Tag Choices

One from Column A and/or

Michael 11 Comments

Did you ever pick your one from Column A and after you chose those two from Column B you wondered if the choice from Column A was the right one? Of course you did. Who hasn’t picked some selection, made some choice, committed to some decision, and then wondered if that was the right one to go for?

(For the younger crowd, Chinese restaurants once were noted for menu choices made from two columns, the first typically the proteins and the second were the sides. Do they still do that anywhere? They don’t here. More often than not, complete meals are presented, or aka carte choices can be picked from the entire menu.)

For me, messing up a menu selection would have significant impact, so strong is my love of food. Of course, I have made more significant yet errant choices throughout my life. I once turned down a promotion because I was concerned that I was being chosen over others who had significantly more time in their positions. After reflection, I realized that yes, they had more time, but I was vastly better at doing the actual work. As you would suspect, it was impossible to un-say no.

Just yesterday I was busy assembling the agenda for an upcoming meeting. Throughout the morning, I was interrupted by calls and messages and made little progress. I finally said to myself, “Self,” I said, “there’s nothing that important that comes through your phone any more. Ignore the darn thing and wrap this up so you can get back to your book and enjoy the afternoon.” So I put the darned thing on silent, finished the agenda, then got back to my book. It after lunch (naturally) before I checked to see if I might have missed anything. Of course I had. Unfortunately, one of them was indeed pretty important and I spent the afternoon trying to connect again without any luck.

Choices made because of rigid or poor thinking, each affecting my life rather significantly. We don’t have to do that. We can be creative in our thoughts and in our choices. I could have told my boss that I was honored to have been her choice, accepted the opportunity that frankly I had wanted and would have been good at rather than “magnanimously” stepping aside to make way for seniority. Or I could have configured the phone in myriad other ways than simply ignoring it, allowing important calls through while filtering the unwanted to a holding area.

Yesterday’s Uplift post, Certainty Unsure, looked at that very topic, how we can be certain we are unsure of what we’re doing. Or perhaps how we can be unsure of what we are certain of doing. The bottom line is that we don’t have to be certain. We aren’t restricted to a single path through life. We can choose our own way and it will be okay. I missed out on one opportunity, but I had many others come through. And I might have missed a phone call but like (all our) mother(s) told us, if it was importantly, they’d call again. Be certain to decide to pop over to the ROAMcare site and check it out.

Choose wisely

Michael 9 Comments

I was reading the local paper on line this morning and did something I rarely do. I glanced at the reader comments section. The assumption is the comments are made by readers of the article but at least a quarter of them, as many as a third of them had little to do with the article they accompanied. It got me thinking a couple things.

My first thought was who made the decision to allow comments on newspaper articles. I routinely read two local papers, a national news service daily report, and at least one of the local TV/radio conglomerates’ news briefs. Only one allows comments on an article. The others all host “letters to the editor” sections so there is an outlet for concerned readers to voice (type) their views. The comments added to the articles rarely add anything thoughtful and routinely devolve into the sort of online bashing more at home at the site formerly known as Twitter. But someone made the choice to open the pixels to anyone with access to a keyboard, physical or virtual.

My second thought was, “Just because some bozo at the paper caved to the pressure of his backward hat wearing after work drinking buddies to allow backward hat wearing examples of threatened masculinity to put their canned beliefs in the modern equivalent of crayon on the paper, who thought it was a good idea to accept the challenge and put to rest any idea that the backward hat wearing contingent is just misunderstood and might actually be at least as smart as a gibbon.” Yes, it was a long thought. Short version: who thought it was a good idea to accept the choice to add their comments.

My third thought was why did I even bother glancing at the comments knowing they were probably as full of waste as a doggie poop bag after a long walk. It was a choice I regretted. Unfortunately it is sort of like watching a 300 pound man do a belly flop from the high dive. You know it’s going to be messy and someone undoubtedly will get hurt, but you can’t look away.

The decision to allow or not allow comments, to make intelligent observations or spew nonsense, to read or not to read, or to climb the ladder to the high dive in the first place are all pretty easy either/or choices.  It’s good to have choices. Choices are what make us different from the parts of the world that do not have some of the freedoms we’ve been used to enjoying. And choices are a fact of life. Every day you will face some (or many) decision making conundrum (conundra) [For those who might be wondering what I’ve been doing now for the last 40 minutes, I had fallen down a rabbit hole looking for the proper plural of conundrum. I can now say that “conundrums” seems to be the preferred plural but “conundra” is not wrong. Given that I’ve already gone out on a limb with my initial spelling, I’ve made the choice to leave it at conundrum.]

Although many are simple either/or choices, just as many may be complex multiple choice decisions (and in life “all off the above” is rarely the correct answer).

We took the challenge and chose to address difficult choices along with their inherent choice fatigue and potential for choice paralysis in yesterday’s Uplift post, The choice is yours. We would appreciate it if you’d read it and if you choose to comment on it. The choice is yours.

A Labor of Love

Michael 5 Comments

Hello dear blogging friends. Labor Day USA is less than a handful of days away and we know that, regardless of what the calendar and the weather nerds say, is the real end of summer. We also know that means sales! An American holiday isn’t an American holiday without a sale! I think that was a law passed sometime in 1970-something, just as I was entering my working years and never got to enjoy a holiday because I was, you know, working. After what seemed like centuries but was really only decades (and decades) of work, my friend and I were completely un-excited about one more day of labor. So we decided to labor together, a labor of love, to try to re-energize others who had lost their enthusiasm for just being, and together we founded ROAMcare.

We thought with it being Labor Day, we’d celebrate our labor of love with a Labor Day Sale! Except we don’t have anything to sell, nothing to pay for, no fees of any kind. So, there’s nothing for you to save on. But we can save your finger the extra work of clicking on a link and give you our most recent blog post right here right now!

The ROAMcare mission is to refresh your enthusiasm for life by dealing with challenges, confirming your choices, or just finding that extra motivation you need to push through the day! In our latest blog post we encourage you to Find Your Enthusiasm. Read it and see if you don’t feel like hopping over to ROAMcare.org just as soon as you’re done and join us over there too!

Find your enthusiasm

4 minute read
Posted August 28, 2024.
© Copyright 2024 ROAMcare Organization

We’ve written over two hundred blog posts and many fall to this type: “Be happy with where you are” or “Be happy with your choices,” or “Be good with how it worked out.” And there is a lot of love being talked about. Loving our lives, loving those in our lives, loving ourselves. It is all part of making, finding, or keeping your enthusiasm for life.

Life, unlike our blog posts, happens every day. It comes at us each day, each hour, each minute. There will be times when you aren’t going to be happy where you are, or with one of your choices, or how it worked out. Then what? One of our Moments of Motivation exhorted, “Don’t complain when things go wrong. Live with what you can. Learn from what you can’t. Grow from it all.” That then leads to regaining your positivity.

As we pointed out in One Job, “There is little impetus to improve something – a product, a task, a procedure – if that something is already working as well as it can.” We can add to the list of things seeking improvement to include a life.

What brought on this reminder to accept things that go wrong as opportunities to improve? Because lately things have gone wrong. The specifics and the details are not important. That we’ve found ourselves questioning our own counsel to keep up our enthusiasm for life is the telling point of the tale. After all, we also were the ones who said, “Sometimes “no” can be the most positive thing to say.” Are we going to be relegated to the “Do what I say, not what I do” crowd of orators. Actually, no. The complete quote is, “Know your limits. Sometimes “no” can be the most positive thing to say.” Know your limits. That becomes your starting point to improve, to live with what you can and learn from what you can’t. That is where you learn to extend your limits.

Extending your limits takes not much more than knowing where you are and where you want to be, then harnessing the enthusiasm to get you over the hurdle and encouraging yourself to greatness – or the next step to it. Having a friend who recognizes the hurdles makes the journey to improvement easier, and sometimes even fun.

That reminds us of a favorite story of encouragement that we shared in one of our earliest posts. The tale of Bill and Phil.

Bill and Phil shared a room in a nursing home and so much more. Both, quite infirmed, had no family and no visitors. Their only distractions were themselves. Bill was in the bed nearer the door. Not able to move from a laying position, he had been on his back for as long as anyone remembered. Phil, next to the window, was allowed to sit up in bed for one hour each day.

One afternoon as Phil was raised to his sitting position, his roommate Bill, anxious for a view of anything but the ceiling above, asked him what he saw, and thus began a tradition that was to continue throughout their acquaintance.

For one hour each day, Phil described scenes of the outside world – the blossoms in the spring, the bright colors of summer, the falling leaves in autumn, the crisp snow in winter. He spoke of children playing, animals scurrying, young lovers holding hands, and old friends taking in all around them. Whatever the season, whatever the weather, there was always something special to tell, and it was for those moments that Bill struggled to build his strength working toward the day when he would be strong enough to lift himself and join his friend looking out on the world.

One morning the aide came to wake the gentlemen and discovered Phil had passed away during the night. She expressed her sympathies to Bill on the loss of his friend. After a while Bill asked if he can be moved to be by the window. The nursing staff made the necessary arrangements and moved him. There, still in pain yet as carefully as possible, he struggled to lift himself little by little, until finally he got a glimpse of the scene outside the window. And there he saw the blank, brick wall of the building next door.

Dejected he asked the nurse why his friend had deceived him all these years, telling him of such a beautiful outside when there was nothing but a brick wall.

The nurse, confused about this replied, “He couldn’t have seen anything. You know Phil was blind.”

Then Bill’s eyes were opened! He realized he asked his friend what he saw, not what was outside the window. What Phil saw was the beauty of the world, and each day he described the scene he saw in his mind.

Some days later a new patient was assigned to the room. Bill’s new roommate was placed by the door in the position Bill himself so long had been. His new roommate says, “Hi, I hope you don’t mind a talker for a roommate. I have no family and nobody else is going to visit me. All I can do is lie here and look at the ceiling. Hey, since you are by the window, would you mind telling me what you see?”

“Absolutely!” said Bill. “I’d love to. It’s a really beautiful world.”

We can learn two things from Phil and Bill. Always know that just because you can’t see it, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. And never underestimate the power of encouragement. The blind roommate Phil was able to create a world of beauty knowing somewhere out there was the world he saw, just maybe not the one right in front of him. Bill, his bed bound roommate, found a reason to work to improve himself through Phil’s world of words, and Phil knew his words were the encouragement Bill needed to work hard enough to affect that change.

Life comes at us every day and no, you’re not going to like every minute of it. Enjoy what you do like about it. Learn from what you don’t. Find your enthusiasm. Encourage a friend. Love yourself. Grow from it all.

We hope you enjoyed that and will join our community and enjoy having Uplift and our Monday Moments of Motivation every week. (And we don’t sell or use your email address for anything except for our own subscriptions.)

And Happy Labor Day!

Uplift 2024

Can You Heat It Now?

Michael Leave a comment

I was working on a household budget for this year over the weekend (so I’m a little late – things happen), when I had to make the decision of whether to renew the car’s satellite radio subscription. That got me thinking about all the iterations of mobile music over the years.

The first car radio I remember was in my father’s 57 Chevy. Of course that was in ’61 long before it would become a classic but that’s a story for another post. That radio was a simple AM job that got music, news, and sports from a handful stations that were within 20 or so miles of the read mounted, stainless steel antenna. It came as a package option that included the radio, an under-dash heater, and cigarette lighter. Talk about luxury!

Sometime in the mid-60s I remember friends’ parents with cars that had AM-FM radios. Now that was something. None of us knew exactly what FM was although a few years later in high school physics they talked about the different types of sound waves and that had something to do with the difference between AM and FM but by then we were too concerned with the music coming from the radio than how it worked. But back in the 60s all we knew about FM radio was that was where the classical music stations lived and that one station that played what they called “album tracks” that our parents wouldn’t let us listen too.

radioAnd that was it for car radio until those high school years. Then the changes came fast and furious. Nobody’s factory model was good enough. The aftermarket offerings included AM, AM-FM, 8-Track, and that newest alternative, the cassette player. Cassettes were cool. They let you listen to “your music” instead of relying on the DJ choices on the radio, they didn’t skip when you couldn’t dodge the potholes fast enough like the 8-track players, and the really good ones include auto-reverse so you could listen to the same album over and over without even having to pull the cassette out and flip it over.

Fast forward (no pun intended but now that I think about it not a bad segue) through college and young adulthood when nothing much new happened other than the ubiquity of CD players in addition to or in place of the cassette to the 1990s and the advent of MP3 players, Bluetooth, and satellite radio. Suddenly deciding on a source of music while riding down the road brought back memories of debating the merits of cassette versus 8 track.

After a few years you didn’t have to make a choice which one to get as much as which one to use since every car seemed to offer every option. Even in my modest family sedan I can choose between AM, FM and satellite radio, an auxiliary jack into which I can plug an MP3 player (or a portable cassette or even 8-track player if I could find one, or the other, or both), or anything that can transmit Bluetooth such as my phone that could play music from memory or stream music from an outside source. With all that decision making to do it’s no wonder only 85% of people decide to buckle up before pulling out.

Now that I’ve put this all down in writing I can see I have plenty of options even if I don’t opt to renew the satellite subscription. That saves me a couple hundred dollars for this year that I can use on 5 or 6 weeks of cable. Hmm, I think it might be decision time again.

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?

 

Feel free to ignore this greeting. Our menu options have not changed.

Michael Leave a comment

It seems to us that every time you call a bank, an insurance company, some retail store, the local ballet company, your drugstore, your spouse’s work, your work, anybody’s work, or even your kid’s school you are greeted with, “Please listen carefully as our menu options have changed.”  Really?  And when was that change anyway?  We’ve been calling the same numbers for years and they all connect to the same recording that starts every call with “Please listen carefully as our menu options have changed.

We don’t remember what the choices were from yesterday so how are we to know if they really did change today.  The only thing that we are sure of is that the option we really want – to speak with a human being – isn’t one of the options!  Never is.  We’re certain that it used to be.  We’re pretty sure the last choice was always, “Otherwise, please press zero or hold on for an operator.”  That one used to get you to a human.  It said so right in the description – hold on for an operator.  Now it’s code for “Press zero and we’ll hang up on you.”  And there used to be one that said, “If you are calling from a rotary phone, please hold on.”  That got you a real person also.  Did you ever hold on even though you were calling from a push button phone?  They couldn’t tell.  Could they?

We think we know what the problem is.  There are too many choices.  People are probably clogging up customer service lines with complaints about that company’s automated line saying there wasn’t a choice for their problem when there might have been.  But because there are menus within menus within still other menus, sometimes finding the right choice isn’t a reasonable option.  So we’re proposing our own universal auto-attendant menu that any company can use.

 

–Thank you for calling the First National Insurance Company of Discount Ticket Sellers and Drug Store

–If you want to check a balance, make a payment, transfer funds, request a quote, refill a prescription, get our mailing address, get our e-mail address, access your most recent statement, access older statements, buy a travel mug with our logo on it, order tickets for a sporting event, concert, live theater event, movie, ballet, upcoming auto, home, garden, flower, RV or boat show, commend an employee, or file a complaint, hang up and go to our web-site and take care of business there.  If you’re willing to do it by phone you’ll do fine with it on-line.  With the proliferation of tablets, mobile sites and apps, you don’t even need a real computer to take care of business on line.  You can stay put on your couch, access our site during the commercial, do whatever you want to do, and never miss any of your show.  If you don’t have a tablet you can use a smart phone but the screen is a little small.  Don’t complain to us if you hit a wrong virtual button on a cell phone screen.  Now really, we’re well into the twenty-first century and you don’t have a tablet?  Next you’ll claim to still have a rotary phone.

–All other callers please hold on and listen to our commercial for easy to use personal tablets.

 

There you have it.  It has only two choices and it even works with rotary phones.  And it’s guaranteed not to need changing.  Ever.  Or until somebody invents something more convenient than cell phones or personal tablets.

Now that’s what we think. Really. How ‘bout you.