So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

It’s not that we never see people with dirt under their fingernails giving the waitstaff (or the bank teller or the taxi driver or ...) a ration of undeserved doo-doo. If there’s a god, she knows that I’ve seen plenty of that, too.

GHT said:

Do other countries have an equivalent to our BSI?

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Indeed. It is most commonly ISO, which I believe came from your shores. Companies here sometimes fly a flag that they have installed a special pole for advertising their certification. It really reminds me of the Better Business Bureau since it seems to have become something one pays dearly to be certified so you can declare you are in good standing but there really is no connection between certification and the product produced not being crap.

tonyb said:

It’s not that we never see people with dirt under their fingernails giving the waitstaff (or the bank teller or the taxi driver or ...) a ration of undeserved doo-doo. If there’s a god, she knows that I’ve seen plenty of that, too.

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Obnoxiousness is not directly connected to perceived importance and a grandiose vision of self but it does seem to make the disease progress to the acute stage.

3fingers said:

Indeed. It is most commonly ISO, which I believe came from your shores. Companies here sometimes fly a flag that they have installed a special pole for advertising their certification. It really reminds me of the Better Business Bureau since it seems to have become something one pays dearly to be certified so you can declare you are in good standing but there really is no connection between certification and the product produced not being crap.

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This makes me think of the "Organic" certification, which my dad went through the rigamole with during his years as a turkey farmer. It's supposed to be a nice, simple, slap-on-able label to give the thumbs up to people who are concerned with quality or ethics in their food, but it's basically ticking the right boxes for whatever certifier is in charge of these things in your area (and the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association has a rep for being as officious as the B.M.V.). To get the stamp of approval he had to, among other things, get organic feed, which is frightfully expensive and not easy to get delivered (my father got his from Cananda before the mill went out of business). And it didn't cover things that were important to him, like adequate square footage of space per bird. If someone asked if his turkeys were organic, he used to say "They're better than organic." After 20 years farming, my dad had his marketing patter pretty well nailed down.

3fingers said:

Indeed. It is most commonly ISO, which I believe came from your shores.

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Why does that not surprise me? We are a class act at creating box ticking, non jobs. We have created a new layer in the police force, these are called, Traffic Officers, who do precisely nothing. They just attend a collision and sit there. Well you and I would say they sit there, but a non job has a phrase for doing nothing and sit there becomes: "Adopt a holding position."

A timely reminder for those suffering from withdrawal symptoms; Only 49 shopping days before St. Valentine's day & only 107 shopping days left before easter.

Oh, nearly forgot, -45°C in Alaska & 50°C in central Australia. I won't be complaining about the weather in my neck of woods for a while.

If I would have kids, I would do the british/american way of Christmas, where the kids find the presents under the tree, next morning. This is so much better than the german version!
Who invented this crap, to present the kids by Santa on Christmas Eve, as we do here?? That just causes senseless stress, which could be avoid so easily.
Because of that, my aunt and uncle did another version, always just presenting her daughter after breakfast on 24th.

3fingers said:

Indeed. It is most commonly ISO, which I believe came from your shores. Companies here sometimes fly a flag that they have installed a special pole for advertising their certification. It really reminds me of the Better Business Bureau since it seems to have become something one pays dearly to be certified so you can declare you are in good standing but there really is no connection between certification and the product produced not being crap.

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In the US, we have ANSI (the American National Standards Institute). From WikiPedia:
"The American National Standards Institute is a private non-profit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the United States."

Not to be confused with the National Institutes of Standards and Technology, from their web site:
"The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) was founded in 1901 and is now part of the U.S. Department of Commerce. NIST is one of the nation's oldest physical science laboratories. Congress established the agency to remove a major challenge to U.S. industrial competitiveness at the time—a second-rate measurement infrastructure that lagged behind the capabilities of the United Kingdom, Germany, and other economic rivals."

3fingers said:

Obnoxiousness is not directly connected to perceived importance and a grandiose vision of self but it does seem to make the disease progress to the acute stage.

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Yes, of course. And grandiosity and a sense of personal importance isn’t the sole province of the more moneyed classes.

Indeed, it’s often those of lesser means who figure they’re entitled to what they ain’t got. And maybe, in some cases, they are. Maybe, in some cases, they have been shorted their entire lives. Maybe their efforts and talents have been overlooked for too damn long. But let’s not take it out on the help, as too many do.

The doo-doo rolls downhill.

LizzieMaine said:

I don't know what it is, but I have never seen Mr. and Ms. Bourgie Q. Bourgeois act more out-and-out hateful toward service-sector workers than they have this holiday season. We expect to get attitude and short-temper from people when seasonal tensions are running high, but never to the extent where I see a normally-pleasant, rational middle-aged woman screaming -- as in a red-faced tantrum -- at a 16 year old kid who didn't get her order Just So. Or the haughty, thin-lipped sneer of contempt from a woman who is told how a certain procedure works, which is not the way she wants it to work. I've talked to a friend who's a waitress at a local middlebrow restaurant and she says she's never seen it worse either. It's not just frustration, it's the actual flat-out hostility -- the real, vicious, pig-biting rage -- that these people seem to need to show to people just trying to do their jobs that really does defy all reason. Is this the world we live in now? Merry Friggin' Christmas, and may they all get rocks in their stockings.

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I hate when I see that brand of bullying. Not only because bullying is hurtful to the bullied and painful to the eyewitness, but because every bully is, at heart, a coward.

ChiTownScion said:

I hate when I see that brand of bullying. Not only because bullying is hurtful to the bullied and painful to the eyewitness, but because every bully is, at heart, a coward.

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Indeed they are, and in time, no matter how big a ‘fish’ you may think you are, there is always a bigger ‘fish’ out there and you never know where it will pop up and swallow you.”

It’s a fish eat fish world.

tonyb said:

It’s a fish eat fish world.

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The analogy of dog eat dog didn't occur to me, I was thinking more of big fish, small puddle.

Bullies and bullying are almost always associated with fisticuffs and violence, but I remember working for a company whose head honcho was a bully. He had the knack of making his managers feel intimidated just by a phone call.

Long before social media, cell phones and instant messaging, that head honcho got a come-uppance that went through the company like a wildfire. He was so full of himself and to be fair, he was very good. He had an instinct for the market and how long to hold out before investing. Just when you think that the wheels were about to drop off, he whipped the chequebook out and spent. Always controlled, always enough. He never flinched from a big spend, but he never exceeded that which was needed either.

His way of bullying was to try and get his managers to match his intellect, and to do that he had a chess set in his office. A call to see him would almost always get you a challenge of a game of chess. He thought that he was invincible, and he pretty well was such, until the day that he hired a new cleaning company to dust, polish and clean the offices.

An older lady, early sixties maybe, had cleaned his office and was moving on to the next one when he appeared. He had asked her if she had finished and she had said that she had but then mentioned that the chess set was set up mid-game and that she had only realised it when she removed the chess pieces so that she could dust the chessboard. Unsure as to where those pieces were, she set the board up for commencement of a new game. Asking her how she knew the players positions for a new game she replied that she played the odd game herself.

It would be too easy to think that his ego got the better of him and that he challenged her to a game, or better still, she might have said that from what she rememebred of the game before she removed the pieces, it was all over for one of the players. But from what I heard on the pre-social media, jungle drums, it was simply a case of him asking if she had the time to play a game. It was all over in under thirty minutes. He was well and truly beaten. He was though, magnanimous in defeat, congratulating her and using his defeat at meetings to emphasise the point of, never judge a book by it's cover. He was still tyrannical but we all knew that he wasn't the invincible director that he portrayed. And as for those jungle drums, whether it was true, or just an embellishment, I don't know, but I did hear that he had tried to capture her in a move commonly known as "Foolsmate." She looked at the board after his move and said: "Really?" Not long after that she checkmated him.

I had been thinking along similar lines — the size of the fish relative to the pond, etc.

It’s an unfortunate tendency, which I have to guard against myself, to suppose that standout performance in any particular context counts for much in other contexts. The kids don’t care that their a**hole of a dad is the top-performing attorney on the 42nd floor.

We’re all dust, eventually.

I worked with a guy in radio who came from New York to be sales manager for a 1000-watt AM station in Maine. All the time he was bragging about what he did when he worked at NBC. "I was the guy who fired Bill Cullen from WNBC, you know that?" Well, jackass, where is Bill Cullen now, and where are you? (They're both dead now, of course, but this was in 1987.)

LizzieMaine said:

Well, jackass, where is Bill Cullen now, and where are you? (They're both dead now, of course, but this was in 1987.)

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Didn't Bill Cullen read Superman's voice for a televised comic series?

Close -- that was Bud Collyer. Played Superman on radio for ten years before that.

tonyb said:

I had been thinking along similar lines — the size of the fish relative to the pond, etc.

It’s an unfortunate tendency, which I have to guard against myself, to suppose that standout performance in any particular context counts for much in other contexts. The kids don’t care that their a**hole of a dad is the top-performing attorney on the 42nd floor.
We’re all dust, eventually.

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Something that I learned 50 years ago, it was an anonymous poem then, and I still have no idea of the author but these are wise words indeed:
Sometime when you’re feeling important;
Sometime when your ego’s in bloom;
Sometime when you take it for granted,
You’re the best qualified in the room:
Sometime when you feel that your going,
Would leave an unfillable hole,
Just follow these simple instructions,
And see how they humble your soul.

Take a bucket and fill it with water,
Put your hand in it up to the wrist,
Pull it out and the hole that’s remaining,
Is a measure of how much you’ll be missed.
You can splash all you wish when you enter,
You may stir up the water galore,
But stop, and you’ll find that in no time,
It looks quite the same as before.

The moral of this quaint example,
Is to do just the best that you can,
Be proud of yourself but remember,
There’s no indispensable man.

Too often those among us looking to leave their mark on the world see that as a worthy end in and of itself.

John Wilkes Booth left his mark. So did Ted Bundy. They, and many, many others, are more famous than any of us ever will be. Good for us.

And then you have those characters who appear to be living for the largest monument in the cemetery.

I’m certainly not immune. I don’t want to die, either, and thinking that my name will still be known after I’ve ceased to be is about as close as I or any of us can come to cheating death.

I’ve long appreciated the title of one of the late “grunge poet” Jesse Bernstein’s books: “I am Secretly an Important Man.”

I knew Jesse, not all that well, but we had friends in common and would exchange greetings on the street. He wasn’t a character you would call a “nice guy.” He could be surly. But his fundamental decency and personal transparency were plain to anyone who wished to see it. He showed me things about myself.

It’s probably a safe bet that Jesse Bernstein will be all but unknown in a few more years, once his contemporaries are gone. He himself died at his own hand in 1991. But yes, Jesse, in my untitled book, you were an important man.