One LONG RANT / Where has the common sense gone?
 

Ever have one of those Mondays / weeks that just lasts for EVER (??) :diablo:

Ok I'm spent!, work has been killer / A One-long two week Monday!.. :whip:

Is common sense so completely removed from our society that no one really has it anymore (??):neutral: I’m talking about “professionals in their trade” this is what they do for a living people!!

Is it so fricken hard to take a moment out of scratching your ass and actually standing back, and OOooo (maybe think / dare to evaluate) what your doing and how it impacts the other trades / tasks after you’ve half assed it together to get back to drinking bear, video game planning, doing the girlfriend / neighbor thing….

Were / WHEN did taking pride and ownership YES I said it OWNERSHIP in you work, in your trade, in your profession go the way of the DODOO (??):oh: Isn’t work over when it done / what you’ve committed too not when the clock strikes 4 – 5pm (?)

Don’t you take pride it what you do and how it finally presented to the buyer / owner ?? or is it just me ??..

So my question to the team is this (?) in your day to day life, do you actually witness “common sense” or have you found it OOooo lets say lacking (??)


P.S.
Sorry for the Rant.. I feel much better now..

Sean

your getting a little Dennis Miller on us tonite..:lol:...but about commonsense...when I was in college I noticed that the smarter a lot of people got the more they lacked in common sense...I knew a few guys who were from a different country, and one was studying for his PHD in Nuclear Physics and he had finished his 100 page thesis and gave it to me to read...I got through a paragraph and a half and that was enough for me....:tongue:, but when it came to commonsense he didnt have a clue.....

Right there with you Shaun...

I find that the more I look around, that I am the only person who pays any attention anymore, to anything.

I own a business, and have a few employees. Seems like they would rather look at an empty sky than pay attention to what they are doing. I try to make it interesting by randomly yelling at them, and making silly hats out of random objects like boxes. Even that does not work.

I have come to the realization that I am surrounded by mediocrity. Our society is currently breeding a crap load of people who have no accountability for their actions. I had to recently tell my employess that if they screw up anymore the repair costs are going to come out of their wages. That is about the only thing I can do, hit em where it hurts.

I do also enjoy cursing at people in other professions when they screw up. Not for little stuff, mainly customer service. I find getting loud and obnoxious is the only way for people to pay attention. Trying to be nice is like pushing water up a wall...

Nice to hear that others feel my pain too. I spent my entire monday sweating in my 90f plus office. The a/c fan smoked itself before I got to work, and it took us all day to find a replacement. I did not even bother to call an a/c repairman. You can imagine how well that would go...

i`m not alone !! yeppy :P well i struggle everyday with people`s lack of common sense. the funny thing is that u r complaining about customer service in the US where i have seen the best customer service in my life!! u should come here to Kuwait and be a Kuwaiti for a while, here when u complain about anything to any business 90% of the time u will get an apology without any action, and sometimes they actually tell u that u can go and they dont want ur business anyways !!

oh I agree. I have a small business and I detail cars. the cutting corners and stupid mistakes I saw working at dealerships and such made me leave. I have to repair a guys black hummer soon. He took it to the dealership (big name place) to have it detailed. omg. the guy obviously tried to do the whole truck without cleaning his pad once. the swirls cover the whole thing and the owner won't even try taking it back to get fixed.

Now I have about 7 hrs of work to repair the damage from a guy too lazy to use the air to blow out his pad once every panel or so. ya that 30 seconds sure kills time on the job. you don't just have to use a spur. I bet 25-30% of my work is repairing damage caused by detail shops, usually black vehicles too. make sure you take all the polish off before letting it go in the sun people if you cut polish... wash it after a serious cut polish even before waxing if you have to (I use a water based cut polish ;) )... read, learn. hell there are free training videos out there on product use, or a good supplier like automagic will send a rep out to demo the products for you.

I also, until tonight, did some mobile security work. I've done it for many many companies over the years. I got injured a while back and needed something to make money while I rehabbed. 2 months of graveyards... yukk. I am too old for graveyards now. Last night, I am doing first patrol. I check the building and go in to sign the log. it's my first and last stop everyday. takes oh 7 mins to walk the perimeter and check things. it's the olympic committee building so pretty important. funny enough I found lights out in a bad place going to parking, and mentioned it. as I am signing the book, the guy starting after me drives up to the front door to come sign the book for his rounds.... well #1 he never even walked around the building so he's allready coming to falsify a statement, and he can see me and knows I do it then, and would rather just play stupid and get it done rather than oh maybe coming back (our office was in the same building)... it makes you wonder how many patrols guys like that do in the same fashion. it's not hard work, but there are so many people like that now. I remember it used to be a profession when I started, now 20+ yrs later, it's hard to get $3/hr more than I made then...

Well I'm one of those idiots tonight. I just hooked up a battery to a velineon the wrong *beeping* way. So the battery still works but is most likely damaged. The velineon esc is toast. Any one know how much it will cost to have Traxxas repair this ESC after this act of stupidity?

I believe you are witnessing what is commonly referred to as diffusion of responsibility, or at least something close to it.

Standards have dropped quite a bit, there's no question about that. When you combine that with the desire for peer validation, you get idiots.

this is a great thread. I have said for a long time that COMMON SENSE IS NOT VERY COMMON! I see people do the dumbest things and not even know it. We all do some pretty stupid things sometimes but actually realizing and correcting it is a different story. Most things though can be avoided all together with a little, and yes i said little, common sense. ex.. yellow means caution the light is going to turn red. Now a lady a block away will try and make the light and t-bone some poor person proceeding on the green. Another one of my buttons is when people ask the stupid questions. We were told there is no such thing as a stupid question but I'm here to tell there is. Nobody is perfect, including me, but common sense is needed badly in the world now days.

The "death of common sense" is something that eternally bugs me these days too. I could go on and on, but I won't, because I get too worked up about it. Grrrr.

IMO, the problem is that a majority of the people only average. Exceptionalism is the exception.

I do think its a bit of rose colored nostalgia to think it was ever different. I work with some highly educated and intelligent people, and its shocking to see how many are incompetant or barely competant in thier jobs. Alot of really good people also, but some... damn.. don't know what they are thinking a lot of the time.

Its hard to be really good at something. Its takes talent, training and a desire to do things well. Not everyone can have this.

OTOH, if I ever worry about doing something different or new, thinking that everyone already doing it is going to be so good at it it would be hard for me to come in and succeed, I just remember just how many people are not that good at what they are doing, and I have a pretty good shot of doing well if I'm determined. Seems like half the challenge in life is just having the balls to try something.

I agree. I was gonna go off on how people used to work harder and there were more real pioneers(read: smart people with confidence), but then again if you consider population growth, I wonder if it is the same percentage.

I do think that people need to start adopting the idea that if they don't devise a solution, nobody else will as opposed to the opposite(someone somewhere is taking care of it) mentality.

People need to start really earning their clout instead of freeloading so much of the time. You know, show that you give a damn.

lol have any of you seen the movie "Idiocracy" with Luke Wilson.... explains it all rofl link

well ,im only 15, and don't have a "job" but me and my dad repair snowmobiles (we had 31 1/2, now only 23) and make money from that, but i don't cut corners and try to put all i can into it, but this is a rare case where, i can not sit and press buttons all day er somthin, i need to be doing something or else im done. i had a job (real one :yes:) watering plants at lowes. wow easiest job ever, hold a hose. i lasted 4 weeks. only because my friend worked with me and we'd always goofed off and just walked around lowes :mdr:

heard over the intercom @ Loews

Trev.....report to your work station !

:lol:

haha, well ok you wanted it, it happen 4 times. :yes: i told my boss i was at the bathroom :whistle: (i was looking at wood :na:)

You were in the bathroom looking at wood? Were you alone...:intello:

haha, no, i was looking at wood for ramps, i told my boss i was in the bathroom. :lol:

I think idiocracy had it right. People just continue to insert their heads further up there butts in my opinion. I fear for the future. I just think that some many things are automatically done for people that they lose the ability to think and problem solve. I spent four years as a butcher when I was younger and came realize that most people don't even have a clue where meat comes from. You would not believe how many people claimed we added water to the meat or that there was blood in the package. (the water was always blood as well)

I have a job at Sears selling the lawnmowers, fitness equipment, tools, paint- basically a whole side of a store because they are to lazy to hire people for the respective departments. I have to work directly with the public- which is probably the last thing I want to do but here I am.

A while back a guy came in with his GDO (garage door opener) and said that we gave him the wrong rail kit for it when he picked it up. No big deal, except that we no longer sold the GDO and the rail kits separately. At the time we had just recently switched over the the all-in-one-box system so I asked him when he bought it to see if he could just return it for a new one. If it were <= a year ago we could have made an exception, but no, it was over 6 (SIX) years ago! I asked him why he hadn't noticed until now and he said that he bought the GDO expecting his current one to stop working soon (how the hell could he know?) and it didn't (of course) so he just left it sitting in his garage. Then when it finally breaks down he goes to install the new one and realizes that he has the wrong parts. Now, I'm not saying that we (Sears) did nothing wrong, but there has to be a statute of limitations on these things! He bought a Belt Drive GDO and they gave him the Chain Drive rail kit. On every side of the rail kit's box it says in HUGE letters: "CHAIN DRIVE RAIL KIT" and he knew he had purchased a screw drive GDO. I just couldn't believe that he hadn't noticed they were incorrect until now (6 years later). None of the managers that I talked to about it (it goes without saying that he asked to see one at the first sign of resistance) could believe it either. He tried valiantly to convince us that he had no idea until now. It was obvious by his tone that he had just expected us to roll over when he came in and complained a bit. He started yelling when we didn't buy his story so our store manager had to send him packing. I feel bad for the guy, at the same time- What the hell was he thinking? "Hey they gave me the wrong ones but it's OK I can just bring it back whenever and they wil be happy to fix it!" AT the very least I would expect people to return something like that when their old one turned out not to be broken.

This little story actually fits both of the topics here. Lack of common sense and lack of responsibility. My point is that this guys attitude represents about 40% of the people who come in with a problem. It's our fault, not theirs at all. It coudln't be since the customer is always right, right? Wrong. This type of person is what makes me come home and tell everyone that my job sucks. Most people, thankfully, are willing to admit that they are at least partially responsible, and work with me to fix the problem.

There's my rant for the day, who's up next? :lol:

Ya'll can bitch about it all you want. I'd be right there with you (and usually am under my breath) if I didn't make a good living fixing or cleaning up other people's half assed efforts!! If everybody paid attention to detail, I'd be out of business!

hehe, I started a new job this morning. I was hired as a grunt and by the end of the day was being trained as a purchasing agent. I jumped right in and started doing stuff.... it is pretty easy, some manual labour for sure, but... I like I am home for the day and it's 1pm. this is going to work out good because I can book details for the afternoon and buy a lot more stuff from Mike now :D

and all because the guy I am taking over for has no common sense LOL so I say cheers to the ones without it, you just made me a happy guy

hey we all lose the CS once in a while. I've fried my share of equipment.... I tried using glue remover the other day to take of decal gunk on a lexan body... ya it worked good, now I have to put decals over the deformed lexan to hide it... it never screwed up vinyl or plastic in cars before LOL... and I just painted it too dammit

I COMPLETELY AGREE there are the ones like you mention that basically want to get something free or fixed because "its not their fault". and they think they know the moto of most businesses is that the customer is allways right.

i was a night manager at an unnamed "DRIVE-IN" for 2 years and you wouldnt believe the BS people tryed to pull to get free food it was unreal, i ran the speaker and bagged the food to MAKE SURE stuff was sent out right, fast, and HOT, i had some middle aged lady, eat OVER HALF of a burger and buss in saying she ordered a chicken club not a burger (when i had personally taken the order), so when the carhop brought it in there where maybe 3-4 bites left:no: and the lady demanded she get her chicken club :lol: i was nice for 90% of the conversation until she asked to speak with my manager and i told her I WAS THE MANAGER, she started cursing at me and called me a "cracker" (slang for what old black people called whites back in the day), i couldnt have the crazy lady rasing hell on my shift so i called the cops :lol: :whistle: you should have seen the look on her face. :diablo: but thats only 1 example of some of the crazy stuff people did to try and get free food. i really got a kick out of when someone robbed one of the carhops at night and then CAME BACK 2 hours later THAT night and ordered food from a car (they where on foot when they robbed the carhop) needless to say they were arrested.:surprised:

Ah, Shaun, you know where I work, surely you can understand :lol:.

For those who don't know, I work at the LHS. It is unbelievable the sorts of customers who come in. Our service is free, because, well, we aren't supposed to provide hands-on service. Our job is basically to assist customers with purchases and walk them through stuff, not to fix things.

But back to lack of common sense... some people expect us to fix their cars despite knowledge of this being a hobby. Sometimes they don't even thank us for repairing what they damaged.

When we do work on customers' stuff we aren't supposed to accept tips, but we are more than happy to take them. For quick jobs we don't expect anything, on longer jobs we usually expect something in return for our time, even if it's food. Whenever reciprocation fails (due to a lack of common sense on the customers' part) we make a mental note to refrain from helping them in a similar manner in the future. In this line of work, you definitely gotta understand: YOU GET SOME, YOU GIVE SOME. Obviously the vast majority of the members here understand this point (responsibility).

Huh, came to this realization a little early (around 15, 17 now), and the fact is, common sense ain't so common. When the county makes it so easy to sit on your ass and do nothing, learn nothing, and have no goals, it almost makes it the american way.

I think a trip to Brasil will be on order for all of us :party:.

WOOOOO! I'd love too! When's my flight? So nice of you to treat:yes::lol:

Yeah!!!..:yipi:....you might want to leave the wives at home..otherwise it would be like taking sand to the beach.....:lol:

LOL..LOL.. IMG your great at putting the smile on faces...

Thanks for the laugh Azjc..

I never said I would be paying for all of you guys :lol:. You all better pay for me if you want a good translator :lol: and to find the good places to :party:.

Or dirt... Good point, we just have to come up with a good story. We are going to Utah to play with r/c cars. That way the wives will not want to come with us. Not much to do in Utah if i remember...

I can see you now, all dressed up in your alligator shoes showing us around...:lol:

Alligator shoes in Brasil will attract a lot of unwanted attention. Flip-flops, short and exposed big belly :lol: will be more appealing for the :angel: looking for some :love:.

Right on red, yield and turn left on solid green, merge, wait your turn, are mostly common sense and courtesy driving stuff right? Are these things not in the driving manual anymore?
Cell phone drivers Ugh! Convent store check writers Ugh! Scratcher lotto addicts Ugh! The slowest driver in traffic usually has a Nascar racing sticker on the car? Thanks you for this thread I had to vent.

Hey, come on now. There is plenty to do in Utah: late night pitch and putt, we could go to the livestock auction and cruise the 4-H babes, throw stuff off a bridge, go cow tipping...

After that list my wife will definately want to come...

Do you guys have a lot of mormons there? Aren't they based in Salt Lake City? Sorry, bit off topic with that question...

Can we throw a cow off a bridge? We could bid on one at the auction!

Excuse my ignorance, but what are 4-H babes? Isn't 4-H some sort of after school group? Or does the H stand for herpes? If so those girls may be a bit outcast...

D00D, i wanna throw a cow off a bridge, (can i come, i'll bring monster) (the energy drink)

I would just have to say I am going to run my RC cars and my wife would say "have fun"...it seems like RC cars isnt very chick friendly......lol

In some countries, if you have an RC car (Boat, plane or heli) you are considered wealthy if you know what I mean :wink:.

Offtopic

Yep, Mormon pioneers founded Utah and that's where the headquarters are now. Utah used to be 95% Mormon but now it's only 70%. I am Mormon, btw, so don't believe any rumors unless you've asked me about them first. Most of what you hear about us is totally wrong. For example, we haven't allowed polygamy since the 1800s, but most people still think we're cool with it. Nope.

4-H is an after school program kinda' like Future Farmers of America from what I understand. I don't know much about it. I was paraphrasing a quote from "Tommy Boy".

As for tossing a cow off the bridge, I think it'd be better to use a catapult like on Monty Python. :lol:

/Offtopic

Good to know that you can answer my questions. I am not that familiar on mormonism. I do know that L Ron Hubbard started it, and Gene Roddenbery wrote a book about it... Tom Crusie is your leader, right? Not sure that I have all of the info though...

I have some catapult plans floating around somewhere, I can probably size it up for cow duty.

your thinking of Scientology.....also John Travolta is in the mix

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology

just in case you were being serious......