Department of Unhelpful Advice

Here's the fine print on a recent piece of e-mail from MyPoints (which I like pretty well, except when they do things like send me a link to a survey, which, when I follow it, then informs me that I have already taken the survey. Which would be a pretty neat trick since it arrive in my mailbox literally minute before):

In other words, Mac user, don't be a Mac user. If you want to do business with us, you should switch to an inferior operating system that you probably don't care much for (seeing how you're a Mac user and all), because that's way easier for us than to have to program our stuff to be cross-platform.

Thanks, MyPoints, but no thanks. After 25 years on the Macintosh, it's far more likely that I will drop you than the Mac.

Indeed, one of the little silver linings in my having been recently downsized out of my job of the past nine years (first hired, first fired, I guess) is that I no longer have to work in Windows on a daily basis. It's been a constant nuisance to have to dive through various hoops to accomplish that which could be done on a Mac in a fraction of the time. (How often did I bring things home to do on the Mac in an hour rather than spend an afternoon trying to accomplish the same things in Windows?)

On the subject of MyPoints: The gist of the service is that they send you e-mail; usually you get a few points, which you collect and spend on stuff later on, for clicking the link to the sponsor's website and reading their material, taking their survey, whatever. You get additional points for following up on their offer or completing the survey or what have you. (You also can log into MyPoints and shop their vendors via their website, amassing points in that fashion, too.) The system works well, and some of the offers have been useful. But it seems to me lately that a greater-than-usual number of offers don't include the points-for-reading feature. If you buy you get points, but you get no points for merely following up on the offer. A sign of tough economic times?

And despite the disclaimer reproduced above, I have almost never had any trouble with MyPoints from my Mac platform. Once in awhile a survey sponsor will insist that I have to access their site using Internet Exploder on a Windows POS computer. Not so; I have the option of clicking the close button, and I avail myself of it.

That, I think, produces the "best results."

I Know Several People Who Could Stand to Read This

C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity (1952):

Finally, though I have had to speak at some length about sex, I want to make it as clear as I possibly can that the centre of Christian morality is not here. If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting; the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither.

A good many people of my acquaintance seem to think that sex is indeed the center of Christian morality, as well as everything else, and I hold them directly responsible for the abrupt elimination of my position with the local Lutheran synod.

Nor has it escaped my attention that most of these people--most, though not all, pastor--decry "society's" overemphasis on sexuality and yet themselves seem incapable of talking about anything else. Merely an observation.

Playing God?

Here's a fun story from the Telegraph:

Russia plans to stop asteroid crashing to Earth

Russia wants to send a spacecraft to knock the large Apophis asteroid off a possible collision course with Earth.

The ambitious plan envisages the co-operation of Nasa, the European and Chinese space agencies to pull off a mission with echoes of a Hollywood blockbuster.

Anatoly Perminov, the head of Russia's space agency, said it would assess the difficulties of knocking the asteroid Apophis out of harm's way.

The 885-foot-wide asteroid was first discovered in 2004. Astronomers estimated the chances of it smashing into Earth in its first flyby in 2029 were as high as 1-in-37, but have since lowered their estimate.

The rest of it is here.

Now, setting aside for the moment the fact that I already saw this movie, I am left with the same question I have whenever I read about this sort of thing, viz., do we know for a fact that it would be a good idea to stop an 885-foot-wide asteroid from crashing into the Earth?

Sure, it sounds like the sort of thing we should take on. But here's the thing: My chums on the right-wingnut fringe of society keep insisting that stuff like stem-cell research, cloning, genetics research, unplugging a dead person's respirator, etc., etc., is wrong because it's "playing God." And they always say that as if it's a bad thing, playing God, although, I dunno, I can certainly think of worse examples to imitate.

But let's go along with the idea that "playing God" is a bad thing. And let's skip over my usual question, namely, "Don't we 'play God' much if not most of the time?"...like, say, every evening when I take my cholesterol medication without the slightest thought given to whether God wants my HDL to go down and my LDL to go up, or whatever's supposed to be happening. We'll leave all that for another day.

But back to the asteroid Apophis: How do we know that God hasn't sent it hurtling toward Mother Earth because that's how he plans to end the world? To my knowledge, most religions preach some kind of end-of-days scenario, however vague or specific they prefer to make it. Maybe Apophis is it!

Maybe this is supposed to happen!

And maybe our attempt to prevent it from happening is, well, "playing God." Which, we previously agreed, is a bad thing.

At this point you might say, "Well, you know, if God wants this to happen then it will happen. Nothing we can do to thwart God, after all."

To which I say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, there, buckaroo! How come you're not so sanguine about, say, genetics research? Or cloning? I mean, if God doesn't want us monkeying around with those things, either, then can we not safely assume that all the effort will simply come to naught and we have nothing to worry about?"

One might--might!--almost form the opinion that it's only "playing God" if it's something of which we disapprove. Otherwise it is both hunky and dory.

So, first thing we need to do is get Bruce Willis. He knows how to handle asteroids.

2009: Looking Back

A short video I made via Animoto.com. Happy New Year!

Not So Fast!

Here are several of the headline articles in today's edition of Salon's e-mail newsletter, "Today in Salon":

* Andrew O'Hehir on the best movies of the decade
* Directors of the decade: No. 3: The Coen brothers
* Stephanie Zacharek on the best movies of the decade
* Films of the decade: "Spirited Away"
* Films of the decade: "Up the Yangtze"

Add to this the hideous number of ads--print and e-mail--TV commentators' (I can hardly bring myself to call more than a couple of them "reporters") pronouncements, and other odds and ends, and one might be excused for thinking that the decade is drawing to a close.

Well, it is. In about a year.

It's not difficult, nor is it tricky. Whenever we reach this point in a decade, someone tries to argue that it has to do with the Julian calendar, or the Jewish calendar or which year Jesus of Nazareth might have been born, or sunspots, or whatever. In fact, none of those has anything to do with when a decade begins and ends.

A decade is a span of ten years--presumably we can all agree on that.

No matter where you start counting, you don't have a "zeroth" year. You start with Year One. So the first decade -- Mayan calendar, Chinese calendar, insurance company calendar -- is Year One through Year Ten.

And there's our pattern: Decades begin in years that end in 1 and end in years that end in 0.

Like 2010, for instance.

So in the commonly used Gregorian incarnation of the Anno Domini or Christian Era calendar, the current decade began on the first day of 2001 and will conclude on the last day of 2010. Because we count them from 1 through 10, not from 0 through 9.

I don't make the rules; I merely enforce them.

A Christmas Carol

This from Delancyplace.com:

In today's encore excerpt - at the end of the 19th century, Charles Dickens' short novel, A Christmas Carol, had readership second only to the Bible's:

"If only Ebenezer Scrooge had not, in the excitement of his transformation from miser to humanitarian, diverged from the traditional Christmas goose to surprise Bob Cratchit with a turkey 'twice the size of Tiny Tim.' But alas - he did, and as A Christmas Carol approaches its 165th birthday, a Google search answers the plaint 'leftover turkey' with more than 300,000 promises of recipes to dispatch it. As for England's goose-raising industry, it tanked. ...

"The public's extraordinary and lasting embrace of Dickens's short novel is but one evidence of the 19th century's changing attitude toward Christmas. In 1819, Washington Irving's immensely popular 'Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent' had 'glorified' the 'social rites' of the season. Clement Moore's 1823 poem 'The Night Before Christmas' introduced a fat and jolly St. Nick whose obvious attractions eclipsed what had been a 'foreboding figure of judgment' as likely to distribute canings as gifts. Queen Victoria and her Bavarian husband, Albert, 'great boosters of the season,' had installed a Christmas tree in Windsor Castle each year since 1840, encouraging a fad that spread overseas to America by 1848. ...

"What is true is that Christmas, more than any other holiday, offered a means for the adult Dickens to redeem the despair and terrors of his childhood. In 1824, after a series of financial embarrassments drove his family to exchange what he remembered as a pleasant country existence for a 'mean, small tenement' in London, the 12-year-old Dickens, his schooling interrupted - ended, for all he knew - was sent to work 10-hour days at a shoe blacking factory in a quixotic attempt to remedy his family's insolvency. Not even a week later, his father was incarcerated in the infamous Marshalsea prison for a failure to pay a small debt to a baker. At this, Dickens's 'grief and humiliation' overwhelmed him so thoroughly that it retained the power to overshadow his adult accomplishments, calling him to 'wander desolately back' to the scene of his mortification. And because Dickens's tribulations were not particular to him but emblematic of the Industrial Revolution - armies of neglected, unschooled children forced into labor - the concerns that inform his fiction were shared by millions of potential readers. ...

"Replacing the slippery Holy Ghost with anthropomorphized spirits, the infant Christ with a crippled child whose salvation waits on man's - not God's - generosity, Dickens laid claim to a religious festival, handing it over to the gathering forces of secular humanism. If a single night's crash course in man's power to redress his mistakes and redeem his future without appealing to an invisible and silent deity could rehabilitate even so apparently lost a cause as Ebenezer Scrooge, imagine what it might do for the rest of us!"

Kathryn Harrison, "Father Christmas," The New York Times Review of Books, December 7, 2008, p. 14. 

Crime Spree

This is one of the topic heads from today's e-mail update from the City of Sioux Falls:

Date: 12/7/2009 From: Crime Stoppers Title: Crime of the Week: Vandalism Spree The Sioux Falls Police Department would like the public's help finding those responsible for eight or more cases of vandalism that occurred over the weekend starting Friday November 27, 2009 in the Southwest part of Sioux Falls. ...

"Vandalism spree." Doesn't "spree" sound like something fun and innocent? Like a shopping spree? Who came up with the idea of attaching it to crimes--killing spree, vandalism speee, etc.? More to the point...why? Seems like it just spoiled an otherwise perfectly good word.

No Wonder Mondays Seem So Long

It's official, as illustrated by this e-mail that I received today (Tuesday) from HP: Monday is no longer an event but rather is now a process.

Two Unfortunate Trends

Of course, there's way more than two--but two that have caught my attention lately as I browse the interwebs are these, each of them annoying in its own way:

1. Multi-Page Lists

If you're going to give me a list of Ten Important Things Your Doctor Is Too Stupid to Know So You're Probably Doomed, then for crying out loud, give me the #@$%! list! Don't expect me to click a link or two, then bring up Item One with a row of icons below it for Items Two through Ten. I can pretty much guarantee you, I will run out of patience before Item Three. Indeed, I might well call it quits at Item One, when I see all of the scrolling and clicking that awaits me, and just take my chances with my doctor. If you're going to give me a list, give me a list--Items One through Ten, right there in front of me.



2. Pointless Videos

I enjoy a funny, poignant, provocative, or entertaining video as much as the next guy, and maybe even more. But the interwebs today seems plagued with a plethora of pointless videos--by which I mean videos that could just as easily been written pieces. A recent CNet Downloads Dispatch included a link to their list of Top Five Worst Downloads. Fun! So I click on the link and am taken to...a video. Which means first, a commercial. Already, I could have skimmed a written list during the commercial sponsorship. There was nothing wrong with the video, and the presenter was charming enough, but neither was there any reason for the video to be a video. The graphics consisted mainly of screen shots of the software dogs zooming in behind the presenter. There were no demos or anything else that required a video presentation. So it amounts to a time-sink: I could have read the copy and looked at screenshots in half the time it took to play the video. And I wouldn't have had to shut off my music to do so.

In both cases, the intent to me seems to be to pad, to dally, to make something small seem bigger than it is. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the reason for that is to keep eyeballs on a given site for a longer time, so as to please advertisers. If there are many people like me, however (and experience teaches that there aren't), these sites may in fact be losing audiences by being dilatory time-wasters. In which case, the trends should go away. Sooner would be better.

Turkey Drop

From the great WKRP in Cincinnati:

Happy Thanksgiving - WKRP Turkey Drop - kewego
http://www.sharkhost.com Happy Thanksgiving from Sharkhost.com! This is a blast from the past, WKRP in Cincinnati Famous Turkey Drop. Sharkhost does not own any copyright to this material. Web host, web design, marketing and promotion.

Keywords: thanksgiving happy wkrp cincinnati turkey drop

Video from sharkhost

In Other Words, You're On Your Own

Spotted this at Google News:

Say, Say, Say

Another batch of quotations that have been piling up in this and that corner of the hard drive. As is often the case, I think that all of these are from the excellent newsletter A Word a Day.

Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived. -Oscar Wilde, writer (1854-1900)

Every man thinks God is on his side. The rich and powerful know he is. -Jean Anouilh, dramatist (1910-1987)

The door of a bigoted mind opens outwards so that the only result of the pressure of facts upon it is to close it more snugly. -Ogden Nash, author (1902-1971)

He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. -John Stuart Mill, philosopher and economist (1806-1873)

Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous. -Confucius, philosopher and teacher (c. 551-478 BCE)

If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning, etc., beginning from his youth and so go on to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last! -Jonathan Swift, satirist (1667-1745)

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day. -Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)

We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves. -George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), novelist (1819-1880)

It is not life and wealth and power that enslave men, but the cleaving to life and wealth and power. -Buddha (c. 563-483 BCE)

To freely bloom - that is my definition of success. -Gerry Spence, lawyer (b. 1929)

Prison: Young Crime's finishing school. -Clara Lucas Balfour, social activist (1808-1878)

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary. -Reinhold Niebuhr, theologian (1892-1971)

A good listener helps us overhear ourselves. -Yahia Lababidi, author (b. 1973)

The eye of the understanding is like the eye of the sense; for as you may see great objects through small crannies or holes, so you may see great axioms of nature through small and contemptible instances. -Francis Bacon, essayist, philosopher, and statesman (1561-1626)

Evil is like a shadow - it has no real substance of its own, it is simply a lack of light. You cannot cause a shadow to disappear by trying to fight it, stamp on it, by railing against it, or any other form of emotional or physical resistance. In order to cause a shadow to disappear, you must shine light on it. -Shakti Gawain, teacher and author (b. 1948)

He who postpones the hour of living is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses. -Horace, poet and satirist (65-8 BCE)

Life's most urgent question is: what are you doing for others? -Martin Luther King, Jr , civil-rights leader (1929-1968)

He who sees a need and waits to be asked for help is as unkind as if he had refused it. -Dante Alighieri, poet (1265-1321)

All high truth is poetry. Take the results of science: they glow with beauty, cold and hard as are the methods of reaching them. -Charles Buxton, brewer, philanthropist, writer and politician (1823-1871)

Writing the last page of the first draft is the most enjoyable moment in writing. It's one of the most enjoyable moments in life, period. -Nicholas Sparks, author (b. 1965)

No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country. -Alexis de Tocqueville, statesman and historian (1805-1859)

"A Voyage Long and Strange"

This from Delancyplace.com:

In today's Thanksgiving encore excerpt - the discovery of America. Author Tony Horwitz muses on the discovery of America after hearing from a Plymouth Rock tour guide named Claire that the most common question from tourists was why the date etched on the rock was 1620 instead of 1492:

" 'People think Columbus dropped off the Pilgrims and sailed home.' Claire had to patiently explain that Columbus's landing and the Pilgrims' arrival occurred a thousand miles and 128 years apart. ...

"By the time the first English settled, other Europeans had already reached half of the forty-eight states that today make up the continental United States. One of the earliest arrivals was Giovanni da Verrazzano, who toured the Eastern Seaboard in 1524, almost a full century before the Pilgrims arrived. ... Even less remembered are the Portuguese pilots who steered Spanish ships along both coasts of the continent in the sixteenth century, probing upriver to Bangor, Maine, and all the way to Oregon. ... In 1542, Spanish conquistadors completed a reconnaissance of the continent's interior: scaling the Appalachians, rafting the Mississippi, peering down the Grand Canyon, and galloping as far inland as central Kansas. ...

"The Spanish didn't just explore: they settled, from the Rio Grande to the Atlantic. Upon founding St. Augustine, the first European city on U.S. soil, the Spanish gave thanks and dined with Indians-fifty-six years before the Pilgrim Thanksgiving at Plymouth. ... Plymouth, it turned out, wasn't even the first English colony in New England. That distinction belonged to Fort St. George, in Popham, Maine. Nor were the Pilgrims the first to settle Massachusetts. In 1602, a band of English built a fort on the island of Cuttyhunk. They came, not for religious freedom, but to get rich from digging sassafras, a commodity prized in Europe as a cure for the clap. ...

"The Pilgrims, and later, the Americans who pushed west from the Atlantic, didn't pioneer a virgin wilderness. They occupied a land long since transformed by European contact. ... Samoset, the first Indian the Pilgrims met at Plymouth, greeted the settlers in English. The first thing he asked for was beer."

Tony Horwitz, A Voyage Long and Strange, Henry Holt, Copyright 2008 by Tony Horwitz, pp. 3-6.

I Think This Might Be Spam!

Hmm. I just don't know. One hates to be so suspicious and cynical and everything, but there's something about this message that makes me wonder if it possibly could be an example of that "spam" of which one hears so much...

Subject: wjreynolds@yahoo.com, transfering to a new account. From: "BankAccountSupport" 

Dear wjreynolds@yahoo.com, The current account you now have is substandard. Your new account is ready for you to access. We hope you'll enjoy your new benefits! Please visit the link we've provided below. My New Bank Account Thank you, Account Support Manager, Tina Connor

As lamented in previous posts, these guys aren't even trying any more. You'd think that a recession might prompt them to step up the effort a little...maybe some graphics, maybe the actual name of a bank. But no. Come on, people! If you don't care, why should your intended victims?

Kindness

If kindness does, in fact, bind us to others, why is this so? 

When we extend kindness, is there a shift in the way we see others as individuals, or a shift in the way we see our relationship to others in a larger context? 

Does kindness change us only as individuals, or does it also engender a change in the social order? 

If we feel ourselves to be kind, are we also challenged to become more just? 

Is compassion greater than simple kindness?

These questions are asked as a "Midday Meditation" in "Your Daybook," an e-mail newsletter that I receive from the Odyssey Networks. As our society seems to increasingly distance itself from simple kindness--we won't even get into civility here--the questions seem to me more than merely a meditative exercise.

I find the last three questions to be the most pertinent. The answer, to me, is yes in all three cases. You?

Officespeak

[http://williamjreynolds.blogspot.com/2009/10/officespeak.html]

This is from yesterday's delanceyplace.com newsletter. I find the comments on "Passive Voice" to be especially applicable to my current work for a religious organization. The church loves the passive voice!


In today's excerpt - if you happen to work for a bureaucracy, you'll need to know the subtleties of "officespeak": "This section deals with the technical aspects of officespeak, such as passive voice, circular reasoning, and rhetorical questions. These are the nuts and bolts of the Rube Goldberg contraption that is the language of the office. Obscurity, vagueness, and a noncommittal stance on everything define the essence of officespeak. No one wants to come out and say what they really think. It is much safer for the company and those up top to constantly cloak their language in order to hide how much they do know or, just as often, how much they don't know. ...  

Passive voice: The bread and butter of press releases and official statements. For those who have forgotten their basic grammar, a sentence in the passive voice does not have an active verb. Thus, no one can take the blame for 'doing' something, since nothing, grammatically speaking, has been done by anybody. Using the passive voice takes the emphasis off yourself (or the company). Here [is an] few example of how the passive voice can render any situation guiltless: 'Five hundred employees were laid off.' (Not 'The company laid off five hundred employees,' or even worse, 'I laid off five hundred employees.' These layoffs occurred in a netherworld of displaced blame, in which the company and the individual are miraculously absent from the picture.) ...

Circular reasoning: Another favorite when it comes time to deliver bad news. In circular reasoning, a problem is posited and a reason is given. Except that the reason is basically just a rewording of the problem. Pretty nifty. Here are some examples to better explain the examples: 'Our profits are down because of [a decrease in revenues].' 'People were laid off because there was a surplus of workers.' ...

Rhetorical questions: The questions that ask for no answers. So why even ask the question? Because it makes it seem as though the listener is participating in a true dialogue. When your boss asks, 'Who's staying late tonight?' you know he really means, 'Anyone who wants to keep their job will work late.' Still, there's that split second when you think you have a say in the matter, when you believe your opinion counts. Only to be reminded, yet again, that no one cares what you think. ...

Hollow statements: The second cousin of circular reasoning. Hollow statements make it seem as though something positive is happening (such as better profits or increased market share), but they lack any proof to support the claim. 'Our company is performing better than it looks.' 'Once productivity increases, so will profits.' ...

They and them: Pronouns used to refer to the high-level management that no one has ever met, only heard whispers about. 'They' are faceless and often nameless. And their decisions render those beneath them impotent to change anything. 'They' fire people, 'they' freeze wages, 'they' make your life a living hell. It's not your boss who is responsible - he would love to reverse all these directives if he could. But you see, his hands are tied. 'I'd love to give you that raise, you know I would. But they're the ones in charge.' 'Okay, gang, bad news, no more cargo shorts allowed. Hey, I love the casual look, but they hate it.' ...

Obfuscation: A tendency to obscure, darken, or stupefy. The primary goal of the above techniques is, in the end, obfuscation. Whether it's by means of the methods outlined above or by injecting jargon-heavy phrases into sentences, corporations want to make their motives and actions as difficult to comprehend as possible." 

D.W. Martin, Officespeak, Simon Spotlight, Copyright 2005 by David Martin, pp. 11-20.     
 
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The Formula

The mystic was back from the desert.

“Tell us,” they said, “what God is like.”

But how could he ever tell them what he had experienced in his heart?

Can God be put into words?

He finally gave them a formula — inaccurate, inadequate — in the hope that some might be tempted to experience it for themselves.

They seized upon the formula. They made it a sacred text. They imposed it on others as a holy belief. They went to great pains to spread it in foreign lands. Some even gave their lives for it.

The mystic was sad. It might have been better if he had said nothing.

Anthony de Mello S.J., The Song of the Bird, 1984

How Not to Use the Telephone

My late father started working for Northwestern Bell Telephone Company (later USWest, currently Qwest) when he was in high school, retiring from it nearly 40 years later. He was quite the stickler for proper phone etiquette, and I guess I must have inherited some of that from him, for I find that instances such as one that occurred a few minutes ago really tick me off.

The phone rings. Being involved in some important TV watching, I ignore it. Four rings, then on to the answering machine. But then it immediately rings again, so I go to see what's so blasted important. The Caller ID box for both calls (spaced one minute apart) says JPMorgan Chase, an outfit that I haven't done business with in some years and am in no hurry to deal with again. But there's a message from the second call, so I dutifully listen to it. A woman who speaks so quickly that I can't catch her name nor the company she claims to be with is calling for someone who doesn't live at this address (same last name, different first name) regarding "this matter that has been brought to my attention." She rattles off a phone number--not the one from which the call originated, which was 713-750-2005, but rather an 800 number--and then hangs up.

Of course my first inclination is to ignore it, but having had tangled dealings with Chase in the past I decide to follow up. I play back the message.

And again.

And again.

And several more times.

I come up with this:

Caller's name: Absolutely impossible to catch. Sort of sounds like "Ess." She has an accent but that's not the issue; the issue is that she talks too rapidly and ignores the first rule of phone etiquette, viz., speak clearly. Also the second rule, which is to repeat and spell out things that are important. Like your name.

Callback number: Well, the 800 part is clear enough. The prefix sounds like 3-8, but that can't be right; I guess it must be 3-8-8. Then maybe 4-2-2-7. Or (on subsequent listens) 4-2-2-4. She disconnects so quickly after rattling off the number once (see second rule, above) that it's next to impossible to say. In fact, it isn't next to impossible, it is impossible.

Company name: Chase something. Chase Auto Client? That doesn't make any sense.

By then my wife has come to see what the hoo-hah is about. She can't catch the woman's name either, and her guess for phone number is 4-2-2-4. I Google both 4-2-2-7 and 4-2-2-4; nothing on the former, and something called GAC International for the latter. I dial it, and get a menu: Press 1 for Imports; press 2 for Exports; press 3 for Accounting... Not too promising. I press * to speak to a person and get voicemail. Clearly not where I want to be.

I then try dialing the 713 number from which the calls originated, but of course that produces only a busy signal. Call centers almost never allow for incoming calls.

Back to Google. I type in Chase Au, and immediately Chase Auto Finance pops up. That seems promising. I go to their website, but there's nothing useful there.

I search Google for the 713 number, and read several irate entries at a couple of caller-complaint sites (my favorite: "These idiots keep calling me at my office phone, when I repeatedly tell them that the person they are looking for hasn't worked here in at least 12 months."), which in addition to being entertaining also unearths a slightly different 800 number, 388-4223. Close enough, I figure, and dial it.

Jackpot.

After pushing a few buttons, I'm speaking with a nice woman. I tell her there's this message on my machine, I can't make out the name of the woman who called but she's asking for someone and there's no one here by that name. She asks me how long we've had this number.

"Well, let's see--since 1985, so, what, 24 years?"

And she says they must have misdialed and they'll check their records to make sure they don't call here again, etc. I don't go into the niceties of telephone etiquette with her, since it's probably not her area (based on tonight's evidence, it seems to be nobody's area) and I had no issues with her.

But one does wonder. This is not the first time I've had a call from a creditor or other business entity looking for someone else with the same last name or, on a couple of occasions, another person with the same name as me. Which always amazes me. I don't know about you, but whenever I've taken out a loan, or bought something of substance, or applied for anything, I've been required to give name, rank, serial number, blood sample, letter of reference from my Scoutmaster, etc., etc. And yet when these entities go looking for someone (I assume somebody named Reynolds owes Chase Auto Finance some money), it seems they merely stick a pin in the phone book and call whoever they land on. I mean, presumably you have the guy's SSN, yes? And I'm under the impression that these big business outfits have all sorts of ways to track you down based on SSN. Certainly that's the case on all those television shows such as the one I didn't get to see the end of tonight, thanks to JPMorgan Chase.

So why do they always seem to employ these horse-and-buggy methods to track down their persons of interest?

Too bad I'm not teaching Business Communication this term. I'd use tonight's message as an example. A negative example, naturally.

Except for One Thing

Today's Headline: Yes, perfectly healthy, except for, you know, the dying part.

"Courage to Accept Acceptance"

I have begun today a 34-week online retreat offered by the Collaborative Ministry Office at my alma mater, Creighton University. Among the suggested readings is an excerpt from the book As Bread That Is Broken by Peter G. van Breemen, S.J. (Dimension Books, Inc., 1974) I was struck by this passage:

How often have we been told that it is important that we love God. And this is true. But is it far more important that God loves us! Our love for God is secondary. God's love for us is first: "This is the love I mean: not our love for God, but God's love for us" (1 John 4:10). This is the foundation. Karl Rahner once made the remark that we live in a time when there is much interest in Church politics (e.g. the pill, the reform of the curia, celibate priesthood). This may be the sign of a deep faith. It can also be the sign of a lack of faith. The basic faith is that I know myself to be accepted by God: "We ourselves have known and put our faith in God's love towards ourselves" (1 John 4:16). This is the content of our faith--"God's love towards ourselves." The whole Apostles' Creed is nothing but a statement twelve times over of belief in this very love which God has for us.

Interesting to reflect on the idea that my love for God is secondary. From the earliest days of Catholic catechism we were taught, in answer to the question "Why was I created?", "I was created to love God with my whole heart, my whole soul, and my whole mind." Which, even as a child, seemed an unsatisfactory answer. For one thing, it reflects rather poorly on the Creator, I think. The passage from van Breemen's book suggests something new to me. Which, I suppose, one must expect from a retreat.