The problem with blogging (or any hobby, really) is that as soon as it feels like homework, I lose all desire to do it. More posts will come eventually. I promise.

Lisa site blogging

The second object lesson from my rose bushes is this: things break.

Of the two rose bushes , the one on the left bloomed first. Seven or eight roses, all at once. The one on the right, meanwhile, only had one bud on it. It finally bloomed as the roses on the left bush were starting to fall apart.

I named it. It was the Last Rose. I greeted it each time I came in or walked out the door. And it was my favorite part of the apartment, especially since that was the week my Internet died.

I wrote the relevant blog post on a Sunday. I lost service the previous Tuesday and didn’t get it back until the following Thursday. Given the fact that the service box was about 300 feet from the Internet Service Provider’s service building, which itself is located right next to my apartment complex, needless to say I’m slightly bitter about the fact that it took so long and so many phone calls to finally get it fixed.

Wednesday was the worst day. By this point I was convinced that I would never get the Internet back and I was going to die a crazy cat lady, alone and unloved. (If something’s going wrong for longer than expected, I have a slight tendency to imagine the absolute worst, whether related to the current situation or not.) This was conviction was strengthened when I looked in the rearview mirror as I pulled into my carport and realized the Last Rose was gone.

It had seemed strong that morning. Definitely starting to wilt, but I didn’t expect it to be…gone.

There is a life cycle, and part of this cycle is death.

Things break.

Lisa Uncategorized

One of the side effects of having a lit degree is that I see symbolism in everything. Much of my jewelry has taken on a symbolic nature. Or there’s the fact that I literally did not see a rainbow for four years until just after starting my new job. I could rattle off a ton of examples; instead, the best way to explain it is that a friend of mine once described me as the most superstitious person she knows, “but not in a bad way.” It’s one of those side effects of believing in a divine creator who takes supreme interest in the minutiae.

The story of my last few weeks can be illustrated through my roses. I have a few rose bushes growing right next to my apartment door. Note that I had nothing to do with their existence; in fact, as they weren’t in bloom when I looked at the apartment, I didn’t even realize they existed. Over the last month, they’ve become one of my favorite things about this apartment. At least part of that is because of what I’ve learned from them. Since there’s a surprisingly long list, I plan to write several entries.

Today’s story is tied up with my fridge. I started my lease a week before I was due to move in. The first day of the lease, I did three things. The first was to unpack a very small number of items I had brought with me. The second was to start the inspection process (during which I discovered a major leak in the downstairs bathroom sink). The third was to buy groceries, since I was coming from renting a basement and had very few refrigerated or frozen supplies. With these things done, I left and didn’t return again until Thursday.

My friend Ellen came with me that time. “Ooh, you have roses!” she said. I still hadn’t noticed, though they were probably starting to bud at this point. I gave her a quick tour and, in the process of this, opened the fridge door to reveal that the fridge (which, I could tell, was brand new) had stopped running, ruining everything that was in there. A call to maintenance had me pressing the reset button on the outlet. Fridge running, I left.

I stopped by on Friday again, mostly to drop off sandwich materials for the move the next day. I then discovered that the fridge was no longer working and I couldn’t reset the outlet.

There was a rumble of thunder as I called maintenance. (His solution, for the record, was to run an extension cord to the living room.)

Saturday was the move, followed by the discovery that the pilot light on my gas had burned out, meaning no hot water. Monday I lost water pressure in the kitchen sink. The fridge saga lasted until the following Thursday, when they finally brought me a new fridge. A month and a half later, this one still works, but there are a ton of other minor maintenance issues that I’m just avoiding for the time being.

What does this have to do with my roses?

On Saturday, as I escorted my parents out of the apartment, I happened to look at my rose bushes and discovered a little toad, hiding from the heat among the thorns. I think I sat and watched him do absolutely nothing for a good five minutes. It may have been just a brief pause for him; I haven’t seen him since.

But object lesson 1 is this: There is shelter, even among the thorns.

Lisa religion personal stories, roses, symbolism

Over the past few weeks I’ve really been contemplating singleness – my role as a single woman, and the inherent problems and blessings of marriage. Specifically, 1 Corinthians 7:32-35 keeps coming to mind – that married people are concerned with the things of this world. Lately I’ve come to realize how true that is. Not that I am by default an example of a person concerned only with the things of the Lord, of course; but there are a ton of odd things that married people have to consider that don’t even cross my mind.

With that in mind, I’ve decided to generate a list of some of the things I appreciate about being single right now. This is not to say I never want to get married. If I ever do, I sincerely hope I can look back at this list and say why I’m glad these things are no longer true. But to any of you out there who’s single and struggling with that fact (including my future self, most likely), if this list helps you cope at all, then my perpetual bachelorhood will not have been a waste.

1. I don’t have to worry about anybody’s allergies or general preferences. Cooking-wise, as someone who loves almost all kinds of food, I’m only limited by what’s already in my fridge. So if I feel like making tofu one week or buying 2 lbs. of Swiss chard for a Greek-style pie, nobody else will complain. Similarly, when I eventually get a dog (assuming I’m still single then) I can get the breed I want. I don’t have to worry if my husband is allergic…or doesn’t even like dogs.
2. I can work late. Most of my coworkers have to leave work by a certain time to make sure they’re home to help out with the kids (or to simply spend time with their spouses), but if I’m in the middle of something I can stay as late as I need.
3. I can stay up as late as I want with no concerns. Some friends and I regularly get together every other Friday for gaming; if we’re running past midnight one week, one of the guys will get a call from his wife (who chose not to participate), making sure he’s not dead in a ditch somewhere and is on his way home soon. While the concern is enviable, so is the position of being able to stay out as late as I want.
4. I’m not interrupted at home. I’d regularly interrupt Mom while she was in the middle of her daily devotions as a kid; as an adult maintaining my own devotional life, I’m very grateful that I don’t have to deal with that. My only interruptions are from e-mails and phone calls.
5. I don’t have to hide anything. This is one of those weird things I just don’t think about. Two coworkers today were talking about hiding their browser history for positive reasons – for example, buying gifts for their wives. One of them actually makes sure to time Amazon purchases just after paying the last credit card bill so his wife won’t see and question the expense until the end of the month (when, hopefully, he’s already given her the gift). That never even crossed my radar as something married people would have to consider.
6. I get to grow in faith in a unique way. Marriage implies having someone to specifically turn to when things go wrong. We singles can turn to our friends, yes, but in a lot of ways we’re reliant first on God to put the correct people for any given situation in our path (say, to take care of my car). It’s like the team building exercise of falling backward and trusting your partner to catch you; my only partner is invisible. A friend of mine who spent some time in Albania once told me that over there miracles of healing are a lot more common because they have less money and it’s literally a choice between prayer and a doctor they can’t afford. Singleness is a very little bit like that.

So what are some things you like about where you’re at right now?

Lisa religion, singleness christianity, linkedin, singleness

It was the second verse that caught my attention.

You have given me more than
I could ever have wanted and
I want to give You my heart and my soul…

I’ve sung this song dozens of times over the last decade or so. In all honesty, I’ve never been a huge fan. Repetitive, very little theological depth – but then, I was raised on a steady diet of hymns and Rich Mullins and Degarmo and Key. So I don’t actually know why it made me choke up a little today. Maybe it’s because I’m feeling blessed, surrounded by friends, working at a job I love. And every apartment hurdle has been overcome slowly but surely.

This joy lasted until I walked out to my car and discovered it wouldn’t start.

My immediate thought was that it was the battery, since it had died once a few months before. Mercifully, two friends (Alan and Tina) walked out of the church only a few moments after I did, and with their help and the assistance of one of the facilities managers at church, we spent the next 45 minutes determining that, actually, the battery was fine and it was probably the starter.

“Do you have a remote starter?” asked Alan. Well, yes, though I never use it; I had actually taken it off my keychain several months ago.

I called a tow truck and had them take me to Sears Auto, which is mercifully open on Sundays. “It’s probably the starter,” they said. All signs pointed to being able to drive home.

After about half an hour, they came back. “Do you have a remote starter?”

It turns out that something in the remote starter had gone bad and burned something or other out. And because of how the remote starter was wired in, they didn’t feel comfortable doing the maintenance themselves.

Well, then.

If you ever want to hit me where it hurts, take away my car. You’d think I’d be used to it by now; this car is car #3, the first car having died a sudden, painful death, and the second having died an extended, possibly more painful death. I got to be on a first-name basis with my mechanics back in suburban Detroit. This car, remarkably, had largely escaped major problems; it’s needed maintenance, of course (including one memorable repair that spent all but six pennies of my federal tax return), but I don’t think it’s ever left me functionally stranded before.

It hurts. It hurts to have to rely on friends, however willing they may be. It hurts to not have the flexibility to go where I want to go whenever I want to go. Being without Internet was frustrating, but I could still go to work or Panera to go online. But with the exception of Panera, pretty much anywhere else I’d like to go is outside of walking range, and my job is out in the boonies, far beyond the range that I could reasonably ask anyone to drive me.

You have given me more than
I could ever have wanted and
I want to give You my heart and my soul…

I cleaned my car while I waited for the tow truck to arrive. Basically, this involved throwing random bits of rubbish into bags to throw in the trash later. On the floor under the steering wheel I found a single penny.

The story of the pennies is a long one. In brief, it involves me working through some of my debt issues and prayerfully trusting God with my finances. Within a week of making some very important decisions (including the decision to start tithing again) I took my car to the repair shop. I had been planning on using my income tax return for these repairs; though the repairs wound up being much larger than I was expecting, the refund covered it almost exactly. With six cents to spare, in fact. These six pennies got returned to God in that I sent one each to various people who were either involved (directly or indirectly) or needed the encouragement. I think I had planned on keeping one myself – taping it to the steering wheel or something.

It’s doubtful that the penny I found today was one of THE pennies, insomuch as they were ever tangible objects, but still.

God hasn’t let me down yet.

You have given me more than
I could ever have wanted and
I want to give You my heart and my soul…

Lisa religion christianity, memories, personal stories, religion

There was, it turned out, at least one advantage to being without Internet. On Thursday I had to leave work early, as my Internet provider was finally going to send a technician out between 4:00 and 8:00 P.M. In my mailbox when I got home was a package from Amazon; I tore into it eagerly and spent the next two hours buried in one of my new books.

The book in question is Carolyn McCulley’s Did I Kiss Marriage Goodbye? Noel had mentioned it in church this weekend – had actually asked single people to go out and read it and let him know if it was worth recommending.

The short answer is that it absolutely is. I expect this book to be a treasured resource for me in the years to come, and one that I pass along to all my single female friends.

Read more…

Lisa religion, reviews books, christianity, personal stories, religion

I have to admit, I kind of feel bad for akoimeexx. He’s had a rough week. Like, seriously rough. Like, caught himself on fire and got chased by killer bees rough. Like, that wasn’t a hyperbolic statement rough. These things literally happened to him.

And having coworkers like me and Alaina, whose souls have been revealed to be the color of “dark, dark evil,” is never easy.

Alaina has, of course, written up a full report of our shenanigans. In brief, it involves erasing his penguin artwork and stabbing things with a vampire spork.

Again, I kind of feel bad for him. I know what it’s like to be the office scapegoat. (I’m actually surprised I haven’t fallen into that role…yet). And really, I should probably try to minimize the torment of the guy who’s doing much of the coding for the new website at work.

If only he wouldn’t make himself such a darn easy target…

Lisa fun humor, personal stories, work

I’m sitting at a Panera two blocks from my apartment to write this blog post. Partially, this is because I love their frozen lemonade. Mostly it’s because my Internet is out at home.

I moved into my apartment less than a month ago – May 22, to be specific, though my lease technically started on the 15th. Right now, the only things I actually love about it are the fact that it’s mine, it’s big, and I have rose bushes right next to my front door. The rest of my experience there has been educational, to say the least. In this last month I have dealt with:

• a leaky bathroom sink
• a highly problematic fridge
• a burnt-out pilot light, resulting in no hot water
• no water pressure in the kitchen sink
• the wrong mailbox key
• an…old toilet (that problem is kind of hard to explain)
• an Internet outage

The last two actually haven’t been fixed yet. I haven’t reported the former; it’s either not actually a problem or will require possibly two new toilets. As for the Internet, well, that went out on Tuesday. The DSL light started blinking, indicating no connecton.That night’s response was to sigh, unplug the modem, and go read instead of write a blog post. When it wasn’t back by Wednesday, I called my provider, who claimed that there weren’t any outages for my area and since I was using an off-brand modem, they’d have to connect me to the department that would charge me $130 to fix it.

Thanks, ISP! I totally want to pay you $130 to tell me my modem’s broken!

So I unplugged it again, borrowed some other modems from my friends (none of which worked at my place), and took mine over to a friend’s house, where I verified that the modem was indeed working. A second call to my ISP finally got them to check the line and discover that the problem was indeed their fault. If I’m lucky, it’ll be back tomorrow by the time I’m home from work. If not, I get to call and yell at tech support again.

The long and short of this is that I get to learn how to actually have and handle conflict. I’m horrible at that. I avoid it like the plague. Like, I wouldn’t even tell a restaurant that they got my order wrong because I didn’t want to risk the wait staff getting mad at me. And having worked in customer service for a number of years, I’ve never wanted to be the problem customer, making a fuss because something wasn’t absolutely perfect. This, coincidentally, seems to run in the family; when I told my dad about this yesterday, he mentioned that he and mom had told my brother that they should get their toilet fixed in their (rented) duplex when he moved in a year ago; supposedly, he hasn’t done so yet because he “doesn’t want to be a bother.” (A theory: working customer service for any period of time will forever ruin your opinion of your own rights as a customer.)

So, mostly for my own benefit, here’s what I’ve learned.

1. The Internet (or hot water, or whatever) is not an inherent right. Believe it or not, I do not take it for granted that I live in a country where I can go to the restaurant down the road whenever my home Internet is out. And yes, I can survive a 24-hour period without checking Twitter.
2. The Internet is a service. It’s becoming a vital one in the U.S. My livelihood literally depends on it right now.
3. I have the right as a customer to get the service I pay for. This one is surprisingly key for me. See also: I don’t want to be a problem customer. But I pay for my DSL, and part of the rent I pay goes to the salaries of the maintenance workers at my apartment complex. So if my Internet is out and it’s the fault of the company, then I’m not being a problem customer if I call them up politely and work with them to solve my problem. Nor am I a problem resident if I ask maintenance to fix a problem in my apartment.A case in point is the saga of my refrigerator. The short version is that there was a brand new fridge in my apartment when I started the lease. This fridge had electrical problems. It took maintenance a week to finally figure out that the fridge itself was the problem and give me a different one. And I truly felt bad for bothering them every single day for several days in a row to tell them, hey, guess what, the fridge is out again. But the thing is, I know they were just as frustrated with it continually not working as I was. And they didn’t blame me for my problems, just as I didn’t blame them for not getting things fixed the first time. I let them know, hey, nope, sorry, for whatever reason the fridge is out again, and we’d try again. This isn’t like me, say, nagging them because my rose bushes aren’t properly pruned or because there’s a scratch in my paint. If something is actually broken, I have a right to get it fixed.
4. Good customer support is vital to any company. Seriously. In fact, they and the UX team should probably be the best-paid employees of any company, since a bad experience is likely to turn a customer away.In a perfect world, of course, there would be no need for customer service. Products would always be usable and functional. Our world not being perfect, good usability will solve a number of problems, but will never solve them all. And that’s where your customer support team is crucial.

   Case in point 1: I was significantly happier with my ISP after the second phone call to tech support, wherein the nice lady on the other end actually listened to what I had to say, ran a simple test, apologized for putting me on hold during the test, and then nicely explained what exactly was going to happen after she submitted a trouble ticket to the Line department (including, coincidentally, the fact that they’re closed on Sundays and they might not get to my problem that same day, as indeed they did not). If I had been forced into paying the $130 they wanted to charge me to fix something that wound up being their fault after all, I probably would have canceled my service with them. (As an aside, while I actually had surprisingly “good” experiences with their automated support line both times I called, the fact that their core assumption as stated in this system was that the problem was with my technology, not theirs, definitely counts as a negative.)

   Case in point 2: We recently made the decision to use Constant Contact for our newsletter at work. On Friday, I discovered a major usability failure in their image editing technology (in short, I couldn’t resize a logo I had uploaded despite them claiming I could). A quick gripe on Twitter got noticed by their customer support team; while this particular problem is, I suspect, only solvable through a major redesign, they get major bonus points for noticing and caring. Even if it turns out that the Twitter response was just an automated reply established through Google Alerts, they still took the initiative to reach out to a customer who was having problems. Wait, let me reiterate that point: I was having  a problem with their service and wasn’t going to bother the company, but they still stepped up to help me out.

If you can get a customer support team together that is friendly, knowledgeable, and proactive, you’ve got yourself a strong backbone to your company. And if my ISP can continue to listen to my problems and explain reasonably why it may take a few more days, well, I’ll be okay with using Panera’s wifi in the meantime.

Lisa society, systems customer service, personal stories, rant, social commentary, twitter

On Friday, our UX Lead having been out sick for three days straight and us being, well, bored and left to our own devices over lunch, Alaina and I decided to kidnap his coffee mug and take pictures of it in random locations throughout the building. These were e-mailed to him sporadically throughout the afternoon. (I will admit a bit of disappointment that his only reaction thus far has been a brief e-mail saying “Funny. Have a great weekend!” I fully expect revenge when he returns, though.)

Alaina wrote up a full post about it (warning: contains me), so I’ll just direct you there for pictures. I would, however, like to add my own little postscript to the adventure.

1. You know you have a good job when your shenanigans are executively sanctioned. Our VP wandered through while Alaina and I were in the conceptual stage and gave approval to it. He even offered use of his iPhone to take photos if we needed it.
2. Our bathrooms are scary, scary places and would be fascinating case studies of material rhetoric. The picture with the cherubs was taken in the ladies’ room. Put it this way: the cherub is but one example of the accoutrements. Flowers and statuettes everywhere. Definitely not my tastes. Though the awesome thing is, in showing these photos to a few people around the office, I learned that the men’s room is decorated like a hunting outpost (camouflage and all). Personally, I’d rather have the camo. But at least we now know where to go for weapons when the zombies attack.

I love my job.

Lisa fun humor, personal stories, work

A picture is worth a thousand words. And sometimes, a picture version of words is worth a thousand words in a non-system-standard font. Read the full story about this cake over at Cake Wrecks; the short version is that the poor font on here was supposed to be Thai, but the baker’s computer didn’t have the appropriate font, and for some reason the baker didn’t know any better.

I have empathy for the guy who designed the cake. I’ve had font errors before, especially when working with free fonts. Fortunately thus far, none have gone to print (though I did send a PDF to a prof once with only half the fonts embedded; at least I caught that problem quickly).

Professional editors and designers, of course, know the solution to this (stick with standard fonts, create outlines of special fonts, package the fonts with the document when you send it to print, have a good editorial process in place to catch problems, etc.). But if you’re not a designer–if you’re not trained to think about these things–what do you do?

Simple: Don’t. Be. Lazy. Remember grade school, where they taught you to check your work? Yeah, it’s kind of like that. Had the person who ordered this cake, for example, chosen to deliver the printout in person instead of through e-mail, he would have saved himself some pain off the bat.

There’s a similar rule for the decorator, of course: If it looks like a mistake, it probably is. We’re all sound and fury here; we are quick to notice others’ mistakes, and probably quick to rip them a new one to the rest of the world, but we’re not so willing to actually call them out and ask, “Hey, was this supposed to be like this?” Maybe as an editor I’m a unique case in this, but I know that not only do I make mistakes, I’m also bad at catching my own. But I can’t improve if I’m not aware there’s a problem.

I remember sitting at the lunch table one day in middle school with my friends. One of them had a rather large booger in her nose for a good 15 minutes before she finally discovered it. And here’s the thing–all of us, and there were six or seven of us at the table–noticed it. And we said nothing. And when she finally noticed it and one of us mentioned that it had been there for a while, she got (rightly) mad at us for not pointing it out sooner. Because really, yes, it would have been embarrassing to her to have it pointed out, but I firmly believe that it was more embarrassing that it wasn’t.

In short: everything in life needs editing. The best editors in the world still need someone to edit them. So no matter who you are, if you see something that you know can be fixed, say something while it’s still fixable. You may step on a few toes, sure, but more often than not the person will be grateful for the advice.

Lisa design, editing, fonts editing, linkedin, Typography