Sprint Has Been Trumped

I started this blog many years ago with a complaint about Sprint's customer service. Today, I return to announce that the horribleness of that experience has finally been topped. Behold...the worst customer experience of my life!

Dear FedEx,

This past weekend, I had the single worst customer experience of my life, courtesy of you.

My uncle was overnighting his hockey tickets to me, which were supposed to arrive at my house by 10:30 Saturday morning, no signature required (an important detail). The game was Saturday night. When the tickets had not arrived by 1:30PM, I let him know, and he checked with his assistant Linda, who had sent the tickets.

Linda learned your courier had tried to deliver the tickets at 10:45, but found there was no one home. Now the tickets were at your FedEx location in Culver City, where I had to pick up the tickets by 5PM.

Let’s forget the minor quibble that the tickets were guaranteed to be delivered by 10:30, yet the delivery guy said he was there at 10:45. The first major display of incompetence is that the tickets were to be delivered NO SIGNATURE REQUIRED, and yet he left with the tickets because he could not obtain a signature.

Secondly, and much more egregious...I was home at 10:45. There was no knock at the door, no ring of the doorbell. I am curious as to how your delivery person expected to get the signature for the package when he did not actually attempt to deliver it. I have no plausible explanation for this other than that he lied about ever trying to complete the delivery.

Stunningly, this is all just the prologue for what would be the truly mind-bendingly awfulness of your customer service.

Now, having offered me no alternative other than having to abandon my playoff football watching and drive the half hour from my place to Culver City, I sucked it up and made the trek.

I walked into an empty FedEx store, with your employee standing behind the desk: a perfectly able-bodied young man. I told him a package was supposed to be delivered to me, but it wasn’t, and now it was here. He asked me for the tracking number. Reaching for my phone with Linda’s texts, I realized I had left it in the car. I told him I didn’t have it, but gave him my ID.

This was no good, he said. “It’s all about the tracking number,” he informed me.

Okay, fine. I ran back to my car, grabbed my phone, and hustled back. Except when I re-read Linda’s text, it said she was out of the office (since it was Saturday) and she didn’t have the tracking number, but did have my uncle’s account number, and that should suffice. I relayed this to the employee.

Nope, he said. He needed the tracking number. Otherwise, there was simply no way to locate the package. “Come on,” I said. “I don’t have the tracking number. There must be some sort of system here.”

He asked me my name again, confirmed the package was supposed to be delivered to my house that morning, and played around on his computer for a minute. Nothing, he said, explaining, “Without the tracking number, I don’t know if it’s a package, an envelope, or what.”

“Well, it’s an envelope,” I told him, getting frustrated. “You could have just asked me that.”

He told me to wait while he went and looked in the back. Then he disappeared for somewhere between 5-10 minutes. In that time, another customer came in. Eventually he came back empty handed. “I can’t find it,” he said.

“Alright fine, hang on. I’ll try and get the tracking number. Help her,” I said, motioning to the woman behind me. I texted Linda that the guy was telling me he needed the tracking number. After a couple texts back and forth, Linda called me, understandably annoyed.

“I can’t believe this is how I’m spending my Saturday,” she said. “I don’t have the tracking number. I called that location, I spoke to a supervisor, he assured me that if you come in and have your ID, they’ll give you the tickets. They are so stupid!”

“Agreed,” I said, as I turned and noticed there was suddenly now a line of about eight people building up behind the woman being “helped.” And she was turning away from the counter now, so I couldn’t let myself fall into line oblivion. “Linda I gotta go,” I said, stepping back up to the desk.

“Look man,” I said, very frustrated now. “She said she called and spoke to a supervisor, he told her all I needed was my ID. There is an envelope for me here somewhere, and I need to get it!”

He looked at me, surprised. “Oh, that was you?” He turned around, picked up an envelope sitting on a counter, and handed it to me.

I was stunned. “What...what was the magic word?” I asked.

“You didn’t tell me you spoke to someone on the phone.”

I was even more stunned. “What difference does that make? I gave you my ID! Why didn’t you just look to see if that was my package?!”

“You had to tell me you spoke to a supervisor.”

Aware there were witnesses present, I chose not to pursue this line of madness any further. “I don’t understand what’s happening,” I said. Then I left.

Hopefully, I don’t have to explain too much why this experience drove me to document it for you. You get it, right? You see how this man you employ was going to let me just walk out of there without the package I drove a half hour to retrieve, after a different person you employ screwed up by not delivering it in the first place?

You understand the lunacy of putting a package aside to give to a customer, then not so much as checking the ID of someone coming in requesting that exact package to see if it’s a match? The utter insanity of explaining matter-of-factly, without apology, as if he is making any sort of sense whatsoever, that in order to complete this transaction, all I had to do was tell him I had spoken to someone on the phone? As if that’s some sort of universally understood rule of shipping?

I hope you can appreciate how truly unhelpful this man was, working at your Culver City, CA location at 3:30PM on Saturday, January 14, 2017. If I had volunteered to do his job for him – having exactly zero experience as a FedEx employee – and look for the package myself...I would have gone behind the desk, glanced at the first thing I saw, and found the envelope addressed to me in within five seconds.

Trump’s not even president yet, but I imagine this is the type of experience we’re in store for. It goes without saying I’ll be using UPS in the future.

A Liberal Confession

This has been weighing on me for some time now, and I can’t take it anymore. I feel a need to unburden myself, even if it costs me the respect of my friends and loved ones. So here goes…

I have been watching a lot of Fox News lately.

I simply can’t help myself. It’s pure entertainment. Yes, I feel gross afterwards. Of course, I question what I’m doing with my life. But for those 1-2 hours a night now, when I’m locked in watching Bill O’Reilly interview Chris Christie about Donald Trump, I forget all of that. I’m blissed out, lost deep in a Foxhole, my cones and rods buzzing with “ALERT” stimuli and patriotic hysteria.

But in addition to causing some soul-searching, watching Fox News has presented me with another dilemma - who do I hate most in the world: Sean Hannity or Ted Cruz?

I’m faced with this perplexing choice every time Hannity interviews Cruz (so like, three times a week), and I have to see both of their smug faces, side by side, at the same time in HD on my television. The way my blood pressure spikes from seeing them simultaneously gives me a pleasant little buzz that can take a good twenty minutes to come down from. And after giving this matter a lot of thought, I feel I can make a definitive call…

I hate Sean Hannity the most of anybody in the world.

Now, this wasn’t easy. I don’t take this decision lightly. Both men are extremely hatable. It’s like trying to pick a winner in a fight to the death between Jack Bauer and Jason Borne: there’s no “right” answer. So let me attempt to explain how I arrived at this decision - as much for my own sake as for anybody else’s.

Ted Cruz definitely has the more sinister, punchable face. It incites a basic, instinctive, surface level reaction of hatred. I also detest his shrill voice, his transparent phoniness, and 100% of everything he stands for, as a politician and a human being. So Ted Cruz is, seemingly, the front runner for the mantle of my most hated person.

But you have to go beyond that, I told myself. Look deeper. Somehow, some way, Sean Hannity was scraping the insides of my skull in a more insidious way. It’s not as obvious as Ted Cruz. It was tough to pinpoint, but I think I finally determined what it is.

You see, Sean Hannity is in kind of rarified air in that he has a major media platform, is undeniably arrogant and smug…and yet he is also very, very stupid. Say what you will about O’Reilly or Megyn Kelly; at least they’re intelligent people. Hannity is not. He repeats the simplest of talking points ad nauseam, using them to formulate an incredibly simplistic worldview, then uses his show to suck up to all those who agree with him, and condescend to all those who do not. 

It’s not even that I disagree with everything he says. That’s obvious, and not a reason to hate anybody. It’s the sheer laziness in his thought process, the lack of intellectual analysis that goes into any and everything he “reports” on. You couple that with his smug assuredness that he just knows he’s right about everything, put it on television, and you have a formula for the most off-putting possible personality I can fathom. I would rather go out to dinner with Bashar al-Assad, or Justin Bieber, or the homeless guy who hordes Russian porn magazines outside my building, than Sean Hannity. I would rather go to dinner…with Ted Cruz.

Congratulations, Sean Hannity. You are the absolute best at being the absolute worst.

Rivers Overflowing

So last night I'm watching the Chargers-Colts game on Monday Night Football, and announcer Mike Tirico jovially mentions that Chargers quarterback Philip Rivers and his wife are expecting their seventh child any day now. He relayed this tidbit this like it was delightful news, as if fathering a child is an accomplishment akin to winning a Super Bowl.*

Well, newsflash, Tirico: it ain't. Not only is repeatedly knocking up your wife a move simpler than a screen pass, it's also selfish and irresponsible. 

We human beings live together in what's called a "society." This society exists within the finite boundaries of planet Earth (until we figure out how to colonize the moon and other planets, that is). Earth has a certain amount of resources we already consume at an alarming pace. In addition, the one ecosystem we have is being precariously pushed into the red zone by all of this consuming we do.

Our planet's population right now is 7.1 billion people, and rising rapidly. If you've tried to get anywhere in Los Angeles between the hours of 3-7PM in the last 25 years, you don't need me to tell you that there are too many goddamn humans in the world.

So forgive me if I don't gush over egomaniacs like Philip Rivers making the decision to contribute seven (and counting) of their own progeny to the population. Last year, Rivers told the National Catholic Register, "It's funny because sometimes when I'm out with just three of them, people ask if they're all mine, as if three is an enormous family." Yes, imagine that. You leave half your kids at home, and the public is still surprised at the rate you reproduce. Hilarious.


What if every couple decided to have seven kids? What would public schools look like? Parks and beaches? In-N-Out drive-thru lines? People shouldn't be allowed to have seven children, let alone celebrated for it. Aside from what it says about your own self-image that you feel it necessary to introduce that many versions of yourself into the world, it is beyond inconsiderate to the other members of this society we all exist in. Without selfless do-gooders like myself, doing my part to balance things out by resisting my powerful impulses to procreate, we'd breed ourselves right into oblivion in just a couple generations. 

Oh by the way, Rivers and his wife are die-hard Catholics and high-school sweethearts who purportedly abstained from having sex till marriage. Thanks again, religion!

*Rivers has never accomplished this.

A Literal Obituary

As we gird ourselves for another Mid-East war, few of us realize that another war was recently lost. It was a war of words, a war on a word, a word I tried to do my part to protect. But alas, the war is lost. The word has died.

Google's definition for the word "literally" has been updated to include this secondary interpretation:

used for emphasis or to express strong feeling while not being literally true.

To simplify, "literally" now means "not literally."

Following suit, the Miriam-Webster and Cambridge dictionaries updated their definitions similarly. I find this very sad, and somewhat shameful. I understand the argument that in many cases, dictionaries simply reflect the language of the day. Words come in and out of common usage; that's how new definitions of, say, "tweet" or "douchebag" end up making it into our trusty word-defining tomes.

But this strikes me as a capitulation. People have been using the word "literally" incorrectly, so incorrectly as to be the opposite of what it actually means. And because of that pervasive misuse, the standard bearers of language legitimacy have kowtowed and deemed its incorrect use is now correct. It's as if the Chicago police department said "You know what, fuck it. Murder's legal now."

If this is how we're going to treat language, then "alright" should officially be a correct spelling of "all right." Most people probably think it is, anyway. There should be no official distinction between "your" and "you're," or "its" and "it's." Soon, words will cease to have any true meaning, and we'll be doomed with deadly misunderstandings.

It may seem like a small issue, but this sets a dangerous precedent: if society does things badly long enough, rather than correct the bad behavior, just label it "good" instead.

I'm going to go literally blow off some steam. And there's no telling what I actually mean by that.

Spastic Colin

Football season is almost upon us. And while this time of year always brings fresh hope and excitement, this time around, I have to admit, I'm a little bit worried.

Why? Is it because expectations for my beloved 49ers are sky-high, with Vegas lines and ESPN pundits predicting they'll win the Super Bowl after coming oh-so-close last year? Yeah, that's part of it. But it really has more to do with this:

This is what I opened my mailbox to discover the other day. (Yeah, I get GQ. Deal with it.) By now it's no secret that Colin Kaepernick, our studly young quarterback, whom many view as the second coming of Joe Montana, likes to show off his abs n' tats. After all, this shot is downright business casual compared to the spread he did a month earlier in ESPN The Magazine's "Body Issue":

Talk about overexposure. Look, I'll admit, I think Kaepernick is awesome. I'm a full-blown Kaepernickerbocker after what he did for the Niners last year. But come on, Kap. There's something to be said for humility. After all, you did lose the Super Bowl last year. You don't see Joe Flacco engaging in this sort of douchebaggery.

In fact, you don't see any other great quarterbacks going this out of their way to put their bodies on display - not Brady, not Peyton, not Brees, not Rodgers. The only one that comes to mind is this guy:

See why I'm worried now?

WTF, WWF?!?

Life is all about the simple pleasures. Those little distractions that ground us, taking our minds off the stressful hustle and bustle of a complicated world.

For me, one such small joy is playing Words With Friends, the iPhone's version of Scrabble. I play WWF every day. Without fail. At any given moment, I have between six and ten different games going on with various "friends" ("friends" being in quotes because some of these people are merely Facebook friends and not people I actually communicate with outside of Words With Friends). Often I've mused about the possibility that I may conceivably play WWF every day for the rest of my life, and if I could envision a situation in which this would not be the case. Barring a nuclear holocaust that would force me underground, I can't think of one.

But something terrible has happened. Something rotten, impure and vile. WWF has become tainted, so much so that I'm considering walking away from the game I love.

Because this week, WWF introduced something called "Vision Power-Up!" This is a feature that, for 99 cents, will assess your letters and suggest three words for you to play.

In other words: cheating.

WWF has been creeping towards this taint for awhile now. It has other pay features, such as "Tile Pile," which will tell you which letters are still available, or "Word-O-Meter," which will assess how strong your potential word is relative to what other possibilities exist. But never before has the game offered to just go ahead and play itself for you, allowing you to sit back and spend your way to victory without having to use any of your own precious brainpower.

"Vision Power-Up!" goes against everything WWF - nay, competition -  is about. If players start using this feature regularly, what's the point of even playing? Why not you and I start a game, then just hand it over to two IBM supercomputers to complete it while we go get drunk and watch Here Comes Honey Boo Boo?

We already have to deal with baseball players routinely getting suspended for using performance-enhancing drugs. But at least Bud Selig isn't walking into major league clubhouses, peddling steroids for 99 cents a pop. Please, WWF, I urge you: do away with this ugly impropriety...or risk destroying yourself, becoming just another imperfection in an imperfect world.

The Los Angeles Giants Fan

The San Francisco Saloon is a lonely place these days. Far from the bastion of frenzy it became last summer, when the Giants were on their way to winning their second World Series in three seasons, this August the West Los Angeles bar attracts only the most devoted of fans, as their last place team plays for little more than pride.

One such fan is Kevin Pavlik, an LA-based attorney who hails from Northern California. Pavlik, 33, stopped in on a recent Saturday for a couple beers and to catch some of the Giants-Orioles game – a game which his team is, predictably, losing. I ask him how he is digesting this disaster of a season, especially living in Los Angeles, while the first-place Dodgers play some of the best baseball in modern history.

“It creates kind of an empty feeling,” Pavlik says. “Especially with the stretch where, it kind of occurred during a time of year when there’s no other sports...and Dodger fans aren’t quiet, so you have to deal with all this. And I kind of have an empty feeling, because I have nothing to respond with.”

Pavlik still watches the Giants pretty consistently, sometimes even streaming games on his phone via MLB.tv. He cited injuries, of course, as contributing to their downfall. But he also suggests that their very success of playing deep into last postseason is also a factor. “The problem with our pitchers is that they’ve pitched so deep into what should have been the off-season, they didn’t get their usual rest,” he says.

Kevin is quick to cherish what the Giants have accomplished in recent years; the magic has not faded. “I’m grateful that I got to see two World Series championships in the last three years,” he says. “It’s easy, especially after last year, to start going into seasons with the expectation that you’re gonna win. I kind of started sympathizing with Yankee fans, who must be disappointed every year, because they can’t get excited over a playoff run. At the same time, my dad was a (Giants) fan all his life and didn’t see a championship until he was 60.”

Still, isn’t it a bitter pill to swallow, living in Dodgertown during this disaster of a season? Pavlik waves his hand, dismissing the sincerity of the baseball fever that has swelled around him. “LA fans love a winner, so it’s not even the Dodger fans that you sort of knew about,” he says. “Now they come out of the woodwork. You see Dodger hats everywhere, and people are really excited about the team who wouldn’t have been saying anything the last couple years. But I guess that’s to be expected.”

I ask Pavlik if he disdains Dodger fans, even hates them? There has been a lot of bad blood between the teams’ faithful in recent years, even boiling over into violence. “I wouldn’t say I hate them," he muses. Dodger Stadium "is certainly an interesting place to watch a game, and they certainly have a lot of aggressive and intimidating fans. But in the last couple years I’ve seen a lot of the same type of fans up at AT&T (Park). I think it’s everywhere. People go to games and think they can just yell out whatever they want. It just seems kind of unnecessary.”

When asked about the Dodgers’ recent signing of former Giants closer Brian Wilson, Pavlik is similarly objective and understanding. “It doesn’t feel like a defection,” he says. “It feels like a guy who’s kind of struggling to keep playing and had to find a home somewhere.” And even if he did sign with LA in part to spite San Francisco for not picking up his contract following Tommy John surgery, “every time he looks at his World Series rings, he has to look at the Giants emblem.”

Does Kevin hope Wilson fails as a member of the Dodgers? “I hope the Dodgers fail,” he says definitively. “So if he has to fail for that to happen, then yeah, I guess so. But I wouldn’t mind seeing him pitch well and still have them lose, and then maybe see him get an opportunity to go somewhere else. But I certainly don’t want to see him close out a World Series in a Dodger uniform.”

When I ask Pavlik if the Giants’ season has him looking all the more forward to football season, he smiles broadly. “So excited about the 49ers. That’s the thing: in past years, when the 49ers were terrible, the Giants had a couple years where they’d pick up the slack, make the playoffs, lengthen the season and it took some of the sting off football season starting. And now I guess it’s sort of the opposite, where football will take some of the sting off the Giants’ season. So it’s pretty nice to have two teams like that, where every year we get to watch legitimate contenders.”

Overall, Pavlik isn’t bitter about how this season is gone. He’s ready to turn the page, and is optimistic about next year. “When you look at the Giants, even when they’re losing, you still got guys like (Brandon) Crawford, who’s learning how to hit. (Brandon) Belt’s starting to pick things up. As opposed to some of the teams the Giants fielded when (Barry) Bonds was around, and if you were losing that year, watching a team that was built for one year, it was frustrating.

“But now, you’re losing watching a team that’s not just built for this year. They weren’t rebuilding, but at the same time, next year could be a perfectly good year without having to make too many changes because we have some good young guys. We’ve just been unlucky. They’re not untalented, they’re just having a bad year.”

Above all else, Pavlik remains a loyal Giants fan, even in the buzzing hornets nest that is LA. “It sucks being in last place, especially with the Dodgers winning, living in Dodgertown,” he concedes. “But I’d still rather have our team than the Dodgers.”