Tag Archives: culture

Rock N’ Roll Dreams

Music in the message. A photo of the Hard Rock Cafe that I took in Washington, D.C.One Friday night a couple of years ago, Karen and I were sitting in a restaurant, and there was a family behind us. They had a daughter…I’m not sure how old she was, but I’d guess around 15. The daughter was talking about music, and she specifically mentioned the band Skid Row.

Have you ever had one phrase stop all the other sounds around you, so that you could only hear the person who said it? That’s how oddly impactful that name was to me.

You see, I went through my metal phase in high school, and Skid Row was one of my favorites during that rebellious period. I can still scream out the chorus to “Youth Gone Wild” with little thought involved. It was just funny to me that someone of that age would be conversant with 80’s metal (although I think Skid Row released a new album within the last couple of years).

A few days later, I saw a boy, younger than 15 by my best guess, wearing a Guns N’ Roses t-shirt, the one that corresponded to their Appetite For Destruction album. I’m so clearly able to recall the edgy intro to “Welcome To The Jungle,” or the seducing guitar line to “Sweet Child Of Mine.” Again, I was struck by how…out of place…this seemed.

Also, I’m a little disturbed that oldies music for them is what I grew up on. Geez, this smells like a mid-life crisis.

I’ve seen music from that era used with some frequency in video games (relatively) recently, but some of this is a bit of niche in which to be interested in these days, confined, perhaps, to a random Pandora station listened to during commutes by…well, by someone like myself, I suppose. I’ll confess that I’m a bit of a snob in my assumptions that today’s pop music will never manage a resurrection like that, but will only fade into obscurity as music with poetry and emotion continues to take its place in…video games…

Please don’t disabuse me of that notion.

Seriously, though. Isn’t that funny?

Cracking the Eggs

Egg Emoticons by Kate Ter Haar - Used under Creative Commons

While we take our faith very seriously, there are very few things about which I’m choosy when it comes to holidays. I’m not that person who shouts about “keeping Christ in Christmas,” if you know what I mean. Still, Karen and I had discussions early on as to how we would celebrate Easter with our daughter. As it’s one of the two most central holidays to the Christian faith…arguably even the most important one…it’s one that we want to get right. By “get right,” I mean not focused on bunnies and eggs and that sort of thing.

That said, celebrating the coming of Spring is fun, and, I think, it’s healthy to observe the changing of the seasons around us. There’s a valuable perspective that comes with that, a thankfulness and observance that’s all too easy to permit to slip by as we stay indoors all day and streamline our workflows.

So, the end result of this was to have two celebrations. The first would be on the first day of Spring, at which time our daughter would receive her basket and eggs and bunnies and chocolate. On Easter Sunday, we would observe the Resurrection, the critical holiday to our faith, and consider it’s implications in how we perform our faith.

Of course, when grandparents get involved, there’s no end of chocolate and egg hunts, but they’ve sort of earned that privilege at this stage.

This year,  Karen chose a medium of which I had never heard to present the story of Easter to our daughter: Resurrection Eggs. They’re a spiffy little device, I must say, and she used them to walk through the events of the holiday last weekend.

This morning, I was trying in vain to wake up and feeding my coffee addiction while watching our daughter play. She has several small toy farm animals that are currently favorites, and she had declared a shelf of the living room entertainment center to be the barn into which they would escape the rain. During the course of the play, she got the Resurrection Eggs out of Karen’s bag, opened all of them, and involved their contents with the rest of the collection. I was struck by the way in which she incorporated these small symbols of a most holy story into the rest of her play…they walked side by side with the other “characters.” This struck me because, each year when Easter arrives, I struggle to find it’s center, it’s essence. This has been true since grad school, largely because I just don’t have the contemplative time now that I had then…and I mourn that loss. For some reason, though, Easter is a time that I can’t ever seem to set aside, to slow down and appreciate. Perhaps it’s the time of year, as well, but, with few exceptions, Easter sails by each year and leaves me on the other side wondering why I can’t find it.

I think that I see the answer in this morning’s events, because that is exactly what this faith is to be. Holidays are important observances, but I don’t for a moment believe in some arbitrary separation between the sacred and the secular, between a religious observance and the rest of the world. If the Christian faith means anything, it’s that entering into what is around us is the desired result, rather than moving away from it. I love that what was in those eggs…those symbols of the sacred for the young mind…were brought out to walk beside, and interact with, the rest of the characters around them, because it is that which Believers are to do.

Perhaps I can never see Easter because I’m always trying to look inside the eggs, when I should, in fact, be walking more amongst them.

Image attribution: Kate Ter Haar under Creative Commons.

No, Really…the Pleasure’s Mine

A crew poster from "McDonald's Open Doors" by coolinsights on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons.

There’s a certain restaurant chain that’s quite prominent in the South. It exists sparsely in New England, but when we moved to North Carolina last summer, we were reminded of just how popular this certain restaurant chain is here. This particular restaurant chain has a policy. When you thank the person waiting on you (which, having been on the other side of that counter for a good bit of my college career, I always do), they respond by saying, “My pleasure.”

No matter how often you say it, no matter how passing it is, no matter how repetitious it is for the person serving you…”My pleasure” must be the response.

It’s become a bit of a trend in the past couple of years, as well. Two years ago, Karen and I purchased a car. As I sat in the salesman’s office in the dealership, I noticed, taped to his phone (and presumably every other phone in the building, as well, as it was the response that I received with every call), was the reminder to say, “My pleasure.”

When I schedule an appointment with my chiropractor, the response on the phone is, “My pleasure.”

For crying out loud…

Don’t get me wrong, this is perfectly polite, and all. And, certainly, if there’s anything for which the South is known, it’s politeness. It’s just that I would rather hear the actual thoughts of the person assisting me…I’d rather hear the way that they would say thanks, rather than a scripted response. And if they don’t want to thank me, that’s fine too. I’m a New Englander. It doesn’t bother me.

And, the problem goes further.

You know the feeling, I’m sure. You’re on the phone with a support person for some large company or service, and you’ve asked the question that you know isn’t going to be answered the way that you want. You’re greeted with, “Unfortunately…”, and you tune out, because it just sounds too scripted. Or, you’re reading a job post, and it’s sprinkled periodically with phrases like, “Here at (insert company name), we strive to….”, as though you’ve forgotten about which company you were reading.

When I worked at a fast food place to earn the rent during my undergraduate days, part of the motivation for me to continue my education and do better for myself was the complete prohibition of thinking on your own. There is to be none of your own polite responses or conversation in those environments, there can be only the scripted response that someone in the corporate headquarters has decided is appropriate. The problem goes further up, though. Technical support staff answering a phone must reply to your questions with a script that sounds all too robotic (“I’ll be happy to help you with…”, instead of something simple, like maybe, “Sure, let’s see what we can do”). Copywriters can’t just fluidly be creative with their copy, they must force the marketers’ scripts into the project, no matter how foreign it may sound. The larger the company, the worse the epidemic. What surprises me is the fact that the corporate decision makers still think that this is a good idea, continuing to have these scripts in place. Do they not realize that it serves only to frustrate?

The repercussions of this issue are huge. We’re removing more and more independent, critical thinking. We’re squashing creativity at record volumes. We’re reducing the quality of human interactions, objectifying both the customer and the employee with whom they are conversing. All because of a lack of trust.

If you interview and hire your staff for a certain role, then trust them to do that role. Trust them to think and to make decisions on their own. Trust them to exercise (*gasp*) some creativity and to be themselves in their interactions with customers. If you don’t trust them in this way, then you either shouldn’t have hired them, or you don’t deserve to have them as employees to begin with. My personal opinion tends toward the latter.

Image attribution: coolinsights under Creative Commons.

I believe that we would become a much more civilized culture if we rid ourselves of the misconception that individuals with certain titles, while those titles may well be deserving of respect, are not somehow better than the rest of us.