I don’t know a lot. But I do know that school should be more like this and less like this.

Don’t get me started.

In addition to complaining about whatever I please, recounting stories of minimal importance, extending past the confines of my living room in my quest bore others with my vacation pictures, and a slue of other utterly disconnected and random topics (if one can call them topics), I’ve decided to add “tech blog for the not-so-advanced” to the list, because this dood is SO my hero. Comments are closed on that post so, since I can’t say it there, I figured I’d say it here. Plus, maybe some small percentage of my readers (so a small percentage of my small number of readers would be, what, uhhh…. 0.15 of a person?) will think I WANTED TO KNOW HOW TO DO THAT TOO! NOW YOU‘RE MY HERO!

But anyway, in keeping with the (see above re: disconnected and random topics), let me now take the opportunity to tell you what bothers me. Or rather, since a lot of things probably bother me, what REALLY bothers me.

It REALLY bothers me that, most often, at least when dealing with large bureaucracies and corporations, the only point at which you are provided good service is when you turn into a giant, whiny, entitled brat.

FOR EXAMPLE.

I recently spent a lot of time on the phone with Medicare trying to resolve one client’s account. When I say recently, I mean more like over the course of some five months. And no, I am not exaggerating. And what happens when you call Medicare, because I know you’ve been dying to find out, is that you wait on hold (and…wait…yes…in fact I think I might have mentioned the hold music) you wait on hold until someone answers the phone. And that someone is somewhere in a different time zone and is one of eight bazillion people answering that phone number, none of whom have identification codes or callback numbers so it’s not like you ever speak to the same person twice. And they ask you for information. And you fax it. Except it takes about three days to fax any information to them because they have ONE FAX NUMBER. For all of Medicare. Just the ONE. And then you finally get your information through. But they never “find” it. Or it never gets processed. Or whatever. So you send it again. And then you wait the sixty day processing period because if you try calling (hold music) before the sixty days are up “just to check on it”, you are simply told that it won’t register in the system until the processing people have processed it. And that takes 60 days. And no, they don’t have any incoming phone lines in the processing room of processingness, so you can’t speak with them.

And then, when sixty days have passed, you call again (hold music) to check on it. And they say it’s processed and in the mail and to wait a few more days. And then you call back (hold music) after a few more days. And they say to wait a FEW MORE. And you say no, please send it again. And they say, ok please hold (hold music), but then they come back and say it’s not in the digital system yet so they can’t send it again. So please wait a few days and call back.

And then you wait a few more days and call back (still with the hold music and the going crazy, by the way, in case that pattern hasn’t presented itself to you yet), and THIS person tells you that, oh…no…actually that thing that they said was completed on time (on time being a relative concept when it takes 60 days to process a letter) and already in the mail was just a copy of something they’d already sent and the thing you are waiting for hasn’t been processed yet because instead of what you said in the letter (two and a half months ago) about charge one and charge two, you have to PHYSICALLY CROSS OUT AND CIRCLE, respectively, the charges you’re talking about on the ledger and send it back again because describing the charges by the name listed on the ledger is just too confusing, apparently. So please start again.

So (are you still reading?) you circle and cross out with fury and re-fax (another three days to get that through). And then you call back (hold music) and are told to wait the 60 days for processing at which point you say

(in your head) HOLD. THE FUCK. UP. (and out loud, with only the tiniest edge of insanity) May I please and ever so kindly speak with your supervisor? This dude assures you at least four times that while you can speak to his supervisor, she will have no ability to speed this process along for you, but you insist and so you are asked to hold (hold music) and you wait a full twenty minutes before….

A saccharine sweet lady gets on the phone, apologizes profusely, listens to your saga, asks you to hold (hold music) while she checks out the issue, comes back and says, “Actually, ma’am, I see that none of these charges are related. I will get out a letter to you to that effect this afternoon.”

And you receive that letter later that week.

And would you believe me if I said that that is the SHORT version of the story? The version where I don’t even bother to mention at least five other times that I called (hold music hold music hold music hold music hold music)?

And so MY QUESTION is, people, my QUESTION TO THE WORLD, is how much of a dent could we take out of the national debt if we were to replace:

1. The money spent on wages for roughly ten (I’m being generous here) phone calls, roughly seven minutes each (including data entry), PLUS
2. The money spent on all the phone lines for people like me to HOLD…again, PLUS
3. The money spent on health care for people like me who just might go crazy from the experience

TIMES the number of people who have had this experience (raise your hand)

with

A small fleet of people with half a brain who evaluate and handle (simple…such simple) issues as they arise and in a timely manner without creating a paper trail storm of useless notes that convey no information at best.

How much? I dare you to guess.

This just keeps on cracking me up.

Get it? Get it!?!

HAHA.

Though to my credit (i.e. by way of reducing my toxic levels of nerdism), I didn’t get it at first. But then I did get it. So…you know…it’s a toss up.

That is all.

Oh. Were you hoping for more? It’s Friday and the weather is supposed to be impeccably gorgeous for the next forty-eight hours. ‘Nuff said. Go forth and be Friday-y.

I was very bad this weekend and I didn’t do any of the 1,435 things on my To Do list, which had been on the previous week’s To Do, then got put off to this past week’s To Do, and then got squished into the weekend, and then I got headache-y, so please boo me now. Bad girl. Baaaad girl. So now I must hop skip double time.

So for you, I give you some belated Mothers’ Day videos:

in case you also like Joe Geronimo:

and, more importantly, in case you live under a rock:

Which reminds me that I must interject and laud the boys who write these songs for a moment, because I have giddily listened to this one approximately five different times this weekend (should I be embarrassed about that?) and it’s been stuck in my head the rest of the time. What’s so exciting about really nastily-facial-haired guys sleeping with their friends’ mothers, you ask? To answer that, I must take us back a moment.

When I was around the middle school age, I listened to the rock station. My love for Tool was burgeoning and my tastes were skewed enough that I didn’t consider it hard rock until it was the kind of “music” that had no melody line and where no lyrics are written because the whole song is screamed. At this time, when every little thing still has the potential to embarrass, I had a love for hip hop as well, and I had to keep it under wraps. ‘Cuz I was a rock girl.

Then I got to be a few years older and I didn’t have to hide it anymore, I just liked hip hop. And these days hip hop is one of my favorite kinds of music. But even now, I generally stress that I like conscious hip hop. I like music with an intelligent (or at least intelligible) thing to say. And I like hip hop with talent. I love the Roots, old Common Sense, Talib Kweli, Zion I, Kanye, and loads more.

I’m old enough now that I don’t really get embarrassed so much anymore by silly things like taste in music, but I’ll admit, I still don’t heavily advertise this: where I don’t generally like talent-less top 40 pop music, I secretly LOVE talentless top 40 hip hop hits. I love bass that threatens to reprogram your heartbeat. And I also love old-school hip hop.

I just love to ghetto booty shake.

There. I said it.

In and of itself this is not a problem. The problem lies in the fact that I am a hippie nerd girl. I don’t advocate buying 24 karat gold grills that are not replacements for real teeth, but are just a “fashionable” sheath for them. I don’t advocate derisive talk about women or assuming that paying them to shake their ass two inches from an HD video camera is all the plot a music video needs. I don’t advocate buying $8,000 reverse spinning rims for your blindingly shiny and hazmat orange HumV.

These are things that are not in line with my values. And yet confound it all if I don’t start to shake my own ass when your music comes on. It’s a cruel, cruel plight. Woe is me. I am hopelessly in love with a world in which I do not belong.

Sure, there are plenty of places to dance that are filled with people like me. But they generally play funk or something comparable. And funk is fun. Sure. I can do that. But it’s no ghetto booty shake.

There are places where I could probably find a club that is my style. But where I live currently, the ghetto booty options are either:

1. Really skeezy and dimly lit with cheap drinks, sticky mustaches, and breasts struggling to escape their tube top confines.

or

2. Swanky and modern with the young professional crowd in mind and lines maintained for publicity out front even when it’s 40 degrees and the club is empty inside.

In either case, whoever my dance buddy is and I just find ourselves carving out a section of the dance floor and going at it. And in either case, can you imagine how ridiculously out of place I look?

I mean, you’re talking to the girl who wants to start a club that you’re supposed to wear pajamas to (no, not lingerie) so you’re comfortable and don’t have to worry about dress code. You’re talking to the girl who wishes they’d open an early bird special club so I could get on my booty shake AND get some sleep.

Speaking of which, was this supposed to be a joke? Is this supposed to be a bad idea?

Anyway, so that’s the background on my plight. And then here come these totally nerdy white Jew boys (I get to say that because I’m both white and a Jew) who are musical GENIUSES and they make music in the ghetto booty style but with silly lyrics that make fun of the values that make us squirmy so that we can love it guilt free.

It’s possibly the best thing to happen since sliced bread.

It just eliminates that awkward part of a night out on the town where I suddenly have an out of body experience and look down on myself thinking:

Really? Are you really earnestly giving your all to a self-ass slap because the song told you to? Seriously?

1. One of the companies we use for court reporting sent us a double-decker box of See’s chocolates for Valentine’s Day. Only about half of our (exceedingly small) office was in, and after about three hours, it looked like this:

2. I just found out that a girl I grew up with recently competed in the Miss America pageant.

3. The geek’s cool tool.

4. Takin’ it old-school.

5. Pyimpin: