people

You know, generally speaking, I like technology. I really do. I’m not sure how I’d get along without a computer and internet access, but I know I wouldn’t like it very much, at least not until I had gone through a long and potentially painful withdrawal period. However, there are some technologies and gadgets that I’m not too fond of. In particular, I think the whole cellphone “thing” has gotten out of hand. Way out of hand.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with the idea of cellphones. They can be quite handy, and I’ll readily admit it. I have a Tracfone, one of those pay-as-you-go cellphones, which I occasionally put minutes on, particularly when we’re going out of town. However, I’m a bit shocked with just how many people have cellphones, and perhaps more importantly, how much the gadgets are stuck to their ears. It doesn’t seem to matter where I go - the university, out to eat, to the grocery store - some people can’t seem to do anything without a cellphone glued to the side of their head.

I can understand businessmen and women needing to be available at any time; say, CEOs and other “important” folk. I’m sure there are plenty of other professions that require such constant availability, too. But I refuse to believe, for example, that half of my fellow university students are secret millionaires who must monitor their business around the clock, regardless of what they’re doing at the time. They take calls during class, they text message in class. They’re on the phone (or texting) while walking to and from class. They’re on the phone (or, amazingly, texting!) while driving. A few of them have moved up to not even needing to hold their phones; they have those little Bluetooth-powered earphones, so they can take that extremely important phonecall at a moment’s notice. After all, who knows when you’ll need to take a call and not have time to pull the phone out of its holder? And anyway, having a Bluetooth earphone latched onto your ear all day, whether you’re using it or not, holds a message: look at me, please!

To all of that, I have to ask: don’t these people get tired of being available around the clock? Don’t they get to the point where they just want to turn the little handheld slavemaster off, and go do something in peace and quiet? Do they ever think that maybe they should turn the phone off and pay attention to the human beings all around them? I’ll often walk by the university cafeteria and take a peak in, and while it isn’t always the case, quite often I’ve seen a peculiar sight: a cafeteria full of people, most of them sitting by themselves at their table, all of them eating and talking on a cellphone. All together in the same room, but essentially alone besides the person that’s on the other end of the phone. Strange.

As I said, I don’t have a problem with cellphones per se. Rather, I have a bit of a problem with how people use them. At times, it looks as if the people are being used by the cellphones instead of the other way around. In many situations in which face-to-face interactions should take precedence over a (usually relatively unimportant) phonecall, the reality is, the phonecall wins almost everytime. I wrote before about one of my classmates texting throughout a class, and unfortunately, that and taking phonecalls mid-lecture are extremely common. What is it these people are talking about that it can’t wait until a 50 minute class is over?

I suppose that, if you get right down to it, I just wish that people would use common sense with the things, and show a little more respect for other people. Being in mid-conversation with someone and them taking a phonecall to talk about last night’s football game or something similar… well, to me, there’s something wrong with that. There’s something wrong with so many university students thinking it’s perfectly normal to interrupt a class repeatedly so they can take that call about tonight’s forthcoming drinking binge.

For those who are expecting important phonecalls, fine; leave them on, but set them to vibrate, please. For those who aren’t expecting any important phonecalls - their wife isn’t pregnant and due to give birth at any moment, their father isn’t in the hospital, they’re not waiting on that billion dollar contract to be finalized - I wish they’d consider turning the ringing taskmaster off for a while. It wouldn’t hurt them to go through a class without texting or to have a phoneless meal with their spouse. It really wouldn’t. Those of us around them would appreciate it; at least I would, anyway!

Some people need to remember that they own the phones. Somewhere along the line, the relationship seems to have been turned on its head.

There are so many of them, if the activity weren’t so common, I’d be scared. I’m talking about people “following” me on Twitter.

I’ve just logged in and posted a twitter (I can’t bring myself to call them tweets), the first since mid-November. And yet since then, I’ve still had 6 or 7 people I don’t know start following me. What’s the deal? I don’t have a problem with it - if I did, I wouldn’t have a Twitter account. But I don’t understand it, either. On Twitter, I follow people that I know from other networks (mostly 9rules), and I don’t feel a great urge to follow hundreds of random people that I’ve never spoken to or emailed before. Do these people who are following me (and hundreds of other people - I’ve looked!) really care about what I post to Twitter? Or is it just a collection game?

I feel like I’m just an item on their page, as if they’re collecting bottle caps or stamps. I felt the same way on MySpace (which I no longer use) and Facebook (which I log into about once a month). It seems that the collecting of friends and faces is more important than actually communicating and forming relationships with the people.

When you hear or read the expression “educated person,” what comes to mind? Someone who is well read? Someone who is capable of writing tight, meaningful prose? Someone who knows how to change the carburetor in your car?

When I hear the expression “educated person,” I immediately think of someone who has at least a bachelor’s degree (the more degrees, the better); they know what’s going on in the world and they keep abreast of politics; they read literature (whatever that may be); speaking a foreign language or two doesn’t hurt. When I look at my assessment of the expression “educated person” or, even more specifically, “well-educated person,” I now realize just how narrow-minded and arrogant my understanding of the expression is.

Certainly, the above describes a type of an “educated person.” But to say that, if someone doesn’t have a degree or they’re not up-to-speed on world politics, they’re not an educated person, is just being snooty, elitist. A good example of this snooty elitism is how I and many others view mechanics.

Mechanics have a rather dirty job. They get grease all over themselves; they lie on the ground an awful lot, poking around underneath our dirty vehicles. I’d say a huge number of people view everyday mechanics as “uneducated” or “poorly educated.” And sure, if you hold up a college education, being well read, etc. as meaning “well educated,” you’re right - many (but certainly not all) mechanics are “poorly educated.” However, this judgment starts to fall apart when you flip things around. From the mechanic’s point of view, perhaps the college-graduating, literature-reading people are the “uneducated” ones. Why, they’re not quite sure how to change the oil in their cars; they can’t figure out a basic engine problem, one that any mechanic would see within 15 minutes; hell, they don’t even know how much air is supposed to go in the tires of their vehicle!

In other words, I think it would be fair to say that many people look down their noses at mechanics and many other people who do “dirty work.” However, it’s interesting to note that, if every person who did a “dirty” job stopped working for a month, a week - even a mere day - we’d all be in trouble. Garbage would quickly pile up; sewers would overflow due to lack of maintenance; our gas-guzzling vehicles would sit in our driveways (paved excellently by those “uneducated manual laborers”). In short, we’d all be in trouble. That’s putting it politely, by the way - a more appropriate expression would contain a six-letter word beginning with f.

Strictly speaking for myself, I need to stop equating educated with book-smart, which is a decent summation of my previous thinking. You can be illiterate and still be educated in some form or another; you can be extremely literate and not know how to do anything. I like to consider myself “educated,” and I couldn’t begin to tell you how to change the carburetor, in any vehicle - mine included.

Earlier this month, I placed an order for a used book, New French with Ease, from an “Authorized Seller” via Barnes and Noble (bn.com). Little did I know that this order would set into motion a month full of waiting (and waiting, and waiting), and ultimately, the uncovering of a lie.

I ordered the book on the 1st of September. Authorized sellers at BN.com are required to ship the book out within 2 days, and so I received a notification from the seller that it had been shipped on the 3rd. Cool, I think; I should have it in a week or so, if my experiences with Media Mail can be used as a gauge.

Well, 6 or 7 days went by, and I had yet to receive the book. I tossed the fellow an email, double checking that it had indeed been sent, because I knew from my mailing and receiving books through Book Mooch that typically, Media Mail did not take that long. He sent me an email letting me know that he was sure it had been mailed on the 3rd via Media Mail, which could take anywhere from 4 to 14 business days. Okie dokie, I say, and go about my business.

Fast forward quite a few more days - to the 20th of September, in fact, day #14 since shipment. Still no book. I emailed him again, asking if I’d be getting a refund if the book never appeared; oh yes, yes, he said, you’ll get a refund. He asked me to wait until Monday to see whether the book arrived, and if it didn’t show up on Monday, he’d issue my refund. Sounded good to me.

On Monday, there was no book in my mail to be seen, so I tossed the guy an email letting him know that the book hadn’t shown. I also, at that time, placed a new order at amazon.com for the book - seeing as it had been that long, I assumed that the United States Postal Service had swallowed my book. It happens.

Of course, the seller never got back to me Monday; in fact, he didn’t get back to me until Tuesday, after I had emailed him, basically saying, “Um, hey - refund?” Oh, he says, BN.com is down to sellers right now, so I won’t be able to issue  your refund until tomorrow. Err - okay! However, it turns out that our mail on Tuesday was running extremely late, because at around 5PM, the mail arrived - with my book in it.

The odd thing about the package, however, was that it had a date on the postage which the seller had printed from Stamps.com. Indeed, the date was actually quite prominent, and it didn’t say September 3rd. Instead, it said September 13th. In other words, the chap lied to me not once, but twice. He lied the first time when he informed me that the package had been shipped on the 3rd, and then lied about it again when I asked him about it. Indeed, when he told me that the package had indeed shipped on the 3rd, the package actually hadn’t been shipped at all. Grrr!

I emailed the guy and told him to not issue my refund, as I had received the book; I also (in polite terms, mind you) tore his ass for lying to me. All is well that ends well, I suppose, and I did get the book, which is in great condition. But this whole experience makes me wonder - why didn’t the guy just tell the truth? Why didn’t he email me and say, listen, I’m running a bit behind, and I’ll be shipping your book soon? I would have been fine with that. I had a copy of the book from OhioLINK, and so I was in no mad rush to receive it. If he’d told the truth about when it had been shipped, it would have saved me and him a good deal of time. I wouldn’t have been wondering where the book was, and I wouldn’t have been emailing him. Furthermore, if he’d planned on lying to me about it, he could have at least tried to cover up the date a bit. It was a bit stupid, really, to tell me it shipped on the 3rd, and then have in big, bold black letters on the package, September 13th.

As the cherry on top of the cake, he responded to the email I sent him about his lying. His response was… nothing. He said “thanks for your order, glad it got to you safely, have a nice day.” He didn’t even acknowledge what I had said.

Sigh. I really don’t understand people sometimes.

I mentioned in my last entry that I’m working at the university library. All of my shifts begin at 7:45AM, 15 minutes before the library opens to the public, which has led to me being able to observe a few rather odd, widespread behaviors.

I’ll get in and be waiting in the hallway to enter the libary proper at around 7:30. Invariably - and I really do mean invariably - while I’m waiting, someone will come into the hallway. I’ll be standing there with my backpack on top of the book drop off thing, usually reading. They’ll look at me, walk right by me, and try to open one of the doors into the library. Locked! Imagine that. If the library was open, wouldn’t it make more sense for me to be inside, sitting down and reading, rather than standing there?

At this point, they’ll look at the doors in disgust - “how dare the library be closed when I need to get in?” They’ll turn, look at the sign which lists our hours - yes, indeed, we open at 8AM - and then, they’ll check their watches. And then, they’ll jerk on a few more of the doors as if expecting them to be magically unlocked.

Now, I know that watches can be off, but I don’t think these dozens of folks all have watches that are off by a good 15 minutes. I can come up with two explanations: one is that they either A) think that our signs are lying about our hours; the other, B) is that they think that the hours of operation don’t apply to them.

So, for clarification: No, the signs aren’t lying. We really don’t open until 8AM. And no, glaring at the doors and jerking on them won’t make the library open any faster. Alas, the rules apply to you too. That’s right, glare at me. Yes, now turn and leave the building in digust, when you’d only have to wait a few more minutes to get in. It’s dreadful, I know!

Silly people.