In aid of a team-building workshop, I recently took a DiSC personality assessment—for the third time since joining my current company over 3 years ago. Personalities are characterized in 4 general quadrants:

• (D)ominance: tend to be confident and place an emphasis on accomplishing bottom-line results
• (i)nfluence: tend to be more open and place an emphasis on relationships and influencing or persuading others
• (S)teadiness: tend to be dependable and place the emphasis on cooperation and sincerity
• (C)onscientiousness: tend to place the emphasis on quality, accuracy, expertise, and competency

When I first took it in 2021, I was an individual contributor and firmly in the middle of the edge of the “C” quadrant—the C-est possible C, if you will. A year later, I was a people manager and had moved a few millimeters in the direction of CD. This time, as I’d suspected, I landed right in the middle of the edge of the CD sector.

This means that my priorities have shifted from challenge, accuracy, and stability to results, challenge, and accuracy.

The most palpable evidence of this shift both in and outside of work is that I no longer feel that I have any patience. When I was younger, I had little concept of time and took my friends’ whims in stride, didn’t mind people changing their minds or plans… and people often told me I was patient.

Now, I have white hairs proliferating daily and a flood of stress hormones at the slightest hint of inefficiency.

Is it my increasing responsibility and need to be decisive at work, or the last few years of restaurants enforcing strict cancellation policies and short grace periods, and most activities needing to be booked well in advance with little room to make changes, that have pushed me to tolerate nothing less than everything done right, and right now?

With an attitude like that, I should probably give up online shopping.

Perhaps I’ve reached this logic only because I’m having unusually bad luck with 2 unrelated orders simultaneously, and dealing with them has caused me a worryingly disproportionate physiologic stress response. With one, the seller has been unresponsive by email and the listed phone number is defunct. With the other, we are at the mercy of customs and I have been discovering how labyrinthine the customer service at UPS can be—do not trust anything an agent tells you if it involves further processing or calling you back. Expect to make multiple phone calls, each time reciting your 18-digit tracking number to a bot before it allows the possibility of putting you through to a live person, to whom you may have to recite the number again!

Will the items end up arriving after the delays? Will I be able to cancel the order and get a refund? Will I have to resort to disputing certain charges on my credit card? …Wouldn’t it be nice to peek into the future and find out?

Of course, if I could see the future, these would probably not be the things I would prioritize seeing—and that’s kind of the point as to why it’s so bothersome that I’m capable of getting so bothered by them. Then again, the distraction of a “paper cut” and “tempest in a teapot” are well known by nature of being relatable, aren’t they?

One shipment that didn’t disappoint was my purchase of Nez magazine issue #17 from Luckyscent, which arrived quickly. One of the samples I requested with this order was Private Teahouse by Chasing Scents. I was intrigued by the listed notes of peach, cacao, smoke, lapsang souchong tea, cedarwood, labdanum, and peach sap in this creation by perfumer Sandy Wong.

The opening is a blast of alcohol and synthetic sandalwood. Then a fruity spiciness that reminds me of a spicy fruit like hawthorn berry. The aura remains mostly sandalwood, while something dark and smoky swirls close to where the perfume has landed. I don’t really get the cacao by itself, so maybe it’s contributing to the warmth and darkness, thickening the smoke a bit.

It isn’t until the perfume has settled down on my clothes that I can parse the notes better—the tea, the peach, and something nutty and little bitter… perhaps almond? The combination gives contrasting impressions of burnt wood and fruity shampoo, although the latter is fleeting. The fragrance as a whole smells quite woody, with a shadow of oudiness. (It’s still mostly synthetic sandalwood.)

In the drydown, as in hindsight, is when all reveals itself.