Thursday, April 1, 2004

Riddles in the dark

What did I do today? Insipid questions merit insipid answers. Here we go:

Deciding to drop by a nearby pawnshop, I put together a backpack full of DVDs I won’t use any more (Dark Blue, Monster’s Ball, Superman: The Movie, and four or five more I can’t remember right now) and traded them in on Three Kings, The Usual Suspects, and Training Day. I’ll probably watch one of them tonight, assuming that, as usual, Smallville is a rerun and there was no new Angel broadcast. I haven’t checked my VCR yet to see.

Bored last night, I got about thirty minutes into watching Lord of the Rings yet again… the first installment, which I think is probably a perfect fantasy film. This time through (about my seventh) I found myself more consciously aware of much of the film’s nearly vulgar lack of subtlety in many areas, especially its so called humor… Pippin and Merry’s introduction has all the charm and gentle drollery of, say, an Adam Sandler skit… and how Jackson’s ‘talent’ for utter, blatant visual obviousness and really pounding a point (or a so called joke) home with repeated sledgehammer blows made watching Two Towers such an odious chore.

However, there is subtlety in Fellowship, and complexity, and nuance, and even intrigue… all the elements I enjoy the most in any fictional artifact, that are nearly always missing from, say, Robert Zemeckis movies, which is a fine, fine reason one should never watch Robert Zemeckis movies. Unlike Two Towers, in Fellowship the villainy is a bit hard to spot (we don’t know Saruman is evil until he finally reveals himself as such by attacking Gandalf… unlike most of Tolkien’s villains, and especially Jackson’s cinematic depictions of them, Saruman’s treachery and wickedness are not shouted from the very mountaintops by everything from his name to his appearance, in contrast to, for example, Grimas Wormtongue).

Granted, no one is going to mistake any of the Nazgul for members of the Legion of Superheroes, but by the same token, just as Saruman’s villainy is well camouflaged early on, so too are we unsure that Aragorn is one of the good guys (or, you know, you were, if you didn’t read the books, you fucking slacker). Boromir is also perhaps the only truly three dimensional character Tolkien ever created; a truly flawed human hero whose heart is in the right place but who allows greed to corrupt him regardless.

It’s this ambiguity and apparent depth of character, along with the occasional interesting cultural nuances, the hinted at shifts in political power and influence happening behind the scenes, the outrageously gorgeous scenery and set pieces, and the frankly fucking awesome action sequences, that make Fellowship into roughly four thousand times as good a film as Two Towers turned out to be. In Two Towers, the only character with any depth at all is Gollum, and honestly, who gives a shit about Gollum? I just want to drown the little fucker. Spending three quarters of the movie with him, Frodo and Sam in the fucking marshes of Mordor is just torturous, and the remainder of the film, however hard it was to get it all in the can, is honestly just bloody awful. There’s no intrigue, no surprise, no plot twists worth talking about, Gimli is reduced to nothing but comic relief, everyone else is flatter than cheap animation, and for God’s sakes, why hasn’t anyone killed Merry and Pippin yet? They’re just annoying.

Anyway, I may throw Fellowship back in, or I may watch one of my ‘new’ DVDs, although I own all of them on videotape and have watched each movie many times. Or I may eat an entire roll of paper towels. Who knows?

Insane people who want to give me gifts (hey, people sent Doc stuff for no plausible reason) could add a nice DVD version of the uncut Fellowship to their lists, though. I only have the uncut version on video.

I’ve had a piss poor week at work. I started out strong with 12 sales on Monday, but yesterday could garner only 2 all day long, and today had only three. My first four hours on the phone today definitely qualified as Weird Wednesday; in that duration I got not one easily resolved problem. Rather, I got convoluted nonsense involving people whose extremely complicated billing issues should have been handled by the last rep they talked to… or the one before that… or the one before that… but somehow all of these people wound up being fucked over and mishandled by two or three people prior to me in the chain, meaning by the time I got them (and I got them all today) there wasn’t much that could be done, because of our corporate client’s viciously calculated policy of only allowing credits to be given going back 60 days. This means if a customer gets fucked over for 61 days by My Boss, they suddenly become responsible for whatever the bill is. This profoundly SUCKS, especially when you find yourself talking to one after another of these poor dicked-over people.

Me, I have the attitude that I’ll just go ahead and issue the credit anyway, if I can approve it myself (I can do credits of up to $50 without going through a supervisor). However, Oversight has the knife out for me lately; I got called in and slapped around yesterday for giving ‘proactive credits’, meaning, I wasn’t making the customer beg me for them, I was just offering them if I thought the situation merited it. This is Very Bad. “We don’t give away the farm,” the sowlike she-orc who managed to somehow bird dog all three calls I’d had on Monday where I’d done this oinked at me. I restrained myself from responding that she shouldn’t worry; a $32 credit wouldn’t throw the farm into foreclosure, and even if it did, she’d doubtless be relocated to a nice wildlife sanctuary somewhere, given that she was clearly an endangered species (although, annoyingly, not an extinct one).

I didn’t say any of that, but I did think it very loudly, and I suspect Her Swininess perceived a hint of truculence around my eyes and nose, because she smacked me around a little bit more for various other Wicked And Unacceptable behaviors, like, you know, calling the customer by their first name (after being on the phone with them for 45 minutes and resolving their issues) and… I can’t remember what the other thing was, unless she felt I had only half heartedly pitched our Product Du Jour, which is certainly possible; I’d never make a pitch at all if our corporate client didn’t mandate it.

I’d just, you know, help my customers.

She finished up by telling me, with great and unctious self righteousness, that she wasn’t being mean, this was meant to HELP me. Now, in my lexicon, ‘help’ means, you know, um, help… something that assists me in some way or makes my life better. For Oversight to actually help me, what they can do is give me perfect scores on all my calls, which I deserve, because I provide excellent customer service. However, I do tend to ignore all this idiotic horseshit about ‘balancing the needs of the company with those of the customer’, because I feel our customers need $37 we cheated them out of by billing them for four months of no usage after they cancelled their account, more than a multibillion dollar international corporation needs (or merits) that same $37. I also feel that after I’ve been on the phone with a customer solving his or her problems for nearly an hour and have clearly established rapport, if I slip and call them by their first name and they don’t say anything about it, and in fact they thank me effusively at the end of the call, taking 25 points off my score for it is not ‘helping’ me. In fact, I would define that as being a rather anal, childish, petulant fuckwad. And last but not least, I firmly believe that enacting a policy in which all customer service agents are forced (under threat of termination) to make sales pitches to customers who are calling in because some mistake has been made or their product doesn’t work, is foolish, and morally wrong, and just plain stupid.

I asked ol’ Hound Dog the other night if anyone had ever done any studies comparing customer ‘churn’ between call centers where agents were forced to make sales pitches, and call centers where they just serviced the customers. He rubbed his jaw in a lugubrious fashion and allowed that he had never heard of such a study, and did not disagree when I opined that the results of such a study probably wouldn’t be anything that any corporate client wanted to hear. Forcing agents to make sales pitches to already pissed off customers does indeed result in SOME sales, so some revenue is generated in a place where no revenue was generated prior to this, and chances are, that’s all upper management cares about. Subtleties like how long a customer stays with a particular provider and/or how quickly they switch to another one that DOESN’T shill them at every possible point of contact doubtless interest no one.

Me, I got a stack of ACE Awards pinned up on my cubicle walls, and I got two more yesterday and today, and I’m a customer service agent, not a salesman. If Oversight wants to keep bitch slapping me for actually servicing my customers, well, what can I say? I’m proud to be giving away the farm… or I would be, if the idea of equating a $37 credit to bankrupting a trillion dollar multinational weren’t so abysmally fucking stupid.

I write about work way too goddam much here, but honestly, what else is there?

I try to keep perspective, though. Today I was reviewing how much my life has improved over the past 12 months. I remember how, back when I was still in training for this job, I yearned to get out on the floor so I could get onto my regular (second shift) schedule, which I vastly preferred over getting up at 7 o’clock in the fucking morning every day. (I have never been a morning person. Not in my childhood, not during my teenage years, and not now. The day I moved out of my parents house to go to college was a wonderful day to me. My mother is a lovely and charming woman, but when I was a kid she seemed to have some deep seated belief, rooted and entrenched in her subconscious and thus incapable of reasonable refutation, that anyone who slept past nine in the morning was irretrievably damned to the deepest, darkest corners of hell itself for all eternity. I find this belief to be both onerous and deranged and have all my life subscribed to Heinlein’s assertion that the old saw about the early bird simply means the worm should have stayed in bed. Being able to get up at noon or even one o’clock in the afternoon if I like EVERY DAMNED DAY OF MY LIFE is about the only thing I like about this job, but I like it A LOT.)

I also made myself cast my mind back to just a few months ago, when I was still sharing space with the Roommate of Utter Despair, who wouldn’t cook, wouldn’t clean, broke nearly anything he set his hand to, didn’t seem to mind overly that his friends stole from me, and who I frequently walked in on half dressed and making out with his rather older slattern of a married girlfriend, leaving aside other noxious habits like smoking two and a half packs of cigarettes a day, or more if he happened to be out of dope at any given time, which he was about half of it. (Living with a heavy smoker is horrible enough when the fucker will empty his own ashtrays. It becomes simply intolerable when it never occurs to him to empty his ashtrays; he’ll simply start balancing his butts more and more precariously on the steadily growing pyramid of extinguished cigarettes, paying no attention to the widening scatter of butts and ashes around said ashtray as he continually attempts to force more and more of his carcinomic detritus into a sadly limited receptacle. What makes it even worse than intolerable is when, after you’ve emptied an ashtray, he comes up at you one morning ranting and raving because he had a half smoked roach – a marijuana cigarette – in one of those ashtrays and YOU THREW IT OUT, YOU FUCKER! AND IT WAS WORTH TEN DOLLARS!!!. And then he insists, not that you let him empty his own ashtrays, but that, from now on, when you empty the ashtrays, you CHECK THEM CAREFULLY FOR ILLICIT DOOBIES BEFORE YOU DUMP THEM.

I think about that, and I think about the fact that in the months I lived in that apartment with said housemate, I never once passed any 12 hour period there without seeing at least two cockroaches, and seeing ONLY two cockroaches (generally over by the stove) was entirely a product of my own non stop efforts at getting the plague of scuttling vermin well entrenched in the apartment when I moved in under some semblance of control. I managed to exile them from my bedroom by relentless spraying, scattering of roach motels, and never eating back there, but the rest of the apartment was a lost cause.

Whereas here, well, I haven’t seen more than one roach since I moved in, and that one was dazed and half crippled and fairly obviously a hitch hiker on my boxes, and I killed it quickly, and haven’t seen one since.

So, I hate my job, and given new corporate policies and a truly reckless demeanor on the part of management I could very well be fired at any moment because, frankly, my attitude sucks. And I don’t know what I’d do if that happened; St. Carmichael isn’t exactly replete with even remotely tolerable employment. And I have no girlfriend, no social life, and have managed to drive Doc’s entire audience away except for Tammy Ruplinger, Mike Norton, and, apparently, one nameless troll.

Nonetheless, I’m not getting up at 7 a.m. to go to work any more, I have space and privacy without roaches, and in general, my lot has improved measurably over the past year or so.

There’s much room for continued improvement, mind you, but still. Let us stop and appreciate what we have.

All right, I’m over that. Where the fuck is my million, my hottie, and my new goddam car? I’m an American, dammit. I’m entitled.

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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

(c) be a better writer 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.

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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.

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