Practice makes perfect….
I was driving home from the grocery store and glanced at the Burger King sign to see if anybody I knew had died, gotten married, had a birthday, or gotten back from Iraq (the sign also doubles as a community bulletin board). The local McDonald’s, in contrast, is more of a prissy uptight corporate kind of place that advertises food only. Their employees suck, too; the only redeeming quality of the local McDonald’s is the cheap food when paychecks are far enough away that you’ll tolerate the crappy service, and their excellent sweet tea. While I normally don’t get my philosophy of life from a Burger King sign (being more partial to fortune cookies), for some reason the message of the day just reached out and whacked me upside the head. “Practice makes perfect, so be careful what you practice.”
I’m sure you have known, as I have, an elderly person that was rude and just plain mean to all those around him or her, and heard the excuses. “Now, Miz Jones doesn’t mean anything…she’s just getting old and that’s why she’s bad tempered.” On the contrary, Miz Jones has had a lifetime of practicing being ill natured and rude, and has become a perfect witch to anybody that has the ill fortune to cross her patch. (My apologies to all the good-natured Wiccans out there. You know what I meant.)
Then there are the serial adultery people. These people have perfected the art of offense. Spouse makes them angry for some reason? They get even! They have an affair, because it is all their spouse’s fault that they felt rejected, unloved, angry, or whatever other excuse that they come up with. The serial adultery people, for some reason that continues to elude them, are often serial divorced people that continue to blame the now former spouses for everything that went wrong.
My very favorites are the people that will go to way more effort to avoid anything resembling work than it would have actually taken to get the job done to begin with. Just do the job and quit figuring out how to dump it on your co-workers, okay? I just know that when they were in school, they were copying everybody else’s homework and skipping class, and then told their parents that the reason they had bad grades is because the teacher just didn’t like them. If they had only practiced doing the work instead of evading it, they’d probably be happier people.
When I got home and shared the Burger King sign philosophy with SwampMan, he observed that there was something that he felt we needed to practice just to make sure that we got it right, and it wasn’t cooking dinner! We could always pick up something at McDonald’s later.
