I Got A Nice Rack Rate

I wrote recently about my experience trying to get someone from CenturyLink, my phone company, to sell me some upgraded service. I spent well over an hour on my cell phone on hold, and then another fifteen minutes listening to my service representative's immediate environs, while he tapped at his keyboard and periodically asked me if I was still there. I was, but he couldn't hear me, and eventually he hung up. I don't know why he couldn't hear me. I visualized him in front of a bank of wires pulling the plugs in and out and mine wasn't in all the way. But that's probably not how it works, or in this case, doesn't work.

Well, things happen. I get that. I could imagine being in his situation myself, reaching way over my left shoulder for the telephone while standing on the recorder pedal for the transcription machine for eighteen minutes like Rose Mary Woods, and all of a sudden all my boss's incriminating conversation is lost in the ether by accident, because things happen. It would have been my hope that someone from my phone company could figure out how to maintain a conversation because he's in the communications business, but such is not always the case.

Because when he gave up and called me on my land line, which he happened to know because he's from my phone company, he was still having problems with the communication aspect, particularly in the area of saying something I understood and getting an appropriate response back from me. The last time I spent that much time on the phone, I was talking to someone in India. I had been on the phone so long I could have set up medical insurance through Obamacare by then, and I no longer remembered why I'd called in the first place. Oh yes: we were talking about rates, and bundling, and what services I could get when.

I was confused, so he explained very carefully. It was something about my modem, and how many phone jacks I had, and what they did together in their spare time, and the fact that I'm in a GPON zone, and whether or not I get a rack rate.

"Rack jack what now?"

GPON. GPON. He explained I had copper in my wires, or didn't have copper in my wires. I don't remember which, or why, but it sounded personal.

The service representatives at CenturyLink go out for beers after work and rag on about how stupid people in the GPON zones are. I know they do. I know this because I also used to be in the communications business.

Some poor postal customer with a legitimate complaint would call up the station and get the boss on the line--our ring was twenty-five "shorts," and he had to wait for all 25 to be sure they wanted us, and not the Department of Motor Vehicles, which is 24--and he'd listen for a minute. Then he'd say "well, ma'am, I cain't do nothing about that, because your carrier is on LWOP, but the T-6 is over there helping out with the nixies, and I'll put a note here for the 204-B to give you a call once he's done entering the MSPs," and then he'd hold the phone out from his ear for another minute, and hang up and say "what a bitch." Then go out for beers.

So answering the phone is not all there is to communication. Most of us letter carriers were better at it. Here's what it looks like. Customer complains. Carrier nods sympathetically. Agrees, in standard English, that this is a truly awful problem. Promises to try to get to the bottom of it. And says "I'm sorry."

Then goes out for beers.

Driving While Stupid

"Just drive the way you normally do for the first 1500 miles and your car will figure out how you drive and adjust itself accordingly," the salesman said when I bought my Toyota Yaris four years ago. It was an odd instruction. How else was I supposed to drive? Was I supposed to drive normally for 1500 miles and then really schiz it up after that?

This was my first automatic car. The shift includes a third gear snugged into the same slot as "drive." And that's what I drove in for the first 1500 miles: third gear. Sure enough, my car figured out something about me that everyone else has known for years. "She's a little slow," my car whispered to the other cars in the parking lot, tapping itself lightly on the head gasket. "Let's keep it good and sludgy so she doesn't hurt herself."

And that's what my car did. It drove sludgy. It drove like a toboggan in cheese. Or a constipated possum. Or a Volvo. Climbing a hill, it had all the enthusiasm of a seven-year-old at bedtime. I kind of related to it in a personal way, but the whole point of driving a car is to get more pep than you'd have on your own. Plus, it was only getting 32 miles per gallon at best, which seemed wrong for a car the size of a postage-stamp dispenser. Once Dave noticed I'd been driving in third, I asked the mechanic if I could get a second chance to instruct my car how I drive. He pondered, squinted, then revved up his brain by snorking snot back into it, wiped his nose on his sleeve and said, "you know, I think it learns how you drive continuously. Just keep driving the way you normally do, only in drive instead of third."

I should have recognized this for the evasion it was. It was classic postal-handbook. When you work for the post office, you get numerous opportunities to placate customers. "Letters never get truly lost," you say. "It's probably gotten stuck behind the flap of another envelope, and it will shake out eventually and get back in the mail stream and we'll have it back to you, right as rain." As a customer-service gambit, this works because you want to believe it. Your customer wants to believe it. And you'll be far away by the time it becomes clear the letter is in postal purgatory, which is right next to unmatched-sock purgatory and the limbo of unrecalled words. We'll never see that little, what is that, little folded-paper thingy with the stamp in the corner--whatever--dammit--again.


My mechanic had no idea how to make my car forget it had ever met me. I may be able to race it to the top of a hill, but it has a way better memory than I do. I continued to drive it new-normally with no change in its attitude. Finally this year I brought it in for maintenance and mentioned the problem to a whole new guy with a whole different brain and he and his brain thought he could help. It worked. After four years, the car is demonstrating something close to moxie, and gets several more miles per gallon. "What did you do?" I asked.

Well! He unplugged the battery, and plugged it back in. Of course.