Author Archives: oinsketta

rewrite one: Verizon

From a business point of view, Verizon’s policy of retaining customers by keeping them in the dark while not providing service makes good sense. The more judgmental might call their corporate policy of deliberate disinformation “fraud”. You be the judge.

Phone and internet service go out in early May. The technician who arrives on May 9 informs me that the problem is in a main cable, effecting many customers in the area. A May 10 robocall (text below) informs me that this could take two weeks to fix. What the pleasant recording didn’t say is that it could also take more than ten weeks, or six months.

Calls to Verizon are answered by a recording that informs you, in late May, in June, in July, that a service call for your number is scheduled for May 9 and that if you’d like to change it, press a number. When you eventually reach a human to inquire about when service is going to be restored, they tell you that they have to contact technical services and that technical services will call back the following day. Technical services never calls back. Nor do any of the supervisors who promise to find out why it’s been five, seven and nine weeks with no service.

The only communications from Verizon are the monthly bills, including late charges for nonpayment of no service. A supervisor tells me the bills must be paid and that Verizon will reimburse customers for the months of no service. She also admits that the time to lay new cables could be between three and six months.

I eventually call to cancel the service and have the account zeroed out. I get into a conversation with a sympathetic employee named Mrs. Moore, who expresses her concern as a Verizon consumer and tells me she’d like to get me an answer about when service will be restored. She asks me to hold while she contacts the technical department. I tell her it’s pointless, but I hold a moment and she returns, promises that a supervisor from the technical department will call the following day. She also tells me she’ll call back to verify that they called, and find out what they told me.

“Mrs. Moore, I’m sure you will understand my skepticism. I don’t expect a call from any supervisor. Verizon, by hiding information this way, even from its employees, is committing fraud to try to retain customers. Understandable behavior from a corporation, but despicable. I’ll give them and you 24 hours to tell me the true story, but I’m not expecting it. So cancel my account at the end of business tomorrow.” We’d discussed the usefulness in emergency of a copper wire phone line. The possibility that they were repairing these antiquated lines was the only reason not to close and then reopen an account, with associated fees and a new phone number.

She promises to do this, and assures me she’ll call me to follow up. Surprisingly, she actually does, leaving a voicemail the following day at 4, one a few days later, and then the following Saturday she invites me to call the 800 number if I want to close my account at Verizon.

Have a very nice day.

text of Verizon’s 5/10 robocall:

“… caused by a cable failure, and cable failures take time to repair…. hello, this is Verizon. We apologize for the disruption in your service and we are working diligently to restore it as soon as possible. Unfortunately, your service disruption was caused by a cable failure and cable failures take time to repair. As a result, we are targeting to restore your service in approximately two weeks. We would like to offer you a Verizon voice temporary solution device while we repair your service. The device utilizes wireless technology and is provided at no cost to you, so long as you return it to us after we restore your service If you are interested in our voice temporary solution device, please contact us at 855-287-8238 Thank you for your continued patience and for choosing Verizon, goodbye.”

This device is essentially a second cell phone and provides no internet service, it turns out.

Certain Things Actually Should Be Easy

(see note at the bottom)

“You write so easily,” she told me, “and this situation is so outrageous, and so right for an exposé on NY1, which is owned by Time Warner, Verizon’s competitor.  Write a paragraph and send it to them, would you?”

From a business point of view Verizon’s policy of retaining customers by keeping them in the dark while screwing them makes good sense.  Some might call their corporate policy of deliberate disinformation “fraud”, though that sounds so judgmental.  You be the judge.

Phone and internet service go out in early May. The technician who arrives on May 9 informs me that the problem is in a main cable, affecting many customers in the area. A May 10 robocall says “… caused by a cable failure, and cable failures take time to repair…. hello, this is Verizon. We apologize for the disruption in your service and we are working diligently to restore it as soon as possible. Unfortunately, your service disruption was caused by a cable failure and cable failures take time to repair. As a result, we are targeting to restore your service in approximately two weeks. We would like to offer you a Verizon voice temporary solution device while we repair your service. The device utilizes wireless technology and is provided at no cost to you, so long as you return it to us after we restore your service If you are interested in our voice temporary solution device, please contact us at 855-287-8238 Thank you for your continued patience and for choosing Verizon, goodbye.”

This device is essentially a second cell phone and provides no internet service, it turns out. Calls to Verizon are answered by a robot who informs you, in late May, in June, in July, that a service call for your number is scheduled for May 9 and that if you’d like to change it, press a number. When you eventually reach a human to inquire about when service is going to be restored, they tell you that they have to contact technical services and that technical services will call back the following day. Technical services never calls back. Nor do any of the supervisors who promise to find out why it’s been five, seven and nine weeks with no service.

The only communications from Verizon are the monthly bills, including late charges for nonpayment of no service. A supervisor tells me the bills must be paid and that Verizon will reimburse customers for the months of no service.  She also admits that the time to lay new cables could be between three and six more months.

I eventually call to cancel the service and have the account zeroed out. I get into a conversation with a sympathetic employee named Mrs. Moore, who expresses her concern as a Verizon consumer and tells me she’d like to get me an answer about when service will be restored.  She asks me to hold while she contacts the technical department.  I tell her it’s pointless, but I give her five minutes.  Two minutes later she apologizes for keeping me waiting and promises that a supervisor from the technical department will call the following day.  She also tells me she’ll call back to verify that they called, and find out what they told me.

“Mrs. Moore, I’m sure you will understand my skepticism.  I don’t expect a call from any supervisor.  Verizon, by hiding information this way, even from its employees, is committing fraud to try to retain customers. Understandable behavior from a corporation, but despicable.  I’ll give them and you 24 hours to tell me the true story, but I’m not expecting it.  So cancel my account at the end of business tomorrow.”  We’d discussed the usefulness in emergency of a copper wire phone line.  The possibility that they were repairing these antiquated lines was the only reason not to close and then reopen an account, with associated fees and a new phone number.

She promises to do this, and assures me she’ll call me to follow up. She actually does, leaving a voicemail the following day at 4:00, one a few days later, and then the following Saturday she invites me to call the 800 number if I want to close my account at Verizon.

Have a very nice day.

NOTE (many months later):  My bill eventually reached almost $300 for many months with no service at all from Verizon.  I eventually reached a woman there who got it.  My bill was eventually zeroed out and, in the end, I received a check for $14, a credit of some kind.  Sometimes the underdog gets thrown a bone, even in today’s corporatocracy, if the underdog is relentless and proactive enough.  So do not despair.

Random

“Yeah, I said it. What?!” some writers will come at you, bam! pugnaciously engage you, grab your shirt front. Make the job easy for the reader? Not interested, these types will say, I am making a statement with my art, doing something that’s never been done. It’s a matter of style, I suppose, how one goes about it.

Style is somewhat random, like finding yourself in the apartment you moved into when you were nineteen. “Is this a fucking dream?” you might wonder, eyes wandering over the detritus of almost forty randomly dreamed years. Everyone else you know has moved a number of times since then, many into fine houses they now own and will pass on to their children some day. An AARP eligible adult still living in the apartment he rented while dropping in and out of college is suspect. “What do we suspect?” she asked suspiciously.

“Wake up!” the voice yells as a train rumbles through, making the floor of this old apartment shudder.

Random, like I said. And an argument can be made, and sometimes is, that this entire enterprise, the time spent here searching for meaning between being born and moving on, is a somewhat random sequence of events, some pleasant, some not. We are ants, a friend’s father told me once. Crawling over the earth, trying to make the best of our short time here. Some thinking they would like to do something good for the world, some actually doing good things, whenever they can.

Randomness itself random. Randomly picking random thoughts, random. The pickled randomness of a randomly plucked random thought? Randomly pickled, no doubt.

Gratefulness out of the blue

On the way downtown, to do the animation workshop with a small group of women fighting chronic diseases:

Bellowing, barking, enraged
man paces short track on empty
uptown A platform
screaming and kicking

on the way down
I had to squeeze past
an oblivious young couple
blocking the stairs
with ten feet clear on either side
“excuse me,” I mumbled
not pausing as I passed
“YOU SHOULD SAY ‘EXCUSE ME”!”
the bellicose voice shouted after me
“I did,” I said
a moment before arriving
on the platform to see my train’s
tail lights
disappear into the tunnel

sat and struck up a tune
on the ukulele
man next to me, as soon as I paused,
went into a lusty falsetto improvisation
in another key entirely,
if any.

Zipped the uke back into its bag,
watched the screaming man
across the tracks
bark and dance to the duet
he was performing
with the falsetto singer.

Mercifully,
this super cool train
arrived within a moment
and I am grateful
for that
impersonal mercy.

Then, downtown, moments after my volunteer assistant cancelled at the last possible minute, and it seemed there would be only four of us (two more of the original 8 showed up late), to my great surprise, the five women made like a bunch of kids, working together and coming up with some very cool animation.  You can see it here (you might need dropbox to see it.  I’ll post it elsewhere soon):

adults playing like kids

 

Slight Nausea

Some days slight nausea is the best choice from a menu of worse options.  Today, for example, I prefer it to the Full-Blown Existential Dread.   I pondered the Bang Your Head Against the Wall entree, thought for a moment of asking if I could get it a la carte, but thought better of it.

Slight nausea it is, though I’m wondering idly how much you tip for this sort of thing.

Another Way of Viewing Things

It’s hard to know, sometimes, whether your view of a situation is colored by the lens you view it through or if the situation simply is that color.   The same situation can be perceived very differently by those who are in it.   She was focused, direct and professional; she was hard-edged and ambitious to the edge of ruthlessness.  She was pleasant and good humored; she was superficial, forced and impatient.  All of the above also may be true.  All of the above may also make no difference one way or the other, if her offer is of value.

I throw another style of viewing things into the mix: the wishful thinking view.  A disadvantage of this style is that it is based in best case scenario thinking rather than on a practical, unemotional evaluation of actual likely outcomes.  An advantage of the wishful thinking viewer, for those so inclined, is how easily it can be converted into a whip, already in hand and poised closest to where it will hurt the most.

This is not meant in any way to contradict the wise idea that it is far better to look at a thing without fear, and with compassion.  It’s clearly better to be in the moment as much as possible and not distracted by the many thoughts that may be pressing their way in.  

The best way to look at things is as you would like to be looked at yourself, as you would like to consistently see yourself.  Hard, yes, and finding your way there without a good map or recipe, good luck.  Sadly (or happily) I have no map or recipe, other than throwing things into the mix and trying to see clearly, and act accordingly, as often as I can.

 

Better Way to Think About A Situation

A situation is what it is, good and bad and also, seen dispassionately, just what it is, with no inclination either way sometimes.  Wise people teach us that the way we look at things makes them appear good or bad. As we look, so shall we see.  When we look with fear, we see reasons to be afraid.  When we look with compassion, it is easier to play nice.

I have a meeting tomorrow that could result in some good things at a time when the signs, laid out like the entrails of animals read by soothsayers at the time of Caesar, would appear to foretell mostly doom. I can tell this, in part, because my friends are at a loss when I myself am at a loss to enthuse about this unusual plan I am pursuing, with modest practical skills, that seems so at odds with the times we live in.

I realize there is no reason to see this meeting in a few hours as a high stakes poker game, though there will be some negotiation.   If it is such a game, I could say, I am playing with house money.   But that is only a way to rationalize, make myself feel more comfortable at a time when I feel challenged.

Here is a more important thing and a much better frame to look at it through: the energetic assistant of a very successful economic and ecological entrepreneur, based again in the impoverished neighborhood where she grew up, visited wehearyou.net and was excited about what she saw.  A meeting was arranged.  Tomorrow is the meeting.

I can think about my program, and present it, like this: I have been programming and refining the simplified animation workshop for almost two years now, have worked with around 80 public school kids, in seven or eight workshops, for a total of maybe 140 hours on a once a week basis.   It is not a gigantic sample size, but it’s enough to know that every place we do it kids respond enthusiastically and creatively.   This is not surprising, it is designed to let them play and learn in a fun, interactive, collaborative setting.

The workshop is non-hierarchic, everybody there is a participant, treated with the same respect, including the adults who are on hand to facilitate.  The adults are not teachers, they’re time keepers, organizers, assistants, enthusiastic supporters of the animation the children make.   That learning takes place without teachers systematically presenting material is a radical but also very natural notion, play leads to discovery, wanting to do something leads to invention and mastery of the skills needed.  Young animals of all kinds play, it is how they master many things they need to know how to do.   Human kids are no different, if given the chance to, they love to play.  Give children musical instruments, they will begin to play a kind of music.

In the typical American school play, invention, improvisation, dreaming up ideas, is secondary, if it is encouraged anywhere but at recess — the main work is learning to master the materials tested on standardized exams.  Exams designed by large educational corporations in a way that ensures many young humans are destined to fail.

I have the animation made by a relatively small sample of kids done in a short once a week time format, so far, and you can find many inventive and enchanting moments in that highly original animation.   But what I’ve assembled until now is merely a glimpse at the potential of the program.   I am looking for a few places where my philosophy and methods can be worked week after week, over time, where kids can make real progress in animation, teach each other, work on more sustained stories, if they like, really master the technical aspects to the extent that they extend the boundaries of what kids can do.   I want people to be amazed, the more cynical among them shocked, at what children can create on their own, with their creativity as motivation and just a little guidance.

People are doing this work here and there.   A brilliant and charismatic educational theorist, Sugata Mitra, embedded a computer and track pad in an outside wall of slums in remote Indian villages and illiterate children organized themselves to learn a functional English vocabulary and were soon surfing the internet and playing games.   Mitra calls many of the things that happen when a group self-organizes to learn “emergent”.   Emergence is the appearance of things not previously thought to be part of the system.

Collaboration, invention, increased attention span, peer-teaching and group problem-solving, are not usually thought of as express goals of a school day or even of an art workshop.   Our society stresses individualism and competition and children don’t often get a chance to work together collaboratively over time.   Teamwork is needed in  team sports and encouraged in that context.   It is also necessary for animation.

Children in the animation workshop begin working in small groups very quickly.   We encourage it and like it when the teams shift players regularly.   Animation is made by a small community of interrelated teams working together.  It calls for the integration of many talents and skills, and requires a good deal of learning and peer-teaching to accomplish.

Deceptively simple, what I have tapped into.    Now what it needs is fertile ground to plant the seeds and demonstrate the things it can grow into.   Tomorrow I may find one such plot in this remote community in the South Bronx.    Someone is interested in listening, and I will be interested in listening too.

Enraged customer at the car wash

The weather service had been calling for severe thunderstorms the other day, but as the sky was clear when I set out, and my errand not long, I didn’t go back for rain gear, which in retrospect was a mistake.

The walk home from the store was about 3/4 of a mile and as I hit the bridge on Broadway I saw that I was walking into a dark vault.  The sky ahead was dark grey as far as I could see downtown. The entire sky, in every direction ahead of me, looked threatening as a tumor.  There were virtually no places to seek shelter between where I was and my apartment, about fifteen minutes away by foot.  When I got across the bridge, the first large drops fell.  Within a block it began coming down with intent to drench.  I made a dash and took refuge in the store attached to the car wash, the only place within several blocks to duck into. I found shelter a moment before the deluge began.

The rain came down like it was looking to flood the earth.   Within minutes there was a deep lake in the street in front of the car wash.   Cars passing through it sent plumes of water up over the sidewalk.   I moved further into the store eventually taking a stool in the back, and I watched the rain, figuring it probably couldn’t rain that hard for much longer.  It did, though.

Eventually another guy who’d taken refuge there took the stool next to mine.  A moment later we exchanged pleasantries about the weather.  He was a sympathetic looking man, slight and brown, looking something like Gandhi, but from the Dominican Republic, he said, his English almost completely unaccented.  I’d have guessed his background was Indian, actually.

I told him this kind of summer shower usually doesn’t last very long.  I recounted how I’d once been soaked in a very quick summer downpour in NYC making a sprint to beat the rain.  I’d been on a bike and when I reached 8th Avenue and 47th Street the skies opened up. Instead of finding cover, I rode like mad and arrived at 47th and 9th Avenue, one block away, drenched, socks and shoes and everything in my pockets soaked, dripping wet.  When I entered the place I was going, water running off me, people looked at me in disbelief.  I looked behind me to discover the sun was shining brightly, the street hardly even looked wet.  I’d learned from that summer shower to duck under something and wait out these flash rains.

But this one continued full-bore for over an hour, and my neighbor and I passed the time in a most pleasant and far-ranging chat while the thunder thundered and the buckets of dirty water fell.   At one point an irate customer barged into the store where we were sitting and began screaming at the girl behind the counter. “IT’S NOT FAIR!!!” he screamed several times, snarling and glaring angrily between screams.   He was at a loss to make the unfairness of it clear.  He turned to scream at one of the African car wash attendants “IT’S NOT FAIR!!!”.  As he stormed out to where he car was he shouted it to everyone a couple of times.   

Evidently some terribly aggravating thing was being done to him, it was unjust, they’d lied to him and then screwed him and it wasn’t fair.   That much seemed clear.   But the ferocity of his screaming really was kind of amazing.   It was also, I realized, the self-lacerating bellow of helplessness– they are screwing me and there’s nothing I can fucking DO ABOUT IT!

My neighbor and I paused, exchanged philosophical looks, and I said they’d probably promised to do something like change his oil, but had run out of oil filters, and they’d kept him waiting over an hour to give him the disappointing news.   He agreed it must have been something like that.   As the enraged man passed us on the way to his car, still screaming, I said quietly I hoped he wasn’t going to get a gun.   It was the kind of blind rage that, silly as the immediate cause for it might have seemed, if he’d been holding a gun he probably would have used it to try to discharge some rage.

My neighbor opened his eyes a little wider, and said he doubted the guy was going for a gun.  I agreed that he was probably right.   As it turns out, he was correct and nobody was hurt, except for the man who had been screaming.   We chatted for another twenty minutes or so, as the storm continued to rage all around, until one of the workers told us apologetically that it was time to go, they were closing the store.   We thanked them for their hospitality, shook hands, introduced ourselves by name for the first time, and headed off in opposite directions to get soaked.

It rained hard for my entire walk home.   Luckily I’d thought to take a plastic bag to wrap my electronics in, because I and my groceries got drenched.   My phone, wallet and iPod did not get wet.   It poured and thundered for a couple of hours, and it was a cold rain.   Actually felt a little good to be wet and shivering on a brutally humid day that had recently been about 85 degrees.   Once I showered and wrung out my clothes I felt refreshed.

I don’t think anything felt very good that day to the man who’d been treated so unfairly by those otherwise decent folks at the car wash.

My boy hisses at me

My boy hisses at me with surprisingly threatening teeth for somebody that small. I have tried to be an affectionate and supportive father to him, and also a friend and caretaker, but it seems to make no difference. It is a question of temperament, I suppose, his and mine, and beyond either of us to change. I know very well that I am not the only man to have had this kind of difficult situation with his kid.

There are a few factors that complicate our relationship as well, and I’m aware of these. He’s not my natural son, I had nothing to do with his coming into the world and that lack of biological connection can be a factor. I basically found him, helpless and hungry, and we adopted him. Sekhnet is very attached to him, and the two of them cuddle, snuggle, and are thicker than thieves, but he has always regarded me with some distrust. There’s another thing, and I know this adds a poignant note, and may strike some as hyperbole but I mean it literally– we are of different species. This does not affect his relationship with Sekhnet, but it seems to come into play in his and mine.

When I reach out to him he hits me. Softly at first, then with his claws unleashed. Sharp damn fingernails the wild little bastard’s got. Then there’s the hiss, resembling a cobra’s hiss more than anything else, the mouth wide open and those sharp canine teeth ready, like fangs. He will not hesitate to sink those fangs into a hand, if it comes to it. Rough little bastard, and outside of making his feelings perfectly clear by his expression and actions, he never says a word.

Thoughts on the uptown A

Gratefulness –
most valuable
where it seems
least possible.
 
The simple math-
addition of all the 
justifcations needed
to explain an otherwise
inexplicable life,
a life as malaise,
misdirection,
drinking invisible Kool-Aid
feeling wise and profound
while others bucked
seeming desperate–
when the ledger is tallied
I would be a fool 
to regret
a single wrong turn
 
clutching to myself
unimpeachable good character
even if
at the moment
gratefulness is not something
I can wrap myself in.