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It
took me a few moments to absorb this information. "What do you mean
you don't have any?" I thought.
"Every
store has bananas." True, sometimes they are almost green enough to
pass for bent cucumbers. And they occasionally appear to have lost an
arm-wrestling match with a watermelon. But there are always bananas of some
sort in the store.
Then
it dawned on me just how foolish my expectations were. I
live well north of New York City. Even if somebody invented a way to
cultivate them in the Great White North, it was early April, and they would
not bear fruit
at that time of year. For goodness sake, outside the snow was falling
and inside I was expecting tropical bananas!
Expect a traffic jam, too
If
you commute in a big city, you might have noticed traffic grinding to a
halt. Why? Look to bananas for the answer. Just as I was frustrated by my
grocery expectations not being met, millions of commuters are frustrated
daily by their traffic expectations not being met.
Consider
some of the major machines in your life, such as television. Twenty years
ago, we would watch a TV show. Ads would come and ads would go, but we
would watch it from start to finish. Who does that these days?
"What
were you watching, honey?"
"I
dunno. But I think I caught 412 channels."
And
if ever you should lose the converter ... I know, I know, this is a family
publication, so we'll cut the profanity.
And
what about the Internet? If a web site takes more than five seconds to
load, where are we?
"Did
you order that book from Amazon for me?"
"I
dunno. But I think I reached warp speed with my clicking finger. Ouch! I
think I sprained it."
If
fancy TV gadgets and high-speed Internet feed our impatience, what about
car ads? Vrroooooommm. See how fast this car can go? Wow. It does zero to
60 in 5.2 seconds ... in the ad. And zero to zero in half an hour stuck on
the Santa Monica Freeway.
As
we expect our machines each day to break yesterday's speed record, our cars
seem to be slowing to a crawl. That's because more and more people are
squeezing onto the same road space trying to zoom faster and faster and
honking their horns louder and louder (because we all know that cars move
faster when their horns get honked, right? Especially when they get honked
LONG and LOUD, right?).
Is
it just me, or is this poor math? A realist would expect traffic to get a
little slower each year, which just proves how rare realists really are.
Every one of us expects to move faster and faster.
And
I expect bananas on the store shelf even when it is snowing outside. So what
can we do? Easy, we can grumble and complain. We can shout abusive words at
store clerks and other drivers. We can honk our horns (not recommended in
the fruit section).
Or
we can step back and ask ourselves logical questions about what we should
realistically expect. For instance, "Can I really expect bananas on my
grocer's shelves in the middle of winter when I know the truck is stuck in
traffic?"
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David Leonhardt is
author of Climb
Your Stairway to Heaven and The Get Happy
Workbook. He also runs a Liquid Vitamins Store
and a website marketing strategies web
site
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