If You Don'T Like It....

[PattayaOneTeam]

If You Don’t Like it …

It was only some 52,534 years ago that Og was married. The ceremony was brief – Iggy clubbed her over the head with a bit of wood and dragged her to a small clearing in the forest to consummate their union. Honeymoons were unheard of at the time so Og set to work helping Iggy build a comfortable life for them both. Iggy was now happy because his workload had been halved but living out in the open, Og started complaining every time it rained. She hated getting wet.

Eventually, Iggy moved all their possessions – a club and a sharp stone – to a spot beneath an overhanging rock formation. This kept the rain out but Og began complaining it was too hot. Their new home did not catch any cool breezes. To stop her incessant whining, Iggy was faced with a challenge: to find or build a place which would keep the rain out but let the breeze in. After many failed attempts, Iggy constructed the world’s first water-resistant, breeze-catching house and civilization made a giant leap forward.

The reason for the ancient history lesson is simple. Almost on a daily basis, letters are submitted to Pattaya’s popular English language publications by people needing to air a complaint about something. A similar number of letters are written by people complaining about other people complaining. This latter group usually resorts to the hackneyed argument that, “if you don’t like it, go home!” That is the last retort of the defeated and means he has no further sensible lines of reasoning to offer.

Complaints can be divided into several categories – futile, frivolous, legitimate and what I call ‘selfish’ complaints. Futile complaints are made about something over which no-one has control. Complaining about the weather, for instance, or the kid in the back seat of the car continually whining, “Are we there yet?” when travelling a long distance. No amount of bitching will change the weather or greatly affect the time it takes to reach a destination.

It’s out of our hands and the only thing we can do is put up with it or avoid it. Move where the weather is more to our liking and travel by plane next time.

Frivolous complaints are made about something over which there is some control but a decision was involved and a calculated risk was taken. You go to see a movie which turns out to be terrible. Just like the adage about ‘crying over spilt milk’, there is no point complaining about it afterwards. For as much as you may like to, you can’t un-watch it.

Being caught in a traffic jam amounts to the same thing. Had you known the traffic would be that bad you may have taken a different route or left at a different time, but sitting behind the wheel of your gridlocked vehicle, getting angry and moaning about it, solves nothing.

‘Selfish’ complaints overlap the futile and frivolous categories but are unique in the respect that they are all about “me, me, me!” I don’t like kidney, but many people do and nobody is forcing me to eat it. Personal tastes regarding food, movies, actors or authors for instance, should not be confused with legitimate complaints.

Legitimate complaints are about real problems. Peter and Jane are a happily married couple, deeply in love. There is one problem, however. Peter snores, which causes Jane many sleepless nights in what would otherwise be her idyllic life. What should Jane do? Should she tell Peter of the problem or should she keep quiet and put up with it? Of course she should tell Peter so they could work together on a solution. And here is where we make a further stipulation: people making legitimate complaints should also have a solution or alternative in mind. It is no use screaming something is bad unless you also propose how to fix it. First identify the problem then come up with a solution.

Returning to those letters to the editor, complaints are often about Pattaya or Bangkok’s traffic problems. To my knowledge, not one of the writers has ever come up with a workable, reasonable solution. Traffic snarls in both places have been worsening for years and building bigger and better roads will simply bring more cars onto those roads. Making the existing roads and road systems more efficient would help, however, engineers and city planners with years of experience and more degrees than a thermometer have been trying to work that out for decades. If the problem is not solvable, our complaints are reduced to being futile – the problem exists but is not going to go away in the foreseeable future. We just have to work around it.

To read the rest of this article download the PDF here:

http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/files/download/666-pattaya-one-issue-9/

Enjoyed this article? Why not go to our poll and vote for it at:

-- Pattaya One 2011-02-14