HOW NOT TO SERVE

Hell, I'm just too sensitive for this racket.

For that matter, I may be too sensitive for anything. I've always felt like a freaking mutant, anyway. Maybe they should put my entrails in a jar labeled "Danger, Weirdo Guts!"

Where to start? I guess we'll rake over some old ground made new by the repeated insensitivity of a modern corporation, in this case Sprint. I'm old enough to remember when you could talk to a responsible human being when you had a problem with a business, but these days after negotiating a lengthy telephone menu, all you get is a lower-caste drone reading pre-programmed responses off a computer screen: "It's not a billing problem, so there's nothing I can do." What really galls me, though, is that these recordings invariably start off with a bare-faced lie: "In order to serve you better. . ." And I know this will sound too heavy for some of you, but I personally think it's a terrible spiritual indictment of our society that we accept these kinds of cruelties and indignities as an everyday fact of modern life.

In this case, then, my disappointment is philosophical, financial, and emotional. It has to do with an issue raised in one of my WebFaust columns at MacAddict ("AirPort Ate My Wallet"). What happened was that I had taken my iBook and AirPort base station with me on a trip to Arizona. During the course of my visit, the base station had been reconfigured (under complicated and confusing circumstances) to dial out using my Sprint FonCard, something you might want to do on a vacation, for example. But here is the crux: I was not aware of this! I was still in the dark after I returned home, plugged in the base station, and happily surfed away for almost two weeks, because the AirPort software does not show the number being dialed. I discovered this just one day before Sprint called me to ask if my card had been stolen, as there was a total FonCard charge of over $1,600 at that point! (Approximately $1,400 of this represented local ISP connection time from my home phone at over seventy cents per minute.) They also told me they wanted their money up front right away or else!

Shortly after this shocker, I did in fact manage to get two middle-level Sprint supervisors on the phone in a three-way conversation. The upshot of this was that I was excused from having to pay the $1,600 right away (whew!). They also promised to call me back "within 72 business hours" and inform me of their decision on whether or not I was liable for the mistaken local FonCard charges. No one ever called, however, and my latest phone bill (received two days ago) has not been adjusted in any way. Between then and this writing, my efforts to recontact these same supervisory personnel have been quite effectively thwarted, as noted above.

I did manage to ask the drone whether it was "customary" for people to use their FonCards to dial local calls from their own homes. She said, "It happens all the time." Another bare-faced lie, unless some of you truly are in the habit of intentionally making local calls that require umpteen digits and choose to pay as much as a dollar a minute for the privilege. Geez! Well, so much for Sprint, what about Apple?

After all, they sold me a device that automatically dials a mystery number whenever I open an Internet application on either of my two networked Macs. And the AirPort Setup Assistant reads the Internet settings on your AirPort card-equipped Mac to configure the base station without telling you what those settings are in the process! (This poor boy's iBook's Location Manager was evidently set to my on-the-road location when the program ran. There must be tens of thousands of you out there who have iBooks or PowerBooks with just such settings, so beware!) Of course, I don't expect Apple to respond at all, due to the obvious exposure to liability any recognition of this problem would involve. Morally, I've got them over a barrel, but that doesn't count for much these days, even with my favorite computer manufacturer.

Over the last few dreary weeks of this lunacy, one bright event has occurred: a number of fellow Mac writers have made it known that efforts were underway to take up a collection to pay my bill! This alone is enough to make me re-evaluate the karmic state of the planet. Maybe it isn't society we have to worry about, maybe it's the corporations! Human beings have offered to help me out of my jam, after all, not Sprint or Apple.

However. . .

This past week I reported on a column written by Mike Cassidy of the San Jose Mercury news. Entitled "A Digitally Divided Life," it tells the story of a 13-year-old Navajo girl named Myra who won an iMac by entering an Internet contest on a school computer. All well and good, but less than a quarter of Navajo families have telephones, and Myra's family does not. In each case the local phone company will bring in the line only if the family comes up with the cash, which may amount to thousands of dollars. Myra's family, surviving on $1,500 a month, can't have the hogan wired, and if this isn't a frustrating and heart-rending tale, I don't know what is (I don't really know if they live in a hogan either, but that's beside the point). [Update: bringing in a phone line to Myra's family would cost between $23,000 and $35,000.]

After I pointed out Mike's column, several things happened. The first was that I received a kick-in-the-stomach letter from a Canadian professor who claimed to have "no sympathy at all" for the Navajos because he and his son had survived on that amount while he was in graduate school and supposedly could have made it on less! Rather than engage in a protracted argument over the relative amenities and advantages of graduate school versus living all alone in the desert, I simply deleted the rest of his emails without reading them and will continue to do so. If you don't get it, you don't get it.

The second thing was that I received a flood of emails from people thanking me for linking to Myra's story. One even offered to donate $100 to help her family pay for a phone line! I forwarded this message to Mike Cassidy at the San Jose Mercury, who immediately responded with the news that not only had my correspondent also gotten in touch with him already, but that substantial numbers of other people wanted to contribute to the same cause. He went on to say that he was exploring means of organizing this sentiment and would hopefully have something to report very soon. [NOTE: An early peruser of this column raised some pertinent points on this issue. Please see below! And Mike has since written a follow-up article called "Myra, Meet Your iMac!" that is also required reading.-- JHF]

At this point other events and insights come into play. . .

For instance, here I am all old, fat, and cranky, whining about a confluence of my own ignorance, bad software, and corporate insensitivity, while a 13-year-old girl who might grow up to change the world can't get her damn iMac online! This, to coin a phrase, sucks. (It might also come to your attention that corporate insensitivity has a hand in Myra's circumstances too, though that is just an ancillary point of this tale.) Those of you with half the smarts of a banana peel will have already perceived where this is heading, to wit:

Fellow columnists, if you really have money to spare, why not help Myra's family pay for a phone line? My wife and I are ex-middle class dreamers who gave up friends, home, and a steady five-figure income to try to make something new of our lives while we still have the strength. Good Lord, yes, we could use some help with the stupid phone bill, but having once been rather well-off, I know how to handle this: charge it! It'll just be another expense we can't deal with until we've clawed our way back up to being able to afford dentists and a less than ten-year-old car. God willing, I should be able to pay off the greedy telecom bastards way before Myra's mom can save up enough to get the kid's computer online.

(But wait, there's more!)

In my last WebFaust column I quoted a woman from the Stanford University class of '93, many of whom have gotten stupefyingly rich in the booming dot-com sector*:

"The thing that gets to me is that the people getting wealthy are young, single boys. . .[who] don't have coping tools. . . They are getting rich and spending their money on 'supersoakers.' [i.e., absurdly expensive cars and houses] They don't have a sense of philanthropy or giving back to the community -- or any community outside of work."

I had the temerity to suggest that these people with more money than sense were in need of an expanded awareness, i.e. some sense of the effects of accumulation for its own sake on the rest of society. For my trouble I was roundly criticized by a number of insolent amoral deviants who merely proved my hypothesis that their souls were badly in need of saving. ("Yay-yes!")

Well kids, here's a solution: first pay my phone bill (coming from you, I wouldn't mind a bit), then get Myra wired! While you're at it, there's a whole mess of Indian reservations and isolated rural areas that could stand to be connected. (Just think of all the crap you could sell them!) But seriously folks, and I am serious: I know we're all here to do more than just make money. . .

Now somebody go tell Sprint, dammit!

POSTSCRIPT: Shortly after posting this column, I received the following from a trusted friend:

"At least you are creating a forum for dialogue. It's just the money thing I really disagree with. Because a) I doubt Myra's family would accept it, and if they did, b) the local culture would resent them for it if they did, and c) it would create more problems that it would solve. But I could be wrong, and I hope I am."

My correspondent is entirely correct when she says that "throwing money at the problem ain't gonna solve it," and her points about the possible ill effects of well-meaning intervention are well-taken. Read Mike Cassidy's follow-up article ("Myra, Meet Your iMac!") to get a feeling for the sensitivities involved, and note that Myra , though pleased, is actually a bit embarrassed. My main point is more personal and has less to do with how to help the Navajos than the fact that there are more deserving recipients of charity than me! I would gladly have my Sprint bill paid by Apple or one of the newly-rich dot-com jockeys, however! :-) --JHF

* Note: for an example of how one materially-blessed individual is doing "good works," please see "They're Not All Bad!" posted 3/6/2000 at Applelinks!

John H. Farr edits the Apple Computer News for Applelinks.com and invites your comments. The Farr Site Archives will take you to the past two years' worth of columns. John also writes his WebFaust column for MacAddict.com and a monthly op-ed page column called "El Emigrante" for Horse Fly in Taos, NM. His personal Zoo Zone site, an animated GIF wonderland, was originally designed to market bronze sculptures based on cat skulls (yes!). Hey, anybody wanna buy a domain?

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February 10, 2012