Do Not Call

My friend Janiece has a post up on her blog about telemarketers. You can go to Hot Chicks Dig Smart Men and look it up, as I have never quite managed to figure out how to make links here on Blogger. It’s the one entitled, “If you call here again, I’m going to track you down and cut you.”

Haven’t we all felt that way, once in a while?

I certainly have.

We’re on every Do Not Call list that has been put out by any governmental unit known to modern man, and we still get annoying sales calls from people with no apparent ability to control their own actions and no clear sense that laws apply to them. It’s like they’re all running for office in the Republican primary or something.

I used to get angry at those people, but eventually it occurred to me that this was having no effect on them – they’re used to it, and from better practitioners of the art than me. They probably have manuals just for how to deal with such things. It wasn’t making them miserable, and therefore the whole thing was pointless.

Eventually I figured out a couple of things, each of which leads to a strategy.

First, they are on a time limit. They have to get so many calls per hour, and the more of their time I took the worse it looked for them. And when you look at it this way, the solution is obvious.

So now whenever they call and I bother to pick up the phone (because mostly I don’t have the time to play either), I always tell them that I’m not the person in the household who makes those decisions. Could I get that person? Certainly.

Please hold.

It usually takes about fifteen minutes, but eventually the phone starts beeping to let me know that they’ve hung up, and I can end the call and get back to my life.

Sometimes, though, I’m feeling more ornery. So I borrow a tactic I learned from my dad, whose basic position has always been that parasites do not merit honesty.

Telemarketers need an answer – any answer – to put in their forms. It doesn’t matter what that answer is, really. They just need something to prove to their superiors that they did in fact call me and I did in fact give them answers to their questions. So I would give them some.

All of my answers were lies, but there you go.

So when they would call me up to sell me cable, I told them I don’t own a television. This was actually true for about a decade of my life, but I see no reason why they should know the situation has changed. Don’t own one. Thank you for your time.

They want to sell me windows? My house doesn’t have any. No, it doesn’t – sad, really, my electricity bill is outrageous but on the other hand the place was a bargain.

Political poll? I don’t vote. Ever. Don’t even follow politics. Don’t even hold with politics – there shouldn’t be any government at all. We should all just go back to the land, shoot any trespassers and let anyone who gets into trouble die. “I’ll just put you down as a Ron Paul supporter, then,” the voice on the other end says. So you can take those polls for what they’re worth.

My personal favorite example of this tactic came a few years ago, when some enterprising young man called to sell me long distance telephone service.

“I don’t own a phone,” I told him.

“You don’t own a phone?”

“Nope. Sorry.”

“But I’m talking to you now!”

“No you’re not. This is all in your head.”

“Yes, I am talking to you on the phone!”

“No, you are not.”

“Then what am I doing?”

“I don’t know. That’s your problem. You’re not talking to me on the phone, because I don’t own one.”

“Yes you do!”

“Are you calling me a liar, son?”

“Uh…”

“Thank you for your time.”

And don’t you know that fifteen minutes later the guy’s supervisor called me back?

“Did you just speak to one of my workers?”

“No. I don’t own a phone.”

“Okay, then.”

They never bothered me after that.

Showdown at the Mostly OK Corral

It’s like the wild, wild west around here.

After nearly a week kept confined to Kim’s office, Midgie – who will likely remain “Midgie” at this point, since no progress whatsoever has been made on the renaming project and every day that passes without alternative names makes such progress that much less probable – has been let out to face Mithra.

This wasn’t entirely intentional.

No, I meant to let her out. That part was intentional. But I also meant to keep Mithra in Kim’s office while Midgie was exploring, in order to cut down on the potential for feline violence. This is when I discovered that the door on Kim’s office – which has never shut properly – cannot be wedged closed hard enough to keep Mithra in there if Mithra does not choose to be in there.

And Mithra most definitely does not choose to be in there, thank you very freaking much.

So both cats have been lurking around the house since Wednesday, off and on. Midgie mostly slinks – she has short, stubby legs the way Tria used to, and she’s low to the ground under the best of circumstances. Mithra, for her part, stalks, with all of the affronted dignity of a silent film grand dame at a television studio.

Slink. Stalk. Slink. Stalk. Slink. Stalk.

And then – WHAM! There they are, suddenly facing each other.

The light changes quality. The clocks magically reset to high noon. Somewhere, somebody starts whistling. We have no tumbleweeds to blow by, so we have to make do with dust bunnies. There is a tense calm.

Eventually the calm is shattered by growling and hissing – mostly from Mithra, who does not really get along with other cats, but also from Midgie, who didn’t survive behind bars in the pound just to be pushed around by some kittypet on the outside, no she did not. So far nothing has come of this, and we’ve done our best to make sure that nothing comes of it. We’re hoping it quiets down eventually.

Add into this the fact that Midgie cannot possibly be the full two years old that the pound insisted she was – she looks, sounds and acts like a cat barely beyond kitten stage. This means that even during the growling and hissing, she wants to PLAY! Playing, in this context, generally entails flying at Mithra with all of the ferocious abandon of a Nerf dart, and with about as much effectiveness against that hardened target too.

And then there are the rabbits.

Hazel is easily Mithra’s size and nearly half again Midgie’s, so when she’s out the three of them just stand there in an equilateral triangle, glowering at each other. Milo is smaller. Mithra just watches him, but Midgie is convinced he will play with her if she chases him enough. Milo, it must be said, is not on board with this, and he does what rabbits naturally do when stressed, which is poop all over everything.

I’m not sure why this is a defense mechanism, really. Are they hoping their pursuers will slip on it? It has been effective at keeping Midgie at bay so far, though, so perhaps Milo is on to something.

Round and round, in and out, stalk, slink, Nerf, hiss, growl, poop, repeat.

It’s how the Midwest was won.

Projects

I’m trying to catch up on projects this semester.

Like most people, I’ve got a list of “Someday” projects that I keep in the back of my head. Sometimes I write them down, just to see if any of them are feasible under the current conditions – there’s no feeling quite as satisfactory as crossing something off of a to-do list. No, not even that one, but it was close, I’ll give you that. Mostly, though, I just keep writing down the same things over and over in a slightly different order than the last time, depending on mood and memory.

This has been especially true recently – the last twelve to eighteen months have been unusually hectic around here, and it’s been all I could do to beat the alligators back. The swamp remains undrained; the projects remain unfinished.

But this semester I’m not driving to Not Quite So Far Away Campus anymore – a 170-mile roundtrip I don’t have to make twice a week, the way I did for all of 2011. I like NQSFAC, really I do – it’s got some very friendly people in it, the students are nice, and it’s pretty, perched up there on the hill like that – but that’s a lot of time I don’t have to spend in my car anymore.

Nor do I have to create new classes this semester. In the last two years I’ve built one class from scratch (including learning the material), learned how to use the University's online class system so I could teach a class someone else designed, and revamped a third class into a wholly alien format. Right now, though, I’m teaching two classes that are actually in my field, both of which I have taught before in that format, and by all indications I will not be required to come up with anything new next fall either. That could change of course – the essence of being an ad-hoc is that you’re never really sure what you’re going to be asked to do or even whether you’re going to be asked to do anything until a week into the semester – but as of right now it looks like I will be in the truly odd position of not having anything to plan or fabricate for several months once my classes end in May.

So projects it is.

My office is clean now.

I’ve organized several different document types into binders, neatly labeled.

I’ve filed away three semesters’ worth of papers and discovered that I did, in fact, have a table under them.

I’ve even begun to pay attention to my healthcare again. I’ve gone to two different doctors and the dentist, and will likely be doing more of that in the near future. And I’ve even managed to stick with my “Eat Less Crap” diet plan, to the tune of 8lbs lost in the last two months. Not bad considering that “Less” is not “Zero” and those two months included ten days’ worth of traveling over Christmas and New Year’s. There are still issues that need to be resolved – notably the “Get Up and Move Around Now And Then” part of the diet plan, which remains somewhat moribund – but progress is being made.

I feel so productive that sometimes I need to lie down.

All this productivity makes me think of larger things I should be doing, though. By modern American standards I’m pretty much the target audience for a midlife crisis right about now, and if I were going to have one I suppose it ought to be soon. I’ve got the time for it, now. Next year any crisis would likely have to compete for attention with other things.

But there are enough crises in the world without me adding to them. Little red sports cars aren’t my thing anyway.

So I nibble away at my project list and cross things off one at a time, as they are completed.

It’s a good feeling.

In Cars

My car is mine, I think.

After several years of diligently writing checks to a bank that neither influenced my decision over what car to buy nor had any part in the actual purchase process other than to be a name on a form, I received a letter in the mail the other day saying that I no longer had to do that. My car loan, in other words, had been paid off.

This is good news. That’s several hundred dollars a month that I can now turn toward other things, such as tequila and gold-plated appliances. Or, more likely, toward other bills, health-care expenses no longer covered now that Governor Teabagger has declared war on us state employees, college funds for the girls (the great irony of being a professor is that it is a singularly inappropriate career if you actually want to be able to afford to send your kids to college someday), and perhaps the occasional dinner out in a place that does not require you to unwrap your food. Hey – every little bit helps.

I suppose I could start putting that money aside for the next car too. Neither of the kinds of cars we own are manufactured anymore – we’re brand-killers, yes we are – so who knows how long they’ll be supported and fixable. But they’re good cars and both paid off now, and we’re going to hang on to them as long as we possibly can.

So I went to the DMV this morning to clear the bank off the title. The bank had sent me a letter telling me to do that. Since they hadn’t sent me the actual title, I figured the state must have it.

The state disagreed. They said I have it.

No, I said, that’s kind of the whole point of me coming here – to get it, which implies not having it in the first place.

There was a brief stand-off.

You never win those stand-offs. The DMV people are far better at them than you will ever be. They do this for a living. They eat noobs like you for lunch and pick their teeth with your bones.

So my next mission will be to figure out where the actual title of the car may be hiding. It’s mine, now, and I would like to take it home and feed it and pet it and love it and call it “George.”

In the meantime I’m riding around in limbo, which is actually kind of a nice feeling since I am convinced that this means nobody can see me and I can do whatever I want in my own car which is mine and not the bank’s and all mine, mine, mine.

Yes, this is what I will tell the nice police officer when he asks.

I’m sure he’s been to the DMV himself a time or two, and will understand.

Seven People Unfit for Grown-Up Conversations

It’s a busy world out there. There’s never enough time to do what needs to be done and always one more time-sucking moron trying to take precious minutes of your life for their own pet projects.

I know!

Even when you get rid of the one in front of you, there’s always one more. It’s a law of nature, much like the one that says that intelligence and decibel output are inversely correlated, a handy thing to keep in mind this election year.

So as a public service, we here at 4 Quarters, 10 Dimes have compiled a handy guide to some of the people you can simply ignore out of hand, thus preserving those precious minutes for more important things, like blog reading or determining the exact point at which relaxation becomes sloth.

You’re welcome.

And yes, it’s my blog and if I want to slide into the “royal we,” as I did above, there is nobody to stop me. That’s one of the prices you pay for reading other people’s blogs.

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You know that the person approaching you is unfit for grown-up conversation, should be kept at least fifty yards from a voting booth or internet comment box, and can be ignored without fear of missing anything important if:


1. They use the word “sheeple” without irony.

If there is any neologism in the last three decades laden with more sand-in-your-underwear irritation and less meaning than this one, I haven’t heard it. It is used by the stupid and the batshit insane to let us know that they are More Aware Than You Are, that they are Mavericks Bucking The Establishment And Flipping Off The Man, that they are Not Fooled For A Minute, Nosirree, Even If You Pathetic Losers Are, but for those of us on the receiving end all it means is that unless you fake a heart attack – up to and including being loaded into an ambulance if necessary – you are about to spend the rest of your evening being freighted down with bizarre and evidence-free conspiracy theories. There will be theatrics, recriminations, and exhortations. You may also end up covered in spittle. Grown-up conversations do not involve spittle.

2. They have emblazoned anywhere on their person or vehicle a Confederate battle flag.

I’ve gone over this before in this space. I’m not sure why people think displaying the flag of traitors a century and a half after they were soundly and deservedly whipped for trying to destroy the American republic and build their own moral hellhole explicitly based on slavery is something to be proud of, but people who think that way need to be told to pass you by and move along. No, no, you say to them, keep moving. Keeeeeep moving. Riiiiiiiight between the white stripes and the double yellow line, just stay there, make yourself at home, and watch the pretty bright lights get closer and closer…

Atta boy.

And yes, the Confederacy was in fact based entirely on slavery. They said so themselves, and attempts to say otherwise just make the speaker look stupid. Said speaker should stop lying about his (almost invariably, “his”) own past, and maybe someday, with intensive training and a passing grade in a sophomore-level US history class, he’ll be fit for grown-up conversation. Maybe.


3. They think any recent American president was a) a Socialist, b) a Fascist, or c) both.

All this means is that they have no idea what Socialism or Fascism actually are, and that attempts at responsible adult conversations with them will be a waste of time. Any attempt you make to enlighten them on their historical errors will probably result in you being called whichever one they are ranting about, or, possibly, a sheeple (vide supra). Spare yourself the agony and beat them soundly about the head and shoulders with whatever is near to hand until they go away, even if all you have to hand is a medium pizza, and you will be better off. And if they seriously argue option c, you have my permission to use something more substantive than the pizza.


4. They have no idea how money works.

I’m not talking about knowing double-entry bookkeeping or basic math, though the math at least helps. I’m talking about how money works in society – what it means, how it moves, where it comes from, what you have to do to get it, what you have to do to maintain it, what happens when you don’t have enough of it (and not just “I can’t buy what I want when I want”), what happens when you have too much of it, and why it can’t simply be willed into existence without consequences.

For example, there are a great many ideas out there that are heartfelt, altruistic, and probably going to help someone if they ever get implemented. But the most basic rule of life is that there is no such thing as a free lunch – you have to figure out the costs of things, and not just the upfront costs but the ongoing costs. Where is this going to come from? And who is going to get it? It is astonishing how many idealistic people there are who seem to think that other people will just pony up money to pay for their castles in the air or devote their time and energy to seek out those who will, and by other people they mean you. These people will spend most of your life draining you with their plans and trying to make you feel guilty for poking reality-based holes in them. Don’t let them get started. That’s not a grown-up conversation.

5. They think education is a luxury.

Welcome to the 21st century, moron. The jobs that pay enough to support a family all require an education. The economies of the world are divided into the ones that support those jobs and the impoverished. The glue that binds neighborhoods and towns together is its schools. The thing that separates a citizen from a subject is education.

And yet in America today stupidity is somehow seen as patriotic. There are legions of idiots who insist that learning in general and schooling in particular is a waste of time, or a frill good only for the already wealthy and powerful, or a drain on what really matters (apparently defined as beer, reality television, and indentured servitude). There is an entire political party dedicated to making sure that American citizens no longer have the opportunity to go to school. This party gets a tremendous amount of support from the very people who would most benefit from an education, in large part one suspects because it tells those people that their ignorance and their hostility to both progress and their own interests is somehow worthy of praise rather than something to be overcome through initiative, discipline, and – yes – education.

Such people should be quarantined in a hostile desert environment far from civilization – Texas, perhaps – and not allowed to interact with civilized folk. Or breed, for that matter. If you don’t think education matters, you have no business talking to grown-ups.

6. They have no grasp of science.

This isn’t about knowing chemical formulae or quantum mechanics. This is about knowing how science – the basic underpinning of modern society – works. It’s about knowing the difference between science and theology. It’s about being able to do the math when confronted with quacks, con artists, perpetual-motion-machine salesmen and politicians scheming to avoid responsibility. People who don’t understand the basics of science lead the charge against modern life. In some cases, such as the fools wearing copper bracelets to improve their health or throwing rocks into their laundry to brighten their whites, they are simply tiresome. In other cases, such as the halfwits systematically reducing the herd immunity of modern society to killer diseases because they read something on the internet about how vaccines will KILL YOU AND EAT YOUR DOG, they are dangerous and should be soundly thrashed. Invariably, they insist that you be as ignorant as they, and if you allow yourself to be sucked into conversations with them, eventually you will be. Grown-up conversations leave both sides better off than before. These people don’t fit that definition.

7. They insist that food is a moral choice and you’re on the wrong side of it.

You’ve met these people. Many of them are vegetarians or – worse – vegans, people who are absolutely aghast at the thought of eating “living things” but who have forgotten that plants were once alive too. They think you’re cruel. The gap between your first bite of a cheeseburger and the invocation of Godwin’s Law is measured in nanoseconds. They insist you eat just like them, or both you and the planet will go straight to hell. On the other side, you’ve got the testosterone-poisoned knuckledraggers who think that anything other than a drawer-sized slab o’ beef swimming in beef sauce with beef jimmies on the top is proof that you are either homosexual, Communist or both. And don’t even get me started on the Atkins people.

There is no good that will come from any conversation with such folks. All that will happen is that your hot meal will get cold (or your cold one will warm up) while you lose valuable IQ points by the sentence. Grown-ups know that once you get beyond issues of sustenance, food is there to facilitate conversation, not be the subject of recriminations.

“Preach not to others what they should eat, but eat as becomes you, and be silent.” (Epictetus)

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Now go out there and have some grown-up conversation. The world needs more of that these days.

Because We Don't Have Enough Fur-Bearing Creatures Around Here...

So now we have another cat.

Ever since Tria wandered off in the middle of the night last September, we have been a one-cat household. Not that this has really meant much in terms of the number of fuzzy creatures floating about the house, with Hazel and Milo lopping about leaving rabbit poop throughout the downstairs all winter. We are up to our eyeballs in fur, which isn't as glamorous as it sounds.

But Mithra has been pretty much on her own for nearly six months now, without feline companionship, and it was causing her to lose what few marbles she started out with. Our previously quiet cat had gotten yappy and rattly, forever searching for – what? Who knows. Maybe just bacon, in which case wasn’t she in for a surprise this weekend?

The girls convinced us to go to the pound on Saturday to see if there were any suitable cats we could take home. The problem with pounds is that there are ALWAYS suitable cats – mounds of them, piles of them, stacked one on top of the other and mewing piteously – and the people who run those places know it.

They were even having a sale.

So we wandered through the place, making faces at the cats and playing with them as much as we dared without incurring the wrath of the staff (“No fingers in the cages!”). One of the cats, a small tabby named Midgie, struck me as particularly friendly, and I called the girls over to see her. They agreed we should give her a try in one of the “greeting rooms” the place has stashed about for people to see if animals will be nice to them before adoption.

Midgie climbed right onto our laps, one after the other, and purred so hard she actually gave herself hiccups. She’s a desperately friendly cat, one who likes nothing so much as to be held and scratched while sitting on you.

We were done.

Kim filed the paperwork while I went home to get the small cat carrier – an antique bamboo shopping basket with “Made In Occupied Japan” stamped on the bottom. After a suitable exchange of cash, Midgie was ours.

She’s been locked in Kim’s office ever since, while Mithra adjusts to the fact that there is another cat in the house again. For all that she liked to play with Tria and really needs companionship during the day when we’re all at work or school, she’s not really a cat for other cats unless she knows them well. So we’re introducing them gradually.

That’s why when Lauren announced this morning that Midgie had gotten out, we were worried. Midgie is about half the size of Mithra. Fortunately she was smart enough to hide in the basement, and Mithra may or may not have even known she was out.

We’re still debating whether to change Midgie’s name – cats don’t come when you call them anyway, so what you name them is a personal preference more than anything utilitarian. Mithra was “Smokey” when we got her from the pound, but that changed when Tabitha – then 5 – began calling her Smokes. We’ll see how it goes this time around.

In the meantime, welcome to the family, Midgie.

All the Colors of the Stage

Yesterday was the big Third Grade Musical down at Not Bad President Elementary. You should have been there.

To be honest, I should have been there too.

Unfortunately I had to teach a class that afternoon. I did make it to the first fifteen minutes or so, and I saw the rest on video. So I can say that yes, indeed, I have seen the play. It was a fine dramatic experience.

The play was called Colors, and as near as I could tell the plot seemed to revolve around the black and white crayons in a box feeling rather left out since none of the other crayons considered them proper colors. There was much singing and dancing involved in the explanation of this sad state of affairs, and eventually all of the crayons realized that it all worked so much better when every crayon was included, after which there was more singing and dancing and not a little of rainbows and harmony.

Lauren was Yellow Crayon #1.

The only thing we were told to get for her costume was a yellow shirt. Do you have any idea how few child-sized yellow shirts there are these days? I spent an entire afternoon searching through the various megamarts that populate the northern edge of Our Little Town (and believe me, we have them all) before I finally found a small selection of them, including the one with the big M&M printed on it that Lauren eventually wore.

Maybe it’s just the times. Yellow is a cheerful color, after all, and things are grim all over these days. But you know, maybe we just need more yellow.

The kids all seemed to have a good time up there, and Lauren did very well with her speaking parts, striding boldly up to the microphone and enunciating to the back row. She even helped direct a little bit by practically tossing one forgetful crayon onto center stage so she could speak her own lines. So that worked.

Good for you, Lauren. I’m proud of you.