Show Me the... Change

I have a peeve. It's not a life-affecting peeve, but like all peeves, it gets under my skin every time it happens, churning the wheels in my brain to think about how I want to fix this, until 1 minute later, I am out the door and the moment passes. At any store, grocery or otherwise, there are two ways the cashier can hand you the change: first the coins then the bills, or the coins piled on top of the bills. The former -first the coins in the palm of your hand then the bills into your fingertips- makes sense to the customer, though it requires two steps for the cashier. To the customer, who is juggling bags, wallets, and trying to grab the purchases to move swiftly out of the way of the next customer, this is the most efficient. It allows you to drop the bills into your bag, pocket, wallet and not drop the coins all over the ground.

The latter approach makes no sense to me, whatsoever, and is completely inefficient and unhelpful to the customer. I personally don't even get it from the cashier point of view, but that it looks tidy. To fold the bills long ways, delicately to hold a pile of loose change, and pass it steadily over to the customer seems like it should be an act in the circus. You can even see the look on the cashier's face as they push their hand (an act of one hand) forward, nervously, and let out a small, silent sigh of relief once it has changed hands and now is the responsibility and under the care of the customer. The act can be likened to the game of passing the orange from chin to chin. Once you've passed it, if it gets dropped, wasn't on your watch!!!

I will admit that other people may be more coordinated than this author, but 5 out of 10 times, in trying to grab it all, coins fall all over the place- on the floor, in my bag, in my purchases -and my hands are twisted in wildly artistic ways trying to catch them, take hold of the bills, juggle my bags and step aside for the next customer. Yes, I look like a clutz, and the cashier just stands there looking dumb-founded at how much of an idiot their customer could be! Isn't that just peachy, my eyes implore. You figured it would be a nice, neat package to hand me bills with a mountain of loose coins and I look like the idiot. Next time, don't do me any favors. Take the extra minute to hand me the coins first, then the bills. I'll smile and be on my way.

My Boss is So Annoying...

I have had a couple of annoying bosses. It actually goes deeper than that. They have had a greater impact on my career and me than they ever should have, but they were in a position of authority and I was stuck, liking my job otherwise. Let's share our rather humorous stories of ridiculous things that go on in corporate America, without getting ugly, angry, using profanities or naming names.

I am fortunate that I never had the kind of boss Meryl Streep depicted in Devil Wears Prada. Yikes! Scary! No, I was unfortunate enough to have a worse kind (in my mind). Meryl Streep, intimidating as she was, wore it all out there. She called it like she saw it and, while that can be harsh to hear, you know where you stand.

I had the kind of boss who smiled when you walked in the room, sat you down, cajoled you into a false sense that there was a trust building between boss and employee. He would talk of lofty visions for a promotion, notice and compliment my skills, and confide in me about others. No sooner than I would leave the room, he was onto his next prey, manipulating people like pawns on a chess board. Getting his pieces in order so that he always emerged as protected king was his triumphant skill. He did this at the expense of people, relationships, emotions and trust. And, he was a smooth talker so he never confronted me about anything awkward. We never had a real conversation. We always had pleasantries. But behind the scenes, he was able to sabotage a career with a deathly slice of presuppositions, unsubstantiated claims, heresay, rumors and playing the popularity games that we all experienced in middle school. The kicker for corporate America is that his peers bought what he said!! Why? As adults, why weren't more of his level seeing through this charade? Is it that they wanted to be "liked" by this person or they didn't have the time to deal with it? I witnessed this boss ruin a career of a colleague merely by bad-mouthing him at leadership conferences. It was toxic. Not only did he block any future growth for this employee - a manager at the time, but he tainted opinions towards the entire department, as people were questioning how this department could be any quality if they follow/work for this manager.

The worst part about a story like this is that this boss continues to wake up every day patting himself on the back for being "the leader" that he is. He proudly dresses for work and shows up thinking he is on top of the world and any "tough" things he has done are a result of him being effective. This type of person has no emotional intelligence. My boss is so annoying... he doesn't think he does anything wrong.

Tech Heck

Does anyone else get beyond frustrated with technology? Does anyone else think that it is completely ironic that a basic user of tech tools should be able to do something basic, like posting a comment to a forum or uploading something. And yet, how many times has something that should take "just 5 minutes" turned into an hour's project, riddled with profanities, foot-stomping, and key-pounding? Isn't this basic functionality that you are trying to complete part of the program's CORE competency?

Well, look. I remember working way back when in the day withOUT the computer - ha! Can you imagine. Then, one day our department of 25 people received 2 computers. Yay! We were ecstatic because they also came hooked in with 2 dot-matrix printers. Talk about s - l - o - o - o - o - w! Then, came the fax machine, with rolly fax paper, then came email, then came cell phones (the big clunkers), then came an AT&T calling card to use overseas. Then came a computer on every desk, the internet, dot.coms, real paper for the fax machine. Log-on time went from 5 minutes down to 1 minute. Where did I go? I grew impatient. The faster things worked, the more I increased my demands on them. It's not fair, but that's life, isn't it? The better you work at something, the more you are tapped for other similar situations. So, we place greater and greater demands on our technology to work faster, easier, problem-free, glitch-free, hassle-free. But that just isn't practical...

Lower our expectations? Not necessarily. With consumer expectations comes the innovation. But, we should strengthen our resolve. Andrea Lee in the ezine article, "Overcoming Frustration with Technology" counsels us to take a step back from time to time. Next time, the universal remote is not clicking through the search functionality quick enough, remember the days when a television set came with 3 channels, a dial and rabbit ears that needed to point in different directions for each channel.