Wednesday, December 22, 2004

I must be one of the wonders of God’s own creation

Very bad day at work today. And I was only there 45 minutes.

Pretty much proving my assertion that a bad day at work is one in which you end up with more negative attention than you are accustomed to, let’s walk through a very bad near-hour on a Wednesday afternoon:

It really started with last night, I gather. Two things factored heavily in to how quickly today became completely unsalvageable. First, I’d been handling this problem for a customer involving two different accounts. Except he didn’t seem to know he had two different accounts (one for each phone line), and when I and another rep had asked him in previous emails if he had two different account numbers (he was talking about two different invoices) he didn’t respond to that. Just kept repeating that he was on a certain plan, and he was getting misbilled, and our service was horrible, and yaddity yah. He wanted the one account he was aware of and had told us about canceled, despite the fact that we couldn’t find the charges he was talking about, and he hadn’t admitted to having two different account numbers at that point.

Anyway, after I canceled the one account for him, he kept bitching, and at that point, he finally advised me that he had a different account number on the other invoice and didn’t know why. I located his other account. It turns out that something complicated had happened. He’d thought he had both his phone numbers on one account with one very good calling plan, but he only had one on that account. The other one had been set up through the local phone company and was on a lousy plan, which was why it was billing so high. And if he’d told me that at first, I could have straightened it out, but now he had one account (the one on the good plan) canceled, and the other account (the one set up by the local on the lousy plan) still active, and he’s screaming about our lousy service and how he wants everything canceled… including his wireless cell phone account with our company, which is generally where our company makes all its money.

Looking back through the notes on both accounts, I discovered that someone on the now defunct e-mail team at one of our other call centers had told him they would set up his new phone number on his current calling plan back in May, and then, apparently, they had not done it. Which was why he had two different accounts on two different calling plans when he thought he had only one account, with one phone number on one very advantageous promotional plan. So this was obviously our mistake.

To try to save the customer, who was by this point screaming for everyone’s head, I credited off all the charges on the account with the bad plan (the only one still active, as he had ordered me to cancel the other account, the one with the good plan, before admitting to the existence of the extra number). I then offered to install his other number (the one on the good account, which was now canceled) on to the account that was still active, and then put that account on the plan he’d had on the other account, so he’d get what he originally wanted (both his numbers on one account on the same advantageous plan).

I wrote him a very long email explaining most of this, and because the mistake was largely his fault (he’d had the two separate bills for months and was only now bitching about it, and he’d ignored two separate requests for the other account number prior to me actually handling the problem), I took the blame on myself and the company, apologized profusely, and made the offer I’ve detailed above.

Because I was concerned that this had all come about because the other email team at the other call center had completely screwed this up, I copied it all to my boss, whom I will call Emily, which, as it turns out, was a mistake.

Mistake number two last night: due to low email volume, each member of the email team has had to take calls for the last couple of months for a couple of hours a day, unless we are told specifically that we don’t have to that day. My shift is from 9:30 to midnight (there are fewer calls late at night, so me and Jarrod, as senior guys on the night shift, get that time slot for taking calls). Last night, I logged on to take calls as usual, and mentioned something to Jarrod about how it was ‘the time of doom’ again, since none of us like to take calls. Jarrod told me, with everyone else on the email team backing him up vociferously, that we were not supposed to take calls last night, we had been told to just work on emails until we ran out. So I logged back off, although, honestly, I don’t mind taking calls, since I get a chance to answer my own emails in between calls when call volume is down, as it has been lately.

Now, today I got to work, and, well, the first bad thing that happened had nothing to do with all of the above. I checked my mailbox (actually a hanging file folder that each of us has, where Jennifer puts hard copy stuff for us) and found a Christmas card from the woman in the cubicle next to me, whom I will call Dierdre. I told her thank you and as she was sitting down at her desk and I was standing over her, I kissed her on the top of the head and said ‘Merry Christmas’. She flinched away from me and said “You have to stop kissing me on the top of the head” (I’d done it a few times in the past ten days or so, as she’d had good feedback scores and I was congratulating her, and she hadn’t seemed to mind at all, but I guess she really did) “if Cal saw you doing that, he would flip out”. (Cal is Dierdre’s very good looking boyfriend and the father to her child, whom she lives with. Dierdre herself is a very cute former high school cheerleader and it is a law of nature in this universe that any man she is dating has to look like a Backstreet Boy, because, well, Dierdre is pretty much exactly that superficial. But lately she’d seemed to be in a friendler mood towards me than usual.)

That was kind of like having someone throw caustic lye in my eyes, emotionally, and it hurt a lot, but I put on a brave face and tried not to let it show, although another truly wretched and loathsome woman on our team, Hazel, was laughing her ass off across the room… perhaps not at Dierdre’s rejection of me, but knowing Hazel, it probably was.

A couple of minute’s later, Emily (my boss, remember) came in. She was on a conference call, well, another very pleasant woman on my team named Julie had been on it and Emily came in for the last fifteen minutes of it. At one point she muted the call and looked around and asked if any of the night shift wanted to go on VTO (Voluntary Time Off, which means, we don’t have enough work, you can go home without pay if you want to and nobody will yell at you). I said “No, I need the hours” and she said “Well, you’ll just be taking calls then, because we really don’t have the inventory” which means, we had no email.

Then Emily had launched into arias about how we had been supposed to take calls the night before, and nobody had, and what was all THAT about, so pretty clearly, the night crew being told to either take calls all night or go home was her way of slapping us around for that.

So I was feeling pretty shitty already and since I did the four hours already on my day off, I figured, fuck it, I’ll go home. I made the mistake, though, of asking her about the email I’d forwarded to her, so she pulled me over to her desk and slapped me around for that for fifteen minutes.

Her criticisms were, as Emily’s criticisms always are, unclear and inconsistent. She pointed out that my email was too critical of our parent & client company. She also pointed out that my email was too critical of the customer. She indicated that the customer probably hadn’t deserved the credit I’d given him, as this was all his fault, then said that the customer probably loved me right now (which I thought was the point). She mentioned that it might not have been the other email team’s fault for not setting him up like they had said they would, because if he’d already ordered service on his line through the local phone service, that order would have canceled out any order we had put in for him. (But I researched the account thoroughly; other than the other email rep’s promise to contact him and set the phone number up, there were no notes at all indicating any further contact or any attempt on our part to set the account up. If the email rep had called him as promised and offered to set the account up, and then found that the phone number was already in our system, it would have been very easy to switch him over to the plan he wanted on that account. I was the only person who had ever been in that separate account, though. And beyond that, it is considered our responsibility, in cases like this, to put follow ups in the system and continue to check and make sure everything is straightened out the way the customer wants, to prevent such problems further on down the line, and at that, the other email team had utterly dropped the ball. This guy should never have had two separate accounts for seven months, and I gave him a whole $19 in credit, in hopes of saving all his business, so I should never have taken the kind of beating I did, especially before the customer responds to my latest email and we see whether I actually saved him or not… which I still do not know.)

It wasn’t that she was harsh, because Emily is almost never harsh. She was simply giving me very mixed up and confusing feedback over something that I was, under no circumstances, actually wrong regarding, which is typical of her. She told me that if this email that I’d sent were taken to corporate level, she would “get her hand slapped really hard”, but the whole point of my email was to try to save a customer whose accounts we had probably screwed up in the first place, and who had exacerbated the situation himself by doing nothing for months and then giving us poor information when he finally did write in to get it corrected. I was, essentially, doing what I could with a really complex and already badly deteriorated situation to keep it from escalating any higher.

Emily intensely dislikes confrontations so she is very passive-aggressive. You have to be extremely careful around her. She makes her criticisms and her feedback sound very mild, but if she is rebuking you at all, it is a very very serious thing, because she doesn’t like doing it. And her feedback rarely or never makes sense, because she is largely concerned with covering her ass and her team’s ass from people higher up the ladder, and corporate policy is rarely or never consistent from one situation to the next.

My screw up was forwarding the email to her for her review, in hopes of preventing similar situations from happening again. It simply put her into cover her ass mode, which made it imperative that she take me behind the barn for a cowhiding so she could tell Corporate later, if necessary, that she had already taken action.

I think I may have saved a customer who was incensed with our client company for reasons that were somewhat our fault and somewhat his own fault, and who was determined to cancel all his accounts with us, including his cell phone account, and not have any more to do with us, and I don’t think there are two other people on the team who would have been able to research the accounts thoroughly enough to figure out what was going on and who would then have made him that offer.

However, as to the Dierdre thing, I have no excuse. I don’t think she did anything wrong; if a co-worker in close quarters is behaving in a way you find offensive, you need to decide whether or not you are going to tolerate it or let them know, and she decided to let me know. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. The fact that if either of the other two guys on the email team had been doing it, it wouldn’t have bothered her at all and she would never have risked hurting their feelings that way even if it had, does not really enter into the propriety of the situation. I was doing something she found very annoying, she told me. It hurt my feelings enormously, but, well, that’s the chance you take when you make an affectionate gesture at someone. They may not like it and they may reject it, even very harshly.

Intellectually, my response to this is very simple: if there is a character flaw here, it’s hers. I am a very nice guy, and I have been very nice to her, and to everyone else on that team, even the people I despise. I was not trying to sleep with her. The gestures were innocent and meant to be supportive. I don’t think her boyfriend’s jealousy is really the issue; the issue is, she finds me creepy because I’m much older than her and nowhere near good looking enough to be allowed to pay that kind of attention to her. However, if her boyfriend would go crazy about something like that, he also has a profound character flaw. (He pretty clearly does anyway; she had his kid and the two of them are living together but he won’t marry her. I have no respect for someone like that, but that’s a side issue.)

Of course, I’ve always known Dierdre is very shallow, and I’ve always been aware that she doesn’t really like me much… at best, she tolerates me, when she’s in a good mood. I’d just let myself be lulled by the holiday spirit, or something, and it was my fault, and she had a right to make it known to me that she was repulsed by my gestures and she wanted them to stop.

Still, the fact that she felt that way indicates a problem with her, not with me. If the least attractive woman in the world (and there are a few candidates for that position who work with me) wanted to occasionally congratulate me for good stats and kiss me on the top of the head when I was sitting at my cubicle, I’d accept it as an honest gesture of affection. I would certainly never ever do anything that hurtful to them, unless they got considerably more out of line.

So I know all that intellectually. But still… bad day at work. All 45 minutes of it.

Day by day

However, it’s not like it’s been all bad since my last blog entry. In better news, I also got my DVD of To Live And Die In LA today and watched most of it before I went to work and finished it up when I got home. It’s not as impressive as I remembered it being, but, still, it works pretty well. It’s a decent cop movie. Willem Dafoe makes an excellent villain in it. I certainly don’t mind having it in my collection.

Yesterday was a very big mail day for me, as I when I checked my mailbox, I found (a) that Baen had returned WARREN’S WORLD to me with a boilerplate rejection letter, and (b) I’d gotten my copy of Natalie Merchant’s Tiger Lily cd. That’s a big mail day for me, but then, when I reached back to the back of the box to make sure there wasn’t something else, I found another small package, which turns out to be from Wiz Kids… my replacement Nastir’rh figure, which I sent in a Mimic fig on a Nastir’rh stand for a few weeks back. I would rather have had a Count Nefaria, since I already have both Nastir’rh and Mimic, but, maybe someone out there will want to trade me a Count Nefaria for a Nastir’rh.

I listened to the Natalie Merchant CD all day at work. “Wonder” and “Carnival”, the two singles from it, are pretty good, and I like a few of the other tracks, too, but for the most part, I don’t think it’s going to be one of my favorite CDs.

Monday night was good, too. I wound up going into work for four hours on Monday (that will show you how our email situation goes up and down; Emily called me at home on Monday and asked me to go in for four hours if I could, so I did, as we were really behind Service Level Agreement, or SLA, at that point), which sucked but at least nobody slapped me around (and in fact, my team won an idiotic Christmas decorations contest, so that was good). And another co-worker, a guy named Frank who is a pretty good guy (he also plays HeroClix, although we don’t play together due to schedule conflicts and me generally being a creep nobody wants to hang around with) and whom I had given my copy of The Adventures of Kavalier & Klay to for Christmas a week or so before because I don’t like the book much and he’d expressed an interest in it, came back into work on the night shift with his girlfriend Kate and brought me a plate of home made Christmas cookies. That was especially fun, because all the popular kids where I work had been leaving Christmas cards and stuff in each other’s cubicles for the past two weeks, and the only one I’d gotten had been one from Frank and his mom Julie (whom I mentioned previously). Dierdre was really pissed that Frank gave me a plate of Christmas cookies (she’s normally day shift but she was working late that night) and didn’t give one to anyone else (the plate had one cookie shaped like a reindeer on top of the pile that had my name on it in frosting, which Dierdre seemed to find especially vexing). So that was nice, although I guess it really presaged a rotten day to come. (The cookies were good; I’ve eaten them all by now. I did offer the plate around at work, though, as I’m not a complete prick regardless of various reports to the contrary, especially by my old buddy Slappy and his Legions of Sycophants.).

The best part about Monday night, though, was watching the hated and despised New England Patriots get bitch slapped by the 2-11 Miami Dolphins on Monday Night Football. I nearly gave up on the game in despair, but amazingly enough, the World Champion Patriots played a whole lot like my boys the Bucs in the last three minutes of the game, managing to somehow squander an 11 point lead as the Dolphins came from behind and pummeled them insensate in literally the last seconds of the game. “Not in our house” indeed, indeed… but apparently, in Miami, the Pats should change their name to the Patsies.

I’m really delighted with the game, as not only did stinkin’ New England lose, but it may have cost them a first round bye in the play offs, which means they could be further humiliated by getting knocked off by, I don’t know, the Kansas City Chiefs, or something, which you’d figure would have to hurt. They’ve already lost home field advantage in the play offs. I’m really hoping the Bills make it, but if they don’t, well, I’m pulling for the Steelers. And on the NFC side… who cares? With TO out, though, I almost hope the Eagles make it to the Super Bowl, just so they can get the crap pounded out of them on national TV by whoever the AFC puts up this year. (If the Patriots go up against the Eagles, I will be profoundly distressed, as I would honestly rather see Bea Archer do a sex scene with Ernest Borgnine than either of those two teams end up as World Champion this year.)

Tuesday was pretty much a wash, other than the stuff I reported at the top. And today I really should have just stood in bed. Although if I’d known dark clouds were gathering and I’d called in sick, I’d have gotten an occurrence, so at least by going in and taking my medicine, I ended up VTOed instead. It ends up the same eight hour hit on my paycheck next cycle, but picking up another occurrence would have sucked.

Social studies

One of my friends has been asking me lately why, despite the fact that I am obviously a very nice and kind and generous guy in real life, most people do not seem to care about this and I find it very difficult to make friends. Having given it some thought, I have come up with the following observations:

As always, there are different types of people. In this regard, humanity seems to largely divide into two groups, one of them comprising most of the existent base.

The larger group… the vast majority of people, it seems to me… seek out their voluntary personal relationships (friendships, in other words, at both work and in their off time) on the basis of one criterion: whether or not the other person involved in the equation at any particular time can enhance their social status or not. For most people, this is pretty much the most important thing in any personal relationship.

Now, this large group itself divides into two sub-groups: People who merely strive to avoid being friends with those who will lower their social status, and people who are extremely strict about only hanging out with those who will actually enhance it. It is a crucial difference, and the latter sort are rarer than the former. The majority of folks will actively avoid having any more than the minimum necessary interaction with anyone they instinctively feel is ‘beneath’ them (or that they feel their ‘peers’ might think was beneath them) but they are, at least, willing to be friends with others whom they do not feel will make them ‘look bad’. They don’t insist on only hanging out with those who make them look good.

The smaller group are the ones who are absolutely rigorous about picking their friends extremely carefully; they are simply never seen hanging around voluntarily with anyone who doesn’t make them look as good as possible.

Now, outside this large group, you have the other group: people who hang around with other people because they enjoy their company and don’t much care what everyone else thinks of their friends as long as they themselves like them. This is the group our cultural mythos urges us all to belong to, and that, in fact, I would imagine nearly all of us think we do belong to.

But, in my experience, there are actually very few people who consistently choose their friends on the basis of how much they like that person and enjoy their company. Most people factor the social thing into it pretty heavily. You may know a homeless guy you see every day on the way to work who is pretty funny and who seems like a good person, but you really don’t want your other buddies to catch you shooting the shit with him. It would embarrass you, and if you are a typical person, you would find some excuse for why you were talking to him that did not in any way indicate that you actually enjoyed his company and thought he was a cool guy.

And, similarly, a lot of people in their places of work simply don’t want to have any more contact than they absolutely need to with anyone who their other friends might pick on them for being friendly to.

It’s very much the sort of social phenomena that used to make a lot of us miserable in high school, and I try to ignore such nonsense as much as I can, but, well, my co worker Dierdre is very much this sort of person. As I noted, had either of the other two guys on the email team kissed her on the top of the head, she’d have been delighted, as those two guys are much more popular and well accepted on the team than I am. Having them pay that kind of attention to her would not have lowered her status on the team, so she wouldn’t have minded at all.

Compounding all of this is the general observation that we really only like the people we want something from. This is why very attractive people are always popular; as a general rule, very attractive people have something that nearly everyone else wants. And some people are naturally likable, or charismatic, to the extent that nearly everyone they meet wants to hang out with them and wants to be liked by them. It’s a natural attribute, what various other students of such things have called a ‘dominance level’. It essentially means that most of us want certain people to like us, and because of that, we are generally willing to do what they want us to do in hopes that they will be our friends.

But, as a general rule, if we don’t want anything from someone, then we find it very irritating if that person continually demands our attention in some way. In the work place, it is inevitable that we will have to pay attention to at least a few people that we do not actually want anything from, and because of that, we dislike those people and regard them as annoying. Sometimes within our family context, we are forced to tolerate people whom we do not want anything from, either. (My brother is currently dating a woman I do not want anything at all from, ever, and the fact that I have to tolerate her and even be nice to her for his sake, as he is family and she may become family at some point in the near future, makes me dislike her intensely.)

The fact that we only ‘like’ people we want something from does not necessarily make us shallow or mean people. Only a Mother Theresa can love everyone, regardless of whether she ‘wants’ something from them or not. Individual worth can generally be measured by precisely what it is we want from other people that makes us treat them in a positive fashion, or take whatever other steps we deem appropriate to securing what we want from them (usually, positive attention of some sort back; the currency of all social interactions is attention).

Those who want other people to basically secure or enhance their social status are, in my opinion, not particularly pleasant or enlightened people. And I think the majority of people are, to some extent, like this. And I have never in my life been anyone who is going to secure or enhance anyone else’s social status, unless the social status they are starting from is pretty dismal (and that has happened; I’m pretty sure at least two of my girlfriends only dated me, whether they knew it or not, because it was a step up from where they found themselves when they met me). And now that I am inarguably middled aged (43 a month ago) and overweight, and neither is considered to be at all sexy by our mainstream society, I have gone from being someone whose friendship does not enhance social status to someone whose friendship actually detracts from it… which is, again, another reason why over the past decade or so, I have had an increasingly hard time making friends or even finding like minded gaming acquaintances to hang out and play RPGs and HeroClix with.

The simple fact is, being a funny guy, and a kind, generous guy, and an articulate guy who is both an entertaining talker and an excellent listener, and generally a good, loyal friend who is interesting company (and I am all of those things) is, for the majority of folks out there, not only not enough, but not even remotely what they are looking for in a friend/acquaintance/clique member. Only other people who are like me (a vanishingly small minority) and who appreciate other people for their human qualities, rather than their capacity to attract more vivacious, attractive friends to the ongoing party that most people seem to want to make their lives into, have any appreciation or respect for me.

I should also probably mention that among those who pick their friends on the basis of how it will effect their social status, there is a smaller minority of people who are actively cruel to those they have no use for, if they are certain that these people cannot in any way effectively retaliate. It is, to an extent, a natural devolution of the type. If you are the sort of person who accepts or rejects others on the basis of how good those people look in a group photo with you, you are clearly lacking in empathy or compassion. That does not necessarily mean you have the necessary emotional alloy of cowardice, sadism, and insecurity that goes into becoming a manipulative social bully, or, for that matter, an Internet troll, but cowardice, sadism, and insecurity are unfortunately common characteristics here in the 21st century. If someone has all three, and they have no offsetting conscience (or, if you prefer, soul, which I tend to think of as simply being a quality of empathy and/or compassion for others who are not necessarily important to you in any pragmatic way), then they will, very likely, take any opportunities that come their way to make themselves feel larger and more powerful by trying to inflict pain on, and otherwise torment, others whom they feel are helpless targets of such abuse.

And that is all I have to say about that right now, as I have two taped episodes of Lost to watch, and I feel like popping some kettle corn, too.

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, "Wow, I didn't recognize you in men's clothing". According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I'm reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I'd take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here's The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people's blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin's Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron's blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don't really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren't related to me by marriage, I'd most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I've learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don't care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I'd get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don't Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.