rants
- “Billionaires are quite philanthropic. Sure, this is a general statement, but check it out.”
- “The reason billionaires are billionaires is that, generally, they work extraordinarily hard to invest their capital using wisdom while calculating risks.”
- God isn’t actually involved down here on earth right now. Apparently He’s somewhere distant, and just observing. That’s obviously incorrect.
- People on earth are at some marginally-acceptable level of sinfulness right now. Wrong again! We’re all sinful. No one does good. We’ve all missed the mark.
- If we cross some line of sinfulness, then… BLAM! God’s gonna come down and make us pay! No. God isn’t up there threatening to blow us away. He promised he wouldn’t flood the earth again and wipe everything out. (I have to remind myself of that when the springtimes get abnormally rainy…) And He poured out His wrath on Jesus. Jesus died so we don’t have to.
- God coming down here to Earth is a thing to be feared. Uh, no. God coming to Earth in the person of Jesus is the best thing that’s ever happened to Earth and humankind.
- Singability. The purpose of a national anthem is to be sung, right? ‘O Canada’ has a nice, singable melody, and a total range of just one octave, suitable to most voices. ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, on the other hand, has a range of an octave and a fifth, which is a range typically only well-handled by professional singers. Live performances should be opportunities for national pride, however, when the US anthem is involved, they are more often adventures in vocal torture.
- Inspiring Language. ‘The True North strong and free.’ What a marvelous turn of phrase. And who can fail to be moved when singing “God keep our land glorious and free”? The Star Spangled Banner is just about a flag, with the bit about the country being sort of tacked on at the end.
- Using words that people actually are familiar with. With exception, perhaps, of the old English “thy” and “thee”, “O Canada” is composed entirely of words that one might use in everyday writing or conversation. “The Star Spangled Banner”, by comparison? Spangled. Perilous. Ramparts. Gallantly. Ugh.
- Actually mentioning the name of the country. “O Canada”: 4 mentions, not counting the title. “The Star Spangled Banner”: 0.
- Not beginning and ending with a question. Questions typically belong in plaintive, whiny songs, not broad anthems. Starting off “O say can you see?” and ending with “O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave?”, while presumably intended as rhetorical flourishes, doesn’t impart the same sort of solidarity as “O Canada, we stand on guard for Thee”.
- He apologized profusely for the bad experience.
- He told me that the saleswoman who visited our home has worked for him a long time and has never had another complaint like ours.
- He agreed that three hours was far too long a visit, that they typically are only an hour in length.
- He objected to my characterization of their giving us bottled water to taste but then not advising we buy the drinking water filtration unit as a “bait-and-switch”. Usually, he said, people do buy the drinking water filter, and so that’s a sample of what they would get. Our case just happens to be the exception, since we have pretty good water here in Hiawatha.
- He volunteered to send me a $100 Home Depot gift card in hopes that it would help remedy the situation.
- He asked if I would be willing to take my blog post down. I told him I’m not in the habit of taking down blog posts, but I would be willing to post an update on the situation. So here we are.
- Be on time and don’t go past the time you said you’d take. I have three hours between the time I get home from work and when my kids go to bed. Don’t take all of them. Did you ever wonder when we were going to eat supper?
- Don’t make us feel like we’re doing you a favor by listening to your pitch. We don’t owe you anything.
- Don’t use the old bait-and-switch. Sure, the nifty specially-filtered bottled water tastes good. But then you didn’t recommend it for us. And you didn’t let us taste the normally-filtered water. Tsk tsk.
- Be up-front about the costs, including the financing. I’m a pretty sharp guy, I know how the numbers work. You preach $99/month up front, but when I ask “for how many months?”, you finally admit that it’s just a $99/month minimum payment on a line of credit that charges 17.99% interest. That’s 8 years at $99/month. Ouch.
- Don’t try to rush me into a sale. Seriously, you’re asking me to make a snap decision, without doing any other research, on a $5000 system? In 10 minutes while you’re here staring at me? If it’s a good value today, it’ll be just as good a value tomorrow. If not, you’re trying to pull one over on me. For shame.
- Don’t try to talk circles around my wife. Yeah, she was struggling trying to verbalize her objections to the deal. But making her feel stupid because she doesn’t see it your way? Bad form. A little hint: if I have to choose between my wife and you, she’s gonna win every time and twice on Sundays. Be glad it wasn’t a Sunday.
- If you’re really trying to sell a product, leave some literature behind in case I change my mind. You didn’t even leave as much as a business card tonight. That gave me the idea that you were only in it for the quick sale tonight, and not interested in the long-term cultivation of a customer.
An Appliance Installation in Four Lowe’s Trips
Setting: a local homeowner has an old dishwasher that is dying. A new dishwasher was delivered and is sitting in the garage, waiting to be installed.
Lowe’s Trip #1: Electrical Stuff
The old dishwasher had just a raw electrical cable coming from the unit. The wire ran through a hole in the floor and was connected up to the breaker box in the basement using wire nuts. The new dishwasher has a proper electric plug. So on the way home from work I hit Lowe’s for a grey electrical box, a GFCI plugin, and an outlet cover plate.
Came home, wired up the box before dinner. Got out a big drill bit and expanded the hole in the floor to fit the big plug.
Lowe’s Trip #2: Water line
I don’t do plumbing work that often, but when I do, it’s the little latent leaks that make me nervous. I read the installation manual for the dishwasher and it suggested “hook up the water line, turn on the water, and check for leaks before putting the unit in place”. Great idea, I thought. However, the existing water line wasn’t long enough to make that work.
Hit Lowe’s again, bought a longer water line. Hooked it up to the dishwasher. Ran the hose down through a separate hole in the floor, hooked it up to the water pipe in the basement. Turned the water on. No leaks.
Ran the electric plug end through the hole in the floor, plugged it in. We have power. Now we just need to hook up the drain hose.
The drain hose boot is marked that it will accommodate up to a 7/8” pipe. The PVC drain pipe plumbed up to the dishwasher location is marked 3/4”, but it turns out that’s 3/4” inside diameter. Outside diameter is a solid one inch. And the rubber boot doesn’t stretch that much.
Lowe’s Trip #3: Drain Pipe Fitting
Perused the PVC aisle. Then to the next aisle over with kitchen plumbing supplies. A “standard” dishwasher install would have it near the sink so the drain hose could tie in to the sink drain. Ours is on the opposite side of the kitchen, so whoever did the first dishwasher install here (sometime well after the house was built in 1959) ran the PVC drain line down through the floor and across the basement ceiling to tie in to the drain there. But I digress.
On the second trip through the PVC aisle, my wife notices the exact fitting we need. Sized to fit the 1” outside diameter pipe on one end, with a tapering ribbed end opposite it to grab a drain boot. I knew I had PVC glue at home, so paid for the fitting and headed back.
Grabbed the cans of PVC primer and glue from the basement. Opened up the primer and primed both pieces. Opened up the glue. It had solidified into jelly. Read the instructions on the back of the can. “Do not use if glue has hardened.” Deep, frustrated sigh.
Lowe’s Trip #4: PVC Glue
I know exactly where it is after perusing the PVC aisle less than twenty minutes previous. Head back home.
Glued up the fitting to the drain pipe. Let it sit for twenty minutes to harden up. Hooked up the drain hose. Carefully slid the dishwasher back into its slot. Confirmed that the hoses weren’t kinked. Nervously checked for drips under the water line fitting a couple more times. Still seemed ok.
PVC glue said to wait two hours before putting any pressure on the joint. Two hours later was getting close to bedtime, so we put the unit on the quick cycle to try it out. Had a minor heart attack when the display turned off every time we shut the dishwasher door. Found the full manual online and discovered that was by design. Let it run. 60 minutes later: clean dishes.
Here’s hoping I don’t have to repeat that task any time soon.
Billionaire Hoarders and “Charity”
I re-posted a meme to Facebook the other day which suggested that billionaires are “hoarders”, likening them to a “human dragon sleeping on their piles of rubies and gold”. Someone popped up to dispute this characterization, making the following assertions:
Now, there were other assertions and comments, but these two were enough to not pass my smell test. My immediate inclination was that (a) most billionaires aren’t particularly charitable, and (b) most of them have gotten that rich by running exploitive companies - either exploiting natural resources or human beings, or both.
Rather than just go with the smell test, though, I decided to do a first-level investigation and summarize what I found. To do this, I took the Top 10 off the current Forbes 400 list. These guys (and they’re all guys) are all household names, each worth $60B or more. (Yes, that’s billion with a B.) To put $60B in context, if you got $80,000 per day, every day, since Jesus was born, neglecting any inflation or earnings on that money, you would just have gotten to $60B this year. That’s a staggering amount of money.
For each one of these guys I am summarizing their current net worth, reported charitable giving, and how they made their fortune. Spoiler alert: it’s not a pretty picture. Let’s go.
#1: Elon Musk
2022 net worth: $167.6B
Charitable giving: in 2022 he donated $160M, the most ever! Fortune also reports he gave $5.7B to a foundation, but it’s under his control and hasn’t actually been disbursed anywhere yet. That $160M is less than 0.01% of his net worth. Even the $5.7B is only 3% of his net worth… seems unimpressive.
How he made his money: mostly from Tesla. How much his own work and skills contributed to the company’s growth is up for debate, but Tesla and Musk have been sued for running a toxic, discriminatory, abusive workplace on multiple occasions.
#2: Jeff Bezos
2022 net worth: $120B
Bezos has in theory pledged to give his money away, but reports say it’s unclear whether he is actually doing that. The biggest documented donation I saw reported was $100M to Dolly Parton’s foundation. Which, to be fair, is a noble cause, but $100M is only 0.08% of Bezos’ net worth.
How he made his money: Amazon, of course. You don’t have to search far to find multitudes of reports of Amazon’s abusive practices to their employees. Maybe not such a good guy, either.
#3: Bill Gates
2022 net worth: $106B
Credit where credit is due: Gates has already given more than $50B of his fortune to the Gates Foundation, and that Foundation is doing significant work around the world in important causes. Bravo, sir.
How he made his money: Microsoft. As in, he wrote the original MS-DOS, and just managed to hit the wave of computers in an unprecedented and unrepeatable way.
#4: Larry Ellison
2022 net worth: $101B
Ellison reportedly is struggling to figure out how to give his money away. So far his reported donations are all in the $100 - $200M range (0.1% - 0.2% of his net worth). (He apparently found it easier to spend $300M to buy an entire Hawaiian island.)
How he made his money: Oracle databases. And then a lot of big finance and investing.
#5: Warren Buffett
2022 net worth: $97B
Here’s the other bright light on this list. Lifetime Buffett has given away almost $50B, largely to the Gates Foundation. However, his wealth is growing “faster than he can give it away”.
How he made his money: investments. If there’s one guy on this list who meets the “a lot of hard work and wise investing” criteria that my interlocutor set out, Buffett is probably that guy.
#6: Larry Page
2022 net worth: $93B
It is reported that he has funded his foundation to $6B, but most of it is in donor-advised funds for later donation, and while the tax breaks have kicked in now, the money hasn’t actually gone to any good use yet. That same article is touting donations to actual charities in the $100k (yes, that’s a K) range, which is, oh, 0.0001% of his net worth. Color me unimpressed.
How did he make his money: he co-founded a little company called Google. So some of that I’m willing to attribute to just hitting the right tech at the right time, similar to Gates and Ellison. But Google’s money-making methods continue to get nastier every time you look - the incessant ads, the deep user tracking, the toxic YouTube algorithms that are happy to feed you fascist content if it’s what keeps you watching… not particularly honorable.
#7: Sergey Brin
2022 net worth: $89B
Brin has given maybe $1B over the past 10 years to his own foundation (which is beneficial for tax purposes), and of that billion, the biggest chunk, almost $200M has gone to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s research. A noble cause, yes… but only donating 1% of his net worth over the past 10 years? Peanuts.
How he made his money: He’s the other half of Google. (See #6.)
#8: Steve Ballmer
Net worth: $83B
Ballmer’s foundation breathlessly announced a $217M donation in 2022, which is to say they are going to offer grants on the topic of climate change. That appears to be the biggest chunk Steve has donated anywhere. That’s 0.25% of his net worth, which I guess is a little more than Sergey Brin gave to the Fox Foundation, but still… it ain’t much.
How he made his money: Ballmer was in early following Bill Gates into Microsoft. If only he were so quick to follow in Gates’ footsteps when it comes to giving his money away.
#9: Michael Bloomberg
2022 net worth: $78B
Bloomberg also deserves some credit here. He has donated as much as $14.4 B lifetime (18% of his current net worth) to his personal foundation, and that foundation has actually dispersed significant funds, including $1.7B in 2022. He has also given nearly $3B in donations to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University.
How he made his money: he started in investing, and then jumped on the integration of computers and investing in the early 1980s. He branched out into other areas of financial market reporting, but then has also taken detours into politics, serving as the mayor of New York City from 2002 - 2013.
#10: Jim Walton
2022 net worth: $58B
In 2019 Walton made his first significant donation to charity - $1.2B to (naturally) the Walton Family Foundation. That Foundation has done some good stuff in Arkansas, so credit where credit is due there. But $1.2B on a net worth of $58B is still only 2% as a donation, which feels paltry.
How he made his money: he inherited it. (As did his siblings, who are #12 and #15 on the Forbes 400 list.) And how does Walmart continue to turn profits? Well, among other things, by mistreating their employees. Wages below the poverty level. Poor working conditions. Unlawful termination. Union busting. Maybe $1B for art and education in Arkansas can assuage your conscience? Jim can only hope so.
Let’s sum up
So, the Top 10. “Quite philanthropic”. “Work very hard” and made admirable business decisions. Really?
“Quite philanthropic” - I think we can safely put that label on Gates, Buffett, and Bloomberg. Many of the others have made pledges that their money will be given away before or at their death, but that isn’t doing anybody any good now. So, 3 out of 10. Not great, Bob!
“Work very hard and made wise business decisions” - I mean, at some level if you want to lionize people playing the capitalism game to come out ahead, by definition these guys have all done that. But if you want to put some sort of moral filter on it, asking whether their gains are well-gotten or not, I think we could safely chalk up Musk, Bezos, Page, Brin, and Walton in the exploitive category. I can’t say I’m very impressed with Ballmer, either, but Microsoft isn’t ugly and predatory in quite the same way that Walmart, Amazon, and Google are.
You do you, Facebook friend, but to my eyes, it’s not a stretch to see these guys as dragons sleeping on piles of gold and gems while 10% of the world lives in extreme poverty.
A little more back-of-the-envelope math
Just for fun, let’s imagine the top income tax bracket from the 1950s (by all accounts, a wonderful time that a lot of people want to go back to) was in place for these guys. That bracket was 91%. And let’s just do the math on their current net worth. All up the wealth of the Top 10 here and it comes out to $994B. Take that times 91% and you come up with $904.5B which would be in the US Treasury. Now, we can quibble about how wisely the US Government spends its money… that’s for another time. But the US budget deficit last year was $1.4T. So, a tax on just the top 10 wealthiest men in the country would take care of more than two-thirds of the deficit. Yes, that’s just for one year. Adjustments still need to be made. But the wealth of these privileged few, even in the scope of the national economy, is, to quote a famous cartoon moose, “antihistamine money”: not to be sneezed at.
Why I'm ditching my Android and getting an iPhone
19 months ago I purchased my first smartphone - well, two of them, one for me and one for my wife. At the time, I already owned two iPod Touches and liked them a lot. However, the service package cost on a carrier that had an iPhone (Verizon or AT&T at the time) was significantly higher than what I could get on US Cellular. So, with boundless optimism in my heart, I marched into the US Cellular store and bought a Samsung Mesmerize (aka Samsung Galaxy S). I paid $199 for each phone, along with a 2-year contract.
19 months later I am counting down the days until my contract is up and I can switch to an iPhone. I was amused the other day when US Cellular’s twitter folks pinged me on the topic. It’s clear at least that the US Cellular party line is “the new Android phones are awesome, forget about that iPhone thing”. And gotta love their optimism: “don’t let your experience with the Mesmerize scare you off”. Really? Why not? I spent a bunch of money 19 months ago to buy your top-of-the-line phone, and it’s turned out to be craptastic at best. Why should I not be scared off?
So, in the spirit of a Shawn Blanc or John Siracusa review, here are the reasons I’m dropping my Android phone like a hot potato and moving to the iPhone.
Hardware
Let’s start from the ground floor and work our way up. I’ve actually had less frustrations with the hardware than with the other parts of the device. The build quality is decent, even with a plastic back the phone feels like it’s high quality (though not up to Apple standards). The camera is middling at best, but sufficient.
My main beef with the hardware, though, is a nasty design flaw that causes the Back button to trigger in low-signal situations. So when I’m in a building where the cell signal is low, all of a sudden my phone goes crazy. I can’t keep an app open for long, because some sort of internal interference is triggering the back key. It’s apparently a known problem with the Galaxy S, but completely unacceptable as far as I’m concerned. The phone needs to just work, and in low signal conditions, it doesn’t.
Operating System
I don’t have too many beefs with the Android OS by itself - in fact, if I got a new device with ICS or Jelly Bean on it, I’d probably like it a lot. But because the OS is customized for each device and for each carrier, it takes forever to get a new version of the OS for my phone once it’s released, and then US Cellular started dropping support.
When I bought the phone in December 2010 it was running Android OS 2.2 (aka Froyo). 2.3 (Gingerbread) came out in December 2010 but wasn’t available for my phone until April 2011. Come on, folks, Honeycomb (3.0) was already out by then. And that’s the last update that US Cellular is supporting on the Galaxy S. No Honeycomb. No Ice Cream Sandwich. Certainly no Jelly Bean. So my operating system has been at least one version behind Android’s releases the entire time I’ve owned it, and is now three versions behind.
(Android’s full version history on Wikipedia.)
By comparison, if I’d bought the current iPhone at the time (the iPhone 4, or, heck, even the lower-tier iPhone 3GS), I would’ve had immediate download/upgrade of each new iOS release when it happened, including the upcoming iOS 6. Given that the big stability and feature advances come in the operating systems, always being behind is just unacceptable.
Now yeah, there are custom ROMs. I tried a bunch of them. Their stability was always tenuous at best, and complete crap at worst. In the end, I went back to using the stock US Cellular-provided ROM, though I did then root it. More about that later.
Ecosystem
I have two main gripes with the Android ecosystem - media management and backup. I’ll address both.
Media Management is an issue because it’s a pain in the rear to get music and photos on and off the phone. Sure, there are a few programs designed to help automate that, but they’re mostly a pain in the rear and don’t work well. Now, iTunes is still a flaming pile of poo when it comes to managing content on devices, but it’s still a far cry better than anything that works decently with Android.
And don’t even get me started about backups. The only way to fully backup the Android phone, apps, settings, texts, etc, is to root the phone and then buy a third-party backup program. And rooting the phone automatically voids your warranty. Let me say that again so it’s clear. The only way to fully backup your phone is to first void the warranty. Does that seem insane to anyone else but me?
US Cellular actually realized how much of a nightmare this situation is, or at least would be for them if angry customers suddenly realized their phones had crashed and they’d lost all of their contacts. So, they wrote some craptastic software “My Contacts Backup” that gets bundled with your phone and will backup your contacts to some unknown server somewhere. If you run it. Manually.
Applications
Application support for the Android has actually improved as time has gone on - more and more of the apps I liked on the iPhone have migrated over to Android, albeit in editions that were typically uglier, missing features, and running more unreliably than their iOS counterparts. I’m getting to the point now, though, where new apps that come out won’t run on the phone because I need a newer version of the OS. After only 19 months, my device is going obsolete. Grrrr.
System Stability
I don’t know whether to blame this one on the hardware, the OS, the applications, or some combination of all three, but for most of the time I’ve had it, my phone has locked up to where I had to do the three-button reboot at least once per day. Yep, once per day.
And it never locks up at a good time. Because either it locks up while it’s in my pocket, with the backlight on full brightness, and it sits in my pocket for who knows how long w/o receiving calls or texts, and running down the battery, or it locks up right when I’m trying to open an app, or take a call, or send a text - i.e. when I need to use it.
Earlier this spring it locked up unbeknownst to me while my wife had taken my daughter to the emergency room. I took it out of my pocket and realized it’d been locked up solid for 20 minutes (the clock display stops updating, so it’s easy to tell how long it’s been frozen). If my wife had needed to get ahold of me in that time, she wouldn’t have been able to, and I would’ve never known until it was too late. Unacceptable.
Earlier this week I was out shopping when my wife texted me to pick up something else at the store. I tried to send her a return text, and it appeared that it wouldn’t send the text. So I tried going into and out of airplane mode, to see if that’d reset the radio and send the text. No such luck. Then I tried gracefully rebooting the phone to see if that’d fix it. Still no dice. Then I crash rebooted it. Finally it did send the text. Actually, it sent my first text about half a dozen times. I finally gave up and just called her.
Oh, but that crash reboot - it completely hosed up my alarm clock app. I tried just deleting the data and cache for the app, but that didn’t fix it. Finally I had to uninstall the app, reboot, clear my phone’s cache, then reinstall the app to finally get it working. And then set up all my alarm settings again.
So what does it do well?
I’ll tell you what this phone does well: if I just want to use it as the Android equivalent of a 3G-enabled iPod Touch, I’m OK with it. I can check Twitter, run my weather and news apps, keep a calendar and some contacts on it, do some Facebook and a little Instagram, and it works tolerably. Especially on wifi.
It’s only when you get to these edge cases like, oh, I don’t know, making a phone call that it seems to totally go to crap.
So, I’m gonna switch.
Now, if the nice customer service person from US Cellular wants to explain to me again why I shouldn’t let this experience “scare me off”, I’d be entertained to hear about it. I’ll kinda hate to leave US Cellular - their customer service has been pretty good and their package prices are reasonable - but at this point I’m much more interested in having a device that works, even if it means I have to pay a little more for it. If my experience with my other Apple devices (two iTouches, an iPad, a Mac Mini, and an iMac) are any indication, and if my family and friends' reports are to be trusted, I’ll be much happier with the iPhone.
A Rant about a Church Sign
There is a Baptist church in our town that I drive by on my way to church at least a couple of times a week. For the past couple of weeks they’ve had a message up on their sign that has irritated me to no end. Now, sayings on church signs have a way of being trite and cutesy, but this one has surpassed that and gone on to outright misguided ridiculousness.
First, the quote from the sign:
“Don’t make me come down there!” – God
Here begins the rant.
I’m trying to think of ways this could be interpreted, and no matter how you do it, they’re all bad. Some things it could be construed to be saying:
I assume somebody at that church saw the message on the internet somewhere, thought it was clever, and put it up without even thinking any further about it. It pains me that the message has been there for weeks now and apparently no one at the church has discernment enough to recognize the gross error and get it taken down.
A message to church sign designers everywhere: if you’re going to put a weekly message on your sign, keep it informational, or, at worst, cutesy. This sign is a big steaming pile of pseudo-cleverness served with a nice heretical gravy on top. Make it go away.
Evaluating Restaurant Catch-Phrases
We took the family to Texas Roadhouse this week for my birthday, and I was quickly annoyed by the overblown descriptions that the restaurant apparently requires their servers to use when describing the food. After the third time our waitress asked what we’d like for a “hand-made side”, I was tempted to ask her if I could have a machine-made, out-of-a-box side instead. After hearing several other servers use the same line, though, I was glad I bit my tongue. It’s not their fault that their employer forces them to use silly scripts.
In the spirit of fairness, though, I wanted to provide my evaluation and accuracy rating on the four primary annoying phrases I heard throughout the night. Your mileage may vary.
1. “Fresh-baked rolls”
OK, this one is really hard to argue with. The rolls really are fresh-baked there in the restaurant. At busy times we’ve occasionally had to wait for a fresh batch to come out of the oven. And they’re yummy. So while it gets annoying to hear “fresh-baked rolls” multiple times a night when just “rolls” would do, I can’t ding them on the correctness of their description.
Accuracy Rating: Four Stars.
2. “Hand-made sides”
They’ve given themselves some wiggle room on this one, because you can define “hand-made” pretty loosely. Take the prepared lettuce mix out of the plastic bag with your hand, sprinkle some pre-grated cheese and some out-of-a-box croutons on top and voila! a hand-made salad. And I’m guessing they didn’t hand-cut the potatoes to make my steak fries. I guess if they want to define “hand-made” that way, fine… but I’m not buying it. (Well, I did buy it. And eat it. But I’d balk at calling them hand-made… OH, YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN.)
Accuracy Rating: 2 stars.
3. “Ice-cold beer”
To be fair, I’ve never had a beer at Texas Roadhouse, so I don’t have first-hand knowledge of the beer temperature. However, I consulted RateBeer.com’s helpful article about the correct temperature at which to serve beer, and they gave this advice:
Very cold (0-4C/32-39F): Any beer you don’t actually want to taste.
Cold (4-7C/39-45F): Hefeweizen, Premium Lager, Pilsner…
Cool (8-12C/45-54F): American Pale Ale, Amber Ale…
Per those standards, if Texas Roadhouse beer is actually ice-cold, apparently it’s a beer that you don’t want to taste. Eesh. So, either their descriptive phrase is highly inaccurate or their beer is rubbish.
Accuracy Rating: 1 star.
4. “Legendary margaritas”
Dictionary.com defines legend as “a nonhistorical or unverifiable story handed down by tradition from earlier times and popularly accepted as historical.” So, if Texas Roadhouse’s margaritas' quality is “legendary”, apparently the message is that the quality of said margaritas is either “nonhistorical” (i.e. untrue) or “unverifiable” (perhaps that means you can’t actually order one?). However, apparently people have passed down stories about them which have been accepted as fact.
The thing is, in my many visits to Texas Roadhouse, I cannot recall ever seeing anybody actually drink a margarita. Maybe this lines up with the idea that the quality of the margaritas is “unverifiable”? I primarily see margaritas consumed at the local Mexican restaurant, but at Texas Roadhouse if people are drinking alcohol they’re usually drinking beer.
Accuracy rating: 3 stars, primarily because I’m starting to buy into that “unverifiable” bit of legendary.
A Good Customer Service story featuring U. S. Cellular
I’ve used this space in the past to gripe about bad service, so when truly good service comes my way, it seems prudent to write it up here, too.
The week before Christmas (December 20, to be precise) my wife and I took advantage of our long-expired Verizon contract and a sweet deal from US Cellular (‘USC’ hereafter) and made the switch to become USC customers. I took a long lunch on a snowy Monday afternoon and we headed over to the location nearest our house to get hooked up. US Cellular was offering “any phone free after rebate” and service credits for switching lines from a competitor over to USC.
We had our eye on the Samsung Mesmerize (the USC version of the Galaxy S), but when we made it in to the store, they were already sold out. They called around and told us that there were a few left at the store across town, but the wait time there was almost 2 hours. Besides, the saleswoman told us, the HTC Desire is also a good phone, and you have a 30-day window where if you’re not happy, you can switch, and you just have to pay the difference in price between the phones. This seemed reasonable to me. The Desire was normally $230, the Mesmerize, $280, so if I didn’t like the Desire, I wait until they come back in stock, pay the $50 upper, and still get the phone I want. Sold.
Three weeks later we were less than happy with the Desires. (That’s fodder for another blog post, I suppose.) So, once USC got the Mesmerizes back in stock, I went down to the store and asked about the upgrade. Sure, they’d be happy to help me switch. I only had to pay the difference in price. Then the saleswoman (a different one from when we bought the phones in the first place) told me that the difference I’d have to pay was $200.
I was stunned. $200? How did they arrive on that number? Well, she told me, you paid $80 for the Desire originally. Now, the current price on the Mesmerize is $280. So, you have to pay the difference between the two, which is $200. I told her that it hadn’t been represented to me that way, but she just gave me a fake-sympathy smile face and said sorry, but it’d be $200.
I suppose I should’ve stopped to ask for a manager right there and then, but I’m lousy with that sort of confrontation. So, I paid the $200, got the new phone, and went home to consider my strategy. (Step 1: figure out how to keep my wife from killing me for paying $200 for a new phone.) Shortly thereafter, made my first complaint via Twitter.
Switched my phone from the Desire to the Mesmerize. Love the phone, very unhappy with @uscellular. Emailing customer service now.
Shortly thereafter I did a quick check and realized that US Cellular somehow doesn’t have an official Twitter account. They’ve done the Facebook thing (badly, IMO), but they have no official customer service representation on Twitter.
Hmmm, looks like USCellular doesn’t do Twitter. Guess I’ll have to complain through other social channels.
So, I went off to the uscellular.com website. I wrote up a few paragraphs to explain that I was an unhappy new US Cellular customer, concisely describe the issue, and explain what I thought a fair resolution would be. I’ll publish the thing here in its entirety. Feel free to skip it.
Dear sirs, My name is Chris Hubbs, and I am a new US Cellular customer. My cell phone number is XXX-XXX-XXXX. My wife and I switched two lines of service from Verizon on December 20, 2010, and added a data plan for both lines.
At the time of purchasing the phones, the Samsung Mesmerize (the phone we wanted to buy) was out of stock at the Cedar Rapids River Run store. Our sales associate called around to the other Cedar Rapids stores and let us know that there were just a few left in stock, and that the wait time at the other stores was almost 2 hours. She also assured us that we had a 30-day window to switch phones, and that we would simply need to “pay the difference in price” between the two phones. Since the posted price for the phones was $199 (with contract and data plan) for the Mesmerize and $149 (with contract and data plan) for the HTC Desire, we ended up going with two Desires, and concluded that the $50 per phone difference would be reasonable if we wanted to switch once the Mesmerize was back in stock.
Today when I went back to the River Run location to switch my line to the Mesmerize, I was told that rather than the $50 difference between the two phones, I was required to pay $200 to switch - the difference between the $80 promotional price I paid on December 20 and the full price of the Mesmerize. This was, to say the least, a shock. This was clearly not the “difference in price” between the two phones. The difference in the posted price between the Mesmerize and the Desire continues to be $50. While I went ahead and paid to get the phone today, I firmly believe that the upgrade price should have been only $50, not $200.
At $200 to upgrade, my wife, who was quite looking forward to switching to the Mesmerize, will not be able to afford the upgrade of her phone, and we are both left quite disappointed with US Cellular while not even into our first month of service. To set things right with our account, I am asking that you credit my account $150 (the difference between the $200 I paid and the $50 I should have paid) and then allow my wife to switch to the Mesmerize for that same $50. Those actions would fulfill the understanding that we were given when we originally signed our contract, and would restore some confidence in US Cellular’s reputation.
Kind regards, Chris Hubbs
Not seeing a lot of other options, I sent the note off to USC via their online form, and sat, less than hopeful, for a response.
Within 30 minutes, I had an email from Sharif Renno, who is a US Ceullar store manager in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. He had no connection with my form submittal, but he had seen my complaint on Twitter, had followed my Twitter account back to my blog, found my email address, and contacted me directly to see if he could help. I sent him a copy of my complaint email and expressed my appreciation for his help. Then I headed off to play rec league basketball and missed a voice mail from him just a couple of hours later. He told me that he thought he had a solution worked out, but that he was working with a manager somewhere in Iowa, and that the other manager would contact me in the morning.
Kudos to to US Cellular manager @SharifRenno who saw my tweet and took the initiative to pass my contact info along to someone who can help.
That next morning I got a call from Matt Murray, who manages a USC store in Marshalltown, Iowa - still 90 minutes' drive from my house. Matt outlined a solution that would end up with me getting exactly what I asked for - the two Mesmerize upgrades for $50 each, per my original expectation. He apologized for the confusion and made it clear that he wanted to do whatever was necessary to ensure I was happy with US Cellular. The solution was easy enough; I would go to a local store and upgrade the other phone (paying the $200), then he would log in and credit my account to make it come out right.
One trip to a USC store, one email back to Matt, and 24 hours later, he had done just as he promised. My account had been credited, we had the phones we wanted, and our initial impression of US Cellular had gone from lousy to excellent. I asked both Matt and Sharif for their supervisors' contact info, and immediately sent glowing notes of commendation for each of them. I hope their supervisors pay attention. These are clearly guys who take customer service seriously.
So, chalk this one up as a win for social media. Not that US Cellular corporate handles it very well. (I finally got an email response back from my web form submittal about a week later: “It looks like this situation has already been handled…") It’s sad that they totally miss that social media path. Big kudos go to Sharif and others like him who take it upon themselves to keep an eye on Twitter for mentions of their company, and who then take the initiative to serve customers whether those customers live near them or not.
On the superiority of the Canadian national anthem
Watching the winter Olympics over the past two weeks, I caught at least a few of the medal ceremonies, including at least a couple (including the one after the amazing hockey game yesterday) where the Canadian anthem was played. Each time I was struck with the same thought, which I finally voiced on Twitter yesterday: that the Canadian national anthem is highly superior to ours. One friend expressed the same thought, but another quickly disagreed. So, let me offer a few thoughts in defense of my assertion.
Reasons that ‘O Canada’ is superior to ‘The Star-Spangled Banner'
Sadly, any attempt to change the US anthem at this point would only result in choosing something worse. “God Bless America” is too overtly theistic to get official sanction; “America the Beautiful” has many of the same issues as the current anthem (hard to sing, odd words). There are occasional odd choices proposed, too, similarly troublesome. For instance, Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land”: written by a communist sympathizer. And who wants to hear a folksy protest song played at the beginning of every sporting event and solemn political occasion?
Being a loyal American I will continue to honor my country by standing when the national anthem is played. But I will at the same time regret that our inferior anthem ensures that we will never have a scene like the one that played out in the Canadian hockey arena yesterday, with 18,000 victorious fans singing the anthem at the top of their lungs.
Sometimes knowing too much is a bad thing
Last night Becky and I sat down to watch the second episode ( titled “Rewind”) of the Fox show Human Target. The first episode was fun in a cheesy action-thriller sort of way, so we decided to give it a continued try.
Back in high school, I had some friends whose dad was a submarine officer in the US Navy. They said it was unbearable to watch The Hunt for Red October around him because he spent the whole moving groaning at the inaccuracies it portrayed in the submarine. After watching this episode of Human Target, I think I now know how he felt. As an avionics systems engineer, the details of this in-air plot just drove me batty. Allow me to elaborate.
First, the plane is going down for no apparent reason. Yes, there’s a fire down in the fuselage, but that shouldn’t cause complete loss of control.
Second, they’ve gotta put the fire out, and apparently there is more wind flow over the top of the aircraft than the bottom (???? Totally bogus) so the solution is to fly upside down until the increased airflow puts the fire out. Are you kidding me?!? We’re not talking a fighter jet here, we’re talking a large airliner. While there is this rather famous video of Boeing test pilot Tex Johnston doing a barrel roll in a 707, look at how much altitude he loses just turning the thing over! There’s no way the airplane could stay airborne and upside down for long, much less the fifteen minutes or so that it does in this episode.
Third, while they’re flying along upside down, suddenly they can’t flip it back around to right-side-up because the on-board computer locked up. We’ll ignore the detail that they say the “flight management” computer locked up when, in reality, it’s the flight control computer that would help them fly the plane. Once the pilot diagnoses that it’s locked up, somebody asks if they can’t just reboot it. And of course the answer is no, they can’t. By this point I’m yelling at the tv screen. “OF COURSE YOU CAN REBOOT IT YOU IDIOTS! POP THE FREAKING BREAKER AND RESET IT AND YOU’LL REBOOT IN JUST A FEW SECONDS!!!” (Becky is not appreciating me too much at this point.) But apparently NONE OF THEM REALIZE THAT, since they then have to go on to…
Fourth, the amazing computer hacker on board decides she can somehow download the flight management software onto her laptop, patch the laptop into the aircraft system, and use it to control the plane. About the only thing that whole sequence gets right is that there are ethernet-based networks on modern aircraft. But it would be next thing to impossible to hack into the system to download the software, and COMPLETELY IMPOSSIBLE to then patch that laptop into the system. And why was she able to download the software right there in the (upside-down) cabin, but to patch it into the aircraft system, they had to go down to the avionics bay?
Fifth, once they got down to the amazingly-spacious avionics bay, they apparently were able to just unplug a standard RJ45 ethernet jack (and normal-looking ethernet cable) from the aircraft wiring and plug it into the laptop, and SHAZAM! it worked! What they ignore is that standard ethernet wiring and a plastic RJ45 jack would never pass aircraft environmental and vibration testing. All ethernet connections in an avionics system are routed through stout metal screw-on connectors, not secured with wimpy plastic clips.
Well, it’s the world of TV, which means that yes, everything worked out fine inside of an hour, the bad guys were caught, the good guys survived to fight another day, and the hero got in his wisecracks just before the credits rolled. (Oh, and fun side-note: two episodes of Human Target, two appearances by actors who had major roles in Battlestar Galactica. For whatever that’s worth in your geek scoring system.) Next time, I hope they just stay off the airplanes so I don’t have to deal with knowing too much about reality for my hour of entertainment.
It's the SNOWPOCALYPSE!
Cower in your homes, everyone - IT’S THE SNOWPOCALYPSE!
Vicious white stuff will attack from the sky. Invisible freezing pneumatic forces will sweep across the land, infiltrating your homes through drafty windows and driving the white stuff into tall barriers that will prevent any and all vehicular conveyance!
Keep your children indoors, stockpile supplies, stay tuned to this channel for further updates! There is no escaping THE SNOWPOCALYPSE. Only the well-prepared will survive.
Taking Worship Seriously
OK, so it’s entirely possible that at the ripe age of 32 I’ve just become an old curmudgeon, but in the past few weeks I’ve had a couple of experiences at church that cause me to wonder just how seriously we take this thing we call Sunday morning worship.
Now, I’ll put some caveats at the front. Yes, I’m going to be talking about Stonebridge. Yes, I expect that there are people from Stonebridge who will read this. Yes, I’m going to ask some questions that will sound critical. So up front let me say this isn’t about any one person, or any one service, or any one topic, but rather it’s about the things I’ve seen, and about the mindset I think it reveals.
Experience #1: two weeks ago we ended the service with a great sermon from James, and started it with a good set of worship songs that were full of the Gospel - solid stuff. But the worship team had barely time to get off the stage, and the music had barely faded, before we were treated to one of the church staff dressed up in a superhero costume - complete with mask and cape and theme music! - to give us an announcement about an upcoming event. Hope you didn’t want time to reflect on what you’d just sung about. You weren’t going to get it.
Experience #2: this morning at church was “Family Sunday”, which means that there was no Sunday School for the kids - the whole family got to sit in church together. Then, after three worship songs, the children’s pastor was tasked with giving the message. First came a pseudo-introduction with a scripted “interruption” to give an announcement about a women’s event. Then came the actual sermon from James, and it felt more like a gimmick than a sermon. There was a very distracting, ever-louder ticking clock in the background (for effect!) and at the end of three short points, during what seemed like a conclusion, the ticking finally stopped, and the pastor cut off the sermon mid-sentence and walked off the stage. And just like that, we were done.
Now yes, I know this morning was an attempt to be dramatic and illustrate the sermon point. But I’m afraid that what people are left remembering this afternoon isn’t the point from James 4, but rather the awkward way everyone sat and looked at each other as the pastor walked off, as my daughter asked “is church over?”. She was confused, too. And yes, Laura, church was over. We ended up spending more time driving to and from church than we did actually in the service this morning.
I fear that experiences like these reveal that we don’t value enough the experience of Sunday worship. Yes, we show value to the Gospel in the songs we sing - but we don’t value them enough to give folks time to meditate on the great riches of God’s grace after singing. Instead, we distract them with superheroes in tights. Yes, we value and encourage the Sunday morning gathering, but then we allow gimmickry to replace Gospel proclamation, and send people home early, wondering “what was that?”.
I remarked to my wife on the way home that, on a spectrum with stodgy and boring but solid on one end, and flashy, cool, and vapid on the other, our current church home is one or two ticks further toward the flashy end than I’m quite comfortable with. Don’t get me wrong - I have great respect for a lot of people there, and have regularly heard the Gospel from the pulpit. But times like these past few weeks leave me wondering if our lip service to the Gospel isn’t quite being backed up with the sort of Sunday morning gravity that it deserves.
A Rant on Amazon's Super Saver Shipping
Mostly to save my Tweeps from a half-dozen tweets venting my frustration.
I ordered a HDHomeRun networked tuner and a chunk of ethernet cable from Amazon on Friday morning, June 12. The tuner was ordered from Amazon proper; the cable from whichever of their providers had it the cheapest. I opted for Amazon’s super-saver free shipping, both to save the $6 and because I didn’t have enough $$$ on the gift card I was using to pay for shipping.
Additionally, I ordered a RAM upgrade for my Mac Mini from newegg.com on Tuesday evening, June 16. It came with free shipping.
Now, as to arrival times.
The network cable shipped the same day I ordered it, and arrived in the mail on the 16th. Snappy response, well done to the Amazon retailer.
The RAM shipped from Newegg on Wednesday June 17th, and arrived this morning via USPS. 5 days, including the weekend. Not bad.
Amazon finally got around to announcing that my tuner had shipped on the evening of Tuesday the 16th. So it took them three full business days to even get around to shipping it. And the USPS tracking number they gave me says that yes, they entered the tracking number into the system on the evening of the 16th. However, the arrival scan for the package doesn’t show up until the afternoon of June 19th. So between the time they boxed it up and the time they actually got it to USPS was another three business days.
Now they’re telling me that the anticipated delivery date to my home in Iowa (from, per the tracking info, someplace in Kentucky) is not until Thursday, June 25th - a full two weeks after I ordered it, and a full nine days after they told me it shipped. I know the USPS isn’t the fastest carrier, but hey, that’s just awful.
I have had better shipping service from Amazon in the past - maybe this is just a fluke. Or maybe it’s part of a strategy to dissuade customers from actually choosing their free shipping option. Either way, it’s pretty awful.
End rant. Carry on.
Rainsoft of NE Iowa: A follow-up
A few weeks ago I wrote about a bad experience we had with an in-home sales call from Rainsoft of NE Iowa. I wrote the rant, emailed it to every Rainsoft of NE Iowa email address I could find, and that was that. Both of the email addresses I found for Rainsoft of NE Iowa bounced, and Rainsoft corporate doesn’t list an email address on their website, so I figured that was the end of it.
Then last week I got a phone call from Terry Bonik, who owns Rainsoft of NE IA. He had been notified of my blog post earlier that day, apparently by someone from Rainsoft corporate. In summary, he expressed these details:
As I told Mr. Bonik on the phone, I rarely complain like this, and when I do, I even more rarely expect a response. I was quite pleased to get a response from him and was happy that he included some literature about the Rainsoft products. I don’t know how soon we’ll be in the market for a water treatment system, but I will add Rainsoft back to my list of firms to consider.
Now… I wonder if it’d be too forward to see if Chris Hubbs Design could be of any help for his web-hosting issues? :-)
Why I dislike salespeople - or at least their tactics
Last week while shopping at Home Depot, a nice lady struck up a conversation with us, and proceeded to ask if we’d ever had our water tested before. Would we be interested? It’d take about an hour, and Home Depot would give us a $20 gift card for our trouble.
Oh sure, we figured, we’d not had our home water tested before. And yeah, we expected a sales pitch about some water treatment system, but whatever. And we can always use a $20 Home Depot card.
The night before our scheduled appointment we got a phone call from a call center confirming our appointment, making sure multiple times over that yes, both Becky and I were going to be home at that time, and then asking a series of questions that really didn’t have anything to do with our home water solution. Becky answered as few as she could and then hung up the phone. We ended up having to call back to reschedule, and we ended up on the calendar then for 4 pm Monday.
At five minutes until 4 the lady we had met at Home Depot knocked on our door with her three briefcases of equipment. Guess we tried to cut it too close by giving the girls a bath, but hey, who ever shows up early for an appointment? So, we rushed the girls out of the tub and set them up with an hour-long TV show.
We sat down at the kitchen table and she told us briefly about her company, RainSoft. Then came the water testing. The kitchen sink didn’t quite work to hook up her little mini-water-treater, so we all huddled in the bathroom as she ran a battery of tests. I knew she was getting verbose, but next thing I knew we were still running tests and it was 5:30. That’s right, 90 minutes, and we weren’t even close to getting the sales pitch. She did let us taste a bottle of their tasty drinking-water-treated water, though.
Finally the tests were nearing completion, so she set us down and worked us through her little notebook-driven pitch, warning of bad things like acid rain (didn’t that get debunked at least a decade ago?), chlorine (“many water systems have more than is safe for a swimming pool!” oh, guess what, we don’t have any in our water), and other nasty chemicals that can cause bad things. (Guess what: we don’t have those, either.) Her sources were as reliable as Women’s World magazine articles from the late 1980’s can be. Eventually we found out that our water is very hard (which we already knew), but otherwise safe.
So then it was time for the sales pitch. It was as bad as a TV infomercial. Guess what? They normally charge $300 for installation. But they’ll waive that today. Then the price of the unit is $4000. And, oh, by the way, you don’t really need the drinking water filter, so how about a home air filtration system instead? Normally it’s $2000, but how about today’s special deal: it’s only $1000! What a great deal! (I would’ve really liked the air filtration system about the time she walked in the door - she must’ve been smoking in her car all the way here. The dining room smelled of smoke for 30 minutes after she left!)
Then she “ran the numbers”. Here’s what a typical family spends on cleaning supplies. You won’t need to spend that much at all because of your soft water. Oh, and we’ll give you a long supply of soap so you won’t need to buy any at all. Here, Chris, you run the calculator. Are you with me on these numbers? They make sense, right? Here, so see? You can get our deal for only $99/month. You’ll actually be saving money! Don’t believe us? We have this free coupon program we’ll toss in free for 5 years, too! Just as a special gift!
It was nearly 7 pm when we had finally convinced her it didn’t matter how rosy her numbers were, we weren’t about to open up a $5000 line of credit to buy the thing tonight. She sullenly packed her bags and audaciously asked for the names and phone numbers of 5 homeowning friends who she might be able to contact. “As a favor to” her, she said. She’d get a gas voucher if we gave her names. We declined.
So, if you’re our salesman reading this, here are some helpful tips for how to make a sale to this cynical engineer next time:
Now, what have I learned? Maybe I should’ve just turned down the test in the first place. But really, is there some unspoken social contract that obliges me to purchase the product because I invited the salesperson into my home to make their pitch? I didn’t think so. In the future I’ll stick to doing my research on the internet and proactively contacting vendors when I want to make a purchase, thank you very much.
its wisdom, who can measure?
Work necessitates that tomorrow I travel from Cedar Rapids to Denver to attend three days of FAA training. On the face of it, that doesn’t sound too bad, travel-wise. CID -> DEN is only a two-hour flight, and one US airline, when not eternally funding the estate of George Gershwin with its advertising budget, provides three daily non-stop flights from our fair city to the Mile-High.
But wait! This is no ordinary travel planning. This is corporate travel! Per the guidelines of our corporate travel policy (its wisdom, who can measure?) I have been routed on a different airline from Cedar Rapids first to Dallas-Fort Worth, and only then to Denver. For those scoring along at home, that’s 850 miles and two hours south-by-southwest to DFW, a 90-minute layover, then another 800 miles and two hours northwest from DFW to DEN. Which is quite obviously far superior to the 700 miles and two hours directly west from CID to DEN. To ice the proverbial cake, the forecast for both CID and DEN tomorrow calls for nothing but sunshine. DFW? 80% probability of thunderstorms.
Two years ago when I attended this training travel was a mess and I ended up driving through downtown Atlanta at midnight searching for my hotel; last year DFW gave me delays heading to New Orleans and I was trying to avoid the bayou and find my hotel after even The Big Easy had fallen asleep. Even with this year’s circuitous routing I am scheduled to arrive in Denver before 7 pm MDT, so it will take some serious delays if I am to achieve the three-peat. Still, with travel plans like this, anything is possible.
Another Half a Foot
Rest easy, friends, I’m not growing some fractional appendage. But I am pretty much tired of winter. Whatever the steps are in dealing with issues, well, I’ve moved past frustration and anger on to acceptance. It’s just more snow. Half an inch of ice to start it off? Well sure, why not? We can use the variety. I am glad this year, though, for the snowblower.
Two weeks from now I will be jetting off for a week in Augusta, GA. I can hardly wait to feel the warmth. The highs for this upcoming week, per weather.com? 11°F, 14°F, 10°F, and 19°F. Windchills down below zero most of the week. Now, I know that this winter is likely a climatological statistical anomaly that has no bearing on the validity of “global warming”, but the cynical part of me would like to invite Al Gore to move to Iowa for a few winters like this one. Right about now I’d be happy to trade him and move down to Tennessee.
At least when it gets cold in Wisconsin they can call it “The Frozen Tundra”, and it sounds cool. Here in Iowa it’s just more snow and ice and cold. And in Wisconsin they specialize in cheese… which would go pretty well with this whine.
Should this really be our fight?
“Clergy fight same sex marriage”. This headline stared out at me from this morning’s copy of the Cedar Rapids Gazette. The sub-heading (which was used as the title of the online version of the story) gives more detail: “Iowa church leaders planning rally ‘defending marriage’”.
A coalition of church leaders today announced plans for an Oct. 28 prayer rally and other actions to defend traditional marriage in the face of a district judge’s ruling striking down a same-sex marriage ban – a development they warned could convert Iowa into the nation’s “Rainbow Vegas.”
“This is a call to arms,” said Dan Berry of Cornerstone Family Church. “The sleeping giant is being awakened.”
Later in the story, the Rev. Keith Ratliff of Maple Street Missionary Baptist Church in Des Moines said the “…campaign is not geared toward hate or fear of homosexuals, but rather seeks to preserve the longstanding, family-based and Bible-backed tradition of marriage as being a union between a man and a woman.”
The final, colorful quote in the story comes from Chuck Hurley of the Iowa Family Policy Center, who warns that if the same-sex marriage ban is permanently reversed, Iowa will be come “the Rainbow Vegas”.
We have gotten all too familiar with hearing pastors and Christian leaders like these over the past two decades. On a national level, radio hosts like Dr. Dobson, televangelists/presidential candidates such as Pat Robertson, and leaders of movements like the Moral Majority (the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, an OK guy in my book), and later on the Christian Coalition (Ralph Reed, who turned out to be a bit more crooked), urged their listeners or viewers to call their congressman, write their legislator, to stop this piece of legislation, encourage that one, or to decry a recent judicial ruling.
There is a place in the life of a Christian for speaking the truth to our community. In many cases that should and will include involvement in the political arena. At our church this past week we had a petition on the table in the foyer urging Iowa lawmakers to pass a state constitutional amendment in “defense of marriage”, and to urge them to support an amendment to the federal constitution as well. One of our elders, during announcement time in the service, asked folks to consider signing it. Many did. (I didn’t. I’m not so sure that we should change the constitution for something like this.) But I fear for the sake of the Gospel and our churches when what our pastors are known for are leading the “sleeping giant” into the political arena when those rascally judges finally go too far. (Why is the church “sleeping”, anyway? Maybe that’s problem numero uno.)
Particularly disgusting to me was the quote from Mr. Hurley of the Iowa Family Policy Center, pulling out the scare tactics to warn good little church people that their beloved, safe hometowns will become a “Rainbow Vegas”. “Ooh! Run away!!! Gay people!!! Be afraid!” I don’t know whether Hurley is a pastor or not, but the IFPC website is pretty plainly espousing Christianity, including on their site a Prayer Request page with a quote from John Bunyan. Mr. Hurley, I see plenty of prayer requests on that page for new donors, success in the courts and the legislature, and politically active people. But where’s the prayer request that these people who you fear so strongly would hear the good news of Jesus Christ and be freed from their bondage to sin? If we’re going to rouse the “sleeping giant” of the church, why are you only rousing them to join the political fight against your adversaries rather than rousing them to minister to and serve those same people?
Our primary command as believers in Jesus Christ is the Great Commission: to go into all the world and proclaim the gospel. We are not to huddle in a spirit of fear, desperately attempting to protect our little enclave against the evil world around us. Christ has already won the victory. It’s over. Instead, we need to go to “those people”, and love them. Serve them. Find out who they are. What makes them tick. Show them the love of Christ in action, so that when we find avenues to share it verbally, they will already understand. We are not to fear “them”, but rather to fear for them, knowing that we, too, were once hopelessly ensnared in sin. Our new righteousness is not our own; we dare not boast in it. Only in Christ.
Change comes from the inside. Pass all the laws you want, legislate your own specific understanding of perfect morality, but if you don’t change the hearts, laws aren’t gonna do any good. (See: The Prohibition.) However, if lives are changed by the power of God, pass or repeal all the laws you want; people living for Christ will make whatever country they live in the kind of country that you probably want it to be. I fear that the siren song of political power has been too attractive to the Church. Let’s stop being distracted by it, and focus instead on loving our neighbor.
Somebody's leaving tracts in the bathroom again...
This morning’s visit to the bathroom here at work revealed that someone has again been leaving tracts on top of the toilet paper holder in the men’s room stalls. Now, the efficacy of leaving tracts at random as opposed to other evangelistic techniques is a discussion for another blog post. But if you’re going to leave a tract in the men’s room, should your first choice really have a pink rose and the words “You’re Special” scripted on the front? *sigh*
Not again!
UPS dutifully delivered my second refurbished iPod this afternoon. The battery was pretty well dead, so I hooked it up to the wall charger for a few hours until it said it was all charged up. Then I hooked it up to the laptop, setup iTunes to sync 18 GB of music, and crossed my fingers. Would this one work?
No. iTunes claims that it’s synced about 350 songs, and then it gives a file write error and dies. I tried removing the song that it died on from the sync list and syncing again, still no joy. The iPod totally locks up, has to be reset, and doesn’t end up with more than the first 11 tracks of the first album on it. Now, I like Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, but I’m gonna need the iPod to hold more than that.
So I guess it’s back to Best Buy tomorrow for yet another return. I’m not good at being confrontational in the store - usually I figure that the person behind the counter doesn’t have much control over it, so why be hard on them? But this time I won’t wait long before asking to see a manager. I waited two weeks for this second refurb, and it turned out to be trash, too. I want a gift card. I know their policy says I need to get another lemon before I get a gift card, but I really don’t want to have to wait another two weeks just to find out whether the next one is any good.
Grrrrrrr.
The trip to Best Buy, or, why you should think when you design a computer system.
So, as planned, tonight I went to Best Buy to find out what was up with my iPod replacement. Long story short, I took my original one in for repair, they sent me a refurb which was also dead, so I took it back, and they were going to send me another one. Two weeks elapse. We pick up on the story tonight as I talk to a member of the “Geek Squad” at our local Cedar Rapids Best Buy.
I explain my story. I brought in the refurb for the second return 12 days ago. The guy wasn’t able to enter it into the system yet, but assured me the system would let him enter it by the end of the day, so 3 - 5 business days and I should get a new one. 8 business days later, I’m back. I talked to them last Friday on the phone and they said yeah, the service tag just closed, so expect the iPod in a couple of days. Three days later, still nada.
So the guy looks it up in the computer and finally says “I think they sent it here by mistake. Let me go look.” So he goes into the back room, and eventually comes out… with the refurb I returned 12 days ago. And then he goes to explain. Yeah, they couldn’t enter it into the system until the previous service ticket closed. And the previous service ticket didn’t close until June 8th. It ends up the way their return software is designed, the service ticket doesn’t close until the one I sent back in is repaired and returned to store stock. Absolutely ridiculous! So my returned iPod has just been sitting there on the shelf for the last 12 days, with nothing happening.
I can draw a couple conclusions from this: First, the guy who told me he could have the service ticket entered “by the end of the day” was lying to me. Certainly he knew how the system worked. He just wanted to get me out the door. Second, they have some very poorly designed software. You telling me they didn’t think about this case where a refurb is itself bad? Or did they think about it and dismiss it as an acceptable error? Either way is unacceptable.
So now I have a new service ticket in hand, and can expect another refurbished iPod to be delivered via UPS in 3 - 5 business days. If that one is bad and requires a return, I’ll be interested to hear how soon they tell me they can enter it into the system… I won’t be too accepting of another two-week wait just to get a return into the system again.
iPod Replacement: A for Effort, D for Results
My refurbished iPod showed up via UPS late yesterday afternoon. I have to give Best Buy full marks for sending a quick replacement; they said 3 - 5 business days, and it ended up being only two. They sent an iPod identical to the one I had before (20 GB 4G, white), though they had obviously cleaned this one up, buffed out the scratches, etc. It looked good.
So last night I hooked it up to the laptop to reload the 4100 songs that belong on my iPod. The first time I tried a sync I got a weird Windows delayed write error. Strange, I thought; maybe I just jiggled the cord at the wrong time or something. So I tried again. The second time, it managed to sync about 2 GB worth of music, then stopped syncing. When I disconnected it and tried to play the music from the iPod, uh oh. The iPod didn’t show any music on it at all. When I reconnected it to the PC, it gave me a nasty error and told me that I would need to re-download the iPod firmware and reset it.
At least running iPod firmware updates isn’t so tough these days; it did make me dig up my wall power charger, but I found that and completed the reset. Then I set it up to sync again. As I watched it gallantly attempt to copy the music, I started listning to the iPod - not to the music, but to the device itself, and discovered that the hard drive in it sounds sick. It’s clicking too much, spinning up and then quickly spinning down; I think I found the source of the problem. Again the sync died after 2 GB of transfer; this time it shows that the songs are there, but it locks up if I actually try to play any of them.
So after work this afternoon I will be heading back to BestBuy with my refurbished iPod (still in box) and my service plan paperwork (still conveniently accessible - hadn’t refiled it yet). I am sure they will have me send it in and get yet another refurbished one. I can only hope it goes better than this one did. I think I have to have three replacements die before they’ll actually just give me store credit. :-( I’d be happy enough just to have one that works.