Day: September 1, 2010

Though a glass darkly

The most exciting thing that happened today was, I called the place where I purchased my eyeglasses a week and a half ago, because they’d said the frames would take 7-10 days on order…and moreover that they would call me when they came in. Seeing as that was a week and a half ago and no call had come through…

Anyway, the first person I reached led off, before I’d even had a chance to say a word, with a long spiel of “thank you for calling” and blah-blah-blah — half a minute, at least, that, only after I’d asked her to repeat herself, did I realize ended in offering to set me up for an appointment with their eye doctor. Um, no thanks, I was just calling to check on frames and lenses I purchased a week ago last Friday?

She transferred me to someone else, who took my name, phone number, and the identifying number on my receipt. Then she went away for a minute, came back, and asked if she could call me back in just a few minutes more. Either because they had to check something there, or because they were with a customer, or…it wasn’t entirely clear. But okay, sure.

She didn’t call back in a few minutes. So I went to lunch. I had my cell phone with me, and that’s the number they had.

An hour later, I’m back from lunch, and still no phone call. Another hour, still nothing.

So I call back, and go through the same song-and-dance — though no breathless opening spiel this time — and get connected to a different salesperson. Who also wants to call me back in a few minutes. I sigh. That’s what the other person I spoke with two hours ago said, I tell her. And she never called back. Don’t worry, sir, this woman tells me. She’ll definitely call me right back. She takes my phone number — my work number, since I’m sitting at my desk — and tells me her name, I guess so I’ll feel like I have someone to complain to if she doesn’t call back.

But she does, first to my cell phone, which I let go to voicemail, and then my work number. My eyeglasses are ready to be picked up at any time. Hopefully, I’ll go pick them up on Friday, the last of my half-days at work for the summer.

Seriously, though, the local LensCrafters needs to invest in a better phone system. If it’s seriously just going to be a few minutes — because you have to check in the back, or talk with the optometrist, or something — just put me on hold.

It should tell you something about my day that this was the most exciting part of it.

Wednesday various

  • James Cameron doesn’t like Piranha 3-D:

    I tend almost never to throw other films under the bus, but that is exactly an example of what we should not be doing in 3-D. Because it just cheapens the medium and reminds you of the bad 3-D horror films from the 70s and 80s, like Friday the 13th 3-D. When movies got to the bottom of the barrel of their creativity and at the last gasp of their financial lifespan, they did a 3-D version to get the last few drops of blood out of the turnip..

    Something tells me he’s going to hate Jackass 3-D.

    Frankly, though, it’s films like that — cheap horror movies with visceral, jump-out-at-you scares — to which I think 3-D is actually most ideally suited. Cameron may be throwing his full weight behind it as a tool on the artistic palette, but even in Avatar I thought the 3-D was a lot less impressive than advertised. It has its uses, but even at its best, I don’t think it rises above a gimmick. (For which you trade a not-insignificant amount of brightness and comfort.) So a film like Piranha, which embraces it fully as gimmick, may actually be exactly what the technology is meant to do.

  • Eye chart for geeks.
  • And interesting look at Yiddish in America:

    The survival of Yiddish in America is an on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand story. Yiddish, once the language of the Jews of Eastern Europe, is undoubtedly moribund, with its last full-throated speakers, Holocaust survivors, now well into their 80s and 90s. (A smattering of their children speak it through sheer willpower whenever they can buttonhole a comprehending ear, but some, like this writer, grew up nagging parents to speak English and regrettably saw their first language wither.)

    On the other hand, the language is booming among Hasidim, for whom it is a lingua franca, mushrooming so prolifically that by some estimates the ultra-Orthodox will form a majority of American Jews by century’s end. [via]

  • Have you been reading Kaleidotrope contributor Jason Heller’s weekly Frequency Rotation posts at Tor.com? You really should be.
  • And finally, based on this clip, I would totally buy Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Alexander Hamilton rap album. [via]