Hold on!

Thank you for calling. Your call is important to us and will be taken by the next available customer service representative.

I wait while my call is routed to Bangladesh. Which I don’t mind–the wait, I mean. (I don’t even mind that someone half-way around the world speaking broken English will try to help me. Everyone’s got to eat.) What I do mind is the music, the on-hold music. More often than not, it is a 12-year old Top 40 hit that I didn’t like at the time and that I certainly don’t want to listen to now. That I have to listen to now, if I am to have any hope of ever speaking to a real person. Played through the tinny speaker of my cell phone, it is a double assault on my ears, sounding like one of those old Victrola machines played at a high volume in a wind storm.

Due to an unusually high volume of calls, your estimated wait time is eight to thirteen minutes.

There is nearly always an unusually high volume of calls. (Couldn’t we put more of those third-world sufferers to work?) What is a usually high volume? What’s an ordinary volume? It doesn’t matter, the music is still the same. (Or, depending on your perspective, the noise. For more on that, see my post “If a tree falls in a forest, is it music to the ears?”) I can hold the phone away from my ear, like I do when my mother-in-law calls; I can put it on speaker phone and walk across the room. But I can’t get away from it.

Did you know that you can have most of your questions answered by visiting our website?

Yes, I did know that. The website suggested I call this number. What it doesn’t answer is why this crappy music? No mind; I thought of a solution: a technology that enables the listener to choose his own music, perhaps from the MP3 files on his phone. Now, that would be tolerable. I took this idea to a friend of mine who works in the telecommunications business. “The technology’s already there,” he told me. But, he explained, the telecom companies aren’t going to let you get at it. “In fact,” he said, “they’re all moving away from music; soon all you’ll hear is paid advertising. It’s another source of revenue for them.”

Have you considered having hip replacement surgery now, before the cost goes up? Our trained staff (the ones in Bangladesh?) can help you choose from among our available options.

So here we go. I’ll soon be a customer who has already paid for a product from the people I’m calling. The product isn’t working correctly. I’m using a cell phone plan that I pay for to make the call. The minutes are adding up, and I am now captive to advertisements I don’t want to hear. It’s sort of like paying $27,000 for a new car and riding around with a license plate frame that advertises the dealership. Shouldn’t they be paying me? The music was bad enough.

We’re sorry; our office is now closed. Please try your call at another time.

Sent from my iPad

To steep, perchance to steam

The hotel room I stayed in recently came equipped with a Wolfgang Puck Coffee Maker and Wolfgang’s Own Estate Grind coffee. The brew is aptly named. It came packaged in a small disk resembling a hockey puck, and the mud that oozed from this one-cup wonder tasted as if it had been unearthed from Wolfgang’s estate.

It’s becoming ever more difficult to circumvent hotel room coffee makers. A dozen years ago, most rooms came equipped with a simple four-cup drip coffee machine. The set-up included a carafe, a filter basket, and a small measured packet of stale coffee. It was an easy matter to bring your own coffee and spoon it into the filter basket, yielding a brew comparable to what you would make at home.

Then the hotel chains began removing the filters from the baskets and packaging the stale coffee inside a filter casing. This made things trickier, but it was still fairly easy to work around having to drink that stuff. You either brought your own filter with you, or you fashioned one from tissue paper proceeded to add your own coffee.

Things became more complicated when the hotels switched to coffee makers that had no basket at all. Rather, these brewers employ a narrow, slide-in dish to hold the pre-packaged coffee and filter. Substituting your own coffee and an improvised filter only made these machines slow-down the dripping process to the point where the coffee backed-up and spilled over the side of the dish. Either that, or the tissue paper quickly wore through in one spot, coffee and grounds sliding together into a lump of wet snd at the bottom of the pot.

Now they’ve even eliminated the carafe. Instead, you get single-cup brewers that make it almost impossible to use your own coffee.

Things are manageable when your room comes with a microwave oven: you just bring along a French press, heat your water to boiling, and take it from there. Just in case there isn’t a microwave in the room, you can bring on your trip a small, gas-fueled backpacking stove, a canister of gas, and a small cooking pot. (Unless you are flying to your destination, in which case I strongly urge you to omit the gas.)

Coincidentally, as hotel room coffee has become more and more unsavory, gourmet coffee shops have been on the rise. It is rarely more than a two block walk from any downtown hotel to the nearest Starbucks. Some hotels have even begun hosting the franchise inside their front doors. So now, for two dollars in the lobby, you can now enjoy the same coffee that used to be free in your hotel room.

Ah, to brew or not to brew, that is the question.

The Time Channel

A man wearing a dark suit with a brightly colored tie sits behind a news desk alongside a honey blonde with dreamy eyes. “It’s now 11:14 on the East Coast,” he is saying. “Right, Clark,” she replies. “Let’s go out to the West Coast and see what time it is there.” The screen changes to reveal a weathered man in corduroy slacks and a tan outback shirt standing in front of a rugged mountain vista. “Hi, Jeanette and Clark! I’m here in the Sierra Nevada where the sun is just peeking through the low clouds and it’s a quarter after eight.”

It has occurred to me that if TV can manufacture a 24/7 show on nothing more than the weather, then there is no limit to the possibilities. There already is a Golf Channel, a Fishing Channel, and a Poker Channel. Why not a Time Channel? I mean, if you can spin round-the-clock programming out of a bunch of guys trying to knock a ball into a hole in the ground, then certainly something as basic to our experience as Time is worthy of the effort.

Consider the possibilities. The Weather Channel offers a feature show called “When Waether Changed History”; the Time Channel could counter with “When Time Changed History.” Much more to the point, don’t you think?. If the Fishing Channel can run a special on striped bass in the Florida Keys, certainly a feature on the invention of the water clock by medieval momks is in order. Interviews with Mick Mickelson and Tiger Woods are staples of the Golf Channel; why not one with Antoine Francois Reynaud, the Paris keeper of the international cesium atomic clock?

One issue I have with The Weather Channel is that they run the same shows over and over. How often can you watch “Life Guards to the Rescue” before you’ve pretty much seen it all? But for time, the possibilities are, well, infinite. You’d never run out of them. There are 10,000 years of recorded history to draw upon and four billion years of prehistoric information before that. Meanwhile, we are every moment adding to the reservoir of past time. Then there is the future: cosmological theories about how the universe will evolve and hypotheses about parallel universes that exist simultaneously with ours.

Everone complains about the weather, annoyed that the meteorologists so often get it wrong. Many a child has awoken in anticipation of the eleven inches of snow that the weatherman predicted the night before, only to discover that nothing has happened and school is on as usual. (“Well, Todd, the storm took a more southerly track than predicted.”) With the Time Channel, you’d never get it wrong! As he climbs into bed, that youngester can be sure that tomorrow morning at eight o’clock it will be eight o’clock. That’s information he can take to the bank.

The Time Channel could be a real money maker, all right, far out-eraning the Weather Channel. Watch makers, finacial advisers (“It’s never too early to prepare for the future”), doctors and pharmeceutical companies (“Do you have a genetic history of risk for diabetes?”) would be lining up to buy advertising time. These are folks with Big Bucks. Who would you rather have underwriting your venture, Chaptstick or Ferris, Baker, Watts? No contest. I don’t know why no one has thought of it before, but I’m going to jump on this idea before someone else beats me to it. I’m heading to the patent office and registering this baby right now!

If a tree falls in a forest, is it music to the ears?

You know the old puzzle: If a tree falls in a forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it make any sound? The answer should be obvious. By definition, sound is the product of vibrating air interacting with the eardrum of a sentient being. If a tree falls and there is no sentient being to hear it, there is no sound. Case closed.

The problem is, that obvious answer is also counter-intuitive. When we imagine that tree coming down, we are also imagining ourselves as the observers of the scene. We’ve introduced an imaginary sentient being (ourselves) into the scene, where we now imagine there must be sound. However, the question asks us about a real setting (or, at least a theoretically real one) in which there is no sentient being present, and in that case the tree doesn’t make sound. Sounds (pardon me) silly, I know, but there you have it.

Okay, if you don’t like that one, how about this: If a car sound system is loud enough to be heard outside of the car, but nobody outside of the car wants to hear it, is there music? By definition, noise is, well, any sound we don’t want to hear. Since, in our theoretical scenario, no one wants to hear it, there wouldn’t be any music outside of the car, only noise. Now, clearly the persons inside the car want to hear that sound (or, at any rate, one of them does), so inside the car it is music. And just as obviously, the occupants of the car can’t hear it once it passes outside the vehicle. So why the hell do people play their car stereos so loud?

Are they altruistically hoping to introduce the general population to new music? Are they trying to call attention to themselves? Are they just being inconsiderate? Are they simply too stupid to realize that they don’t need it that loud? I don’t have the answer, but I sure would like to know WHAT IN THE WORLD is going on.

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