Good points

Over the past week I’ve been exposed to two very good examples of what used to be called common sense.

The first was from a friend of mine who prides himself on not knowing much about current events. He is much more interested in Oprah and The Young and The Restless, lines from which he can recite on command. On Saturday we were talking about the oil disaster. “I stopped watching that story,” he said. He told me he got sick of hearing about how hard it is to do anything five miles beneath the gulf’s surface. “They say that every time anyone asks,” he said. “And I wish someone would say, ‘It wasn’t that hard working under five miles of water when you put the drill in there in the first place.’” I thought that was an excellent point, and I’ve thought of it every time I hear someone on the television say “Remember, we’re doing all of this under five miles of water, and it’s very difficult.”

The second example came my way when I was eating pulled pork and potato salad with a friend who knows a lot more about current events than I do. I was grousing about one of my clients. This guy cannot manage to hit ‘reply all’ rather than ‘reply’ when the e-mail message pertains to everyone on the ‘to’ and ‘copy’ lines, I explained, but he is a social media expert. “That’s just impossible,” said my friend, who was wearing the most adorable pair of pajamas I’ve seen in a long while. “That stuff just came out last year. How could anyone be an expert on it?”