Doug and Bob McKenzie did a Hoser rendition of the 12 Days of Christmas that started out with: On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me ... Beer. How can you top that? Well, I saw a sign on my way to work the other day:
What says Christmas
Like booze and strippers?
Book your Christmas party here
And let our strippers
Show you their Ho Hos.
Nuff said.
Actually, I realize that I’m not avoiding Christmas, per se. What I’m avoiding is “holiday music”. It’s the endless repetition of songs I was never crazy about in the first place. It would be like loving classical music, and then being ambushed by disco music for two months of the year, or loving country music and having the radio suddenly burst into the same two dozen opera songs, repeatedly, two months of the year. I suppose that for those who have grown up with “holiday” music and have fond memories associated with it, there’s a certain reverie that comes with that time of year. But for me, it’s just an annoyance.
This morning, in a Nyquil-induced stupor, I wandered over to the sofa and turned on MuchMusic (a youth-targeted music station like MTV) just in time to see a commercial where a star topping an Xmas tree starts to sing a generic holiday song, wherein an ornament goes postal and demands that it stop. After a frantic sequence involving earmuffs and a chainsaw, bedlam ensues and the ad closes with a “holiday wrap” theme. So it seems that my sentiment is echoed quite widely.
I got an interesting - useless, mind you, but an interesting spin on useless - offer in my inbox today. My mobile phone service provider wants to give me a shopping bag with their logo splashed on it. Well, if I drive to one of their stores, they’ll give me one, for FREE!! (I wish I knew how to make this blink and twirl like a bad marquee). I gather that by “free,” they will give me one even if I don’t buy one of the phones they’re pushing as holiday gifts to put into the bag so that I can walk around advertising their phones.
I understand that it’s supposed to be a clever promotional gimmick, and I can see one of their used-to-be-a-union-job marketers spinning in their swivel chair and sucking on a pen, wondering how to get the message out there, and thinking, most people just take the bag home and toss it, but if we can get people to re-use the bags for a month or so, that’s a lot of free advertising during a slow season. So how do we make them think of the bag as a commodity and not just a tossable receptacle? I know, people love free stuff. We’ll give them a bag, and stress that it’s free. I know you have that same picture in your mind.
Is it any wonder this doesn’t work? If the mental model (in other words, the general way we’ve come to expect that things work in the world) is that you go into a store and the retailer gives you a bag, for free, to put your stuff in, then what’s the commercial value of a shopping bag? Why would I want to come all the way to your store to pick up what’s basically advertising material? To walk around advertising your product for you, for free? Heck, you should pay me to advertise your stuff for you, and don’t be expecting me to have to come pick it up from you, either.
This is a typical example of poor user experience, and says to me one of two things, either that the company is grasping as straws to have some sort of promotional campaign with no budget (as in “oh oh, the company is in financial trouble") or that this is a company that just doesn’t get it (as in “out of touch with reality"). I don’t know which it is, and I don’t have the energy to really investigate, but it does make me wonder.
Just finished reading Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, a novel by Vincent Lam that just won the prestigious Giller Prize. Very interesting book - a series of short stories from the perspectives of a series of connected people in the medical profession. Each story puts forth the doctor as a person as well as a professional, and it’s easy to become engrossed in both the characters and their journies. In fact, I was counting on reading this book on the plane on the flight home, but I finished it at the hotel.
Ten professionals, gathered in Boston for a conference, look for a restaurant where we can gather for dinner. The concierge recommends a place called Stephanie’s. Someone vaguely remembers going there during last year’s conference. Those to arrive have a drink in the bar. When everyone arrives, they seat us upstairs, in the back.
We proceed to make a wide variety of orders. Some people order liquor and appetizers and entrees and coffee; others order an entree and mineral water. We’re all business people, most of us travelling, so we all need receipts. We ask for separate bills. Then the problems start. We can’t have separate bills. OK, well, we’ll cope. The total bill is $406 (including the 18% they automatically charge for parties over six people). We’ll just put in all 10 credit cards and put $40.60 on each card. The maitre d’ comes up to explain that they can’t process our credit cards. It’s a maximum of three per party. We ask what the problem is. After blaming their software, he confesses that it is restaurants policy. Now, I’m not sure what kind of ridiculous, arbitrary cusotmer service policy that is to spring on a bunch of patrons of your business, but it smells like a bunch of B.S. to us. Now the frustration really begins. We start figuring out who has cash and who can give what cash to whom and how we can collapse ten bills into three bills. One person takes charge and gives instructions of what to charge to which card, and the waiter takes away the cards and cash and processes them.
The waiter returns with the cards and cash and - as inevitably happens - the totals are short of the total once the tip is included. Everyone is talking over each other; we can’t seem to get a straight answer about what is happening; I’m given back my cash from the person I paid, and I’m about to hand it over to the other person, but I don’t have enough cash, and want to pay with my card but, oh, I can’t because we’ve exceeded our limit of cards for that table. Then some more counting goes on, and tips are added and re-calculated, and I think some more money may have thrown in at the other end of the table though I’m waving money around at our end of the table, and then someone shouts about about how we’re now over again, and everyone groans, and at some point, we’re talking about how in this day and age, such customer unfriendliness is inexcusable. The maitre d’ had given us some excuse about how long it inconveniences customers by swiping all those extra credit cards. Excuse me? As if we’re not being inconvenienced with all this nonsense?
It’s not like we’re at the restaurant during the lunch rush. We were leaving around 9:50 PM, and the restaurant was practically empty. Back home, all but the most prickly of restaurants would have re-rung the bills as five tables of two, and the restaurants that had the ability would break down each table’s bills by diner so that each person could pay separately, particularly restaurants serving the business crowd. It would have relatively easy to make this groupf of ten happy. As it was, on the way out, the person who recalled being there last year commented on the way out that we certainly wouldn’t be returning next year. It’s a shame, because the food wasn’t bad. But food isn’t the only distinguishing factor in choosing a restaurant; at some point in our lives, good customer service gets equal billing.
The other day I was channel surfing and ran across some medical show where a surgeon was doing breast reconstruction and commenting on some surgical technique. What struck me was that the breasts were blurred out in that way that television stations do to protect themselves from contravening obscenity laws. It made me wonder why they bothered airing the show at all - if the show is about a topic that can’t be shown, is there a point in showing it?
Of course, there are other, more fundamental questions, suc has why are breasts considered obscene at all? What is it that’s so terrible about showing the body that television stations could get fined for it? What have we become, as a society, that on the one hand, we obsess about the body (exalting extremely thin models, fashion that shows lots of the body) but at the same time, fetishing the body (blurring body parts, etc.)?
A number of years ago, someone asked of an orthodox rabbi whether it was OK to look upon nudity, and the rabbi’s answer was fabulous: it depends on the purpose. His take was that as long as the purpose was noble - which I would argue range from studying for medical school, bathing your kids, making out with your sweetie, and walking along a nudist beach - there’s no problem with it.
When the body is fetishized, then the decisions made around how to control the fetishes become irrational. When we see this in other cultures, we see it clearly because it seems strange to us. For example, in the book Reading Lolita in Tehran, there is a passage describing how a young man claimed that a small, exposed patch of skin so inflamed his passion that he reported it, and the young woman was thrown in jail. Covering up is supposed to be the only remedy to such “indecency.” In North American culture, the cover-up is done with pixels on the screen. Either way, the idea is that the body is indecent. Not any act of the body, but the body itself.
Looking at this from another perspective. Let’s agree that the Judeo-Christian modesty continuum has become the global standard, and sex organs are considered private and always kept under wraps. Never mind that the breast is technically not sex organs, I won’t get into that argument right now - let’s just include them in the modesty taboo for the moment. Now what happens if someone decides that foot fetishes mean that feet should always remain covered? And then what happens if someone else decides that hands are really, really sexy and should remain covered? How far away are we from being covered by a burka? So what makes us different from the people that we consider “different?”
A friend told me that when he was a kid - so this must have been about 35 years ago - a woman chastized his mother for having him and his brother in the women’s changing room with her, and she replied to her children, “Don’t pay attention to her. She’s Canadian.” Meaning, she’s a prude. I never thought of us being prudish, and never really thought of Americans being prudes, either - well, except for the “banned in Boston” part, but that was connected to having a Puritan heritage, and that was supposed to be relatively raree - so when did slide start down the slippery slope? When did North America develop this hysteria over the physical bodies that God gave us? Do we really want to pass this type of shame and hysteria along to the next generations? I know I don’t. If I’m going to blur anything, it’s scenes of violence; I’ll leave the body intact.
Alright, I admit defeat. I’ve been ambushed once too often to be able to say that I successfully avoided Christmas. What did it was Boston. Yep, good old Boston. The first booby trap was the ladies’ room at the airport. At first, I wasn’t going to count it, because I wasn’t going to count hearing one bar of a song (the length of time it takes to hit the mute button on the remote), and what was playing in the ladies’ room was a medley of the first bars of many Christmas tunes, all crammed together and played at a frenetic pace, an octave too high.
But then, I got into the shared van, and whatever radio station the [probably Middle Eastern] taxi driver had on had a Christmas portion. And then the hotel lobby ... and in Walgreen’s ... and then, no escaping it, the restaurant I wandered into (Vox Populi, the one with the sweet ex-Torontonian gay guy who took such good care to seat me where I could read my book) which unfortunately had lots of loud Christmas music playing.
This year, I have one simple goal: to not hear any Christmas music. As of last week, I realized how Hurculean a task this is going to be.
First, I have to stay out of stores. I realized this when I stepped into the elevator at IKEA last Friday and got ambushed by some jazz version of a Christmas tune. I don’t remember which one, just that I recognized the first bar, at which point I stuck my fingers in my ears and started to hum, loudly. I didn’t care that I made the other woman in the elevator so uncomfortable stood WAY on the other side and scooted out the door before it even opened all the way. But I figure that I can do any holiday shopping online, either through Amazon or eBay. Even my groceries can be ordered online through Stongs. I just have to make sure that I turn off the sound on my computer - some sites ambush you with cheesy Christmas music when you least expect it.
Second, I have to keep my hand firmly on the remote control. The second the commercials come on, hit the mute button. Watching actors contort their faces and offer up merchandise that I would never, ever want to buy, while wearing decidedly Christmas-themed clothing, can be quite amusing, actually. But the sound track that goes with it drives me round the bend. So watching television is no longer a relaxing activity, it’s one filled with great vigilence. And once December proper rolls around, I may have to stop watching altogether, as the insidious strains of those same recycled Xmas tunes will make their way into the plot lines themselves, and the most caustic of shows will go mushy “for the holidays.”
Third, stay out of the public domain. Shops blare music out of stores, and some office buildings pipe special Chrismas muzack into their lobbies and elevators. You notice that despite being the public domain, which suggests Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and other religious and cultural traditions would be honoured, it’s only the same old, same old Christmas music that gets played over and over and over and over again. I have yet to hear any Kwanzaa muzack, or Chanukah muzack. Just those same tired carols, over and over again each year.
Fourth, beware the radio. This one is the hardest because it’s hard to start changing stations while driving down the highway, and there is no guarantee that the change will be to a station not playing Christmas music at that moment. This year I have satellite radio, so I’m hoping it will be easier. Maybe I can find a nice Xmas-free station and just keep my radio tuned to that station until Dec 25th. What are the chances?
Fifth, avoid recitals. This one I’m not sure I can get away with. I’ve already been told I need to attend the recital of the granddaughter who sings with a juried choir. I can’t imagine they’ll be singing anything but Christmas carols. I won’t tempt fate by faking an illness (though it is tempting), but I am wondering if I can wear earplugs and just smile sweetly through a cotton batting fog.
Someone asked me the other evening why I hated Christmas music so much, and I must say that his premise is all wrong. I’m not Christian and don’t celebrate Christmas, so I can be benevolent and appreciate someone else’s tradition. But Christmas is one single day long, and I don’t want to listen to Christmas music for 16% of the year. That’s almost 60 days of the year, which is about 58 days too many days of Christmas music. (Can you imagine the outcry if the 8-day long holiday of Chunukah got its music billed for 4 months of the year? We’d all go mad listening to I Had A Little Dreidel five thousand times!)
I think what bugs me the most is the collective cultural blind spot to the invasiveness of Christian doctrine as part of Christmas. When my granddaughter went to a Montessori daycare that prided itself on it ecumenical-neutral stand, they would go into a Christmas frenzy at the beginning of November and continue on through the end of December. I heard more about Santa, reindeer, wise men and stars, and so on - it got nauseating for me, and I wasn’t even there all day! But talk about Chaunkah, and the response ws that “we don’t do anything religious.” So until things change, to adapt the words of the Seinfeld soup guy, No Music for Me!
I just have to contrast these items:
(1) South Africa legalizes same-sex marriage. Then again, it was the first constitution in the world to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, so we shouldn’t be surprised by this amazing and progressive move.
(2) This Terrence Has Two Fathers video, as seen on You Tube, Netherlands’ Children for Children series. Again, amazingly progressive.
(3) Delta Airlines lets a flight attendant’s personal prudishness overrule public legislation when a woman dared breastfeed her child - in other words, commit a legal act (breast-feeding is protected under the Public Accommodations Act, meaning that a mother is allowed to breast-feed in public). How amazingly regressive!
(4) Passenger is removed from flight for wearing “offensive” t-shirt. Again, how regressive and anti-democratic. And selective about free speech - just about every time I’ve been on a flight, I’ve seen lots of stuff offensive to me, and those passengers have been allowed to fly. So who gets to decide what is offensive?
It’s World Usability Day, 2006. On my drive to the office this morning, I was anxious to get to my email - I have several hundred people participating in a global online card sort, and I want to be on hand in case of emergency.
On the radio, Sounds Like Canada is on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and show host Shelagh Rogers is airing a segment with award-winning cookbook author, Margaret Dickenson, who is talking about how she made her cookbook more usable - simply without using industry jargon such as “usability” and “user-centered design.” Dickenson discusses how she asked representative audience members - notably, her daughter - for advice about how to structure the recipes, and got back lots of ideas and tips about what types of information to include about the recipes themselves and about things peripheral to the recipes, such as storage guidelines, make-ahead dishes, alternative ingredients, and icons that indicate “grillable” or “no time, no talent” status.
Imagine my delight at listening to a show about usability - a topic very much on my mind - on World Usability Day. It was serendipitous, I’m sure, as I doubt that anyone locally informed the CBC about World Usability Day - I know I didn’t think of it - and so all the more interesting this juncture. Given the circumstances, I think it only appropriate that I try some of the recipes.
OK, so it’s a Sunday. Yesterday I took the day off, and Em and I visited my good friend, Joy, out in the valley. We hung out all afternoon and evening with her, her menagerie, and her neighbour and her menagerie. So today, I had to catch up on stuff that I didn’t have time to do during the week. No, not housework, though I had really, really, really wanted to hang pictures, vacuum, dust, and do other things around the house. What I needed to catch up on was all the business-related stuff that didn’t within the week. I’m trying to squeeze a presentation, a few articles, and various other loose ends for World Usability Day in before the day ends. So when we get the phone call to the effect that someone wants to conduct a telephone survey, I get a little cranky. I mean, who has extra time to waste doing things like answering surveys? Especially if you don’t know whether the survey is a veiled sales call. If I had more time, I’d be spending it with my grandkids, not loitering about. Maybe I’m in a particularly grumpy mood today, but I suppose that’s part of miserably rainy day where there’s no reason to even get out of my jammies, and be chained to the computer at the dining room table working all day.
When we come to Portland - well, actually Tigard - we stay at the same hotel, the Embassy Suites. The staff have gotten to know us, and the breakfast crew predicts what kind of omelet we’ll have as we enter the atrium in the morning. But at night, it’s a different story. Emma likes to get a latte at night from the little coffee bar in the gift shop (I got turned off going in there because the biddy tending the shop is the paragon of negativity, and would talk my ear off about her various ailments and woes) so she’d go down there around 9:00 to get her coffee, and have to listen to the woman huff and puff about how she had just cleaned the machine. Then it became 8:00, and then 7:00. The relief attendant is even worse - she makes it sound like she’s doing you a big favour selling you a coffee. Last week, the excuse was that they had only skim milk. Then, it was a drama over wanting two coffees. Imagine, having to sell two coffees after 6:30 p.m.! And one of them decaf! I swear, if I had a video camera, I could make a “how not to” training video, no problem.
I’ve been reading the new book, The Starbucks Experience, which explains why we overpay for coffee at Starbucks: because of the user experience! Compare my experience at the hotel and my experience at Starbucks, where as I walk in the barista is asking what he can make for me before I even get to the cash register. I’m very happy to drive over to the mall for a coffee the way I like it: the coffee AND the service. Too bad the coffee shop in the hotel just doesn’t get it. The bumper sticker I say may read “Friends don’t let friends drink Starbucks” but until the rest can get their user experience up to the quality of the coffee, I know where I’ll have my coffee.
So we’re unexpectedly in Portland for the weekend, and it’s so tempting to go out and “play” instead of catching up on the various things that make up a huge backlog of work. The hotel filled up with soccer families during the day, so the pool is full of kids, and hotel is full of gangly teens, a number of which I swear were playing soccer upstairs from us last night. Staying in my room instead of hanging out in the atrium with the parents and kids had its advantages, though. I watched an excellent movie, The Last Kiss, with Zach Braff and Jacina Barrett. (Caution: The site is barriered by Flash, and once it loads, the music is pretty loud. In short, it’s a film about how various people handle the adversities in their relationships - more interesting than most Hollywood productions.
So my buddy helped me out with installing Expression Engine and a template. If I’d done this on my own, it would be another year before I got around to it. A big public thanks to him. We met in 2001 and became unlikely friends. I adore him and his wife and their adorable daughter.