Life worked out more than well today. So well that my morning will be booked. I decided to write up todays entry right now, while I have the time. I’ll have some new haiku from jail eventually, but first a little rant…
There is something wrong with the world. There seems to be a conspiracy to keep the elderly confused and unable to fend for themselves. It is a simple, and supposedly efficient design called ‘tele-prompting’. You know what I mean—you call your phone company or any business these days and you hear the recording, “Press 1 for Mr. Jones, press 2 if you want free soup,…”. These voice commands can be very confusing to the elderly who only want to speak with a human being. Many are hard of hearing, or are not exactly sure what they want to say or who they want to speak with. They only know that they want help. In their frustration many folks just hang up and give up on their quest for assistance. I have experienced this first hand with my mother as well as a neighbor. The neighbor was suddenly unable to make a long-distance call. He grew angry at the fusillade of numbers that the prompt was spitting out at him, so he called me. I went to his aid, dialed the numbers, encountered the same prompts, and was eventually (30 minutes later) able to speak with a human being. All would be well except that this poor operator/tech support could barely speak English. I am not kidding. It took me almost 15 minutes to realize that he was telling me that my friends LDS had been sold to another company over the weekend and we needed to contact our local company to have the service reassigned, or something like that. I’m still not entirely sure what the guy was talking about. The upshot is that tomorrow I’m calling Taconic Telephone and having the LDS transferred over to them. I am hoping that this will help out my friend. I mean, really, if I had such a hard time with the system, imagine what an 85 year old man who has suffered 2 strokes and a quadruple bypass operation in the past year is going to do? My mom had a similar circumstance, but this was with her doctor. She needed to go in for some blood work and wished to make an appointment. She called the local clinic and received the endless series of instructions and options one hears. Some how she got the idea that the clinic was closed for vacation and would not be open for 4 or 5 days. I called back and was able to untangle the knot of confusion for her. We made the appointment, all went well, she’s in good health. All she wanted to do was speak with a human. There is something irresponsible about the whole theory. Teleprompters direct our calls to the party we need to speak with. The service skirts the issue of someone answering the phone and speaking with us, ascertaining the situation, and then making the relevant decision by connecting us to whomever we need to speak with. There is no one to blame now. No one to remain accountable if we cannot understand the instructions.
There is no one home.
Slow down, people. The work you’re doing doesn’t require you to ignore your fellows.
I don’t watch TV (except for X-Files).
I don’t own a cellphone.
I don’t have Instant Messenger
There is nothing so important that it can’t wait for me to breathe.
Here are some haiku…
#60.
Really, is it strange,
as the sun is leaving town,
to think of your eyes?
#175.
I’ve dreamed of green leaves
and sunshine in the garden
and always of you.
#214.
Sometimes I wonder,
“Is this happening to me?”.
Life is but a dream.
Johnnyboy
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