Seaweed - Philosopher

Philosophy:  A discipline that seeks truth through reasoning rather than empiricism.

When people ask me what I "do" I tell them that I'm a philosopher.  It quashes any further questions.  It chills the interest.

I like the fact that when I'm doing what I believe to be god's will that I feel fairly calm, even when I'm in the midst of a lot of activity.  I try to start my day with a little chat with god, along the lines of "this is what I'm going to be doing today or trying to do - if you have something else in mind maybe you can let me know" and then I get cracking.  If I don't hit any brick walls whilst traveling at a high rate of speed, then I figure I'm doing god's will.  Simple as that.

SuperK's morning reading was about change and how intimidating it can be, that sometimes we stay someplace uncomfortable or even harmful because the change is too daunting.  I know that I usually think that change is going to be for the worse.  This after 25+ years of trying this way of life - I still think that god is going to drop me on my head just for the hell of it, ignoring the fact that god hasn't dropped me on my head yet.  Not once.

If you've never been to a bad meeting you've not been to enough meetings.  I heard a guy last night say this: "If someone asks me to sponsor them I tell them call me in 30 days.  If they're still sober, I say call me in another 30 days.  If I get that call I tell them 30 days more.  At that point I'll start working with them.  I'm too  busy and new people are too frustrating."

I'm glad I wasn't asked to share my opinion on that bullshit.

Philosopher

Uncertainty:  Doubt; the condition of being without conviction; ambiguous.

A little more philosophy today, unfortunately.  I enjoy writing about my car troubles and rampaging drunks and other minor occurrences more than my free-wheeling, wide-ranging, not particularly perceptive or clever or wise observations on life and spirituality, but really, what I'm trying to accomplish here is to work this shit out on electronic paper, instead of in my head, which is a dark and forbidding place.  I do have a great story about falling into the tub in the middle of the night but that'll have to wait.  And I got yelled out on the street yesterday for a parking job that some busy-body found objectionable, and I lost my temper.  That's a pretty good story, too.  It's funny when I act like an ass.

Uncertainty is a part of life that I don't enjoy much, being a control freak and a power driver and a guy who knows exactly how everything should work out for everybody and everything.  Nonetheless, it can be disconcerting.  Not knowing the exactly how I'm going to be denied things that I want or when undetermined terrible afflictions will visit me can be disconcerting.  It's like standing in the dark, waiting for some big dude to punch me in the gut; it's the waiting that's worse than the punch.

There.  That wasn't so bad.

Walking Through a Region of Shrubs

Chaparral:  A region of shrubs, typically dry in the summer and rainy in the winter.

I'm OK with failing today.  I'm not even all that sure what that means anymore.  I'm not afraid to give things a whirl and see what happens.  I can't even begin to figure out where I'll be in a year or two or five, somewhere down the road, assuming I'll even be able to find the road.  I may have driven over the curb and be sitting in the chaparral.  Chaparral, by the way, is my new favorite word.  I did a lot of hiking in the chaparral in Vacation City.  There were rattlesnakes in there.  I kept my distance.

I want to feel like I gave everything a shot.  I  don't want to wonder What If.  The uncertainty can be awful when the outcome is uncertain but the payoff is wonderful.  One of my most memorable memories is stepping off the train in Venice, Italy, with the city splayed out in front of me.  I had seen pictures of Venice, of course, but the pictures were inadequate to the scene.  It was so beautiful and so exotic and so stimulating that my knees buckled.  I had to sit down on the steps of the train station for a minute to breathe deeply and collect myself.  This visit to Italy was my first foreign trip and the novelty of it - not speaking the language, getting on a Vaporetto,  sharing a train compartment with real live Italians - was very stressful.  I know now that walking through that fear made the vista all that more beautiful.

Walking through the chaparral.

Thanks for Your Note!!!

So I did want to give an official tip of the hat to Mitch . . . er, Martin for the great job he did for me.  I'm quick to complain, loath to praise.  The following is the note I sent to Mitch's . . . er, Martin's supervisor.  I made sure I had his email before I left.  I also tipped Hector $5 and I tipped the guy who put the tire on the next day - Raul, I believe, also $5.  I could have tipped them more but their respective reactions lead me to believe that they don't get tipped very often.

"Dear Mr. Big Shot District Manager:

I wanted to send a note along to express my sincere appreciation that Martin is one of your employees.  My wife and I were traveling on a Sunday when I blew a run-flat tire on my Very Expensive Car.  The totally unhelpful Very Expensive Car Dealer sent me to your store where I got a chance to see how a real service manager takes care of his customers.  Martin didn't have the unusual tire size in stock - offering to have it at his place and installed first thing in the morning - but he did take the time to inspect the tire with one of his mechanics, Hector.  Because the tire was so damaged they brought a couple of similar tires out to try to find a temporary solution before finally settling on one that was slightly smaller.  This allowed us to get to a hotel a few miles away safely.

 

First of all, if I received this service just passing through I can only imagine how well your regular customers are being treated.  This man is going to build your business.  And I was just as impressed with the interaction between the front office guy and the mechanic - there was no "you're just the manager" or "you're just the mechanic" dynamic in play.  This kind of teamwork is going to make for happy employees.  Between the two of them they came up with the solution.

 

Thanks again for a tremendous job  by tremendous employees.

 

Gratefully,

Little Stevie Seaweed"

I received a reply that evening:

"Dear Mr. Seaweed:

Thanks so much for the feedback !!! I will make sure Martin is commended for his customer service!!! It's not often we get to hear when we do something right!!! I appreciate you taking the time and thank you for the business. Mr. Big Shot District Manager" I don't know about the exclamation points.  Am I to assume that he was yelling these things at me.  He could have spoken in a normal voice and I would have gotten the same message. Just trying to be of service.

The Very Expensive Dealership

You think I'm done whining about my Very Expensive Car problems?  Think again, Kemosabe.  Actually, it's not that expensive of a car - a Porsche or a Range Rover or a Ferrari is an expensive car.  My car falls in the category of Not That Expensive Until Something Needs to Be Fixed.  THEN it's expensive.

Anyway, we drove into the nearest town and found The Very Expensive Car Dealership.  You can tell you're going to be treated poorly and overcharged when the waiting area has Starbucks coffee, a big flatscreen TV, and some hipster furniture.  The mechanics - who charge about as much as a good neurosurgeon - do the same kinds of things as the mechanics at Bob's Car Repair, just without the good coffee and comfy seats.

This being Sunday there was no one in the showroom except for a lot of sales people standing around.   They were not helpful.  They weren't aggressively antagonistic - they didn't taunt me or do a little touchdown dance or break into a home run trot -- but they were definitely not helpful, either.  No one offered to look at my damaged run-flat tire, suggest a hotel in the area, or do anything beyond a general milling about.  They directed me to the sales manager, comfortably ensconced behind her desk.  I gave it a whirl.

"Can you set me up with an appointment first thing in the morning?" I asked, in a reasonable tone.
"The sales department and the service department use totally different computer systems," she said.
"That sounds stupid," I replied.  "Any way I can get a loaner car?"  
"We don't have access to loaner cars," she said.
"There's no way I could get a car to get to a hotel and back in the morning?"  I persisted.
"We . . . don't . . . have access to ANY cars," she said.
"I'm not sure the tire is in good enough shape to get to the hotel," I said.  "Could one of the salespeople take a look at it?"
"No," she said.  "They're just salespeople."  
"And we have the dumb ones today," she added.

I wasn't trying to be a dick.  I was a guy from out of town with no place to stay and no car to get there, talking to someone who sold and fixed cars like mine and who lived in the town in which I was stranded.  I was trying to give her an opportunity - any opportunity - to be of service, or to do her fucking job, neither of which she was doing.

She finally did something helpful.  She called a tire company nearby.  Martin.  She spoke to Martin.  That tire cost me $275.  She told me to go somewhere else and get it fixed.  I was a customer in her showroom and she got rid of me, without ever even getting up from her very expensive office chair.

Should I send a note to the general manager of that store?  I bet he wouldn't be pleased to hear about this incident.

I'm mulling it over.

Mitch er Martin

When we pulled off the highway with our ailing car - a fact that annoyed me no end because why should I have problems?  The Great Seaweed?  With car problems?  Not fair - something that should happen to lesser mortals, to people who are not as important as me.  That makes sense.  Problems for me is not a concept I'm comfortable with.

As a practitioner of gratitude - a poor student and mostly an unwilling one but a student, anyway; it's like high school where you have to go even if you don't want to  - I have taken the time to reflect on my years of work travel in the snowy upper Midwest.  I drove tens of thousands of miles in winter weather with never a car problem.  That was a blessing.  Losing a day off when I've got no real schedule to keep is not a problem.

Mark at the Shell station gave us a list of local businesses.  I called a few with no luck, maintaining my composure.  Then I had the bright idea of calling the 1-800-Why-The-Hell-Are-You-Bothering-Me? - customer service line of The Very Expensive Car Company.  They offered to send a tow truck over - for a $120 service charge - and deliver my car to the Very Expensive Car Dealer.

"But they're closed right?" I said, perplexed.  "They're not open, right?"
"Yes," she said.
"I don't understand," I said.  "What would I do that for?  I have a cat and a car full of stuff because I'm traveling.  What would I do at the closed car dealer?"
"I see," she said.
I wanted to say "I don't think you do because you wouldn't have made such a stupid suggestion" but Superk was listening and I didn't want to make any amends.  I was having a bad day as it was.  Instead I asked why I would tow a car with run-flat tires.  I'm not a car-guy but I understood "run-flat" to mean you can run them when they're flat.
"Sir, sometimes Pep Boys carries these tires.  Would you like me to connect you to Pep Boys?"
"Sure," I said.
"In fact, why don't I call them and see if they have the tire in stock.  Would that be helpful?"
"Yes," I said.

She went away for a while.  
"Should I just hang up?" I mouthed to SuperK.  She gets disgusted when I hang up on people and makes me call back and apologize.  Secretly, I think she gets a vicarious thrill when I do it.  She kind of eggs me on because she never hangs up on people, pretending she's better than me, which she is so it's no big stretch.

This went on for a while in a similar vein before I terminated the call. I wasn't getting anywhere and I really did want to get my problem solved.   I love it when service people who have provided no useful service conclude the call with: "Is there anything else I can do for you today?"
I'm always tempted to say: "That sentence structure suggests that you've done something useful for me already.  Which you have not."

Mitch

My lovely wife pointed out that the guy who I'll never, ever forget - ever - was named Martin, not Mitch.

Awright, then.