Teenagers aren't the only people who don't finish the job

It was a recurring problem when our sons were teenagers.

After taking a ridiculous amount of food into their rooms to eat – cereal, chips, leftover pizza, frozen taquitos, Mountain Dew – they would bring the dirty plates/bowls back to the kitchen, rinse them out . . . and then leave them on the counter, just above the dishwasher.

It was better than leaving the dirty dishes in their rooms, but they rarely finished the job. The hard part was bringing the plate to the kitchen and rinsing it. The last 10% of the job was putting it in the dishwasher. That part was easy.

It's not just teenagers who do 90% of the job and stop. There are many things in life where we do the equivalent of running 25 miles of a marathon and then stopping (that's an overstatement. Bringing a plate to the kitchen from your bedroom is not like running 25 miles).

Here are five common areas in which we do 90%, then inexplicably stop. And we don't have a good excuse.

Putting a new bag in the trash can. We take out the garbage – which often involves pulling out a bag of refuse, hauling it to wherever our larger garbage can is and returning – then neglect to put a new bag in the can. It's a problem, but it's worse if someone assumes there's a new bag in there and dumps a plate of spaghetti. We only did 90% of the job.

Filling a hand soap dispenser. If you use liquid soap, you know this routine: We get low on the hand soap, but we just keep dispensing smaller and smaller amounts. Pretty soon, it's spitting out a spray of soap. Do we think it will magically fill? The hard part was getting the dispenser and getting a refill, but we keep getting smaller and smaller amounts of hand soap without refilling it. We only do 90% of the job.

Emptying suitcases after a trip. We take the time to correctly pack a suitcase, then live out of it for a day, a week or 10 days. We return home, with a few items of clean clothes, a bunch of dirty clothes and some other stuff. We endure the travel, we make it home, we bring in the suitcase . . . and leave it. A few days later, there are still clothes in your suitcase. We only do 90% of the job.

Putting the new toilet paper on the roll. The hard part – if you can call it that – is getting the additional roll out of storage. But too often, we get a new roll, put it on the counter near the toilet, maybe use it, then walk away. It would have taken 10 seconds to put it on the roller. We were literally sitting there. We only do 90% of the job.

Folding clothes after laundry. It takes a couple of hours to wash and dry a load of laundry. We have to gather it (or take a hamper), put it in the washing machine, pull all those wet clothes out and transfer them to the dryer. Later, we load the dry clothes in a basket, take them to a bed or wherever we place them, dump them and . . . leave them. It takes three minutes to fold a load of clothes, but we do only 90% of the job.

There are probably other tasks you can think of – tasks where we routinely do the hard 90%, but don't finish it.

It would be like me writing this column and not having a final paragraph that wraps things up.

Maybe I'll do that later.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.

Why we don't need to give our autographs anymore

In the early 1990s, I was working as a Daily Republic sports writer, covering an Oakland A's-Minnesota Twins baseball game at the Oakland Coliseum. About 90 minutes after the game – having interviewed the managers, some players and written a game story or column – I walked out of the stadium toward my car.

As always, a collection of fans – mostly young fans – waited outside the tunnel that led from the Coliseum clubhouses to the parking lots, looking for autographs.

"Hey, are you Scott Erickson?"

I didn't respond at first. Then I realized it was a kid. Maybe 10 or 11. Asking me if I was Scott Erickson, an outstanding pitcher for the Twins (he won 20 games one season). Scott Erickson was 6-foot-4, 220 pounds. I was 5-foot-10, 175 pounds. He was six years younger than me. But we both had dark hair, I guess.

The kid wanted an autograph!

"No, sorry," I said, feeling bad for the kid, but great for me. He thought I was a major league baseball player! I was a sports writer for a small newspaper who occasionally played city league softball (badly). But he thought I was somebody! I was like Navin Johnson in "The Jerk!"

That feeling stayed until a few days later when I covered my next game. Same thing. Game ended. I wrote my article and headed out to my car.

"Hey is . . . no, never mind. He's not a player." 

Different kid, very different (and accurate) perception. No autograph in either case, but one gave me the illusion that I had some sort of similarity to a 6-foot-4 guy who could throw a baseball 90 mph.

I didn't give any autographs because they weren't needed. Just like they're not needed for a credit card.

(Columnist trick! If you can't think of a way to lead into a subject, consider something similar, write about it and then add a paragraph to explain the correlation. In this case, follow that paragraph with a parenthetical paragraph explaining what you did. You learned something today.)

Did you know that you don't need to sign a credit card receipt? That when you go to a restaurant and put the meal on a card, when they bring you back the card, receipt and a list of suggested tips, you can write a total and not sign the card?

It doesn't matter and it hasn't mattered for a long time. In fact, Visa, Mastercard, Discover and American Express (all the major cards except Diners Club, which I just discovered still exists but is not issuing new cards in the United States) all dropped the requirements to sign.

In 2018. Six years ago.

We haven't needed to sign credit card receipts (or those credit card readers) for six years!

Still, many places expect us to sign for the card purchase to be "official." It doesn't make it official. Signatures are not even used to detect fraud. No one checks your signature against anything because the card companies stopped requiring signatures in 2018.

I don't know how that makes you feel. It makes me feel like we're continuing a social contract that's outdated, like not wearing white after Labor Day or men taking off their hats while indoors or using a duel to settle a dispute. We don't have to sign for our credit cards!

However . . . while I think it's a good idea for you to make a scene at a restaurant by refusing to sign, I'm not going to be the guy who tries to explain this to a waiter who brings me the ticket. I'm not going to tell the cashier at CVS that my signature isn't required because that went away six years ago. I'm not going to refuse to sign when I get a haircut and the stylist (or barber) asks me to sign.

I'm not going to do it for the same reason I wouldn't pretend to be Scott Erickson. I'm not doing it for the same reason I didn't tell the kid who said I wasn't an athlete that I could switch hit and ground out to second base from each side of the plate in softball.

Because it's sometimes easier to go along than to make someone uncomfortable.

It's what Scott Erickson would do, at least. And I don't know if I've ever told the story, but I was mistaken for him once ...

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.

An invaluable lesson learned as a young McDonald's employee

The good folks at McDonald's say that one in eight Americans will work at one of their franchises at some point of their lives. You deserve a break today, so my high school stint at McDonald's can offset that statistic for you and six other people.

Politicians and business leaders have used their McDonald's experience to burnish their working-class appeal. Kamala Harris worked at McDonald's. Jeff Bezos worked at McDonald's. Heck, Jay Leno worked at McDonald's.

Brad Stanhope also worked at McDonald's. There, I learned one of life's most important lessons: Stay focused.

McDonald's was an important job for me. After losing my first two positions (including at a supermarket where I was fired by a boss who told me in the middle of the store that I didn't need to come in anymore), my confidence was shaky. Working at McDonald's allowed me to be around plenty of people, get training and realize that I wasn't (totally) incompetent.

I was a senior in high school, working at McDonald's in my hometown of Eureka. One of the roles I filled was being the guy who emptied garbage cans, cleaned the bathrooms and was a gofer for everyone. That wasn't all I ever did – I also took orders and repeatedly scalded my arms while making french fries – but on the winter night in question, I was the cleanup guy.

It was wet and cold around 8 p.m., which is typical for that area. The Pacific Ocean was a few blocks west of the restaurant, so it was foggy. As I remember it, there were just a handful of cars in the large parking lot.

I checked the three garbage cans spread around that massive parking lot. Being Eureka, there were always people wandering around. There was a substantial homeless population even then and some of those residents would look in the McDonald's dumpster, searching for food. That made sense because we would make the food, set a timer and throw it out after a certain period.

Anyway, I wandered the dark parking lot thinking of whatever a 17-year-old thought of in that era. Sports. Girls. School. "Welcome Back, Kotter." The Bee Gees. I grabbed one full bag of trash, went to another can and grabbed that bag. Then I walked to the dumpster, climbed up the short ladder, opened it and . . .

A GUY SPRUNG UP LIKE SOMEONE JUMPING UP FROM A CASKET.

OR MAYBE FROM A JACK-IN-THE-BOX.

I gasped and almost fell off the ladder. What the heck? 

The guy was equally surprised. He was dumpster diving, about to find some food when . . . some kid opened the lid and surprised him!

I didn't tell him to leave. I probably apologized for bothering him. I tossed the bag to the part of the dumpster away from him and told him it didn't have any good food.

I was mad at myself. I wondered if I screamed. I hoped I didn't make the guy feel bad. I was mad that the guy was there.

Nobody saw it. Nobody knew about it. I doubt I am the only employee of that or any McDonald's who had that experience. But it stuck with me: Always stay focused.

When Bezos or Harris or Leno talk about working at McDonald's, they probably don't think about nearly having a heart attack caused by a Jack-in-the-Dumpster experience when they were 17 and thinking how weird it was that John Travolta was in movies, too.

Yeah, I worked at McDonald's.

I made friends there, gained confidence and learned an important lesson: When putting trash in Dumpsters, always be cautious.

I'm lovin' it!

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.

America changes this week, the toy hall of fame and more

This is the week that America changes.

Things will be different. Whether it's brighter or darker depends on your outlook, but change is coming.

Yeah. In case you missed it (far less likely now than before our electronic devices updated automatically), daylight saving time ended early Sunday morning. It's now standard time, which means it's dark earlier in the evening and we can all settle into months of sadness.

Most of us have strong opinions on whether it our current system makes sense.

Some of us like daylight saving time and think it should be in place all year, rather than just eight months. Some of us think we should stay on standard time year-round. Some of us think we should pick a lane and not have to change our clocks twice a year (particularly our car clocks).

I don't know who's right, but I think we should learn that we can have vastly different views of issues and not hate the other side. If you're a DST denier, I think you're wrong, but I don't think you're evil. You may just not have the same information as me.

It seems like that may apply somewhere else this week, but we'll see.

While we're on the topic, consider my latest proposal with daylight saving time: What if instead of springing forward and falling back, we just fell back every time the time changed? Fall back in the spring, fall back in the fall.

Of course, that would hamper the idea of longer summer days (at first), but it would . . .  are you ready . . . have a time-shifting element unlike anything else. Falling back twice a year would result in us getting an extra day every 12 years. It wouldn't change the calendar, it would just mean that over time, we're stealing an extra day.

We could defeat time!

On to the topics du jour. . . . 

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If you're like me, you're losing sleep over this month's big election.

Correct! We're about to discover the makeup of the 2024 class for the Toy Hall of Fame. The Strong National Museum of Play announced 12 finalists back in September, but most observers think it's likely time for balloons and trampoline to break through and gain entrance to the toy shrine. Pokemon cards and Transformers – popular with generations younger than me – also seem likely to get in.

One beneath-the-radar toy that might sneak in: The stick horse.

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OK, something equally important: Why do manufacturers put peel-off caps on products, but leave off the tab that makes it easy to pull off the caps? I mean, it's bad enough that I have to pull a metallic cap off my toothpaste tube, but how am I supposed to do that when they don't give me something to grip?

It's ridiculous and I generally end up pounding it with tweezers or my toothbrush, like I'm a caveman (who owned tweezers and an electric toothbrush). If you put a peel-off cap on a product, give us a tab that's easy to grab.

It's simple decency.

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No TV show in the history of broadcasting has been more pleasant than "The Great British Baking Show." It's now in its (I'm estimating) 1,500th season, but every season features a bunch of really nice people baking tasty items in a good-natured competition at a country house with pleasant music playing.

Anxious about Tuesday's election? Binge watch that show.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.