A lot of credit cards now offer an “Annual Summary,” detailing how much money you’ve spent throughout the year on merchandise, travel, food, services, et cetera.  My card issuer sent out an e-mail asking us to call customer service to enroll.  It’s strange that we can’t enroll online, but it’s no big deal.  The call was simple:

Call #3:

(I key in my card number when prompted, and say my “phone password” aloud: “Socrates”)

Harry: Hello, my name is Harry.  How can I help you?
Me:  I’d like to enroll in the Annual Summary program, please.

Harry:  Would like a paper copy, or do you want the report online?
Me:  Online, please.

Harry:  One moment… Okay, sir, you are enrolled.  Is there anything else I can help you with?
Me:  Nope; that’s it.  Thank you for your help!

See?  That was really easy.  But what’s that “Call #3” heading doing up there?  Smeg.  Now we have to travel back in time 30 minutes to see what happened earlier.

Call #1:

(I key in my card number when prompted.  The system doesn’t ask for my password.)

Agent:  Hello, my name is Mumble-Mumble.  How can I help you?
Me:  I’d like to enroll in the Annual Summary program, please.

Agent: What is the password on your account?
Me:  Socrates:  S-O-C-R-A-T-E-S
Agent: No, that’s not it.  I’ll give you a hint: it starts with “S” and it’s either your mother’s maiden name, or your best friend’s last name.

(I apologize profusely to whomever I might be forgetting, but I can’t think of a single “best friend” whose last name begins with an S.  More to the point, I’d never choose an actual name for that kind of question, so even if all my friends were named Smith, Schmidt, Sutherland, and Samson, I’d still have given Socrates as my answer.)

Me:  I’m still pretty sure it’s Socrates.  If it’s not that, I have no idea what it could be.

Agent:  Could you verify the amount of your last transaction with this card?
Me:  Yes, I used it this afternoon to order pizza from Eddie’s Pizza, for $23.19.
Agent:  No, that’s not it.  I’ll give you a hint: it was for $68.72.
Me:  (pause) Okay… I went to Star Market on Friday and spent about that much…
Agent:  No, that’s not it.  I’ll give you a hint: it was on October 24th.

(First of all, she’s claiming I haven’t used my credit card in almost a month.  Second, by this time I’ve opened my account online and I’m looking at my complete transaction history.)

Me:  That transaction was from the Cheesecake Factory.
Agent:  I’ll give you a hint: it was from some sort of cake place.
Me:  Yes, the Cheesecake Factory.  I spent $68.72 there on October 24th.

Agent:  Okay.  Are you calling from your home phone number?
Me: Yes.
Agent:  I will terminate this call now, and call you back at your home telephone number to verify your identity.

Stunned silence.  The phone rings almost immediately.

Call #2:

Me:  Hello again.
Agent:  Hello, this is Mumble-Mumble calling.

<snip> (We repeat some stuff from the last call.  She verifies my home address.  She verifies my social security number.  Eventually, she starts to enroll me for the annual summary.)

Agent:  I’m having some technical problems. What I suggest is you terminate this call, and then call back.  Is there anything else I can help you with?

Me: (silently, in my head): What do you mean, anything else?

My favorite part of this is that my password really was Socrates the entire time.  We know this because it worked fine on the third call.  Also because I know how I would choose such a password, and it’s inconceivable it would have been anything else.

(This is almost verbatim, by the way.  I naturally made up amounts and dates and such, but the exchange was, sadly, real.)

My dental health center moved to new offices recently.  It’s a much nicer space, with natural lighting, more treatment areas, and all new equipment.  Instead of the posters of kittens my childhood dentist had tacked to the ceiling, for example, there’s now a flat-screen monitor hanging over the chair, cycling through serene images.

In taking all this in, I began to fixate on the fact that the new X-ray gun has a USB port, and I cannot fathom why.  Sure, an X-ray detector that connects to a computer is commonplace now, but that connects to a computer, not the X-ray machine.  The “gun” just shoots X-radiation.  That’s its job.  You tell it how much you want, and it delivers it.  It doesn’t much care what happens once the radiation leaves the tube.  So why would it need a USB port?

There’s a long history of advertising products by counting things that don’t matter.When transistor radios first came out, manufacturers loved marketing how many transistors they had. Technically you only needed one to make a radio, and you could put five or six to good use, but after that you were just cramming them in there for sport. It looks great in ads, though: 14-transistor radios! Those must sound amazing!

Intel advertised microchips the same way. The 1.8 GHz processor was better than the 1.7 GHz processor because it had more gigahertzes. (It scares me that Firefox thinks “gigahertzes” is a properly-spelled word.) The fact that AMD could make faster chips at slower clock speeds tended not to bother the numbers-obsessed consumer.

Gillette kicked off perhaps the strangest counting war when it added a couple extra blades to its safety razor to create the Mach3.  Men everywhere instantly recognized how much better the shaving experience must be with three blades.  I was too smart to fall for that.  I’ve instead spent a small fortune on Schick Quattro cartridges.  I happen to know that it’s a much better razor: it’s got four blades.  I have absolutely no idea what the extra blades do, exactly, but I’m certain I’d be a scruffy mess without them.  Today, we even have the Gillette Fusion Power, which incorporates six blades (one on the back) and a microchip.  Again, the marketing material doesn’t make entirely clear what the microchip does, but we can all agree: the more transistors a razor has, the closer the shave!

My favorite counting game is still with cheeses.  I enjoyed a great three-cheese pasta dish some years ago.  Some time later I had a great four-cheese lasagna, and later still I ordered a delicious five-cheese pizza.  Today I can order a six-cheese dish from several different restaurants.  And do you know what I reply when a server sets down a plate of six-cheese pasta and asks, “Would you care for some freshly grated Parmesan?”  I say, “Yes!”  Who wouldn’t want seven cheeses at once?

So I have to ask: with all this counting of superfluous components, did they just put a USB port on the X-ray machine ’cause stuff works better when it has more USB ports on it?

Technical support can sometimes recommend a placebo solution if a customer insists on doing something when no action is really required.  This solution might actually improve things, but at least it won’t do any harm.  For example, you might clear your browser’s cache, or quit and re-launch an application.  Working with computers, I’m pretty good at spotting a phony solution when I hear one.

When my tooth started hurting intensely after a routine cleaning last week, I made an appointment for someone to examine it.  Unfortunately, the dentist I was scheduled to see was out sick, so a very helpful receptionist scrambled to find someone with a few free minutes.

Looking rather peeved at having a patient crammed into the 15-minute window in his schedule, the dentist examined my X-rays from last week and poked around in my mouth for a moment before declaring my teeth clinically healthy.

Then, as if searching for a way to make me feel that he’d accomplished something, he said, “It looks like you have some food caught in there that’s causing pressure.  I’ll flush that out.”  He produced the dental equivalent of a turkey baster to spray a jet of water into the problem area.

Uh huh.  Sure.  I’ve been brushing, flossing, rinsing with Listerine, and eating more food every day since that cleaning, and it hasn’t stopped hurting.  Flushing it out with this higher-pressure contraption is meant to help?  I sighed mentally.

The dentist finished in a few seconds.  No kidding: the pain went away instantly and completely.  Even jabbing my tongue at it, which would have been disturbingly masochistic a minute before, felt fine.

Then he explained the details.  Even I can see on the X-ray that there’s a space behind my bottom molar where my top molar can really wedge food pretty good as I chew.  He really did see a problem in his quick examination and executed a legitimate solution.  It only sounded bogus to the uninitiated.

So I guess the moral of this is: when the technician tells you to turn something off for 30 seconds and then turn it back on, do it!  It might actually help!  I’ve been made a believer.

Everyone living in a city tunes out city noise.  Constant sounds like cars driving by are easy to tune out completely.  Less frequent sounds, like a helicopter flying overhead or an ambulance rushing by, are hard to tune out completely but easy to ignore.

Emergency sirens are a great example.  I certainly hear them, but unless they’re going right past my building I just ignore them and continue focusing on what I was doing.

Tonight, I was watching a movie in which a character says:

 I can’t think with all these sirens!

And all I could think was: “What sirens?”

I had to pause the movie to realize the sirens I was hearing and ignoring were actually an important part of the plot I was supposed to be enjoying.

Blërg.

Dear Medical Science,

Please explain why receiving a hypodermic injection rates lower on the pain scale than removing the Band-Aid placed after the injection.  I admit it’s not a big difference – the needle is a flat zero, while the Band-Aid pulls a one or maybe up to a 2 in some cases – but it’s measurable.

In the interest of full disclosure I should probably reveal that I once required general anesthesia to remove a Band-Aid as a child.  Okay, technically I was receiving general anesthesia for unrelated and more traditional medical reasons, and my parents just asked the doctors to remove the Band-Aid at the time, but the fact remains I refused all efforts to remove it until I was unconscious and fully sedated.

Medicine has seen many important advances in my lifetime, and I have every confidence that you can make peeling off a bit of adhesive hurt no more than piercing one’s skin with a steel needle.

Please look into this.

Sincerely,
Not Going to Get the Flu This Year

P.S. It is not permissible to solve this problem by making the injection hurt more.  Make the Band-Aid hurt less.

P.P.S. For all practical intents and purposes I got the flu anyway.  Sure, I didn’t have the classic sinus problems or chills, but I was still exhausted and feverish all day.  It’s a very strange sensation to feel your body fighting a perceived illness that has absolutely no outward effects.  Come to think of it, this has all the benefits of staying in bed all day watching television with none of the disadvantages of sneezing and taking medication!

I hate accounting policy.

For my 403(b) retirement plan, my employer contributes “5% of [my] base salary up to $34,000; 10% of [my] base salary above $34,000.”  If I make (hypothetically) $68,000, then I should get 5% on half of it, and 10% on the other half — 7.5% on average.  That’s $425 per month.

Sixth graders, are you following this?

Now let’s all guess why my last paycheck shows only $283 (adjusted for my hypothetical salary, of course).  What happened to the other $142?

It turns out my “averaging” technique is wrong.  My employer will contribute 5% until they’ve covered $34,000 in earnings, and then switch to paying 10% for the rest of the year.  Most years this is perfectly fine, since I can’t spend this money until long after the year ends, so the total is what counts.

However, what about this year?  If I was only eligible to join the plan in July (halfway through the year), then I’ll only see 5% contributions all year!  I miss out on that 2.5% difference.

Of course, I used a $68,000 example salary to make the math easier, but really anybody who makes more than that cutoff amount suffers to some degree.  I’m outraged!

(Okay, I’m not really outraged, but I am mildly disappointed to learn that some of my unhatched chickens will never hatch—and they were my retirement chickens!)

All day, I planned to watch a movie when I got home tonight.  The movie I planned to watch? Becoming Jane.  This is a “biographical portrait” of Jane Austen.  It’s generally based on historical fact. The movie I actually watched?  Bring it On.  This is a story about cheerleaders.  It’s based on audiences’ enjoyment of watching cheerleaders.

I’m really not even sure how that happened.  I don’t even have that movie!  I just glanced at it on Hulu for a moment, and then 90 minutes went by.

In college I formed a theory I dubbed The Conservation of Mental Abilities.  During the summer, or at the beginning of the semester when work was light, I found myself reading mostly non-fiction, with a mix of notably long or verbose novels (e.g., Lord of the Rings).  Then, as the semester progressed and the workload got heavier, my recreational reading grew simpler, favoring simpler novels and even magazines.

Once, near the end of a particularly grueling semester, I caught myself rereading Roald Dahl’s Matilda — a book I first read at the age of nine.  Ostensibly, I’d stumbled on the 1996 movie starring Mara Wilson and wanted to read the original story.  Realistically, my brain was exhausted, and a children’s book was all the supplemental reading it could manage.

It’s the Conservation of Mental Abilities.  I (i.e., we all) have a certain capacity to absorb and process information — malleable over a period of several years, but fixed over shorter periods.  After a light day, I crave knowledge and self-improvement.  After a long and difficult day, I watch Bring it On.

And I’m not ashamed to admit it.

Today, I drove a Duck Boat.

Jealous?

Self Checkout and I have always gotten along – I scan things and it beeps at me – until our little tiff today.  I scanned a bag of shredded carrots, and it told me it had no Earthly idea what it was, and that help was on its way.  I called over the supervisor.

Her: Do you remember how much this costs?
Me: Sorry, I have no idea.
Her: That’s the only way I could enter it.

Me: Oh, that’s not a problem; I’ll just get them next time.  Thank you.
Her: Well, how much do you want to pay for them?

Sweet!  Uhh… $5!  No, no, wait… $2!  No, hang on, I’ve got it… 50¢!

Somehow this reminds me of the famous Seinfeld episode where Kramer starts taking Moviefone calls.

Kramer: Using your touch-tone keypad, please enter the first three letters of the movie title now.
*beep beep beep*

You’ve selected Agent Zero.  If that’s correct, press one.  (silent pause) You’ve selected Brown Eyed Girl.  If this is correct, press one.  (silent pause) Why don’t you just tell me the name of the movie you selected?

(Looking online after the fact, Peapod lists store-brand carrots for less than I actually paid, but I bought a name brand, so I probably got it about right.)