I haven't written one of these things for over two months, and I've begun to worry about the reasons for that. I don't know what writer's block is, but I do know that I don't live there. To be sure, this summer has not been full of many pleasures and delights - the weather was beastly hot and humid for a few days - nothing that residents of the American South would be derailed by, but up here in what we call the "northland," we just melted into puddles of goo.
After what seemed like forever, the heat subsided, but the humidity has remained, so the towels hanging on the rail are forever damp, paper curls, the spirit weakens until one senses that
Yes, two of my rooms at home are air-conditioned (it's over a hundred years old - pretty old by our standards - and is heated by radiators, and to the best of my knowledge, it can't be cooled by radiators, so we all suffer and survive.
Islay the Scotty has had a rambunctious summer chasing squirrels, birds, and the occasional cyclist, but the head and humidity knocked her for six, too.
Come to think of it, when it turns really hot, I don't consume alcohol - no beer, none of my whisky drams, none of the dreadfully sounding popular forms of pushing alcohol down the gullets of the young.
Maybe it's that I've been paying too much attention to daily events - the cable channels must be grateful during the slow season when reporters tend to be on holiday for sundry wars, airline industry problems, and confessions from decade old murderers, each of which allows them to terrorize those of us sitting slack-mouthed in front of our television sets.
The rich are doing great, thank you very much; the poor, who will always be with us, increase. We can't figure out an equitable immigration policy or how to provide our citizens with medical insurance, what constitutes appropriate end-of-life care when all hope is gone, or how to invent a car which does not make us dependent on people, none of whom seems to like us at all. And while the globe heats up, it's our country which contributes much to the problem which actively chooses to avoid even thinking about the problem. Even public radio and television now have what they call "enhanced underwriting," or what the rest of us would call commercials
Meanwhile, our politicians diddle while the voters burn, and any list of their accomplishments during this Congress would be appallingly brief. Those in the administration play the terror card at every opportunity, vaguely aware that they are weakening the Constitution but apparently not caring.
William Butler Yeats wrote "The Second Coming" just after World War I. It was taught to me in secondary school, and I have yet to shake it out of my ears, probably because through the decades of my life it has increased in meaning. So here it is:
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
W.B. Yeats, 1920
Normally, summer ends, and we start bunching our muscles because we know that darkness, snow, and ice are just ahead. This time, at least for me, I'm hoping things won't get a hell of a lot worse than they are - they're already bad, and that a few months of cold and dark might offer some kind of perverse respite, enough anyway, to help us slough off this national depressive state, so that we can look to the future with some sense of hope, however moderate.
Thursday, August 24, 2006
Saturday, August 19, 2006
Humidity & Hot Air
I haven't written one of these things for over two months, and I've begun to worry about the reasons for that. I don't know what writer's block is, but I do know that I don't live there. To be sure, this summer has not been full of many pleasures and delights - the weather was beastly hot and humid for a few days - nothing that residents of the American South would be derailed by, but up here in what we call the "northland," we just melted into puddles of goo.
After what seemed like forever, the heat subsided, but the humidity has remained, so the towels hanging on the rail are forever damp, paper curls, the spirit weakens until one senses that
Yes, two of my rooms at home are air-conditioned (it's over a hundred years old - pretty old by our standards - and is heated by radiators, and to the best of my knowledge, it can't be cooled by radiators, so we all suffer and survive.
Islay the Scotty has had a rambunctious summer chasing squirrels, birds, and the occasional cyclist, but the head and humidity knocked her for six, too.
Come to think of it, when it turns really hot, I don't consume alcohol - no beer, none of my whisky drams, none of the dreadfully sounding popular forms of pushing alcohol down the gullets of the young.
Maybe it's that I've been paying too much attention to daily events - the cable channels must be grateful during the slow season when reporters tend to be on holiday for sundry wars, airline industry problems, and confessions from decade old murderers, each of which allows them to terrorize those of us sitting slack-mouthed in front of our television sets.
The rich are doing great, thank you very much; the poor, who will always be with us, increase. We can't figure out an equitable immigration policy or how to provide our citizens with medical insurance, what constitutes appropriate end-of-life care when all hope is gone, or how to invent a car which does not make us dependent on people, none of whom seems to like us at all. And while the globe heats up, it's our country which contributes much to the problem which actively chooses to avoid even thinking about the problem. Even public radio and television now have what they call "enhanced underwriting," or what the rest of us would call commercials
Meanwhile, our politicians diddle while the voters burn, and any list of their accomplishments during this Congress would be appallingly brief. Those in the administration play the terror card at every opportunity, vaguely aware that they are weakening the Constitution but apparently not caring.
William Butler Yeats wrote "The Second Coming" just after World War I. It was taught to me in secondary school, and I have yet to shake it out of my ears, probably because through the decades of my life it has increased in meaning. So here it is:
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
W.B. Yeats, 1920
Normally, summer ends, and we start bunching our muscles because we know that darkness, snow, and ice are just ahead. This time, at least for me, I'm hoping things won't get a hell of a lot worse than they are - they're already bad, and that a few months of cold and dark might offer some kind of perverse respite, enough anyway, to help us slough off this national depressive state, so that we can look to the future with some sense of hope, however moderate.
After what seemed like forever, the heat subsided, but the humidity has remained, so the towels hanging on the rail are forever damp, paper curls, the spirit weakens until one senses that
Yes, two of my rooms at home are air-conditioned (it's over a hundred years old - pretty old by our standards - and is heated by radiators, and to the best of my knowledge, it can't be cooled by radiators, so we all suffer and survive.
Islay the Scotty has had a rambunctious summer chasing squirrels, birds, and the occasional cyclist, but the head and humidity knocked her for six, too.
Come to think of it, when it turns really hot, I don't consume alcohol - no beer, none of my whisky drams, none of the dreadfully sounding popular forms of pushing alcohol down the gullets of the young.
Maybe it's that I've been paying too much attention to daily events - the cable channels must be grateful during the slow season when reporters tend to be on holiday for sundry wars, airline industry problems, and confessions from decade old murderers, each of which allows them to terrorize those of us sitting slack-mouthed in front of our television sets.
The rich are doing great, thank you very much; the poor, who will always be with us, increase. We can't figure out an equitable immigration policy or how to provide our citizens with medical insurance, what constitutes appropriate end-of-life care when all hope is gone, or how to invent a car which does not make us dependent on people, none of whom seems to like us at all. And while the globe heats up, it's our country which contributes much to the problem which actively chooses to avoid even thinking about the problem. Even public radio and television now have what they call "enhanced underwriting," or what the rest of us would call commercials
Meanwhile, our politicians diddle while the voters burn, and any list of their accomplishments during this Congress would be appallingly brief. Those in the administration play the terror card at every opportunity, vaguely aware that they are weakening the Constitution but apparently not caring.
William Butler Yeats wrote "The Second Coming" just after World War I. It was taught to me in secondary school, and I have yet to shake it out of my ears, probably because through the decades of my life it has increased in meaning. So here it is:
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
W.B. Yeats, 1920
Normally, summer ends, and we start bunching our muscles because we know that darkness, snow, and ice are just ahead. This time, at least for me, I'm hoping things won't get a hell of a lot worse than they are - they're already bad, and that a few months of cold and dark might offer some kind of perverse respite, enough anyway, to help us slough off this national depressive state, so that we can look to the future with some sense of hope, however moderate.
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
There's Customer Service & Then There's Customer Service
As a predominantly internet business, my company rarely deals with customers in person. Occasionally, some hardy soul will find his or her way to our office/warehouse on the second floor of what used to be a movie theatre in suburban Saint Paul, Minnesota - that happens so infrequently that we are always surprised - and given the general state of things, not always delighted.
A decade ago, most of our business came in by fax, mail, or phone. When we decided to stop pulverizing trees by publishing catalogs and to head to the internet, we did so with some trepidation.
Yet in spite of all those electrons dancing from hither to yon and all over the globe, we've gotten to know some of our customers from phone conversations and the comments they write about the business in on-line evaluations or letters.
About a year ago [Ed. Note: May, 2005], on the day I was flying to Glasgow, Scotland, on holiday, I checked my email just before heading to the airport. One new order had come in, and it turned out the customers lived in Scotland and not more than twenty miles away from the bed & breakfast I had booked near Loch Lomond for the next night.
This was too good to be true, so I threw caution out of my carry-on, tore back to the office, did the paperwork and put a baton and carrying case in the space left by caution's departure, and then headed to the airport.
When I fly through the night across the Atlantic, my goal is to get in the rental car and drive no more than thirty minutes to my first night's lodging and then collapse. So after a brief nap, I rang up the customer - let's call her Ellen G - and after telling her my name, I said that I had good news and bad news about her baton order.
"The good news is that the baton has shipped. The bad news is that I'm here to deliver it in person."
Ellen tooks this news onboard very evenly. "My hustand and I are leaving in the morning for Lancashire where our daughter has a school performance. Is there any chance you could come up tonight?"
And so I got in the car, remembering to keep to the left, and headed north along the western shore of Loch Lomond in that period the Scos call the gloaming, with a crescent moon eventually lighting the night sky.
I turned away from Loch Lomond and found my way to the village of Arrochar on Loch Long, and shortly thereafter was knocking on the door of a stone cottage, and Ellen herself answered the door. No doubt she was surprised, and I was delighted. I gave her the parcel, and she invited me in for coffee.
Her husband Stuart came along, and we sat down and chatted for a few minutes. At one point she said that while I was enroute to the cottage, she and Stuart checked the picture of me on the company's web-site to make sure the guy at the door was the same person. I guess I couldn't blame them - stranger arrives after dark from the USA with something you've ordered online the day before.
As it turned out, the baton and case were to be a birthday present for Ellen's brother, and she would see him the next day. She told me that she would say to him that she had a remarkable story to tell him - but not until his birthday.
We talked about the internet, its advantages for people living in small villages, how she had come to order from us, what she and her husband did , and about the renovation of their cottage.
And then it was time for me to go. On the drive back, I thought about what a rare experienced this had been - to get an order from over four thousand miles from our office and to be able to deliver it the very next day. That has never happened before, although once or twice orders from London have arrived the day after I've flown there - I've always regretted the missed opportunity.
I don't expect this will ever happen again, and until Ellen and Stuart read this, they'll not know what a treat it was for me to be driving down from the Highlands later in the trip, and as we went past their cottage, I said to Karen, "I have a customer who lives in the stone cottage, just there. Nice people, she and her husband...she's the one who bought a baton for her brother. Hope he'll like it."
It was a great trip to Scotland, one of my favorite places ever, and after swimming in all those electrons all these years at The Nash Company, meeting one of our Scottish customers was one of the highlights of the trip. Maybe, just maybe, lightning - or pixels might strike twice and soon, because I'm heading back to Scotland shortly, and I have this funny feeling....
A decade ago, most of our business came in by fax, mail, or phone. When we decided to stop pulverizing trees by publishing catalogs and to head to the internet, we did so with some trepidation.
Yet in spite of all those electrons dancing from hither to yon and all over the globe, we've gotten to know some of our customers from phone conversations and the comments they write about the business in on-line evaluations or letters.
About a year ago [Ed. Note: May, 2005], on the day I was flying to Glasgow, Scotland, on holiday, I checked my email just before heading to the airport. One new order had come in, and it turned out the customers lived in Scotland and not more than twenty miles away from the bed & breakfast I had booked near Loch Lomond for the next night.
This was too good to be true, so I threw caution out of my carry-on, tore back to the office, did the paperwork and put a baton and carrying case in the space left by caution's departure, and then headed to the airport.
When I fly through the night across the Atlantic, my goal is to get in the rental car and drive no more than thirty minutes to my first night's lodging and then collapse. So after a brief nap, I rang up the customer - let's call her Ellen G - and after telling her my name, I said that I had good news and bad news about her baton order.
"The good news is that the baton has shipped. The bad news is that I'm here to deliver it in person."
Ellen tooks this news onboard very evenly. "My hustand and I are leaving in the morning for Lancashire where our daughter has a school performance. Is there any chance you could come up tonight?"
And so I got in the car, remembering to keep to the left, and headed north along the western shore of Loch Lomond in that period the Scos call the gloaming, with a crescent moon eventually lighting the night sky.
I turned away from Loch Lomond and found my way to the village of Arrochar on Loch Long, and shortly thereafter was knocking on the door of a stone cottage, and Ellen herself answered the door. No doubt she was surprised, and I was delighted. I gave her the parcel, and she invited me in for coffee.
Her husband Stuart came along, and we sat down and chatted for a few minutes. At one point she said that while I was enroute to the cottage, she and Stuart checked the picture of me on the company's web-site to make sure the guy at the door was the same person. I guess I couldn't blame them - stranger arrives after dark from the USA with something you've ordered online the day before.
As it turned out, the baton and case were to be a birthday present for Ellen's brother, and she would see him the next day. She told me that she would say to him that she had a remarkable story to tell him - but not until his birthday.
We talked about the internet, its advantages for people living in small villages, how she had come to order from us, what she and her husband did , and about the renovation of their cottage.
And then it was time for me to go. On the drive back, I thought about what a rare experienced this had been - to get an order from over four thousand miles from our office and to be able to deliver it the very next day. That has never happened before, although once or twice orders from London have arrived the day after I've flown there - I've always regretted the missed opportunity.
I don't expect this will ever happen again, and until Ellen and Stuart read this, they'll not know what a treat it was for me to be driving down from the Highlands later in the trip, and as we went past their cottage, I said to Karen, "I have a customer who lives in the stone cottage, just there. Nice people, she and her husband...she's the one who bought a baton for her brother. Hope he'll like it."
It was a great trip to Scotland, one of my favorite places ever, and after swimming in all those electrons all these years at The Nash Company, meeting one of our Scottish customers was one of the highlights of the trip. Maybe, just maybe, lightning - or pixels might strike twice and soon, because I'm heading back to Scotland shortly, and I have this funny feeling....
Sunday, January 1, 2006
Shades of Gray
t a recent holiday event, one of this column's regular readers reminded me that now that the Christmas screed had gone past its sell-by date, perhaps it was time for a new one. (I promise to do better next time.
Maybe yes, maybe no.
Screeds come to me in a variety of places - in the car, the shower, during a meal, but rarely from someone else, and at least this friend was kind enough not to include several ideas along with his remonstrative observation. Having done this sort of thing on radio for several years in the distant past, I learned quickly that any idea from someone else was, for some reason, not usable - perhaps because it was not my idea or didn't fit whatever sensibility I have developed over the years.
I did think about the apparent drought in the arrival of a new idea, and while listening to the radio one day, I heard that the stretch of gray days - that is, days without sun, had set some sort of record for our teentsy part of the planet, a record untouched for years, and one of those records kept by people who should have gotten around to keeping track of more important things.
Gray days got me thinking about colors. Here in Minnesota the dominant winter color is white, with occasional blots of dark mud - the thing about gray is a recent phenomenon. White or gray or both make some people blue here, even people who describe themselves as red.
Most political red and blue people, just before they start talking loudly in black and white, seem to be suffering from a case of seething purple rage.
For me, I admire those citizens and politicians who appreciate gray, which probably means they are more interested in what politicians can accomplish than the green required to put them in a corporate or issue-oriented pocket.
I haven't brought this up because when politics enters the world of the screed, I turn a pale shade of yellow and try to avoid it...and while typing this, I've tried every way I can to move in another direction.
And haven't found one.
Let's appreciate gray - the calm tonality of compromise, concession, and progress, however, haltingly it may come when the school board, city council, legislature - or even Congress, convene to struggle with issues facing most of us. Too dull for the networks, especially Fox, but suitable for us in our ordinary tax-paying, bill-paying, just trying-to-get-along and keep-our-heads-above water lives.
It's the shouting from the red and blue people who view the world in black and white which has put me into a darkling funk these last several weeks. Nobody can think in the midst of all the yelling.
If you can ignore the cacophony, try to take time to enjoy the golden light of the sun, whenever it appears; whether it shines on your face or in your soul, enjoy it in the silence of your own thinking.
Now that's a good resolution!
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