The Eyes Have It

Salvador Dali Museum

The Eyes Have It

Sometimes you just have to throw up your hands. Take today for instance. I witnessed incidence after incidence of people engaging in amazingly rude, insensitive, and mostly embarrassing behaviors. I even found myself quite accidentally joining the party.

This morning I woke up and dressed for the day. On my way out the door, I decided to wear my special warm Turkish coat that my brother-in-law had given me many years ago. He had bought it at a market while he was stationed in Turkey. The coat is vibrant in much the same way that Joseph’s coat of many colors might have been. With the coat on, I decided to wear a hat to warm my head on this frigid morning. So I reached for my Land’s End blaze-red flop-eared Elmer Fudd hat. Once I got to the car, I realized that my hands were freezing, so I put on my black leather thermal gloves. My outfit was completed when I donned my special Roy Orbison black plastic shades. I can only imagine how completely ridiculous I looked.

What would you do if your child’s school called you and the school secretary told you that your child was requesting to borrow lunch money again in order to get a meal? Furthermore, in order for your child to eat, you would have to come to school, pay your debt, and deposit sufficient funds into your child’s lunch account. Keep in mind that the call only came to you after two previous bouts with insufficient funds and two letters home. Would you have responded the way a parent at one of my schools did today? After screaming at the secretary on the phone about how rude it is for a school to be following this policy, she slammed the phone down, charged over to the school, barged in to the office yelling at the top of her lungs. She was threatening to call her lawyer and suggesting that we would be getting a visit from “NewsChannel 10.” What that lady obviously didn’t comprehend was that if you look at the root cause of her issue, she was getting all upset and blaming others over a situation where she neglected her parental responsibilities.

Some might believe that the lady was justifiably upset. I would disagree completely. In my view, it is never acceptable to deal with others the way that lady did with our secretary today. Secondly, the school has the call home rule in place simply because cafeteria programs in my county school system are not allowed to float loans to kids and the school does not receive any additional money itself to float loans to kids. In years’ past, our school has been burned to the tune of hundreds of dollars a year when kids were allowed to borrow repeatedly even if they never repaid their debt. That funding deficit was impacting our instructional program. That lady was so unreasonable and rude.

After school today, I went to Mal-Wart to visit my eye doctor. I’ve been trying to get contacts again after going for several years without them. I find playing basketball in clunky glasses to be hampering my game. So I went in and was ushered right in to the exam room where the doctor gave me a new pair of contacts to try on. So I took out the pair that I had been wearing for a week or so and stored them in my case with the lid off. Unfortunately, these new contacts were too loose, so she had me take them out. Haphazardly and since I didn’t have a case for them, I placed these new contacts on the lids of my regular case, because when I looked down at my case I saw that it was filled with liquid. My usual practice is to rinse the case out then put in fresh solution before I put my contacts in for storage. Forgetting that I had placed my colorless set of contacts in the case, I picked it up and rinsed it out in the sink as I usually do. As soon as I did that, I realized that I had just dumped my good contacts into sink. Geez, I felt so stupid! Quickly, I grabbed the contacts, rinsed them and put them back in; however, they didn’t feel right. I figured that I had gotten my left and right contact mixed up, so I took one out and placed it in the case’s lid. Then I put them back in the proper eyes. I took the one from the left eye and shifted it to the right eye. That one seemed to be much better. Next I reached down and placed the other contact on my index finger and inserted it into my left eye. While it felt just fine, I realized that I couldn’t see anything but blurriness out of my left eye. Throughout this whole episode, my doctor was watching me and laughing at my incompetence. My blurry eye befuddled me. I couldn’t figure out exactly why I couldn’t see. A little voice kept nagging me, however. It was suggesting that perhaps someone had committed some blunder. Perhaps even I messed up again. I looked down at the case lid to find the other pair of contacts I had tried on. I easily spotted the right lens, but I could not find the left lens. That’s when the embarrassing theory came to mind. I must be wearing two contact lenses in my left eye. My doctor, still laughing, thought that sounded like a sound theory. She told me of a lady who drove all way to the office with three contacts in one eye. After finishing her chuckle, she had me belly up to her optiscope, and she bored in to the emptiness of my head. There she validated my embarrassing theory. I was indeed wearing two contacts in my left eye. The rest of the appointment proceeded without further personal embarrassment.

After my appointment, I walked further in to Mal-Wart to visit my friend who works at the Mal-Wart bank. The good people who own that place had the good sense to give their Wart bank a fancy name. So anyway, I walked in, sat down at my friend’s client desk and proceeded to catch up with him. We were having a great conversation when our peace was interrupted by a lady at the teller’s window who was busy chatting on her cell phone as her two small children pushed the shopping cart all around the smallish bank floor, crashing into desks, counters, and me. I watched as the little three year old girl climbed in to the shopping cart over and over again. I was sure that cart was going to flip her over, but she managed to avoid that disaster. Meanwhile her chatty mother only glanced over once or twice to order the six year old girl to “...take care of your sister! Get over there.” Then the lady would go back to her man-friend on the phone. I have no idea why she was even in the bank. That lady was embarrassing.

My journey through Mal-Wart continued, and I continued to encounter embarrassing people. There was a lady at the head of the 20 items or less check-out line who had finished checking out, yet she stayed planted at the cashier to talk to the guy behind her in line. They carried on a conversation for several minutes as I and several other people waited patiently behind them. Finally, I just gave up and moved to another line. That lady was insensitive.

On my way out of Mal-Wart, I was dodging my way through the parking lot when I passed by a lady with her four year old boy in harsh tow. I heard her say to the tyke, “Now, am I gonna haf to swat you again?” That lady was clueless.

This evening, a friend sent me a link to a silly sketch I performed with some colleagues last week at a technology conference. We were testing out a new green screen technology in which we read script off a tele-prompter and stuff happened seamlessly behind us. The whole idea reminded me of one of those sketches you might see on the TV show "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" Since I'm sharing such embarrassments, I'll share this one with the world, too. Me at the Virginia Technology Leadership Conference.

Why aren’t we all more perfect all the time? Why am I so judgmental all of the time? What’s going on with this world? Are we all nuts?