sad

Over the past few years, faculty have found something new to complain about. They used to complain bitterly about students who forgot to silence their cell phones in class. And faculty would rail about how unbelievably thoughtless it was for students to do this. Who could IMAGINE such rudeness!?! Then, one day, faculty just quit. The reason, of course, was that they themselves got a cell phone and discovered that it was incredibly easy to forget to silence your cell phone before class. Once it had happened to them — in church or at a movie or in their own f***ing class — they realized that maybe this wasn't the hill to die on.

Lately, it has been about email from students. Faculty love to get on their high horse about email communications from students, railing to one another about how rude students are. And some are now providing students a guide to email communications in their syllabus. Here's a nice one from a writing center: Effective email Communication.

OK. We've all gotten email that was thoughtless or poorly written. But c'mon. They tell students that they need to use a salutation and a closing, like a business letter. Stupid. Email is a memo, not a letter. It has a "To:" line. Now, it's true that if I send a letter to someone I don't know — or if I sent a letter to one person and copy others — a salutation to make clear to whom the letter is written might be helpful. But mostly, it's just ballast. The same with a closing. You should be using a properly structured signature block.

Now, it may be true that showing some additional care -- or stroking the ego of a fragile faculty member -- may score some points with some people. So I'm not saying it's necessarily bad advice to be aware of these expectations and tread carefully when you're not sure. But the tender snowflakes getting pissed off if someone doesn't conform to one is just pathetic. Get over yourselves.

I've had a great time during my Professional Improvement Fellowship working in the All-Campus Makerspace. It's a vibrant community of people working on projects they're passionate about. I enjoyed going in every morning, getting a few hours of work before anyone else arrived, and then breathing in the atmosphere as the place filled up. I've made good progress on my project and learned a huge amount about the topics I'm studying. And it's been fun.

I fear the students didn't quite know what to make of me. I wasn't staff and I wasn't student. I was just kind of there. But they were very welcoming and let me be a peripheral participant. I got to help out, in minor ways, with a dozen or more projects going on in the Makerspace. And they were just starting to discover what a weirdo I am. 

On Wednesday, March 11, 2020, it became clear that the University would be taking steps to enable social distancing and the Makerspace made the decision to close operations to give staff Thursday and Friday before spring break to plan and prepare for the changes.I swung by on Wednesday and took home my box of materials and got set up to begin working on my project from home. I had realized, even as the pandemic was in its earliest phases, that working there was probably risky. It's a campus crossroads with students from all over campus coming through. So I had been expecting to step back at some point. It was just a surprise to have it happen so suddenly.

I haven't made much progress since I started working from home. I assume that once the excitement over the pandemic wears off, it will be easier to focus and get stuff done.  But I'm really going to miss working in the Makerspace and all the new friends I've made there.

It was really only several years ago, in the run-up to the 2016 election, that I came to realize how serious the problem of institutional racism actually was -- even in my very liberal institution. During the last round of strategic planning the campus held a number of listening sessions related to diversity, inclusion, and equity -- and I remember a statement that one black student said about how frustrated she was about being the victim of instutional racism and yet was expected to somehow educate her white faculty and peers about the problems of racism. That struck home with me.

One thing the campus has done over the past couple of years is to institute a series of book groups for faculty, staff, and students to read a common book and then discuss the readings over a period of weeks. The group I participated in this year read the book What If I Say the Wrong Thing by Vernā A. Myers. Our last meeting was today.

Last night, at a dinner that brought all the groups together, I pointed out that a better title for the book might have been, "You WILL Say the Wrong Thing and That's OK." I told them that I had come into the group intending to say very little because I've gotten the message that old, white, cis-het men should shut up and listen. And growing up, as I did, in an environment of racism and misogyny, I found that I have a lot baggage that I learned uncritically and that can come out in surprising and unexpected ways. But that a key message of the book and the book club was that it was OK to say these things as long as you were ready to learn and try to improve. People politely applauded and the organizers seemed pleased with my expression of learning.

But, as I confessed to my group today, this was really a lie. Almost any statement can quickly snowball today into an internet mob and the instution is perfectly ready, for all their statements about diversity and inclusion, to throw you under the bus at the first whiff of controversy. Yesterday, a senior lecturer was pulled from her class for showing a parody video made by previous students in the class as an extra credit assignment. I find the current climate in academia very chilling and I watch what I say pretty carefully. Of course, I've always done that.

Many years ago, my brother Phil and I learned that anything you post online, no matter how seemingly ephemeral, may well persist forever. Some people approached this by trying to avoid leaving any tracks online. I recognized that much of what I did was going to be visble on the internet and so, therefore, I resolved to be relatively open about it: to make sure that anyone who cared to look, could easily find a balanced picture of me, so that no one negative thing would seriously distort the publically-available record. But to do so knowing that any thing you said online might be read by anyone. Forever. That said, it has increasingly become clear that, as mores and societal values change, even uncontroversial statements made in the past can come to appear problematic. I don't see any way to avoid that, though. You just have to acknowledge the past and move on.

I'm glad I participated in the book group anyway: it was an interesting mix of people from very different environments on campus. But it's still a scary time in academia.

This morning my frustration with the help desk at my university boiled over and I (perhaps unwisely) sent this note:

Thank you very much for the prompt and complete response to my concerns. This is perhaps the fourth or fifth time in the past year that I have reported a problem to the help desk and have gotten an inappropriate reply back. I could go back in my email and find them all, but that's not the point I'd like to make.

In the past, Dreamhost had you indicate with a menu option how familiar you were with technology with options from "I have no idea" to "I probably know more about this than you do". (I always picked the option before that.) I don't know if that's why I always got prompt, excellent service from them, but I'd like to imagine that they paid attention to that and used it like a filter to interpret what I was saying.

Similarly, in xkcd, randall munroe dreams of having a "code word" you can use that will automatically transfer your call to a person who knows a minimum of two programming languages.

I'm not sure what the best solution is, but perhaps something like printing out a small note and putting it next to each person's phone that says "Steve Brewer is not a moron." I don't need people to tell me to check whether it's plugged in. If I say they should do something, I'd like them actually check with someone who knows what they're talking about before replying. I don't report stuff that isn't borken.

What I've been doing is what I did this time: I take a deep sigh and I write a polite note to [the director] asking him to fix it. But it's a PITA, wastes my time, wastes his time, and makes everything take longer.

Perhaps, instead of a note with only my name, perhaps we could have a flag that shows up for any of the technical staff. Or something.

I want to use the system. I just want the system to work.

Thanks again for the prompt, courteous follow up to my concerns.

It probably won't help, but I've already been told by someone else that I'm "very pissy" this morning and needed to vent.

I saw this tweet recently, which made me reflect on the question, "What should we feel grateful for?"

1989: mr. burns is a dick.

2019: i would literally weep with relief if my boss offered me this kind of job security. pic.twitter.com/qqwLtRGHFf

— Ross Daniel Bullen (@BullenRoss) March 2, 2019

I've been thinking about this for a while at least in part due to watching Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid. There are several scenes where the characters express, what seems to me like unreasonable levels of gratitude for very small things.

I mean, anything Kanna does is sweet and charming. And it fits in well with my preferred genre of television programming: soothing shows where people are praised for doing inconsequential things. Wouldn't it be nice if we could all be so grateful for small things? But something about it niggles. Why should we have to feel grateful for stuff?

Wouldn't it be better if we didn't need to feel grateful for little things? Wouldn't it be better if the little things were taken care of, so we could free up our gratitude muscles to feel grateful for really big things?

Of course, it's a truism that you don't know what you should feel grateful for (like health) until it's gone. But I want to save up all of my gratitude for when the Mueller report finally comes out.

As someone who lived through the heady days of the Internet revolution, it's been hugely discouraging to see big corporations gradually stuffing the internet genie back into the bottle. Today's edition is that Google wants to kill the URL.

The early internet was amazing because it was something people could aspire to actually understand. There was a time when many people were interested in learning HTML and, as part of that, learning how URLs worked. Nobody does this anymore. Partly, this is because the technology has become so complicated. But a big part of this complexity is actually unnecessary -- and contributes to empowering corporations to create interfaces that conceal the complexity behind a "consumer" experience.

URLs have become a problem because people don't understand how they work. And because corporations have chosen to make really complicated URLs, it can be hard to tell a "real" URL from a fake one cooked up by identity thieves or malware authors.

As it turns out, however, URLs mostly don't have to be complicated. Google *could* instead undertake an effort to punish sites that use complicated URLs (or "link shorteners") and encourage other technology companies to do the same. Instead, however, we see a continuing effort to conceal the complexity and "re-mystify" the technology. It's rather like the annoying "check engine" idiot-light in your car. There's no reason why they couldn't tell you exactly what the light means. But, instead, auto manufacturers have created a system that requires an expensive, proprietary tool to be connected to the car's computer to read-out the code.

Why? More money for them.

Well, I wouldn't have thought my Republic Wireless runaround could get worse, but it did. Although, I thought I followed their documentation pretty carefully to return their phone, they have refused to refund me. In their documentation, they said:

Perform a Factory Reset: This is a very important step. After you've removed all personal info and screen locks from your phone, you should perform a factory reset. Performing a factory reset will erase everything on your phone and put it back to it's original factory state. It will also remove what's called the "Kill Switch," which is a protection feature added by Google. If you send a phone back to us without removing the Kill Switch, we'll be locked out thus rendering the phone useless and you won't receive a refund for your phone.

So I follow the link to perform a factory reset and it says:

Due to the "Kill Switch" regulation that protects consumer's information from lost or stolen phones, if you have a screen lock set up on your phone, you'll need to verify ownership of your phone when performing a factory reset.

I hadn't set a pin on the phone, so I assume it's all good. But no, if you perform a factory reset using the recovery menu, it doesn't remove the "kill switch". It turns out that the following paragraph on the first page says this:

Important Note: When performing a factory reset, you must follow the instructions that take you through the Settings app on your phone (performing a factory reset through the boot menu won't remove the Kill Switch).

But since I had already followed the link to the factory reset directions, I evidently overlooked this point.

So, after days of trying to sort out their confusing and conflicting documentation, Republic Wireless basically scammed me for the full price of the phone. I followed up on the still-open trouble ticket to see if there is anything that can be done to get them to give me my refund and now they won't acknowledge the comments I've posted in the still-open trouble ticket. Just no response whatsoever. (At least not in 48 hours).

[UPDATE] They have reversed this decision and said they are providing a full refund.

The Republic Wireless saga continues. Yesterday, a new customer service rep appeared on the help ticket. But his first statement made it clear he hadn't actually read the thread of previous messages. After I summarized and we went back and forth, to unambiguously state that I was NOT trying to cancel my service and that I DID want to keep my number, he indicated that they would make the switch for me behind the scenes and that, although I might expect a brief interruption of service and have a different number show up for my phone briefly, they could quickly reassociate my number with the phone and get it working again.

Then the first customer service rep jumped back in and, seemed to have not read the intervening messages and reiterated the same thing she'd been saying the previous day. Shortly after noon she said "Thanks for being so patient. In order to better assist you, we will be escalating your ticket for further assistance. Again, we thank you for your continued patient and understanding". That was at 12:40 yesterday afternoon. Since then, crickets.

This morning, nothing appears to have happened, so I followed up in the ticket to say "It appears no action has been taken. Please send me the label to return the phone ASAP."

While I'm waiting for them to sort out the problem, I found Whistleout which has a nice comparison of wireless carriers. I've identified a number of plans that I might consider if Republic Wireless can't sort this issue out promptly. They keep telling me I need to cancel my service: I can do that, if that's what it takes.

I'm still getting the runaround from Republic Wireless that is telling me to cancel my service before they'll let me return the phone I bought. I tweeted at them yesterday and they promptly replied and said they would follow up. But when they did, they just said to follow the same nonsensical directions. They said the customer service rep would follow up with me with more information, but she never did.

When I finally clicked on the link using my phone, it evidently doesn't take you to the page to cancel your service anyway: just a page to create more help tickets. And it warns you not to create another help ticket if you already have one. But I filled one out anyway, since that seemed to be what they were telling me to do. Very frustrating.

This morning, I followed the link on my computer and it takes you to a different page that is where you supposedly cancel your service, but the page doesn't match the directions. There is supposed to be "green check" to confirm that isn't visible on my screen. I've sent them a screenshot.

It's particularly frustrating because it's not like I'm a non-technical person. This shouldn't be this complicated. Furthermore, I understand that a business shouldn't require a customer to do things because their business process is broken. If they needed me to affirm something to the federal government, I could understand that: they aren't able to do that. Or if they needed me to enter some particular piece of information that I have and they don't, that could make sense. But to tell me that I need to click around in their lame web software because they can't make it work any other other way, that's just broken.

While I'm getting the runaround, I'm looking at other carriers. I hate Comcast, but since I'm already a Comcast customer, the Xfinity Mobile service looks like a possibility. Unfortunately, you can't bring your own android device to their service. Still, I am in the market for a new phone… Another possibility is Google Fi. They're selling the Moto X4 for $50 cheaper than Republic Wireless. And my colleague George uses their service.

But maybe Republic Wireless can find some way to make this work without me just canceling my account and switching to another carrier. But I'm starting to lose hope.

We were early adopters of Republic Wireless, a cell carrier that was an innovator in VOIP phones. Their business model was predicated on getting people to use Wifi for most of their connectivity -- an easy proposition for me, as I spent most of my time at home or at work. In fact, I use almost all of my cell data for playing augmented reality games (like Ingress and Pokémon Go). And generally I've been very pleased with the service. Until today.

I recently got a new cell phone, which I purchased through Republic Wireless. But I discovered, when I tried to set it up, that this model of Motorola phone can't do adoptable storage. (Never mind that my cheaper phone a generation older can do it. As can my son's more expensive model.) Republic Wireless has a generous return policy and I've been trying to return the phone.

Rather than activating the new phone with a new sim card, I had simply moved my existing sim card over to the new phone. So I switched it back, turned on my old phone and did a factory wipe of the phone to return.

But now they're telling me I need to "cancel my service" to "deactivate" the "new" phone: "It is the only way we can begin a return process."

I don't want to cancel my service or deactivate my current phone. But if they're making it this complicated, I guess I should be looking for a new carrier as well as a new phone.