At the tender age of two my son is already firmly in the clutches of corporate America. I’m not talking about the plethora of shows and characters designed to captivate children and annoy the living hell out of parents.
No, I’m talking about brand recognition in it’s scariest form. Sure, my son knows Elmo and Mickey and Caillou, but we haven’t had satellite television for about three months now, so his exposure is limited to those types of things. That’s right, my son goes bonkers whenever he sees a Target sign, or anything that resembles one.
When I ask him to get his shoes as we are getting ready to leave the house his reply to me is always “Papa, Target sandals?”. During our latest adventures in trying to get him to take his medicine for an ear infection, once he saw the Target logo on the syringe he readily opened his mouth and proclaimed “Target medicine?”.
Just yesterday while my wife was reading a story on the Internet about how Starbucks is going to be offering wi-fi nationwide, little man pointed to Starbucks logo in the story and said “Target!”. The first instinct she had was to tell him “no, that’s Starbucks”, but then she thought about it for a second when she realized that there is a Starbucks in the Target we go to regularly.
Clearly, I need to start shopping somewhere else, or I should target dressing him exclusively in khakis and red polos and make some money off of this.
Yesterday my wife hit the 38 week mark and at her latest check-up she was about 1 cm dilated. Obviously, this did instill a slight sense of urgency in us, but weren’t sweating it because we’ve known people who were 1 cm dilated weeks before they ever delivered.
That all changed when a good friend of ours who was due six days before my wife had her baby this past Friday. Needless to say we have contact mission control and have initiated the starting launch sequence.
In reality we really don’t have a lot left to do, as we’ve been pretty diligent in taking care of the big things. I’m pretty sure that it is an innate trait for dads to love to assemble things, so the crib and other assorted baby gear were put together as soon as the boxes arrived in our home.
Still, there was the matter of getting a bag packed for the hospital, cleaning up the baby bucket and doing the whole car seat shuffle in the swagger wagon. As we headed off to bed last night the last item on our to do list was to reassemble the infant carrier whose padding was air drying after having washed it.
We both rested comfortably knowing that at this point we are as ready as we can possibly be.
You know what really grinds my gears, when people use the term “free of charge”.
The other day our local gas company informed us that there was a gas leak in the line going to our house. The leak was coming up from a connection that was under the sidewalk next to our house. They told me they were going to have to fix it by tearing up the section of sidewalk, but that it would all be good by the end of the day.
As little man and I headed out run some errands (at Target, ironically enough), I checked in with them as I was leaving because they also had to do something to the meter attached to the house which resulted in them digging up some of the landscaping I had only recently planted.
Just as I was finishing up my conversation with the guys doing the work, a supervisor appeared and cheerfully proclaimed to me: “Don’t worry, this will all be fixed up in a few, free of charge to you.”
Really? Free of charge, you say? I immediately looked at him and had the following conversation:
Me: “The leak was under the sidewalk?”
Supervisor: “Yes, sir”
M: “And the sidewalk and the land underneath it is city property, right.”
S: “Uh, yes”
M: “And the pipes delivering gas to my home are the property of the gas company, right?”
S: “Yes, sir”
M: “So, how exactly would this ever have been something I would have been charged for directly?”
S: (says nothing)
M: “Nothing is free of charge. The expense of you and your crew being out here is paid my gas bill and any cost the city might incur for this work is paid by my taxes. So, how again is this free of charge?”
I didn’t even bother to wait for a response as I headed towards my van to get the day’s errands out of the way. Stupid thinking like this gets me so riled up that I start seeing red.
The reality is that nothing is free. A free lunch isn’t free. Someone is paying for it in hopes that their message is heard.
A leaking gas line most certainly isn’t free. Someone has to pay for the materials and the man hours required to fix it whether they pay the direct costs because of personal liability for the situation or if the costs are built into the monthly gas rate that consumers pay.
No matter what it is in life we all end paying whether it is directly or indirectly. So, please, for the love of all that is holy, don’t ever say something is “free of charge”.
Photo credit: j.reed
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