Yesterday, I parked in the University of Colorado parking lot at noon. A guy got into the SUV next to me. He put a tube connected to the dash into his mouth and blew into it. He waited about fifteen seconds, started his car and drove off.
A breathalizer. My first sighting.
After a middle aged woman with Wanda on her nametag took my order at Quizno's today, I moved down the line to pay for my sub. I quizzed two teenagers standing behind the register, "How ya doin."
"Boooooring," moaned the girl with Celeste on her nametag.
"Slow day?"
"Yep," as she rung up the sale; $8.69 appeared on the register screen.
I gave her a gift card worth five dollars.
When she credited the five dollars, the $8.69 morphed into $3.69.
I gave her a ten dollar bill for the remainder.
A long pause; a perplexed look. "The machine has a problem," Celeste confessed.
She yelled to Wanda, "It won't figure out the change."
Wanda couldn't fix the register problem. She then showed Celeste where the hand held calculator was kept.
It took a few tries on the calculator, but Celeste finally solved the ten take away three sixty-nine problem.
Wife Lois and I went to a pizza place that was ranked as top notch by the local news paper. We ordered our pizza and then went to the back of the room to wait.
On the wall was painted a mural that was over ten feet long. The theme of the place was New York Pizza and the painting was of a subway. There were two dozen people standing in front of and in a train. We could identify about half of the figures: Joe DiMaggio, Babe Ruth, Mohammed Ali, Gandhi, and Jesus.
We could not identify any of the people in the train. When the waitress brought the pizza, I asked her who the two women were in the last window of the train. She said, "The one on the right is me!"
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The mural artist had painted some of the pizza place employees in the train.
I was sitting by the fireplace when the telephone rang. It was a telephone survey.
The young voice asked me prioritize the radio stations I had listened to in the last week. I gave her the names of four stations.
She then asked, "How old are you?"
"65," I said.
There was a long pause. "Are you still there?" I said.
"How old?"
"65!" I replied.
"Is there anyone in the house between the age of 21 and 64?"
I set down my gallon of milk at the grocery checkout counter. The clerk with the nametag "Chris" asked in a somber tone if I had my Preferred Card.
"How ya doin'?'" I asked as I handed her my card.
"Terrible. I hate this job, this store, this management. I'm going to get out of here as soon as I can."
"How much longer?"
"As soon as I can pay some bills and get out. Such a waste--a college dregree and I am doing this."
"What did you graduate in?"
"Statics and Management. This is dull, dull, dull."
"You must make a difference somehow..."
"No, nothing, I can't make a difference, I don't make a difference."
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A few days later I heard on the radio that the grocery clerks were voting on whether to go out on strike. Maybe Chris is usually just a cheerful checkout clerk.
Back in the late 70's I worked for Hewlett Packard in Loveland Colorado as an R&D section manager. We were under the aegis of Executive VP Paul Ely. He was a brilliant, driving, abrasive manager. No one knew what would happen when he visited our Division, but we all knew we would be asked tough questions and some heads would probably roll.
At a time management seminar I attended, we were to think of some long term goals we would like to achieve. One I wrote down was to "one-up" Paul Ely. Pure fantasy, because I was no match in intelligence, wit, or power.
Time passed. Once a year, we had a division review, where all the top executives would come to review the progress of the products we were developing. At this particular review, I was chosen to give the pitch about the computer we were developing for the market.
Paul Ely was in the group as I started my pitch. He always put me on edge.
Part of my presentation was to show how much faster our prototype was than other products on the market. I had three competitor's products to compare our computer against. I started the first computer which computed a complex problem. It took fifteen seconds. I used a stopwatch to catch the time.
I did the same for the other computers. Each was computing the same problem. Finally, I tested our computer and bragged that it had solved the problem in less than a second.
After I gave the result, Paul jokingly said to the crowd, "It looks like he has a quick thumb," meaning that I had fudged the results.
[Now you must know that I actually am missing the first knuckle of my thumb that was on the stopwatch. I lost it when I was nine from a dynamite cap explosion.]
Serendipity. I raised up my thumb and said, "It's a birth defect."
Wild and crazy laughter. Everyone was ribbing Ely. Non of the execs were dismayed to see their irritating counterpart embarrassed and piled on.
I crossed "one-up Paul Ely" off my life list. It was an incredible bit of luck and uncontrolled bit of quick thinking. I could not have achieved my goal any other way.
I was driving Interstate 25 through Wyoming at night. Traffic was heavy and slowed down to a few miles an hour when we passed the "Form Single Lane Left" sign. The sign was two miles before the multi-mile construction area. As suggested, everyone politely formed a queue, leaving the right lane vacant.
After ten minutes, I had progressed about a mile. Looking in my rear view mirror, I saw the headlights of a jerk racing up the right lane at 60 miles per hour. A rude dude!
But there was hope. Ahead of me a Safeway semi pulled out into the right lane, stopping the jerk. The driver pulled up along side of another Safeway truck ahead of him. Side by side, the Safeway drivers escorted the jerk the mile to the start of the road construction.
Sitting in the dark, I could feel the cheers from drivers around me for the vigilante truckers.
