The Lemon Thief: Moral Relativism at the Disco Kroger

I refuse to use the U-Scan at the Disco Kroger for one simple reason: I don't work for Kroger. I think if they want me to bag my own groceries, they should pay me. Next they'll be asking me to mop the floors.

But I may be rethinking my position now that I've learned  that "some people I know" have occasionally used the U-Scan to beat the system. To right the scales of justice and stick it to The Man. For example, if they go in to buy avocados or peppers or (just for an example, say, lemons) and the regular versions are sold out or damaged, they get the organics, and ring in the regular price. (In my mind, they look exactly like Michael Douglas in Falling Down when they do this.)

Michael Douglas in Falling Down

This struck me as "sheer genius" while it struck others as "stealing."

Dozens of rationalizations immediately sprang to my (obviously criminal) mind.

For one thing, Kroger constantly overcharges me. And I do mean constantly, as in, practically every time I have more than a dozen items and lose track of them ringing me up.

For another, their increasing reliance on U-Scan infuriates me. I can't count the number of times I've gone in to shop and those lanes were the only ones open. They're happy to install a "Bull" or a "Screw" (as I believe they're known in prison-speak) to stand at the end of the U-Scan to ensure nobody pockets a lime. If they have time to stand there and monitor you, they could just as easily be operating a register. I either make the Bull check out my stuff, or I park my basket at the entry to the self-serve lane and abandon it in protest.

And, finally, if they want to make self-serve available to those who prefer it, great, but they should compensate those shoppers for doing their job for them. Make everything in that line, say, half off.

My mastermind pals made it clear that they only engage in this savvy (or questionable, depending on your point of view) practice, on A. items they ring in themselves (like produce), and B. items where the price difference is negligible. They'd draw the line at, for example, organic beef. That would seem wrong. (Also, it would be easier to be busted on scanned items that are clearly packaged, whereas one head of broccoli pretty much looks like another head of broccoli.)

What I wanted to say was: Teach Me.

But what we all know is, I am not cut out for this -- not because of any overriding moral compass -- but because I absolutely can not learn how to operate one more piece of technology. The Kindle has overloaded my circuits and I'm contemplating an iPad for my birthday. There is no room for anything else.

In my mind, I already look exactly like Yul Brynner in Westworld. 

Yul Brynner in Westworld

Yul Brynner in Westworld

Let's Take the Long Way Home

I started this new book today -- the first physical book I've opened since the Kindle came to live here on Saturday. I read the NYT Review and excerpt on Sunday. In it, writer Gail Caldwell writes about her BFF, writer Caroline Knapp (who wrote Drinking: A Love Story), who died of lung cancer.

I didn't know it was an Oprah-approved title until I got it (or I might have harshly pre-judged it), but I'm still looking forward to a book about two writer BFFs and their dogs.

I'm only one chapter in, but I have to admit I was irritated -- irritated! -- when I had to get up and walk into another room to find my highlighter (I thought I had really arrived in this century when they started pre-loading the barrels of highlighters with post-it flags), like an Animal.

After one weekend, I've already gotten used to the Kindle's highlighting and tagging feature (though I should also disclose, I haven't gone back to look up any of those marked passages yet).

For both Kindle and a book, I still have to turn on a lamp, which supposedly reduces iStrain, but I'm beginning to think that's why God made iPads. 

"Torch" Wielding Villagers

"Next WEEK?! That's the worst thing you can SAY to an early adopter!" 
--Phil not getting his iphone the first day on Modern Family

 Early adopters get on my nerves. I think they're smug. So it was with a great deal of trepidation and irritation that I entered the store last Thursday to pick up the new Torch, on the day it was released.

I had no choice. The BlackBerry Bold trackball had frozen. Again.  I have lost count of how MANY times this has happened. Six? Seven? I know if you search blackberry on this blog, it will come up at least as often as "food" and "Ambien," which is saying something.

I didn't even WANT the first BlackBerry -- it was a gift after the number 8 finally died for good on my trusty little Nokia.  But I have stuck with them, long past the point of reason, and am now flirting with what might just be a co-dependent/abusive relationship.

I don't know what I get out of it....except....it's not an iphone. I am a word girl. I want my keyboard. I always said if BlackBerry added a touchscreen that retained the keyboard, I would get one. And that's when I heard about the Torch. But it wasn't out yet. And I still had a bold with a dead trackball, again.

I called up the provider and explained, but he said since it was past warranty, I would have to file an insurance claim.

"Oh, no. I will not," I explained, "because that isn't FAIR."

I believe he thought he was reasoning with a two-year-old,  but I had had it. As I told him, I am happy to pay the Insurance Premium as "insurance" against something stupid I might do -- drop the phone in a puddle, lose it... anything could happen. But I am NOT paying that $100+ deductible to "insure" against their design flaws.

I barely ever even had a "new" Pearl, or Bold, despite having bought several of them, because the trackballs always died within a month or two. Then they were warrantied out with "refurbished" phones. And a month or two later, the trackballs on the "refurbished" phones died too. There's nothing wrong with recycles. But I got frustrated paying full price for new devices with such obvious design flaws, and then getting stuck carrying around their beat-up "refurbished" models the rest of the time. Even if they'd just fixed my new phones, that would've been better.

I explained all this to the young man on the line in Bangelor as politely as I could, over and over, until he eventually kicked me over to a "supervisor." I repeated the whole scenario as calmly as I could to the nice lady. I used my inside voice, and I told her I was doing my best to refrain from profanity, because I did realize that none of this was her fault, personally. In turn, she "apologized" for my "frustration," and said she would make it right with a new Bold.

So I took the new Bold to the store, with an eye toward trying out the Torch.
Which was a problem, because AT&T service promptly went out all over the southeast. We lost signal, and apparently so did pockets of Georgia. The outages were broadcast all over the news -- which I was forced to read about on the big screen, like an Animal.

At the end of the process, I have to say, I have never worked so hard to hand over my hard-earned money to someone who so clearly couldn't be bothered to take it in my life.

Since Lucas was off the day I went in (the one guy in the city -- as far as I know -- who understands blackberries), everyone else in the store was an iphone guy. There were massive signs on the door saying they didn't know when the outage would be restored. And the store was filled with angry would-be torch-wielding Villagers. One guy was mad because he couldn't bring his dog in the store, another middle-class guy in a golf shirt seemed on the verge of beating his child in public, but contented himself with hissing through clenched teeth, "you touch one more thing in this store, and I am going to ... go bananas." I got the sense that "bananas" was the only euphemism he could think of that was child-protective-services friendly. But under my breath, I promptly responded "bananas. B-a-n-a-n-a-s. Bananas," because it's impossible not to.

The outage meant I came home with a phone on which I had no training, and no understanding of how the features worked -- or, as it turned out, even something as basic as how to pull the battery. (Try googling it -- all you'll get is a lot of answers about appropriate and inappropriate disposal and battery-life.)

This left me at the mercy of @blackberryhelp on twitter which I've been busy messaging like it's my fulltime job (and to their credit, I have to say, they respond everytime -- and they even knew how to pull the battery).

That is... until my twitter app started popping up a screen that said, "You have been rate limited," which is, apparently, a message no other smartphone user has ever seen, in the history of time. Believe me, I asked around.

I started with AT and ;T. They double-checked. All my plans include unlimited data, so there was no chance they'd "limited" my "rate" on anything. After researching every permutation they could think of, they routed me to blackberry -- explaining that if I were to call them on my own, I would be paying for tech support.

I was already mad, but I was downright indignant at the prospect of that. 

"Are you....kidding me?" I asked, slowly... pausing because it took profound mental exertion to refrain from inserting my usual profanity of choice before the word "kidding." By this time my teeth were clenched so hard I was coming down with TMJ. I could not believe this.

"Do you mean to say that after I have suffered through all these years of blackberries... defective blackberries, with design-flawed trackballs...and a parade of used phones.... that two days after I buy the brand new model that they have spent a jillion dollars advertising and promoting but their staff can't use because they're all too busy with their iPhones ....or they would be, if they could get service... Do you mean to tell me, that after all that, they would also like me to pay them for the privilege of troubleshooting this device... this device that I just paid hundreds of dollars for...that even they can't operate?"

His answer was something along the lines of "uh, yeah," but he assured me I wouldn't have to pay for this particular call, because he was routing it through. Which he did, so that I ended up with a young man on the other end of the line, presumably in Canada, who divulged that they didn't even have their Torch simulator screens working yet, and that there was only one or two of the actual phones floating around the building.

What I was thinking was... A. he probably should not be telling me this (regardless of whether or not I happen to work in media), and B. if they aren't prepared to support the device, they probably shouldn't be selling it -- regardless of the gazillion dollar ad campaign. 

Although he gamely tried to start an online support session, linking into my laptop, and attempting to download a bunch of (probably completely irrelevant) software that I'm quite sure my IT guys would kill me for. (For one thing, he wanted me to sign in using Internet Explorer and they forbid that a long time ago.)

Sometime in the middle of the session, "the rate limited" menu disappeared from my twitter screen. No one knows why. It isn't anything he did. The phone was in the other room. It wasn't anything I did. It's probably the same thing that happens when you take your car to the mechanic and it refuses to make that noise in front of them.

At that point, he admitted defeat, and so did I. But I couldn't hang up without getting one thing off my chest. I said I didn't know what RIM's relationship is to AT&T, but if I was allowing AT&T to be the exclusive carrier of my product, I would make sure that AT&T put somebody on that sales floor who actually carried a blackberry. If they want to be an iphonestore, they should put a sign on the door that says they're an iphone store, and then stop selling BlackBerrys. 

And then we poor, unwashed blackberry masses who can't seem to shake our clearly unhealthy, one-sided, co-dependent loyalty no matter how hard they try to drive us away would know up front that we have to take our business elsewhere -- probably to some back alley blackmarket operation, which soon may be the only option left. 

Because that's what it's coming to. I might head down there later and try to sell some busted trackballs.

Surveying the Wreckage

Can you spare a few seconds to minimize my problems?

--Bruce Eric Kaplan

I heard from two of my favorite long-distance friends this week, Walter in Austin, and Elle in NYC, both of whom asked me what I'd been up to this summer -- and the only real answer I could give was Computer Crashes. It's extremely boring to write about, and to hear about, but starting in April, there's been nothing but one tech system collapse after another.

Since April, my entire life has been largely given over to an endless series of hardware, software, and web disasters -- some of it routine aging, and some of it old-school viruses. It's consumed more or less every minute of every day -- when I haven't been actively engaged in trying to find someone to fix it (an experience I liken to climbing a stairway that's falling out from under you as you grasp for the next step  -- I think that's an actual scene in The Money Pit) -- I've just been barely keeping the lid on a chronic low-grade fury. On the rare occasions I haven't been actively engaged in obsessive and failed problem-solving, I've still had this nagging pain at the back of my mind -- the feeling you get when you're sure you left a burner on, or lost your keys. I feel like that every minute of every day, and I have since April.

Somewhere in between all that, I moved, and I went to my day job everyday, and I got my parents to all their doctors' appointments, took in some stray dogs and kept them fed, had a couple mini-relationships, ate wonderful meals with my friends, and the usual routine daily stuff.

I read about a dozen books -- mostly in denial about the one I had planned to spend the summer writing  -- there's a line in one of them (I think it's All Over the Map), where the author reminds herself that she shouldn't be confusing consuming art (movies, books, etc) with making art.

I didn't need a reminder. Writing is the one creative thing I do, and the impulse to do it just dried up without a reliable means to preserve it. And nothing feels reliable. What I hate most in the world is A. being beholden to someone, and B. being forced to count on somebody else to fix something I can't. The physical realities of moving (no, I can't, in fact carry a sofa) was already enough to send my rainman into a spin, and the tech collapse just happened to coincide with it.

Every time I sit down at a keyboard, I become more or less reliant on the kindness of strangers. I know nothing about computers outside of the on/off button. When they die, they're dead until I can find someone to revive them. The same is true of websites. I can't code. I'm not a designer. I can barely take a picture and load it. I miss the days of IT departments and IT-guys at the other end of the line, 24/7. I am always at someone else's mercy. I am a dinosaur. The kids just a few years behind me grew up living online -- they can code and design and lay out in their sleep -- I grew up writing actual letters. On paper. Like an animal.

Today, I finally managed to cobble together what few resurrected files there are from the last ten years, and inventory them, to see where I stand. These are just the file names. Sometimes they correspond to that week's headline, sometimes they're just what I wrote to be able to find them later.

Here's what's left:
2002 May 2 In Style
2002 May 23 Adult Swim
2002 June6 Hot Property
2002 June 20 Waterloo
2002 July 18 My New Boyfriend
2002 Aug1.GoToTheMattresses
2002 Aug8. Pret a Porter
2002 Aug22 Guerilla Gardening
2002 Sep 12 Everything Must Go 
2002 Oct 17 An Awkward Age
2002 Holidays. The Gift of Porn.

2003 thru 2006 are blanks. Unrecoverable. I did write during those four years, but there's not much evidence of it.

The electronic trail picks back up slightly in 2007.
2007 Aug 8 Blackberry Adam
2007 Nov8 Travis Dies

That's it for 2007.

There's a slightly better record of 2008:
2008 March 20 craigslist
2008 Oct 30 RingToss
2008 Nov 13 Strangers with Candy
2008 Nov WuTang
2008 Dec 11 Sorority BreakIn
2008 Dec 18 Mom's Santas

2009 Feb 12 FosterRob
2009 March 26 The Bubble
2009 Apr 9 Colonoscopy
2009 Aug20 Funnelcake

2010 Feb 11 The Ghost of 94
2010 March 4 Mr. Edwards
2010 March 11 My First Car.

That's it.
That's all there is.
26 columns. In ten years. For 2009 and 2010 at least there's a blog version of a lot of what I've written, but those are not what I'd commit to print -- which comes an endless series of revisions later. The best line I remember from a college English class was Dr. Lucas quoting (I think) Hemingway, "It flows from no one's head in perfect form." Something like that. In the facebook/twitter/blog era, everyone "fancies themselves" a Writer, but hardly anybody fancies themselves an Editor. That's my day job though. I spend far more of my life editing than I do writing, and most of the blogs barely constitute a rough draft.

Somewhere in there is maybe a head start on a book, but there's definitely not a book. The last one was 14 chapters, comprised of 64 columns. In truth, it does NOT stand the test of time. And I had put a lot of work towards this one (originally due out in October 2010) being better -- or at least, better organized and less dated.

Most of that work is gone. Nobody's going to come in and push a few buttons and restore those archives or even the software that would read it, if it could be restored. What little could be saved has been saved. There are a few extra paper copies the Intern unearthed last Spring, but he barely made a dent. They're just ashes now, electronic rubble. Detritus.

Another book I read this summer is Meghan Daum's Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House. The title gives you the general gist (and I'll probably write more about it later). Miraculously, I still have a beat-up copy of her first novel, The Quality of Life Report -- and I say miraculously, not because it isn't good (it is) -- but because I probably read and reviewed a 100 books that year (2003), and of those, I kept maybe a half dozen. I've kept up with her work sporadically ever since, but started paying attention again when the new book came out, which is when I found  her site -- which mostly filled me with the white-hot rage of envy. Her work is neatly categorized -- there are her articles, her books, her blog. It's the site I'm angry I do not have. I don't know who I'm angry at, exactly, and that just makes me madder. Granted, she has the asset of having contributed to the meticulously-archived LA Times, but I worked for Village fucking Voice, so the truth is, I have no real excuse as to why my organizational and web skills never kept up with those of other writers working at roughly my age and volume. I had good mentors and trainers. Now I think, Life Would Be Perfect if I had that Site.

So I have spent a lot of this summer angry and frustrated. (That isn't new, by the way. I can see from those few 2002 columns it happened a lot more often then than now.) It's an endless game of whack-a-mole. One machine gets replaced, and then it's time for new software, which doesn't work with the old printer, which then has to be pitched because now they can't communicate on the new server anyway. Round and round.

Most of the time, this Spring notwithstanding, I'm a happy person -- occasionally undone, like everybody is, by too much work and not enough time to do it -- but generally content. I have a great life, populated by wonderful people, and even in a rare phase of misery like this one, I always know how lucky that makes me, and I always try to reserve a small corner of my shriveled, pissed-off little heart to be grateful for that. I am pretty sure this week's ulcer flare-up has more to do with barely-suppressed hate than it does with anything I ate. My BFF asked today if I'd noticed that my ankles are swelling -- I hadn't, but I imagine all those pools of rage had to go somewhere. I have noticed my face looks exactly like it did the summer I had to take steroids for an injury, only I'm not taking any. (It's so awful you get that sense that even good friends don't know what to say, because what they're thinking is, "I wonder if...she knows she looks like that...Should I maybe say something?" Or would the messenger just get killed.)  I know I haven't felt good, physically, since I moved, and I don't think it was the move that did it -- it was The Crash.

There will be a new book. Hopefully. It won't be this year though, and it'll probably be a lot different than the one I started out to write, and that may be a good or bad thing. By the time I finish it, it might be the sort of thing you buy on a microchip and plug into your left temple for all I know. We've established I'm not exactly at the tech vanguard.

I'll probably spend some time loading those 26 relics that do exist into a format people can see. I'll back them up a little more carefully, since they're all I have to show for the last ten years.

Over time -- with a new computer and some new software equal to the task -- I'll probably become more sanguine. My family home burned to the ground halfway through college, and while it was heartbreaking at the time, I don't really miss the access to all that overwrought adolescent poetry and would-be novels. 

This time out, I'm not rebuilding my house, or my life -- there's no real flood or fire -- I'm just missing the stories, the chronicles, the records. I'm sure they're around here somewhere.