Coffee Chat: The Business of Trust

Rory Bore at Ink Interrupted hosts the Tuesday Coffee Chat, and this week she asks the question,  Who do you trust most? 

Last week, Ms. Rory was having a great deal of trouble with her blog, so i posted my first trust discussion a bit early.

It didn't leave me much to chat about this week, or so i thought.  Now i'm getting started, and maybe i do have a few more things to say.

The Jalopy has been telling me for a few days that i need to "change oil soon!"  "Change Oil Soon!"  "Change the Oil, Blast it!"  (Okay, so maybe not that last one.)

My only possible minute in which to do it was yesterday morning before my two jobs, so i took Jalopy to Kevin and Lenny.  While there, i got the price on getting Humphrey the Honda some new tires which were a requirement for inspection.  (Those babies were as bald as...well, never mind what they were as bald as, suffice it to say they were bald enough to have never have passed inspection.  How they got us to NOLA and back like that is the Lord's grace only.)

Also i am getting them to work up the price on replacing the oil pan on Cicero, Bigger Girl's vehicle.

While talking to Kevin, i realized that it's so good to have a mechanic shop i can trust.  They do nothing we don't need, are fair about pricing, and have done a couple of small things for us at no charge, like when Jalopy's power steering seemed to have a small leak and they put the stuff in to seal it for free.   (It's holding so far, keep fingers crossed.)

Also on the topic of trust, the work i do requires that people trust me.  Some of them give me keys to their homes, alarm codes, and let me wander through their homes cleaning with no one else around.  Even those who are home when i'm cleaning don't follow me around, and they let me into every room in the house, including offices that might have file cabinets or small safes.

It means i have to be 100% honest every single time about every single thing.  If i find a penny on the floor, it goes in the change jar.  (Please note that i have yet to ever clean a house that does not have a change jar.)  If i break something, i admit it right away and offer to replace it.  Those who pay me by the job know i will be there until the job is done, and those who pay me by the hour know i don't dawdle to pad my pay.

Then, too, in my line of work i see things in people's homes or offices and i have to be able to keep my mouth shut.  The janitor/housekeeper knows a lot about you, and if that person isn't reliable, you never know what information about you might get out to people you don't want having it.  Being trusted to know what people have in their dressers when you are putting the folded clothes away is a big responsibility.

Ms. S, whom none of you know and whom i will not call by  anything but that on my blog, has some trouble with hoarding.  One time she asked me if anyone else i clean for has as much stuff as she does.  My response to her was, i don't kiss and tell!  There's no way i would talk to anyone she and i know in real life about her home without her permission.  Sort of the way a doctor might refer to a case study without a name, but would never talk to a mutual friend about another friend's medical diagnosis. 

 

Trust is a two-way street.  When you find a person or business you trust, hold on.  And if you are in a business where you have to be trusted to get the job done, be careful to hold yourself to a high standard.

Trust takes time to develop, and is worth it.

 

Today is:

Birthday of Wenchang Wang, the God of Literature -- China

Car Keys and Small Change Day -- ???

Dia de Andalucia -- Andalucia, Spain

DNA Day -- day in 1953 when Watson and Crick determined the double helix structure of DNA

Februalia -- Ancient Roman Calendar (purification of Rome performed by citizens making sacrifices to the dead)

Floral Design Day -- a day to acknowledge this art form, sponsored by Rittners Floral School 

International Pancake Day

Kalevala Day -- Finland (Finnish Culture Day)

Mardi Gras -- Fat Tuesday, Carnival, the last day to feast before the Lenten fast begins tomorrow, greeted with revelry in many parts of the world; related observances and names:

     Scotland, Fasten's E'en or Bannocky Day

     Portuguese, Terça-feira Gorda

     Italian, Martedì Grasso

     Swedish, Fettisdagen

     Danish, Fastelavn

     Norwegian, Fastelavens

     Estonian, Vastlapäev

     Spanish, Martes de Carnaval

     German, Faschingsdienstag

     Hawaiian, Malasada Day

     Lithuanian, Uzgavenes

     Icelandic, Sprengidagur (literally, Bursting Day)

     also Pancake Day or Bursting Day, the day to eat the last of the eggs and butter in the form of some kind of fried cakes, and to eat until bursting

National Chocolate Souffle' Day

National Science Day -- India

National Tooth Fairy Day - and/or August 22, depending on whom you ask

Nylon Day -- the first aliphatic polyamides were produced on this day in 1935

Peace Memorial Day -- Taiwan

Public Sleeping Day -- this one even has a wikiHow page 

Rare Disease Day -- International 

Read Me Day -- local and national celebrities, with community volunteers, are encouraged to visit classrooms this week and read to children; the original idea included wearing t-shirts with writing on them and encourage the children to read the shirts, thus "read me" 

Shrove Tuesday -- Christian

Single-Tasking Day -- encouraging you to do one thing at a time, and not feel guilty; begun by Theresa Gabriel, who claims multitasking is inefficient and hurts your brain! she suggests it be on the 4th Tuesday of the month, although other sites list other dates

 

Spay Day USA -- sponsored by the HSUS; Sit! Stay! Spay!  Good Owner! 

St. Hedwig of Poland's Day (Patron of queens)

St. Romanus' Day (Patron of the mentally ill; against drowning, insanity)

Teacher's Day -- Algeria; Bahrain; Egypt; Jordan; Libya; Morocco; Oman; Saudi Arabia; Tunisia; United Arab Emirates; Yemen

World Spay Day -- don't let your pets litter! 

Anniversaries Today:

University of Pittsburgh is chartered, 1787

Birthdays Today (followed by Feb. 29 Birthdays)

Ali Larter, 1976

Robert Sean Leonard, 1969

John Tuturro, 1957

Gilbert Gottfried, 1955

Bernadette, Peters, 1948

Charles Aaron "Bubba" Smith, 1945

Brian Jones, 1942

Mario Andretti, 1940

Tommy Tune, 1939

Gavin MacLeod, 1930

Frank Gehry, 1929

Svetiana Allilueva, 1926

Charles Durning, 1923

Zero Mostel, 1915

Earl Scheib, 1907

Milton Caniff, 1907

Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, 1906

Vincente Minnelli, 1903

Linus Pauling, 1901

Ben Heckt, 1894

Charles Blondin, 1824

John Tenniel, 1820

Mary Lyon, 1797

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, 1533

Antonio Sabato, Jr., 1972

Tony Robbins, 1960

Gretchen Christopher, 1940

Jack Lousma, 1936

Dinah Shore, 1916

Jimmy Dorsey, 1904

William Wellman, 1896

Herman Hollerith, 1860

Debuting/Premiering Today:

"On Golden Pond"(Play), 1979

"La Reine de Saba"(Opera), 1862

The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling(Publication date), 1749

Today in History:

Coronation ceremony of Liu Bang as Emperor Gaozu of Han takes place, initiating four centuries of the Han Dynasty's rule over China, BC202

The first edition of Henry Fieldings' "Tom Jones" is published, 1749

John Wesley charters the Methodist Church, 1784

The first commercial railroad in US, Baltimore & Ohio (B&O) is chartered, 1827

Robert Nelson, leader of the Patriotes, proclaims the independence of Lower Canada (today Québec), 1838

Regular steamboat service from the west to the east coast of the United States begins with the arrival of the SS California in San Francisco Bay, 4 months 22 days after leaving New York Harbor, 1849

The Bulgarian Exarchate is established by decree of Sultan Abd-ul-Aziz of the Ottoman Empire, 1870

The American Telephone and Telegraph Company is incorporated in New York State as the subsidiary of American Bell Telephone, 1885

The USS Indiana, the lead ship of her class and the first battleship in the United States Navy comparable to foreign battleships of the time, is launched, 1893

Queen Ranavalona III, the last monarch of Madagascar, is deposed by a French military force, 1897

Egypt regains independence from Britain, but British troops remain, 1922

DuPont scientist Wallace Carothers invents Nylon, 1935

Basketball is televised for the first time, 1940

In Taiwan, civil disorder is put down with the loss of 30,000 civilian lives, 1947

James D. Watson and Francis Crick announce to friends that they have determined the chemical structure of DNA; the formal announcement takes place on April 25 following publication in April Nature (pub. April 2), 1953

The first-ever color television sets using the NTSC standard are offered for sale to the general public, 1954

The United States and People's Republic of China sign the Shanghai Communiqué, 1972

Andalusia approves its statute of autonomy through a referendum, 1980

GRB 970228, a highly luminous flash of gamma rays, strikes the Earth for 80 seconds, providing early evidence that gamma-ray bursts occur well beyond the Milky Way, 1997

First flight of RQ-4 Global Hawk, the first unmanned aerial vehicle certified to file its own flight plans and fly regularly in U.S. civilian airspace, 1998

Over 1 million Taiwanese participating in the 228 Hand-in-Hand Rally form a 500-kilometre (300-mile) long human chain to commemorate the 228 Incident in 1947, 2004

Jupiter flyby of the New Horizons Pluto-observer spacecraft, 2007

Egypt annunces the discovery of a granite head from a statue of King Tut's grandfather, Amenhotep III, 2010

Tuesday Coffee Chat: Do You Trust Me?

A note on this week's Coffee Chat:  Ms. Rory Bore is having trouble with her blog.  First she was locked out of it, and once she was able to post again, no one else was able comment.  Thus i don't know if she will be able to put up a link for Coffee Chat this time, or if she can post at all.  That's okay, i'm going to post and hope that the tech people will help her get things working again soon.

ETA, she has announced that Coffee Chat will resume next week.  Since i have what i have, i will just revisit the topic then.

Rory Bore at Ink Interrupted hosts the Tuesday Coffee Chat, and this week she asks the question,   Who do you trust most?







Trust is an interesting topic.  There can be many facets to it.

Hurricanes and earthquakes and wildfires and floods have taught me not to trust "mother nature."  The only thing we can trust about the weather is that it will change, and disasters may result.

Among other events in my life the failures of businesses that were "too big to fail" has taught me not to trust in mammon.  Wealth flees, economies collapse, people betray and sometimes outright steal, "riches do not endure forever, and a crown is not secure for all generations." (Proverbs 27:24)

People don't always turn out to be exactly who you think they are, and never trust what the sales rep says about the warranty, read it for yourself!

Things you thought you could trust to last break down or aren't always reliable.  We can probably trust the pyramids to last a while longer, but this old house (or even your old house) is another case entirely. 

One thing i can trust is that if i tell the dog or the cats a secret, it will be kept, the dog because he's a trustworthy companion and the cats because they don't care and didn't listen in the first place.

Most of the time when i'm driving i can trust the traffic lights to be against me when i am in a big hurry.  Even more specifically, if i have a really good book i'm wanting to read at the red lights, i won't run into a single one, but if i have nothing to do at the lights, i get stuck at them all.

Yes, i trust my Sweetie, the children, my extended family, my church family.  None of us are perfect, none of us perform 100% of the time, sometimes we are let down or we let others down.  Yet if it's an important situation and i really, really need them, they will be there for me as i am there for them.

Ultimate trust, though, has to go to The Almighty alone.  There's no way to know what the future holds, i have to trust in the One Who holds the future.  Not once have i found that trust to be misplaced.


Today is:

Anniversary of His Majesty the King -- Bhutan

Anthesteria -- Ancient Greek Calendar (three day Festival of Flowers, feast of the dead, and drinking festival; date approximate)

Card Reading Day -- because greeting cards can be fun to just stop and read, can't they?

Day in Honor of Dr. W. H. Lini, Father of Independence -- Vanuatu

Feast of the Feralia -- Ancient Roman Calendar (final day of the Parentalia, with picnics in the graveyard that included libations to the departed)

International Mother Language Day -- UNESCO

National Sticky Bun Day

Remember the Funniest Thing Your Kid Ever Did Day -- in honor of Erma Bombeck's birth anniversary

Sandino Day -- Nicaragua (assassination anniversary of Augusto César Sandino)

Shaheed Dibosh -- Bangladesh (International Mother Language Day/Language Martyr's Day, for those who died in the Bengali Language Movement in 1952)

St. Peter Damian's Day (Doctor of the Church)


Anniversaries Today:

Dudley Moore marries Brogan Lane, 1988
Liz Taylor marries Michael Wilding, 1952
The Washington Monument is dedicated, 1885


Birthdays Today:

Corbin Bleu, 1989
Ashley Greene, 1987
Ellen Page, 1987
Charlotte Church, 1986
Jennifer Love Hewitt, 1979
William Baldwin, 1963
Christopher Atkins, 1961
Alan Trammell, 1958
Jack Coleman, 1958
Mary Chapin Carpenter, 1958
Kelsey Grammer, 1955
Christine Ebersole, 1953
William Petersen, 1953
Olympia J. Snowe, 1947
Tyne Daly, 1946
Alan Rickman, 1946
David Geffen, 1943
John Lewis, 1940
Gary Lockwood, 1937
Barbara Jordan, 1936
Rue McClanahan, 1935
Nina Simone, 1933
Roberto Gomez Bolanos, 1929
Erma Bombeck, 1927
Hubert de Givenchy, 1927
Sam Peckinpah, 1925
Ann Sheridan, 1915
W.H. Auden, 1907
Anais Nin, 1903
Andres Segovia, 1893
Alice Freeman Palmer, 1855
Charles Scribner, 1821
John Henry Cardinal Newman, 1801
Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana, 1794


Debuting/Premiering Today:

"Die Physiker"(Play), 1962
"A Woman to Remember"(TV; first soap opera), 1949
"War as it Happens"(TV), 1944
"Green Pastures"(Play), 1930
The New Yorker(Magazine), 1925
The Communist Manifesto(Publication date), 1848
Cherokee Phoenix(Newspaper, first US Native American paper), 1828


Today in History:

England begins the trial against Joan of Arc, 1431
John Wilkes is thrown out of the English House of Commons for his pornographic poem "An Essay on Woman," a satire of Pope's "An Essay on Man," 1764
Freedom of worship is established in France under its Constitution, 1795
The first locomotive, Richard Trevithick's, runs for the first time, in Wales, 1804
The first Native American Indian newspaper, the "Cherokee Phoenix", begins publication, 1828
The first known sewing machine in the US is patented by John Greenough of Washington, D.C., 1842
Sarah G Bagley of Lowell, Massachusetts becomes the first US woman telegrapher, 1846
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publish the Communist Manifesto, 1848
The US Congress outlaws foreign currency as legal tender in the US, 1857
Edwin T. Holmes installs the first electric burglar alarm, in Boston, Massachusetts, 1858
The first Roman Catholic parish church for blacks in the US is dedicated, in Baltimore, Maryland, 1864
Lucy B. Hobbs becomes the first US woman to earn a DDS degree, 1866
Benjamin Disraeli replaces William Gladstone as English premier, 1874
The first telephone book is issued, to 50 subscribers in New Harbor, Connecticut, 1878
Oregon becomes the first US state to declare Labor Day a holiday, 1887
The North Carolina legislature adjourns for the day to mark the death of Frederick Douglass, 1895
Dr. Harvey Cushing, the first US neurosurgeon, performs his first operation, 1902
Gustav Mahler conducts his last concerto, 1911
The Battle of Verdun (WWI) begins, will last until Dec. 18; over a quarter of a million casualties, half a million injuries, 1916
The last Carolina parakeet, Incas, dies in the Cincinati Zoo, in the same cage that had held Martha, the last passenger pigeon, 4 years earlier, 1918
The Constituent Assembly of the Democratic Republic of Georgia adopts the country's first constitution, 1921
Great Britain grants Egypt independence, 1922
The first issue of "New Yorker" magazine is published, 1925
The first instant developing camera is demonstrated in NYC, by E H Land, 1947
The British government, under Winston Churchill, abolishes identity cards in the UK to "set the people free", 1952
Watson and Crick discover the structure of the DNA molecule; according to legend, they walk into the Eagle Pub in Cambridge and Crick announces "We have found the secret of Life," 1953
The Peace symbol is designed and completed by Gerald Holtom, commissioned by Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, 1958
Malcolm X is assassinated, 1965
The Convention on Psychotropic Substances is signed at Vienna, 1971
The Soviet unmanned spaceship Luna 20 lands on the Moon, 1972
Former United States Attorney General John N. Mitchell and former White House aides H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman are sentenced to prison, 1975
Steve Fossett lands in Leader, Saskatchewan, Canada becoming the first person to make a solo flight across the Pacific Ocean in a balloon, 1995
Euro zone finance ministers agree on a second bailout for Greece, 2012
Scientists discover that bumblebees have the ability to sense electric fields around flowers, enabling them to identify specific flowers for pollination , 2013

I mailed a package out today, and it got me thinking (a very dangerous thing for the world's most boring blogger to do). Here I have sent a package to a person I have never seen, and only know through the cyber world. I have "spoken" to her extensively in a chat room, and read her responses on the boards, that is all.

From those things I have developed a strong enough connection to her that I have invested both time and money (mailing books) into helping her. It is amazing and in a way scary. Amazing that we can become friends across the miles and support one another in this way. Scary, because we just never know, until we meet in person, whether the person is who we think.

Still, all I am doing is sending her books. What trust it must take to try online dating.

Today is:

Baby Food Day

Black Ship Festival, Japan (Commemorating Admiral Perry's arrival in Japan)

Corfuflux (Discordian Calendar)

Cow Appreciation Day (Remember Bossie when drinking that milk in your coffee.)

Festival of Rowana (Tree Goddess)

Gummi Worm Day

No Hitter Day

National Ice Cream Day

National Tapioca Pudding Day

Respect Canada Day

St. Bonaventure's Day

St. Swithin's Day

St. Vladimir's Day


Birthdays Today:

Clement Clarke Moore, 1779
Rembrandt Van Rijn, 1606


Today in History:

The First Crusaders capture and plunder Jerusalem, 1099
Alexei Chirikov and his men become the first Europeans to visit Alaska, 1741
The first Buddhist Temple in the US is formed in Los Angeles, 1904
Jews take Jerusalem, 1995