Man, nature, technology

Increasingly I find it difficult to trust people--and by "people," I don't mean family and friends. Specifically, I mean sales and customer service staff from airlines, car dealerships, and cellphone companies. By which, ultimately, I don't mean people at all, but instead some insipid race of money-devouring, soulless changelings who walk among us, feeding on our ATM withdrawals and paltry self-worth, hiding their true nature until after we've been worn down, sucked dry, and become a host for the long haul for their parasitic ways. Such as by way of a two-year contract for a cellphone or a five-year loan for a new car.

Which, I guess, brings me back to people again, 'cause the situation is more than a little vaguely reminiscent of any number of ex-boyfriends I've had. One small, hard case in point (about customer service reps, not ex-boyfriends, 'cause, really, I've moved on) . . . airlines. We know how I feel about them already, don't we?

Luckily, lately, I've been able to arrange most of my travel so that I drive instead of fly, even with gas at more than $4 a gallon (and who among us so Pollyanna that we dare not believe that it will be at $5 or even $6 a gallon by summer's end?). Still, in a week's time, I am facing the prospect of flying to California on business--and, god help me, to Anaheim at that. Not San Francisco, San Diego, or even America's favorite urban suburb, LA (im)proper.

No, instead, it's just Anaheim. Or as I have become fond of saying, F--king Anaheim, like it's some sort of dreadful date movie, a Chasing Harriet or a Kissing Louise, with a wispy blonde lead and a misunderstood-but-darling guy doing a second-rate imitation of an already second-rate actor (read: Ben Affleck).

F--king Anaheim, home to that other ever-smiling, money-devouring, soulless leech of corporate greed--Mickey Mouse, the Kelly Ripa of cartoon characters.

I'm just imagining what the delays will be due to this time--no plane but crew; no crew but plane; plane and crew but no engine; no plane no crew no engine no fuel; Midwestern flooding; Middle Eastern terrorism; or perhaps global warming causing Walt Disney's head to thaw at a precipitous pace.

Despite the obfuscation with delays and yellow-bellied sap-sucker security levels, essentially what it comes down to is this: The airlines hate us. They provide a service to us--albeit a crappy one--and yet resent us for taking advantage of the service, when really all they want us to do is fork over our funds, make no demands upon their time or resources (hell, these days, they won't even let you check a bag without greasing their already greasy palms), and go away as quickly and as quietly as possible.

And, basically, this is the problem with contemporary capitalism as practiced in the United States: There is an exchange of money for a desired object, be it a car, a cellphone, or a space for your butt and a suitcase on a plane. Once, though, you have paid the bill, the service--even when you pay for one of those lovingly offered, practically useless, extended service contracts--seems to come to an abrupt end. So what you get is not good capitalism--"I can buy lots of lovely things with my hard-earned money, and if I have a problem, I can quickly get it resolved"--but bad capitalism. Very bad capitalism. "Help! I've been anally probed by a cellphone salesman, and now I've been impregnated with a useless piece of plastic crap that can't pick up a signal when there are leaves on the trees! And the gestation period for this telephonic Alien bastard isn't up until summer 2010!"

Now what would ever give you the idea that I'm speaking from personal experience?

* * *

Ah, telephone service. Yes, it's taken me almost a year, but I'm back to that topic again. But this time my middle-aged crazy wrath is not directed at Verizon but instead at T-Mobile, the German-owned cellphone giant that kept Catherine Zeta-Jones in diamonds and superior smirks for a several years.

I have had my Motorola 330-something-or-other for 2-1/2 years now, and since about the beginning of the year, I've seen a noticeable reduction in signal strength. Granted, I live in a particularly hilly part of Pennsylvania, which, truth be told, describes pretty much all of Pennsylvania except maybe Philadelphia and environs. Thus, I thought maybe just maybe some of my reduced signal strength was due to spotty coverage along the Pennsylvania Turnpike or the ubiquitous cloud cover over Pittsburgh, my new hometown. I know, I sound like I think a fax machine transmits ink through the phone lines, don't I? But I was grasping at microwave signal straws (or ionized moonbeams or carbonated death rays, whatever it takes to make a cellphone ring around the world) to explain why my mobile at age 2 would start to degrade so badly in signal strength.

Oh, I've dropped it a couple of times, stuffed it in the bottom of a bag or two, and played a few too many hands of Mahjong on it while stuck at the airport. But I'm not one of those persons who lives and dies by his phone. If anything, my phone and I have more of a passing, casual acquaintance with each other rather than a hot-and-cold, bipolar affair.

The wilds of Pennsylvania aside, though, I started to notice problems with signal strength at major airports--Kansas City and Las Vegas, to name but two. I also started to notice that even when sitting next to someone with a T-Mobile cellphone, they would get multiple bars while I would get nothing but empty wrappers. Even walking from my house to work--hardly a trek along the Appalachian Trail--I would be lucky to generate the occasional bar but would occasionally get an "unregistered SIM" message and tales from friends of dialing me up but being told that my phone was not in service at this or any time.

What gives? I should be able to call T-Mobile and get some answers, shouldn't I?

Ha. What a poor, pitiful, capitalist pawn am I.

I did make the call and got some . . . words . . . not necessarily answers. The number on my sim card wasn't the number they had on file--had I changed it out recently? No, never actually. How many bars was I seeing on my phone while at home--3? 4? Maybe 2-1/2, I noted. Had I tried cleaning the interior of the phone and the battery connections with a static- and lint-free cloth? No, actually, that hadn't occurred to me. Will that help? Well, who knows? Who cares?

I could swear that I spoke to the same customer service assistant the last time I called T-Mobile when I had a problem way back in late 2005--a call I made from Germany on a landline because I discovered that despite the promise that I could use a global, quad band phone on their pay-as-you-go plan, surprise! Frankfurt does not believe in tears! You cannot--you have to have a plan.

The customer service rep had the the same very strong Alabama drawl and a best-foot-forward approach to making a difference in resolving my problem, dadgummit, yet the same vague cluelessness about what to do to make it so.

Anyway, I did all of the above and then some, and the phone worked slightly better--that or I am more of a hopeful romantic than I realize--at least for a day or so.

And then it went right back to dropping signals in unlikely places--my office, a city bus, my neighborhood, and, weirdly, a Panera's on Forbes Avenue in Oakland, right across the street from a T-Mobile shop. Funny, the phone had worked fine--in fact, wonderfully, while I was on the street in front of the T-Mobile shop--and just as amazingly when I walked into the shop itself. But across the street in the "dead zone" that is apparently Panera's--a dead zone not unlike that near Dick Cheney's private lair in Fairfield, Pennsylvania--I could no more raise a signal than Catherine Zeta-Jones could illustrate a genuine emotion (other than perhaps revulsion) with Michael Douglas's unsheathed torso in sight.

"Hi, I seem to be having a problem with my cellphone. The signal strength is wonky, highly variable. I noticed this started a few months ago--"

"A few months ago?!" chimed the sales rep, a man-child who had decided to wear his father's ill-fitting clothes that day. "Well, it's spring, there's lots of foliage. That may be why your signal strength is so poor."

"Foliage?" I asked, incredulously. It was such a ridiculous notion that I didn't even try to cover up my I-don't-suffer-fools-easily edge to my voice. "You're telling me there are too many trees out now, and that's why I can't get a decent signal?"

"Yes, that could be the reason!"

"So," I said slyly, starting to warm up to what I envisioned as an entertaining game of cat-and-mouse, with me being the cat, and Junior about to have his sinews separated like strands of spaghetti, "pretty much all of Europe and North America are without cellphone coverage this time of year on account of all the trees. So the reason why I couldn't get a signal at the Las Vegas Airport or the Kansas City Airport, which are both fairly tree-free, is because . . . ?"

"You have an old phone!" blurted another sales rep.

"And you have a stupid haircut," I said.

Well, OK, no, I didn't actually say that. Alas, somedays, I'm too much of a Southerner still. I just thought it, wished ill on his people, and regretted later that I didn't say what I thought.

"The phone is less than 3 years old," I said.

"That's really old for a cellphone!" Spikey said. "Cellphones change out all the time nowadays, more often than cars."

I didn't really know what that sentence was supposed to mean, but if he thought he would win an argument about the rapid obsolescence of cellphone technology with someone who had just unloaded a 12-year old teal-colored Subaru, he was in a for a surprise.

"We have phones that are outdated within 6 to 8 months of release!" he added.

For a second I was quiet, stunned into submission by the knowledge of the short lifespan of the average cellphone, which was starting to rival that of the common housefly. Finally, I focused on Spikey's face and not his hair. "Have you ever heard of landfills?" I asked.

And from the look of all the product in his hair and a quick vision of a dumpster in a back alley in Oakland full of dessicated bottles of L.A. Looks or Bedhead or whatever it is the kids use nowadays, I assumed he had not. He reminded me of that blond douchebag Chad in the commercials for a rival cellphone carrier--Nextel, Alltel, Dotell, whatever. You must have to swear an oath of fealty to the "energy" industry, promise to use copious quantities of petroleum-based hair gels, in order to get a job with a cellphone company these days.

I argued with them for a while longer, enjoying pointing out the ridiculousness of their case. Now at least I know why professors must enjoy their work so much--you can always be the smart one in the room when you're surrounded by 19-somethings with too many dollars, not enough sense, and a training course in sales and marketing under their belt. After all, these are kids who've known nothing other than life in a post-Reagan America. You could tell these chumps anything--war is peace, freedom is slavery, waterboarding is not torture, I did not have sexual relations with that woman--and they would swallow it, crook, slime, and finker.

However, when my voice rose higher in exasperation--"You mean I should buy a new phone from T-Mobile because you tell me to, even though there's no guarantee that the new phone will work any better than the old one?"--all three of us seemed to reach the same conclusion, that this was no fun anymore and really just a big waste of our time. I wasn't going to crumble in the face of being called out for having an "old" phone (and thus for being old, dated, obsolete, and irrelevant myself). I wasn't going to feed my head and give into my psychological panic over my irrelevance and please the young pups by forking over more money and agreeing to a 2-year, even unbreakable by O.J.'s defense team, contract either. And they were no doubt tired out by having to think on their feet for more than a second or two.

I fancied for a moment that they must have been thinking, "Who knew sales could be this challenging?"

But who am I kidding? I'm sure "Wearing down the old curmudgeon" was covered in the first week of their sales seminar, "Selling and Suckering: The Customer as Patsy." They just needed to practice with one of their bros to perfect their technique.

Ultimately, I've got nothing on them, except a little cockiness, which I suspect will make me tragically vulnerable to their next good cop/bad cop sales pitch.

* * *

I'd like to conclude with a paean to the Good Ol' Days when the Customer was King/Queen. (And in my case, sometimes both.) If work by contractors was to be done on time, by golly it was! If your car didn't work, you took it into the garage, the mechanic fixed it, and charged you a reasonable price! If you visited a museum exhibition or watched a show on PBS, you never once saw a commercial for Lexus or Pfizer disguised as sponsorship!

But sometimes I'm not so sure the good ol' days were indeed the good ol' days--although I do recall a time when Pfizer and Lexus didn't sponsor everything cultural moment in our lives. The world has had a long history of economic exploitation, and in some places and periods, it has been worse than others. If you're successful at capitalism, you get to buy lots of nice things for you and your family. But what if you're unsuccessful at it? Or, as is the case in the U.S., what if you're too successful at it?

It seems like a particularly greedy era in which we are living. It gets back to the point I first made, that used to, it seemed that we exchanged money for goods *and* services, not just goods, and not crappily made goods at that. Nowadays, clearly the emphasis seems to be solely on the money endgame, rather than the satisfaction or service. Wealth is concentrated among a few, elites and elitism rules, and whoever dies with the most toys wins. The poor aren't worthy of our money through charities or taxes--they're losers, after all, unsuccessful saps in a country where nothing succeeds like success.

I keep fantasizing about a time or place, in the past or in my future, when this wasn't or might not be the case. That may indeed be just a fantasy. Even when I visited the Soviet Union in the 1980s, I could plainly see that enforcing economic equality (which was equal in propaganda but never in practice, as in some Politburo members were more equal than others) at the risk of human rights might not be the best approach. Even if I did think I would look fabulous in all that Young Communist drag.

But I can't help but wonder if at least attempting more economic equality through, I dunno, social welfare programs and public spending, the sorts of wild and crazy things that make places like Canada, Sweden, Australia, and Germany (T-Mobile excepted) such pleasant and stable nations, might make us a kinder, gentler country. Would we be nicer to one another? Would we feel less edgy and more relaxed? Would we be less selfish? Would we be less likely to covet our neighbors' consumer goods and more likely to be unconcerned with their personal lives? Would we vote for someone who supports government-funded universal healthcare and pension plans instead of someone more concerned with geopolitics, oil revenues, or interns?

Doing so might make Americans unrecognizable to ourselves. We are, after all, a country of cowboy swagger and economic can-do-ism, and I don't think we necessarily want to do away with those aspects of our nature. If nothing else, people like Donald Trump and H. Ross Perot provide a lot of comic relief.

But, jeez, you think we could lighten up a little and maybe cut each other some economic slack. After all, we've got all the money we need. We're the wealthiest country in the world! Why not spend some of the moolah on our own nation-building rather than some place else's? Maybe we should give ourselves a break and serve up some Good New Days, rather than just dream about old ones.

Now that's a service you could sell me, no matter how much hair gel you're wearing.