Personal

The stuff about me and my life. The “diary” side of blogging.

Consequences of an Overactive Imagination

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I don’t think I’ll ever cease to be amazed at how strongly the mind can react to things — and which things it chooses to react to.

I’ve always had an extremely active imagination, a quality which has both good and bad points. Growing up, I often retreated into my own little fantasy worlds instead of dealing with the real world around me, and that’s something that has never entirely ceased. While I’ve long since ceased hiding within myself as an escape from things I didn’t want to deal with or as a defense mechanism, I can’t say — and really, I wouldn’t want to — that I’ve ever ceased letting my imagination run away with me from time to time.

Walking down a hallway, someone might notice a small twitch of my hands from time to time, though it’s most likely they wouldn’t. Just a small gesture, perhaps just stretching my wrists a bit, nothing really worth paying attention to. Of course, that’s only because they can’t see the blast of power I just released careening down the hall, rushing past them, sweeping papers and debris in its wake as it crashes into the locked gate at the end, bursting it open with a horrendous shriek of tearing metal as the hinges shatter and fall to pieces.

People passing me on the streets at night never know of the creatures stalking them. Wingless batlike creatures the size of large dogs, walking on their forelegs, hind legs slung up and over their shoulders and terminating in wicked-looking claws. Needle-sharp teeth beneath an eyeless face, the cries of their sonar echoing from building to building as the pack converges on another unlucky derelict passed out in an alleyway. Curious how few rats this section of the city has.

Okay, perhaps it’s a little juvenile. Silly daydreams built on many years of fantasy and science-fiction novels. That doesn’t make these worlds any less fun to play in from time to time, however.

When I was younger, my fertile imagination would often get the better of me. Certain television shows would keep me up for nights. The Incredible Hulk — or the “crumbly hawk”, as I deemed him — was an especially potent terror for a time. I didn’t see Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller‘ video until long after it was released when I was only nine years old, and even into my early teen years, horror movies were a rarity.

I once tried to watch the sci-fi horror movie Lifeforce during one of HBO’s promotional free weekends after our family got cable, because of the naked lady at the beginning — but all puberty-driven fantasies were driven violently out of my head when she sucked the very life out of some poor hapless man, turning him into a horrible desiccated corpse before my very eyes, and I don’t think I slept well for a month afterwards.

Even the trailer for Gremlins was enough to give me nightmares when I saw it, and I never saw the movie in the theaters. I read the novelization to try to get an idea of how the movie was, and oh what a mistake that was. At one point in the story, the gremlin Stripe escapes from being studied by a teacher in the school’s science lab. While in the movie Stripe simply jabs the teacher with a single hypodermic needle, the book described seven or eight needles, maybe more, being stuck into the teacher’s face. It was literally years before I got the nerve to watch the movie (and then was somewhat chagrined to see how tame it was compared to the images I’d had seared into my brain when I read the book).

As I grew and began to be better able to separate the fantastical worlds inside my head from the real world around me, I started to develop a fondness for some of the more disturbing images that I hadn’t been able to cope with as a child. I started watching all the horror movies I’d heard about for years, but never been able to watch. Dean Koontz, Stephen King, Clive Barker, and other similar authors started appearing on my bookshelves. The Alien movies introduced me to the artwork of H.R. Giger. Discovering David Cronenberg‘s films led me to Naked Lunch, and then to the literary work of William S. Burroughs. My musical tastes, while never having been particularly mainstream, started skewing more towards the gothic and industrial genres. Black soon became the dominant color in my wardrobe.

Finally being able to explore and embrace this darker imagery helped me a lot through my teen years, and still does today. While I wasn’t always the happiest teenager around — I had more than my fair share of whiny, angsty moments — I never ended up succumbing to the depression that so many other people seem to. I’ve never been suicidal (in fact, quite the opposite, as I’m somewhat frightened of death, and have never found myself in a situation where suicide seemed like an even remotely good idea), and while there were certainly some stumbling blocks over the years, I think I’ve ended up becoming a fairly well-rounded and well-grounded adult (oh, lord, did I just admit that I’m an adult?).

I have my ups and downs, same as anyone else, of course, but on the whole, I’m a fairly chipper and easygoing guy (chipper…who talks like this?). That “dark side” is still there, of course, manifesting itself primarily through my tastes in music, movies, and an often bitterly bleak sense of humor, but rather than dominating my personality, it’s just another aspect — and, importantly, one not incompatible with a love of childlike (and sometimes childish) silliness (a double feature of Hellraiser and The Muppet Movie isn’t something I’d find particularly unusual, for instance).

For all that, though, there are times when my imagination can still play games with me. What it latches onto now, though, aren’t the fantastical elements of horror movies. I can watch Freddy suck Johnny Depp down into his bed in a geyser of blood, watch Pinhead flay the flesh off of Frank’s recently resurrected body, or watch Jason skewer horny teenager after horny teenager without batting an eye — heck, I enjoy ever last little blood-soaked minute of it, and sleep soundly as soon as the movie is finished.

What gets me now are the real possibilities — and, more specifically, the really realistic situations, as redundant as that might sound. Kill Bill, for all the hype it got over its extreme amounts of blood and gore, didn’t bug me simply because it was so ridiculously over the top (in a good way) that I didn’t feel real. It may have been live action with real flesh and blood actors, but it felt like a comic book, and so my brain quite happily filed it away with all the rest of the blood and gore from all those silly horror movies.

It’s when it’s something that could conceivably really happen that I get the willies.

Pulp Fiction is a great film, and The Rock, while certainly not great, is a lot of fun. Those two films have one very important element in common, though: an adrenaline shot straight to the heart. I can’t watch either movie without cringing and turning away as the needle plunges into the character’s chest and into their heart — heck, I can’t even write this paragraph out without rubbing my own chest due to the sympathy pain I feel.

Last week Prairie and I watched Deliverance, which I’d never seen before. Just after the disastrous run through the rapids as the boats break apart and the men go tumbling over rocks and down the river, Burt Reynolds pulls himself up and out of the water onto a rock, revealing the compound fracture sending his legbone tearing through skin and muscle and jutting out the side. “Oh, God,” I said — if it was even formed into actual words — and immediately curled into a ball on my side, rubbing my calf as my oh-so-eager-to-oblige imagination sent spasms from my own suddenly shattered body up my leg.

Tonight — because I’m apparently a glutton for punishment — Misery was the movie of choice. Okay, I knew the hobbling was coming. Even without having read the book or seen the movie before (that I can remember, at least), that scene is so much a part of pop culture that it would be nearly impossible to really be taken by surprise when it comes up. That certainly didn’t make it any easier to watch, however. The sickening crunch of splintering bone as the sledgehammer pulverizes his ankle, and at thirty-one years of age, I’m curled in a ball on my bed.

Honestly, in some ways it’s as funny as it is exasperating. I can laugh at the absurdity of having such a strong reaction to these things even as I’m still trying to drive the residual twinges out of my ankles. I wouldn’t trade my imagination away for anything…but I’ll freely admit that there are times when I wish I could just turn it down a few notches.

Stop!

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The Windows Error Message Generator allowed me to recreate (to the best of my ability) the single funniest and most exasperating error messages I’ve ever seen on a Windows machine. I don’t remember what I was doing, but I ran across this dialog box while on one of the Windows boxes at my old job at Kinko’s in Anchorage:

Stop

Not only did it give no indication of just what had gone wrong, but it told you to stop whatever it was you were doing without providing a ‘Cancel’ button. Just ‘Stop’ — ‘Okay’. A definite funny-because-it’s-stupid moment.

(via Boing Boing)

iTunes “I Love You…I’ll Kill You” by Enigma from the album Cross of Changes, The (1993, 8:50).

Requested: Favorite Pike Place Market Store

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Requested by Robert:

Okay, you’ve lived in Seattle for a few years yet, so why not tell us what your favorite store at The Pike is and giving us a description of it?

This was actually relatively tough. While I do live close to the Pike Place Market and go wandering through it fairly frequently, I don’t do a whole lot of shopping there, nor do I really spend a ton of time there. Generally when I head down that way I’m just on a general people-watching and/or photography jaunt, so the stores get less attention than the crowds wandering through.

There are a few places that I’m more likely to stop by while I’m in the area, though, so this afternoon I grabbed my camera and headed down to the market to try to figure out just what my favorite spots were. Here’s what I came up with…

Lark in the Morning, Pike Place Market, Seattle, WA

Lark in the Morning is a musical instrument shop unlike any other I’ve been in. They’ve got an absolutely incredible selection of instruments for sale, from all over the world and of all eras. Most of their instruments are able to be played too, as long as you’re careful. While it wasn’t there this weekend, they do occasionally have a hurdy gurdy up on one of the walls, and one of these days I may get up the nerve to ask if I can take a closer look at it.

The Great Windup, Pike Place Market, Seattle, WA

The Great Windup specializes in silly little toys and knickknacks, especially any type of wind-up toy. They’ve got all sorts, from more modern plastic toys to old turn-of-the-century style tin soldiers. Right in the center of the store is a large table with a good selection of toys set out, ready and waiting to be picked up, wound up, and sent walking, skittering, or rolling across the table. Always good for a few minutes of fun.

Pike Place Market, Seattle, WA

Much of the market I enjoy simply because it’s such a wonderful place to go people-watching. Lots of locals stop by to check out the produce or the locally made goods, and of course there’s almost always a good number of tourists wandering through. Next to Broadway up in Capitol Hill, the market is one of my favorite spots to go and spend time just watching people pass by.

Magic Shop, Pike Place Market, Seattle, WADown in the Market’s Underground section is the Magic Shop. Card tricks, magic rings, even gag gifts like whoopee cushions and hand buzzers are likely to be found in the bins here. Outside the front entrance is an old fortune telling vending machine, ready and waiting to give her next prediction for a mere fifty cents.

Golden Age Collectables, Pike Place Market, Seattle, WAYears ago, I’m not exactly sure when — possibly right after my freshman or sophomore years in high school — I went to Missoula, Montana as part of my church’s delegation to that year’s Episcopal Youth Event. To get there, we flew down to Seattle and then drove over to Montana, and while in Seattle, we spent some time at the Pike Place Market. The only part of that expedition I remember was going through this comic store, because at the time we went through, they had a real Star Trek prop phaser! It even still “worked” — that is, the trigger activated the little light in the tip so that the special effects artists knew when to draw the phaser beams! They don’t have the phaser anymore, but it’s still full of all sorts of fun little goodies.

Women's Hall of Fame, Pike Place Market, Seattle, WAThis one’s a favorite of both Prairie and I: The Women’s Hall of Fame. Lots of pro-women’s rights/lib/feminism memorabilia and goodies. There are two bags hanging on the ceiling with wonderful quotes: “Well-behaved women seldom make history. — Laurel Thatcher Ulrich” and “I have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat. — Rebecca West, 1913”.

Cinnamon Works, Pike Place Market, Seattle, WAOutside the main market and in the vendor stalls is Cinnamon Works. Prairie and I make a point of stopping by here nearly every time we hit the market, for one simple reason: they have cookies as big as your HEAD! Really good cookies, too.

And that’s what I came up with. There’s a few more photos in the Flickr photoset that goes with this entry, too. Hopefully this was close enough to the original request!

iTunes “Mask” by Bauhaus from the album 1979-1983 (1986, 4:34).

Requested: The Meaning of Life

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Requested by Tim Who?:

What is the meaning of life?

It’s a movie by the British comedy group Monty Python.

Why are we here? What’s life all about?
Is God really real, or is there some doubt?
Well, tonight, we’re going to sort it all out,
For, tonight, it’s ‘The Meaning of Life’.

What’s the point of all this hoax?
Is it the chicken and the egg time? Are we just yolks?
Or, perhaps, we’re just one of God’s little jokes.
Well, ça c’est le ‘Meaning of Life’.

Is life just a game where we make up the rules
While we’re searching for something to say,
Or are we just simply spiralling coils
Of self-replicating DNA. Nay, nay, nay, nay, nay, nay.

In this ‘life’, what is our fate?
Is there Heaven and Hell? Do we reincarnate?
Is mankind evolving, or is it too late?
Well, tonight, here’s ‘The Meaning of Life’.

For millions, this ‘life’ is a sad vale of tears,
Sitting ’round with rien nothing to say
While the scientists say we’re just simply spiralling coils
Of self-replicating DNA. Nay, nay, nay, nay, nay, nay.

So, just why– why are we here,
And just what– what– what– what do we fear?
Well, ce soir, for a change, it will all be made clear,
For this is ‘The Meaning of Life’. C’est le sens de la vie.
This is ‘The Meaning of Life’.

Either that, or simply ‘42‘. Your choice.

iTunes “Animal…Come Back Animal” by Williams, Paul from the album Muppet Movie, The (1979, 1:30).

Requested: Turn Your Back On Bush

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Requested by AxsDeny:

I’d like to hear your take on the turnyourbackonbush.com people. Specifically the incidents at OSU that led to the removal of a few of the students from the graduation ceremony.

First off, as far as the protest technique itself, I think it’s brilliant, especially in the current political climate we’ve got. When there are designated “protest zones” being set up at every event — generally so far removed from what’s actually going on that they’re nearly pointless — that anyone carrying an anti-Bush sign, wearing an anti-Bush shirt, or possibly even cracking an anti-Bush joke is going to get herded into, I think having a more or less “undercover” method of being able to publicly protest is very important.

By eschewing the normal protest trappings of signs and banners and dressing normally, people would be able to get in to more conspicuous spots closer to where Bush is and still be able to publicly show their opinion. It’s also wonderfully non-disruptive, if handled correctly: the protesters are doing nothing more than turning around. They’re not shouting, chanting slogans, or causing a public disturbance in any way. Ironically, of course, protesting in any way is seen as so reprehensible an activity these days that it’s quite likely that the people around the protesters will raise a fuss, security will be called in to pull them away, and far more attention will be paid to them than if they’d simply been allowed to stand in silence.

I love that.

As far as the removal of the TYBOB protesters at the OSU graduation, I think it’s despicable. Even before the graduation ceremony they were being threatened with arrest and denial of their diplomas, and at the ceremony, one man was escorted out and charged with disturbing the peace (a ridiculous charge, as he was being silent, as requested by the protest organizers — thankfully, the charges were dropped when he left peacefully).

As pointed out above, though, by reacting (and denouncing the protests proactively) as strongly as the OSU administration did, they called far more attention to the events than if they’d simply allowed everything to progress normally.

People — especially people in power — can be so stupid sometimes.

iTunes “Cyberspider” by Tear Garden, The from the album To Be an Angel Blind, the Crippled Soul Divide (1996, 3:53).

Requested: Women and Science

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Requested by Royce:

I’m interested in hearing what you think about the Harvard “women may be congenitally less apt for the sciences” comment.

I’ve got to admit, I’m having a little difficulty with this one.

First off, this was the first I’d heard of it — somehow, this little fracas had managed to pass entirely under my radar until Royce mentioned it.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, virtually all there is on the ‘net is _re_action to the statements, which were made at a function that was neither taped or transcribed, so there’s not even complete agreement on what exactly was said. Just a lot of people up in arms about it.

From the first article that Royce linked to, I was at first inclined to write Harvard president Lawrence Summers off as a misogynistic shmuck. Trying to track down information about all this didn’t seem to support that, though.

The best account of what happened that I’ve found so far comes from the Washington Post and even here, it doesn’t really account for much of the story:

…[Summers] has provoked a new storm of controversy by suggesting that the shortage of elite female scientists may stem in part from “innate” differences between men and women.

…Summers laid out a series of possible explanations for the underrepresentation of women in the upper echelons of professional life, including upbringing, genetics and time spent on child-rearing. No transcript was made of Summers’s remarks, which were extemporaneous but delivered from notes. There was disagreement about precisely what he said.

…Summers pointed to research showing that girls are less likely to score top marks than boys in standardized math and science tests, even though the median scores of both sexes are comparable. He said yesterday that he did not offer any conclusion for why this should be so but merely suggested a number of possible hypotheses.

From that and other similar accounts I’ve found, it seems to me that Summers is being rather unnecessarily roasted over the flames. He didn’t say that women were any more or less intelligent or capable than men, only that there may be differences in the way men and women process and deal with information that may account for some of the disparity in the numbers of men and women in the higher sciences, and that these possibilities should be investigated. He was putting forth a hypothesis, not a conclusion — unfortunately, it’s a politically incorrect hypothesis, and because of that, he’s being lambasted for his remarks. It’s very possible that he might have badly chosen his words, and that’s much of what’s adding fuel to the fire here, but without a transcript that’s going to be difficult to determine.

One of the best overviews of the situation I’ve found comes from William Saletan at Slate:

Everyone agrees Summers’ remarks were impolitic. But were they wrong? Is it wrong to suggest that biological differences might cause more men than women to reach the academic elite in math and science?

[…]

What’s the evidence on Summers’ side? Start with the symptom: the gender gap in test scores. Next, consider biology. Sex is easily the biggest physical difference within a species. Men and women, unlike blacks and whites, have different organs and body designs. The inferable difference in genomes between two people of visibly different races is one-hundredth of 1 percent. The gap between the sexes vastly exceeds that. A year and a half ago, after completing a study of the Y chromosome, MIT biologist David Page calculated that male and female human genomes differed by 1 percent to 2 percent — “the same as the difference between a man and a male chimpanzee or between a woman and a female chimpanzee,” according to a paraphrase in the New York Times. “We all recite the mantra that we are 99 percent identical and take political comfort in it,” Page said. “But the reality is that the genetic difference between males and females absolutely dwarfs all other differences in the human genome.” Another geneticist pointed out that in some species 15 percent of genes were more active in one sex than in the other.

You’d expect some of these differences to show up in the brain, and they do. A study of mice published a year ago in Molecular Brain Research found that just 10 days after conception, at least 50 genes were more active in the developing brain of one sex than in the other. Comparing the findings to research on humans, the Los Angeles Times observed that “the corpus callosum, which carries communications between the two brain hemispheres, is generally larger in women’s brains [than in men’s]. Female brains also tend to be more symmetrical. … Men and women, on average, also possess documented differences in certain thinking tasks and in behaviors such as aggression.”

Let’s be clear about what this isn’t. It isn’t a claim about overall intelligence. Nor is it a justification for tolerating discrimination between two people of equal ability or accomplishment. Nor is it a concession that genetic handicaps can’t be overcome. Nor is it a statement that girls are inferior at math and science: It doesn’t dictate the limits of any individual, and it doesn’t entail that men are on average better than women at math or science. It’s a claim that the distribution of male scores is more spread out than the distribution of female scores — a greater percentage at both the bottom and the top. Nobody bats an eye at the overrepresentation of men in prison. But suggest that the excess might go both ways, and you’re a pig.

Also interestingly, yesterday I came across an article from the University of California, Irvine, where a study is showing that men and women of similar IQs process the information in very different ways — very much what it sounds to me like Summers was talking about and proposing that more work be done in studying these differences.

While there are essentially no disparities in general intelligence between the sexes, a UC Irvine study has found significant differences in brain areas where males and females manifest their intelligence.

The study shows women having more white matter and men more gray matter related to intellectual skill, revealing that no single neuroanatomical structure determines general intelligence and that different types of brain designs are capable of producing equivalent intellectual performance.

[…]

In general, men have approximately 6.5 times the amount of gray matter related to general intelligence than women, and women have nearly 10 times the amount of white matter related to intelligence than men. Gray matter represents information processing centers in the brain, and white matter represents the networking of — or connections between — these processing centers….

This, according to Rex Jung, a UNM neuropsychologist and co-author of the study, may help to explain why men tend to excel in tasks requiring more local processing (like mathematics), while women tend to excel at integrating and assimilating information from distributed gray-matter regions in the brain, such as required for language facility. These two very different neurological pathways and activity centers, however, result in equivalent overall performance on broad measures of cognitive ability, such as those found on intelligence tests.

At this point, I’m inclined to think that Summers is the victim of political correctness run amok. While it’s all very nice and fuzzy to say that no matter what, we’re all identical across the board, it’s not a very realistic idea. Of course, that doesn’t mean that different people, different sexes, different races, or different cultures are inherently better or worse than others, only that they’re different.

Trying to gloss over these differences under the veneer of political correctness is foolish, but when suggesting that we should look at these areas for more study results in a controversy like this, is it really that likely that we’re going to learn anything about ourselves? Sadly, I’m afraid not.

Requested: Penguins and Monkeys

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Requested by Candace:

Penguins…..definately penguins….Oh! And monkeys too! :P

Penguin slap

Penguins, huh? And monkeys? Well, there’s two critters that don’t generally appear together as a topic. Hm…

I picked up my love for penguins (platonic, I assure you, you sickos) from dad, for the most part. When dad was working for the Alaska Court System, his office was practically wallpapered with pictures of penguins. He had little penguin figurines on his desk. Stuffed penguins on his shelves. Even a three-foot tall stuffed Emperor penguin in one corner. Penguins everywhere!

And — if I remember correctly — it all started through dad’s love of kids.

Dad’s been working as a custody investigator for years (first through DFYS, then the Alaska Court System, and now freelancing after his retirement). It can be something of a rough job, as he spends his days interviewing families that are splitting up for one reason or another and determining which parent should wind up with custody of the children. It can lead to some tough situations and hard days, but it can also be very rewarding for him, through working with the kids and doing what he can to make sure they’re placed in the best situation possible.

(Now, what follows comes from memory, so I may not have it quite exactly right. The gist should be pretty accurate, though.)

Because he spent a lot of time talking with young children, he always made sure to keep various toys and stuffed animals in his office for them to play with. Being a fan of Bloom County, one of the toys he had in his office was an Opus the penguin doll. After one of his sessions with a child, the kid came back later for another session and brought along a picture they had drawn for dad of his penguin, which he then put up on his wall.

Later, another kid came in, saw the Opus doll and the penguin picture, and drew another one. Co-workers started to notice that there were a few penguins in dad’s office, figured that “hey, this guy must like penguins,” and got him a penguin calendar. Or another stuffed penguin. Or a little penguin figurine. And on, and on, and on…

After a while, it was difficult to look anywhere in dad’s office without seeing a penguin. And — perhaps as evidence that immersion therapy really does work — a perceived thing for penguins eventually became a real thing for penguins.

Me being my dad’s son, and sharing much of his sense of humor and love of the absurd, it’s not all that surprising that I’d pick up on all this. It certainly helped that I grew up reading Bloom County, of course, but penguins are such silly, fun little birds that it’d be tough not to like them anyway. I don’t have the penguin wallpaper effect going on that dad did for years, but I do have a little stuffed penguin that sits atop my computer monitor that Prairie got me a while ago, and I always make sure to stop by the penguin exhibits when we go to a zoo. Definitely my favorite animal out there.

Monkeys, now. That’s a little tougher for me. Candice had a purple monkey in her truck, and Prairie has a pink monkey in her car, but that’s about my only association with monkeys at the moment. I do have a couple of monkeys in my past, though (whether or not you want to include some of my friends on that list is entirely up to you).

Me, Kermit, and Charles Wallace in 1991

For a long time, I had an arm-puppet monkey with a little squeaker air bulb in his mouth that I liked playing with. More importantly, though, was the one stuffed animal I had as a kid — Charles Wallace (named after the little boy in Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time).

Charles actually looked more like a dog, with his big floppy ears, but for some reason I always considered him a monkey. I had him for the longest time (and still do, I’m sure, I believe he’s in a box up in Anchorage at the moment), and even had mom perform surgery on him at one point after a fight between my brother and I when we each had ahold of one of Charles’ legs, tugging back and forth…and Charles got suddenly neutered.

iTunes “Heat” by Kronos Quartet from the album Heat (1995, 7:41).

Bank of America can kiss my ass

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I’ve been behind on payments to a Bank of America credit card for a while. My own fault, these things happen. The automated phone calls were annoying (but then, they’re supposed to be), but I just had to make sure I had money available to give the bank. Today I had that money, so on lunch I wandered down to a local BoA branch and handed them an even hundred dollars.

In order to make sure that the credit department knew about the payment, I had been instructed to call their 800 number and then dial an extension to speak to a representative regarding my account. Once I got home from work (since I didn’t have the information with me at work), I gave them a call. After sitting through the oh-so-cheery “We’re here to help!” recorded message, I was prompted to enter my extension. I did so…and was promptly disconnected.

Um…okay. Let’s try that again.

Dial. Annoyingly cheerful message. Prompt. Punch in the extension.

Disconnect.

Now I’m definitely annoyed. I dial back a third time, this time just sitting and waiting for an associate to answer. One does, I give them my information, and that much is taken care of. However, during that annoyingly cheerful message I’d just listened to three times, another 800 number had been given so customers could call and give any concerns with the service that they had just received. Since being unceremoniously kicked offline a few times had gotten under my skin, I figured it was worth letting them know.

So, I call the second 800 number…and sit on hold. For ten minutes. With a recorded “We’ll be right with you!” message playing in my ear every twenty seconds. Now, I know that these messages are a good thing overall, in that they do assure you that you haven’t been dropped from the system and that you will be taken care of eventually, but the frequency of the message got pretty grating after a while. Still, on the grand scheme of things, that was fairly minor.

Eventually, the phone is answered. I explain to the girl what had just happened to me, and she then informs me that if there’s nobody at a particular extension when it’s dialed, the system disconnects. Well, okay, that seems like a really bad design decision, but I can accept it. Still, I let her know that it might help in the future if there were some form of recorded message letting the customer know that that extension was not currently active before they were disconnected, or possibly have the system re-route back to the main line, instead of just dropping the caller without any indication of what was going on.

At which point she starts to argue with me.

Apparently, I just hadn’t understood what she had just told me. I tried to assure her that I understood what she had said perfectly well, I just thought that there might be a better way to go about things.

And she continues to argue with me.

I tried to explain that I had been given this number by their system in order to report customer service issues, and that I was only trying to pass on a suggestion in order to improve things for other customers later on down the line.

And she continued to argue with me.

At that point I gave up, snapped “Never mind,” and hung up on her, mid-babble.

I was tempted to call back to the customer service hotline in order to complain about the girl who’d just helped me, but I hadn’t caught her name, and I wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about sitting on hold for another ten minute listening to the system assure me that they’d be with me “soon” every twenty seconds.

Bank of America will get their money, as fast as I can get it to them without risking my health or home — and I’ll be very happy not to do business with them in the future.

iTunes “Be There (Tormentor)” by Tall Paul from the album Duty Free (1999, 5:24).

Homeless Vet

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My mind misinterpreted a sign I saw while walking back to work from lunch, and I ended up spending the next few moments contemplating a world with destitute veterinatarians on the street corners, holding up their handmade cardboard signs as people walked by, begging for “Spare Change or Sick Puppies?”