This entry started as a post to a comment thread at a blog I enjoy called Things They Don't Tell You In Film School. I enjoyed writing the comment, although it's long and the blogger there may well not enjoy reading it. Since no one is reading this blog, and SuperGirlfriend is going to drive me to work today so I have plenty of time to fritter away this morning before I get dressed, I figured what the hell, might as well edit it somewhat and stick it up here.

See, in her latest entry, the woman over at TTDTYIFS was talking about dreams she had had recently, especially one in which her teeth steadily get looser and looser and then fall out.

Now, I've had the tooth-loosening dream, too, fairly often. As I understand it, it's a fairly common stress dream, and generally means no more than that we are currently stuck in some situation where we feel badly out of control and utterly at the mercy of generally malign and incomprehensible Powers That Be.

Similar common "powerless" nightmares are ones where you are staring into the mirror and gradually notice some kind of disfiguring mark on your face, which then becomes larger and more disfiguring as you watch in horror, helpless to do anything about it. Or those ones where people are chasing you around and they won't stop and you can't get away and it's all very existential and you don't know WHY they're chasing you but they clearly hate you and if they catch you it's going to be really bad.

Sometimes... not very often lately, but I used to do this a lot when I was younger... I become more self aware while immersed in a dream and can then affect it more directly, because I realize that I am dreaming and somehow this gives me some modicum of control over the goings on there.

It's always very unsatisfying. When this happens, I can then generally fly, but not very high or very fast, and it never really lets me escape from my pursuers, it just allows me to get a little further ahead of them for a brief period.

Other times, I can sort of turn invisible... which is to say, I can tell myself "I'm going to turn invisible". Then my pursuers will all run up to me and I say "No, I'm invisible, you can't see me" and instead of doing whatever horrible thing they are going to do to me, they will stop and argue with me about it. "I'm invisible!" I will insist. "You can't see me at all. In fact, you are sure you see me running off in that direction even as we speak. Quick! I'm getting away! Be off with you!" And they will stare at me as if I'm demented and say "Well, I don't know, you don't look very invisible to us..." But, if I'm insistent enough, they will sometimes humor me and leave me alone for a little while, running on lackadaisically in the direction I indicated that I ran off to, but their hearts clearly aren't in it and they generally look back at me doubtfully and, after one or two halfhearted attempts to comply with my clearly deranged directives, they visibly shrug it off, say to hell with it, and start chasing me around again.

And they're usually even more pissed than they were before, too.

I went on the worst date of my life once with this completely toxic psychobitch named Anne and over dinner at a much nicer restaurant than I could afford (she was a very good looking female comics and science fiction fan; how often do you meet one of THOSE?) she listened to me relate my dream experiences as above and then pronounced, in tones of irrefutable expertise, that I was a 'dream weaver' and clearly had vast untapped psychic powers.

Now, by the end of that date I never wanted to see Anne again regardless of how good looking she was, because she was a truly mindbogglingly annoying person, but I suspect if we'd had a second date, she'd have worked around to telling me she had a must read series of books for me that would let me harness my vast psychic powers for only $59.99. Or perhaps she was genuinely as batshit as she seemed. (I generally believe that she was just one of these dreadful people who has to seem like an absolute expert at everything and anything, and she just made that shit up on the spot so I'd think she was very wise.)

But whatever the case, my point here (see, I do have one) is that I really do believe the dream where we lose our teeth is a dream about powerlessness, because I am a dream weaver with vast untapped psychic powers (so don't mess with me, punk) and even though I can fly and kinda turn invisible in those horrible chase dreams, sometimes, I have never in my life managed to keep my teeth in my head in those goddam tooth-falling-out dreams.

I will say this; those are the dreams I am really grateful to wake up from. Well, those and the ones where I'm trapped back in high school or Basic Training (or some weird amalgam of both, where my old art teacher has a Smokey the Bear hat and an M16 while my drill sergeant is constantly giving me my book reports back with a big red F on them and demanding that I drop and give him 50).

And, of course, the ones where everyone in the world is a vampire but me. I really hate those.

Let’s face it, at some point in your life, whoever ‘you’ may be, you are going to have to call customer service. And, given that I have worked at three different call centers to date and seem doomed to retire from some call center or other at some nebulous point in the future, you may very well talk to me. But even if you don’t, my experience would seem to qualify me to offer you some advice as to how to maximize your customer service call center experience. So, a small list of tips on Just How To Get The Best Service When You Dial That 800 Number:

1. Try to speak in a heavy and all but incomprehensible accent. Working at a call center, regardless of who you are actually working there for, basically boils down to one thing: telling putative adults of all age ranges, cultures, religions, and general social strata over and over again, “I’m sorry sir/madam, but you are not the Monarch of the Universe just yet, and therefore, things do not work to your maximum convenience at this juncture. You will have to do the same things everyone else has to do and comply with the same restrictions and physical laws as the rest of us.”

Details, of course, vary. Sometimes you may be being told that yes, whether you like it or not, you will have to pay your phone bill and you will have to pay the exorbitant rates for your international calls that you get charged when you do not want an international plan because the international plan has a higher monthly fee and you only talk to your sister who lives in Berlin once or twice a year so that’s ridiculous. Other times you may be being subjected to the unwelcome knowledge that you do have to actually fill out a claim form and attach an honest to god itemized receipt for the services you are seeking reimbursement for, instead of simply scrawling ‘gimme $600 I bot a Waterpik’ on the back of a Hershey’s candy bar wrapper and faxing it in to our processing department. Whatever the case may be, the essential message – “the universe is not at this point being run to your specific convenience” – remains the same.

Now, those of us who work at the other end of that 800 number love a challenge, of course, of course, and while communicating to our callers that we do not have the ability or even the authority to deform the laws of God or man in their favor is often a difficult and demanding task, there is nothing we like more than making such a process even more arduous and grueling. So, by all means, when you talk to us, try to torture the English language as much as you possibly can. Whether it is because you are Southern, urban, hail from New Jersey, or you just finished the arduous journey from Shang Hai or New Delhi and can't wait to get started on your new life as an American, your heavy, nearly indecipherable accent will immediately endear you to those of us forced to attempt to decipher your labored attempts at communication and convey complex information in response to you.

Because we love that. And you will definitely get our best effort that way.

2. Be very confused when you call us. Starting out the call with “I’m very confused” is actually optional, but if you want to get the best out of us, make sure you are the biggest, most spastically disorganized clusterfuck imaginable before you call. Be drunk. Be wasted. Or just really really stupid. Optimally, if you can manage to be all three at once, you're golden. If you have documents you want to question us regarding, make sure that you left them somewhere else that you do not have access to from the place at which you are calling us. If you saw something on our website that puzzled you, by all means, do not be looking at our website when you actually decide to talk to us about it. Rely on your memory, because relying on your memory of something you don’t understand anyway is always a great idea. If you think you actually remember whatever it is you want to ask us about, then for God’s sake hit yourself in the head with a hammer several times before you dial that phone. In fact, this last tip is such a wonderful one I cannot stress or repeat it enough; the next time you decide to pick up your phone and call customer service, by all means hit yourself in the head with a hammer several times first.

3. Make an effort to find out when the call center you want to reach closes. Then call five minutes before that time. This is an especially useful tip, because there is nothing we customer service agents love more than getting a call in the last five minutes of our shift. It guarantees that you will get our absolute optimal service, especially if you call within that time frame and say something like “On February 12 I called Bangladesh and you charged me $3.17 a minute so I called you guys and you put me on an international plan and said you would back date the charges which was fine but on March 27 I called New Guinea and spoke to my uncle the headhunter for 117 minutes. Now I asked when you put me on the international rate what that call would cost me and you told me 27 cents a minute but you actually charged me 29 cents a minute and I don’t know why plus on May 11 I called and said to take me off the international plan and I am still being charged for it plus I think you charged me wrong for all my calls to my boyfriend who lives just across the river in Queens which is supposed to be in my free dialing area.”

We love that. Honest, we do. We can’t get enough of calls like that, even in the middle of our shift. Coming two or three minutes before quitting time, let me tell you, they just light up any customer service representative’s life.

4. Open your call with “I just have one quick question”. Ask that question. Then, after we answer it, think of another question. Say, “oh, I just thought of something else, while I have you on the phone…” Keep doing this. Forever. This is a great way to make sure you get a quality customer service experience. There is absolutely nothing we love better than someone who calls up, promises us a quick bit of the ol’ in/out, and then turns the whole thing into a marathon b.s. session that eventually devolves into a discussion of metaphysical quandaries that have haunted mankind since the dawn of time and that even the Gods Themselves couldn’t lucidly answer, like “Did you know your 800 number spells out SATAN SAYS HI?” or "Don't you think it's innately biased that you do not offer the option of receiving bills written in Tagalog?"

5. Yell at me for asking you for your Social Security number. This is especially fun. Because, you know, all we do all day long is write down your Social Security number along with your name, address, home phone number, and email addy in great big notebooks that we then take home and sell to professional international identity thieves for gigantic amounts of money. It is this lucrative side line that makes working in a call center worthwhile. Please never once consider the concept that maybe we ask for your Social Security number because, you know, we are told to by our bosses, because all of our programs work using that one specific unique number, and if we don’t ask for it then we can’t find your file or do our jobs and then authority figures drag us into little rooms and berate us at great length, which you honestly wouldn't think would bother us given our insouciant natures and the fact that we know our bosses are all hapless miserable tools of The Man, but which still, nonetheless, considerably harshes our buzz.

None of this could possibly be the reason we ask for your Social Security number, and it’s not like we aren’t forbidden by company policy and actual law to write your Social Security number down anywhere other than on Post It notes we have to shred at the end of the day. Oh, no. It’s all about identity theft at our call centers, so by all means, give us ten or twenty minute lectures on the illegality and inherent fascism of us demanding your Social Security number over the phone. Because that's endlessly fascinating to us, and we really, really appreciate it.

6. Require endless repetition of the same fairly simple facts before you begin to vaguely comprehend what we are talking about. When you ask us for our mailing address or fax number, continually read them back incorrectly. Confuse "PO Box" for "BO spots", assume we are insulting your personal hygiene, and become shrilly defensive. Insist on transposing digits, or putting extra digits into, the fax numbers or zip codes we provide you. When you finally get the information straight, marvel over whatever city our call center is located in. If we are in the south, or the southwest, put on a fake southern accent and say "Shore thing, pardnuh!" This is all great fun for us, and will really enliven our day.

7. Always call customer service when you are really really pissed off. This is the best idea ever. This way, no matter how we open our phone call to you, we are wrong, and you will be able to easily discern any number of things in our greeting that were clearly intended to do nothing except annoy you. Open with "it's about goddam time a real person picked up the phone". When we say "how can I help you?", respond belligerently that we can "tell you what the hell is wrong with your account". Surlily contradict anything we say from that point forward with wonderfully eloquent phrases like "No, that ain't right" and "your computer is completely fucked up" and "that isn't what I remember" and "look I don't even know anybody in Tibet so how could I have placed that call" and "you people have been screwing me ever since I started doing business with you and I'm sick of this". Demand that we tell you our names. Get pissy when we only give you our first names, because honest to God, what we want more than anything is people like you being able to do Google searches and find our home phone numbers and addresses. Tell us that your time is valuable and someone should be paying you to waste so much of it getting this straightened out. Whine because you highlighted the receipt you faxed in and it came through our fax machine as a solid black scribble we couldn't read and now you'll have to mail in a legible copy and that's very inconvenient.

After pissing and moaning and bitching and being insulting and offensive and using invective and implying that we are all retarded and we hate you and there is some sort of conspiracy against you for ten or fifteen minutes, sigh heavily and say "I'm sorry, I know this isn't your fault, it's just you happened to be the one who picked up the phone, I'm really sorry, I'm just frustrated". Because that really helps, and maybe if you're lucky, we will then be able to get back into the system and cancel the disconnect orders, or pull out the denial commands we have coded onto all your accessible claims, or even pull out the "this customer is an asshole give them NOTHING" notes we have hung all over your account for future csr's to read.

8. Wait until the very last minute and then get really aggravated with us when things don't go perfectly for you because, you know, you waited until the last possible minute and somehow that's our fault. If it's open enrollment and it's been open enrollment for the past month, by all means don't call up and enroll until the very last day, and then have a set of questions like "If I have a chronic bone condition and I have to take a $200 vitamin pack every month and vitamins are normally ineligible and these aren't covered by insurance, can I claim mine anyway on my reimbursement account, because it's my money, dammit?" And then when we tell you that the only way it would possibly be reimbursable is if you submitted a letter of medical necessity from Dr. Nick Riviera and even that might be rejected, get very upset with us and demand a more specific answer than that and say it's not fair, you don't have time to submit a letter and Dr. Nick Riviera is just a cartoon character anyway and besides you need an answer because it's a lot of money to put into your flex spending account if you're not going to be able to use it for your vitamins, and somehow, again, this is all our fault.

Even better than this: wait until the very last day of your three and a half month close out period. Then mail us a 43 page claim. Then wait seven months before you begin to dimly realize you never got a check. Start sending us emails at that point saying things like "I just wanted to enquire if you had ever sent me reimbursement for plan year 2004 because I am not sure I have any record of receiving it". When no one responds in any kind of meaningful detail to this, finally call us up and say "This is about the 2004 plan year. I've been emailing you and emailing you and all I get are these vague replies. Now my wife and I are fairly sure we mailed out our claim for 2004 towards the end of February or March this year. That's the time we always mail our claims out. And neither of us remember you sending us a reimbursement check. Also, I'm looking at your website and I can't be sure but it's possible that we sent our claim to a different address than the one I am seeing there. Can you help me with this?"

Because, honest to God, we live to answer questions like that; the sheer transcendant joy of taking a call and hearing someone like you asking a question like that on the other end of the line is enough to send shivers of bliss throughout the entire call center and transport us all into a whirling Buddhist loop of euphoria.

Because, more than anything else in the world, we love having to restrain ourselves by actual physical force (usually with our mute button pressed while we bang our heads over and over again on our desks whimpering no no no for the love of christ no please someone just kill me now repeatedly and shrilly, like some mantra of the damned, until we can regain some shredded, tattered semblance of self control) from saying stuff like "You know, you frickin' retard, if you wait until not only the very end of your plan year, but the very end of the 105 day close out period following your plan year, and then you mail off every claim you have for an entire year in one package, and you don't bother to call first and make sure you have the right address, well, there is a discernible chance things are going to go badly, badly south with that unbelievably fucked up plan, and when they do, guess what? Not only is it not our fault, it should by no conceivable stretch of rationality or justice be our problem, either. YOUR CLOSE OUT DATE IS LONG PAST, DUCKIE. YOU BLEW IT. GET THE CHRIST OFF MY PHONE LINE."

Of course, when you work in customer service you never, ever get to say the stuff you actually would LIKE to say to a customer, and perhaps at some point I will entertain you further by providing you with examples of the things we hear over and over and over again every day, and what we would really LIKE to say in response, as opposed to what we in fact choose to say because, you know, while we hate our jobs, we prefer working in this absolute hell of a customer service call center to, say, fighting with Laundrybag Joe for the last bunk at the Salvation Army shelter on a really cold night, and then having to sleep with one eye half open in case Aqualung wakes up early and decides to steal our torn plastic garbage bag full of recyclable cans.

So, by all means, let's all look forward to that.

Here's some scary shit from Digby's blog:

Topic: politics <p>
There’s a blog I’ve just discovered that I like very much. It’s called Orcinus, although it’s URL isn’t anything that remotely resembles that, and other than as the Latin term for a killer whale (I think) I don’t know what Orcinus means, or why this blogger is applying the title (if I’m understanding it correctly) to his blog.

I mean, for all I know, it’s a Tolkien reference. But I like this guy’s writing very much. If you want to find the blog, it comes up first after a Google search on ‘Orcinus’. I could paste a link, but it’s way more trouble than I want to go to right now. Sorry.

Anyway, everything I’ve seen on this guy’s blog is worth reading (I’m especially enjoying the way he’s been bitch slapping Michelle Malkin all over the place lately) but here’s what I wanted to write about a bit – an entry from November 7 2005 which he opens with:

Topic: politics <p>
From Katherine Schrader of the Associated Press:

Topic: random <p>
One of the things I looked forward to from childhood on was living in the 21st Century. It's been a consolation to me as I grew steadily older, through my teens and twenties and thirties, using up and wringing out from the rag of my lifetime every last drop of anything you could remotely describe as my youth, that although I might be inevitably and irreversibly approaching middle age, at the very least, I was also approaching that epochal and much storied turning point, where I would get to peek into not only the changing of a century, but of an actual millenium.

For me, a lifelong science fiction geek, the year 2000 and beyond was a magical concept. I absolutely loved the idea that I might very well live to see a time period so constantly and continually evoked and imagined by so many of my favorite authors. As the turn of the millenium drew nearer, I was filled, more and more, with anticipation. Oh, sure, it was abundantly clear to me that most of my favorite fantasists had substantially missed the mark in a lot of different details... I wasn't going to get to vacation under a domed city on the Moon or Mars within my lifetime, nor could I go into a Radio Shack and buy a working jetpack, and it wasn't very likely I was going to get to ride around in a flying car any time in the forseeable future, either. But, still, the world did and does have personal computers, DVD players, the Internet, cell phones, laser-beam tape measures, remote controls, holographic postal stamps, and a whole lot of other really cool shit, and if capitalism guaranteed anything, it was that people would keep inventing nifty gadgets as long as there was a profit to be had from doing it.

So I was content. The future might not be what it used to be, but still, it was pretty spiffy nonetheless.

Then this idiot Bush stole the millenial Presidential election, and my entire 21st Century experience went straight to hell.

It's a grisly irony, I think, that the dominant political figure the Arthur C. Clarke's real world 2001 is the ramrod for a social movement that would happily turn the clock back to 1952 tomorrow if they only could. And not even the real 1952, which was a terrible time full of anti-intellectual hysteria and paranoid xenophobia, but to some weird conservative fantasy 1952, where white men still wear coats, hats and ties whether they're at home or the office, white women are all smiling married mothers who stay home all day and bake, and non-whites are all cheerfully employed doing menial labor for 35 cents an hour any time they're not at church.

In fantasy-1952, there is no minimum wage, gas costs 22 cents a gallon and every service station has a uniformed fellow with a big smile who cleans your window and checks your oil in addition to filling your tank for you, cars are roughly the size of Texas but there's still plenty of free parking because only Caucasian folk can afford them, the only known midwinter celebration is Christmas, and everybody goes to Sunday School and prayer meeting. Nobody is homosexual, nobody gets pregnant before they're married, Americans are always the good guys and we always win, and everybody loves the President.

This is the antithesis of the egalitarian, fully integrated, sexually liberated and high tech future promised in the pages of Amazing Stories and Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine when I was growing up, and while I can accept that that future is never going to actually happen, I have to say that I would certainly have liked to live to see a 21st century that embodied something besides a passionate headlong heartsick reach for a mythical American heyday that never actually existed.

Somehow or other, Bush and his insanely bigoted clique of pinhead conservatives have hijacked my future. And if I can't have jet packs, domed cities, orbital colonies and rocket cars, then at the very least I'd like to have a world where Americans aren't entirely despised outside our own borders, healthcare is affordable, tolerance and open mindedness are universally regarded as admirable social traits, and religious fanaticism is an acknowledged psychological aberration.

I want my 21st Century back, dammit. Who do I talk to about that?

Topic: random <p>
This is going to be an odds n sods entry. Deal with it.

I find it amusing that over at Boneyard's page on Collateral Damage, he has the new Clayface listed as 'confirmed' for the set. What's amusing about that is he has Clayface listed as '(Ultimate)'. Now, to the best of my knowledge, DC has no Ultimate characters, although recently they have begun ripping off Marvel's Ultimates line (a truly dreadful and appalling idea... well, both are; Marvel's Ultimates line, and the idea that anyone should rip the concept off) by putting out All Star versions of their characters. I guess this new Clayface is from one of the All Star Batman stories, although I'm proud to say it is very unlikely I would ever actually be in a position to state this in an authoritative fashion, because if you ever catch me with an All Star comic in my hands for longer than it takes me to ball it up and toss it in the nearest incinerator, you'd better check me for a pulse.

I also find it equally amusing and annoying when I see someone on the Internet spelling 'the' as 'teh'. I used to see this and think it was a typo (it's an easy one to make if you type quickly, as many of the up and coming generation does), but apparently it's morphed into some kind of deliberate textual slang for modern morons.

I find it annoying that the left shift key on this keyboard sticks about every third time you depress it, so I'm near constantly having to backspace out a line of inappropriate capitalization and then hit the left shift key again to unstick it.

I find it deeply entertaining to watch conservatives trying desperately to tell me that because only ONE member of the Shrub Administration has been indicted so far (on five charges that could, but will not under any circumstances, result in 30 years of jail time), this is a triumph for the Republican Party and a crushing defeat for liberals everywhere. I do wish Fitzgerald would get his thumb out and just paper the Oval Office with indictments, though. I think if he's going to issue indictments, he should just let the throttle stick wide open and indict every single Republican working in Washington for something, and get some paper on all those fucking conservative bloggers, too. Supporting the troops and cheerleading for the war from behind a nice safe comfy computer desk should be good for 90 days in prison or a mandatory tour of duty in Iraq, at the very least.

I find it depressing that I now miss Harriet Miers. I liked it when the righties were throwing grenades at each other over the nomination. I don't really know anything about this Alito guy, but when conservatives unite behind someone, I have to assume he's bad news.

I find it depressing that Halloween is over and we got no trick or treaters, especially since I went to a lot of trouble to get the night off from work so I'd be home for trick or treaters. Somehow, in my adult life, I have never managed to live anywhere that trick or treaters come by, or if I do, there's a tornado warning that year on Halloween and they all stay home.

But I find it exhiliarating that we're heading into Thanksgiving and beyond that, into Christmas. We won't have the SuperKids for Thanksgiving, which is exasperating, but it's in SuperGirlfriend's divorce agreement that she gets the kids for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, so that will be wonderful.

And SuperGirlfriend has gone off to work, so the apartment is sadly quiet and empty. Time to go put some music on and take a shower.

It's been a while since I've written anything about my HeroClix House Rules. No one reading this cares much about them, but then, very few people reading this will comment, either, so it's all good.

I've made changes to how several powers work over the past few weeks. In addition to beefing up Impervious and Invulnerable considerably (the powers now absorb 4 and 3 clicks of damage, respectively, instead of 2), I've also added the following text to (of all things) Leadership:

Now Playing: In Thee by Blue Oyster Cult
So I had a really lousy day at work yesterday. But as all of you non-commenting lurkers know, I have the Greatest Girlfriend In The World, which is why when I walked out to the parking lot after my shift last night, I found her waiting for me with a gift wrapped present. Upon tearing it open with the enthusastic glee of a 5 year old, I discovered --

-- the DC Archive Edition of Kamandi, probably my all time favorite, and arguably the absolute freakiest, of Jack Kirby's singularly creative comic book visions.

The first ten issues, printed on wonderfully soft acid-free paper, in vivid colors that do full justice to the absolutely gorgeous Kirby art... ahhh, I am truly the luckiest of all men.

Some of these ten issues I've read, others I haven't. I'm looking forward to acquainting, or re-acquainting, myself with all these stories. And I certainly hope DC continues to reprint Kamandiissues at least through the entirety of the original Kirby run.

SuperGirlfriend is the best!

Oh, and SuperGirlfriend wants to send a big shout-out of gratitude to Steve Tice, for helping her out with something related to this Kamandi archive edition. So there you go, Steve. Thanks for whatever you did.

Okay. While SuperGirlfriend is out frying up some catfish and hush puppies for dinner (Gad, I feel Southern) let's talk a little bit about The New Job:

I work for a Third Party Benefits Administrator. That's going to be so much Mandarin Chinese to most of you, so let me explicate further: my employer is what is called a 'carve out' or a 'niche player' in the health services industry. If a company would like the benefits of offering certain types of benefit plans (specifically, Flexible Spending Accounts, for health care or dependent care) to their employees, but they don't want the hassle of actually administering those benefit plans, my employer will do it for them... for a fee.

This means that if you have an FSA, and you want to file a reimbursement claim for some of your health or child care expenses, and your employer is my employer's client, you file your claim with us. We process the claim, which means, essentially, we make sure you filled out the paperwork correctly and gave us the correct supporting documentation to prove you really did get charged $25 for your co-pay or $400 by your daycare provider this month, and if you did all that right, we cut you a check... or, in some cases, we send your medical provider or your insurance company a check, but mostly, we send it to you.

Flexible Spending Accounts, and similar but different benefit plans like Health Savings Accounts, are simple in principle... well, no, fuck that, they're actually quite complex in principle, and can be hopelessly complicated in individual application, and this is what I do, all day long... talk to people on the phone about their claims, more often than not, about why the claim they submitted was denied and what they can do (if anything) to get it successfully reprocessed.

If you have one of these flex spending accounts (and I honestly don't know who I'm kidding when I type things like that, since pretty clearly nobody is bothering to read these goddam blog entries, but still, it's a useful rhetorical device even if I am apparently writing for myself alone) then you probably know that there is a thing called 'open enrollment' every year, which is when you call your human resources department (or a carve out subcontractor like the one I currently work for) and you pick all your benefits and make your elections and figure out just what you're going to pay for. Open enrollment is the period when you make decisions like this, and if you miss open enrollment, then you're just screwed, and you have to wait until the next open enrollment to sign up for your benefits.

Open enrollment is a huge part of what my employer does for its clients. Open enrollment season is, in fact, the reason I am currently working there, because this time of year many many companies have their open enrollment, and in order to handle the huge volume of calls that come in now, my employer has hired several hundred 'seasonals' (their word for temps) to come in and help take the calls and process the enrollment data.

Now, you would think that a company that brags relentlessly about having 200+ corporate clients, and that does nothing all day long every day but administer those corporate clients' benefit plans, and which gets a huge percentage of its annual business volume during open enrollment periods, would pretty much have open enrollment down to a science. (You would especially figure this as they entrust a significant part of this work to temps. If you're going to hire 200 plus temps every year to do a very important and reasonably complex job for you, you had better have that job worked out to a point where a trained monkey can do it, because any time you place an order that size with any temp agency, some of the temps you get are going to be, effectively, trained monkeys. It's the nature of the beast.)

Of course, I suppose you could afford to be somewhat sloppy and a little bit disorganized if you were only dealing with little mom and pop organizations and smaller companies who don't make a lot of money, and whom, if you lose their business, you can easily replace the revenue by picking up another, similarly modest client. And, indeed, all the corporate clients my current employer has are tiny tiny little companies that you have never in your life heard of, like, I don't know, Pep$ico, and C0ca C0la, and the $tate of Ge0rgia, and the Feder@l Goddam Judiciary System, and S^n Microsystems, and the ^niversity of California, and a bunch of other pathetic little non-players like that. And when you're dealing with small fry like that, companies no one has ever heard of that don't have a lot of influence over the marketplace and that really can't afford to spend a lot of money on their service providers anyway, well, you really don't have to worry about having your shit together.

Which, I suppose, is why over the past two days I've been directly involved in several conversations nearly identical with this one:

ME: Hey, Juanita, I've got a guy on the phone from Pep$iCo who wants to enroll in his benefits plan for next year. Our department isn't handling open enrollment for Pep$iCo; who do I transfer him to?

JUANITA (not the name of one of my supervisors, but it will do): Oh God I don't know. Isn't it in the computer somewhere?

ME: Well, the computer has a note that we aren't handling Pep$iCo's open enrollment this year, we are supposed to refer Pep$iCo employees back to their HR department. But...

JUANITA: Well Jesus then, do that!

ME: Okay, but he says the last person he talked to here did that and he called his HR department and they told him we were handling their open enrollment. They were very insistent.

JUANITA: Oh Christ. (turns to another supervisor) Meg, are we handling Pep$iCo's open enrollment?

MEGAN: I don't fucking know, isn't it in the computer?

So then Megan and Juanita hunted through the computer and came up with what is supposed to be the master sheet for open enrollment this year, telling us exactly who is handling which of our many clients' during their OE seasons. However, the spreadsheet is somewhat flawed, in that (a) it does not contain one single phone number, internal or otherwise, and (b) the people it says are handling open enrollment, if you go through the laborious process of looking up their phone numbers in the computerized diretory (which hates all humanity with a passionate maniacal frenzy you would think impossible for a cybernetic organism) and then dialing them, disavow all knowledge of any such responsibility faster than the Secretary disavows all knowledge of Jim Phelps' Impossible Missions Force.

In point of somewhat amusing/depressing fact, when we look up Pep$iCo on this spreadsheet, it says quite clearly that Juanita and Megan are in charge of the department that is handling it.

JUANITA: Okay, there is no fucking way we are handling Pep$iCo's open enrollment, I know that for DAMN sure.

MEGAN: Um... well... if you're sure...

Eventually, we managed to find a manager in a different department who let us transfer the poor guy (who had been on hold for twenty minutes by then) to her. She was certain that her department wasn't handling Pep$iCo's open enrollment either, but she was 'aware of the problem' and was 'working on it'.

That was yesterday, and it's not like we aren't getting a hundred calls a day from Pep$iCo employees looking to enroll in their benefits from next year, and as of today, we are still 'working on it'.

Not working on getting them enrolled. Working on finding out which department is supposed to be handling it. So far, everybody is absolutely certain THEY aren't handling it, but after that it breaks down into an urban legend... each supervisor is pretty sure that someone else they know knows someone who may be friends with someone who knows who is handling it, but they aren't sure...

And the really amus/azing thing about this is that this isn't an anomoly. I mean, if it was an anomoly, it would be a pretty bad one, because, you know, if you have a list of 200 plus clients you are handling a very complex and potentially costly job for, you would think Pep$iCo, which just pretty much owns everything on the planet not already under lease to MicroSoft, would not be high on the list of those clients that you want to screw stuff up for.

But, well, Pep$iCo shouldn't feel like the Lone Ranger or anything, because much of yesterday and today I took similar calls from another very small company's employees who also wanted to enroll in their benefits for next year and who had been assured by their HR department that we were handling it. You've never heard of this company and will merely blink in bewilderment and apathy when I tell you their name is $BC. Now, you would think that,for the love of sweet baby Christ, if we've already screwed up Pep$i's open enrollment, at the very least we are going to learn from that mistake and not similarly fuck over the open enrollment of another inconsequential and easily replaceable client like the $outhwestern Bell Company, but if you thought that, you must prepare at this moment to roll your head on your neck like John Belushi and sneer "But noooooooooooooo" in a highly aggravated manner, because here's how that conversation went:

ME: Say, Juanita...

JUANITA: Holy Mother of God can't you see I'm BUSY? ::cuts another V shaped slash in the flesh of her forearm with a razor blade while jittering her bloodshot gaze frantically from one place to another around the room::

ME: Okay. Say, Megan, I've got an employee from $BC on the phone and he says we're handling their open enrollment and he'd like to enroll. Where do I transfer him?

MEGAN: To hell! TO HELL!!!! ::shrieks, leaps out window::

So, you know, that's what my current job is like.

There's more I could tell you. Like yesterday, I got pulled into a room by someone from Quality Review, along with two of my supervisors, and they proceeded to bitchslap me all over the place for a lot of stuff, including not documenting all my calls. Now, what you need to know here is, in order for us to document a call, we need a social security number, which is a whole different rant I may get to, but anyway, without a social security number, we can't even get the call doc program to open. So, now that you know that, here's how that conversation went:

ME: Well, a lot of the calls we got today were open enrollment calls, and they don't want to give us a social security number because they haven't signed up yet and they just want to ask general questions about how the accounts work.

MARGUERITE THE HORRIFYING BITCH WHO EAVESDROPS ON OTHER PEOPLE'S CALLS ALL DAY LONG FOR A LIVING: Well, you still have to document every call at 100% and you know that.

JUANITA: That's right, 100% documentation is the goal and you need to do that.

MEGAN: You know that is part of the process which is expected of you the Gold Call Process you were trained on in training and we expect it of you and you have to do it.

ME: Okay and I understand that. But if they won't give me a social security number then how do I open call doc to document their call?

MARGUERITE: Well, you put in 99999 and then your four digit extension and that will let you doc the call.

JUANITA: I thought it was 00000 and the four digit extension.

MEGAN: I thought it was 1111... and isn't it a five digit extension?

JUANITA: What did they teach you in training?

ME: Well, we were told about three different ways to do it but none of them work. And nobody out on the floor knows how to do it either.

So the three of them exchange an annoyed glance, and then they tell me they'll get back to me. But in the meantime, I still have to doc every call at 100%, even though half our calls this time of year are general questions about open enrollment where the caller won't give us a social security number.

Then there was this exchange, just this afternoon:

JUANITA: Okay, H., I need to talk to you about something when you get done with that call.

ME: What should I sign off on?

JUANITA: Uh... ::turns to another employee who has been there forever:: Lloyd, if I need to talk to him after this call, what does he sign off on?

LLOYD: Aux code 5.

So I sign off on Aux code 5 and Juanita is showing me how I totally screwed up my last call, which she was eavesdropping on, the cunt, and telling me I have to call the participant back and give them the correct information, and suddenly here comes Wilhemina on a dead run with a horrified look on her face and she says:

WILHELMINA: Why in the name of God are you signed off on Aux code 5?

JUANITA: Isn't he supposed to sign off on Aux code 5 if I have to talk to him?

WILHELMINA: Jesus no!!! Aux code 5 is only to be used for emergency volcano eruptions and Presidential motorcades! Oh my God I have to write this up right now or democracy falls!

JUANITA: Well, okay, what code should he sign off on for something like this?

WILHELMINA: Uh... ::scratches her head, then turns to Lloyd:: Say, Lloyd...

Stuff like this makes it hard to have any confidence in management.

Oh, and then there is the social security number thing. See, all our files are keyed to social security number. Now, I'm reasonably sure that this is actually grotesquely illegal; I believe there are about eight Federal laws that expressly forbid anyone from ever requiring anyone to give them their social security number for any purpose without a court order, but, nonetheless, we open every call with "Thank you for calling The Planet Of Drunken Monkeys, my name is Bonzo the Inebriated Chimp, may I have the participant's Social Security number or alternate ID?" (I am of course paraphrasing; the last thing I need is a suit from management at my current employer doing a web search on the name of the company and turning this page up and starting a witch hunt for the man or woman with the funny funny blog page where he or she is blurting out all sorts of corporate secrets. But we say stuff a lot like that, just with different proper nouns.)

What amazes me is that most people just pony the fucker right up. But, still, a fraction of them... a significant fraction, like, maybe, one in 8 callers... balk. Many of these seize on the 'alternate ID' thing in the greeting. None of them actually HAVE an alternate ID, the idea of an alternate ID is yet another urban legend, every employer in the world and all the service providers in the health care industry just use the SS number because it's a unique number and they're all fucking lazy, but, still, we have to mention it in our greeting just in case unicorns or Keebler elves or yeti started up their own company last week and they are actually using alternate IDs. And these people who (quite cogently) don't want to give us their Social Security numbers will leap all over that and say "What kind of alternate ID?"

So then you have to explain "No, no, you don't have an alternate ID, it's just something we say to calm down the libertarians, give me your Social Security number". And then a surprising number of them will acquiesce, but still, it's a thing. Right off the bat, for everyone who calls, we are asking for something no one in their right mind wants to give a stranger over the phone, and that sure as hell doesn't help you establish rapport.

There is always a hard core who just won't do it. They aren't comfortable with it, they aren't going to do it, it's illegal, we should be ashamed. If I'm lucky, they hang up with that, and no one who works for a call center ever minds when a customer hangs up on them, no sir. But if I'm unlucky, then they will stay on the phone and demand I find some way to help them without using their Social Security number, which I suspect is probably their entirely legal (and reasonable) right, but, well, I can't do it.

So, all in all, my new job sucks. But it's better than my last two jobs, and I have SuperGirlfriend waiting for me at the end of every night, so, you know, life is pretty good. I just hate my job, but I guess we all do, right?

Now Playing: Send Her My Love by Journey

I gather that the 'criminalization of politics' non-defense against the various impending Fitzgerald indictments has become the talking point du jour among the right's talking heads -- apparently Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, among others, have been whipping their moronic audiences into a froth by repeating this phrase over and over again.

I'm trying to make sense of this -- not actual sense, because conservatives, especially the mindless masses that make up the right wing base, don't intellectualize things well, and I understand that. But usually I can at least put the latest right wing demagoguery into some kind of consistent emotional context and get a vague grasp on what buttons the big mouths are trying to push in their listeners' heads... and this time, well, you wouldn't think it was possible, but this 'criminalization of politics' makes even less sense than the usual conservative horseshit.

Again, I'm not talking intellectually. On the level of reason and logic, well, any thinking human being understands that a crime is a crime -- you break the law, you get caught, you're going to get in some kind of trouble -- and whether the lawbreaker is involved in 'politics' or not, at the time they committed the crime, is immaterial. Being a 'politician', whether you hold an elected office or an appointed position or you're just a mover and a shaker behind the scenes, does not convey any kind of legal immunity (unless you're the President, but, well, that's not what we're talking about).

But, as I say, I understand that Limbaugh and Hannity aren't trying to come up with anything logical or reasonable. They are trying to whip their audiences into an infuriated frenzy, which means that, like all demagogues, they are attempting to craft an emotional appeal that will overwhelm their target market's rudimentary thinking ability. But usually these guys are pretty good at it and I can figure out what kind of gut level response they're trying to invoke.

In this case, I'm baffled.

See, you don't go to a bunch of Joe Lunchbuckets and start whining about the 'criminalization of politics' and expect any sympathy. To Limbaugh's Louts and/or Hannity's Horde, all politicians are already assumed to be criminals unless proven honest, and 'politics' is already a dirty word. To talk about the 'criminalization of politics' is just going to perplex these guys. Of course all politicians are crooks, and of course all politics is dirty politics. How many times do you think these people have heard about some sleazy deal in Washington and cursed to themselves over a beer "there oughtta be a law, the stuff they do in D.C. is a crime". They all implicitely BELIEVE that the entire political process is corrupt; Republicans have been coining votes for thirty years by promising to 'get the government off the backs of the average American', with the underlying and fundamental assumption being that government (politics) is inherently BAD.

So I have to think, if Rush Limbaugh starts going on and on about 'the criminalization of politics', even his most avidly mouthbreathing minions are going to be scratching their Dittoheads a little bit. I mean, wouldn't criminalizing politics be a good thing? SHOULDn't we have long since been locking these guys up? Aren't they ALL crooks?

I have to assume, if whining about 'the criminalizatin of politics', mixed in with a lot of bluster about how Democrats are picking on Republicans and it's just not fair, is the best that Limbaugh and Hannity can come up with, then, well... they're desperate, and they got nothin', and they know it.

This may be a very good weekend.