Republicans should be jumping on the bandwagon to legalize gay marriage, as David Brooks points out in his Saturday column. I don’t agree with Brooks much of the time, but he’s a hell of a smart guy, and very worth listening to.
I hear he based this column on a piece he read on Andrew Sullivan’s blog.
Here’s a response to my letter (and a couple of others) in the Times the other day:
o the Editor:
Re your Nov. 19 letters about self-service systems in stores:
I used to work in retail. My spouse continues to do so. When he comes home from work upset and fed up, I understand why.
Many customers are rude: they talk on their cellphones in front of the
clerks trying to wait on them, toss money or credit cards onto the
counter rather than putting it into the clerk’s hand, speak to the
clerk as if he or she is a total idiot, blame the store’s staff for
product problems, and then react nastily when the clerk can’t solve
their problem.
If customers want to have a better shopping experience, they can hang
up their cellphones upon entering the store and treat the staff like
the human beings they are. They will be surprised at how helpful the
staff will be. They might even learn to prefer human help to automated
help.
ELEANOR S. HUDSON
Austin, Tex., Nov. 19, 2003
Eleanor’s right. But what do you do when the clerk has dealt with
the jerks all day and won’t respondly humanly when you initiate some
sort of human contact? What if I say “Hi!”, refuse to talk on my
phone when I’m checking out (my mother raised me to be much more polite
than that), hand the card nicely over, say “Please” and “Thank you,”
and still get treated pretty shabbily? What am I supposed to do
then? Any more ideas?
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