The Checkout Lane

It has always bothered me that grocery checkers/baggers don’t even seem to try to minimize the number of bags that they use.

I can almost understand the challenge in the day of flimsy plastic bags that only hold a couple of boxes of cereal or some apples and carrots.  But the problem was there even before we had the opportunity to choose “Paper or Plastic”.

Today I see it when I [actually remember to] bring my own reusable bags to the store.  Checkers today just toss items in the bags randomly and inefficiently.  I find myself repacking the bags after I put them

Stephen Covey, in the book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, introduced the concept of handling the Big Rocks before the Little Rocks.  He was talking about life, not packing groceries, but the concept still applies.  Start each bag with a big item, then begin filling the bag will smaller items.  You’ll get a lot more groceries in a bag that way, and with a lot less trouble.

A lot of groceries come in rectangular boxes.  Is it too much to ask that several similarly-sized boxes be put in a bag neatly side by side?  Then the soft or unusually shaped items can go around the edges.  When using plastic bags, this also helps keep the corners from breaking through the bag.

Packing groceries in a bag is a puzzle, folks, and not a particularly difficult one.  You can do it!  I know you can!

  

I’m not against immigration

But it really irks me when people – especially journalists – use migrant and immigrant as though they mean the same thing.  The problem might be with the headline writers.

Here’s a recent example:

According to Webster:

Migrant – a person or animal that migrates.  Also called migrant worker, a person who moves from place to place to get work, especially a farm laborer who harvests crops seasonally.

Immigrant – a person who migrates to another country, usually for permanent residence.

So…a migrant isn’t necessarily an immigrant from another country.

Our broken health care system

Why should a person without insurance have to pay 20 times as much for an MRI as someone with insurance.


I’m definitely glad I have good health insurance!

Unsubscribing

So, why does it take seconds to subscribe, but 10 days to unsubscribe?



I think I got signed up for this in the exhibit hall of a conference a few years ago.  Finally went looking for the unsubscribe link.  This is what awaited me.

Right Turn on Red

The other morning I was stopped at a red light in the right turn lane.  I was assessing traffic and making sure that the car in the closest  lane of cross traffic was really going to stop.  Then I heard the honk.  REALLY?  Was someone honking at me because I had not yet turned right on red?

After I turned, and he turned too, he passed me.  Yep, he was in a Mercedes convertible.  I guess he thought he was more important than me, or that his time was more valuable than my safety.

Don’t you people realize that the right to turn right on red is a privilege and not a requirement?  Go ahead and honk at me if I fail to notice a green light and am slow away from my stop.  But don’t honk at me because I haven’t turned right on a red light.

Why “Clutterfication”?

In an earlier post, I ranted about how all the “good” blog names are taken.  I still needed a name for my blog.  It seemed to me that a made-up word my be the key to my success.

The other day, a coworker was talking, “blah blah blah clarification blah blah blah”.  My brain did a double-take because I heard clutterfication instead of clarification.  It didn’t take my brain long to adjust to the correct word, but I thought my misunderstanding was not only humorous, but also somehow appropriate.  So often when we attempt to clarify things we just make them worse:  we clutterfy them instead.

So, I have decided that clutterfy is the antonym of clarify, and there for clutterfication is the opposite of clarification.

In this blog I may clarify some things.  For others, I may just reflect on how clutterfied they are.

All the good names are taken

All the "good" blog names are taken.

I wanted to start a blog of my random rants and bits of wisdom.  Clearly "Random Rants" or "Random Bits Of Wisdom"  would be a good name.  Hold on.  Those were taken.  So were many of the other ones I tried.

People are allowed to create blogs and use the "good" names. That's not what bothers me.  What bothers me is how many of those blogs are inactive.

• random.blogspot.com has exactly one post.  From 2001.
• randommusings.blogspot.com.  One post.  From 2000.
• thisissorandom.blogspot.com.  The last post was in 2006.
• 101ways.blogspot.com.  The last post was in 2003.

And the list goes on and on.  Honestly, I'm OK with the blogs that haven't posted in years.  What irks me, though are the ones where no one every really used it.  They're wasting a good name.