Sunday, March 28 2004

This is no social crisis, this is me having fun

One of the mistakes I think Doc made with this blog was telling friends and family... people who actually knew him in real life... about it. I can't imagine how rough it would be, trying to write honestly about people whom you have real world, positive interactions with, without destroying those friendships. I mean, shit, if I read on some friend of mine's weblog about what an asshole I'd been when I'd come over the previous weekend to watch a basketball game, I'd be pissy about it for weeks.

So I haven't told friends n'r family about this thing. Furthmore, Doc's long hiatus seems to have chased most of his regular audience away (many of them seem to have roosted over at Mike Norton's pretty good 'miraclo mile' blog, which you can find at www.miraclo.blogspot.com) so I'm writing for not much of an audience at all... one troll, apparently, as well as someone named 'frank' and, I'm fairly sure, Doc's friend Tammy, who must be godawful disappointed in what I'm doing here (or, at least, she hasn't sent ME any boxes of HeroClix and Twinkies since I started here, so I must suck indeed).

Doc goes crazy without feedback, I don't mind it. If I am, as Doc often put it, shouting into a void, well, the void never argues with me about what I'm going to watch on TV.

The times they are a changin' at Pridemark. We have a brand new Senior Program Supervisor, a hotshot troubleshooter named Walter Nimmons, who has been brought in to end our triflin' ways. See, our major corporate clients, who will remain nameless, grade their various subcontractor call centers by tracking various statistics, and the St. Carmichael Pridemark center has sucked in every area, especially sales, for quite a while.

The interesting thing, to me, is that Walter Nimmons, aka Hound Dog (he's a huge Elvis fan) is an old buddy of mine from college, which gives me kind of an inside scoop. Not that Hound Dog won't fire me if he's gotta, although I suspect he'd spend ninety seconds or so crying real tears in his office before he came out and handed the pink slip to my team leader to be passed on to me. And in fact, the Box o' Doom came startlingly close to me Friday, when a new girl on the floor named Aubrey who sat in the next cubicle over from me got termed, and for one heartstopping moment I thought the bell tolled for me. The team leader who had been given the job of escorting her out of the building brought the Box o' Doom (a small cardboard box used to put personal items in when they give you the heave ho) right back to my cubicle and since I was on a call, put it down right next to my trashcan. In a panic, I muted my mike and said "Do you need me for something?" and he waved and said "Don't worry about it" and it turned out it was just that Aubrey was (as usual) signed off illegally to go have a cigarette, and he was waiting for her to show up again. And she did, and off to the guillotine she went. But the wingtips of Azrael brushed my shoulders Friday, and that sucker has some cold ass fucking feathers!

Anyway, I went over to Walter's place... a little rented house over on Kibble Street... to invite him out for some barbecue and generally shoot the shit with him, since I haven't actually seen him in the flesh in years. (This was Friday, I believe.) Over racks of ribs at Gringo's Dead Meat Cafe, he allowed, grudgingly, since he kept repeating that he really wasn't allowed to talk about this stuff to reps, that a lot of bad policy had been taught by various team leaders and assistant supervisors over the years and it had to be corrected, pronto. Attendance was going to be cracked down on, because the clients were cracking down on it. (This means that not only is Aubrey gone, but another woman on the floor, who is the closest thing I have to a friend at Pridemark, will probably be following her soon, since her kids have caused her attendance to be spotty at best.) And a lot of misinformation... taking two minutes between every call to keep total call volume down, calling a customer back if we know it's going to be a long call in order to keep our talk time down (since outgoing calls aren't measured, only incoming)... has to be corrected. Anything that can be construed as call avoidance (a lot of reps extend their wrap up time by hitting the OUTSIDE LINE button and then just hanging there on a dial tone without dialing anything, for example) will be, and people will be frog marched to the scaffold for that in short order.

In general, well, the whip is coming down. What this means to me, the king of inconsistent sales stats (some weeks I'm up, some I'm down, it just depends on the calls I get) is as yet unknown. Will they fire good customer service reps for having lousy sales? Walter himself doesn't know how far it will go. However, I pointed out that inconsistent sales stats are far more a norm than otherwise, and he agreed... only a very few agents there get consistently high sales day after day, while most of us flounder in the up/down cycle, depending on the luck of the queue. So if they start letting people go for not making sales stats, that call center is going to turn into a ghost town PFQ.

Leaving Pridemark aside for a moment, let me rattle on about what a bad idea, in general, it is to find out anything about hot actresses whose work and/or chassis you admire in the movies or on TV. The only hot actress I can remember not being disappointed in, after seeing her in an interview or reading something personal about her, was Kim Delaney, who seemed pretty cool one time when I saw her on Leno. But many others... Claire Danes, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Allison Hanigan, Winona Ryder, just to name a few... any crushes I might have had on them, even minor ones, just evaporated after seeing them act like complete idiot/bimboes on some late night show or during some awards thing they were hosting. (I should note here that Drew Barrymore also didn't disappoint me. Drew isn't exactly an intellectual giant, and she certainly doesn't aspire to classy elegance, but she seems completely unpretentious to me, and very unself conscious, and not at all stuck up. She seems like she'd be fun to hang out and play HeroClix with, whereas most of the other babes from TV or the movies seem both too dumb to learn the rules and too stuck up to want to bother trying.)

Now, I normally don't bother to listen to commentary tracks on DVDs; I think the last one I bothered with, prior to yesterday, was the track on MONSTER'S BALL where Billy Bob, Halle, and the director all basically gave each other handjobs for the entire length of the movie, constantly cooing about how wonderful they all were and what a brilliant film it was. Halle seemed just about as smart as an aspen tree, too. Billy Bob, admittedly, occasionally demonstrated a little bit of insight and a tiny amount of depth, but mostly he wasn't all that impressive either. And the director was some guy with a foreign accent and honestly, who cares. After that, I pretty much gave up on commentary tracks.

However, after resolutely skipping all of them on the Roswell set, I gave in and listened to a commentary track in which two of the female actresses (not, dammit, Katherine Heigl, but instead Shirl Appleby and Majandra Delfino) did a running dialogue while watching one of the steamier episodes, "Sexual Healing", in which Max and Liz discovered that intensely passionate making out would allow him to see her memories, and her to see, apparently, buried memories of his of the Roswell crash. This led to a whole episode of sucking face, and apparently, this was the only ep these two actresses felt competent to comment on, because, as they put it at one point about halfway through "Imagine if we were commenting on one of the science fiction episodes!" "Oh my god we'd be totally lost..." "Yeah, we always found it hard to follow the science fiction plots... a lot of times I was acting and didn't really have the slightest idea what was going on..."

Morons. They have morons on their team.

In the first place... where do I start...? Roswell bears no resemblance to science fiction. There's no fucking SCIENCE in it. It was set in the modern day. It was basically a super powered teen angst soap opera, in which totally hot supposed teenagers, three of whom had superhuman abilities and a reason to be secretive about them, interacted libidinously while having wildly unlikely adventures in and around a small town in New Mexico.

Winona Rider once irretrievably destroyed any sexual interest I might ever have had in her in when she said something similar in an interview regarding the one Alien movie she was in: "The interesting thing about science fiction is that logic kind of goes out the window".

No, Winona. That's 'bad writing' you're talking about. It has nothing to do with 'science fiction'.

Of course, as a general rule, science fiction in TV and movies does equate to 'bad writing'. The reason for this is simple... you need to reach a much larger audience in TV and movies to be successful, as opposed to with books, and in order to reach that much larger audience, you have to dumb it down. Science fiction has always been a medium that has appealed to a relative few, because it's challenging... it requires some intellectual capacity, and some imagination, because it's generally the only medium that consistently speculates, that sets its stories in worlds not only different from our own, but that are different in challenging, threatening, even frightening ways. "Fantasy", which, when it has space ships and ray guns tossed in, often gets confused for SF, especially by idiots who think Star Trek is SF, is also set in different places and times, but those places are never substantially different from our own (sword and sorcery is set in medieval type places generally recognizable to anyone with even a dim notion of history, and is based around popular common archetypes, so it seems very familiar).

True science fiction is always about something unfamiliar, something we DON'T immediately recognize, often something we find scary or threatening, something we have to sit down and FIGURE OUT. Real science fiction is an exploration of what might happen to humanity, and human society, due to the impact and influence of certain as yet fictional (or at least, not commonly known or widely used) technologies and innovations. Science fiction is not "people exactly like you, your dad, and your next door neighbor explore space in cardboard starships and beat up aliens exactly like the bad guys on every other TV show except their skin is colored funny". That's just melodrama. TV SF, and movie SF, is often just melodrama (making the rare 'real' SF TV show or movie something to be treasured when it comes along), so the best you can hope for is good melodrama, rather than good SF. (What's criminally offensive to me about Star Trek is that it rarely manages to be even mediocre melodrama. What I love about Star Wars is that it is nearly always excellent melodrama, and it's actually far more 'science fantasy' than fiction anyway, because nobody ever even remotely attempts to explain how any of the technology works.)

To that extent, I have to reverse myself, because Roswell did have some elements of SF... it showed a society that had been deformed by a mythology of a flying saucer crash taking place back in 1948. However, other than throwing weird conventions and having odd business names and weird waitress uniforms, the society and the human beings depicted in the show didn't behave any differently than any other small town society or human beings in the late 1990s. These kids were normal, they were just normal human kids that had super powers. They could have just as easily been mutants, or supernaturally powered Slayers, or half human, half werewolf, or something like that, as weird human-alien hybrids... and science never had a goddam thing to do with ANY of the plots.

So for these two ditzes to say that they often didn't know what was going on on the show, and then blame it on the 'science fiction'... these are some dumb dumb people here. All that was ever going on on the show was fairly standard soap opera crap, slightly modified to fit into Roswell's peculiar half assed 'teen age X-FILES where the aliens are the heroes' riff. I enjoyed the show, and bought the DVD set of the first season, because I liked the characters and how they interacted, and there was pretty good dialogue, and, well, staring at Shirl Appleby, Majandra Delfino, and especially Katherine Heigl once a week or so is never a bad idea.

But I should have known better than to let myself look behind the curtain. Dummy, dummy, dummy...

I could go on and on and on and ON but fuck it, I need Pepsi.

Oh, Doc was supposed to be working up a graphic for "Fat Man Blogging" or maybe "And Your Little Dog Too" or possibly even "My Mighty Kung Fu Powers", any of which could have been the next temporary title of the blog, but he's been too busy putting his hand into his armpit and making fart sounds lately to be bothered with any kind of constructive work (like answering my fucking email). So we'll stick with "Industrial Strength Braino" for now. But blame Doc's lazy ass.

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, “Wow, I didn’t recognize you in men’s clothing”. According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I’m reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I’d take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here’s The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people’s blogs, you MUST NOT:

(a) seem smarter than the person writing the blog you are posting comments to

(b) be funnier than the person writing the blog you are posting comments to

(d) be correct when you point out some manner in which the person writing the blog you are posting comments to was wrong, and/or

(e) Upset The Wimmenfolk On The Blog.

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin’s Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron’s blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don’t really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren’t related to me by marriage, I’d most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I’ve learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don’t care if you:

(a) seem smarter than I am, I like people who are smarter than I am, as long as they’re not jerks about it;

(b) are funnier than I am, then I get to laugh at your witty remarks, and hey, that’s all good;

(c) are a better writer than I am. Although I’m in a peculiar place as regards writing skills; good enough to be better than nearly all the amateurs out there, not good or lucky enough to be a professional at it. So if you are a better writer than I am, you are probably a professional writer and therefore do not have time to post comments on other people’s blogs, so this probably doesn’t matter, as relates to this blog;

(d) correct my mistakes; unlike apparently 95% of the remainder of the human race, I am under no illusions as to my own infallibility and simply don’t care if someone points out that I am wrong about something. Being wrong about things does not strike me as either a character flaw or a shameful embarrassment; we are all wrong about a lot of things every day of our lives, and that’s just how that works;

(e) Upset My Wimmenfolk. Well, actually, I shouldn’t say I don’t care if you upset my wimmenfolk, I do, the very thought deeply offends me. However, it’s just that the wimmenfolk at this point on this blog are my mom, my cuz in law, and my sister in law, and if you do something to upset them, I strongly doubt the authorities finding what’s left of you will be able to identify you without a DNA comparison. My mom, and any woman who marries any of the males in this family and stays married to him for any length of time, are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. So offend them all you want; it’s a self correcting problem.

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I’d get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don’t Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.