Im not sure if this is a sign of me having grown up in England or simply times having changed, but does anyone else feel like showing up unannounced at a family member’s / friend’s house has become socially unacceptable?
Category: Opinions
I love a good discussion, and these are typically fuelled by personal opinions
Cement and concrete
Here follows an engineer’s pet peeve.
Cement. Concrete. They’re the same thing, right? It’s the hard grey stuff that many buildings and slabs are made out of.
Wrong.
How to spell a name
I certainly don’t think of myself as old-fashioned, but when I see names spelled incorrectly, I’m sure I come off that way.
This became especially noticeable to me when I moved to America. Evidently, there is a cultural trend here of giving your child a unique name for the sake of them having a name that no one else does but also it seems as something of a status symbol, that you were free or daring enough to spell it differently.
To me, alternative spellings not only look weird and ugly, but they just cause confusion in life.
And what is your name, ma’am?
Michaela. With an A, not an I, a K, not a CH, and a Y not an E.
It’s also just a progression of the bastardisation of language that people feel that they should just spell things how they sound or how they want in the name of expression. It’s the kind of attitude that is seeing through spelled as thru all too regularly and even in professional contexts.
Call me what you will, but to me, Rebekkah will always be Rebecca, Jacklynn will always be Jacqueline and Mikeal will always be Michael.
Further reading: Does a baby’s name affect its chances in life?
The cost of doing business – my price is my price
I’m a business owner. As such, I incur costs from providing services to my clients, from banking fees for every transaction I process, to hosting fees for backing up my client’s sites before and during development.
An extremely important way that I build trust with my clients is that when I tell them a price, that’s the price they should pay. Sometimes less, but never more.
We’ve all experienced something similar to this situation: you sign up for a $40/month cell phone contract, but by the time they’ve added on line rental, roaming, credit card fees, voicemail, fees and taxes, your original “deal” isn’t quite the bargain that it sounded like.
Respecting others’ opinions
The world has never been smaller and we’ve never been closer to people of different backgrounds than we are today. We are immersed in a world where Christians, Muslims, atheists, Brits, Mongolians, Communists and those under dictator rule are but a click away.
With so many different belief systems – political, religious, cultural, social and moral to name but a few – now part of a global, inter-weaving conversation, we’re surrounded by people who have very different views on a wide range of issues.
We have to acknowledge that, while in some disagreements there is clearly a wrong position and a right one, (many) others have two (or more) very good solutions.
The culture of tipping
As a Brit, the culture of “tipping” was something rather foreign to me when I moved to the States. In the UK, it’s not very common to tip anyone. Your waitress might get a few quid if she’s done a particularly decent job, but it’s by no means required or expected and would be quite small in comparison to what is the norm in the States. And you’d certainly never rarely tip your barman, barista or taxi driver.
It’s taken me a few years to get used to and accept the culture of tipping, but that doesn’t mean that I agree with it.
Now, waiters and waitresses (and other workers highly reliant on tips): don’t lynch me yet.
I recognise that a large portion of your salary comes from tips. I am by no means saying that you’re not worthy of a decent income. I’m merely saying that I don’t agree that the majority of your income should come from tips.
The state of Christianity illustrated by the treatment of Rob Bell
I’ve never much understood the vilification of Rob Bell. One of Christianity’s “superstars” of the new millennium, he was quickly tossed aside after questioning the idea of Hell and whether what we’ve come to be taught is actually true.
The sad truth is that, most ironically, the bulk of this vilification is from those who call themselves Christians; you know, the religion that models itself on the life and teachings of Christ, namely love.
“What a beautiful boy! Sorry… girl!”
It has always baffled me how people get so offended when they incorrectly identify the sex of a baby.
Until puberty, the two sexes are quite similar and boys can easily look like girls and vice versa. The only main distinction that we have as the children grow is the way they style their hair and the way they dress because of our cultural norms.
With babies not having (much) hair to style and short of wearing pink or blue all day every day, it is quite conceivable to mix up boys and girls.
So parents, chill out: it is not offensive, nor a slight on your child’s appearance – just a biological fact that there is not much to distinguish them until puberty hits and their bodies start morphing into the adults that they will become. Just a simply-stated correction will suffice.
The lunacy of trying to end encryption in the UK
Yesterday, David Cameron gave a speech aimed at improving national security in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks last week in Paris.
In doing so, he indicated that he intends to put a stop of end-to-end encryption, at least for messaging services.
This is lunacy.
Encryption is the technology that ensures that my information is kept secure and can only be read by the intended recipient. This includes my bank details when looking at my bank account, credit card details when shopping online, social security numbers, driver’s license details and any number of less-sensitive but not-publicly-appropriate data.
Slower traffic keep right
If there’s one thing that quite irritates me on the road, it’s people not keeping right (or left in the UK) when they’re not overtaking.
In the vast majority of states, it is the law to keep right unless you are overtaking and this is far from the norm on the roadways as many of you are probably already aware.
It makes the roads so much slower than they need to be. By keeping slower traffic right and faster traffic left, traffic moves much smoother and causes less road rage in people being held up by those not obeying the law.