foolish fire

Okay kids, I admit it. I’m probably not a contender this year for the It’s a Wonderful Life Holiday Sportmanship Award.

But in my own defense, I submit the following compelling excuses…

1. My mom got sick and almost didn’t make it to Christmas, seriously. Fortunately she got better and is resting up in a Nursing Home/Rehab place (no, not THAT kind of rehab) and should be back home this week. But it was definitely touch and go there for a while.
2. The Christmas budget this year was, shall we say, compromised a bit by the fact we’ve been “scrooged” by a few of our clients.


Okay so that’s enough stress right there to cause “naughty” to kick the crap out of “nice” but wait there’s more…

3. I decided this year I would make all my gifts this year (thus saving precious financial and planetary resources at the same time taking a stand for non-commercialism), which would’ve been fine if the one machine I needed to pull that off (my trusty Epson 2200 6-color printer) hadn’t decided to deposit a mysterious black splotch on everything I sent through it. Fortunately I had the foresight to make prints of all my favorite illos a while back so I used them as a Plan B even though I wasted nearly an entire shopping day in Troubleshooting Hell trying to fix the printer. I concluded after much Googling and Wiki-ing and gnashing of teeth that the cats are to blame. This actually could be true. They like to sleep on the printer. Hey…it’s warm.
4. The Annual Post-Thanksgiving Constipated Kitchen Drain Phenomenon happened right on schedule…. and we didn’t even host Thanksgiving at our house this year! It’s a miracle! And because Dr. Seuss designed our plumbing, whenever the kitchen sink gets clogged, it overflows into the master bathtub, depositing whatever is queued up waiting to go down the garbage disposal around my wife’s ankles. So not wanting to shell out $200 on a plumber a few days before Christmas, I found myself at Home Depot shelling out $40 for a snake thingy, which amazingly….worked, thus saving Christmas! Huzzah!
5. Simultaneously, the youngest daughter who is currently residing with us because she’s “between life transitions” and who is about to go on a cruise to Puerta Vallarta with LA boyfriend’s family is having pain in her jaw, which after a visit to her childhood dentist turns out to be caused by a tooth that once housed a filling that blah, blah, blah, blah……….root canal. Estimated cost: $1,100.00. Likely daughter contribution to same: $0. So now I’m looking up venture capitalists with holiday hours in the Yahoo Yellow Pages and finding myself saddled with that age-old conundrum of setting parental limits vs. helping a kid who’s just starting out when it occurs to me that…hey, “I” want to go to Puerta Vallarta and swim with the Humpback whales in the Sea of Frickin’ Cortez and I’d be a HELLUVA lot more open to helping finance her root canal if it wasn’t to provide her with a pain-free cruise! Without going into the boring details, this situation is 90% resolved. The cruise was saved. Thank god (he said snidely).

So that’s my list and I’ve checked it twice and yes…I believe it does provide legal grounds for being a tad bit crabby and perhaps making the odd snippy comment about not being able to record the Manchester United match because the DVR is 90% full of Christmas shows (thanks, writers strike!). And exacerbating the whole thing is my wife’s unnatural level of “cheer” that starts just after Thanksgiving and lasts until the last ornament is packed and relegated to the attic just after New Years Day, if she has her way. I, on the other hand, always advocate the de-Christmas-ing commence the day after Christmas, claiming the tree is by now a lethal, ticking incendiary device, a tactic which has worked in the past, but not this year, I’m afraid. This year, I owe her. And I admit, my “grinchiness”, as I prefer to call it…my wife having other, less flattering ways to describe the phenomenon, is not easy to live with.

So I have apologized for my whole “glass of egg nog half empty” attitude this season. So the tree is still up as I write this. And though it is indeed a ticking time bomb in it’s current desiccated state I’ve not made a stink about it. Or the victorian Santa still on the mantle or the glass snowflakes still in the window, or the wreath she made from our backyard trees on the front door. And of course there is still plenty of evidence that a hand-made gift workshop invaded the dining room for the better part of two weeks so that will need to be cleaned up. But all in due time. Because my mom will be going back home in a few days with a pretty good prognosis, and it’s been a few days since youngest daughter and boyfriend left on their cruise and the house is delightfully quiet again, and there have been no plumbing emergencies to speak of, and one of our clients just paid us, and I’m still feeling the laughter hangover from our Annual Holiday Movie Day with our family and friends (4 movies in one day..seriously)….so I’m just starting to get some Christmas Spirit up in here, alright?

I’m involved in fashion controversy about as often as I find myself assisting in heart bypass procedures, which is to say, not a lot. In fact the last time I remember even thinking about anything even remotely connected with my appearance as any kind of “statement” was back in my pre-hippie days when I had about an hour-long flirtation with paisely. It ended badly. Although, I will concede the shoulder length hair I sported from 1968-1975 was a sign of my rebelliousness. I know that because it’s the first thing my Dad made me lose when I got into trouble. It went something like…get caught with girl in room, cut off hair, if hair already shorn from previous transgression, sell drum set.

Alas, since my teens and early twenties fashion has been a non-issue for me for the most part. I was a photojournalist for most of the past three decades, which fortunately absolved me from wearing a suit and tie and I could fill my wardrobe easily in one hour, twice a year at the Gap or Mervyns whichever had the best sale going on. Fast forward to 2001, I’ve career-morphed into a graphic designer, and could have easily raised the fashion bar a few notches but I work from a home studio, so even if I did show up to work wearing Doc Martins, gel in my hair and skinny black horn-rimmed glasses, it would only scare my business partner, who is also my wife.

If I had to describe the fashion ‘niche’ to which I now belong (and have for most of my adult life) it’s probably something like “suburban camolflage”, or “soccer dad” and I’m necessarily not proud of that, just a little risk averse when it comes to fashion. As evidence, a tour through the 10% of available closet space that my wife sublets to me will reveal the following:

• three polo shirts, one each black, gray and blue
• 3 pairs jeans
• several pairs Dockers or similar (only 2-3 pair fit me at any given time)
• business shorts (what I wear to work 9 months out of the year)
• a few semi-nice long-sleeve shirts (for weddings, a rare business meeting, outings to the “city”)
• Several drawers devoted to workout/cycling wear and my collection of soccer jerseys from around the world
• Outer wear-wise…enough fleece to raise the ambient temperature of Finland and one black-leather coat which is what I wear when I go to any “city” so I don’t look like a tourist. (I learned my lesson about that several years ago when I was sent to Moscow on assignment and realized about 20 minutes into the country that everyone was wearing black leather except me…and very small Russian children.)

Footwear is the only clothing category with which I’ve ever pushed the envelope, probably starting in the 70′s with Earth Shoes. If you’re not of the vintage to remember Earth Shoes or have tried hard to forget this and other ugly shoe trends, let me help you relive the pain. Earth Shoes were designed in the Netherlands around “negative heel technology”. In other words they took impression your foot makes when it walks in sand and made a line of shoes out of it, and according to it’s inventor Annie Kalso, all upright bipeds are intended to wear them. They also allegedly improve your attitude, your breathing and illuminate the path to enlightenment. She wasn’t half wrong about some of that (the calf cramping is pretty enlightening alright) but damn, she came up with one ugly-ass shoe! But ,for a brief time they were a way to put your politics where your feet are, and to say to the world, “to hell with fashion, I’m going to wear these expensive, silly looking shoes that make my legs ache after 10 minutes because dammit……” I don’t honestly remember why I wore Earth Shoes.

Interesting though, that they were probably most popular on the two coasts where even barefoot, hippie liberals realize that walking on the beach all day is frickin’ painful. But did I own some? Damn right. Wore out more than one pair. Proud if it. Earth Shoes are still around, by the way, and have become slightly more stylish and can be even be purchased in “vegan”, so you can eat them without guilt. The web site depicts young progressives wearing Earth Shoes while doing yoga on hilltops and telecommuters taking breaks to stretch their IT bands. My homeys.

I can’t reconstruct the hippie shoe timeline with any accuracy (or much else from that time period) but sometime around the Earth Shoe era, Birkenstocks became all the rage and I got on that bandwagon, too. I still own a few pair of these oft-counterfeited shoes which let’s face it, are still the official footwear of Berkeley professors and good Unitarians everywhere. I especially love my Birkenstock clogs, which I’ve nearly worn out after 5 or 6 years to the point where my wife will only accompany me if we’re going to the movies…at night, if I’m wearing them. But we Birk devotees love our shoes to the point where some of us own the original pair we bought in the 70′s, we just keep having them re-corked and re-soled, procedures undergone by more than a few us owners as well…metaphorically speaking.

Which brings me to today’s topic and the latest ugly shoe trend…Crocs. And yes, I wear them, naturally, and have taken several shots across the bow from friends, family and major media alike. In fact I was most chagrined when one of my counter-culture heroes, Bill Maher, devoted an entire “New Rule” to them. I normally get all warm and glowy when he rails on about the Bush administration, but when he talks smack about my footwear, if it weren’t so painful to have something in common with Ann Coulter, I’d say I he really pissed me off.

In the interest of full disclosure there are points to be made on both sides of the Croc debate, Maher’s invective was only aimed against at their rather pedestrian appearance (hmm…that sounds oddly logical) but other less fashion conscious detractors have levied charges ranging from the fact that Crocs are made from toxic materials to reports that they can literally destroy electronic devices. The latter I find fascinating but have yet to….wait….computer…shutting down…no…power….kidding. Seriously, there are anecdotal accounts that Crocs can shock! I’m no expert but doesn’t that seem a little counter-intuitive? Standing on a golf course in Kansas during a thunder storm wouldn’t you want to be wearing ugly rubber golf shoes? Read on…

As for Crocs’ “green” report card, the anti crowd do raise a valid concern; Crocs are made extremely cheaply (over 3 million pairs produced last year) because of an EVA based material called Croslite PCR foam or Levirex, all of which sounds way to “Duponty” for my taste, but it’s what makes them so damn light, durable and moldable. Unfortunately, this foam is petroleum based so there’s that unfortunate strike against, although they can conceivably be recycled when they’re spent (basically when the tread wears off the bottom) though the corporate web site doesn’t mention anything about that. It’s the whole “just another cheap, disposable toxic commodity” thing that has tree huggers and their ranks rankled, and I can see their point. Cheap isn’t necessarily always good (I give you WalMart) but, as any good WalMart flak will remind you, tell that to a single mom of four who just shod her family for the price of a pair of Reebok running shoes from Macy’s. Point well taken…advantage Crocs, Inc.

Further, Croc-o-philes point to the fact that the shoes are made of only one material, though, except for the two, small strap rings on some models. Conventional footwear is typically made of a plethora of nasty materials including adhesives, solvents and baby seal tears. Further, Crocs, the company, does a lot of donating to shoeless people around the world. So there’s that. So like Microsoft and Starbucks, you can’t completely hate them, even if you completely hate them.

So let’s review…all in all, Crocs are “almost green”, they’re amazingly wide, spongy and comfortable and only $39.00 and the other day I wore them while doing yard work and hosed them off afterwards, which you gotta love. So why do some people still hate Crocs? Including my wife? And why are they so popular with 8 year old girls AND 50 year old men? Here are my theories…

• As for my wife…she’s obligated to hate them. It’s part of the fashion-designer-disguised-as-a-graphic-designer-Project-Runway-watching persona that takes an oath to be forever vigilant against the rise of the ugly shoe. It’s a girl thing. Oh…and she says when I walk around in them while she’s trying to sleep, it sounds like I’m walking on soggy carpet.
• As for why 8 year old girls AND 50 year old men like them….well they come in pink and lime green and I raised two girls and know that 8 year old girls will wear anything that looks like recycled Barbie cars. And we 50 year old men like them because we’ve become lazy and our feet hurt and we no longer care what you think. And double that for 50 year old ex-hippie men.

So…word to the establishment….keep your hands off my footwear! And if it’s any comfort…I draw the line at Tiva sandals. Can I get an “amen” from Bill Maher?

“You can checkout any time you like, but you can never leave!”–The Eagles, Hotel California

I knew I was in trouble when one of the phone tree options was, “If you’d like to discuss canceling your account with a specialist, please stay on the line”. Discuss? What was to discuss? I called to cancel my Tivo account, not to sit down and have a cup of tea and weigh the relative merits. I was suddenly seventeen and asking my dad if I could stay out past midnight. I wasn’t calling to get permission to cancel my account. I sensed this would be a difficult phone call. And I was right.

I may be broadcasting my naiveté here it seems like companies are going to greater lengths to hold on to customers these days. In fact it seems some companies are placing a lot more emphasis on keeping customers from getting away than they are keeping them happy while they have them. I suspect this because my recent experience with Tivo happened almost ver batim a few weeks earlier when I tried to cancel my gym membership at 24 Hour Fitness. In fact I now believe I dialed into the same call center in both cases, although the Tivo “specialist” was nowhere near as pliable as the one I got at 24 Hour Fitness, who had a tinge of a middle eastern accent and was probably calling me from a business park outside of Bangalor. No I’m pretty sure when you choose the “discuss canceling” option, you ring up the east German stasi-trained ex-spa salesman mated with a pit bull, sitting in a dingy basement like a scene from Brazil, chained to a metal desk with lots of ambient blue smoke in the air. She has a computer with a black and white, 13″ TV monitor and a keyboard from 1930′s vintage Royal typewriter. She wears a black trench coat and has stubby, ink-stained fingers that nervously flick through a 4-inch thick company manual called “1001 Ways to Keep Your Customer” with the word “keep” in large, bold, impersonal sans-serif letters while the other set of fingers compulsively plays with a scale-model toy guillotine. Okay that’s overkill but a nice visual, yes?

But what’s really scary about all this is the scripted way in which both my cancelation calls went. In both cases the “specialist” was compassionate at first and seemed to understand my decision. With Tivo, I had valid reasons to cancel my monthly service, although nothing was really Tivo’s fault. Namely, with the particular entertainment center I own, I have no way to watch one show and record another which means I hardly used the thing and even my UC Berkeley math major brother in-law couldn’t figure out how to hook it up any other way. So Comcast made me a better offer, an HD, 2-channel DVR for less money/month than Tivo. No brainer. So when the compassionate approach didn’t work, she started to recite all the reasons my “generic” DVR was insufficient and my “high end” Tivo box had more attractive features like internet hookup and a DVD burner (features I never used, which I explained, but got nowhere). After talking smack about my DVR didn’t work she went to Level 3: The Shameless Pleading, wherein she offers a two-month freeze on the account so I could “reconsider” my decision after trying my new “generic” DVR. I politely refused her generous offer and interrupted her diatribe hoping the slight increase in volume and irritation in my voice would convince her to get right to the “cancel my account” part. But she had one last arrow in her quiver…

She was silent for a few beats and I could picture her reading from a script “pause here and sigh audibly before continuing”. There was a palpable note of fake exasperation in her voice when she returned as she said, “Al-right, sir…(pregnant pause) I’m prepared to offer you a monthly fee of $6.95/month, no contract, for the life of your service”. Clearly I was only in it for the money all along and I had finally beat her down. I’d only been threatening to jump ship, and I’d made up the whole thing about Comcast and the connection issues…I was after that $6.00/month savings and dammit…I had pushed and pushed and prevailed in the end! Now I was peeved. Heart rate quickening I said, “Look, let me save you some time here…I’ve already thought this through and nothing you’re going to say is going to convince me NOT to cancel so PLEASE, can we cut to the chase and do whatever you need to do? I’ve already spent a half hour on your web site trying to find out exactly HOW to cancel my account (which was true) and I’ve been talking to you now for 20 minutes not including the 5 minutes I waited for you to pick up. I know it’s your job to try to talk me out of this but it only makes Tivo look desperate. It’s kinda pathetic, really. So now will you please just cancel my account?”

Normally when my blood pressure is this high I’m prone to babbling incoherently (ask my wife) but in this case I felt so, dare I say it, righteously indignant I had no problem articulating my position, while (hopefully) leaving “my opponent’s” dignity in tact. Something I learned from Dad. Not that I always do it. Although, I have rarely been in similar situations, I do remember with fondness one that happened years ago when a used car dealer tried to welch on a deal to include a set of new tires on a VW Beetle. There I was sitting in some 1960′s vintage, crap office that reeked of ashtrays, surrounded by 4 or 5 salesman and managers in cheap suits all trying to blame the mistake on one of the “new guy” who “shouldn’t have made that offer”. So I told them “Look, I have no control over what your salesmen offer your customers but it was part of the deal and I’m walking out of here if you don’t stand behind it.” I was so right it was almost sport. They relented. I drove off with a new set of tires feeling like Clarence Darrow after the Scopes verdict. I’ve learned since that being “in the right” can have a very short half life and one should be wary of the feeling…but I digress…

There may be nothing so maddening than someone calling you “sir” while they treat you as if you had the IQ of a sponge wort. She insisted “Sir, you couldn’t possibly know I she was about to offer” and if I wanted to “stay with my generic DVR with its’ substandard features” she could put me on hold for 4 or 5 minutes while she completes the cancellation process. Finally, I drew a normal breath. The end was in sight. I’m pretty sure she used the 4-5 minute wait to use the bathroom, enter a stall and morph back into human form because when she returned she assured me, in a much more conciliatory tone, that it wasn’t her intent to make me upset but she was “just being sure I was making the right decision”. At this point if I’d had the slightest inkling that she actually WOULD have passed along a constructive comment to someone who mattered at Tivo, it would have been this, “You lost me at “discuss”.

Long story short…ish, my earlier experience with 24 Hour Fitness went almost exactly as described above, but without the over-the-top hard sell. My request to cancel my membership was first met with compassion, then a reminder of all the wonderful features of the “thing” I was giving up, then an offer to freeze my membership, then an offer to permanently lower the monthly fee, then a very reluctant but more business-like acceptance of the fact that I was leaving. In both cases, I was led along the same prescribed path, one carefully designed to lead me right back to the welcoming arms of the company, having learned the error of my ways…lost but now found, blind but now sighted”. But the bottom line is the almost lock step sequence of increasingly demeaning attempts to keep my business was beyond creepy. I’m actually tempted to cancel some more stuff just to see if it happens again. In the interest of full disclosure, I re-joined 24 Hour Fitness after a month or so. It’s a long story, and they’re by no means perfect, but they weren’t nearly as nasty and clingy as Tivo during our “divorce” proceedings. Tivo, on the other hand…well I have a little message for Tom Rogers, the CEO of Tivo…join me on camera three…

Hey Tom…ever heard of a book called the “Ultimate Question”? It’s by this marketing guru named Fred Reichheld. I read it because one of our clients is in the Customer Loyalty consulting business and I needed to bone up on the latest thinking in this apparently burgeoning field. The book, and in fact this whole, new industry is mainly about people like me, customers, and how we’d answer the one “Utimate Question”: “Would I refer your company to another person?”. Simple? You bet. Almost too simple, really, but pretty powerful when you consider that every Tivo customer, Comcast customer, corner grocery store customer ultimately has an answer to that question, and to the extent that the answer is “yes”, well that’s good, you’re doing something right; you’ve got more “promoters” than “detractors”. If I had to guess, however, I’d say in Tivo’s case the short answer to that Ultimate Question is “no” more often than you think. Why? Because of the way I was treated when I tried to take my business elsewhere. And I’m sure I’m not atypical given the competitive business space you’re in. Lots of “churn”, lots of ship jumpers out there. It’s just business reality. But the difference between Tivo and a company I might refer to someone else is…that other company would have to be able to make me feel just as good about my decision to join up with them as my decision to leave. They’d need to make a key assumption…that I know what’s best for me. And they’d have to respect that. In my case, the other guy had a better deal and the rest was just technical stuff, not your fault. There’s a lot about the Tivo product I like. And I wouldn’t have minded answering questions during my “exit interview” so you can learn how to be a better company. And most important, I would have gladly steered someone else toward Tivo who had a simpler equipment configuration than I did. It was the desperate attempt to hold on, even to the extent that your Customer Service rep tried to make me feel stupid, greedy and disloyal. And that’s what I take away from my “Customer Experience” with Tivo. Too bad, I’m probably in your key demographic.

So far be it to complain without offering some solutions:

• First, make it as easy to cancel as to sign up. I know it sounds counterintuitive, but it works. You have to treat people the same whether they’re going in the door or out. That way they leave knowing the door’s still open a crack, in case things change. So please don’t make me waste time going in circles on your web site trying to find a “cancel” link (that’s MY business, and it’s really bad usability).
• Next, when someone calls to cancel, sure, ask them why, once, respectfully. Hear the pain and if it’s something fixable, fix it. But hey, people aren’t ALWAYS dissatisfied. Shit happens. Thank the caller for their business and extend an invitation to return. Treat them with a little class and dignity, as if the company will survive without them. It’s basic human psychology; desperation is just plain unattractive, in a person or a corporation.

I could say more but I have to go set up my Comcast DVR to record a soccer match.

Besides ants, fruit stickers, leaf blowers and spam, one of the things that really irks me is the whole concept of “executive privilege”, basically the rationale that bad presidents use to excuse the bad behavior of their cronies. It came up recently with the whole Scooter Libby pardon thing and caused me to do three things, only one of which was productive:

1. Pace up and down shaking my fist at the heavens asking “why, why?” (almost a daily occurrence)
2. Do the math to January 20, 2009…a-gain. (527 days, by the way)
3. Do this illustration…

Click on the image to enlarge

My first Official Edict when I take over the planet, Rule One of Many in the New Order to Come: Noises Off! Or in more plainspoken terms…”Hey world….shut the f— up! I’m trying to think!

“Yes…yes, you’ll all be thanking me, praising my name…quietly…as you settle into your Barcalounger on a Sunday afternoon to read your favorite novel and realize….it’s quiet! James Be Praised for he hath ordained it and it has come to pass. There is indeed….quiet in the land. Praise be to King James. He hath wrought it and it is good. But how…how has this been manifest…you might ask?

It has been taxed…that’s how. Noise, that is. Call it what you will…A loudness levy, dollars for decibels, a tariff on tumult…it shall all be taxed under what I like to call the Shut Up or Pay Up Tax Plan for a Quieter Society. Own a Harley? Pay up or get a muffler. Own a leafbower? Pay up or get a rake (remember those?). Have a sub woofer the size of a dishwasher in your trunk? Cha-ching, bro’.

I mean why not? We tax other obnoxious behavior like smoking, drinking..well maybe not the behavior itself exactly but the stuff of bad behavior, so why not noise? It’s not as tangeable, sure, unless you’re trying to sleep in on a Saturday and the gardeners descend on the house next door with their thermonuclear leaf blowers.

Offhand, I’m thinkin’ $100.00/decibel per hour of use, so let’s see…taxpayer Rod Testosterone cranks up his Harley on a Sunday morning at 7:30 a.m. and lets it idle in the driveway for a few minutes while he checks his leather pants for salt stains and then drives the belching behemoth down to the Harley store or wherever, and the trip takes about 20 minutes. An average factory-mufflered Harley spews forth noise in the 88-100 decibel range x 20 minutes (1/3 hour) = $2,933.33 on the low end. Disincentive? Uh-huh. Rod then gets a bill from…well, me and failure to pay results in confiscation of said Harley and other indiginities I still need to come up with.

So until such a time as I take over the planet, thereby ushering in the next “Nice Age”, I will suffer the fools with the sub woofers, the crass with their leaf blowers, the uncouth with their back-up-beepers, the cretans with their unmuffled motorcycles, and the just-plain-inconsiderate whose concept of personal space includes their zip code, knowing that someday, if only in my dreams, “Keep it Down” will not be just a request but the law of the land.