So I’ve mentioned that I’m doing a lot of writing at work and that maybe I should use that writing to, like, do something with my own personal blog. I also have a couple of for-realsies blog posts simmering, so, hey, building momentum.

One of the coolest things about where I work is the mission. We’re talking truly life-transforming and belief-shaping. Pornography is the easiest example. Before I started at my job, I found it morally objectionable but was personally ambivalent for non-Christians. (This is my default stance on many issues: I may find a behavior objectionable, but I’m not going to force someone who doesn’t share the basic tenants of my faith to live under my moral code.) Now, almost two years later, my opinions on porn are much more closely aligned with my opinions on drugs. In short: “NOOO DON’T DO IT YOU’RE RUINING YOUR BRAIN YOU WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO HAVE A HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP STOP WATCHING IT NAOW!” Seriously. There’s a ton of science behind why it’s just about one of the worst things you can do to yourself sexually. Read more…

personal, religion, society editing, linkedin, personal stories, rhetoric, social commentary, work, writing

First off, a statement: I have never not been single for Valentine’s Day. Ever. Unless something magical happens in the next 24 hours and 19 minutes, this year is not going to be the exception. And usually I experience some level of depression (Yup, still single), anger (I wish singles would stop ranting about how much it sucks), and glum acceptance (At least there’s cheap candy tomorrow).

I can’t control the holiday’s existence – no matter how much people rant about how commercial it is, it’s not going away. However, I can control my attitude. So the last two years, I’ve been trying to shift myself mentally back into celebrating the holiday for what it’s supposed to be: a celebration of romantic love.

Therefore, I’ve come up with a few ways that singles can celebrate the holiday productively. Holidays shouldn’t be about pity-parties, after all.

1. Make a treat.

Like cookies! Who doesn’t like cookies? The cookies in the photo are my mother’s special mint cookies; they’re a pain to make, but worth it once a year. Tomorrow, I’m bringing them into work. It’s not much, but it makes the day a bit more special for everyone.

2. Throw a party.

No, not a pity party. Round up all the other singles you know and hang out. Eat lots of chocolate, play MASH, and find solidarity. I’m neither throwing nor attending such a party this year, but I know I’ve increasingly been amazed at how not alone in singleness I am. It’s one of the easiest traps to fall into – you attend *another* friend’s wedding and you think, that’ll be everybody else in the world but me. Honestly, though, if you’re ever the only single person you know, you probably need to make more friends. The more I’ve looked around and seen all the singles around me, the more at peace I’ve become with my own perpetual singleness.

3. Treat a married couple.

No, I’m not doing this one either, but only because I didn’t think of it until it’s too late. Here’s the thing: Valentine’s Day is supposed to be a celebration of love. But marriage is really freakin’ hard. So look around you and find an older couple that’s been married for a long time. Preferably, find one of those sweet little old person-type couples who have been married for 50 years or so. Really, the idea is that they are a couple whose marriage has withstood the test of time and is a positive example of what love actually means. Chances are, they weren’t planning on doing anything for Valentine’s day anyway. Buy them flowers and a gift certificate to a local restaurant, and be sure to say that you’re celebrating their love for each other.

Alternately, you could also treat a younger couple out to eat, or possibly babysit for them for free while they date. Will this give you an opening for bitterness? Perhaps. But remember, marriage is tough, and in a lot of ways your freedom as a single is better than their marriage.

Which brings me to my last point:

4. Remind yourself of how awesome it is to be single.

There are a couple of ways you can do this. You might want to read a book about it, for example. Or pick up and do something that you wouldn’t necessarily be able to do if you were seeing someone, like experimenting with a weird food or planning out a mostly spontaneous roadtrip for next weekend. Relationships tie you down, so use Valentine’s Day as a reminder not to waste your freedom.

Those are just a few ideas I had floating around in my head. Any other suggestions?

personal, singleness social commentary

Context, first: I work for Covenant Eyes in the marketing department. Our big product, for the unaware, is accountability software…basically, once a week, a self-selected accountability partner gets an e-mail with a report on your Internet activity. Originally, this was about calling out pornography, but we’ve been pushing to expand it to Internet dangers in general (i.e. bad use of time, bad interactions online, and bad content). The main goal of this is that you and your partner are supposed to talk about what you’ve been doing online. This is particularly useful for parents, especially of older kids, since it means that the kids can go and do their thing online but the parent can monitor it and engage in discussions about it.

So this post by danah boyd popped up in my RSS feed. Go read it – it’s short – but the gist is that a girl who is forbidden from using Facebook by her parents but uses it anyway has a therapist who (a) lets her use Facebook at her office and (b) actually talks about what she’s doing online. Read more…

society linkedin, social commentary, 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.

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

This post by John Stackhouse is an interesting commentary on Westernized humor. I have little to add other than a memory: on a mission trip to Guatemala, three of us dressed as clowns. We attempted to be silly in a standard ha-we’re-clowns way, but when one clown pulled a chair out from under another, none of the kids laughed. Apparently in America our standard of humor is a lot meaner than elsewhere.

rhetoric humor, social commentary