Small Things May Be More Important Than We Realize

Let me give you a real example.  I was practicing my Spanish by writing an e-mail to a Hispanic colleague.  I was attempting to let her know that my mother-in-law was doing well for a woman of 84 years (as it might be phrased in Spanish).  However, my e-mail program won’t easily let me switch to a Spanish alphabet.  So I was going to skip the tilde ( ~ ) that goes over the n in the Spanish word for years.  But before I sent the message, I used a translation program which told me that I had written “My mother-in-law is doing well for a woman who has 84 anuses”.  I decided to change the sentence.

So a tilde is the only thing keeping me from having 55 anuses instead of being 55 years old.  Who would have thought that ~ could be so important?

Now what is true for tildes may be even truer for small things like letting someone know that you care about them.  Come to think of it, caring about others is the one of the few things that will make it much less likely that you’re an anus!