Some of you may not understand.  I love my job.  Every day brings with it new challenges and a constant drive to change for the better.  To keep up with the environment, you start to acquire new skills either by focusing on the need to develop them or by inheriting the skill through some form of mental osmosis.  This latter form of metamorphosis has started to lead me down the path of noticing things.  Maybe the following awareness test will help to explain a little.

If you didn’t see it, thank the loving scotoma wherein you simply don’t see that which you’re not looking for. This ability to “notice” things even applies to that which isn’t there but ought to be as in my cell phone adventure where a seemingly simple solution to something just wasn’t there.

It’s getting worse for me. Today I saw a simple advertisement in a gas station regarding a bluetooth headset. There was a picture of the headset next to a picture of a model wearing the headset. Actually, she wasn’t wearing it at all. She was wearing a completely different model. Out of all the things to notice, that’s what I picked up on.

To clarify my point, I wanted to share a picture of the ad with you. My cell phone took a really crappy picture so I thought I would check the facility’s website. Amazingly there is a page dedicated to store specials and there is a small version of the flyer on that page (at least for now because they change it every month). That version of the circular doesn’t help illustrate the point because it’s too small. But they’ve apparently thought things through enough to allow you to click through and acquire a .pdf version of the ad. Click! Grrrrrrrr. The .pdf version is the circular from LAST MONTH. Come on!

I’m a nice guy, so I decided that I would let them know about the problem by submitting a comment about their page. My first problem there is that “location visited” is a required field. I don’t have a problem about a location, I have a problem with the website. Well… let’s fill it in anyway.

OK… where the hell was I? I was driving from point A (which I know the name of) to point B (which I also know the name of) but I never had the need to remember what city or town I was in when I had take a piss. So why would I want to look at a list of cities? I’d much rather look at a list of states and then cities. But I’m just being harsh I suppose. Eventually I find out that there is only one location in Michigan, so I chose that one! Let’s fill in the comment itself. And you know what, I am feeling so nice, I want to give the technician who’ll be working on this problem the actual url to the page.

So what exactly am I suppose to make of this? Is this the list of characters that I can’t use, or the list of characters that I can use? Because when they tell me “alpha-numeric,” I’m thinking letters and numbers and I know that letters and numbers are fine. So if letters and numbers are fine and the site is telling me something in relation to letters and numbers, then it should hold that everything else in this list should be fine. Not! Too bad for the technician that needs to fix the .pdf problem. I don’t have enough time to turn into a pro-bono consultant for inept thinking so I’ll leave the shitty form feedback for another day.

Now as you’ve been reading this, I know that you’re thinking that I’m just being picky. Admittedly there is a very fine line between being picky and being hyper-aware. Where that line sits has a lot to do with your environment. If you work in an environment that thrives on improvements and yearns for being the best, then expressing your concerns would be welcome and you are being hyper-aware. If you’re not in that environment… get another job.