When you tell me your story, I’ll listen. If yours is a story I’m interested in, I’ll even pay attention. I’ll be touched by your heartwarming and inspirational posts on Facebook and laugh along to your delightful YouTube videos. I’ll notice when you have an ad campaign running and wonder which agency was responsible for the potentially award winning creative. I’ll even speculate about how much money you spent on the campaign.

Before I deleted my personal Twitter, I used to entertain myself by scrolling through my timeline looking for the newest <insert brand name> rant. You know the ones I’m talking about: XYZ brand is despicable. They made promises they didn’t keep. Customer Support was useless. Rant. Rant. Rant. My particular favourites were rants involving cell phone companies and their cookie cutter (non) responses. I very rarely, on my searches, however, came across the opposite – praise for a service or experience that was simply remarkable.

You do not have my permission to spam me with promotional email just because we met or traded business cards or information.

Acceptable. Adequate. Decent. Reasonable. Satisfactory. Sufficient. Tolerable.

We are confronted with mediocrity every single day. At our local coffee shop. In the workplace. In cinemas. Restaurants. We endure. Either because we couldn’t care less or because we’re resigned. Calling mediocrity out when we encounter it makes us seem like awful, snotty people.

If you build it, they will come.

If you build it and advertise, they will come.

If you build it and blitz them with messaging, they will come.

Yesterday as I waited for my ride, I watched two men do everything they could to jump the queue for an auto. They jumped over q-manager as soon as one of the autos lining up to pick up fares agreed to take them where they wanted to go. Their joy at beating the system was loudly vocal but short-lived. Mall security made them get off and return to the queue.

In an ideal world, women wouldn’t need a day to celebrate them. We would be equals with our male counterparts in all areas. At home. At work. Everywhere.

At home we we’d be equals with our partners, treated with the same respect demanded of us; child rearing would be a shared responsibility as would cooking or housekeeping.