Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Why I hate living in this wretched land....

Aggressive marketing is one thing; but when wage-slaves feel a need to defend "their" company, telling me about company policies whose nature is evident.....I lose my patience.

A few weeks ago I asked a company called "greatcall"  (ha...ha...ha....Do I believe that/??  Is the telephone industry regulated?  Do the laws favor me?  I doubt it....)

I wanted to know about services for elderly people, especially about easy to press buttons on devices which would call 911.....

I was ASKING not ordering, not requesting a service be started.

Today I got in the mail a very nicely colored and larger than usual envelope:
"Thank you for adding [name omitted]." and then they specified the name of the so-called service.

Well, I didn't ever express a decision to add; so I phoned up these jerks to ask them if they
had misunderstood me.

Fortunately they hadn't.  And, when I complained that this was "aggressive marketing" (or some
such bullshit)---and that it should be illegal....

Explaining that:
Thank you for giving me a cake IMPLIES (presupposes) I gave you a cake

And so, by parallel,
Thank you for adding X.... implies (or assumes) I added X---which I never did.....

The lady started into an explanation of customer policies (as if I were an idiot or a child)
"Well, sometimes if a customer asks.....", and she went on to describe the background to what had happened, as if it were a hypothetical case.....

Well, she was describing what I already knew, and what I already told her---i.e., wasting
my time.....

And when I bent over backwards to be concessive by saying "Look, I know you are
only doing your job...."
she started to deny that she was only doing her job....

Really, does she have such deep false consciousness?  Maybe she never heard of bad faith?

But, then again, we know companies have gotten so arrogant and authoritarian as to expect their employees to "believe" in them.....

What a sad country.

What a miserable way for me to start my day......

No I won't be adding this so-called service.

And someday I shall leave this country, never to return.

The fact is that I never experienced this sort of irritation for the 12 or so years when I lived in Central Europe, experiencing both a post-communist country (which remains in many ways like a so-called communist one).....and also experiencing a country which never was under the Soviet thumb.....And in neither of one did I experience such irritation.  It seems to be a uniquely USA form of abuse....

Apparently the laws favor Capital,....and there's no other word for it.

INcidentally, I spoke to a fellow with a machine gun under his bed yesterday (again).
He appeared recently in one of my entries.  Yesterday, he really spoke like a dogmatic
asshole.  Very specifically, when he complained Obama is a 'socialist", I attempted to
provoke him by claiming to be a socialist.  (yes, I know, that was a provocation.)
His response was to close down the conversation, to end it, to stop listening, and to
make a dogmatic remark about how he knew better....Well, my friend, I actually visited
the CSSR, and I've known many people who lived through the thing you call "communism"
(which is actually state capitalism---err, it was......)...

Of course, the machine-gun-man's real idiocy is something like this:  to think that preferring an economic system or a set of political arrangements is not a matter of fact, argument, reasoned
considerations, but something like rooting for a sports team.  He who shouts the loudest wins.  And if the fans on one side drown out the competition, that's all there is to it.

So, all in all, in so hostile an environment as the land of the free, I find zero advantage in
being fluent in the local language.  Really, I experienced less irritation as a foreigner
speaking SLovak with less than perfection, but more like intermediate competence......

Oh, I rue the day that I let my sisters trick me into coming back......
But my poor parents do need help.......

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