The fine line between proper and annoying

While we were on the aforementioned vacation to Grand Marais, MN, we stayed at our usual hotel in town, but this time we got a fairly newly redone room. A nice thing about this particular hotel is that over the many years that we have stayed there, it has continually improved and upgraded, which isn't something we have seen in other hotels that we frequent. As recurring guests, we have met the owner and its clear that she runs a first class operation. Additionally, they have pretty much the same people working there from year to year, which is probably quite unique in a tourism focused town. Anyways, this new room had a groovy new bathroom with glass shower and double shower head affair, a definite upgrade from previous rooms. As it turns out, something wasn't quite adjust correctly and there was some problems getting it to not spray out the side and over the glass wall and onto the ceiling. But that isn't what this post is about. Of course we called the front desk and they sent the usual maintenance guy up. He's an older guy that is very competent and nice. The problem is that when he knocks on the door, he keeps knocking a bit too long. I reckon that its about twice as long as it should be. To fix the problem, and some other minor issues that we ran into, he had to come up to our room several times and subject us to "the knock". It's such a petty thing and yet so annoying. It's almost insistent and beckoning us to get our asses off the couch and open the door right now. I fear that I am channel Jerry Seinfeld or something, but it was annoying. In reality, it was just a few extra knocks and shouldn't have even registered, but it did. Consequently, I have concluded that sometimes there is a very fine line between proper and annoying.

On Paying Attention...

While on vacation to Grand Marais, MN, my wife is in the habit of visiting the Viking Hus, that specializes in Scandanavian goods, which is consistent with both our ethnic backgrounds. She secretly wishes she was of Norwegian descendency, but has settled quite nicely with being Swedish, although she won't admit it. Norwegians, after all, have lefse. Anyways, getting to the Viking Hus requires that you go through a drug store and enter the store through a side doorway. It's quite hard to absent-mindedly find your way into the Viking Hus. While she made her pilgrimage into the store, she overheard another customer complaining about all the products that were in foreign languages. I often lament about the profound lack of critical thinking skills in most people, and situations like this illustrate exactly why I do that. Wasn't she suspicious when the name of the store was spelled in such a peculiar manner? Plus, after even a coupla seconds of observation, it isn't too difficult to divine the nature of the store. I'm pretty glad that I was sitting out front, playing with my iphone, as I would have found it hard to contain an audible "well duh".

A Matter of Perspective

The other day my wife and I were driving home from a very nice vacation on the north shore of Minnesota. We were most of the way home and had to stop to get gas and I chose a nice little locally owned rural-ish gas station that I often frequent in Coates, MN. Approaching the gas station I saw a Hummer that had just pulled in probably 20 car lengths ahead of us. Hummers are always noticeable and that typically suits the owners just fine. As we approached the doors of the Hummer popped open and people started rapidly piling out. One... two... three... pretty soon like ten people have exited the vehicle and were quickly heading towards the front door of the gas station. Obviously a potty break or something. I was frankly startled a little bit by the number of people that had quickly piled out of the vehicle and I was wondering whether the Hummer was just that spacious, or if it was some kind of clown car. As I pulled into the parking lot my angle on the Hummer changed and it turns out that it was a stretched limo version of a Hummer and was about as long as the gas station was wide. My wife had apparently had equivalent thoughts about the clown car nature of the Hummer and we had a good chuckle. Typically limos are very distinctive and you can tell them, even from directly behind them, for miles. It turned out to truly be a matter of perspective.

Liability WTF?!?!?

Yesterday I stopped in the local outdoors outfitter type store Gander Mountain. I had a few moments while my takeout food was cooking at a nearby restaurant, so I thought I would go over and pick up some carabiners for my son's backpacking trip in a couple of weeks and Gander should have a good selection. After his last backpacking trip, he has expressed an interest in getting a carabiner to attach his water bottle to his belt for convenience sake. So... I go search the camping section, no carabiners. I kind of search around randomly, thinking they may be on an aisle display or something. Eventually I give in and go up to the checkout counter and ask. I did so with trepidation, as its not in my nature to ask such stupid questions and I feared that they would tell me exactly where they should obviously be. The response that I got was quite befuddling. The clerks responded that they don't sell carabiners to "liabilities sake" and that "apparently people had been hurt climbing with them" and that "they would have to keep a qualified climbing instructor on staff to sell carabiners". Apparently attaching his water bottle to his belt was much more dangerous than I thought. When they told me this, my jaw hit the floor, as I was absolutely aghast at how stupid this was. It wasn't until later that I truly was able to behold the full extent of the irony, as Gander Mountain is a huge seller of guns, knives, and fire-starting technology. That is more than just a little messed up. The saddest aspect of this tale is that I will have to go to Walmart to live on the dangerous side and get a, gasp, carabiner.

McDonald's Surprise

Periodically I run upon things that astound me. Not clever things, or complex things, just things that make a great deal of sense and probably should have been self-evident previously. In this case, the surprise came in a most unexpected place, namely McDonalds. Our 15 yr old son and I were going to take a quick trip to pick something up about 170 miles away in Cedar Rapids, IA and we would come right back. As the trek wasn't on an interstate, or similar, I was uncertain about what to expect along the way. Usually when we travel, we stop at McDonald's drive-thru's and are quickly back on the road. It's just our typical routine and I was interested in finding where Mickey D's were along the way to catch supper at some point. So, of course, I go to the McD's corporate website figuring that they have a restaurant locator that I could use. Lo and behold they had one, but they also had a trip planner. I expected to iteratively check for restaurants in the larger towns along the way, which would be somewhat time consuming. Instead the trip planner was much more like mapquest driving directions in that it had me enter the starting and ending points and it showed the route with McD's dutifully annotated along the way. It also had extra useful info like whether there was playland's and if it was a stand-alone store or not, which would be useful for the just hitting the drive-thru. Furthermore, it had the distances from your starting point to help plan which one you would stop at for the given target time. Absolutely brilliant and useful! The horrible thing is that now I will come to expect such good stuff from other restaurant sites and be pissed off if they don't have it.

National Health Care Database

The problem with a national health database is "accuracy" and "context".

Accuracy. First, how does such a database intend to have a better track record than the national credit databases? My wife has, over the last several years been plagued with credit bureaus who have erroneously attached our home phone number to a bad loan of a woman with a similar name (middle name is different) and completely different social security number, of course. While we have been assured that the number will be taken out of the database, it persists all these years later. Similarly I have someone with a similar name that skipped out on a Discover card bill and I have been trying to get that off my record since we bought our house, 15 years ago! Personally, I don't want others data erroneously added to my records, nor do I want mine attached to others.

Context. In terms of context, the problem is that with records in the national database there will be situations where the entire relevant context will not be included with a particular entry. Let's say I am going to do charity work in some third world nation, and as a result get vaccinated for something important like Hep C (or similar). Or perhaps tested for it, before going. In the database goes that injection (or test). Five years hence my hopefully soon to be employer, with my permission runs a query of my national health records, looking for flags. Voila, Hep C transactions, typically indicative of high risk behaviors such as unprotected sex or intravenous drug use. Suddenly I am a potentially bad insurance risk and would cost the company more to insure than #2 on the list to hire. Not wanting to be illegal and discriminating for health issues, my formerly soon to be employer nit picks something else on my resume and moves to the next guy. So because I was doing wonderful work in a crappy part of the world, I have to start looking for a job again. That's all due to the missing context.

Weight Loss Trick: Switch Your Scale

While working at losing weight, there is a very important emotional component to the process.  The first step towards weight loss is the emotional choice that you have, perhaps reluctantly, come to a point where you need to lose weight. If this emotion is strong enough, you embark on the process. As you start diligently working at weight loss, you often lose a large bit of weight relatively quickly. You cut out pop, reduce portion size, eat more salads, and just generally eat better. Suddenly the weight seems to be flying off. That goes for a while and your emotions drive the process. Success breeds success. But at some point you will likely hit a plateau, a place where the weight loss slows or may even stop. Even though you remain diligent, you just can't lose any more weight, or so it would seem. Every morning you stare at the scale and the number remains the same. This goes on for a while and seeing that same number every morning bums you out. You now associate that plateau weight with failure and often this weight is somewhere near some emotional metric (ie. "that's my weight when I graduated from high school"). 

Little did you know that the ticket out of that disempowering rut is right at your finger tips. Most of the bathroom scale that I have seen have a Pound-Kilogram switch. By switching to the other unit of measurement, you take that emotional number and turn it back into a relative figure of merit. As an American, I am accustom to using pounds as my unit of weight. While I can easily make the conversion in my head, I simply don't think in terms of kilograms. My weight in pounds makes sense and like I said earlier, there are certain emotional metrics along the way towards my goal and those weights in pounds also make sense. As an aside, I have long since given up at hitting my high school graduation weight again, as I topped out at over 100 lbs north of that. Even sitting here thinking about it, being 45.45 kg north doesn't emotionally compute. So back to the trick. Because there is so much emotion connected with that number, on a weight continuum that you all-to-well understand, changing to the other unit of measure turns the number into a simple figure of merit that doesn't have the emotional baggage and will help you get to the next level of weight loss. You still have to plot the next step in your weight loss plan, such as more exercise or whatever, but at least you don't carry around the albatross of your plateau weight. Going from pounds to kilos, cutting the numbers in half, might even have an odd buoyant effect on your mood. On a recent trip, we drove to Winnipeg from Southern MN. I understand miles, but when we got into Canada the kilometers just seemed to fly by and made it seem like we were "really making time". It is, of course, all illusory but anything that helps is good. Similarly, removing a bad emotion from the weight loss process is a good thing too.

Guerilla Tourism Board

I've told this story to many many people, so I thought I would share it with the world.

Early in December my Son and I went to Winnipeg for an exhibition lacrosse game of our favorite team, the Minnesota Swarm. Winnipeg is about 8 or 9 hours and an border crossing away from our home, so it was a non-trivial jaunt for a sporting event. For us, it was a novel adventure. I'll spare you almost all of the details other than it was a wonderful trip and Winnipeg was an awesome place to visit, even in the winter. Everybody we met was really great and especially helpful, which leads me into the actual story. Two other die-hard Swarm fans made the trek up as well. We sat on one side of the MTS Centre and they had seats on the other side. The game was fun, even if we did lose. Once the game was over the other guys stood up from their seats to leave. Someone tapped one of the guys on the shoulder and when he turned around, he asked him "Did you drive up from the Cities just for the game?". His answer was, of course, "yes". The man handed him a twenty, said "gas money", and walked away. To this day I am still astonished by the man's anonymous generosity and can't help but reflect on how that simple act affected the perception of folks from Winnipeg and perhaps Canadians in general. Like I said, i've told that story to many many people and the universal response is "whoa". I'm sure the people that I told have told it to others and so on.

How quickly and thoroughly did that simple act trump any efforts that the local tourism board could have done?