Thursday, April 07, 2005
Me: 1 Husband: 0
Almost a year ago, I saw an ad for a very unusual digital watch that was on sale for a good price, and my husband agreed to pick it up for me on his way home from work; as is often the case, the watch came in packaging that you need power tools to get into, probably made by the same people who put the wrappers on CD's, so I asked him to wrestle it from the box and set it for me... little knowing what doom was about to befall us.
Normally, setting a digital watch takes less than a minute; with this watch, though, quite a few minutes went by, and he was still struggling with it, despite the fact that he'd broken the sacred code of manhood and was looking at the instruction booklet... and we now know that it's a BAD sign when a watch is so complicated that it needs a BOOKLET to show you how to set it. My husband is a whiz with technical things, and this watch was meant for teenagers (I don't like "adult" watches, so shoot me), so it just didn't seem POSSIBLE that he couldn't get it set, but the battle went on and on and ON; finally, he pronounced it done, and all seemed well... until the top of the hour, when the stupid thing let out a loud beep.
To many people, I'm sure, this wouldn't matter, and might even be desirable, but an hourly beep would drive me NUTS, would be rude to have going off at social gatherings, and would wake me up every hour if the watch were in my room where I'd naturally expect to store it. My husband went back to work, and eventually announced that he'd turned it off; at the next turn of the hour... beep. He went at it again, and pronounced it fixed; at the turn of the next hour... beep. Day after day, round after round, he tried to shut the feature off, and failed every time. Weeks, and finally MONTHS, went by. The watch sat in its box in one of his work areas, aka the guest bathroom, and he kept promising to work on it some more, but of course never did, because he'd already been through the entire booklet countless times and tried every control sequence countless times... or so he said.
Eventually, the cool new watch that I'd never been able to wear dropped off my radar, as our lives are busy and there are always 50 emergencies to contend with on any given day, and that brings us to today, nearly a YEAR later. I'd gone into the bathroom to deal with an unflushed toilet (my husband apparently believes that every time he flushes it shortens his life, sigh), and I saw that tauntingly-cheerful box, and the urge to give it a shot struck me; I didn't hold out much hope, as I have no ability at all with this sort of thing, and my husband had essentially declared it un-doable, but he was asleep and wouldn't see my efforts, so I sat down with the watch and the booklet and started pushing buttons.
The booklet contains instructions for setting a long list of watches made by this company; that shouldn't be an issue, but it turns out that the instructions for each function have been randomly distributed among sections, so I had to try the button sequences for EVERY model of watch to find what worked for whatever aspect of the functions I was trying to alter. I managed to reset the day and date, and the minutes, without any difficulty, after stumbling unexpectedly onto the set mode for them; that was the only progress I made for some time. Weirdly, the stopwatch kept turning itself on, and sometimes paused before running again; eventually, I figured out how to stop and clear it, which I needed to do a bunch more times. Even more weirdly, the alarm started turning itself on, which was freaky as it had never been SET. When I finally had both of those things off at the same time, I was about to return to my search for the elusive kill-the-chime control... when I saw that the darned watch had switched itself to 24-hour time!! Another protracted trudge through all the button combos ensued, until I discovered, quite by accident, that the claims for every model that you could toggle back and forth between 12-hour and 24-hour time were LIES, and that in fact the only way to get from one to the other was to keep advancing the hour until you got through the entire day, at which time it would switch to the other system; this means that in the fall, when the time changes, instead of having to go through an entire day's worth of hours to reset the watch, I'll have to go through TWO days... VERY poor design, even by the standards of the rest of the functions.
So then I was back to searching for the chime-off control; there was one button pattern that claimed to affect both the alarm and the chime depending on how many times you pushed the final button, but, although the alarm icon went on and off, there was nothing to indicate that the chime had been toggled-this was where my husband had been fooled, I felt sure. Determined to find some other reference to the chime, I gritted my teeth and went through EVERY set of instructions for EVERY feature and EVERY model... and there it was. It showed how you could view the alarm setting without having it try to reset (which should NOT be necessary), and claimed that if you pushed yet another button while in that screen, you could look at the day-of-the-week things at the top of the screen and see if the chime was on or off based on whether THEY were on or off; this was incorrect, it turned out, because if the chime was on those things at the top of the screen would already be on when you got there... but the button they'd said to push turned out to TOGGLE the chime!! I tested it, both on and off, and it WORKED!! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOO!!
That was one of the great moments of the year, but the best part of it came when my husband got up from his nap and got told the story, ending with him having to accept that *I*, with a minuscule % of his technical ability and instinct, had succeeded where he'd failed, and in a tiny fraction of the time he'd spent on failing. Hence the title of this essay. :-)
Normally, setting a digital watch takes less than a minute; with this watch, though, quite a few minutes went by, and he was still struggling with it, despite the fact that he'd broken the sacred code of manhood and was looking at the instruction booklet... and we now know that it's a BAD sign when a watch is so complicated that it needs a BOOKLET to show you how to set it. My husband is a whiz with technical things, and this watch was meant for teenagers (I don't like "adult" watches, so shoot me), so it just didn't seem POSSIBLE that he couldn't get it set, but the battle went on and on and ON; finally, he pronounced it done, and all seemed well... until the top of the hour, when the stupid thing let out a loud beep.
To many people, I'm sure, this wouldn't matter, and might even be desirable, but an hourly beep would drive me NUTS, would be rude to have going off at social gatherings, and would wake me up every hour if the watch were in my room where I'd naturally expect to store it. My husband went back to work, and eventually announced that he'd turned it off; at the next turn of the hour... beep. He went at it again, and pronounced it fixed; at the turn of the next hour... beep. Day after day, round after round, he tried to shut the feature off, and failed every time. Weeks, and finally MONTHS, went by. The watch sat in its box in one of his work areas, aka the guest bathroom, and he kept promising to work on it some more, but of course never did, because he'd already been through the entire booklet countless times and tried every control sequence countless times... or so he said.
Eventually, the cool new watch that I'd never been able to wear dropped off my radar, as our lives are busy and there are always 50 emergencies to contend with on any given day, and that brings us to today, nearly a YEAR later. I'd gone into the bathroom to deal with an unflushed toilet (my husband apparently believes that every time he flushes it shortens his life, sigh), and I saw that tauntingly-cheerful box, and the urge to give it a shot struck me; I didn't hold out much hope, as I have no ability at all with this sort of thing, and my husband had essentially declared it un-doable, but he was asleep and wouldn't see my efforts, so I sat down with the watch and the booklet and started pushing buttons.
The booklet contains instructions for setting a long list of watches made by this company; that shouldn't be an issue, but it turns out that the instructions for each function have been randomly distributed among sections, so I had to try the button sequences for EVERY model of watch to find what worked for whatever aspect of the functions I was trying to alter. I managed to reset the day and date, and the minutes, without any difficulty, after stumbling unexpectedly onto the set mode for them; that was the only progress I made for some time. Weirdly, the stopwatch kept turning itself on, and sometimes paused before running again; eventually, I figured out how to stop and clear it, which I needed to do a bunch more times. Even more weirdly, the alarm started turning itself on, which was freaky as it had never been SET. When I finally had both of those things off at the same time, I was about to return to my search for the elusive kill-the-chime control... when I saw that the darned watch had switched itself to 24-hour time!! Another protracted trudge through all the button combos ensued, until I discovered, quite by accident, that the claims for every model that you could toggle back and forth between 12-hour and 24-hour time were LIES, and that in fact the only way to get from one to the other was to keep advancing the hour until you got through the entire day, at which time it would switch to the other system; this means that in the fall, when the time changes, instead of having to go through an entire day's worth of hours to reset the watch, I'll have to go through TWO days... VERY poor design, even by the standards of the rest of the functions.
So then I was back to searching for the chime-off control; there was one button pattern that claimed to affect both the alarm and the chime depending on how many times you pushed the final button, but, although the alarm icon went on and off, there was nothing to indicate that the chime had been toggled-this was where my husband had been fooled, I felt sure. Determined to find some other reference to the chime, I gritted my teeth and went through EVERY set of instructions for EVERY feature and EVERY model... and there it was. It showed how you could view the alarm setting without having it try to reset (which should NOT be necessary), and claimed that if you pushed yet another button while in that screen, you could look at the day-of-the-week things at the top of the screen and see if the chime was on or off based on whether THEY were on or off; this was incorrect, it turned out, because if the chime was on those things at the top of the screen would already be on when you got there... but the button they'd said to push turned out to TOGGLE the chime!! I tested it, both on and off, and it WORKED!! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOO!!
That was one of the great moments of the year, but the best part of it came when my husband got up from his nap and got told the story, ending with him having to accept that *I*, with a minuscule % of his technical ability and instinct, had succeeded where he'd failed, and in a tiny fraction of the time he'd spent on failing. Hence the title of this essay. :-)
Wednesday, April 06, 2005
Where did the nightmares go?
I've had multiple nightmares every night for as long as I can remember, right on back to early childhood... except that I've just recently started noticing that I'm NOT anymore. I'm still having SOME, but not nearly as many, not nearly as grisly, in fact not grisly at all with few exceptions, and not every night; not to sound ungrateful, because I'm VERY grateful, believe me, but what's going on here? I'm the same person, living the same life in the same surroundings... why has this lifelong pattern radically changed?
I've had that question popping in and out of my mind since I started noticing the nightmare decline, although never when I had the time to devote any real thought to it, naturally, but today I DID think about it, and it belatedly occurred to me that the only thing that's changed that could have caused this major reduction over the past year or so is... you guessed it; I started writing this blog.
Why should blogging be a cure for nightmares? One reason is that I write my entries right before bedtime, about whatever's uppermost in my thoughts, and I think that clears my mind, tones down my emotional intensity on those days when what I'm blogging about is upsetting, and reduces my stress level by making me concentrate on choosing the right words and struggling to type them properly... all of which would logically lead to less turbulent dreams. The other, and probably bigger, thing is that by having this blog, and thus being forced to focus on my spirituality by the necessity of recording its expansion and clarification, I've become vastly calmer and more grounded; I've written about the change in my emotional life (and it's a BIG change, because I've always been tightly wound and highly strung) due to my increasing spirituality before, and that process has continued, such that I keep realizing more and more often that things that would have given me a heart attack before don't bother me now, but I hadn't made the connection to the fading of my nightmares until today, perhaps because it's been such a gradual process, and because I've trained myself to ignore my dreams for the most part, to keep the nightmares from casting a pall over my waking life.
Clearly, there's something about opening yourself up to spirituality that brings positive, healing energy into your mind; the religious talk about feeling this sort of thing because God (Allah, etc) is caring for them or handling things for them, but *I* don't have a deity to point to, so it looks like just having spiritual awareness is what does the trick. This makes me think that there could be a basic goodness about karma, that on the whole it's not a neutral thing but is... nurturing? Could the engine of karma be not quite "blind," but rather predisposed to help us, at least on an emotional level? Or, does being spiritual radiate positive energy that merely draws more of the same? I'm going to go sleep on it...
I've had that question popping in and out of my mind since I started noticing the nightmare decline, although never when I had the time to devote any real thought to it, naturally, but today I DID think about it, and it belatedly occurred to me that the only thing that's changed that could have caused this major reduction over the past year or so is... you guessed it; I started writing this blog.
Why should blogging be a cure for nightmares? One reason is that I write my entries right before bedtime, about whatever's uppermost in my thoughts, and I think that clears my mind, tones down my emotional intensity on those days when what I'm blogging about is upsetting, and reduces my stress level by making me concentrate on choosing the right words and struggling to type them properly... all of which would logically lead to less turbulent dreams. The other, and probably bigger, thing is that by having this blog, and thus being forced to focus on my spirituality by the necessity of recording its expansion and clarification, I've become vastly calmer and more grounded; I've written about the change in my emotional life (and it's a BIG change, because I've always been tightly wound and highly strung) due to my increasing spirituality before, and that process has continued, such that I keep realizing more and more often that things that would have given me a heart attack before don't bother me now, but I hadn't made the connection to the fading of my nightmares until today, perhaps because it's been such a gradual process, and because I've trained myself to ignore my dreams for the most part, to keep the nightmares from casting a pall over my waking life.
Clearly, there's something about opening yourself up to spirituality that brings positive, healing energy into your mind; the religious talk about feeling this sort of thing because God (Allah, etc) is caring for them or handling things for them, but *I* don't have a deity to point to, so it looks like just having spiritual awareness is what does the trick. This makes me think that there could be a basic goodness about karma, that on the whole it's not a neutral thing but is... nurturing? Could the engine of karma be not quite "blind," but rather predisposed to help us, at least on an emotional level? Or, does being spiritual radiate positive energy that merely draws more of the same? I'm going to go sleep on it...
Tuesday, April 05, 2005
The color of karma
You know the color the sky gets around the end of twilight, that deep, soft blue with alot of violet in it? That color that you virtually never see anywhere else, although we use every other color in the world in our clothes and such... have you ever wondered WHY that gorgeous blue is almost never used, not even in paintings that depict twilight? It's as if our minds just skate by it on the way to the standard sky blues, as if it wasn't quite real... or as if we've got some lingering instinctual fear of it, because it signals that the dangers of night are just a few minutes away.
I looked up at the sky at just the right moment today, and saw that color, and it gave me CHILLS. It gave the sky a look of infinite depth, and of substance, as if it were made of something that would feel plush and velvety. It suggested dreamy music full of pan flutes and windchimes. It hinted at the scent of sweet, musky flowers that only bloom at night for a few days out of the year. It was the closest I've ever come to synesthesia, and it was astonishing to get all of that from a color.
Somehow, it came into my mind after that that this was the color of karma, this rare color that has no name, that we couldn't really describe to anyone who hadn't seen it, but that everyone who HAS seen it knows what you're referring to as soon as you talk about it. I know it sounds a little goofy, but people supposedly pick up spiritual vibrations from all sorts of things, including colors... hmmmmmmmmm, I wonder what those who believe in the color/spirituality connection say about this color, or at least the colors closest to it on the spectrum... I foresee research on that topic in the near future.
I looked up at the sky at just the right moment today, and saw that color, and it gave me CHILLS. It gave the sky a look of infinite depth, and of substance, as if it were made of something that would feel plush and velvety. It suggested dreamy music full of pan flutes and windchimes. It hinted at the scent of sweet, musky flowers that only bloom at night for a few days out of the year. It was the closest I've ever come to synesthesia, and it was astonishing to get all of that from a color.
Somehow, it came into my mind after that that this was the color of karma, this rare color that has no name, that we couldn't really describe to anyone who hadn't seen it, but that everyone who HAS seen it knows what you're referring to as soon as you talk about it. I know it sounds a little goofy, but people supposedly pick up spiritual vibrations from all sorts of things, including colors... hmmmmmmmmm, I wonder what those who believe in the color/spirituality connection say about this color, or at least the colors closest to it on the spectrum... I foresee research on that topic in the near future.
Monday, April 04, 2005
What can we inherit?
Our hair color, our eye color, a tendency towards chubbiness or a quick temper... but how about a scary experience your grandfather had? I don't mean could such a thing influence his behavior as an adult, and thus his children, and thus you... I mean can the actual experience somehow be passed along to you in some way analogous to how he might pass on his high cheekbones, via some spiritual or karmic equivalent of DNA? I know that sounds freakily new age-y even for ME, but I got this from the sermon of my favorite Christian religious leader, Joel Osteen!! :-O
The full story was that a boy in a loving family started having savage panic attacks at school centering around his certainty that his parents weren't ever going to pick him up; his parents had to be called constantly, first to reassure him over the phone, and then to start coming to get him... and they couldn't figure out why it was happening. The boy's dad told his own father about the situation, and grandpa had the answer; when he'd been a little boy, his daddy had died, and he'd been so terrified of losing his mother too that he couldn't be separated from her... when she'd walk him to school, he'd cry so hard that she'd often bring him back home with her. He believed that, somehow, that experience had been transmitted to his grandson, and that that was the cause of the child's intense and groundless fears.
Sounds impossible, doesn't it? Osteen used it as an example of how things can be "passed along spiritually" down through the generations; I don't think this is a standard Christian belief, as he told the audience he wasn't trying to be "scary" rather than quoting something from the Bible as he usually would after telling a story, which makes it sound like he was NOT describing something they'd have been familiar with. Even if this IS just something he came up with all on his own, his instincts have shown themselves to be dead-on so many times that I'm willing to give some thought to the topic; I'll be asking a hard-core Christian friend about it, too, just to cover all the bases.
The Osteen sermon reminded me of an article I read a few years ago by a woman who developed an excruciating pain in her foot that no doctor could diagnose or cure. One day, she did a past-life regression, and discovered to her amazement that she'd once been a slave who had run away, been caught, and been tortured by having a hot iron applied to, you guessed it, the exact spot on her foot that she'd been getting so much pain from. She never had the pain again.
And THAT reminded me of a scene from "Stand on Zanzibar" where one African-American man, through a process I no longer remember clearly, discovers that another African-American man has a sort of "muscle memory" of the pain a slave ancestor of his had from having his hand sawed off; that novel is a work of FICTION, yes, but Brunner is making reference, I think, to the actual beliefs held by many traditional African cultures that the suffering of one's ancestors CAN cause one to suffer in some mystical way.
And THAT made me think of how some people who recall past lives say they have physical manifestations, such as birthmarks, of where they had serious injuries in those lives.
All of these things point to the transmission of something, some energy presumably, that "remembers" pain, both physical and emotional, to future generations, whether by biological descent or by hitching a ride with the soul as it moves from body to body; I see nothing that counts as evidence one way or the other, but the diversity of cultures that believe some version of this concept tells me that I need to accept that it's a possibility, and give some serious thought to how it might work... so I will.
I ask karma for additional input and/or epiphanies on this topic.
The full story was that a boy in a loving family started having savage panic attacks at school centering around his certainty that his parents weren't ever going to pick him up; his parents had to be called constantly, first to reassure him over the phone, and then to start coming to get him... and they couldn't figure out why it was happening. The boy's dad told his own father about the situation, and grandpa had the answer; when he'd been a little boy, his daddy had died, and he'd been so terrified of losing his mother too that he couldn't be separated from her... when she'd walk him to school, he'd cry so hard that she'd often bring him back home with her. He believed that, somehow, that experience had been transmitted to his grandson, and that that was the cause of the child's intense and groundless fears.
Sounds impossible, doesn't it? Osteen used it as an example of how things can be "passed along spiritually" down through the generations; I don't think this is a standard Christian belief, as he told the audience he wasn't trying to be "scary" rather than quoting something from the Bible as he usually would after telling a story, which makes it sound like he was NOT describing something they'd have been familiar with. Even if this IS just something he came up with all on his own, his instincts have shown themselves to be dead-on so many times that I'm willing to give some thought to the topic; I'll be asking a hard-core Christian friend about it, too, just to cover all the bases.
The Osteen sermon reminded me of an article I read a few years ago by a woman who developed an excruciating pain in her foot that no doctor could diagnose or cure. One day, she did a past-life regression, and discovered to her amazement that she'd once been a slave who had run away, been caught, and been tortured by having a hot iron applied to, you guessed it, the exact spot on her foot that she'd been getting so much pain from. She never had the pain again.
And THAT reminded me of a scene from "Stand on Zanzibar" where one African-American man, through a process I no longer remember clearly, discovers that another African-American man has a sort of "muscle memory" of the pain a slave ancestor of his had from having his hand sawed off; that novel is a work of FICTION, yes, but Brunner is making reference, I think, to the actual beliefs held by many traditional African cultures that the suffering of one's ancestors CAN cause one to suffer in some mystical way.
And THAT made me think of how some people who recall past lives say they have physical manifestations, such as birthmarks, of where they had serious injuries in those lives.
All of these things point to the transmission of something, some energy presumably, that "remembers" pain, both physical and emotional, to future generations, whether by biological descent or by hitching a ride with the soul as it moves from body to body; I see nothing that counts as evidence one way or the other, but the diversity of cultures that believe some version of this concept tells me that I need to accept that it's a possibility, and give some serious thought to how it might work... so I will.
I ask karma for additional input and/or epiphanies on this topic.
Sunday, April 03, 2005
Odds and ends
Squirrel babies update: My little sweetheart was less skittish today than she'd been recently, and was willing to vacuum up lots of walnuts while being petted. I held the nuts high enough to get her to stand up, and, determined to find hard evidence of motherhood, began gingerly searching through the fur on her underside (ignoring my husband's comments about my being a "lesbian squirrel molester"), and... YES!! Although she didn't seem distended the way I'd expect from a lactating creature, she DID have a half-dozen clearly enlarged teats, which means that she MUST be nursing babies; HOORAY!! I wish I knew how many there are, and how they're doing, and if there are any predators lurking around, and if they're getting enough milk, and if they're warm enough, and if they'll be willing to let me pet them... I can't WAIT to see them. :-)
If you send someone merchandise through the mail that they haven't ordered, they're not legally required to either pay for it or send it back; many people don't realize this, so it used to be a common scam for companies to do mass mailings of stuff in the hopes that enough people would pay rather than hassling with returns to make it worthwhile. Eventually, these crooks, who were of course making it look like people DID have to pay for or return the merchandise, started being prosecuted, and the practice died out... until today, when I got a DVD in the mail from a charity that I seriously doubt I'll be sending any more $ to, with a bunch of paperwork repeatedly telling me that I had to send $, and sign up to get more DVD's in the bargain, or send it back. I had no intention of doing either, of course, even for a charity, and I was getting pretty worked up at the thought of the people that'd be fooled or guilt-tripped into playing along... and then I saw it. On the back page of the flashy brochure that came with the paperwork was a little one-line disclaimer that you didn't actually have to either pay or return; this protects them from mail fraud charges, but in my mind it just isn't enough.
And finally: Today, the camcorder found another use besides taking endless footage of the squirrel eating. My husband had laid down on the floor to watch TV, and, as always, was asleep within 30 seconds... in nice bright light, which caused a light to go on over MY head. I got the camera, got it running, got it right in his face, and recorded about 5 minutes of him blasting out his deafening snores, BWAHAHAHAHA!! When he woke up, I prodded him into playing it all back on the computer, and for the 1st time in his life he was treated to what *I* am all too familiar with... and turned an amusing shade of crimson in his embarrassment as he listened in disbelief to the amount of noise he generates. He said that he could get me a wav file with a sample of his snoring from the video file, so I can share it online; keep your fingers crossed!! ;-)
If you send someone merchandise through the mail that they haven't ordered, they're not legally required to either pay for it or send it back; many people don't realize this, so it used to be a common scam for companies to do mass mailings of stuff in the hopes that enough people would pay rather than hassling with returns to make it worthwhile. Eventually, these crooks, who were of course making it look like people DID have to pay for or return the merchandise, started being prosecuted, and the practice died out... until today, when I got a DVD in the mail from a charity that I seriously doubt I'll be sending any more $ to, with a bunch of paperwork repeatedly telling me that I had to send $, and sign up to get more DVD's in the bargain, or send it back. I had no intention of doing either, of course, even for a charity, and I was getting pretty worked up at the thought of the people that'd be fooled or guilt-tripped into playing along... and then I saw it. On the back page of the flashy brochure that came with the paperwork was a little one-line disclaimer that you didn't actually have to either pay or return; this protects them from mail fraud charges, but in my mind it just isn't enough.
And finally: Today, the camcorder found another use besides taking endless footage of the squirrel eating. My husband had laid down on the floor to watch TV, and, as always, was asleep within 30 seconds... in nice bright light, which caused a light to go on over MY head. I got the camera, got it running, got it right in his face, and recorded about 5 minutes of him blasting out his deafening snores, BWAHAHAHAHA!! When he woke up, I prodded him into playing it all back on the computer, and for the 1st time in his life he was treated to what *I* am all too familiar with... and turned an amusing shade of crimson in his embarrassment as he listened in disbelief to the amount of noise he generates. He said that he could get me a wav file with a sample of his snoring from the video file, so I can share it online; keep your fingers crossed!! ;-)
Saturday, April 02, 2005
The hardest task in the world
Curing cancer? Orchestrating world peace? No; apparently, based on my experiences, it's... making a properly-functioning automated phone system.
Huh? How hard could THAT be? Not very, you'd think, but I've had to make calls to a wide variety of large corporations recently, and there's not a single one of them whose system performs its intended function; to get the caller hooked up with the information they need in some reasonable time frame.
The first part of the problem is that what they're ACTUALLY trying to do these days is prevent you from talking to a human being. I don't care how many functions they've automated, and how much info they have programmed in, it's simply not possible to handle customers effectively, or at all in some cases, if there isn't a way for people to talk to something without chips and wires, and I mean withOUT wasting 10 minutes floundering around in the system first. Is it somehow impossible to provide the ability to get directly to certain kinds of info AND make it so that entering "0" or "#" or whatever gets you to an agent? It sure doesn't seem like it should be, but if it IS possible, why are fewer and fewer companies doing it?
It was bad enough when they made you listen to 500 menu options before FINALLY giving you the code to enter to get to a person, but now there are an alarming # of systems that literally NEVER have a way for you to get directly to a human being... you can only reach one through luck or trickery. I wish that was an exaggeration, but it's not; I just had an incident yesterday where I finally had to admit defeat and hang up, because I'd been all through their system, tried every trick I knew, and couldn't get to a person. And here's where luck kicked in; the phone rang instantly, with that freaky call-back thing some systems do if you hang up at certain points, and I picked it up without speaking, assuming it was the computer, and nearly hung up on what turned out to be, amazingly, a MAN. As you can imagine, I asked him to take down a detailed complaint before handling my business.
Just FYI, the tricks that still get you to a person, sometimes, are: Not pressing ANY buttons once you're connected to the system, so that it thinks you're on a rotary phone and sends you straight to the operator; this rarely works anymore, sadly, because they've apparently decided that there are no rotary phones left in the entire country, or, more to the point, just don't care. Not entering something it asks for, in the hopes that, once it's prompted you several times, it'll assume there's a problem and send you to a person; unfortunately, this one's not working much anymore, either... it'll either keep prompting you forever, or hang you up, as often as not. Pick menu options that would HAVE to take you to a person, because they refer to things that are too complicated to handle with button-pushing; they've made these systems so big and fancy now, though, that they've got automations and elaborate recordings for every topic, and assume that they HAVE handled your most complex problems that way, whether they in fact have or not. Sometimes, they've removed the code to get to an agent from the menus, but if you press 0, # or *, or the # after the # of the last option they give you, it'll still get you to a person; that one's fading fast too, though.
It's not just the ever more clever attempts to keep you away from the customer service staff that messes up these systems; what's almost as bad is that they're losing sight of how someone who's unfamiliar with the system, or confused, or distracted, or who can't find menu options that relate to their problems and has to take wild guesses, can end up in the wrong area... and, when that happens, they MUST have a way to get to somewhere useful withOUT hanging up, calling back, and spending another 15 minutes surfing through menus. Part of the problem is that the menu options are apparently designed by people with no clue as to what the businesses they're making the systems for entail; there are always all sorts of major, obvious issues that don't remotely fit into the offered categories. The other part is that they've started taking out menu options like "return to the previous menu" and "return to the main menu"; if you don't have the option of getting to a person either, all you can do if you stumble into the wrong area is hang up and start all over again... is that the BEST they can do?
Even if you DO break through to a human being, there's one last outrage for you to endure; you can be fairly sure that you were asked to input your 20-digit account #, and the last 4 digits of your social security #, early on in the process, but somehow, through some evil magic, when you finally reach a person, they claim to not have access to what you entered, and you have to give it to them AGAIN. Where do all the #'s you put into the system go after you enter them? What POSSIBLE excuse is there for your having entered your account # to mean ANYTHING other than that whoever the system connects you to will have received that #, and already used it to pull up your account info? Why do you get asked for your account # at a point when nothing is DONE with it? What level of stupidity does it take to NOT have things set up so that you don't enter account info until it's needed, and then don't have to give it again at any other point in the phonecall? How can it be that even ONE company failed to set up their system so that all info entered by the customer is instantly available to the customer service reps, much less that ALL of them have failed to do this... how hard can it be?
This pattern of adding more and more automated services when they haven't even gotten the basics done right, while removing access to agents, and even necessary navigation controls, is NOT acceptable; it's time we ALL started letting them know that. The crucial thing to remember is that the powers that be at these corporations DON'T want to actively drive customers away, and didn't actually plan to have phone systems that would frustrate and upset people; these systems are designed by clueless tech staff, or even more clueless outside companies, so the managers, and the people who actually work in the departments that deal with the public (who DO generally want to help you), usually have little or no idea how badly the systems work, because they've never had to use them... I've yet to find a single person who wasn't astonished at the trouble I had getting through their system to talk to them, and they can't ALL be terrific actors. Ask who complaints of this nature need to get to, and take the time to talk to those folks and tell them very clearly what the problems were, and what the VERY simple solutions are. There's no guarantee that this will ever accomplish anything, but if enough people do it, it might.
That is... unless the ones with the power to make changes can only be reached via phone #'s that lead to automated systems...
Huh? How hard could THAT be? Not very, you'd think, but I've had to make calls to a wide variety of large corporations recently, and there's not a single one of them whose system performs its intended function; to get the caller hooked up with the information they need in some reasonable time frame.
The first part of the problem is that what they're ACTUALLY trying to do these days is prevent you from talking to a human being. I don't care how many functions they've automated, and how much info they have programmed in, it's simply not possible to handle customers effectively, or at all in some cases, if there isn't a way for people to talk to something without chips and wires, and I mean withOUT wasting 10 minutes floundering around in the system first. Is it somehow impossible to provide the ability to get directly to certain kinds of info AND make it so that entering "0" or "#" or whatever gets you to an agent? It sure doesn't seem like it should be, but if it IS possible, why are fewer and fewer companies doing it?
It was bad enough when they made you listen to 500 menu options before FINALLY giving you the code to enter to get to a person, but now there are an alarming # of systems that literally NEVER have a way for you to get directly to a human being... you can only reach one through luck or trickery. I wish that was an exaggeration, but it's not; I just had an incident yesterday where I finally had to admit defeat and hang up, because I'd been all through their system, tried every trick I knew, and couldn't get to a person. And here's where luck kicked in; the phone rang instantly, with that freaky call-back thing some systems do if you hang up at certain points, and I picked it up without speaking, assuming it was the computer, and nearly hung up on what turned out to be, amazingly, a MAN. As you can imagine, I asked him to take down a detailed complaint before handling my business.
Just FYI, the tricks that still get you to a person, sometimes, are: Not pressing ANY buttons once you're connected to the system, so that it thinks you're on a rotary phone and sends you straight to the operator; this rarely works anymore, sadly, because they've apparently decided that there are no rotary phones left in the entire country, or, more to the point, just don't care. Not entering something it asks for, in the hopes that, once it's prompted you several times, it'll assume there's a problem and send you to a person; unfortunately, this one's not working much anymore, either... it'll either keep prompting you forever, or hang you up, as often as not. Pick menu options that would HAVE to take you to a person, because they refer to things that are too complicated to handle with button-pushing; they've made these systems so big and fancy now, though, that they've got automations and elaborate recordings for every topic, and assume that they HAVE handled your most complex problems that way, whether they in fact have or not. Sometimes, they've removed the code to get to an agent from the menus, but if you press 0, # or *, or the # after the # of the last option they give you, it'll still get you to a person; that one's fading fast too, though.
It's not just the ever more clever attempts to keep you away from the customer service staff that messes up these systems; what's almost as bad is that they're losing sight of how someone who's unfamiliar with the system, or confused, or distracted, or who can't find menu options that relate to their problems and has to take wild guesses, can end up in the wrong area... and, when that happens, they MUST have a way to get to somewhere useful withOUT hanging up, calling back, and spending another 15 minutes surfing through menus. Part of the problem is that the menu options are apparently designed by people with no clue as to what the businesses they're making the systems for entail; there are always all sorts of major, obvious issues that don't remotely fit into the offered categories. The other part is that they've started taking out menu options like "return to the previous menu" and "return to the main menu"; if you don't have the option of getting to a person either, all you can do if you stumble into the wrong area is hang up and start all over again... is that the BEST they can do?
Even if you DO break through to a human being, there's one last outrage for you to endure; you can be fairly sure that you were asked to input your 20-digit account #, and the last 4 digits of your social security #, early on in the process, but somehow, through some evil magic, when you finally reach a person, they claim to not have access to what you entered, and you have to give it to them AGAIN. Where do all the #'s you put into the system go after you enter them? What POSSIBLE excuse is there for your having entered your account # to mean ANYTHING other than that whoever the system connects you to will have received that #, and already used it to pull up your account info? Why do you get asked for your account # at a point when nothing is DONE with it? What level of stupidity does it take to NOT have things set up so that you don't enter account info until it's needed, and then don't have to give it again at any other point in the phonecall? How can it be that even ONE company failed to set up their system so that all info entered by the customer is instantly available to the customer service reps, much less that ALL of them have failed to do this... how hard can it be?
This pattern of adding more and more automated services when they haven't even gotten the basics done right, while removing access to agents, and even necessary navigation controls, is NOT acceptable; it's time we ALL started letting them know that. The crucial thing to remember is that the powers that be at these corporations DON'T want to actively drive customers away, and didn't actually plan to have phone systems that would frustrate and upset people; these systems are designed by clueless tech staff, or even more clueless outside companies, so the managers, and the people who actually work in the departments that deal with the public (who DO generally want to help you), usually have little or no idea how badly the systems work, because they've never had to use them... I've yet to find a single person who wasn't astonished at the trouble I had getting through their system to talk to them, and they can't ALL be terrific actors. Ask who complaints of this nature need to get to, and take the time to talk to those folks and tell them very clearly what the problems were, and what the VERY simple solutions are. There's no guarantee that this will ever accomplish anything, but if enough people do it, it might.
That is... unless the ones with the power to make changes can only be reached via phone #'s that lead to automated systems...
Friday, April 01, 2005
What's the thrill of winning?
My husband, and some of my friends, LOVE games; I don't mean video games, I mean elaborate board games, sometimes involving role-playing, that take forever to master and almost forever to play... like I've said, we're geeks, and we know other geeks. I've watched these otherwise lovely people go at the cardboard cutouts and plastic tokens like they actually MEANT something, as if the outcome of the game had some significance to real life; if I'M stuck playing, by contrast, I pretty much just do whatever the minimum motions are for an official turn and make whatever choices there are at random... I'm there with people to socialize, not to struggle to collect cards or fake $ or whatever the silly goal of the game is. I've never been able to understand why anyone would take it any more seriously than that, or what the joy is in engaging in mock battles to take over some section of a board or kill off imaginary characters, or in general why people treat winning ANY game like it's a big deal... because IT'S NOT, hence the common phrase "it's just a game."
It isn't just hard-core gamers who get overly caught up; you can be at a party, and people who haven't played a game in a decade will start in on Pictionary or Trivial Pursuit like their very lives were at stake... and some folks will go beyond trying inexplicably hard to win to being downright nasty about it, as if their honor (and/or manhood) were hanging in the balance.
The passion for winning can become truly frightening with sports; perhaps it's more primal, and the biological drive to prove fitness in order to win mates is involved, but I've seen mild-mannered types turn into virtual psychos when they're playing a close one on the tennis or basketball court. WHY? What difference does it make who wins the golf game or racquetball match? Why is winning such a thrill that even if there's no $ or other prize involved, people will STILL put everything they've got into trying to do it?
This is one of the many areas where I differ from the overwhelming majority of the human race, and just plain can't understand my fellow (wo)man; everyone assures me that games are fun, and winning is really fun, and that fiercely competing against a skillful opponent and coming out on top is REALLY fun... but I don't see it. I don't enjoy games; I don't like to compete, as pitting myself against other people seems adversarial and counterproductive to me, I dislike losing, which I'll nearly always do, and I dislike winning even more, because if *I* win it means that everyone else LOST, and why would THAT be enjoyable?
I sometimes wonder if I'm from another planet...
It isn't just hard-core gamers who get overly caught up; you can be at a party, and people who haven't played a game in a decade will start in on Pictionary or Trivial Pursuit like their very lives were at stake... and some folks will go beyond trying inexplicably hard to win to being downright nasty about it, as if their honor (and/or manhood) were hanging in the balance.
The passion for winning can become truly frightening with sports; perhaps it's more primal, and the biological drive to prove fitness in order to win mates is involved, but I've seen mild-mannered types turn into virtual psychos when they're playing a close one on the tennis or basketball court. WHY? What difference does it make who wins the golf game or racquetball match? Why is winning such a thrill that even if there's no $ or other prize involved, people will STILL put everything they've got into trying to do it?
This is one of the many areas where I differ from the overwhelming majority of the human race, and just plain can't understand my fellow (wo)man; everyone assures me that games are fun, and winning is really fun, and that fiercely competing against a skillful opponent and coming out on top is REALLY fun... but I don't see it. I don't enjoy games; I don't like to compete, as pitting myself against other people seems adversarial and counterproductive to me, I dislike losing, which I'll nearly always do, and I dislike winning even more, because if *I* win it means that everyone else LOST, and why would THAT be enjoyable?
I sometimes wonder if I'm from another planet...
