Monday 4/5

Snail Mail

What’s worse than becoming obsolete?  Becoming obsolete and being made fun of.  The term ‘Snail Mail’ is a prime example of this.  It’s hard to say snail mail without sounding snoody about it.  Think about it.  Snail Mail.  Audio cassettes and VHS tapes should be thankful they blew over gracefully instead of becoming a joke.  So why do some things get replaced and retired respectfully and others linger in laughable limbo?

My first thought is that regular mail is controlled by the government and therefore it’s just an easier target to poke fun at (Funny thing is, the government continues to lose money on the postal service because it’s out of control.  I guess ‘control’ is relative).  I can think of other very similar examples which have no government interest.  Take CDs for example.  MP3s and MP3 players are far superior to CDs and although slowly, everyone is making the switch.  But we don’t make fun of CDs like we do mail.  So if the government isn’t the reason we make fun of mail, then what else?

Maybe it’s because the US Postal Service is unionized!  Unions are easy targets, too, with their “competitive wages,” “work standard definitions,” and “tenure.”  (Need some job security and don’t want to work as hard for it?  Join a union.)  If you think snail mail is silly, you probably don’t care for unions, either.  After considering it further though, other unionized industries aren’t humor-ized.  Railroads, as a means of transportation, are very slow, but we don’t call it Snail Rail. 

Perhaps people laugh in the face of regular mail because you actually have to pay for it.  Email is FREE, after all!  And all email costs you is a little bit of your time and the wrinkle in your brain to learn how to use it.  You can use different fonts and colors with email.  You can send an email out to many people at once!  And you don’t have to lick an email to shut it! 

Pretty much anything you do via the postal service you could just as easily do online now: pay bills, read newspapers and magazines, send letters, etc.  Only some things still need to be manually sent, but even still, there are some hungry third party shipping services out there ready to beat the USPS rate.

What it seems to boil down to is just a recipe for ridicule.  It’s not that the mail is any of the things listed above, it’s that the mail is all of them: government controlled, unionized, costly, obsolete, and so on.  All that remains is the good feeling you get when someone sends you an honest-to-goodness card or letter with an honest-to-goodness stamp on it.  Ahh, nostalgia.  It’s a great benefit for mail, but a bad business plan.

By: S. Cole Garrett

Friday 4/2

Movie Night

“I’d like to see [Insert movie title here] in 3-D at 7:30, please.”  The gentleman in front of me pulled out his wallet and the box office attendant punched a few buttons on her computer.

She leaned forward into the microphone.  “Fourteen dollars,” she said.

“Oh, no, just one ticket, please.”  The man was very polite, trying to correct the girl behind the glass.

“Yes sir, that’s fourteen dollars,” she smiled.

Then it hit him and his jaw dropped.  He reeled it in and reluctantly handed her a twenty.  She quickly returned him his ticket and six dollars.  He walked away and looked at his six dollars like he had just sold his soul to the devil.  He shook his head and walked into the theater. 

Take a minute and think about what you could do with fourteen bucks.  Better yet, imagine you were taking someone to the movies and it was twenty-eight instead.  Don’t worry about the keg of soda and the dump truck of popcorn you might buy once you get inside.  That’s for another day.

Just let it sink in . . .

Unless they start handing out bars of gold with those 3-D movie tickets, I probably won’t be going to see too many of them, if any.  There’s a local rental store where you can rent two movies for one dollar (and they’re not that old.  There are plenty on those shelves that I meant to get around to watching and still haven’t).  I could see fifty-six movies with that same twenty-eight dollars.  (Ok, if you really want to be technical, which I usually am, I could only rent fifty-one movies if you calculate taxes.)  It would take me three months to watch that many! 

I’m not saying you should forever forgo the nostalgia of the theater.  I’m just saying maybe you should consider all your options before forking over a fifty on a Friday night.

Clearly, the premium you pay for a 3-D movie ticket is for the experience.  Sure, it’s a sense-adventure, but there’s still the crawling-over-people and who-forgot-to-turn-off-their-cell-phone-? that, personally, I can do without.  So make it a movie night at home and save a buck (or lots of bucks!)

By: S. Cole Garrett

3/23/10

Thursday 4/1

Oxy-moronic

Humans often have very bizarre behaviors.  Some people are just really quiet, some wash their hands fifty times a day, and some people are mimes (which is pretty bizarre in and of itself).  More often than we realize, people do things that are very contradictory of themselves.  There’s a word for it, too.  See, when you do something dumb, it’s moronic.  If you act in a way that is contradictorily stupid, it’s oxymoronic.

Let’s start from the top.  In case you’re unfamiliar with them, an oxymoron is a term, usually two words put together, which have opposite meanings.  Like Jumbo Shrimp.  Jumbo = Big.  Shrimp = Small.  Here are some of my favorite examples:  pretty ugly, only choice, act naturally, same difference, Great Depression, crash landing, recorded live, and virtual reality.  Combine two opposite actions and you have a case of oxymoronic behavior.

Sometimes, we as a human race do oxymoronic things.  For example, you can walk into just about any gas station and buy a sweaty, chilled bottle of sweet, lemon, iced tea.  Tea was originally brewed and consumed hot.  Somewhere around the turn of the nineteenth century, someone decided it would be good on ice (and might I add, it is quite nice!).  Actually, when tea was first being iced, it was also heavily spiked with liquor (like a really long island iced tea).  Anyway, we have hot tea poured over ice.  That’s oxymoronic.  But we Americans have a greater calling than that, so we put sour lemon in iced tea to give it some flavor and sugar in it to sweeten it up!  (which, might I also add, is quite yummy!).  It’s an oxymoron-fest in a cup!

Other times, individuals are able to simply embarrass themselves, oxymoronically.  My family and I were sitting in a nice steakhouse one evening and we overheard the gentleman in the booth behind us ordering.  It went something like this:

“Here is your diet soda, sir,” the waitress beamed, “Are you ready to order?”

“Yeah,” he bellowed, “I’ll have the eighteen ounce ribeye, medium rare, loaded mashed potatoes, corn, and stuffing.  Can you add the shrimp tempura on that?  And I’d like to go ahead and start with the chili-cheese-bacon-sour cream waffle fry mountain, please.  Thank you.”

Rewind.  Before we get the heart attack on a plate, he ordered diet soda!  That’s textbook oxymoronic.  A calorie-free soda to go with a 4,000-calorie meal!  I guess compromise is in the eye of the beholder.

There is an oxymoron around every turn.  Whether you’re shopping for tight slacks or hearing on the news about someone being found missing, open your eyes and ears and you’ll see people doing some seriously funny stuff!

By: S. Cole Garrett

3/31/10