Baltimore Diary

Inevitable Decline

Niles: Marrying money can have its perils. Ten or fifteen years down the line, after you've adapted to a lifestyle now totally beyond your means, you can find yourself cast aside, a hollow husk, penniless and crushed.
Frasier: Niles, Big Willy's eighty five; he's on his third pacemaker.
Niles: Ah! Mazel tov.

—Frasier, "Where There's Smoke, There's Fired" (4/30/96)

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It's been a hell of a week around my abode. I got a call on Tuesday afternoon from GF that her grandmother had had a fall, and that she was going over to St. Agnes Hospital to get checked out. This meant that I had to pick up Wee One from the neighbors' place and it might be necessary for me to calm her down a little. Wee One was doing OK, although she wondered when her mother was going to get home. As it happened, she didn't get home until sometime after midnight; I'd already fallen asleep.

During the next couple of days, some other details emerged: She'd fallen at about 9:30 AM, but nobody at the congregate facility she lives at found her until around 5:00, when she failed to show up for dinner. By Thursday night they'd determined that the cause of the original fall was a heart attack, and that she needed a pacemaker because her heart rate was so slow.

On Friday they put the pacemaker in—did you know they could do it that fast? Because I didn't. They had to use something other than general anesthesia because there's a very real danger of advancing dementia when you put someone out as deeply as that. Did you know that? I certainly suspected it after my grandfather's surgery, but now they have some hard numbers.

So the bottom line, at this point, is that Granny (what everyone calls her) is still in the hospital because there are other tests they'd like to do. She's also on heparin now, which means that she can't return to the congregate housing. If she were to fall and nobody knew about it, she could bleed out, so as nice as the apartment is—and it is a nice little place—it's no longer a viable option for her. GF and her mother have started the search for a setting with greater supervision (which probably means nursing home). GF's father is predictably dysfunctional (this is his mother, after all), and her brother is...invisible. I had a harsher word there but that one will do.

Me? I've been holding down the fort, keeping an eye on Wee One and offering whatever support I can. Before much longer it will be my grandmother going through this, and my turn. My grandmother lives with my mom in Florida, and my brother lives nearby, so I'm not close to the action as such, but I do try to participate in some of the decision-making process.

When they let me.

Invisible in Petco

Alex Forrest: Well, what am I supposed to do? You won't answer my calls, you change your number. I mean, I'm not gonna be ignored, Dan!

—Fatal Attraction (1987)

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(Warning: this one is kind of long.)

At six-foot-one and over 250 pounds, I may not look like much, but I'm wiry.

OK, let's face it. I'm not exactly tough to spot. So I don't really get it when I'm in a store where helping the customer is not only desired (which would be all of them), but in some cases absolutely necessary. Specifically, I'm talking about the Petco store on Route 40, just outside the Beltway near the Golden Ring area.

As some of you may recall, I have a fish tank that I got shortly after moving to Parkville. These things aren't exactly plug & play; you have to take care of the stuff INSIDE the tank after it's set up. So a few weeks ago, just before Spring Break, I went to this particular Petco to pick up some supplies (vacation feeders, extra dog food for the people watching Keiko, etc). I also still have a problem with the snails, so I was hoping to get some advice there.

Into the store I go, and I'm hovering over the fish food shelves first. I locate what I want, but now I have to find out about the snails. I look around...nobody. I decide to wait a couple of minutes. Nothing.

As it happens, there's a button on a post nearby that you can push if you need assistance. I push it, to no apparent effect.

At least ten minutes go by and absolutely nobody has acknowledged my presence in the store, never mind offered me assistance. For all they know, I could be buying feeder goldfish; I could be buying one of those hundred-dollar marine fish (god DAMN but I want a salt tank). Or I could be a shoplifter. It would have been easy enough; I was wearing my barn coat from Bean. Look at those big honkin' pockets. I could have walked out with half the store and it woudn't have shown on me. But that's not the way I fly. And I'll tell you what: I had a four-dollar bit of vacation food in my hand, but I usually buy other crap for the tank even though I'm about to go on vacation: plants, extra filter media, whatever. This time, I put the food back and left the store. PetSmart got the sale of the fish food AND the dog food that day. (I was still a little too irritated with Petco to buy the other crap for the tank.)

Shortly after the break, I was back in the Petco because, hey, everyone has an off day. There was a sale on some fish I wanted and I was running low on the fishes' regular food. So this time I'm actually in the market to spend some money, and not just the usual food-plus-an-impulse-purchase. This time around I go to the aquatics department, pick up a canister of food, and walk over to the tanks to see the fish that are on sale, plus whatever else might catch my eye. I'm alone at first, but not for long. An employee comes into the area. She's making notes on a clipboard, she's looking into assorted tanks, she's working over by the sink area, etc. etc. etc., but she's not talking to me. She's not said "hi", not asked if I need anything, not nothing. I'm the ONE person in her immediate area, standing expectantly before the fish tanks, with fish food in one hand. Hmmmmm...what could I possibly be there for? AGAIN a full ten minutes goes by (this time I actually timed it). Again I put the food back and went out empty-handed. Time was short, so I picked up the fish food at the Wal-Mart a couple of hundred yards away.

That's right: I bought pet supplies at Wal-Mart.

Now, if you've been with me awhile you might recall that I had some bad customer experiences with McDonald's, and I chronicled the experience and how they handled it. (If you follow that link, be sure to read the two post that come after that one.) I decided to do the same with Petco. After all, this is two sales they lost because of nonexistent customer service.

I went to Petco's website and found the "contact us" link. From there, there is a "Petco store feedback" link, so I followed that. I filled out my contact information, identified the specific store, and then I got to a space that asked if I'd spoken to a store associate.

Son of a bitch. I clicked "no" and moved into the "comments/questions" section. I had 1500 characters to work with, so here's what I came up with:

My job isn't for me to speak to store associates; THEIR job is to speak to ME. Unfortunately this hasn't been the case for my last two visits.  I have a dog, a cat and some fish, so there are plenty of supplies I can pick up at Petco. However, when I go to the aquatics department it's either unstaffed, or the people who are there don't acknowledge me or offer assistance.
   This is NOT a case of me waiting for thirty seconds. On both occasions I've been there for well over ten minutes without anyone even speaking to me. As a result I've left the store empty-handed and gone elsewhere.
  Coincidentally, the day after my most recent visit I received a 10% coupon in the mail. I have to think long and hard about whether it's worth a small discount to go back to a store where the staff basically ignores me.
  From what I read in the news, this is a rather challenging time to be in the retail business; it's therefore interesting to me that the people in your store are so confident in the economy that they don't feel a need to assist customers.
  Incidentally: I've worked in retail before and I know at least as well as you do how much a simple "Hi, can I help you find anything?" can reduce shrinkage in any given store. I was wearing a barn coat with large pockets and could easily have departed with a lot of merchandise undetected. However, theft wasn't the point of my trip. But neither was it going in, only to leave without purchasing anything.
  Thanks for your attention.

That was on a Friday. On Sunday I got this response:

Dear Claude,

Thank you for contacting PETCO regarding your concern with our store at 8640 Pulaski Highway, Suite 104. We are sorry to hear about your past experiences with not being able to find assistance.

At PETCO, we strive to offer the highest level of service to all our customers. I am very sorry to hear that our associates did not offer you assistance when you were waiting in the aquatics department. I want to ensure that our customers leave our PETCO stores satisfied, and as such, I will be addressing your concern with the General Manager of the store so that next time your experience will be more pleasant and complete.

Please know that we care about our customers and what they think of us. By letting us know when we fall short of your expectations, we have the opportunity to address your concerns and to be better prepared to meet your expectations in the future. If we can be any further assistance, please feel free to reply to this email or call PETCO Customer Relations directly at 1-888-824-7257.

Sincerely,

Megan K.
Customer Relations Coordinator

In my head this was a pretty standard, canned response. (Look again at how McDonald's responded.) But what the heck, I figured. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. Megan K's email came to me on April 20. On Wednesday (April 30) I gave it one more shot. This was my follow-up email to Megan this evening:

Dear Megan K,

I'm afraid that your discussion with the General Manager of the store had no effect whatsoever. I returned to the store on April 30, again with the expectation of purchasing fish and some supplies for my tank. Again, despite there being someone in the aquatics department, I was not acknowledged, nor was I offered any assistance. At this point I don't think anyone would have attempted to interact with me unless I took it upon myself to treat the aquatics department as a self-service station and tried to retrieve my own fish.

Let me stress that on none of my visits was the store especially busy. The gentleman in the department did help another customer, but it was only after they went after him to get some help. I'm not the sort of person who has a huge sense of entitlement, but I do want to feel as though the fact that I had a choice, and I chose to go to Petco, means something to them. Obviously this is not the feeling I get when I'm in that store.

Since I don't have a receipt from the store (because again I wound up leaving empty-handed), I'll just mention that by way of demonstrating that I was there, someone may remember finding a container of fish food on an endcap among hamster cages, which is where I left it as I departed. If they check the front door recording, they will see me and an eight-year-old redheaded girl, sometime between 7:30 and 7:45, exiting through the entrance and stopping to wave goodbye to the camera.
Thank you for your earlier reply and your attempts to improve my experience. I'm sorry that they appear not to have been very successful.

Sincerely,

Claude

As with McDonald's, I'm not looking for freebies here (McD's gave me coupons for free meals but they went unused because that wasn't the point) because that's not what I want. What I want is for people to understand that there are folks out there who are going to vote with their feet, and their wallets, when a store's employees aren't doing their jobs, and that this isn't exactly the best economy to screw around with that sort of thing.

I've always said that there's really no such thing as a crappy job. You want to flip burgers? Flip burgers, but strive to be great at flipping burgers. I've paid those dues. I've worked in jobs that some would consider menial or unattractive, and each time I tried to do a decent job of it. This doesn't mean that I didn't put in some time slacking off, but when I was asked to make a Whopper with no mayo and extra tomato, that's exactly what came out. I don't think I ever had to do a re-make when I was at Burger King, and the biggest complaint about my work was that I used too much bleach to clean the shake machine. When I worked as a manager at Record World, I had to reprimand people for not being helpful to customers. Even when the customer doesn't get precisely what they asked for, they knew that the floor staff at least tried. Are people really that honest-to-god comfortable in their jobs nowadays that they don't feel the need for customers in their stores?

If I hear from Megan again I'll share it with you. Stay tuned.

Because It's My Job to Educate You

Crowd: We need a cure! We need a cure!
Dr. Hibbert: Why, the only cure is bed rest. Anything I give you would only be a placebo.
Blonde Woman: Where do we get these placebos?
Man: Maybe there's some in this truck!
[the mob pushes over a truck. Boxes labeled "DANGER KILLER BEES" break open, the bees go everywhere and everyone panics, one man puts a bee in his mouth]
Man: I'm cured! I mean, ouch!

—The Simpsons, "Marge in Chains" (5/6/93)

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Learn from me instead of the hard way: If you put a contact lens in your eye backward? That son of a bitch hurts.

That is all.

The Eyes Have It

Donna Moss: Josh, this was delievered by messenger.
Josh Lyman: What is it?
Donna: It's... wait, wait, no, damn. My X-ray vision is failing me today.
Josh: Gimme that!

—The West Wing, "The Leadership Breakfast" (1/10/01)

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That's not my eye over there but it's the same color. Nice, yes? I rather like my eye color. My favorite part is the way they seem to change color from time to time. Sometimes they're more like brown, other times they're definitely leaning toward green.

Daughter doesn't have my eye color, which is sad. On the bright side, she does have this steel blue that she seems to have gotten from my grandmother. A quick Google image search doesn't turn up much, so I'll have to take a digital pic of her and blow up the eye, sometime. Anyway. 

A couple of weeks ago I went to get my eyes checked as part of the biannual thing. And, it's official: I get to wear glasses on a full-time basis. Not that I wasn't doing that anyway.

I'm abnormally rough on my glasses. I push them up on my forehead, then grab them by the lenses to bring them back down, then wonder why I can't see. What's a few fingerprints, anyway? I've dropped them, lost them, chipped them...the only thing I haven't done with my current pair was bend them out of shape, and that's because I sprung for frames that are made of some space-age polymer. I don't think you CAN bend them enough that they'd remain misshapen. But I do have these glasses with the scratched lenses and the chip from when they fell off my face at the Pig Roast last May...it's just sad.

So, since I'm such an irresponsible glasses-wearer, I asked the doctor if I could get contacts. Last time he was resistant because I wasn't supposed to be wearing them all the time. This time? No problem. He ordered a starter kit for me (freebie) and, if all was well, I could order a more permanent set.

For the uninitated: when you buy glasses, you wait a week or so and they call you in. You go, they put them on you and make sure they fit, and send you on your way. With contacts, when it's your first time, you have to go in and be trained in the ways of sticking stuff in your eye. And that was the first question she had for me: "Are you comfortable putting your finger in your eye?"

"Sure," I said. "I do it lots of times. Occasionally on purpose."

It took me over ten minutes to get the first lens in correctly, but I managed it. The process involves holding one eye wide open and basically pulling my upper eyelid outward and then down over the lens. I was told that it would feel as though I had a foreign object in my eye. (What! My lenses aren't made in America? Snerk.) In fact, it felt to me as though I had a stray eyelash bugging me. The left eye didn't take quite as long but it still wasn't easy at first. Then I had to take them out again for her benefit, to show that I could do it.

For today, I was told to wear them for four hours .Naturally, as that mark passed I wasn't in a position to take them out, so they were in for nearly five. I took them out around 8:30 and my left eyeball is still a little sore. Tomorrow they should be in for five hours (maybe I can go six, since I already did five?), and so on until I can wear them all the time, except when I'm sleeping at night.

So here I am, one with the Contact Lens Nation. So far, so good.

A Fine Line, Methinks

Carmela Soprano: He's a good man. He's a good father.
Dr. Krakower: You tell me he's a depressed criminal, prone to anger, serially unfaithful. Is that your definition of a good man?... You must trust your initial impulse and consider leaving him. You'll never be able to feel good about yourself. You'll never be able to quell the feelings of guilt and shame that you talked about, so long as you're his accomplice.
Carmela: You're wrong about the accomplice part, though.
Dr. Krakower: You sure?
Carmela: All I did was make sure he's got clean clothes in his closet and dinner on his table.
Dr. Krakower: So "enable" would be a more accurate job description for what you do than "accomplice". My apologies.

—The Sopranos, "Second Opinion" (4/8/01)

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A friend of mine was telling me a little bit about the dynamics in her family. She's met my family and thinks that our willingness to yell at each other (when necessary) is a little on the weird side. My argument is that it's a reasonably healthy way to go, because at least you know where everyone stands and there's none of that weirdness where everyone tapdances around everyone else and nobody says anything because of how someone will react. You know what? They're going to react anyway, so get it over with.

But something she said struck me, and I've been pondering it for a couple of days, now. She said that "We complain about each other all the time, but we're also very supportive of one another.  I know that I can call any member of my family at any time and they'll come a running."

This was a paraphrase. The idea behind what she'd said was that, even though they bitch about one another, there's also a whole support system going on there should someone who is outside the family do some sort of injury to one of them. The specific phrasing ran along the lines of "my family, right or wrong" and intimated that anything that happens, happens TO them. There is no fault in this family, no responsibility. There are no errors here. There are only outside influences which are going to somehow disturb the family dynamic or some such. I got the feeling that even people who marry into this family remain forever on the fringes, somehow.

(For a "throwaway" conversation that took place a day ago, I thought about it way too much.)

But with this sort of attitude, what happens when a family member does go wrong? How do they handle the one whose activity goes criminal? The alcoholic? The one who doesn't react appropriately to frustration or failure? The drug abuser? The one who refuses to grow up? The one who sleeps around? The bipolar one? 

When does "support" stop being support and become a form of codependence? Where does the distinction get made? And who decides? What if someone in that family unit decides that this is, indeed, an unhealthy situation and tries to break out? Do they become the "black sheep" of the family? Do they wind up with the ties cut off?

It's a curious thought, isn't it.

Starting from Zero for the New Year

Ralphie as Adult [narrating]:  [T]he Old Man loved it. He had always pictured himself in the pits of the Indianapolis Speedway in the 500. My old man's spare tires were only actually tires in the academic sense. They were round and had once been made of rubber.

—A Christmas Story (1983)
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On Saturday evening, GF and I started looking at cars, since my Hyundai (R.I.P.) is about to be torn asunder and its parts sold off. I'd done a little research on the Web to see what was out there, and so it was that we went to Jerry's on Joppa Road. The people there were pretty nice and quite straightforward, once they realized that GF wasn't fooling around with the whole "How much were you thinking about paying every month?" routine, or the "write down a number" bit. They also learned (as did I) that GF's parents are neighbors of Jerry himself, and that one fine evening a few years ago, some of his cows(!) got off the property and were wandering around the road. (Snay, have you seen any wandering cows while on the Franchise job?) They had a fairly attractive offer on a 2008 Chevrolet Cobalt (coincidentally blue), but since it was the first car I'd looked at, I didn't want to jump on it right away.

I wanted to see what Hyundai was up to (the damage to the Accent was my fault, not theirs; I still really like the cars), so this morning we headed over to Schaefer & Strohminger to see what they know. Not much, as it turned out.

I was teetering between the Elantra and, if I could afford it, the Sonata. The first one we looked at was the Elantra. So the salesman went to find a key for one of them. This took several minutes. To be fair, the one they usually use for test drives was already out, so this is why he couldn't locate it right away. Anyway, he located a key and got the car out of its parking space.

I pull the car out of the parking lot and immediately we hear it: "Wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa". GF thought it sounded like a flat tire. That's when I noticed there was an indicator light on the dash for the tires. "I guess we have a low tire, or a flat," I said, although it wasn't handling like a flat. I make the U-turn and go back into the lot. The guy goes to get another car. We look around it and none of the tires appear flat, or even especially low. He returns with a second key and fetches the car. As soon as I sit in the driver's seat I see that this car has the tire indicator lit as well. He gets out to get another key, handing me the dealer plate so he doesn't have to keep track of it.

While we're waiting, one of the other salesmen, who didn't realize that we were being waited on, started to chit chat with us. We noted the problem with the tire light, and he started to say something about how cold it was. "It's not THAT cold," I said. "We had rain last night, not snow." His response went something along the lines of "Uh". Thanks, bub.

When the FOURTH car had its light illuminated, that's when I handed the plate back to the salesman, telling him, "OK, I think we're done, here." Either something is substantially wrong with the tire sensors or there's something wrong with the way the tires are mounted, or something. At any rate, I was very disappointed, because the Accent was my second Hyundai, and until today I had no questions about their reliability.

Earlier today, GF had called another Chevrolet dealer (Koons, I think) and they had a 2007 Cobalt with the same features as the '08, so it would have been a few thousand cheaper, so we started to head over there. On a whim, we stopped in at the White Marsh Carmax, which has a Nissan dealership. GF didn't want me to simply jump on the Cobalt just because it was there, so she had me look at the Elantra and the Versa.  The Versa is nice, but just a wee bit too small for me, so we started poking around the Elantras.

Surprise! It's a pretty nice car, and it gets decent mileage (25 city/33 on the highway). There was a small problem with a blemish on the passenger front door that they couldn't manage to buff out, but it was nearly invisible and they offered to knock $200 off the price. How could I say no?

So now I'm up to here with the car payments again and practically zero in the bank (and by "practically" I mean I'm likely to be late on most a few of my bills), but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. Another few weeks and I swear I'll be in slightly better shape.

Brokedown Mountain

Randy Peone: Good morning, this is Randy Peone on KREZ radio, the voice of the Coeur d'Alene Indian Reservation. And it's time for the morning traffic report on this rainy Bicentennial Fourth of July. Let's go out to Lester Fallsapart in the KREZ traffic van broken down at the crossroads.
Lester Fallsapart: Big truck just went by... now it's gone.
Randy Peone: Well, there you go folks. Looks like another busy morning.

—Smoke Signals (1998)

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I had a problem with my car not long ago, with the battery starting to go bad. After almost exactly 80,000 miles and almost exactly six years, I wasn't complaining. And since GF has been at home recovering from the surgery, there was no hurry to get the battery replaced; I could just use her car for awhile.

Yesterday was finally the day I got it done. I went down to BJ's on Belair Road and poked my head into the Auto Repair department. The guy there told me that I had to buy the battery and then, for another $15, they'd put it in. Since the car was back in my driveway, I figured I wasn't going to use Step Two. So I went to the back of the store and looked around for someone who might know what they were doing. Failing that, I asked the employee at the Tires 'n' Batteries counter for some help. She simply pointed me to a manual hanging from the battery rack. Swell.

I picked out my battery, put it in my cart and made my way to the front registers. I make that sound easier than it was; as though I didn't have to contend with about nine thousand morons wandering the aisles aimlessly, just sort of milling about and stopping for no apparent reason. Hey, dumbass, these batteries are heavy. This cart doesn't exactly stop on a dime. I nearly crashed into several people and they would have had it coming if I'd succeeded.

At the checkout lines. The lines look busy, but as they say, 'tis the season, but I spot a self-checkout with a single person behind the one checking out. That's for me. I go over there and the people in front of me realize that this particular lane can't take cash, so they have to move to another lane. Now I'm next in line. Which is pretty sweet.

Until this woman in front of me, and (I think) her mother decide that this cart with about ten items in it will be split into three orders. I may have audibly groaned when I saw that two orders were turning into three. They were actually slow enough that I was able to scan and pay for the battery, and hit the exit before them.

I get home and put the new battery in the car. While I'm doing this, it occurs to me that they may have needed to charge the new battery. What if the car doesn't start? GF is out driving for the first time in weeks, and she isn't due home for hours. It's not like I'm going anywhere, but still. Fortunately, the car started right up, so I ran to the store to get gas and some stuff for dinner.

Just as I get back to the house, my cell phone rings and it's GF. She's on her way home, blah de blah. While I'm taking stuff out of the car, I realize that I forgot a key ingredient for dinner, so I get back in the car and head to the SuperFresh on Harford Rd, near Taylor Ave. Get my stuff and back in the car. I start the car and it runs for a few seconds, then simply dies. Attempts to start it meet with no success. I call GF and she's just gotten home, so I tell her to come get me.

Today we went back to the car and I had GF try to start it while I watch the engine. Originally I thought a belt had broken, but that wasn't the case. The belts appear intact, the wheels are turning but it doesn't sound as though the engine is trying to catch. Plus I'm hearing a relay-like click when the key is shut off again. Fortunately there's a Merchant's Tire & Auto nearby, so I simply walk in there and hand over the keys.

Even if it's a major repair, it would really be the first one for this car, with the exception of the clutch I had replaced in April. I have no complaints in the long run, although doing this in the middle of Holiday Season is a little on the inconvenient side. Still, I've driven the hell out of this car (over 80K miles since Halloween 2001) and it owes me nothing in the long run.

 

When It Sucks to be Responsible

Joyce: I'm, uh, guessing I missed some fun?
Willow: The spirit of the first slayer tried to kill us in our dreams.
Joyce: Oh. You want some hot chocolate?

--Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "Restless" (5/23/00)

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Well...I'm really irritated and bummed that I couldn't be at the Octovember Happy Hour, but sometimes that's the way it goes. I wound up working late (on a Friday! I know!), plus with GF and the post-operative discomfort still going on, and Wee One's picking up some kind of bug, I had to go home and play nurse. And it wasn't even the kind of Naughty Nurse game that GF and I You know that there are times when you're going to be told "No no, go out and have fun anyway" and if you do, you're a dead man. This was about three of those times. But with any luck, my lending comfort to the sick and wounded will win me some karma points and keep you all from deleting me from your blogrolls.

Despite working late, Friday wasn't a bad day, not like the rest of the week. It was just very busy and very long (and it didn't help that I got in late), and I got almost everything that was on my list done in addition to whatever was on my boss' list, but it took forever to do nonetheless. I'm not going to be looking forward to going home in night-darkness; it just feels like the life is getting sucked out of you. I may have to invest in one of those full-spectrum lamps to chase away the winter doldrums.

Goofus and Gallant

[Neela and Abby is trying to help a women who was rude to them, who has just twisted her ankle]
Drew: Don't touch me!
Neela Rasgotra: Try not to move, I'm a doctor. You may have broken your ankle.
Drew: If you're a doctor, I want a second opinion.
Neela: Okay. Doctor Lockhart, would you care to give a second opinion?
Abby Lockhart: Sure, your ankle may be broken and you're a bitch.

—ER, "Nobody's Baby" (9/29/05)

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Yesterday while working I had to go from one location to another. As I do.

I realized that it was a little on the late side and that, if I didn't stop for lunch (read: breakfast), I wasn't going to get anything to eat until supper. So I hit the drive-through at the McDonald's on McClean Boulevard, at Perring Parkway.

Normally this one's pretty busy, but not so much this day. I drove directly up to the menu board/loudspeaker jobbie and placed my order. I have to say, the young lady taking my order was very pleasant, cheerful and easy to understand. Those who know me, know that this sort of thing goes a LONG way with me. Drove to the first window, gave her my debit card, again with the pleasantness. There was no car ahead of me so when that was done I went straight to the second window. Get this: my food was actually waiting for me. I was so happy that I actually sent the corporation an email to tell them about it.

However, you probably don't much care about all that. What's more, that's not why I'm writing all this.

So I pull the car into a parking space nearby and shut the car off, leaving the key in the accessory position so I can keep listening to the radio. This is for about ten minutes, so I can eat my fries and double-check my schedule, that sort of thing. Then off to my next destination.

Except, not so much.

I turn the key and nothing happens. Uh-oh. Then I remember that, because I shut the car off altogether, I have to re-set the kill switch. So I take care of that and try again. No go. A single "click" and that's it. Crap. No previous sign that there's a problem with the battery and now this?

Well. I'm just practical enough that I do have jumper cables in the back of my car...somewhere. I have a lot of crap in the back of my car. At present it includes two 12-packs of Coke Zero and a pair of collapsible chairs that I brought to the most recent football game at which Wee One was cheerleading. Also, being a bit of an electronics geek, I have numerous other cables and wires back there. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised to find Billy Batts back there as well. I go fishing through all this and do, indeed, come up with the jumpers, which naturally are tangled up with about twelve feet of telephone wire.

Now it's off to find some assistance. Fortunately, the pickup truck two spots away has a pair of guys in it eating their lunch. I go over and ask them for a jump: "Hi, excuse me, do you think I could get a jump from you guys?"

The driver's response, through a mouthful of French Fries, was a lame-ass excuse about already being late for something, he's going to literally be leaving in about two minutes, blah blah blah. Yeah, because a battery jump takes a half hour and nobody on the planet would give you a pass for helping out another human being. Fuckwit.

A few spaces away there's another pretty large vehicle and, while the driver seat is empty, the passenger seat has someone awaiting her partner. As I approach the car, the driver comes up. I explain the situation and he's more than happy to help, so long as I have cables (because he doesn't). He pulls into the space adjacent to mine and, as we pop our respective hoods, there's a problem: Our batteries are on opposite sides of the cars, so the cables don't reach. And it's not as though he can go to my other side, because I'm on the end space and there's a curb/median thing there.

Finally I say, "How about if I let off the brake, let it roll back a bit and you nose it in, in front of me?" He says that would probably work. So I get in my car, release the brake and allow it to roll about halfway out of the spot (we're on a slight incline). Meanwhile, my benefactor has to ask the the guy in truck that turned me down, who's still sitting there, to get out of the way. This, he had no trouble complying with, being late and all.

I get the jump and all is well so far. The guy noted a little corrosion on my battery terminal and pointed out that it appears to be the car's original battery, so maybe it's just nearing the end of its life. All of which are true, so I guess after almost exactly six years and 80,000 miles I haven't much cause to complain.

Except about the other asshat. Too bad I won't be around to see the karmic wedgie he gets.

While I Was Out

Helen Stewart: My officers are trained professionals.
Nikki Wade: Well, if Fenner's anything to go by, you'd be better off training chimpanzees.

—Bad Girls (1999)

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GF came through the surgery well. It actually took longer to get her anesthetized than it did for the procedure itself, and she was discharged several hours later. Scientific progress!

When I went to work on Thursday, I had to present a staff development session that I'd taken the time to re-write, since the materials they gave me were just so awful. Although I got there early in order to set up my room, I nearly didn't get it all together on time because of people doing one, or both, of two things: 1) asking about GF, and 2) telling me how bad the previous day's session was.

Obviously I can't comment on that, because I wasn't there, but I do know this. Many of the people who presented this material had expressed that they weren't comfortable with it because they weren't familiar with the stuff they were talking about. This concern basically went ignored. The second thing was that they wanted a script to work from. The person who developed that particular aspect of the training was very resistant to writing scripts, because it tends to lead to cookie-cutter work. In general I tend to agree with this, but that doesn't mean that I didn't set myself up with a solid list of talking points. I don't really think these people even had that. The other thing was that the topic was a comparison of the old computer system vs. the new one. There's a serious paradigm shift involved here (hence the presenters' discomfort), and the product is deeply entwined with the process. The hope was that the morning session would be about process, and the afternoon about product. As I understand it, they spent so much time trying to separate the two that few people learned anything.

Whenever we do these staff development sessions, participants are asked to complete satisfaction surveys. I do get to see them although they are anonymous. Usually they're positive when talking about me and my co-presenters; occasionally the subject material, or some piece of it will take a hit. I would be very curious to see the surveys that come from other rooms, or from sessions that I'm not involved in.

In the long run, it's not enough for Dr. Alonso to reorganize people and fire (or encourage the resignation of) others. It's also important that he work to bring some common sense into the policies and procedures that we go through on a daily basis. I'm sure that people at North Avenue read the surveys, but there isn't much sense that the commments are in any way heeded.

When my boss and I first heard about the changes that were going to be made with regard to the schools we'd be working with, there was a great deal of apprehension on our part. We truly thought that we were not exactly going to get "the best and the brightest" people to work with. We were very pleasantly surprised to find a bunch of motivated, competent people who had been just so beaten down by the way the system was working, or failing to, for them. Phone calls and emails had gone unanswered, requests for technical assistance apparently went ignored. All they needed was a little support from the people one level up and their jobs would have been so much easier and less stressful. Consequently the first part of this year, for me and for my boss, has been taken up by helping some of these people play "catch-up" with some of the students they've had problems with last year.

How difficult and frustrating it must have been for these folks, looking for help and feeling like they were shouting down a well. And in a way, nothing's changed, really: these people are getting the help they need, and as far as the ones who no longer work with me and my boss? What we're hearing is that now they're the ones who are asking for support and finding none. Do with that what you will.