Happiness, Part 1
by Zube (zube@stat.colostate.edu)
Created:  Mar 11, 2014
Updated:  Sep  4, 2014
http://www.stat.colostate.edu/~zube/happiness.part1.txt

A list of related things:

If you open Apple Time Machine or use Windows Media Player for the
first time, you'll may see that the disk is unrecognized or that
there is no music in your library.  Wait a bit though and poof!,
things that weren't there magically appear.

There are very accurate ("atomic") clocks where I work.  On many of
the clocks, the second hand never moves.

Type an incorrect password in Windows 7.  First, you are "Welcome"
and then, in an offhand, oh-by-the-way manner, it tells you that the
login has failed.

See that sign?  It reads "No Parking on 1/17 and 1/18".  It turns
out that there will be no parking on 1/19 either, nor any parking
for the next 18 months.  The parking spaces will be blocked off by
a huge fence.

In my town, if there is red paint on the curbs, it means "No Parking".
Sometimes.  If there is a "No Parking" sign, it means "No Parking".
Sometimes.  If there is no red paint on the curbs, it means "No
Parking".  Sometimes.

Adagio Tea allows customers to create their own tea blends.  At one
point, if you happened upon a particularly popular blend, it would
tell you what its ranking was ("#4 most popular blend").  However,
there was no way to see a list of the 50 or 100 most popular blends
and if you asked about it, you get the email equivalent of a dumb look
and a question about why anyone would ever want to do that.

In my town, we have curbside recycling, but this article:

http://www.coloradoan.com/article/20130714/NEWS01/307140056/Think-glass-will-recycled-Think-again

examines our town's definition of "recycling":  of the 2500 tons of
glass that were placed in curbside recycling bins, "only about 247
tons of glass were actually melted down and reused last year."  The
rest were dumped in landfills.

Waste Management, our garbage and curbside recycling company, picks up
recyclables every two weeks.  You can visit their website and see that
there are "yellow" weeks and "green" weeks during which recyclables are
picked up, but there is no way to tell if your address is a yellow
or green one.

**

Curb-stomping reasonable expections is a fact of life in our modern,
"bite me", I-don't-have-to-care society.

In a more generous world, the people responsible for this rubbish would
be pelted with rotten squash in the public square to the delight of
both small children and rotten squash vendors.   But that world isn't
this world.

If you'd rather be right than happy, the way to do it is to fume
over these inanities and try to get them fixed.  You might also try
stuffing a giraffe in a flowerpot.

If you'd rather be happy than right, it's better to lower your
expectations and use your energies in better ways.  Indeed, one way
to improve the world is to remember these bad examples and make sure
you don't follow them when you exercise your talents.

Lesson 1: (RFC 793) "Be conservative in what you do, be liberal 
in what you accept from others."

Lesson 2: Low expectations are the way to happiness.