Category Archives: slice of NYC life

Chill Pill

Sekhnet recommends multitasking while listening to blaring corporate hold muzak and being thanked periodically for your business, which is so important to the modern corporation that they take the trouble to play a recording of their gratitude, at the expense of their on-hold captive audience advertising time.  

This multitasking usually involves something like paying bills on-line or doing some research on-line, or playing some mindless on-line game.   Since I am using my cell phone to call Verizon about my lack of phone and internet service, these options are not available.  I decide that while I’m on hold I will grill two processed fake meat hamburgers, probably as healthy for the vegetarian as a Big Mac is for everyone else.   They are almost as tasty, when prepared right, and probably slightly less toxic than the real thing.

After only a few minutes, upon being told the wait is longer than usual to speak to a human, I’m given the option to tap in my number and a representative will gladly call me back.   Nice touch, I think, feeling slightly pleased with myself, since today I am calling the “buy new service” line, rather than “trouble with my existing line” department.

Flipping my burgers when the phone in my shirt pocket rings about two minutes later.   Total time so far under ten minutes, I note.   Excitedly I pick up and am greeted by another robot, then several minutes of loud advertisements, then too loud muzak.  I put the phone on speaker and place it on my kitchen table, volume turned down as I continue to prepare my lunch, making a kind of slaw (finely chopped scallions, red cabbage, romaine lettuce) to put on my burgers.  I am trying to remain calm and friendly so I can get help, not take my understandable (going on 7 weeks with no service) frustration out on the pawn who is talking to hundreds of angry, powerless customers today.

I mix the bowl of slaw, flip my burgers, grill a flatbread in the pan next to it, then hear a human voice come on the line.  In my eagerness to speak to this human being I hit not “speaker” but “talk” and somehow this connects me to a robot at Verizon asking me for my account number.  By the time I link the calls so I can speak to the human, a maneuver that takes at most four seconds, the human is gone and the robot drones on about the longer than normal waiting time to speak to the next available representative.  I see that I’ve been on hold only four additional minutes since I picked up to speak to the representative, a total of slightly less than the fifteen minutes I usually wait.  The ads and the blaring muzak made it seem longer.

Why would anyone tolerate this kind of shit?   Why would anyone not shred the bill they sent yesterday, charges due for six weeks of service not provided?   A normal person would not stand for it, would not tolerate being powerless and fucked around by some company just because it happens to have a monopoly.  But these are not normal circumstances.  Normally a person like me would live in a nice house, like virtually every other adult he knows, with several options for internet service.  The neighborhood where my rent stabilized apartment is located does not have other options for internet service, unless I buy a TV and get a cable and internet bundle from Time Warner, another highly altruistic outfit.

I wrote this yesterday in the little book I carry in my shirt pocket, and I stand by it, especially now that the chill pill I took to end my cursing tirade before I started smashing up this place is kicking in:

If you choose not to avail yourself of the privilege of a hard-working middle class life, you would do well to cultivate stoicism in the face of the thousand small, vicious indignities that are the lot of society’s losers.

We live in a society where winners are now required to brag and losers medicate themselves, or become violent, hypertensive, inordinately sarcastic or completely inert.   Mass media shows it over and over again—winners do not tolerate losing, losers do not have any idea how to win.   The game is as unfair as it’s been since the eve of the famous stock market crash at the end of the Roaring Twenties.  This is not a problem to those who are not being gamed by the game.  The question for someone like me would be:  if you had every opportunity to align yourself with the rest of the middle class, why would you choose being a powerless person at the mercy of a merciless system rigged against those at the bottom?

$300 out of pocket to have my ears cleaned?  Not anyone’s problem that I know but mine.  $280 for a urologist to spend perhaps 40 seconds palpating my prostate?   The Affordable Care Act, after all, is not responsible for the fact that my primary care doctor doesn’t consider ear cleaning, even for a patient who needs it annually, or a digital prostate exam, for the son of a man with prostate cancer, part of their overall wellness.  There are specialists for that.   He didn’t decide that there would be a $50 copay for the insured under Obamacare, or a $1,750 out-of pocket deductible before any of the insurance premiums paid by the patient every month would begin to kick in in the form of covered medical service.  Or that dental services, or eye glasses, were not deemed to be part of the average person’s health needs.

A wealthy friend suggested that I get rid of the remaining money I have in the bank and apply for Medicaid, which would cover all these things.  I pointed out that it would mean giving up my apartment, of course, and, if things went as badly as they sometimes do in our winner take all society, spending some time in a homeless shelter, assuming I could find one to suit my tastes.   He agreed that I was probably better off paying for Obamacare than going on Medicaid, but allowed that it was atrocious, the poor, expensive medical service I am getting under the Affordable Care Act.

Is it better to be comfortable than uncomfortable?  I would definitely say comfortable.  I am not poor.  If I knew now that I had five years to live, I could probably have a more or less middle class life style.  The problem is, I could live twenty more years.   I would actually like that, living a long life.

For one thing, that might give me time to have a small impact in this merciless world.  Imagine for a moment that I could show that a talented kid born in a slum was just as creative, and worthy of human rights, as a slightly less talented kid born to wealthy parents.   Imagine, in spite of the ridiculously daunting odds against it, that I was able to get funding for a program I have already designed to do this.  Imagine that program producing a thousand animated films a year, shorts that won awards all over the place and actually changed the conversation about education and the lot of thousands of children our society now regards, if at all, as future criminals, profit generators for lucrative privatized prisons.  Imagine the book I could write about that program, illustrated and illuminated by the imaginations of dozens of brilliant future inmates.

You can write that book now, one might say.  True.  But to have it published and widely sold I would have to have made the dream real in the world, monetized it, skillfully marketed it.  The talk shows don’t waste time interviewing even well-spoken losers with nice dreams.  Even I know that.

Dog Kickers

Seething silently behind reflective spectacles

One must exercise care

around these mild-seeming creatures

 

One, after a day spent,

undoubtedly doing distasteful things

for too little pay,

wants the seat next to yours on the uptown A

and not finding as much room as he requires

to spread his legs the way he likes

rises, huffy, roosterish

crosses to perch on another too narrow seat

eyes slits burning at his newspaper

 

Then, as deep sleep returns to you

this well dressed person leaps

to change to the seat across from you

Your ankle the dog he kicks hard

as he lurches toward  it.

 

Rudely awake you glare, ankle aggrieved  

he resists by staring at his newspaper

face like an unsanitary knife, stinking

 

Ahimsa boy is left watching him exit

a stop before he could rise,

cross the car,

stand briefly and heavily on the instep

and raise one side of his face impassively to say

“pardon me.”

Living in the Moment

Easier said than done, of course, but worth focusing on if a person is to live their life as productively as possible.   Nothing that happened a few days ago, or in childhood, should cast a dark enough shadow on the moment to prevent it from being lived fully.  Easy to say, hard to do.

 

An action brings up a strong, familiar feeling that was so painful so many times? Very hard to remain in the moment, with that old tightness in the lungs, choking down the desire to strike back somehow.   A friend keeps saying “remember, we are not helpless eight year-olds now.”  True dat, though it’s something the feelings don’t always take into consideration.

 

Days spent stewing over the disrespectful, pugnacious, other-blaming “office manager” at the local tax-in-the-box where I have been trying to have my tax filed.  Feet up on the desk, legs apart, ESPN flashing box scores on the screen next to him, a smirk like a sideways ass crack on his face, he said, after a week of zero service, lying and wrong information given “you can’t intimidate me by trying to get my boss’s contact info.  I’m not giving it to you anyway.”   He then added, for the benefit of his cow-faced associates, and to make his contempt crystal clear, “you’re the only customer I’ve ever had a problem with.”

 

That the problem he referred to was his failure to keep any of several promises to the customer, or to follow up, or to have the correct software installed for the half hour late appointment, or confidently giving the wrong advice regarding what needed to be filed, and the rest?  Not his problem.  The problem of the unreasonable customer, you dig?

 

I spent days unable to stop choking over having my nose rubbed in my “powerlessness”, even as a paying customer, or the 48 hour delay in his immediate supervisor getting back to me (I dug up her email address from a correspondence a year ago), pleasantly, only mildly defensive.   I wrote back to her, making sure she forwarded our correspondence to her boss. Then, because we live in a society where nobody apologizes voluntarily, and offense is often employed to bolster defense, she felt compelled to add that my tax filing was a year late (I owe no tax, so that’s not strictly relevant) and that she “left a message immediately after i had completed the return with information provided and knew exactly what I needed to finalize the return.  I will ask Michelle to call.  Have a great weekend.”

 

To which I replied: 

 

YOU knew exactly what you needed to finalize the return, you are just sharing that with me now, more than a week after my appointment. Have a great weekend

 

The meaning of that “have a great weekend” is universally understood in this context.  Not ten minutes later, the call I’d been waiting a week for arrived.  Michelle, the boss, eventually conceded that she was sorry that I felt I had not received good service.  

 

I corrected her.  She should not be sorry that I felt I had not received good service, she should acknowledge that the service I received was objectively the opposite of good service.  She needed to acknowledge that anyone would have felt disrespected by the unprofessional treatment I’d received. That I was not looking for an apology because my sensitive feelings were hurt, but because I was put through an unprofessional and disrespectful series of aggravations that nobody, let alone a paying customer, should ever have to tolerate.  She conceded as much, telling me that she was sorry and would talk to the jerk in question about his attitude.  

 

And because I was reasonable, and didn’t browbeat her once I’d extracted the apology, things going forward will be fine whenever I get the paperwork this jackass told me I don’t need.

 

In the midst of it, when all that exists is an unwanted, undeserved hassle with a belligerent and unyielding moron, there is no completely putting it out of mind, no 100% focus available for the other difficult concentrated work a person in a tight corner must do to get out of that corner.   In the moment, all is possible, truly, if you can focus completely on what you have immediately in front of you to focus on.   Dealing with multiple moments at once, or several aggravating ones at once, is a recipe for bad karma, poor sleep and unhealthy eating.

Better to breathe, smile, remember what you love to do, and do it as much of the time as you can arrange to do it.

You Know What I’d Love?

Working in a crowded classroom today, with eight or ten kids who have just spent a long Monday in school, the kids are distracted, cannot focus, some do their homework.   Two brothers, both very talented, sit outside the room, one doing his homework, the other staring at the screen of his phone.  The animation workshop is set up, the materials arrayed, endless possibilities all around them, but the after-school program is ineptly run at this place, and the kids come into the room mostly unhappy.   It takes a good 40 minutes for the beehive to start humming and the two paid adults in the room to get busy.  Sadly, that leaves 20 minutes or so of animation. My assistant, who sets up and breaks down the animation workshop, is well-paid and I pay the guy who runs the workshop the same thing I was paid for a session twice as long, and myself, as so often, I pay nothing, even though I am actually still running the workshop.

“You’re an idiot,” says an observer.

An idiot with a fond dream.  Like Woody Allen’s father in Love and Death who loved his little piece of land.   The camera pans back to show the demented old man fondly petting a square of sod he is holding close to his beaming face.  “My father was an idiot,” says Allen’s character, the cowardly braggart based lovingly on Bob Hope.

You know what I’d love?   Not so much the widespread success of my “business”, which would be very gratifying.  Not so much giving the children of the poor, the crazy, unteachable kids that society gives up on, the chance to shine, to show the billionaire funders of school innovation what poor children are actually capable of, sing their songs, improvise in a climate of tolerant appreciation for wild creativity.  Not so much an award and handshake (instead of a kiss!) from the lying sociopath who is our president at any given time.

What I would love, and it does not seem ridiculous to me, even as it may be galling to read the words here, is a MacArthur Grant.   Not so much the grant to hire the staff I need, or to rent a storefront where the workshop could have a home base, not a grant to pay some internet designer a fraction of what one was paid to design the wonderful Obamacare site– a grant for me, personally, in recognition of my evolving life’s work, to allow me to continue that work without the frequent knot in my stomach because I am failing to find a way to pay myself, even as I pay two or three young people very well for their hourly services.

I am not a selfish man, nor greedy.  I’m not acquisitive.  The MacArthur grant would enable me to work to build a more just, verdant and peaceful world, to carry out the mission of the MacArthur Foundation for more than a decade to come, should I live that long.  I would be freed from the wheel I am bound to now.   I would be able to walk into a room and smile, because the best smile to smile is the smile of a person who needs nothing but friendship from those people he likes.

I know the world I am living in, and so continue on up the long, greasy slope, muttering as I go, employing my current version of a smile whenever I can.  But, if it was up to me, I am exactly the kind of person this grant was designed for, if you know what I’m saying.

(I told her not to put the copyright notices on these stickers….)

 

Image

Just One Question for the President

There are very rich, cynical people who, because speech has now been equated with money by the Supreme Court, can speak ten or a hundred million times more articulately than the average struggling mutt.    It is now common knowledge that the extremely privileged have unfettered access to lawmakers, who, dependent on their wealthy benefactors’ generous campaign support, will move mountains to privilege the advantages of the already privileged at the expense of everyone else.  

There are two brothers, the Koch brothers (pronounced “Coke”) who are only recently becoming well-known for their tireless, well-funded and influential speech against sustainable environmental policy, universal health care, collective bargaining, a living wage and many other things an unbiased person might consider basic rights of citizenship in a wealthy democracy.   The Koch brothers combined “worth” of about 100 billion dollars, puts them close to the richest twosome in the world today.  As anyone who has been following the news recently knows, it will never be enough to be among the richest people in the world today without making every effort to become richer still.

 

The Koch brothers stand to double their money when Obama quietly signs off on the other half of the Keystone pipeline (he’s already opened the southern half).  This pipeline will pump oil sludge, tar sand, the dirtiest form of nonrenewable fossil fuel, from Koch-owned lands in Canada to refineries and shipping points in the American south.   It will enable the profitable extraction of a very dirty and unsustainable fuel source that climate scientists (but, in fairness to science-deniers, only about 99% of them) say will put immense amounts of additional carbon into the biosphere.   It will accelerate climate change at a time when we need to slow it down, for the survival of life on the planet.  The extraction leaves behind a ravaged strip mined landscape and the toxic consequences are frighteningly far reaching; on the other hand, the Koch Brothers stand to make as much as $100,000,000,000 when the president quietly signs off.

 

My question is a purely rhetorical one that I will never have access to actually ask:  do you work directly for the Koch Brothers, my man?

 

I mean no disrespect to our president.    I love a Nobel Peace Prize winner with a sense of humor.  I’m just frustrated because he speaks so well and people want so badly to believe pronouncements that let them cling to the ghost of idealism rather than accept the evidence of even more eloquent and entirely consistent actions.  It’s depressing to judge this good man on the damning evidence of what he actually does, rather than on the strength of the uplifting things he has the talent to say.

 

And so it is with Obamacare, written by a lobbyist for the health insurance industry who has since gone back to work for that industry.   There are corrupt scumbags on both sides of the aisle, and in the aisle, and sliding slimily through the revolving door between lobbyists and legislators, everything oiled by the money, er… speech, of the legally created persons known as Corporations, entities whose only consideration, like the Koch Brothers, is maximizing profits.  If the corporation was actually a person it would be a psychopath.  And so it goes.

 

I received no invoice this month from Obamacare — which does not allow me to keep any of the doctors I’ve seen for years–  so I called on February 20th to find out how to pay.  Can’t do it on-line or by phone, it emerges, so the nice woman at the insurance company emailed me an electronic copy of their invoice, prepared 2/14 and not received by most consumers yet, with this maddening sub-punchline:

 

IMPORTANT MESSAGE: Our records show that you have not paid your premium for this month.   This premium is now overdue.  This bill includes your overdue premium in addition to the premium you owe for next month.  If we do not receive both of these premium payments by the due date set out on this bill, your coverage will be suspended.  Any charges for services (claims) will not be paid.

 

 So the consumer, not billed until the last week in February, deemed late and threatened with cancellation unless the “overdue” (payable by 2/28 at 5 pm. after all) premium and the preemptive March premium payments (payable by 3/31 at 5pm) are both mailed and received by the due date.

Punchline: there is no New York State agency, known to the operators and supervisors of the New York State of Health Marketplace, that monitors or oversees the business practices of the corporations that do business in that so-called marketplace.  

 

Nor is the hundred million dollar website easily navigable, or even updated, there is no on-line support to be accessed, nor any way to email anything to anyone at the Marketplace.   You can theoretically initiate a web chat, but that feature is not currently working.  The FAQ section, last updated in December 2013,  has nothing about complaints, grievances, appeals or getting help, outside of calling their overwhelmed help line.  

 

On the plus side, waiting times to speak to operators have gone down impressively, from over an hour to about ten minutes.  The operators are helpful, and overwhelmed and their hands are tied.  The consumers, well, can you spell SCAMMED, good citizens?  LOL!   Have a very nice day!