D.Cous. Once Again Lashes Out At The Man

I feel a little bit like I'm sitting in Pierre Bernard's Recliner Of Rage when I do this, but what good is a weblog if you don't use it to rant every now and then? (Please note that the preceeding question is entirely rhetorical.) To be honest, I was thinking about just letting it go unblogged about, having finally gotten what I wanted, when I stumbled accross this article, and was suddenly swept away by a flood of bad memories of long hours on hold waiting just to talk to someone who was something remotely like a human being, or at least had been such before taking a job with Sprint/Nextel. No, I must write. Too many have suffered outrage at the hands of Sprint's unholy legions for me to keep silent any longer. My outrage and that of a thousand voiceless others shall be channelled through this blog into the vast ocean of the Inter-nets, and yea, it shall brimeth over until the world rises up out of its comfy armchairs and its politely distant social cirlces and its Chrysler 300 sedans, and that great multitude of disgruntled wireless telephone consumers shall cry out as one: KHAAAAaann... er... I mean FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEDOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMM!!!!

Ok, phew. Chill out, Cous. You're gonna break the keyboard. Right. To be honest, I'm not totally sure what the oppressed multitude will yell, but it'll be something pretty dramatic, that's for darn sure. You get the idea. By this point, if you're still reading (or, for that matter, if you started reading at all) you're probably wondering what I'm on about, so I should give you a little context: For the past two years, I've been a Sprint wireless customer (my account disappears in two short days, by the way), and at work we have a few Nextel phones, which we are slowly phasing out of use. To that end, I had to call Nextel (somewhat recently acquired by Sprint) to find out when certain contracts expire, how much it would cost to end the contract before expiration, and a few other questions related to the service. It hardly matters what exactly my questions were, because the odds of speaking to a human being at Sprint are slim to none. I would venture a guess that there are more people currently climbing Mount Everest than answering the telephone for Sprint. So, over the course of a week or so, every now and then when I was doing something that did not require leaving my desk, I'd give Sprint a call. The general form of each call was something like this:

*ring... ring... ring...*

Computer: "Welcome to Sprint. Para make-a da computer speak-a da spanish, pressiona uno."

(short pause)

Computer: "To activate your new phone, press one. For all other options, press two."

*2*

Computer: "Please hold. All of our operators are currently assisting someone else, and by the way, your call may be recorded for training and quality assurance purposes."

Then begins a short segment of what, for lack of a better definition, I'll call "music," which lasts for about forty seconds, then loops back to the beginning. I don't know the name of the person who "wrote" this "music," but I'm pretty sure that they were hung following the Neuremburg trials, or should have been.

What happens next varies a bit from call to call. Most of the time what would happen is that I'd put the hold music on speaker phone and do my work for the next two hours, then hang up in frustration at the end of the work day. About a third of the time, however, the computer would put me on hold for about fifteen minutes, and then just hang up on me. I'm almost sure that this is a breakthrough in the growing feild of Bad Customer Service.
But Cous, you're saying, what about those new-fangled Inter-nets? Surely, a company as large as Sprint would have a usefull and informative website. Good question, reader. Unfortunately, belonging to Generation Y (I think), that was actually the first thing I tried. That's where I got the 3 or 4 different phone numbers I used for the above exchange. Let's try a little experiment, just for fun. Go to www.sprint.com, and at the top of the screen, click on the link that says "Contact Us." Under the headings "Customer Service" and "Nextel," you'll see a link that says "Service & Repair." Click it. Did you get This screen?I did. I think you can click it to make it bigger, but in case you can't, it's a very informative page, telling you when the service and repair kiosk will be open at some sort of racetrack, during some sort of race. Or maybe all races. I'm not sure. It just doesn't say. In fact, it makes absolutely no sense. You know the old cliche about monkeys and typwriters? I think they've moved up to computers and html, but have yet to come up with anything remotely shakespearean.

I've run out of time and lost my train of thought at this point, suffice to say that Sprint doesn't like people, and I don't like Sprint. You get the idea. I'll try to post something happy here soon (Lindsey graduated!), enjoy the weather out there!

A Quick One (While He Eats Lunch)

Typing with my mouth full could prove to be hazardous to my health, but I haven't updated in a while, so I will now. As you may have heard, I spent last weekend in GR visiting the GF and hanging out with her friends at GVSU. Golly, it was great. Ok, that's enough of the letter G for now. Seriously though, it more fun than a weekend in Tijuana, and without getting robbed by currupt police officers, too (not that I've ever done that). I did make the mistake of going shopping for clothing with Lindsey at one point, though. I jest, it was fun (how could it not be with such company?), and I learned something really valuable: Do you ever wonder why women sometimes act crazy? I figured it out. It's because sometimes they are crazy. No more losing sleep over that one. I did manage to impress her with my uncanny ability to find clothes that were the right size for me without trying anything on. She was amazed (not really). She explained to me that (in more than as many words) the sizing of women's clothing makes absolutely no sense any way you slice it. Apparently she's a Gemini in one store, and a Libra in another, and a Leo in a third, or something like that, where I'm a Virgo anywhere I go. She tried to make it sound reasonable, since women have more significant dimensions to worry about (no complaints here), but we ended up agreeing that the real reason is simply that women in general are emphatically not interested in what size they are, in inches or centimetres or kilograms or pounds or whatever. Makes you wonder why they keep scales in their bathrooms, doesn't it? The funny thing is that even when they've cast aside any and all useful forms of measurement, they will still engage in conversations that go something like this:

Woman 1: "Oh my gosh, you're so skinny! You must be like a Cancer (the zodiac sign, not the disease) or something."

Woman 2: "Well, I'm a Cancer at Littlemisscutesie's (not a real store name), and a Libra at Maybe's (perhaps a real store name)."

Woman 1: "Oh my gosh, I hate you."

Cous: BUT IT DOESN'T MEAN ANYTHING!!!

Right. The moral of this story is that I bought shorts, so that the world could save on electrical expenditures associated with lighting their homes. Also, I did not try on said shorts, and they fit me anyways. I'm a Virgo anywhere I go.
I also feel like mentioning that Suzy, one of the bitches I live with (relax, I said bitch, not ho), believes that human beings are walking, talking popsicles, and that this ceases to be funny pretty quickly when one has exposed legs. Gross.

E.C. And D.C. Were Both Here

It was September 23, 2006. I remember it like it was last Thursday. The sun was shining, and I could smell hamburgers sizzling on an open grill somewhere nearby as I drove down Dexter-Pinckney Road that Saturday afternoon, with the sun roof open and the wind blowing in my hair (I had more of it back then) as I sang along to the radio at the top of my lungs, taking my hands off of the wheel on straight stretches of road to play some air guitar. I had recently turned 22. The world was my oyster. A large dragonfly suddenly met its end on my windshield, a windshield that a few short months later would acquire a large crack that remains there to this day, but that's another story. September 23, 2006. I had just been over at my fine girlfriend's house, but had neglected to stay for dinner because I had an appointment to keep. An appointment with destiny, or so I thought. "You've been listening to some great Eric Clapton live cuts," chirped the middle-aged probably-mother-of-three-teenagers classic rock disk jockey. "D*mn straight!" I said, but she continued. "...On what would have been our Eric Clapton pre-concert psych-up for the show at The Palace tonight." Uh oh. Would have been? The smile on my face quickly faded. I looked down at my radio in disgust. What have you done to Eric Clapton? I realize that it's disk jockey lady's job to sound excited all the time, but I really didn't appreciate the tone of her voice as she informed me that the concert I was just on my way to attend was canceled, to be re-scheduled "at some later date." If she worked on the Titanic, she would have been thrown overboard for excitedly announcing that "there just aren't enough life boats for everyone! Oh well!" I called up the friends I was on my way to meet, who had yet to hear the bad news. "Hey John" I said, "remember when we went to see Eric Clapton?" "And he ROCKED OUR FACES OFF? Yeah, that was awesome." "Yeah, but do you remember when we found out the show was canceled at the last minute?" I don't remember exactly what John said at that point, but he was pretty upset, as we all were. We were particularly miffed that Ticketnazi, the world's only ticket vendor for any event anywhere, from the Superbowl to your six-year-old daughter's school play, made no attempt whatsoever to stop us from driving all the way to Auburn Hills to attend the event for which we had bought tickets from them. Thanks for nothing, Ticketbastard. What exactly do you do for that hefty "convenience charge," anyways? Nothing? Right, that's what I thought. It was only sheer chance that I happened to be listening to the right radio station at the right time which saved us two hours' round-trip driving (through metro Detroit's trademark perennial road construction) for a show that did not take place. Brilliant. One of John's co-workers, as it turns out, was not so lucky.

Now, fast forward a little more than five months. My windshield now has a crack in it. A few other things have probably also changed, but I can't think of any of them right now. Maybe some babies were born or something, I don't know. "That time we all went to see Eric Clapton and he ROCKED OUR FACES OFF" has become one of the longest-running inside jokes in the history of inside jokes (other notable entries being the entire careers of musician Bruce Springsteen, and newspaper cartoonist Brad Anderson), as has the exclusive use of various pseudonyms for a certain online ticket sales monopoly, which shall not be named. Now it's April 5th. It's freezing out. There are flurries. I am once again on my way to The Palace to see Eric Clapton, only this time we've checked and double-checked and triple-checked to make sure that the show has not been canceled.

I have to admit that I was worried that E.C. had lost his touch, or that he'd end up playing a set mainly made up of his slower, more pop-oriented songs, the ones women seem to enjoy. I'm ashamed to say it, but a small part of me didn't think he knew how to rock n' roll. This small fear gnawed on me for most of the drive out, and into the well-played set of the opening act, the Robert Cray Band. Then the roadies started to hurriedly set the stage for Clapton's band. They even put out a pretty nice-looking rug in the middle of the stage for E.C. to stand on, then set his mic stand and wah-wah pedal on it. I'm not sure what was the significance of the rug, but it struck me as pretty cool. You might say that it really tied the stage together. Then the house lights dimmed, the stage lights came up, and the band walked out onto the stage: Two female background singers, an organist, a bass player and drummer who both looked like they had walked right out of the 1970s (the drummer even wore a t-shirt with the sleeves cut off and a large gold chain around his neck), a guitarist, a pale, silver pony-tailed piano player, and...
As Clapton strutted out to the stage he lifted his guitar, blasted out a few bluesy fills, then turned to face the band as they all burst into "Tell The Truth," a pretty rocking song from Clapton's 1970 album with Derek and the Dominoes, Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs, with the other guitarist playing the part of Duane Allman on the slide guitar. I'm probably going to gush a little bit, so if you'd like to stop reading right now, I'll at least give you my three main talking points:

1. Eric Clapton is an amazing musician.
2. Being both an amazing musician and a very successful one, Eric Clapton is able to surround himself with other people who are also amazing musicians, although not quite as awesome as he is.
3. Eric Clapton is an amazing musician.

Got that? Good. Clapton has been around for a while (quite a while indeed), and has been pretty prolific, so his setlist could easily have been made up entirely of songs I didn't know, and I consider myself a fan. Instead, he played this setlist:

1. Tell The Truth
2. Key To The Highway
3. Got to Get Better in A Little While
4. Little Wing
5. Why Does Love Got To Be So Sad
6. Driftin' (Solo, acoustic)
7. Outside Woman Blues (acoustic)
8. Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out (acoustic)
9. Running On Faith (acoustic)
10. Motherless Children
11. Little Queen of Spades
12. Further On Up The Road
13. Wonderful Tonight
14. Layla

The songs I marked in bold are all from the aforementioned album, Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs, which is awesome. The band was great. There's something that's always funny to me about background singers, and these ones did the "background singer" dance for the whole show. All the musicians soloed at some point, and they were all quite good. There was a short acoustic set in the middle of the show, when the lights went out and came back on to reveal Eric seated on a chair alone in the middle of the stage, acoustic guitar in hands, singin' the blues. It was great. The only words he addressed to the audience the whole evening were "thank you," and the names of the band members. The seats in front of us were occupied by four or five 15 and 16-year-old boys, who seemed to be having almost as much fun as we were. In the row in front of them was a group of probably 60-year-old tatooed, bearded (even the women, not kidding), leather-clad biker types, who lit up marijuana during the acoustic set, and nearly started a fight a few songs later. I chuckled that the teenagers behind them were acting more grown-up.

Playing an encore has become pretty cliche, such that everyone just knows that the act in question is going to play one, but we the audience still played along for the sake of tradition, shouting ourselves hoarse for the band to come back to the stage and play another song or two. "PLAY COCAINE!" I shouted, half because I actually like the song (terrible as it is), and half just to be funny. "PLAY COCAINE!" Sure enough, the band returned to the stage, waving and smiling at the audience, and Clapton let fly the opening riff of "Cocaine." I laughed. The show wrapped up with Robert Cray joining Clapton and company on stage for the Robert Johnson classic (and also a big hit for Clapton) "Crossroads."

Well, that's all for now. I'd been meaning to post for a while but hadn't gotten the time, I'll try to post something else soon. I tried to draw a picture for the show, but people and Stratocasters are really hard to draw.

Princess

The other day at work I spoke on the phone with someone whose first name was literally "Princess." I'll bet her sister loves her. I was even dumb enough to ask her to spell it for me, thinking that I had misheard her. "Just like it sounds," she said. "P-R-I-N-C-E-S-S." "Oh, what a nice name" I said. "Thanks" she replied, probably having heard that her whole life. The rest of the conversation went on as it would have had her name been something less unusual (ooh, double negative), except that I kept wondering if her middle name was an ordinary girl's name (thus making her full name something like "Princess Katherine Jones"). The thing is that (for whatever reason) while I'm on the phone for work and the person on the other end gives me their name, I try to use it in the conversation. Maybe it's just to remind myself to be civil, or to just feel like I'm talking like a person and not to some sort of drone with a telephone headset on. I like to think that I'm trying to add a personal touch to the conversation, but the real reason is probably something more selfish. Whatever the reason, when I had gotten the information I needed and the conversation was wrapping up, I said "Thanks so much, Princess" right before hanging up the phone, and I suddenly felt like I'd just said something rather sexist. It was like Philip Marlowe (as portrayed by Humphrey Bogart) in the film The Big Sleep, where he adamantly refuses to call any woman by name, instead always saying something along the lines of "Angel" or "Doll-face," or "Princess."
Of course, in the film, this doesn't bother the dames one bit, because, as a general rule, they want nothing more than to bear Bogey's progeny. Crazy dames. Anyways, guess I don't really have a point here, just that I talked to someone whose name was actually "Princess," and that the encounter was amusing to me. Right. Best of luck to you all in coping with the "wintry mix" that has replaced our sunshine and warmth around here. Ah, spring.

Ah, so that's what it's for.

Well folks, I finally figured out what's different about the "new, improved blogger," other than the fact that I now need to have a longer sign-in name. It allows you to customize the look of your blog to a much greater degree without mucking around in HTML, which I don't know how to do anyways. Sweet. So yeah, here it is. Let me know what you think of the new look if you get the chance and are still reading this rubbish, I'd love a little feedback. More posting soon, have a good Tuesday!