Daily Archives: September 27, 2021

BE CAREFUL USING THE WORD ‘TOMORROW’ IN EMAILS.

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A lot of people have still not figured out that making an appointment by email is very different from making an appointment by telephone. When you call someone on the phone, you are in direct communication with the other person. In a phone call, ‘today’ means today, and ‘tomorrow’ means tomorrow. However, when you send an email, you can’t be sure when the recipient will get it. He may get it immediately, but if his server or yours is down or screwed up, he may not get your message for hours. Haven’t you ever received an email the day after it was sent? You should get in the habit of being specific about dates in email messages. State the day of the week you are talking about. At some point, you may get yourself into trouble, like missing an important appointment, by using words like ‘tomorrow’ in an email.

When is ‘next Tuesday’? ‘Next’ is another word that gets people into trouble in emails. Suppose you get an email on Sunday, October 10 inviting you to a meeting ‘next Tuesday’. Is the sender referring to October 12 or October 19? The dictionary defines ‘next’ as ‘immediately after’, but after what? Avoid confusion. State the date.

Business etiquette.  In business schools in Europe, students are taught business etiquette and how to write business letters. That is a basic part of a business education in Europe and Japan. Here in the U.S., business schools don’t normally teach that at all. I majored in business, and the subject of business etiquette never came up. I do recall a lecture on how to write a resume, but not how to write a business letter.

The Handshake. Shaking hands has been part of business etiquette for centuries and refusing to shake somebody’s hand has always been considered an insult. Covid has changed that. If someone offers to shake my hand, I politely tell them that I don’t shake hands anymore because of Covid. No one has yet taken offense by that. Dr. Anthony Fauci said last year: “I don’t think we should ever shake hands again, to be honest with you.” Forget about bumping elbows as an alternative to a handshake or having everybody wipe their hands with hand sanitizer before or after shaking hands. If I was running an office, I would put up signs around the office stating: ‘We do not shake hands in this office due to Covid.’

CALLING ME ON THE TELEPHONE.Before I answer my phone, I always check my Caller I.D. screen first. If my Caller I.D. does not identify the caller or says that the call is from a ‘Private Caller’, ‘Unknown Name’, ‘Blocked Number’, ‘Toll Free Number’, or just the name of a city; I will not answer the call. If you are calling me from a telephone that does not identify you, just leave a voicemail message. Do not hang up and call me back later. That won’t do any good. I check my messages frequently, and I will reply to legitimate voicemail messages. I am sorry if this seems rude, but I get a lot of robocalls, and this is the only way I can control the problem. You should do the same thing that I do about this. When you answer a robocall, you are telling the computer that called you that you answer robocalls. Doing that gets you more robocalls, calls like: “Your auto warranty is about to expire” or “Congratulations! You have been selected to receive a free…….” I recently got a robocall that said that I failed to appear for jury duty and that a bench warrant for my arrest would be issued in 48 hours unless I paid a $500 fine, a fine that I could only pay with Walmart gift cards. It seems hard for me to believe that there are people gullible enough to fall for a scam this obvious, but I am told that a lot of people do.

FORT BRAGG, CALIFORNIA.

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A couple of months ago, I wrote that a lot of U.S. military bases back east are named for Confederate generals. As several people pointed out, there are lots of places here in California that are named for Confederate generals as well. I think the most interesting of these places is the city of Fort Bragg, named for Confederate general Braxton Bragg. If you want to go somewhere for the weekend from the Bay Area, Fort Bragg is worth a trip. Although the city is very small, it has 2 major tourist attractions: Glass Beach and the Skunk Train. The Skunk Train is a 19th Century steam train that weaves through ancient redwood forests. Fort Bragg also has a beautiful coastline and great hiking trails.


California’s admission into the Union was a big factor leading to the Civil War.  Prior to 1850, all the new states in the southern half of the U.S., like Texas, were admitted as slave states, and all the new states in the northern half, like Michigan, were admitted as free states. However, California is in the southern half of the U.S., going right to the Mexican border. Slave state senators voted for California’s admission as a free state in 1850 in exchange for northern senators voting for the Fugitive Slave Act, something the slave owners badly wanted. But afterward, it dawned on the slave owners that California’s admission as a free state meant that they had no future in America’s westward expansion and that with time, slavery would disappear.

CORPORAL PUNISHMENT IN SOUTHERN SCHOOLS.
Last month, I wrote that it seems ironic to me that many Southern states inflict harsh physical punishments on public school students for minor violations of school rules while at the same time prohibiting schools from requiring students to wear face masks. Since then, several people have told me about their experiences when they went to school in the South. A man I know well told me that he was paddled in junior high school in Texas for wearing a baseball cap backwards. The teacher claimed that it was evidence that he was in a gang. Southern politicians, including the governors of Texas and Florida, have banned face mask mandates in public schools on the grounds that “we are against government mandates”, but they defend beating up kids for minor violations of school rules. Am I the only person who thinks this seems illogical? I never hear TV newsmen questioning Southern politicians who oppose mask mandates but support corporal punishment.

P.S. – If every boy who wears a baseball cap backwards is in a gang, then there are a lot more gang members around here than I imagined!

MORE CAT TALES.

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Landlords and Catnip.  Catnip is easy to grow. It is green all year round (at least here in the Bay Area), and it has pretty pink and white flowers with purple spots. Catnip has a pleasant fragrance, and its aroma repels garden pests, like aphids. Catnip might seem like an ideal plant for use as ornamental ground vegetation, but it’s not. The photo below shows what happens when a landlord plants catnip around his building.


Cat Security Guard. There is a sign in front of the security guard station in the photo below that says in Turkish that no one can enter this building without showing an entry pass to the security guard. Surprisingly, many people did show their entry passes to the cat as they entered the building.


Civet Cat Coffee. San Francisco has the most billionaires per capita of any city on Earth – and by a huge margin. In San Francisco, there is one billionaire for every 11,000 people. In New York City, Dubai, and Hong Kong; there is one billionaire for every 80,000 to 100,000 people. Very rich people in San Francisco buy some astonishing stuff, like civet cat coffee. It is made from coffee beans that were eaten by civet cats. Civet cats eat coffee berries but cannot digest the beans inside and expel them in their poop. These beans are hand gathered from the cat poop, washed, dried, and shipped to coffee roasters. There are several places in San Francisco’s financial district where you can buy 100% civet cat coffee. It costs around $70 a cup. You can also buy civet coffee on Amazon for $700 a pound. Here is how to buy it. https://www.amazon.com/Weasel-Coffee-Special-Organic-Arabica/dp/B08HZ9PB42 Amazon calls it Vietnamese weasel coffee, but it’s the same thing as civet coffee. You can find much cheaper civet coffee on the market, but it isn’t 100% pure. The cheap stuff is a mixture of a few civet beans and a lot of regular coffee beans. (By the way, civet coffee is not kosher. A rabbi familiar with this product once told me at a trade show: “You cannot make kosher food from something that came out of a cat’s rear end.”) If someone offered me a cup of civet coffee, I would turn them down because I would be thinking about how it is produced. Would you drink it?