2 and a half

Sunglasses disaster

Note to self: Don't leave your sunglasses on the table on the back patio after doing yard work, knowing full well that your dog likes to hop up there on that table and lie around, and that if he does so he may find whatever is up there and chew it to shreds.

Witness the following diagram, which I have carefully laid out to illustrate the carnage that happened to me:

Shocking, isn't it? I might as well have set fire to two $100 bills. 

Imagine that you're walking through the yard, doing the job that every dog owner must do which is scooping up poop. You come across a brown object that looks like poop, but no - it's the pair of sunglasses that you lost two weeks ago. And they don't look like sunglasses any longer. They look like the picture above.

That was me, although I suspected Barry had gotten ahold of them but just couldn't come to terms with it until I knew for sure.

I might have to go with a pair of gas station sunglasses from now on.

Comcast

I posted the other day on Facebook that, "Yet again, Comcast wins the worst-company-in-the-world-to-deal-with award."

Lots of people agreed, and then a friend requested a blog post on it, so here it is.

Don't mistakenly think that I'm going to tell you that you need to deal with people at Comcast in the same way you'd deal with children. I would never write that. Children are generally fun to deal with. Comcast never is. In fact if children ran Comcast the company would be much better off than it is today. But then again, my girls and most other kids are way too smart to work for Comcast. Comcast would reject them for not being stupid. That's a pre-req for working there.

I have had innumerable bad experiences with Comcast. And as a result I have demanded refunds. I have cursed them silently to myself and loudly over the phone to the point the person on the other end wanted to hang up on me. I do not like them and many others seem to agree.

But that's neither here nor there. I am a customer so I have to accept that they are difficult to deal with and hope they'll get better or switch to DirecTV or something. But in the meantime I can pretend what Comcast would be like if it was well-run and cared about customers. In fact, let's entertain what Comcast would be like if it were run by kids. What would Audrey do, for example, if she ran the place?

Well, as a famous book once espoused, "everything you need to know you learned in kindergarten." Audrey has had a couple of years of preschool already so by that measure she's nearly done with her education. Running Comcast, then, she might apply the following principles:

Play fair

Today Comcast sells you a big package of channels, most of which you don't watch. But because it is a monopoly at worst and an oligopoly at best it does this because it can. And forcing you to buy 50 additional channels because you want to watch one of them isn't playing fair by any stretch. Audrey would make shows available a-la-carte instead. If her customers wanted to watch "Barney" and only Barney day in and day out, for example, they could. They could buy the Barney Channel on an exclusive basis and watch it until they turned purple (pun intended).

Or if her subscribers wanted to watch Barney plus "Blue's Clues" they could buy the two channels and perhaps get the one that shows re-runs of "Scooby Doo" for free, just for being good customers. In fact the a-la-carte offering could take on any number of permutations -- anything would be better than the forced tiers that exist today. 

And on the chance that the Comcast signal to your house is bad, Audrey's Comcast would provide a complimentary amplifier. Naturally it would be free of charge since it is Comcast's fault that its signal is weak. The days of a $25 fee for such a thing would be long gone.

Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody

Today Comcast hurts all kinds of people daily by taking their money and wasting their time related to service outages and billing mistakes and screwed up installs.

When it came to billing mistakes or outages Audrey would make sure her company said it was sorry if it screwed up. Customers wouldn't be required to make repeated phone calls and negotiate a convoluted automated system only to end up being put on hold and then disconnected after waiting 15 minutes, or worse, after explaining the problem in painstaking detail to a customer rep only to get disconnected because the rep accidentally hit the wrong button. No, customers would get a credit on the spot and would receive a follow-up personal phone call and an apology. Maybe they'd get a free screening of "Annie" on HBO or something too. The possibilities, again, would be endless.

And for an install Audrey would grant customers a specific time of day. Not a four-hour window that turns into a six-hour window that turns into a no-show -- a reliable time that would mean her customers wouldn't have to take a full vacation day from pre-school in order to be at home in the event the Comcast guy actually decided to show up.

And if the install guy screws up the install because he's a moron and then has to book another appointment with you to waste more of your time, Audrey would instead make sure Comcast dispatched a smarter service technician who understands today's modern home entertainment setups and would do it at a time convenient for you. Not to mention providing a billing credit and a phone call to apologize and all that good stuff I said before.

Don't take things that aren't yours

Refer to the above. As in my time and money. Audrey's Comcast would only spend your time and collect your money if you were a happy customer.

Clean up your own mess

During installs Comcast technicians tend to leave a mess of cable clippings and other crap lying around. Audrey's company wouldn't permit that at all. The rep would pick up after himself and if he didn't do so to your satisfaction he'd come right back out and make it right.

Don't hit people

This one's for me. I am tempted to hit people from Comcast so I need to keep reminding myself about this.

Learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some

The operative words her are learn and think. I don't believe today's Comcast management does much of either one. And frankly I hope they go draw and paint and sing and dance and play because with all the pissed off customers they deal with every day they'd surely need an outlet.

Flush

I doubt Comcast management does much of this either. Gross.

Take a nap every afternoon

Ah ha! That's what management is spending its time doing.

Be aware of wonder

This could be the crux of the issue. There is no wondrousness (if that's a word) to Comcast. It is a big, boring, bully of a company. Which is exactly why Audrey might be a perfect fit to run the place. A child is full of wonder. She could bring imagination and creativity to the products and create a customer experience that is good, maybe even pleasant. People would marvel at Comcast and its quality as a company and employees would gush about working there. 

But no matter. That's all fantasy and I don't want Audrey working at Comcast because, like I said, she's way too smart.

A wine bottle, a vacuum and a kite

This post originated as a Facebook status update but a friend got a laugh out of it so I thought I'd elaborate here.

You know how when you're cleaning you're sometimes moving pretty quickly and sometimes things just go wrong? Well, they did. I picked up a closed bottle of wine from the counter to put into the wine rack and accidentally bumped the shelf above and it fell from my hands, flat on the counter, shattering into a zillion pieces. 

Naturally it was red wine - white wine would have been too easy to clean up - and it soaked our white cupboards, trickling down toward the floor and running into each drawer and each cabinet on its way. And when it reached the floor it landed on our soft grey rug that just doesn't handle red wine very well. 

After cursing myself for a bit I began the cleanup. After picking up the largest shards from the counter and the floor, I took a thick wad of paper towel to soak up broad swaths of wine from wherever I could. The drawers and cupboards came next and I had to tediously move pieces of silverware and other kitchen items to get to the pools of red wine accumulating everywhere. And as soon as I'd soak some up more would drip down.

And then came those little tiny pieces of glass that are impossible to pick up with a paper towel and almost as difficult with a broom, but if you miss them they are the most dangerous part. They are sharp as ever and you just can't risk any being left lying around when two little girls are motoring around everywhere during the day.

After collecting as many pieces as I could I examined the floor and the counter closely and then vacuumed the area to make sure I didn't miss anything. And then I spotted some glass across the room. How had it gotten over there? I went over to vacuum that spot as well. When I came back to look along the floorboards, there laid another piece of glass. I shoved the vacuum in there to get that piece also. 

Now I was really paranoid so I began vacuuming everything again. This is where insult was added to injury. The kite Audrey and I had flown that afternoon at the park laid on the floor, a picture of Cinderella staring at me. The kite's long pink tail meandered lazily on the floor, as if to tempt the vacuum. And tempt it did. All of a sudden the plastic tail got sucked into the opening and wrapped around the rotor. And since we have a high-powered vacuum with some serious torque the tail melted a bit as it wound itself up. Fortunately for me the tail broke off and the rest of the kite was saved. But I was left to extricate the pink plastic ribbon from the jaws of the vacuum. And eventually I did.

Like any good dad I tied what was left of tail back to the main body of the kite and it almost looked passable as a kite tail. Almost. We'll see what Audrey says next time we go fly it.

The whole process took well over an hour and by the time I was done I was so flustered I couldn't even explain to my wife what had happened. Maybe I shouldn't clean anymore.