The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. ―Edmund Burke
funny Godlmighty. It’s like living in some retrograde Southern state during the 1950s. Doubt me? Check out this example of Arizona civility, a fine performance by the products of our state’s fine educational system.
Image: “We Are All Loyal Klansmen,” sheet music cover. 1923. Public Domain.
Well, after diddling away $700-plus on clothes a few weeks ago, I’ve done it again. This time, a like amount is going into the optometrist’s pocket. Over the weekend I ordered up two new pair of glasses. Actually, one new pair and a pair of lenses for an existing frame.
I’ve never been satisfied with the progressives and the up-close glasses Costco ground out for me last fall. They just don’t work for the tasks I do in my day-to-day life, which largely entail reading, an activity that apparently has fallen into such disuse that optometrists don’t understand that one or two of their customers still do it. And the truth is, I never intended to use those as my regular glasses, anyway—I bought them on the cheap to use as back-ups.
When we learned that the university would delay closing our office until December, I realized that the period between open enrollment and Canning Day would only be about three months. This made signing up for Avesis, the low-rent vision insurance program, highly cost-effective, since I would only have to make three payments to get the benefit of a year’s worth of coverage. It was only a few bucks a month. If I ran over to Costco, the only dispenser they covered that’s not excoriated in various online consumer reviews, I could try a new pair of progressives (which had never worked well for me in the past) and get a back-up pair for the up-close glasses at a deep discount. My plan was to continue using my old glasses, which at least more or less work, and stash these to use when the good glasses wore out or got lost.
Well, even though I can’t see to read more than a few words in them and they’re useless for computer work, I found myself using the progressives as distance lenses. They work OK to drive in, and I can read the list of ingredients on most (but not all) packaged foods in the grocery store. It’s easier to navigate Costco and Safeway with glasses that will allow me to see down the aisle, even if sometimes I have to take the glasses off to read what’s on a package.
However, they’re not very satisfactory. To read the music for choir, I had to take a pair of old, very strong prescription readers, clip a case to my music folder, and trade off the progressives for the readers whenever the print was smaller than about 12 points. Which is, we might add, most of the time. Some of the print on those scores is submicroscopic! This was a clumsy proposition from the outset. And though I could see the music with the readers on, I couldn’t see the choir director, who signals his desires not only with hand gestures but with various facial expressions. Through the readers, his face is a blur.
Add to that the fact that both the Avesis-underwritten pairs are plug-ugly. I’d selected the frames I thought were the least ugly at Costco, but their selection, despite being numerous, is actually pretty limited. These things are clunky and owl-like. They work at cross-purposes to my current scheme to start looking better.
Well, for quite some time I’ve known about this optician’s shop next to A.J.’s, my favorite overpriced gourmet grocery store. He has gorgeous frames, and he insists that he can do a better job than Costco ever dreamed. He claims he can make a pair of progressives that actually will allow me to read copy, and he does himself one better by proposing to make a pair of monovision intermediate glasses that will bring 8- to 10-point type into view and allow me to see the choir director well enough to follow what the man is trying to tell us.
So on Saturday, having bent the damn Silhouettes again sliding them in and out of the case I clipped to my choir folder (they warp at the drop of a hat), I dropped by his place to ask him to straighten them. This time I took my latest prescription, having already decided to replace the clunkers with a better-looking pair.
What I found there was a frame along the lines of the Silhouettes, but made of a stronger, bendier material. The temple pieces are attached to the lenses in a different way, so they’re less likely to snap off and less likely to crack the lenses. They’re almost invisible on your face, and they’re so lightweight it feels like you aren’t wearing glasses at all. And supposedly they don’t warp as easily as the Silhouettes; when they do, they’re allegedly easy enough to put back into shape that the consumer can do it herself.
So while the optician was measuring for this new device, he revealed the reason I can’t read through the Costco progressives without tilting my head back and peering down my nose. Though the prescription is right and the Costco optician’s measurements were correct, somewhere in the assembly-line manufacturing process they cut off the lower part of the close-up vision range. So in fact, there’s just not enough space on the lens to see a page of print. That’s why…not surprisingly…I can’t see a page of print. He said you should not have to tilt your head to see through the things—that you should be able to read by glancing down, not by doing contortions.
He suggested I take them back to Costco and ask them to redo them correctly. I pointed out that it’s been six months since I bought them, and he allowed as how after that long they probably wouldn’t do anything about it.
At any rate, he makes the lenses himself, at his shop, rather than shipping them to Indonesia or wherever these huge chains outsource to. This means the glasses will be ready the middle of next week instead of two or three weeks hence. And he does his own quality control.
So, we’ll see how this works. Of course, I don’t expect these new progressives to work for all the things I need to see. But I’ll be happy if they work a little better and don’t make me look like the owl-eyed Mma Makutsi in the Ladies No. 1 Detective Agency.
So…ahem! Where exactly is the money going to come from to cover seven hundred and some-odd dollars for a pair of freaking glasses? The frames alone were $390 (hey! I resisted buying the incredible $525 gilded pair with the ruby-colored Swarovski crystals), and then the progressive lenses were over $300, too.
Well, the truth is, even after paying for the clothing extravaganza, I still have enough in diddle-it-away savings to cover the cost. So when the bill comes I’ll probably just draw that down again. Even if there weren’t enough there to cover it, after having lived under budget for the entire spring semester, my $14,500 unemployment cushion has grown to something over $17,000. That overage was supposed to carry me through the summer, when, in the absence of teaching income, I’ll be living on nothing but Social Security, which covers only about half my base expenses. However, that extra $2,400 the college has decided to pay me for preparing the online course will moot the question of how I’m going to live through the summer. So, I figure there’s plenty to cover the glasses.
And in the justification department: one’s vision is not something to compromise on. Especially when dealing with it ties in so intimately with one’s vanity. La Maya once remarked, in justifying the wildly expensive pair of glasses she wears, that you have to wear the things on your face 16 or 18 hours a day. So if you have to have the things hanging on your nose all day long, you might as well break out of cheapskate mode and buy a decent pair.
Besides. Given the extravagant cost of Medicare B, Medicare D, and Medigap, this will easily push my 2010 medical costs high enough to make them deductible.
The other day, Budgeting in the Fun Stuff remarked on Frugal Scholar‘s rant about the excruciating customer service emanating from Virgin Mobile. Both bloggers asked readers which corporations are best and worst in the customer (dis)service department.
Apparently they touched a hot button. They each got a slew of responses. Among them, we see that Comcast is roundly hated. Free Money Finance is locked in combat with that worthy organization—as his saga unfolds, it’s hard to tell whether Comcast is merely incompetent or deliberately obnoxious.
Yesterday while I was driving up to the optometrist’s office, what should I hear on NPR but this interesting story. It suggests a new tool for hacking through thickets of bad customer service, at least in some instances: small claims court.
Dartmouth Professor Charles Wheelan was subjected to United Airlines’ latest insult to passengers, a $25 charge for checking his bag. When they lost his luggage, they refused to refund his money. So he took them to small claims court. So far, he has yet to see either the bag or the refund, but, as he notes, even though the action cost him $72 in court fees, revenge is sweet:
Turns out that it’s [the $72 trade-off] actually really important in terms of economics. It’s essentially vengeance, and vengeance has a technical definition, which is you’re willing to harm yourself in order to impose harm on somebody else. Now when we do that, what the behavioral psychologists have learned, is it makes us feel good. It lights up the pleasurable parts of the brain just like doing other things that make you feel good. So vengeance might actually be quite rational.
United crossed the wrong guy when its baggage handlers threw musician Dave Carroll’s expensive guitar across the tarmac, with predictable results. His revenge came in the form of a hilarious (and infuriating) YouTube video that, says he, “became one of YouTube’s greatest hits and caused an instant media frenzy across all major global networks and sources (including the likes of CNN, the LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Rolling Stone Magazine & the BBC to name a few)” and spawned two more videos. He may never have extracted the $1,200 it cost to repair his guitar from United, but the resulting publicity boosted his career, probably returning that much and more in increased revenues.
Well, most of us don’t have Dave Carroll’s talent. But it’s not hard to put up a talking-head video on YouTube describing some egregious example of customer disservice, and the idea of taking the SOBs to small claims court over money owed has its charms.
My own strategy is first to bypass the CSRs by tracking down the names of upper management at the corporate headquarters and firing off a dear-sir-you-cur letter. Often this will get results, or a simulacrum thereof.
If the go-over-their-heads gambit fails, then I head for a regulatory agency or an attorney general. Many of these customer service fiascos amount to fraud or theft—when they stonewall you or outright lie to you, they’re ripping you off. The trick here is to go to the AG in the state where the company is headquartered and send a copy of your complaint to the AG in your own state.
When a company operates across state lines, as most of the faceless monsters that have developed immunity to customers do, then a fraudulent action becomes…yes…a federal case! Corporate America, as we have seen by the vast corporate donations to doctrinaire Kill-the-Beasters’ political campaigns, really dislikes dealing with federal regulators and attorneys general. So if you can’t get any action from a state attorney general, kick it up to the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, or the U.S. Attorney General. You’d be surprised how fast a call from any of these entities will settle your complaint.
Frugal and Budgeting ask readers what are their choices for best and worst customer service. My all-time worst customer service nightmare is Qwest, an outfit with whom no one should ever do business. Videlicet:
Back Again—Temporarily?
“We Value Your Business”
Unbundled! Qwest Strikes Again
What Happens When a Live Qwest Guy Shows Up
Qwest Redux: How Do These Companies Stay in Business?
Qwest: The Saga That Will Not End
Qwest Update
The best? It’s hard to think of many, since retailers and service providers now will openly tell you that the old saying to the effect that “the customer is always right” is dead wrong. CSRs apparently are encouraged to be rude and trained to bounce off complaints like tennis balls hitting a concrete wall. In my experience, the only outfit that’s consistently shown excellent customer service is the Mayo Clinic.
My question to you is this:
What has worked best for you to cut through a customer disservice fiasco?
A vast haystack of deferred work around the house has piled up while I’ve been struggling to get out from under the mountain of paid work. (And though grades are now posted, I still have paying work to do for two clients, but today I’m playing hooky for a few hours.)
Last night I managed to shovel off and clean the biggest counter in the kitchen. The stove and counters and cabinetry around it remain to be done, but at least the main annoyance was dealt with by 10:00 p.m. Sharpened the knives, which had dulled so much they could only mash the food apart. Repaired the knife sharpener first. Realized the next kitchen purchase will have to be a new knife sharpener. The one I have is a Chef’s Choice Multi-Edge Diamond Hone Knife Sharpener
At five this morning it was off to do battle with the cat’s claw vines, which have decided to cover the pool equipment beneath an exuberant mound of jungle vegetation. First, though I had to replace the plastic panels that shelter the equipment to some degree from the sun and from the depredations of another jungle vine, the big cape honeysuckle that hides the ugly pump and filter from view in the backyard. This contraption, which was secured to the wrought-iron fencing with plastic tie gadgets, had broken loose in the winter storms. It’s now wired firmly in place—that should hold it for at least another couple of years.
It’s a big job to put that thing up by oneself. It really takes two people.
Onward. By 8:00 a.m. the vine that ate Philadelphia was hacked away from around the equipment and pulled down off the palm tree. Its incursions across the CoolDeck and into the water were beaten back. Satan & Prosperpine’s strange little bell-bedangled poolside decoration was freed from the mass of plant matter that had enveloped it, as were a couple of decorative boulders that had almost disappeared beneath the greenery. Raked up bushels of fallen leaves and twigs from beneath the vinery. Trimmed the powdery-mildew-infested rose by the pool and cut back the blue plumbago that wishes to push the rose into the next world. Picked up the fallen lemons, dodging angry ant myrmidons in the process. Put out some stale ant bait for the ladies; made note to buy fresh stuff. Hauled a gigantic mountain of trash out; put my neck out lifting it into the shoulder-high garbage bin. Cooked a steak, its freezer bag dated 11/3/09, for breakfast.
As soon as I get up off my duff here, I’ve got to get back out there and treat the roses with powdery mildew meds. This winter’s El Niño rains brought forth a burst of joyful rose exuberance, but the almost daily leaf-soaking also brought forth more powdery mildew than I’ve ever seen. Even the David Austin roses, which allegedly resist this annoying disease, are covered with it. From there it will be on to…
• do the bookkeeping
• clean the stove, counters, and cabinetry
• pick up the house
• dust
• clean the floors
• clean the bathrooms
• water the plants inside and out
• get back to work on the client’s arcane tables
• get back to reading page proofs for the other client
• test and adjust the pool water.
A house is an ongoing project, that’s for sure. I believe it was George Bernard Shaw who remarked that home is a girl’s prison and a woman’s workhouse. LOL! I think of it as a black hole into which to pour money and labor.
That notwithstanding, I love my house. It’s so pretty, inside and out. Satan and Proserpine did a few nice things to it—the new kitchen cabinets, the out-of-code mantelpiece in matching pine, the tilework in the kitchen, dining room, living room, and hall, the travertine shower, the nifty deck off the dining room. Then I did a lot more stuff to it. The skylights in the kitchen, family room, and master bath really make the place, IMHO. So does the tiling Mike the Bosnian Tile Genius put into the rest of the house, and the remake of the kitchen counters he accomplished. The relandscaping job added the glorious fruit trees (on which I’ve largely subsisted all spring), the spectacular emerald paloverde, the beautiful desert willow, the climbing roses around the deck, the attractive front courtyard…to say nothing of xeriscape that doesn’t need to have treated city water poured on it.
PF bloggers like to ruminate now and again about the cost-effectiveness of upgrades and renovations. Very little about fix-up is cost-effective. Unless you manage to buy a house for next to nothing, it’s unwise to imagine you’re fixing up a place so you can sell it for a profit. Obviously, you should keep up its maintenance and replace things that break or wear out. But really: renovation is for the pleasure of the present occupants, not for future buyers to pay for.
I don’t expect ever to recover the money I’ve put into this house when (or if) I sell it. When I bought the place, I bought it intending to live here until they carry me off to the nursing home or the mortuary. So the money I spent on the house went to make it a pleasant place to live.
It worked. Now, so do I. Work, I mean.
Time to get out and treat those roses! Bye…
Heaven has arrived.
Just climbed out of the pool—the first dip in the water of the season. Soooo heavenly! It’s still a little on the brisk side, this spring having been unusually temperate. Even today, it’s not hot enough outdoors to turn on the air conditioning. Weather has been mixed: a day or two of 90-ish temperatures will warm the water almost to the tolerable range, and then the temps will drop back into the 60s and 70s.
With the afternoon at a balmy 92 degrees, cleaning the pump pot and fiddling with the plants left me warm enough to think…oh, what the hell. Into the drink it was!
What a splendid, refreshing experience is that first dive into the water! I love it. The injured arm was not pleased at pulling through anything thicker than helium, but the rest of the body really enjoyed it.
Speaking of bodies that are happy to be alive, SDXB called this afternoon sounding like his old self. Barely two weeks out of major cardiovascular surgery, the man is walking 30 to 45 minutes around his neighborhood fairly briskly (for him, that means none of us could keep up with him). He’s already lobbying to be allowed back behind the steering wheel and planning this summer’s trips to see his daughter in Texas, New Girlfriend at her Colorado digs, and Sister in Oregon.
It’s such a joy to hear that he’s OK. We were all very alarmed when NG spread the word of the scary condition he was in. His medicos (according to His Nibs) seem to concur that, since he sustained no damage to his heart, he should recover fully and expect to live at least another 15 or 20 years. One of his doctors said he should be able to do “more” than he has… Heh heh heh… But does the guy know what SDXB has been doing? “More” would be on the order of superpowers.
So I told him I expect to go along on his next hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. And well, yes…he’s already planning that, too.
Godlmighty. I’d better start getting into shape.
At last, all of my final grades are filed in the college’s system. Except for one change-of-grade form, which I’ll do next week when I get around to it, the semester is now officially over.
And even though I won’t get the three-month totally work-free vacation I coveted, things will slow down enough to allow some substantial loafing. Maybe I’ll take the Cassowary up to Sedona or Payson for some walks in the forest—that should be kind of fun. Dogs like walks in the forest.
First, though, it’s off to finish a book for one of the clients, and then back to work on the young psychologist’s dissertation.
Enjoy!
Image: Doug Dolde. Public Domain
Hm. This is retirement, eh? Interesting experience.
So I started grading 50,000 words of student efforts after breakfast this morning, right around 7:00 a.m. Racing along as fast as I could read, making no comments except for a few overall observations attached to the electronic rubrics I post in the terrifying BlackBoard, I finished sometime after 3:00 p.m. That would be eight (count’em, 8 ) uninterrupted hours of grading.
Then their scores had to be entered in the rubric forms, each of which has 20 items, and each had to be added up for this assignment’s total number of points.
Thence to Blackboard. Oh god.
It took an hour and 45 minutes to enter all the points for all the students and then upload all the forms to all the students through BlackBoard’s arcane communication system. It is soooo…slooooowwwwwwwwww.
It took another 45 minutes fill in zeros for all the assignments that students didn’t bother to do, to copy out their total numeric scores, to compare each one to the grade equivalences, and to figure their letter grades.
None of this was helped when FireFox developed a hitch in its pants and decided it would not, no way, NOT enter anything in the ever-aggravating BlackBoard. So I had to go over to Safari, which is OK but slightly more cumbersome to use. No degree of extra cumbersomeness was in any way welcome at that particular moment.
If you are a parent of one of my students, you’ll be pleased to know that all our children are above average. What we have here, in the afternoon section, are 12 As, 4 Bs, 4 Cs, 1 D, and 1 F.
How, you ask, could so many young geniuses cluster in one classroom? Well…obviously, birds of a feather flock together!
In the community colleges, large numbers of students drop. At the first whiff of a D or F (or, among the most ambitious, of a C), the young things shoot out the door like frightened cottontails. After these clear out, the students who have a shot at success remain in the classroom.
Then we have all the devices designed to get them to show up in class. Understand, many of these students are bright enough young men and women who, at the age of 19 or so, haven’t imbibed the best of all possible learning skills. One learning skill is, as you might imagine, showing up in class. To get them there and to address the attention-deficit problem (they can’t stay awake through a full hour of lecture), I fill the days with interminable in-class activities and exercises, each of which racks up 10 points here and 20 points there. Plus, because we’re required to keep roll, they get one point for sitting in a seat and breathing—36 points (for this section) shows the young scholar surfaced in class every day.
Because I’m required to assign only three major papers in English 102, that is all I do assign. So…that’s only 300 points. By the time the semester ends, the total number of points including the three papers and the drafts and the peer reviews and the quizzes and all the exercises and doohickies adds up to something between 650 and 800 points. For this section, the total possible points came to 766. Thus over half the available points consist of busy-work and breathing exercises.
Consequently, even a kid who can’t write his way out of a paper bag can get a B in this class, if he (okay, or she) bothers to turn in the papers. To get a C, you have to cut class with some regularity; to get a D you have to work very hard to prove your incompetence, and to get an F, you have to be brain-dead. Really, when you think about it a D is a greater accomplishment than an A, because it reflects a great deal more effort.
I hate this. In the first place, I hate flunking students, some of whom do try very hard but are just not up to snuff. And in the second place I hate handing out A’s like Hallowe’en candy.
One of the things you should know about these students is that most of them are pretty bright. Some are very smart, indeed. If they’re not great at academics, it’s because they’re distracted by other concerns, because the state of Arizona’s K-12 system leaves much to be desired, or because they haven’t the temperament or patience to sit through interminable mind-numbing courses.
The best student writer I ever had the privilege to meet got a gentleman’s C in my course. OMG, could that guy write! Given half a chance and a degree from Princeton, he could give John McPhee
True to form, he cut a fair number of class meetings, and he flat refused to jump through the busy-work hoops I’d set up to insure that as many students as humanly possible would rack up enough points to pass the course. Last I saw of him, he was on his way to fight fires in Montana. He promised to take a journal along and think about writing articles or essays about his experiences.
This was a man that…well, any young woman in her right mind would fall all over herself to land him as a husband. If we were still living in the cave, he would be bringing home the mammoth steaks for us all. And he also would be keeping the peace in the clan: he was a natural leader. The course, in the first place, wasn’t challenging enough for him, and in the second place, the classroom experience asked him to do something he wasn’t really suited for.
The next time I teach this course, there’ll some changes made! We’re required to assign two 750-word papers and one 2,500-word paper to the 102 classes. Twenty-five hundred words is more than three times the length of each shorter paper, and so next time around, I’m going to make that gigantic hunk of a paper worth 300 points. That will devalue all the in-class activities, so that assiduous presence and faithful hoop-jumping will not, of themselves, carry one through to a passing grade.
In addition to that, they’re starting the semester with annotated bibliographies. They. WILL. Learn. A. Style. Manual. If. It. Kills. Us. All. This activity will occupy great wads of time and also will give them a running head start on their research paper.
Next semester we’re using the “Assignments” function in BlackBoard, which (if I’m informed correctly) speeds the exchange of papers, automatically creates a grade column in the online gradebook, flags you when one of the li’l thangs has submitted a paper, and enters your grade when you’re finished reading the thing. This will speed matters along to some degree.
It also appears that BB will let you enter a letter grade instead of a numeric score and, possibly, create a running averaged letter grade for each classmate. If I can figure out how to make that work, then next fall we’ll be reverting to my old, unreconstructed SchoolMarm Grading System, whereby each hapless student starts with 100 points and gets two to six points dinged off for each crime and misdemeanor that I have told them (a thousand times!) not to do. This, oh fellow pedagogues out there, is an effective way to teach students grammar, style, thematic organization, paragraphing, and sentence structure, theories to the contrary notwithstanding. By the end of the semester, they’re all writing coherent copy with very few grammatical, punctuation, and style errors. It also has the advantage of letting you see their equivalent letter grade at a glance.
If university juniors and seniors who are mostly transfers from the junior colleges can do that, I’ll bet junior-college freshmen and sophomores can do it, too. You have to work with them, but you can get almost all of them to that level, with a few LD and ESL exceptions.
The Eng. 101 students got off too easy, too, though their grades were not quite so skewed to the higher range. Next semester, all four of their papers will be researched, including the two little Mickey Mousers that are not so required by the district. They also will start out with a cold plunge into MLA style, and in fact, I’m going to make them buy the MLA Manual
The little pistols are going to come out of 101 knowing how to write a bibliography and enter an in-text citation, and, not only that, knowing how to write tight. And what a pronoun antecedent is. Maybe even what a subject and a verb are.
They are going to do a lot more work, and I am going to do a lot less work.