[Ohio-talk] Regrets and Missed Opportunities

[Smith, JW]

Friends and Colleagues,

One of the joys of getting older is remembering your regrets and counting your missed opportunities. By regrets I mean those times when you regret some action or inaction. I will only bore you with one relevant example of each. When I was working on my PhD at Wayne State University in Detroit in the 1980s (yes, the dinosaur age), I had an encounter with one of the faculty members that shall we say was quite full of himself and very pompous on top of it all. It could also be argued that he had a history of making racist comments. He was an avid hockey fan and during one of our conversations in the hallway one day we were talking about the ability of certain players to effectively communicate during press conferences and pre and post-game media interviews. This professor made the statement "the hockey players tend to be and sound more intelligent than most of the others, especially the basketball players...". As a graduate student at the time I sheepishly laughed it off but later I regretting not calling him on his clearly racially twinged comment. I wish I could do it over again. Now to my missed opportunity and really the reason why I am sending this message- yesterday, which was Thursday, August 14th, I had lunch with some colleagues and my bill came to $13.38. I gave the server a $20 bill and when she brought me my change she brought me the coins and two bills, one of which was a one and the other was a five. Habitually, I asked one of my colleagues which of these was the five. It was only about an hour after the lunch that I remembered that I had my new Bill Identifier in my pocket and that I had missed a great opportunity to use it because old habits die hard! Well, I learned my lesson and I have spent the last 24 hours using my identifier with any bill I can find just so that I can get in the habit of using it. So, the moral of the story is, that old habits do die hard and it may be true that it's very hard to teach old dogs new tricks but even those of us who have been around a little while can and should make the effort to get with the times and create some new habits.

Enjoy the weather and have a great weekend.

Jw