Maybe it’s because I spent two years working telephone tech support. Or maybe it’s because I solve problems professionally. Perhaps it’s because I have functioning brain.

Whatever the reason may be, I find that very little in life is more frustrating for me than a “tech support” person who will not deviate from the script.

And I get that 80% of most users’ problems, regardless of what they’re calling tech support about, can be solved with a rote series of maneuvers. But the reality is that by the time someone has picked up the phone and called tech support, she’s already to frustrated to be read to from a script…

Now press the menu button on your remote twice…
Now press the down arrow five times…
Now press the right arrow once….

Yes, these are the verbatim instructions I got when I called my cable company’s “tech support” line because we’re having a problem with how network programs display when delivered by our HD-DVR to our non-HD TV.

Treat me like a human being. Treat me like I’m smart enough to actually work the piece of equipment I’m calling about. A better version of this script would read…

OK, we need to change the Video Output settings on the DVR. Can you get to the settings menu for me? No? Alright, press the menu button on the remote twice.

Great, now, do you see a setting called Audio/Video output near the bottom of the list? Awesome. Use the arrow buttons to scroll down and highlight that for me.

Is it highlighted? Great, now use the right arrow button to open the menu.

One of these “scripts” treats me like a dumb piece of meat. The other involves me in solving the problem. The more involved I am in solving the problem the less pissed off I’m likely to be if it can’t be resolved on that call.

The thing that really bugs me about so-called tech support is just that: they don’t actually solve problems. And I think that’s mostly because no one teaches their children to solve problems any more.

See, systems are really pretty simple when you strip away the bells and whistles. There’s an A side and a B side and something that connects the two.

Basic problem solving tells us that you cut the problem in half. If you can remove the A side and replicate the problem then the thing that’s broken is (most likely) in the B side. If it doesn’t replicate chances are that the problem is on the A side. Very rarely your problem is in the connector.

Yet, most service providers automatically assume that 1) the problem is on your side, and 2) you did something to fuck it up.

There’s no possible way that the reason your cable modem only works 3 days out of 15 is because the wires are strung on telephone poles and subject to the elements and the machinations of squirrels who haven’t heard of pedicures. No, the problem must be in your computer.

I know I’m ranting, and to no purpose. Everyone knows that telephone tech support sucks. And everyone knows that outsourced call centers suck the most (yes, it’s the language barrier which makes the “techs” even more dependent upon the scripts; and I get that their English is better than my Hindi or Farsi or Bangla but even if I spoke another language fluently I wouldn’t dream of doing tech support in that language).

Still…why make life any harder than it is? Enough bad tech support and I’ll take my $103.76 (including taxes and federal licensing fees) to another company whose support is likely just as shitty but with whom I haven’t interacted as much yet.

On a slightly more pleasant note: someone somewhere in my neighborhood is playing a saxophone…and rather well. It’s quite pleasant.

I was browsing nytimes.com last night and ran across this headline “Basketball Prospect Leaving High School to Play in Europe” and because I’m curious I followed it through to the article where nytimes.com proved once again that even The New York Times needs editors.

SAN DIEGO — Jeremy Tyler, a 6-foot-11 high school junior whom some consider the best American big man since Greg Oden, says he will be taking a new path to the N.B.A. He has left San Diego High School and said this week that he would skip his senior year to play professionally in Europe.

Tyler, 17, would become the first United States-born player to leave high school early to play professionally overseas. He is expected to return in two years, when he is projected to be a top pick, if not the No. 1 pick, in the 2011 N.B.A. draft.

Tyler, who had orally committed to play for Rick Pitino at Louisville, has yet to sign with an agent or a professional team.

“Basketball Prospect Leaving High School to Play in Europe” by Pete Thamel, Published April 22, 2009, The New York Times

Now, M-W.com defines orally as “uttered by the mouth or in words : spoken” but given the connotations wouldn’t verbally (spoken rather than written) have been a better choice?

The best books make you think. You put them down and days, sometimes weeks, later your hindbrain will toss up some revelation about life in general or your life specifically. Sometimes these revelations will alter the path of your development as a human being. Sometimes they’ll simply shine some light on an event or person that makes you see things a little differently.

I’ve been reading Valencia by Michelle Tea. It is not one of the best books but it has led me to some interesting questions and some not quite fully formed conclusions. The questions first: when did squalor become romantic and artistic and when did “authenticity” become an excuse for bad writing?

Western culture has long romanticized the “starving artist” with, I think, some justification. The starving artist type is committed to her art. No, no day job for the starving artist type; that might interfere with her creative mojo. Unwilling to bow to the rules and whims of mainstream society, the starving artist usually works a series of menial jobs, if she works at all, or relies on patronage, charm, or graft to meet even the most basic of life’s needs (shelter, food, and, of course, supplies for whatever her art might be).

Because the starving artist barely skates by, living in constant uncertainty about where the next rent check is coming from or how she is going to buy groceries, quite frequently the starving artist lives in conditions that are pretty damn rank. Houses that come pre-inhabited by decades old colonies of cockroaches and mice. Houses with little security of place and roommates who are content to let random people simply wander in and out; the kind of places where you never know when you wake up who might be sleeping on the couch (or mattress) in your “living room.”

Most of us think we could tolerate this lifestyle for a while, at least until we hit it big with whatever our art might be, and some subset of us really don’t have that many standards about cleanliness or personal security, but most of us outgrow the circumstances in which the starving artist lives somewhere around age 26 (if not sooner). The practical circumstances of the starving artist’s life are not what we envy.

What we envy, and envy is a key part of the romantic haze that surrounds these ideas, is the freedom that the starving artist’s life implies. Let’s face it, if given a choice most of us would not get up and go to our jobs every day. We would pursue the things that interest us, the hobbies we barely have time for, the relationships that we have to work to maintain, the random past-times that catch our eye for a while. The starving artist, by maintaining her “principles” and her “commitment to her art,” has that freedom we all lust after. And because we lust after it we ignore the facts of that life or imbue it with that romantic haze. But where is the line between romantic haze and squalor?

Valencia, which takes place in San Francisco in the early-mid 1990s, Tea writes in her introduction is “…a snapshot, more or less, of my twenty-fifth year on earth, written not how it happened but how I felt it happened, and how I felt about it happening.” And it is a particular interlude, one in which she and her friends are stoned on mushrooms, that inspired my first question. Tea writes

We sat outside on the front stoop, a great place to sit, maybe the best in the city. You were connected to the absolute hub of 16th Street, but you sat in a dark corridor, apart, quieter, like 16th Street was this incredible secret and my street was the moment before you told it. You had the sense that something was building, sitting in the subtle glow of the streetlights facing the bottlebrush tree sprouting freakish bristly blossoms that actually looked like bottle brushes. I had seen a bottlebrush tree once before…

…

Now I had one right outside my house, growing all the way up to my window, filling the frame. A great tree. The one from which Laurel hung upside down in the rain the night she learned her friend died from heroin…Laurel cried and George smoked a damp cigarette and then Laurel hung by her knees from the bottle brush tree. The tree also served as a kind of toilet bowel when you were out on the stoop drinking 40s and smoking and felt too sluggish and congested to climb the stairs to the bathroom. Or maybe you didn’t want to miss anything, so you pulled down your pants and squatted over the patch of dirt the tree grew out of.

Michelle Tea, Valencia (Berkeley,CA: Seal Press, 2008), 76-77

San Francisco: land of foot traffic and narrow sidewalks. Call me square but I think dropping trou and pissing in the treebox in front of your house on a regular basis transcends the boundaries of the romanticized discomfort of the starving artist lifestyle and lands square in the land of total, absolute, unreconstructed squalor. I mean, seriously, are we talking about, as my friend M. would say, grown ass people or animals here?

My second question is tangentially related to my first question in that one of the other key markers of our romanticization of the starving artist lifestyle is the idea that how down and dirty the artist gets, and how much the artist “suffers” for her art is directly proportional to how “authentic” the art is. Basically, we have this misguided idea that people who live comfortable lives can not produce any artistic work that speaks any kind of truth because their comfort blocks them from having access to “real life.” This presupposes that there is only one kind of truth about life, and there is only one “genuine” route to that truth.

Whether you buy into the idea that the more an artist suffers the greater her access to truth and the more “authentic” her art is has a bit of bearing on what standards you apply to that art, and with writing there are, indeed, standards (we call them grammar and punctuation).

Warning: this next passage is not for the faint of stomach.

Tea writes of this year “[t]hat was the year I puked on every winter holiday.” She also writes of the Thanksgiving night on which she, a vegetarian, indulges in turkey with gravy:

Somehow I made it to the bathroom, the narrow red water closet. I folded myself around the bowl and stuck my head in like I was bobbing for apples. My entire internal system clenched and released, clenched and released as I threw up forever. It smelted worse than anything.

(ibid, 139)

Yes, you read that right: her the ore of her vomit refined worse than anything.

Now, I’m all for colloquialisms. I could have let “smelt” go by without a blink; it is an accepted colloquial past participle of smell. But smelted? This isn’t authenticity. This is just plain bad writing no matter how you cut it.

I also happen to think that this is posing, the self-conscious striving to be “authentic” which is itself inauthentic as hell. Why do I think this? As I was looking for the citation information for this book I noticed that the Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data for this book are:
1. San Francisco (Calif.)-Fiction
2. Lesbians-Fiction
which means someone took the time to polish and edit this book which also means someone consciously let this go out with “smelted” in print.

Again, call me square but if you’re going to edit a book I don’t think that making it make a little bit of sense detracts from the overall authenticity and ambiance.

In fact, maybe, just maybe, it might actually make it more accessible to more people. And really, if the point is to share the experience (which is the point of these memoir-type pieces of fiction), then don’t you want to reach the broadest audience possible?

But please don’t misunderstand, I’m not necessarily picking on Tea specificially. There are some good pieces of insight into human nature in Valencia like this one buried in a recounting of an encounter with an ex-girlfriend when Tea is in that stage where you’re still attached emotionally but only out of reflex and still attracted physically and you have no idea why:

Good Night, I said, digging for my keys. Have another cigarette, she coaxed. What was this about? She didn’t want me. This was fear, this was the primal fear of abandonment, it was childhood, fear of death, the infinite void, fear of the unknown. This was not about me. That’s what killed me, worked in into a cold astrological bitch. To have someone know you so thoroughly and not want you. Is there anything more painful? I was a favored piece of clothing that had lost its novelty. I was bound for the thrift store, to be bought by someone who would think I was new. I just couldn’t kiss her again.

(ibid, 175)

No, Tea isn’t the only memoirist to wallow in squalor. James Frey and Augusten Burroughs are both guilty of the “squalor effect” as well with Frey having writing standards issues. In fact, is seems these days that most memoir-fiction dips into the squalor barrel in some way, enough so that it’s starting to seem like a requirement for publication. If you can’t show the scars from the suicide attempt or the burn marks you got from the trick or you don’t have a kid you lost in a custody battle because you were a meth addict prostitute, well, sorry, your book just isn’t publishable (even though it’s about gardening).

I’m not sure what conclusions to draw except to say that I wonder about our progress as a species if these two trends are to become standard.

2.1 and 2.2: Usability is customer service (aka: Why geek speak should never make it to error messages and why a single path to problem resolution should never be the option)

Usability failures can come in many flavors when the interface mechanism involves a computer. Most of these failures are directly attributable to a defect in the process: someone without the experience and flexibility to understand that people don’t all think the same way is allowed to control what is essentially a customer service process. Or, to put it another way, some manager let the programmers decide what the best method was and let them write the error messages.

I have to travel at the end of May and I will need a rental car. Avis is my preferred outlet largely because their at least 15 year-old policy of waiving the second driver fee for two people who live at the same address regardless of their relationship is a low-key way of supporting lesbian and gay couples. Primarily it’s the “as folk” crowd that gets the benefit from this rule but it harms no one else in the process. So, when I need a car I typically go to Avis.com to rent one.

My insurance company has a special deal where you can become a “preferred member” without any fee but the catch is you have to be logged in to your Avis.com account to do this. Now, I rent a car three, maybe four times a year which means my knowledge of my Avis.com account particulars dims rapidly.

I’ve got a “wizard number” which I dig out and use to try to log in. Then I realize…I have no idea what my password is. I try a couple of things using my standard password format. No love. So, I follow the “Forgot your password?” link and this is where the trouble starts.

I'm lucky. I have my Wizard number, I know my name, and my birthday. It's in the password information box where the trouble starts. I can't remember the answer to my secret question so I guess.

Technically yes, this error message is correct but from a functional perspective it's a mess. The most important bit of information, that your password must have a number in it somewhere, is hidden behind the at best opaque phrasing of "passwords should be using at least 6 alpha-numeric characters" (yes, programmers and math geeks know this means a mix of letters and numbers but when the average user can't even remember the rules on how to use a comma you're stretching credulity to say this is transparent language). Additionally, the design here is a nightmare with alpha broken up by layout.

Then there's this error message. On it's face, this means nothing - which information? my name? my wizard number? my birthday? - when in reality what this means is that I can't remember the answer to my secret question. This is where usability as customer service comes into play: this is the only process besides picking up the phone during normal business hours that is available for me to retreive information to access my account.

Unlike 99% of other businesses out there, Avis has rejected the process of sending a randomly generated password to the user’s registered e-mail address so that when someone can’t remember the answer to her secret question she can still have access to her account without burning time during a work day. This is a key indicator that programmers controlled laying out this customer service path. They did what was easiest for them on the front side of the process with no regard to what would be easiest for the customer or better for the company in the long run.

So, piss poor usability makes for bad customer service. And yes, I will be asking them about now that I finally have time to call them during business hours (two weeks after I already made my car reservation over the phone).

1.1: Customer service is usability

I think about usability a lot. Some of that is because it’s my job and some because I’m fascinated that products and tools get released onto the market after what must be hundreds of thousands of dollars expended in use-case testing only to be just not quite right.

Take the self-swipe credit card terminal at the grocery store (we’re not even talking about the self-check stand). Upwards of 90% of people using these machines in the U.S. (and possibly the world) are right handed. From a usability perspective it makes sense, then, to put the slot you swipe your card through on the right. But then where does the special pen you often have to use to sign go? Some designers have put it across the top…neatly blocking the swipe slot. Most designers just give up and put it on the left (because yes, it’s so convenient for a right handed person to reach across the screen, drag the cord that connects the special stylus to the terminal across the screen and then hold it out of the way while scrawling a signature). The best designed of these machines put the swipe slot across the top and the moderately small stylus on the right, in a hole that seats it like a traditional fountain pen.

The great thing about usability as a concept, and about the practice of user interface design that promotes it, is that it can be applied to almost anything, even interactions and systems that have nothing to do with technology. Which brings me to my first usability failure.

Sunday I met my friend S. for brunch at a popular diner downtown. I got there about 20 minutes early and the restaurant teemed with diners though no one waited yet for a table. After looking around and realizing that no, my friend wasn’t there, I let the hostess know that there would be two of us but dining partner wasn’t here yet. No problem, she says. It’ll probably be about 10-15 minutes for a table.

During this 10-15 minutes which was actually more like 20 (yes, my friend constantly runs late) a complete party of two arrives, and another, and then a party of three, and then a party of six. When a table for two opens up, my friend is still no where to be seen so the hostess moves to seat the complete party of two that arrived 10 minutes after I did.

Being who I am I say, excuse me, but I was here first.
Oh, she says, but your party isn’t complete and theirs is.
Yeah, but if you seat one it’s the same as seating two.
Well, their party is complete and that is how we do things here.

This is where the usability failure comes in: initially she set my expectation that in 10-15 minutes when a table opened up I’d be seated then later she came back and added an additional rule that contradicted the expectation she’d set with her first statement.

Later, after watching three other parties of two get seated in front of me, when my friend showed up and she finally seated us I explained to her that it wasn’t having to wait until my party was complete that was the problem. The problem was that she’d initially told me I’d be seated when a table opened up, set an expectation that would happen, and then changed the rules. Her reaction: you can talk to my manager if you want.

Now, maybe I should have talked to the manager because, theoretically, if you get enough experience in the restaurant trade to be the MOD during Sunday brunch you understand that managing expectations is the key to keeping customers happy. Instead I let her know that it wasn’t a big deal but that the next time it happened she should let the person in the incomplete party know that it was policy only to seat complete parties and set the expectation correctly. Given that she just blinked and said “OK” I doubt her behavior will change which is too bad because it’s not as if I was playing irate, entitled customer, either. The whole thing was extremely calm.

Next installment:

Usability failures 2.1 and 2.2: Usability is customer service (aka: Why geek speak should never make it to error messages and why a single path to problem resolution should never be the option)