Picking Up a Prescription

 I'm 64 years old and in relatively good health, but I take several medications for chronic conditions.  Hereditary high blood pressure, high cholesterol, blood sugar management, etc.  Before you gasp and say that it really sounds like I'm a train wreck, let me just say that our health in the latter part of our lives is highly dependent on our lifestyle choices earlier in life and also by how our bodies handle the normal aging process.  I'm a former smoker and was at one point a consistent heavy drinker.

As I've gotten older, I've paid the price for some of those choices, but I'm very lucky in that I haven't paid a super high price for making them.  For that I'm grateful every day now.  I really don't deserve to be in good health at age 64.  Luckily I can function relatively normally on a day to day basis as long as I take my maintenance medications as instructed and don't do anything really stupid.  Some of my friends have not been so lucky.  Many are now deceased and others struggle to just get through every day.  I am thankful for what I have.

This post is about a trip I recently made to the pharmacy to pick up refills of the aforementioned maintenance medications.  My lovely wife, Tanya, said she also had some prescriptions ready to be picked up and asked me if I could get hers while I was there.  She is a little younger than me, although she tells our friends that she is much, much younger.  I won't go there in this post.

I got to the pharmacy and decided to just go to the drive-up window.  Our pharmacy is in a very busy grocery store and I didn't want to deal with the lunch hour crowd.  As luck would have it, there was no line at the drive-up window.  The Pharmacy Tech greeted me pleasantly as soon as I drove up.  They are always very friendly, but many times you get a Tech who would really rather be somewhere else and they certainly let you know it.

I was lucky enough to get one of the more enthusiastic ones and I asked for the prescriptions for Jeff and Tanya.  I used fake names, addresses, and birth dates in this post for obvious reasons, but I gave him the real ones.  You get the idea.  This was the dialog:

"Hi, I'd like to pick up the prescriptions for Jeff and Tanya Smith."

He looked us up on his computer and said "Ok, great.  I'll be right back with them" and disappeared back into the recesses of the pharmacy.  When he came back he opened up some plastic bags with all our drugs and eventually asked:

"What is your last name?"

I had just given it to him and he had just used it to find our prescriptions, but I gave it to him again anyway.  He nodded and sent out a signature sheet in the security drawer.  I signed it and returned it to the drawer.  Once the sheet was safely back in his hands he said:

"Can you verify your address?" 

So I gave him my address.  

"999 Main Street, Omaha, Nebraska, 68888."

He immediately asked for my birthday so I gave him that, too.  He then said:

"What is your address?"

I said "It's still 999 Main Street, Omaha, Nebraska 68888."  He looked at his computer and promptly asked me for my driver's license.  I put it in the security drawer and after retrieving it he briefly scanned it and asked for my birthday again.

"5/5/55" 

He looked at the computer again for a minute and then asked:

"How many prescriptions are you picking up and what are they?"

"I don't know.  The automated system just sent me a text and said I had prescriptions ready so I'm here to pick them up, whatever they are."

He nodded and returned my driver's license in the drawer.  A line of cars behind me had formed and it was growing by the minute.  He dropped my prescriptions into a small paper pharmacy bag and then asked:

"Who is the other person you're picking up for?"

"Tanya Smith, but you already know that since you went back into the pharmacy and grabbed her prescriptions already."

Normally I would be quite angry by now and probably would have told this guy to get his shit together and give me our damned prescriptions, but this time it was just too comical for anger and nasty words.  He said:

"Please verify her address."

"The same as mine.  999 Main Street, Omaha, 68888."  This time I left out the state, so he asked:

"What state?"

"Nebraska.  We are married and we live at the same address.  In the same house.  we share everything except prescriptions.  She has her own for her particular health requirements.  We are two different people.  Living at the same address.  In Nebraska."

"Please verify her birthdate."

"4/4/44."

"Ok."

He looked at the computer for a long time and then said:

"Please verify her address."

" This is getting ridiculous.  Please give me the prescriptions and tell me how much they are."

"I need to see her driver's license."

"I don't have her driver's license.  She drove to work and she needed to keep it with her."

"What's the name of her insurance company?"

"The same as mine.  United Insurance."

"I need to verify her insurance card." And he opened the security drawer again.

"I don't have her insurance card, but it's the same as mine.  Both our names are on both cards."

He apparently didn't want to deal with my insurance card and I was getting a little testy, so he said:

"$14.23. We might be able to do better than that with GoodRX instead of your insurance.  Do you want me to run it through GoodRX and see if it comes up with a better price?"

By this time I was ready to flip this guy $1000 cash plus the titles to our camper and one of the cars, and also throw in an all inclusive week in Cancun just to give me my drugs and let me leave.  

"No thanks.  $14.23 is fine.

I put my debit card in the drawer and sent it back.  He printed some receipts and drug information and stuffed the drugs into the small bag, carefully stapled it shut with several staples, and then sent it out in the drawer.  I immediately grabbed it, fearing that he might yank it back and demand a hair follicle in order to confirm my identity through DNA analysis.  By this time the line of cars behind me was getting very long and several of them were honking their horns.

"Your card is in the bag."

I thanked him for his hard work and diligence and then drove out of the pickup lane. It had taken almost 20 minutes to pick up our prescriptions.  The exit lane from the drive-up ended in the supermarket's loading dock area.  I pulled over to get my card from the paper bag and return it to my wallet.  One time in the past I didn't do this and ended up at the grocery store checkout lane with no way to pay for my groceries because my card was sitting in a prescription bag on our kitchen counter.  

I fought my way into the bag that was apparently sealed well enough to withstand a nuclear blast and carefully removed about 30 pages of drug interaction information.  No card.  He still had my card.

Rather than wait in what was now a 90 minute line of cars back at the pharmacy drive-up window, I parked the car and went inside to the pharmacy counter and asked them to retrieve my card.  They asked my name only once and then they were able to retrieve my card in a few minutes.  

You should know that most trips to this pharmacy are quick and uneventful.  The only time I have ever had a problem with them is once when I got a text saying I had a prescription ready for pickup.  I stopped by on my lunch hour thinking it was just one of my automatic refills I get all the time.  When I was picking it up and got to the payment part they said it would be $224.50 because my insurance didn't cover it.  It was someone else's prescription for Viagra that the pharmacy had filled and put on my account.  I guess if the other guy did that on purpose expecting a big discount then the joke's on him.  My insurance apparently doesn't cover Viagra.

Corporate Speak -- A Beginner's Guide

Have you ever been in a meeting or conference call and afterwards you ask yourself "What the fuck was that all about?"  I have.  I've worked in several large and very large organizations where we had a lot of meetings and conference calls.  Sometimes there were so many that they started before 8AM and were scheduled one after another until the end of the day.  We might get a few minutes along the way for a bio break, but that's about it for the day's non-meeting time.  At the end of the day I would look back and realize that the only time when I didn't have to be "on my game' was when I was standing at a urinal.  And that wasn't even guaranteed.  About half the time someone else from the same meeting would be standing at the next urinal wanting to discuss something that happened at the meeting that just ended.  On those days I relished the 20 minute commute home in complete solitude.  Unless my cell phone rang.  You get the picture.

In my first very large organization I began to notice that the higher ranking managers and directors used a terminology that I had never heard before.  I started to call it "corporate speak"  and I learned quickly that if I was going to be successful in that organization I had better become fluent in it immediately.  So I did.

The first term I encountered was "push back," which means to offer resistance or voice disagreement with something another person had said or something that they had done.  I immediately started using that term and right away it caused me to be respected and sometimes feared in meetings.  I became good at pushing back, even if there was no real reason to do so.  So far, so good.

The next term I learned was "circle back," which means to check up on something later or follow up on the subject currently being discussed.  It made others think that, if they agreed to do something, I would be checking later to make sure they actually did it and there would be dire consequences if they decided not to.  They (rightfully) decided that I would probably forget about it.  Once you say you're going to "circle back" on something you have to make sure you actually do it.  I started to circle back on everything.  In retrospect, it probably made me a better manager and greatly increased my effectiveness for the most part.

The next one was "reach out."  This one means that you are going to contact someone.  During a meeting or call you would say "I'll reach out to him."  There were many ways to "reach out."  You could call the person, send them an email, send a text message, or simply walk into their office and speak with them face-to-face.  A couple of times when the subject was important enough I even reached out by getting on a plane, flying to their location, and storming into their office to have the necessary discussion.  After such a trip I would "circle back" to make sure they had completed the instructions I had mercilessly imparted to them.

Another great one was "that is like herding cats."  This was used to describe a task that would be very difficult due to it's complexity or the fact that it would require work from a large number of resources.  Resources, by the way, are people.  You assign resources to a project.  You don't assign people to a project.  Resources, not people.  If you've ever had a cat, you know that it's next to impossible to get cats to do anything they don't want to do.  If you have several cats then you might as well just give up.  It isn't going to happen.  Sometimes during project meeting a manager or director would ask a project manager for the reason their project was behind schedule.  Their response was usually "This project has so many moving parts it's like herding cats."  This usually resulted in the project sponsor assigning one or two directors to join the project and apply a "scorched earth" policy to get it back on track.  That usually meant that people were going to be fired and whole careers were going to be irreparably damaged.

Another good one was "Let's eat that elephant one bite at a time."  This one is used to describe a very large project that seems overwhelming due to the large amount of work needed to complete it successfully.  Essentially it means "Let's break up all that work into smaller, more manageable chunks and address them one at a time."

One of the really good ones was "I'll get my team together for a team building exercise."  This one was usually heard when a manager or director was being chastised publicly for his team's poor performance on something.  You would think that a team building exercise would involve getting the team together and conducting activities that help them appreciate each other's work and to develop a consensus on how the team is going to work together more effectively.  In some companies it means that management would take the team out for dinner and drinks at a nice restaurant and let them have some casual time together.  In others it means putting the team up at a local hotel and having a series of uplifting meetings to help everyone bond with each other and encourage the team's cohesiveness and mutual support.  But where I worked it meant "I'll schedule a mandatory team meeting where I will get everyone in the same room and kick their asses like never before to get them to work harder."  

Another one is "I'm building a high performance team and it takes time."  This one actually means "I'm having a hell of a hard time finding employees who are qualified to do the job and actually want to work.  Be patient and it will eventually happen."  Managers could usually get away with this only once or twice before being fired or demoted.

The next one is one I'm currently experiencing on my job.  About a year ago my Team Lead started added the word "right" to almost every sentence.  "We're going to look into this, right? When we find a solution we'll implement it, right? The first step is assessing what we already have, right? Then we'll be in a position to move ahead, right? Afterwards we'll be in a position to circle back and verify everything, right?"  Incidentally, the sentences in quotes are actually real sentences recorded during a meeting.  I'm not kidding.  Drives me absolutely nuts, right?

The absolute crown jewel that I've encountered is something called Model-Netics.  The organization where I worked decided that we could be more effective if we were better communicators.  This is not an unreasonable statement.  One part of communicating effectively is to convey a concept to others using a common lexicon.  The English we've learned since birth is apparently not good enough.  They contracted with a company who designed a library of over 150 small stick  figures, each representing a concept that we might want to communicate to others within our organization during our day-to-day work.  As an example, one of them was a stick figure doing something and this figure was the symbol for "information hoarder."  An information hoarder is someone who only shares a very small part of what they know about something, feeling that they were more valuable to the company if they are the only one who knows certain information.  Just about every organization has one or two of these.  

My company bought this program for the entire IT Department of over 300 employees.  It wasn't cheap.  I looked up the current price per employee and it currently starts at $995 and goes up depending on how the system is delivered and probably a host of other factors.  My company designated a dozen or so SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) to train the rest of us.  We had about 6 hours per week of training time scheduled for classroom instruction.  They were very serious about it.  There were quizzes.  There were tests we had to pass and not completing the training or not passing the tests were going to be reflected in the annual "calibration" meetings where raises and employee longevity were determined.

After a short time, I started to hear Model-Netics phrases being used in meetings almost on a daily basis.  People had learned all the models, but no one really understood how to use them to communicate more effectively with each other.  The Vice President who signed the purchase order declared the program a resounding success, but all it really succeeded in doing was to reinforce his grip on the organization and thoroughly convince the employees that they were being gaslighted by their employer.  By the time I left the organization shortly after Model-Netics, only a few people were using the new Model-Netics terms and the majority of us still had no idea what they were actually trying to say.

So, after years of listening to corporate speak I can confidently say that if you use it, then it may help your career advance to a point, but you're probably not going to endear yourself to your fellow employees.  Most people can only listen to it for so long before tuning it out entirely.  I tuned it out about almost 15 years ago and I haven't looked back.  You might go a long way in your organization if you "reach out" and "circle back" often and you demonstrate an above average success rate at "herding cats," but you still have to look at yourself in the mirror every day and ask "Am I really that superficial and is this who I really want to be?"  Whatever your decision, best of luck to you.

Yes Chef, No Chef

 Have you watched "The Bear" on TV yet?  I won't spoil all the fun for you if you haven't, but it's about a world-class up and coming chef whose family owns a fast paced roast beef place in Chicago.  The family member who is the head guy at their restaurant dies and the up and coming chef returns to run the family business.  Without divulging too much detail, the plot is about the drama caused by the changes he makes to the restaurant to improve food quality and make it a super successful upscale business.

The reason I bring this up is that during the course of two seasons you hear the phrase "Yes Chef" about a million times.  Every person in that kitchen addresses everyone else as "Chef."  The cooks.  The dishwasher.  Everyone.  In fact, the actual Executive Chef of the restaurant addresses the Maitre'd as "Chef."

This was perplexing to me.  In my restaurant career, the only person addressed as Chef was the actual Executive Chef or maybe a particularly talented Sous Chef.  Except for those two people, we used real names to speak to each other.  After I thought about this for a bit I realized that the practice of calling anyone and everyone "Chef" was prevalent on most of the Food Channel's so-called "reality" shows about kitchen life.  Before I retired from foodservice I was also hearing that more and more from the younger men/women who were just starting out in the industry.  I never thought too much about it because by that point in my career I was usually the Executive Chef of the restaurant or club and that's how you address the person holding that position.  I remember that the first time I heard a Sous Chef call one of the prep cooks "Chef" it struck me as odd, but I didn't think it was worth discussing so I just forgot about it.

Before I get too far down the "Yes Chef, No Chef" rabbit hole, you should know that I started working in kitchens in the 1970's and things were very different back then.  In a traditional kitchen there is one Executive Chef, one or more Sous Chefs, and maybe a Chef de Cuisine, a Pastry Chef, and sometimes a Banquet Chef.  Then there are line cooks, pantry cooks, prep cooks, and maybe some other guys who do specific things and inhabit the lower rungs of the kitchen hierarchy just above the dishwashers.

The Executive Chef is the undisputed king/queen of the kitchen.  He/she is ultimately responsible for every plate of food that goes out of the kitchen, food purchasing, food cost management, food preparation and quality control, hiring and firing, menu design and implementation, labor cost, sanitation, and basically anything else even remotely related to kitchen operations.  He/she is highly respected and usually feared to some extent because of the exceptional skill level required to do all these things better than anyone else.  Some of these duties are usually delegated to Sous Chefs.  

Some Executive Chefs never spend a single day in the kitchen due to the difficulty of juggling all of their duties.  Others, like myself, believe that working alongside the other kitchen employees every single day is absolutely essential to building a high performance team that takes pride in their product.  Those of us who actually prepare food handle our administrative duties before the rest of the kitchen staff arrives for work or after they've left when their shifts are over.  I learned this from an IT Director who once told me "Never ask your employees to do something you wouldn't do yourself."  I think this philosophy works.  Only once have I ever had a kitchen employee try to kill me. 

In a large kitchen the Chef de Cuisine position falls right below the Executive Chef.  The Chef de Cuisine handles much of the administrative duties of the kitchen, menu development, vendor relations, and many operational functions.  Chef de Cuisine roughly translates to "Head Chef."  The Executive Chef may oversee multiple kitchens/locations.  The Chef de Cuisine oversees one location and reports to the Executive Chef.  He/she may or may not cook very much on a daily basis.

The Sous Chefs occupy the next rung of the ladder.  They are responsible for the daily food preparation and service.  You will typically find them in the kitchen almost all the time.  They report to the Chef de Cuisine.  

There are several more layers of the kitchen hierarchy, but these are the top levels.  You might wonder why there are so many people required to serve a restaurant menu.  It seems like a lot of people just to turn out some nice food and you would be right to wonder this.  The structure I described above is a traditional kitchen hierarchy.  In reality, most restaurants just have an Executive Chef, one or two Sous Chefs, and a bunch of line cooks.  Smaller places will just have a head cook and a few line cooks.  You don't need an Executive Chef to serve burgers and fried pork tenderloin sandwiches.

So back to "Yes Chef, No Chef."  In all my years in kitchens, until recently I had never heard kitchen employees say "Yes Chef" when speaking to each other in a real working kitchen except then they were addressing the Executive Chef or maybe a Sous Chef.  This was true in every kitchen I have worked in. From TGI Friday's all the way through to exclusive country clubs and Michelin-starred establishments.

I can only surmise that this phenomenon was manufactured by Food Network TV shows for entertainment purposes.  Unfortunately, there are a lot of younger culinarians who grew up watching Gordon Ramsay degrading everyone he meets or some kind of cooking competition packed with all kinds of drama and suspense around cooking a turnip in less than an hour.  The young people who watched those shows enter the foodservice industry thinking that it's just non-stop drama and excitement.  Now you hear "Yes Chef, No Chef" in professional kitchens.  Everyone thinks these TV shows are what working in a restaurant is really like and they go to culinary school expecting to dive head first into what they saw on TV once they graduate because they think that's what it will be like for them.

Let me tell you: It isn't.  It's fucking hard work and you have to work your ass off doing boring, unglamorous things for a long time in order to make just enough money to feed your family.  At the end of the day we don't sit around in a plush lounge drinking expensive wine and discussing our feelings.  It just doesn't happen that way.  I'll save the Food Network rant for another post, but by now you probably know how I feel about it.  Interesting entertainment, but it's caused a lot of people to embark on foodservice careers for the wrong reasons and ultimately fail at them.

So let's stop with the "Yes Chef, No Chef" for a minute and use our real names. And let's stop glamorizing something that really isn't that glamorous.  Ok?

40 Years After 1984

 As we close out the last few weeks of 2024 I've been thinking about 1984, the dystopian novel and cautionary tale written by George Orwell in 1949.  It talks about the dangers of mass surveillance, totalitarianism, and repression of individuality in our society.  If you haven't read it then you should get a copy and read it.  You might want to locate a copy soon as it will probably end up on a "banned books" list sometime in the next year due to the actions of the incoming administration.

I remember reading 1984 in a literature class in middle school.  Everyone in the class liked the book, but we had a sense of security, thinking that our country's democratic principals and our system of checks and balances would keep our future safe from the horrible 1984 scenario.  To us, 1984 was just an amusing curiosity and the chances of mass surveillance, unchecked repression, and totalitarianism ever actually becoming our collective reality were very small.  When the year 1984 actually arrived, the country gave itself a pat on the back, secure in the belief that George Orwell was wrong.  His book was considered an example of exceptional literature, but thankfully hadn't turned out to be historically accurate.

Over the next 20 years I heard many references to 1984.  These references were usually in response to a company's policy of limiting its employees' ability to do things that would, in the opinion of the company's leadership, harm the company or give people outside of the company a bad impression of the organization or it's leaders.  We usually just laughed them off, but occasionally they felt a little too much like what was described in Orwell's book.  

At one company where I worked they implemented software that mainly monitored network devices and generated alerts when a device became non-functional.  The name of this system was "Big Brother," a clear nod to 1984's phrase "Big Brother is Watching You."  

One of the capabilities of this software was that it could capture network traffic from a user's computer, save it, and later decode it so that it could be reviewed by Human Resources.  They requested this a few times, but we made sure to provide so much data to them each time that it would take a team of 10 dedicated people at least two lifetimes to review.  Everyone was used to URL filtering and reporting, but this was different.  After all, it was understandable that a company doesn't want to pay someone to hide out in their office and troll the internet for porn all day.

Those of us responsible for the care and feeding of this monster were older and had experienced the internet at the beginning when it was a learning and collaboration tool for academics and scholars rather than the money-making cesspool it is today.  In those early days you could be confident that the content you found there was considered, at least by it's creator, to be accurate.  Today you can't believe hardly anything you find on the internet is actually true.  Most of it was created to get you to do something that you wouldn't otherwise want to do.  It's mostly just marketing something, whether that's a product you order (and may or may not ever receive), a subscription to some publication of little or no value, or the promise that if you make a donation then the world will be a much better place for it.  I know that's a cynical view, but I believe it's pretty accurate.  As a side note, I'm not going to ask you to buy anything, subscribe to anything, or donate to anything.  You can go figure out how to make the world a better place on your own.  You don't need me for that.

Ok, back to 1984.  The incoming Trump administration has a roadmap for what they perceive to be their "roadmap for governing."  It's called Project 2025.  Trump has claimed that he doesn't know anything about it, but he's already packing his cabinet with Project 2025 authors.  I'd like to go through all 900+ pages with you, but that would be ridiculous so I just want to sum up a few points and if you're curious about what will shape the next 4 years of your life (and likely much longer afterwards) you can go read it for yourself.

First, I want to admit that I haven't read through the whole thing myself.  I've read several sections and that was enough to make me terrified of what it contains.  I'll just tell you about one section here.  It's the section regarding the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).  You might think the FCC only deals with radio and TV, but it does much more.  One of those things is that it has the power to regulate the internet transmission of data.  

Currently, the content allowed in internet transmission of data is regulated by the carriers and platforms.  An example of a carrier would be Verizon or Unite Networks.  An example of a platform would be Meta (Facebook), X, ABC News, and the countless other news platforms and social media apps.  The platforms are responsible for content moderation, which means they are controlling what users are allowed to post on the different platforms.  For example, you would get banned pretty quickly on Facebook by posting hate speech directed toward a minority, minors performing sex acts, etc.  You get the picture.  Generally bad stuff.  The platforms are responsible for deciding what permissible content means and they can act to prevent it or to permit it up to a point.

Project 2025 wants to save us all from our content being censored by the platforms and carriers.  In their opinion, Facebook not allowing us to post negative remarks toward a group or an individual is an infringement on our First Amendment right to free speech.  And not just for Facebook.  It is for all social media platforms, internet carriers, and broadcast media.  Project 2025 wants to save us from this horrible scenario by placing responsibility for content moderation squarely in the hands of the government.  They will decide what is allowed and what is prohibited.  On the surface it may sound like it will level the playing field and make social media and other platforms safer places, but let's really think about it for a minute.

Do you really want a bunch of Washington bureaucrats deciding what news you're allowed to see and what is blocked from your view?  Would you trust them to decide what's important to you?  Are you ready for social media platforms to be banned in the US because they won't submit to the Trump administration's demands to control their content?  How will you communicate with friends overseas?  If other countries don't agree to to US government content moderation on some scale then messaging to and from the US (email, social media, web) could be blocked entirely for those countries.  

Basically, you'd be cut off from anything the government doesn't want you to see.  Does this scenario sound familiar?  To me it sounds like 1984.  And it sounds like Germany in the 1930's.  As Hitler rose to power the first thing he did was control the media and the flow of information.  Then he created an "us and them" scenario in which he blamed the Jews for everything he perceived to be wrong with Germany.  According to Trump, our country's problems are caused by immigrants.  Us and Them.

There are many more jewels like this in Project 2025.  Every section is presented in terms of their benefits to the country, but if you take the time to really think about it then you'll find that, in actuality, it was developed to concentrate power in the hands of a few people and remove the checks and balances that keep them from doing bad things to us for their own gain.  It implements the same environment as Germany had in the 1930's and places Donald Trump, a convicted felon and lifetime con man, in a position of unchecked power.

I guess you can decide if that scenario is ok with you, but for me it's not.  

 

The Most Powerful Potato Salad in the World

I had the craziest dream last night.  It was a restless night and I don't really feel rested at all this morning.  We went to bed at our normal time of about 11:00PM.  For some reason I woke up at 1:10AM craving some potato salad.  After a few minutes of thinking about it I fell into what I thought was a very light sleep and the adventure got started. 

It began with Tanya and I spending every waking moment for two weeks in our tiny  kitchen trying to develop a really good recipe for potato salad.  No jobs, no responsibilities, no bills to pay.  Just potato salad.  We tried countless combinations of ingredients.  We laughed. We bickered. We tripped over our calico cat.  We thought about long passed relatives.  We contemplated man's purpose for existence and speculated about mankind's ultimate and certain demise.  We reminisced about our childhoods, mistakes we had made in life, and all the things that make up two lives well-lived.  

Eventually we hit the target and came up with a recipe for the best potato salad either of us had ever tasted.  Jackpot.  We quickly recorded our precious recipe on a small scrap of paper.  After two full weeks we were done with our masterpiece.

We were having a close friend over for dinner the following Friday and decided to grill out some kind of meat so we could serve our fabulous creation as a side dish.  The anticipation grew every day as we got closer and closer to Friday.  It felt like you feel when you special order a brand new car and the dealer tells you it will be ready to pick up in a few days.  There was electricity in the air.  The dog and both cats knew something big was about to happen.  They could feel it through their special senses that humans do not possess.

We carefully gathered our ingredients during the week.  Potatoes and Duke's mayo from Kroger, onions from Trader Joe's, cage free eggs from Hy-Vee.  It was like we were putting together an epic symphony of flavor.  On Thursday we brought it all together and produced about two pounds of our glorious masterpiece.  The stage was set.

Our friend arrived a few minutes early and, after a couple of cocktails, we grilled some burgers and set the table.  Our guest took one bite of the potato salad and he just stopped moving altogether and then just sat there motionless for an extraordinarily long time, letting his eyes roll well back into his head.  After what seemed like an eternity, he put down his fork and proclaimed that he had just eaten a bite of the best potato salad of all time.  We were all ecstatic and the three of us finished the remaining potato salad without even touching our cheeseburgers.

At this point we knew we had a winner.  Word of our incredible other-worldly potato salad spread rapidly.  Within a few days we had dozens of requests for the recipe.  After some careful consideration we decided not to share our miraculous formula.  Neither of us had robust 401k accounts or government pensions that would actually allow us to retire and live comfortably, so we decided that we might want to monetize our discovery sometime in the future.

Here's where the dream got weird.  When I was the Executive Chef at a fine dining restaurant in Omaha, I briefly employed a very talented cook.  He left after a short time to start his own restaurant and he has since become very successful.  We don't keep in touch regularly because he is a very, very busy man and running a restaurant takes up about 200% of your time.  In my dream he showed up at our door one day and asked for our recipe.  When we politely declined he asked if we would be willing to just make large quantities of our potato salad for him each week so he could sell it in his restaurant.  We also politely declined this request.

Over the next month we were contacted by many other restaurants, cookbook publishers, magazines, and internet influencers who all wanted the recipe.  We did not relent.  To keep the recipe secret we even hid the scrap of paper containing the recipe on page 43 of a Southern Living cookbook.

Then one day the doorbell rang.  Once the dog was confined to her kennel we opened the door only to find Elon Musk standing on our porch.  Although both of us regard Elon Musk as a loudmouth windbag who sucks the very soul out of everyone who crosses his path, he made a very compelling offer for signing over the recipe to him.  When we asked him what he planned to do with it, he said he wanted to fill a 55 gallon drum with really good potato salad and shoot it into space.  We declined, knowing that one day there would be a very real risk that some poor person out watering his or her garden could be killed or maimed by being hit with 300 pounds of potato salad falling from the heavens at supersonic speeds.  He stood on our porch and wailed for some time, eventually climbing into a ridiculous looking CyberTruck and speeding away, all the while shaking his fist angrily at us.  If this sounds impossible to you then please remember that this was just a dream.  The mind can be a terrible thing.

Some time later we received a very official-looking certified letter in the mail.  At first we were a little afraid to open it, but eventually we decided to see what it contained.  It was from Donald Trump.  He was demanding that we turn over the recipe to him immediately, stating (incorrectly, as always) that it was a matter of national security and that he was willing to go to extreme measures in order to obtain it.  After some thought, we decided to ignore the letter as we do for anything originating from Donald Trump.  Shortly thereafter we received a more aggressively worded letter, again demanding that we turn over the recipe.  We decided to ignore that one too.

Ignoring the letter turned out to be a mistake.  We thought that Trump's attention would soon turn to deporting anyone who wasn't old and white or possibly to stripping basic human rights away from all women and people of color.  There are still parts of the USA where the air and water isn't quite fully polluted yet, so we reasoned that decimating Earth's resources and a good part of it's population would keep him pretty busy when he wasn't playing golf at the taxpayers' expense and ultimately he would forget about the recipe.  We were wrong again.  Elon Musk really wanted our recipe and he had Trump's ear, so he kept it fresh in the very front of that feeble little adolescent mind.  

Very early one morning there was a loud knock at the door.  It was about a dozen fully geared-up members of the Nebraska National Guard and the Trump puppet Republican Governor of Nebraska.  They demanded that we hand over the recipe.  Again, we declined and both of us were promptly arrested and ushered into two waiting Humvees.

That's where the dream ended for now.  I've been contemplating whether the events that took place in my dream could actually occur and at this point I think it's entirely possible.  After all, we just elected a person who was arguably the worst President in America's history to yet another term.  Hispanic males just overwhelmingly voted for a candidate who has pledged to deport as many Hispanics as humanly possible.  A large percentage of women just voted for a convicted sex offender who has said he would favor limits on birth control and is more than willing to strip them of any rights to their own bodies.  Strange times indeed.

I hope to be able to go back to that dream again tonight and see what happened.  Sometimes I can do this if I think about the dream a lot right afterwards.  Believe me, I've been thinking about this one quite a bit today.

What Will I Leave?

 I turned 62 a few months ago.  Normally another birthday wouldn't bother me, but for some reason this one hit me hard.  I suddenly realized that my time on this planet is getting pretty short.  The last time I saw life expectancy numbers for the US I think the average was 79.1 years.  At first I thought I was OK with the thought that, statistically speaking, I should have about another 17 years left.  You can do a lot of stuff in 17 years.  Then I realized that 79.1 was an average and the life expectancy for men is only 73.2 years.  I really thought I could use that extra 6 years for something important, but now I need to cram everything into 11 years.

Now the thought of leaving this existence doesn't particularly scare me except for the fact that I've never done it before that I know of and I'm not exactly sure how to go about doing it correctly.  I suppose I'll figure it out when the time comes.  After all, billions of people before me have been able to stumble through dying without any formal training.  Some were very good at it and some were not so good, but they're all dead for sure.  You don't get to put it off until you get some training.  I'd rather do a good job and be remembered as someone who seemed to know what he was doing at the end.

So the part that hit me so hard was when I asked myself "How will I be remembered?"  I'm not sure if I've done or made anything that people will point to and say "I know the guy who did that.  He's dead now but he left this great thing for the benefit of the rest of us who are still here."  I feel some amount of pressure to make sure I have a few of those things done before I go.  I decided to take a personal inventory.

As I considered what I will leave for those who outlast me or come along well after I'm gone, I decided that there actually are a few things that might be of value to someone in the future.  I have four great kids, a lot of stuff that I've written over the years, a large body of photography work, and countless memories with friends, family, foes, and random people I've met over the years.  Obviously my memories will go with me, but hopefully the memory of me, whether good or bad, will last in the memories of others I've encountered over the years at least for a while.  I don't have a bunch of possessions, real estate, or a big stack of money stashed away somewhere (sorry kids).  I do, however, have a couple of pretty great cats.

So there.  I guess I really HAVE done something in those 62 years, even if I didn't realize I was doing it at the time.  Well, I better get this post finished up.  Only 11 years left and a lot of stuff left to do.

Note:  If you're reading this post and thinking it is some kind of goodbye note that will likely be followed by a self-inflicted early exit from this world, you can just stop it.  I'm not even close to being done with this life yet.

Social Experiment About Priorities and Seeing Beauty Every Day

 Normally I wouldn't copy and paste something into this blog that was written by someone else, but a photographer friend posted this today and I think it is important enough to share with you:

“In Washington DC, at a Metro Station, on a cold January morning in 2007, a man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, approximately 2000 people went through the station, most of them on their way to work.

After about four minutes, a middle-aged man noticed that there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds, then he hurried on to meet his schedule.

About four minutes later, the violinist received his first dollar. A woman threw money in the hat and, without stopping, continued to walk.

At six minutes, a young man leaned against the wall to listen to him, then looked at his watch and started to walk again.

At ten minutes, a three-year old boy stopped, but his mother tugged him along hurriedly. The kid stopped to look at the violinist again, but the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk, turning his head the whole time. This action was repeated by several other children, but every parent - without exception - forced their children to move on quickly.

At forty-five minutes: The musician played continuously. Only six people stopped and listened for a short while. About twenty gave money but continued to walk at their normal pace. The man collected a total of $32.

After one hour:

He finished playing and silence took over. No one noticed and no one applauded. There was no recognition at all.

No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the greatest musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a violin worth $3.5 million dollars. Two days before, Joshua Bell sold-out a theater in Boston where the seats averaged $100 each to sit and listen to him play the same music.

This is a true story. Joshua Bell, playing incognito in the D.C. Metro Station, was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and people’s priorities.

This experiment raised several questions:

*In a common-place environment, at an inappropriate hour, do we perceive beauty?

*If so, do we stop to appreciate it?

*Do we recognize talent in an unexpected context?

One possible conclusion reached from this experiment could be this:

If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world, playing some of the finest music ever written, with one of the most beautiful instruments ever made…

How many other things are we missing as we rush through life?

Rabbi-Yisroel Bernath

How Much Empathy for the Unvaccinated?

I heard an interesting story on NPR today over lunch.  It was about COVID-19 hospitalization rates for the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated.  The reporter was interviewing a doctor and was trying to get to the reason some people get more severe cases of COVID-19 than others.  It kept coming back to the fact that the most severe and life threatening cases were primarily among the unvaccinated.  He tried several times to get the doctor to say that vaccination status wasn't a determining factor in the severity of the disease, but it kept coming back to the fact that the unvaccinated have more severe cases of COVID-19 and are more likely to die from it.

At some point in the interview the reporter asked the doctor if he was likely to provide better healthcare to a vaccinated patient because he knew that their outcome was likely to be much better than if the patient was unvaccinated.  He was asking if the doctor showed more empathy for a vaccinated patient than an unvaccinated patient since the unvaccinated patient made a conscious choice to put him/herself at risk when he/she refused the vaccine.  As you might imagine, that particular question took the interview down an entirely different path.

I've had many friends, both vaccinated and unvaccinated, who suffered the ravages of COVID-19.  Their experiences were exactly what you would expect.  The vaccinated ones were uncomfortable for a week and recovered easily while the unvaccinated ones paid a high price for their decisions to decline the vaccine.  A couple of the unvaccinated ones are still suffering some long lasting effects of having the disease.

It was relatively easy for me to reconcile the differences in outcomes between my vaccinated friends and unvaccinated ones.  I know that several times I thought to myself "Well, you're the one who decided not to get vaccinated.  The disease kicked your ass but now you're OK so maybe you'll rethink that strategy now."  I genuinely felt bad for all of them and would have done anything I possibly could to help them regardless of their vaccination status.  The thing is, though, they all recovered and life goes on.  Except for one.

In college I had a fraternity brother named Art.  I never liked him much because, quite frankly, he was an asshole and he was happy knowing he was an asshole.  Art was obnoxious and I did my best to avoid him for the four years we were there.  Unfortunately Art didn't feel the same way about me and would gravitate toward me at parties, social functions, and when I went out to bars with my fraternity brothers.  In the spirit of brotherhood I did my best to be gracious and tolerant, but it didn't always work out too well.  

The thing I found most annoying about Art was that he would argue about anything just for the sake of arguing.  If you happened to say something like "The sky is a beautiful shade of blue today," Art would make it his mission to convince anyone who would listen that you were color blind and had no idea what color the sky actually was and it was likely due to the fact that your mother was a dirty crack whore and your father was a heroin addict.  It was like that with everything that Art touched.  Somehow he felt the need to contradict everything and he was good at it.

After college Art worked for the EPA for awhile doing whatever the EPA actually does.  He got into public health statistical analysis and lived in the Washington, D.C. area.  He made a good career out of that and was an expert in public health policy.  Make no mistake, Art was very intelligent.

I had not had any contact with Art for about 40 years when out of the blue he sent me a Facebook friend request.  Normally I would have just ignored it but I felt that I couldn't do that to a fraternity brother.  We exchanged pleasantries for a few days and caught up on family, careers, and plans for retirement.  

Inevitably, our conversation turned to politics.  Art was an avid Trumper and if you've read this blog for very long you know that I think Donald Trump is the Antichrist.  We argued politics for several weeks and finally just agreed to disagree and maybe revisit the whole subject toward the end of Trump's term as President.

Then along came the coronavirus.  Art posted something negative about mask mandates in his area and for some reason I decided to take the bait.  For a full week we argued day and night whether coronavirus was actually a pandemic or just something manufactured by the Democrats to seize power from our idiot President.  Art insisted it was nothing more than a bad cold and that the US would reach herd immunity in just a few months.

I work in healthcare and had experienced caregivers crying in the hospital cafeteria because they had just spent the last twelve hours watching a mother of four drowning in her own mucus and eventually welcoming death rather than continuing to suffer.  True story.  That vision still haunts me every day and night and I wasn't even on the front lines.  I'm serious.  Every day and every night I think about this.  Based on that I was pretty sure it was more than a political trick.  

Art and I continued to argue for the better part of two weeks.  He cited figures from the CDC and WHO and they were very credible until you really dug into them and discovered the details.  At that point his argument collapsed but it still didn't deter him.  Anyway, we eventually decided that neither of us was going to change our opinion so we stopped arguing about it.

When the vaccines came out Art asked me if I was going to get vaccinated.  When I told him I would take the vaccine he mounted a series of attacks on my intelligence that lasted for over a month.  By this time I knew arguing with him was fruitless so I didn't waste my time or energy on it.  

The next thing I heard regarding Art was on our fraternity's Facebook timeline a few months later when his son posted a message saying he had passed away from COVID-19.  This is where we get back to the empathy part.  On one hand I wanted to say "I told you so and you got what you deserved" and on the other hand I was truly heartbroken at the suffering my friend must have endured toward the end of his life.  I still can't quite figure out what to make of this.  I know it's wrong to not show any empathy, but geez, he was a really smart guy and should have known.  On the other hand, I should just set that aside and feel sympathetic to any human suffering regardless of whether he could have prevented it.

So I'm still conflicted over this and I probably will be for some time.  It feels like unfinished business that I need to take care of before I can move on.  Maybe eventually that will fade and I won't think about it anymore, but maybe it won't.

So that's where I am on the whole empathy thing.  It angers me to see people choose not to get vaccinated but I feel like I still can't shut them out entirely when they do contract COVID-19 and then suffer for their poor decision.

Anyway, I hope none of you are in this position and that you and your loved ones have made the right choice for you.