Sources: Dell Support Staff Trained by CIA at Secret Black Box Location

The core concern of this blog is the way in which self/other (self/technology, self/animal,
self/montser, etc.) interactions define the nature of the self, particularly as those interactions are represented in popular culture. For the most part, "I" ( I almost want to say "Dasein" here) experiences Being through those interactions, though the experience of these interactions is that "they" are "me." I.e., I think of my machines as an ability I have, for instance, to surf the web in my shorts in the living room; I am only aware of my machines as things when they cease to function correctly, as when a laptop gives me a blue screen.

This is why I thought it would be worthwhile to blog about my horrible experiences with Dell support. I was trying to be modarate in my last two posts. Big mistake! I take back every moderate thing I said about Dell!


It's truly incredible. I've been waiting for support to call back for over 90 minutes. They sold me a hard drive, assuring me this would solve my problems.

It didn't. New Hard drive, same error message.

Only then does the techie think that maybe the drivers on my system might be out of date.

I want to hit someone. Hard. With a 7 pound dell laptop.

I've now been waiting for support to call back for over 105 minutes.

Reflections on What I'm watching on DVD

The Closer, Season 1 Disc 1

Good to see Kyra Sedgewick again. I remember her from the Laroquette show. Good to see a 40+ woman in the lead. Best moment so far: "If I enjoyed being called a bitch to my face, I'd still be married." Worst moment: At the end of the first episode, she puts on cocktail dress, then collapses on her bed eating a Ring Ding and moaning (its the dress that's inauthentic).

Birds of Prey

I never even heard of this when it was being aired. Released to coincide with "Dark Knight" in theatres, it was apparently a little noticed tv show about the daughter of Batman and Catwoman, aka Huntress, and a semi-retired Barbara Gordon (Batgirl) after she was paralyzed by the Joker. On the plus side, it gets the world of the comic book right (there are references to the three former Robins at one point), and the main villian is a blonde psychoanalyst playing Sharon Stone crazy, and good "atmosphere." On the downside: Clunky dialogue (i.e., villains who explicate their thinking for the hero), a pretty girl playing "Huntress" with very, very limited acting chops. Also, her shtick is that she dresses as a prostitute while on patrol to blend in with the underworld. Only she doesn't. She dresses like an actress, which is to say, she doesn't look like the character or like a real person. I may not watch the next two discs.

The Wire, Season 4, Disc 1.

TV bliss. The best television show ever? Maybe. We'll know more in about 3 years. (I would have said that about Hill Street Blues once).

Regarding they who reputedly do suck of hairy bananas

Yesterday, I sent an email to Dell while I was waiting for them to answer the phone (every few minutes, the loop they played on hold would run an ad for what sounded like a higher tier of service than I was getting. Capitalism at its finest?)They replied:

Thank you for contacting Dell Online Customer Care. I see that you are not
satisfied with the level of service you have received. I sincerely apologize for
any inconvenience caused to you. I have forwarded your message to the management
and I assure you they will look into this issue and will work on making
improvements based on your feedback.

Eventually I DID get through to a human being. I told him that I has been transferred at least 8 times already in the last hour, and asked him if he was going to transfer me again or try to help me. In short I was an impatient jerk. Incredibly, I had gotten through to the right department and he set out to try and help me. I told him my tale of woe ( the tattoos, the piercings the family dysfunction, discovering Soldier of Fortune magazine...) eventually leading up to the appearance of the dreaded Blue Screen on my laptop last year. I told him how I spent hours on the phone with other tech guys trying to diagnose and spend two hours wasting his time and mine going through diagnostics that I had gone through before.

He decided that, just for kicks, we should start from the beginning.

As impolitely as I could, I asked if he’d been listening. Nonetheless, I felt our relationship got stronger after that.

Two hour later, he gave me step by step directions on how to return microsoft windows to its original factory settings, which was what I had asked him to do two hours earlier. Unfortunately, both times I tried, I got the blue screen. He agreed to call me back this morning at 10.

He didn’t. I called Dell again.

This fellow didn’t waste much time. He gave me directions on how to reload my original software. When that didn’t work, he said, "Your hard drive is flawed."

That finally made sense. I ordered a new one. I probably could have ordered one cheaper shopping online, but then I would have lost the right to resent Dell when the reinstallation does not work. I need something for my bucks.

What to make of all of this?

First the obvious: this helpline is designed around impatience. They keep you on hold so that you become impatient. Each person who answered the phone seemed to be proceed on the assumption that I didn’t know what I was talking about: they interrupted me, they asked meaningless questions, they were too quick to transfer me, and they transferred me to the wrong person. This is the result of impatience.

It’s also clear that each person I have dealt with in this process (going back to December or January) knew a little bit less than they wanted to appear. They kept putting me on hold, apparently to check what things meant, what to do next.

Nonetheless, though so far the end result has not been worth the toil, it's oddly satisfying when you finally get past all the junk and actually start collaborating with someone half a world away. "It’s asking for a prompt. Do I press return or let it continue? Its giving me the same error code as earlier. Do you think I should restart it?"

Frankly, it made me think of Habermas and his suggestion that the discourse between psyschoanalyst/analysand could be a model for communicative action. The analyst doesn’t want anything from you but to collaborate in fixing your problem. Habermas (as I recall) seems to suggest we need a politics based on this, to complete the project of the enlightenment. To which the scientifically minded reply, "psychoanalysis?"

It seems to me that the model of the tech support hotline/customer is an idealized version of Habermas’s ideal use of language, ie communicative action . Once you actually get to talk to someone, solving the problem is really the only goal. But the embodiment of this form of communication is something that only the mind of Philip K. Dick would have foreseen. Calls get dropped and misrooted, endless loops of useless reminders play. And the end result is about as effective as psychoanalysis, which is to say, after all the frustration, there was a feeling of breakthrough, which in and of itself feels good–but so what? Nothing has changed, and it won’t until after I drop 2 C-notes for a new hard-drive.

Thinking about my own reactions, I had put off and put off making these phone calls because I KNEW it would be like this. I was right. Owning a dysfunctional laptop is oddly paralyzing. There are things I think of myself as being able to do, BUT I can’t do them because I don’t have a laptop (ie, type blog entries in my living room while sitting in my underwear). Getting a new laptop was going to be expensive, and fixing this one very, very unpleasant (especially because they kept claiming that they had resolved my problem). So the problem sat.

It’s like trying to convince a doctor that your knee really hurts, while he’s insisting that a little ibuprofen is all you need (that happened to me last year too). It’s also like trying to convince a mechanic that your brakes need work, while he’s telling you they’re just wet. I took time off from my day and my work to get my brakes fixed. They ain’t fixed. I’m going to have to go somewhere else another time. I feel sick.

Let me state the obvious. We are our machines when they are working, or rather, they are extensions of our body, parts of it for all intents and purposes. Then they stop working correctly. So we stop working correctly. In the brave new world, tech is -- not potency but the illusion of potency -- and I felt impotent.

An Open Letter to Dell support services

Your telephone help is inadequate. I'm being polite.

Back in March, a sevice rep told me I needed to download drivers for my computer. He was going to send me information how. He never did. I sent two follow up emails, asking for help. No reply.
Yesterday a woman who claimed it wasn't her job helped me do exactly that. It took ten minutes.
As I write this, I have been on the phone for 1 hr, 40 minutes, and have yet to be transferred to anyone who believes that addressing my problems (persistent blue screen) is his job. Got that? I give everyone my service tag and express tag number, explain the problem, and they transfer me to someone else.
This is not satisfactory.

Noir goût

About a year ago I picked up a copy of John Marks’ Fangland because it was a staff selection of the good people at Malaprop’s Bookstore in Asheville (www.malaprops.com), and because it looked like a light hearted satire, in which a fictional version of 60 Minutes (called The Hour in the novel) is taken over by vampires. I was expecting a kind of Network News with corpses and fangs.
Corpses it has. Fangs, despite the title, no. And though it’s not without satire, it’s not a comedy. More, Marks seems to think he’s writing a real novel (as a opposed to another vampire book).
Loosely, it’s a retelling of Dracula. The main character is Evangeline Harker, and she stands in for both Jonathan and Mina Harker. There’s also a Renfield character and character’s who can be loosely associated with Seward and Van Helsing. Dracula’s three wives, whose attempt to feed on Jonathan Harker make for that novel’s most genuinely frightening moment also have counterparts in the form of three brothers who are shown vividly but mysteriously; like their sources, they provide a sharp, frightening menace to the novel early on.
Like the novel Dracula, the book is told in a scrapbook epistolary style of diaries, letters, journals, and, because this is set in the 21st century, email (why no blog?). Evangeline is an assistant producer sent to the province of Transylvania in Rumania to interview a man who claims to be the head of a crime syndicate that has operated since the cold war. He turns out to be the novel’s version of Dracula, named Ion Torgu, an odd enough name that I figured it was probably an anagram; best I could do was “noir goût,” which would translate into “dark taste,” a fair description of the character and what he represents.
What Marks borrows especially effectively from Bram Stoker is that he brings the monster onstage early, still trying to act human, than, after Evangeline escapes his clutches, keeps him in the background.
The most effective thing the novel reinvents the vampire without any of the standby clichés. Torgu, for instance, collects burnt, ruined debris, including holy relics. Why is not entirely clear, except that it seems to be the type of thing a vampire would do.
Because it’s difficult to read Stoker’s novel with fresh eyes, most modern readers probably miss how mysterious the nature and extent of Dracula’s powers are throughout that novel, and this, too, is something Marks borrows effectively. Torgu can and does pass his vampirism on to our heroine—but just how is a little mysterious.
Equally mysterious—but not in a good way-- is the reasoning behind why two members of the Hour staff plan an explosion to call attention to Torgu’s evil. Not to kill him, but, apparently, to make people believe he’s trying to kill them. I could not figure out if their thinking was supposed to be infected, or if this was supposed to seem like a heroic, last ditch act.
All of this is set in a studio nearby Ground Zero. Marks makes effective use of that setting, though frankly I wish he’d avoided. The devastation of ground zero is one of the things that has attracted Torgu to NY. But if he’s attracted to mass death, wouldn’t Iraq or parts of Africa have been more interesting to him?
He also has some apparent plan to infect the world with his vampirism through a broadcast, though to what end I’m not certain.
Still, it contains chilling scenes. Everyone who works for the Hour starts to hear place names whiere slaughters have happened being whispered. Evangeline finds that writing starts appearing on her skin as the vampirism takes hold of her. And the most chilling, one of the senior Hour correspondents is seduced by Torgu, and slowly turns into a shade.

Nalo Hopkinson: The "new"--no, I can't say it.

In June of 2007, roughly a year and a half after the unexpected death of Octavia Butler, Wiscon, the feminist science fiction convention held annually in Wisconsin, had a panel discussion on Genre Tokenism: The New Octavia Butler. Thanks to the tenacity of a few Bloggers, the thoughts that were informally exchanged that morning have been recorded on the Feminist Science Fiction wiki (wiki.feministsf.net) and discussed at length across a special corner of the web. In part a tribute to a revered foremother, and in part a bitter commentary on the lasting racial and gender blinders in the fields of speculative fiction, a group of respected authors (their numbers include K. Tempest Bradford, and Nisi Shawl, among others) who plow some aspect of the speculative fiction field and happen to be women of color, reflected on being called the “New” Octavia Butler, and what that might mean. While of course rejecting the question as tokenism, several of the panelists agreed that the writer most likely to be attached to that label is Nalo Hopkinson, because she has been relatively prolific as a novelist. When the blogger Oyceter picked up on this discussion (http://oyceter.livejournal.com/605061.html), it sparked a lively conversation in which, again Nalo Hopkinson’s name was again mentioned prominently. Hopkinson herself chimed in: “I find that when white people in SF talk about this stuff, money of them assume that the only perceptivle difference between a POC writer and a non-POC one is skin color. But that’s like assuming that a hearing person won’t regnise a tune being played if s/he can’t see the band. The makers of culture, language, and experience ring as loudly as any visual marker – which is to say, they’re so fluid that you can’t make any hard and fast assumptions.”

Hopkinson’s stateswomanly response to this issue seems to me to acknowledge two plain facts: In turns of similarity, no careful reader of Butler’s clean, direct prose would mistake her work for Hopkinson’s often flamboyant, Caribbean inflected prose, just as the introspective, heroic women who occupy center stage in Butler’s novel bare little similarity to the brash women Hopkinson is often at home with. Yet both of them have, with some been able to insert a black, female voice into the overwhelmingly white boys club that has usually been American SF. And of course, both of them question the hell out of standard definitions of race and sex.

more to come

Dark Corners: As I Was saying...

As I was saying, Brandon Massey's Dark Corners imports wholesale aspects of Steven King's Salem Lot: a rural town with a tradition limited contact with the outside world, a dark evil related to the town's past, a young man whose move to the town stirs things up, the quick spread of the vampire disease.

Each of these elements is a horror cliche by now.

What works for Steven King that doesn't work quite so well for Massey; King has absolute contempt for the small mindedness of this town. The evil of vampirism reflects the evil within the town itself.

Brandon Massey likes his people and his town, for the most part. Vampirism here does not represent the evil of slavery which brought it on the town; vampirism represents the desire for revenge.

This is a great idea. I wish he'd have done more with it. Instead, the theme he siezes upon is the father / son dynamic. David Works it out with his father, Kyle fails to work it out with his father, and Kahlil very effectively works it out with his. There's something to it: the wanton siring of vampires by vampires is an image of fathers wantonly siring sons.

Too earnest.

Where I really fell off the boat, though, was with the handling of Nia James and the romantic subplot. In a subplot unrelated to the main plot, Nia is being pursued by an abusive man from her past, Colin Morgan. Nia, who can repeatedly shoot a friend turned vampire until he's incapacitated, lets Colin get away AFTER he has captured and abused her Grandmother.

Here I see an author manipulating his plot to make certain plot points. It just doesn't work.

What I would have liked: Diallo is compelling. I wish his son had been equally so. I wish we were made to feel that his thirst for revenge, and that he were almost right to have it.

He leaves himself room for a sequal, which I expect to see. I hope Lisha, Kyles mommy, shows up and turns out to be unextectedly complex and not at all squishy good, and that Kyle intends to do evil but gets sidetracked into being less than evil. After he eats David Hunter. That's what I hope.

Brandon Massey's Dark Corner

I first heard of Brandon Massey in connection with Dark Dreams, a volume of horror tales by African American writers edited by him. His own story, “Grandad’s Garage,” about a packrat who has collected such things as a signed copy of Phillis Wheatley’s poetry, is strong, not the strongest, but I remember it fondly, so I can say it’s not one of the weakest. Zane’s pornographic vampire story is silly, but it is what it is. One of the better stories is “Bras Coupe,” which takes its title from the story within a story of an African slave in The Grandissimes, George Washington Cable’s magnificent novel that pre-Faulknered Faulkner. In Cable’s novel, Bras-Coupe is an indominatable spirit who cannot be broken, only destroyed, and that not easily. In the story in Massey’s collection, Bras-Coupe comes back as a ghost who appears and then disappears from the apartment of a young white man living in New Orleans.

There is also a Dark Dreams II and III, by the way. I own but have not read Dark Dreams II. DD III has received some of the strongest reviews of any of the three books.

I belabor the point about Bras-Coupe not to show how well read I am (although, you know….) but because at the heart of Dark Corner, Massey’s Vampire novel which I have recently finished is an African Vampire who is very much the literary descendent of Cable’s Bras-Coupe. Only he’s ramped up about a hundred fold into a vampire who wants to destroy mankind.

This is all to the good.

It is equally influenced by Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, which is a pretty darn good vampire novel, but Massey takes the elements which King returned to about a thousand more times—a haunted house, a man returning tohis small rural town, a love at first sight subplot—and uses them as a formula, which is not good.

One of the most interesting things about the novel is the parallel it sets up between two naïve sons trying to live in their father’s shadow. David Hunter is the son of Richard Hunter, who disappeared in a boating accident. Maybe. Kyle Coirat is Diallo’s son (with Lisha, an ancient vampire), who wants to resurrect his father (he does). There’s a nice parallel which loses some steam halfway through when Kyle falls under his father’s spell and never re emerges as himself. Still, Kyle, the modern vampire, is one of the more interesting characters. Diallo is essentially a black Dracula, but I do not mean this in any way as a dig. He’s compelling.

Lisha is not. She appears, disappears, acts from a distance, then doesn’t. I can see the problems the author is facing. Diallo is too strong for Hunter and his girl Nia to take on, so they need some alliance. But if there’s someone even stronger than Diallo capable of taking him out, why doesn’t she? The ways of Lisha are strange and mysterious, my child.

Actually, the novel has another father and son pair, and they nearly steal the show. Van Jackson is the police chief of Mason’s Corners; and his son Jahlil (who represents the hip hop generation) has the best arc of any of the characters, developing from selfish and indifferent to engaged and fierce. I like that these characters snuck up on me; both are presented as potentially 2-D, and both develop unexpected depth.

Next Up the good and bad of Nia James, her baddy Colin Morgan, and why King's overall structure does and does not work here.