints about some of your…
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The Golden Rule Seems Broken.
I’ve been wondering about something I hope you can shed some light on for me. At what point in the last, say, forty or fifty years, did it become the norm for Americans to stop giving others the benefit of the doubt or even the simple courtesy of not jumping to conclusions in everyday situations? The Golden Rule seems broken to me. Let me try to explain where I’m coming from. Two weeks ago, I went to IKEA with the older boy, to get one more thing for his dorm room. One thing. Literally. And so we went to the self-checkout registers.** There were three registers open and in use,…
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So These Four Jews Go To Germany…
While on our wonderful family vacation in Germany, we had three Jewish experiences (two were planned; one was not) which I thought deserved mention in their own post. We first visited the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site, which is completely different from saying that we visited Dachau. When the four of us were leaving Kat and Holger’s house to make the visit there, they made sure to tell us that though the area is known for this horrible piece of the Holocaust, the town of Dachau is a lovely place and we should make sure to visit the Altstadt there, since we’d be in the area. (Check out the website…
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Apparently I Should Be Eating More Marshmallows.
You might be surprised at what I have chosen to write about today. On second thought, you might not. In spite of the castles, the Alps, the colorful town squares in the Altstadts of Bavaria, and all of the other local flavor we experienced, what I’ve decided to tell you about first are… THE GROCERY STORES. Yes, the grocery stores. I loved going to the grocery stores in Germany. Let me back up a bit. Some of you new readers may not know the extent of my foreign fetish: you can read about why foreigners make me giddy by clicking here. Anyway, I let Kat know ahead of time that…