Cover your mouth

In case you have not heard, there is a pandemic occurring. People are being hospitalized and even dying simply because it is flu season and they are not taking the proper precautions.

But what does flu season have to do with your shopping? More than you may like to think.

One day you suddenly fall ill; your feverish, you cannot keep any food down and your whole body hurts. No one in your house is sick, nor is anyone at work, so how did you get sick?

“Maybe it was someone at school,” you may think. “The girl two seats down from me did cough, yawn and put her head down.”

What about the other day when you went shopping (and consequently wandered through everyone else’s germs). When you picked up all those DVDs, read the backs then put them all back because you could not make up your mind.

Little did you know, but before you picked up those DVDs, another customer had just been there — coughing. Everyone gets sick and we all know our lives do not always allow us to stay home; but when this customer coughed, they did so carelessly NOT covering their mouth.

According to It’s A SNAP.org’s Clean Hand Statistics:

• There are many types of germs (viruses, bacteria, parasites, fungi) that cause many types of illnesses – including the common cold or flu, food borne illness, Lyme disease, hantavirus, or plague. These germs can spread easily from one person to another – and have wide-reaching effects.
• One of the most common ways people catch colds is by rubbing their noses or eyes after touching someone or something that’s contaminated with the cold virus (rhinovirus).
• Rotavirus – a germ that causes gastrointestinal illness – can be transferred from a dry, smooth surface to a clean hand for as long as 20 minutes after the surface has been contaminated.
• The 15 leading causes of death in the US for 2006 include influenza and pneumonia.

Your germs are discussing, in the end even you do not want them. Why carelessly disperse them around town then? Where did your manors go? If your fever is so high that you cannot remember to cover your mouth when you cough (a skill which you were thought when you were two), then maybe you need to find your way to a hospital bed.

Infection Control Today reported in their article in Dec. 2003 that, “Most people (73 %) know that a common cold can spread by coughing. Far fewer people recognize that more serious illnesses — such as the flu (57 %) and bronchitis (27 %) — can also spread through coughing. In reality, the flu and bronchitis are spread more often through coughing than sneezing. However, most people (71%) consider their average cough to be simply a mild problem or annoyance, and seek treatment either rarely or not at all. By not taking their cough seriously, these people are likely spreading their infection to others.”

So now when you go out all shopping and you have that terrible or minor cough or even flu-ish symptoms, hopefully you will keep in mind mankind and your fellow shoppers and will cover your mouth when you cough.

No one likes being sick and people especially do not like getting sick. So save someone else your pain and if you go out while under the weather, cover your mouth when you cough.

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Make sure you order everything you want

Starbucks allows us to obtain our daily coffee fix, to go on with our day without that caffeine headache and weather you are getting coffee or some other drink, you need to be specific.

You walk in, the cashier greets you saying, “Hey how are you today? What can I get you to drink?” And you respond, “I would like an iced grande caramel macchiato.” The cashier asks you if that will be all then tells you your total and calls your drink.

“Calling… an iced grande caramel macchiato.”

You make your way down to the bar to wait for your drink and in a matter of minutes the barista calls out, “I have an iced grande caramel macchiato on bar.” You pick up the drink, examine it and place it back on the bar. For some reason you did not get what you wanted. You looks at the Barista and say, “Excuse me, I wanted my drink decaf and with caramel drizzle inside the cup. Oh and I wanted whip on it to.”

But wait. Did you even ask for any of those things when you ordered?

Time and time again customers walk into Starbucks, ask for their drinks and leave half of what they wanted out.

Think about it like this, on your birthday you make a list of every last thing you want (or at least probably used to)… well every day at Starbucks is your birthday, ask for everything you want. Weather it is extra pumps, extra whip, light whip, decaf, skim milk, whatever – ask for it at the register. By doing so you save yourself time, because let’s face it unless your day is too short to have to stand and wait for your Barista to make your drink again, you have better places to be and other things to do. As do all the customers standing in line behind you that to now have to wait even longer for their drink.

So you want to throw a fit at the bar because your drink is how you asked for it, not how you imagined it?

Don’t do it. Weather your Barista says it or not, you are the one who made the mistake, not them, so don’t take out all your anger on them. If you do you simply make for, in many cases, lower quality service for the next customer.

No one comes in and tells you that you are doing your job wrong, no one yells at you on a daily basis because of something missing. Give these Starbucks employees a break, all they are doing is trying to make your day and your life simpler, give them the same common courteously back, and make sure you order everything you want. If you want legendary customer service, which Starbucks does provide, please make sure that you yourself are not the soul person causing the hold up in the line.

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