Back When the World Made (Some) Sense

I was in an antique town recently and somebody gave me a piece of candy. I realized that nowadays we have gummies in hamburger kits where each gummy is shaped like the burger, the bun, pickles, lettuce, or tomato. We have candies within candies, like when you go to the store and it advertises on the packaging that its a Reese’s with chocolate covered pretzels in the middle or with mini peanut butter filled m and m’s inside. I don’t know what to make of candy now. It’s so busy. Theres so much imagery jumbled into a little space on the packaging and there’s something inside of everything else. Nothing can just be anymore. Its all got to be redone, reimagined, and amplified. Back when the world made sense to me candy was a sweet morsel wrapped in a paper twisted at both ends and the only two decisions to make were the flavor and the color.

I got to thinking that i’m probably in trouble when my grandmother’s generation dies. Back when they were young adults the veterinarian only did testing on your animals if they were sick. They didnt have a monthly quota of tests they needed to sell. Nobody was marketing preemptive vet care like lets check just to make sure that theyre healthy even though you say you have seen no problems, they’ve been on flea and heartworm preventative their whole lives, and they look healthy to me. Its important we screen for any problems in the urine, blood, feces, eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and we’ll need a skin scraping as well. When they come back with a clean bill of health you’re missing around 700 to 1000 dollars just to hear “they’re healthy”. However, you cannot obtain more flea and heartworm preventative if you do not follow their rules.

When people were ill they stayed home until they got better. They didnt take a fever suppressant, a cough suppressant, Imodium, and an anti-nausea pill and show up to work on time, duty bound to do so because employers wont entertain the reality that people get sick and you should have a back up plan in place for this scenario.

Jobs didnt have units per hour, customers per shift, and run time quotas. They didnt have time thief police who accused employees of stealing money from the company when they went to the bathroom or took a sip of water on shift.

As time and technology march on i understand less and less of the human operation. Recently i called to have an incorrect auto generated delivery instruction deleted from my online order and because i spoke when the customer service rep spoke (not to be mean, i was just trying to tell him something relevant to what he was saying) he got very angry that i was speaking over him and notified me of this before placing me on an indefinite hold. While i was on the way to realizing he was never coming back he cancelled the biggest item in my order of 4 items, i think out of spite. Because i hung up and called again they said there was no way to identify who had “helped” me in order to make a complaint. I spent over an hour on the phone with three different reps and the third one said he was very sorry his colleague did this and he could offer me a 20 dollar discount code for my troubles but i would need to order the item again because he did indeed cancel it and wrote down that i had requested it cancelled. I thanked him for his help and used the discount code to order it again but i just dont understand how any of this was good business. Why not just be nice to the customers and not cancel their orders and then they pay full price and the company doesnt lose twenty dollars cuz someone has no people skills?

I stared at this candy between my fingers and i thought, “when my grandmother’s generation dies i’m in trouble because there will be no one here with me who remembers the old ways of doing things.” There’s a lot i dont agree with from their age. My patients at the nursing home sometimes use words that i dont find kind or politically correct. There also wasnt too much regard for environmental conservation back when they thought everything was unlimited and if they used it up God would just make more. However, sometimes i feel like corner cutting an efficient process or the normalization of unnecessary extravagance in the name of the almighty dollar is fed to me on a spoon labeled innovation. Did candy filled candy really revolutionize our experience of sweets or did it create something so addictive that its not a holiday treat but a daily necessity?