The Meerkat Muse: 6th of November 24
Remember remember the 5th of November… because the future of the world may be shaped by the Presidential Election taking place! Welcome to the Meerkat Muse!
Fireworks
The 5th of November is Guy Fawkes Night, when Britain traditionally marks the attempt by Guy Fawkes and his band to blow up Parliament. Had the Gunpowder Plot succeeded, it would have killed King James I, and a host of political representatives, but historians believe it would have also been far worse for Catholics in the long run. It would have certainly altered the course of British history!
Yesterday, the course of global history hinged upon how the US electorate would respond to weeks of campaigning from Vice President Kamala Harris, of the Democrats, and Republican challenger, former president Donald Trump. I have at various points made my opinions plain on how I would vote, if I could, but as a Briton, I have no power to directly influence the outcome. All I could do is offer my thoughts, and then wait and see.
The Case of the Incomplete Name
A few weeks back, I ordered a Linkin Park jacket for my wife. This is quite an amazing jacket, and it features a lovely tribute to the late Chester Bennington. Well, it should have. For some curious reason, the company that sold the jacket sold it incomplete, with Chester Bennington becoming ‘Chester Benning’. I emailed the company that sold it, and after a day they replied. Their response did not thrill me.
Upon reviewing your order, it appears that we have sent the correct item as per your request, so we cannot consider this an error on our part.
However, we want to ensure your satisfaction and are prepared to offer three options:
1. Issue a refund for these shirts (shipping not included) – £18
2. Send you a discount valued at £18
3. Resend you new item.If you opt for option 3, please confirm the size, type, or color of the replacement item. We wanted to inform you that there is an additional shipping fee of £10. All other costs will be covered by us.
I am struggling to see how sending a jacket with the wrong name is not an error on the part of the supplier. Had I been putting together a personalised jacket and misspelled something, or omitted part of a name, that would be entirely on me. In this instance, the company producing the jacket has made a fundamental mistake. I don’t see how I should have to pay out more money, under any circumstances, in this situation.
To add insult to injury, I received another email, where they thanked me for my business, and offered me a promo code! I have no intention of going back to them, and at the time of receiving this email I was ready to leave a review on Trust Pilot, to see if this might prompt them to be reasonable. To give them their due, they did come back with an acknowledgement of their error, though they wanted £10 towards ‘fees’. My suggestion was that I would wait to receive the correctly-spelled jacket before sending more cash their way.
Angry with Rage
In the sales game, there is the concept of ‘honour among salespeople’. When you do a quote for a customer, that quote ensures – or should ensure – that the order is yours, no matter what else happens. If that customer goes to another store, it does not matter. They should convert the quote to an order, rather than create a new order. If you have already created an order, there should be absolutely no room for doubt. That order is yours. With that in mind, it was quite galling to learn that another showroom effectively poached an order from me, in precisely those circumstances. I wouldn’t necessarily go as far as to say I am actually seething, but I am certainly annoyed!
You see, we work on an honour system, so to speak. In the past, my colleagues and I have given up potential orders at our store, since we knew there were quotes from elsewhere on the system. We have been honest, and yet it seems a few of the other local stores are not prepared to play with honour. What makes this worse is that since the company pays commission on orders, this act is effectively taking money from my pocket. One could even go as far as to consider it theft! Unfortunately it seems that some of the other nearby stores are not interested in acting with integrity, and so it raises questions. Will I be inclined to help, or even consider helping, those other stores?
Things are already sketchy on that score. Between being short-staffed and also screwed over by another local branch, the mood at my showroom is that we should not waste our time assisting other stores. We’ve collectively tried to hold ourselves to a good standard of engagement with our colleagues from elsewhere, and with a few exceptions, it seems this has been pointless.
It is better to not retaliate in anger, so however I might stew in the short-term, it is best to consider how to respond. It may even be worth taking the high ground here, showing that where we are, we hold ourselves to a code of conduct.
Last-Minute Changes
Keeping with the theme of work, sometimes customers can drive you absolutely mad. Waiting until virtually the final moment to sort out an order is as frustrating and chaotic as it gets! I understand that circumstances can intervene, and make life awkward for everyone, but breakdowns in communication between third-parties has led to frantic work for me, which is never, under any conditions, something I appreciate or enjoy!
The somewhat difficult nature of alternating between sheer boredom, and hectic stress, is starting to get to me. Work is not delivering a happy medium between these two states, and I wonder if it ever will again.
The Schism Takes Shape
A few days ago my publisher sent me the first round of edits for the sequel to The Awakening. There’s a lot of work ahead of me, but this also means I’m another step closer to publishing The Schism! What I need to do now is make the time to sit down, and go through the edits. There’s a part that dreads this process, but it’s a necessary one, and it will be worthwhile at the end. It’s also rather exciting!
Missing Shoes
Time for some random dream moments again, because no Meerkat Muse is complete without them. Firstly, I was dreaming I was on holiday somewhere, and I’d gone for some sort of walk or wander. On the way back (seemingly from a beach, but I’m not sure), I reached my hotel room, and suddenly I could not find my shoes, for love or for money. This was annoying, because I’d had them recently, and I needed them!
The next dream was altogether more interesting, because it invoked something I love: sweets!
As a cub, I recall going to a local newsagents after school, and armed with little more than 50p, I could get quite a few so-called penny sweets. These would include chocolate-coated peanuts, cola bottles, strawberry strings, and a whole lot more. In my dream, I wound up with the opportunity to get something like 28 sweets for a pound, and in my clever wisdom, I picked up packets of sweets from the shelves. They only count as one, right?! I had a little tub, which I stacked as much as I could, being keen to indulge my sweet tooth. Alas, I woke up before I could eat any!
The Quest for Calm
In a bid to soothe my turbulent mind, I have taken to watching videos on Buddhist meditation. I don’t know if they’re actually doing much good, though they certainly carry a gentle, relaxing sound. The hope is to switch off more easily. My brain tends to race at a mile a minute, even when I’m trying to sleep. I’ve often felt like I have to battle my own head, and this is but one more way that I have to do so. Any method that offers a gentle, calming influence is one I am open to.
Back Links
In a rather random moment, one of the sites to steer people in the direction of Meerkat Musings was Backlinktool.org. I don’t generally pay too much interest to where people find my website (maybe a mistake on my part), but whenever something comes up that’s outside of the ordinary, it piques my interest. Near as I can tell, this sort of site will tell you where you will find a link to your site. I can imagine this sort of service – which like most, has free or paid options – would come in handy for people who are actively marketing goods or services. I don’t know how or why it’s come to serve as a referrer to Meerkat Musings, since I didn’t know this existed! Clearly someone else has taken an interest in discovering how people can find Meerkat Musings, for reasons only they understand.
A Debt of Gratitude
I had a couple of days off last week (regular days, not emergencies or anything like that!), but they coincided with my manager being away on holiday. What with there being only two of us, this meant someone covered from another showroom, and let me tell you, they did a fantastic job. Sometimes an outside perspective can wash away what you don’t see, since I dare say all of us have a tendency to be a bit robotic with our routines and procedures. My immediate feeling is to reward this guy somehow, perhaps an offering of wine? After all, wine usually goes down well!
Card Tricks
Time for another whacky nocturnal adventure. I don’t remember much of this dream, only a sequence which involved two people using a pack of playing cards as forms of weaponry. No, nothing like Gambit from the X-Men, more… I don’t even know. The higher the card, the more physical damage it could inflict when played against an opponent, and it made sense that people would want to control more of the deck as a result.
Come the end of the dream, a team of special forces rescued the heroine of the dream, though by then she had vanquished her foe, and had been rendered quite exhausted from the effort. I wish I had any sort of context for this! Prior to this, I had another dream where I was at a small airport, which even had small planes. It was the most unusually tiny airport I have ever seen, but instead of flying out of there, I ended up on a bus into London. I only realised I was in London when I saw the London Underground logo.
This whacky adventure was swiftly followed by something to do with Scrooge McDuck having some kind of laser fight whilst flying above the snow, and a dream about Christmas (shudder!).
Halloween!
October’s final bow was of course the spooky season of Halloween! My daughter went trick-or-treating as Sonic the Hedgehog, and I accompanied her as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Leonardo. To be more accurate, I was a Disgruntled Middle-aged Mutant Turtle. Maybe it was just me, but it didn’t seem there were as many trick-or-treaters as in past years, though my daughter managed to collect a reasonable haul of sweets.
A Touch of Revenge?
Revenge might be too strong a word, but given how a couple of other nearby showrooms have been looking down upon us, it was quite nice to take a bit of a bite back the other weekend. This stemmed from someone quoting (or misquoting, as the case may be) customers, who checked prices online to discover our company has a sale on, a sale one of my colleagues allegedly declined to mention, nor appropriately price for. The customers also felt this colleague was quite rude in their manner, and made it clear to me they would either deal with my store, or not deal with the company at all. At the time of writing this, I have no idea what the fallout from any of this will be, but it may serve as a pointed reminder that arrogance and conceit can backfire.
Slightly Stressful Sundays
Lone-trading at a weekend serves up regular reminders that it’s a far-from-ideal set of circumstances. I had to more or less let two sets of customers go, as I was serving someone and therefore couldn’t help them. All I can do is explain I’m on my own, but that doesn’t stop them from loitering, or looking at you as if to say ‘hurry up’, as though I should hurry up the customer who is committed to spending money. The steady stream of customers in and out of the showroom at the weekend also interferes with lunch, and I have to consider when to use the facilities, because it will be Sod’s Law that people come in whilst I’m in the loo.
Motorbike Madness
As I brought my daughter home from school on Monday, we walked through the town centre. It should go without saying that the town centre is a pedestrian-only area, so why is it that at least one idiot decided to ride his motorbike up and down? He wasn’t going especially slowly either, and it would have taken only one absent-minded person wearing headphones, or a small child racing out of a shop, to put the rider off, and possibly into something, or someone.
There is a degree of common sense missing here. What sort of fool rides at speed on a motorbike in a busy pedestrian area? Surely they cannot be that ignorant as to how dangerous their actions are? Mind you, my daughter and I might have missed this completely, had the buses been running. Instead, the buses were conspicuous in their absence, and this isn’t the first time services have vanished into the ether. I swear public services decay over time.
The End Has Come
At the very beginning of this Muse, I mentioned that it goes live the day after the pivotal US Presidential Election. Right now, as I type, it’s the night before the big day. It is therefore the night before Guy Fawkes Night, an occasion that marks a treasonous, violent plot. I cannot help but note a certain poetic nature to all this as well. The UK held a General Election on the 4th of July, which is famously the USA’s Independence Day. Now, the USA will go to the polls on a day famous in the UK. Whilst we are dazzled by literal fireworks (well, assuming the weather is kind), the USA and the world will be dazzled by the political fireworks, and either way, it’s likely half the nation will be fuming and dismayed at the outcome.
Then again, considering how chaotic US elections can be, there isn’t any certainty that we’ll know the outcome yet. It could be days before a result is announced. There may be disputes over the results. The whole thing could get extremely messy. All we can do is watch this space.
So, with that, it is time to draw this Muse to a close, and wonder with baited breath as to who gets into The White House! Take care everyone, love to you all.
