The Habitual Howling Hierarchy

January 18, 2026 RilalyLeave a comment

“I have nothing to complain about!” Melissa yelled as if volume made her grievance more grievous. She was employing irony, and she was winning! Complaining is what Melissa did. It’s what we all did, and if you wanted in you had to learn how to complain about something, even if that something involved the crushing burden of having nothing to complain about.

Our complaints often had something to do with the inhuman monolithic corporation we worked for that didn’t pay us enough, offer us enough benefits, or care that we were trapped behind a computer for ten hours a day, four days a week. Those of us in the inner circle of our inner circle learned to cycle out and complain about everything. There was no regular menu of complaints from which to choose, and there were no specials of the day. Complaining was just what we did.

“Complaints are like orifices,” Brian said to try to ingratiate himself with the group, through ironic, observational humor that matched Melissa’s. “Everyone’s got them, but we complain about not having more.” Unfortunate to Brian’s legacy, his little joke didn’t land, because we had an unspoken rule that we don’t complain about complainers, until we’re complaining about their constant complaints behind their backs.

Complaining is such a vital component of our being that it’s just something we do. We complain about how bored we are in the beginning, we complain about school, the workplace, and in our final decades on Earth, we complain about our lack of health, until it goes away.

If there is an afterlife, and we are introduced to absolute, unquestionable paradise, we will probably be blown away by it, initially, but we’ll get used to it after a while, and we’ll find something to complain about. “Have you noticed that they provide Black Duck umbrella picks for our cocktails here? I hate to complain, but it’s just such a huge step down from the OGGI cocktail umbrellas to which I was accustomed.”

If we have nothing to complain about, our brain will make something up just to justify its existence.

How often do we think just to avoid boredom, and thinking about how to complain about something is far more interesting than realizing how good we have it. Thinking about how good we have it kind of defeats the whole purpose of thinking.

“That sounds like first world thinking.” It is, but I’m guessing that there are plenty of third-world citizens who complain about stupid stuff too.

*******

My friends’ parents enjoyed complained about the state’s college football team, until the team started winning. At that point, they complained about having nothing to complain about. I didn’t realize it at the time, but we were all complaining about a college football team that proved to be one of the most successful programs for that span of time. Our complaint was that our team didn’t win the national championship every year.

His parents did this, my dad did it, and we all grew up complaining about it. “We were so close!” we’d complain. “I’d rather finish 0-fer than get that close again,” was our common complaint. Their complaints were so unrealistic they were funny. I laughed at them from afar, but I also laughed at them from above, as I considered some of their complaints so foolish, until I watched my son’s second grade baseball team.

When those seven-eight-year-old children played baseball, they made errors, and I had to stifle my snarky comments. “Of course he didn’t catch that ball,” I thought, “not when it was coming right at him, and it could’ve won the game for us.” I will provide this space right here ( ) for you to criticize me, slam on me, and analyze the deficits of my character. I deserve it, but I just could not click that hyper-critical, “I could do better. Even at their age, I wouldn’t have done that” portion of my brain off. I wouldn’t have done better, and I knew it, but I couldn’t tell me that, not in the moment.

We’ve all seen videos of parents overreacting saying such stupid things at their child’s game, and what we see probably isn’t even one one millionth of the times it’s happened. We’ve all seen those viral videos of parents screaming their heads off over the dumbest things, and we found them disgusting, sad, and hilarious. And I would’ve agreed with every single one of your characterizations of these people, until I became one of them. I didn’t unleash any of these thoughts, and to my mind no one knew how unreasonable and unfair I was, but those thoughts were in there, percolating their way to the top.

I could take a couple of errors here and there, as I wasn’t so demanding of perfection that I ignited over every single error, but there was always that one error, that over-the-top error, that just broke the dam for me. I’d leap to my feet and take my dog for a walk to get as far away as I could from everyone. I didn’t want anyone knowing what I was thinking.

All I can say, in my defense, is I’ve been watching sports and screaming things at TVs for as long as I can remember. I learned that we fans don’t have to sit quietly in the comfort of our own home when athletes are engaging in inferior play. I took those unfair and unrealistic expectations of college-aged images on TV to seven and eight-year-olds trying to play baseball. I never said anything aloud, and I knew my thoughts were unrealistic, unfair, and obnoxious, but I couldn’t stop thinking them after all those years of conditioning.

When our favorite college football team actually started to win so often that they won three national championships in four years, my friend’s family didn’t celebrate our victory, they were bored. Bored? Yes, bored by all that success. I knew this mentality so intimately that shortly after the Cubs won the World Series, I warned my friend, “This is really going to put a dent in your favorite team’s fan base.” Why? “Because the Cubs were lovable losers, and Cubs’ fans enjoyed complaining about them year after year. Every Cub’s fan could recite the rolodex of reasons why their beloved team hadn’t won a World Series for 100 years. The Cubs actually winning the World Series will turn out to be a poor business decision on their part. You watch.” I turned out to be wrong by a matter of degrees. Most Cubs’ fans are still loyal, more loyal than I thought they’d be, but they lack the fanatical fervor that the complaints about them not winning once fueled.

When our favorite college football team finally beat our inter-conference rival in resounding fashion, I celebrated each touchdown as if it was the first in a very tight ball game.

“Why are you still cheering this game on?” my friend’s dad asked. “It’s a blowout.”

“I don’t know,” I said, “But it might have something to do with all the pain they’ve caused us for decades. It feels like it’s finally over.”

“It’s still a blowout,” he said. “It’s a boring game.” It took me a long time to realize if this guy couldn’t complain about a game, he wasn’t all that interested in watching it. That victory was so complete that he didn’t have anything to complain about, and he basically had no reason to watch it anymore.

If I were to dig far too deep into this superficial element of life, I might say that complaining about sports so much that we’re screaming at the images on TV, and becoming so irrational about something we cannot control, is actually quite healthy in that it provides a non-confrontational outlet to unleash our anger and frustrations in life, as long as we don’t take it out of the home and into the public realm at our seven-to-eight-year-old’s baseball game.

*******

“You can change his name if you want, and I won’t be offended,” a breeder said after I drove nine hours to pick up the puppy I just purchased from her. I was so sure she was being sarcastic that I said:

“Well thanks, that’s awful nice of you to allow me to name my dog?” in a tone I considered equally sarcastic. The breeder gave me a look to suggest our connections weren’t connecting.

“Wait, do people actually keep the name you choose for the pets they purchase from you?” I asked her. She said she didn’t know, but she wanted us to feel free to change it.

I already had that eight-week-old puppy’s name picked out. I knew the name the breeder chose, as she listed it in the online listing, but I never even considered the idea that she might be offended by the idea that I would change it. She lived nine hours away, so we would never see her again. How and why would she be offended by this, and why and how would I care if she was?

When we purchase a puppy, we plan on keeping it for 12-14 years. Why would anyone want to keep the name someone else chose for it? That is so foreign to my way of thinking that I just thought everyone but the rare exception changed the name. I was shocked to learn how wrong I was. Since that interaction with the breeder, I began asking my fellow pet owners how they arrived at their dog’s name, “How did you pick that name, I like it?” I’d ask in the most polite frame I could.

A surprising number of people said, “It was their name when we purchased them.”

“You know you can change it right?” I asked. “Do you know how surprisingly simple it is?” Dog lovers know that dogs have unique personalities, but do they know that those personalities are not tied to their name? If we were to try to change a human’s name, say when they’re twelve-years-old, that would be a complicated procedure that would confuse the kid so much that we wouldn’t even think of doing it, except in rare cases.

Dogs don’t cling to names the way humans do. They adapt so quickly that a name change can be accomplished quickly. We did it in about two days with that puppy we purchased from that breeder, and it took about a week for the eight-year-old dog we purchased a year before.

“I know, I know…” my fellow pet owners said when I told them how easy it was to change a dog’s name. Some tried to explain why they felt the need to keep the name, but most just left it at “I know, I know…”

I don’t know if people lack creativity, if they don’t want the hassle of being creative, or if they fear they won’t be able to successfully change their pet’s name, but I met a family who purchased a rabbit and kept that rabbit’s name. “Does a rabbit even come to you when you call it?” I asked within my ‘Why didn’t you just change its name?’ frame.

“It does,” they said after debating among themselves. “But only when it wants to. He doesn’t come to you every single time you call him, as a dog would.” That debate involved family members who didn’t want to concede to the uncomfortable theme of my question that rabbits aren’t intelligent enough to know the difference.

“So, why didn’t you change the name?”

They never answered with thorough and complete conviction, but they did try to convince me that their rabbit was far more intelligent than I knew, which I interpreted to mean that they didn’t want to insult the beloved Binky the Bunny by arbitrarily changing his name to something they wanted it to be.

I conceded that I didn’t know how intelligent a rabbit was, but I said, “Who chose the name Binky? Do you think that sixteen-year-old pet store employee had greater insight into Binky’s being, his personality, and how he wanted to be identified?”

“He is Binky the Bunny,” they said. “That’s who he was when we purchased him, it’s why we purchased him, and it’s who he is now.” The other family members liked that answer so much, because it suggested that they, as a family, respected and liked Binky so much that by keeping the rabbit’s name it paid homage to his heritage and ancestry so much that they wouldn’t alter that by enforcing their will on him. There was also an implied notion that the move from the pet store to their home was so confusing and traumatic that they didn’t want to add to that by forcing Binky to adapt to their personal preference of a name. They didn’t say this, but they implied that they didn’t change the rabbit’s name, because they wanted him to know that his past mattered to them too.

Twenty years ago, I may have continued to argue against what I considered holes in their argument with the tenacity of a terrier on an ankle, but the smiles of joy surrounding me that day suggested that not only was my war against Binky unwinnable, but if I did somehow achieve some definition of victory my only prize would be a diminishment of those smiles.

*******

“Why are you loyal to them?” a friend of mine asked. “They’re not loyal to you.” My friend said this when I told him that I just finished the year with no absences, no tardies, and the best quality scores I’ve ever accomplished as an employee. My uninformed guess is that this argument has probably been going on between employee and employer for as long as man has been employed by other men, but my Depression-era dad argued:

“No, that’s new to your generation, and probably a generation before yours, but we felt lucky to have a job.” Subjective critics of the modern era back my dad, “Companies and corporations actually cared about people back then [during The Depression and in the immediate aftermath]. Back then, employers kept people fed, happy, and alive. Businesses cared about people more back then. They paid more and gave better benefits back then. Now it’s all about the shareholders.”

‘So, you’re saying that The Depression-era companies and corporations didn’t have shareholders?’ I would ask those critics. ‘Or are you saying that they didn’t worry about them back then? Was that what led to The Depression? No, I know it didn’t, but did they worry about regaining the trust of the shareholders back in the aftermath of The Depression?’ My guess is the system was much more similar to the system we employ now than the subjective critics know.

“If you’re lucky enough to gain employment,” my dad taught us, “You stay with that employer for life.” That obviously didn’t penetrate, as my brother and I had numerous jobs before we landed great ones, but we met several fellow employees along the way who bought into my dad’s philosophy. Yet, we also found that their decades-long tenure at the company was not formed entirely by loyalty as much as it was fear. There were some who were loyal, some who were extremely loyal, but most of them stayed at the job that was no longer rewarding because they feared that they couldn’t do anything else, they were just happy to have a job, and they adjusted their life to how much money they made in that job.

The subjective, cultural critics examine the system from the position that most corporations are evil and selfish. They embody this argument with the comparisons of CEO salaries compared to the average worker’s salary. To which I ask who is more valuable, valued, and replaceable? They would avoid this argument by complaining that most CEOs are evil, selfish, and some even argue that CEOs aren’t truly the top figureheads in the corporate hierarchy. That’s right, most of the figureheads sitting atop the corporate hierarchy are inhuman monoliths that we call the corporation, and these inhuman monoliths don’t care about humans anymore. I’ll let others argue for or against that, and I’ll focus on the more rational argument that those in corporate hierarchy don’t care about us. How do you define care? The members of your corporate hierarchy care enough to fulfill their end of the bargain we agreed to when we decided to be employed by them. They continue to pay us for services rendered, and they give us all the benefits they promised when we were hired. They also give employees performance-based raises, bonuses, and stock purchase programs.

If we don’t care for the various agreements we made with them anymore, we need to get competitive and see how competitive the other evil, selfish, and inhuman corporate monoliths are willing to get for our services. Before agreeing to that change, we need to focus in on what these other corporations have to offer us for our skills before we agree to work with them. Change, as we’ve all discovered, is not always better.

As for companies not caring, I’ve worked with supervisors who didn’t give a crap about me, and I’ve worked with others who cared a great deal. Our relationship with an employer is often defined by our relationship with our immediate supervisor. If we go further up into the hierarchy, we find that those people do not, in fact, care about us, but it’s mostly because they haven’t met us, and they don’t know us. They are required to create comprehensive corporate policies that try to make us happy while making their bosses happy.

When I applied for a mid-management job in our huge corporation, my supervisor said, “If you’re hired, you’re going to get the stuff rolling at you from both sides. You have to make the employees under you happy, and you have to make the employees above you happy. You need to accept the fact that if you become a boss, you will still have a boss, because everyone has a boss.”

The thing the subjective critics don’t understand is that their supervisor has to make their manager happy, and that manager has to make their bosses happy, all while trying to make you happy at the same time. And they all have to make a CEO happy, who has to make the corporate board happy, and the corporate board has to make the shareholders happy. Everyone has a boss. To make the shareholders happy, the corporate board convinces the CEO to work with the hierarchy structure under them to make sure all of the machinations of the corporation are so finely tuned that they create the most evil word in the subjective critic’s dictionary: profit.

If you reach a point where you loathe that word as much as the subjective critics who believe there is no reward for company loyalty anymore, you might want to seek employment with a non-profit. Before we leave the for-profit for the non-profit, we should know that their will still be a hierarchal structure that mirrors the for-profit, corporate hierarchal structure, but we will be able to remove that evil shareholders brick (stressed with disdain). After deleting them, we will need to replace it with a brick designated for those who provide charitable contributions, and/or the funders who offer grants. Even though the names are changed, those in the hierarchal structure will still feel scrutinized to the point that they feel the need to perform for their bosses, and at some point in our tenure with the nonprofit we’ll feel disillusioned, because we’ll come to the conclusion that they don’t care about us either, they just focus on performance.

*******

There is one class of people who truly don’t care about us, criminals. Who are you? How do you define yourself? In ways significant and otherwise, we define ourselves by our stuff. We prefer to say the opposite at every outing, because we deem those who define themselves by stuff superficial and of diminished character. The moment after someone steals our stuff is the moment we realize that the stuff that defined us is now defining him, and we feel this strange sense of violation that informs us how valuable that stuff actually was to us.

When criminals steal something of ours, it offends us, because it feels like they’re taking elements of our character. Criminals don’t care about our attachments to stuff, and they don’t understand why we care so much about things. If they take one of our things, those things are theirs now.

When they spot something they want, they take it. It’s really not that different from the typical purchasing agreement we make with stores. We saw something on the shelves, and we took it. We paid the store for the product, yet money is an agreed upon, but artificial construct, if we view it from the criminal’s perspective. We took it from the store, and now they’re taking it from us. They don’t buy into that quaint and somewhat archaic idea of ownership the way we do.

Renee, my seven-year-old friend introduced me to this concept of the thief’s mentality when I spotted one of my Weeble Wobbles in her toy chest. “Hey, that was mine!” I said. “You stole it from me!”

She tried to convince me that her mother purchased it for her, until I pointed out a very specific flaw that her Weeble Wobble shared with mine.“Fine!” she said when she decided to give it back to me. She said that in a tone that suggested he didn’t understand what the big deal was. “I never saw you play with it, and I didn’t think you were using it anymore.”

“What? Even if I wasn’t, it was still mine, and if you wanted to borrow it, you should’ve just asked.”

“I said fine! Here,” she said, giving it back. We were seven-years-old, but in my limited-to-no experience in this field informs me that the misunderstanding of how the system works remains constant when I hear adult shoplifters try to compromise with store security by saying, “Here. Fine. I’ll give it back.” They hope by doing so, they can enter into an agreement with the storeowner that permits the storeowner to drop all charges. If that doesn’t work, they attempt to enter into an agreement with the storeowner, or manager, by saying they’ll pay for it. If the storeowner refuses, the criminal walks away thinking the store had a personal vendetta against them. It’s the thief’s mentality (trademarked).

At some point in this process, we’re taught to forgive and forget. “Everyone deserves a second chance.” If we refuse to forgive, our mothers, fathers, priests, and other authority figures teach us that holding onto anger, requiring retribution, and/or holding grudges have a way of darkening the soul. They say that learning how to forgive with all of our heart provides a spiritual cleansing that will pave the way for greater happiness. It’s true, and we know it’s all true. Yet, if we abide by the loving logic they teach us, and we decide to forgive the criminals for their violation, our relationship with the thief will arrive at another complicated definition of human interactions, when they steal from us again.

Fantastic, Now What’s a Jiffy?

January 12, 2026 RilalyLeave a comment

“Dr. Jones will be with you in a jiffy,” the receptionist says.

“Fantastic, now what’s a jiffy?” we ask. “I don’t need you to be exact, but I would like a rough estimate.”

Is it just me, or is it a little odd that those who work in doctors’ offices, auto mechanics, and other businesses that offer waiting rooms refrain from providing true Estimated Wait Times (EWT)? I understand that it’s tough, rough, and in come cases impossible to know with certitude, but all we’re asking for is a rough estimate from a receptionist, and her team of employees, with their decades of experience in their shared field, to come up with a fairly decent guess. When I enter their office I do so with my own EWT, my Expected Wait Time, and while I know my EWT might be uninformed compared to theirs, I’d enjoy gathering with them to see if we can find a Crucial Meeting Ground (CMG). The problem for those of us sitting in waiting rooms, waiting for our services to be rendered, is that most employees at places like doctors’ offices think they can circumvent all EWTs with: “A jiffy!”

“It will only take a jiffy.”

“Fantastic, now what’s a jiffy?” we ask again, “and before you answer, you should know that we’ve tried, for centuries we’ve tried, to come up with a definition that we can all agree on. Some stay vague, saying, ‘it’s lightning fast,’ ‘blink of an eye,’ or ‘in a flash,’ but physicist Gilbert N. Lewis clarified jiffy as the time it takes light to travel one centimeter in a vacuum, or 33.3564 picoseconds, and a picosecond is one trillionth of a second. So, if you’re equating your Estimated Wait Time to the physicist’s definition of jiffy, then you’re saying Dr. Jones should be ready in 0.0000000000333564 seconds, and that’s not too bad.”

The primary reason these businesses offer vague “jiffy?” EWTs, is the disgruntled customer. Anyone who has worked in the service industry knows that guy who approaches the desk with his “You said he’d be ready between 5:18 and 5:23. It’s now 5:24.” The disgruntled customer loves playing the sophisticate who can spot flaws, inconsistencies, and hypocrisies inherent “in the system”. “This is not a chicken McNugget,” this customer says displaying a small McNugget. “It’s a half of a McNugget. You’ve given me nine and one half of a McNugget. I ordered ten. It’s not even a half a McNugget. Look at it, it’s more of a third of a McNugget. Who do you think you’re dealing with here?” The reader reads this, and they think we’re using hyperbole to prove a point. Yet, if the reader worked in the service industry as long as we did, they know that some aggrieved customers believe that we pimply-faced sixteen-year-olds were in cahoots with our employer in a MickeyD-pimply face industrial complex conspiring against him, John McGillicuddy. If he’s not that far down the totem pole of conspiracy, he thinks the corporation has been putting it to the little guy for far too long, and he Mr. John McGillicuddy appoints himself the emissary for all those little guys who are afraid to stand up to pimply-faced sixteen-year-olds.

“It’s not about you, John McGillicuddy,” I want to tell these disgruntled customers. The pimply-faced sixteen-year-old in the back, didn’t see that John McGillicuddy was at the drive-thru, so he decided to throw a half nugget into the pack. “And one other thing, Mr. John McGillicuddy, or whatever your name is, all those snarky lines you dreamed up in the mirror the night before. We’ve heard them all before.” John McGillicuddy obviously brings a lot of baggage to the drive thru window, and he brings the same baggage to the waiting room receptionist who offers him a rough EWT. So, even though the jiffy line grates on me, I understand what drives an office to keep it general for the entry-level employees who have to put up with the John McGillicuddys of the world.

“Okay,” John McGillicuddy will say. “Let me talk to your manager.”

Here’s the dirty little secret that most in the service industry businesses won’t tell you. The manager is but another employee, at a higher level and often a little older and more experienced, but they are not granted a magic wand that can fix all of the flaws and inconsistencies you spot. The employees and managers can meet with their higher ups and eventually fix the flaws you’ve exposed, but it’s not going to happen today, while you’re all impatient and frustrated.

In other words, we know it’s not fair to take it out on the employees or even the manager, but they’re the face of the corporation standing before us. We also know to apply relative constructs to the term “jiffy” in conjunction with the nature of the services we require. In a doctor’s office, we could say that a jiffy should be anywhere between five to ten minutes, if our appointment was at 8:00 AM, and we showed up at the office at 8:00 AM. There are always going to be variables in a doctor’s office, of course, as some patients eat up more of the doctor’s time than expected, but doctors, and all of the employees in charge of the waiting room office, have a combined tenure of decades, and they should have a better feel for “a jiffy” in their Expected Wait Times. When I end up waiting twenty-three minutes for a doctor, I see that as a violation of the term a jiffy, as I know it and physicist Gilbert N. Lewis defines it. Twenty-three minutes waiting should be more of an auto mechanic’s definition of jiffy, but when I end up waiting over an hour and a half for them, I can’t help but think we’re all violating the jiffy. Even after allowing for relative definitions of the term in an auto mechanic’s shop, I can’t see how an hour and a half can even loosely be defined as a jiffy. Like those in a doctor’s office, auto mechanics’ employees have a combined decades of experience, and they should calculate their definition by how many cars are in front of me, and how long they think each job will take, until they 1-2-3 me and say, “I’m going to guess we’ll have you out of here in under two hours.” You know what I’d say to that? I’d say, “Thank you. Thank you for being so honest.” I’d say that because it’s much better to wait a concrete two-hour EWT than a vague jiffy that could take two hours.

*******

I only wrote a letter to a corporate home office one time, and to be completely honest, I hated doing it. I hated being that guy, that John McGillicuddy, so much that I didn’t write it that day, because I was overheated. I waited a day and composed a more professional, less emotional complaint letter. It was my only complaint letter, thus far, and I didn’t want to get anyone in trouble, but if you’re a “jiffy” guy who violates with variables to the point that I question your veracity, it could vex me to the point that it triggers my emotional mutation into Letter Writing Man … and you wouldn’t like me when I’m vexy.

The Complaint Cloud

April 7, 2021December 31, 2024 RilalyLeave a comment

When the complaint cloud approached our table, we didn’t need a meteorologist to tell us that conditions were ripe for a chance of complain. All we had to do was wait for the complainer to receive her food.

“There’s something wrong,” Rosalyn said to introduce us to her complaint, and she added the international prelude to the complaint, “I don’t want to complain, but …” She probably expected us to avoid starting our meal, until we could address her complaint. We didn’t even pause. In lieu of that apparent insult, Rosalyn repeated her complaint. She wouldn’t eat. She couldn’t, because she found something wrong with her food.

Rosalyn didn’t call the server over, because some part of her enjoyed having the complaint cloud hover over us while she instructed us on the proper way to prepare an onion ring. She said she didn’t want to lord her industry knowledge over our table, the server, or restaurant, but she couldn’t help herself. It might’ve taken a server two minutes to address her concern and return with a new plate of onion rings, but Rosalyn didn’t want to explore that avenue. Rosalyn wanted to guide us on a tour of the knowledge she attained in her years in the industry. She shared a strained smile to reveal her internal struggle, but she knew too much to just eat a poorly prepared onion ring that she knows isn’t a temperature the industry requires.

Rosalyn could’ve said her onion rings were room temperature, but she knew that description carried no attention-grabbing exclamation points, so she said, “They’re ice cold!” to superlative her way to some real attention. When she finished displaying her mastery of provocative adjectives, we feared touching the onion rings the way we do dry ice, because we know the physics behind something being so cold it could burn.

To bolster her characterization, and the resultant sympathy that followed, Roslayn added that her slightly above room temperature onion rings were, “Gross!” Was it a gross exaggeration to call them gross, yes, but isn’t it always. We all do it, because no one challenges the “Gross!” assessment. Gross is also such a relative term that it’s personal, and any challenge of a personal assessment is perceived as a personal insult.

The proper reaction to the “Gross!” assessment, as illustrated by our fellow patrons across the country, is the sympathetic and empathetic crinkled nosed. The crinkled nose response is so pervasive and ubiquitous that it’s almost reflexive now. We don’t even require the “Gross” assessor to back up their assessment. They say it, and we crinkle our nose. Gross can now be used to describe everything from finding live insects in our food to tasting excrement in fresh seafood, to finding a french fry in a serving of pasta, or being served an onion ring that is somewhat less than perfect.

My prime directive, at one point in my life, was to try to unseat the word gross from atop its perch in our lexicon. I tried to develop a campaign to limit use of the word in my social circles, to give it back some of its power. I made some strides in my battle against the ’ly words, literally and actually, so I thought I might experience some success with gross. I didn’t know what I was up against. The word is gone, it’s just gone. Overuse has diluted any power it once held, because it wields so much power, (and yes that dichotomy was intended).

When someone at our table tired of her grumblings, as a result of Rosalyn’s carefully orchestrated drama, they called our server over. It was anticlimactic when the chef quickly arrived, in a surprisingly timely fashion, with a new hot plate of onion rings. The chef informed us that the price of the onion rings would not appear on our bill. Shows over folks, time to go back to other conversations, because there’s nothing left for us to talk about in the immediate aftermath of a resolved dilemma.

“How are those onion rings?” one of the uninformed asked her.

“Eh, they’re all right.” The uncomfortable truth about those onion rings was they were not all right, and they never would be, because no onion ring can ever be all right in the complaint cloud. They’ll never be as tasty as they could be, or as hot as they should be, or as crispy and pleasing as the industry requires. “I prefer a solid crunch when I bite into an onion ring, don’t you? Yeah, no, these are not for me. This is a fine restaurant and all that, that’s known for their onion rings, but these… these just don’t meet my expectations.” Rosalyn picked the restaurant, and she selected the side item that she would eat, for which this restaurant was well-known. She knows restaurants, because she works for a competitor, and she knows what this restaurant specializes in, and she’s “always wanted to try their onion rings”. When they arrive, she takes it personal when they serve her something that is a couple of degrees below the industry standard that she knows only too well.

“Do you have any idea who I am?” is a question Rosalyn would never ask, because she knows they don’t, and even if they did, they probably wouldn’t care. Plus, no one outside of the cartoon world of Gilligan’s Island or Scooby-Doo says that anymore fearing that someone might confuse them with an archetype, obnoxious rich guy. Yet, the subtext of her complaint suggested that part of her complaint was just that, an attempt to treat her like a commoner who doesn’t know the difference between gross, room temperature onion rings and the top-notch onion ones they reserve for the clientele of discerning tastes.

Roslayn made her complaint cloud personal, and she concluded this dramatic portrayal of her virtuosity by saying, “I will eat them,” when the server returned to see if the second plate of onion rings met her expectations. She was kind enough and virtuous enough to suffer through those onion rings, so we wouldn’t view her as a complainer after she spent the last couple minutes doing nothing but complaining.

Praised be the all mighty, now will you climb down and speak to the peasants, as you said you would when you invited us to try to enjoy an evening out with you?

*******

Complaining is what we do. It’s what I do. We even complain about complainers. “I don’t want to hang out with him anymore, because all he does is complain,” we complain. I complain all the time. It’s what I do. It’s what I’m doing in this article. I’m complaining about complainers who complain too much. We complain about family, friends, politics, religion, our place of employment, and the people who walk extra slow through cross walks. Complaining is just kind of what we do when we’re in groups, but we shroud most of our complaints in humor. Complaining is fun and illustrative. It defines our character, and it can provide for some provocative, engaging conversations. When we invite friends and family for a night out, however, most of us try to keep those complaints in check. We know the looks, the eye rolls, and the physical discomfort some display when we complain too much about our relatively comfortable lives. We also know some of our complaints can bring an evening to a crashing halt.

Some of us don’t complain when we probably should, because we don’t want to bring unnecessary attention to ourselves. Is this submissive? Perhaps, but how brash are you? We know that they “Don’t want to get you started, because you have so many opinions to challenge the status quo that you’ll shake up and shatter their whole world,” but are your complaints really that substantive, or do you just enjoy lofting yourself up into the complaint cloud for the impressions it accrues?

“I don’t care. I’m paying for these goods and services,” complainers say to justify their complaints, “and the least they should do is try to provide me what I’m paying my hard-earned dollars for, and some of the times they don’t.” They also say such things about air travel, “You’re flying in their aircraft, and the airline should do everything they do to accommodate you and assure your comfort and feelings of security.” It’s all true of course, and it’s actually a good rationale to expect as much from our fellow man as we expect from ourselves, especially when we’re paying them, but as Malcolm Gladwell once wrote, there is a tipping point.

The tipping point arrives when everyone you know, knows that you’re going to complain about something, anything, just to complain. We know that it doesn’t really matter what you’re complaining about as long as you’re complaining about something. The meal they set before you could pass every stringent code restaurants have for quality food, and you will find something, because you’re not some stooge who’s going to eat anything just ‘cuz. We could try to dig into their past to figure out what drives them to do this, but it all boils down to one incontrovertible fact that some people just love to complain. Most of us go along to get along, and others debate, argue, and fight because it provides grist for their mill. They might not consider themselves complainers, and they might even say they hate people who complain all the time, but if the people intimate enough to know them know that the minute they sit down for a meal that a complaint cloud will darken their table one minute after that server puts food before them, it might be time to reevaluate that perception. When it happens once or twice, it’s annoying. When it happens so often that the people at your table dread this moment, it should be obvious that your greater complaint is not with the goods and services others work so hard to provide, but with the way your life panned out.