Spooky spider

Scientists have announced the discovery of a new spider species -- the bluetooth tarantula. The species, included in this Time magazine 2010 roundup, was found in French Guiana and got its name because its teeth are indeed cobalt blue.

My first thought, of course, was that the tarantula fed by attaching itself to the human ear, turning the victim into a self-important asshole who talks too loudly. Not so, but real teeth are scary, too, I guess.

B.T. phone home

“Hello?”

“Hi, it’s me. I’m at the airport in (insert city here). Thought I’d call and see how things are around the house.”

“Oh, everybody’s fine. Just the usual around here.”

“Yeah? No major disasters? Haha.”

“Oh, you know, the usual. A small grease fire when (insert teen-ager’s name here) was cooking, but everything’s fine now. A little smoke damage.”

“Yipes.”

“We needed to paint the kitchen anyway.”

“Was (teen’s name) traumatized by the fire?”

“Nah. (S/he) seemed to think the whole thing was funny.”

“We’ll see how funny (s/he) thinks it is when (s/he) gets to paint the kitchen.”

“I’m just glad no one was hurt. Although the fire did affect the dog.”

“How so?”

“He yarked up all over the carpet. I guess it was the smoke. Might’ve been something he ate. One of my rubber gloves is missing.”

“Better keep an eye on him.”

“I will.”

“I’m afraid to ask about the cat.”

“Missing for three days now.”

“But the kids are OK?”

“Well, we did hear from the school.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Hate to bother you with this when you’re traveling. I’ll take care of it.”

“No, go ahead and tell me.”

“Well, (insert student’s name here) got detention. We have to meet with the principal.”

“What did (s/he) do this time?”

“It’s no big deal. Just the usual. (His/her) hair.”

“Now what?”

“It’s (purple/pink/magenta/green/some other color not found in nature).”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake--”

“And it’s shaved off on one side of (his/her) head.”

“Are you kid--”

“And the other side is dreadlocks.”

Pause.

“Well, that’s different.”

“The usual teen-aged attempt to get attention, but the principal says it’s distracting the other students.”

“Oh, well. It’s only hair. It can be (fixed/shorn/burned).”

“Also, the principal said (his/her) clothes are inappropriate.”

“What kind of puritanical operation are they running--”

“I think it was the fuzzy chaps that did it.”

“Oh.”

“Another fashion statement. The usual.”

“What about (insert older child’s name here)?”

“Some progress there. (S/he) called the other day and (s/he) is not riding with those bikers anymore. Had a little dustup in (insert city name), but I sent bail money and it’s all fine now.”

“Sounds like you’ve got everything under control.”

“Oh, sure. But hey, I was going to ask you: Have you noticed a funny noise in the bathroom?”

“What kind of a noise?”

“Kind of a rumbling? After flushing?”

“Uh-oh.”

“The plumber said it was a sewer line problem.”

“Oh, no.”

“It’s OK. He fixed it. Only a thousand bucks. And the sinkhole isn’t even that big.”

“Aaugh.”

“You’ll see, when you get home from your trip. I think we can fix it ourselves. Rent a dump truck. Buy some sod. How hard can it be?”

“Right. How about you? Have you been able to work amidst all this mayhem?”

“Oh, sure. Though I did have to redo a bunch of stuff after the computer died.”

“The computer?”

“And my boss wants a meeting. Something about our ‘place in the community.’”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know exactly. But he does play golf with the high school principal. No telling what he’s heard.”

“Great.”

“Don’t worry about it. Just have a good trip. It’ll all be waiting for you when you get home.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. Maybe I’ll go to Vermont instead.”

“Vermont?”

“That’s where my luggage went.”

“Oh, my.”

“That’s business travel for you.”

“The usual.”

“Right.”

I'm in the mood for voicemail

Anybody who has voicemail knows you can waste entire minutes every day, sorting through messages, erasing and saving and prioritizing.

Researchers at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology (who apparently have a lot of time on their hands) have come up with a software that will prioritize your voicemail on the basis of the callers' moods.

Emotive Alert software measures the volume and pitch of the voice and the ratio of words to pauses in each message, then compares them to eight "acoustical fingerprints" representing different emotional states: happy, sad, excited, calm, urgent, not urgent, formal and informal.

Critics say this technology could have a downside. Telemarketers likely will figure out how to leave messages that score highly for "urgency," so they'll go to the top of the list. Every time you check your voicemail, all the most urgent messages will be "spam." Just like your e-mail is now.

Telemarketing is only the most obvious hitch with emotion-recognition software, however. I can think of lots of other problems:

--How will the software analyze those prerecorded messages used by doctor's offices, where everything is a robotic drone except the time and date of your next appointment, which is filled in by the chirpy receptionist? Will the resulting pauses and tone changes move the call to the bottom of the list? If you've got a voicemail message that begins, "The results of your medical tests are in," that might be a top priority.

--Will heavy breathing count as pauses?

--Does "formal" language make it a priority message? I'd be much less interested in a formal message about a picayune legal matter than in the informal language used by a redneck threatening to "come over to yore house right now and stomp a mudhole in ya."

--"Excited" rarely means a top-flight message. It usually just means the caller himself is excited, often for no good reason. My dog could leave an "excited" message.

--Does a "sad" message automatically become a low priority? Seems to me that news of Aunt Ruth's demise, while sad, might be the most important message of the day.

--Why should "happy" messages go to the top? Are we so shallow that we always want the good news first?

--Isn't such software biased against plodders? Just because there are pauses doesn't mean the message is unimportant. If the caller is distracted while leaving the message, does that push him to the bottom of the list? What if the distraction is, say, a standoff with the police?

--Doesn't this put a lot of pressure on the person leaving the message? It's already hard enough to create a brief message while remembering to leave a phone number, a good time to be reached, etc. If you knew your mood was being measured, too, couldn't the result be panic? And why isn't "panic" on that list of emotions? I would think that would be a top priority.

--For that matter, why stop there? If you're going to sort your messages by emotion, how about "anger?" Angry messages might be the ones you want first (see "mudhole" above). Other emotional states that should be measured: love, hate, rancor, loneliness, fear, envy, arousal, pity, "bad vibes," consternation, guilt, gratitude, euphoria, shyness, delirium, impatience, depression, sympathy, playfulness, boredom, "just friends," drunkenness, exaggeration, stupidity, regret, resentment, menace, misery and "the willies."

Finally, and most importantly, there's this issue: If you get so many voicemail messages every day that you need to prioritize them by mood, then you're getting too many messages. You need to slow down. Take yourself out of circulation. Get an unlisted number.

Too much voicemail can give you the willies.

Bad news bearers

Of all the modern afflictions that plague today's parents -- sleeplessness, sass, televised violence, fast food, Eminem -- nothing's worse than the dreaded Call From School.

You parents know these calls -- when you answer the ringing phone and a disembodied voice on the other end identifies itself as being from your child's school. Is anything more instantly stomach-wrenching?

It's never good news. School officials don't call the parents to say little Johnny made the honor roll or that little Ruthie is an introspective, respectful scholar. No, they only call in cases of emergency or dire misbehavior.

Sad to say, but experienced parents know that the absolute best news that can come from such a call is that the child is slightly ill. Throwing up, or headachy, or running a mild fever. When it's the school nurse on the phone, we parents immediately assume broken limbs or random gunshots. When the nurse says little Johnny merely yarked all over his teacher, it comes as something of a relief.

Yes, the child's illness disrupts our workday and might even require a quick trip to the doctor, but at least there's nothing life-threatening. More importantly, calls from the nurse concern something that's completely out of the parents' control -- a virus, a germ, a freak accident on the seesaw.

We don't want our children to be sick, but we'll take that any day over the calls that report discipline problems. With bad behavior, there's always the implication that the parents are to blame.

Where did little Johnny learn such language? Why doesn't he do his homework? Why does he keep picking fights? Why does little Ruthie suffer temper tantrums? Why does she dress like a tramp? Is everything all right at home?

Teachers, counselors and administrators have the kids' best interests at heart, and most of them have more patience and understanding than your average saint. When things go wrong, there comes a point when they must simply throw up their hands and lob the problem back to the parents.

But the ever-present implication that the kids are not being reared properly only serves to dump a big shovelful of guilt on the parents.

(Granted, some parents need that wake-up call. There are certainly some homes where everything is not all right.)

But most of us parents are doing the best we can. We monitor the homework production and we turn off the TV and we try to get our wild-eyed children to eat something other than processed sugar. We lecture and scold and threaten.

For seven hours a day, however, the kids are out of our hands. They're in the wilds of school, being stalked by bullies and pressured by peers and exposed to bad influences. When the kids inevitably act up in response, it's not the bullies or the bad influences who get the Call From School.

The call goes to us guilt-ridden, worried parents. And we're expected to do something to fix the problem.

The only solution is for parents to use caller ID to avoid these calls. Kidding! The real answer to misbehavior is for the parents to march right down to the school playground and push little Johnny off the seesaw.

Then, when the Call From School comes, it'll be from the nurse. And the parents can act surprised and say, "Is everything all right at school?"

Dude, you got a New Delhi

It's often said: "To err is human, but to really mess up, you need a computer." To that adage I'd like to add: "And if you want to go crazy, call overseas for technical support."

Recently, my desktop computer's CD-ROM drive stopped working. I tried to fix it myself. Unfortunately, most recovery programs require -- you guessed it -- use of the CD-ROM drive.

After sweating over this Catch-22 for an hour, I called my computer company's technical support number. After the requisite 15 minutes of voice mail options and canned music, I got a real live person on the phone.

This person was in India. No surprise there; we've all heard about the "outsourcing" of customer service jobs. Didn't bother me that the guy was halfway around the world. He seemed perfectly nice and I thought, if he works for the computer company, he surely knows more about computers than I do. (Though that's not saying much.)

However, we had trouble understanding each other. The phone connection was jerky, and he spoke with a heavy accent, so it sounded like he was talking through a bad case of the hiccups. I don't know how I sounded to him, but clearly he had problems with my Southern accent.

(I grew up in Arkansas. I normally don't have much of an accent, but the South tends to rise again when I let down my guard. Pour a few drinks in me, and I sound just like Bill Clinton.)

Our conversation quickly degenerated into repeated use of the word "What?" Over and over, back and forth, stress steadily building.

Under such pressure, I drawled more and littered my language with "ain't" and "y'all," which stymied him. Frustrated, he talked faster and louder, which made him sound like a taxi driver in rush-hour traffic.

It was a relief when he put me on hold. I tried to let the canned music soothe me, but it seemed loud and foreign, too.

He came back on the line to inform me my warranty had expired. (Heck, I could've told him that.) If I wanted technical support, he said, I'd have to pay $40 and there were no guarantees they could fix anything.

"But you keep the money?" I drawled.

"What?"

"Even if it's still broken, you get paid?"

"What?"

"Never mind," I shouted. I gave him my credit card number and, after more confusion and canned music, he said we could proceed.

But I wouldn't be talking to him anymore. He wasn't Technical Support. He was The Guy Who Takes Your Personal Information and Makes You Pay Up Front.

Back on hold, I told myself it couldn't get any weirder. Then Tech Support came on the line. A woman. She had an even stronger accent. Plus, she spoke Computerese, which meant it was all gibberish to me.

We spent another 20 minutes on the phone, shouting "What?" and speaking gibberish and putting the computer through its paces. When we were done, she confirmed what I had come to fear. It was a hardware problem, and I would need to take the computer to an Authorized Service Center for repair.

In other words, my CD-ROM drive was broken. Which is right back where we started.

I hung up the phone, $40 poorer and no better off. My shoulders ached with tension. My head hurt. My ears were tired.

But, hey, I figure I did my part for International Understanding. And won't the folks in India be surprised when my broken computer arrives in the mail?

It's marked, "Postage Due, y'all."

Today's calls: Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob and Ann

An open letter to the people who formerly had our telephone number:

Dear Bob and Ann,

It's been a year now since we moved into our new house, and we're still getting phone calls for you. Sure, the number of calls has dwindled, but we continue to get one every day or two.

We want you to know you're on the minds of people here. They're still calling. We do our best to be nice to them.

It was strange at first. Day and night, the phone ringing, people asking for "Bob" or "Ann." Some days, we'd get calls from four or five different people, all seeking someone who didn't live at our house. You were getting more calls than we were.

We had to wonder: How long had the phone company kept our new number out of circulation before assigning it to us? (Clearly, the answer was "not long enough.") Who were you, Bob and Ann, and why didn't you alert people that you were getting a new phone number? How did you get so danged popular?

This wasn't your usual "wrong number" problem. If we said "wrong number" and hung up, the phoners would figure they'd misdialed and would call right back. They knew Bob and Ann's number, by golly, had it right there in front of them, and this was it. We learned to say, "Bob and Ann don't have this number anymore."

Most callers responded with the quick "sorry" and disconnect you'd expect. But some felt moved to quiz us. Where had Bob and Ann gone? Did we know a new number for them? They hadn't mentioned anything about moving away . . .

We felt these callers' pain, but we had no answers for them. We tried to find your new number, Bob and Ann. (We knew your last name, of course; all those callers had informed us.) But you weren't listed anywhere.

We told ourselves the problem would resolve itself in time. People would learn your whereabouts, and they'd stop calling us, looking for you. But the calls kept coming.

As the months went by, we started to feel a certain kinship with you, Bob and Ann, even though we've never met. We began to worry about you. How come nobody knew your new number? Were you getting word of all the medical and dental appointments the offices kept calling to confirm? Wasn't it dangerous to miss those appointments? Were your very lives in jeopardy?

We began to speculate on what could've happened to you. People don't just up and disappear, leaving no forwarding address or phone number. Had there been some terrible accident? An act of terrorism?

Was your vanishing part of some bigger secret? Had you fled town to escape a scandal? Were you dodging creditors? Were you in the witness protection program? Had you been kidnapped by a cult? Were you abducted by aliens?

We became so concerned, we even considered alerting the authorities (or at least the tabloid press) to your apparent disappearance. But we decided to write this letter instead.

So, Bob and Ann, if you're out there, let us hear from you. Tell us where you've gone. At the very least, give us your current phone number so we can pass it along to our callers.

You reached out and touched many people here. Your friends are worried about you. And so are we.

So give us a call, Bob and Ann. Please.

You know the number.

(Editor's note: Nearly four years later, and we still regularly get calls for Bob and Ann.)

Hello? Hello? Aw, hell

If you read business news, then you know phone response centers are one of today's growth industries. Every time you turn around, there's another article about a new phone center opening, providing jobs for hundreds of people who'll take customers' calls.

So here's the question: How come, when you call a computer company or a governmental agency or an insurance claims office, there's no one to answer your call right away? Instead, you're subjected to Voicemail Hell, where you must "press 'one'" to get through complicated menus of choices before -- someday -- a human being comes on the line.

My theory long has been that voice mail is simply a stalling tactic, something to keep you busy while the phone workers finish their doughnuts. It doesn't really matter which buttons you push, as long as you're willing to stay on the line. Eventually, some operator will tire of that blinking light and answer your call.

But lately I've found that Voicemail Hell has become truly eternal. If you don't press a button, then the recorded message repeats until you do. And repeats. And repeats.

And heaven help you if you punch the wrong button. Might as well hang up and start over.

Those of us who run home businesses spend large portions of each day in Voice Mail Hell. For those of you who manage to avoid it, here's a sampling of what you're missing (with commentary):

"Thank you for calling Endless Delay Incorporated, a division of Satanic Industries. Your call is important to us--"

(Not important enough for someone to answer the phone.)

"--so please stay on the line."

(Forever.)

"All operators are busy now. Your call will be answered in the order it was received."

(And you're No. 6,429 on the list.)

"Endless Delay Incorporated offers a variety of special services for our call-in customers. Please listen carefully to the following menu."

(Zzzzz…)

"To hear this menu in English, press 'one' now. For Spanish, press 'two.' For Mandarin, press 'three.' For Lithuanian, press 'four'--

"You have pressed 'one' for English. To hear these messages in standard American English, press 'one.' For British English, press 'two.' If you're calling from Alabama, y'all press 'three'--"

"If you know your party's extension, please dial it now."

(If I knew that, I wouldn't be listening to this blankety-blank recording!)

"To speak to someone in Customer Service, press 'one' now. If you have a Technical Support question, press 'two.' If you have a problem with one of our products, press 'three.' If you are responding to a product recall, press 'four.' If you are placing an obscene call, press 'five'…"

(I've forgotten why I was calling. Maybe if I just stay on the line, someone will remind me.)

"You have pressed an invalid number."

(But I didn't press a number!)

"To speak to someone in Customer Service--"

(Here, I'll press 'one.' OK? Happy now?)

"Someone with Customer Service will be with you shortly. Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line."

(Perfect. I can't just hang up now. Too much time has been invested.)

"Your call may be monitored for quality control."

(That's creepy. Who's monitoring it? The FBI? And if this company cared about quality control, wouldn't they just answer the phone in the first place?)

"All operators are busy now."

(Doing what? Having a Tupperware party? If they're not answering the phone, what else have they got to do all day?)

"Your call is important to us."

(So you said.)

"Please stay on the line."

(Aaaargh!)

Finally, finally, a real live human comes on the line, saying, "Customer Service. This is (insert unpronounceable foreign name here). How may I help you today?"

I explain what I need. And the operator says I've reached the wrong department. I need Tech Services, not Customer Service. And the operator offers to transfer me.

Then I'm back in Voicemail Hell, on permanent hold, listening to how important my call is and how everyone's too busy to take it.

I know I've reached the true depths of eternal misery when I find myself longing for Muzak.