The Alcove: Chapter 2

Chapter Two

School started that next day and like good humble students Paige and I trotted off to our respective classes - I my philosophy, playing with words and developing great systems and Paige her religious studies, playing with spirits and essences and deep pious angel hearts.  And school can really be a spiritual type of cleansing provided you look at it from a humble, awe inspired point of view and that's why it didn't cause me spiritual pain to use that blessed alcove as a quiet place to rest my head and read my Descartes.  Aside from soft bouts of meditative zazen, that alcove became in addition a center for intellectual reflections and inquiries.  And it wasn't long before our philosophical, religious friends knew all about it and wanted to crawl inside the famous tunnel.  

I was off in my room, talking to my parents by telephone when I heard Sam's voice downstairs.  He was down there with Paige saying hi and all that.  I said goodbye to my parents and trotted down the stairs.  When I reached the bottom I saw Paige and no sign whatsoever of Sam.

"Isn't Sam here?" I asked.

Paige grinned and pointed downward to the alcove door, closed and quiet.  I laughed.

Sam's a kick back, tall, long faced Bikkhu, excited and fascinated on his search for samati flashes of enlightenment, perhaps quite sudden.

"What could that be like? And what is enlightenment?  What does so and so think about it?  And did you read this or that book?  And damn it's cold in here!," Sam would cry.  He was always cold and one day Paige was developing crazy ramblings about people's heads shrinking as the temperature dropped and if this were true Sam would be constantly in a state of embarrassment because his head would consistently be the size of some shrunken head tribe size in the middle of a wet rain forest.  How unfortunate that would be!

Paige and I waited outside the alcove for Sam to return to the real world, expecting him to be a mere one-two minutes (in fact, surprised that he crawled directly in that hole and actually closed the door) and we were brewing up some tea.

That tea was stark cold by the time Sam finished his meditative practice (or whatever he was doing - perhaps napping).  He crawled out with his long sad face and said “I wonder what fung shui says about triangular structures” being that the roof of that alcove slanted down like an Egyptian pyramid. 

Sam was always asking interesting questions like this.  He was always asking questions.  He had such a wonder and awe at the world that is so refreshing to find among fellow students.  So often a student will spend one semester, about three hours a week for fifteen or sixteen weeks and come out thinking they know all about sociology or biology or art history when in fact they know just a minuscule fraction of a universe-size pie.  I’d certainly been guilty of it.  I once took an introductory course to modern philosophy and walked out thinking I fully understood Spinoza when I had only read secondary sources and never even cracked open a book written by Spinoza’s hand!  And then that’s, of course, been translated and messed with and developed into our English animal that may not fully reflect Spinoza because words do change things!  And then we’re still not in his shoes, seeing things from his angle, from his time period, period.  Someone could spend all of grad school and become a so-called master of Spinoza and still not fully understand a thing about the man.  You can’t get into his head!  Sure enough, Spinoza scholars all disagree and argue about what the man meant.  

And I think about Henry David Thoreau and he said you should spend as much time with a book as the author spent making it.  And then it becomes a seemingly life-long meditation to fully digest something.  And there are enough books in your average book store to get lost swimming in all kinds of words and pages and you think there are enough books in the world to throw the world out of orbit simply by the sheer weight of them! 

Sam understood that and, like a great Bodhisattva, constantly asked questions, reaffirming his beginner’s mind and instilling it in all the proud minds that approached him.

The Alcove: Chapter 1

Chapter One

It was our nature to do these things.  That's for right sure.  Like the time we dressed up as mafia hitmen and payed a grand old visit to the local Italian joint, Abruzzi's, and went into this classy venue decked out in "wife beater" tanktops and scummy jeans and said in thick Italian tenors "How you doin'?" and "Fo-git about it".  It was in our nature to be crazy, irrational, some might say foolish but nevertheless funny as all hell. 

And then there were the constant crazy questions.  "What would you do if Satan rose from the deepest pit of fiery hell and said you could either be Johnny Depp or Robert Plant?"  And we'd sit there and analyze it like we were solving world hunger and say such things as "Well Johnny Depp is so suave and acting in noble movies and Robert Plant has that wild hair and you know when he swings those sugar hips he understood a great Koan...I'd definitely be Johnny but just cause he looks cooler and perhaps that Koan is not supposed to be understood."  "Well, what would you do...." and so on and so on.  It was in our nature to be wild and silly and so when Paige approached me and said she had special plans for the tiny little alcove looming under our staircase I was all ears and eager.

By this time we were seriously caught up in the study of zen and Buddhism and reading all kinds of material by Suzuki and Kerouac.  We were thinking strange thoughts like looking at an empty banana peel and remembering the banana that used to rest in it and seeing nothing and thinking it's all the same anyways.  We were both wild with excitement because the stuff we were learning was changing everything.  The great psychologist William James said that religious people had a sort of spiritual center through which all our experience is filtered through.  By God he was right!  My studies of philosophy were turning from a serious inquiry into the very nature of substance to a dreamy bird's eye view into the vast no-thingness of everything.  My evening walks were turning into serious meditations on the first of the four noble truths: all life is suffering.  I constantly found myself meditating in the vast redwood forest behind my school, up here in the tall northern California.  All my thoughts and reckonings were being filtered through a flamenco web of zen artistry and prose.  I was thinking strange thoughts like "The Buddha lives in trees and corkscrews" and "Life is an empty glass bottle with an air filter in it."  Without the air filter how could we breathe?  This being a testament that I was not yet enlightened.  

Paige was the exact same way, practicing zazen on a faithful stump in a red forest, reading Dharma Bums by candlelight and thinking "Pow!  Japhy's a cool cat...and dog, and squirrel."  We thought of ourselves as tiny Bikkhus, beginning monks on a lonely trail to sweet ever last.  And thus the alcove made perfectly sound sense and I was nearly blown away by the ingenuity of Paige's idea to make it not only a useful but a damn near necessary tool in our path to a zen mind, beginner's mind.

"We need a spiritual center to come to so we can feel holy and peaceful for this semester in school," she told me.

"But we have the big fat redwood trees and long lawn grassy plains," I replied.  

"But that doesn't work.  It rains so ever consistently here that we little Arhats get cold and wet and shiver when we should be enjoying the ultimate quietude of the mind."  

"Well yes, that's true.  What do you have in mind?"

"The alcove," she said gravely.

We were renting out this two story, rather nice apartment near the center of our tiny college town.  It was plenty big for two poor kids and it was often the center for cheap wine tasting parties entirely too adult for our young spirits but nevertheless a good time.  Underneath the staircase was a tiny little hobbit door that, when opened, revealed a little hole with a downward slanting roof and just enough room for one person to lay or two people to sit.

"That's going to be our spiritual center?" I nearly laughed.  Then I started to imagine the sure genius of the crazy plan.  Here in this tucked away hole in the wall we would have an intimate space of hiding, a tucked away retreat when we felt the overwhelming stress of life and school (I was going to be soon cracking open Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit - Pow!), we had a place of comfort and rest like a mother's womb, warm and enclosed, and should we ever need it we would have a fall-out shelter for potential bombings and a hide-away for potential mad rush wild dog police chases not that we were intending any crime or hijack.  

We went to work right away, one by one carrying boxes in storage out of the tiny shelter like ants in line to do their ant farm chores.  It wasn't long before we had an empty alcove and a corner of the room stacked high with hideous boxes, coolers and a vacuum and its accessories.  Time to enter, to peak our tiny heads inside the unknown cave to see if it was a tiny hole or a spiritual vacuum filled with tiny speckles of enlightened dust and magic. 

I got on all fours and peaked my head in before filing in like a saddled horse.  Paige was right at my tail.  We filled the alcove awkward and strange, leaving no room for anything else save a pot of Asian green tea and two tiny cups.  Perfect!

We got all excited and happy and started talking about paths to enlightenment and indeed I think we felt a little samati right then and there.  We were like beat zen monks traveling in a deep China jungle stumbling upon a tiny little wooden haven clinging onto a cliff for dear life just to overlook a valley of trees and peace and solitude and honey and ommmm.

"We need some cushions!" Paige yelled.

"We need a tea table!" I returned.

"We need some pictures!"

"We need a stapled on wise koan!"
"We need a bell!"

"We need a stuffed animal!"

"We need a drum!"

"We need some incense!"
"We need a lamp!"

"We need a candle!"
"We need a sandal!"
"We need a handle!"

"We need a panhandle!"

"We need a Randall!"
And we went back and forth like this until our alcove was filled to the tip with books and shoes and corsets and cotton candy and yankee doodle dandy and we just laughed and thought about how we need nothing at all and we could just sit in this dark crevice and meditate for hours.  The alcove was a place for spiritual retreat and not because it had some wild and fantastic force or magic but because all places have this wild and fantastic force and magic and the alcove was no different than a bubbling brook or a child's smile.  Absolutely no difference at all if you teach yourself to see.

But it was rather dark in that lonely alcove and it did require a little sprucing up.  Time was of the essence as school was beginning soon and being that I was quite inept in decorating up a room (my room consisted of a bed, a desk, stacks and stacks of books and a few pictures on the wall - one of which being a fantastic array of colors that melded into a happy Janis Joplin sitting on a tie-dye Volkswagen bug in the middle of responsible Washington DC - a prize picture indeed and my only triumph in room arrangement), Paige went out to pick up supplies.  When she came back she had picked up zen pictures and writings - one picture featuring a solitary monk gazing at the moon in great koan manner, a dingy beautiful bell, a piece of wood donated freely by a lumber yard - true Bodhisattva's they were, a lovely Celtic pattern cloth - maroon and green squares, and a fine Chinese tea set.  Before long the alcove was a complete zen temple, sitting room only, with a bell to ding your entrance and a table set for soothing and meditative tea.  Above the tiny door on the outside we put an expression, written in Chinese, that said, "Mani Padme Hum", an old Tibetan Buddhist blessing to clear out negative energy and bring in that good sweet stuff.  

We crawled into the alcove and looked joyfully into each other's eyes knowingly.  We thought into the nature of our wild ideas realizing soon that they have no origination but just come like little quarks of bundled energy.  These crazy ideas gave me much joy.  And I thought about William James' crazy contention that a belief is "true" when its effects are good.  And I thought, "Is Buddhism true because it helps you to see past this cycle of pleasure and pain and the suffering inherent in it?  Or is it true regardless of its effects?  Is it true for those who don't practice or believe?  Is there a Buddha essence that may one day touch down on all these lonely, sorrowful souls like on a day when all the great Bodhisattva join hands and nod their gentle heads in great anticipation and faith and the world will just clean up and put down its weapons of mass destruction and empty speech and just rejoice in the ultimate essence of the Tao?"  I thought these lonely thoughts in the embrace of our dark little alcove and wrote down this prayer:

"May the world bask in light

And realize fulfillment

And see the truth in an acorn

Like the innermost blue of a child's eye

As it reaches out to return us our nature.

Sit still oh sorrow world

And breathe the deep breath

Of everlasting bliss."

The next day would be school for Paige and I and I was ready to chew on some academia. 

On Pilgrimage: Part III: Cycling Across the USA

Josh and I learned an important lesson as we arduously pedaled our way across the United States: it's important to plan.  

Planning has never been my forte (and still isn't).  I made no plans out of High School, which landed me in Community College.  I chose my major (Business Administration) not out of proper planning, but just because it occurred to me one day that I'd taken several classes needed to get an AS degree in business, so I decided it would be my major.  I changed that major after jumping on a plane to Spain to walk the Camino de Santiago, a trail I'd literally read nothing about, putting my faith in my friends who, for their part, did very minimal planning.  I came back and applied to Humboldt State without even looking at their website.  Service in the Peace Corps was decided on a whim, although sustained by a long and very involved application process.  And I applied to just one graduate program: San Jose State, ultimately chosen because they didn't require a GRE score - a test I adamantly did not want to take.  So, as you can see, I learned my lesson on the bike trip but have never applied it.  This has had one negative impact and one positive impact on my life.  The negative is that things haven't always worked out as I'd hoped.  The positive is that, even so, I've done a lot of interesting things.  Too much planning can cause inertia, while too little can cause erratic, but exciting, behavior.  

The bicycle trip was largely erratic.  But then again, if we had planned, we might not have done it.  As noted in Part I, we were dropped off in the rain.  That rain never really stopped in Oregon, aside from when it snowed on us as we made our way through the Cascades.  We got rained on in Idaho, and again in Montana.  The only difference in Montana is that the temperature dropped significantly as well, and we were freezing.  In a sleepy town called Twin Bridges we endured one of our coldest nights in the chicken barn at the town's fairground.  We spent the day trying (and failing) to find a backyard to camp in, but ended up sneaking into the fairground's only barn without a lock on it, and drifted in and out of a sleepless night wondering if we'd wake up in a hypothermic state of shock or the local jail for trespassing.  As we pedaled through AMAZING Yellowstone, we were rained on sporadically.  In Colorado, we counted on an evening shower every day.  It was about that time that we took a close look at our maps and the annual rainfall graph they provided on the back.  This is where the poor planning comes in: WE WERE BASICALLY FOLLOWING THE AVERAGE RAINFALL HIGHS ACROSS THE UNITED STATES.  That is, we left Oregon and Idaho in May, one of their rainiest months.  We made it to Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado in June, one of their rainiest months.  Kansas was alright, although it was unseasonably hot (that is, June is a hot month, but they were having record highs!).  We also inched our way through the midwest as tornado season started, nervous the whole time. And then we made it to the eastern states in time for their infamous humidity.  Fittingly, we reached Yorktown, our destination, wet and tired, spending our last night in the tent trying to keep the rain from leaking in and soaking us as a storm passed over Virginia.  

This lack of planning explains why we had next to nobody riding with us.  Most people take an east to west route because you hit the eastern states BEFORE they get uncomfortably hot, and the western states AFTER they've endured the rainy spring.  We rode alone the entire time, just crossing people's paths as they traveled against us.  This lack of planning had the unfortunate result of making us uncomfortable practically the entire time, but the positive effect of having actually cycled across the USA.  I don't think we would have made the trip otherwise.  It needed to be done on my summer break from school, so May to July was the only possibility.  And it needed to be convenient.  It was easy to get our bikes up to Oregon and begin the trip.  It would have been much more difficult to start from the east.  So, in the end, having survived, I am glad we didn't consult the maps for the answer to the most primordial question before traveling: Is this trip a good idea?  It was not, but we didn't know it, even as we tried to outrun a lightning storm in Montana - even as Josh got scared, abandoned his bike and hid behind a tree as lightning struck all around us.  By the time we realized it, we had miles behind us and there was no way we'd turn back and give up.  

So let this be a testament for poor planning.  You may not enjoy that which you undertake, but you will do it nonetheless.  And there are always good stories afterwards.  And there was NOTHING better than an evening ride in Missouri when the sun was setting, the temperature sank, and the oppressive humidity turned into the most perfect weather in the world, allowing you to contemplate the mystery of life as you glided down an Ozark hillside.  (Don't consider the counter-argument that there are tragic stories associated with ill-planning as well.  Just don't.)

Song: Pinch Me Now

Here is a song I wrote for Anita, and I'm posting it today in honor of our three year anniversary of being together - an AMAZING three years!

On Pilgrimage: Part II: Cycling Across the USA

Riding a bicycle across the United States makes you an instant celebrity in all the small towns you go through.  At first it's embarrassing.  I remember riding into Sisters, Oregon just a few days into our journey and being surrounded by a crowd of middle-aged shoppers.  I was embarrassed because I hadn't yet earned the right to talk about the toils of the road or the hardship of being away from family so long.  Sure, we'd ridden through rainy weather, and it was uncomfortable, but my clothes were pretty clean and I hadn't even changed a flat tire yet.  Still, people crowded around and gawked at our ambition: 4400 miles in around 3 months, west coast to east coast.  As time went on, we'd be embarrassed for entirely different reasons.

In Oregon and Idaho we attracted attention because people were impressed.  In Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado, we attracted attention because we were men wearing a hell of a lot of spandex, walking into bars with bison heads mounted on the wall.  One of our most uncomfortable moments came in a tiny town in Wyoming called Jeffrey City.  We rode into this town and immediately got rampaged by mosquitos.  We all but ran into the one and only building in town, a bar, sporting spandex from head to toe.  Everyone in the bar looked tough, and they all turned in their seats to witness the freak show.  Fortunately, there was a second room, away from the bar and the people.  We took refuge in there.  We planned on spending the entire afternoon/evening in there, not wanting to brave the mosquitos.  We ordered meals and beer, and spent time reading National Geographic and any other magazines they had available.  We spent hours and hours prolonging our stay.  Finally, it was time for bed.  When they brought us our check, we pulled out our credit cards.  Unfortunately, it was cash only, and there was no ATM machine in town.  We panicked.  The people running this joint had guns, trucks, and tough-looking handlebar mustaches.  We were in spandex and had bicycles that we lovingly referred to as our steeds.  We all but panicked.  We first emptied our wallets, then our pockets, then my backpack, and finally our panniers, dumping out every last coin.  We came up with just enough, and a 22 cent tip.  Apologizing as we gathered our gear, we headed across the street and slept in an old fairground, breathing a deep sigh of relief.

The next day we had our toughest day on the route.  It was 70 miles of nothing, with a strong head wind fighting us the entire way.  There was no mountain range to topple, which had to do many times (peaking at 11,580 in Colorado), but the head wind made it feel like one large mountain, all uphill.  Usually we would average around 13-14 miles per hour, but we made our way on this particular day at 6-7 miles per hour the entire time.  It took FOREVER!  Meanwhile, dust blew against us and there was no place to stop and rest in the shade.  It was a desolate wilderness between Jeffrey City and Rawlins.  When we finally reached the outskirts of Rawlins, we threw our bikes on the ground and sat on the curb, thankful that it was over.  Just then, a mysterious car pulled up next to us.  A woman called me to the passenger window and she forcefully put a bag of donuts and a couple juices in my hand.  She didn't say a word.  She just thrust the treats into my hands and drove away.  All we could do was guess at her intentions as we enjoyed the best tasting donuts we'd ever had.  We assumed she was a good samaritan and it was important to her that she didn't receive thanks or recognition.  We assumed she drove by us as we struggled into Rawlins, took pity, and went to get us some snacks.  Or maybe she already had the donuts in the car, saw us, and spontaneously decided to give them to us.  Whatever her intentions, she was one of the many angels we met with along our route.

Another angel was Gillian in Ordway, Colorado.  We heard about her from cyclists heading west.  They gave us her phone numbers, emphatically telling us to call her.  The day we were riding into Ordway, we gave her a ring.  She answered the phone and we told her we were riding through Ordway and would love a place to stay, if possible.  She asked what time we were coming, and we told her in the afternoon/evening.  She said she works the late shift.  She was a nighttime prison guard at the local jail.  Under normal circumstances, this would have been followed by us saying thanks anyway, and then calling the local police to seek permission to sleep in the town park.  But Gillian went on: "I won't be home when you arrive, but here's my address and I'll leave the key to the front door under the mat.  Help yourself to anything in the fridge and I'll see you in the morning."  WOW!   We slept in a guest bed she had all made up.  We woke very early in the morning, trying to beat the eastern Colorado sun, and just as we finished writing her a thank you note, we heard her walking down the hall.  We did not get the early start we wanted because we ended up conversing with Gillian for hours.  First of all, she thought we were crazy.  Second of all, she loves talking to cyclists because, although crazy, they usually shared her thirst for adventure, alternative kinds of lifestyles, and exploration.  We had a lot in common.  I stayed in touch with Gillian for years, and she was a great person to have on my side as I experienced the Peace Corps.  She's always a source of encouragement.  We met other blessed souls like Gillian, and we covered a lot of terrain.

By the time we hit Kansas, we were not embarrassed at all about our venture.  We had a lot to be proud of.  We were over half-way done, we'd conquered the Rockies, we'd changed plenty of flat tires, we'd slept in parks all across America, and we were dirty as hell.  We were making it to Virginia!  In Part III, I'll share more stories and make some remarks about the valuable lessons I learned as a cross-country cyclist.

02 Two Months on the Road by tmhfband

Song: The Creation and Destruction According to Mike

Check this out!  It's my own interpretation of Genesis and thereafter.  Epic!

Lyrics for The Creation and Destruction According to Mike


Part I: The Creation


I breathed a spark of life into a lifeless universe  

I made the trees and bushes from the scarcity and dearth  

And still I wasn’t happy in the end 

I needed someone else to have a talk with when I’s bored

I needed some self-consciousness to help even the score

I put a naked man down on the earth

He found himself in the same sort of crisis I was in

He felt so god-damned bored I cursed myself for making him

I threw him down and tore out his rib

Like playing with my legos I fit his rib inside a bone

Until I had a rib cage and some breasts and a womb

I introduced her to her man

They partied every day and slept like babies through the night

They rode on Terradactyls holding on with all their might

Their garden was their playground

One day he looked at her and it was not so innocent

They lay down in the bushes doing things not so decent

I had to hide my eyes and look away

When I met them in the evening they didn’t look at me the same

It was like I was a stranger intruding on their game

My loneliness came back like a knife

They don’t need me to construct another person when their sad

They do it on their own,  they’re now a mommy and a dad

I ain’t needed anymore

It’s like I don’t even exist  

I don’t think that I’m even missed  

Oh I’ve been thoroughly dismissed  

Oh you don’t want to see me pissed


Part II: The Destruction

You forgot your maker, don’t think your maker forgot you

Maybe you’ll remember me when I do the things I do

You’ll be sorry you lost track of me

I’ll raise the temperature of earth so slowly you won’t see

Like a frog who’s stuck in boiling water, you’ll swim like you are free

Till the moment it’s too late

Sure there will be signs like polar bears who’ve lost their home

But after all the arguing you won’t be certain that they’re gone

And then the storms will come

The sun will blast so brightly the sea will fly away to it

And swirl around the sky like a maniacal puppet

Till it all comes crashing down at once

Scientists love to argue that humans caused the storms to come

And their conclusion is correct, but their reasoning is wrong

What humans caused is almighty wrath

If you didn’t make me lonely I could have filtered fossil fuels

And patched the ozone layer with my special magic glue

Your irresponsibility could have been managed

I could have brought back to life all the species you killed off

I could have planted a new seed for every tree that you did log

Your home didn’t have to be a bloody mess

But alone I sit in heaven and look down at your carnival

You walk around like nothing is happening at all

How stupid you’ve become

I can’t even make you see

How mad you’ve made me

Even as the planet’s warming

You still don’t believe 

They say parents need to let their kids go, 

but oh, oh, I just don’t know

Customer Service in America

A Book review on Emily Yellin's "Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us: Customer Service and What It Reveals About Our World and Our Lives"  (And may I point out - her last name makes her the perfect author of this book!)

When I moved to Portland about five months ago I was pretty nervous about finding a job. Anita and I had used almost all our cash hiking the John Muir Trail and traveling to Japan. It was imperative that we found jobs right away as we relocated north so we could get back on our feet and start seriously planning our wedding. And here we were moving to Portland, Oregon, known as the place young people go to RETIRE, not to WORK. The economy here lags behind the rest of the country, which is not doing well itself. Still, we packed our UHaul truck and headed north, and I found myself applying to jobs indiscriminately. And I landed myself in a customer service call center, taking calls from all over the country and Canada, trying to solve the thousands of unique problems inspiring people to get on the phone and call, many of whom are very, very angry.

As I try to understand my place in the world one call at a time, my parents thought it would be funny to gift me Emily Yellin's book for Christmas. On the front cover is a headset that looks just like the one I wear. After a good laugh, I opened it and started to read, causing me to think a lot deeper about customer service than I ever really wanted to. Here are some reflections, gathered from the book.

First of all, the fact that there's an 800 number for just about any product you purchase reveals that there's been a serious consumer rights movement underway for years and years. Corporations did not benevolently start paying hundreds of employees to help serve your needs. They were forced to do it. The customer service call center was born out of the telephone company, starting in the late 1800s, which required operators to direct you to the place you were calling, starting with young unruly boy who transitioned into their roles as telephone operators from the telegraph industry preceding it.  An account from 1910 said, "By the clumsy methods of those days, from two to six boys were needed to handle each call. And there was usually more or less of a cat-and-dog squabble between the boys and the public, with every one yelling at the top of his voice" (26). This led to women operators, who cost the phone company less per hour, and who had a much more polite demeanor and reliable work ethic. As usually happens in United States business, they were replaced by machines, their role reduced to connecting long distance calls.

 In the mid 1900s, customer service saw its first incarnations as businesses started to answer questions and take orders by phone. The first customer service agents were rude, due to their working in cramped quarters and not having adequate access to information. They would often answer the phone, "It's your nickel, brother, talk fast." This was before the 'toll free' lines. By the early 1960s, businesses had been greedy enough to force the government's hand, leading to Kennedy's Consumer Bill of Rights in 1961, which established the Consumer Protection Agency. It stated that consumers had the right to be heard. We have people like Ralph Nadar to thank for this right, as he spent much of the 1960s and 1970s fighting for consumers, and blatantly criticizing the US Automobile industry, writing "Unsafe at Any Speed", fighting for the passing of 'lemon laws'. "His advocacy... led to stricter regulation of product safety and quality-of-life issues across the board, such as mandatory seat belts in cars and clean water and air legislation" (33). This eventually led to 800 numbers, which made it less expensive for customers to make contact with companies. 800 numbers started with AT&T's introduction of WATS, a service for businesses which allowed businesses to pay a reasonable flat fee for long-distance calls, rather than pay costly collect-call rates. As with so many groundbreaking movements, customer service came about when people mobilized in response to greed and too much centralized power. In this case it was against mighty corporations.

Such mobilization was put on steroids over the last fifteen years with the internet. Even as corporations have long advertised their commitment to customer service, such service was hard to come by and consumers still didn't feel any sort of empowerment. For example, one day in 2007 Mona Shaw waited all day for Comcast to install their 'triple-play service', which included telephone, internet, and cable television. They never came. They finally showed up two days later, and left the job only half done. A few days later, the service she still had was cut off, and she was left without even phone service. She had to drive to her local Comcast office to speak to a manager, where she was left to wait outside for two hours. She was then told the manager had gone home. After the weekend passed, and Mona's rage had festered long enough, she returned, stormed into the office and took a hammer to the customer service rep's keyboard. One misdemeanor and a restraining order later, Shaw became a national hero, appearing on Good Morning America, Nightline, and Dr. Phil.

With the internet, such extreme antics are not usually needed. Consumers are ultimately empowered with the ability to air complaints and spread devastating press for companies that just won't listen.  More and more, consumers frequent these sites before they'll trust corporate advertising.  Such websites include:
PayPalSucks.com
AllstateInsuranceSucks.com
MicrosoftSucks.org
Amexsux.com
Walmart-Blows.com
IHateStarbucks.com
VerizonPathetic.com

and the list goes on. More general sites include:

GetSatisfaction.com
Complaints.com
PlanetFeedback.com
My3Cents.com

Consumers can now get their particular experiences listened to and talked about, not by the company, but with other consumers or would-be consumers. This has forced the hand of corporations, and many take customer service much more seriously as a result. One company that was particularly devastated by the online consumer movements is AOL. Check out this video if you want an example of horrible service, consider that technology made it possible, and bear in mind that this video has over 500,000 views on youtube:







Another thing I found interesting in the book was its commentary on outsourced call centers. Facing daily racism and torment from American callers, international representatives typically include highly educated and motivated university students. Companies seek locations with a large student population in countries that have been historically colonized by a European country or America. That gives a company the best opportunity of employing bilingual, intelligent representatives. Representatives are brought in intimate contact with American ignorance and impatience. Typically, the American caller on the line will have no idea where the country that the rep talks from even falls on a map, even as that rep knows a great deal about America. This is often upsetting to the representative halfway across the world, a blow to their national pride. Additionally, it takes a great amount of cultural sensitivity to adequately help a consumer calling from another continent. Often callers are enraged because a package was delivered several hours behind schedule or they can't get something to work. It takes cultural training to understand such anger, because the efficiency and reliability we take for granted in our products is not typically enjoyed by the rest of the world. Imagine that you are used to things coming days and days behind schedule, and you're suddenly on the phone with someone screaming or crying because their product is three hours late. A big part in the job of an international customer service rep is to understand the mind and culture of American consumers.

All this indicates something very important about the world Americans live in - we take for granted that we be treated with exceptional service, and we're very, very fortunate that this is the case.  It's the exception, not the rule.  Any time you receive great service, be thankful for it. There's a whole history behind an act of good service.  It should not be taken for granted. Thankfully, I work for a company that takes customer service very seriously. They don't force us to follow scripts and they empower us with a variety of ways to help an angered customer. And the most interesting thing about my job is I get to talk to Americans from all walks of life, from highly tech savvy individuals to people who can't access a website without using google's search, from people living in the middle of a bustling city to people without internet because they live in the woods, from people with incredibly gracious personalities to people with anger spilling out from the depths of their being. While their levels of expectations vary, all call because they can - they are empowered with a voice, which is a very special thing.