Susan's Scribblings the Blog

Author Archives: kayewer

• Keep It Flowing

  Posted at 4:31 pm by kayewer, on July 22, 2023

  While I was on my way to my computer to post this entry, I was driving behind a vehicle from out of state. They were keeping to the speed limit and taking their time, being unfamiliar with where they were. The route we were traveling was a four-lane divided by a median for most of its length, but in the area where they were planning to execute a left turn, the median is broken by a double lane into which drivers can swerve and wait for the chance to turn without interrupting the traffic flow. These folks were apparently not used to such configurations, because they didn’t use it and waited in the left traffic lane instead. This meant I had to stop behind them.

  The first impulse for most drivers would be to honk the horn and jar some sense into them; my choice was to wait patiently for them to turn. We were, after all, in the left lane, which normally would be reserved for passing or making left turns (which in this case was either the buildings on the other side of that double-wide, or the main cross street a few yards away at the traffic light).

  Engineers worked hard to work out the way the traffic in that area would function the best, and our job in driving on that road is to consider how we can best keep ourselves and the other cars safely moving along. By my not tooting at the out-of-state driver, nothing major went wrong; it wasn’t as if there was heavy traffic into which I could have caused them to panic and cause a disaster, but I also didn’t throw them off by distracting them from where they were looking to turn. They were turning left into an unfamiliar entrance, after all, and I had no idea if this was their first time going there or not.

  It seems like a small thing, but life flows the best based on the small things we do every day. Stopping and waiting is a little thing that can mean a lot for somebody trying to drive in unfamiliar territory, or a person with mobility issues who should still be allowed to do some in-person shopping.

  When we reach a traffic light, we get to pause and stretch, while the drivers in the other direction continue on their journey and remain alert. Sometimes we can drive for quite a distance before a light stops us, but that pause is just as good for us as completing the journey.

  Right now we could use some more pauses and wait times. We all pause and move in turns, and it’s part of the flow of life as we stand still and watch the movement around us.

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• Bus to Nowhere

  Posted at 4:54 pm by kayewer, on July 15, 2023

  I used to like taking the bus, and over the past decades I took more bus rides into the big city than I can count. Greyhound was the carrier of choice, with a history of service going back to 1914 when a Swedish immigrant named Erik Wickman started a short service to take iron ore miners on a two mile trip. He gained two partners and expanded the line into what we have known today.

  After major strikes, bankruptcy and several mergers and acquisitions, the company is now owned by a group that brought FlixBus to our area. Some time in-between the near total shutdown of public transit in 2020 and the present, the new company started paring everything down. This is where bus travel gets complicated.

  I used to ride from a terminal in a town about twenty minutes from me. It was a pleasant building, and the wait was always as comfortable as the ride. Near the end of its life, the terminal even picked up monitors updating passengers on departures and arrivals.

  The first thing to go was that bus terminal on which people depended for decades. It was abruptly closed; it was on the side of the turnpike, held a massive parking lot and was a hub to buy your tickets, get a cab, grab a snack or whatever you needed while going from one place to another. In the months when travel resumed, we stood forlornly in front of that terminal and looked inside, helplessly, at the huge potted plants which had been left to starve to death, their corpses on the floor like deflated party decorations.

  The location of the operation was not actually moved as much as it was treated as an afterthought, since people had to board and depart from someplace. Busses began picking up passengers in the rear parking lot of a hotel across the turnpike from the original location. There was no ticket counter–and, in fact, no staff–and no seating or restrooms. The only positive thing about the new spot was the overhanging protection of solar panels throughout the lot, under which passengers could park their vehicles and stay dry.

  This did not last long, however. As I noted in a prior post in the spring, I printed out my bus ticket in advance and brought it to the location to find that they had moved again and offered no information as to where they were, so I could not reach the new terminal in time to make my trip. The pickup and drop-off spot was moved, again, to a public bus stop hub some 15-20 minutes north, with no services and simply parking spaces and no clear place in which to queue up for departure. I was out the cost of roundtrip fare for something which was not my fault, as they refused me a refund.

  Folks in Philadelphia are now facing the same inconvenience. The original terminal was located on a parcel of land near a spot which is now being considered for a sports complex within the city (why they simply don’t keep all the sports arenas in one zone, I have no idea). It had a ticket counter, vending machines and restrooms. The new location also has no personnel, no restrooms and no seating. Passengers mill about on an area of pavement on busy Market Street with no sense of purpose or belonging. Nobody wants to ride with a company which considers its passengers to be of so little value. The regional paper scathingly called the change a disgrace, and I agree with them, as do many passengers who board there and used to transfer to the terminal I once used to connect with other destinations.

  So it appears that Greyhound bus passengers have now been abandoned. Nobody seems to care, and no future improvement seems to be in sight.

  I suppose I should look at train travel.

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• Customer Chaos

  Posted at 4:45 pm by kayewer, on July 8, 2023

  For many of my 45 years working, I have worked in the complaint department in some capacity. Until about ten years ago, customers had usually been reasonable, docile, polite and easy to interact with. Once every few weeks or so, we would have a particularly difficult person call in, who proceeded to make everybody’s life miserable, and the entire story was often the topic of talk in the cafeteria (which has replaced the water cooler in the hallway as the place to congregate and share camaraderie).

  Today, the number of grumpy people outnumber the pleasant ones by a large margin. Our hundreds of call center associates working from home field an average of one grumpy call from what are known as Karens (or Darrens) for every dozen or fewer. It’s non-stop abuse for eight hours a day. Fortunately, only once did I bear witness to a serious threat to one of the call takers, and the result was an immediate visit to the customer’s home by a man in blue carrying a badge, bringing the status of our customer to a rather quick and embarrassing end.

  Fortunately, I moved on from the days when I took customer phone call complaints to email complaints, but that doesn’t make the job much easier to do. People still manage to be cruel, demeaning and rude in emails. Even when they misspell or use improper grammar, their messages are clearly meant to make the recipients feel bad about existing, for the simple reason that they, the customers, are in a bad mood.

  This is the one aspect of my life in which I am eternally grateful to all the bullies who made my school days a living hell, because my emotional callouses are too thick to be penetrated by most derogatory invective I see in emails every day.

  Sometimes the source of the problem is the complainer’s own doing. One email opened with, “Your website (obscene term for a love-related activity) sucks, because I can’t log in.” Upon examining the user’s account, I was pleased to politely inform them that they misspelled their email as a “dot con” instead of a “dot com.” If you misspell it the first time, I think you should have to misspell it always, just to remind you not to pick fights when there are none (just kidding).

  Occasionally customers suffer from what I call Rumplestiltskin Syndrome, named for the woman who received help from an imp in exchange for her first child and then forgot about the deal. This occurs when we offer customers a year’s worth of the moon and the stars for practically nothing, and when it’s time to pay at a later date, they forget how much we did for them and complain about not authorizing this or that, or the service costs double what they originally paid. It’s called half-price, discounted, free, limited time or “with your acceptance of this, you get that.”

  The offers are not fine print, either; it’s all laid out in regular type, in brief but clear English. Some people don’t complain well in their native language, however, which makes them angrier. A stipulation which says “new customers within three months” becomes “old customers anytime.” Poor translations like that have started military conflicts, but for us it’s a daily drag.

  I sometimes sit back and watch videos by Scott Seiss, a fellow whose sense of humor dealing with customers is a source of great relief for those of us who can’t use his witty comebacks. An example is when a customer asks to have an expired offer honored. His reply is that to receive such a bargain, one would have to travel back in time.

  The real challenges come when a customer actually takes a second to find out your name and then personalize what they’re directing at you. For every ten people who email back to say, “Thank you, Susan, for helping me,” I’ve had that customer who has gone off on a tirade to say, “Susan, you are (foolish, arrogant, a poor example of customer service) and *#@^# disgraceful because you won’t give me something that nobody should be allowed to get, and I’m going to keep harassing you until I crack you psychologically open like an overripe melon and destroy your sense of self, because your destruction will be a bonus to me when I get what I want (which won’t matter to me by tomorrow, because none of the tantrums I have truly get me anything which makes me happy, but I’m stuck in this loop and you’re the one going to share it with me this hour).”

  My advice to you when you are a customer is to remember that you are interacting with a real person. Our job is essentially to make you happy, so if you aren’t happy, let us know calmly, have information ready for us, be patient and listen to what we have to say. Maybe both sides can walk away somewhat satisfied. And no uniformed officer knocking on our door.

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• Seat of My Plants

  Posted at 5:04 pm by kayewer, on July 1, 2023

  I had one half of the front of my home landscaped this past week. The pros did a fantastic job, and it looks much better than it has for years.

  My family has lived in the house for decades, and back in the early days we didn’t have much greenery in front, but the biggest plant was an out-of-control azalea bush. It eventually died and was dug out. My parents decided to replace it and line the front with ferns. The idea came from a few perennial varieties which grew happily and stayed green year-round on both sides of the steps leading to the front door. If those would last, why wouldn’t others?

  The variety they chose, unfortunately, grew like kudzu over the walkway, and by September they reached over three feet high and choked any semblance of order to our front. One positive thing is that the front was nearly always green.

  In the fall, the yellowed remains of the ferns would be ripped out and trimmed down with a weeder, but the network of roots beneath the soil was unbreakable, so pruning or thinning out was out of the question. The ferns became a nebulous, unwanted squatter.

  Until this past spring, when I gave the okay for landscapers to tear up everything and install new plants. They took out the ferns and dug down deep to pull the entire carpet of roots. The old clusters of perennial ferns remained on my orders. My attachment to them was too strong, and they brought joy to the front yard.

  This week, the crew came and added the new plants. I also found that I have a responsibility to water them daily for two weeks to establish their hold in the soil and keep the warranty valid. This morning, I set out to start watering, but I found that my new hose came with an attachment which doesn’t do anything gently, such as lightly sprinkling new shoots. This meant I had to go out for some accessories. I came out of the mega store (you know the one) with a hand sprayer and an extended wand.

  I’ve never used a wand before when doing anything in the yard, so it will be interesting to see how it works. For the next fourteen days, I will take on the role of the little old lady tending her garden early in the morning. It will be worth it for the plants to take hold and enjoy the rest of the season before going dormant in preparation for a resurgence in the spring of 2024.

  Plant ahead to plan ahead, I always say.

  Next year I may do the other half of the front. It contains the last of those squatter ferns and a crazy japonica with tendrils that project in fifty directions at once, but lovely flowers (in the local school district colors) and greenery come with them. By then, it may be time for the past to go with them.

  I’ll keep you posted.

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• Like They Used To

  Posted at 4:39 pm by kayewer, on June 24, 2023

  Back in the “good old days,” manufacturing was a complex chore. The televisions in the early days held wires, fuses and boards of welded circuitry, encased in wood and molded metal, and they weighed as much as an adult. The repairman (I’m not being sexist here; women didn’t commonly take on such jobs, though many did do such tasks while men were serving in WWII) would dismantle the device in your home, lay out the parts on a tarp, diagnose the problem and replace the worn out pieces.

  Today, televisions are flat, light and contain microchips which can’t be replaced, so we throw them away.

  Why does modern technology have such a wasteful price tag?

  This came to mind because the Titan submersible, which was destined to tour the wreckage of its namesake, the doomed Titanic (which has lain on the ocean floor disintegrating since it sank on its maiden voyage in 1912), seems much more tragic due to its apparent cause of failure. The vessel did not withstand the pressure of the ocean and suffered a “catastrophic” implosion which claimed five lives, including a father and son.

  We are supposedly building better things, not cheaper. If a vessel needs metal hulls of a certain weight and thickness, so be it. If making televisions with replaceable parts which will keep many out of landfills, isn’t that a better way to do things? Some of us still have grandparents with console televisions in their homes. Those products lasted decades compared to the year or two of service we manage today.

  The volume of junk we are discarding due to item failure, our boredom or a lack of recycling alternatives is catching up to us. We need to call attention to the elephant in the room, which is the amount of stuff being dumped into our oceans to “make it go away.” In those old days, things lasted for a long time, and waste was considerably less. The American average tonnage of municipal waste in 1960 was 88 million tons, compared to 292 million in 2018 (last figures available). Today, Americans discard an average of five pounds of trash per day.

  When the ultimate cost of bad production or cutting corners is human lives, we need to re-think how modernization may be failing us.

  My heart breaks for the families of those lost in this latest tragedy that didn’t need to happen.

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• Summer 2023 Random Thoughts

  Posted at 4:34 pm by kayewer, on June 17, 2023

  The summer has officially begun. Yesterday in my region, all the schools ended with graduations galore, which meant that today was a heavy traffic day, as countless families left home for their choice of vacation spots. This has been the first summer since 2020 that feels like normal again, so there is sure to be some craziness going around. Here are some observations from somebody who has experienced these madcap summers for a few decades.

  Everybody needs to relieve themselves, so when you’re in a new place and experiencing new things, this becomes an issue for you as the tourist and the people who live full-time where you’re vacationing. When you’re at the shore with Fido on a walk and come across homes with nicely manicured lawns, keep a poo retrieval device with you and don’t let your poopsie poop on that nice lawn; try the curb instead.

  Also, when you go to the beach, don’t pee in the ocean. Go before you leave your temporary lodging.

  Don’t feed the birds: it encourages them to be pests. Let seagulls eat what seagulls eat in the wild, not boardwalk food.

  The containers and other items used to hold or transport your food are your responsibility from the moment you purchase the food item until it is placed in a proper disposal area. This is an unspoken term and condition of buying food on the go, and nobody is going to make fun of you if you carry an empty paper plate for a hundred yards before finding a trash container. Believe me: I’ve never seen anybody get trash shamed. Don’t drop stuff on the ground; it encourages seagulls.

  Use sunscreen. Skin cancer is not something you want to endure. Leave being brown- or red-skinned to those whose heritage gives them the beauty of that privilege. Be your pale, wonderful self, but protected with SPF 30 or better.

  Cleaning up the beach or campground is indeed somebody else’s job, and that somebody else is you. If you’ve established good habits of cleaning up after yourselves at home, this shouldn’t be an issue elsewhere.

  If you raise an eyebrow when you see yourself in the mirror, the thoughts of other people around you if you go out that way will be much more embarrassing. Fix it before you tip out the door.

  I have never understood the social rules which say that the only acceptable hair on humans is on the head or eyebrows, and all other bodily hair is repulsive. Although it’s true that some folks out there–men in particular–may be wildly hirsute, unless you truly look as if the Michelin tire man was genetically crossed with a Yeti, and the result is decidedly inhuman, who among us can truly judge?

  Remember the sun damage rule of thumb and stay away from the risk of skin cancer by being extra cautious between 10:00 AM and 3:00 PM, when the sun does the most damage.

  Be careful drinking milk in hot weather, and don’t lock your knees when standing. This is a lesson I learned during military training. This helps you avoid passing out.

  Officials at the parks and beaches, such as lifeguards and rangers, have a ton of good advice for visitors. Stop and learn something from them and obey their instructions.

  Ice cream is tougher to eat slowly in humid weather. Avoid disaster and order a small.

  If somebody produces a way to avoid pizza drooping, you’ll save the world a lot of damaged clothing. Even John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever had to deal with a bit of floppy double-stacked goodness (I’m sure he ate them backwards to avoid the problem).

  Tipping at vacation resorts is always welcome, and often helps short-funded people stay healthy and well-fed in the off-season. Teenagers also get college fund money for sundries this way.

  If you check your car before leaving on vacation, you’ll save a ton of grief. A quick inspection at your dealership or car care center such as at AAA branches, can make sure your SUV won’t become SOL.

  Always pack one more pair of underwear than the length of your stay, and one less pair of shoes. Slip some adhesive bandages and diarrhea medication in with your makeup or toiletries.

  Remember those post-visit sheets from your physician? If you can, take a photo of the medication list and store it on your cell for emergencies. In the absence of that, if you use a mail-order pharmacy, try getting a list from there, or have your local one print your med list up for you.

  I could go on, but this is a good stopping point. I hope everybody has a safe and happy summer. It only lasts so long (around ninety days, as most radio stations and marathon-running networks will remind you), so make it last in your memory for all good reasons.

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• Sleepin’

  Posted at 5:17 pm by kayewer, on June 10, 2023

  When it was time to replace the old bedding at home, I decided to make some changes and selected a twin mattress for one bedroom, and a queen for the other. Naturally the new beds also came with complications I didn’t see coming.

  First, I had a choice of height for the twin mattress, so I picked a slightly higher one, which meant that the sheets I owned would not fit. I needed to shop for new ones, and this became more difficult than I would have imagined. The department stores available carried only a few select sheet sets in twin, and none seemed to have deeper sides on the fitted sheet to allow for tucking in. It took some looking before finding the perfect set, and it required ordering online.

  Fitted sheets are in themselves a problem. In the old days, the gathering was limited to the corners, so the sides could be tucked in flat under the mattress. Today, most fitted sheets seem destined to look and fold like rectangular shower caps, with elastic all around. Strangely, they don’t fit snug, and turning in one’s sleep produces bunching and wrinkling. So much for improving on a classic. Obtaining a good fit from a fitted sheet now requires a device such as sheet suspenders which can tighten the fabric from underneath.

  The queen bed was my best decision, as most stores carry queen sheets, and there was no need to pick a mattress height (at least it wasn’t offered to me).

  What I didn’t know was that there are many more mattress sizes than I imagined. Besides twin and full sizes and their XL versions (adding five inches to the length), queen mattresses come in varieties such as RV queen (for those who want most of their motorhome taken up with their sleeping quarters), and Olympic queen.

  Then we enter the realm of king-sized, with California king, Texas king, Wyoming king and Alaska King at 108 inches on each side. I assume that is the type of bed one would find at an old oil baron’s estate, and if sheets aren’t available at the stores in town, one could ask the seamstress to whip up a set on demand.

  I have gathered up all the old sheets and surrendered them to the animal shelter for use in potential adopted dogs’ and cats’ temporary lodging. I’m sure the linens will hold up for a long time, as they did for me. Time will tell if the new sheets for my new beds will pay for themselves.

  Or maybe the beds will give out first.

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• Restrictions Apply

  Posted at 5:04 pm by kayewer, on June 3, 2023

  Our town will be hosting a pride festival, so the other day I picked up a special tee shirt I had ordered, and a lawn sign to display in my yard. A few of the signs already on display in town have fallen to what has been attributed to teen pranks, but the neighborhood I live in may be quiet enough to not deal with such vandalism.

  It’s a wonderful thing for our country to finally admit, after almost two and half centuries (I believe we turn 247 this coming July 4), that not every human being is the same when it comes to lifestyle preferences. In ancient times, men portrayed women on the stage because women themselves were forbidden to act. Women wore pants in the Wild West without being considered too manly, and a man in a kilt in Scotland was not at all thought to be effeminate. Nobody can know for certain how any of our co-workers, or the person on the street, started their morning. Some grab a donut and coffee. Some grab a joint and a bottle. Others punch another crack in their spouse’s jawbone, and still others put in a little quick pleasure (man with woman, woman with woman, man with man) and then dress and go to work, possibly having showered afterward or without touching a bar of soap.

  In any particular household, the scenario at the breakfast table may be so different, a standard would not exist. One kitchen table may have mommy and daddy, or mommy and grandma, or dad and uncle. The child still boards the same bus as the other kids.

  We have been living in a stew pot of variety since the dawn of society, and not acknowledging it has not made it non-existent, so it’s about time we call everything out into the open and realize that giving voice to those who are not clones of a perceived norm is acceptable. Those in the LGBTQ community (and their add-ons) are still valuable citizens and important enough to live their lives in a lawful way, in privacy and without harassment.

  The pride fest will feature a variety of events to allow folks an opportunity to enjoy themselves, and I support that, which is why I purchased the swag.

  However, I won’t be joining them, and not for the reasons you might think.

  There is a commercial for a popular laundry detergent brand, featuring a woman named Alice. She likes how her detergent has a pleasant scent, and the voiceover indicates her wishes to have the same scent for her fabric softener and dryer beads. The next shot is of one of the stocker in the grocery aisle, holding up the product she has been dreaming of, and the voice says, “Say hello to your fairy godmother, Alice.” The fellow (definitely not a godmother) is a sallow and slightly overweight type one would normally see staring at a computer screen in a basement gamer environment, and he is dressed in an ill-fitting shirt and apron with a too-short necktie. The kind of person whom everybody glances at but nobody truly notices. One whom we would assume would spend eternity living with the parents. The bit is played for lighthearted fun, but in real life it’s not funny. I cringe every time the spot airs.

  Some people like the stocker have experienced “the look,” in which a person offers a cursory glance and then erases you from sight as if you are not permitted to exist. People who deal with “the look” regularly are steps away from the level of people who have no home or hope and are never looked at at all.

  I have known others on social media and off, who have similar issues. Of my closest circle of friends, only one is in a successful marriage, and the rest who may still be seeking a relationship seem doomed to only receive attention from men seeking citizenship or a substitute mother. None of the people in the excluded group I’m speaking of are anything but simple, vanilla, hetero individuals seeking the most basic rewards in life, which happen to involve sharing with another human being. The denial of this leads to isolation, depression, substance abuse and worse.

  Unfortunately there is no classification for the unknown invisibles, and they don’t seem to belong with the rainbow culture which has finally been given a voice. It means staying put at home, paying bills like a good citizen and not causing a fuss. It certainly doesn’t mean joining a pride festival, because in spite of whatever credentials one has in life, if you are still getting “the look,” you don’t belong.

  Just proves that inclusion has a way to go yet.

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• Good Smells

  Posted at 5:00 pm by kayewer, on May 27, 2023

  

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• Tuck In

  Posted at 4:21 pm by kayewer, on May 20, 2023

  My department held an awards luncheon this past week. It was virtual, since the company decided to discard one of our leased buildings, leave the second one closed except for basic services, and continue to have all our phone contact personnel work from home. There have been rumors that next year we will actually meet in person someplace, but considering we are spread out in some half dozen states from Cape May to Kalamazoo, I doubt we will have as big a turnout as a virtual meeting will.

  The surprising thing about the virtual luncheon is that nobody ate on camera.

  In the good old days–three years ago when we had an actual office culture–people ate together in the cafeteria without any embarrassment. Now that we’ve become hermits in our own homes, we seem to be more ashamed of being observed close-up while eating our meals.

  One person was too tempted by their selection (delivered via food delivery service and paid for by the company) to wait, and they sneaked in a few bites as we joined in some good-natured ice-breaking conversation and tried to stoke the fires of camaraderie on a Brady Bunch-style video conference. Even though nobody else ate, I know everybody got lunch, because had one of the e-gift cards not been delivered, I would have been the first person to hear of it.

  I had also chosen not to eat while the meeting was in progress, because as one of the organizing crew, I needed to be the one to run the awards slideshow and watch for any activities needing attention. If I needed to speak up, that would be hard to do while devouring luncheon food.

  In all it turned out to be a fun time. We set aside an hour for the event and it ultimately ended up taking about forty minutes. It wasn’t anything like black tie or a stage with an orchestra pit, but we had the opportunity to see people we don’t normally view in our new normal. All but one attended, which is admirable considering how our schedules work. I could do it again next year.

  I doubt we will actually do anything in person before I’m ready to retire. It doesn’t seem feasible, and it may just end up being more awkward than a virtual event. Does anybody still have clothes for a nice place to eat out anymore?

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