Don't Be A Monkey

An oldie but a goodie.

I didn't write this maniacal & masterfully metaphorical masterpiece about monkeys, I just like to refer to it all the time.

But while we didn't write the thing, you and I sure could have! Please read the part after this ... rhyme?

Scientists placed 7 monkeys in a big cage.

From the top center of the cage, well beyond the reach of the monkeys, they hung a bunch of bananas.

Beneath the bananas: they placed a ladder.

Almost immediately, one of the monkeys spotted the bananas and began to climb the ladder.

As this monkey did so, scientists sprayed the monkey on the ladder with a strong jet of cold, cold water -- as well as the other 6 monkeys, too -- with ice cold water from a fire hose.

The screaming monkey on the ladder fell off - wet and freezing cold – and the other monkeys sat for a time on the floor - wet, cold, shivering and bewildered - bewildered, but thoughtful.  

Or so you would think.

Soon, the temptation of the bananas became too great, and another monkey began to climb the ladder. Again, the scientists sprayed that ambitious monkey with more freezing cold water as well as all the other monkeys, too.

Screaming angry wet monkeys ... and I bet at least one of 'em smelled really bad -- so you're now dealing with bewildered, hungry, wet, pissed off, stinky monkeys.  Nice.

Then -- a third monkey tried to climb the ladder to reach the bananas.

But!   Lo and behold,  the other monkeys, wanting to avoid the cold spray, pulled him off the ladder and beat the crap out of him!

The scientists then *removed* one of the monkeys from the group and a new monkey was introduced to the dynamic. Spotting the bananas, Mr. Newmonkey naively began to climb the ladder.

As you probably guessed, the other monkeys immediately pulled Mr. Newmonkey down and gave him a sound beating (they beat the crap out of him).

The scientists then removed a second original monkey from the cage and replaced him with a another new monkey. As with the first new monkey, the 2nd new monkey began to climb the ladder and, again, the other monkeys in the cage immediately pulled him down and beat him up – including the *first* new monkey who had never been sprayed by the fire hose!  Mr. Newmonkey, shame on you!

By the end of the experiment, after *all* the monkeys had been replaced and none of the original monkeys were left: despite *none* of them ever experiencing the stabbing cold, wet jet spray blast from the fire hose: *none* of them dared to ever even *think* try for the bananas!

Why?

Because that’s the way they’d always done it around there.

Don't follow the behavior of others in or out of the office just because they say so or "that's the way we've always done it."  If it doesn't make sense:  fix it.

... think for yourself.   Or, if you're like a lot of other people, watch out for Mr. Newmonkey, he might just screw up your day.  BUT!  Be nice to him or her ... they might just make your life *easier!*

-- JM --

Differences

Most current post rescued from the old blog (before they blow it up because I'm moving it to GOOGLE from GoDaddy) after returning to 'Murica about 1 year ago (in September) after first heading that way in June of 2003:

One of the biggest changes I’ve noticed about The States after being away for a while: Everything’s “Online”

The biggest difference I’ve noticed so far since being back after quite a while is “how you get stuff.” It’s all “online.” Grooming appointments for the dog, online. Food: online. Paying rent and communicating with my apartment building’s management: online. Pizza, booze, almost everything else: online. Online online online. Blehh.

Is it only a only a matter of time before we can "Fill 'er up" online?  Actually, you can kinda do that, can't you, sorta?  Aren't we already able to get gas for our cars online and I just haven’t figured out how to do that yet?

Everything can be, and often is, found and ordered online compared to “the old-fashioned way” of getting it by driving to a store and actually shopping (looking around, touching, etc.) and maybe even actually talking to an employee/salesperson before buying it. 

You can order crap-food from McDonald's and have it delivered to your house!!!

Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m aware that many Americans had been ordering stuff online while I was stationed in Italy; Amazon Prime and all that, but I didn’t.  I was apparently one of the ignorant few who held fast to buying stuff by actually going to the store. If it wasn’t there, I didn’t get it. Kind of like “you don’t know what you don’t know,” except in this case it was “you can’t buy what’s not there.”

Since I’ve been back here for just short of two weeks, we’ve ordered pizza online and had it delivered.  Ordered (way too expensive) burgers and then picked them up from a place downstairs and right next to our apartment building! I couldn’t help but think “Why not just walk down there, order it and maybe talk to someone while you wait for it?” Don’t ask me, I didn’t make these changes, someone else did. And, rather than speaking to someone on the phone about my cable channel “package,” I customized it online before committing to paying for it.  I *did* “chat” (typed) back and forth with a cable-rep and asked them at one point “wouldn’t this be easier if I called you on the phone?”  At that point I was told “No sir, this is how we do this” or something similar that made no real sense to me.

Much like when you actually *do* speak to a ‘Tad,’ or ‘Jim’ or ‘Lisa’ or ‘Sue,’ when dealing with a Customer Service department - but you detect a distinct accent that tells you that Customer Service Call Center is probably not located anywhere in the United States, I was pretty sure they didn’t want to talk to me because of a similiar geographic issue.

No matter how hard they try to convince you that they're in Texas or anywhere else in the U.S., sometimes ya just *know* they're not. I copy/pasted the whole conversation and captured a few sentences which definitely indicated the same thing: that the ‘chat’ was with someone on a different continent. No big deal, after about TWO HOURS of typing tho, I was actually able to get what I thought was a better “cable package” for cheaper.

SO ANYWAY, this afternoon I was looking for a table, a ‘bistro table’ they call them, to put on our balcony. After breaking down and succumbing to this new process (does ‘succumbing’ in any way related to “succubus?” It would be appropriate!) and looking around at various kinds of “available” (well, ‘available’ meaning something different now, remember) little tables at all the big store online sites for places like Sears, Walmart, Costco, Sam’s, Lowe’s, Office Depot, Home Depot, etc., I went to the place with the closest thing to what I wanted (Lowe’s) and, after the quasi-expected disappointment (it wasn’t what I thought it would be) I found I was fortunately in an area which had a bunch of other stores around it: not a “mall” in the traditional sense, more like a “commercial store area” that seemed to be built up and developed with that specific purpose in mind.

Table bought in person vice online.

So I drove around and I found this “home stuff” store that’s kinda hard to describe. It had all sorts of “home stuff” in it (duh), one of which was lots of “stools” and “benches” and stuff, mostly for indoor use. And I found this one here nicely modeled by Duke, which *immediately* reminded me of my late Uncle David whose hobby was woodworking. He was known for his walking sticks and canes he used to show and sell at art shows as well as on a website I made for him on one of my earlier websites called “Artsticks.”

Uncle David's "Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake XVI"

Uncle David used to carve his sticks and canes from solid logs, the most impressive being his “snake sticks” which people were always surprised to learn weren’t 2 pieces of would (stick inserted through spiraled snake).

So when I saw this wooden table which was an imperfect slice of a log made into a functional piece of art by filling in the gaps with lucite (I guess) and mounting it on legs, it reminded me of Uncle David and the nights I’d spent camping with my Dad and him, my cousins and my grandfather (Uncle David’s brother) when Uncle David would just be carving sticks at the campfire ‘just to carve them’ -- way before he “got serious” with the snakesticks and other cool stuff you can still see on his website.

It was a no brainer. I got it. And I love it.

My point: it was “the actual shopping,” the “being there” that brought me to the table. I wouldn’t have found it otherwise because it’s not online.

The salesperson who saw me “looking around” even helped me look at a few other little tables *and* they gave me a discount (amounted to -$8, hey, better than a stick in the eye, right (pun intended)) because he agreed with me after the conversation we had (one you can’t have with a website, although you might be able to leave them feedback via an e-mail!) about the store’s cool, odd and assorted and eclectic collection of stuff that, even though they’re a chain store, was different in each of their stores and no store had all the same stuff. As a matter of fact, I think I got the two chairs on my balcony from another one of these same stores and this particular store had no idea what I was talking about when I asked someone for a little table to go with the two chairs I’d gotten at ‘one of their other stores.’

We agreed that it’s no fun anymore and you “can’t shop right” online and all that jazz I’ve already written about “shopping and interacting in person being better than ordering online” and that it’s not as “fun” to choose stuff from a picture and then either having it delivered or picking it up at a store ... a store that *used* to actually *have* your item there for you to pick up, but now only has a picture of it on their website. And after you click on it and put it in “your cart” (which I think will soon be as funny as the picture of a 3.5” floppy used as the button to ‘save’ things, but many people don’t remember 3.5” floppy disks anymore just as I’m guessing they’ll collectively soon forget what a “shopping cart” is) you click some other button and then either have it delivered to your house -- where you’ve been sitting on your ass doing nothing but gaining weight from lack of exercise ... so you order magic weight loss pills or some other gimmick to help you lose the weight you gained from running your life online instead of on your feetses.

And they don’t have “enough stuff” in the stores anymore, either, I don’t think. That’s part of the fun: looking at stuff while you’re there with the intent of getting something else! I even went to a place called they called a “Super Store.” But there they only had “the latest and greatest” models. If you wanted something else (an earlier model of something, for example), as I said: you need to order it from their website and they’ll have it delivered to the store or your door the next day from some mysterious warehouse on the outskirts of town. Can’t blame ‘em ... nice business model, but it’s NO FUN.

PREDICTION: These mysterious warehouses on the outskirts of town from which our ‘overnight deliveries’ come from will soon be also accessible to the public as showrooms and we’ll be able to purchase stuff there since we’ll be saving the company the costs involved in magically delivering it after we clickity click on their websites, maybe?

... and won't that be like going back to how it used to be done?  They can save money by having us go to them for our stuff instead of the expenses involved in all this 'home delivery' thing?  I dunno.  What do *I* know?

Sophia

Sophia will be 83 on September 20th of this year.

Sophia Loren was born as Sofia Scicolone at the Clinica Regina Margherita in Rome, Italy, on September 20, 1934.

Her father, Riccardo Scicolone, was married to another woman and refused to marry her mother, Romilda Villani, despite the fact that she was the mother of his two children (Sophia and her younger sister Maria Scicolone).

Growing up in the slums of Pozzuoli during the second World War without any support from her father, she experienced much sadness in her childhood.

Her life took an unexpected turn for the best when, at age 14, she entered into a beauty contest where she placed as one of the finalists.

It was there that Sophia caught the attention of film producer Carlo Ponti, some 22 years her senior, whom she eventually married in 1966 once he finally obtained a divorce from his first wife.

Some quotes attributed to Sophia:

“There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.”

“Beauty is how you feel inside, and it reflects in your eyes. It is not something physical.”

“I've never tried to block out the memories of the past, even though some are painful. I don't understand people who hide from their past. Everything you live through helps to make you the person you are now.”

“Sex appeal is fifty percent what you've got and fifty percent what people think you've got.”

“A woman's dress should be like a barbed-wire fence: serving its purpose without obstructing the view.”

“Everything you see I owe to spaghetti.”

“Nothing makes a woman more beautiful than the belief that she is beautiful.”

“If you haven't cried, your eyes cannot be beautiful”

“After all these years, I am still involved in the process of self-discovery. It's better to explore life and make mistakes than to play it safe. Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life.”

“Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life.”

“Getting ahead in a difficult profession requires avid faith in yourself. That is why some people with mediocre talent, but with great inner drive, go so much further than people with vastly superior talent.”

“When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. You are connected to your child and to all those who touch your lives. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child.”

“It's a mistake to think that once you're done with school you need never learn anything new.”

“Spaghetti can be eaten most successfully if you inhale it like a vacuum cleaner.”

“When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child.”

"Getting ahead in a difficult profession requires avid faith in yourself. That is why some people with mediocre talent, but with the inner drive, go much farther than people with vastly superior talent”

“You must all, somewhere deep in your hearts, believe that you have a special beauty that is like no other and that is so valuable that you must not abandon it. Indeed, you must learn to cherish it.”

“At the dressing table, every woman has a chance to be an artist, and art, as Aristotle said, "completes what nature left unfinished.”

“Food makes people happy, it takes you back home, it says so many things that words can’t say.”

“Discipline is the great equalizer. If a young woman is beautiful but has no discipline, she will lose her looks as she grows older. If a plain woman is disciplined she will undoubtedly become more beautiful with time.”

“I have my own peculiar yardstick for measuring a man: Does he have the courage to cry in a moment of grief? Does he have the compassion not to hunt an animal? In his relationship with a woman, is he gentle? Real manliness is nurtured in kindness and gentleness, which I associate with intelligence, comprehension, tolerance, justice, education, and high morality. If only men realized how easy it is to open a woman's heart with kindness, and how many women close their hearts to the assaults of the Don Juans.”

“Every opportunity is a big opportunity,”

“As time passed there was no more buying food, no money, no supplies. On some days, we wouldn’t even have a crumb to eat. There’s a vivid scene in Nanni Loy’s The Four Days of Naples, a movie made after the war about the uprising of the Neapolitans against the occupying Germans, in which one of the young characters sinks his teeth into a loaf of bread so voraciously, so desperately, I can still identify with him. In those four famous days in late September, when Naples rose up against the Germans—even before the Allies arrived, it was the climax of a terrible period of deprivation and marked the beginning of the end of the war in Italy.”

“You have to believe in marriage and you have to believe in a relationship between two people. If you really think in your life that you have found the right person, you have to stick to it, even though there are ups and downs. If you really believe in your union, you have to nourish it and work for it, then you can really spend your life together forever.” 

― Sophia Loren

Thick-headed morons promoted past their usefulness ...

A quick note about the current graphic above:

I happened upon it coincidentally after a 1-sided chat with someone who didn't like something I wrote - which they may or may not have felt indirectly referred to them. Although they may have missed the message I was trying to convey (entirely my fault since I wrote it in a way which could be construed exactly as they did ... on purpose, I guess), and, after one of their minions caught it, they showed my 'anonymous input' to their boss.  Their boss obviously didn't like what they thought they understood and officially told me so in no uncertain terms that they thought it was "unprofessional."

Okay.  I'll agree.  It might have been written more vanilla, but I was pissed.  So ...

2017 addition:

What I said was that a particular person was "thick" to believe what he was doing was a good idea.  I pretty much said that, in those words, on a survey asking for feedback on how I thought a particular process was handled involving the office where I worked.  He didn't like being called "thick," I guess.

This person probably would have been communicating their feelings more accurately had they said something like:

"I would have liked you to not make me look so bad and you could have used nicer words that weren't so "direct."   I probably would have apologized.  But, ummmm, he didn't.  So, neither did I.  I was urged by half a dozen if 1 person to report this lil dude for using a procedure (and an official gov't form) to reprimand me (unofficially and not on record; I was kinda stunned for a week or two actually).  But, he's since been relegated to a position where he can do no further harm.  So all's well.

I thought that this graphic "said it all," which is:

If you want people to write (or say) 'warm' things about you, then it's probably not a good idea to do things which tend to have them do the opposite, right?  

Kind of a no-brainer, right?  He and I both kinda screwed up.  But I feel better for having done it and this particular person probably has little or no memory of the incident.  Sigh.

-- JM(M) --

K.I.S.S. / NBA

12, 13 & 14.9.14

"K.I.S.S." & "N.B.A"

(Keep It Simple Stupid & No Bullshit Allowed)

(No BS! You don't like it or need it. Don't take it.)

Nobody has to put up with other people's crap.

Specifically: at work.

Most of us spend the majority of our non-asleep adult lives at work somewhere (well, at least most people are awake - most of the time - at work - I hope). And, sadly, many people *think* they have to put up with BS from others.

Not. True.

We may *choose* to do put up with BS because "things are just less difficult if I put up the the BS" than if we were to deal directly with a problem. Or, more likely: we are afraid of the confrontation -- we simply prefer not to tell someone (usually a 'senior' person, but not always!) what they need to be told and made to hear ... because it's more comfortable. It's "within our comfort zone."

What's funny is that, in many cases, the perceived problem is actually more of a molehill than a mountain ... and if your problem is a person, these types of folks very likely wouldn't be paying due attention even if given the most well-rehearsed and eloquently delivered "you're an idiot/jerk/moron and need to shape up and knock it off" speech.

But if you did (deliver that eloquent speech) you would be releasing tensions (your own, we don't care about the idiot at this point) and, when nothing is done about the existing problem (because they weren't listening) you would be able to, "by generally accepted U.S. workplace standards," go to the "next level" boss for another attempt at "fixing things."

There is a way to fix everything.

You only have one life. Don't let some stupid senseless rule or process or someone you consider to be a totally incompetent buffoon take control of it and wreck it.

If you don't like how things are. Change 'em. It can be done.

If you don't think you can change 'em, you're wrong.

You don't have to put up with bullshit.

So don't.

-- JM(M) --