Apple Foot

Cancelling RCN

Many, many years ago, I subscribed to a dial-up account at a small, local Internet Service Provider. After a few years, that small provider was absorbed into RCN. I kept the RCN dial-up account for several years. In November I got DSL from Verizon (not, I should point out, because I have even a sliver of love for Verizon). I hung onto the RCN account for a couple months to make sure I was getting all my email, etc. A couple months turned into six months, because I am a loser. Yesterday I finally called RCN to cancel my account.

I worked my way through the usual long phone tree, eventually finding an option that specifically said it was for "canceling dial-up service". Of course, at large, soulless corporations like Verizon and RCN, the number you press on the phone tree does not actually route your call any differently than pressing any other number. It's a useless exercise designed to keep you busy so you won't notice how long it's taking to get a representative on the phone.

So I choose the "cancel dial-up account" option and get "Brian", who makes me give him my home phone number, address, reason for calling, reason for canceling, etc. Then he announces that he can't cancel the account, and he'll have to transfer me to Billing. After 15 minutes on hold, the Billing guy makes me answer all the same questions again, then informs me that Billing doesn't do any cancellations at all, and he's going to have to transfer me to a dial-up technician. At which point I tell him to whom I've spoken already, and point out that this sort of poor customer experience is precisely the reason I'm running from RCN. In transferring me to the dial-up tech, our man in Billing disconnects me.

I go back to the toll free number, work my way through the phone tree, and am sent back to a customer service rep, who makes me give her my phone number, street address, reason for calling, etc. Then she announces that she can't cancel my account, and she'll have to transfer me to Billing. So I tell her my whole customer experience so far today, emphasizing the fact that someone in Billing has already told me that their department absolutely cannot assist me.

Now suddenly she can handle this herself without transferring me any further. This takes several minutes, during which I repeatedly wonder if I've been disconnected again, due to the static on the line and the lack of a speaking voice.

It took almost 45 minutes and considerable aggravation to close an account costing me $21.95 per month. I can't tell you how often I thought, "It might be worth it just to keep paying them," but I'm convinced that their nefarious plan includes making things so difficult that I will do just that, continuing to pay them for the convenience of not having to deal with them.

Employment

I can no longer put it off (although, as evidenced by the existence of this post, I'm trying). Tonight I must apply for my job.

Thanks to the recent merger, everyone in the organization is being asked to re-apply for their jobs. I have not updated my resume in more than five years. Technically, all I have to do is fill out a very basic one page application form, but I'm pretty embarrassed that I don't have a resume to attach, so I'm punishing myself right now, trying to work one up.

It's pretty much a sure thing that I'll be hired for the position, so in a way it's low stress, but I'm making it more stressful on myself. And my head is killing me.

Thoroughbred racing

On Friday, Racing Hall of Fame trainer Frank Whiteley, Jr., died. Whiteley's most famous horse is probably Ruffian, so it seemed appropriate that Saturday's Derby featured a filly (the first in nine years to enter racing's premier three-year-old event) that seemed to capture the hearts and imaginations of many. Souvenir stands sold out of Eight Belles supporter buttons while they still had plenty on hand for other contenders. The filly obliged with a good race and showed placed behind a strong Big Brown.

And that's when the reminder of Whiteley's horse turned horribly specific. While Ruffian, despite her heartbreaking efforts (link includes interview with Whiteley and footage of the match) to run on three legs, never finished the great match race, Eight Belles crossed the wire and was galloping out before she broke down.

Some early commentators questioned whether it was fair to run a filly with colts. These were followed by animal cruelty questions, questions about track surface (a hot topic right now in racing), and finally questions about the industry's breeding practices.

When I was going through my adolescent "horse-y" phase, I followed thoroughbred racing more closely than I do now. A thoroughbred race is a beautiful thing--they're gorgeous animals, with great big hearts, lots of determination. Unfortunately, racing lore is full of gallant horses that tragically broke down.

It's always seemed weird to me that humans take so much credit for the work of horses--trainers and owners lifting the trophy and being honored while the horse goes back to the barn. That contrast was especially evident yesterday, when humans took a lot of credit for Big Brown's win while not taking much responsibility for Eight Belles' death. That's probably not fair of me to say, pending autopsy, but I think as much as I love thoroughbred racing, it's worth asking what place racing has in our modern world.

Recently Misinterpreted

What the database record said: "High Plain Elementary [School]"

What I read: "High Pain Elementary"

Which is silly, since everyone knows that "high pain" is junior high.

New excuse: time crunch

My phone service was restored almost two weeks ago. Turned out the wire outside the building (but past Verizon's demarc) was all broken up and pulled away from the house. Verizon didn't charge me, since it was outside the building and I'd already had them in telling me the problem was fixed, but he could have. This last guy was pleasant, professional, and fixed the problem, all of which was an excellent start to my Saturday.

So now we're back to me not posting for my own reasons. It comes to this: I am utterly crazed at work. We're going through the merger process, which means a lot of merging systems, databases, networks, etc., and there aren't enough IT people to keep all the plates spinning. It's been very difficult to keep up with longer term projects because we have a lot of fires to put out. I keep thinking I'm getting too old for this. I don't know how I would get through if I weren't sleeping so much better than I was last year.

Hello

Just so you know, this latest long blog silence is not the usual kind of long silence, where I can't even come up with anything uninteresting to post. No, this long silence is because my phone service (and therefore my DSL) is hosed. I'm posting this from-- well, not from home.

You may remember I have a history with Verizon. The current outage stretches back several weeks (during most of that time I had my DSL, but not phone service, so I didn't really care), due to a combination of typical Verizon service standards, my neuroses (basically, after an unsuccessful service call, I got so frustrated I couldn't call them to come back), and my heavy work schedule (I already spent one morning sitting around waiting for the service guy, I can't kill another half day this way). So I'm not sure when I'll actually get the problem fixed, although I'm becoming sufficiently aggravated that I will soon work up the energy to call Verizon again.

MBCR: All The Wonderful You've Come To Expect

On Tuesdays, I get on the Stoughton line. I catch the train at 5:20PM at Back Bay, and by 5:32 I'm supposed to be stepping off at Hyde Park.

Tonight I got on the train and, by the time we hit Ruggles, the conductor had announced that due to an emergency ahead of us, we would be traveling slowly. Somewhere just shy of Hyde Park, the conductor announced that due to a medical emergency at Canton Junction, ours was the last train outbound for Stoughton that night, and that our train would either disembark all passengers at Hyde Park for transfer to shuttle buses, or return to South Station to meet up with buses. After twenty minutes or so in a tunnel near Hyde Park (so I couldn't call the person meeting me there to let her know what was going on), the conductor announced that the train would be going back to South Station (no stops at Ruggles or Back Bay) as soon as the driver got back to the car at the other end of the train. Several minutes later, the conductor announced we'd be returning to South Station after a brake test. Several minutes after that, we were moving, and the conductor announced that we would, after all, be stopping at Ruggles and Back Bay (much rejoicing as those of us looking for Orange Line connections thought we'd avoided the South Station vortex). As we got closer to Ruggles, the conductor announced that dispatch had changed their minds again, and that we'd be going straight to South Station.

At about this time, folks started to get cell phone service, and we heard that there was an accident in Canton involving an earlier train and a boxcar.

We pulled into South Station at about 6:26. At this point I'd been on the train for over an hour in order to go back one stop from where I started. As we got out, I recognized the conductor with the train on the other side of our platform: he usually is the conductor for my return from Hyde Park on train 922.

As the crowd was making it's disgruntled way down the platform back toward the station we heard the announcement: "6:30 train to Stoughton now boarding on Track 5."  Chaos ensues, since we just got off the train to Stoughton, and we'd been told there were no more Stoughton trains tonight, and we'd been further told that shuttle buses would be run from South Station. After much shouting, rumormongering, and gesturing reminiscent of traders on the stock exchange floor, it turned out that the 6:30 was only going to 128, then shuttle buses would go to Sharon/Stoughton. This information was not shared over the public address system.

Honest to God--we'd just been on a train that had made it halfway to 128 before being sent back to GO and then were told to get on another train back to 128. Not to mention that now the 6:30 has a double load of people on it, having picked up everybody from train 919.

I realize that when things go wrong, you have to expect a certain amount of inconvenience. There was an emergency, and our train had to be re-routed/re-scheduled. However, the indecision about where exactly we were going and how we were getting home from there, is really disturbing. And stupid.

The MBCR: all the wacky wonderfulness you expect from the MBTA!

P.S. Since my music lesson was well and thoroughly missed, I actually got the Red Line to the Orange Line and went home, wishing the rest of the Stoughton passengers good luck.

Spring Cleaning

The documentary film Possessed spends a few minutes with each of four hoarders. Each hoards different things, for different reasons, and some desire freedom from their stuff more than others.

To me it seems there's a logical progression through the four. The first is the one I think of as most reasonable, probably because he hoards books, which I highly value, too. He's got 6000 books in a one bedroom flat, and he's carefully cataloged them all in a database, including their physical location in the apartment. A fire inspector would probably have a coronary just walking in the door. I could be this guy--I have 6000 comic books, and probably a thousand books.

Contestant number two has a problem with acquisition. Inside of a year, he buys 300 cell phones and stores them, unused, in his stuffed home. He is deeply in debt, and can't seem to stop buying things. He also can't seem to get rid of them once he has them.

The third hoarder is a woman who literally saves junk, albeit somewhat neatly. There are neat stacks of used cosmetic sponges, her kitchen is full of neatly rinsed jars and plastic bottles. She sleeps on half her bed, the other half being stacked with stuff she can't bear to throw out. It looks to me like the reductio ad absurdum of "It's a perfectly good..."  This is the sort of thing I've heard many people, including one of my roommates, say to justify storing some item they have no need of: "It's a perfectly good [item]." It's unthinkable to throw out a perfectly good item, even if you'll never use it, because it's not trash. "That's a perfectly good mayonnaise jar. Someday I could use it to store something in."

Hoarder number four is the sort you think of when you think hoarder (unless you think of cats--thankfully, none of these people hoards live things). He's a rather sad, lonely, late middle-aged man, living in absolute squalor (his once-white stove is black with cooking grease, everything has a thick layer of dust over it) among his piles and piles of trash. As he sits fiddling with a broken pair of eyeglasses and talking about his grief for his deceased mother, all I can feel is profound pity.

I come from a line of hoarders. Great-grandma had stacks of newspapers in her home, and paths from one room to the next between boxes and piles. She had gobs of useless items bought at garage sales and other items she and her pack rat husband deemed "perfectly good..." When their grandchildren cleaned out their home to sell it, construction-grade flatbed trucks were needed to haul away the junk. My grandmother, having grown up in this home, was not much better. When my grandfather made a bedroom out of a partially finished attic, he shoved some of my grandmother's stuff against the side walls and dry walled over it.

I can talk myself out of a certain amount of "It's a perfectly good..."  I can periodically look in my closet and think, "Yes, those are all perfectly good mittens, and I'm never going to wear some of those again," and then throw the extras out or give them away. I can admit that it's time to liquidate the relics of some abandoned hobby. But there are some things I can't seem to get rid of, the worst being the comic books. I throw away magazines all the time, but it's nearly unthinkable to do the same with comic books (I have recently made one or two exceptions). The storage of my comic books is a constant concern, a weight on my life. The thought of moving is horrifying to me, and I fantasize about just walking away from everything I own and letting someone else deal with the disposal.

My roommates contribute more than their fair share to the clutter in our apartment. I try not to be a hypocrite about their clutter. I often remind myself that my collection of comic books is not intrinsically more valuable than the things my roommates hoard. We just value different things, I tell myself, as I jam my coat into the overstuffed closet or gaze despairingly at the "perfectly good" mattress in our tiny front room, or knock over some of the several dozen bottles of shampoo in the bathroom. I remind myself of George Carlin's joke about "my stuff, your crap." Unfortunately, the convergence of my crap with my roommates' crap into a cumulative clutter of crap has become dispiriting.

Possessed is unsettling, bordering on terrifying. That could easily be me. Maybe it already is me, and I just haven't admitted it yet.

St. Paddy's Day Melody

I'm pretty sure you can catch this show live at a tavern in Southie somewhere.

Birthday Cake

Memo to my sisters' kids: when we were little, we didn't have friends over for birthday parties. Birthdays were just family, and we'd get to have some favorite food for dinner, and then Grandma & Grandpa C. would show up with ice cream, and we'd eat cake and ice cream and the grown-ups would drink coffee made in a Corning blue corn flower percolator.

This year and last, my parents have come up from New Jersey to celebrate my birthday, and mom brings cake. Specifically, she brings chocolate mayonnaise cake with a fairly small amount of what I guess is called butter cream frosting.

Funny story about frosting: One day in college my friend E. said something about making fake frosting for a cake. "When you don't have time to make real frosting, you can do this fake thing with butter and confectioner's sugar and vanilla..." I had to inform E. that to most Americans, this is real frosting; fake frosting comes out of a can. E. believes real frosting involves a candy thermometer.

At any rate, every year on my birthday I get myself something sweet to stick a candle in. In recent years, it's been brownies or congo bars or something. I'm usually unsatisfied by my improvised birthday cake (especially if it's actual bakery-bought cake), and I'd thought this was because I was sitting alone in my bedroom singing happy birthday to myself and blowing out a candle from a package I've had in my desk for twenty years. It's not just that, though. Now that I've had mom here with her mayonnaise cake two years in a row, I know what is really lacking on my birthday.

I can't even tell you how happy it makes me to eat birthday cake that tastes like the birthday cake I had as a kid. It would be the perfect birthday if dinner were a couple slices of plain Sicilian from Carmine's, followed by cake and coffee.