Michael R. Barrick

There was a lot of talk today on the CBC and other media about the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives issuing a new "living wage" value for Metro Vancouver.

A "living wage" in this context is defined as a minimal amount for two adults working full-time (40 hours a week) both have to earn to support two children above the poverty line. The value released today is $18.71. That's two people earning $18.71/hour and both working full time. This is poverty line, i.e. food, shelter, clothing, and minimal entertainment, not being able to afford to buy a house, not being able to afford to go away for vacations, not being able to save for retirement, etc.

I want to look at this $18.71 value in terms of pre-Generation-X standards, before it was expected and required for both parents to work to simply support a family, back in the days where normal meant one person supporting three others. So for one person to support another adult and two children would really mean double this value. That would mean an individual supporting a spouse and two children at the poverty line would need a full time, 40-hour a week job at $37.42 to "get by."

In the 1950's, 1960's and up to the mid-1970's an adult working at a crappy job like pumping gas, waitressing, janitor, etc. could expect pretty close to that kind of living, say enough to support a family of three. Since two adults earning $18.71 is enough to support two children it follows that one adult making $18.71 is enough to support one person, so we'll assume $9.36 is enough for one person. So for one person to support two others we get $28.07. To have the life one could earn at the $1.35 minimum wage of 1974 one would now have to make $28.07. And in case $28.07 is a bit too abstract, let's translate that to an annual salary: $58,385.60. Now look at it this way—if you are making less than $60,000/year, you are making less than your average Space-Age gas-jockey.

You know why the punks started yelling "no future" in 1977? This is fucking why! Welcome to the future.

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

1. Use Point Form

   Most people can't or won't read with comprehension, they just skim headers and assume they already know what's going to be written below. If your crappy link-bait list is going to get Stumbled, Digged, or whatever, you need to appeal to the lowest common denominator and make them feel like they are clever. It's all about the "F" reading pattern that SEO snake-oil salesmen like to harp on. Remember that 99.83% of humanity has an I.Q. below the second standard deviation, it's only that remaining 0.27% (or 0.0027 if they work for Verizon) are geniuses capable of understanding prose and have the freakishly long attention spans to stay focused on something for more than a tenth of second.
    

2. Steal Your Content

   Why waste valuable time thinking for yourself? Just assume that your audience has the attention span of a gnat and a memory like a sieve. They won't remember that they've seen the same list four hundred and twenty seven times before just so long as you change up the order a bit and use a different coloured background.
    
   Here are a couple of great things to steal:
    
   

   1. Do a Photoshop Tutorial

      Make sure it is something completely inane that every freaking wanker calling themselves a "designer" now that they've managed to get their pirated copy of Photoshop working can get into, like how to use layers, handy keyboard shortcuts like "CTRL-SHIFT-Z", or pretty much anything else you can get straight out of the help file. Remember that your audience is functionally illiterate, so you are pretty much guaranteed that they won't have looked in the help file.
       

   2. Present an Uncredited List of Photographs

      Everyone likes pretty pictures, especially the drooling morons that read your crappy blog. Remembering once again that your audience can't or won't read makes writing any kind of credits for the photographers pointless anyway. Doing anything so intensely difficult as, say, linking to the photographers' websites is counter productive. Not only would it mean learning how to form an <a> tag, but it might mean people would leave your site by some means other than clicking on the fucking Google ads dominating your page in the upper left placement because you are so damn clever about exploiting that whole "F" pattern thing (never mind that it makes your first bullet point illegible, the content doesn't really matter anyway.) You can even pretend that you give a shit about the people you are exploiting by saying something like, "I found these pictures in various places around the Internet and don't know who they belong to. If you recognize something send me a note so I can credit the photographer." That's really brilliant, that way you look like the good guy and it's really your readers' fault for not knowing who you should credit.
       
      Here's some popular things you can rip-off:
       
      

      1. Weird Houses

         Your lowest-common-denominator audience just loves laughing at creative freaks. Throw together some pictures of houses that have some character and your audience will feel better about the suburban monotony that surrounds them, and the ones from AOL will feel better about their trailers.
          

      2. HDR Photographs

         The sort of idiots that boggle at pressing three keys at the same time to get more than one level of undo out of Photoshop are really impressed with these. They're like magic. Especially if they are trailer-park ass-hAOLs and the pictures are of things they can't grasp, like buildings in Europe that are more than 20 years old.
          

      3. Big Stuff

         How about that picture everyone has seen a million times of that really big excavator crossing the highway? Or that bridge in France that crosses a valley? Or the strip mine in Siberia that sucks in helicopters? People love shit like that. One more time won't hurt. And enough people might click on your Google ads that you can treat yourself to a stick of gum.
          

      4. Renderings of Product Concepts

         If they have absolutely no chance of going to market because the concept relies on violating some fundamental law of nature, so much the better.
          

      5. Cats

         Because the Internet needs more pictures of cats. That's what it is there for. Especially "LOL Cats" - make sure you cover the classics: "I can has cheeseburger", "Drillcat will kill your family", "Ceiling cat is watching you masturbate", etc. They never get old.
          

      6. Stuff They Don't Have in America

         Face it, if you are writing in English, even if your domain ends in .uk, .au, .nz, .ca or the two-letter country code of any civilised (with an "s") country, most of the drooling idiots that with look at it (I'd say "read" , but we know that is being too generous) are going to be from the good-ol' U.S. of A. Just run together a bunch of things that Americans have never seen in real life, like canals, advertising designed for people with more than two functional brain cells, small reliable cars that get good gas mileage, clean subways, buildings more than 20 years old, books, etc.
          

3. Don't Screen or Moderate Comments

   Nothing makes an interesting post more interesting than the unfiltered insight of knuckle-draggers. Maybe start things out by trolling your own post with the requisite "photoshopped" comment. This is especially effective for posts of things that are necessarily photoshopped, like HDR photos or photo-manipulations. If you're really lucky the comment thread will degrade into a Republican vs. Democrat argument on American politics. Those are always fun.