Nails, Arrows, Rhetoric, and Other Sharp Pointy Objects

Tonight we have time for two jokes and a quote.

So my leasing office wants me to renew my lease. I call the office to inquire about the details. She says yes, thanks for calling, do you know you want to renew? I say I imagine so, but what will rent be? The receptionist informs me she doesn't know, but if I come in, they could find out for me. She imagines it would only go up $5 or $10. I ask her if she could find out and call me back with the information. She says yes. Then she asks me if I would be renewing for sure next year. I reply that I expect to, but that really depends on the rent, strangely enough. She asks if the rent is unchanged if I will renew. I say that I expect so, but could she please find out for me?

The punch line: She called back within 5 minutes to offer me not only the current rent, but $200 off.

Story number two: I went to the tire store today to get a nail removed from my tire. I noticed the nail on Sunday and expected the tire to be flat on Monday. No...still good today. So today I decided to take out the nail, thinking that maybe it wasn't that deep. No, when I started prying at the nail with a hammer, a hissing noise starts. So I left the nail alone and took it by the tire store later. (No, the tire was still not flat. This nail was of the self-sealing variety, it seems.)

So the nice tire man tried to sell me his $40 warranty on my current tires (free patches and rotations) rather than simply rotating and patching for $24. I said thank you, but I'll just pay the $24. (The store normally does routine maintenance on tires bought from them for free...but my tires aren't from their store.) The guy ends up charging me nothing as he "figures I'll buy tires from them eventually." He's probably right. Especially since they did successfully patch my tire rather than telling me it couldn't be fixed in an effort to get me to buy new tires.

For today's serious thought: I wonder how many of our characters are like my tire. They look solid, but they have major holes that are just waiting for an opportunity to spring a leak and strand our lives at the side of the road.

Finally, in honor of singles' awareness day, here's a few interesting tidbits from Freakonomics by Steven Levitt - a very cool statistics book that looks at real numbers and their implications. Similar to social science, but without an agenda. From data on a mainstream data sites, analyzing 30,000 users from Boston and San Diego.

4% claimed to make $200,000+ a year. 1% of typical internet users actually make that much. 70% of women claimed "above average" looks, compared to only 67% of men. A paltry 1% considered themselves below average. The average height: 1" taller than national average. Women weighed 20lbs less than the national average.

A man not posting a photo of themselves got 1/4th the volume of mail of a man who did. Women? 1/6th. 57% of the men posting ads did not receive one response. 23% of women received no response.

Here's a few other quotes:

For women, a man's income is terribly important. The richer a man is, the more e-mails he receives. But a woman's appeal is a bell-shaped curve: men do not want to date low-earning women, but once a woman starts earning too much, they seem to be scared off...For men, being short is a big disadvantage (which is probably why so many lie about it), but weight doesn't matter. For women, being overweight is deadly (which is probably why they lie). For a man, having red hair or curly hair is a downer, as is baldness-but a shaved head is okay. For a woman, salt-and-pepper hair is bad, while blond hair is very good. In the world of online dating, a headful of blond hair on a woman is worth about the same as having a college degree-and, with a $100 dye job verses a $100,000 tuition bill, an awful lot cheaper.

Wow. The 21st century internet-using Americans are not quite the progressives I thought they were. Lot's of sobering thoughts in there, but it reminds me that there are much worse fates than singleness.

Better to live on a corner of the roof
than share a house with a quarrelsome wife.
A quarrelsome wife is like
a constant dripping on a rainy day;
restraining her is like restraining the wind
or grasping oil with the hand.