Dear Dotcomrades:

I tried sending out an issue of Write Between The Eyes without a letter accompanying it once. I got a lot of “Hey, where’s the letter?” so I decided not to pull that stunt ever again.

But Igottatellya, I was sorely tempted to send this particular one out sans a letter. Why? Because I haven’t got a dang thing of interest to say. No amusing anecdotes. No advertising diatribes. (I have to save them for my Screen columnn.) No self-promotional devices. I can’t even think of a good self-indulgence in which to wallow.

Since one of my hobbies is railing against bad service, I suppose I could lay out in detail the last dozen or so encounters I’ve had with institutional ineptitude at stores and other businesses.

Like when I bought some file cabinets from Office Max recently. They gave me the wrong color, which I didn’t discover until I got them upstairs to my home office. So I called and argued with the manager for a while. Finally, they came to pick up the wrong ones and bring me the right ones (impressive that I persuaded them to do that, considering that, remarkably, they don’t have a delivery service.) Except they brought me the wrong ones again. So they took all four back, and brought me two more. This time they brought the right color. But the wrong size. When they picked these up and delivered two cabinets of the right size and the right color, I unpacked them only to discover that both of them were all dented in. Finally, having run out of ways to screw up, they picked up the dented ones and gave me mint-condition cabinets. Right size. Right color. And that’s how Office Max ground up one of my precious weekends. Of course, that’s not the end of the story. Oh no. Upon examining the receipt a while later, we noticed that they overcharged us, thus causing us yet another trip to Office Mess to argue with the less-than-contrite “customer service manager.”

If it hadn’t been them grinding up the weekend, it would have been Osco trying in vain to actually fill my prescription. Osco. We Put The “Harm” in “Pharmacy”. Shouldn’t a pharmacy staffed with loons be called a lunacy?

Or Home Depot, with no helpful staff in sight and interminable lines. Or Ruby Tuesday, where they’ve recently started serving drinks in undersized plastic mugs and replaced the really good homemade croutons with little store bought pieces of hippo crap. And where the prices expand at precisely the same rate that the portions shrink. On top of which, the cheerfully brainless staff invariably inform you that they’re sorry but they’re out of whatever you ordered ten minutes ago so you choose something else but they’re out of that too.

Or Penney’s catalog department, where surly salespeople glower at customers and move in an under-water-like fashion, as if in training for the post office, while, like a swiss watch running backward, the entire catalog department team searches for new ways to devolve its record-keeping and order-picking system. I understand they will be installing an elaborate network of pneumatic tubes this fall.

Or Sin-e-pox Odious theatres, whose projectionists are into soft-focus. REALLY soft focus. I attended a movie at one of their theatres recently, which was run on a broken projector that mangled and distorted the soundtrack. The manager was well aware that the projector was broken, yet chose to run the movie anyway, and chose not to warn customers beforehand. “Some customers can stand it and some can’t” she informed me matter-of-factly.

Chicago Cable. Sears. Builder’s Square. Casio. Saturn. McDonald’s. Chicago White Sox. Every bank. Every supermarket. Every car dealership. The list of businesses not yet visited by concepts like competence, quality and customer service goes on ad nauseum. I have stories about these businesses that might be even worse than the stories you no doubt have about them. In the words of Mr. Saturday Night, “Don’t get me started.”

Have a fine summer.

Stoically,

 

“You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisments.” - Norman Douglas

Thirty-two cows ate themselves to death in Olympia, Wash., after one of them shook loose a pipe on an automatic feeding machine and let loose a torrent of grain.

“They just don’t know any better,” veterinarian Michael Paros said. (Chicago Sun-Times)

Earthworms have 5 hearts. Ants have 5 noses. Newborn humans have no kneecaps. Coincidence? I think not.
Fits of Historia

Le Petomane, a 19th-century music hall performer, had the singular ability to control his farts. He could play tunes, as well as imitate animals and machinery sounds rectally. Le Petomane’s popularity briefly rivalled that of Sarah Bernhardt.

“Individuals and organizations need to have a way of doing things for which they have no good reason.” - James March