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Knife, fork, spoon

My dinner last night was a spinach salad from the drive-through window at Wendy’s. Now, I can understand that there’s a lot of pressure on the drive-through staff, and sometimes it’s not easy to make a snap decision about which utensil would best suit the food. But really. You gave me a knife. Not a fork — or even a spoon — but a lonely plastic knife.

A bit of nonsense verse that I read as a child sprang to mind, though I can’t remember where it’s from:

I eat my peas with honey

I’ve done it all my life

It makes the peas taste funny

But it keeps them on my knife

Replace peas and honey with spinach leaves and Italian dressing and you can picture how my meal went.

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Little yellow rectangles

I made a trip to the office supply room recently. I needed Post-It™ notes — or “yellow sticky notes” if you want to be generic.

Is it really necessary to have 5 billion different formats of sticky note? They really do come in all sizes and shapes. You could probably write a novel on notepad-size self-adhesive paper.

I can understand that you don’t need the big ones all the time. I sometimes use the smallish ones for little notes while I’m editing, and I cut them into strips if I need bookmarks. But there are also stickies that have “Sign Here ->” pre-printed on them. Wouldn’t it make more sense to get blank ones and just write “Sign Here” on them? Why would anyone need a whole pad of “Sign Here” stickies? Why can’t you just design your documents so that it’s clear where you should sign?

I’ve seen such waste. I’ve seen entire pads of large stickies used for nothing but bookmarks — on every second page of a 500 page document! Shocking, but true!

Something must be done about this. Somewhere, entire forests of little yellow trees are being clearcut.

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Cubey’s word of the day

Isn’t “deracinate” an excellent word? It kind of slips off the tongue to curl delicately in the air and linger… like a wisp of smoke from an extinguished candle.

It’s a shame that if you use it in casual conversation, you’d be considered a pompous twit.