I recently went along with my wife to her doctor’s appointment. I tend to dread this event because of one key element. Her particular doctor never holds his schedule … EVER. This is not a 10 or 15 minute inconvenience. If you actually see him under an hour past your schedule slot, you might as well go play the lottery because the planets are aligned. On this particular day, it was not the schedule issue that caused my major portion of annoyance. Instead, as Linda was checking out with the receptionist, the doctor’s accountant caught my attention. To be honest, my life runs at a pretty hurriedly pace. This includes my walking pace, my reading pace, my speech cadence and my inability to actually just sit down and watch a TV program. Linda classifies this as an O/C disorder but I view it as getting the most out of each and every day. This disorder (if you must) causes me to be more sensitive to inefficient actions of others. This particular accountant was standing over a desk and reading pieces of paper. Once read he would proceed to slowly rip it lengthwise into about 7 strips. Then he would take each strip and tear it again into about 10 pieces. Once a strip was completed, he would then gather up each of the pieces and stack them neatly on top of each other until he had a neatly organized pile of paper. Imagine this at a pace of 10 seconds for each long strip and another 10 for the cross rips. Once stacked he would slowly place them by hand in a garbage can and then start the whole process over again. I watched 3 of these cycles which literally felt like fingernail scratches on a blackboard (does anyone actually know what a blackboard is anymore?). Linda completed her business and we exited the office. I explained to Linda what she forced me to go through (prompting the “disorder” label again) and explained how Office Max has ads about every Sunday for shredders which are a) faster and b) far more efficient especially if you get the cross cutting ones. The bright side of this was I completely forgot about the hour delay in seeing the doctor.
While I am on the subject of annoyances I have a survey question. Who is the more annoying marketing spokesperson?
- Paul Sherman (from the Sherman Store)
- The Mac Guy
- The Progressive Lady
In case those marketing organizations are reading, I refuse to even watch, much less purchase the product, based on their condescending tone. Guessing I must not fit their target demographic.
To complete this month’s quota, I figured I would mention I recently earned another medal for my running collection. I basically train year round for one key race a year and that race is the Bix7 held in Davenport Iowa. For those who have never experienced it, the event is 7 miles (actually 2 miles if you choose to do the QuickBix) in some difficult hills. The first 7/10ths of the mile is basically straight up followed by ~2 miles down and then the smaller but definitely harder hill short of the turnaround and then reversed. This year I finally lined up at the start without much injury for a change and that coupled with favorable start temperature led to a P.R. for me. Usually the temperature and humidity are through the roof due to the late July start, but thanks to Global Warming (smirk) we starting the morning at 57 degrees (yes, I was shivering when I got out of the car) and warmed up to around 87 by mid race. I’ve ran it in the past over 90 with 23 people going to the hospital that year.
It is very apparent that I spend waay too much time at Target or there is just waay to much stuff to be observed there. I think this is like my third post based on things that I have seen there and thought was interesting. This particular incident occurred at the checkout lane a few days ago. While we were completing our purchase there, something on the electronic register display caught my eye. On the lower left hand of the LCD panel there was a section labeled as Last 10 Ratings (or something very close to that heading, I forgot to write down the actual words). Underneath that label was a series of 10 letters which I am guessing where the results of the last 10 assessments. In this particular situation there were only the letters G and R. There were definitely more R’s than G’s, but there was absolutely no legend for what they actually meant. If it was important enough to have it visible to the customer, you would think there would be some explanation for the values provided. I decided not to question the clerk on the chance the ratings she was getting were not flattering. The trip home was spent pondering the potential rating options:
Life Intrigued 