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March 31, 2005
The Blogatron Top Nine: Most Hated Modern 'Conveniences'
9. Package Tracking
Yes. While great in theory, the grim fact of the matter is that my package will not arrive faster just because I can go online and see that it was "DELIVERED SORTING STATION MSHPEE 8:01AM." Package tracking does not help us do anything better, except maybe obsess over the relative speed of the SORTING STATION in MSHPEE and for god's sake, just put that thing on a truck already! How hard is it? Because, in the event that there is an actual problem with your package, what do you still have to do? You still have to wend your way through the interminable phone hierarchy of your FedEx or your UPS or your, heaven help us, postal service, in order to talk to someone who must creakily and manually uncover the tangled path your Amazon DVDs took to South Dakota instead of to your doorstep. I am all set with the obsessions, thanks. I do not need to be enabled in developing another one.
8. The Digital Cable Channel Scroll
Like a bad breakup, I hate the digital cable channel scroll only because I don't have it anymore. Have you had this? It is the most beautiful thing in the world. You just press a button and, without interrupting the very important program that might not be as important as other programs elsewhere, the lower half of your TV screen tells you what you are watching now, and – the best part – you can flip through the info on the other stations yourself, without waiting for the agonizing Hooked-on-Phonics pace of the everyman's scroll to get to the channel you are interested in (invariably a channel that has just scrolled out of view whenever you go there). Giving up the digital cable channel scroll is like kicking herion – what's going on? What's this show here? What's on the other channels? What's on the Soap Network at 3:00am? You just don't know. It's like torture. I hate you for getting me into this, digital cable channel scroll.
7. The Electronic Signature Reader
I can't adjust, I don't want to adjust and I am convinced that to do so is to accept the Mark of the Beast. I am still incapable of even registering one of these things in front of me at the counter; when it is time to sign for my credit card I flail about, looking for the paper and the pen, until some bored Target clerk sighs dramatically and gestures to the scratched screen and plastic stylus of my nemesis like she had to for 4,000 other idiots already today. How do you write on these damn things? It's like communicating via Etch-a-Sketch. Suddenly all your missing packages that you are tracking are coming up as "Signed for by Squiggly Line," a stranger is taking your Discover card to the grocery store, and your financial identity has no meaning. Enough!
6. The Second-Counting Walk Sign
Problem the first: What are we, a bunch of babies? You get to the intersection, you see the walk light, you grab your balls and you go. Why must we be reassured that we have a full 37 seconds to cross the street? Those damn cars are just going to have to wait for us if we start out with just a few seconds left on the clock, aren't they now? Hell, yeah. We don't need no stinking second counter. Problem the second: That countdown is stressful, man. Watching the time tick down to the last second as a bunch of crazy-eyed Boston commuters rev their engines and inch into the crosswalk, not seeing pedestrians at all but just itching to hit the gas so they can peel over from the far right into the far left lane ahead of everyone else trying to do the same thing. I'm going to die either way, why do I have to count off the timeline of my impending doom?
5. The Walkie-Talkie Phone
I can't *beep* really talk much trash *beep* about cell phones *beep* in general, since I *beep* have one. But *beep* unless you are on a *beep* security team, or *beep* possibly a bike *beep* messenger, you are just *beep* not important enough to *beep* intrude on our consciousness so *beep* shrilly and *beep* ostentatiously. Must you add all this *beep* beeping to your already inane *beep* conversation? Not to mention that *beep* one side of the idiocy was bad enough – now *beep* I must hear your staticky *beep* companion's input on that *beep* "totally insane night last" *beep* "night, dude?!?" I will *beep* pass, thanks.
4. The Self-Checkout Lane
The self-checkout lane is way too much for me. WAY TOO MUCH. Scan things! Scan things again! What the hell way do you point things, to the side or to the little mirrory part on the bottom? I can never remember because I am always in a blind panic by now! Scan! Scan like the wind! That guy behind me thinks that I am an idiot, I know it! Find the Cortland apples on the screen, where the hell are they, so many kinds of apples, line growing longer behind me! Coupons? Aaaaah! And then you have to race your groceries down to the end of the lane, and bag them before the next person's stuff touches yours and gives it cooties. Oh the terror. I will gladly suffer all the indignities of the regular checkout to avoid all that.
3. Those New 'Foam Applicators' in Liquid Paper
I don't know when these little monstrosities started infiltrating my correction fluid, but I do know they were damn sneaky about it. I was never offered a choice; they just started showing up under the guise of regular old Liquid Paper from the office supply catalog. No warning, no nothing. "Smoother and easier application!" my ass. What's so hard about the brush in the first place? And then, this foam thing, it's a loose cannon. There's no telling how much stuff you've got in there; you try and try to get the flow started to no avail, then all of a sudden it's Liquid Paper Armageddon, a big puddle of white overflowing the page. I do not like this pretender to the correction fluid throne; I do not like the way it horned in on my brush action without so much as a by-your-leave, and I do not like the way it acts now that it's here. Bad foam! Evil foam! Inconsiderate and immoderate foam!
2. The Fax Machine
My problem with the fax machine comes down to trust. In my experience, the fax machine only does what you tell it to on about one attempt out of three, and, to make things worse, it communicates its status in a manner more obscure than the oracle. "PG 5 TRANS OK-1 TRANS NOGOOD-4 LN BUSY/NOT RSP" What? So you are constantly calling people, or getting calls from people, about "Did you get my fax? Where is it? Didja get it now? Is the fax on? Is there a paper jam?" and so on. Madness! We could all read these damn things over the phone to each other, and retype them, and forge each other's signatures, in the time it takes to make our obeisances to the telefax gods.
1. The Pager
The pager equals the fax machine in inscrutability, and then adds the trump card of social anxiety. I hate these damn things; my palms get clammy when I am asked to page someone. There you are, just dialing numbers into the ether, communicating with a device that may or may not be expecting you to enter # or **911* or some other obscure code into it to get the person to actually respond. And there is no phone call I hate to receive more than the following: "This is Mr. X. Someone paged me?" There Mr. X is, all puffed up with the urgency of his mission, tapping his foot with impatience, and never having the slightest idea who out of the 90 people with access to phones here might have buzzed his belt area. How I am to track this person down is not Mr. X's problem; his time is important! He has a pager! And thus it is my job to find the page-placer, despite the very good chance that that person isn't listening, isn't here anymore, or doesn't actually know Mr. X's name, just his function. You cannot even foist Mr. X off onto voice mail like most annoying callers, because that whole process is based on the conviction that you are putting him through to Just the Right Person who will Get Back to Him Right Away, and since he already knows you don't know what the hell is going on, the jig is up there. The whole receptionist/caller power dynamic is just thrown out of whack altogether. Pagers, pfeh! You might as well engage the city of Boston in an immense game of Telephone, asking each person to scream the name of your target to the next person they meet going east in hopes of hitting them eventually. I wash my hands of the whole thing.
Posted by hilatron at 04:53 PM | Comments (5)
March 22, 2005
Extend. Retract!
This morning on my way to work I encountered a woman pushing a stroller, approaching some garbage cans that were strewn across the sidewalk. "Oh! I will be helpful," I said to myself, "and move these cans out of the way so that she can pass by." And so I grabbed one and pushed it out toward the street, smiling helpfully, as she grabbed another one and put it behind the fence...hey wait a minute. Those were her very own garbage cans, that she was here to put away, that I was moving out of her reach, smiling helpfully all the while.
A normal person would have said "Oh sorry! I thought you were just trying to get past," and given her her garbage can back. But this did not occur to me. Instead I grinned my ever-more-frozen helpful grin and scurried past silently, mortified and ashamed at this horrific and unsolveable faux pas, as she no doubt wondered why this freak was making faces at her and moving her garbage cans around, what the hell?
Social awkwardness haunts me, freezes me right up, and I never have the presence of mind to say the thing that will make it all better. Like the bus driver who clearly thinks I am someone else, someone with whom he has a jovial chatty relationship: "Hey! That was a short trip!" he called out as he took my ticket the last time I headed up to see the Dad. A normal person would say "I think you have me confused with somebody else," and laugh it off, and maybe form a jovial chatty relationship of their own. But me! How can I tell the bus driver that he is wrong! So awkward! So instead I found myself trying to make his comment make sense as though he had actually said it knowing that I was me, as though this would make him feel better. I mumbled something incomprehensible about yeah, I make a lot of day trips, be back tonight, hey hey, okay, which makes no sense at all and now the bus driver thinks that whatever poor woman he mistook me for is completely out of her gourd, and a little standoffish to boot.
I collect these little moments and keep them, to pore over later: so many failures, so much silliness I've generated. The problem is that I am so concerned with the immediate issues - form words, don't shriek in terror, keep standing upright, etc. - that I kind of forget to just breathe deeply and say what I mean, and that most people really aren't looking for an opportunity to point and say "Ha! Moron! You took part in a momentary misunderstanding! I shun you, and call upon others to do the same!" I mean, no one is ever going to do that, but I always act as if they will, and always realize too late that that is what I did, and resolve not to be pointlessly sneaky next time, except that if history is any guide I of course will be.
As a further example of my neurotic obsession with every human interaction, I have been mulling over the phone calls I received this morning from Dad's Soothing Image Center. I kind of let an innocent nurse have it when she accidentally told me about yet another Suprise! doctor appointment. I have been trying and trying to get the Soothing Image Center to tell me when the Dad has appointments, apparently to no avail. And so I did some bitching to this part-time nurse, who of course did not schedule the appointment herself, so who can be held accountable? The plan now is to put a note In The Book informing future appointment-setters that they should always call me; apparently they don't as a matter of course, because "the families usually don't want to know" about such things, which, entirely its own novel's worth of *sigh* to that. We'll see how that goes; my previous experiences with In The Book do not fill me with confidence.
So I was feeling kind of bad about busting out the snippy on this nurse, but: whoa back up there. After I got over the initial "grr appointments stomp stomp stomp oops sorry I yelled" thing, I remembered that the whole reason I got this call at all was because she had noticed the Suprise! appointment In The Book, scheduled for 3:00, when "all her people" go home. So she was hoping that I might be wanting to accompany the Dad to the doctor, since it would be hard for her to coordinate an aide to do so.
Now, let's say for the benefit of the doubt that I am kind of making up the implied guilt of "the families usually don't want to know" and the "maybe you would like to go with your dad [like a good daughter would]." Let's assume that those are my issues. Still. What? Did you just call me to ask if I would maybe like to come do your job, since it's proving inconvenient for you? Did you really do that? Am I crazy, or how many kinds of wildly inappropriate is that?
So in the space of ten minutes or so between the phone call and the garbage cans, I went from grrr to feeling bad about the grrr to thinking that I should maybe upgrade to a good solid RAAAAH! If I think about this too much more, and how likely is it that I won't, I will probably either be sending this woman a gift basket or off sharpening a knife somewhere. And in the meantime, I haven't had a free second to worry about the implications of the garbage can incident, and its possible effect on world peace, so who knows what will happen if I don't get busy fretting about that. It is a hard row I hoe, my pretties, and don't you forget it.
Posted by hilatron at 11:54 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
March 15, 2005
Tuesday Miscellany, or, This Blog Is Starting to Need a Glossary
Voting is now somewhat belatedly open for the Diarist Awards, so go forth and cast your ballot. The weighty responsibilities of a panel member are now lifted from my shoulders! Whew! So I'm sure that I'll now be writing lots of riveting things here.
Any day now.
Yeah.
This weekend was fun in a way that left me actually physically tired, though probably mostly because I have been hiding out at my house a lot lately, growing soft and pasty and unaccustomed to lots of activity. Friday was for errands, as I went to fetch my laptop from the laptop fixers to the tune of, ouch, almost three hundred bucks, sorry bank account; went on a big huge oh-my-god-everything-we-eat-is-on-sale grocery run; cleaned our filthy pit of a house; and made food for the snow bunny party.
Saturday I picked up Kethrai, who honored me by coming down to Boston just for the party, and we headed over to the Garment District, where we both came away with big hauls from Buck-a-Pound and made a quick and very restrained, if I do say so myself, tour of the vintage goodies upstairs, where I learned once again that I am not Katherine Hepburn or Carole Lombard or any of those elegant Golden Age ladies. Sigh.
Did I mention our big hauls? Really really big? Yes, so maybe it was not the best idea for me to lead us slodging through the extremely wet, heavy snow, a mile or so to Agent C's house where the party was to take place, afterward. Ow, and also, damp. But we made it, and Kethrai never even clocked me over the head with twenty pounds of soggy thrift, not even after the four hundredth time I said "We're almost there!" Then we prepared for the party, and had the party, which was lovely, and the snow made for great scenery once you were not in it, and many people came, and there was sausage everywhere, and at one point I was trapped in the kitchen for several minutes because there were SO MANY PEOPLE, and I invented a new cocktail: shake equal parts brandy and creme de cacao over ice, pour, and top with seltzer. Call it the Transparent Alexander, if you please.
This morning, a series of events which are unimportant now left me thinking how much of a letdown it is sometimes that with social awareness, one loses the ability to get up a really good self-righteous, unreasonable tantrum. Suppose, for example, that one wanted to have a good stomping session on the theme of "Men! Bah! Why don't they understand things?" But no, you can't do that, because Emergency Total System Lockdown occurs, and the next thing you know you are all "this is a communication problem between two individuals, different socialization, work together to reach a compromise, blah blah" and then, boom, you're totally out of steam. What fun is that?
But then I started thinking that it would be really funny if all us bleeding-hearts adopt "differently socialized" as our univeral put-down. "Quit being so differently socialized!" "Well, if you're going to be differently socialized about it..." "She is such a Person of Different Socialization (or 'PDS' for short)." Not only would it be hilarious, but it would make all the hardline right-wingers pop a blood vessel because it is so ridiculous that it can't be made fun of. Just like they are always doing to us, those effing PDSs!
Posted by hilatron at 10:41 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
March 07, 2005
Blue Pompoms Would Make My Butt Look Perkier, But Oh Well.
Oh how sad is my empty blog. Where did the week go? Well, I've been making things, and I think there is some sort of problem where I can either exercise the part of my brain that makes things, or the part that talks about things, but not both at the same time.
I've been committing terrible acts of violence against some innocent sweaters, and sewing up some new bags, and things like that, in preparation to revive Crafty Robot, which with some luck, and good photo-taking weather, will happen this weekend. I also spent an afternoon at the mall with Agent C, window-shopping till our eyes bled and our hearts hurt from the excess of beautiful, not-affordale Proper 50s Lady retro things that are in all the fancy stores now. Damn you, Arden B, Banana Republic, Bebe, and even Ann Taylor freaking Loft (oh, the shame)! How could you? I much prefer it when I can scoff at all the fashions of the day. Please send me massive gift cards immediately, so that I may consider forgiving you.
The main reason for us to brave the Cambridgeside Galleria was an ultimately unsuccessful search for furry and/or marabou hair accessories to wear to the Snow Bunny Party, which is mere days away. I am now resigned to the fact that I will not be wearing baby-blue pompoms in my pigtails; sad though that is, probably no one else will notice, as they will be focused on my EXTREMELY UNFLATTERING PANTS instead. Seriously. Tapered navy-blue polyester? I hope my co-hostesses appreciate the sacrifices I'm making here.
Posted by hilatron at 12:16 PM | Comments (4)