Baggage…

My wife and I were in a store the other day and spent way too much money. The store was a stand-alone boutique operated by one of the world’s best-known manufacturers of luxury handbags and other leather goods, and they were having what passes for a sale when your merchandise is grossly overpriced to begin with. But the stuff looks good and wears well, so there we were, shopping our brains out. And in the spirit of full disclosure, two of the many items that we purchased were for me. These two were NOT handbags.

One of the items that my wife selected was a beautiful and large travel bag. When we travel by air we like to go with carry-on luggage only, so each of us takes a rolling bag that fits in the overhead, and a second bag to go under the seat. A BIG second bag. Mine is from Nike, and costs fifteen dollars. It’s fine. My wife has one, coincidentally, from the same maker that operates the aforementioned boutique, and she loves it. It costs a whole lot more than fifteen dollars. It carries everything, it’s well organized, it’s durable. But we found another one that she liked…very much. Even on sale, it was expensive. She needed it not at all, but she really liked it. She said that she wasn’t going to buy it, but I suggested that she decide about it while standing on line to pay for her other purchases.

Since the “sale” was a pretty good one (considering that this brand is almost never marked down) the line was rather long. She asked me to put the travel bag back on the shelf, since she didn’t really “need” it. I asked her if she liked it, and she said that she liked it a lot. I insisted she take it for that reason and that reason alone. I believe that my exact words were “if you like it then you should have it.” I am ALWAYS trying to convince my wife to “treat herself.” It’s not easy. She is the least acquisitive person that I have ever met, and (despite my feeble attempts at humor) to hear her string together the two words “I want” is a rare occurrence indeed. She was only in the handbag store in the first place because I wanted her to be.

And then it happened.

Standing in the line in front of us was a very pretty young woman in her early twenties. She was all by herself, and was about to purchase one small item. She could not help but overhear our conversation about the travel bag. She turned around and looked at my wife. The girl flashed a very beautiful and very real smile, and said to my wife…”I want a husband just like him”…pointing to me. I was for the moment flattered, and my wife said something about how lucky she was to be married to me (poor delusional soul that she is). And that was that, at least for the two of them. For me…well…it got me to thinking about how people wind up with who they wind up with.

If you were to ask a cross section of unmarried American women if they’d like to marry a “Nice Guy” I would suggest to you that most of them would say yes. A “Nice Guy” is probably pretty difficult to define, but allow me to list a few possible criteria. I guess that a “Nice Guy” should be honest, generous, caring, affable, trustworthy, and decent. Now all of us have had, I imagine, times in our lives (or in my case MANY times in our lives) when we have fallen short in one or more of these criteria. So I’m talking here about “as a rule” rather than “100% of the time.”

Let’s say that you were to round up a ballpark full of unmarried “Nice Guys.” I would suggest using Camden Yards in Baltimore, since the Orioles aren’t using its 48,190 seats for much of anything productive this season. And if you were to ask those 48,190 “Nice Guys” what their single biggest social concern would be, I’d bet you an overpriced stadium hot dog that the answer would be “the inability to find a compatible mate.” So if the women say they want “Nice Guys” and the “Nice Guys” can’t find receptive women, where is the disconnect?

I think the answer might be that people give lip service to the kind of person that they think they ought to desire, but when it comes right down to it, those they REALLY want (on a much more visceral level) are very different. The woman who says she wants the “Nice Guy” often really craves the danger and the excitement of the “Bad Boy.” And let’s not forget about the guys who will trample over a roomful of decent women to get over there next to Ms. Trouble (Google Jesse James/Michelle McGee for additional information on this phenomenon). And how many times have you heard one of my…

TOP TEN EXPLANATIONS WHY YOU AND THAT LOSER ARE STILL TOGETHER?

1. I can change him/her. (If you want a project, build a model airplane!)

2. It’s not his/her fault. (Well y’know…it kinda is…)

3. He/she has a lot of good qualities. (If you have to say this, then the bad outweighs the good by several tons)

4. It’s the drugs/alcohol/stress/etc. (No…it’s WHY there ARE drugs, alcohol and stress)

5. Things will improve once we’re…married/living together/parents. (They won’t…they’ll get worse)

6. It’s his/her no-good friends. (Our friends are our friends for a reason)

7. It’s his/her no-good relatives. (You don’t get a Golden Delicious from a Crab Apple tree)

8. He/she is still trying to find himself/herself. (Check under that rock over there.)

9. Jesus will fix this if we pray hard enough. (Oh Puh-leeze !!!)

10. Money will solve things. (It has worked out so well for Larry King, now on wife #8)

If you are now or have ever been in a situation where you have had to make any of the above explanations, here is why: The fact of the matter is…we get the mates that we deserve, and, I guess, the mates that we really, deep down inside, want. That pretty young woman in the handbag store may think, after a momentary and superficial exposure, that she wants “a husband just like (me)” but when it comes down to it, does she really? The only thing she knew about me (other than my clean cut good looks) is that I encourage my wife to have the nice things that she could never have while growing up. That’s a pretty weak reason to choose a lifelong partner.

There are an awful lot of us out there, decent people looking to make a life with another decent person, and most of us are not nearly as lucky as I was. We’re all hoping to hit the relationship jackpot. And when we do, as I did, we want nothing more than to make it last forever. The notion that all men fear commitment is nonsense. Many years ago a girlfriend of nearly three years broke things off with me by telling me that I was unwilling to commit. I said to her “I’m not unwilling to commit…I’m unwilling to commit TO YOU.” I never saw her again, thank goodness.

This pairing-off process is difficult. You have to be patient and persistent and brave and strong. It may work out for you, or it may not. There are lots of obstacles to overcome…some that come from outside, and some that we generate within ourselves. But when it happens for you, it is so well worth all of the time, effort, risk and sacrifice. I really did get the mate that I wanted. My wife claims that she did too. I wonder if that pretty young woman standing in line at the handbag store, she of the bright smile and the snap judgment, will be as fortunate.

Think Locally…

Alice Waters is the owner and chef at just one of the many fine restaurants that I can’t afford, Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, California. After many years of dining out, I’ve learned that I can not afford to eat at ANY restaurant with “Chez” in the name. Anyway, Chef Waters is well known as a proponent of the use of local products in her restaurant. Reading about her got me to thinking how far we’ve moved away from the idea that local products, local businesses and local services are good for us and good for our communities and good for our nation.

We need to support local businesses (if we can still find them) with unique local products (if there still are any such things) and local viewpoints. If we don’t do something, everything will be the same no matter where we go. Take Chili’s for example. Now I have no objection to Chili’s. They serve pretty good ribs, and they have a terrific warm chocolate dessert that I’m sure has killed more people than texting while driving has. And those people died happy (the diners, not the drivers). But wherever you go, from sea to shining sea, when you eat at Chili’s, the food will be exactly the same. It will look the same, it will taste the same, and it will be served to you by the same server with the same Chinese symbol tattooed on the upper arm, which the server was told (by the tattoo artist) means “Serenity” but in reality is the Chinese symbol meaning “Brake Fluid.”

A short while back I was in Philadelphia for the first time in many years. Decades ago I used to visit my late aunt there…the one that everyone else in the family referred to, only half-jokingly, as “Crazy Trudy.” Whenever I would visit, she would take me to lunch at Wanamaker’s Department Store. The store was huge, with a wonderful central gallery that went from the first floor all the way to the top, and a luxurious restaurant overlooking the gallery. The food, served on fine china by liveried waiters, was really good, the live organ music was a nice touch, and best of all, it was THE famous Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia…it was special…one-of-a-kind. It had been there since the 1876 Centennial, and it had it’s own character, it’s own personality, it’s own products. It was as “Philadelphia” as the Liberty Bell. It’s a Macy’s now. It carries the same products as every other Macy’s, has the same displays as every other Macy’s, and it’s as “local” as a McDonald’s.

Speaking of which…we’ve got a town here in south Florida (SoFla to those locals who are concerned with the ever-rising cost of printer cartridges) named Davie. It’s a suburb of Ft. Lauderdale. Davie fancies itself a “Western” community, even though driving east for just fifteen minutes will cause your car to fill with Atlantic Ocean water. It has some horses, an annual rodeo in its very own little rodeo arena, and three “Western Wear” stores, inexplicably selling “Cowboy” clothes (Stetson hats, flashy boots made from the skins of every conceivable animal, belt buckles the size of manhole covers) to nearly every Jewish attorney in the Ft. Lauderdale metropolitan area (“Happy Passover, Pardner…”). The Davie McDonald’s used to have wallpaper with a horseshoe motif, and, hanging on the wall, a medium-sized glass “shadow box” frame with labeled samples of various types of antique barbed wire. I thought that it was pretty interesting. It wasn’t much, but it differentiated this McDonald’s from others. Several years ago, they refurbished this McDonald’s (and changed the oil in the fryer for the last time) and lo and behold, the horseshoe wallpaper and the barbed wire display mysteriously disappeared. Too local, I guess. I know that it’s silly, but that was when (and why) I stopped going to this McDonald’s.

And even though I have never had a cup of coffee in my life, don’t get me started on Starbucks and the premeditated murder of America’s local “coffee shops.”

I used to be able to find local seafood products everywhere. You can’t swing a dead catfish down here without hitting a fishing boat. Now, it’s beyond challenging if not downright impossible to find anything caught anywhere near here. As a matter of fact, most of the seafood I see in the stores wasn’t wild at any point in its life. It didn’t even have to be caught…it was “harvested.” Farmed tilapia, farmed salmon, farmed shrimp and so on…none of it local, or for that matter, none of it American at all. And I can get the exact same farmed seafood anywhere in the country. The Kahler Hotel in Rochester, Minnesota used to serve locally-caught Pike, and it was delicious. Today, the Kahler’s menu is replete with the same imported farmed seafood as everywhere else. This problem goes WAY beyond seafood. Does your city or town have ANY local merchants, local craftsmen, local farmers, local ANYTHING? How do you go about finding them? Do you buy a local tomato, or a cheaper Mexican one? Can you even FIND a local tomato?

In Florida, agricultural products must be, by law, labeled with the country of origin. I have not been able to buy American-grown garlic for years. From the taste I can’t really tell the difference between American garlic and imported garlic, but that’s not the point. Every year I see something or read something about the Annual Garlic Festival in Gilroy, California. Thousands attend. They even have a guy walking around dressed as a huge garlic bulb, and all manner of garlic products are featured, including, of all things, garlic ice cream. Now I can’t imagine that garlic ice cream has become so popular that the countless tons of garlic that Gilroy produces ALL go into that product (garlic ice cream slogan… “Bad Breath AND Clogged Arteries…You Really CAN Have Both…”). But they sure aren’t shipping it to stores near me. Is California garlic really a “local” product? It is when you compare it to the Chinese variety for sale in my local supermarket.

I was, fairly recently, in Maui, Hawaii, and found a beautiful “craft” shop in the town of Paia. I saw a wonderful carved wood plaque that had flowers and trees, and said “MAUI” on it. When I turned it over to check the price, I saw the “Made in Thailand” sticker, and I could not put it down fast enough. The mother-of-pearl headband that my wife purchased in the same shop was from France. I tried to buy some locally produced “Aloha” Shirts (the official uniform of The Association of Old Guys Who Don’t Give a Damn What You Think). After looking at dozens of them made in China, Indonesia, Malaysia, and so on, I was about to give up, when I FINALLY found some, actually made in Hawaii, at, of all places, the Maui COSTCO. COSTCO? Really? COSTCO? But if I hadn’t gone to that COSTCO (COSTCO Slogan… “Are You Sure That Five Gallons of Mayonnaise is Enough?” ) I would have had to purchase colorful and alarming shirts that were NOT made in Hawaii, which I did not want to do. It’s bad enough that my souvenir Eiffel Tower (purchased within sight of the real thing) was made in China. I would LOVE to know if anyone has seen, in the last twenty years, an American Flag Lapel Pin MADE IN AMERICA. I’m THIS CLOSE to offering a bounty for one.

Okay…I just read this over, and I’m starting to rant. Not a good sign at my age. But I think that you get the point. Alice Waters is on to something. We need to get the local character back, wherever we are. It won’t be easy, but it is worthwhile. A nation with nothing but Chili’s, Macy’s, Starbucks and so on, is a nation deprived of itself. We need to get back to the notion of the local product, the local vendor, the local craftsman, the local landmark…whether it’s a store, a farm, a coffee shop, or even a restaurant like Chez Panisse. Without landmarks, how will you ever know for sure where you are?

Many Happy Returns…

Next up in our series of money saving tips…the one household purchase that you can make that is guaranteed to not only pay for itself the first time you use it, but will continue to provide huge savings year after year. Go out and buy yourself a large size box of kitchen matches, and watch the big money start piling up. I suggest that you purchase “Diamond Strike Anywhere Kitchen Matches” in the economical 250 count box. 250 of these will save you a fortune! Don’t thank me…I’m here to help…it’s what I do.

Okay…so I haven’t actually done this yet, but I think that I’m going to. Here’s why.

My wife likes to shop. She likes it a lot. And I like to shop with her. Now I know what you’re thinking, and I don’t want to go all sexist on your ass here, so for the sake of full disclosure…I’m 100% guy. My idea of “getting in touch with my feminine side” involves glancing at the television briefly while walking (quickly) through the family room while my wife is watching Grey’s Anatomy (or, as I call it, Grey’s Monotony). But even though I am positively reeking with intense guy-ness, the very un-guy process of shopping is something that we like to do together. While shopping we encourage each other (“That looks GREAT on you…it makes you look nearly as good as you did way back, many, many years ago, before you started to…oops…I mean…that looks GREAT on you!”). We tell each other the truth (Yes, those jeans DO make your ass look big, and no wife wants her husband’s ass to look big.”). And we give each other reality checks (“Do I think $300.00 is too much for a handbag that you’ll use maybe twice? Is a bear Catholic?”). By the way…just in case you failed to notice, I’ve used the word “ass” three times, no, make that four times, so far in this one paragraph.

One other thing that we have in common regarding shopping is that neither of us like to try things on in the fitting rooms. There are numerous reasons for this. Have you been in a fitting room lately? The days of the locking door, the good lighting and the sparkling three way mirror are on the way out, I guess. Now, we are treated to ripped shower-curtain style enclosures and if the fitting room has a mirror at all, it’s filthy, and about the size of the one in your car. The lighting in your average fitting room can be either so dim that you can’t find your shoes when you’ve finished, or so harsh and bright that you develop a tan while changing. There are discarded straight pins everywhere on the floor, poised to attack, and when I remove my shoes to try on pants, one of them invariably finds its way into the softest part of my foot. And worst of all, taking everything off, putting something on, walking out to the front to show your spouse, walking back, putting something else on, and repeating the process…oh…three or four hundred times on a average shopping day can get a tad tedious. So we often purchase items that we THINK will be just fine without first trying them on, expecting to try them on at home, where the lighting is just right, the mirrors are clean and full length, and the floors are, for the most part, feral-straight-pin free.

When you try your items on at home, not everything fits, not everything coordinates with what you thought that it would, not everything looks as good on you as it did on the hanger (which explains why so many models, both male and female, are chosen for their uncanny resemblance to hangers) and some items…well…you just decide that you don’t want them after all. And this is where the Kitchen Matches come in handy: When you have purchased something and brought it home, and decided that you don’t want it after all, Here is a way to save yourself some SERIOUS money. Firmly grasp the item that you wish to return, and take it out into your back yard. Then go back into your house, get some old newspaper and your box of “Diamond Strike Anywhere Kitchen Matches” and go back outside. Crumple four sheets of newspaper for each item that you wish to return, put each “return” item on top of the four crumpled sheets, and light each pile on fire. This will save you a fortune in the long run.

The only other alternative is to return the item(s) to the store, and this is a VERY costly mistake to be avoided like the plague. Here’s why.

In this economic situation, everyone is cutting back, particularly retail stores. The way for the store to save the most is to have the minimum number of employees, and so, when you require some help from an actual human being, be prepared to wait. Here’s how it goes when we go back to a store to return something:

ME: “Wow…will you look at the line for returns. This may take a while.”

MY WIFE: (Already dazed and confused by the colorful handbag display near the return counter) “What?”

ME: “I SAID…Wow…will you look at the line for returns. This may take a while.”

MY WIFE: (Sadly looking off into the distance at the racks of clothes) “I’ll wait with you (LONG SIGH…).”

ME: (Trying to be the Good Husband) “No reason for both of us to stand here until Justin Bieber’s voice changes…why don’t you go look around, and I’ll find you when I’m done.”

MY WIFE: (Trying VERY HARD to conceal her delight) “Are you sure?”

ME: (As if I had not been down this road before) “Yes.”

And so off she goes, and I wait and wait and wait…until I’m able to get that $12.99 t-shirt back into the loving hands of the highly bored employee (who I’m certain is being punished for being REALLY, REALLY SLOW by being assigned to process the returns).

And so I’m now finally done, and, clutching my return receipt for the princely sum of $13.90, I set off to find You-Know-Who. And when I find her, she is pushing a shopping cart that resembles the colorful little clown car in the circus, only more tightly packed. By the time we’re done “discussing” the contents, we’ve carved the total cost of the “must-haves” all the way down into the low four figures. So we go and pay for these items. And the cycle begins anew. Had we not gone back to the store to return that $12.99 t-shirt, then this iteration of the Italian leather designer handbag, the six blouses, the four pairs of pants, the jeans, the shoes, shoes, shoes, and so on, would have never taken place, so please, take my advice, and, rather than return items to the store, take them out into your back yard and set them on fire. It’s a lot cheaper.

And you know that second batch of items I just told you about? I suspect that my wife put one item in that batch (another t-shirt, I think) that she has no intention of keeping. And I think I know what she’s up to. You wait here…I’m going to get my matches.

What Love Smells Like…

My father spent the last years of his too-short life as an importer. He made a really good living at it. But I think more than the income it provided, my father liked being an importer because it allowed him, along with my mother, and often me, to travel all over the world. We went everywhere together. We crossed the Atlantic twice, first class, on the ocean liner S.S. United States. We marveled at the noise in the Pachinko parlors off the Ginza in Tokyo. We flew on Pan American Flight 002, which went from New York to New York, around the world heading east. A traveler on this flight could get off and get on anywhere along the route, stay as long as he wished, and pick up the next available seat(s) to the next destination. These were wonderful experiences for an inquisitive kid like me. One of our favorite stops was Paris. On several occasions I was able to wander the Louvre, stroll along the Seine, and visit the Eiffel Tower. And of course, Parisian food and Parisian shopping were even more renowned in the those days than they are today.

My parents’ favorite shop in Paris was Sagil. It’s still there, at 242 Rue de Rivoli, in the same block as Angelina, home of the world’s best hot chocolate. My father used to love to take my mother shopping at Sagil, with its designer handbags, luxury accessories, and, best of all, a huge selection of the finest French perfumes. I liked to go with them, because Sagil employed a saleslady that even as a kid I found alluring. Her name was Odile. She was very petite and very beautiful, with porcelain skin and the longest eyelashes I had ever seen. But what really interested me was her hair. If you’ve ever seen the film of Marilyn Monroe singing Happy Birthday to President John Kennedy…well…that was Odile’s hairstyle…except, unlike Marilyn’s hair, Odile’s was pink. The color was exactly that of cotton candy. I had always liked cotton candy. No one in those years had pink hair…except Odile…and I was smitten.

My mother loved perfume, as did most women of that era, and my father loved buying it for her. The perfumes smelled good, but more than that, the perfumes reminded them of their trips together, and the perfumes reminded my mother of my father. I can remember them choosing the various scents…some scents which were not even exported to the United States. My mother had four favorites…”Oh La La”, “Mitsouko”, “Shocking” and the one she liked best of all, “Mistigri.” My mother and my father had happy times shopping at Sagil. When my father died, he had only been in the import business for about ten years. The trips ended, the business was sold, and my life and my mother’s life continued, albeit incomplete without my father. And my mother continued to apply small amounts of those perfumes each day, not because she was going out, but, as she explained to me, they reminded her of my father. She never so much as looked at another man.

After a while, the perfumes were used up. My mother took the empty bottles and put them in her dresser drawers, so that the faint scent remaining in the bottles would infuse her clothes. Even that eventually stopped working. Nearly forty years had gone by. One day I saw her remove the “Mistigri” bottle from the drawer and put her nose to it. She commented (with some sadness) that it no longer had the fragrance, but I noticed that she put it back in the drawer anyway. This clearly was not about the scent. It was about my father, their travels, and their love for one another. My mother (who was by then in her late eighties) had a birthday coming up, and I had a plan.

By this time I was a regular user of ebay, the online auction site. I had sold hundreds of items, and found that I could buy things on ebay that I could not find anywhere else. I began to search ebay for those very same perfumes, and, much to my surprise, I was able to find them…brand new, sealed bottles, in their original boxes…perfumes that hadn’t been produced in decades, and some of them had never even been sold in the United States. But there they were…and I bought them. You might think that these were rare items and therefore were very costly, but to my great surprise, they cost me less than they had cost my father forty years earlier. And so…they began to arrive. An “Oh La La” gift set from the early sixties, with its bottles and sprays all of classic mid-century design. A small bottle of “Shocking” by Schiaparelli, with its famous “shocking pink” label. A beautiful round bottle of “Mitsouko”…a fine crystal flask in miniature, with its ground glass stopper and its golden cord. The birthday was drawing near, but still, no “Mistigri”, my mother’s very favorite, and the one that, more than any other, reminded her of my father.

With about two weeks to go, I finally found a listing for “Mistigri”, in, of all places, St. Augustine, right here in my home state of Florida. It was hard to believe the listing. The seller stated that the bottle contained an unheard of 1 1/2 ounces of perfume…not cologne…not toilet water…perfume. The seller claimed that the bottle was sealed, in its original satin-lined wooden box, which was in turn encased in its own original paper outer box. This didn’t seem possible, considering that “Mistigri” hadn’t been produced since 1968. I didn’t care how much it would cost…I had to have it…so I bid a lot of money. Fortunately, no one else wanted it very much. I won the auction for about the price of a good quality dress shirt…much less than my high bid. It arrived just as advertised…it was perfect. I had all four of the perfumes I wanted to find, with about a week to spare.

In my family, we’ve never been much on special occasion gifting. My wife and I have given up on it all together. But this was different. This wasn’t about gifts…this wasn’t about “stuff.” This was about traveling though time. I wanted to give my now-elderly mother the gift of her past, the gift of a better time, the gift of a few more happy memories of my father. When she unwrapped the package and realized what it contained, her eyes lit up like they hadn’t in many years. And so it was…she was back in Paris, and young, and healthy, and back at Sagil with my father, if only in her mind, and if only for a little while.

Neuro-scientists tell us that of all of the senses, smell is the one that persists longest in memory.

My mother didn’t live long enough to use up those perfumes. She loved them, and in her last years she loved telling the story of how she got them. After she died, I gave away most of her things, as she wanted me to do. But I still have those partially used perfumes. They’re stashed away in the back of a closet. They remind me, as they did my mother, of the past, of a better time, of my father. And now that she’s no longer here…they remind me of her. When I’m gone, I hope that my wife will sell them on ebay. Even though they’re now slightly used, someone will be as excited to find them as I was, and someone will be as happy to receive them as my mother was. I can’t possibly be the only one with a story like this to tell…and a loving quest like this to complete.

My Top Ten Valentine’s Day Gift Giving Tips…

Of the many ways in which my great good fortune manifests itself, all pale in comparison to my being married to the love of my life. We have been together for many years. Early in our relationship I received a tearful, sobbing telephone call from her. She had gone shopping at a local mall with her best friend, and she was calling out of frustration, not having been able to find the perfect Birthday/Christmas/Valentine’s Day/Anniversary/Hanukkah/Arbor Day/Kwanzaa/Whatever (who remembers these things) gift for me. NOTHING is worth making my wife cry. At that point we agreed to STOP BUYING EACH OTHER GIFTS. Things are not the barometer of how we feel about each other. We have all that we want, and if we need a little something, we go get it together, with no special occasion necessary. To us, a perfect holiday involves being together, in good health, on the couch in the family room, with the phone disconnected. That’s it.

Now…that having been said…I realize that most folks are still going the GIFTING route. Not that there’s anything wrong with that (as they used to say on “Seinfeld”). So I’m here to help, with my Top Ten Valentine’s Day Gift Giving Tips…

1. If you intend to write an original love poem, three words to avoid are MUCOUS, CHAFING, and NANTUCKET.

2. One Dozen Long Stemmed Red Roses…Yes
Stolen Funeral Arrangement…NO

3. No matter what it says on the sign in the store, WALMART sells underwear, NOT lingerie.

4. Box Wine… OK
Box Champagne…not so much

5. If you are a man purchasing clothing for a woman as a Valentine’s Day gift, ALWAYS know the correct size, and then
purchase AT LEAST two sizes smaller. She needs to believe that you think she’s still a size six.

6. Make certain that you remove the WALGREEN’S sticker from the heart shaped box of candy.

7. Hot Chocolate Dipped Strawberries…Yummy
Hot Chocolate Dipped Body Parts…Painful

8. The fact that you can purchase Edible Panties does not mean that all panties are edible. Please do not ask how I found this out.

9. There is no such thing as a SWIFFER Gift Set.

10. Valentine’s Day cards should never be addressed “Occupant” or “To Whom It May Concern.”

Now that I’ve helped you with a few gift ideas, I have some additional suggestions. Tell your Valentine that you love her (or him). Tell her every day. Several times. Many times. Mean it. Every time. Things don’t really matter. We all have too many things anyway. Life is short. Your time together is shorter still. Make the most of it. There is not enough jewelry or chocolate or champagne in the world to compensate for one minute of lost time.

Fear and Loathing at the Return Counter…

Here is another in my continuing series…”Why People Don’t Get It.” Okay…maybe it’s not a continuing series, but it should be.

I am constantly amazed at the simple, little things that facilitate successful daily living that so many people just don’t seem to grasp, no matter their level of education or breadth of experience. When you tell profligate spenders that they should save their money for the things that they might really need in the future, they look at you as if you were speaking to them in Serbo-Croatian. When you suggest to someone that they might want to call a taxi instead of driving “in their current condition” they are insulted. With the holiday shopping season getting underway, our topic for today is…dealing with customer service representatives.

It’s tough being a customer service representative, especially around the holidays. On more than one occasion I have stood in line and listened to the people in front of me verbally assault the poor man or poor woman behind the counter, including colorful language (and here in south Florida that means several languages) and running commentary on the legitimacy of the customer service representative’s parentage. It is not the fault of the customer service representative that you bought something, destroyed the packaging, threw away the price tag, lost the receipt, misused the item and ruined it, and now think you should get your money back. The customer service representative did not cause this, nor did he or she manufacture the product with which you are so dissatisfied. The customer service representative cannot turn back time, nor can he or she repair whatever it is that you have found so problematic. What is the only thing that that customer service representative can do? That’s right…help you. Help you by…refunding your money…exchanging the item…upgrading you to a better item…and so on. Why would you want to abuse and berate someone who has only one choice to make as far as you’re concerned? Why give them a reason to decide against you when it’s time to make a decision?

I don’t understand why so many people can’t figure this out. You’re looking across a counter at a person making maybe eight dollars an hour to stand there for eight hours each day and talk with unhappy people. It’s a hard way to make a living. So I try to be nice, and the more sour the attitude of the customer service representative (yes…customer service representatives can be just as nasty as the customers, and I don’t wonder why), the nicer I try to be. Sure…sometimes it’s an act on my part, but the more it works, the less of an act it becomes. The most amazing aspect of this is not that I always get my way…which I do. The amazing part is how quickly a little joke, a smile, or a simple pleasantry will brighten them up. It could very well be the first and only time so far in the day that someone has treated them like a valuable human being, instead of like something you would scrape from the bottom of a shoe. As I always tell others when discussing this and similar issues…the trick to getting what you want from a stranger is to be the best part of their day. It works.

This even works on the telephone. You’d be amazed how easy it is to make a complete stranger laugh over the phone. And once you have them laughing, the rest is easy. I guess a lot of folks think that since they’re not face to face with the customer service representative, they’re not in imminent danger of being spat upon or worse, so they can be as nasty as they want to be. But why? The best attitude, on the phone or in person is this: How can the two of us work together to solve my problem? Sometimes just saying this straight out works like a charm. Study after study on altruism indicates that, given the opportunity, people want to help others when they can. In his first inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln mentions “the better angels of our nature.” Don’t give others reason to act against those better angels and against your best interests.

Now for the reveal. When I was in graduate school, I worked part-time for the late, lamented department store chain…Jordan Marsh. And I don’t think I need to tell you here…I was that customer service representative. When someone was nice to me and made me smile, I bent over backwards to see to it that they got what they wanted, even if it was “against store policy.” When someone was unpleasant, obnoxious, demanding, rude or otherwise difficult to deal with, I went out of my way to thwart them, even making up “rules” that meant I “couldn’t” accommodate their needs (“I’m so sorry sir, but we cannot accept returns of blue shirts on odd numbered Tuesdays”).

So, fellow customer, when you read this, if you think it applies to you, then it probably does. Be nice. If you are a customer service representative and you are reading this, please remember…I am an older man, strikingly handsome and virile, tall and bald, with brown eyes and a love of humor. And the secret password is “Swordfish.” If I show up at your workplace after the holidays, trying to return some godawful crap that someone unloaded on me as a “gift”, I’ll use that secret password. When you hear the word “Swordfish”, remember that I’m on your side, that I was one of you lo these many years ago, and that I am most deserving of all the help, kindness, understanding and consideration that you can muster. And I swear that when I received this item, it had no packaging, no receipt, no price tag, and it was already broken.