Mr T's rants and ravings

I’m on the road a lot and pretty often I get hungry while driving. It’s pretty hard not to when one is taking 5-6 hour drives or when one is rushing from one appointment to the next with little time between them. So occasionally I stop (or drive through) a fast food restaurant to pick up a snack.

Now I know all the bad things about the food. The quality is often not so good and the calorie counts are high and blah blah blah. But they are cheap (relatively) filling and sometimes you just need to get some food in your system. My biggest problem with them lately is the service though.

Not that it is slow but that they get the orders wrong. I’ve had triple Whoppers (yeah I know) come with only two meat patties. Or missing ketchup. Or added stuff that I asked to be left off. Or order hot chocolate and get hot coffee. Some of the errors, like the coffee, mean that the order is inedible for me.

Yesterday I ordered a bacon burger that turned out to be completely someone else’s order. No bacon and a bunch of stuff on it that I don’t like. Fortunately I had decided to eat in rather than drive through. It seems like fairly often after driving through and getting on down the road and finding out that the order is wrong. Far too late to turn back and get it corrected. There seems like little one can do about this.

Yesterday’s problem was resolved as they always are when you bring things back and show them the problem. So it is an annoyance when you eat in but it is still a big deal when you drive through.

Oh and did I mention that the deciding factor between eating in and driving through was that they had a sign that said “free wi-fi inside” in the window? There was wi-fi but my laptop could not connect to it for reasons that are lost to me. Somehow I didn’t think that the people behind the counter would be able to help me. And by that time I had pretty much decided that I had lost enough time at this one location to stay. Had the staff gotten my order right and given me a bit more confidence I might have tried to get the problem fixed. That would have meant better satisfaction for the next customer and been a good thing for the store. But somehow fixing their problems had fallen to a low priority for me.

I’m not sure what the answer is for these places with regards to getting orders right. They have to hire people smart enough to do the job but not so smart that they get too bored to do the job right. A fine line. And few of the employees seem to feel invested in the company or store enough to take real pride in their work. It’s tough. But I sure do wish they could get my orders right. Is that really too much to ask?

I’ve been on the Federal do not call list (sign up your phones at http://donotcall.gov) so when I get a span phone call I get annoyed. Today one came in and asked me to hit 6 to talk to a representative. I did.

After a minute a person asked if I was holding to lower my credit card interest rate. I replied that “I am if you can tell me who I am. Other wise I am holding to see if I should file a Federal complaint against you.”

Amazingly they hung up before I finished my statement. Do you think they realized that they were breaking the law?  At least I figure I cost them time and money.

Don’t read this if you object to spoilers. You’ve been warned.

This show gets me worked up week after week. Were it not for my wanting to spend time with Mrs. T. who likes to watch it I wouldn’t watch.

Two things bother me about it. One is Jack Bauer. Yeah, he’s the hero. But the man is so into torture and it seems like each show brings things down to the bad guys winning (where the bad guys are defined as anti what ever Jack is for) or jack has to torture someone. And yet torture is bad/evil. Such a conundrum.

Of course it ignores that torture doesn’t always work. In fact if often backfires. So what we have are artificial cases that make it look like a bad thing gets a good result. The ends justifies the means? In this case they are building a straw man argument of sorts. What if they showed it sometimes not working? But on 24 is is so artificially clear that “torture is the answer.”

This is not a good thing. In fact I worry a little that the show is going to convince a lot of people that torture is ok if done by the good guys. Talk about a TV show teaching something about morality!

And the other part of the show that bothers me (this is the spoiler I warned you about). Some of the characters are complete idiots. The VP tonight should absolutely 100% without hesitation have ordered the re-taking of the White House. But no. He doesn’t want to be blamed for the off chance that someone could hold him responsible for the President getting killed. Ordering the retaking is still a no-brainer.

If he doesn’t order the re-taking they might get the President and bad things happen. (Which oh by the way exactly what is happening.) If he does order the retaking and the President is killed people will blame him. But at least the real bad guys lose. Probably he survives to finish the term as President. Maybe if he is as good as he things he is people forgive him for any bad that comes out of it and he gets reelected.  Fifty years from now someone will write about him and call the book “More Profiles in Courage” and he’ll have done the right thing. And maybe, and this has a high probability of happening, the President will be saved, the bad guys will be dead, the White House will be free. In the real work there is not Superman Jack Bauer. Dang how hard is this one to call?

Maybe idiot is not the right word. Maybe the right way to describe it is that people are so totally self-serving that they can’t put the good of the nation ahead of themselves. There are just so many of those characters on 24. Sometimes it makes we want to throw things. Arrggghh!

Now the President had a terrible choice tonight. Did she make the right decision? I don’t think so. Not on a rational logical basis. But of course you can’t make decisions about your children’s well being logically and rationally. On the other hand she is the President of the US! We ask a lot of those people.

Now I don’t fault her completely. I don’t know how I would have decided and perhaps I would have done the same. But just once I want to see someone do something genuinely heroic at great personal cost. I want to cry for them in their pain rather than wait for some deus ex machina Jack Bauer to make things right.

Yeah I’m grumpy. 24 does that to me.

Lately it seems like as soon as I close my eyes at night my mind starts working on blog posts. I start thinking about something and my mind organizes my thoughts in the way they would be organized for a blog. The problem is that I’m really trying to get to sleep so the posts never actually get written. In fact it seems like as soon as I open my eyes and get out of bed the mind shuts down and I lose the whole thought line. Sigh!

So the end result is that mentally I have written a lot of posts but the blogs themselves are not seeing any activity. I’m not sure what this all means.

Has my mind become hard-wired to thinking in 500-1000 word bites? Is this good or bad? I need to think about this.

Lately I have been getting an extra amount of spam offering to help me get a degree from “prestigious NON-ACCREDITED universities.” That’s the formatting they use. “NON-ACCREDITED” is shouted out in all caps. I have to wonder why?

Is it because they want to make sure you know that the “prestigious universities” they are working with do not have accreditation? Somehow I doubt it. After all “non-accredited” and “prestigious” are pretty much opposites when it comes to universities. The other option is that they are highlighting “non-accredited” to fool gullible uneducated people into thinking that “non-accredited” is a good thing. Surely, people must think, it is highlighted so that you notice how good it is?

And yet people fall for this sort of thing. For some reason they think, or fool themselves into thinking, that their real life experience is as good as a formal education. They think that all they need, like the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz, is a diploma to prove how smart and knowledgeable they are.

Oh there is something to be said for real world on the job training. When I went back for my Masters there was an awful lot that I already knew. I could have passed tests in at least half of the classes without actually taking the classes. But these was this other half where I learned a lot of new things. And even in the classes I could have passed without attending classes I learn a lot of new things. I think this is true for most people.

Rare is the person who knows as much as a formally trained person does and generally those people are so obviously good that no one cares if they have a degree. Of course if you are an idiot no number of degrees is going to overcome that – earned degrees or otherwise.

I’m in Texas this week. I’m here helping to take care of my father who is recovering from surgery. I probably make it to Texas on business about once a year. Sometimes twice. And I really like Texas. But it is different. Much different from New England. In fact its almost like a different country in some ways.

Take flags. One sees Texas flags everywhere. It’s in logos of businesses and organizations. It’s flying from flag poles and painted on signs. Every classroom in the state has both a US and a Texas flag hanging in the room. Occasionally the Texas flag is larger than the US flag. Intentionally so? Probably not but who knows?

Besides flags there are outlines of the state map in a lot of places. And address signs are always clear that the city, town, county or what ever is in Texas. It’s pretty hard not to know you are in Texas if you can see and pay any attention at all.

Food is different as well. There is steak of course. Though Chicago and St Louis may actually have more and (dare I say it) better steak places. But there are lots of good steak places here. And there is barbeque. I love barbeque and there are other centers of fine barbeque but it is different. The Carolinas and Tennessee have great barbeque but it is different from what you find it Texas. It’s all good and I like it all. But I still take advantage of it when I am in Texas.

Of course there is Tex-Mex. This is one of my favorite foods and Texas is where it is done best. Sometimes it is hard to enjoy Tex-Mex or Mexican food other places until the effects of a visit to Texas have faded a bit. Refried bean are almost inedible in New Hampshire but I love it in Texas. You’d hardly believe its called the same thing in both places. It has so much more taste in Texas.

People are a little different as well. I don’t just mean the accents either. People do wear cowboy boots. You do see cowboy hats and big belt buckles as well. You also see a lot more women showing a lot more cleavage than you do in the north. Lots of heavy makeup and seriously done up hair is more common as well. It looks good on a lot more than you’d expect as well. Although the word “cheap” does come to mind in some cases. But you learn to expect different styles and standards after a while. Either way Texas does seem to have more than their share of attractive women.

Texans are friendly – very friendly. Even you a Yankee like myself. I really enjoy the people in Texas. Helpful, friendly, polite, outgoing, and fun loving. People and food are two reasons I enjoy my Texas visits. I’ll be back in February and am looking forward to it.