Another Thanksgiving weekend is in the memory books – or journals – or photo galleries.  I’ve had so many wonderful Thanksgiving memories that it takes me quite a long while to thank God for my many blessings.  Thankfully, the potatoes stay hot! 
               This past Thanksgiving provided me with “take-aways” that weren’t in small boxes, plastic-lidded bowls, or baggies.  In the spirit of the season, I will share them with you, dear readers.

               First and this is actually from a few holidays ago, but nonetheless actually happened: check all your equipment.  There’s not much worse than finding out four hours after placing your turkey in the roaster pan that while the red light is on, the pan is not hot.  That lovely, though mild, turkey smell you are experiencing is merely from the giblets cooking on the stove.  The table is set, the potatoes are on the sideboard, the veggies are being plated and you lift the lid to reveal…a stone-cold, white turkey.

               It’s not great.

               Fortunately, people with wine are flexible and the dinner is postponed a few hours.

               This year I discovered that carb-loading wreaks havoc on my digestive system.  Having completed a full three years of a keto-based diet, I’m at a healthy weight, I feel great, and I am down several sizes.  Eating several servings of stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie results in a massive problem for my intestines. 

               Enough said.

               There’s never a good time for you to lose power, water, or electricity, but Thanksgiving is really not a good time.  Our furnace decided two nights before Thanksgiving that this was the perfect time to have the motherboard (whatever that is) begin to melt.  Being a holiday week, the heating company was quick to come out, assess the problem, and assure us it could be resolved…in 6 days.

               So we spent Thanksgiving weekend with cheerful fires, space heaters, and blankets on our laps.  It wasn’t bad, actually, but my takeaway was that it would have been better a week earlier.  Or later.  Or not at all.

               The annual Thanksgiving Day parade used to be more fun to watch.  Sure, it’s possible that’s because I was younger, but I don’t think so.  There are more balloons, more bands, and it’s longer, so it should be amazing. 

               But the coverage (much like, in my opinion, other events) seemed to focus more on the announcers and their antics and the “celebrities” than on the performances, bands, and actual floats in the parade.  And seriously, Santa should be the crowning star of this parade, not Cher (and I like Cher, it just didn’t seem like she should get more coverage than St. Nick).

               My last takeaway is that we should recognize the strengths of all generations.  The youngers certainly exceed us in their knowledge and use of technology.  They can use Instagram, Facebook, Tick-tock, and Flip-Flop and that is great, especially when we need help with setting up our remote, restoring a deleted phone message, or using our computers.  But don’t let them diss us!

               We can do math in our heads, make change without a calculator, write in cursive, and read actual maps.  We have much for which to give thanks!

               Lately, I have heard a lot of people bemoan that customer service isn’t what it used to be.  I try very hard to notice the helpers and the courteous people whom I encounter in my day.  There are a lot!  Honestly.

               That said, I’ve had a trio of less-than-polite encounters with people who are dependent upon me (and customers like me) for their paychecks.  So I’m puzzled when these people don’t have, at the least, manners when they interact with folks.

               First up comes my local grocery store.  For reasons that surpass understanding, they have put the “pick-up” entry to the left of the customer entry and the pick-up staging is on the right just as we enter.  Yesterday morning I took a cart from the rack and entered the store.  Thankfully, I was looking ahead and not at my list or rummaging in my purse for a pen, because an employee pulling a large cart of groceries barreled out of the staging area and past me.  Had I not stopped, he would have plowed right into me.  He didn’t say “excuse me” or even look in my direction. 

               Let me add that this isn’t the first time this has happened.  I’m used to watching for wild drivers on the road, I guess now I have to watch for wild drivers in the store as well.  But given that I’m the paying customer, I sort of thought that the employees might think my safety was a tad important.

               Then I got home to find my husband in our yard talking with one of the three men who were digging up said lawn.  Apparently, our county commissioners and township trustees hired a company to install fiber optic lines throughout the county so “rural folks” can have internet. 

               The trouble is – and there’s a lot of it – we already have internet.  We’re the only people on our road and we didn’t want the 300 yards of lawn and field dug up.  We weren’t informed of this in advance.  When we asked the field supervisor (who turned out to be the president and CEO of the company) if they could stop, said person said, in a snarky tone, “We have a permit.”  When asked who issued the permit, he said “I don’t know.”

               When asked if we could contact someone about this, he said, “Sure, call my attorney.”  My husband said, “Okay, who’s that?” and the president and CEO said, “I don’t know.”

               One thing he knows now is that he will never, ever get our money for this service.  Even though it’s cheaper than our current provider.  Because if this is his idea of customer service?  Well, you get it.

               And finally, we went today to our church for our weekly stint at serving breakfast to folks.  It’s a “grab-and-go” kind of breakfast, so we stand in the door way, fill orders, and chat with people.  It’s really a great mission and we’re delighted to be part of it.  The folks who get the food are pleasant and appreciative.

               This isn’t a new program.  Our church has been doing it for years, and it’s right downtown, so city government officials know about it.  But city officials approved the digging up of our streets and sidewalks with jackhammers and apparently couldn’t schedule this work to stop for a half hour every morning.

               We spoke with the diggers and they were very nice and told us when they saw someone walk up, they would halt the screeching noise and dust-producing digging. 

               But they didn’t.  So we had to stand, yelling at people to get their orders and trying to protect the food from the dust. 

               I grew up hearing “the customer is always right.”  It seems the current motto is “caveat emptor.” 

My phone and I have a love-hate battle that only grows as technology adds more “stuff” to cell phones.  In the old days, you used a telephone to make a call or receive a call.  Now, you can email, text, record your fitness and food intake, play games, read maps, buy products, track your friends’ whereabouts, pay bills, identify plants and birds, and any number of other things that I can’t even imagine.  My phone is way, way smarter than I am, that’s a fact.

               Given that fact, you’d think my phone would figure out what I am trying to text just slightly better than it currently does.  For example, I text our son every morning.  EVERY SINGLE MORNING.  I text a cheery “Good morning.”  Why then, does it not autocorrect “goid morning?”  Is this a Swedish greeting that is commonplace among texters?

               Granted, my texting has come a long way in the past several years.  I’m reminded of a joke (one that’s not really funny to some of us) that I read recently.  It told the story of a mom who texted her son, saying “What does IDK, ILY, and TTYL mean?”  He responded, “I don’t know, I love you and talk to you later.”  She replied, “Okay, sorry, I’ll try your sister.”

               Yep, it’s funny because it likely happened to real people.  I know for a fact that I found out the hard way that LOL does not mean “lots of love” and isn’t appropriate to reply to people who tell you they are ill or they lost their dog. 

               My texting anagram knowledge has grown over the past years, but sadly, my texting skills – and this dad-blamed autocorrect feature – has not improved.  I did try to remove autocorrect, and it was an abysmal failure.  I wasn’t just making mistakes, my texts were, for the most part, unreadable.  So I put autocorrect back on and learned a second valuable lesson.

               It is this:  I cannot text without my reading glasses.  It doesn’t matter how short or easy the text is, I will mess it up badly if I don’t wear my glasses.  Naturally, proofreading before pushing “send” would be ideal, but who does that??

               The other day, I thought I could quickly inform my friend of my status.  So I pulled out my phone – without putting on my glasses – typed “I am going to the doctor” and sent it.  Later, when I received a “?” back, I put on my glasses to read what I had sent.  I had typed “I am a gong theme later.”  Really?
             

  I’m sure auto-correct was part of that problem, but the big problem was my laziness in retrieving glasses before texting.  But a simple few words shouldn’t be a problem – or wouldn’t be, I guess, if my arms were longer.  If I could hold my phone four feet away, I could see to text.

               It’s not so bad when your family and friends catch you in a silly mistake.  They are forgiving and not hesitant to say “What?”  But this texting issue has caused me some embarrassment.  Recently, I was texting a lady from church about a program we’re involved with.  I was sharing some numbers of people who had attended one of our functions, and the numbers were low.  I put my glasses in my purse and then remembered I needed to text her one more thing – that few of our “regulars” were there that day.

You can imagine my horror when she replied, “Excuse me?” and, putting my glasses on my face, I read my text:  “Few of our regulars were horny today.”

               Drat that autocorrect, anyway!  It really should have an alarm when you’re texting something stupid!

In many ways in life, I am a purist at heart.  I can wax poetic – and not in a good way – at a restaurant should my Caesar salad arrive with something in it that simply isn’t right.  Caesar salads do not include tomatoes, onions, olives, cheddar cheese, or (shudder) any green vegetable other than lettuce.  I realize that some chefs think they are creating some masterpiece, but perfection need not be “improved” upon. 

               I feel pretty much the same about pizza.  I realize that some folks out there enjoy pineapple and ham on a pizza, but that’s not pizza. That’s just Hawaiian salad on dough.  Seriously, who thinks white chicken and BBQ sauce belong on pizza?  They don’t.  Just eat a sandwich for heaven’s sake. 

               My regard for purity includes sporting events.  I was not happy when entire bowl games became sponsored and the sponsor’s name had to be included in the name of the bowl.  Hence, we were encumbered with the “All State Sugar Bowl,” the “AT&T Cotton Bowl,” the “Discover Orange Bowl,” and the “Prudential Rose Bowl.”  As bowl games continued to grow in number, so did the wacky names.  We now have the “Tony the Tiger Sun Bowl” and the “Chick-filet Peach Bowl.”

               These just don’t make sense.  If we absolutely have to have sponsored bowl game names, then at least get Tropicana to sponsor the Orange Bowl and Domino to support the Sugar Bowl.  It would take some creative thinkers to get all the bowls sponsored so it made sense, but at least it would…make sense.  Here are a few suggestions:  a Tidy Bowl, a Campbell’s Soup Bowl, and a Purina Dog Chow Bowl. 

               Those pesky sponsors weren’t happy with just being named for bowl games. In recent years, we’ve been saddled with sponsors for everything from half-time reports to plays of the game.  These stay true to the pattern of not contributing to the flow.  In this year alone, I’ve been forced to watch the Xfinity 10G network Halftime Report for starters.  I don’t even know what Xfinity 10G Network is (and I don’t care).  Is it something to do with halftimes?  If not, then why aren’t we getting some Half & Half maker to sponsor this feature, like the American Dairy Association?

               But no, they provided the “Keys to the Game.”  Seriously, they should have done the half time report and let some locksmith support the Keys.  Not to be outdone, Jersey Mikes had the “above and beyond” report.  Now, Jersey Mikes has good subs, but shouldn’t they have been sponsoring a substituted player who did well?  I mean subs are not really “above and beyond” food, in my opinion.

               Last week, in a different game we had Jersey Mikes play of the game and the Allstate halftime report.  The only one that might have made sense was the Frito Lay crunch time play of the game – except it wasn’t a crunch time play they featured, it was just a good play. 

               Ah well, if I’m stuck watching various insurance companies sponsor features of a game that aren’t insured at all, then so be it.  I’ll just continue eating my Caesar salad with anchovies and renaming these ludicrous sports supporters.  Right now, I’m dreaming up sponsorships for “bad coaching moves” for TTUN.  How about “U.S. Steel Coaching Moves?”