The run in a few months ago with my neighbor, Raoul reminded me of two very important things: 1) I need to keep a tighter rein on my temper and 2) how the world would be a better place if everyone just did their job.

Just do you job; that’s the subject of this particular post.You don’t need to have a smile pasted on your face all the time to make the world a better place. In fact smiling happy people of the New Age variety with their out of a can spirituality, everything is god attitude just generally pisses me off. But I can put up with your fake smile if you accompany it with doing your job. Don’t do your job and there isn’t a smile big enough in the universe to keep me from wanting to push you out in front of traffic.

If you’ve taken my money for a product or a service don’t patronize me and tell me you’re going to do something and then not do it. In my humble opinion, stated as simply as I can – the one true way to a better happier world is if we all just shut up and do our jobs.

Now it is not inconceivable that certain people and organizations will deliberately try to mislead us away from their real job definition. Take the airline industry. The flight deck (and the airport intercom systems) constantly reminds us passengers that their primary duty – their job –  is all about our safety. And that we the passengers need to assist them in providing for our safety chiefly by following the rules and when onboard by remaining seated at all times with our seat belts securely fastened. Right. If you’ve ever flown outside of the US you will know what an absolute boldfaced lie that is.

And just as a reminder, the whole safety thing is an implicit promise embedded in most of the goods and services that we buy. For example, the restaurant we are dining in; we sort of expect that the waitress doesn’t somehow accidentally confuse one of their cleaning products with the coffee creme substitute. And anyway, how long would a restaurant stay in business if their main mission and motto was ‘Your Safety Comes First’?

Or how about if the wheels of your brand new SUV mysteriously fell off the first time the speedometer pegged 65 mph? Not just is that not going to happen but it’s also not going to be talked up as a selling point. So why should the whole airport/airline transportation industry get away with elevating the safety aspect of their business to be more or less their primary talking point when if you think about it, that argument is really only that red herring that serves to purposely obfuscate the real issue?

This post is about ‘do your job’ so obviously I am not here to talk about airline safety and the relative worthlessness of the whole TSA apparatus. I am only using the whole airport/airplane thing to call attention to what their real job is and that is to get us to our destination on time.

Come on. That’s why everyone flies as opposed to buying passage on a ship, driving or taking the bus; it’s supposed to be quicker. But in a lot of cases it really isn’t anymore. So is the airline industry doing their job most of the time? No.

My beautiful daughter asked me a few days ago if I had any gender biases. Like did I expect different things from a woman than a man?  Like should women be expected to take different jobs then men? She wasn’t really asking me specifically as she was more like thinking out loud. Still my answer was an unequivocal ‘hell no’. And I don’t care about what color a person is either or where they’re from or what their sexual preferences are. I have one and one only judgment criteria; do your job.

PS – If you got the feeling that this post turned into another American Airline bashing post, let me just say that it was an unintended consequence through my recent experiences in dealing with their inefficiencies of such epic proportions that the example serves as a classic case of how not to do your job.

PPS – Jeff Bezos at Amazon.com should be consulted to modernize the passenger delivery system. Why? They get their stuff delivered on time.

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