JESUS H.

You may well have heard, or actually not heard, how, on last night’s Letterman show, the audio was dumped out when Janet Jackson said the word “Jesus”. During last week’s tech crisis I uttered the same word, and with considerably more emphasis, while on the phone to a corporate tech support thrall who was telling me that I should move my files to another computer and totally reinstall my entire system. I was immediately reproved. “Please don’t say that. It offends my religious beliefs.” Offending Christians is being rapidly elevated towards criminal status, as far as I can see, and we’ll soon have to leave the bar and curse in the street, for fear of giving offense by second-hand invective. Damn it to hell.

But the real problem in this is that a whole bunch of things offend me. And unfortunately one of them is computer tech support. I was already developing a theory that the tech supporters were making it up as they went along, and the only real object of the exercise was to get me and my problems off the phone as fast as possible. Then Henry C. Beck sent me the following first-hand account from Salon of life in a outsourced tech hell-hole. (Won’t link salon.com because they want money.)

Outsourcers are paid by the computer manufacturer based on the number of calls they handle. The more calls we take, the more the outsourcer is paid. So naturally everything that happens in this vast carpeted warehouse of cubicles is done with an eye toward speed. Our managers stress something called "average call time," which is simply the average amount of time a tech spends on each call. They want us to be under 12 minutes. Our phones monitor our ability to reach this magic number as well as the total number of calls we take, the number of times we ask for help, how much time we take between calls, even the amount of time we spend in the restroom. As long as we could answer the phones and provide records that we'd done so, the company would be paid every time we thanked someone for calling technical support...The most incompetent among us could have written a manual on how to answer calls and log them properly. As for how to actually troubleshoot and fix computers, we were largely on our own. Beyond a cursory overview of the computers we were in charge of healing, the closest thing to a troubleshooting tool we were taught was The Mantra. We repeated it over and over, the words seating themselves deep in the folds of our brains until the breakup of class began to feel more and more like the end of a cult meeting...The Mantra is simply, "We don't support that." On the face of it, it's completely logical. We're here to help with problems related to your computer hardware, but we don't pretend to know anything about your digital camera, or how to get the most out of Adobe Photoshop. Without The Mantra we'd waste precious time trying to answer questions beyond the scope of our expertise. Never mind that the scope of our expertise was largely limited to reciting The Mantra and logging calls. The important thing was that we understood our mission was to answer questions that fell within the limited margins outlined in the computer's warranty. Beyond that we didn't have to do anything.

WE’RE ALL DOOMED PART III

But offending people seems to be the theme of the week, if not the era. Seems that I have sadly upset Jay Babcock with yesterday’s response to his email. He resents that I misrepresented him as a defeatist. I assume the mail he sent me today was not intended for publication, so I can’t exactly give you chapter and verse, but he did want his posts removed, and I have agreed to that, only I fear it won’t be tonight because I’m too deadline beat to do the tech brain-surgery on the archives. He was also pissed I didn’t provide a link to Arthur, so here it is. Read Jay on his own turf. I think that’s fair.

http://www.arthurmag.com

Meanwhile there’s a whole bunch of related stuff over on the anarchic comments board from A-B-C, nigelr and some charming practical suggestions from philosohoe. (Long posts can be mailed to byron4d@aol.com, I’ll post ‘em.) And Beck (again) weighs in with...

“Look, it's *over for liberals in this country. Has been since Kennedy was killed -- possibly even earlier than that. It's a conservative nation and it's getting more that way with each year.”

I don't agree. I think the boomer generation went through a conservative phase in their thirties and forties, due to a kind of natural bio-sociological phase, and I think that same group will start to open up a few notches in their political waistbands as they get less nervous--one reason why Bush and his cronies are so determined to keep fear alive and ever present.

It's entirely possible that the success of movies like The Passion aren't about a movement towards religio-conservatism, but rather a reaction to an encroaching liberalism and the ever-greater slackening of religious bonds and beliefs. Dude, where's My God? Wasn't that a Bergman picture?

This doesn't make me any less cynical, because liberal or conservative we are and will remain a passive-aggressive people. But the hefty sales of books like Moore's, Clinton's, and Franken's seem to indicate there's a real shift out there--the new Silent Majority, maybe...

LINKS

Our pal hipspinster blogs about jury service at http://hipspinster.blogspot.com/

While fidicen draws our attention to the Washington serious, but highly informative http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/

QUOTES OF THE DAY

When you’re smashing the state, keep a song in your heart and a smile on your lips. – Skip Williamson

A liberal is a man who leaves the room before the fight starts. – Dorothy Parker

CRYPTIQUE – beep! beep!