The return of Mrs. Davila

Mrs. Davila is one popular lady. I--or rather, she--got another call the other day:

fundraiser woman: Hello, this is so-and-so from such-and-such charity. May I speak to Mrs. Davila, please?

me: I'm sorry, there's no one here by that name.

FW: Oh, my apologies, she must have had your number previously.

me: That's okay. Have a nice--

FW: Wait, while I have you on the phone, are you the lady of the house?

me: I am.

FW: As I said, I'm so-and-so from such-and-such charity, and we're asking for your support--

me: I'm sorry, I don't make donations over the phone. Please take my number, and Mrs. Davila, off your list. Bye.

Smooooth.

On peer review and cell phones

My cell phone and I have a love-hate relationship. I do not care for bells and whistles like call waiting, text messaging, or camera functions; and I always have a devil of a time explaining myself to the guys at the Verizon store. I also do not care for cell phones' collective implication of round-the-clock availability of their owners. But I like being able to talk to certain people for free, as well as to call Mrs. Gerbil to check on the little gerb while I'm off on my errands.

But alas, my cell phone's battery is dying a slow, horrible death. It demands to be charged at least once a day, regardless of whether I have been using the phone; and the phone now starts beeping its "feed me!" beep 30 minutes into a conversation. Yet if I hang up but don't plug it in, it will miraculously find a partial charge after only a few minutes' rest.

(Perhaps my trusty rusty phone is jealous of the baby--I like to talk on the phone while nursing.)

I don't really want to get a new battery. I have no idea whether I can even get a replacement battery for my no-frills phone; and besides, Verizon will give me a new phone, or at least a credit toward a new phone, in September. So I'm content to put up with its constant demands for attention for a few more months. I just wish that I'd known ahead of time that the battery would begin sucking this much less than 18 months into my relationship with this phone. Isn't that what all this R&D money is for?

There has been a lot of kerfuffle in the media and the blogosphere lately about a certain Harvard researcher's failure to disclose some of the money he's received from industry sources. This researcher, whose name begins with a "B" and ends with an "iederman," has been churning out scientifically solid work on pediatric bipolar disorder for a long, long time. (His CV probably requires at least a ream by now.)

Some are taking his disclosure malfunction as an indication that his research is shoddy, and, by extension, that bipolar disorder (and, for that matter, the entirety of DSM-IV-TR) is a load of bunk. This is one big logical fallacy--the straw man, to be precise.

If you have not spent a lot of time in academia, you may not be aware of the process by which research like this gets published. After you've obtained the necessary human subjects approval from your local Institutional Review Board or its equivalent, after you've collected and analyzed and interpreted your data, and after you've written up your manuscript, you must figure out which journal might publish it. Then you send your manuscript to that journal's editor, and the editor sends it as a de-identified document to three people who know your subject matter inside and out.

If you're trying to get psychological research published, one of these people might just be yours truly.

As a peer reviewer, I read your manuscript thoroughly, check your analyses and your interpretations thereof, determine whether it's appropriate for this particular journal, and write up a few paragraphs on my findings. I make a recommendation to the editor as to whether your manuscript should be published as is, with minor revisions, considered as a "revise and resubmit," or rejected outright. The editor then sends you a letter containing all three reviews and his or her decision.

I get about a month to complete my review, and it typically takes me about 20 hours, but I don't get paid. At no point do you know who I am, do I know who you are, or do I know who my two compatriots are. If your manuscript gets published and I recognize it, I sure hope you thank your anonymous reviewers in your acknowledgments footnote.

In my time I've saved the world from a lot of crappy manuscripts.

Although research ability and ethics overlap, they are not one and the same. Yes, conflict of interest is a huge problem. But before dissing a researcher's entire body of work, as well as the work of his or her colleagues, consider the lowly peer reviewer... who along with two other unidentified colleagues decided that each of his or her publications was worthy of ink.

Confidential to Motorola: Revise and resubmit, yo.

I am not the Jedi you are looking for

I used to feel rather guilty if I slept past 8:30 or 9 on a weekday. This changed with Tovah's arrival. I now feel emotionally out-of-sorts if I don't sleep past 8:30 or 9!

Previously I was not bothered by phone calls before 9:30 in the morning. Of course, this too has changed. 9:30 in the morning now feels like 7:30 in the morning, which is just too darn early for the phone to ring. But, perhaps to spite me, the phone has been ringing shortly after 9 pretty much every day for the past several days.

This morning the phone rang right on schedule. I think perhaps the woman on the other end, who was probably a telemarketer (and we are on the do not call list!) was operating on about as many cylinders as I was.

me: Hello?
woman: [says something not entirely into the phone]
me: Hello? Can I help you?
woman: Mrs. Davila?
me: I'm sorry, you have the wrong number.
woman: Mrs. Davila?
me: No, I'm sorry, you have the wrong number. Whom are you trying to reach?
woman: Mrs. Davila? I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. [ed.- huh?]
me: I'm sorry, you have the wrong number.
woman: Mrs. Davila, I do not have the wrong number! I called xxx-xxxx.
me: Yes, you did call that number, but as I've told you three times now, you have the wrong number. There is no one here by that name.

Then I told her to take our number off her list and summarily hung up. I'm not usually that abrupt, but it does really rub me the wrong way when someone persists in being mistaken about my identity.

Mrs. Gerbil says I should have said, "Oh, silly me, I forgot--today I am Mrs. Davila!" In any case, why do I keep encountering callers who have trouble accepting that people get new phone numbers--or rather, that phone numbers get new people?

Playing telephone

First, some ketchup: Day Five of our cross-country drive took us to my parents' house in good old Newtown, PA; and Day Six took us to our new home in South Hadley, MA. We've been here since January 13, but we only just got the internet to come into the house this morning. Thus, my lapse in blogging. Sorry about that. (In any event, there wasn't anything funny on Day Five except my parents; and by the time we actually made it to our new abode, we were too tired to consider anything funny.)

So, yes, the internet now successfully comes into the house. The telephone, however, does not. Verizon was supposed to have connected our new phone number on January 11, such that it would work when we arrived a few days later.

It did not.

Well, that's not entirely true. We plugged a phone into the jack and got a dial tone.

When we moved to Berkeley, we discovered that we had a dial tone but no ability to receive calls, as some other number was coming into the house instead of the one we'd ordered. Amazingly, SBC was able to fix the problem within 48 hours. What had apparently happened was that the previous tenants had not disconnected their phone service (which was with another company), so SBC had to send someone up the pole to unplug the line and plug it in again. And voila, we had our rightful phone number.

Having learned well from this experience, I called my cell phone from our newly-plugged-in Massachusetts phone to see what number came up on the caller ID. And lo, it was not our phone number.

So I called Verizon on the 14th and asked them please to hook up our phone which was supposed to have been hooked up on the 11th. I was assured that this would be done by the end of the business day.

It was not.

I called again on the 15th and asked them please to hook up our phone. The representative said that there was defective wiring outside the house, and that it would be corrected either by the end of the week or by February 8. I expressed my frustration that (1) our service had not been connected as scheduled and (2) no one had contacted me to inform me of any problems, when I'd provided my cell phone number for exactly this reason upon placing the order. I made the representative promise me that we would not be charged for phone service until it actually worked. Then I asked what we were supposed to do about all the people (read: potential employers) to whom we'd given our non-working number. The representative offered us a voice mailbox.

"I hope we don't have to pay for that either," I said. The representative thought for a moment and then agreed that we would not be charged for voicemail. Score!

By the end of last week, we still did not have a working phone line. So I called Verizon again. I was told that there was a problem with the outside line--more specifically, that there was no line coming into the house.

"That's interesting," I said, "because every call I've made about this issue has been from a phone that is plugged into a jack in my kitchen."

(This is oddly similar to a situation frequently encountered by Childhood Friend J, who used to work for the phone company in Wisconsin. The difference is that his callers would call him to say their phones weren't working at all--then inform him that the number they were calling from was the one that was out of service.)

I was assured that there was, indeed, a problem outside the house, and that someone would fix it as soon as possible. I was also offered a rather condescending explanation of "how phone lines work," which I politely (okay, semi-politely) declined.

Yesterday, we were very excited to see a Verizon guy up the pole that serves our house. Oh, frabjous day! Calloo, callay! But alas, by evening we still did not have our phone. So I called Verizon again. Verizon said that the number that was coming to our house used to belong to the animal hospital across the street. The animal hospital had since switched carriers and phone numbers, but through the miracle of crossed lines, we somehow wound up with their old number. Verizon also said that the pole-climber had indeed found a working line up there, which could be routed to our house once another technician could come to unplug some wires in our network interface box and then plug them back in again. Verizon promised that this would be done by 11am today. Verizon also promised that I would get "more confirmation calls than I probably wanted" today, not just from the repair department but also from our case manager.

I feel a little weird being case-managed by the phone company.

Needless to say, by 2pm today no one had gone near our network interface box. I called Verizon again and, after initially being told that there was no work order on file for today, was promised that "someone will be out by the end of the day today." It's now well after dark, and not only does our phone still not work, but I haven't received any of these fabled multiple confirmation calls.

I'd call our case manager (again, being case-managed by the phone company? totally weird) but I have no way to get in touch with her.

Verizon must be taking lessons from the Department of Mental Health.

Enjoy the hold music

Thank you for calling The Afterlife.

If you know your party's extension, please dial it now.

For heaven, press 1.

For hell, dial extension 666.

For purgatory, please stay on the line and someone will be with you as soon as possible.

The price of convenience

According to the newsletter Mrs. Gerbil received the other day, the Alameda Green Party is congratulating itself over preventing the construction of some cell phone tower somewhere. I don't know where the tower was supposed to be, as Mrs. Gerbil has already recycled the newsletter and the link which should lead to the newsletter doesn't actually yield anything of use.

But this will not stop my snark. Oh, children, my snark cannot be stopped.

I will concede that cell towers are ugly. I'll also concede that I had no idea that there were so many ways to disguise cell towers. But it's not just aesthetics (or lack thereof) that fuel protests against cell tower construction. It's the possibility of a health hazard. It's the intrusion of commercial activity into non-commercial zones. Oh, and it's the principle of the thing.

Now, I'm all for preservation and good planning and all that, but there's a fundamental problem with cell tower nimbyism: No cell tower, no cell service.

Many people have no land line because their cell phones are their primary phones. That's great for people who know they can always get reception. Mrs. Gerbil and I each have a cell phone, but we also have a land line because cell phones aren't 100% reliable. On our landline we have a cordless phone and an old-school phone with a 25' cord. (Why the ancient model? Because we can't use the cordless to notify PG&E that the power is out.)

If cell tower construction is restricted, then existing towers may get overwhelmed--and then we'll all bang our heads on the wall to the tune of "We're sorry, all circuits are busy now. Please try your call again later."

When I decided to get a cell phone about five and a half years ago, I chose my company based on local coverage. The best coverage in my area came from Verizon or Sprint, but it was well known that there was no Sprint reception on Coventry Road. Coventry is full of all kinds of fun shops, and as I lived about a quarter mile away, I was there all the time. Needless to say, I chose Verizon. Verizon, however, does not have such great reception in our bedroom in Berkeley. But this doesn't bother me. I can put up with the lack of reception in our bedroom, because the only way to fix this is to put up a cell tower on the bed. And that's just plain silly.

However, I also don't subscribe to the belief that cell phone ownership equals constant accessibility. So I suppose it's okay to support the restriction of cell tower construction if you don't mind not being able to use your cell phone everywhere and all the time. But if your cell phone is necessary for your survival, then cell towers are your necessary evil.

"No" means NO.

One of the unfortunate things about my job is that I cannot do a single thing about claims. I cannot tell anyone the status of a claim. I cannot reprocess a claim. I cannot even say whether a claim has been received. This is because I am not in the claims department.

My department never closes. The claims department does. When the claims department is open, I can transfer callers to a real live person over there. When the claims department is closed, not a single real live person is there to receive the transfer. And the only thing I can do is say to wait until the next business day--which can be a tall order if it's 7pm on a Friday night.

I don't know why it is so difficult for people to understand that I can't view their claims information. I get at least three calls per day that go like this:

caller: I am calling about a claim that my doctor submitted three months ago.
me: I'm sorry, I can't see any of your claims information. The claims department is open Monday through Friday, from...
caller: But my doctor sent in this claim three months ago and it hasn't been paid yet.
me: I apologize for the delay, but as I said I do not have access to any information about your claims.
caller: What do I have to say to get you to pay my therapist?
me: Please call back when our claims department is open and they will be happy to assist you.
caller: But why can't you help me with my claims?
me: Because I am not in the department that handles claims. That department is closed right now.
caller: Oh. Okay then, bye.

As you can imagine, I get very tired of saying the same thing over and over and over again. I probably say "I can't see any information about your claims" in my sleep. Sometimes I feel like I'm David Spade in that one commercial, except I'm not saying "NOOOOooooo!" for the passive-aggressive hell of it.

Mrs. Gerbil suggested that I come up with fun, creative ways to impart this information. Last night we came up with a whole slew while we were supposed to be sleeping.

Some of them were inspired by cheesy martial arts movies:

~ Your claims information is silent, like the ninja.
~ Your claims information is as the first crocus of spring, but it is still December.
~ Your claims information is as a deer, deep within in the forest.
~ Your claims information is as concrete shoes at the bottom of the Hudson River.

Some of them were inspired by television:

~ In the world of managed care, claims information is considered especially valuable. In this company, claims are handled by an elite squad known as the claims department. These are their hours...

Some of them were inspired by folk songs:
I cannot give you your claims status
I cannot do squat about claims
That's done by another department
So why are you talking to me, to me?
Call back, call back
Call back on Monday at six AM
Call back, call back
Call back on Monday at six.

And some of them were inspired by nursery rhymes:

Baa baa black sheep, have you any wool?
Yes sir, yes sir, but I don't have any of your claims information.

The man in the moon came down too soon
And asked the way to Norwich;
He went by the south and burnt his mouth
From eating your claims information.

Old MacDonald had a farm
E-I-E-I-O
And on his farm he did not have your claims information.

Alas, I don't think this would qualify as good customer service.

Public transit story #17: Private lives

Mrs. Gerbil and I took the bus into town over the weekend, in order to accomplish various and sundry activities such as paying the rent. We were among only a handful of people headed into town on that particular line at that particular time, which should have meant a nice, quiet 5-minute ride.

But no.

Also on the bus was a girl about our age who was engaged in an extremely loud pre-break-up conversation. The presumably-soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend was not on the bus, however, but on the other end of her cell phone connection. Mrs. Gerbil and I heard far more than we wanted to about this girl's life, her burgeoning self-confidence, and his infidelities. And about how "the punk-rock world is very small."

The awful thing was that there was really no way not to overhear. Mrs. Gerbil and I tried in vain to hold our own conversation at normal volume, but this girl was just so incredibly loud (possibly because of the volume at which the small punk-rock world plays its music) that we kept getting derailed. We tried really hard not to laugh, but that didn't work so well either.

She was still having words with her soon-to-be-ex as she got off the bus. I turned to Mrs. Gerbil and said, "There are some phone conversations that you just shouldn't have on the bus." Mrs. Gerbil agreed.

I mean, the punk-rock world is awfully small. There might only be two degrees of separation between you and the bus driver.

Not-so-phunny pharm

I have terrible allergies.

Often people ask me which is my allergy season. I have no allergy season because in my world it's always allergy season. And so I must take anti-allergy (and anti-asthma) medications every single day. I've been doing this since I was three years old. It's old hat. In fact, I can rattle off the name of almost every prescription and OTC allergy drug I've taken over the past 24 years. Most of these have since gone off the market, been reformulated, or just spontaneously stopped working for me.

Which leaves me, at the moment, with three prescriptions to contend with. My insurance company loves exactly one of these. Another they agreed to love when my doctor assured them that I do, as a matter of fact, have asthma. A third they agreed to tolerate when my doctor assured them that none of the other drugs out there are effective for me. (When I rattled off my prescription history for her, she stopped me after a minute or two and said, "I think maybe we'll just mention a few of those.")

On Friday I went to the pharmacy for some refills. I was quite surprised, and not in a pleasant way, to find that the aforementioned third medication cost $50 instead of my usual $15. My insurance sets co-pays of $15 for generics it likes, $25 for brand-name drugs it likes, and $50 for anything it doesn't like. I freaked out, but knowing I'd be in a world of hurt without this stuff, I paid for it anyway. Once outside the store, I called the insurance company to inquire as to WTF?

The representative offered me three absolutely ridiculous explanations:

1. Your prior authorization expired yesterday.
Okay, so first of all I had no idea that prior authorizations expire. Second of all, I'd gotten preauthorizations for both my refills on the same day last year, but only one of them had a co-pay change this year. For the one which did not change, my doctor merely stated that I had a life-long history of asthma, and amazing! it still costs $25 instead of $50. I was left to conclude that diagnosis-related prior authorizations don't expire, but drug-related ones do. Which is odd, considering how long it would take to demonstrate each year that the rest of the formulary still doesn't work. That wouldn't get points for patient-friendliness, either. So why should my doctor have to remind the insurance company of my history every 12 months?

2. Oh, and that drug changed tiers as of the first of the year, so it's always going to be $50, even though it's generic.
Last year, it was tier 3, which meant $50 per fill unless my doctor and I jumped through hoops to lower the cost to $15. From tier 3, there's nowhere to go but up. Curious about whether they'd quietly implemented the industry's first 4-tier system, I asked the representative which tier it was now. "Three," she said. I pointed out that it was tier 3 in 2006, and it's tier 3 in 2007, so what's the difference? Had they changed the co-pay rules for tier 3? "No," she said. So if I get my prior authorization renewed, I should get my medication for $15 again, right?

3. No, because the prior authorization isn't related to how much you pay. Your doctor has to demonstrate medical necessity for us to cover the drug. You can't get it filled at all without a valid prior authorization.
Obviously I had successfully filled my prescription that day, so what's this about needing a prior authorization to do it? "Um," said the representative. If the drug (sticker price: about $75) will cost me $50 with a prior authorization, and I've just proven that it also costs $50 without a prior authorization, then what, pray tell, is the point of the prior authorization? Isn't the prior authorization supposed to give me my own personal formulary? "The pharmacy that was charging you $15 was making a mistake," she said, changing the subject, "but it was saving you money." It's not saving me money now, I replied, and the pharmacy just charges me what you tell them to. "Um," said the representative.

Unfortunately, before we could get this all settled, I had to go to work. And the insurance company is closed over the weekend--so I've got to wait until tomorrow to get to the bottom of

THE MYSTERY OF
THE PHARMACY BENEFITS
THAT NO ONE,
NOT EVEN MEMBER SERVICES,
UNDERSTANDS.

Tune in next time for another exciting episode of Gerbil vs. the demons of Market-Driven Healthcare!

Rantings of a Luddite philistine

I recently asked Mrs. Gerbil (who has a much better grasp of such things than I) whether performance artists need a cognizant audience. For example, if a performance artist sat at a bus stop in downtown Berkeley and just stared suspiciously at passers-by, I doubt anyone would realize it was performance art.

Put another way: Can you do performance art for the plain old art's sake?

Mrs. Gerbil said that performance art relies on the relationship between the artist and the audience. The audience at least has to know that something out of the ordinary is occurring--and that it's occurring on purpose. Downtown Berkeley is full of people who stare suspiciously at passers-by. Therefore, unless the bus stop performance artist squirted soda water at people wearing red sweaters and just stared at everyone else, it's not a very effective performance.

I don't understand performance art. I think it's very strange, although I also think it's an excellent punch line.

Knock-knock.
Who's there?
Performance artist.
Performance artist who?
Performance artist.
Performance artist who?
Performance artist.
Screw you! Go away!
Performance artist performance artist performance artist PERFORMANCE ARTIST...

The real question, however, is this:

If tree falls on a performance artist in the woods and no one's around to watch, is it still performance art?

In other news, I got a new cell phone last week. The last time I got a new phone, I had to convince the Verizon guy that I did not want a camera phone. Our conversation went something like this:

VG: So how come you don't want a camera phone?
Me: Because I don't need my phone to take pictures. That's why I have a camera.
VG: But you could use your phone to take pictures.
Me: All I want to do with my phone is make and receive calls. I don't need to take pictures with it, I don't need to surf the web, I don't need to send text messages with it.
VG: But if you had a camera phone, then when I called you, you could see a picture of me on your phone and know that I was calling you!
Me: Um, I program in people's names. Because I can read.

This time around, the Verizon guy didn't give me a hard time about not wanting a camera phone. Our conversation, however, was pretty amusing:

VG: So what do you want your phone to do?
Me: Make and receive calls.
VG: That's it?
Me: Yes. That is it. I don't even care about text messaging.
VG: You don't use text messaging????
Me: No. I figure, if someone needs to tell me something, they can call me. If I'm not there, they can leave me a message.
VG: But text messaging is cool!
Me: I turned off text messaging a few years ago because it cost me money to receive messages like "I'm bored." If people are bored, they can call me and tell me about it.
VG: Uh, yeah. I guess you have a point there.

When Mrs. Gerbil found out that I didn't have text messaging, back when we were still living apart, she said, "Oh, that must be why I sent you all those text messages and you never replied!" Which leaves me to wonder:

If a performance artist doesn't know that I don't have text messaging, is it performance art if he tries to text me that a tree is about to fall on him?

Hot Live Local Singles Strike Again!

Racy Wrong Numbers: Not just a San Francisco treat!

The mayor of Edmond, Oklahoma, handed out tens of thousands of flyers upon which was a rather unfortunate typo. The flyers, prepared by the Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services, were intended to discourage underage drinking but accidentally advertised a phone sex line.

I am not making this up.

Your call cannot be completed as dialed

When I moved apartments in Cleveland, I was very excited that I could keep the same phone number. I liked my phone number. It had been all mine since early July of 2001, and it was all mine through at least last December, when my free informational recording ("This number has been changed. The new number is...") was set to expire. I was very proud of my phone number.

I moved to a new place in June, 2003. Shortly thereafter, I began getting messages on my answering machine:

Hi, Mrs. Johnson, this is Dr. So-and-So's office, just calling to confirm your appointment tomorrow at 1:30.

Sometimes the messages went like this:

Hi, Mrs. Johnson, this is Dr. So-and-So's office, just calling to follow up on your appointment from yesterday. We missed you. Please call us back so we can set up a new appointment for you.

No one named Johnson lived in my house. I got tired of this pretty quickly, and I also felt some sense of obligation to help care for Mrs. Johnson, whoever she was. But the doctor's office never left a phone number, and the doctor had a rather unusual last name. So one afternoon I star-69'd the doctor and played the Good, Vaguely HIPAA-Compliant Samaritan:

Receptionist: Hi, Dr. So-and-So's office?
Me: Yes, I keep getting messages on my answering machine for a Mrs. Johnson, and I wanted to let you know that I have no idea who that is and maybe you should ask her again what her phone number is.
Receptionist: Uh, did you just move in?
Me: No, I've had this number for almost four years now.
Receptionist: We've been trying to reach Mrs. Johnson about her--
Me: Hey, I don't know who she is, and I don't want to intrude on her privacy. Just make sure you have the right number for her, in case you actually have to reach her by phone.

And that was the end of that.

Here in California, I have a different problem: people think my cell is the "pharmacy." One afternoon I got extremely bored and used reverse lookup on similar numbers. Oddly, all conceivable misdials were also cell phones owned by Verizon Wireless. I ask you: what pharmacy operates by cell phone?

I, too, am guilty of misdialing on occasion. Once, I thought I was calling Comcast, and instead I got one of those Chat Now with Hot Live Local Singles! lines. I figured I'd called 1-900-COMCAST, instead of 1-800-COMCAST, so to assuage my mortification, I put a 900/976 block on our line.

The other day I got a call at home which was eerily reminiscent of the tale of Mrs. Johnson:

Hi, Christina, this is Dr. Such-and-Such's office. We haven't seen you in a while and are wondering if everything is okay. Maybe you moved, or you got a new number, but please give us a call and let us know how you are doing.

So I called Dr. Such-and-Such's office. I've owned this number for a year and a half, and as far as I know, I'm the first to have it. I was all set to tell Dr. Such-and-Such's receptionist that I didn't know any Christina and that maybe they should double-check their records...

...but who should pick up but an overly enthusiastic recording, encouraging me to Chat Now with Hot Live Local Singles!

Either every unclaimed phone number in this area redirects the caller to Chat Now with Hot Live Local Singles, or I just have extraordinary luck in stumbling across such opportunities.

Trick or treat, dudes.

Gerbil Jumble #3: I need a job

I love the San Francisco Chronicle. We get the paper seven days a week. This means I could do seven Jumbles a week, if I really wanted to. But usually I just read a few sections, occasionally pen a letter to the editor (I've had, like, four or five published!), and do the crosswords.

In the daily paper, one of the two crosswords is in the Classified section. So is the Jumble. So are the job listings. I need a job, as I've been voted off the proverbial island at the one that pays part of the rent and all of the health insurance. Sadly, there aren't a whole lot of listings in the paper for what I'm looking for. And don't even get me started on why I'm considering (at least temporarily) changing my field.

So pretty much every day I skim the classifieds and come up with nothing. Dejected, I move on to the crossword. If I still have energy, I do the Jumble. I had some extra energy today because my sixth-to-last day at work was, well, indescribable in a negative fasion, so I did this one and made my wife giggle like a schoolgirl:



It's too bad there aren't any jobs out there for people gifted in the incorrect solution of Jumbles.

Wrong number

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and
over again and expecting different results."
attributed to Albert Einstein

So you know how I ranted about people who just can't accept that they've dialed the wrong number?

Today, around 3 in the afternoon, I happened to look at my cell phone. It showed not one, not two, but three missed calls from a number I didn't recognize. It also showed that I had voicemail. So I called my voicemail. I had one lonely little message. And it was from my wife. And she'd called me from her cell phone.

I did a reverse look-up on this mysterious number. It is either someone's cell phone or someone's unlisted number, and it's registered in Hercules, which isn't all that far from our humble abode.

It seems to me that one of two things happened here:

1) Mystery Caller dialed my cell phone number by mistake. My voicemail picked up. MC figured out that it was the wrong number and hung up. MC dialed my cell phone number by mistake again. My voicemail picked up. MC figured out that it was the wrong number again and hung up. MC decided to try one more time, got my voicemail, and hung up. MC then tracked down the person who gave out this number and bitched him/her out.

2) Mystery Caller dialed my cell phone number by mistake. My voicemail picked up. MC figured out that it was the wrong number and hung up. MC then hit redial (send-send, or whatever). My voicemail picked up. MC figured out that it was the wrong number again and hung up. MC then hit redial (send-send, or whatever) again, got my voicemail, and hung up. MC then called his/her phone company and bitched the representative out about the defective automatic redial on his/her phone.

My money's on #2.

Is this the party to whom I am speaking?

I hate cell phones.

Mind you, I have a cell phone. My cell phone is kind of a necessary evil these days. At first I got a cell phone because I was supposed to see clients in the psychology department clinic, and I needed a phone number that wasn't my home number and wasn't either of the numbers I shared with about eight other students. So I got a cell phone.

Even though I ended up not seeing anyone in the department clinic, my phone was still useful. My minutes were free after 9pm and on weekends, and, owing to my long-distance relationship, I tended to make a lot of long-distance calls. My cell phone turned into a cost-saving measure. Then my mom got a cell phone, on the same plan as I had, and so we could talk to each other for free whenever we wanted. It was still a cost-saving measure, I swear.

But here's the thing I hate about cell phones. Cell phones feed right into our collective quest for instant gratification. They promise to make you constantly accessible. But they accomplish this by interrupting whatever it was you were just doing. Call waiting (which I've never had on my regular phone, and which I turned off on my cell phone) lets your phone interrupt you while you're already using it. How arrogant can a little piece of circuitry get?

According to a collection of polls, 15 percent of US respondents have answered their cell phones during sex, 38 percent said it was okay to use a cell phone in the bathroom, and 87 percent said the most frequent forms of bad behavior they observe involve... the cell phone.

There's an interesting corollary of this instant gratification business, which is that people get phenomenally stupid when their gratification is delayed. My cell phone number is made up of 4 different digits. Anecdotal evidence (i.e., my own observations) suggests that the potential for misdialing is inversely related to the number of unique digits in a phone number. Less variety, more misdialing. I, of course, get a lot of wrong numbers. Most of these calls start out like this:

me: Hello?
other person: Hello?
me: Yes, hello?
other person: HelLO?
me: Yes?
other person: helLOOOOO?!?!

And very often they proceed like this:

me: Who are you trying to reach?
other person: helLOOO?!?!
me: I'm sorry, you have the wrong number.

One call went like this:

me: Hello?
guy: Hey, Jeff!
me: I'm sorry, you have the wrong number.
guy: Jeff! How's it going?
me: I'm sorry, I'm not Jeff. You really do have the wrong number.
guy: Is Jeff there, then?
me: No, this is my personal phone, and I don't know Jeff.

And this one is my favorite:

me: Hello?
crazed-sounding woman: Hello?
me: Yes?
CSW: helLOOO?!?!
me: Yes? Hello?
CSW: Is this the pharmacy?
me: No, I'm sorry, you have the wrong number.
CSW: But I called the pharmacy. This is the number for the pharmacy!
me: I'm sorry, you have the wrong number.
CSW: Why isn't this the pharmacy?
me: Because you've called my personal phone.
CSW: What's the number for the pharmacy, then?
me: What pharmacy are you trying to reach?
CSW: THE PHARMACY! I AM TRYING TO CALL THE PHARMACY!
me: I'm sorry, I really can't help you, except that this isn't your pharmacy.
CSW: WHAT THE HELL?!?!?!

I am not making this up. And I don't think she was trying to reach Walgreens, if you know what I mean.

I don't know why it is so hard for people to say "is so-and-so there?" as soon as I pick up the phone. And if one is trying to call Joe's Pharmacy, and the person on the other end doesn't say "Hello, Joe's Pharmacy," the proper thing to do is to ask, "Is this Joe's Pharmacy?"

But at the same time, that "hello" dance cracks me up every time.

Doogie

I am seriously thinking about chopping off all my hair. I've been coveting a cute little pixie cut. Or a cute little dyke cut. Or a cute little pixie dyke cut. I don't know. Something that will make me look more than 15.

This is getting OLD--no pun intended.

On Thursday morning I was supposed to have a meeting with my supervisor, the principal, and the counseling coordinator at the high school where I work. The principal and my supervisor was running late, so the counseling coordinator and I just stood around in the main office to wait for them. My supervisor often runs late, but she was really late this time; and so I decided to give her a ring to find out where she was.

No sooner did I pull out my phone and dial her than one of the secretaries barked, "YOUNG LADY!"

Now, there were several potentially misbehaving young ladies in the office. And I've met this particular secretary before. So I figured she couldn't possibly be talking to me.

"YOUNG LADY!"

Oh, but she was.

Still waiting for my supervisor to pick up, I looked over at the secretary.

"YOUNG LADY! You are on your cell phone!"

"Yes, I am," I replied. I mean, what else could I say?

She glared at me evilly.

"I'm staff," I said simply.

Still the glare.

"She's one of our therapists," said the counseling coordinator.

The glare quickly became a look of panic.

Just then my supervisor picked up. "I'm parking my car," she said. "I'll be right in."

"I'm SO sorry!" said the secretary. "I didn't mean to offend you! I hope I didn't offend you! Did I offend you?"

"I'm used to it," I replied.

"But you--I'm sorry, you look like you're 15!"

"Wanna guess when I graduated from high school?" I said. (Okay, it was kind of cruel.)

"No!" the secretary said. "I mean, no, I don't want to guess, because I'm just going to offend you more."

"I'm so not offended!" I said. "But anyway, I was in the class of 1997."

My supervisor had walked in by this point. "Oh," she said to me, "did she think you're in high school?"

"You know, it's going to be even worse after I get my degree in May," I said. "When I went back to defend my dissertation in the fall, the guy next to me on the plane got all nervous and accused me of being some kind of genius kid when I told him the purpose of my trip. Then I told him I was 25, and he softened up a bit."

But here's the thing. If I chop off my hair, I probably wouldn't be mistaken for a 15-year-old girl anymore.

But I might start being mistaken for a 15-year-old boy.