the best laid plans

Your Feet

When I can not look at your face
I look at your feet.

Your feed of arched bone,
your hard little feet.

I know that they supoprt you,
and that your gentle weight
rises upon them.

Your waist and your breasts,
the doubled purple
of your nipples,
the sockets of your eyes
that have just flown away,
your wide fruit mouth,
your red tresses,
my little tower.

But I love your feet
only because they walked
upon the earth and upon
the wind and upon the waters,
until they found me.

Kelly made this. It’s pretty.

I have this theory that customer service representatives who work for a company that has a bad product are poised to treat everyone asking for help poorly.

A little backstory: my translink card used to work and now it doesn’t. Not only does it not read on any of the translink terminals on Bart, Muni, etc., it doesn’t scan when an attendant tries it, or even the sales lady at Walgreens. I’ve been told to do many things: purchase a new card, report this one stolen, send it in for testing, drive to the East Bay and get a replacement, the list continues. This morning I decided to call the number on the back of the card and see if I could get to the bottom of this Translink fiasco.

Ring… ring…

Translink curmudgeon (TC):  Hello, my name is Darrel, how can I help you?

Kathy: I’m trying to get a replacement for my card, it hasn’t been working for a few weeks.

TC: Well, how do you know it’s broken?

I explain to the man my translink card woes and the TC intrrupts me.

TC: You can take the card to Bart and try again.

Kathy: I’ve been doing that over the last 2 weeks… is there a way to get a new card to replace this one?

TC: Well, yeah… but it’s gonna cost you.

Kathy: How much?

TC: five dollars!

Kathy: Ok, how do I do that?

TC: You have to mail it to us, we’ll test it and if we decide that it’s actually broken, we’ll let you buy a new one.

(I’ll spare you the rest of the conversation.)

At this point, I’m a little floored. I have my five whole dollars in my hand and I’m ready to pay the man for another card, but he needs to verify that I’m telling him the truth. Ok.

So here I go: I’m sending my translink card complete with a dysfunctional card form that I downloaded, printed, and filled out from translink.com, into the void that is customer service, which is a P.O. box in Concord, CA.

Will I ever see my translink card again? I’m not holding my breath.

Done on my way back from a trip to Oahu.

The other day I was coding in AS3 and just couldn’t get things hooked up correctly! As frustrating as this always is, it’s such a sweet reward when I figure it out (although this doesn’t usually happen at work, I’ll solve the problem later in the evening when I’m at dinner, or going to bed). So, when I’m stuck, this is what I do to at least try and figure it out!



PS: I did finally figure it out, and all is back to normal in coder-land

For the past few days, my house has been living sans internet. We feel naked, we feel detached, we feel… strangely liberated! I believe there are emotional stages that a person goes through when they have no internet in the house. First you realize that your internet is out, you casually head downstairs to where your modem and router live, and start to fiddle. You fiddle for a while and think you know what you’re doing because you’ve declared yourself the household network technician. After the blinking lights stop blinking, you head back upstairs to reap the benefits of your genius whereupon you discover that the internet is still out. This dance goes on for about another 30-45 minutes; back to the modem, fiddle… fiddle… fiddle…, back up stairs, internet is still out.

The next stage is realization. This is where anxiety sets in and you begin to understand that there will be no email, no facebook, no twitter, no flickr, no hulu, no youtube, no net tonight! It’s like being stood up. You head back downstairs for a final fiddle… still no internet.

Stage three (final stage): exploration and acceptance. It’s only 8pm, not time for bed, dinner has long been over, it’s too dark to go outside, so you start to wander around the house looking for things to do. Read a book, take a bath, play a game with your roommates.

After a few days of going through the stages, the first two start to becoming less and less important. Since our internet at the house has been out, I’ve read two books, finished a few projects, my room is immaculately clean, and my laundry never piles up! I do still feel the need to check my email, and I know my roommates and I will have to resolve the cyber void, but for now I’m enjoying the imposed loss of connection… besides – I still have my cell phone!