You have watched the decay of customer satisfaction decline with anger in your heart. Once upon a time, there were companies that cared about the customer. There were bosses that loved their workers, and there were co-workers that put in everything they had to give.
You can see, all around the restaurant, customers that are unhappy, yet unwilling to demand proper service. You look around and you see that fear and laziness have allowed excellence to decay into barely tolerable.
You make excuses why something might be less than excellent. You dismiss a problem thinking someone might be having a bad day.
You are tired of sub-par performance from those around you. You want the best there is, not the best someone has the energy to muster despite not having a smoke break in like… a whole half hour… pshaw!
When you spend the money that you earned, you want your products to work. When you do have a problem, you want to speak to someone who is courteous and wants to take care of the problem. You want the service man to show up on time and with all the tools needed for the job.
You demand excellence from yourself, and you should demand it from others.
You hate to admit it, but you were caught up in all the glitz and glamor. You were seduced by the gadgets and the millions of tools designed to make life better.
In all of that hoopla and hootenanny, you lost focus on what has made you who you are. The Basics. The Nitty Gritty. The Nuts and Bolts. The Guts. The Innards.
The Core.
You need, as Vizzini said, to go back to the beginning. The Roots. The … go back to the core values.
A shortstop cannot make a flashy double play if he cannot even field a grounder. A guitarist cannot rip into a whaling guitar solo if he cannot even get the basic chords down. A man cannot become the leader of his country without first knowing the history and foundation of that country.
There are, of course, always exceptions.
You make too many meaningless statements, and it limits your progress in this life. Day in, day out, you basically say words that really mean pretty much very little, for all intents and purposes. At the end of the day, fundamentally, as far as that goes, you truly spend far too much time groping for your words. If your goal was to hit one out of the park, you got held up at the gates, and didn’t even step up to the plate. Furthermore, if I may say so, essentially, at the bottom line, you sound like an idiot, with all due respect, and stuff like that.
You need to realize that your desire to communicate quickly is causing you to communicate slowly. Look at Mr. Obama. He chooses his words the way a thin man chooses meats on a buffet. He pauses, considers the situation, reflects upon his intentions, and selects the most succulent and succinct sentence. Like all forms of organization, a cluttered thought process makes for twice the work with half the result.
Too often people are simply waiting for their partner to pause for breath, so they may ejaculate their own thoughts. Worse still, the hurried rush to explain one’s self forces one to repeat sentiments, talk in circular patterns, and generally prattle on and on and on. It is the verbal equivalent of Shaggy and Scooby-Doo attempting to elude a spook by spinning their leg-wheels. Whole lotta noise, whole lotta movement, and no one is any closer to their destination at the end of it.
Eliminate the superfluous words in your speaking. Pause, consider, and react. Do not be afraid of the tiny gaps in conversation. If a person is asking your advice, give them measured advice, not senseless cliché and blather. You are insightful. Prove it.
You are hellbent on succeeding. You put in 80 hour work weeks and burn the candle from both ends. Early to rise and late to bed. You run yourself until you are completely out of fuel.
Eventually, it is going to catch up to you.
You hear people talking to you, but the words sound hollow and distance. That is because you are tired and find concentrating very difficult.
You can achieve so much because you are intelligent, driven, and caring. When you are well rested, you can achieve even more.
You have just about had it with the chains that bind you. Row after row of always red, smiling signs point you to the dining corrals that dot our countryside. Lunch meetings, exit ramp dinner dates, somewhere we can all agree to eat. The food is at once soulless and yet smarmy, plasticine and yet mealy. You shovel, fork, and spoon the banal foodstuffs into your mouth, sit through the tepid wait staff’s cajoling, and leave the prescribed and perfunctory 17%, so as to not appear cheap nor pretentious.
Like parasites, these structures appear without notice, ready to feed on the tender occupants of office parks and commercial zones and colleges across the nation. You see their construction, and are stricken by the duality of your anticipation of “something new” at first, and the brief pang of disappointment as you choke your way through another bland meal, slightly oversalted by an overzealous cook in the back, striving to make some, hell, any flavor appear in tonight’s frozen and reheated entree.
The salmon tastes like fishsticks. The steak tastes of ham. The soda is flat, the servers are, too. Or greasy and overtall, their lank and dank emo hair requiring constant attention, endless adjustment, and everyone’s patience. They swear to you total efficiency, and careless demeanor, but as plate after plate of poorly aimed and mistimed foods strike the surface of your table, you nestle down into the sameness of it. There is almost a comfort in sub-par mediocrity. You play with your cutlery too much.
It wasn’t always this way. You remember greasy spoons, or white linen cloth affairs. You remember roadside burger grills and malt shops and deco themed seafood houses and genuine cafeterias. Food was versatile, and if you were willing to risk the latent threats of salmonella and heartburn, you could find satisfaction at the hands of a man in a well stained white apron, his wife patiently ringing in the fare of another happily swollen stomach.
These neuvo dísh cardboard and cookie cutter chophouses leave everything to the imagination. The ubiquitous cobb salad, the ever-present and seemly potato skin, and the never ending march of an army of lifeless and lackluster flatbreads have replaced any food that smacked of locality, or ingenuity.
There is a place near you that is still serving food that isn’t selected by a boardroom, their tongues, tastebuds and palates stripped off and sanded smooth by the power of the last customer’s complaints. You should find that place.
After you’ve decided you are tired of eating the same six meals served by automatons with too much chatter and too little platter, you must struggle to deny the sentence that has been passed upon you, this utter surrender to the bland and faceless chains. Try it all. Pan-Asian, Moroccan, Vegan – Yes. Meat on a Stick, even. Get it, try it, maybe you will like it. Your need to feel something on your tongue, against your teeth, in your belly; it drives you to try new things, and maybe even to cook for yourself. At the very least, you musn’t stand like some sheep, willing and waiting, wishing they would please, please, please call for your table.
You are in a rut, and you know that you would eat free, if you only knew where to go.
You are truly a good person. You are kind and considerate. You are helpful, loving, and caring. However, you are wasting the good you can do. You spend time swimming out into the lake to save each person, one by one. You could, instead, build a raft in the middle and allow them to swim to you.
You are apprehensive about this approach because you sometimes feel that someone might get lost in the mix.
The path is for you to choose. Know that, either path is filled with loss and great glory. Each path will have setbacks and triumphs. Each path will lead to people having better lives because of you.
You just have to choose which route you think will do the most good.
You do not have to be at work every single day. Your boss has allocated vacation time for you. The company has set up a standard plan to allow you to be away from your workstation for a handful of days out of every year.
You should take advantage of that. Every now and then you need to get away and recharge yourself.
If you work yourself to death, the sad fact of life is, that the company will still grind on without you. So take advantage of the chance to get away now, while you are still breathing.
Maybe after a short break, you will not have such a desire to strangle your co-workers.
