How to lose customers, chapter something or other
Perhaps you’ve called your auto dealer for a service appointment and been surprised to face a two- to three-week wait in the schedule. Yeah, yeah, blame it on the supply chain issues and the worker shortage.
Our nearest franchise has responded by limiting appointments to cars purchased there. Everyone else can be put on a waiting list, should a cancelation create an opening. Never mind that I’ve been a loyal customer for two years since moving from New Hampshire.
What miffs me is that when I bought my car before the opportunity for our relocation developed, my choice of the American-made brand was based on an awareness that it was the core of the only new-car dealer in Washington County. Its nearest competition is 2½ hours away or somewhere over in Canada.
I’ve been happy with the service department, even if it is a haul up the highway and back. Frankly, though, the car itself has left me wishing I’d stayed with Toyota.
Adding fuel to the fire is the coupons for discounts that show up in my inbox, sent from Detroit but applying only to the brand’s service departments.
Instead of encouraging me to buy my next vehicle there, I’m feeling ill will. In today’s business world, that’s not a good thing. You spend a lot on advertising to get a new customer. Maintaining an ongoing relationship is much cheaper.
As for those annoying “How are we doing” surveys that show up after an appointment, I do wish I’d get one now so I could say just how peeved I am.
Feeling vulnerable all the same
LIVING AGAIN IN AN OLD LIMESTONE dorm, had a room in each of two or three buildings, under the pretense of opening some kind of retail store in all but one. For some reason, though, none of the doors would lock; or if they were locked, they wouldn’t hold. Anybody could push in. I was greatly annoyed – after all, I couldn’t be everywhere at once; besides, I had to be away for classes and the library, too, even though nobody actually broke in.
On the way back to one of the dorms, I saw a two-story building that had smoke rolling out of its windows – “Oh, no! It’s the firehouse!” – and then bright flames licked from the structure.
Poetic justice, perhaps, more than alarm – and relief wasn’t our building.
OUR building?
I RETURN TO MY APARTMENT, which is at the bottom of a staircase in a carpeted basement. The apartment is essentially one room, with the door in the corner and a panel of windows along the hallway – a commercial feel to it, like a small store. But as I approach with a friend, we realize the door is agape – and everything has been cleaned out, except for my violin case and same papers atop the closet. Somehow, I’m not disturbed by all the loss.
This leaps to something from another set of dreams, the door latch that will not lock – which has been the case in this apartment. “They” finally got me, and that’s it. Except it’s somehow also liberating.
This came the morning after our trip to IKEA, with all of its designer small-scale apartments, and my unexpected surge of feelings of poverty no doubt arising from my sudden “retirement” with its accompanying issues of finances that still need to be addressed. So who was with me? You? Even so, I felt insured … and that all my creative work and notes could be recovered. That, before clothing and kitchen ware!
There isn’t much common ground left anymore, is there?
I’ve tried to steer clear of politics lately.
In part, it’s a sense of fear or futility in the face of blustering bullies.
Beyond that, it’s a sense that they’ll tune out anything else I’ll have to say.
Never mind that I majored in political science.
Our Coast Guard icebreaker
When the icebreaker Thunder Bay visited Eastport last summer, I wondered why the Northeast would need one. And then I learned about the Penobscot and Kennebec rivers this time of year, as well as the mighty Hudson. Yes, they ice up even in the navigable tidal stretches.
Here’s how the Penobscot Narrows look from the observatory atop the Fort Knox bridge:
‘Tell me something interesting’
Out of the blue, she asks that, not as an interruption to anything.
Believe me, the question always shuts me up. Or down.
Duh?
Even more than “What is the meaning of life?” without platitude or getting pedantic.
As for romantic attraction?
Yeah, this is the big day for roses and chocolate and those mood-drenched candlelight dinners. Let’s put it all in some perspective.
- Historically, it overlaps an ancient three-day Roman festival that included drunkenness, nudity, sacrifices of dogs and goats, and slapping by goatskins intended to heighten fertility. It was something the early church tried to deflect by invoking Saint V.
- As for the saint? The bio gets mysterious. Did the man really exist? Or was it eight?
- The oldest printed card, 1797, cited a day the sender desired to “be your Valentine.” Whatever that meant.
- The Quaker Cadbury chocolate company introduced the Valentine’s Day heart-shaped box in 1861 but failed to register the design. Copycats soon piled on.
- About a billion cards are sent for Valentine’s Day every year, second only to the 2½ billion at Christmas.
- Nasty cards have also been part of the tradition. Ever get a “vinegar Valentine”? Anyone else intrigued?
- It’s big business – by one count, $27 billion pre-Covid, with candy – mostly chocolate? – the biggest gift, followed by cards, roses, romantic dinners, and, for ten percent of recipients, jewelry. Not that you’re limited to just one category. And I’m not sure if the ranking is by the quantity of each one or by the amount spent.
- As for that jewelry? Much of it takes the shape of engagement rings – with six million being presented on the day every year.
- In Japan, women are expected to give the chocolate.
- Teachers receive the most cards, maybe because children age six to ten, exchange the three-fifths of the cards overall.
So far, I haven’t found perfumes, love potions, or aphrodisiacs on the list.
A few diamond jubilee reflections
Yeah, a big Seven Five. Amazed I’ve survived so long, considering much of the stress and upheaval earlier.
The achievement comes with a burden of feeling I’ve failed to accomplish so much of what was expected of me – even without appropriate resources or support – as well as an amazement at the twists my life has taken along the way.
Perhaps that’s a generational issue many of my peers feel. Please weigh in.
Meanwhile, the serious political crisis in America’s future leaves me feeling utterly terrified. Quite simply, we failed to preserve the republic, with the assault coming not from a Commie left but rather by the know-nothing, no-saying, me-first, destroy-it-all right – those who would conserve nothing, despite the label they cling to. Along with their superrich allies.
Let me admit that at one point in my development I would have claimed to have been a Goldwater Republican. These folks are way to the right of that, like the hoards that destroyed Rome. Yes, ready to sack and ravage. Could they be the dreaded zombie hoards awaiting in the ultra-wacko wing?
I was amused recently by a Project Runway Junior’s challenge that had the teens trying to define themselves (blame my beloved elder stepdaughter for my even watching the streamed series). How would I have seen my core at age 14 or even 17? Quite simply, I’d say we were all so confused.
So here I am, once again pondering how we ever wound up in this state.
Personally, it’s been what I’ve seen as a zig-zag journey, building from what I heard in a poetry reading by John Logan in the very early ‘70s.
Much of what evolved in my encounters can now be found in my novels and poems, though my last third – and most fulfilling – years are yet to be expressed, apart from flashes here at the Red Barn.
In short, I’ve moved far beyond my expectations of things like Paris Review and the haute literary scene or some upper middle-class comfort.
There were 25 years in my native Ohio, most of them early but with two returns to other corners, one in my 20s and another a decade later. But they ended in ashes.
To my surprise, there are 42 years in the Northeast, 36 of them in New England. Well, technically Maryland isn’t quite Northeast but as Eastern Seaboard, I’ll include it.
Throw in four years in the interior Pacific Northwest, four in southern Indiana, and a season in eastern Iowa.
Plus a childhood I’m finally admitting was dutiful, not “happy.”
Many people my age find themselves living more and more in the past. I, in contrast, want to live more and more in the present – having dug out through so much of what has guided me here, to the easternmost sliver of the continental U.S.
When I’m 80, I will have lived half of my life in the Northeast.
Unless another twist pops up before then.
Kinisi 144
cloudy sofas already squeak
I really hate the excuse, ‘Well, it’s my truth’
Quite simply, to make truth subjective muddies the water and likely denies the existence of any external standard of measurement. Or, from another perspective, to impose “my truth” will quickly make everything unreal. End of argument, if you must.
Or, for perspective, Donald Trump manages to negate the rest of us and all science. The world becomes flat, OK? And insanity rules.
In contrast, the concept of a universal Truth exists as a perfection outside of our individual perceptions. It’s something to reach for. You know, the way one and one is two, no matter what. (Except, maybe, in some higher mathematics that nevertheless remain rigorous.) It’s the basis of logic, so without it, everything is illogical. You know, one Truth. As in either/or.
I do wonder if that imposes a monotheism, even when coming from Greek philosophers. One God rather than some chaotic, even neurotic, confusion.
To say, however, “It’s my reality” is far more on target.
Yes, “My reality” in contrast to “My truth.” I can buy that. Now we can talk. After all, feelings are real, even when they’re wacko. And dreams, however fleeting, are another reality.
Through that, too, I have come to recognize times when both sides in an argument are right as well as when both sides are wrong. Forget Aristotle here.
For now, let me point you to my booklet Seeking After Truth, available for free on my Thistle/Finch blog.
Jnana's Red Barn 