mini rant on customer service and keeping your life a happier place by cultivating reasonable expectations.

I'm too knackered to look it up, but I saw a splash online this week about a flight attendant who mouthed off to passengers stuck on a tarmac that they could leave the plane if they had balls.

Jose was tacky and out of line to say that, and he must not have been in his right mind to not realize this would make him the focus of the passengers' ire, rather than the mechanical/air traffic/whatever problems their delay was caused by.  He was silly to have said that, but the rabid people demanding to be let off the plane because of it were not doing anything but perpetuating the problem.

Here's a few tips from me in the service industry to the good patrons who benefit from the servitude of myself and others

• if you are of questionable sanity to the degree that you plan major services (such as moving, travel on mass transit or home repairs) on or about a holiday, expect delays.  build extra time into your schedule.  That haggard flight attendant/representative/fill in the blank wants your terms of service to be fulfilled so they can go home to their own lives they are missing out on  because of these delays.  They do not delight in your pain.  They are as much a hostage of the situation as you are.  To that end, berating them does not show your superiority so much as how you reek of cheapness.  Oh, and if you book a flight on the same day you have major services like home repair or moving, you're not as smart as you think you are.

• If you are in a desperate state, yelling and berating really aren't the kind of squeaking wheel that gets the best lube, darling.  I'll bend over backwards to a polite but plaintive "I'm in a real bind here. Can you help me out? What do you suggest?"

• When said representative gives you their best, honest opinion, you would do well to heed it and seriously consider going the way they suggest.  After all, he or she works in this industry year-round and may happen to know what they are talking about.

If, however, you are recalcitrant and insist on haranguing people who have already apologized but advised you they are powerless to change the course of events (most likely set about by your poor choices), you deserve whatever trouble you are experiencing.  You are not ruining that representative's day, though.  More than likely, that representative will sleep a sweet and peaceful night knowing that you receive (or perceive) consistently shoddy service throughout the universe, and you are a frequent flier in the Most Likely To Ingest Unexpected Ingredients in bars and restaurants.

Bon appetit, my dear.  Have fun with that. 

Wiener girl!

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I wanted to git a long little doggie.

Expect a big introduction tomorrow.  :)

Downton Abbey: I'm not addicted. I can quit any time.

I don't watch television-- haven't for years.  I think if I tried to get broadcast tv on my television, I wouldn't be able to.  But Himself picked up the first season of True Blood a few months ago.  Turns out, that was a gateway show.  A couple weeks ago, it was on to Game of Thrones.

All the while, me precious Mum has been nudging me to watch Downton Abbey.  Apparently, Pop is under strict orders not to disturb her on Sunday nights when a new episode is on.  She told me I'd love it.  She was right.

I wish I could say I started with even a modicum of moderation, but I can't.  I think that first night we watched 6 or 7 episodes of True Blood.  Within a week, I'd picked up seasons 2 and 3 at the local video store for $15/season.  We burned through those episodes like a crackwhore with $10,000 on a 3 week bender. 

True Blood is cheap and smarmy.  It's so soap opera it's pathetic, but it's oddly compelling, even through all the baloney.  Game of Thrones, on the other hand, is epic fantasy, and it's wonderful and terrible.  [SPOILER ALERT - DO NOT HIGHLIGHT THE NEXT SENTENCE UNLESS YOU WANT TO READ A SPOILER]  Of course, Sean Bean had to die.  This is my favorite role he's done.  At least he made it all the way through the first season.  I love the strong female characters who are made of ass-kicking win, namely Catelyn and Arya and that chick with the dragons.  Most of the family characters even look believably related to each other. 

So after all of that, I find I'm quite taken with the upper-, middle- and lower-crust antics on Downton Abbey.  The hats are wonderful and I've swooned over more than one pair of shoes.   

Maggie Smith is superb as the Dowager Countess



I've only seen a few episodes at this point, but I'm looking forward to seeing all the rest.

online metronome

My guitar lessons are going well.  I played one piece on Sunday's lesson-- my third-- and my teacher burst into a huge grin.   He's having me work on my positioning by playing chromatic scales to a metronome.

He referred me to a metronome that is online.
THis is mighty handy!  I still think the tactile part of working with a metronome makes them worthwhile to have and use, but having a quick and easy tool online (is there a metronome app?) is as handy as a handle on a pig. 

Is it just me, or is this baffling?

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Sunday, Puppy Sunday: pup tart

No explanation necessary, I think. :)

in which sociology falls all over itself

The following question on a quiz today really stuck in my craw:

Because we tend to use our own culture to judge that of others, ___________ present(s) a challenge to ordinary thinking.

[Correct answer is cultural relativism]

The course is full of enough that seems valid and interesting that you'd be foolish to dismiss it all out of hand, but the question above has one glaring contradiction to me.  The first chapter went to great lengths to say that everyone has a culture and this frame of reference is so ingrained for the individual that the person will be unaware of their own biases in much the same way that a fish has no awareness of the water in which it swims.   If everyone has this cultural relativism, isn't viewing the culture of others through the lens of cultural relativism the very definition of ordinary thinking?

I'm on about my third straight week of solid Mondays at work...

...and Wednesday I felt like complaining for a minute, and then I remembered to be grateful that I don't have a 100 pound scrotum.  Come to that, I'm glad not have a scrotum at all, what with me being a girl and all, but, still, SHEESH!

Now THAT would put a hitch in your git-along.

Suddenly, that crap that was bugging me seems a tiny bit less severe!

I'm a sucker for naso-centric shots of puppehs

Rosie the bloodhound in this video is just a grand girl.  She had me at "row row row arooo!"



I love the way the guy in the video is conversing with her, too.  We people who converse with our dogs must stick together.

This has mostly been a month of Mondays at work, so a grin-inducing puppy video was just what the dr ordered.

I may have enough self control, but I may not.

I am still striving for an A in my class this first summer term, but I must warn you there may be a post when grades are final in which I set afoot a blistering beast of vitriol trailing great swags of obscenity in its wake. 

I looked up the professor on rate my professor.com, and the only two ratings that are not witheringly negative appear to be sock puppets. 

Intercoursing prostitute.  Wait till she gets the review I'm going to give her.  I won't use obscenity(on rate my professor), and it will all be ugly and it will be the absolute truth.  Here, OTOH, I reserve the right to vent 31 new and hideous flavours of spleen in as many vulgar ways as I can muster.

Gird your loins, darlings.  It's going to be ugly.
For now, light blogging as my eyes are still on the prize, but to say I'm mad as hell would be an understatement.

Happy belated Father's Day to my dear, dear Papa

I love you, Dad.

A lovely composer of whom you've likely never heard: Sigfrid Karg-Elert

I first came to know Karg-Elert's compositions when I competed in state UIL competitions in high school.  His devilishly fast and complex solo pieces for flute were superb training grounds and a great way to separate the wheat from the chaff amongst aspiring flautists.  I was extremely competitive at that time and placed well in competitions (always first in my district) and I earned a couple of scholarships which-- in my infinite teenaged wisdom-- I opted not to use, plunging instead into what would be my *aherm* illustrious professional life.

I was privileged to take private flute lessons from an elderly gentleman in Dallas named Ralph Utley. Mr. Utley was a former jazz trumpeter, if I recall correctly, but he also played violin beautifully.  He did not train me in a strictly theory-sense, but worked more on musicality and the directional line of music.   My being a wordy sort of person, he had a brilliant sense for teaching me the conversational aspect of instrumental music.  The front room of his house was where I took lessons, and it was an elegantly appointed little room filled with dozens of antique clocks.  Lessons never ran late. :P  This serene place seemed its own universe beyond which no world of plastic and kitcsh could possibly exist.  I appreciated then the incredible refinement of that experience, and it is a pleasure to remember. 

When I set my chops to enter a competition, the assigned music included 2 Karg-Elert pieces which at first appearance were dense smears of black on a page on which the white background was fighting for its very existence.  And what key is this?  Q-flat?  Jeepers!  What a beast this composer was!  I'm sure I was in the throes of a full-on teenaged freakout, and Mr. Utley sat with me very methodically and asked me what I was looking at.  "A mess."  He made me take a pencil and circle what I thought were the most important notes.  He showed me the melodic lines were usually the upper notes in the phrase and the lower notes were mere underpinnings which supported the musical idea like buttresses.  This dense flurry of notes was a foundation to support the upward spiraling strains.  Mr. Utley was absolutely right: this music was not impossible, but was a wonderful challenge.  

I'm sure I did not play as well as the talented Nina Perlove below, but I wasn't bad. Mom and Dad will recognize this piece:



Today, I looked up Karg-Elert and was surprised and delighted to learn that as a young man, he discovered the harmonium and made compositions for this instrument his primary focus from 1903 onward.  The Wikipedia link above says that after WWI, there was an anti-foreign sentiment in German (go figure!) and Karg-Elert's French inspired stylings fell out of favor.  Pity, that.    He died rather young at 55, but left a lovely catalog of music which I know will continue to confound and inspire musicians for centuries to come.

Anyway, I stumbled upon the below video which is beautifully produced and features a Jonathan Scott performing Karg-Elert's Totentanz. Stunning display of a fine organist operating the controls of the harmonium.  My German is super-rusty, but I think the name, Totentanz - means "death dance?"  I'm seeing plucky, skinny little devilkins prancing about and making mischief, delighting in their grim tasks. A little dark, a little charming.




Fun stuff!