Complaining is something that we all do to some degree. I often think we all feel that complaining is our God-given right. I think some people do it because it makes them feel better or just because it's hard wired into their DNA like flat feet or hammer toes. To me, it often just feels like a waste of time because once you get done complaining about it, you still have to complete the task. But then there are times when customer service has hit rock bottom and we have no choice but to complain, or do we? Whether or not it will do any good is anyone's guess. Not so long ago I went in to get some ice cream at three in the afternoon only to find that I had accidently rested my elbow into a large pile of mustard on the counter while digging for my wallet. Of course, during the lunch rush I can see how this could be missed but by the middle of the afternoon it should have been cleaned up, or at the very least noticed. Call me weird. Any restaurant manager worth their salt would surly agree with this. It goes along with the old sediment, "if you have time to lean you have time to clean." Someone long before me came up with that quote, maybe it was Socrates.
Back in the mid-nineties I took my first wife with me to visit my dad, who at the time was living in northern California. At one point in the trip, we found ourselves at a restaurant just outside of Lake Taho. The young lady who waited on us from the get-go was pretty flirty with dad and me and fairly rude to our wives. This is usually a recipe for disaster and while you could have fried an egg on the foreheads of our wives; we men were just hoping that our deodorant would give us twelve-hour protection as advertised. Towards the end of the meal my wife excused herself to the restroom, but before she did, she peered at me over the top of her sunglasses and said in a voice that could cut steel, "go ahead and pay the bill, but if I find out you tipped her, I'll kill you!" With a trembling hand I paid the bill and under her advisement I skipped the tip. The girls continued to commiserate each other in the restroom as women are known to do while dad and I walked next door to a tee shirt shop. Dad and I had nearly forgotten about the mealtime fiasco and the old man had his eye on a tee shirt that said, "they call me the silver fox." That was until we heard a commotion coming from the steps of the restaurant where the waitress in question followed my wife out of the restaurant and had an exchange that frankly should be hanging in the Smithsonian. Many words were exchanged between the two, but few were I able to decipher at that distance. All but one of course, it was a word that sounded a lot like fudge, only it wasn't fudge. If memory serves me correctly Raphie from the movie "The Christmas Story" called it the mother of all dirty words. Needless to say, the young waitress was fired that day because unknown to her as the exchanged happened the restaurant was standing right behind her. One might say that even by California standards she found her tit in the ringer. Oy Vey!!
By now, most of us have figured out when it pays to complain and when it is better just to bite our lips. This of course when we are discussing people who are like-minded. I recently discovered a story about a woman who is not like-minded and is suing the Hershey Corporation for five million dollars. A woman from Florida by the name Cinthia Kelly has decided to sue the makers of Reece's holiday cups for not providing the jack-o-lantern faces on their candy as advertised on the packaging. Evidently when she made said purchase, she felt more tricked than treated. Five million REALLY? How many tears could she have possibly shed over such a confectionary fiasco. So now comes the question of the day, have we as a society just forgotten how to lodge a complaint or have, we just become such a society of snowflakes that everything feels like a problem? This is in fact not a problem and is akin to a flea on a dog's back. Any half-baked lawyer that would tackle such a case is surely just chasing ambulances in his BMW. Lawyers, money, and senseless people is all it took to ensure that it takes a pair of garden shears to remove the packaging from a new pair of garden shears.
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