2011 July « publikworks

Befuddled? Use the Elevator Code.

July 29th, 2011 § 8 Comments

Life is fairly teeming with embarrassing, uncomfortable situations. Those of us who are utterly bereft of social graces, and I know I’m not the only one, need a handbook for these unwelcome occasions. There has to be a more graceful response than blushing a brilliant red from collarbone to hairline. So, until there’s a proper guidebook to tell us what it is, I’m using The Elevator Code and you can, too. In other words: maintain a comfortable distance, keep your eyes straight ahead, be quiet.

To my everlasting relief, the code is flexible enough for a variety of social milieux, with slight variations. To wit:

First Day of Prison — meeting a cellmate is tricky, you can’t afford a rookie mistake. Just follow the code: shut up, stay out of the way, avoid eye contact. Don’t offer a breath mint or a fist to bump. Small talk and friendly gestures lead to the prison infirmary. That’s Prison Manners 101.

Locker Rooms and Urinals — a less punishing environment than the above, but risky nonetheless. Naked, exposed adults can misinterpret wandering, roving eyes. Keep yours averted, this is not a venue for browsing. Or smiling. Do what you need to, but don’t enjoy it and don’t linger.

Airplanes — a quick review of your seatmate decides how strictly to apply the code: Do odors emanate? Is he reading True Conspiracies? Any discernible nose whistling? If you feel sociable and that sausage smell doesn’t bother you, chat ‘til landing. If nut jobs set you on edge, activate the code.

Chance Encounters — spotting your neighbor at a clandestine dinner with someone other than the spouse is a shock. Don’t stare or cringe, just look away, study the menu or your shoes. If eye contact occurs, smile politely at the nice strangers and ask for your check. Leave. You can eat later.

There, see how easy it is? Since I’ve adopted The Elevator Code I don’t hear things like oaf, dolt, and lout as often. And neither will you. Use the code in good health, my fellow befuddled friends, and relax. You are now armed with social skills. Of a sort.

Wait, who sucks?

July 27th, 2011 § 7 Comments

An investigation.
This weekend found me in a live chat with “jagdeep”, a technical support rep from QuarkXpress, a pricey software company. My Quark application would no longer open, crashing each time I tried. “Jagdeep” informed me that QuarkXpress no longer offered support for my six-year old version of their very own product. He suggested I upgrade to their newest version, for about three hundred bucks. Well, I had a suggestion of my own for jagdeep and Quark.

Steamed and seeking vindication, I launched my investigation.

I zipped over to google and typed in ‘quark sucks’. I got 426,000 results, a number probably equal to their customer count. Was I surprised? A little. Not by the number who think Quark sucks, but that there was proof. Feeling emboldened, I typed ‘at&t sucks’. Wow, 6,910,000 results, nearly seven million unhappy campers. And ‘verizon sucks’ found 6,630,000 results, neck and neck with AT&T. Tin cans with a string are about the only option we have to these two arrogant behemoths if we want wireless service. And they know it. So why should they try to please customers? Well, they don’t is the short answer.

I couldn’t stop, I didn’t even try. I was morbidly fascinated.

‘amazon sucks’ = 35,500,000 hits.
‘barnes & noble sucks’ = 897,000 hits.
‘zappos sucks’ = 705,000 results.
‘microsoft sucks’ = 34,600,000 results.
‘apple sucks’ = a surprising 48,500,000 hits.

Only five companies, but 120,202,000 pissed off customers. Try it for yourself. Just go to google and type in the business name of your choice followed by ‘sucks’ or, for a refreshing change, ‘blows’. Hours of fun await.

Granted, this was a highly unscientific, totally suspect poll and angry customers are much more vocal than satisfied ones, but still. The numbers speak for themselves; they’re saying crappy customer service is rampant, epidemic even. And at a time when every business is frantic for new sales and new customers.

All the while, the powerful titans who run these goliath companies sit around scratching their heads and wondering how to increase revenue, how to increase market share. It takes a special kind of bonehead to miss the very obvious, practically neon-lit answer: start treating your customers as assets rather than nuisances. Not one of them will recognize these dismal numbers as the huge opportunity they are.

For this myopic vision they reap millions in salary and bonuses and stock options? Where do I send a resumé? I’ll do the job, only better, for half that much. Please contact me via the Comment Box below. Thank you.

Beauty Shop, My Eye.

July 25th, 2011 § 8 Comments

That’s what they used to be called, remember? Then they put some teeth in the truth in advertising laws and, presto change-oh, beauty shops turned into hair salons. A trip to the beauty shop was as eagerly anticipated as a dental appointment and there was nothing beautiful about it. This I know from years of personal experience. I’d arrive a little shaggy, a little tousled and wind up resembling Woody Woodpecker on Prom Night, albeit a heavily moussed and hair-sprayed Woody Woodpecker.

Once settled in the styling chair and wrapped in the plastic cape my fingers would clamp onto the armrests in a death grip, every muscle tensed for flight. The stylist, fingering my hair, would ask “what are we going to do today?” I’d freeze, I had no answer. That’s where it started to go wrong. Twenty minutes later, the stylist spun the chair to face the mirror, “What do you think?”

After showering and shampooing, I was stuck with hair cut for a style I’d never, ever achieve. With all the ‘product’ washed out I looked like, like, Lloyd in Dumb and Dumber. What can I do? There’s no remedy for it, but to pick up a book and make myself comfortable while I wait for my hair to grow back. Once, I read Shelby Foote’s Civil War Trilogy, thousands and thousands of pages. Even now, I have flashbacks whenever someone mentions hardtack, which happens more often than you’d think.

So who’s to blame? The stylist? The hair products? No and no, it’s fate and it’s genetics. I inherited my mother’s straight-as-a-stick, baby fine hair. There’s no body, no curl, no volume. Yet stylists insist they can make it look awesome, just awesome. It’s a challenge. Thus the carnage began: they’d cut and snip and spritz and lacquer and shape and curl and spray and ssssssspraaaaaaaay. Et voilá!? A ridiculous ‘do.

I’ve had wedges (think Dorothy Hamill), ledges (think a layered Dorothy Hamill), mullets, page boys, bobs, pixies, shags; I’ve been feathered, cropped, permed, highlighted, and colored. No clear winners in the lot. Not one. My hair is a sliding scale of disasters.

Lately, I’ve begun to speak up when a stylist asks “what are we going to do today?” I ask him / her to leave enough hair for a simple, low maintenance hairstyle and let them know I can only operate a curling iron (without mentioning the burns) and a blow dryer. And you know what? It’s worked. I haven’t needed a stocking cap in months, post-haircut waits are down to a few days, mirrors don’t scare me. As much, anyway. All in all, a miracle.

Just watch. Now that I’ve discovered the secret passwords to a decent haircut, all my hair will fall out.

Communication By Forwarding.

July 22nd, 2011 § 18 Comments

We are an incredibly lazy bunch, are we not? We keep the TV remote within arm’s length of the recliner. We drive climate-, fully equipped, automatic everything cars. We don’t climb stairs, we take the elevator. Myself included.

We don’t even go to the trouble of composing a simple, declarative email. Instead we send text messages by the trillions and gather in chat rooms to talk in abbreviated code: btw, lmao, ttfn. Where’s the originality when a text says the same thing, in the same way as a zillion other texts?

On rare occasions, we’ll park ourselves in front of the computer and pound out an email. Maybe. Much more often, though, we communicate by forwarding. That way, we don’t have to compose an email, we just forward one from our inbox, usually a mindless, irrelevant chain letter. The email promises great fortune if we send it to three hundred additional victims within the next ten minutes, but warns of dire consequences if this is ignored. Are you kidding? I forward it to my trash.

I don’t respond to extortion nor do I fall for get rich quick schemes. I fall for everything else (my body practically glows from the frequent x rays), but I don’t fall for million dollar jackpots. And if you shared my particular brand of catastrophically bad luck, you wouldn’t either.

To these threatening emails I am expected to reply with a newsy, entertaining email of my own making. Not one I’ve hijacked from the internet, duplicated, and sent to several dozen other close friends. Yeah? Fat chance. If the best you can do is send a vague threat to my health and happiness, I’m not obliged to amuse you with tales of my egregious social missteps and the new people I meet when they help me up from another fall. I’m drawing the line here, now.

Another irksome development is the appearance of emoticons punctuating a snarky comment, to wit: “hey, what’s up? Did you know you’re starting to smell funny? : ) Gotta run, ttfn, bff.” A smiley face does not make personal attacks charming or forgivable. Insults aside, people are rapidly losing the ability to express themselves and, if this trend continues, we’ll be reduced to pointing and grunting before long.

Where, I ask, is the fun in that?

July 22nd, 2011 Comments Off

I’d like to welcome my new subscribers and friends to the pages and posts of publikworks. Feel free to make yourself comfortable and help yourself to refreshments. If, at any time, you’d like to make a suggestion or air a grievance, please raise your hand. I’d like to thank you, as well, for the many comments and ‘likes’ you’ve so generously showered on me. The attention has been gratifying and very, very unexpected. It’s been quite a trip.

And now, without further adieu, new content.

Why Can’t I Get a Dial Tone?

July 17th, 2011 § 16 Comments

For years I paid two phone bills, one for a land line and one for wireless. I don’t even like phones. I’m perfectly happy listening to the voices already in my head. I usually forget to take my cell phone with me, anyway, and isn’t that the purpose of having one? Oh, well, if I miss a call or days of calls, life will go on.

People ring you, not with news of import or to hear what you’re up to, they call because they’re bored. And after listening for a minute or two I understand why. They’re very tedious, these people. Enabling them to reach me twenty-fours hours a day, wherever I am, is masochism. So I canceled my land line service, but kept wireless for one reason: an off button.

What I gave up is a dial tone, a significant loss. The dial tone was a fine, useful invention, letting you know all was well. When the power went out, the dial tone was there to alert the authorities. When a creepy noise woke you at three in the morning, the dial tone told you not to worry, the phone line hadn’t been cut. On Christmas Day, when you called dear old mom, the dial tone said, feliz navidad, buddy. Noble bastard.

Now I hold a silent phone, as mute on as it is off. The screen lights up if I push a button, but it’s not the same. That says the phone’s charged, it doesn’t promise a signal or not to drop the call. Of course, if the call is dropped, how will you know? There’s no dial tone announcing you’ve been disconnected, so you go on talking to someone who isn’t there. Like people do before therapy.

Busy signals are history, too. Now you get shot straight to voicemail, no questions asked. That seem presumptuous. I hadn’t intended to leave a voicemail, but the phone decided I should. Well, I don’t need a cell phone telling me what to do. I have people for that. Plenty of them. Besides, leaving a message is redundant when every wireless activity is duly noted and the call recipient notified of your unsuccessful attempt to get in touch. Man, having a cell phone is like carrying a nosy little tattletale in your pocket.

Who needs a phone to rat you out? Not me, I have people for that, too. What I need is a dial tone. Hello? Are you still there? Hello-o-o-o?

Hindsight blows.

July 14th, 2011 § 2 Comments

Planning ahead isn’t for scatterbrained, procrastinator types. Plans are the bailiwick of logical, prudent folks who know what they’re doing and schedule accordingly. In my bailiwick, the future’s going to happen whether I have a plan or not, no need to get my undies in a bunch.

If I knew a piece of space junk had my name on it, how could I prepare anyway? Buy a sturdy umbrella? The future is variables, uknowns. Who has time to speculate about looming possibilities? I’m busy juggling the stuff I put off weeks ago, if not months. Stuff like mailing belated birthday cards with my 39¢ stamps. A planner I’m not, so things have a tendency to get hectic. This lifestyle demands an ‘in the moment’ approach.

The past no longer offers respite from the chaos of today and, for that, I blame hindsight. I couldn’t see an oncoming train without my glasses, but I can see back thirty years with perfect clarity. The tiniest indiscretion is as big as a mountain, bad decisions stand out like a polar bear in Jamaica. Oh, and try to miss the trail of disastrous consequences, it can’t be done. I want a selective memory, dammit.

The past would be a better place to visit if there were no such thing as hindsight. Memories are familiar territory, plus you were a lot younger and more fun. It’s a wonderful place to go, until hindsight kicks in and ruins everything. Why, what purpose does it serve? What’s the benefit of seeing how horrible decisions led to catastrophe and on and on? Aren’t the emotional scars enough of a reminder, do we need a loop of our failures running in our heads, too? I don’t.

If life was fair we could have hindsight removed, like cataracts or tonsils. I would like that, wouldn’t you? Then, yes, let’s start a petition, let’s write our congressional representatives. Wait, are they afflicted with hindsight, they seem remarkably unfettered by foresight, don’t you think? Bunch of lazy, no-good, low-down scoundr … Sorry, that’s a subject we can explore in another blog, a future blog. Let’s plan on it.

Is there such a thing as a good weight?

July 12th, 2011 § 8 Comments

Because of a ridiculously high metabolism, I was underweight most of my life. A good twenty or thirty pounds under, if you believe the people who decide these things. I was as shapely and voluptuous as an ironing board. Which would’ve been okay, if I’d been a twelve year-old boy instead of a forty year-old woman.

Last summer I, mysteriously, started gaining weight. A pound or two. Then twelve. Then thirty-four. Today, I’m big as a zeppelin. That’s right, a zeppelin. I went from a size 4 to a size 10 (give or take) in seven months. My old clothes are mementos now and way too small. Likewise the size 6s and 8s I bought to replace them. Even my shoes are tight. I think I’ve become inflatable.

Several years ago I broke an arm when I ricocheted down icy steps. The physical therapist would mutter about adipose tissue and its benefits during every appointment. At one point, overcome with frustration, she blurted, “eat a cheeseburger, why don’t you?” Well, I think she’d feel vindicated now. I could fall out a third floor window and bounce away, boing, unharmed.

Another annoying aspect of gaining weight is not being able to fit into my swimming suit. And, with my new-found girth, I seriously wonder if I can even fit into the pool. If I jump in, I could get wedged in there for days. Besides, the abrupt water displacement might injure poolside sunbathers. So I’ll stay in the shade and mold.

Yes, the new weight is hard to adjust to; I feel bulky and clumsy and awkward. On the other hand, being skinny made me feel insubstantial and flimsy and brittle. So which is better? I don’t know. Hard chairs are more comfortable now, but the tight clothes keep cutting off my circulation. Oh, hell, just shoot me into space. Where it’s weightless.

The Karma of Bug Killing.

July 10th, 2011 § 21 Comments

We’re all pretty quick with the fly swatter and folded newspaper. We’ve got spray cans of insecticide, tubes of insect repellent, bug lights, mosquito netting, an entire industry dedicated to killing bugs. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve done my share of squashing and swatting. I’m as anti-bug as the next guy, but.

I draw the line at offing ladybugs and crickets. In my book, they both fall into the catch and release category. I won’t kill crickets because it’s bad luck, especially in the house. Ladybugs get a pass because they’re sweet and happy-looking. Their entire purpose is to fly around spreading cheer. What harm is done?

Oh, and I don’t kill big, behemoth bugs, either. I move.

Yesterday I began to question my ‘squash first, ask questions later’ policy. I spied an ant on the stove, doing what ants do, scurryinSMACK. I nailed him with my sandal and buried him at sea, flushed him, actually. As he swirled in the bowl, remorse and guilt and second thoughts ambushed me. I killed a bug for no reason except for being a bug. Had I turned a little family into a widow and orphans?

What, I wondered, do entomologists know about the inner lives of the insects they study? How sophisticated are their brains, for instance? Do they even have brains? Do they have social lives? Do they take vacations? Do they have a bug language? Then a little voice muttered, ‘hey, dumbass, you’re not Disney.’

That’s right, I’m not, but a miniature part of me clings to that colorful cartoon world. Where mice wear gloves and Martians have scrub brushes mounted on their helmets. In that kind of world you survive calamities like exploding tnt and falling off cliffs. Look at Wile E. Coyote, for Pete’s sake. Or Bugs (no pun intended) Bunny, he survived decades of an armed and blood-thirsty Elmer Fudd. Our world just isn’t as forgiving, but shouldn’t I try to be?

Nah. splat Th-Th-That’s all, folks.

Meet My Neighbor, Son of Frankenstein.

July 8th, 2011 § 6 Comments

He’s home right now. He’s always home. You know how I know? I can hear him up there, moving around like the Son of Frankenstein fleeing torch-bearing villagers. Or Babar in a hurry. ka-BOOM ka-BOOM ka-BOOM ka-BOOM. Judging by his thundering tread, I guessed him to be the size of a piano. Not an upright, a baby grand. In the back of my mind I prepared for the ceiling to give out and him to land in my living room.

Around three o’clock every morning, this guy has a Chinese fire drill, right above my bed. ka-BOOMka-BOOMka-BOOMka-BOOM pause pause ka-BOOMka-BOOMka-BOOMka-BOOMka-BOOMka-BOOM pause ka-BOOMka-BOOMka-BOOMka-BOOM for a good two or three minutes. Not only is it annoying, it’s curious. What’s he doing at three a.m.? Alone? And vertical? The mystery keeps me awake.

I’ve never actually met this fellow. I had a sighting once, but I couldn’t pick him out of a line-up, not even if my life hung in the balance. All I know is he’s young, probably mid-twenties and of normal proportions. He plays video games, preferring warfare and explosions. He showers pretty regularly. He doesn’t work. He likes to vacuum. He doesn’t have a girlfriend. He doesn’t have visitors. He isn’t a partier or a drinker. He keeps the same hours as Dracula. And he has a dog, but doesn’t take it out during daylight.

Surprising what you can learn from noises, isn’t it? Probably why I don’t like living in apartments. No matter how well-constructed they are, and this place is far from that, you get to know your neighbors pretty well, whether you want to or not. I mean, I know more about this dude than some friends I have.

As neighbors go, he’s a fairly good one. He’s not nosy or intrusive or disruptive. Except for his incredibly heavy tread I wouldn’t know he’s there. And I don’t get the eerie, quiet loner vibe, either. More like he’s trying to keep a low profile to avoid a pet deposit. If he’d stop with the Chinese fire drills he’d be perfect. I think you’d like him.

Writers Who Aren’t: The Larry David Syndrome.

July 6th, 2011 § 5 Comments

There’s a popular misconception leading people to believe that studying The Mighty Big Book of Bathroom Humor and Genitalia Jokes will make them a writer. A very, very wealthy writer. A conclusion which is, in fact, false. You will not become a writer, you will become Larry David, a creepy organism indigenous to bathrooms and the activities therein. A writer he is not.

So why is he considered one, if only by Hollywood’s questionable standards? Because Larry David had something your average tasteless schmuck doesn’t: he had Jerry Seinfeld and a vague idea for the show Seinfeld. Those are the qualifications in his pencil-case. Note the difference, if you will, between Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Seinfeld was funny and likable with great characters and plots, Curb Your Enthusiasm was a long, tiresome bathroom joke with implausible and boorish outbursts.

Being funny takes talent and work. Look at the Simpsons, the writers are brilliant and original, even after twenty plus years. Look at The Daily Show with John Stewart, maybe the best writers in the business. And The Late Show with David Letterman is a gas. Lively and unexpected and funny and entertaining. Not one lame reference to ‘a tickle in my anus’ or ‘the dog bit my penis.’ Ho. Hum.

The disheartening aspect of Curb Your Enthusiasm is the fact there was an audience for it. Disheartening, but not surprising. People will watch anything, the test pattern probably earns a Nielsen rating. Humanity just isn’t terribly discerning and, today, the market caters to the lowest common denominator.

In big cities and isolated hamlets alike, writers still struggle to create illuminating, provocative, funny, insightful, entertaining, candid, mysterious, witty, explosive, thoughtful work that may never be seen. It’s what they do, it’s what they’ve always done. For the vast majority it’s a tough, lonely job with no perks and meager earnings and little recognition. Yet, we persist. And good for us.

We are not Larry Davids. And that, my friends, is high praise.

Where Am I?