Multitasking: A young person’s game?

This morning NPR ran a feature about a neuroscientist whose research shows that people reach their peak ability to multitask—defined as doing more than one thing at once—in their twenties, that young children are incapable of multitasking, and that as we age we lose the knack of handling several trains of thought or attention at the same time. 

It’s an interesting proposition. One thing is for sure: it goes a long way toward explaining why I feel more and more hostile toward conflicting demands on my attention, and why contemporaries often say the same thing. Two things happen as you age, of which either or both may be related to this issue:

1. When you put something down to attend to something else, you tend to forget the first task and wander off into new realms.
2. When you are trying to perform a given task, it begins to look to you as not one task but a whole series of tasks. For example, doing the laundry = a) gathering clothes and toweling, b) hauling laundry to the washer, c) treating stains, d) setting the washer to soak, e) adding soap and bleach, f) going back out to the washer to run the rest of the cycle, g) going back out to put the wet clothes in the dryer or hang them on the line, h) going back out to haul the clothes out of the dryer or off the line, i) hanging and folding clothes, k) putting the clothes away. “One” task is actually eleven tasks!

Each of these eleven tasks interrupts something else that you’re doing: housecleaning, yardwork, blogging, child care, paying work, whatever. Even if the subtasks of a given activity happen all in one chunk of time, rather than spreading out over minutes or hours as the laundry chore does, as you get older you still see X job not as X but as a + b + c + d . . . and so on to infinity. 

The point I’m trying to make (I think) is that “multitasking” is not doing several things at once. It’s actually a conflicting tangle of interruptions. It may be, in fact, that at times in your life you’re better equipped to stay focused during a series of interruptions: your attention wanders less, or you’re less conscious of the annoyance factor inflicted by gestalt activities. But I would argue that proceeding forward by interruption is not an efficient or effective way to function. Certainly there’s nothing new about that thought: researchers have known this for years.

So What Can We Do about It?

Plenty. First off, we can recognize that as 21st-century Americans we’re subjected to far more concurrent demands on our attention than humans are evolved to cope with. Knowing that, we can consciously engineer our activities to enhance focus and cut out distractions.

For example: Working on your computer? Turn off the e-mail programs. If there’s no burning need to know when every minuscule, generally meaningless message comes in, then you’re justified in checking your e-mail three times a day, two times…or even less than that!

Oh, revolutionary!

Extending the rebellion: Get rid of telephone features that distract your attention or interrupt a phone conversation. Do you really need call-waiting? Can anything be ruder than interrupting a phone conversation with the remark that you’ve got to put the person on hold to answer an incoming call (probably from someone sooooo much more important than the person you’re speaking with)? Give each telephone call your undivided attention, and don’t brook any electronic interruptions. Do you really need caller ID, for that matter? Why do you need to interrupt what you’re doing check the identity of every caller and make a decision as to whether to answer the phone? Just let the call go through to your voicemail and decide, at your convenience, which caller you will talk to, and when.

Turn off the television if it’s just running as background noise to an intellectual activity. You’re not really listening to it as you do your homework or office work—you’re interrupting your train of thought to pick up on something that attracts your attention. Switching back and forth, even at a subliminal level, is inefficient, time-consuming, and stressful.

Make a conscious decision to focus on one thing at a time. Recently, for example, I realized that I tend to start things, drop them to do something else, and then delay or never finish the them, especially in the morning. I get up, wash my face, and brush my teeth. While I’m brushing my teeth I turn on the e-mail or the blog program. Then I stumble out and feed the dog. I throw on some clothes and race out to meet La Maya for a morning walk. Then I fix and eat breakfast, trying to read the paper while eating, without much luck. Maybe I water the garden or add water or chemicals to the pool. Then I’m back at the computer. Then I realize I’m late for work. I bathe, wash my hair, throw on some presentable-in-public clothes, bolt toward the door and realize…

…I haven’t put my makeup on;
…I haven’t made the bed;
…I haven’t put the breakfast dishes in the dishwasher, possibly because
…I haven’t unloaded the clean dishes;
…I haven’t put together the paperwork I need to carry to the credit union today;
…I haven’t put the work I needed to return to the office back in the car;
…I haven’t turned off the water on some plant;
…I haven’t put water or iced leftover coffee in the car for the long drive across the city;
…DAMMIT, I’m not ready to go!!!!! 

So as I’m trying to get out the door, I’m racing around tying up a great frayed fringe of loose ends. 

There’s a way around this, and it’s simple: Finish every action that gets started before starting a new action. That means finish the WHOLE action. Recognize the entire series of subtasks that constitute an action and get them all done at once. This morning after I washed my face, I put on the light make-up I need to appear more or less alive at the office (i.e., brushing-teeth-and-washing-face also includes painting face).  Before leaving the bedroom, I made the bed (getting out of bed entails making the bed). Before wandering out of the kitchen after breakfast, I put the breakfast dishes in the dishwasher (preparing and eating a meal includes putting the dishes away).

The gestalt atmosphere that we live in today tends to unlink a given activity’s subactions, so that we leave things undone or get distracted in the middle of a series of actions that really should be regarded as one action. We need to relink the parts of each activity, so we can resist the blandishments of “multitasking” and live our lives in a more coherent, efficient—and dare one say it? meaningful—way.

The Strategy

1. Dispense with as many distractions as possible.
2. Be conscious of all the activities an action entails, link them together, and think of them as a single action.
3. Try to complete each whole action before moving on to something else.

Of course, if you’re a young parent, this is easier said than done: children require attention, and they generally require it sooner than later. Maybe that’s why, so the scientists say, young adults are better able to “multitask” than the rest of us. But maybe what we should do is simply pay full attention to the children. I suspect that at any time of life, we’re likely to be happier and less stressed if we make it a habit to do one thing—one whole thing—at a time.

Mysteries of blogging

Tina, my associate editor at the Great Desert University and partner in crime at our business enterprise, e-mails to report that our Copyeditor’s Desk site appeared among WordPress’s fastest-growing sites. It arrived at number 64, after a reader stumbled one of Tina’s recent entries. 

Isn’t that amazing? Our readership is anything but huge, and so, I suppose, when a spike to 340 hits appears, it’s relatively so large it creates the impression of rapid growth.

I never cease to marvel at what attracts readers. The olive-oil hair conditioner story still is cranking readership: over 300 yesterday. Every day, someone out there googles “olive oil” and “hair conditioner” and shows up at Funny. Interestingly, the piece I posted on using lemon juice or vinegar to bring out blonde or red highlights hasn’t generated anywhere near that much traffic. Must be a lot of folks out there with dry hair. 

Wish I knew what people love. Then I would give it to them. But then, if we all knew what people love, we would all be rich, eh?

Or better yet, happy.

Qwest update

Yesterday while I was at work Julie called from Qwest’s corporate headquarters in Denver. She left a phone number that, believe it or not, dialed straight through to her, unfiltered by any gate-keeping robots.

Butter would not have melted in Julie’s mouth. She was soothing, she was apologetic, she was smooth.

Julie revealed that when the Josh claimed he could save me $10 on a “bundle,” he really was claiming to “save” that amount on a much larger set of services than I had or wanted. In other words, his scam scheme would save me $10, all right: off a much larger bill! I said he had led me to understand he was going to reduce my existing bill, and that I never asked for nor needed any of the extra bells and whistles. It was thanks to the Josh’s deceptiveness that I ended up with a doubled bill.

She said she would deactivate all the extra services he had put on the system and cancel the long-distance “membership plan,” which costs an astonishing $30 annual “membership fee” (give me a BREAK!) and $20 a month for the privilege of being billed 2.9 cents per minute of long-distance talk. If you’d prefer not to pony up the monthly premium, for just the thirty-dollar annual rip, you can talk for 5 cents a minute: exactly the rate Cox charges with no extra fee.

She also agreed to cancel the cell phone contract, effective immediately.

*****Ta DAAAA!*****

Since I’d already canceled Qwest’s phone disservice and am about to cancel its DSL disservice, all I really wanted from this transaction was to get quit of the extra $30/month ding for the cell phone that I hardly ever use.

She said the various credits for all this canceled service would appear on the December bill. The $170 inflicted by the Josh’s “bargain” still is to be extracted from my checking account the first part of November, but the final bill will show a bunch of credits. She asked that I not cancel the automatic bill payment until the final bill comest through in December. Reluctantly (as usual), I agreed to this.

So, since I can’t afford a $170 phone bill, now I will have to transfer money from savings to cover it—timed perfectly as I’m looking at a possible layoff. Thank you SO much, dear Qworst. It also means, of course, that I’ll be buying less than planned in the way of Christmas presents next month. Merry Christmas, dear Qworst! 

It also means I won’t be fully disconnected from Qworst until the first week in December, at the soonest. Meanwhile, she said the Cox service will start on October 30 but the paperwork will not go through until November 3. She also said that, contrary to what Cox’s “Rose” told me, Cox has to request the DSL disconnection, not me. Qwest cannot cancel it at my request. I said Cox had told me that after the serviceman came by and installed the new Internet connection, I had to call Qwest and tell them to end the DSL service. She said Cox is supposed to do that.

So it looks like that will be another bone of contention. {sigh} When will this be over?

Previous chapters:

Back Again—Temporarily?
“We Value Your Business” 
Unbundled! Qwest Strikes Again
What Happens When a Live Qwest Guy Shows Up 
Qwest Redux: How Do These Companies Stay in Business?  
Qwest: The Saga That Will Not End

Moments of Fame

Hallowe’en comes to the Festival of Frugality at Living Well on Less, where some very weird characters appear at the Monster Mash. Funny’s report on the fall garden (you have to live in Zones 9 or 10 to appreciate it) appears in this round-up. For those of you who live in more normal climates, check out Frugal Pursuit’s tips for how to prepare your garden for autumn and winter. Check out the amazing photo and Money Ning’s self-questioning about the wisdom of buying certain products in bulk. Saving Advice has an interesting post on the “freegan” lifestyle which has elicited some even more interesting comments.

Hot diggety! If you blog, check out Financial Wellness Project, where FWP uses a heuristic theme for the 82nd Carnival of Money Stories that generates about a jillion new ideas for posts: he asks a series of questions related to his plan to move to full-time freelancing. Along the way, he fills the carnival with a treasure chest of very interesting pieces, among which he has kindly included one of Funny’s several rants about the Qwest misadventure. In FWP’s editor’s pick, Mr. Credit Card’s Mrs. describes what happened in the couple’s lives after they declared bankruptcy. The story is at once inspiring and cautionary, and shows that the bankruptcy laws should never have been changed to cut off this avenue for ordinary people trapped in credit-card debt to turn their finances around. The Financial Blogger tells a funny job interview story, one that will especially entertain anyone who’s ever had to screen job candidates. For those of us who are blowing around on the winds of layoff rumors, Retired at 47 has some encouraging words…his story makes me think I may be able to pull off unemployment without too much agony.

The current Carnival of Personal Finance is up at Master Your Card.

Another day, another dollar

 

Are we all canned tomatoes?

Once again we were told a big announcement of layoffs would come down today. And once again, no such horrible fiat occurred.

I am beyond getting myself worked up over this stuff. Who knows how much truth lurks in these rumors, and really: who cares? There’s not a thing anyone can do about it. If GDU decides to can you, you’re canned. So deal with it!

The current flap arose when a local television news program interviewed the chair of a department on the East campus. The reporter spelled the interviewee’s name wrong; described faculty associates (low-paid semester-to-semester temporary workers) as “professors”; and claimed that today the university would announce that most or all such wretches’ jobs would end with the start of spring semester.

Well, in addition to our intrepid investigator’s obvious little lapses in fact-checking and her glaring ignorance of how a university works, there’s no reason to believe that the guy she interviewed should know any more about pending layoffs than any other chair of any other department. And to my and my spies’ considerable knowledge, departmental chairs presently are sitting in the pitch dark.

A fair amount of stürm und drang arose over this, with much uneasy watching of e-mail in-boxes and the university’s homepage. Once again, the nothing that happened amounted to an anticlimax.

About all anyone can do in these conditions, IMHO, is get one’s financial ducks in a row and then forget it. Figure out what emergency fund or other resources you have to fall back on, pay off as much debt as you can, get check-cashing protection on your bank account, learn what your employer will pay you at severance, and find out how to apply for unemployment. Maybe apply for a few jobs and activate your professional network. Then put it out of your mind and go on about your business.

And be thankful for every day you still have a job.

Cassie’s dog treats

We’re about out of the fancy home-made treats I got at the dog bakery (yes!) last time I visited the upscale shopping center where the Apple store is located. Cassie likes the things and they appear to be unadulterated (or so the sales staff says), but the cost is ludicrous.

Click the image to see what's in dog treats.

Contemplating one of those little doggie-bite-sized gems, I wondered what, really, could be in this stuff? A cruise on the web revealed that by and large dog treats are made from heavy biscuit dough rolled out thin, cut into cookie-like shapes, and baked until they’re crisp. 

 

We can do that. And we don’t have to pay a queen’s ransom for the privilege. Check this out:

You need:

2 1/2 cups whole wheat (or other) flour
1/2 cup powdered milk
1/2 cup wheat germ
1 egg
2/3 cup water or broth (meat or chicken)
6 tablespoons oil or melted butter
1 cup cheap shredded cheese

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Checking the ingredients

Check the ingredients listed on the cheese package to be sure it’s actually cheese and not an artificial imitation. If you use canned or boxed broth, be sure it doesn’t contain onion, which is toxic for dogs. 

Lazy person’s technique: Put the liquid ingredients in a bread mixer’s container. Add the dry ingredients and the cheese. Run the “dough” cycle until the stuff is well mixed and holds together. No need to run the cycle all the way through, since this dough is unleavened and (of course) will not rise.

Another lazy way: Put the ingredients in your food processor and blend until the dough holds together.

Normal person’s technique: Mix the dry ingredients in a big bowl. Add the remaining ingredients and stir with a wooden spoon to form stiff dough.

Because I am extremely lazy and desire not to wash the cookie sheets, I Iined the sheets with tinfoil. These dog biscuits do not stick, so you can save the foil to use with your next baking project, which as we speak will be this week’s store of fresh bread (and which, coincidentally or not, will contain whole wheat flour, white flour, powdered milk, wheat germ, egg, and water, among other things).

For a little dog: Roll the dough between your hands to form long strips and, using a sharp knife, cut into small bite-size pieces. Arrange on a cookie sheet.

For bigger dogs: On a lightly floured board, roll out the dough to a thickness of about 1/2 inch. Use cookie cutters or a clean, dry frozen juice can to cut out cookie shapes (cute bone shapes keep the human happy but make no never-mind to the pooch). 

Bake on an ungreased cookie sheet at 350 degrees for 25 minutes. Cool the baked treats completely before feeding to the dog.

 

Dog Joy!

Consumer Headaches: 15 ways to get help

My two-month-long fight with Qwest, which barring a stroke of luck will no doubt go on a lot longer, would have been lost early on if I were not adept at writing the dear-sir-you-cur letter (more about which in a later post) and experienced with tracking down corporate executives and agencies that regulate commerce.

Consumers have more resources than you would think—and certainly more than outfits like Qwest think you will find out about. Qwest is the worst I’ve ever dealt with: combatting serious problems that might damage your credit rating or cost you big bucks requires you to roll out the big guns—state and federal regulatory agencies, attorneys general, and possibly even a paid lawyer of your own. But for smaller fry, there are easier ways.

Consumer protection resources fall into two groups: those you can and should take advantage of before you do business with a retailer, contractor, or service provider, and those to whom you have recourse after you’ve had a negative experience. Here are a few worth knowing about:

Before the Fact

The Better Business Bureau. I’ve never found a complaint to the BBB effective after the fact, but it’s a place to check before you do business with a chosen company or contractor. Though the group doesn’t seem to do much about complaints, it does at least keep a record and will let you know the company’s history.

Your state’s registrar of contractors. This is a very powerful resource. States regulate a wide variety of contractors, and in doing so they gather consumer complaints. Before hiring a contractor, get his or her contractor’s license number, call the state agency, and find out what complaints have occurred and how they were resolved. Some states turn filing a complaint into a major hassle; that means that if the agency shows a complaint record, the incidents in question probably were serious.

The Consumerist. Simply enter the name of the product or the company you’re considering into this site’s “search” box and all sorts of enlightening reports will come up. This is where I learned that Qwest had pulled the “let us give you a cheaper package” scam on other customers. This site is so useful it’s worth bookmarking and revisiting regularly. This site also lists the names and addresses of many high-ranking corporate executives. Thanks to The Consumerist, I finally tracked down Mr. Ed Mueller, Qwest’s well-hidden chairman and CEO.

The RipOff Report. Unlike the Consumerist, which carries a fair number of positive reviews, the Ripoff Report consists mostly of angry complaints. Some of these must be taken with a grain of salt. It’s useful, however, simply to compare the volume of complaints registered for two similar companies. Also, if the same issue appears over and over again, that should tell you something.

Consumer Reports. This site supplements the print magazine, and unfortunately you have to subscribe to get much value from it. But it does have a few free features. By and large, Consumer Reports reviews are more useful when they address things mechanical or electronic rather than in matters of taste.

Google. Enter ["name of product or service"] and “consumer reviews” with each word string inside quotation marks. This will usually bring up several sites, some more useful than others, where people hold forth about their experiences with services and stuff.

After the Fact

Get Human. This excellent resource lists strategies to reach live human beings at companies and organizations whose representatives barricade themselves behind telephone punch-a-button labyrinths. Bookmark it!

Corporate headquarters: This link offers some leads. Also you can Google the company name + headquarters, or try The Consumerist. Don’t be shy about going straight to the head of the company.

State attorneys general. Few companies relish an inquiry from the biggest, meanest lawyer in the state. If you can’t get satisfaction and you have evidence that fraud or a rip-off has occurred (or is about to occur), a complaint to your state AG’s office can be an effective way to get the attention of someone at the company who will do something about your problem. If a company’s home office is located in a state different from yours, you need to complain to the AG in that state. 

Your state public utility commission. These agencies also are surprisingly powerful. They have a lot to say about what a utility can charge and how it can treat its customers. I sent a copy of my letter to Qwest CEO Ed Mueller along to the Arizona Corporation Commission, with the commission’s PDF form showing which specific regulated issues apply. 

County and state trade and professional groups, state and county medical societies, and state and county bar associations. Some of these organizations actually license members; others simply try to ride herd on businesses to keep up the communal image. When a sleazy used-car dealer kept telephoning me looking for some mysterious woman who had welched on her car payments after giving the outfit my phone number, I discovered a statewide trade group of used car dealers. After I contacted them, the guy gave up pestering me. 

The U.S. attorney general. If you have been the victim of an interstate fraud or other crime, this is the agency for you.

The Federal Communication Commission’s Consumer & Governmental Affairs Bureau. The Bush Administration has effectively defanged formerly powerful federal regulatory agencies, among them the FCC, leaving American citizens with far fewer resources to defend themselves against predatory corporate interests. However, the FCC still does provide a fair amount of consumer information and accepts complaints or reports on a few interstate matters.

The Federal Trade Commission. This agency retains substantial clout. It oversees consumer protection in seven major areas. If my current approach to Qwest through the state corporation commission and the company’s upper management fails, the FTC will be hearing from me.

Other federal regulatory agencies. Thelen’s Construction Weblinks includes a list of federal agencies. If you don’t see what you want here, this wiki provides a few extra leads.

When you’re certain you’re in the right, don’t give up. Pursue all avenues to get recourse. Often when a company sees that you’re serious and that you will not be brushed off easily, it will capitulate or at least offer an acceptable compromise. Keep up the good fight!

How the garden grows!

Well, darn it! My camera won’t export my most recent veggie photos into iPhoto. But trust me: the garden is lookin’ good. Click on these thumbnails (twice!) for some older photos of the tiny babies…

Everything is much bigger now. I’ve thinned the chard and beets. The tiny pea plants are now pea toddlers, as it were, and are beginning to put out tendrils. I haven’t gotten around to thinning the carrots, mostly because they’re so thick it’s sorta daunting to figure out how to thin them without damaging the survivors—must do that today.

Having watched Jim’s summer-long gardening project at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity, I drew a few conclusions…well, more like theories…relevant to my own craving for garden-fresh veggies.

First, I think it’s probably best to plant in the ground rather than to continue the container-gardening strategy. I’ve always liked to grow things in pots. However, plants seem to prefer being in real dirt in the real ground. In Arizona, too, you have to use a lot more water to keep a plant alive in a pot: once the weather hits about 95 degrees, you have to water every morning or your plants will fry by midafternoon. Less water is needed when plants are in the actual earth. And pots, potting soil, and the extra fertilizer needed to replace nutrients washed out by frequent watering are expensive.

Second, also related to the local weather: fall and winter seem to be the best growing seasons here. Anything leafy bolts to seed when the ambient temperature reaches about 80 degrees, which is most of the time. Between October and March, though, lettuce, chard, and spinach seem to last forever. They can take a light frost with no damage, and you can pick off enough leaves for a salad or a side dish, letting the plant continue to produce more for you through the winter and early spring. Some tomatoes will bear fruit before the frost (they hate getting cold-nipped, though, and generally die in December). 

Third: grow from seed. Buying plants at the nursery quickly turns into a pricey proposition. If you get started early enough, you can get a nice healthy crop in just as the weather turns perfect. Seeds are very cheap and produce a zillion plants.

And fourth: don’t think you’re going to save much on this project. Think of it instead as a way to get especially delicious, vine-ripened produce that you know to be as chemical-free as possible. And think of it as a stress-relieving hobby that brings you some pleasure, gets you outdoors, and on the side presents you with something good to eat.

This winter’s Grand Experiment is bush peas. Casting about for a place to plant them (my yard is xeriscaped and doesn’t have many unoccupied planting beds), I realized the basin around the queen palm gets watered a couple times a week by the overflow from the Meyer lemon tree. So I excavated some holes in the gravel, digging down to the dirt, and filled the holes with commercial garden soil plus some compost from my own compost bin. Stuck a pea or two in each prepared hole. If they want to climb at all, they can go up the palm tree’s trunk. These are doing quite well today.

I still had more than half a package of peas after this, though. So I found an old plastic plant pot and filled that with the rest of the bag of garden soil I’d bought to improve the flowerbed near the pool (which now hosts chard, beets, carrots, herbs, and a tomato plant). Not ideal, but better than nothing. The ones I put in that are kind of crowded—probably also need to be thinned—but just now are doing very well. I love fresh peas! And they never show up in grocery stores any more. On the rare occasions that I’ve found them, the price is well beyond my budget. So I do hope these grow and produce.

Qwest: The saga that will not end

The Qwest b.s. simply will not die! 

As you’ll recall, in the last episode I received a nasty form letter claiming the credit union bounced a payment (it did not) and threatening to shut off my phone service. In the ensuing call to Qworst, customer disservice representative “Brad” told me this was fixed and my bill should revert to the normal amount, around $86.

Yesterday, I opened the monthly phone bill to find a gouge for $169.03! Further examination revealed that the cost for phone service had jumped from August’s amount of $26.72 to $43.15; Internet service was jacked up from $29.99 to $89.98!!

So, with my tape recorder running (having learned from “Brad” that the recorded voice’s claim that Qwest records your conversations with its reps is not true in 99% of calls), this morning I call back again and reach one “Alex.” He is obsequiously apologetic and, when he hears the reprise of the endless story, he decides he needs someone in authority and puts me on hold while he tries to reach the “Loyalty Department.” (Yes. That’s what he called it.)

A while later he comes back online and says he himself has been on hold. He disappears again. A few minutes later, he comes back on the phone to report he still can’t get past the hold button but on reading my bill he thinks a $108.29 credit was issued on 10/16 and I should have been billed only $69.03. He says I’ll be credited for the overcharge next month.

I say I can’t afford a $170 bill this month. He says he’ll have to go to the collections department to get the overcharge removed from this month’s bill…then he notices the $108.29 credit actually was applied to my bill.

I point out that the bill is unintelligible and it’s impossible to tell whether this is true or not (after all, look at what he had to go through to come to that conclusion!). I also state that I want the automatic payment from my checking account canceled NOW, and I will pay whatever is actually owing by check. He says he’ll call collections, stay on the line with me, and arrange for the credit to go through this month.

Then I point out the weird increases in the costs of “phone services” and “Internet service.” Now he says in this case he needs to talk to “Escalations” after all. He puts me on hold again.

Forty-five minutes into the call, I’m still listening to Qworst’s annoying “Get in the Loop” ad, endlessly looping.

Now someone named “Amber” gets on the line. She demands that I turn off the tape recorder, saying no action will be taken as long as the call is recorded.

Got that? It’s OK for Qworst to tape-record you, whether you like it or not, but not OK for you to record them.

She says the local service came to $22.64 with tax and that the apparent differences between the two monthly bills are the result of Qwest’s new layout for the bills—that magically, the amounts are really the same. This doesn’t sound very believable to me. She says $30 was added for a renewal fee for long distance—that I’m on a “membership plan.” I say no one told me any such thing, and that I had not signed up for any plan. She says I was billed that much last year.

Not until after the phone conversation ends do I think about the fact that Quicken is still live on my computer. When I check, I discover that no such extra fee was levied last year, so she simply lied to shut me up.

At any rate, I reply that $30 does not account for a difference between $85.99 and $169.03. She says I was billed for 2 1/2 months’ worth of Internet service because the upgrade in September was not billed at the time. She said the bill for the Internet service went up. I said I was told there would be no change in the amount due. She said that was “misinformation.” (Read: another lie?) Then she said she would return the service to 256K and backdate it, reducing the fee.

Scant satisfaction: I still have a ridiculously inflated bill I can’t afford resulting from a chain of events that started with Qwest’s DSL screw-up, entailed several examples of “misinformation,” and has wasted hours of my time.

This morning’s phone call alone consumed over an hour.

I called Cox, using a number given to me by a friend who claims to be satisified with Cox’s service. There I reached one “Rose,” who said that the midlevel Internet service runs at 9mb/second (if I’m not mistaken, that’s somewhat better than “256K”) and costs $45 a month. The phone service costs $20 a month, for a total of $65. This afternoon, when “Rose” arrives in her office, I’m switching from Qworst to Cox.

Qworst corralled me into a two-year cell phone contract about 18 months ago, and so that runs until June. As soon as it expires, though, I will let the cell phone service go, leaving me with a much more affordable phone bill. The only reason I got it at all was to have some way to call for help if I get in an accident or if my car craps out on the freeway; as it develops, all cell phones will dial 911 for free, whether or not they’re connected to a service. Not only that, but in many areas you can use an unconnected cell phone to dial a number and have the call charged to your credit card. The call may cost around $3 a minute, but that’s a far cry from $30 every month for a device you hardly ever use!

The Consumerist has published a list of Qwest senior executives’ addresses. I intend to get in touch with several of these folks and request an early cancellation of that cell phone with no gouge, given the gross mistreatment I have suffered at the hands of the company’s customer disservice staff. Interestingly, The Consumerist also reports a scam similar to the one The Josh pulled on me was inflicted on another woman. Apparently Qwest has a track record for this sort of thing.

Whatever you do, 

NEVER

EVER

DO BUSINESS WITH QWEST!

Previous chapters:

Back Again—Temporarily?
“We Value Your Business” 
Unbundled! Qwest Strikes Again
What Happens When a Live Qwest Guy Shows Up 
Qwest Redux: How Do These Companies Stay in Business?

What’s your conspiracy theory?

Over at CBS Marketwatch (my favorite portal to the Wall Street roller-coaster ride), Paul B. Farrell has an entertaining post highlighting his theory that big business has sabatoged democracy.

It’s a little oblique to my own conspiracy theory, which is that democracy in this country evaporated a long time ago, replaced by a latter-day incarnation of what Dwight Eisenhower first called the military-industrial complex. Exactly as he warned, it has taken over the functioning of this country to such an extent that our much-vaunted “freedoms” have effectively disappeared. The citizenry has been too busy sucking on the pacifier of material plenty to have noticed that little factoid.

I have even gone so far as to theorize (hang onto your black helicopter helmets) that huge pan-corporate interests (which we see manifest in the puppeteers behind the Bush administration) are responsible for the dumbing-down of public education in this country. Universal education in Western government-run schools has never existed to train brilliant minds; from its outset in 19th-century Prussia, its purpose was to develop compliance. Schools exist to teach kids to do as they’re told, so that as adults they will cooperate quietly with what the government wants them to do. It’s an effective device to create a nation of sheep.

The way to make sheep out of American citizens is to see to it that they know nothing about the history and ideas that brought their nation into being, and by design to avoid teaching them how to think logically or coherently: hence the erasure of history and literature in grade school, of civics courses in high school, and of Western civilization courses in college. Indeed, it was Eisenhower who warned,

Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Dumb down the citizenry and you get your way. There’s a reason college juniors and seniors will tell you Wisconsin is a Rocky Mountain state and World War II happened in the 19th century. This is not something that happened by accident. It happened because over the past forty years public schools have systematically been commandeered to teach compliance, not to furnish young minds with facts and thought.

Over time, functions that once were performed by the government have been taken over by private entities which, because they are nongovernmental, do not have to abide by regulations designed to protect your privacy and your civil rights. Consider:

→ Federal law forbids the use of the Social Security number as an ID number. But try to get a credit card, a home loan, or medical care without forking it over for use as exactly that. Even if you refuse to reveal your Social Security number, insurance and financial companies already have it, and they use it as an ID number in national databases designed to track your behavior. How can they get away with it? Because the law applies only to government bureaucrats…not to corporate bureaucrats.

→ Big Brother watches you in every store, every parking lot, almost every intersection in this country. Every purchase you make is tracked on store “club cards,” on credit cards, on debit cards. Every step you take is recorded on cameras. Who is Big Brother? He ain’t Uncle Sam. He’s corporate America.

→ By law, the government is not allowed to violate your privacy and to track your every movement in this way. Government agents have to get a court’s permission to do this sort of thing. But corporate interests do not.

→ You can write to your Congressman about an issue and be damned. If you don’t have enough money to purchase representation, the only way your wishes will be considered is if they happen to coincide with those of the lobbyists who do own your elected representatives. Who can afford to buy representation in this country? Only very large, allied corporate interests.

→ Prisons, schools, medical care, and most social welfare programs are now the province of industry, not your elected government.

→ Every time you pass through an airport, enter a public building, or go through the electronic examiner at the door of a retail store, you are searched without due cause. This is a violation of the United States Constitution, a fact ignored because the illegal searches are conducted by private entities, not by government agents. You accept it because you have been trained to comply and because you have been told that you should be scared, very scared. 

→ The reason we no longer have the basic access to decent medical care that Americans enjoyed thirty or forty years ago is that corporate interests took over that access, bringing us “managed medical care” that places an army of corporate bureaucrats between you and your doctor. These same interests have fought a one-payer medical system—expensively and efficiently—for decades. They have played a major role in running up the cost of medical care and have seen to it that most Americans are discouraged from seeking good, consistent care…what propagandists call “Cadillac healthcare.”

→ Habeas corpus? Oh, that… If we don’t like you, you’re not eligible for it.

So it goes. Or, we might say, so it went…

And you…what’s your conspiracy theory? Is the truth out there? Is George Bush a robot? A stuffed puppet? Is Barack Obama a Muslim terrorist? Are black helicopters operated by aliens? Is truth beauty? Beauty truth? Is code poetry? Who made us think so?