Thursday, November 20, 2008

Customer Courage

Just this morning I felt a stupid three-second waver while trying to find someone to sell me a used power supply for my not-new laptop. I was 40 minutes away from the one I'd forgotten and left at my office

I was browsing the Yellow Pages, and thinking: But what if I call the wrong place? Suppose I call a company that sells only giant networks for global corporations?

Well, so what if I do? As a British bus ticket vendor once said when I made a preposterous physically-impossible request out of geographic ignorance: "Oy loyk a giggle."

That's the worst that can happen. No need for three-second wavers.

This is a variation on retail therapy, when you go shopping to feel good. This is personal growth through shopping.


If you like this post, please bookmark it on del.icio.us, share it on StumbleUpon, vote for it on Digg. Thanks so much.

7 comments:

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Unknown said...

That's a very Cognitive-Behavioural Theory approach. Identify the situation, work out what is the worse thing that could happen, make your decision as to whether to do it or not... :)

http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/mentalhealthinfo/treatments/cbt.aspx

Peggy Payne said...

About the deleted comment, if I did that, it was by accident. Sorry, commenter. Please try again. But if you deleted it, I'm really curious about why!

K.B., I've done some reading a while back on cognitive therapy but didn't realize I'd soaked up enough to spout off about it.

The approach seems sort of commonsense-y. But then a lot of terrific ideas do, once someone has thought them up. The wheel,fire, etc.

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Unknown said...

Oooh, aargh.

No, BOTH deleted comments there are me! The first was because I didn't realize I could use HTML tags and didn't realize it left a big Comment Deleted tag and there's no way to edit your comments I can see. The second is because a friend had been signed on to his gmail on my laptop and I didn't realize he was still signed in. :)

Yeah, CBT is pretty commonsense. However, given that often common sense is not the first thing on our minds when we're going through something, I suppose it's good to have a road map! :)

Peggy Payne said...

Yeah, it's amazing what I can lose sight of. I have to keep notes to myself taped onto my computer.

The current one for revising fiction is: MEANING Why is it good or bad that X has happened?

Unknown said...

Not a bad thing to examine about non-fiction life experience, either! :)