How Bad Can it Be?

We have DirecTV here at our sprawling estate [/sarcasm]. Well, I do have DirecTV, is the "sprawling estate" that is not so much. Anyway, we've been pretty happy with our service. Light-years better than the cable company we used to have. It's cheaper too. That's enough of the commercial for DirecTV.

Anyway, as a gesture of appreciation, DirecTV gave us free ShowTime for 3 months for being a loyal customer. We don't have any movie channels as part of our package. Netflix, an occasional pay-per-view movie and a few trips a year to the video store handles our movie needs quite nicely. So I was anxious to have ShowTime for a bit and see if we liked it.

Oh my, ShowTime is really bad. Not just a normal type of bad, it's colossally, horribly bad. The movies they show are horrible and they show them over and over and over and over.... In the two plus months we've had ShowTime I think I've watched one movie; and I had already seen that movie. The rest of them simply aren't worth watching. How does this channel turn a profit and stay in business?

I'm not upset for DirecTV giving us this disaster of a movie channel as an appreciation gift. Although here's a bit of advice to any DirecTV big-wigs who may be reading this, maybe you should consider letting the customer pick which channel their free 3 month appreciation gift will provide. I'm just saying... Even though I detest ShowTime, someone out there must be paying for and watching this channel. Although that thought baffles me. So I can understand why DirecTV would think that I might like it.

I guess the old adage, "it's the thought that counts" comes into play here. It's nice to remembered, even if the gift isn't my favorite.

Why Do You Ask, If You Aren't Going to Listen?

We all ask questions we don't really want an answer to. When you walk up to someone and say "Hey! What are you doing?" We usually don't really expect an answer; we can obviously see what they are doing. It's more of a greeting than a question. Another one is "How's it going?" If someone stopped and started giving you detailed information on how it was going in their life at the moment, we'd probably interrupt them and tell them that we weren't really that interested. Again, it's more of greeting than anything.

Someone once asked me for some advice about something. I listened to what they had to say and gave my honest advice. "That's a really bad idea." Hey, I'm a straight forward kind of guy. That same person later asked two other people for advice on that same topic in my presence. And they both said, "That's a really bad idea." Ok, they used different words, but basically the answer was the same - don't do that. Yet this person went ahead and did it anyway. Guess what, it truly was a bad idea. There were repercussions regarding that action. Something that could have easily been avoid if they had simply listened to sound advice from three people.

Why do we ask, if we aren't going to listen? Many times it's because we aren't really looking for advice - we are asking for permission. But even when we don't get the permission, we often do it anyway. What makes us so hard headed sometimes?

Please do me a favor. If you get some advice, especially if it's from multiple people, listen to it. You asked those people for a reason, presumably because you trust them. So trust them. And if I ever ask you for advice - make sure I listen.