You're welcome, rest stop and airline blues

A trio of observations, all loosely tied to summer travels.

What’s the deal with “of course”?

On a July trip to the New England states, I noticed many people responding with these two words instead of “you’re welcome.” As in, “Thank you for checking me into my hotel room this evening,” to which the desk clerk responded, “Of course!” in place of the (to me) customary, “You’re welcome.”

I didn’t get it, so I googled it.

As with most cultural phenomena over the last, oh, 10 years or so, I must have missed when “you’re welcome” fell out of vogue. The New York Times Magazine covered the expression’s demise in 2015, and the Huffington Post addressed it in 2018. The consensus is that “you’re welcome” has a certain braggadocious swagger, that the person who says it is acknowledging that a “thank you” was deserved. “You’re welcome,” by this line of reasoning, is pompous.

Go figure.

To me, “of course” feels that way, like the person is waving off my sincere gratitude and saying that my judgment is skewed for even considering whatever they did for me to be a favor. Or that they were taught to say it in some corporate right-speak training seminar about how to deal with moronic customers.

Look, my small-talk is already in the bottom of the ninth, with two outs and nobody on. Now I have to worry that my automatic response to “thank you” is uppity or snarky. Thanks for nothing, “of course.”

***

On the drive home from vacation, my wife and I slept in a rest stop overnight.

Based on the way our families responded, you would have thought we lay down with snakes, lions and roaring bears instead of merely cracking the windows, leaning the seats back and catching a couple hours of sleep.

Undoubtedly, rest stops figure in the urban legends of the automobile age as places where terrible occurrences, uh, occur after dark.

But to a tightwad like me, few things could be as frightening as checking into a hotel after 10 p.m., paying an inflated rate for the room (because of COVID, which has become the boogeyman/scapegoat for all higher prices this summer) and then leaving early the next morning. It’s like paying $150 each for the privilege of a shower. A rest stop was a thrifty alternative.

At some point in the night, my wife elbowed me to put the windows up (she was cold) and the people sleeping in the car next to us drove away loudly (says my wife, but it didn’t wake me). Otherwise, we slept like babies. Big, cranky babies, but still.

Oh, and the next morning, as I creeped along some desolate back road on my way to a Dunkin Donuts, a police officer pulled me over for allegedly going left of center.

As we waited for him to run my license and registration, my wife leaned over and whispered, “If you get a ticket, it’s going to wipe away all the money we saved by sleeping in the rest stop.”

Thanks, Captain Obvious.

Happy ending: He let me off with a warning and a wave. The moral? A rest-stop sleepover police-proofs a driver for at least half a day.

***

I was stuck in the Tampa airport last Monday, one of thousands of “victims” of Spirit Airlines’ implosion of canceled flights.

I qualify “victim” because I had a good book (“Survivor Song,” by Paul Tremblay) and good tunes. So the first canceled flight wasn’t so terrible, nor were the two delays on the second flight. It felt a little like a vacation in a big, noisy library.

I’ll admit that the second canceled flight, some eight hours later, annoyed me a little, but I had a nephew in nearby St. Pete Beach, who gave me a ride to his place, let me spend the night and ferried me back to the airport the next morning for a flight on Frontier.

I left a less-than-glowing review on Twitter, which led Spirit Airlines to contact me about how they could make up for the mess. But, really, I was probably one of the least inconvenienced wannabe flyers at the airport that day.

When I consider the opportunity to kick back all day reading and grooving, what I really should be saying to Spirit is, “Thank you.”

To which they should respond, “Of course.”

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Please, consider the COVID vaccine

If you can get vaccinated, please do.

I understand vaccine hesitancy, fears, and the unfortunate (re: tragic and unnecessary) politicization of this virus. I understand that people are busy, that everyday life is hectic enough without having to factor a series of shots into the mix. I especially understand the fear of needles.

But look at what is happening in Texas and Florida right now.

As I write these words (on Aug. 4), Texas is seeing a rise in hospitalizations among people in their 20s and 30s, according to a USA Today report. Some hospitals there are revisiting surge plans and converting parts of their facilities into COVID treatment wards. Others are diverting patients because beds are already full.

Florida had the dubious distinction of having 11,515 people in hospitals with COVID on Tuesday, the state’s largest number yet. In the last week of July, the state had more than 110,000 people test positive for the virus.

No, not all those 11,515 people in hospitals were admitted on the same day. No, nowhere near all 110,000 people who tested positive were seriously ill.

But those 11,515 people are taking medical resources away from other patients: AdventHealth, the largest hospital system in central Florida, is deferring non-emergency surgeries. And all of those 11,515 people are losing time with family and friends. Some will lose their lives. That’s not fear-mongering; it’s reality.

Healthy people can and do get this virus, and some end up hospitalized. Even those with mild symptoms, the people who won’t need to go to a hospital or even to a doctor, can pass the virus along to others, including to people who may be immunocompromised and not shrug it off so easily.

Being vaccinated does not guarantee you won't get COVID, but it does mean your symptoms likely will be mild. Vaccinated people can pass along the virus, something that has surprised researchers; but, again, if the vaccinated pass it to other vaccinated people, those people are far less likely to become seriously ill.

Yes, it’s true that the medical establishment is better at treating coronavirus than they were a year ago. But treatments aren’t always perfect, or pleasant. (Being intubated is nobody’s idea of a party.) Treatment also can’t go back in time and keep an infected person who hasn’t yet shown symptoms from going to work, to a department store or a movie and inadvertently passing along COVID.

Yes, Ohio is a long way from Texas or Florida, both geographically and in terms of infections. But we are seeing an uptick here, concerning enough that in many counties where this column circulates, the CDC is advising that even vaccinated people wear masks indoors.

Yes, masks are a drag. They are hot, uncomfortable and fallible, especially when worn below the nose (and sometimes below the mouth). Yet they are necessary evils. They are also our best defense against COVID spread. Or at least they were — until the vaccine came along.

Recognize that many of the people you see in certain ultra-conservative quarters railing against vaccines are doing so to gain monetized clicks, ratings or notoriety. Many won’t say if they’ve been vaccinated, claiming it’s a HIPAA violation even to ask. (It isn’t.) Consider that their refusal to answer likely means their response is yes, but it’s bad for business — theirs — to acknowledge it.

Also recognize that social-media algorithms send you stories about what you are interested in. So if you search for “vaccine dangers,” you will get more and more stories about vaccine dangers, enough to make those dangers appear much more common than they are. It’s an echo chamber of our own devising.

Admit there is no coordinated plot among the world's elite or anybody else to drive the public toward vaccinations for nefarious ends. The reason for all the begging, pleading, cajoling and incentivizing is because it is in the best interest of all levels of government, business and the public to quell this pandemic. It’s costing us money. It’s costing us lives.

Get facts from reliable sources, not dot-com websites or random healthcare workers who overheard somebody's alleged vaccine horror story in a break room. Don't trust your health to what people say on Facebook or in newspaper columns, including this one.

Talk to a reputable healthcare provider. Ask questions. Ask lots and lots of questions.

If you like what you hear, if the benefits outweigh the risks for your personal situation and for your family, then please roll up a sleeve. You’ll be helping yourself and everybody else, too.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

The sublime joys of ... mailing a potato?

This column originally ran in October, 2015. 

Among the things that give mail carriers nightmares, I imagine, are dogs, rain, snow and gabby residents who delay them on their appointed rounds. Now they can add a new fear — potatoes.

Yes, potatoes are legal to mail through the United States Postal Service. We’re talking potatoes without shipping boxes or bags. Just a spud with a message on one brown side and stamps and an address on another. Think of them as three-dimensional, earthen postcards.

At least two companies will handle the logistics for you. The first, Mail A Spud, charges $9.99 and estimates delivery in 10-15 days. The second, Potato Parcel, offers some unique options, including the Spooky Tater and a burlap-sack add-on, the latter of which destroys the thrill of receiving a solitary potato.

Of course, you can mail the potato yourself if you really want to. Mail A Spud notes that it costs about five bucks. Left unmentioned are the weird stares you will receive from clerks at the post office, but you do save half the cost of using a professional service.

I wanted to ask a real, live mail carrier to share an opinion about the possibility of hauling potatoes around with all those political advertisements, catalogs and centerfold-free subscription copies of Playboy, but since it meant taking a day off work and camping out under the mailbox, I decided against it.

I would guess, however, that after the novelty wore off — say, somewhere around delivery of the eighth or ninth potato — it would be just another annoying part of the job.

And, really, how much of a message can you fit on a potato? “I love you,” “I hate you,” or “I’m breaking up with you” is probably the extent of the deathless prose that can be legibly committed, especially when you take its uneven surface into account.

Additionally, there aren’t all that many potato jokes or puns that you could share. “You’re so a-peeling,” “my little hot potato,” “let’s mash it up,” “I’m rooting for you,” and maybe something about “speck-taters” are the only ones I can think of. None of which are as clever as “Orange you glad you met me,” but you can’t mail an orange.

And this potato uncertainty comes from somebody for whom the potato is a running joke. In my family, we often reference a report on Poland written by my daughter in grade school. In a desperate attempt to fill the space requirement, she shared at least half a dozen times that the potato is the country’s top export. Reading that report would make you think that the entire history of the world depended on the tiny tuber.

I could see myself sending my daughter a potato with a dig about Poland, and maybe mailing one to Dan Quayle where I misspelled it “potatoe,” but otherwise the long-term outlook for postal potatoes is rather limited.

Yams, on the other hand, seem much better suited to punning and post offices. Just as I was about to file a trademark on the service, I discovered Yammogram online.

Yep, you guessed it — they mail yams. And tins of Spam, sardines and Vienna sausage with messages written on the outside. That’s American ingenuity and capitalism at its finest.

I yam so unimpressed.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

cschillig on Twitter

First-day photo tradition never ends

My 20-year retrospective of columns continues. Here is my first, from all the way back on Aug. 16, 2001. Boy, did I have to fight the urge to make all sorts of changes to it before posting here. 

I could never escape The Photo.

It was usually the first Tuesday in September, the day after Labor Day and the beginning of the school year.

I would be wearing a dress shirt and a new pair of Levi's so stiff that they could stand up by themselves. Breakfast had been eaten, teeth had been brushed, and notebooks, pencils and lunch bags had been collected neatly by the front door.

As the time to board the bus drew near, I started to wonder: Is this the year, the very first year, that I'll escape?

Wishful thinking.

At the last possible moment, Mom popped up like some demented Jack-in-the-box at the front door, camera in hand, ready to take The Photo.

"First day of school, gotta take a picture!" she would chime.

My sister and I knew the drill. Stand together — by the door or, weather permitting, on the front porch — mug for the camera and look excited about resuming our formal education.

While hair length, height and location would vary from year to year, my expression seldom did. There I am in first grade, a surly young punk in Middlebranch. There I am in high school, a surly young punk in Homeworth.

Sometimes, Mom snapped The Photo so late that I could hear the air brakes of the bus hissing just down the road, and I prayed, hope against hope, that the yellow roof wouldn't pop into view before The Photo had been taken, subjecting me to the ridicule of my peers — surly young punks whose parents probably took pictures of them each year, too.

I got on the bus with stars in my eyes, visions of flash cubes, not sugar plums, dancing in my head.

The first-day tradition didn't end with my senior year of high school. No, as a college commuter, I was subjected to the Photo for four more years.

"I'll never do this to my own child," I vowed.

Liar.

Our daughter, Malori, will start the fifth grade on Tuesday. Counting kindergarten, this will be the sixth time that my wife and I will request her presence in The Photo.

She handles the picture with much more grace than I ever did, smiling and holding up a sign that will tell us, when we are old and infirm, what grade she is entering. We even went high-tech last year, when I began printing out banners from my computer with fancy graphics of school buses and books.

And I should point out that after all these years my mom has been vindicated. The latest issue of “Family Fun” magazine lists several ways to help your children get a good start this school year, and taking a first-day-of-school photo is one of them.

Here I always thought it was an obscure form of torture. Turns out Mom was a visionary.

And that’s a photo finish.

I'm a sad excuse for tech support

As my twentieth anniversary as a weekly columnist for The Alliance Review approaches, I continue to look back at earlier work. Here is a piece from 2014. 

My in-laws had a tech-heavy Christmas, which spells D-O-O-M for me in the new year.

My mother-in-law got a laptop, my father-in-law got an iPhone, and I got a migraine. A standard policy in the family is the one who bought it services it, but like Obamacare, implementation of the policy has been somewhat suspect.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that I’m on the hook for every installation, software and hardware question, like the Geek Squad minus the black-and-white Volkswagen bug.

Now anybody who knows me will testify that I am a sad excuse for tech support. I like my little toys, but I’m also very happy to let others work out the kinks and then show me how to use them.

Any tech savvy I have comes from Googling every question, no matter how inane. “How do you take a photo of your desktop?” Google it. “What’s the best way to merge two email accounts?” Google it. “I dropped my phone in the toilet. What do I do now?” Google it. If the web is the world’s instruction manual, Google is the index, and I thumb through it often.

But back to my in-laws. To make their new laptop worthwhile, they needed wireless Internet, and that calls for a router.

Despite the fact that I’ve been leasing the same router from my cable company since George W. was in office and have therefore paid more than $1,000 for a device that costs $40 at the corner Radio Shack (something my wife never fails to remind me each time she opens the cable bill), I was assigned to buy the hardware.

This was surprisingly easy, as was the installation. (I might do it at my own home in the next decade or two.) I plugged the router into my in-law’s modem and voila! instant wireless service.

Just as I was thinking this whole task would take less than five minutes and that I would soon be lying on the couch, staring at the ceiling and thinking deep thoughts, I hit a significant snag with my mother-in-law. Our conversation went like this:

Me: What’s the password to your new laptop?

Mo-in-Law: I don’t know. Is it the same as my email password?

Me: I don’t know. What’s your email password?

Mo-in-Law: I don’t know. It comes up automatically when I log onto my old computer.

Me: Did you write it down anywhere?

Mo-in-Law: Hold on.

She produces a notebook filled with approximately three thousand words and numbers, some underlined and others circled.

Me: Great. Which one?

Mo-in-Law: I don’t know. Try this one.

Me: (typing) Doesn’t work.

Mo-in-Law: Then try that one.

Reread previous two sentences approximately three thousand times.

Me: None of these works.

Mo-in-Law: Oh, then try this.

She launches into a recitation of numbers and letters involving her birthday, mother’s maiden name, cups of flour in her favorite cake recipe and approximate hectares of land owned by British royalty. I type each into the box on her computer screen. Meanwhile, in the real world, more than two hundred animals go extinct, 6.73 million passengers ride the Moscow Metro and Hershey’s makes another 60 million Kisses. No success.

Ultimately, I resort to Google, giving away my ancient Chinese secret for tech gurudom right in front of her.

The answer is ugly: Restore the entire system, which wipes out all files the user has amassed over the life of the machine.

In my mother-in-law’s case, this is approximately two hours’ worth of Facebook postings of teddy bears and kittens. Not exactly a Shakespearean tragedy, but the reboot takes over an hour, during which time I am (ital.) not (end ital.) lying on the couch, staring at the ceiling and thinking deep thoughts.

From here on, all passwords are stored in a secret location on my phone, accessible at any hour of day or night whenever The Call comes.

It is then I realize a key difference between the Geek Squad and me: Geek Squad support has a finite lifespan, but my contract is indefinite, entered into with “I do” and terminating only when “death do us part.”

I ask Google for advice. The top response: “Marry an orphan.”

Thanks for nothing, Google.