Does that apply to nuclear explosions, too?

If you've visited this blog at least—well, ever—you know I'm not a fan of empty-headed sloganeering. If I had my way, we'd take all of the pseudo-inspirational platitudes splashed across those cloying posters that today hang on almost every executive's office walls, and we'd build one huge effin bonfire. (I'm referring to the kind of posters they sell, for example, here. Or in that special pullout section in the middle of all inflight catalogs.) To make things even better, ideally we'd start the fire with a coal that's a direct descendant of the ones Tony Robbins used in leading the "firewalk experiences" that launched his nine-figure motivational empire.

By now you're probably wondering what, ahem, inspired this tirade. On in the background is Extreme Makeover Home Edition. Tonight's sob-aganza focuses on a woman whose 30-year-old husband died suddenly of a heart attack the same day she gave birth to their first child. In the course of explaining how she decided not to let this tragedy throw her life into chaos, she says brightly, "You can turn anything into a positive."

Is that so.

To my mind, the death of her husband was bad enough in its own right, but I wonder if she'd still be talking about turning negatives into positives if, say, the baby had been stillborn as well. That's not even the crux of the issue, though. The crux is that you can't "turn anything into a positive." You absolutely cannot. To some degree, you can control how you feel about the negative—if you're equipped with that kind of equanimity and self-discipline. Many of us aren't. The larger point is that changing the way you deal with something is not the same as changing the something itself. Inhabiting a private world of illusion (or delusion) does not fix whatever core problem might drive a person to want to detach from reality. The soldier who returns from Afghanistan minus three limbs, and who decides to go back to college, get a degree and make as much as he can of himself, has not "turned a negative into a positive." He has simply survived. He is still missing those three limbs. And if he tells you that losing those limbs was "the best thing that ever happened to him," he's kidding himself.

I'm not a moron, and I'm not an unfeeling person, either. Quite the contrary. I know what the woman on Extreme Makeover is getting at: that some people, faced with tragedy, give up altogether, which doesn't help matters. I'll buy that. I'd never encourage a person who has experienced some misfortune to fold up his or her tent and wallow in self-pity. I'd hope that such a person would recognize that all is not lost (although in some cases it may be). That's not the same as "turning a negative into a positive." When we denature language—especially when we do it in the service of that hypnotic illusion-world the New Age has foist upon us, in which the Universe will happily do our bidding if we can just learn to be of good cheer all the time—we also devalue the concepts that underlie language. You don't conquer failure by redefining it or wishing it away. You don't undo tragedy by "turning it into a positive." You don't beat cancer by simply "refusing to die of it," a la Lynn Redgrave (who, of course, died of it anyway).

No more than I can hit Aroldis Chapman's 105 mph fastball by telling myself that the pitch is really just lofting in at 60 mph.

People who need to die. Chapter 28.

I figure that anyone who's smart enough to own a home, hold down a job and raise a family is also smart enough to recognize the extraordinary danger—to others as well as himself—of jogging or cycling down a curvy, narrow, rain-slick backwoods road. If your IQ is higher than a dandelion's*, you know that under those conditions, a driver's slightest emergency course correction can set in motion a catastrophic chain of events. So I assume that the problem with the asshole/jogger I encountered this morning in the teeming rain, near a blind curve on exactly such a backwoods road, was not an IQ deficiency; rather, it was a total disregard for his fellow human beings.

I would therefore like to serve notice, not only to this morning's asshole but to his like-minded assholes-in-arms, that if it ever comes down to a choice between (a) swerving into oncoming traffic and (b) turning you into a hood ornament, this particular motorist will not be swerving, thank you very much.

I will, however, send flowers to your widow. Maybe even drop by to console her....

You'd expect nothing less from me, nice guy that I am.

* Giving credit where it's due, this is actually an allusion to a line from Jim Bouton's hilarious baseball tell-all, Ball Four. At one point Bouton quotes a ballplayer who famously said of a coach, "If his IQ were 3 points lower, he'd be a dandelion." That may not be the verbatim quote, but it's close.

"I developed this overwhelming compulsion to put on black-face, drop to my knees and sing Mammy!"

My doctor prescribed a drug called Mobic to help alleviate swelling and tenderness in my knees. Inasmuch as the drug belongs to the highly suspect Vioxx class, I began investigating side effects. Although many of those side effects, albeit not unexpected, are sobering (sudden death due to heart attack would tend to fall in that category), I had to laugh my ass off when I came across the woman who claimed that after taking the drug, she experienced "minstrel issues." Click the link above and scroll down to the comment titled "Barbarasays." It's currently third, as I view the page.

How can a woman reach the age of menstruation and not know how to spell it? Another fine testament to the American educational system...or the American educational ethic...?

We interrupt our regularly scheduled program...

For music lovers only: This may be the prettiest movie theme I've ever heard. The chord at :37-:38 is genius; it just reaches inside you.

More nonsense from your favorite sports(think)writers...and why even non-sports fans should care.

Newcomers to the blog may be unaware that I have a "thing" about Sportsthink,* which to me is as good a mainstream example as there is of the PMA-based silliness that has seized hold of this country.

Here's the latest illustration. Apparently we are to believe that aging Yankee catcher/DH Jorge Posada had a great day yesterday because he was "motivated" to do so. This raises a number of questions in my mind.

So to this point in the season, Posada has not been sufficiently "motivated" to do better than his overall .237 batting average?

So the way to "motivate" players is to sit them down (not play them) for a week?

And the core question of all:

So all it takes to hit a wicked Roy Halladay 94mph 2-seam fastball is motivation? Then why don't the most motivated players just go out and do it? How does Halladay get anybody out? Oh wait...I forgot...he must be even more motivated. I mean, it couldn't possibly be true that the most talented guy wins the battle, most of the time...

The significance of this line of pseudo-thought extends well beyond sports. We are a nation of people who judge other people by their emotional trappings: whether or not they seem successful, or confident or, yes, motivated. We assume that if someone seems (or just expresses the certitude of being) A Doer, he or she can get the job done. This is a staple truism in latter-day politics. We vote for, and rally around, candidates who say or project the right things...even though most of the time, those "right things" have nothing to do with any specific plan of action. They're simply the right things in terms of attitude. Or as I once wrote in a wry piece on PMA for The Wall Street Journal, "In too many cases, we take confidence as proof of having a plan. Far too often, confidence is the plan."

That societal tendency can lead to grave misjudgments. Look at the Obama-phenomenon, for example. Love him or hate him, there's no question that he won because he inspired hope...not through any concrete strategies that he espoused, necessarily, but because he talked constantly about, and seemed personally to embody, hope. Hope and Change. Those are abstractions. (In fact, they reside in the world of emotional memes that are clearly related to what the NLP crowd calls anchoring.) Today, even though I supported and voted for the man, I can see where his detractors might wonder if it was all a diverting illusion. I don't see it that way; I think post-election Obama just ran headlong into the realities of today's Beltway, which isn't very welcoming to Change. Still, I can certainly understand how diehard GOP types would scream that we were taken in, if not "duped."

Amazing where some of us will go based on a simple headline about Jorge Posada, huh...?

* I devote an entire chapter to it in my book, SHAM.

While we're on the subject of customer disservice...

Read yesterday's related post.

Last week I was in Washington, DC on business with my boss and a few other key employees. In the course of our two-day stay, which we spent at one of the city's premier hotels, just down the street from the White House, we encountered no less than five hotel employees who could barely make themselves understood in English. It's hard for me to convey how Kafkaesque and exasperating some of the resulting "conversations" were. Apparently we weren't the only ones who felt that way. At breakfast in the hotel cafe on the morning of our departure, a well-dressed man at the next table grew so irate over the situation that he summoned the maitre d' (whose Spanish accent was only slightly less thick than our server's) and loudly insisted on being served by "an American." Lest he himself be misunderstood, the man added, "someone who speaks actual English."

At first I was a bit embarrassed by the man's demand, which struck me as jingoistic, but the more I thought about it, the more I found it defensible, even reasonable. Anti-discrimination laws or not, no mainstream company would be required (would it?) to hire in a customer-service capacity an individual who literally did not speak English—which is to say, a non-English-speaking person. Just as I can't imagine that EEOC laws meant to protect the obese would be invoked in a case where a 410-pound man applied for a job as a jockey. So what's really the difference? If the person's attempts at English are as faltering and ineffective as what we encountered in DC, how does that materially differ from, say, a Monty Python skit in which a Lithuanian-speaking taxi driver is taking directions from a Mandarin-speaking customer?

The problem is especially acute when the would-be conversation is occurring over the telephone (or the squawk box in the drive-through lane of a fast-food restaurant), where you don't have the benefit of lip-reading, supportive gestures and body language, or other communication enhancers.

So I'd like to hear from our contributors. Where should these lines be drawn? Why in the name of political correctness or social engineering should we be forced to endure situations where each of a succession of questions must be asked and answered a half-dozen times? And even then you can't be sure the proper action will ensue. (Several times, for example, one or more members of our Washington contingent received a menu item we did not order, or failed to receive an item we did order.) Come to think of it, I'm sure we've all had hotel experiences where we attempted to ask a question of the maid making up our room, and she simply shook her head and said, "No speak English" or some such. Not to mention the technical-support lines provided by many firms nowadays, which all seem fiber-optically routed to the same building in Jaipur.

Did the well-dressed man in the hotel cafe have a valid gripe? What do you think?

Adventures in oye-land.

Today would've been my father's 93rd birthday. As regular readers may recall, I lost him a long, long time ago—1978!—and I am certain that the narrative of my life has not been the better for it. It also occurred to me the other day as I was memorializing my sister that more of my (original) immediate family is now dead than alive—three of the five of us. For some reason, that realization brought me up short. But rather than devolve into the maudlin remembrances that have become typical for me on such occasions (e.g. this or this), I've decided to pay a different, more offbeat type of tribute to Dad.

See, my father did not complain about a lot of things. He was a stoic sort of fellow who didn't ask or expect much from life—in other words, the antithesis of my generation, which spends most of its time screaming, me, ME, ME! But my father did have one major pet peeve, and that was customer service. Or the lack of same. And it occurs to me that some of the more scathing or satirical musings I've presented on this blog (e.g. this, this or this) really had their genesis in my father's sporadic dinner-time sermons on the insufferable incompetence of the folks at DMV, the phone company, the local Pizza Hut, etc. F'rinstnace, after the phone company had torn up our Brooklyn neighborhood in order to "upgrade" our service, my father nightly bemoaned the constant static that had newly appeared on our line. After a few weeks he called the phone company and said, "I'm requesting that you downgrade my service again so that I can actually make a viable phone call." He was abruptly disconnected.

Anyway, in that spirit I present a conversation I recently had with a perky young CSR from a well-known credit-card company. (Hint: Its name rhymes with Bapital Gun, and its ubiquitous TV spots are always asking me what's in my wallet.) This was pursuant to several voicemails I'd received in regard to my "missing a payment." I returned the woman's call, and the rest is self-explanatory. We're picking things up after the opening pleasantries have been exchanged.
_______________________________________________

Her: "You will need to pay $78 to bring your account current through July 16."

Me: "Why are we worrying about July 16? July 16 is a month away. Let's talk about the June statement payment that I supposedly missed."

Her: "Yes, sir. You are one month behind."

Me: "I am? A month behind? Look, I grant you, I misread the May statement. I thought it said $75, which is what I sent. It really asked for $76. So I'm one dollar behind. Not one month."

Her: "Would you like to pay $78 to bring your account current—?"

Me: "Can we look at that statement together?"

Her: "Yes, sir."

Me: "Good. What does it say under 'amount due'?"

Her: "It says $76."

Me: "Correct. And what does it say I paid?"

Her: "$75."

Me: "Correct again. And I paid that by the stipulated due date, is that correct?"

Her: "You made a partial payment by the due date, yes."

Me: "A partial...? [composing myself] So all these phone messages, all this aggravation is over a dollar?"

Her: "If you fail to pay your payment, you are behind."

Me: "Did I fail to pay my payment?"

Her: "You did not pay your payment on time."

Me: "I did not pay my payment on time?"

Her: "You did not pay the correct amount on time."

Me: "I was off by a dollar."

Her: "Yes, which is why I'm asking you if you'd like to pay $78 now to bring your account current."

I pause. I sigh. I regroup.

Me: "If I'd intended to miss a payment, do you really think I'd miss by ONE DOLLAR? If I didn't have the money or was in some sort of financial difficulty that affected my credit-worthiness, would I have sent $75 out of $76?"

Her: "I can't speak for what you were thinking, sir. I deal all day long with customers who get behind in their payments and have different reasons why."

Me: "Are they usually off by a dollar?"

Her: "The amount varies."

Me: "While I'm on the subject, have I ever missed a payment with you folks?"

Her: "That's what we're talking about here today."

Me: "I mean in the past. I've had your card for four, five years now."

Her: "Sir, I don't have that information."

Me: "Oh, but you have my missing dollar from last month underlined in red, huh?"

Her: "It is very important that you keep your account up to date."

Me: "Do you folks not believe in something called customer good will?"

Her: "Sir?"

Me: "I have been an exemplary customer of yours. I have always paid my bill on time. Most months I paid off the entire balance."

Her: "That may very well be true. Until last month. Sometimes when customers begin missing payments, it's the first sign that—"

Me: "When they miss by a dollar? All sorts of alarm bells go off then, do they?"

Her: "By any amount."

Me: "How about this. I'll go online right now and authorize my bank to send a dollar to you. It will go through first-thing tomorrow. Will that settle the matter?"

Her: "I can arrange right now for you to make your $78 payment, and that will bring you current through July 16."

Me: "You're not really saying you don't trust me to make a one-dollar payment through my bank. Are you?"

Her: "I'm merely trying to get this important matter settled."

Me: "This important matter."

Her: "I would assume your credit rating is very important to you, sir."

Me: "It is. Which is why I paid your bill promptly. I just made a minor error on the amount. Is none of this getting through to you?"

Her: "I don't know why your tone should be so sharp with me. I'm not the one who failed to keep up with the terms of my credit contract."

Me [deep breath]: "OK. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go online this very minute, as we're talking, and authorize a payment for $78 through my bank. I think you might've mentioned something about how that would bring me current through July 16. Can I do that? Would that be acceptable to resolve the matter and end this phone call?"

Her: "If that is what you insist on, I will note your account accordingly."

Me: "Excellent! So are we all set, then?"

There is a pause on the line. Then she says, very brightly, "Now, are you sure you wouldn't like to make a telephone payment of $78 to bring your account current through July 16...?"

(At this point, I think my father would've reached through the phone line and torn her throat out.)

Happy birthday in heaven, Dad. This one's for you.