Random things I’m thinking about. Delivery services. Just read an article about meat delivery. You know, like Omaha Steaks, which I’m sure everyone has heard of. There are some really good-sounding places out there, and I have had food delivered before. I tried Blue Apron way back when and then Hello Fresh and What a Crock, which has really good food for your crockpot. The problem with all of these aside from all the packaging that Blue Apron uses, is the actual delivery. Deliveries used to be brought to my door. MY door. For the past few years, they have been left in the outer lobby, which is open to the street. Sometimes without any kind of notice to me that they have been delivered. I have a chronic, painful, debilitating, exhausting illness and cannot always get down to the lobby, let alone carry things back up. So I no longer order these things. This is another frustration that I could do without. What happened to service, even before the pandemic? No one seems to care anymore about anything. There is no work ethic, no integrity, no quality in the things you buy. Try buying something, and then buying a replacement or second one a while later. Same item name, same price, same codes, same, same, same. Everything except the actual product, which is sometimes completely unrecognizable as the same thing. I bought a little table top Christmas tree at Benny’s years ago after I first moved here. It was getting kind of ratty, thank you various cats I’ve had, so I bought a replacement a few years later. Same store, same box, same everything yet again, but when I took it out of the box, it was a cheap, crappy piece of dreck that looked like it had been made by a kindergartener wearing a blindfold. Let’s do it as cheaply as possible, maximize our profits and to heck with the customer. I took it back and still use the ratty one, which is miles nicer even ratty than the new one I bought.
This is everywhere. Dell. I’ve gone into my issues with Dell here last year. Clothing. I buy my clothes online, because shopping is not really happening. I can buy something, love it and decide to buy a couple more, because it will wear out eventually. The repeat buy is never the same. Never once have I gotten the exact same item I bought the first time. Even if it’s been only a few weeks since the first purchase. Again, everything everywhere says it is the exact same item. but surprise Less well made, poorer cut, cheaper material. But nothing tells you this. It tells you it is exactly the same. Integrity. Quality.
Then there’s Windows. We are all well aware by now of the lack of quality control Windows is currently having. Every update seems to have an almost immediate flurry of articles about how to fix what it broke or how to uninstall it or just warnings not to if you haven’t. I now always have updates on a delay setting It’s not like they cannot afford good quality control. They just choose not to pay for it.
I don’t like feeling like this. I just want a nice world where people care about the products they put out, the services they render, their fellow inhabitants of this planet, and where people are paid a wage commensurate with the value of what they are doing. Garbage men, for example. Without them, can you imagine? Nurses and other health care workers. The grocery store clerks and stockers, the office cleaners, every person you normally don’t even acknowledge is in the room with you. These are the people who are now considered ‘essential’ workers and are required to put themselves in harm’s way to serve you. They were always essential to our well-being. We just chose not to see it, and to treat and pay them as ‘less thans’. Shame on us. Is your doctor going to come in the middle of the night and help you to the bathroom, or give you your pain meds, or change your bedding or whatever? What does the NFL player do for you personally, except give you a reason to get drunk and yell a lot with your friends? Which I guess has benefits too, but somehow it’s not the same as not living in a sea of garbage, or lying awake in pain with no one to help. I mean is Tom Brady going to deliver your on-line grocery order? I don’t think so.
We as a species have gotten it wrong. We value the wrong things, the wrong people, and we have developed an ‘I am the only one who matters here’ concept. It has become especially obvious during this pandemic. It hurts me to say that I do not think this is going to change. As soon as it’s over, and even before, actually, I think we are already going back to business as usual, with no regard again for anyone but our own selfish selves. it is very disheartening, and I do not know how to change things.
There have been stories about the finding of a new, possibly inhabitable planet. So what. What we would take to it is ourselves, and we are the problem. We will just wind up ruining it as a place we can survive like we are doing this one. I think we went wrong with the whole ‘save the planet’. The planet will do fine, in one way or another. It’s us who will not survive. ‘Save our species, help keep the planet inhabitable’ might have been a better marketing tool. We do that by not over-using resources, not killing off other species with abandon, not changing the entire natural world to suit ourselves. We decided to put into the Bible, you know that book everyone swears to live by while doing every single thing it says not to do, we put into it that god gave man dominion over every living thing. If there was a god, and if he really had done that, I would bet he’s been kicking himself in the rear ever since, and cringing at what he has created. People wrote the Bible. I can say god said this or that to me, does not make it so. Sorry religious people. It’s my opinion and I am entitled to it, just like you are entitled to pretend you are followers of Christ, who would also be cringing if he could see how you have distorted his message. Have any of you ever read what he actually taught, supposing that is that he was a real person and not a myth? Check it out sometime. No where did he say it’s okay to cheat your neighbor, to keep everything of value for yourself, to let people starve and go homeless while you hoard all the wealth. I’m pretty sure he didn’t advocate any of that. And I am positive that if he existed, he never said ‘Greed is good’.
I have been really angry with humanity, can you tell? Really angry. It’s better than just giving up, which I refuse to do. Never give up. Never surrender. Thank you Galaxy Quest. But it gets harder every day.
Side note: OMG my proof-reading sucks. Aaaand, this is my favorite thing to come out of the pandemic.
Feeling kind of draggy, with no real desire to do anything at all. It’s another gray day, too, and sunshine is always a mood lifter. But I know this is not good, it is easy to fall into a slump and stop caring, and I do not want to go there. Hoping if I just take it easy today, tomorrow will be better. I hope. Yesterday was my birthday, and while I got some emails, I spoke to no one, which in some cases I completely understand, but it would have been nice if a friend had called just to say hi. Everyone I know, has other people around them, but I am completely alone and except for a total of about five minutes seeing Tess and Ed for hand-offs, have been completely alone since March 12th, the last day my homemaker came. I’ll manage, I always do. I get into slumps and then I get back out of them again. Yay me. But meanwhile, bah humbug. And all that jazz.
I did a grocery order a couple of days ago. Pretty good, it was delivered about an hour after I ordered. Instacart person left it outside my door and left so I could open door and bring it in. Gave a good tip. I am a good tipper anyway, because those folks get paid about a millionth of a second’s worth of what Jeff Bezos makes in a minute. (They don’t work for Amazon, of course, but still. Right?) Or practically nothing, and they use their own cars. Wear and tear and oil and gas have to come out of the pittance they are paid. Ranty Jean is on a rant today it seems. Anyway, wiped down with disinfectant wipes anything that had to go in frig or freezer, and just left the rest in the bags on the floor. I have a teeny kitchen. Teeny Two people is a crowd in it. One more day and I think it’s safe to unbag, it will be three days. Maybe I’ll wait till Saturday. 🙂 Meanwhile the floor is half covered with plastic bags of canned and boxed goods. Only five or six, it’s a very small floor. This pic is the the entire kitchen. Sink is on the right of the frig. It is not even close to this neat at this moment. Plus, the calendar is gone and there is nothing on the cork board because Miss G removed it all for me. Soooo helpful. And, I washed the produce by hand under running water. That’s all. Never use soap or dishwashing liquid, just water. So far, so good.
I am still waffling about Amazon. There are some things I can’t get anywhere else, some I could except not during the plague. So it’s kind of necessary for me. On the other hand, Bezos, the richest of the rich, is also the greediest of the greedy and treats his workers, you know, the ones who do the jobs that make the money for him, like shit on his shoe. Don’t bother excusing the expression, because that’s exactly how important they are in his world-view. The man disgusts me, and yet I need his company to survive right now. Rock and a hard place, anyone? I can’t afford massive shipping charges even if I could get some things elsewhere. Prime is a really good thing, and so would Amazon be if the workers were given a wage commensurate with their efforts, and safe working environments and good sick leave pay and policies. But no. Jeffy baby needs all he has and more, because he obviously plans to live the thousands of life-times it will take for him to spend it all. So every time I order, I develop just that bit much more self-loathing and sense of betrayal to those workers. Social consciences suck, let me tell you. It would be so much easier to be that cold, uncaring type of person that money seems to turn you into. I’d rather be poor, I think.
This is by Edith Holden. One of my favorite books, The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady.
strangely peculiar 