The best thing about getting older….

08. February 2008 · Comments Off on The best thing about getting older…. · Categories: General

…is that it beats the alternative. At least that’s what I keep telling myself. And for once, I’m not talking about myself, although I don’t seem to be getting any younger, these days. I’m talking about my dad..

He turned 77 on his birthday last November. He spent his birthday weekend in the hospital, dealing with a heart attack. He had gone to the ER in his small town to get checked out for a suspected urinary tract infection (his regular doc had retired, and he didn’t have a new one yet), and they realized he was in the midst of a heart attack. They kept him over the weekend, and released him early the next week.

But my aunt called me last week. She’s the one who takes care of my dad’s finances, and has full power of attorney to handle whatever needs handled, since my mom passed away. Dad’s doctor says he needs to move out of his split-level house, before the stairs kill him. He doesn’t do stairs well – they trip him up. He had a stroke in 1976, and his right leg has never worked particularly well since then. His answer to the stairs in the house was to go out the back door, take two steps down from the back deck, and walk down the sloping hill to his truck. Until he fell one day, and couldn’t get up. Thankfully, two neighbors saw him and came over to help him to his feet.

He is a stubbornly indpendent man, my father. So we are NOT moving him to assisted living. We are helping him get his house ready to sell, and we’ll help him buy a small single-story in his small town. I’ve rearranged my vacation time to go north and help out. Other than that, I try not to think about it.

My daddy… I have always endowed him with some mythical heroic power, and while he may not have hung the moon, I was always convinced that he could have, if he’d wanted to. In one swift move, he could grab me up and hoist me to his shoulders, assuring I got the best view of the Santa Claus parade as it wound through our neighborhood. We found a domestic rabbit shivering in our garage one winter day, and next day, he built a wood and wire rabbit hutch for it, out of scraps he had, and with no plans to work from. When we built our “dream” house in 1975, he and Mom did the roofing, the siding, the flooring… before his stroke he was all-powerful, and full of genius, if short of patience.

After his 1976 stroke, I closed my eyes to his limitations and encouraged him in his successes. It was easy to do then – I was a teenager, still in high school. Now I’m an adult, and high school is 30 years behind me, this May. Dad is 77, and not as healthy as he used to be. His heart is enlarged, his liver is fatty, and his bad leg drags enough to scare you if you watch him walk, because it looks like he won’t make it across the room if he’s barefoot.

But he’s still around for me to love, and that beats the alternative. Still, I find my eyes tearing up at odd times, and I’m dreading this northern trip on Feb 26, helping him get ready to sell the house my mother died in. I find myself wondering if I’ve really told him enough about how much he means to me. I try to reassure myself that actions speak louder than words, even for someone as vocal as I am, and that driving across the Appalachians in the tag-end of winter declares that I care. But I think I’ll work on sending cards more often, to let him know I’m thinking of him, and that I love him.

And I marvel at how the fact that my dad is growing older can make me feel so much like a very young child.

Join the Marines

08. February 2008 · Comments Off on Join the Marines · Categories: General

Travel to exotic lands
Meet exciting unusual people
And kill them.

Protesters without a clue.

Berkeley, the famously liberal college town in California, has taken aim at Marine recruiters, saying they are “not welcome in our city.”

Unh, ladies?  The ditty you’re quoting isn’t a protest slogan.  It’s usually found on t-shirts and bumper stickers for sale outside the main gate and in Army-Navy surplus stores across the land.  It’s one of those yin-yang duality of nature mock-ironic things that service members do so well and clueless zealots just don’t get.

Instead of mindlessly repeating something you read on a recruiter’s bumper sticker, may I suggest a return to the classics?

1 .. 2 .. 3 .. 4
We don’t want your dirty war!

or

Hey, hey what do I say?
Kick the Marines into the bay!

or

Hey, hey, look our way!
We’re naive and we like it that way!

You’re welcome.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

This is Weird

07. February 2008 · Comments Off on This is Weird · Categories: Politics

The more John McCain talks, the better Barack Obama sounds.

My friends, I know…kind of freaks me out too.

Curious Edibles

07. February 2008 · Comments Off on Curious Edibles · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Eat, Drink and be Merry, General, World

“You have curious things to eat…but I am fed on proper meat” – From R.L Stevensons’ Child’s Garden of Verses

My mother had a fairly open-minded attitude about what exactly constituted edible animal protein; if Dad’s paycheck could afford it, and it was available from any of the places providing our edibles in the 1960s, she would damn well have a go at making something tasty out of it. Beef-heart casserole and fried rabbit made appearances often; so did ground beef in any of a hundred different guises, as well as liver and onions – basically, if it didn’t look too awful and smelled good, we were prepared to be adventurous. Except where liver and onions were concerned, which smelled good but tasted revolting; and which Mom insisted we eat because it was A) cheap and B) good for us.

Generally, that attitude served me well ever since; overseas on Japan and Korea, in Greenland and across Europe. Roast chestnuts – good to go. Unidentified bits of chicken flesh on a skewer, brushed with some kind of soy-based sauce and grilled over a little charcoal brazier – excellent! Stir-fried noodles and strange vegetables – oh, yeah! Strange meaty stews with lots of potatoes, served up in a French youth hostel in the summer of 1970? My traveling friend, Esther Tutwyler and I cheerfully agreed that it probably was horse-meat and ate it anyway. We were hungry and on a budget – and when in Rome, or in this case, Paris – do as the Romans. We were generally baffled by the bread rolls, though – they went hard and inedible after a day or so, and every time we had had a bag-luncheon from whatever youth hostel kitchen was supplying our nutritional needs, there were at least two of them. What to do with the uneaten extras? Seemed kind of ungracious and wasteful to throw them away, but we had to eventually. There was that time we did have a game of kick-football with one, in the corridor of a subterranean hostel in Vienna’s Esterhazy Park, – until the roll skidded underneath the door of someone’s room. We always wondered what the occupant of that room thought the next day, finding a stale bread roll in the middle of the floor.

On the whole, youth hostel food was pretty much like my mothers – fairly edible and usually recognizable; cheap cuts of meat figured fairly highly, and always good sturdy bread. The breakfasts in Scandinavia were especially tasty, for the hostels generally set up a buffet table, with bins of different sliced bread, and every sort of condiment and bread topping imaginable. Kind of strange, we agreed, having salami for breakfast, but when in Rome, et cetera.

There was only one meal that left us completely baffled – coincidently, it was the evening meal in a Scandinavian hostel: Bergen, Norway, if memory serves. The main course at dinner was… well, we couldn’t tell exactly what it was. It appeared on our plates as opaque white gelatinous circles about three inches across and about half an inch thick, obviously sliced from a canned or extruded mass. It had a very faintly fibrous texture and feel in the mouth, but otherwise had no discernable taste at all, offering no clue as to its origin, animal, fish or vegetable. I mean, it tasted and smelt of precisely nothing. It was served with a dollop of almost equally tasteless béchamel sauce (milk gravy to Southerners) and formed a symphony of unappetizing white on each plate. At least we recognized béchamel sauce, but the stuff that it was on? It appeared almost as if the kitchen staff had just opened generic cans labeled “food” and gorped out a neat and faintly rubbery slice on each plate. I had never seen the like – and after fifteen years of Lutheran pot-luck lunches and dinners, and Mom’s cooking, I thought I had seen everything. We ate it – no one opting for seconds. By luck, none of the kitchen staff that evening seemed to understand English, so the mystery food remained a mystery.

Two or three years later, my high school had a Norwegian exchange student. I described the mysterious rubbery, tasteless white stuff to him, and he said it was fish pudding. A Norwegian national dish, apparently. Kind of like lutefisk, but without the rat poison.

Appreciating Winter

06. February 2008 · Comments Off on Appreciating Winter · Categories: General

There is one nice thing about changing a tire in Wisconsin in February: all that ice and snow gives you good place to jab your tire iron so it stands upright.

This keeps it ready-to-hand and super easy to find.

The Irony, Election 2008

05. February 2008 · Comments Off on The Irony, Election 2008 · Categories: Politics

What I love about the current popular wingnuts who are saying they won’t vote, or that they’ll for Clinton before they vote for McCain is that these are the same people who have accused the Dems for years of voting for political gain vs for the good of the country.  It just makes me giggle.

VOTE DAMMIT!

05. February 2008 · Comments Off on VOTE DAMMIT! · Categories: General, Politics

That’s for all the idjits who have decided that they’d rather let someone else make their decisions for them. For all the wingnuts who have decided to not vote at all rather than to vote for McCain. For all the moonbats who are pouting because Kucinich has left the race.

VOTE.

As Heinlein once wrote, “There may not be someone to vote for, but there’s always someone to vote against.”

“Sins of The Assassin” Review

05. February 2008 · Comments Off on “Sins of The Assassin” Review · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun With Islam

Robert Ferrigno’s “Sins Of The Assassin” is released today in hardcover. A couple of years ago I received an email from Robert asking me if I’d like to get an advanced copy of “Prayers For The Assassin.” Since I never turn down a free book, I said yes and wrote this review about it. A few weeks ago I received another email from Robert asking if I’d like to get an advanced copy of “Sins.” See above for my answer. I still love the fact that he shot out advanced copies to bloggers. I’m sure he didn’t have to this time around, yet he still did.

I would have been perfectly happy if the story had stuck around the Islamic areas of America for its backdrop and continued with Rakkim and Sarah’s hunt for The Old One. Robert changes the scene on us this time around. Rakkim takes a mission into The Bible Belt. The Southern States that, by all that’s holy, weren’t going to be converted to Islam. What would it be like if the country divided? Who would be in charge? What would they do for fun? What happens to New Orleans the next time it gets slammed by a hurricane? What happens when intellectuals don’t have their colleges as their pulpit? What will Mexico and Canada do?

This is future history. It plays what if and it plays it pretty darn well. The fun thing about future history is that you can comment on today’s events from a distance. The perspective may surprise you. I found it hilarious in a lot of ways. Not the least of which is the running commentary on how exceptionally smart people can be pretty darn useless, if not downright dangerous if they’re put in the wrong situations.

If you haven’t read “Prayers” yet, “Sins” stands well on it’s own. Robert does a good job of filling in the backstory without beating you over the head with it. One of the things I hate about some series is when an author feels the need to spend a ridiculous amount of time on exposition. It’s okay if you haven’t read the previous works, but if you have, it can kill a book dead. “Sins” doesn’t do that.

I hope the third one comes out quickly and sincerely hope the trilogy gets picked up for a movie deal. I think the guy from Lost would make a great Rakkim.

I would have gone over to Borders later to pick it up if I hadn’t received an advanced copy.  I was that anxious for it.  Normally I wait for the paperback version of anything.

Magical Spam

04. February 2008 · Comments Off on Magical Spam · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General, sarcasm, Site News

Among my regular chores as regards maintenance of this site is that of emptying out the spam queue – which, unless there is more than a couple of hundred entries in it – I feel obliged to do a quick pass-over just to make sure that no ones legitimate comment has been caught in the spam torrent. This does happen, on occasion, although the program that Timmer plugged in more than a year and a half ago is supposed to be self-regulating. It learns, in other words. But the most marvelous part is that none of the automated comment spam has ever “leaked” into the blog, thus depriving our many readers of a handy link with which to purchase or download a dizzying variety of pharmaceutical products, porn, online games of chance and cell phone ring tones. Every once in a while, there is a spam which looks like a completely conventional and legitimate business; a spam with somewhat of an embarrassed look to it, as if not being able to figure out how it got into such disreputable company. But such are very rare – and since I do not click on the links, I have no way of knowing if they are indeed legitimate – or just generated by someone who is a little cleverer about disguising themselves.

Most of this stuff is so inept, so very bad at even looking like a blog comment that I wonder what they are getting out of generating it to start with. Sometimes it comes in Russian, sometimes Italian and Spanish, but most often in fractured English. Last week, it came with topic headings like this: “Cartoon Alien Porn” “lindsay lohan razzie” “limewire 2008 free download” and “Celebrity Cartoon Porn”. Some of the most curious comes with a two word comment that looks like someone has been playing a random matching game with a thesaurus. It results in such madly poetical conceptual pairings as “shooing inosculate” ” trimmed pestiferous” “dilutions hernial ” “fecundated anticorrosive” “surfeit psychoanalyze” “adumbratively tawdries” ” insolvent joists” “nettlier intarsia” “glutinously cosmos”. Yes, those phrases came from last weeks spam haul – I copied over the most hilarious for your delectation.

Some spam comments have just a random string of letters as text: thusly – “qjkdgtvf tdelpfnq ngwakhqb phkm ncyflb jhgikz ykwlqrcvp” but others have made a go of inserting a sentence – or at least half a sentence. All the following examples came as text for links to various porn sites. At least someone is trying. Not very hard, or with much success, but at least they are trying:

An English-language quarterly magazine targeting professional

Suzanna Gratia Hupp (born 1959) is a former Republican member

Jon Tester is a third-generation Montana farmer who understands

Hyperlinked encyclopedia entry provides a personal and political profile of the US Senator for

The last variety of spam is a real head-shaker: that’s the one that comes as a couple of hundred lines of text with links embedded in every two or three words. These go on and on and on, to the point where one wonders where the hell whoever generated it has been for the last couple of years. I believe most blog spam-filters kick back comments with more than one or two embedded links. One would think one with two or three hundred would be kicked back so far it would come out the backside of whoever sent it out – but hey, I don’t know anything at all about the thought processes of whoever generates this stuff. I just deal with the results.
More »

The Boy is Back In Town and He’s Loaded for Bear

03. February 2008 · Comments Off on The Boy is Back In Town and He’s Loaded for Bear · Categories: General

Cap is back .. and he’s packing heat.

 

Sadly, the article is short on details.  What kind of weapon is that?  Does he have to follow rules of engagement?  Is he available to be a spokesman for Colt?  Does Cap have a rifle in the truck of his Captain Americamobile?  Cause when you want to really reach out and touch someone a pistol just isn’t going to do.

I am morally certain that – this being Captain America – he’s packing am M1911, chambered in .45.  What could be more frickin’ American than carrying an All-American gun like that?

Subject Line Tip o’ the Hat to Thin Lizzy.

Friday night they’ll be dressed to kill
Down at Dino’s Bar and grill.
The drink will flow and blood will spill
If the boys want to fight, you’d better let them.

Good Iraq Wrapup of “The Lies”

03. February 2008 · Comments Off on Good Iraq Wrapup of “The Lies” · Categories: Iraq

Jay Tea over at Wizbang has a good wrapup of how we got into Iraq in the first place. I know I’ve linked to various posts like this over the past few years, but it’s always good to be reminded of what happened vs the rewrites often repeated over and over by the anti-war crowd. I refuse to apologize when calling a man’s bluff.

He’s a little easier on the conduct of the war than I’ve become. But then, we’ve all got the advantage of hindsight there as well. I do think “The Rumsfeld Doctrine” will be studied in years to come as a sub-category of the war college course, “What’s Wrong with Wishful Thinking?” Or whatever it’s called.

Rant

31. January 2008 · Comments Off on Rant · Categories: General

Half Sigma said [1]…

I am not impressed by McCain’s military experience. I worked for the army as a civilian, and it was the most poorly managed organization I ever worked for. Romney, on the other hand, has the proven capacity to run large organizations.

I think that whatever McCain’s failings, earning his wings as a Naval Aviator speaks volumes about young John McCain’s intelligence, adaptability and ability excel. Dummies don’t fly airplanes.

Now, I’m not sure when Half Sigma worked for the Army .. but generally he’s right.

The military is optimized to break things and hurt people. When it’s not actually doing this – and that was most of the time before between 1973 and 2001 – it’s incredibly inefficient.

The reason is that it’s really tough to run a lean military optimized for peacetime and then change stuff around in the span of a few months so you can destroy Iraqi mechanized armies with minimal waste. Or at least minimal waste on our side.

Nobody wants to replay Task Force Smith.

I was in a support role in 1991 and it’s amazing how many wasted cycles .. suddenly were not when we had to pack up people and gear and move them halfway around the world.

Did 3D FSSG need a whole bunch of desert camo in 1990? Going to the Middle East wasn’t our mission so you might think that the cubic set aside in the warehouses were wasted space.. But when we were tasked to send people the guys who went were pretty happy to be able to draw the gear they needed.

Likewise in 1990 3D FSSG didn’t need a DFASC [2] – mainframes in a trailer [3] – but when 1st and 2nd FSSG found theirs were breaking down (AC issues) we were able to ship them ours on a day’s notice.

Sorry for the rant – ignorance irks me.

Via.

[1] A rant is a terrible thing to waste so I’m recycling and editing a comment from another blog into a post.  Some editing for clarity, some to correct a faulty memory.

[2] Rumor had it that we were going to get rid of it someday and in the meantime we didn’t use it – or at least hadn’t in the year and few months I’d been assigned to that unit. After 1991 the mainframe guys routinely dragged them out and operated them on field exercises.

[3] Interesting beasts they were – two semi-trailers per DFASC, one for the mainframe, one for the operators and programmers.  Since my MOS was ‘programmer’ if we’d had to deploy ours I would have been put to work doing ‘programmer’ work.  Since I hadn’t done that since school that would have been interesting.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

Attention Local Weather Forecasters

31. January 2008 · Comments Off on Attention Local Weather Forecasters · Categories: Letters to the Editor, Media Matters Not, Stupidity

Temps in the 30s with wind, rain and snow, does NOT qualify as “SEVERE” weather.  If I can see down my street clearly to the “T” intersection (about a block and a half away) this is not limited visibility.  Visibility would be more limited if we weren’t getting any weather and the smog got a chance to settle down.  “Mountain passes are closed!” is not a reason to break into Regis and Kelly, it’s what’s known as “normal” for winter in the freaking mountains!  A crawl across the bottom would suffice.  Seeing your red, panic-stricken, hyperventilating face telling me you’ve come in early to “monitor the situation” doesn’t make me think any better of you, it makes me think you’re an idiot who migrated here from Southern California back when we were in a draught.

Seriously people, get a grip.  It’s just snow and ice.  You handle it by driving what we call “carefully.”  Say that with me, “Care-full-ly.”  Full of care.  It’s simple.  Slow down and be aware of the people around you.  Get off the damn phone, especially if you’re talking to someone you’re on your way to see.  Oh, and your four wheel drive protects you against, say it with me, “nothing.”  We’ve had black ice for the past three nights.  In case you haven’t learned the hard way yet, all four tires slide on wet ice just fine.

Your freaking out over every “weather event” just makes people become immune to your warnings.  If we ever do get a no-kidding, rip roaring blizzard dumping a foot or three of snow on us, we’re not going to believe you when you say to stay inside.

If Things Keep On This Way

31. January 2008 · Comments Off on If Things Keep On This Way · Categories: General

Our choice for November looks to be either McCain or Clinton.

Seriously?  This is the best that both parties have to offer?

I wonder if I should look at jobs outside the country with a four year contract starting Next January?

Good Dhimmi

29. January 2008 · Comments Off on Good Dhimmi · Categories: European Disunion, Fun and Games, Fun With Islam, General, Media Matters Not, World

“Here, dhimmi! Sit! Stay! Roll over! Want a treat?! There you go – such a good dhimmi!

“Now, give up your minorities… there’s a good dhimmi, now!”

“Sit! Stay! Who’s a good dhimmi then?

“Quiet, now! Good dhimmi!”

“So obedient! I hardly have to tell them what to do!”

(All links courtesy of Da Blogfaddah)

Later: “Now, Dhimmi – quiet! Sit still!”

Multi-Tasking considered harmful – not

28. January 2008 · Comments Off on Multi-Tasking considered harmful – not · Categories: General

In which the author blames multi-tasking for

The Iraq quagmire. The mess in Afghanistan. Failure to capture Osama. A car crash. The breakup with his girlfriend. Problems with his new girlfriend. Sexual disappointment. Failure to obtain cheap airplane tickets to San Francisco. His bosses failure to pay attention during a face-to-face. Enron.

The scientists call this ruinous mental lurching “dual task interference,” or just plain bottlenecking. I call it the reason Keven Federline cost me a cheap flight to San Francisco. (It also explains, perhaps, why sexual threesomes are often disappointing.)

I just wish the military understood the concept. They might understand then why “walking and chewing gum” in Afghanistan and Iraq is no way to catch bin Laden.

Right. ‘Cause we sure ’nuff had problems fighting Japan and Germany at the same time, fifty years ago. For that matter I worked for units that did complicated and diverse stuff all the time. It is as if getting stuff done across the world with hundreds of thousands of troops is just a bit more complicated than pulling a fum-ducker and driving your car off the road while looking a nekkid photo of your girlfriend on your cell phone.

I’m sure it plays well around the campfire with all the scouts nodding wisely and learnedly. But I ain’t buying it.

………..

It is true that when you try to multi-task it becomes enormously more difficult to do anything that requires actual thought.

Adults compensate for this by turning off the phone, not looking at email, setting distractions aside and getting on with stuff.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

That’s What I LIke About Texas

28. January 2008 · Comments Off on That’s What I LIke About Texas · Categories: General

http://selenite.livejournal.com/207839.html

I ran into the lovely awamiba at Chikfila

Two things about Texas that I miss that I never thought I’d miss;

Chik-fil-a.

Jack in the Box.

Chik-fil-A for the food – about the best fast food you can find. And the cow advertisements – the idea of sentient cows selling out their fellow livestock (Eat Mor Chikin) tickles me.

Jack In the Box because the food is not at all good for you, it’s damned tasty, and Jack In the Box places don’t have playgrounds or pretend to be doing anything but moving fast food and getting people in and out.  And some of our first meals together were cheap burritos at Jack In The Box.

Mmmm. Burritos.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

It’s Really Frustrating

28. January 2008 · Comments Off on It’s Really Frustrating · Categories: General

The more that the current bunch of Presidential candidates talk, the LESS I want to vote for them.

I liked Thompson. He was a Federalist and had a clear vision of what the Feds should and shouldn’t do. He didn’t talk enough to win any primaries. So he’s gone.

McCain was the guy I wanted as a candidate in 2000. Bush’s folks basically covered him with slime, so he stopped running. He was my second choice this go-’round, but now he’s attacking Romney, who I don’t really like, but McCain’s current volley has me backing away from him.

Romney. He’s way too slick. He sounds good. He looks good. I immediately don’t trust him. He looks like a ’50s Dad coming home from the office. I keep waiting for his wife, with a perfect string of pearls around her neck, to look up at him and say, “Ward, don’t you think you were a little hard on the Beave last night?” It’s not because he’s Morman, although most of the Mormans I meet are the annoying ones knocking at our door just around dinner time to “talk about the bible.” Ummmm, no thanks, I’m going to eat, no, please don’t come back at another time.

Huckabee. This has nothing to do with what he says or what he stands for. I’m simply not voting for a man with a name that sounds like something Jodie Foster chanted in “Nell.” Okay, so the Christmas message bothered me too. Not because there was a cross in the background, but because he tried to pass it off as an accident that it was there. The man’s a preacher. If he’s going to deny that a cross is a cross, where is his conviction?

Giulliani. I just heard that he’s probably going to drop out and run with McCain if he can’t win Florida. I never saw the man running for office that I remember from 9/11. I’m not sure that man ever existed other than in my shocked memory of that day.

Clinton(s). Every time they open their mouths a voice in my head screams “LIAR!” The simple truth is I can’t hear a word they say because of that. I’m told I wouldn’t agree with them anyway. Hillary is a poor speaker with that annoying midwest nasality, and while Bill is one of the best speakers I’ve ever heard, when he’s in attack dog mode, he comes off as a tired Mel Gibson in “Lethal Weapon.”

Obama. To be honest, based on what I’ve seen in the debates, I’m not sure what he stands for other than to bash at Hillary. This endears him to me. The fact that he’s inexperienced in almost all areas supposedly needed to be President is actually a plus in my book. The “experienced” folks of the past 20 years haven’t impressed me all that much once all was said and done. The fact that Kennedy has endorsed him isn’t helping my opinion of him, but on the other hand, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Edwards. I stopped listening to him when he agreed to run with Kerry. Anyone who’s willing to compromise as much as he did in 2004 simply for the chance at being number two doesn’t have what it takes to be number one. Anything he does say is drowned out by what he did in 2004. The fact that the unions love him makes me shiver as well.  There’s word that he’s trying to strike a deal with Obama that if he drops out, he’ll get Attorney General from Obama. This man is NOT a President.

I still have no idea who I want as our next President. This pisses me off. I should be able to listen to them and become MORE inclined toward them. The more they talk, the less I like them. I hate to admit it, but I’m frightened for us.

Confessions of a Wireless Customer Service Rep, 080128

28. January 2008 · Comments Off on Confessions of a Wireless Customer Service Rep, 080128 · Categories: Technology

There are times when being a Customer Service Rep for Ginormous Worldwide Telecom is downright boring. Changing rate plans, selling phones, adding and subtracting features until it not only meets the customers’ needs but also their pocketbook. Those are pretty standard calls. We also have the folks who call up screaming their heads off because their “phone is broke and I just bought it and…” Nine times out of ten that can be fixed with a simple, “You know, at this point, cell phones are basically little computers. Do me a favor and turn it off…wait about five seconds and turn it back on…is it working now?” “Ummm, yeah, what’s that do?” “It reboots it. If the same problem happens again, try that first.”

Every now and then though I get great satisfaction out of helping a customer that no one else has seemed to be able to help out before. Now a lot of folks call in, over and over and over again, hoping they’ll find some sap to listen to their sob story and credit them back the ridiculous amount of overage that they accrued over the holidays. Most of the time, I’m going to tow the company line an advise them, just like the last four reps did, that those are valid charges and there’s no way we can credit them. Every now and then though, I get a customer who, for some reason or another, no one has LISTENED to before. That happened right before my night ended tonight, and I feel pretty good about it.  Earlier the customer had called in and the rep had told him that he had oodles of minutes remaining for the month. However, the customer went over by over 200 minutes when the cycle actually closed out. When he called in to dispute it, he was told, “Those are valid overages.” Once, twice, three times. He wanted to cancel and was sent to cancellations (or SAVES, the folks who do their best to keep the customer) who once again told him those were valid overages and wouldn’t refund him anything either. He cancelled service, pretty much fed up with us. The man was quite tenacious and had a strong feeling that he’d been wronged and called in one last time to see if I could help him. And I could.

Once all was said and done and after I’d simply played with the database a little, it was easy to see that at the time he was told he had oodles of minutes left, he was already over. A little further digging and I found out where that customer service rep had found that oodles of minutes number…from his previous month’s bill!!! That’s clearly our error and I was able to fix it for him, making him so happy that he had me restore his service immediately. Three lines. That’s potential profit the company was going to lose because no one would listen.

And like I said, I got a great deal of satisfaction out of that. Three previous reps AND a “SAVES Specialist” missed the simple fact that we gave him the wrong information from the wrong month’s bill. I’m very much in an, “I SO rule.” mood right now. I’m also disappointed in four of my coworkers, one of them deemed “The best of the best.”

As much as other reps are going to hate me for saying this, if you’re a customer, and you KNOW something’s wrong, keep calling until somebody hears exactly what you’re saying to them. Maybe, just maybe, you’ll have someone on the other end who’s willing to dig a little deeper and say, “Sir/Ma’am, that’s clearly our error, and I’m going to fix it for you.”

A Girl and her Grill

27. January 2008 · Comments Off on A Girl and her Grill · Categories: Domestic, Eat, Drink and be Merry, General, World

With the very last insurance payment for the late lamented Mitsubishi coupe (totaled last spring in a collision at the I-35/Division off-ramp) which was not received until after we returned home, don’t ask for the long and involved explanation of how this came to pass – Blondie went straight to Lowes’ and bought a gas barbeque grill. Then she hied herself to the local Humongously-Enormous Big-Ass Grocery store for all the grill impedimenta to go with it – including one of those little stands for doing beer-can chicken, which I would swear was invented by one of the clients from the inventions-consultant that I was working at when I began blogging, yeah on many years ago. (five and half, if you want to get really technical – not quite the dark ages, but nearly there.) The beer-can chicken came out well, BTW, but last night we did something else, entirely.

To celebrate Blondie’s birthday, we had a sort of garden-party dinner; catching the weather at just the right moment. Yesterday was mild and only tenuously cloudy, and Blondie cleaned up the garden and adorned it with candles, lanterns and tea-lights from her vast collection gleaned at various yard-sales and the Extremely Marked Down shelves at various retail outlets. She invited her co-workers and I invited mine; making a nice mixed crowd, since some of them knew each other. Dave the Computer Genius has sorted out the computers at Blondie’s place of employment on a couple of occasions. There didn’t seem to be any of those awkward pauses, and there was very little leftover food. Always reassuring, that – even better, no one had to go to the emergency room for treatment of food poisoning. Look, that is always a worry, when you have people over and feed them. Projectile vomiting – not a memory to hold on to, although I seem to have retained mine for all those AFRTS food-safety spots.

Anyway, we did a very nice pasta salad, from one of the Barefoot Contessa cookbooks, and a splendid barbequed chicken – also from the same source. My sister, Pippy is a fan, pointing out that the beauty of Ina Gartons’ cookbooks are that just about everything can be done in advance. All we had to do for the chicken was throw it on the grill. This is the recipe, and it was splendid! We have enough that we will do “pulled chicken BBQ” sandwiches tonight.
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Doldrums

25. January 2008 · Comments Off on Doldrums · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Rant, Veteran's Affairs, World

I read – in a couple of places on the intertubules or overheard on a TV fluffy-news item sometime in the last couple of days that some genius has deduced that mid-January is without peer, the most depressing part of the year. Forget about Christmas, and such moveable feasts such as post-natal depression, the suckage-factor of this time of the year cannot be measured with current technology. At least he got some news coverage out of this blinding flash of the obvious.

And this is actually rather bizarrely comforting – at least I know it just isn’t me. Other people are feeling the great dreary weight of generalized malaise and suckage too. I’d be cheered right up, except for my own accumulation of post-Christmas blah.

Let me count the ways, enumerate the bleakness, have a nice wallow in it… at the very least, it gives me a nice blog-entry topic. Actually I haven’t felt much like blogging, either producing free bloggy ice cream or reading anybody elses free bloggy ice cream. Some of the best have quit, pulled the plug, nothing more to say, and everyone – including me seems to have said it all before; much better, with more zest and with a great deal less laborious effort. It all seems terribly stale, flat, pointless, joyless.

The presidential contest 2008 promised to be unutterably depressing and pointless; Her Inevitableness versus The Fresh Prince of Illinois. Yuck. Bill Clinton. Double-Yuck. Nancy Pelosi. Triple-Yuck.

Even the discussion groups I participate in, the other members appear to be enervated and depressed. Days go by without any comments or new topics. I am winding up a project for the Independent Authors Guild, to collect up a number of books by our members to donate to the BAMC patients’ library. Since before Christmas, authors have been mailing books to my address so that I will be able to deliver one big box of them to the volunteer librarian. Getting boxes of books in the mail almost every day – what could be more exciting? But I haven’t been able to generate much interest in this outside of the contributors themselves… and the library may already have enough book donations anyway. Delivering yet another box of them to BAMC just feels like one more onerous chore.

I had a spike in sales from nice book review and instalanche around the first of the month, but nothing much since then. There are six or seven other copies of “To Truckee’s Trail” that I sent to people in September on promise of an eventual review, but no review produced to date. I’ve pretty much given up on following up. Just as a note, the cost of those review copies come out of my budget. No review means I might as well have made a nice bonfire and burnt them in the fireplace, except for this way I can claim the expense on my income tax.

Another cause for malaise – income-tax filing time. I know the deadline is April, but I like to beat the rush.

Received a rejection from a publisher on the first volume of the Texas-German trilogy, from a place that didn’t even have the courtesy to even send a letter saying no thanks. I don’t know why this annoyed me so much, but it did –having to hunt them down and ask seemed very much like waiting to hear the results of a medical test. You wait and wait and wait, never get a call… and then when you finally call and ask, they tell you “Sorry, you’re dying from the ingrown toenail. Have a nice day and best of luck.” This is why writers go mad, although I would swear a lot of them started out that way anyway.

The weather is dreary, it’s cold. I’m not making any money, from the book or much else, the dogs are doing their best to kill me on the morning walkies, and I don’t much want to do anything else than sit down and pound out another half-chapter for the last book of the trilogy. It’s a refuge in a way, just about the one thing that I can control. If great writing comes out of misery and depression – it’s going to be a pretty damn good read.

Confessions of a Wireless Customer Service Rep, 080125

25. January 2008 · Comments Off on Confessions of a Wireless Customer Service Rep, 080125 · Categories: General, Stupidity, Technology

Working for Ginormous Worldwide Telecom can sometimes be a chore. Especially if you have a sense of personal responsibility.

Right now, cell phone companies sell cell phones at hugely discounted prices, sometimes even giving them away, in return for a commitment from the customer to stick around for X amount of time. If you break that commitment, there’s a fiscal penalty. There’s always the choice to buy a phone at full price with no commitment. People don’t normally choose to buy a phone at full price, they chose to take the discounted price and agree to the commitment.

Right now, cell phone companies sell service plans for X amount of minutes. You can sometimes get drastically reduced rates on your service plans if you agree to stick around for X amount of time. This, it seems to me, is a good thing. If I know I’m getting good service in my area from a company and they’re willing to sell me more minutes for less money, or even the same amount of minutes for less money, in return for a commitment, I’m all about that.

That may change one of these days. If it does, you can blame California.

If this class action lawsuit goes through, and the folks who have filed it win, you can bet that we’ll all suffer for it. There will be no more discounted cell phones and there will be no more reduced-rate service plans. We’ll all pay more because some folks who can’t read a contract before they sign it or who refuse to honor a contract after they’ve signed it, decided that they’re special and the rules that the rest of us live by don’t apply to them.

I Was Sad to Hear

23. January 2008 · Comments Off on I Was Sad to Hear · Categories: That's Entertainment!

…that actor Heath Ledger died yesterday afternoon. Of course the press was salivating over how he died and whether or not he died of an overdose. Were Ashley and Mary Kate involved? Seriously, i could care less.

I was sad because I liked him in everything I saw him in. From “10 Things I Hate About You” to “A Knight’s Tale” to “The Patriot” to “The Brother’s Grimm” I simply thought he did some good work and I’m bummed he won’t be doing more. I’m looking forward to his take on The Joker in the next Batman movie. It takes serious balls to take on a role that Jack Nicholson has put his stamp on.

I never regretted seeing one of his movies. That says a lot.

Ever-Accelerating Waltz

21. January 2008 · Comments Off on Ever-Accelerating Waltz · Categories: Domestic, General, Home Front, Veteran's Affairs, World

I’ve been lax in blogging the last couple of weeks – three reasons for this. One – slogging away at the epic known as Barsetshire with Cypress Trees and a Lot of Sidearms, for I have reached a Very Interesting Chapter, one that I had thought a lot about – so the narrative does not have to be yanked out of my consciousness, inch by reluctant inch, like pulling a large boa constrictor out of a tight-fitting drain. I have spent four or five chapters setting up all the characters in place on the literary chessboard, establishing motivations, dabbling on the foreshadowing and setting up the conditions for what happens now. It’s a lightening-fast raid by a Comanche war party, which results in death for two characters and the kidnapping of another characters’ children. I am not planning on being particularly politically correct in describing the aftermath of the raid. I imagine Mom’s English-professor friend who has been reading the story all along will be terribly freaked out by this development. There’s no getting around the fact that the Comanches treated adult captives with a brutality that can really only be described as psychotic.

Second reason: my various employers – Dave the Computer Guy, and The Worlds’ Tallest ADHD child have gotten their respective post-holiday business plans in order and for the past two or three weeks I have been working almost every day for one or the other. The Worlds’ Tallest finally got the last little scrap of his office organized. Heretofore, he had been in the habit of just scraping off the top of his desk whenever it reached an unbearable degree of clutter and dumping everything in a file box. When I first began working for him, more than a year ago, there were more than a dozen of such boxes piled up under the living room table… and naturally he would be in a tizzy because he could never find anything; a file, a post-it note reminder, a scribbled telephone number, last weeks farm and ranch property classifieds, a past-due bill from the utility company. You name it – he couldn’t find it. But over Christmas, he sorted out the last two boxes – mostly by throwing out the contents on the very fair assumption that if he hadn’t missed anything in them in a year, than there wasn’t much important therein. The file cabinets are purged, the desk-tops are clean, he found a whole case of copy paper buried in another closet, and I have almost trained him to put receipts into a manila envelope in the wire file-rack on my desk instead of leaving them crumpled up in the most unexpected places. So he is off to take pictures of various ranch properties, and on the morrow I will start making up nice little one-page write-ups for each. Which is what I was supposed to be doing, all along, but never mind.

Dave the Computer Guy is helping one of his friends launch a carpet-cleaning business, in addition to the computer-repair and website stuff, which he runs from his home. Yes, he is diversifying his vast corporate empire; and I am doing his market-mailing and general office support. He went all-out and set up a private office for me, in an attempt to untangle the office stuff from the computer-repair stuff and the carpet-cleaning stuff. They were formerly jumbled all together in the second bedroom of a double-wide in a trailer-park on O’Connor Road. Yes, I have achieved the dignity once more of a private office, but alas, no corner view – no window, for the office was formerly the walk-in closet. It has worked out rather well, actually – for it is just large enough to accommodate an L-shaped worktop, with shelves above and below, a single office chair and myself. The neat thing is that I can reach everything, just by scooting the chair about six inches one way or the other.

Third reason: Not much interested in the spectacle of Her Inevitableness and the Fresh Prince of Illinois slugging it out, other than relishing the irony. It’s gonna be a long political season, and I’d like to pace myself.

Another Fine Mess

17. January 2008 · Comments Off on Another Fine Mess · Categories: General, General Nonsense, GWOT, Home Front, Media Matters Not, Military, Rant, sarcasm, Veteran's Affairs, War

Oh, so it looks like the ever beloved New York Times has nobly volunteered itself to be the Piniata o’the Month for unleashing yet again – in the words of Maxwell Smart “the old Krazed Killer Veteran Story”. You know, the same old, same old pathetic round of stories that those of us over a certain age saw in the 1970s – and not just in the news but on every damn cop show; the freak who got a taste for killin’ and brought it home with him after the war. Honest to key-rist, NYTimes-people – what is your assignments editor these days smoking these days? I am a little late to joining the predictable pile-on from every quarter, which looks like it includes just about everyone short of the VFW.

At least it’s nice to know legacy media drones can do a google search these days and assemble a laundry list of whatever it was they were looking for in the intertubules. A step up from a couple of years ago, all things considered. But… and that is a big but there, almost as big as a Michael Moore butt…it is just that – a laundry list of incidents where someone who was a military veteran of a tour in Afghanistan or Iraq was subsequently involved in or thought to be involved in a murder. Or manslaughter, or something.

No context, no analysis – just OMFG, the Krazed Killer Veterans are Koming (and it’s all the military’s fault!) Look, NYTimes-people, coincidence is not co-f**king causality. Sometimes, it is just a co-incidence, and laying on a smarmy layer of sympathy and glycerin tears over the poor *sniff* innocent *sniff* widdle misdiagnosed *sob* veterans does not make your s**t-sandwich of a story any more palatable. Not to veterans and their families.

Not only can we remember this kind of story post-Vietnam, but the very senior among us can remember it post-WWII. I am reliably informed that there was even a certain amount of heartburn over an anticipated propensity for free-lance violence on the part of returning veterans from the Civil War – and no, I will be not sidetracked into a discussion of how the still-expanding western frontier managed to provide an outlet for all of those Billy Yanks and Johnny Rebs seeking post-war excitement.

My point would be that when this same-old-same-old went down post-hostilities every other damn time, the experience of military service was a bit more evenly spread among the general male population. The general reader had enough friends and relations in his immediate circle to take the whole Krazed Killer Veterans are Koming narrative with a large handful of salt. They knew enough veterans personally to not take what they read in the papers as necessarily the whole truth, and to put the sensational stories of post-war veteran crime into context. And they could blow them off as just another grab at the headlines.

But service in the military these days draws on a smaller sub-set of the population – and unfortunately that set does not include the media or cultural elite. Tripe like the NYT’s Krazed Killer Veteran – if it is not challenged and countered robustly- will soon solidify into conventional wisdom, just like it did with Vietnam veterans. And that, my little scribbling chickadees at the NY Times – is not going to happen again. Welcome to attitude adjustment, Times-folks. I can promise a real interesting and educational time for you over the next couple of days. Take notes. They will come in handy, especially for the next time you are assigned a story about military veterans.

Later: (Update from Iowahawk, too delicious to leave unlinked. Beware, NYTimes- this one is gonna leave a mark!)

Still later: And so will this blast from Col. Peters. My advice to the NYTimes writers is to load up on Midol, as well as taking notes.

American Idol Season 7

16. January 2008 · Comments Off on American Idol Season 7 · Categories: That's Entertainment!

I don’t know why I expected more actual talent on the first night…but I did…and now all I can say is that I’m grateful as I can be to the inventors of the DVR. I was going to record all of the episodes and just ff through the bad ones but I think I’m just going to skip the sucktitude all together and wait until they get to the actual competition where there’s at least a chance of hearing more actual singing than seeing some fat guy get his chest and back waxed.

Hey, I’ve got movies, I’ve got some of my favorite shows on DVD. I refuse to let the writers’ strike drag me into reality hell…not as long as there’s Discovery Channel.

Hey, who knows, maybe if this keeps up, America will start turning off the TV and reading more…what? It could happen.

Just Heard From Robert Ferrigno

16. January 2008 · Comments Off on Just Heard From Robert Ferrigno · Categories: Fun With Islam, That's Entertainment!

Received an email from Robert Ferrigno yesterday. “Sins Of The Assassin,” the sequel to “Prayers For The Assassin,” is due to be released in February. I can’t wait. What I’m expecting is a lot of information on Islam, wrapped in an action packed thriller that will keep me up way too late waiting to see what happens next.

What I liked about “Prayers For The Assassin” was that it showed Islam from all sides. From the whack jobs who want to destroy us, to the good people of that faith that are desperately trying to do the next right thing.

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