theology&geometry

The bots have discovered sarcasm:

That is a super-peachy-keen post. Thanks for really blathering on like that! Seriously, I don’t think I could have spent more effort wishing for something heavy to fall on me to erase that nonsense from my mind!

Ouch, sort of!

Remember this bit of strategic foreshadowing? No? Well, that’s why Al Gore invented the hyperlink.

So my pal Ed and I sat down and had a little chat about the social web and what a sticky wicket it is, and we recorded that conversation for posterity and for a time capsule element I will one day beam into my children’s head pods’ humor modules. My one regret is that I was having such a mouth-stuffing love affair with my honey-slathered bagel that I didn’t make some of the points I should have. Good food gives me temporary amnesia, so what? But honestly, if you read this post, you get the gist of where I’m going with my thoughts anyway.

The point is that the social web has such amazing potential for connections that never before could have existed. But I am scared about where we are headed because companies looking to get in on a good thing are hell bent on fucking it all up. The image I keep getting in my head is of an over-eager chihuahua frantically humping a human leg. You are the leg, these companies seeking to infiltrate and control are the chihuahua. They want your attention, they want you to like them, they want your thumbs ups, they want you to opt into the game, but on the flipside, they want you to play by their rules and conduct yourself 24 hours a day as if you are a roaming ambassador for them. What you do is what the company is. Your living out loud on the web means you are subject to constant scrutiny and potential regulation by your employer. Doesn’t that scare you? It surely scares me, and I have a fairly boring life and a fairly lenient employer.

Anyway, listen to the conversation if that’s your bag, and then check back. I was Ed’s guinea pig, so I’m super excited to see where he takes his project once he starts sitting down with the really interesting people he knows.

I killed my Twitter account.

I wish I could say it felt good, that it felt like a burden had been lifted, but that’s not altogether true. I feel a bit like I threw my car keys into the ocean. But that’s silly, isn’t it? Mostly I don’t feel much of anything.

Do not fret. I’ll be around!

But my math might be off.

I like to imagine that somewhere out there in an underground art bunker in Kansas, a plucky collective of socially conscious guerilla artists is concocting outlandishly offensive and nonsensical and misspelled/English bastardizing pay-per-click ads and submitting them to popular websites to call attention to the ridiculous notions being pushed by the weight-loss/body shame industry. I like to imagine that they are inciting a quiet revolution during which the shame we feel when we catch sight of blinking, targeted LOSE 80 POUNDS IN THREE MINUTES WITH THIS SATANIC RITUAL ads will crumble into utter chaos and result in an uprising of stocky but hardy folk, who insist that beauty does not mean your head is too big for your body or looking like a large gust of wind could blow your brittle bones out to sea. I like to imagine.

If you’ve spent some time on Twitter, you’ve probably spent some time bitching on Twitter about some company that provides some service to you. And if you have spent some time doing that, you have probably spent some time reading super friendly replies to your bitchy tweets from CSRs who spend their time searching all of Twitter for mentions of their company. If memory serves, Comcast was really the first out of the gate on that front with @comcastcares. Which, given the unholy amount of bitching about Comcast that happens on Twitter (and elsewhere, presumably), seemed like a good, ahead-of-the-curve move on the company’s part.

And maybe it is, in some ways.

But this week, as I wrestled internally and then externally on Twitter with whether I should dump my AT&T service (land line and DSL) in favor of Comcast (wireless and potentially cable TV), it occurred to me that having a company’s CSR crawl Twitter and find your complaint and then offer to fix your problem — even after you have called the company directly to address that same issue — could be damaging to the company anyway. Because — and maybe this is just me — it fucking pisses me off that a company wouldn’t dig its heels into my problem when I asked them to do so. Why do I have to passive-aggressively bitch and moan about a thing on some social networking platform before someone at a company will pay attention to what I am saying and offer to fix it? Is it because said company is trying to do damage control and squelch potentially bad PR from going viral on the web? Because, as we all know, we internetty people get loud when we get irritated.

I have no doubt that both Comcast and AT&T agents will find their way to this post because of Google alerts or some such. And they might even take a moment to comment and assuage my fears or assure everyone reading that their intent is true and they really are trying to help people. And I hope they will read to this sentence where I say that I have no doubt that there is good intent in their efforts to meet customers’ complaints head-on in an arena whose popularity is growing. My beef is with the entire customer-service structure that would lead to so many people going online to air their issues with companies to begin with.

My specific issue is that when I moved into a new house and neighborhood, I asked AT&T to transfer all of my DSL/phone services as-is. (Quibble with my DSL choice if you must; I was trying to a) keep costs down b) compromise because I need a phone line for the alarm system and c) hold out for U-Verse to be rolled out here.) So I got to the house and realized I had a bunch of dead phone jacks that need repair work, meaning my only internet access is in the kitchen, which means that until the phone jacks are fixed (tomorrow, hopefully), my internetting is done standing up on my laptop in the kitchen with wires running EVERY WHICH WAY. But that’s not even the dealbreaker, since it’s a stop-gap measure. No no no. The dealbreaker is that when I moved, I traded my maxed-out Midtown connection speed (6.0mb/s) for a more quaint Middle East 3.0. Which, granted, isn’t horrible. But I do a lot of file transfers. With big files. And I like to have lots of tabs open so I can multitask so I don’t spend every fucking waking moment of my life trying to finish all the stuff I need to get done.

So 3.0 doesn’t cut it for me and my needs. But the man who set up my new service when I called to tell AT&T about the move never told me that my connection speed wasn’t transferable. (This is the same really sweet man who also tried to sell me a long-distance plan by telling me my cell phone was full of harmful radiation. My cell phone is powered by AT&T. Sigh.) So it wasn’t until I called AT&T to complain that I was told that 3.0 is the fastest I will ever be able to get from them. Which, had I known that from the get-go, would have caused me to completely rethink my connectivity options and NOT pay the connection fee and NOT base my alarm system on a landline and et cetera and so on and first-world dominoes hooey. All this amounts to me probably being out more money than I had originally planned. Which, whatever. It happens, I know.

I aired my frustrations on Twitter and got a very nice inquiry from one of AT&T’s roaming Twitter CSRs, who asked for my contact info and told me her DSL team was looking into my issue. Which is very nice, right?

Except it fucking pisses me off. Because I already spent more time than I care to recount on the phone with AT&T trying to hammer out why I wasn’t told what my connection options were and why I was still going to be charged for 6.0 when I was getting half that (I can’t wait to see my first bill). Why can some CSR on Twitter do more to help me than the person I called SPECIFICALLY TO TALK TO ABOUT MY ISSUE? I haven’t responded to the Twitter rep’s most recent request for my contact information because a) she seems really, really nice and I am far too bitchy to engage right now and b) because if she tells me that she CAN help me and I CAN get a faster connection, I am going to LOSE MY FUCKING MIND. Because I was already told that I couldn’t get anything better than what I have. And because I shouldn’t have to beg and moan and bitch and hem and haw to get good service from a company I pay good money to.

And if this rep tells me yep, sorry, you’re really out of luck, then what? She has wasted her time and gotten my hopes semi-up for nothing. I guess I’m supposed to feel grateful that she went out of her way to seek me out and help me, and in a way I do because awww they really do care, but at the same time? I want to be able to bitch in peace.

I broke my blog in a major way just now. I think I deleted a bunch of shit, including my WP install or something stupid like that. I was using Filezilla to do install a WordPress plugin that would have backed up my database and upgraded WP, when my pinkie — the most idiotic of all my fingers — hit the delete key and suddenly shit started moving and turning green and red and I kept seeing “delete delete delete” in the status window thingy and it took me a beat or twelve to realize what was happening. Well, not what was happening, but that SOME BAD SHIT WAS GOING DOWN. That’s when I hit the abort button and visited the blog and saw this screen and started crying like a little bitch. Thank God Sig knows what the hell is going on in the world. He didn’t even make fun of my dumb ass — too much — as he got me back up and running. HUGE SIGH OF RELIEF. AND he upgraded my WordPress to the current version, which I had been putting off for forevs. (It’s pretty slick.) I owe him a keg of beer. Every day. For the rest of his life.

You’ll notice that I’ve lost my lovely flocked background and my header. I can live with that for now. Those files are somewhere (my laptop maybe?). The important thing is that I didn’t lose SIX YEARS’ worth of posts. Which reminds me: It’s my six-year blogiversary! Sort of. My archives only go back to November of 2003, but I “blogged” using basic HTML on my previous (now dead) site starting in August or September of that year. I can never remember the exact date. What a wonderful way to celebrate by reminding myself that these pixels could all disappear at any given moment. I guess if those monks can be at peace with the destruction of their art, I need to get right with the impermanence of my own. (But mostly I need to learn to keep my files backed up like a moderately intelligent human being.)

See this photo? I titled it “neck veins” for obvious reasons.

Someone called “veinale” on Flickr favorited it tonight. I clicked through to veinale’s profile and found this (probably NSFW unless you work at a nipple clamp factory). (One of veinale’s contacts is nudedude840, whose photostream is full of women’s necks, stressed so the veins pop. Bokay.)

Anyhoo, many of veinale’s photos advertise a site called veinywoman.com. I’m not hyperlinking it because oh, for fuck’s sake, do I even have to explain myself on this one? Turns out veinywoman.com is in English and German. Those crazy Germans. Also those crazy English speakers. If you click through the scary warning screen, you’ll find “the internet’s home for the most beautiful women with strongly pronounced veins in the world.” And I can say with reasonable confidence that I have never seen a site with such a robust collection of thick-veined women. Maybe I’m sheltered and maybe I’m a little on the vanilla side, but I have never heard of a vein fetish. More power to vein fetishists, of course. Blah blah to each his own hooey. At first blush, many of the veiny women pictured seem extremely muscular, like bodybuilder types. But the flipside of that is that is that a lot of the women pictured seem extremely thin. Malnourished, even. Ooookay?

And oh hey, there are some who are clearly anorexic or possibly in very advanced stages of cancer. Like Kristine (warning: that is a disturbing photo). Jesus. Someone get that woman some help. Her fetish-modeling career can come after she’s gotten some fucking nourishment. I just don’t even know what to think.

Other than the requisite ickiness, of course.

Anyway, I hope Nick and JR don’t mind a pro-ana vein fetishist favoriting their photo.

I’ve been struggling with sour soul lately, so I did a little bit of unplugging, including from Twitter, and what happens? Last night I get a notification that my mother is now following me.

That flash you just saw? That was the illusion that I am not a foul-mouthed, drunken degenerate taking to the sky with pigs.

So, Internet, welcome my mother to Twitter. She has three followers right now: Me, my sister, and “Britney Fuck Vids,” whose avatar is a woman giving a BJ (N very SFW).

You stay classy, Internet.

Hi, Geoff? Just because you’re bad at Twitter doesn’t mean that Twitter itself sucks. Just saying.

Twitter is only bewildering and unmanageable and dumb if you can’t figure out how to apply your filter — either figuratively or literally using specific applications.

(An aside: How tedious to have to keep explaining this kind of thing to people as they throw their hands up and proclaim that the technology is beyond their grasp. Or — worse yet — too trifling to be worthy of their attention.)

Yeah, there’s crap on Twitter. Just like there’s crap on TV or in theaters or on the radio or in the newspaper. There’s crap everywhere. But people with big-boy and big-girl brains figure out how to get what they need from these media without collapsing into a crumpled ball of whine.

I can tell you that there have been at least a dozen times in the past few months that I have been at work when something has popped up in my Twitter feed that has led to either a story or a brief for the metro desk or a major heads-up for the people monitoring the wires for late-breaking news.

And that’s just the stuff that I catch. I’m sure I miss a ton, too. Which is why I think it’s important for reporters to use this new technology as part of their routine. It’s no different than monitoring a police scanner, which mostly dispatches crap. (Often hilarious crap, at that.)

So sure, pile on if you don’t get the potential of Twitter. It’s hip to hate Twitter, I get it. (It’s also kind of tired to hate on Twitter, isn’t it?) But for reporters and people who need to be as plugged in to the community as possible — especially now that there are less reporters covering a larger area than ever before — it’s criminally negligent to turn your nose up at a technology that can essentially bring community news to you in a split second. Just because you find some of it annoying.

Related reading. HT: Rebecca