You want customer service? Go f*#& yourself. How's that?

First let me start by saying that flicman's post helped spark today's rant.

Telecoms, car insurance companies, and potentially worst of all, health insurance companies - these businesses hide behind their size in order to make it nearly impossible to speak to anyone with any sort of accountability. I can't tell you how many times I've heard "I'm sorry sir, there's nothing I can do" followed up by some sort of line about company policy. That, and it's complete bullshit. They're not sorry at all. And neither are their supervisors, or their supervisors' supervisors. They want you to think that no one short of the god-damned CEO can make any sort of real decisions, and even then not without approval of the board and majority stock holders. Bullshit. My health insurance company has decided to throw back hundreds of dollars of physical therapy bills to me that they decided not to pay - and this is after I've already paid my share - but no one, not a single useless person I've talked to, has any helpful information to give me about why this is, or how I can go about arguing these additional charges. But as useless as these customer service reps are, it's not necessarily their fault. Most times the companies are structured that way to intentionally make it nearly impossible to argue or change anything the consumer disagrees with.

I recently talked with AT&T (formerly SBC) about an incomprehensible phone and internet bill that had miraculously nearly doubled last month, and while the rep was very friendly and helpful, informed me that he has a much more complete version of my bill, and that customers aren't allowed to get a copy of that easy-to-understand summary. Is that not one of the more devious and screwed up things in customer service? I mean, I'm a phucking physicist and I couldn't make sense of a goddamn telephone and internet bill, even once the charges were explained to me. Without talking to the rep with the complete bill and account history, there was no way I could be sure about the reason certain charges were included in the bill, or even what months they were for, in some cases. Intentional obfuscation in billing and customer service pisses me off to no end.

Unfortunately, it's not just large companies that manage to make a joke out of customer service. I have had my motorcycle at a mechanic's shop - arguably the best motorcycle mechanic in Houston - for nearly four weeks for minor repairs and paint, and have yet to receive a single call from them. I've initiated every instance of contact, often days after I was promised a call or some sort of information about cost, delays, and paint colors. Obviously when someone who's working for your money promises to call back, it seems that it would be a good business practice to actually do it. But what the hell, once someone has information on you and can threaten your credit or withhold your property, basic manners and good business practices go out the window. And for years, in companies big and small, I've seen no evidence to disprove that customer service is dead.

...Eternally Wars

Like the signature on an apocalyptic love letter, the message that the Bush administration has been driving into the psyche of the American public is that the "War on Terror" is an ongoing battle that justifies any government action deemed necessary to guarantee the safety of American citizens around the globe. Don't do anything that could possibly compromise any of those "protective" measures, either - and of course don't question them - or you're personally threatening American lives. I see so many inherent problems in this line of thinking that I just don't know where to start. Fear-inciting governments? Gross abuses of power? Multiple intelligence leaks? Irresponsible blame-shifting? The devaluation of non-American lives? So I'll start with what incited today's rant, instead.

Friday's New York Times story (similarly in the LA Times and the Wall Street Journal) disclosed a secret CIA program operating since shortly after 9/11/2001 that collects confidential financial records and data maintained by a Belgian cooperative said to be a nerve center for international banking. Needless to say, Bush and other supporters of Big Brother government are righteously pissed, with Representative King (R-NY) calling for criminal investigations of the NY and LA Times as well as the WSJ. While of course the administration claims that everything that they're doing is simply for the good of the American public and entirely legal, you have to question why, exactly, officials directly involved in the exposed programs would have strong enough discomfort about the programs' legality and oversight to take such risks as talking with the media. I know that mainstream media is all about generating hype and controversy, but there's got to be a lot of truth in this story for everyone to be so upset about it.

This brings me to the first point that everyone's talking about, so I'll just touch on it briefly. What constitutes irresponsible reporting, and how does the public's right to know - a basic tenet of democracy and effectively freedom of speech - measure up to the government's power's and responsibility to defend the public from threats? All I'm going to say is that in my opinion, a public isn't worth defending that would gladly forefit it's rights of information to support that safety. While I'd rather be the farmer than the sheep, I'd rather still we all were famers with no sheep to sheer, and full knowledge of all the wolves and other threats that surround and infuse us. That's a bit corny, but you get the idea.

On to the appropriately-placed second point. This Swift story is the second exposure of questionable (to put it euphemistically) practices by intelligence and security agencies under the auspices of finding and tracking terrorists and their organizations. Of course these methods aren't going to work as well if everyone knows about them, but I highly doubt that they then become entirely useless. More importantly, what was viewed by many of the nearly 20 unnamed officials to speak with the NY Times as an initially necessary yet temporary measure after 9/11 has turned into a permanent practice, even though its implementation was based partly on the president's emergency economic powers. Is the U.S. still in a time of emergency? I don’t think so. You must have a strange definition of the word if you think we are. Are we still under threat? Of course. Have there been two years since the inception of our nation that there hasn’t been a threat of some sort or another? No.

The question is, then, how much of a threat is the country under, and does it warrant the kind of sugar-coated gross abuses of power that the government sells as doctrine every chance it gets? The culture of fear that has been shoved down our throats since 9/11 has now just become a part of our daily diet. Yes, yes, of course there’s a horrible omnipresent terrorist threat that will kill us all if our big brother government doesn’t use all it’s available powers (and some formerly illegal ones, but he said they’re legal now so it’s okay) to protect us – but only if we’re supportive American citizens. We’ve heard it all a million times before. Now shut up and let me get back to watching American Idol. Do whatever you need to do – just don’t interrupt me.

(The whole Ameri-centric-ness-ocity-ism-ness of the majority of public statements also really bugs me, but as I’ve already tried to cram about 5 essays worth of topics into one increasingly lengthy rant, I’ll have to get to it later.)

So, before I prematurely wrap up this unfortunately long rant, let me find my way back to the title. All this fear-based governance has been with us so long already, that it’s becoming a bore. While that usually spells the end of a movement for the increasingly ADHD American public, it seems that the practices will continue, unfortunately. All that’s going to change is the fervor and frequency of the fear-based battle cry of justification. What has me thinking about all this is the number of times you hear the President and his administration saying that we’re at war. Most of the time, the topic is terrorism, but the war they reference is in Iraq. The “War on Terror” is a war just as much as the “War on Drugs” is a war. Calling it a war is almost comically arrogant. Which one is deadlier? Illegal drugs have killed so many more people than terrorists, yet no president has ever even asked for emergency powers during that war. Based on the Bush administration, Reagan should have been exercising emergency executive privileges in order to protect American lives from the unprecedented threat of illegal drugs. Is this “war” on terror that much different? It’s just as futile, just as unending, and is being approached in a manner that is just as stupid as the “war” on drugs. It’s not going to end, especially if the current administration and the prevailing right-wing power base have anything to say about it. War is good for those in power, and as long as we continue to sit on our butts and accept everything we’re fed, It’ll be

Eternally Wars,
AJ

U.S. Decency Standards - What the F@&!!

In a blatant attempt to boost waning support from the religious and conservative right, the Bush administration has taken another big step down the increasingly steep slope to decidedly undemocratic media censorship. Welcome to Iran, ladies and gentlemen. While increasing fines for indecent material on the few completely regulated sections of the media spectrum might not seem like such a big deal - and it may not be at the moment - it portends a scary future where comedy sketches about Jesus killing Santa Clause are fined into oblivion. This is a post that I started last week, but never had the time to finish. You get the general, though incomplete, idea, and I've got many, many other things to rant about.

Another Photoshop Project

While this one doesn't look as drastically different as the first two, (see a comparison) it was certainly a lot more complicated. It seems I'm learning a thing or two, as well, though I'd still call it a hack job by some standards.

Beginning Photoshop

So like most of you, I'm sure, I have a bunch of pictures that I've taken that didn't turn out exactly the way I'd planned for one reason or another. Maybe the colors didn't come out as vibrantly as they seemed originally, or the background is way too dark or the foreground is washed out. Things like this seem to ruin a good portion of my pictures - granted, I use my little 2MP ghetto digicam - and I'm always a little disappointed when a picture I've set up and actually thought about before snapping comes out looking like crap. So, you get the idea. Here are a couple of my first quick attempts at photoshop-alterations to my crappy little digicam pics. More to follow, I hope, with improvements.

Gay Marriage

I tend to disagree with most things Lou Dobbs says - he can really be a pompous windbag - but at least the main idea of this cnn article gets it right, even if he never even mentions that the idea itself is just a bad one. I mean, a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage is horrible in even the best of times - it doesn't take other, more "important" issues to make it wrong. It just is. Period. The mere idea of writing fear- and ignorance-based discrimination into our Constitution is insulting to the ideals and individuals that have driven progress over the last two hundred thirty years, and changed our country from a slave-holding colony run by rich male landowners, to a nominally equality-based democracy with the power to change the world. I, for one, am against letting elected officials use that power to undo over two hundred years of social and idealogical progress for their own archaic, personal belief - be it in morality dictated by a higher power or the innate right of those with power to impose their will on the world.

To give credit to Dobbs, though, the main idea of his article is that any wedge issue, gay marriage in this case, is just insulting to the american public when there's so much more going on that might actually be resolved. Wedge issues, even important ones like this, are basically only ever used as tools of political maneuvering. I mean, no one expects this to get the 2/3 vote. No one. Forget that it's a bad idea to begin with, it's just a huge waste of time.

Obligatory Post

Now, I'm fully aware of just how arbitrary our current calendar system is, but it's still kinda cool to point out that today is 6/6/6. I mean, just because some dead guy decided to graduate the passage of the sun around the earth (everything was geocentric back then) into more than five months guarantees that we'll have 6/6/6 at least once a century. But what if a month was 73 days long instead? Arbitrary choice? Yes! But at least each month has the same number of days. Also, there'd never be a sixth month, and so we'd never get to glibly note the passage of 6/6/6, no matter what century. Gotta love arbitrary gradations.

200+ horsepower on 2 wheels

... seems a little out of my league. Okay, a lot out of my league. I hardly ever put the 120+ horsepower of my bike to use, and it's a hell of lot heavier than this Ducati. With a US MSRP of $65,000, I don't think I'll have to worry about that any time soon, though. Egads, that makes me want to go to a track day.

Really want to rant

... but I'm too tired at the moment. In the meantime, get a taste of some similar feelings by reading this wonderful rant. Those who are easily offended, fiercely southern, extremely right wing, or have no sense of humor (funny how those tend to go together) should probably abstain. Or sod off. I don't really care.