Day 308 - Apple Tree

Thought of the day: I had my car washed today and I was not very happy with the result.  It's so often the case when it comes to the quality of work performed by a third party.  The third party certainly doesn't care about the outcome as much as we do.  When the third party needs to serve a large number of customers, quality suffers even more. Every customer is not the same and they may have different demands and expectations. It's difficult to provide a customized solution for everybody. When you work under pressure - either time-wise or financially or both, you do the minimal work necessary to satisfy the majority of your customers instead of doing your best work to satisfy those with high expectations.  This is true for car wash, and is also true for so many other services like housekeeping, cooking, construction and, sadly, public education.  Sometimes there is a good reason to do things ourselves, but we all have limited amount of time and resources to do things in our own way to our satisfaction, so eventually it all comes down to a matter of choice.  What can we put up with and what can we not?  Sometimes we don't even realize that we are making such choices everyday, and when we do, some choices can be hard to make.

Photo of the day:

Girls climbing up an apple tree.  This tree is situated outside of Lila's preschool and has been there for a while.  Jasmine used to climb it when she was little and now they both love to climb it.  As parents, we're making many choices for them on a daily basis, including whether to allow them to climb a tree, whether to send them to school, what to pack for lunch, what activities to do, etc.  Some choices are made subconsciously but they may nonetheless have an impact on their lives.