Please, Make It Look Like the Picture!

The other day I went to Taco Bell.  Hopefully, that does not disgust you.  But I love Taco Bell.  I like their food.  It's quick and easy and if you order the cheaper items off the menu and get water to drink, you can eat there pretty cheap.  Maris and I  ate for like 6 bucks this week.

While we were waiting in line, we were behind an older gentleman.  You could tell he is not the type that frequently visits taco bell.  He asked several questions about the menu.  The cashier who was taking his order had to seek help from the shift manager to answer some of his questions like what came on or with the particular items he was questioning.  He finally settled on ordering the number 1.  The number 1 is a burrito supreme, a taco supreme, and a drink. After ordering the number 1, he faced the dreaded question, "crunchy or soft" (referring to the taco.)  After asking a few more questions about crunchy versus soft, he placed his order for the soft.  After settling on his order, it took him awhile to pay.  He questioned the cost and then had to pull exact change out of several different pockets of his polyester leisure pants.   By the time he had finished paying for his order, his food was ready.  They called his number.  He stood there for a minute looking at the food and then said "this does not look like the picture."  They had to call the shift manager back to deal with him.  She turned around backward and leaned her bottom on the counter so that she could get herself into a position to actually look at the picture of the number 1 on the menu board.  After taking a gander at the picture, she said "well, sir, this is what you ordered.  This is the number 1 - a burrito supreme, taco supreme and a drink."  He smiled a "right- fighter" type of smile and had the shift manager actually walk around to the front of the counter to see that his food indeed did not look like the picture on the menu board.  Maris and I were just standing there waiting and I thought I could easily intervene and "help" these young Taco Bell workers with this explanation, but it was more fun to just watch.  Shift manager finally explained that she could not make it look like the picture because it was served in a wrapper and not on a plate as shown in the picture.  Polyester pants man said he wanted his served on a plate.  Shift manager said she was not allowed to serve it on a plate and began the turning of her shift manager key in the cash register to generate a refund for his Mexican shapes that sadly did not look like the picture.  She got the money out of the drawer and polyester pants man said "what are you doing? I don't want my money back.  I just want my food to look like the picture."  He finally just said "forget it" and took his shapes to a table and sat down to eat it, leaving his large drink cup behind.

Although polyester pants man should probably not eat at Taco Bell because he will never be happy, I think we've all had times of disappointment when our food did not look like the picture or something was not as we expected or anticipated it to be.  It happens in everything we do, big and small.  Makeup is the wrong color.  Sheets are not as soft as they should be.  Laundry detergent doesn't make the clothes smell as good as in the bottle. Clothes don't look as good as they did in the dressing room mirror. This baby cries more than I thought it would. The check was not as big as I thought.  It goes on and on.

One place I always find problems with my expectations being too high or service being too low is with people I hire to do labor or work on things.  Specifically, with my house or house projects in general.  Rusty, my husband, is a pretty handy man. I think he can fix or do just about anything, but occasionally things arise that are too labor intensive for the amount of time he has to do them.  We always end up getting disappointed with people we hire.  Usually they just quit showing up.  I know that may be hard for you to believe and probably never happens to you, but it's true. I think it's a curse or something, but it happens to us all the time.

We built a swimming pool in 2001. The guy got almost finished and just never came back leaving us (who had never dealt with a pool before) to figure out how to hook up the pump, heater, chlorinator, cleaner, etc. We remodeled our house in 2003. It was supposed to take 30 days to complete. After 120 days, the contractor just never came back. The house was so dirty and in such disarray, we weren't even able to live in it for about a month. That experience ended with the contractor filing a lawsuit against us because he did not receive his final payment. We counter-sued for his faulty construction and not completing the job. We settled it out of court with neither party receiving any payment (except the attorneys we both had to pay.) After 9 years, there are still things that are not finished or are not right with the remodel. But you live and learn and then move on.

This year we needed a bathroom finished in the upstairs bonus room that the 2003 contractor left incomplete. We called 3 different plumbers. They all gave about the same estimate of around $1000 for the project. One even went so far as to design a shower for the room, but then the day came and went for him to start the project and he never came and never called. That's been four months ago so my guess would be he's not coming back.

We are currently trying to do a quick remodel on a house that is for sale. We are trying to take a large open space and frame in some walls to turn the open space into 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms and remodel a kitchen. We got a bunch of bids and settled on a company to do the framing, heat and air, electrical and plumbing. We signed a contract, paid a deposit, and they started on the project. It's looking really good, but Friday, for no apparent reason, they did not show up to work. We called the owner of the company and he was very apologetic and  assured us they will be working this weekend to catch up. I want to believe him, but am getting a touch of deja vu with the whole experience. I have to believe this project will work out. We were very careful this time to space his payments in the contract so that he has more labor, time, and money in the project at any given point then we have paid for. Hopefully that will provide an incentive for him to "make it look like the picture."

I guess what I can take from all these experiences is to focus on making what I do "look like the picture." If I say I am going to do something or things are going to be a certain way, I need to do everything I can to make sure what I do is indeed what I said I would do or as close as I can make it. I cannot be responsible for the behavior or actions of Taco Bell, swimming pool builders, contractors, plumbers, or anyone else, but I can be responsible to my own stakeholders for my own actions in my own endeavors.

I wish everything looked like the picture, but we all know sometimes thing won't. I'll close with words from the "Serenity Prayer" by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr,
"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, 
Courage to change the things I can, 
And wisdom to know the difference."

Thanks for reading.