• Surgeon General’s Warning: Children can cause severe bruising

    Here’s a helpful hint from your friendly neighborhood parent… never bend over to speak to a hyperactive child. God made parents tall for a reason… to keep their heads away from their children’s.

    Take it from my wife… you want to keep the more fleshy parts of the body between your head and their’s. Even a shin takes a head-butt better than a chin.

  • My favorite telecom

    “This is Verizon Wireless, how can I help you?”
    “Yes, I wanted to know if I could port the number for my land-line phone over to a new line on my wireless account – and keep my two existing wireless numbers.”
    “Let me get this straight, you currently have two lines with two numbers on your Verizon Wireless account – which you want to keep – and you’d like to add a third line which would be what is now your home number?”
    “Exactly.”
    “Would you like me to go ahead and get that started for you now?”
    “Yeah, that’d be cool.”
    (The conversation continues, but is even less interesting… until…)
    “O.K. Mr. Kauffman, that should do it. We’ll need some time to arrange for the “port” on our end. We’ll send you a text message on your wireless phone to let you know we’re ready to complete your request.”
    “Too cool my man.”

    Three days later I get a text message on my cell phone telling me to call customer service to complete my “port request.”

    “… well that should do it Mr. Kauffman. Now you just need to reset your phone and it will have your new number, reassigned from your wired home service.”
    “I’m sorry? That’s not what I asked for. I wanted add a new line with the “ported” number. I wanted to keep my old wireless number on this phone and activate another (new) phone with the ported number.”
    “I’m sorry Mr. Kauffman, your old wireless number has been replaced with the ported number. You should have told us that’s what you wanted when you put in this request, and we would have referred you to sales to add a new line prior to processing the port req- ….”
    “I’M SORRY, I NEED TO INTERUPT NOW. You see, I DID tell your customer service representative that this is what I wanted when I placed the request. I was not advised I need to activate a new line of service first; otherwise I would have done so. Are you telling me that my old wireless number is lost?”
    “Probably.”
    “Well I’ve got to tell you, that’s going to be pretty damn inconvenient.”

    The person on the other end clearly didn’t care how inconvenient it was going to be. I was probably just one of a dozen or so pissed off customers yesterday, and he was just trying to make it to the next call.

    This where I point out that Verizon does not enjoy a monopoly over wireless service in this area… they’re one of half a dozen providers. In other words, my customer service experience is the result of the vaunted “free market.”

    This is yet another example of why government shouldn’t always aspire to operate like a business.

    Cheryl thought I should have asked to speak to a manager. My sister thought the occasion, at minimum, called for a little yelling. My co-workers thought I should have wrung a new phone out of the deal (rather than settling for reactivating my old phone on the third line of service – with the new, unfamiliar, and wholly inconvenient number). Oddly, I just feel like a schmuck. I don’t know why… I’m clearly the victim. None the less, I feel like I was taken for a ride… and it’s got a two year contract to boot.

    Maybe I should write a letter…

  • You’ll thank me later!

    If you were a voter in the mid-1970’s, I’ll bet you never thunk someone would be riding Gerald Ford’s coat-tails thirty years later. Then again, you may have never envisioned the thunking-man’s president sitting in office today (or having another Dick in office). Well Cheney was out and about this last week, providing the American people a timely history lesson. He reminded us that Ford’s pardon of Nixon was pretty unpopular at the time, but the ensuing years gave us perspective… and opinion changed.

    Dick can be pretty subtle when he wants to be, eh?

    I thought it would be pretty neat to look at some things in history that were unpopular at the time… and still are.

    Things like: breaking into a rival political party’s national committee headquarters… having oral sex with a White House Intern… “Whip Inflation Now” buttons… lying under oath in a deposition… bungling the invasion of foreign country…

    You get the idea.

    I won’t say that today’s controversies (re: Iraq) will turn out more like the invasion of Cuba (than Nixon’s pardon), but I must point out (with all due respect to Dick) that it’s irresponsible for us – the voting public – to subrogate our vital responsibilities of government oversight to the judgment of history. Imagine where this country would be if we had waited thirty years to pass judgment on Joseph McCarthy.

    Sidebar comment: Imagine McCarthy’s nerve… condemning his critics by questioning their patriotism and making wild statements that they were helping the Communists. It’s a good thing nothing like that could happen again.

    As a general rule, it seems to me that the “history will prove me right” argument is the calling card for someone who knows they can’t justify their actions in the present (albeit with a few notable exceptions). Let’s not forget history can be a fickle mistress. Who’s to say that history won’t judge them more harshly instead of less?