Tuesday musings
Kids are little humans, not lifestyle accouterments. Covid was your excuse; what's your excuse now? More on why the media is less about news and more about partisan performance art.
My wife, Megan, and I have breakfast at our favorite coffee shop every morning. It’s our “us” time - right after the kids head off to school. Along with coffee and breakfast scrambles, we consume headlines.
This morning I came across what has to be among the most disturbing and disgusting things I've read in a fair while. The piece, ‘Just Like Rape’: Lesbian Couple Sues Fertility Clinic For Alleged Embryo Mix-Up, Say They Wanted A Girl But Got A Boy,’ by Amanda Harding, appeared in my social media feed via the Daily Wire. If you have kids, and you love them, you can happily go the rest of your life without reading this.
If you do read this piece, prepare to be outraged. The story concerns a Buffalo, NY couple who decided to have a child, specifically a girl, with the aid of a fertility clinic. Instead, they got a boy. While I can understand the disappointment and anger at the apparent mixup, I can’t understand one of the mother’s (Heather, in what I sure hope is a pseudonym) disturbing reactions to her child’s Y chromosome.
To wit: “That was the most isolating thing — that we had a healthy baby, but I had no emotional connection and now I had to wrap my head around having a child forever that I wasn’t planning on.”
“I started experiencing extreme anxiety. I would look at the baby and it would contort into the faces of all these grown men that I know,” Heather said. “It was so creepy. Whenever that happened, I had to give the baby to Robbie.”
Children are not lifestyle accouterments, they are little human beings. Your job is to raise what you get, not to cop to design failure as the principal excuse that you suck as a parent. That kid drew the short straw with one of his mom’s. Let’s hope that the other one is able to compensate.
Onward.
After breakfast, we went to the market to pick up a few things for the week. I have shopped at the same grocery store for about 30 years. Our entire family used to love going there. It’s always been clean, spacious with a great selection and a friendly staff. Then the pandemic hit, and things changed.
Selection hasn’t been good at the market for going on two years now. Although there are a dozen checkout lanes available, generally only one or two are open - often including the self-checkout lanes. Service is terrible. Today I was asked for my ID, and after handing it to the clerk, she tossed it on the counter instead of handing it back to me.
That would have gotten you fired back when I was a clerk. Today you get to keep your job apparently because the next person who applies is not likely to have any better customer skills.
I understand, a little better anyway, inventory issues, Supply chains are currently knackered nearly everywhere. I don’t understand the seemingly ubiquitous lack of customer service. There’s a distinct “take it or leave it” attitude that permeates retail trade anymore.
Increasingly I’m inclined to select option #2.
My family and I are big fans of the “buy local” ethos. We trade as close to home as we can. We buy American made products whenever we can - even if they cost considerably more to purchase. But based on the terrible customer service that’s everywhere since the pandemic, we are wondering if we’re into diminished returns with this MO.
We’ve recently stopped doing business with two local stores we’ve patronized for decades over unforgivable customer service gaffes.
In one case, the owner of a store called us to apologize over poor service concerning an unsuccessful repair that took months, rather than the days that were promised. When we finally went back to the store to retrieve the item, we were confronted by an angry employee who told us that the boss was wrong, and that we should be happy to get what we got (which we were not).
That’ll be the last time I ever knowingly let anyone with a social (and perhaps mental) IQ of less than fifty touch anything of mine more complicated than a set of nail clippers.
It gets worse. We recently ordered an appliance for our home from an appliance store that we’d partonized, again, for decades. This particular American made appliance was both expensive and in short supply, according to the dealer. We were “lucky” to get the only one that he had available.
After listening to the owner go on at length about the difficulty in finding good help, we were informed that it would take over two weeks to have the appliance delivered. At that point I was in favor of just having them put it in the back of our truck and save a couple of hundred bucks.
I consented to pay for, and wait two weeks for delivery, mainly because I felt a twang of concern about the owner being able to adequately pay the help that he could find.
Big mistake.