Just Written By Hand

A claims reviewer for an insurance company--I'll call her "Ms. Jones"--called to check on a bill I'd given to a client. She wasn't sure about it, she said, because it was "just written on a piece of paper." She needed me to return her call and verify the information on the bill before she could authorize payment.

It took three calls to get through to her, so that I could tell her that, yes, I do write my bills on pieces of paper. In fact, I write most of my bills by hand, on carbonless duplicate stationary with my name and office address printed at the top. Apparently, a bill that's been word-processed on a computer and printed on an attached printer seems more authoritative than a handwritten one, to this reviewer.

So, to Ms. Jones, a bill written by hand is "just written on a piece of paper," but a computer generated bill is the real thing. Tempting as it is to dismiss her as a complete idiot, there's food for thought here.

Although she thinks that she has a method for discerning the true from the false, it's as shallow as whether a bill is generated by computer or written by hand. I suppose that, these days, most of the bills she receives are computer-generated, so a hand-written one stands out. What she's saying, in effect, is, "Whether something is real or not depends on whether its familiar to me." How many of our own decisions about what's real and what's not are based on such truly idiotic distinctions?

Proportion

It's interesting to observe that insurance companies' claims of customer satisfaction, which are so profuse on television, radio and billboards, have increased proportionately to the decline in their services to customers. This isn't to knock the industry, particularly, but to raise the issue of the difference between appearance and reality, which is so fundamental to the immaturity--and the pathology--of our culture. It is some sort of illness in our society that demands that businesses, politicians, artists, etc., who want to be successful, have to become good at projecting an attractive image instead of becoming good at actually doing what they are supposed to be able to.

Random and Senseless

A bumper sticker proclaims the phrase, "Practice Random Kindness and Senseless Acts of Beauty." This saying, reportedly created by a California waitress, has swept eastward across the country, like so many other things from California. Paying the toll for someone behind you at the toll booth is given as an example of random kindness, and doing something to make things prettier somewhere that you're just passing through as an example of senseless beauty. But the saying is wrong, both about kindness and about beauty.

Kindness, to be real, must be done for the sake of the other person as an end in itself. If it is done for personal gain, it is calculated, and not really kindness at all, but some sort of transaction. Yet much apparent kindness is done out of the expectation that it will benefit the doer, if only because treating people kindly with whom one lives, works, or goes to school, might be expected to elicit kind behavior in return. Beauty, by definition, cannot be senseless, since beauty is always a function of sensory perception. So, the phrase would be more accurate if it said: "Practice Senseless Kindness and Random Acts of Beauty."

Stop Sign

Driving down the street today I noticed that a stop sign at the end of a block was concealed by a sign on a tree in front of it showing children and adults walking. The pedestrian sign, placed to alert drivers to the presence of children, completely concealed the stop sign, and raised the risk that drivers might run through it. The stop sign was there first, and the pedestrian sign, although intended positively, and based on a genuine concern, obscures the original, and much more important, sign.

Open almost any commentary on human nature and you will find a similar situation.

Modern

A friend of mine, an author and psychologist, was chided by his editor for defining the term "self-esteem" from a dictionary that was fifteen years old. His editor felt that it was important to have a more modern definition cited from a newer source. Puzzled, my friend said that the major work in self-esteem had been done in the sixties and seventies. The definition from the mid-eighties was comprehensive and nothing significant had changed in the last fifteen years.

The urge for the newest thing may be valid, or it may not. Antibiotics manufactured this year may work better than those that have been on the shelf for years and lost their efficacy over time. But healing medicine can equally come from a tree planted a generation or more ago. Whether you need medicine from a newer or older source depends on what kind of ailment you have. Some wines are best drunk new, while others need several years of aging to attain peak flavor.

The assumption that something new must be better than something old may be as foolish as the reverse. What needs to happen is for the mind of the assumer to do less assuming and more understanding.