Earlier today on Twitter, Chuck Wendig posted:

The myth that white people tell each other is we need to fear black people. The truth is that we are the scary ones. #BlackLivesMatter

— Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) December 3, 2014

Every week, every month, every year, another story, the same story told over again. White police killing unarmed black men. White men on the street killing unarmed black men. Because they thought the black men were armed. Because they felt threatened. Because they were afraid for their lives. Because the black man didn’t obey fast enough, was wearing a hoodie, was playing his music too loud. And time and time again, verdicts handed down that say, that makes sense. Of course you were afraid; of course you killed to protect yourself from the threat that wasn’t there.

I think about what I feel like, as a white woman of less than Amazonian build, walking down the street alone at night. Tensing up just that little bit when I see someone else approaching; tensing up that little bit more when I see that it’s a man. I imagine what it would be like to be a black man, and to tense up that little bit more when I see it’s a police officer. To see such a person as a hazard, rather than an ally if trouble occurs.

An op-ed in the New York Times today said,

Any police department that tolerates such conduct, and whose officers are unable or unwilling to defuse such confrontations without killing people, needs to be reformed.

This is fundamental. When we have riot police on the streets in military gear, SWAT teams burning infants with stun grenades, tanks rolling through suburbia because they’re army surplus and they might as well go somewhere — then something has gone so profoundly wrong I don’t have the words to describe it. When police turn their force against black men who have done nothing to deserve it, I can’t say “something has gone wrong,” because that implies it was ever right to begin with. But this is just a new verse in the same song. From its very founding, the relationship between the United States of America and its black citizens has been wrong. (The relationship between the United States of America and any of its minority citizens.) This country has used every tool at its disposal, from law to money to rhetoric to armed violence, to preserve the imbalance against them. Our steps in the other direction have been too few, too small, too often reversed with steps in the other direction. The problem hasn’t gone away. It’s right there today, tonight, all around us.

We need to reform a lot more than just the police. But the police are a place to start. If we cannot trust them, then we cannot trust anything that follows.

A few weeks ago I noticed that my Nexus 10 tablet wasn’t charging properly. I poked around online and found a number for Samsung’s customer support, so I called them up.

The lady I spoke to was very nice. We ran into confusion, though, because when I looked in the settings where my model number ought to be, all it said was “Nexus 10.” Apparently there was supposed to be something else. She gave me a ticket number and said I should call back in a few days, at which point her supervisor would have made the arrangements to put me manually into the system, which would allow them to send me a shipping label to get the tablet repaired.

Seemed good to me, so I thanked her, hung up, and waited.

When I called back, my first call got dropped. On a second try, the guy I talked to seemed to have no awareness of this having happened, despite the ticket number. He asked for my model number, and when I told him it only said “Nexus 10,” he said somebody would call me back in one to two days, after his supervisor made the arrangements to put me manually into the system, which would allow them to send me a shipping label to get the tablet repaired.

It took something more like three or four days, but I did get a call back from a woman saying there was some confusion about the lack of model number, but that she suspected the problem was that my tablet is wi-fi only, and they’re the department for tablets that are registered with a carrier for cellular service. She asked me to call her back and gave her a number.

Let me say for the record that up until this point, I feel like the service I’d received was less than ideal, but basically par for the course with this kind of thing.

That’s about to change.

Today (having been busy for several days, plus the holiday weekend seemed like a bad time to follow up), I call the number I’ve been given. It has a menu. Press 1 for mobile devices, tablets, etc. Okay. Press 3 for tablets. Okay. Press 1 for wi-fi only tablets. Progress, right? I seem to have had the wrong department before, but now I’ll get the right one. I press 1, 3, 1, and get a customer service rep to talk to.

“Can I have your phone number? First and last name? Verify your email address? Thank you. How can I help you today?”

I explain that I have a wi-fi only Nexus 10 tablet that isn’t charging properly, and I’m trying to send it in for repair.

“I’m sorry, but I’m not able to do anything about that here. I’ll have to transfer you to another department.”

. . . not sure why the people under the wi-fi tablet option can’t help me with my wi-fi tablet, but okay. But note: in the eight or so times I called this number and went through this process, I’m fairly certain that I did not get transferred to the same department each time. I’m not positive, since I didn’t take notes, but I’m pretty sure.

And here’s where things get terrible. No matter where I get transferred to, I’m in the wrong place — and it’s blatantly obvious that half the reps aren’t even listening to what I say, because when they ask what I’m calling for, I say it’s a wi-fi only Nexus 10 tablet . . . and then a little while later they are surprised to discover my tablet is wi-fi only, or a Nexus, and they’re going to have to transfer me to somebody who can help with that. One call, I get transferred four times, and I know for a fact that at least two of those transfers were to the wi-fi department. Meaning the wi-fi department sent me somewhere else (I think it was the Nexus department), and then somebody else sent me back. The rep doing the sending back apologizes and says something vague about them having trouble with their phone system. This must be true, because that call gets dropped while I’m waiting to talk to the wi-fi department again — and that is not the only time I get dropped, because I’m not calling Samsung eight times in one afternoon just for shits and giggles. I get dropped once while the initial rep is going through her opening spiel. I get dropped when I’m on hold. I get dropped when somebody picks me up from hold and asks what department I’m trying to reach. At no point can anybody give me the number of the department I’m supposed to be talking to, because apparently they don’t actually have the numbers; they only have a phone system they can use to transfer me.

I’m composing this post while I’m on hold — but not for the wi-fi department, or the Nexus department. I’m on hold waiting to tell Samsung that they have the shittiest customer service I have ever had the misfortune of dealing with. I’ve been waiting to tell them this for forty minutes now, and nobody has picked up.

Basically, Samsung doesn’t give a fuck. I can’t take my device to someplace local to get it repaired, because it’s a tablet; apparently the only way I can get it fixed is to mail it to the manufacturer and wait for them to send it back. But I can’t even do that, because they can’t be bothered to meet the bare minimum standards of actually helping their customers.

I broke off writing this post because after forty-five minutes on hold, I finally got a competent customer service rep who neither attempted to transfer me nor dropped my call. She gave me a new ticket number and her extension, so that if I have to call back, I can (theoretically) get hold of her again and not be sent around the merry-go-round for the millionth time. I’m still waiting — yet again — for someone to set up whatever’s necessary to deal with the lack of model number, but I supplied my proof of purchase, so maybe this time it’ll work? We’ll see.

Not gonna lie, though. I’m not holding my breath.

I play solitaire a lot on my tablet, and there’s a banner add that has been popping up on it lately which is, I think, the worst ad I’ve ever seen.

It flashes between a white bar with black text and a black bar with white text. And I do mean flashes — very nearly at the level of “isn’t there something about this kind of stimulus causing epileptic seizures?” It is phenomenally distracting. Good ad, right? Nope — because it is so. bloody. annoying. that I might light my hair on fire before voluntarily tapping it. (Nor is it in a location where I’m likely to tap it by accident.) And if you’re thinking that even annoyance-publicity is still publicity, and they’re at least getting their product into my head . . .

. . . the text of the banner is “(1) Free Game.”

That’s it. No brand name. No hint of what type of game it is. No image I might recognize if I see it again later in a less annoying context. Just a seizure-inducing, content-less banner which is so obnoxious, it’s giving me a strong inclination to stop playing solitaire entirely, so I’ll never have to see it again. Which is about as profound of an advertising failure as I can imagine.

What were they thinking?

Dear Google,

I’m so glad you decided to link all of my settings to my Google account, rather than to device on which I’m using that account. Because of your decision, I don’t get to say that I would like chat notifications on my tablet, but not on my phone. I either get notifications in both places, or in neither. This is perfect! I get to choose between never seeing chat messages unless I’m on my laptop (where I use Pidgin, a wonderful program that does all the things Hangouts won’t), or having my phone pester me with pinging and buzzing every single time somebody sends me a chat message. Which is fabulous when I’m, y’know, in a public place.

This is such a brilliant move on your part. Even better than that time you decided to take away the nice Talk app and replace it with Hangouts, where I don’t get to see whether somebody’s status is Active or Away or Do Not Disturb. I just love having companies strip away utility and force me into some marketer’s pre-determined idea of how I’m going to use the program, rather than the way I was using the program. You’re doing a bang-up job of understanding your audience; if you didn’t have such a firm grasp of what we wanted, you wouldn’t be so successful at giving us the exact opposite.

No love,
Me

This post has been brought to you by the behavior of a very large dog at the post office today.

***

Dear Dog Owners of America:

Please train your dogs.

To those of you who actually do, I say, thank you! I appreciate your effort, and your dogs are probably lovely creatures. Unfortunately, you are in the minority, and the other dog-owners and their pets are making you look bad.

It used to be that whenever the Great Pet Debate came up — dogs vs. cats — I found myself wondering, why don’t I like dogs more? After all, the qualities ascribed to them sound great. I liked Platonic Dogs very well, but Actual Dogs much less, and I didn’t know why.

Then I realized that was because the majority of the Actual Dogs I meet are badly behaved.

They bark. They bite. They chew on stuff. They jump on anything and anyone they can get near. No, their “enthusiasm” is not adorable. In small dogs, it’s annoying; in large dogs, it can be outright dangerous. You know what’s adorable? A dog who knows how to express his enthusiasm in a socially acceptable fashion. Which is to say, a dog who is trained.

And no, a dog who brings the ball back when you’re playing fetch and sits (sometimes) on command is not “trained.” If you have to drag your dog down off the counter of the post office, your dog is badly trained and badly behaved. If he barks for a minute straight every time the doorbell rings, he is badly trained and badly behaved. If you have to bribe him with treats to get peace and quiet during dinner, he is badly trained and badly behaved. If he draws blood through my clothing because he tried to jump on me and his claws went raking down my thigh, he is badly trained and badly behaved.

A well-trained dog is one who knows how to behave like a civilized member of society.

I have met far too few of them in my life.

So please. For the love of god. Train your dog. Teach him when it is and is not okay to bark. Teach him to show enthusiasm with tail-wagging and jumping in place, not on people. Do not reward his bad behavior by giving him commands and then, when he ignores them, rewarding him with whatever it was he wanted. You owe it to your dog to be consistent, to give him a framework within which he can operate and be happy. And the rest of us would appreciate it very much.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/602011.html. Comment here or there.

Several people were interested in this, so I figured a new post was better than replying in several places.

I believe what I did was this:

1) Click on the little dark/light rectangle in the top left — the one with a down arrow next to it, that does nothing to tell you what it’s for. (Design failure #1: I’m clicking semi-randomly on things to find out what they are.)

2) In that menu, tell it to show me the menu bar.

3) Now I have a “File/Edit/View/etc” bar. Thank god. But there’s something else I have to do before that can become useful.

4) Click over to Songs in that top ribbon — not the menu bar I just brought in.

5) This allows me to deal with the “Column Browser” sub-menu under “View,” which was inactive when I was still on the default Artist tab. I think it defaulted to showing me the column browser (which is what I wanted), but if not, you can turn it on here.

6) Now you have your genres/artists/albums listings up above, with the songs below, like it used to be (at least for me). But where the hell are my playlists and such, that used to be on the left???

7) Again under “View,” click “Show Sidebar.”

8) If you want, you can also click “Show Status Bar,” which gives you back the bottom edge of the window, where it lists stats.

That got me back all the navigational tools I was accustomed to using. I basically will never click on that top ribbon again, the one with “Songs/Artists/Albums/etc,” as any tab other than “Songs” is Ye Newe Terrible View.

Also, the “shuffle” button now operates more like on an iPod: it’s up by the top of a playlist name, and you click on it to start the music playing in a shuffled fashion. If, once it’s started, you want to turn off shuffling, that’s in the window where it shows time, etc.

Hopefully that’s useful to people.

I understand wanting to make improvements to your program. But when I install a new version of iTunes and it defaults to a different layout that is HORRIBLE and NOTHING LIKE WHAT I HAD BEFORE, and I have to hunt around to 1) find what to click on to get a toolbar and 2) experiment in that toolbar to get back the navigational framework I had before? That is not an improvement. That is me staring in horror at what you’ve inflicted on me and praying to high heaven I can get it back to what it used to be. (Which I could. Thank god.)

Don’t do that to me again.