Nor no e-mail, neither. (Triple negative there—whichever direction that ends.) 

Last Thursday I couldn’t access either email or the internet here at home. Oh, bother. This has happened before with Comcast, and internet access later comes back, so I gave the problem one of my favorite solutions—I ignored it, hoping it would go away.

 It didn’t. I was off last Friday and had a couple ideas for posts, but all day long—no internet. So Saturday morning I called Comcast and navigated the phone menu (doing my best to keep blood pressure in check) and finally was told there was a high volume of calls and I should opt for a callback later. Fine. So half an hour later they called me back and put me on hold for a bit anyway, promising I could speak to someone … soon. I got a very definitive young man who, upon realizing that I’d come into Comcast from Alamedanet (our local ISP and cable TV utility that Comcast swallowed, shanghaiing us, too) he identified my old Surfboard cable modem by model number and adamantly told me I had to replace it. Either rent one from Comcast or go buy a new one. He guaranteed, aggresively, that this would solve the problem.

I thought to myself that he probably deals with cranky customers all day long, and his emotional, high energy approach was probably both outlet and self-defense.

 I was preoccupied with a project last weekend, but Monday night, after Mrs. O picked me up from BART and our pups from Happy Hound, we went to Best Buy and forked over $90 plus, with tax, for a new Surfboard modem.

 Which I plugged in and didn’t work—but I expected that.

So I called Comcast and spoke to a very earnest young man, probably in Pakistan or The Punjab or The Philippines, who tried for a little over an hour to get me back on line. Much disconnecting and re-connecting of cords, with me reading long gibberishy serial numbers and MAC ID numbers, etc. into the phone, and him repeating it and unplugging cords and re-plugging cords and then him  coming back on and asking me to recite the same, dang, numbers, again. (Sadly, I’m not exaggerating.)

 It didn’t work. We needed a technician. So we scheduled a tech visit this morning, and it turned out my wireless router wasn’t talking the new modem’s language. Or so they claim.  He also said they had made changes to their system that rendered the other modem obsolete–do you think someone might have let us know this could happen? Rather than just cutting us off and leaving us to hang without access for almost a week? Anyway, I’m back, and newly enamored of the Internet.

 Really. Once you get used to finding crap online, it’s a nuisance when you can’t. Looking words up on Merriam-Webster, checking ESPN to see who won last night’s baseball game, looking up TV listings or arcane info on who some movie starred, all that stuff.

 I’ve got several items I’ve meant to post on, including finally posting honestly, per the Honest Scrap tags of my fellowbloggers. I’ll get there—honesty is just proving more elusive than I thought.

 *    *    *    *    *    *

In the meantime: my exploding Coke can. I’m not a big soft drink guy. But every so often I want the mild carbonated caffeine-sugar water buzz, usually to get some task done, with artificial flavoring and Latin-named chemical compounds and preservatives for pickling my internal organs. We have a bunch of sodas down in the basement left over from some party. So I got a Coke, and tried to open it, and the ring broke off. I took a fork and tried to punch open the can, and it exploded open with a bang!

Surprised the hell out of me. I stared at the flap blown outward for a couple seconds, wondering if it was safe to drink the explosive beverage:

  Aw, hell, I’m not a kid imperiling my whole lifetime any more. (Once past 50, you’re over the hump, right?) I drank the thing down. The twitching has mostly subsided now, and I don’t think any permanent damage was done.

For a couple decades now, but especially during the rise to power of  Limbaugh, Gingrich, et al., we’ve heard how liberal the “mainstream media” supposedly is. It’s probably the most devastatingly successful con job of the last two decades, if not in journalism history.

My last post considered how the media singles out individual villains rather than focusing on systemic failures. So long as the mass media are able to find convenient scapegoats for us, red herrings to distract us from a systemic ill that worsens life for the lower orders, it’s obvious, really, for whom the mainstream media are really working.

Their own corporate bosses.

And that should have been obvious all along. The people who own the media companies have no interest in showing how the system screws the middle and working class—quite the contrary.

They have an interest in giving us show. Giving us spectacle. This guy Madoff here–he’s the villain. The problem isn’t a corrupting system, it’s a lone scoundrel. And can you believe his wife gets to keep two and a half million? When others are destitute? It’s outrageous! Please, all of you, as the billions keep flowing in other directions, please focus your attention on Martha Stewart and Mrs. Madoff. Trust us, it’s the most rewarding story. Rewarding for you emotionally, and for the media moguls, the rewards are even more real.

*    *    *    *    *    *

In any enterprise as complex as mass communication, it’s easy to cherry-pick the facts you want. Simply close one eye and focus on what you want to see–there’s always an abundance of  facts to select from.  And so long as journalists are like the rest of us, some will be liberal and some conservative and some moderates and independents, too.

But reporters often aren’t the ones choosing what stories to cover; stories get assigned. And stories are edited and given direction, then hacked into smaller pieces, and now more than ever the editorial department are beholden to their publishers, who are beholden to company ownership.

These are wealthy, propertied people, who live in wealthy, propertied neighborhoods, and hob-nob with their wealthy, propertied friends. Forty years ago there was a great term for them:  the establishment. It was a charged term in the 1960’s, a volatile time, and like other high voltage terms (like groovy, man) it soon became dated, but it essentially meant the haves, rather than the have nots.

The irony is that the 1960s were a time when the middle class was ascendant, unlike post-Reagan America, when the middle class is increasingly squeezed and we are stratified into rich and poor.

I’m not saying there’s some evil conspiracy forged in secret by an oligarchy of the rich, a de facto plutocracy. The establishment doesn’t need to conspire.

Noam Chomsky did a brilliant job, in the movie Manufacturing Consent, at showing how it doesn’t take a cabal of capitalists meeting in secret and setting strategy for them to broadcast what they want. All they need is common goals, and a common desire to maintain the status quo.

*     *     *     *     *     *

Conservatives such as Limbaugh and Gingrich got an awful lot of mileage out of portraying the mainstream media as liberal, when it was in fact middle of the road and trying to present diverse angles on topics.  Football pundits say the best defense is a good offense, and the conservatives gained a lot of ground with those attacks.  (Further, Newt Gingrich once called President Clinton “the enemy of normal Americans.” I heard it again recently on the bay area radio retrospective, KFOG’s 10 @ 10. How that for a balanced opinion?)

We’re at a curious crux, politically and financially. The enemies of big government (evil socialism!) suddenly discovered socialism was the only cure for the excesses of unfettered capitalism.

Now that catastrophe has been deferred, if not averted,  the conservatives once again decry liberal solutions. And the conservative media once more ask you to focus on the sexier, more captivating, more accessible story.

Don’t let yourself be confused by macro-economics. Don’t waste time listening to bureaucrats drone on about regulations on news shows. Don’t worry about billions for health insurance or trillion-dollar federal debt or the billions sucked up in the maze of issues presented by Wall Street bail-outs.

It’s really about Bernie Madoff’s widow getting to keep two and a half million.  Outrageous!

p.s.  But how did she get the money in the first place?

 The mass media were all over the Madoff fraud story recently, broadcasting how well-heeled Bernie Madoff ran a Ponzi scheme the size of Fort Knox and bilked so many people, including old and dear friends, out of billions of dollars.

The story has its own hero, Harry Markopolos, the whistleblower whom no one heard, and its own red herring distraction, Bernie’s wife, who gets to keep two and a half million, which is what people get to key on. Let’s hear it now, all together: why should she get to keep all that money when all his investors got screwed?

 The truth is, there are hundreds if not thousands of Madoffs now. When you look at how it went down with our national real estate market and then our banks, it’s not so very different. A Ponzi scheme simply has the game more rigidly fixed–those last in are guaranteed to lose, once the spigot of money stops flowing.

But thousands are complicit in the greed that fueled our mortgage and banking melt-down, and that game also sang the siren song promising bigger pay-offs in the future than could be legitimately sustained. People who had no realistic means of paying their mortgages were suckered into home ownership, wiping out their life savings.

In retrospect, those adjustable rates are laughable, in a gallow’s humor way, and they allowed the mini-Madoffs to obtain then bundle their mortgages together into what were essentially fraudulent financial instruments, fueling the speculative bubble. Elderly people, no longer as sharp-witted as they’d been in their youth (and some day it’ll happen to us, too, should we live long enough) were suckered into taking out mortgages on their homes—in the process, many ultimately losing the only home they’d had for decades.

When newly impoverished senior citizens get evicted (some of whom commited suicide), are these real estate and banking villains really so very different fromn Madoff, except in scale?

 I’ve never met the guy. I can’t prove it either way. But I’ll bet Madoff’s descent was a slippery slope, that he started out playing by the rules then liked playing the big shot and liked showing a profit for all his investors, for friends, acquaintances and everyone else, and it was a series of misjudgments and ethical stretches that would still be going had the game of musical moneyed chairs not stopped.  

We’ve been down this path before. Earlier this decade we had insider trading and accounting scandals involving Enron, Worldcom and others, where the powerful committed massive fraud, and the media spotlight shone on some of the perps — including the made-for-primetime culprit Martha Stewart. 

Martha Stewart garnered headlines for months – but she was comparatively small potatoes. The fraud committed by Enron alone dwarfed Stewart’s insider trading, yet she made such a juicy story. It was easy for the media to key on her. She was already a public figure, already on display. She was (and is) the doyen of the domestic; her cooking so good, her home so perfect, and she’s so much better at everything than you. So easy to want to see her taken down a notch or ninety, and thus she made a great scapegoat.

If you can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen — and Martha took the heat  off any systemic failures the stories exposed.

If you’ve ever seen Robert Redford’s wonderful movie Quiz Show, you know the story of the rigged TV game shows of the 1950s, and how the scandal erupted and the fix was exposed. Yet the scandal was adeptly changed from that of a corporate fix to the dishonor of a well-known, aristocratic figure, Charles Van Doren.

In that way, we don’t focus on the systemic problem, our scapegoat is ready-made for us, and we don’t see any other ongoing shenanigans. In fact, they may never come to light at all.

 I sketched this out in late June, before Madoff’s sentencing (along with a few other pieces) but didn’t finish this first section until today; I’ll tie it back in to the media next.

Mrs. Ombud enjoyed the new Star Trek movie, and I’m glad I saw it.

It’s quite a series of cliffhangers, with all the suspense any fan of action movies could hope for, and the special effects are state of the art. I’m not a fan of the franchise, since watching the reruns of the original series as a kid, but the plot progresses at warp speed and it’s mostly good fun (especially as my dad wasn’t complaining that every time he entered the room with that program on it was just a bunch of people screaming and yelling at each other).

We went to see it in the theater, which isn’t something I do much, any more. I’ve become a complete Netflix fan, but every so often it’s nice to go see things on the big screen (in spite of how loud they crank the sound system, the kids yakking behind us, and the cost of everything from driving and parking to popcorn).

It’s cool to see how they “prequel” all the familiar characters from the 1960s, especially the old TV shows’ supporting characters such as Uhura, Chekov, and Sulu. They even show you some of the inventive progress of familiar Trekkie technology such as the transporter; I really liked that. And I hadn’t seen the old Vulcan mind meld for years—it made me wish I could employ the device myself, but never mind stubborn types back in the early 21st century.

I don’t want to wreck anything for those who prefer not to know what’s coming, yet several of the reviews I’ve seen straightforwardly announce that there are two Spocks, so I figure it’s fair to mention that (I will not discuss the ending).

It employs time travel, of course, and has one of them come back in time to alter events to prevent the destruction of worlds in the future. I know this is a time-tested cinematic plot device. Still—it’s kind of sloppy, I think. Here’s my problem.

If you have characters going back in time to alter certain events, how do you know that so much gets altered the situation that sends one of them back in time would never happen?

I mean, let’s pretend there’s a guy with access to a time travel machine who was born in Canada and knows that his Tory family got kicked out of the colonial family mansion back during the American Revolution. It’s in the Hudson Valley, he likes New York, never cared much for Saskatoon where his family lives now, so he decides to go back to 1780 and slip key information to the redcoat officers and stop General Howe from getting bottled up at Yorktown and losing the war for the Brits.

But then, as the family keeps the mansion on the Hudson, his ancestors go on to live happy lives frittering away their fortunes in Manhattan on cheap women, cheating cads and parasitic jerks so that his parents never meet in Canada, let alone perform the human pelvic meld that sparks the zygote to bring him into existence.

So I have a hard time with the whole plot device. Mrs. Ombud thinks it makes more internal sense than that, and feels that he could go back in time to change the course of history and still everything else would happen exactly as it had before, nothing else would be changed, but it seems dang iffy to me.

And probably it dodges through another black hole into my more global problem. Which is that I like movies that are believable. I think it’s really cool that movies like The Lives of Others come along, or I’ve Loved You so Long, that don’t have to take shortcuts with reality to immerse you in the story. I love Michael Clayton because I don’t have to pretend or ignore something that’s patently absurd to be drawn into the story.

Really, isn’t it better that way? What do you think?

Wait, maybe it’s best not to go there. Maybe if we go there the whole business gets time-warped through a black hole and we won’t be able to have this conversa-

 I spoke to Ms. Norberg, of StubHub.It took a while; the past couple weeks have been a bit of a blur. There was a bit of damage control going on at work – nothing out of the ordinary, and in fact, in some ways it was a good thing. I work in a bureaucracy that, decades ago, used to get somewhat backed up. It may even have fed into stereotypical notions about bureaucracy; I don’t know, I worked in the private sector back then, publishing companies, CNet, a law firm, etc.

 Perhaps as a result, the group I’m with now prides itself on processing its work quickly. Projects don’t tarry long, even though there are complex situations that can take a while for resolution. Plus, as we are resolving issues members of the public have a keen interest in, some have to be fast tracked, such as those involving children.

 Anyway, as we’re all still human, something slipped and I pitched in to help a coworker. We got things back on track but it meant I didn’t call Ms. Norberg of StubHub as quickly as I might, and then we played phone tag for a bit.

 I’m finding out that people rely on the digital display on their phones to record numbers for them. Even though I carefully enunciated my direct line at work to Ms. Norberg’s voicemail, she somehow dialed the number captured by her phone system, which is my office’s main phone number. (What displays on people’s screens is not my direct line—I have to tell people on cell phones not to call the number displayed on their gadget.)

 So she sent me an email saying she couldn’t reach me, and I called her again, but it all took about two weeks.

 After initial pleasantries, she began again to tell me that StubHub does not print tickets, and cannot guarantee, yadda yadda. It was starting to annoy me; it was enough to live through it all once, I didn’t want to listen to their CYA again.

 But then she changed tack. She reiterated that they want to make it up to me. And she told me that StubHub does have a partnership with major league baseball. As I mentioned earlier, it would have been nice if someone at StubHub had run interference for me and contacted the Pirates, so that the team in Bradenton had known a guy had had his ticket stolen and been ready for me when I arrived.

 She said they had identified the customer service reps at StubHub who had given me halfway assistance, and they were being re-trained so that, in the future, they’d go to the MLB teams and be of more help. That impressed me.

 And she said they wanted to make it up to me. I had gotten an email back in March offering me a voucher (for $20, I think) which was nice but it had slipped from the forelobes the way so many things do. My out-of-pocket, for the ticket, shipping and the StubHub fee had been $42.75, and Ms Norberg sent me an email with a gift code I can apply to future purchases as a discount.

 Which is decent of them. I’ll use it for Mrs. Ombud; getting reimbursed for the ticket doesn’t mean that much to me. I got into the game, albeit not in the seat I’d bought behind the Twins’ dugout. But it really was quite a hassle for us, for my wife in particular, and in some way it makes up for all the stress we went through.

 If she has something she wants to see, that’s fine, otherwise, maybe I’ll use it to go see a Twins game when they visit Oakland.

The upshot is that it pays to blog about experiences like this. I think Jellyjules’ approach is good, too (she commented in my last post that she writes letters the old-fashioned way to the presidents of companies) in that she gets a response. An what worked for me was to simply blog about it. Back in January I put Comcast’s name in the subject line, and now StubHub — both times, the companies have contacted me wanting to rectofy the situaiton. chalk one up for the blogosphere.

I’ve heard back from a senior supervisor of executive customer care at StubHub. Those who stop by frequently might remember we had three spring training tickets stolen a week before we left town.

And now, two months after we began e-mailing and calling StubHub to try and replace the stolen tickets before we got to Florida, this comment was made to my March 14th post about getting into the ballgame, with no help from StubHub:

My name is Jennifer Norberg and I’m the Sr. Supervisor of StubHub Executive Customer Care. I read this post and would like to sincerely apologize for your StubHub experience.

As StubHub is a secondary ticket marketplace, we are not a ticket seller and therefore we hold no ticket inventory of our own. We instruct our buyers to treat their tickets as if they are cash and keep them in a safe, secure place until they’re ready to use them. In the situation that tickets are lost, damaged, or stolen, we’ll do our best to try and obtain reprints from the ticket seller. That said however, the seller may not be able to obtain reprints and is under no obligation to do so. Unfortunately most tickets are irreplaceable and for that reason, we cannot guarantee reprints.

For more information, you are welcome to review our Buyer Q & A:

http://www.stubhub.com/help-top-questions-buyer/#lost-damaged

I regret that we were not able to resolve your situation as we would have liked. Our goal is to get our customers to their events and we never want a customer to go away empty handed. If you are interested in discussing this, I’d like the opportunity to address any questions or concerns you may have had regarding StubHub and our policies. I’d also like the opportunity to try and turn this situation around if at all possible. I can be reached via email at …

Two months later, what to say? First, thanks for the apology, I guess. It grates a little bit to be lectured on keeping the tickets safe – we’d had them shipped to my wife’s office to be safe. But at some point they need to be transported, right?

After all, had we left them locked safely in a drawer at work they would have been of little use once we got to Florida. It wasn’t like she left her backpack out on the street – on March 5th, as she went quickly in and out of day care in about two minutes’ time, the window of our car was smashed and her pack was grabbed by a guy who jumped into a car and drove off, for chrissake. (It was caught on security camera, which was offered to the Oakland police, but as their officers have been getting shot lately, our backpack wasn’t exactly a high priority.)

After that, my wife went into overdrive. As well as personal stuff (such as a $180 jacket) she lost her wallet, with drivers’ license, cash, her checkbook, her cell phone, and the tickets.

While both doing our jobs, and with everything we had going on getting ready to get out of town, we both hit the phones and ran around like crazy to get it all fixed. She was especially stressed, trying to pull it all together, in part because she knew I was a bit freaked thinking that thieves now had our address and tickets that indicated we were leaving town. Suddenly, leaving the place empty for nine days didn’t seem like such a hot idea to me, as it might be far emptier when we got back, yeah?

But you know what? Some companies were great.

For instance, I called the credit card company, and they shipped replacement cards to us. Express. At no cost to us. We had them the next day.

Her cell phone company shipped her a replacement cell phone, too. Our insurer sent a truck the same day to replace the broken rear window of our car.

The bank was great about shutting things down, and even the Department of Motor Vehicles was helpful in getting a new driver’s license. Remember, you need photo ID to get on a plane. So she got a temporary license and was able to use an expired drivers license with a photo and explain about the stolen ID. It took a little longer, but on march 11th, we made our flights.

Now consider what happened with StubHub. Between us, in the 6 days between March 5th and 11th, my wife and I spent several hours on the phone and emailing them. We spent more time with them than we did with everyone else combined. They eventually got the tickets to the ballpark for the Yankees game on March 15th, but I had to go empty-handed to the Pirates game on March 12th.

The call center reps answering their phones were of little help. They have canned answers, and their response was essentially reactive, rather than proactive.

If they are going to broker tickets for ball clubs, couldn’t they have an expeditor  for situations such as this to proactively contact the clubs and say “this guy’s ticket was stolen, we know his section, row, and seat number, please help him out when he gets there?”

Instead, I showed up with a fistful of email printouts, and it was only the kindness of the Pittsburgh Pirates’ ticket manager (who complained about StubHub) that got me in the game. I’d bought a great seat, behind the visiting team dugout (as a Twins’ fan) and instead I was sitting a couple sections farther out and back from the field – but I was just happy to be there.

Still, I paid extra for that great ticket by the dugout, so I could be close to the Twins. I think the face value was around $30, plus the StubHub fee, plus the shipping expense – it was somewhere between $40 and $50, if memory serves. So what did I get for the extra I paid, on top of the ticket price?

Considering how much help those other companies gave us, would it be possible for StubHub to maybe have placed a call on my behalf? A little proactivity would have been great.

Disney seems to be an irony free zone. There is an immediacy to the experience here, a lack of reflection, doubtless derived from the novelty of childhood, the newness of sensations.

Most of our meals at Disney World so far have begun with a perky costumed waiter or waitress asking us if we’ve had fun and what we’ve done that day. Which is fine. Connecting with customers – guests – makes people feel valued, and gives them the sense that our hosts are really interested in our lives. It probably increases tips, too.

However, coming from a metropolitan area with its crowded anonymities, and as I’m often preoccupied with where we are and what I’m about to order, it sometimes surprises me. And now that it’s happened a few times, I find myself ready to crack wise.

After we went to the Magic Kingdom’s Crystal Court (where the buffet really is delicious, by the way) and Mrs. Ombud enjoyed all the Winnie the Pooh characters working the floor, I wanted to answer the next solicitation by saying, “I was interrupted during my lunch by Piglet today, and I shook his hand so hard I brought that furry pink mascot to his knees.”

Mrs. Ombud is appalled by this.

But I maintain that, if I were a waiter who had to ask dozens and dozens of people, shift after shift, about what they did that day, I’d bust up laughing if someone answered that way.

Mrs. O is not convinced.

*   *   *   *   *

I got incredibly lost on my way back from the Twins/Pirates game at Bradenton last Thursday. This, after successfully navigating the freeways and a highway to a small ballpark in a town I’d never visited before with only minimal directions. Afterward, to escape post-game traffic I took a totally different route in a new direction and got lost again, but within a recognizable city-grid system, and thus easily found my freeway again and made it back to Disney World, hundreds of miles away – only to get completely, utterly, infuriatingly lost here.

A whole new league of getting lost. I once got so turned around in Florence, Italy I ended up back where I began. Which crushed my young man’s navigatory confidence, as I looked at the map and figured out how I’d done it, but never mind that, except to point out that that time I had a map.  With all my preparations, after the robbery, I’d handled it all but neglected any kind of map of Disney for my return.

I simply assumed there would be novelties like signs, and a cognizable road system.

I was very, very wrong. I knew to look for Port Orleans or Riverside, but saw nothing. I ended up going all the way into the belly of the Disney beast, to The Magic Kingdom itself, where the traffic flag guy in bright clothes had me go ask a smartly costumed tour caravan guide, who directed me in a wide sweeping array of turns around the parking lot and involving dodging across a service road behind a toll plaza (she warned me thrice, “be careful, the oncoming cars do not have to stop!”) which got me to Frontierland, where the park ranger-bedecked security guard told me I was close and gave me some more directions that ended in a service area for “cast” members (every employee is a cast member here) and led me to some bustling rush hour district (Downtown Disney?) and a very sincere, friendly girl in some sort of 19th century outfit, who thought she knew where my resort was, did her best and I ended up in the fire station. Talking to a visiting cop from Orange County (in a genuine uniform!), who said she thought I should look for Bonnet Creek Road. And she was right! Forty to fifty minutes after arriving at Disney, I found a few discreet road signs directing me to Port Orleans and then Riverside.

I could have driven most of the way back to Tampa in that time.

My eyeballs and brain were rattling pretty good by then, but never mind. In my quest for a sign, any kind of a sign (was Moses on his Mount any more eager for a sign? With a glimmer of personal meaning?) I did pass a sign along a busy boulevard which read “No Jogging Beyond This Point.”

Which got me thinking about the topic of this very post.

Have you ever seen the Non Sequitur comic of a guy standing in a crosswalk reading the sign: “No juggling chainsaws in the crosswalk” who says, “You know, if they hadn’t told me I couldn’t do it, I wouldn’t want to”?

At that point in my Disney experience, I had a strong desire to get out and jog, especially if jogging beyond that very sign would get me to my room, although I haven’t gone for a run in years.

It was then, through my red-rimmed confusion, I dimly began to sense either a great lack of irony or an immensely sophisticated irony we are only beginning to gauge the extent of. To wit:

We did the Pirates of the Caribbean ride last Saturday. It’s clever, and cute in its own robotic way, if you feel drunken pirates carousing with crazed women can be cute. Many barrels and casks of rum, much spillage and animatronic debauched revelry, much wanton excess. And not a drop of it to drink.

Afterward, we ducked our heads into the “Liberty Tavern” and Mrs. O asked if they served beer. The colonially costumed young man answered, “There’s no beer in the Magic Kingdom.”

It lost some of the magic for me, there.

And then it occurred to me that Disney might have a far more developed sense of irony than I had ever suspected.

A couple posts back I mentioned the invaders who’ve moved in, and want to live here rent-free. Recently, we’ve had others rats in our lives, too.

This post I’m telling you how Mrs. Ombud and I are going upscale. We are hitting the road — or the skies, as it were, on our way to Orlando, Florida (our first time in the so-called Sunshine State), for about a week’s worth of Disneyworld and Epcott Center. And for me, some Grapefruit League baseball, too. I hope. 

But, given the winter we had, it couldn’t be ours without a little more adversity.

Last Thursday morning as Mrs. Ombud was dropping our dogs off at Happy Hound doggie day care (which they visit a couple times a week, and wears them out, saves us having to walk them weekdays, and cuts down on doggie neuroses, too) she had a very unwelcome surprise when she stepped back out to the car. Someone had smashed the back passenger window of our car. And stolen her backpack.

She was only gone a minute or two, just long enough to hand off the pups, so they clearly had their timing down.  They got her purse and her wallet. Driver’s license. Credit cards. Her cell phone. Our tickets to spring training baseball games in Florida.

For us, it’s mostly the nuisance of it — replacing all that stuff. The most valuable thing they got was a very nice windbreaker, which comes with a bit of a sentiment, and a travel story.

Several years ago we were in Seattle in October, dealing with the Seattle drizzle- rain-drizzle, and she had on an old windbreaker of mine that was not, frankly, doing the job.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Mrs. O said, ready to soldier on (as in: never mind about me). “No, you’re not,” I was adamant, as one thing growing up in Minnesota teaches you is that there is absolutely no point in not preparing intelligently for the weather.

I took her go into a store with me. And we found a wonderful Patagonia windbreaker, perfect for the job and very versatile, too, as it is a light shell so it isn’t too hot when it’s a warm, muggy summer rain, and yet with warm clothes on underneath is waterproof and will keep you perfectly dry and snug right down to freezing weather.  

And then I checked the pricetag and got sticker shock: “one hundred and eighty dollars?!”

That’ll teach me to be adamant.

But the upshot is, she came to love that windbreaker, with all its versatility and added functionality, and now it is gone, as it folded up so nicely and it was tucked into that backpack, too, handy during all the rain we’ve had late this winter.

But we’ve bounced back, mostly. Made the phone calls and got the new credit cards. California’s budget crisis has meant that state workers have furlough days, so the Department of Motor Vehicles was closed Friday, but she made it in that same day to get her new license in the works. And she had taken out an insurance plan on the cell phone, which has already paid off handsomely, as she got her replacement the next day, with the express shipping charge waived, too.

We don’t have the replacement spring training tickets, yet, for me to see the Twins @ Pirates and Twins @ Yankees. But we are forging on — in spite of my trepidation. Because the low-life criminals who stole her backpack got our address off her driver’s license, and with those baseball tickets, they can surmise we are leaving town, too. 

So now we’ve arranged for a friend to come stay here while we are gone. I don’t imagine these low-lifes are bright enough to read blogs, but if they are:  Got that, scum-sucking thieves? Someone will be staying at our house while we’re gone, ready to dial 9-1-1 as needed, so do stop on by. We’d love to arrange for a little jail time for your sorry asses, after you ripped us off and smashed the window of our car.

With any luck, even though we no longer have the tickets I paid for, and paid the service fees on, and the shipping charges, too, even though it’s tight on time as far as getting the replacements, maybe I’ll get to see my Twins playing some spring training baseball for the first time, too.

After various rats out here, we are ready for Mickey Mouse.

Okay, actually, they’re not “meeses.”

Part of the reason I’ve been a bit, umm, quieter, of late is that rodents have invaded my downstairs sanctuary. It’s the garage level of our house, and analagous to a basement “back east” as they say. Shelving and boxes. Old books. My brewery. The spare fridge (and cold beer). In the back is my little corner cockpit office with my computer, and the TV that gets the sports stations, and the old couch hide-a-bed that has followed me from SF apartment, to Alameda apartment, to first house with Mrs. Ombud, to this house, as well.

And when we had our dear little old lady cat, Millicent, bless her tortiseshell heart, this house was rodent-free, too, as Mill-pill was quite the mouser in her day.

Late last year, when the first cardboard- and wall-chewing evidence appeared, I set a trap. The first time, the peanut butter-smeared cracker was taken, the trap was unsprung. But that was okay. It meant the little culprit would return and say hello to my little friend. The next time I smeared peanut butter right on the trigger, and the little fucker took it. Snap! He flipped over on his back, his little paws up in the air when we found him.

I thought that was the end of it. I was wrong. Here is what I found several weeks later, when I went downstairs and looked at the old couch hide-a-bed:

And yes, I freaked.

Not screaming and hollering freaked. Just OMG put-it-in-high-gear freaked. The new-tenant evidence was suddenly very pervasive throughout the garage, like maybe the whole gang was looking for new turf, and I took that hole as evidence that maybe somebody wanted to become a momma, and this ain’t no rodent maternity ward.

I called the exterminators. First, it was bait stations, with an anti-coagulant poison that makes them crave water and fresh air, so they leave the building without dying in the walls.

So far, it hasn’t worked. Now the exterminators have added their spring traps.

So far, they haven’t eliminated the “evidence” either. The calling cards are still left for us. It’s highly aggravating, and one of the upshots is that, although I come down here regularly to check the evidence and see if the traps have caught any of the little rat bastards, I just, somehow, don’t end up hanging out down here as much as I used to.

It’s as if my garage office has cooties, and I’m waiting for the exterminator to rid us of the evidence.

I have my DVR down here. I still watch some of the news programs I record, check e-mail, etc. but somehow, the blogging well has been dry.

But I think that’s about to change. More to come.

Ever since the economy went ka-flooey, I’ve had this suspicion that companies are more interested in customer service. Case in point, our local utility recently bailed on providing cable TV and internet service.

Our local utility entering the internet and TV business was controversial from the get-go, about a decade ago. Then they lost oodles of money, sucked profits from local electric utility (one of the oldest in the country), sparked angry letters to the editor, but nevermind the outrage.

After hemorrhaging money, Alameda Power & Telecom’s internet and cable TV service was sold to Comcast. So we all have to switch over.

Our end of Alameda island has been selected for early conversion (oh, joy), and Comcast sent out mailers and door-hanging flyers and seemed eager to please. I figured now was my chance to add a couple cable outlets, called them up, got some options for an appointment to meet them and have the outlets run (free of charge), got the time off from my boss, and scheduled the appointment for January 14th.

And then they converted us on January 8th, ahead of time.

Oooh-kay.

So for the past couple days my wife and I have been learning the new cable channels, and today found out that we have lost internet access. It would be foolish to expect a seamless conversion, right?

So I called and spoke to a guy who spoke to other guys and we discussed my configuration, I explained about my modem and router, and they put me on hold then said “try it now” a few times, and it didn’t work, so I shut everything off and disconnected it all and re-connected it in the sequence they specified and we tried it again and it all (45 minutes later) worked just fine, thank you very much, and then I asked to talk to someone on the cable TV side about renting a video recorder, a DVR.

And here’s where it got weird.

First of all, a confession. I’m late to the hard-drive-wired-to-the-TV revolution. But I’m all for zipping past commercials, also recording two programs at once, as my three favorite news programs (The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, the Deutsche Welle Journal, and the BBC World News) all come on at 6:00 PM here. (Don’t even get me started on how absurd it is that these PBS broadcasts aren’t staggered, and how at 7:00 PM the news options disappear. Let’s not go there.)

So I went to Best Buy shortly before Christmas and flailed at salespeople to get some customer service and ended up with a hard drive that only works with DirecTV. Okay. My goof. I went back and once again struggled to get sales assistance, and this time bought Tivo before learning that you have to get a subscription. Ah, well, me in a big box store: innocence abroad.

I went back a third time and insisted on speaking to someone who knew the field and found out that Best Buy no longer sells DVRs that don’t require a subscription service. So I figured some divine power was telling me it’s simply time to rent a DVR from Comcast and be done with it.

A couple people had recommended renting, as the field changes so quickly, anyway, so why not?

Now flash back to my phone call: I politely ask the young kid at Comcast what it would cost to rent a DVR and can they bring it next Wednesday, when I’ve scheduled an appointment to run the new cable lines.

He tells me my conversion is now completed so it will cost me to get the new cable outlets.

Say, what? (Bear in mind, I’m an hour into this Comcast phone call now.) I explain to him that I had already scheduled this appointment, and the new lines were to be free, and he tells me I have to pay for them now, at which point my voice got a bit louder and I asked to speak to a manager.

So he put me on hold.

And he kept coming back on to tell me he was waiting to talk to his “lead.”

Then put me on hold a while longer.

So I stewed, and about the fourth time he came on to thank me for my patience and tell me he was waiting for his “lead” to approve waiving the fee, I told him in detail how I had called on the 5th and already set up this appointment for the 14th, gotten my boss’s approval for time off to meet the technician here at my house and get switched to Comcast then, and how this phone call was becoming a great sales pitch for me to switch over to a satellite dish with DirecTV.

We did some talking past each other for a bit, too, but nevermind about that. And he put me on hold again and thanked me for my patience. I held my tongue and declined to point out that it wasn’t really patience, it was more endurance, but the next time he asked me if I would mind being put on hold I asked, “what are my choices?”

He put me back on hold.

So an hour and a half into the whole internet and cable TV phone call he told me they would waive the fee, and I said great, so he will still come when I had set it up next Wednesday, the 14th, right?

And the kid put me on hold to see when the next time was available.

And came back on to thank me for my patience and tell me they couldn’t schedule anyone until January 24th.

What happened to my first appointment, for which I had gotten time off from work?

That time was lost, sir, when your order was completed.

But it was not completed now, was it?

It was deemed completed, sir, when they converted you over to Comcast.

But without me being here to let them in to run the new cable lines, it couldn’t be completed now, could it?

But it was logged in as completed, sir, when they converted you over—

But it couldn’t have been completed, could it?!

The kid finally said he understood my point.

So the first time they can come is the 24th, a Saturday? He put me on hold to confirm that January 24, 2009 is, indeed, a Saturday.

At which point we were over an hour and a half into the phone call. I gave up on the appointment for which I’d scheduled a day off. They’ll come on the 24th now, possibly with a DVR box, and perhaps they will run two new cable lines for us, if I haven’t ordered DirecTV, first.

And about the notion that companies, during the recession cum depression, might be more interested in providing customer service? I can say the efforts are uneven. They still seem eager to please. I am getting cable lines added for “free” (ignoring that our rates are going up, for fewer channels than we had with AP&T). And they will thank you for your patience as they put you on hold and try to find someone who knows what the hell they’re doing.