Finding an appropriate greeting card is a tricky proposition at best, and in recent years Father’s Day has become one of the most treacherous of all Hallmark Moments. Nearly every card on the shelves falls into one of two camps, with little in between:

GROUP ONE: “O Saintly Father, your Christian charity and homespun wisdom bring tears to my Christ-bless’d eyes, for as I walk through this world as one of God’s Soldiers, your beatific countenance serves as a perfect inspiration of intelligence and integrity. Let us join hands and weep as one, for the eternal bounty that the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, whose teachings you have imbued into my soul as if they were your own. You are truly the wind beneath my wings.”

GROUP TWO: “Hey, Happy Father’s Day, you big fat fartin’ dummy! You look like a big ol’ fartin’ monkey, sitting your fat ass in your favorite fartchair, watching NASCAR, drinking beer until you pass out! Try not to fart too much! Also give me some money, ha ha!”

These cards are great if your father is Charles Ingalls or Homer Simpson. For everyone else, the greeting card industry had no time for you.

As I imagine is the case for many readers, my father lies somewhere in the middle. My father is not the living embodiment of Christian Virtue, nor is he an oafish fart machine. So paying him tribute on Father’s Day can be difficult. I hope this story does him justice.

Brief preface: Last month Isley visited New York as part of the What is Best in Life East Coast
Tour. As you may have read in his recap, or seen via the wonders of online photo sharing, he and I engaged in a spirited Scientific Beer Tasting. We tested a wide variety of beers, many of them dating back to 1995. Some of you may wonder why we had beer lying around that dated back to the first Clinton administration, a time when neither of us were anywhere near the legal age to drink it. It was because of my father’s Beer Fridge. For as long as I can recall, my parents’ home has had a second refrigerator dedicated to beer. It was usually full of prosaic brews like Coors Light, Yuengling, Sam Adams, or Stegmaier, but as my father has an adventurer’s palate it accumulated a wider variety of oddball bottles, the leftovers of myriad experimental six pack purchases. When my parents sold their New Jersey home to move to China by way of Florida, the Beer Fridge was dissolved, and many of these beers (like so many other things) found their way to my apartment.

Why, beyond the obvious reasons, did my dad so diligently curate a Beer Fridge? The answer, as well as my very existence, dates back to The Blizzard of 1978.

At the time, my parents were relative newlyweds, recently relocated to Worcester, Massachusetts. My father was a rising star in the shoe business, having made the leap from retail manager to assistant buyer in the corporate offices. My mother worked at a bank, and both were on the job when The Blizzard hit. My father’s offices closed early enough that he made it home safely, but the bank tried to stick it out, leading to my mother’s car getting stuck in a snow bank as she attempted to drive home. While she was close enough to a friend’s home to find shelter, the storm had knocked out electricity and phone lines in many areas. My father, unable to locate my mother beyond her initial phone call saying she was headed home, began to walk the route between the bank and their home in the hopes of finding her, freezing one eye shut in the process. When he returned home to defrost himself, my mom managed to get him on the phone and let him know she was fine. Stranded across town, but fine.

For the next two days, my father was stranded at home, alone and often without electricity. As a struggling young couple, they didn’t have much in the way of provisions, and he almost immediately ran through their stock of alcohol. In this moment of desperation, he turned to Billy Beer, the famously terrible product endorsed by the then-Hillbilly-Brother-in-Chief and Libyan Foreign Agent Billy Carter.

At the outset of The Blizzard, my father possessed a case of Billy Beer, presumably the result of a gag gift or a moment of ironic kitsch. By Blizzard’s end, only two cans remained. Those two cans are still in my father’s possession, a physical reminder that he would never allow a situation like this again.

Also by Blizzard’s end, the roads cleared enough that my mother was able to find her way home, and was joyously reunited with my father. Almost exactly nine months later, I was born.

I eventually learned that not many people get told the circumstances of their conception. But it never seemed odd that my father would be willing, even proud to relate it to me. That’s one of those Middle Ground lessons my dad taught me: if a story’s good enough, go ahead and tell it. This particular good story has other life lessons embedded in it:

1. My father doesn’t give up, especially on the people he cares about, even if it means his eye is going to get frozen shut.
2. My father learned the hard way about the value of preparation. When the Blizzard of 1996 hit, he had plenty of beer and other provisions in the home; including some of the beer Isley and I drank last month.
3. My father knows that in a tough situation, you have to make due with what’s on hand; sometimes that means drinking Billy Beer. Sometimes it means switching from beer to shots so you won’t have to urinate and lose your spot at a packed concert. Other times, such as right now, it means working in China and only being able to communicate with his family via Skype, one of the few social media sites the Great Firewall has not decided to block.

I understand that the greeting card industry cannot be too specific with their targeting. I know the market for a “Hope You’re Doing Well Literally Halfway Across the World on Father’s Day, Wish You Could Be Here Drinking By a Bonfire Talking About How Great Breaking Bad Is” card line would sell, at maximum, two copies. But it would be nice if there were a few more cards in the middle ground. I’m pretty sure I can only get away with blogging about my conception story as a card substitute once.

So I am a Cablevision customer. So are my parents. None of us have any real choice in the matter, as Cablevision/Optimum hold an effective monopoly on internet/television service in our respective communities. Both of these incidents were really annoying and wasted significant chunks of my Sunday and Monday, but by Wednesday everyone in my family had their service up and running. It was still deeply annoying, made doubly annoying by the near-constant stream of condescending and misleading information pushed forth by Cablevision employees. My attempts to find an appropriate place to express my displease at these practices led to an entirely new level of frustration, though.

Cablevision is incredibly secretive about their employees’ contact information; over the past few days I’ve been told repeatedly that management have e-mail accounts available only through their intranet, or that they have phone numbers inaccessible from outside lines. Both of these things happen to be untrue.

My frustration reached its peak with a series of tech support chats last night, which inspired a couple of tumblr posts about their persistent references to legal action and the tortured syntax employed in their exchanges.

One of these posts found its way onto the screen of Jim Maiella, VP of Media Relations for Cablevision, who followed me on Twitter and offered to help resolve the issue. Jim provided me with his e-mail address, and I will respect his wishes not to offer it to the public. But I will say I was able to communicate with him without being on the Cablevision intranet, and there’s something seriously flawed with a company’s workflow when the only way to get a contact address from a massive corporation is to bitch about them on Twitter and hope that one of their vice-presidents notice. What follows is the e-mail I sent him. It’s really long. Did he help me resolve the problem?

TO BE CONTINUED

from Chris Eckert <*******@gmail.com>
to Jim Maielle <********@cablevision.com>
date Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 1:26 PM
subject Customer Support Issues

Apologies in advance for the info dump, I’ll try to make it as concise as possible.

On Saturday June 12th, I was visiting my parents in Towaco NJ when their Optimum Internet and Phone service failed. They told me this was a persistent problem, and that while physically resetting the modem would often resolve the problem, it was happening on close to a daily basis. I contacted Optimum on their behalf, and eventually was given a service appointment for between 8am and 11am on Monday. I made arrangements to be at their home on Monday for the service call. I then borrowed a car from them and drove back to my apartment in Brooklyn for the evening.

Around 2:30pm on Sunday June 13th, I discovered that my borrowed car was blocked in by a double parked Optimum Service van on 50th St. between 8th and 9th Avenue in Brooklyn. This was a problem not only for me, as my road is on a city bus route, and the MTA bus was physically unable to pass by the double parked Optimum van. This caused a blocks-long traffic snag, and alerted the entire block to the situation with a symphony of car horns. About fifteen minutes of horn honking and annoyed community members standing on the block passed with no attempt on the part of the Optimum servicers to move their van, so I called the Customer Support line at approximately 2:45pm

After finding no option within the automated phone menu for such issues, I resorted to brute-forcing my way to an operator by repeatedly pressing 0. A live support person answered, and I explained the situation and gave the relevant details — the location, the license plate tag on the van, etc. I was informed that there was no way to contact the service department with the issue directly, but that the information would be passed along and dispatch would inform the servicer of the issue.

Several minutes passed with no sign of the van’s owner, and eventually the horn blowing attracted the attention of the owners of the cars on the opposite side of the road. Those cars were moved, and the traffic stuck behind the van was able to bypass the roadblock formed by the Optimum van. Shortly afterwards, the Optimum serviceman sauntered out of a neighboring building and leisurely drove off, either unaware or indifferent to the chaos his sloppy and illegal parking job created.

That was the first negative experience I had regarding Cablevision. The next came on Monday, June 14th. Around 8:45am, we received an automated call to confirm our service appointment between 8:00 and 11:00am that day. We confirmed, and began waiting. About ten minutes later, my father (who was still home at this point) received a call from an unknown number on his cellular phone. We later learned this was our repairman. The repairman apparently hung up after a few rings, before my father could reach the phone. He left no voicemail, made no attempts to call back, and when we attempted to call the number back (still unsure whether it was our repairman) the phone system informed us that the number accepted no incoming calls.

We thought it would make no sense for a Cablevision repairman to make such a halfhearted attempt to contact us, much less block his phone from incoming calls, so I waited around until 11:00am, figuring that since we confirmed, the repairman would show up. At 11:05am, I called Cablevision again to inquire on the status of our service call. In this call, I learned that the mystery phone call was indeed our serviceman, and while it was accepted that it’s odd for someone to not wait for voicemail or try calling back, I was repeatedly assured that they have NO OBLIGATION to leave a voicemail or otherwise perform due diligence. I was even told that after we missed that phone call, the repairman had no obligation to come by our home, even though he did.

Of course, the fact is that the repairman did not come by our house. At the time of the alleged house call (9:00am) both my father and I were at home, sitting in the living room, reading the newspaper and looking for the repairman. We had a clear view of our driveway and the street. My parents also have a large (but friendly) dog, one who excitedly runs around and barks when anyone rings the doorbell, pulls into the drive, or in fact drives down the street. None of us noticed any repairman, and the repairman’s description of my parents’ house also has no bearing on its actual physical appearance. I am not saying that his “no one’s home” report is a fabrication, but at the very least he attempted service at the wrong address. This was not something the phone associate was willing to grant, giving me the impression that Cablevision’s official position was that I was lying about being home.

After several more frustrating minutes of conversation, I agreed to wait around for a ‘callback’, where the repairman would come by again between the hours of noon and 8:00pm that same day. I tried to occupy myself and wait patiently, but somewhere around 5:00pm my parents’ internet and phone failed yet again, twice in rapid succession. I called Cablevision yet again and was greeted with an automated voice message letting me know my service appointment was scheduled for Wednesday, June 17th — in other words, I had puttered around my parents’ home for six hours for no reason. I brute-forced my way to a live associate, who effectively scoffed at the notion that I would have ever gotten a callback — I had missed my appointment! When I asked what happened to the callback, she explained that a request had in fact been put in, but it was rejected by the ever-mysterious Dispatch soon afterward. Why no one would contact the consumer about this development, I have no idea. Again, it was implied that either I was lying about my situation, or that a previous associate has misinformed me. Any attempts to talk to someone from Dispatch, a supervisor or anyone who had a modicum of power to affect my situation was shut down. Dejected, I returned to Brooklyn.

I’m told that my parents successfully received service on June 17, and they’ve had uninterupted phone and internet service for over 24 hours, a feat unheard of in their recent experience. The supreme hassle that it took to get there — and let’s be honest, uninterupted phone and internet service is not an unreasonable benchmark — frustrated me though, particularly the lack of transparency and the difficulty in actually contacting someone who appeared to understand the issue at hand and take steps to resolve it. I wanted to send an e-mail to someone at Cablevision, to let them know how frustrating the automated phone service and repair call process can be for an end-user.

This is the third wave of problems, the ones that led me to complain on Twitter. Last night I prepared a letter (much of which is excerpted above) and wanted to send it to someone in customer support or consumer relations at Cablevision. Unfortunately, your website contains absolutely no such contact information. I was given the option of an extremely dubious webform (with no dropdown category for customer support), calling the very same number that I wished to take issue with, or contact an Optimum associate via live chat.

I chose chat, which is something I lived to regret. After a brief wait, I was put in contact with “John J”, whose grasp of the situation seemed very shaky. After explaining to him that I was not having trouble with my e-mail, that I simply wanted to send an e-mail to Cablevision, he suggested I call the aforementioned main customer service line. I told him that phone line had not been useful in the past, but assured me that if I selected Internet within the automated menu, I would be able to speak to someone about the issue. When I did not accept that as a solution, he suggested I fill out the web form and select IO TV, which completely baffled me, but I complied, not wishing to be rude. I still haven’t heard back from IO TV about whether or not they’re the appropriate department to handle consumer relations questions, but I theorize they were not.

Since my problems now are less with my actual Cablevision service and more with the way I am treated by Cablevision as a consumer, I wanted to save a chatlog of this unpleasant chat experience, but “John J” logged out of the system before I had a chance to save the chatlog. This further annoyed me, so I logged back into the chat service to request the previous chatlog. An excerpt of that was republished on my tumblr blog, and I saved the second chatlog and have attached it to this e-mail.

But effectively, I was repeatedly told that the chatlogs were “only saved for the sole purpose of review only” and that I was not allowed access to them. This escalated into me receiving a phone call from a Charlie ****** (516-***-****) who continued to insist I would be unable to ever see this chatlog or any other Cablevision records without a subpoena or warrant, which seemed like an extreme escalation — I wanted an e-mail address to contact Cablevision, and now a Cablevision employee is effectively daring me to sue them?

Things eventually calmed down, and Charlie was helpful — he credited my parents’ account $20.00 for the missed service call, a policy I was only aware of because I was searching for Cablevision e-mail addresses and came across a series of articles on Consumerist.com about various customer issues with Optimum/Cablevision. Somewhat less helpful was his suggestion for the e-mail address I contact: abuse@cv.net, which I was under the impression is generally the sort of place you contact Cablevision when someone is spamming, DDoSing or otherwise performing malicious computer deeds from an Optimum account. Still, I wanted to believe Charlie was giving me the right information, so I e-mailed abuse@cv.net. I was correct, it’s the wrong place to direct my concerns.

Charlie also called me a second time, and informed me that I ought to contact someone via postal mail:

Rich K*******
300 Jericho Quadrangle
Jericho, NY 11753

I was told that Mr. K******* does not have e-mail or a phone number, but he is the appropriate person to contact. A google search doesn’t reveal anything about Mr. K*******, and I am dubious that this information is particularly useful or correct. All of this led to my public complaints about Cablevision, which apparently caught your eye. I appreciate that you reached out to me, and provided me with your e-mail address. But at the same time, you must appreciate the irony of this situation, yes? Hours spent being stonewalled and frustrated by a simple request — “who can I e-mail about my customer support issues?” results in absolutely no progress and a series of dead ends. It’s only after I vent my frustrations in public that by happenstance someone from Cablevision reaches out to me and provides me with an e-mail address — one that I am asked to keep secret.

I am sure you have very valid reasons for building the firewalls you do into your communications with the public, and I know it would be productivity-crushing if people started spamming every single Cablevision employee with a mass e-mail when their Showtime isn’t working. But at the same time, the system you have set up seems broken. Better communication would have avoided pretty much every negative situation I have described in this e-mail, and on a selfish level, would’ve saved me a big chunk of a work week’s worth of unproductive frustration. I hope you don’t take this as the ravings of a crank; I’ve worked in tech support and customer service for the better part of a decade, and I know it’s not always easy. But I also know when the system’s not working. And this is not the optimal method for a consumer to get access to proper contact info.

Thanks for your time,
Chris Eckert

The Food I Love to Hate

Taken from Stories Galore! by C.R. Eckert. Topeka: American Binderies, 1987 edition. 1/1.

1. Lobster
2. Grapes
3. Onions
4. Ham
5. Frog Legs
6. Lima Beans
7. Green Beans
8. Spinich
9. Apple Sauce
10. Pineapple
11. Lamb
12. Shushi
13. Fish
14. Pear
15. Oysters
16. Cherries
17. Oatmeal (sorry, Gonzo)
18. Liver Oil
19. Prune Juice
20. Cantalope
21. Caviar
22. Hot Peppers (drawn with flames surrounding words)
23. Cailflower

I like to fancy myself a writer. I don’t know what kind of writer, but I write things with some degree of regularity, I think about the writerly craft, I help children and adults improve their writing and I get irrationally angry when professional organizations let the phrase “could care less” into their publications.

All of this bluster and bravado is impotent in the face of this:

I don’t know what I submitted, but I have no doubt that it was ill-suited for an elementary school “literary magazine”. Still, all rejection letters sting. The Print Shop Pro aesthetic and jaunty dog cartoon do soothe the pain, a bit.

COMING SOON: Material that may have led to the rejection letter!

I am poised to spend a significant amount of time socializing with not one, but two people that are not Ian, Jessica, Miles or a family member within the span of seven days. For me, this is a nearly unprecedented level of social flightiness!

This past weekend, Shena (Shena has a livejournal too!) came to visit. She read through and gave me the highlights of the awesome box of Blue Ribbon Digests I recently received in the mail, and was sometimes-frustratingly relaxed about what to “do” over the course of the weekend. We made it to Coney Island, a delightful Malaysian restaurant, a disturbingly Gene-less Burp Castle, and a night of drinking with Ian and Jessica (Jessica also has a livejournal!). It was good to see Shena, and to have new people to participate in super-familiar settings such as “Ian, Jessica and Chris drink in a L.E.S. dive bar” and “Chris and Miles discuss the news of the day”. Not to mention uniquely Shena-related activities, like Malay cuisine, comic strip gossip and an indulgent ear for discussions of old and obscure science fiction and comic book errata.

With Shena safely returned to the bucolic plains of Kansas, I have but a few days of workaday sameness before Liz (holy crap, who doesn’t have a livejournal these days?) arrives from the A-T-L. She will be engaging in some degree of Catskillery, but will still hopefully be on hand for a little celebration of our Flag and Country and Bootleg Fireworks and Charred Meat.

Plus — Explaining to Extended Family What Exactly a Degree in Media Studies is, Round 2! I need to remember to print out a few papers so everyone will realize that it isn’t just TV Guide Cheers & Jeers style reviews.

In camera phone news, behold these photographs!

It’s hard to see from this low-res picture, but this is a kicky, slightly trashy cocktail dress on display at a boutique just a few hundred feet from my home, with a crudely reproduced likeness of MF’in HONEST ABE LINCOLN on the hip. When I saw this, a single thought consumed me — I would adopt a daughter, and upon her reaching the flower of adulthood, she would be married wearing this dress. I am contacting the proper social services tomorrow.

Speaking of adoptions, my brother recently became caretaker to a Great Dane puppy named Mickey.

Mickey has reminded me of what it is like to have an actual dog around. Yes, my family has had Cassie around for over a decade, but she is a tame dog in her twilight; so long as you do not perch your food on top of her muzzle, she will not go after it. And she’s certainly not going to just randomly decided that it is time to eat your shoe.

Mickey is a dog. He is also about 95 pounds, able to reach pretty much every counter, table and shelf in my parents’ house. Oh yeah, and he’s still a puppy. If he can manage to put his mouth on something you leave lying around, odds are he will. This is a major adjustment. My father works in the shoe business. Since Cassie was a puppy, he has picked up sample slippers for Cassie to use as her ‘babies’; she devotedly totes them around with her, offers them as signs of devotion, arranges them around her bed. It is a familiar tradition around the house, one that makes you feel almost guilty about having Cassie spayed, until you remember her running out to meet you getting off the bus, wearing a menses-stained pair of Fruit of the Loom briefs. But regardless, Cassie’s babies are an adorable if spittle-flecked part of my parents’ household.

This is what happens when Mickey gets a hold of one of Cassie’s babies.

I guess we should be grateful it was not an actual baby dog.

Yes, everything work-related comes in pairs. I’m like a retail Noah.

One
YOUNGER BROTHER: Rosa Parks Story? The hell is that?
OLDER SISTER: Duh! Think back to history class!
YOUNGER BROTHER: What do you mean, I don’t remember any Rosa Parks.
OLDER SISTER: You’re so stupid!
YOUNGER BROTHER: …
OLDER SISTER: Come on!
YOUNGER BROTHER: …
OLDER SISTER: She ran the Underground Railroad! For the slaves!
YOUNGER BROTHER: …
YOUNGER BROTHER: That looks like a bus.

Two
(commentary from a college-aged female, upon picking up the box of Blazing Saddles and turning to her similarly collegiate-aged female companion)

“Did you ever see this movie? It’s kind of funny. My brother rented it one time. It was made back in the 1970s, and I guess, like, there weren’t people fighting for civil rights and stuff back in the seventies, because this movie is soooooooooo racist! It’s kind of funny. I mean, like, in the seventies they didn’t care if you were racist, and so this movie is soooooo racist.”

I don’t know why both of my favorite customer pairs are so race-minded.