It would not surprise me in the least to find out I’m about the last one on the planet to discover the pleasure of watching those short videos that float around social media these days. But then I’ve never aspired to be au courant when it comes to popular technology. Nor, I suspect, does anyone who uses the term au courant.
For about a month now, I just can’t get enough of these clever clips by content creators, if I’m using that term correctly. Usually, they are young women sharing recreated vignettes of what is presumably their own experiences and observations. I think of them as belonging to the “slice of life” genre, which is now one of my favorites, right up there with videos of line dancing, big-bottomed puppies climbing stairs and shirtless cowboys washing their horses. The occasional clip of shirtless, big-bottomed cowboys line dancing is almost more than I can bear.
These clips of the toxic mother-in-law, the exhausted school teacher and that bitch that everybody hates are a fun little break from the summer heat. But the best ones in this genre are from the bartenders, waitresses, receptionists, hotel clerks, hostesses, hair stylists and other folks who have to handle the public on a daily basis. God bless them all for dealing with those among us who think they can treat service personnel rudely simply because they have a Mastercard that isn’t completely maxed out.
The recurring theme across these stories is dealing with time. People trying to order a drink after last call. People showing up an hour before or an hour after their appointment time and expecting to be served immediately. People wanting to check into their rooms at 11:00 in the morning. People deciding they want their roots done or a color correction when they only scheduled for a haircut. Since there is a legal defense of justifiable homicide, perhaps we could look into something like the legally excusable bitch-slap.
The respect for time, which neither expands nor contracts, has gone the way of the day planner for far too many people. I spent years working the Franklin Planner system with its daily prioritizations of tasks. A was gotta do it today, B was gotta do it tomorrow, and C was gotta do it before it becomes an A or a B. That’s how I survived the ‘80s and ‘90s. Of course, I haven’t used a day planner in years, just an old-fashioned desk calendar, which is why I can get overwhelmed if I have more than three things to do in a day. Or a week, for that matter.
But the one person who my heart goes out to with the worst time management problem ever is Donald Trump. This week, he asserted that he was too “busy” to go through the boxes he took to Mar-a-Lago from The White House to remove personal items, including clothes, from the material being demanded by the National Archives and the Department of Justice. As we all know, criminal indictments followed, providing a textbook case of how not managing one’s time can lead to seriously bad outcomes. As my 8th-grade teacher Mrs. Boswell always said, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
Now that trial is scheduled for August 14, although it is generally believed that it will be postponed. But that’s not the only trial on Trump’s schedule. There’s the civil suit brought by New York attorney general Letitia James in October. That’s the one about the financial practices that fraudulently minimized taxes on one hand while maximizing value for banks and insurance companies, with James alleging that $250 million in illegal profits were made from this scheme.
January 15 of next year is scheduled for round two with E. Jean Carroll over defamation. She won the first round. Two weeks later, yet another trial is scheduled to start for a federal class action lawsuit filed back in 2018. It sounds like a run-of-the-mill pyramid scheme.
Then in March is the criminal case in New York about business records that were falsified in the porn star payoff. That’s a total of five.
Fani Willis is widely believed to likely produce further criminal indictments in the next couple of months. Jack Smith is still working on the January 6 insurrection investigation, about which former Attorney General Bill Barr said last Sunday he “think[s] they will pull the trigger on that, and I would expect it to be this summer.” Yikes! That would be seven—four of them criminal.
All those trials, running for president, presiding over your financial empire and golfing? Donald, you need a day planner. I’ve got a nice leather one, only slightly used, and very effective when I used it. I’ll give you a deal on it, way less than retail.
Cash only of course.
