Decaf World

The first thought of the day comes almost in an unstopable way: "T.G.I.F.", sometimes (most of times) comes tied up with a "I'd love some potato skins and chicken wings with Jack Daniels' sauce". Early or late, it doesn't matter, because it's Friday, and yes, you have to finish this or that, and hell, you gara make an Olympic run for it, because you are out of time! No more weekdays to pull your job from one to the other, and Hyne if it would have been good to skip that seminar that took all day yesterday.

A friend of mine, Luis, sent me a Hoops&Yoyo e-card yesterday. Hyne, if it is a lovely card! It was one of a series of Office+Coffee cards, which are a recurrent topic in their cards, and which I love so much, even though I'm not the biggest coffee drinker in town. (Well, this weekend I plan to buy myself a water heater pitcher and some Britt coffee, my fave brand, and we might see how things come around next week!) This card was about "decaf", something just as silly as alcohol free beer or canabis free cigs, or cigs with reduced nicotine and tar, or sweeteners without sugar. The thing is "what's the point?".

Little by little the world is cuttering up with fake copies of everything that we like, wrapped up in so much publicity it becomes dizzying. So yeah, some people like coffee, but it hurts them, so there's decaf for them. Diabetics can't eat sugar, so there's aspartame (which is a poison) and sacharine and all that crap. Now explain to me the cigs and the booze. Then explain to me why perfectly healthy people would consume no-sugar or decaf? And who is the abnormal animal that drinks decaf with no-sugar, and Hyne forbids, while smoking a nicotine low cig. You don't take the sugar out of the sugar, the smoke out of the smoke, the booze out of the booze or the coffee out of the coffee, and yet there are industries build and profiting out of make-believe things. There's butter that's not butter, and Hyne knows how many other things.

If we pay attention, we have these "decaf tendency" taking over in every aspect of life. There's a lot of people hired to do a job they are not qualified for, or people with a given expertise poured into a completely different area, when there would be expert working in that given area, far more qualified to do the job. Labor-wise speaking, this is called "being flexible". I call it being a "decaf professional". Want more? Coz I can give you more. How about that cell you buy that does ten thousand different things and its actually good for nothing? Because they stuck the PDA into the phone. So, can the genius behind the idea tell me how am I supposed to write down an appointment being talked over that same phone, at that precise time? Then there's a camera crammed up into the phone and that's cool, but it has low resolution and sometimes is a pain in the ass trying to get your pictures into a computer. Oh, and let's not get started with the computers! Lets not go over a certain brand that hires whatever celebrity availables, real or animated chops the head off and has them talk about oh how wonderful their new laptops are, but said laptops don't even worth the cardboard they are packed in because they fail constantly, the touchpad reacts to your aura, not only to your touch, has compatibility problems with printers of the same brand, can't stand a language change, which isn't downloaded, but comes among the facilities of the OS... and when it comes to the OS, the biggest decaf of all, two words: Windows Vista.

Problem is, by the way that I see it, that we live in a world where people has been systematically taught to never be satisfied: nothing is ever enough. Without goal or purpose, people need new, and fancy and "better". But is "better" better? Or it is simply a hell of an advertising campaing? You don't really need "better", you need "right". Does your computer work for you? Is it still functional? Then keep it. You don't need the new sweeper sold on TV when you have a perfectly good broom or hoover that has been doing the job magnificently all these years. You don't need "healthier" sugar or coffee, or coke, or booze, or suplements. If you want to be healthy, LIVE HEALTHY. Eat fresh vegetables, maybe even grow them in your backyard or in a pot, but you don't need to follow the trends, specially when the trend in healthy goes one day leaning to this and then leaning to that. You don't need to be toothpick skinny, you gara be you and live with it.

Be real, don't be decaf.