Michael R. Barrick

Culture Jamming with a Meaningless Mob instead of a Pointless Protest 

Ask the average zombie, "why?" and the answer will be something along the lines of "for fun." Thousands of people will spend hours preparing and then give over more hours to the walking/shambling for apparently "no reason" and the this absolutely baffles the uninvolved. But there is an underlying, deeper, unspoken reality to events like Zombie Walk.

It is a wonderfully subversive absurdist spectacle. People caught unaware and ask what it is for are stunned by the superficial lack of meaning. They expect people taking to the streets in such numbers to have some reason for it. The Critical Mass rides, the Olympic protests, the G20 protests, all of these people are comfortable with because that sort of activism is expected and understood. But confronted with a flash mob of the shuffling undead, they have to start asking themselves questions, even if only for a moment.  A few thousand people out of a Saturday afternoon collectively not doing the ordinary and expected, disrupting traffic, taking over a couple major streets, and confusing tourists and commonplace consumers is a very powerful thing.

Part of the appeal, I am sure, for many Zombie Walkers is there is a thrill in taking over a busy downtown street and co-opting it for a free-form collective street theatre. Unlike the expected form of protest in Vancouver and elsewhere, police presence is minimal, and - probably a manifestation of the confusion over the start time and the disorganized decentralized "organization" that is a fundamental reality of a flash mob - there was almost none at all this year.

Contrast this with the massive police presence at the recent G20 protests in Toronto or the Olympic protests earlier this year here in Vancouver. In both cases earnest protesters with serious and noteworthy agendas were forceably shut down and the presence of violent protesters led to the discrediting of all the voices of protest. With the media's repetitive focus on the violent minority all messages and meaning were lost and the excuse was presented to remove everyone else to prevent any further dialogue. In this way protest is reduced to something majority people are more prone to ridicule than get behind and the attempt to be heard ends up in nothing but backfire.

Conversely the agendaless Zombie Walk "succeeded" in ways the earnest protests can no longer hope to. Vancouver's main shopping and tourist street was completely shut down. Vancouver's consumers and tourists where presented with a very telling mirror in the shuffling, decaying horde moaning for "brains." This critical agenda could be seen many of the walkers' costumes. The zombie hausfaus, the zombie businessmen, and my personal favourite, a zombie Olympic tourist. But for each individual with something to say there were plenty more wearing simple costumes with no apparent agenda, helping to make the Zombie Walk impossible to discredit in the fashion "hippie protesters" and "black bloc anarchists" can be dismissed. The zombie walkers are comedy, theatre, parody and superficially without agenda that can be subjected to ridicule. The mainstream media is unable to fault and devalue what is perceived as a non-existent agenda.

People come and participate because it is fun. It is not a "broccoli" event attended out of a sense of necessity and duty, but it is not fluffy cupcakes either. The Zombie Walk is meat and brains.

Continued from It's a Sad State of Affairs, part 3: See, Blair, Anything is Possible

My replacement phone arrived today. This is good. But first let me back up a bit...

Some of you suggested I send my blog posts in to Rogers, and I was planning to. However, Rogers got to me first. Yesterday morning I received this comment under my "part 2" posting:

Hi Michael - This is Mary with Rogers.
I came across your blog and am sorry to hear about your experience. Perhaps I can help? I've sent you an email so please let me know if I can offer assistance.

Take care,
Mary
@RogersMary
http://www.twitter.com/rogersmary

as well as the following e-mail:

Subject: Your blog posts
Date: Tue, 2 Feb 2010 08:49:30 -0500
From: "RogersHelps" <rogers.helps@rci.rogers.com>
To: mbarrick@mbarrick.net

Hi Michael - This is Mary with Rogers and I'm part of the online
communications team. I came across you blog post(s) and am very sorry to
hear about your experience.

The entry indicated that you were going to call back in on Monday. I
wanted to check on how that went and offer assistance if it's still an
open issue.

My team is not intended to replace existing lines of customer care but I
can jump in to help from time-to-time if needed. I'm happy to help here
if that's what you require at this time.

All I'd need is your full name (I assume Michael Barrick is the name on
the account?) and a contact number where best to reach you. I'll forward
to a higher level resolution team and they will call you to help sort it
out.

Again, I regret the experience you described and hope I can help put
this right for you.

Let me know if you'd like me to step in here.

Take care,
Mary

**************************************
Mary Pretotto
Community Manager, Social Media Monitoring & Engagement
Rogers Communications Inc.
@RogersMary

In both cases I directed Mary to the "part 3" entry where I was promised the replacement.

I thought this was quite interesting and I didn't think anything at all about Mary's job title until I showed it to someone else, who found the "Monitoring" part of "Social Media Monitoring & Engagement" a tad ominous. Personally I think it is just straight-up and accurate. I do the same thing for myself and my own websites using, for example, a Google Alerts that searches for my name and nic. But, Mary, if you are reading, maybe just, "Social Media Engagement" might be the way to go since, apparently, some people are creeped out by "Monitoring"?

I'd like to hear what other people think.

And now, back to the new phone, which brings me back to griping about Canada Post, rather than Rogers. I got a pickup notice today. Checking the pickup notice number online to see if it was available for pickup I noticed a line saying the postie had "attempted delivery" this morning around 11:00 a.m..  I was here, frantically working on photos from a fashion shoot last Saturday, and no one buzzed or knocked. And once again the package was sent to the wrong postal outlet (at least I looked in advance this time.) I was served by the same mostly-illiterate couple as last Saturday. They seem like very nice people, and are very friendly, but really, is it unreasonable of me to expect the people handling my mail to have better than a first-grade grasp of at least one of the official languages?

Once I got the phone home and unpacked everything went as well as expected. I had to make a couple calls to customer service and tech support to provision the new SIM card and remove the blocks on my account. Because I have a BES server there was, of course, no lost data since all of that syncs up wirelessly all the time. I had to reinstall some application (like facebook and Twitter) that I was never arsed to back up. I bought a higher capacity MicroSD card so now I have even more room for music, pictures, and maybe I'll put some video on there as well to give me something else to do on the bus.

Now the things I remain worried about:

1. I dropped the Nokia 2660 in its return envelope off at the UPS store on Davie Monday night and it still isn't showing up when I check the tracking number. UPS better not lose the damn phone, because I really don't want to end up in a argument over whether or not I returned the it when I already went though so much grief trying the physically hand the phone to someone on Saturday.
   [EDIT: 20100206] It's showing up in the tracking now, and therefore out of my hands - huzzah!
2. I haven't seen a bill yet. I don't have a lot of confidence that my bill won't be completely messed up and I am in wait-and-see mode.

Continued from It's a Sad State of Affairs:

And, as expected, my attempt to get someone to resolve my problem at a Rogers Wireless outlet was useless.

I went to the nearest Rogers outlet identified by their website as dealing with wireless and business services, "Digital Communications" at 1093 Robson St, and explained my problem. The clerk at the store was apologetic and explained that there was nothing he could do and I would have to call customer service on Monday. I explained that doing so on Monday was going to be more than a little inconvenient. I asked, hypothetically, that if I were to outright buy a new phone would he be able connect it to my existing account and have me walk out with a working phone. He said, yes. So I posed the question, why could he not do that, take the incorrect phone that was sent to me back, and then make whatever calls and do whatever internal paperwork might me necessary to straighten things out. He said that it would be impossible because they were a franchise store and I had received the phone from the corporate office and there was no way to reconcile stock between the franchise and corporate. At this point his co-worker suggested I try a "Rogers Plus" outlet, since they are corporately owned and that the nearest one was in Pacific Centre Mall.

So off I went to the Rogers Plus kiosk in Pacific Centre, unit D2G, 701 W. Georgia Street. When I got there both employees were talking to people, so I took a look around the kiosk to make sure they did in fact have a Blackberry 8900. Standing at the kiosk, with a perfectly useful replacement phone not a foot away from me under the glass, one of the employees came over and asked how he could help me. I presented the box with Nokia phone I was sent in error, and explained the mistake that had been made. I told him I would like to give him the useless phone in exchange for the phone I should have been sent. He said I couldn't do that, that the phone would have to be sent back in the post, and when it was received some 10 days later the right phone would be sent out to me.

I asked why I should have to wait three weeks to resolve an internal mistake when there was a perfectly good phone not a foot away from me and why he could not accept my return when he was a corporate employee working at a corporate outlet. He had no satisfactory answer and said that what he could do was connect me to customer service and maybe they could do something for me.

Despite the absurdity of this, which I made him aware of, I let him connect me to customer service. For the third time I explained the mistake to the customer service representative, "Ken." Ken was equally useless and after jumping through the same hoops with him, asking again why I could not return the phone sent to me to a corporate outlet in exchange for the phone I had in fact ordered, Ken said he did not have the authority to make that happen and I should speak to a manager.

At this point I was passed on to "Blair," employee number 1695238, with whom I had a protracted argument about what was an was not possible. Blair confirmed that I had in fact talked to a representative around 1:30 p.m. on the 26th of January and ordered a replacement Blackberry 8900, and that the wrong phone had been sent to me. Blair then maintained a position no different than Ken, that it was against policy, that there was no way to enter the exchange into the system, that I would have jump through all the hoops to correct the mistake made by Rogers and wait an interminable three weeks for the resolution. I told Blair that, no, it was possible, since I was standing no more than two feet away from the right phone, at a corporately owned outlet, with a couple of corporate employees standing no more than two metres away (although I'm sure they would have been standing farther away if the confines of the booth allowed because they sure as hell wanted nothing to do with me.) I told Blair that I was not prepared to waste any more of my time on this mistake, and that the lot of them could exchange whatever information necessary to sort out the paperwork on Monday just so long as I walked away with the phone I had ordered on Tuesday.

Blair explained that he understood my frustration and that he was very sorry and the best he could do was have someone call be back in a two-to-four hour window. I explained to Blair how that was less than convenient since, not having a cell phone at the moment, I would have to return home to wait for the call and the very reason I was standing there at a corporately owned Rogers Plus outlet was so that I would be returning home with the situation resolved. I told him to get someone on the line so that I would not have to go home to receive the call. He put me on hold for a while (where I suspect he chatted with Ken about what and asshole I was) and then returned to tell me that since it was Sunday there was no one who could talk to me and he could arrange a call-back between 8:00 a.m. and noon on Monday.

I told Blair that I was not going to be anywhere where I could receive a call during those hours without a cell phone, and asked him why I needed to waste more of my time, plus the valuable time of the people I would be working for on Monday, when the mistake belonged to Rogers, and asked again why it was that he and the two people next to me being paid by Rogers could not use their time, for which they were being paid by Rogers, to sort out the error, while I walked away a happy customer with a working phone.

He maintained his tack on "policy" and the all powerful "system" that did not allow him to do this. We went in circles for a bit. I eventually lost my temper and shouted about just wanting "the @#$%ing phone I ordered" loud enough that I'm sure half the mall heard me (not a shining moment, but this was now an hour into the ordeal and my patience had run out.) Regaining my composure, I suggested again to Blair that if the system didn't allow for this that he not use it, that I didn't really care what limits bad programmers may have imposed on him, and that he write down on paper the details of the transaction and pass it on to a higher level manager or their I.T. department on Monday to sort it out with "the system." He said he couldn't do that. I said, "Yes, you can, you are just afraid to. Have some faith in yourself. You can write. You know the alphabet. You can do it."

With my patience exhausted and Blair being completely useless, I told him exactly how useless he was being. I told him that at this point it wasn't just Rogers that I was frustrated with but that he, personally, was useless. He said he didn't have to listen to such abuse, to which I retorted, "but I have to suffer though fixing this mistake and waiting three more weeks for a replacement for a phone I have already been without for a week while there is one here right in front of me, and then paying the bill for a month's service I will not receive." He said, "Oh, I can put a note on your account..." where I cut him off and said, "Well then, why can't you put a note on my account that I exchanged my phone and fix my problem." He paused. I pushed, "You don't have an answer for that, do you? Why is that? I know, because you are useless! Is there anything you can do for me? How about cancelling my account without penalty?"

"I can't do that."

"How would you feel about appearing in small claims court?"

"I'm sorry you feel that way."

This is where I collected his name and employee number, told him we were done, hung up, collected the box with the useless replacement phone, and left. As I left mall security was walking toward the kiosk. I forget how scary I am when I'm mad to people who don't know me, I think I may have given up an left at just the right moment.

Now I wait until Monday to see if I can talk to someone else higher up the food chain. I'm not done yet.

And to think I switched to Rogers because Bell had messed up my account and their all-powerful "system" did not allow for it to be corrected. Clearly it really doesn't matter who you deal with and I'm questioning the utility of having a cell phone at all.

Continued in It's a Sad State of Affairs, part 3: See, Blair, Anything is Possible