The Sock Puppet, Bernie, And Me

From a comment to another post: 'The latest Tama Janowitz novel ("They Is Us") features a lonely old man whose only social contacts are the people who write him scam letters. He's always trying to offer them advice ("Maybe you shouldn't be so trusting of me? Maybe you should learn more about me before you offer me all this money? Let me tell you something about MY life...") It's very funny and very sad.'

I should try that. I'm getting older, and I don't have that many friends since my hamster died. Not that many. Not any, really.

Sure, after the freeze-drying he still looked pretty much the way he always did. Though of course he'd slowed down a lot. Death all by itself does that, let alone freeze-drying, but we still had a good relationship, and he was available all the time. Whenever I needed someone to confide in, he was there, since he no longer slept all day.

And hamsters are naturally quiet. You might not know that. You don't get a hamster if you want noise. They aren't noisy. They're for quiet conversations, for confiding in, for working through things. You want noise and a lot of action, then it's dogs. It would be a big change if your dog died, but for a hamster no. Not really so much. They don't change all that much.

So our relationship continued.

Everything was fine for a good long while. You know a cynic would say that it couldn't be the same because I'd have to grab his little dry corpse and move it around because, of course, it was a corpse, and didn't move on its own, but really, no, it isn't all that different after you get used to it. Hamsters are always snuffling around and digging into things, and kind of twitchy, but it's like they're listening to you all the same, and they aren't noisy, so it really wasn't all that different.

Well, everything really was pretty good for a while. I'm not that social. Just someone to talk to every now and then, that's about all I need. I'm not typical that way, but it works for me.

But then Bernie made a couple of unscheduled trips off the kitchen counter way down onto the tile floor and things got a bit strange. These incidents introduced some unfortunate changes, and our conversations just haven't been the same since.

For one thing something broke loose inside, I don't know what. You wouldn't expect this. You look at a live hamster (or a freeze-dried one in my case), and the first thing you think (if you even think about it at all) is "solid all the way through". No. No longer.

Now he rattles a little when I shake him. I don't do it that much but I do it sometimes when we're having an argument. He never did that before, especially when he was alive, the rattling, though I suppose I've gotten rougher since his death. Gentleness is less important now.

Hamsters are sturdy but really quite delicate in some ways, and you can't simply throw them around, squeeze them, or give way to anger just because of a little disagreement. Not with live ones. At the very least they bite, and can be quite fierce, but are very much too easily injured, so you hold back. You control yourself for the good of the relationship.

Well, that rattling was one thing. Only one thing, sadly.

After a few months of this his fur was starting to look disorderly, exhibiting some disarray, and became a bit matted in spots. I didn't know what to do. Something.

I really should have known better, but I tried shampoo. I tried shampooing him.

A disaster. Almost immediately he began to balloon up (freeze-dried, remember?) and then, eventually, got all mooshy inside. I believe it wasn't the shampoo as such, but the rinsing. Rinsing took a lot of water, more than I expected. I didn't know a hamster could soak up so much. I mean, sponges, yes, but you don't expect a freeze-dried hamster to hold so much.

I wasn't thinking.

But what else could I do? He was sort of like this little furry bag. Couldn't stand up anymore. I had him set in a cute upright position with his little front paws just ready to reach out for a treat. No more. It took about a week of dangling from a wire hanger by a clothespin before he firmed up again, even a little, and then I noticed it — mold.

Talk about creepy.

Once mold gets a foothold the game is about over. Seriously. But he's still all I've got for now.

Yeah, there are days when I think of taking him out for a drive in the car, and when we get out there, far enough from home, just making a quick flip and out he goes, through the window, over the side, down into the grassy ravine and that's the end of it, before he even knows it's happening.

But this isn't like the old days.

The household is down to only us two. If the sock puppet was still here, Bernie would be gone in a flash, but that isn't the way the game played out. Mr. Socky had some serious problems and had to go. Serious, serious problems. Really. Serious. Problems.

At first he seemed OK, and was a welcome addition to the family, and we all had some good times together, great times even, but his dark side surfaced all too soon.

I can't go into it right now but eventually things got very strange. Some nights Bernie and I even locked ourselves in the bedroom and stayed there until daylight, but even then our eyes kept returning nervously to that crack under the door. Sock puppets can squeak through some really narrow places, and the last thing we wanted to see was Mr. Socky sliding in for a visit. I still shudder to think of some of the things we had to go through.

Well, after too many unpleasant experiences and, let's be honest, close calls, Bernie and I just left one night. Just like that. Sneaked out. Changed apartments. Changed cities. Changed states even. Got a new phone number, a new mailing address, new job. The whole deal. Never heard from Mr. Socky again, though we kept our guard up for a long time. A long, long time.

But the downside is, well, the family is pretty well down to just me now. Bernie won't be around that much longer. Not the way that mold is going. I really don't know if I should try having a talk with him or simply end it with a one-way car ride, but then where will I be?

I don't even have anyone writing me scam letters. No one at all. It's just me here. How long can this last?

 

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Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? Recently nominated for something by someone, somewhere.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

Customer Service, Where Ha' Ye Gone?

In what is now the past, I had a few interesting times dealing with reputable businesses. Hold on a sec. Maybe I should qualify that. I'd have to call one of them a formerly reputable business.

I had a hosting company, in the sense that I contracted with them for services. My first account worked out really well. They were a relatively small company that the owners had built from the ground up. They were on top of things and had created a bunch of custom features and though not a giant company had a good reputation.

I bought in. I had a few small problems, mostly due to inexperience on my part, and the service was great. I always sent a final email thanking the service technician when my problem got resolved. I figured that I owed. I figured that people like to be thanked. And I was grateful.

Times were good. My site stayed up, it worked perfectly, I added to it, and had no further problems. So after almost two years with this company, they were the obvious choice for my second site.

A few months before this I'd seen a few emails coming in about the hosting company "joining forces" with some other company. Or maybe they called it "teaming up", or something like that. I vaguely wondered if something unfortunate was going on, but since nothing seemed to be changing, I ignored it. About the only change I could see was that they were offering more services at lower prices. Whatever.

Not too very long after setting up my second account I began checking it every morning. Every now and then the site would be unresponsive. I wondered if my internet service provider or my DSL provider was having problems, but then before I could get too worked up things seemed to resolve themselves.

This happened maybe once a week for a few minutes. Then it seemed to be getting worse, but it was sporadic. I'd had some problems early on with my DSL provider, a major phone company whose telephone support had been vile. But they had been OK for several years now. I wondered if I was getting hosed by them again, or if my ISP was mucking around, though they had been dead reliable and even had helped me figure out that the phone company was lying to me when outages were really the phone company's fault.

Anyway, one day my site simply did not work. I checked everything I could. Browser OK (I had four installed). Computer on and running. Other web sites came up OK. In fact I could access any other web site that I could think of except my own site number two.

After pulling some hair out and thrashing around looking to define the problem, my site was suddenly there again. This happened several times over the following weeks. It seemed to be down about 20 to 30 minutes, and then it was back. I kept notes.

Finally one day when this was happening I submitted a support request to the web host, documenting what I'd seen. The logs for my site showed nothing and there were no reports from the hosting company, or notes in their forums.

The response I got was to let them know if it happened again. I think I ate my tongue. But after a few minutes I got back on track and let it slide.

Then a few days later it happened again. After a half hour of thrashing around checking things I saw my site come up again, but five minutes later it went down and didn't come back for another 20, so I submitted another support request. And got pretty much the same response, so I kept after them, saying that I'd at least expect them to check things and let me know what they checked, when, and supplying some proof.

I got a condescending response from someone who said he was a technical support supervisor. He mentioned a couple of things that weren't all that deep and basically let me know that they were not interested in following up on my problem.

OK fine. I love you too.

About a week after that my site disappeared again. The original site was still doing fine. I never did have a problem with that, but the newer one was down. I decided to log on to the control panel and check the logs. I don't know much about web servers and the back end stuff, but I can make some sense of it.

Except that I couldn't get there. The whole server had disappeared from the internet. I checked the company's forums for an announcement, and checked my email inbox but found no news, so I submitted another support request in case they were unaware. I got a reply that they knew there was a problem. And beyond that they supplied nothing else, ever.

A couple of days later I received an email notifying me that my request for support had been resolved, so I queried them. They said that after three days of inactivity, their system considers all support requests to have been resolved. Period. Thank you very much now go away.

Then my site went down again and so did the server. Totally gone.

I submitted another support request and asked that it go straight to a supervisor. I said I was fed up with a web site that kept disappearing, and a server that did the same and wanted some answers and a resolution.

OK, children, now it gets fun.

After some back and forth the person identifying himself as a technical support supervisor told me three interesting things.

One was that they would provide no support for application programming problems. He said that if I was having problems with my web site I should contact my developer and work things out there.

I had a contact form on my site which had been working fine, but after the server disappeared it stopped working. Cold. Dead. I hadn't touched the site in several weeks and made this clear several times. Nevertheless, this guy had to make a point of telling me not to even think of getting any help of that kind.

Up to that moment it hadn't occurred to me for the obvious reason that I had had a perfectly working site and hadn't changed a thing. It could not be my faulty code.

The second thing this guy said was that they would provide zero help configuring anything whatsoever within my account. Since I was on an Apache server on Linux, there were .htaccess files and file permissions and things to fiddle with. But I hadn't, and hadn't asked for help either.

Then the third thing I was told was that if I thought that the goofiness I had been experiencing were due to hardware, operating system or server software problems, it was my job to verify it (right, from my apartment 1500 miles away), document it, and tell them exactly what they had to do to fix their system.

And by the way, we didn't notify anyone or put the outages on our company forum because that's reserved for major outages. (He didn't answer when I said that having my server disappear was a major outage for me.)

Talk about your body slam.

So there I was, having been told that no matter where the problem was, they were not going to do anything to help. Thank you very much and please don't call again.

Luckily my first account had only about a month to run, so I found another host that looked good. I even queried one of its customers. Everything sounded OK. A little more expensive, but I could consolidate two accounts into one for about the same total cost.

So then I notified the first company that I was going to move my first account, and in case I missed the deadline I did not want my account to be automatically renewed (which they normally do). This unleashed another load of stuff that went right into the fan.

It so happens that they have no way of closing an account unless they do it immediately. Their system is set up in such a way that they cannot indicate that an account just runs out and dies. According to them. So they could either close it immediately or if I ran over they would have to bill me for another entire year and then refund me (if things worked out that way).

The information on the company wiki said something else, but they didn't accept that. I got into a major email battle and made it clear that I would consider it fraud, and fight them up one side and down the other. All that fun stuff. They kept saying that the giant robot in the back room would not listen to them. Etcetera. It was lovely.

I spent about two weeks updating the style sheets for my site (on my desktop) simplifying them and bring them up a notch or two in quality. I finished that and got my site moved over to the new host without a problem, and then managed to cancel my account with about a week left to run. Later I noticed that they had changed the company wiki to explicitly say that they could not cancel in advance.

A few weeks later I was ready to move my second site. First I had to get my domain name pointing at the new host's servers. I went into the control panel about three times and for the life of me could find no option to let me make the change.

Sounds like it's time to submit another support request. So I did, lucky me.

The reply I got was "You could change the domain nameservers via BackStage >> Domains >> [redacted].com, click on the 'Edit' button on the left and then you will be able to do that. Hope this helps."

Like I hadn't' been there.

So I replied, and told them that there was no 'Edit' button and sent a screen capture.

Of course the reply I got (from a different monkey) was "Hi, On Domains tab: [redacted].com click on that 'Edit' to change nameservers."

Lovely day in the neighborhood. Lovely.

Eventually, out of desperation I went looking around some more and accidentally stumbled on that elusive 'Edit' button under the name of the account that I had closed about a month earlier. I'm sure they never expected me to find it there, but I did.

So after gluing most of my hair back on I closed that account too, with 16 months to run. No refund of course. They'd never think of that, but I'm glad to be free, and the new hosting company is another small one, with real people working there, and it's their livelihood and they don't offer the lowest prices but they are actually on the job.

So far it's working.

Part two in this story is about a gift to my sister.

I sort of missed Xmas. I wanted to get her something. Life has been especially unkind to her since her birthday is about two weeks before Xmas, and she's been shorted all her life. Mine is in the warm months so I never had that sort of conflict. I can't understand why my parents didn't move her birthday to July instead. They muffed it and she has suffered.

So I owed her. I haven't been that good either, but now that I'm a geezer I realize I won't have another six decades to put it off. If I don't do something now, maybe there won't be a next year to make it up.

Chocolate and coffee seemed good.

I ordered some chocolate. Goofy web site but pretty good deals. Fantastic service. When you submit your order you can specify delivery options, such as an acceptable temperature range, or let them decide when it's cool enough to send chocolate, and so on.

An email confirming the order arrived shortly, then another one told me when the order shipped, and included a UPS tracking number. I followed the order and notified my sister when it had arrived, in case maybe it hadn't really. Then I got another email confirming that the order had been delivered. Everything went beautifully.

I've been buying coffee locally from a great company for 20 years. This was a good chance to share with my sister, and since the coffee company had an online store, all I had to do was order and pay, and let it all rip.

RIP. You know what that means, but I didn't get too much peace out of this one.

I selected two pounds of premium beans, then went to check out. I entered my billing info, credit card number and all that, but when I put my sister's name and address into the shipping address form the system changed the billing info to the shipping info.

I found this out after I submitted the order, on a summary screen. Too late, Jake.

I had to log on to the site (you need to set up an account in order to order) and filled out a contact form notifying them of the difference between the shipping and billing addresses (and that they were two different people). Silence.

I kept checking with my sister. No coffee.

After about a week I logged back into the coffee site and saw a note about the order having been shipped, but there was nothing else there. No tracking number, no way to follow up on anything. After 10 days my sister informed me that the order still hadn't arrived so I logged onto the site one more time and sent them a few flames. I gave them a day and a half to provide me with a definite delivery date, which had to be within the following week, or I'd have to cancel the order and demand a refund.

So then I get an email. Finally someone wants to talk.

Dear sir, so sorry. Order has been faithfully delivered. Here is fabled UPS tracking number. Please see for yourself. Meanwhile we are sending a duplicate shipment Real Soon Now just in case. So sorry please.

It was about then that my sister went snooping out in the office of her apartment complex and found that her original order had indeed arrived and gotten stuffed away somewhere. Since they hadn't notified her (as they used to do) she hadn't thought of going out digging around.

The other half of this is that if I had had a tracking number in the first place I could have told her to go look on a particular date, to verify that it had or had not actually been delivered.

So I'm a butthead. My sister is at fault for not being curious enough to look for something that she did not know was coming, and the merchant created a bad experience by being secretive about all of this. I still don't know if the second, courtesy order has even been shipped. I just logged in to the web site and the address was still wrong, about a week later. And so on.

Great coffee though.

(Original post was written in 2008 but I'm still mad.)

 

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Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? Glad I forgot which hosting company that was.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

Information Density And Continuing Value

You buy a book. You read it and put it on your shelf. You never really want to read it again.

This is familiar, even more familiar with shorter pieces. If the book is a novel, there's a chance you'll reread it. Or if it's a textbook.

Much less so if it's not a book. If it's a pamphlet. Or if it's a daily newspaper. There's no need to ever look at either again.

Why?

Because there isn't enough there, and because what is there is not so moving.

Things are different with other media.

Take music. Music is different.

Music has a much higher information density, even though it's non-verbal content.

Music's content is non-verbal.

And music's content is mostly emotional.

Music is different from writing. Writing is linear. Even though you can jump around in a text, any place you put your eyes requires linear effort. And you have to work at understanding what you're doing.

Music is non-verbal. Even music with lyrics added. Lyrics are more like seasoning than the meat of the meal. Since music is non-verbal, it doesn't require thought. We can appreciate music with the non-rational parts of our minds.

Since music's content is mainly emotional, this aspect reinforces the non-linear, non-verbal aspects.

And music is dense. Even the notes of a single instrument are made of complex sounds. Add more instruments, add time, and you have a rich enfolding and layering of sounds and rhythms that interact in complex ways.

All of this plays out differently each time that a given piece is performed, even if it's a recorded piece, because it depends on the listener's mood, freshness, state of mind, and location at the time of listening.

Motion pictures are similar to music.

Compare a motion picture to a still photo. Different. No doubt about that. The still photo is more like a short short story, the motion picture to a long novel.

There's a still starker contrast comparing a motion picture to a piece of writing. No contest. You can watch a movie many times over and enjoy it each time, getting more and more from it. Not so much from a written plot outline.

And to enhance motion pictures even more, they can contain music. They are more like life, and no matter what, no matter who you are, life is something that no one tires of.

To write well you need to have lots of information complex ideas expressed simply the telling of involved stories imagery conjuring visual and other imagery emotion...(See? I'm still working on it.)

 

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Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? Reconsidering the role of mail order in life as she is lived.

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals