In Praise of Doctoring

I went out to eat last night, and took most of a chopped salad home in the process. It was an okay salad, but not exactly one you'd tell someone about.

This morning, I threw some heirloom tomatoes, some Kalamata olives, some fresh sliced thin jalape?o peppers, some feta, and a sprinkling of Tajin (IYKYK). Oh, and some dressing.

NOW, the salad is delicious and spicy and flavorful, has a few more colorful vegetables in it (not exactly nutrient dense, but whatever - I could've added some spinach).

It got me thinking about "doctoring."

In Praise of "Doctoring"

You know what I mean: take a thing and "edit" it to make it yours. When Windows 95 came out, we all doctored our desktops by adding our own photos, so suddenly, you could see your coworkers' families in Hawaii or whatever. You can take crappy dried ramen packets and doctor them by adding a boiled egg slice and a piece of pork and some fresh chopped green onions and maybe some Vietnamese fish sauce (why not?), and that's doctoring.

It's tweaking. Making something your own. We doctor our laptops with stickers. We make mix tapes or playlists so that we don't have to listen to the entire album (every Weezer album but the blue and the red - maybe green - only has a few great songs and lots of okay ones).

You Can Doctor a LOT of Things About Work and Life

I still haven't mastered the habit of drinking...what is it you call it? Water? But I can buy a big packet of Crystal Lite and throw that into a 2 quart pitcher, and that's cool. That's also not doctoring. I split one packet into 3 (sometimes four) pitchers because I don't like punch-in-the-face amounts of flavoring. I add 3 packets of "True Lime" and then I'm drinking "nearly" water with some flavors. This makes it taste more like what I want, and saves me a few bucks (not enough to make THAT the driving factor, but you get what I mean).

In work, I prefer 20 minute meetings to 30. I either schedule 30 but let people go 20 minutes in, or I schedule 20. I get three meetings to an hour instead of two.

I doctor documents and meetings and many things to put the most important information first. No one is eager to sift through material to get to the good part. When I'm being polite, I doctor my own writing to remove "throwaway" words and phrases ("So" is one, "But" is another).

Doctor = make it your own.

What are YOU doctoring? Anything come to mind?

Chris...