​Sometimes things change so fast that life blurs. “Change” has been the buzzword of the 21st century, and it doesn’t appear it will go away any time soon, unless it’s modified to encompass a continually speeded up world. That’s the way it feels.
 
A couple of weeks ago, we went out with good friends for Valentine’s Day. We do this annually, and took in the U.S. Women’s Soccer Olympic Qualifying game, went to the gun range and had dinner. It was a relaxing day with lots of considered conversation back and forth where everyone inputted. It felt good.
 
At one point, as I looked around the stadium at the crowd and realized that we were dang close to being the oldest people there, it made me think about how fast events seem to zip by these days, and the difficulty sometimes in just keeping up with technology, ideas and the people you care about. I felt passed by.
 
I asked the other husband in our group if he ever felt like he couldn’t keep up with things. His IMMEDIATE response was a head nod, slight smile, and, “Oh yeah.” We sipped our beers, and commiserated a bit about the next generation moving so quickly that we just couldn’t keep up.
 
This feeling hits you in many ways. Take my most recent airplane flight. I don’t fly a lot, perhaps 4-6 times a year the past few years. I keep up with the rules and regulations to can whip through security without holding nyone up.
 
Though I was prepared for the security part of getting into the airport, I wasn’t ready for electronic ticketing. Let me say this first: I’ve used electronic ticketing since the day it was installed, so I’m no amateur.
 
But, just since the last time I’d flown, the software program had changed so after the ticket ejected from the machine, I went to the counter to get my tag for my luggage, but it wasn’t there. The machine now delivers that sticker. No biggie, but it was mildly flustering because you think you have a system down, but you don’t. Of course, ironically enough, on the flight home, that newer software had not been installed at the Phoenix airport, so it was back to old school.  Made me laugh. And you realize you must be aware of and understand both systems.

Though that is not a complicated situation, it is compounded when these types of electronic information portals change randomly with no explanations. Sometimes you can figure them out, and sometimes you can’t. They are seldom as intuitive as the developers would have you believe.
 
Locally in the Dallas-Ft. Worth metro area, traffic patterns are changing day-to-day. Lanes open, roads are diverted, detours send you off your route. The metropolitan area grows so fast that new and repaired roads can’t even begin to keep up. As a driver, you are in a perpetual state of angst regarding traffic patterns, gridlock and bottlenecks.

If you are on top of your smart phone apps, you have a decided advantage in checking the “red” status to avoid the next traffic backup. That’s one more piece of technology changing the roadmap and forcing you to keep up just so you can negotiate driving from here to there.
 
Traffic, travel and communications are just a few of the areas rocketing along, forces you can’t control, that cause you to adopt or fall behind. Repeatedly, there is more falling behind, and though I don’t think that is automatically a bad thing, you do stop and ponder what the Millennials will think when their kids are old enough to leave the house.

​There’s an extremely strange syndrome that affects containers like toothpaste tubes as you close-in on the last few squeezes. It seems like you never reach the bottom. Has this ever happened to you?
 
It sure has to me. Way more than once. And this applies to toothpaste, shaving cream, deodorant, body spray, mouthwash, soap – you seem to get near the end of the product, so you go to the store to buy a new one in preparation of needing it within the next week or two at the longest. Three weeks later, or even three months, you’re still milking the last few drops.
 
I’m not sure what to term this.  Perhaps, “the never-ending toothpaste tube.” If we’re to name this syndrome, we must capture the full range of its capabilities.
 
The issue raised its head in our household the past couple of weeks because back in December I chose to stock up on deodorant and body spray.  My body spray was done and the deodorant stick was on its last legs. Hefting the light plastic deodorant dispenser, I figured it was history in the next week. I went out and bought both, and they continue to sit on the shelf because the deodorant stick maintains its ability to slowly emerge as the button is rotated.
 
Based on personal historical averages, the stick should be in the ash heap. Instead, it keeps coming back for more. This seems to happen at the end of containers, not when you first twist off the cap and brush your teeth or apply the blue cake to your hairy underarms.
 
Why, when you first unscrew the lid of your shaving cream or toothpaste, does the first-third seem to dispense so quickly? You buy something in June and by August, you start thinking you’ll need to stock up in a month.
 
During phase two, the toothpaste, soap or cream appears to develop a slowing down ability so it doesn’t come out so quickly or in vast amounts. This could be a personal response, as you subconsciously don’t squeeze the tube as hard or apply as much to your face, teeth or other body parts. You begin to hoard. You start to imagine how long you can make the product last.
 
At the final-third stage of these types of products, your mental mindset morphs again, this time into conservation mode. Because you don’t want to spend money, your subconscious tells you to use less and less.
As you apply this concept to your toothpaste, you figure out how little you really need to brush your teeth. In fact, you can just use your toothbrush and no paste, letting the residual taste of previous tooth brushings lend flavor to your twice-daily ritual.
 
Why do we act this way as the container gets near the end of its lifecycle and not at the beginning? Is it easier to squeeze the tube or dispense the shaving cream during those early weeks? Do we not think about how much we’re using and what a waste so much of it is?
 
Or is there a physical law in play: “The last ounce of a personal product takes three times longer to use than the first ounce based on thermodynamic probability and the quantum laws of random physics.” Yeah, that sounds about right.
 
Measure this next time you go through the lifecycle of one of your personal grooming products. Pay attention to use patterns. Do they go up or down over time?  Keep a diary. Write down your thoughts.
 
Maybe you’ll be able to come up with a novel theory and publish it to spectacular reviews. Then you’ll be able to waste all the soap, shaving cream, toothpaste, deodorant and mouthwash you want.

​Whether you have a dog or not, you’ve probably seen one somewhere barking and you wonder what the heck it is doing. I certainly have.
 
Do dogs bark to say “hello?” Are they territorial and telling the hound next door, “This is my place. Stay off my turf.” Or, when they unleash a staccato of yaps, is it just that they want to share neighborhood information, “Hey, Waldo, there’s a skunk living in the ditch in front of the house on the corner. Check it out. Maybe you’ll get sprayed like I did. Smells great.”
 
We don’t know. It’s all assumptions on our part. Dogs have their own language.
 
Dogs operate in ways we can’t understand. Their senses (sight, smell and hearing) are supposed to be heightened compared to humans. That’s accurate based on the reactions our two dogs – Pepper and Thor – display when the slightest noise is out of the ordinary.
 
We see this in our house, when for absolutely no reason at all (to us deaf humans), both of them jump from the couch and blast their way to the doggie door, on a mission to communicate with their fellow mammal. Within seconds, sure enough, a dog will emerge around the curve on our street, and the barking contest begins.
 
“This is my place. Stay off the turf,” ours howl.
 
“So what. You’re behind the fence and can’t do anything about it,” the dog on the street responds. He then lifts his leg and hoses down our mailbox or drops a couple of loafs on our grass.
 
That’s probably a pretty accurate conversation from the human perspective. What amazes me most in those situations though is, “How the heck did our dogs know the other one was coming up the street?” Ours were sleeping or lounging about, so they didn’t see anything out the window. I can’t imagine they smelled the newcomer since ours where indoors.
 
That leaves the third option, which is that somehow they heard the other mongrel. Can they hear a pin drop a block away? Sometimes I wonder.
 
When we drive our cars up the driveway, the dogs are often there to greet us. It may be that they only happened to be there by coincidence. But, if I am home alone, and my wife’s car comes up the street, the dogs have already heard her vehicle and are sprinting outside to greet her. “How the heck far away can they hear a car?”
 
I’m not sure of that answer, either. So, I decided to test Pepper and Thor’s hearing recently.
 
The TV was on.  The microwave was humming and I was putting some shredded cheese on a plate. “Hmmmm, I wonder if the dogs can hear one sliver of shredded cheese drop into their food dish?” Surely not, the human thinks.
 
I sneak over to their metal food bowls on the floor. Thor is upstairs, Pepper lying down facing away from me. I drop one tiny and thin shredded piece of cheese into the dish. It lands, muffled by the background noise. But it must have “dinged” somehow on the metal, because Pepper IMMEDIATELY rousts herself, and comes over to inhale the human food. Snarf, snarf.  Unbelievable.
 
My wife is sitting in the room, and I explain my dog hearing experiment to her. She shakes her head. She knows all about animals, so she probably isn’t surprised.
 
But I am astounded. Think if we could harness dog hearing for national security. They could eavesdrop on North Korea or the Russians from a neighboring continent. The implications for intelligence gathering are titanic.
 
And if we could figure out what the barking means, we might get somewhere.

​Let’s talk about the problem rather than solve it. That seems to be the way of the world on far too many issues today.
 
Last week I was at a leadership summit and one of the takeaways was: Be bold.  Don’t wait. Don’t push the issue around the table. Eliminate multiple layers of decision-making.
 
The point was that if you don’t change, and something at your business is going in the wrong direction, then you’ll continue your decline. The first step in halting the decline or altering your course is a quick and bold step in another direction.
 
That seems to go without saying, but how often do big companies or governmental agencies do the opposite, instead meandering along, talking about something endlessly, while the problem grows. DO SOMETHING!
 
This is powerfully reflected in the current drinking water problem in Flint, Michigan. For anyone playing ostrich the past couple of months, and burying your head in the sand, the water in Flint is contaminated with lead (and other hazardous materials) that renders it undrinkable by U.S. standards.
 
So what’s been happening since the issue has jumped from a statewide one to the national stage? Well, there sure have been a lot of stories. People point fingers. Blame is assessed. Horrible stories are told.
 
To get this message out, I understand the coverage. But, immediate action can and should be taken (and this should have occurred years ago, with foresight, by the agencies charged with paying attention to local water quality). Sure, bottled water is now arriving regularly to help residents. That’s the finger in the leaking dam.
 
Immediate and bold action means getting at the source. Change the pipes. Get water flowing from a clean source. Start with the most contaminated homes/areas first.

Will any of these be easy? Who pays? Who does the excavation and replacement work on the pipes? There are certainly many tough questions, ones that should have been answered and addressed years ago.
 
When the media continues to talk, talk, talk about an incident or situation, nothing is actually occurring on the solution front, and that’s what’s frustrating to the residents in Flint, and it’s what frustrates so many Americans on various public policy issues. We want to see action, and we get talking heads instead.
 
I would love to see how much money in salaries, travel expenses and management time has been spent on covering the Flint story. Take all that money, and have the media donate it to the cleanup.  That would be a multi-million dollar jump start in the right direction. Maybe the media should be part of the financing solution in this way.
 
Instead, their coverage inflames viewers, leaves us dissatisfied and angered, and creates an unproductive outcome. Think of the wasted money.
 
As the Presidential campaign moves ahead, the bucks invested by those running for the office and all the media outlets covering the bonanza are stunningly beyond belief. If you add the costs for each candidate, by the time the show is done, the totals will be well over $1 billion. It’s another example of spending on something that doesn’t accomplish much in the real world.
 
We can only imagine what it costs ALL the media outlets to sustain their coverage during that time. Have the advertisers on the news contribute to the Flint cleanup. That’s better publicity and contributes to the solution.
 
The media predict, point fingers, raise awareness (and our blood pressure), discover problems. Those are good.
 
Allocate money and resources to fix problems and stop talking about it! Rant over.