Ramblin' with Roger

Spectrum “communications” cluster…

My calm demeanor had deteriorated

I had thought to “break away from the box” in the new decade. The sheer, and repeated, incompetence of Spectrum, part of Charter Communications, has made this mission-critical. And it started off so casually.

Thursday: I get home from the choir rehearsal. Deciding to watch JEOPARDY! before going to bed, I turn on the TV. Soon, the DVR flashes 10:41 several times and dies. OK, stuff happens.

Friday: Taking the disconnected DVR with me, I take the bus to Colonie Center. I go to the Spectrum store. Unable to discern how one gets into the queue, I ask a customer. He tells me I need to talk to the guy talking to someone in the corner. I’m seventh in the queue, and 15 minutes later, some other rep takes my old device and gives me a new one.

Interestingly, it doesn’t have the time on the front. “Do you WANT that? You can get Spectrum Mobile…?” Don’t try to upsell me. I just want to walk into the room and see the time. I was so annoyed, I went to the Christmas Tree store next door and bought a $5 analog clock.

When I get home, I think I’ve reconnected the wires correctly. Yet I get the message:

You’re in Limited Mode

“We’re sorry, your Spectrum receiver is in Limited Mode and some features may be temporarily available.” Actually, there are no features that are available.

“We’re working to resolve this issue, but please check your cables for a loose connection that could affect your service.” I think it’s my technological incompetence in play.

Friday evening: I call the help line for Spectrum. This is always a chore. The automated system wants to offer “help” even when I know it won’t solve the problem. When I finally talk to a real person, he tells me something useful. I was under the old Time Warner/Spectrum.net account. The DVR is for the newer Spectrum.com service. They gave me the wrong DVR. NOT my fault – yay! (40 minutes)

Saturday: I call the ordering department. This guy promises me a recurring monthly charge of $80 less what I’m paying for now. The package also offers a greater number of channels, what they call the Silver level. He also suggested AppleTV+ which I decided to try on our second TV. He needs a payment, though. I use my primary credit card.

(Sidebar: the charge was rejected on my Chase VISA because I don’t use it often enough. I’ll have to make some small charges with it.)

Later, I check the email confirmation. “The technician is scheduled to arrive on Tuesday” between 11 and 12. At an address in the 321 ZIP Code of Florida.

The great undo

Sunday: I call the ordering department again. I have to explain, in great detail, what has happened so far, a recurring theme. He has an email address and phone number for me. They are both incorrect. Essentially, he has to undo what the previous dude did.

This includes changing the service call from Florida to my Albany, NY address to Tuesday at 1 to 2 pm. He also notes that AppleTV+ would NOT be a good choice for me, and I get remove that. (100 minutes)

I get the email conformation, and the amount is far greater than what I had been told.

Monday: I call the billing department. The previous person had expressed admiration with my calm demeanor. By this point, however, that had deteriorated. The prices I had been quoted by the Saturday guy was for new customers only. What she could do was give me a $25 credit towards the Silver upgrade for the month, since I would not have taken it had I known the cost.

She also asked if I knew that I would be charged $50 for the installation on Tuesday. I did not. As I had asked for her supervisor, she said someone would call back in a couple hours. (40 minutes)

More than four hours on the phone later…

Tuesday: I receive a call back for the supervisor who deals with stuff when issues “escalate.” He apologized profusely, and agreed to waive the installation fee. It would not have applied if the Spectrum store had given me the right DVR box in the first place. He is also crediting the money I spent on Saturday, though it might take a few days. (25 minutes)

The technician showed up a few minutes after 2. He had gone to a house two doors down, then called me from his cell to see if I were home. He started fixing the cable, determining the box the store had given me was, in his word, “junk,” and switched it out. Then he replaced the modem so that it was four times faster. Why didn’t that happen before? Then back downstairs to finish with the cable.

After he left, I checked the channel choices. Far fewer than I had been promised. The local channels, C-SPAN a couple shopping channels, and TBS, pretty much. I went to the Spectrum website, found some instruction, rebooted the box, and suddenly I had the channels I desired.

In the next couple days, I got to see the shows on demand that I had recorded but had not watched, such as a 60 Minutes from the week prior, and the Kennedy Center Honors. Still, this was an organizational clusterf@(# at a level I do not believe I have ever experienced. My resolution in 2020 is to get a divorce from Spectrum and its alleged “communications” services.

January rambling: Liar, con artist

Fahrvergnügen

I Love the 20s — xkcd – This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.
This means you’re free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them).

The Decade of Democracy’s Decline.

He’s a Liar, a Con Artist and a Snitch. His Testimony Could Soon Send a Man to His Death. A Twitter summary.

1 Billion Animals Killed in Australia Wildfires Is “Very Conservative” Estimate and Its Government Must Stop Denying Climate Crisis.

Why Is Middle School So Hard for So Many People?

Go Green: Eco-Friendly Products We Should All Be Using.

“If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.” Henry David Thoreau

‘Here We Go. The Chaos Is Starting’: An Oral History of Y2K. (You may get a popup asking you for an email address before you can read the story.)

How New York’s Bagel Union Fought — and Beat — a Mafia Takeover.

Why Churches Should Ditch The Projector Screens And Bring Back Hymnals. BTW, I own a hymnal from c. 1850.

I ignored warnings from friends and family not to marry my husband. Was I making a big mistake?

Jan Žižka ‘the One-Eyed’ is one of that elite band of great military commanders.

Football Hall of Fame: Congratulations, Coach Cowher.

I Was Captain of the Team that Loses to the Harlem Globetrotters Every Night.

Buck Henry, R.I.P..

Now I Know: How a Flush Beat a Checkmate and The Astronauts Strike Back and The Best-Selling Volkswagen Doesn’t Have Fahrvergnügen and The Soccer Star Who Helped Someone Else Reach Their Goal and Why Public Toilet Seats are U-Shaped.

Cadet Bone Spurs Wags the Dog

Remember Normal Presidents?

7 Stunning New Pieces of Impeachment Evidence Just released by the House.

How He And Mnuchin Slipped Billions In New Tax Breaks To Corporations.

The Year The Press Tried — And Failed — To Stand Up To Trump.

“Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history. ” – Aldous Huxley

The cost of deceit over Iran and North Korea.

Noam Chomsky: US Is a Rogue State and Suleimani’s Assassination Confirms It.

Trumpist Evangelicals Respond to Christianity Today.

MUSIC

A decade of pop.

It’s Been a Long, Long Time – Kitty Kallen and the Harry James Orchestra.

Spontaneous – Neil Innes.

Never Gonna Give You Up – The Newfangled Four.

A Week and a Day – Boys II Menorah, with James Corden.

Overture in D Major by Franz Joseph Haydn.

Playing for Change: Soul Rebel, featuring Bunny Wailer and Manu Chao. |

Coverville 1292: The R.E.M. Cover Story.

On the Beautiful Blue Danube.

You Can’t Stop the Beat – Masters of Harmony.

Main theme from Star Wars – Attacca Quartet.

Imagine – MonaLisa Twins.

Uptown Funk – Mark Ronson featuring Bruno Mars.

Martin Luther King Jr: Economic Justice

“What is the job of government? Just to benefit the rich?”

The book, To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice, (W.W. Norton, 2018) came out April 3—the day before the 50-year anniversary of King’s assassination. The author, historian Michael Honey, makes the case in an interview conducted for MLK Day 2019 that ECONOMIC JUSTICE WAS ALWAYS PART OF MLK JR.’S MESSAGE.

I find it strange that some commenters seem to eschew the idea that MLK was an economic warrior. They tend to believe such an idea is the result of revisionist thinking.

As Honey notes, King “said in Memphis: ‘It’s a crime in a rich nation for people to receive starvation wages.’ That remains a basic issue right now across the country, where it seems like the economy is doing really well but there are millions of people—about 40 million people—in poverty.

“Economically, things for poor people and working-class people are probably worse in some ways now than in his time. The unionized, industrial jobs that created the black middle class in places like Memphis are mostly gone…

“King said the best anti-poverty program is a union. Where you can fight for your own agenda—somebody doesn’t have to hand it to you. But you have to be organized to do that. King always supported unions. He gave his life in that cause, in a sense.

“Many workers in this country recognize King as a labor hero. ‘We can get more together than we can apart,’ King said in Memphis. He always said we have a common destiny, and he put it in an economic framework. And we do need that.”

Eliminate Poverty

Also, from Food for the Hungry, 9 Powerful Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes on Eradicating Poverty. The earliest one cited was from 1961. “As long as there is poverty in this world, no man can be totally rich even if he has a billion dollars.” That was in his American Dream speech.

If you want to truly celebrate Martin Luther King Day, support The Poor People’s Campaign, “a national call for moral revival. As Honey said, the PPC “said everybody should have health care, everybody should have a median level of income—not poverty income, a median level of income, such that you can live a normal life. And education, and housing, and jobs at union wages. King thought the role of government is to bring about social justice.

“To those who say it’s not the government’s job, King would ask, Well, what is the job of government? Just to benefit the rich?”

Movie review: Ford v Ferrari

Wide World of Sports

fordvferrari I read the description of Ford v Ferrari in IMBD. “American car designer Carroll Shelby and driver Ken Miles battle corporate interference, the laws of physics and their own personal demons to build a revolutionary race car for Ford and challenge Ferrari at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1966.”

Frankly, this doesn’t sound too compelling to me. I’m not a car guy by any stretch. But as a critic put it: “Ford v Ferrari reaches beyond a niche car-enthusiast audience. The screenwriting team has really made it accessible for anyone with or without car knowledge.”

It’s partly an unlikely buddy movie with the clever, smooth-talking Texas-born Shelby (Matt Damon) encouraging, protecting and occasionally fighting with Miles, the prickly and creative Englishman. Certainly, it was a love story without a lot of hearts and flowers between Ken and wife Mollie (Caitriona Balfe). Their kid Peter (Noah Jupe) is nice without being movie-kid annoying.

Shelby exploits the corporate ego of the Ford Motor Company in getting them to let him and Miles build the car they wanted to create. Ford loses yet again to their Italian rival at the 24 hours at Le Mans. The jousting between Shelby and Ford executives such as the Henry Ford II himself (Tracy Betts) was quite delicious.

NOW I remember

Finally, it’s a sports story of speed, endurance, and technology which I ended finding fascinating.

These were real-life guys I had never heard of. But I suddenly remembered that I had seen television coverage of Le Mans when I was a kid. I was probably watching it with my grandfather McKinley Green in the second-floor apartment he shared with my grandma.

I’m guessing it was on ABC’s Wide World of Sports and that the late Keith Jackson was the announcer. The TV anchor certainly was a ringer for Jackson.

At two hours, 32 minutes, it is probably too long by a quarter-hour. But Ford v Ferrari was a film both my wife and I enjoyed when we saw it at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany in December 2019.

Albany has fine cultural offerings

the walk signals

Albany cultural The blogger Jaquandor has more questions for Ask Roger Anything.
Do you like the cultural offerings in your area?

I LOVE the cultural offerings in the Capital District of New York State. The Albany Symphony Orchestra received two more Grammy nominations this year. They often perform contemporary, challenging pieces, not just the old warhorses. Although they do those very well.

Proctors Theatre in Schenectady offers a panoply of performances. I have season tickets to see the shows that were on Broadway and are now touring. But there are a lot of other things going on in the former vaudeville venue with 2700 seats.

Capital Rep does very fine theater with mostly Actors’ Equity performers. In the past, I’ve had season tickets. There are many fine other theatrical venues in the area, such as Mac-Haydn Theatre.

Free shows in the good weather include Alive at Five, performances on the Empire State Plaza, the Tulip festival, Larkfest, and many more.

The New York State Writers Institute offers name authors and challenging films throughout the year. The Underground Railroad history project always has informational and educational events.

APL

I can’t forget the Albany Institute of History and Art, since we are members. The New York State Museum is another of the many museums and galleries in the region. I must mention that the Albany Public Library, which offers over a thousand events each year, including a weekly book review at the Washington Avenue branch.

My friend David Brickman writes about a lot of these. Check out Nippertown for more events than I could possibly attend. My theory: if you’re bored here, you’re not trying very hard.

What’s something completely mundane that bugs you or freaks you out? For me, it’s the fact that the buttons on the drive-thru ATM have braille on them. It’s clear why (they probably don’t bother making multiple sets of buttons for those machines), but it still always strikes me as really odd.

It’s the walk signals in Albany. Some of them do nothing except mirror the street lights, so what’s the point? Some of them you press and you get extra time to cross the street – important crossing Madison at West Lawrence. Without, it’s about five seconds, and you’ll probably die.

There’s an intersection a block from there. It has five spurs. The walk sign lights up only if you hit the button crossing Madison at South Allen,. If you cross Western at North Allen, the walk sign lights up regardless of whether you hit the button. But the sequence of when you can cross and when you can not is unchanged.