"Retreads" isn't what I wanted this title to be. I wanted a different word -- remove the second 'e', flip the second 'r' and the 'a' -- but it's not a PC word, and if I put it up, I'm worried my legions of readers would abandon my site like it was a Chick-fil-A in Dupont Circle (DC joke). But sometimes this word is just too apt and it has to be used, if only implicitly.
I experienced two such times this week, the first came in an email exchange I had with a woman who works at a DC police station. We want to get a "car seat safety inspection", where you bring your car seat into the police station before your child is born, and they sign off on it as safe and show you how to properly buckle your kid in. Now, I'm fairly confident that this is a completely superfluous task. I'm pretty sure these car seats aren't all that complicated, but we're doing it anyway, because you apparently just do superfluous tasks when you're having a kid if somebody uses the term "safety" or "well-being" when describing them. So I call the number given on the DC website, and I'm given the email address of the woman who handles this type of thing. I'll call her Ms. X.
We then have the email exchange given below. This is verbatim and complete. I'm cutting and pasting the entire emails from my inbox, only replacing her name with Ms. X, and using my first initial instead of my entire name. The emails are separated using dashed lines and I've put what we actually typed in italics.
Hi Ms. X,
wed-fri, some mondays 7am-1230pm, at 3320 Idaho Ave Nw
-------------------------------
We'd like to do it in the morning the Friday of next week (Aug. 17), can we just stop by, or do we need an appointment?
I'm pretty familiar with Paul Ryan, through a New Yorker story I read about him, and through Paul Krugman's repeated take downs of his inane economic plan. Ryan is an Ayn Rand Republican, who is intent on pushing his square ideology down the round throats of the American people. When it doesn't fit, it's fine to pretend that it does and try to deceive others about it (and Ryan is joining the right ticket for this). Man, I'm sick of people like Paul Ryan. I wish they'd all just leave, go create their utopia on Mars or a pontoon in the middle of the ocean or something, just leave. Leave the US to people who actually want to understand and solve the real problems in our society, not to a bunch of people who read "Atlas Shrugged" at an impressionable age.
[Remember in second grade when you learned the difference between fiction and non-fiction?]
[Since I mention car seats below, I wanted to put up a "Jackass" bit I remember involving car seats, but I couldn't find it, so instead you get this one, in which Preston asks an airport shuttle driver to help him with his bag.]
I experienced two such times this week, the first came in an email exchange I had with a woman who works at a DC police station. We want to get a "car seat safety inspection", where you bring your car seat into the police station before your child is born, and they sign off on it as safe and show you how to properly buckle your kid in. Now, I'm fairly confident that this is a completely superfluous task. I'm pretty sure these car seats aren't all that complicated, but we're doing it anyway, because you apparently just do superfluous tasks when you're having a kid if somebody uses the term "safety" or "well-being" when describing them. So I call the number given on the DC website, and I'm given the email address of the woman who handles this type of thing. I'll call her Ms. X.
We then have the email exchange given below. This is verbatim and complete. I'm cutting and pasting the entire emails from my inbox, only replacing her name with Ms. X, and using my first initial instead of my entire name. The emails are separated using dashed lines and I've put what we actually typed in italics.
Hi Ms. X,
My wife and I would like to schedule a car seat safety check, and I
understand you're the person to talk to about this. How do we proceed?
Thanks,
D
-------------------------------
wed-fri, some mondays 7am-1230pm, at 3320 Idaho Ave Nw
Check out the "One City Action
Plan"Read Mayor Gray's comprehensive strategy to create a thriving
city for all!
Visit http://onecityactionplan.dc.
gov to learn more.
Visit http://onecityactionplan.dc.
-------------------------------
We'd like to do it in the morning the Friday of next week (Aug. 17), can we just stop by, or do we need an appointment?
Thanks,
D
-------------------------------
fine
--------------------------------
And that was that. What... the... fuck? She's completely unprofessional; she doesn't even attempt to use any sort of proper address or proper grammar (or even complete sentences), and she doesn't even sign her name. But I'll let that go. We've somehow decided as a society that it's OK to be completely informal via email no matter what the setting, so fine. The much bigger problem, as you can read, is that she doesn't answer my questions! Apparently, an entire sentence is too much for this woman to handle. I should have just emailed her, "appt?". The thing is, it's not like I went through the DC government directory and picked a person at random to email, I was told to contact (not just contact, but email, I wasn't even given a phone number) this woman specifically. She is the designated point person for this particular task. Communicating with people like me is explicitly part of her job, and this is how she handles it.
It's almost unbelievable. I'm embarrassed if I notice I so much as made a typo emailing somebody I don't know. Once, 11 years ago, I used the word "perspective" instead of "prospective" in an email to a professor, and it still bothers me today when I think about it. This is a whole different level, a whole different level of, I don't know what, laziness? Lack of pride? Something. As I always say when I encounter somebody like Ms. X, "14 million people unemployed and you have a job?" What's worse is that she's a DC employee, so that $300 that comes out of my paycheck each month, this is where part of it is going. After exchanges like this, I get why the Tea Party exists, I don't like the Tea Party, I think its full of misguided people (to put it nicely), but I get why it exists.
Speaking of the Tea Party... we've come to my next retread, newly-announced vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan. Apparently "Etch A Sketch" Mitt went with the "bold pick", the young intellectual leader of the Republican party, Congressman Ryan. Except that Ryan isn't really intellectual, unless you use intellectual as an antonym for reality-based, which is essentially what it means when applied to a Republican today. It's funny how the stereotype is of effete liberal idealists, with their ivory towers and Ivy League degrees, who don't understand the real world, when it's the conservatives who seem not to get that the society doesn't function a certain way just because you think it should.
I'm pretty familiar with Paul Ryan, through a New Yorker story I read about him, and through Paul Krugman's repeated take downs of his inane economic plan. Ryan is an Ayn Rand Republican, who is intent on pushing his square ideology down the round throats of the American people. When it doesn't fit, it's fine to pretend that it does and try to deceive others about it (and Ryan is joining the right ticket for this). Man, I'm sick of people like Paul Ryan. I wish they'd all just leave, go create their utopia on Mars or a pontoon in the middle of the ocean or something, just leave. Leave the US to people who actually want to understand and solve the real problems in our society, not to a bunch of people who read "Atlas Shrugged" at an impressionable age.
[Remember in second grade when you learned the difference between fiction and non-fiction?]
The silver lining is that Paul Ryan isn't really all that popular with the American people or at least the people of his home state Wisconsin (VP picks historically don't help a candidacy much, anyway), and the political forecaster Nate Silver currently has Obama as a 72% favorite to win the presidency. That's nice and all, but there is still plenty of time for the odds to change, and even if they don't, that still leaves a 28% chance for Romney. My boyhood hero Alvin Davis was a career .280 hitter -- just saying.
[Oh AD, why didn't you ever live up to your promise as a rookie in 1984?]
Alright, that's all for now. If you haven't yet, buy my brother's novel (search his name followed by the string "(Author)" on Facebook).
Until next week...
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