This morning I went to the bakery to get a cup of coffee and bran muffin. Nothing unusual about that. But as I prepared my coffee, I could not see the coffee cup lids. I looked around the little prep table, and there were no lids. The line to the cash register was pretty long, so I decided not to shout “where are the lids?.” After looking around a little, I noticed a drawer in a cabinet slightly to one side. I pulled out the drawer, and there were cup lids. So I put one on my coffee and stood in line.
So what. Nothing special yet. But as I got to the cash register, the clerk took a look at my cup lid and went over to a sign that said “we are out of coffee lids,” and took it down. I realized that the morning staff just didn’t know where to look.
So I paid and was about to leave, when another customer shouted “where are the coffee lids?” Another worker shouted back “We’re OUT!”
I motioned to the customer and pointed out where the lids were. But to my surprise, the customer just said “That’s OK” and left with his cup overflowing.
Now I can understand how the morning shift of workers might be clueless about where the lids were and not very focussed on that small problem. They were bakers and newbies: it might be a couple of hours until the manager got to that store on his morning rounds.
But what seems really strange is the reaction of the customer: He had a problem. He wanted a lid. But when he was shown where the lids were, he rejected the solution as if it did not exist! What was going on inside this guys head??
I’m wondering if this is what we all might do from time to time: We have a problem. We even know what the problem is. We ask for a solution. Someone tells us the answer. And then we just walk away. Just walk away like dummies.
If we are doing that, then we really may deserve the job we have, instead of the career of accomplishment we could have with some more education. We deserve to be a slave to our negative emotions of fear, shame, when EFT, NLP and hypnosis are readily available. We deserve to get the bad marriage we have, when we could get some real help from lee baucom or the Celarien Experience. We deserve to get the crappy leaders we elect to the executive branch, instead of kicking the bums out: we are the government of the people, you might remember.
It is bad enough that we are in control of our lives and we make inferior choices. But it is totally insane to walk away from a solution that is staring us in the face. As Ann Landers might have never said: “wake up and cover the coffee before you spill it on your shirt!”
