2010 January

	2010, JANUARY

January 29

I’ve been wondering why firms whose short-term marketing goal is addiction, with the customer’s death as the long-term objective, are allowed to continue to sell their products. With apologies to the few friends I have left who are smokers, it seems to me this might be the time to make tobacco illegal. The cigarette companies who weren’t smart enough to diversify will go under and jobs will be lost, but in these difficult times a few more unemployed folks in North Carolina would probably go unnoticed. Farmers will have to grow something else, but they aren’t making any money these days anyway, so it won’t make much difference to them. Can you grow corn in Virginia?

We have a new Secretary of Health and Human Services, a new Surgeon General, a new Commerce Secretary, and a whole new Congress. Not to mention an Attorney General who will be eager to put his own personal stamp on the Justice Department. What better way than to outlaw the sale of tobacco and then start locking up the death-mongers? President Obama, listen up; this is America Going Forward.

But no. Instead, we have decided to put tobacco under the “authority” of the FDA. It’s definitely not a food, so I guess it must be a drug. No prescription necessary. The move was supported by the tobacco industry, for obvious reasons. Look for the government to be as effective in regulating cigarettes as it has been with Vioxx and Celebrex which are still sold despite the risk of heart attack and stroke, antidepressants like Abilify and Cymbalta that make you suicidal, and other hazardous but highly profitable formulations. There is a minor difference with tobacco, though. At least the drugs have some marginal or at least purported benefit to go with their side effects; tobacco is all side effects.

Still January, I hope

I’m back. Did you miss me? As you will see, I opened the third can.

I know I told the TV story somewhere (Archives, May 28, '08) but it turns out it isn't over. Is anything ever over? I passed the point of Maximum Allowable Frustration fiddling with the rabbit ears about the time Verizon came up with an offer I couldn’t refuse. HD TV (with the cable plugged directly into the TV, no flicker, no drop out, no “no signal” messages), faster Internet, and fixed-rate phone service that lets me call all my friends in Samoa, Guam, and the Marianas, all for the price of cable.

I went for it. I have HD TV, which is pretty good except when the whole system (including phone and internet) craps out together. It included access to 100-odd (some of them really odd) channels. My low D TVs, that had digital converter boxes, now have Verizon’s boxes and good reception. And 100-odd channels with no way to delete any of them, so if you want to flip through the channels, it’s a full day’s diversion.

And my new phone service now includes voice mail, which I don’t want. It says I have missed 8 calls and I have no idea how to find them. Sometimes my answering machine still takes a message, but apparently not always. Plus I have caller ID: my phone now announces as it’s ringing “caller from wireless network.” Not informative and surprisingly annoying. I think I have call waiting, too, but I don’t know how it’s supposed to work and don’t much care. How often do two people call me at the same time, anyway? And what am I supposed to do with the person I’m talking to if I can figure out how to answer the second call?

I can theoretically get rid of all these useless “upgrades,” but it requires getting someone at Verizon to answer the phone. Since they have a robotic voice that can handle any problem they wish to deal with, and caller ID and call waiting and voice mail for the rest, they don’t have to bother.

Verizon’s digital adapters are no better then the converter boxes I had, and with the old ones I only had to deal with the local channels. The Verizon office is 5 miles from my house, so to save time I went over there to return their digital boxes. I walked in and took a number: 41. They were “serving” number 3. I came home. I’ll mail them in.

So let’s see, where am I? I have good reception in one of the 3 TVs in the house. I have deleted all the fancy stuff from the phone and I don’t know anybody in Guam to call. And I have a faster Internet connection (it downloads noticeably faster, but I can’t see any difference in upload speed) but if it has a problem, I can’t call anybody about it. I am rapidly approaching MAF. Again.

A few weeks later, too late to back out, I needed tech support to get my laptop to work with the mail program. Verizon support is available 24/7, but you have to guess which 24 hours a week they are. I spent one hour by the clock trying to reach an actual human being, but I finally did get someone on the phone. He couldn’t figure out why it didn’t work, but in poking around he managed to fix the problem. That he had no idea what he had done tempered my delight, but it’s working. So am I pleased that I can email, or am I worried that it takes an hour to reach someone at Verizon who doesn’t know what he’s doing?

Well…now the TV has decided it wants to show all possible channels (I don’t know how many, but it goes at least into the 600’s), even the ones I can’t access, which are represented by a message: “You are not subscribed to the Solid Waste Management Network. To subscribe….” I thought this was MAF, but was being optimistic. When I phoned to cancel the service, the phone, TV, and internet all went dead together. Twice. The next day I tried again, and told the guy I had to talk fast. I told him who I was and what I wanted, and he asked if I would share the reason for my dissatisfaction. “Certainly,” I said—and the phone went dead. Couldn’t have put it better myself. Now my blood pressure is reaching the red zone and I am writing Verizon a letter. If you wondered why you hadn’t heard from me, now you know. I tried to send the following email to everyone in my address book :

Having major problems with Verizon. May be out of touch for a while. If emails are undelivered, web site not updated, my phone disconnected, don't panic. I will be in the Twentieth Century.

But Verizon beat me to it and my mail server is gone.

Post Script: After six tries (1 letter, 1 email, and four phone calls) I managed to have FiOS disconnected. Theresa told me there would be a $175 early termination fee, and I just told her that, compared to what my treatment for high blood pressure was costing, it was a pittance. Money well spent, I say.

Verizon doesn’t come out, they just leave all the cables on the floor and the holes in the walls, and I have to return their equipment to their office—yes, that office, but I don’t plan on waiting around; I’ll just drop off the box of stuff and leave a note inside. I am still hooked up to the optical cable system and will be forever—they cut the copper wires to the phone—but I have made a couple of calls without the thing going dead, so maybe it will be all right.

I called Earthlink and begged them to take me back. They say it will be “2 or 3 days” before they can determine if DSL will still be available. Kevin in Calcutta says he can’t guarantee anything, but “let’s keep our fingers crossed.” Two or three days later, they said they would know "tomorrow." When tomorrow came they said "one day." I told them to let me know, and began looking for a new Internet Service Provider. This is surprisingly hard to do if you don't have internet service. What I found out is that Pacbell.net is now SBC, which is now ATT, which is not open on weekends. And MSN's high-speed provider is Qwest, which doesn't serve California.

Post-Post Script, and I hope this is the last: Two weeks and a day after my first call to Earthlink, they called me back and told me they had determined that DSL was no longer available “in my area” (i.e., at my address) because I had a fiber connection (which is what I told them in the first place) and DSL only works on copper wire. I called Verizon: they will not restore the copper wiring connection (which is still intact in the box on the side of the house) but assured me that Earthlink would do that when I placed my order. I called Earthlink: they say they are forbidden by law to disturb the phone connection, which is owned by Verizon.

I can get cable, of course, but I’ve already got two opened cans of worms.

P.P.P.S.: This afternoon (Jan 21) I got a phone call from Shawne Something (I neglected to write it down), Verizon’s Vice President of Customer Relations, expressing concern and inviting me to e-mail her if I was not 100% satisfied with their service. I could have told her at the time, instead of by e-mail, except that Shawne wasn’t actually there: it was an automated robocall.

P.P.P.P.S.: So, as I said when I started out, I opened the other can. Earthlink transferred me to the cable company (Time Warner, which is no better without AOL). Despite my trepidation and their reputation, the installer was at my door two days later, precisely on time. He looked things over and announced that the cable coming to my home, installed thirty years ago, was so deteriorated as to be unusable. He said he would have to notify the construction people to install a new cable (at no charge) and said that they “usually” called back within 24 hours.

Later that afternoon, someone called from the construction department. An actual person! In less than 24 hours! She was calling with bad news: our hoped-for Thursday installation was not going to happen. Since the forecast was for 3 to 5 inches of rain, I guess that was understandable: I’d have stayed home to sandbag my house or work on the boat, too. We made a tentative date for Saturday, when the rain was supposed to stop.

Saturday came clear and sunny, a beautiful day, and the construction guys, who actually work for a different company and contract to Time Warner (a time-honored business technique known as “obscure the blame”) came early. They cut a hole in my driveway and inserted a four-foot long device they called a missile—essentially a horizontal jackhammer—to drill through to the other side. It works really well in hard soil, because the friction stabilizes the outer sleeve while the inner chisel cuts. When the dirt is wet the outer sleeve just bounces back and forth and no forward progress is made. We had 9 inches of rain in the last 5 days.

The missile actually made it about 5 or 6 feet, far enough to disappear. And no farther. Nor would it come back. So today I have Time Warner’s undoubtedly expensive missile buried somewhere under my driveway. And a concrete patch where it went in. Monday the boys will call the boss and see if he has any ideas. It’s supposed to rain Monday.

January 9

Our local sportswriter recently said of the BCS championship that it wasn’t a “true” championship because it wasn’t the result of a playoff. Needless to say, I took exception. Sort of.

"Maybe you're not old enough to remember when the champion was the team that ended the season with the best record. In those days, there was only the season; the term "regular season" hadn't been invented yet. Playoffs were devised for professional sports by commercial interests for commercial reasons, and no "system" that allows a team with a losing record to be crowned the best in the league has any validity.

The BCS, of course, is even stranger since it jumbles together teams from all over who have no season in common. Schools in the Pac10, or the SEC, or the Big 8 (or are they 10 now, too?) play each other all semester (they’re schools, remember?), so it at least makes some sense to call the team that won the most games the Conference champion. Why not just leave it at that? The Rose Bowl (the original bowl game) was an exhibition game, played for fun and glory. Just because 30-some other promoters knew a good, profitable thing when they saw it is no reason to proclaim the winner of one game a national champion

Hmm. Wait a minute. This sounds like I agree with you. I guess I do, as far as that goes. I just think the notion of a playoff system is a stupid idea in any sport, and would serve no particular purpose for colleges as long as we continue to pretend that college sports are about something besides money.

I have no doubt that somebody will figure out that he can make a bundle by setting up some sort of playoff among eight NFL teams and eight NBA teams to determine the Athletic Team of the Year. Can Champion of Intercollegiate Athletics be far behind?"

January 6

Fiction writers can’t walk down to Starbuck’s without somebody asking where they get their ideas. Don’t people read the newspapers?

I may soon become one of those people, he said in a senseless digression. I got my bill for next year’s subscription, and it’s up 60% from last year. The young fellow I spoke to about it said it hadn’t actually gone up, they had just done away with the annual rate, and I would now have to pay the weekly rate, which is 60% higher. I told him I’d have to think about it. I suppose I will have to capitulate—Jeanine will insist and besides, what would I do for this blog without the Times?—but first I’m giving them plenty of time to come back with a better offer.

Anyway, the article that got me started concerns the settlement of a lawsuit filed by songwriter Joseph Brooks (“You Light Up My life”) against his former fiancée. What kind of a guy gives his fiancée two million dollars worth of stuff, including a $60,000 engagement ring, without noticing that she’s already married? According to the paper, he is 71 and she is 23, which may be a clue, but he probably thought she was in her 60’s. For her part, she claims he knew perfectly well that she wasn’t single, but had a hard time explaining how she came to accept an engagement ring.

It’s clear that she was getting what she wanted out of this relationship, but poor old Brooks apparently wasn’t getting any: he is currently awaiting trial for 11 casting-couch rapes.

Casting-couch rapes? What the heck is that? If the quid pro quo was spelled out, I believe it’s technically called prostitution. On the other hand, if the ladies in question were merely answering the Craigslist ad hoping to get the part of a prostitute in the upcoming film of an old geezer who hadn’t done squat since 1977, they may be terminally stupid for consenting, but consent they did. I suppose you could argue that anyone dumb enough to respond to a call for auditions on Craigslist couldn’t possibly have the intellectual capacity needed to form consent….

However it turns out, I’m betting that David E. Kelley has already finished the first draft of the screenplay. He reads the Times.

COMMENTS:

A.:Can't concur with your they-had-it-comin' take on the casting couch rape thing. Just because they were foolish doesn't mean it's ok for him to drug them up and have sex with them, which you know that I know that you know. And casting couch does not = prostitution - there's a serious power dynamic and manipulation thing going on there. It's like if your boss makes you sleep with him or her to keep your job - technically you could boil that down to being called prostitution, too, if you're looking to reduce things down past the point of realistic representation in order to get a zingy statement.

M.:If he drugged them, I agree with you. But sleeping with the boss to keep your job isn't the same thing as making a deal with somebody who isn't your boss that you will screw him for a price, the price being a role in a movie.

January 1: Happy New Decade.

The hot new thing in footwear these days is “Shape Up” shoes. That’s what Sketchers is calling theirs, but other brands are hyping the same idea: a rocker-bottom sneaker that’s supposed to lift your butt, tone your legs, and strengthen your core by making it harder to walk.

My personal feeling is that shoes ought to make it easier to walk, but what do I know?

Actually, I do know a little about this. It’s not a new design, only a new marketing concept. Years ago an Italian shoe company, Famolare, sold shoes with wavy convex soles, promoting it as a major breakthrough in comfort. I was one of many who invested $100 in them, back when $100 was…well, a hundred bucks.

I fell off my shoes and broke my foot.

And it turned out they weren’t really Italian, either.

The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect--well, yes, come to think of it, I guess they do.

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