Two stories, part 1

A couple anecdotes.

My wife has a hard time taking compliments, see, for whatever reason she feels she was regarded as the "sensitive" child, and was shielded from criticism wherever possible, leading her to not trust when people say she did something good. This has shown up in a bunch of ways, but in day to day life it usually manifests when talking about her cooking. I... do not have a super refined palate, I like the vast majority of food and flavors, which means that when I say I like something she has made, I mean it.
But that doesn't help her much, because she knows when she makes mistakes, and when something doesn't taste the way she wants it to. So I have had to learn to give usable feedback. If I like something I try to talk specifically about what elements of the dish I enjoy, I need to critique the food some so that I can talk with her about what she thinks she can do to improve it another time, and yes, I need to tell her honestly when I don't care for something. An example: The other day she got an urge to make some sort of hot dog... popper... thing, basically it's an anaheim pepper stuffed with a hot dog that is stuffed with cream cheese, the whole thing wrapped in bacon and cooked in the oven.

If that sounds delicious to you then I hate to tell you that it totally isn't, if that sounds disgusting to you then it isn't that either although I wouldn't blame you for having that reaction. It is not more than the sum of it's parts. It is perfectly well cooked pepper, hot dog, bacon, and cream cheese, and it tastes only like those things, they do not combine well is what I am saying, at least in this context. Now I don't tell this story to embarrass her, but the thing is if left to myself, I'd probably say "It's good" and eat my serving then forget about the leftovers until they go bad. That feedback doesn't help much, so I had to think out my reaction to it as described above.

My other story is from the store and I may have mentioned it before, I had a customer come in looking for a special version of Monopoly, "Ghetto-opoly" or some name along those lines. He (it's always a he) thought the game was hilarious and would even pay for a special order of it, I did my research and found the game was discontinued as it was absolutely not a licensed product, and it was also exactly as racist as the name implies, from the names, to the artwork, to the rules text. I sent him on his way secure in my decision to not make any effort to bring that into my store.

Why do I share these two stories? I'll tell you tomorrow because it is getting late and I have a bedtime these days.