Bestir yourself, Self

In Wodehouse’s very first Jeeves & Wooster story, Jeeves says to Bertie, when Bertie’s fiancée wants him to read Nietzsche:

“You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.”

You can buy this on a t-shirt. 

I do enjoy a little bit of Nietzsche to buck myself up [See, complacency, prone to], but it’s true that if you go out too far with him, you’ll find you’re sitting on a very flimsy branch indeed. 

However, I just saw something Nietzsche said about betrayal/trust that expresses so nicely how I feel about store management, I am going to quote the blighter:

"I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you."

It’s not mere carelessness and ineptitude on management’s part, it’s culpable negligence and active lying. 

And ineptitude. 

Yesterday BB came back to the clothes sorting area, next to my work area, with a couple bottles of Febreze. (Donated of course—the store doesn’t buy supplies if they can help it.)

“Spray this over racks of clothes ready to go out,” he said to Clothes Alice. 

Alice has environmental sensitivities (don’t we all?), and she said she couldn’t use it. 

She’s only part time, though, so he was going to leave the Febreze for days she’s not there.

I spoke up. “Don’t use Febreze! That stuff is toxic.”

“I never heard that,” BB said. 

“You never checked,” I said, pulled out my phone, and quickly found and read out loud:

 “The chemicals in Febreze are neurotoxins… aggravate allergies and asthma…”

BB took the bottles away. 

I said to several coworkers gathered around, “You don’t want to breathe anything but air—” 

and, looking at Grateful J (now manager of furniture because Mr Furniture began driving the store truck full time)—Grateful J who had refused my offer of a mask when he was taking down the dressing rooms in a haze of sheetrock dust, 

I added—“like, not plaster dust.”

“Oh, sheetrock isn’t plaster,” he said. “It’s not dangerous. It’s plaster that you want to watch out for breathing—the particles are sharp-edged.”

I pulled my phone back out, looked it up, and read out loud:

“Sheetrock is gypsum plaster pressed between two sheets of material”.

(I did not add that lungs do not care for soft-edged dust either.)

“Why did they tell me it was okay?!” he said—meaning the apartment management company he once worked for.

“Because people lie to get you to do stuff,” I said. “Or they’re stupid and don’t look stuff up.”

Though he doesn’t look stuff up, GJ’s not stupid! 

He’s super smart about attaching-things-to-other-things (something I’m stupid at), and plant sciences. 

What he is, is gullible.

I KNOW that anywhere I work, I will encounter The Humans—and we are a wonky lot, creatures of habit, prone to taking the path of least resistance. 

Me too! 

I’m sure if I get a job in the public schools, I’ll soon be raging about how badly they are managed. 

I can think of an example already: 

I recently learned that students can keep—and use—their phones in class. 

I wondered if private schools allow that. 

Looking it up, I see the most elite school in town, Breck, just last year required students to keep their phones in phone bags during class.

I should think so.

If you’re going to keep ruling the world, you better stay sharp. 

One of my personal “stupidities”—or, things that dull sharpness—is complacency. 

It’s not stupid, of course, in an uncertain world—and the world is always uncertain—it’s not stupid to stay in place. It’s a survival skill. 

But there’s more than survival. 

There’s this question that I blogged recently—in support of developing resilience:

“Is this [whatever] helping me or harming me?”

The answer is not always clear, but Penny Cooper has cast her vote:  “Look for a new adventure.”

And I think of Jane Eyre, who said that if she couldn’t be free, at least she could have a different servitude.

For the change. 

Stir it up!