Steerage

The Times ran this article, "Class Conflict on the Airlines," complete with accompanying sardonic picture and, hey, were you aware that airlines have been trimming the amenities in coach? Airlines save money by throwing out what used to be essentials — according to the article, United stopped handing out their delicious pretzel mix and saved $650,000, while American Airlines saved $600,000 by scuttling the pillows from their flights. Would this be a good time to point out that United took in $19 billion in revenue last year, and American made $22 billion?

Anyone who's ever flown knows the situation is different in first class, because the airline insists on shuffling the cattle through the luxury zone, just so we can see what we're missing. Lie-flat seats, four-course meals, noise-canceling headphones, while people have literally died from sitting in coach for too long. At least Singapore Airlines is doing something about deep vein thrombosis, restoring some legroom to economy class.

No, I'm just kidding. They're distributing brochures laced with magic blood thinners.

Here's where the free market system fails miserably. United says that eight percent of its fliers make up thirty-six percent of their revenue, and they'd lick those guys' balls all the way from Dulles to Düsseldorf if they asked. So applying some math skills, you have to figure that United's leaving ninety-two percent of their customers — and nearly two-thirds of their revenue — in Seats of DEATH, and taking us for cheap tourist fools buying carefully worded lines about "The passenger who is buying a ticket from us based on price sensitivity — we also want to make sure they have a comfortable flight." I'm not calling bullshit right here, but judging from our nation's hack comedians at open-mic night, there's a market for flights with peanuts, and no one cares to meet it.

The airlines epitomize the trouble with letting corporations do whatever the hell they want in the name of making a dollar. There's a diverse market that gets relegated to the "have" extreme and the "have-not" extreme. I might be willing to take a ten dollar flight on a FedEx cargo jet, but at even economy class prices, someone, somewhere should have to meet certain minimum expectations: that I'll get to my destination as efficiently as humanly possible, and that I won't have to spend eight hours in a Seat of DEATH. I don't think that's a lot to ask, but apparently ninety-two percent of you do.

My train was late today because of "small mechanical difficulties," which is code for a door wouldn't close. It's one of my many problems with NJ Transit, especially since they used to let you ride in between cars with the door wide open and the wind in your hair. What changed is NJ Transit's level of contempt for their customer — we're all such morons that we'll jump off the fast-moving train unless we're shackled into our seats. Of course, what probably happened between the old days and now is that some retard did jump off the train, because he saw it on Jackass or something, ruined train riding for everyone and made me miss my connection this morning. Bastard!

While I'm at it, here's the warning underneath a window on a New York City bus. Keep your arms and legs inside the moving vehicle at all times, assuming you enjoy having arms and legs. I absolutely can't stand being given obvious warnings — Don't spray bug killer in your eyes! Danger: coffee is hot! Life is full of risks, and if you want to take the relatively high risk, low payoff option of having a fireworks fight in the woods, that's your business. This is how natural selection controls the population.

There are people in the world — dangerous people — who are drunk with power (cough, cough, Cheney) but most of them are harmless little weenies whose sole purpose is to drive you nuts with their arbitrary rules, plus the obvious ones now chiseled in stone, so they'll have something to point at when they catch you. I, for one, won't be returning to my latest coffeshop review, Rohr's, not because the decor wasn't my taste and the wireless wasn't free, but because of their Ten Commandments, helpfully posted on the wall. You're basically walking into a nanny state: "Feet off the sofa! We are not a maid service: clean up after yourselves! No cursing!"

Even better, there's a separate list of bathroom rules taped to the toilet, and if the standard Rohr's code of laws isn't patronizing enough, check out Rules and Regulations... I'm sorry, I mean General Bathroom Tips #3 and 4.

Gee, thanks for the "tips," but I'm fully toilet trained and confident in my ability to use a bathroom without any retarded rhyming advice. I would've taken a picture of the non-bathroom related rules, but it turns out "no photography" is on the list.

Call Center

We had this little cross-continental tech support incident at work yesterday.

Last week, the office became the proud owner of a Hewlett-Packard all-in-one scanner-copier combination device object thing. I plugged it in, but we were all dismayed to discover that it wouldn't make copies, at least not without resizing and shrinking the original. Much time was wasted. This morning, the hardware IT guy came in and made a call to HP tech support, which is evidently located in Bangalore, India.

Let me say that I am overflowing with sympathy for the poor people stuck working the help desk; I've spent days dealing with the less technically-inclined over the phone, and frankly the combination of confused half-wits who don't know a mouse from a hamster and angry jerks blaming their computer problems on you that you have to deal with would turn even the most patient saint into a raving mad Luddite. I honestly don't know how the help desk people keep their cool — not to mention actually solving customers' computer issues — unless maybe heavy, heavy doses of Valium are involved.

There was probably a bit of frustration in the air already, since we'd been looking forward to photocopying things full-size for a week already, and even sitting across the room I could feel the vibes of disgruntlement going down the phone lines, into the switchboard, beamed to a satellite, and bounced back to India. Just to boost the awkwardness, the hardware guy, interfacing with tech support, put India on speakerphone. It sounded like this:

"Did you press the 'copy' button or the 'print' button?"

"Did you install the HP 5570 Scandisk driver?"

"When you go to print, does a window appear on the screen?"

...and a little pitchier...

"Does the HP Document Center start up when you turn on the scanner?"

"Does the picture shrink in one direction or both directions?"

...India's voice turns musical....

"Is the scanner plugged into a USB 2.0 port?"

"And is the printer plugged into an IEEE-2848 parallel port?"

"Did you try resetting the scanner?"

I'm sure HP spent a good deal of money sending this tech guy to accent reduction classes (no way generous billion dollar company would make its beloved employees pay for their own training) but now he sounds like Apu from The Simpsons.

"Okay, when you want to make a copy, you need to go and scan your image into the Document Center. Then select Export to PDF from the File menu and open the PDF with Acrobat Reader..." which I'll admit sounds like a lot more work than just pressing the copy button and standing by the printer, waiting for output. This sent our hardware guy over the edge. "You know, this scanner was advertised as being able to make copies. If it's gonna be that much work, I'd rather just return it. What's your return policy?"

Thus starts like a five-minute debate on the topic "What'dya mean you don't have a return policy?" I'm almost certain something or other was lost in translation from English to heavily-accented English, but the gist of the conversation was as follows: The scanner is supposed to make full-size copies. Also, the scanner is not supposed to make full-size copies. Once you settle the contradiction without causing a rift in the time-space of the universe, you can't return the scanner.

"What's your return policy? Your return policy. We only bought the scanner a week ago. It's not functioning the way I expected it to function. It says right here on the box that it makes copies." And this is only the shit from one customer that one Indian call center guy has to take. Imagine dealing with this twenty-four/seven, a nation of a billion people, with nuclear weapons. All I'm saying is we should start building fallout shelters now. "But it should make full-size copies. If I want to shrink the copies, that should be my choice. Your return policy. How do I return this and get my money back? What do you mean I can't get my money back? You realize that you're basically telling me, and my group, and everybody in my organization never to buy another HP product ever again?"

And that's where I'd find license to just hang the fuck up, which is why I shouldn't be working the help desk.

Our guy was a trouper, though, staying on the line through repeated requests to get a manager, and then repeated requests to make sure he wasn't going to hang up on us while getting the manager, and then repeatedly telling us that the manager wasn't in. Even after we thought he hung up, and we were all making jokes about how much HP customer service has gone down the tubes since they outsourced it to India, he was still on the line, double-checking our phone number and everything. Man, if they gave out awards for the most tenacious call center guy, I'd totally nominate him. And if I'm ever in Bangalore, I'll be sure to take him out for a drink.

Fortunately, I don't think I'll ever be in Bangalore, so no having to follow through on that.

My computer is back in the hospital and I'm starting to realize that I'm stuck in this dysfunctional relationship with Tekserve. I brought my laptop back to them last week, still suffering from narcolepsy and also from a misaligned CD drive. This time, I brought my computer in for diagnosis knowing full well how tight he and I were, and hoping that they'd be able fix his little circuits up while I waited. But no such luck. They took my laptop and left its sad motherboard and memory on a shelf in the back, rotting away in the clinic queue for the second time in as many weeks.

What gets to me is that the Tekserve customer service techies are really cool about the whole thing, at least upfront. The generalist who first took a look at my computer apologized for them not fixing it right the first time, said he put my laptop right at the front of the queue on the Tekserve technical techie's desk, and even left me with one of those computer science brain teasers I so detest. (Puzzle: Detect a loop in a linked list.) But the minute your computer in their care, it gets trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare of unfilled stock orders and bizarre "extensive" testing, and frankly I don't think I'm ever getting my machine back. I wonder if there's a heated debate in the back between the technical techie and the boss techie like on those medical shows: "I can justify keeping it here another twenty-four hours for observation, but after that I'm gonna release it."

"Dammit man, if we send it out there without a diagnosis, it'll be dead in less than a week!"

"Then you have a day to figure out what's wrong with it." Scene.

I already complained about the computer's first stay with Tekserve, which despite my Mac withdrawl, went pretty smoothly until they told me they needed to order a part. It just felt disingenuous to me, like they had the computer for four days at that point and they knew what it needed, so why didn't they put in the order as soon as I left? I don't have any proof of this, but I believe that's exactly what they did and "a part is out of stock" is their euphemism for "we're running behind," which is what I would've rather heard. I asked if they thought my computer would be ready that day and they told me no, but my annoyance and long face at having no computer (other than the five other computers in my house) for the weekend turned moot when I got the call at six in the evening, after I got home.

Instead I got to be annoyed because I had to make another pain-in-the-ass trip into the city to rescue my damn computer, which was explicity what I was trying to avoid when I asked them if the computer would be ready that day. We don't all live in Manhattan, Tekserve, so how about you work with us here for a minute? Like, when I call and ask for a status update, maybe tell me where in line the machine is so I can plan out my whole day. Thanks.

It's been a week now, and Tekserve still has my computer — which I'm assuming did not skip to the front of the line — and I'm getting antsy. I want to call them up and ask, hey what's up, but the work order they printed out for me says, specifically, "Please don't call to ask if we are done sooner, we'll have to stop fixing computers in order to answer the phone! We'll call you when it's done." I don't remember that admonition being on my first work order, so I feel like I made some horrible trespass upon them when I called that first time.

Also on the work order, which is cluttered with stuff like this, another warning: "We'll call when your repair is complete, please don't come to pick up your unit until you have heard from us." I bring that up because everyone I'm bitching to about my computer in absentia is telling me that I should put in a personal appearance at Tekserve, that you get better service when you're standing right there in the flesh. This has never happened for me, ever: I get the same indifferent service no matter what I do. Besides, what I am supposed to say to them: "I demand you drop whatever you're doing and repair my computer this instant!" I really do feel like they're not treating me right, especially on the re-repair, where they've now had the machine for longer than they did the first time. Next time, I'm seriously gonna just ask them to give me the new pieces and I'll do the repair myself.

Which brings me back to the whole dysfunctional relationship. See, my iPod is on life support, with its ticker holding less and less charge, and I'm going to need a new one. So what's the first thing I think? "Better go to Tekserve and get a new iPod." Goddamn it! After they took the computer hostage, I still want to deal with the Tekserve techies? Do I really have that little self-esteem? And of course, the answer is yes. The thing about Tekserve that I noticed is that, unlike every other electronics store, and especially the Apple Store, the Tekserve techies realize that you're an intelligent human being and don't talk down to you, almost in violation of everything Apple stands for. When I bought my computer at the Apple Store, the sales-phony spent like twenty minutes telling me how easy Tiger is to use and how you have to be a rocket scientist just to turn your Windows machine on. Or take a look at those "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" ads, where hypochondriac PC-guy makes a huge freaking deal about how tough installing a video driver is. Yeah, Apple: I'm too stupid to put the CD that came with the camera into my computer and follow the instructions on the screen. Last time I bought a PC peripheral, I tried to eat the USB cord that came with it, and then for like five hours I was all, "How come this hard drive won't show up in My Computers? Oh, maybe I was supposed to plug the cord into a port on my computer instead of dousing it in ketchup! How dumb am I! Now if I could only compare the shape of the plug and the shapes of the holes in my machine, and figure out where to stick this damn thing." Note to Steve Jobs: I'm not a toddler, and I'm not Mom.

So you tend to get sucked in when you're talking with a techie who shares your passion for Unix-based computing rather than just parrots back sales pitches. It's like we've got a connection, ending up in a $269 purchase, and I can walk out of the store feeling like a cool geek. (Answer: Hash the node addresses for time efficiency, or switch a flag bit on each node for space efficiency.) And I keep going back. Although next time, I'm not letting the Tekserve techies get anywhere near my beloved computer.

Last week, my computer decided to fall apart on me — literally, chunks of the thing were coming off in my hands, so I took the machine to Tekserve for some of their famous repair service. Fortunately the computer was still under warranty... but on the other hand, it was only nine months into its three-or-so year lifespan and I sort of expected my machine to be in the prime of its life. Workmanship these days just isn't what it used to be, I'll tell you. I could talk about my four-year-old Dell laptop, which works perfectly if not lethargically, or my Dad's second-generation iBook, now seven, suffering from an anemic battery, but otherwise working fine. But I'd rather talk about my Apple IIgs, purchased back in 1989, with no hard disk, one megabyte of RAM, and a 5.25" floppy drive that still works as if it's the first day out of the box. Man, did they know how to build things back in the eighties!

I brought my computer in on Monday and Tekserve estimated that they'd have it fixed by Friday, and I thought, "Well, that's just four days. I can live without my computer for four days, especially since we have five other computers at home." But it took less than six hours before Macbook withdrawl started, and by the time I got home Monday night, I was on my bed with my old laptop trying to get the same sort of dual-core fix and totally freaking out cause the Dell spent half an hour downloading and installing updates! It was pathetic. Like, I was carrying around notebooks with me, doing my work with pencil and paper. Totally Luddite.

Friday came and it was like Christmas with the anticipation of getting my computer back. I called up Tekserve and... it was horrible. A part was out of stock! It needed to be ordered! Try again Monday! It was like opening your Christmas gift and getting socks. I stopped by in person, too, cause maybe the guy on the phone was just toying with me. (I'd be tempted to do that if I worked in customer service.) I said I'd sit around, wait for a few hours... How could they not have the part? It's a relatively popular computer, not an obscure western European automobile! It's all they sell! Strangely, groveling didn't help. I went home disappointed.

But when I got home, the most amazing thing happened. Five minutes after getting home, my cell phone rings, and it's Ripley from TekServe. (Really? Your parents named you "Ripley"? Okay...) My computer's ready! Yay!... except now I've gotta go into the city tomorrow, and I told them I'd wait a few hours cause that's easier for me. And fine, they deal with computers better than they deal with people — which makes them my kind of people — but my computer's home! Welcome back, MacBook!

God I'm a dork.

My Heroes at Tekserve

I'm having some rotten luck with my computer gizmos lately. First, there was the iPod coma to deal with, and then I spent all day yesterday trying to get my laptop to regurgitate the DVD it was choking on. I'm waiting for the next disaster, like my monitor falls off the keyboard, or the mouse explodes, or a deranged help desk guy gets his brain encoded in my local area network during a freak lightning storm and goes on a mad killing spree through America Online. I'm pretty sure the limited warranty doesn't cover that.

The DVD was a rental so I was more than a little desperate to extract it from my computer. I turns out that the list of things you can shove into one of these slot-loading DVD drives is pretty short. Pliers won't even get near the slot, and tweezers — which I'm sure are great for the health of the DVD — only pulled out some of the white fuzz protecting the opening from, well, jerks sticking things that aren't DVD's into the DVD player. I settled on credit cards, which you can apparently use to keep the DVD from spinning, however that's supposed to help. Worked for plenty of other people, but not me, and after a few hours, I was all set to unscrew the whole laptop and perform a discectomy, and my computer would be in a hundred little pieces right now except I couldn't find a T4 screwdriver, whatever that is.

I had to take the computer in for repairs, again. I was incredibly not thrilled about going back to the Apple Store, where they'd make me wait a couple of hours for my Genius Bar appointment before telling me that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act prevented them from removing the DVD from the drive, but would I like to buy a whole new computer? Thank God I live near New York and I work near Tekserve, which is the world's friendliest Apple geek haven ever. It's almost like the distinction between the people who buy Apple products because they're stylish and trendy and the computer geeks who buy Apple because their 32-bit MIPS dual-core processor outstrips the Pentium variable word-length processors. Some people just know what they're talking about.

Tekserve is ridiculously efficient. Granted, I went pretty early in the morning, but I had to wait less than a minute to see a specialist. Less than five minutes for her to squeeze the disc out of the computer, test several more discs to make sure the drive is working, and recommend that I not buy a new drive unless this one starts failing consistently. Total cost: nothing. Awesome. Well, now when the DVD drive does fall apart, I know where I'm going to get a new one.

Requiem for a Lost iPod

My iPod died the other day. Moment of silence, please. I'm actually in a Fristian state of denial about it, so I took the device to the "Genius Bar" at the Apple Store this afternoon for some last-ditch life-support. There's this thing you can do called "restoring" the iPod, supposedly the panacea for all your iPod comas, but restoring the iPod erases all of the music on it and I spent a lot of time downloading that music in a manner that's one-hundred percent in compliance with Russian copyright law. My hypothesis, and maybe it's just wishful thinking, is that the master boot record is corrupt and most or all of the music on the iPod is still intact.

Although the download gestapo will give you shit over it, it's really not that difficult moving your music from a living, breathing iPod to your computer. There's plenty of third-party software that will do it for you, or there's the Unix back-end in OS X, or if you just open the iPod external USB drive in Windows and show hidden files, your library will appear. So we all realize that stuff like this isn't exactly sanctioned by any supposedly legitimate computing authority, but then again, neither is all sorts of geek computer-pimping like overclocking or registry hacking or encasing your iPod in rosewood.

This is the Apple Store in Soho, one of my favorite places to work because the store has an abundance of electric outlets for loiterers. I have low standards, and there are plenty of places in the neighborhood where you can freeload off a wireless network without the 2:00 presentation "How to use iPhoto" happening in the background. The Genius Bartenders, are, like real bartenders, not hired based on how well they can do their job but on how much they look like Justin Long. In terms of diagnosing my iPod, I'd guess they were less Dr. Gregory House and more Dr. Meredith Gray. In terms of physical attractiveness, they're probably somewhere in the Zach Braff range.

My game plan was to put on my best nerd voice — my glasses and acne help with this — and just ask for what (I thought) I needed, which is a iPod driver installed on my computer. "Driver." It's like ordering a mojito: the odds are around eighty percent that they'll have no idea what you're talking about, fifteen percent that they'll screw it up, and five percent that you'll actually get what you want. But my request kind of came out, after an hour waiting in the Apple store, as, "My iPod won't mount. It says it needs to be restored, but I don't want to restore it and lose all the music."

I'm certain they cover in this Apple Genius Bartending Manual, and the company's official response is, "As an Apple employee, I can't help you copy your music from the iPod to the computer," — which isn't what I asked — along with a contemptuous glare, like I just asked her to help me dispose of the body. Then she shakes the iPod, cause maybe it's only sleeping with the hard drive spinning and snoring, and she tells me that it sounds like the hard drive's dead, which it totally does not sound like. Then she asks if I want to buy a new iPod (for what, all my music's on my old iPod), tells me I could hire a data recovery service to pull my music off the device for thousands of dollars, and castigates me, again according to the official Apple Genius Bartending Manual. "You're supposed to have your music in iTunes." Which I totally will whenever Apple's ready to subsidize my premium hard disk space. What's that, Steve Jobs? No?

The moral of this story is never go to the Apple Genius Bar because the people there are jerks. And not the kind of jerks who mock your tech ignorance but then fix your problem just to show off. They're the kind of jerks who embrace ignorance and spew scorn at anyone trying to exercise control over a machine that they paid a couple hundred dollars for. I tried to send a nasty note to Apple's customer service, but apparently they've been getting too many angry letters and have taken their email address off their website, so I'm putting the note here, where they'll never see it. You're not the music police, Apple. Nor are you the hard drive police or my mom, who's convinced that I'm an ignoramus and she knows what's best for me. Just give me the tools, thank you very much, and I'll solve the problems myself.