Common Sense... Isn't.

Does anyone out there have pride in your common sense? I do. I tend to think of myself as pretty practical by nature. I try to cut through to the center of the problem and find the simplest way out. Obviously, it doesn't always work out that way, but I try.

Common sense, though, just isn't that common. There's an ability there to frame the question in a particular way, to be able to see through to the simplest solution, that eludes some people. And those who do it well generally can't tell you how they do it, either; they just do. And it seems almost incomprehensible to those who do have a solution as to why someone else might not get it.

Nobody gets every problem, every time; I certainly don't. I'm not the Rainman of problem solving. But I do enjoy a good thought puzzle every once in a while. Aside from the unhappy-customers part, I always really enjoyed it when a customer came in with some kind of unusual issue with his or her glasses- it meant I had to figure out what the problem was and how to fix it. And yet, at the same time, I worked with people who couldn't figure out how to straighten a crooked frame. (You go opposite to the problem- if the frame is too high on the left-hand side, because the patient has an ear that's higher, raise the temple on the other side to compensate.)

A lot of things that should be common sense aren't simply because people don't really understand the concept. For example, paying off your credit card in full. Many people don't seem to understand the way compound interest works, so don't really understand how much more they end up paying by making only the minimum payments. I don't know that this is so much a lack of common sense as it is a lack of education, but whatever.

This posting mostly stems from a seminar I attended on the weekend.
It was great - very interesting, and the sponsors were kind enough to supply some very nice wine at each table. They also had put together a number of gift baskets as door prizes. One of them was a selection of teas. When the girl drawing the ticket was announcing this particular prize, she mentioned having gone around town to various tea shops in order to put together the gift basket. And then she said, "I tried to get English teas, but no matter where I went, all the teas were grown in India or Sri Lanka."

I laughed. Nobody else did. I thought she was joking. She wasn't joking.

First of all, I thought it was pretty common knowledge that tea doesn't grow in the UK. I also would have thought there would be some awareness of history in terms of the tea and spice trade, and the British Colonies around the world, especially considering we ARE a former British Colony. However, that's ignorance, not necessarily a lack of common sense. What really struck me in all this as a lack of common sense was the fact that she went all over town, to several tea shops looking for tea from England, and it never once occurred to her to ask the shop staff??