Wednesday Walk: Happy Friday! 🙃

A missed anniversary, nobody can help, and a possible dream sequence

Mar 15, 2024

Every Wednesday (or in this case, Friday), I offer a few short ideas that I hope will inspire you to do some more reading, thinking, and exploring. Let’s take a little walk together and see where the path leads…

Four Years Ago

It’s clearly been a hectic week around here. My Sunday newsletter this week didn’t publish until Tuesday and here’s this week’s Wednesday Walk on Friday! I hope to get back to a more regular schedule soon, but with closing on our new house and trying to get settled, things have been a little tougher to juggle.

This week, I’ve been thinking about the anniversary of the pandemic. Or rather, I guess I haven’t been thinking about it.

Wearing a makeshift mask on a plane in late February, 2020 (Seema Racela)

My podcast and this newsletter started as a way to chronicle the shutdown in the entertainment and media industries. For the better part of two years, I documented how our world was changing as a result of the shutdown, remote work, and more.

Early March was always a time of deep reflection for me, as this time of year marked a number of big changes for me and my world (and all of our worlds, of course). It was a time when the pandemic was officially a worldwide problem and things shut down overnight.

It was also a time when I lost my nearly 15 year career with This Old House Productions, which had been the defining part of my identity for most of my adult life.

Here we are now, four years later, and the anniversaries of all of these events came and went without me even realizing it at first. It’s no longer top of mind for me in the way it had been for the past several years.

I still remember the fear and panic of losing my job at a time when TV production was also shutting down and opportunities seemed to vanish overnight. My family was all home with me and we couldn’t really go anywhere else or do anything. With no real income stream (but also very few expenses), life became about simplicity, a theme which I have tried to carry with me.

I launched the podcast two months after my layoff, imagining it as a short run series of maybe 10 episodes. Episode 121 posted yesterday. (If you’re interested, I wrote more about the history of my podcast last year).

The podcast may have changed names and direction over the years, and at times, I really had no idea where it was headed. I can finally look back at all of it and feel like it has been a worthwhile experience. I have grown and stretched in so many unexpected ways and am really a completely different person than I was four years ago.

As I’ve written about before, I do wish some of the lessons of the pandemic had stuck with us more and become permanent changes to our society. I was very encouraged by the idea of remote work and the positive results that many companies saw because of it. Workers no longer had to give up hours of their day to commuting and could life could be more balanced.

While there are still some companies offering fully remote work now, it seems the majority are giving up on it, at exactly the time that we need to be reducing our emissions. That’s disappointing and incredibly short sighted to say the least.

I hope the last four years have also taught us to value relationships more. Many tenuous friendships were severed because of the pandemic and unexpected ones blossomed. I hope that the pandemic taught us to put our energy into the relationships that matter and not into ones that prove toxic.

It’s wild to me that early March no longer has quite the same psychological hold over me that it once did. While I still am cautious about COVID and mask in most public settings, the pandemic now seems both incredibly distant yet not that long ago.

Customer Service Hell

As part of the process of moving into our new house, we’ve had to transfer some things from the old owner’s names into our name. Most of the new house is more or less “off grid,” with water coming from a private well, sewer waste on a septic system, and heating fuel from propane (although I’m currently pricing a geothermal system). Even the electricity is mostly coming from solar panels, although we are still grid connected and will need to have some electrical service to supplement the solar power.

Fortunately, this meant the only utility that required transferring was electrical power. Unfortunately, this has turned into a wild ordeal that seems to capture so much of what is wrong with modern capitalism, where “efficiency” (yes, in quotes) is prized above all else, which leads to horribly inefficient customer service interactions.

At my old house, the electrical and water utility are a combined municipal service that services my town and the town next door. When I call their number, usually one of two women answers. They can handle anything I need, or they can immediately transfer me to an employee who can help. I’ve never spent more than 10 minutes on the phone with my utility at any one time in the 15 years I’ve lived in my current house.

My new house falls into the territory of a massive, statewide utility who offers both electrical and natural gas service. When I first called to set up an account, they took my information, but then I had to upload photos of my ID and social security card so they could verify my identity(?!), then once that process was completed, I had to call back to finalize the account.

There were a lot of hoops to jump through, and frankly, it was low on my list of priorities around closing on the house.

I finally got around to calling them back to finalize our account yesterday, and it was not the simple 10 minute phone call I had grown used to.

I didn’t look up the phone number before I called, but rather Googled the phone number for the utility and called the number that came up. I spoke with a representative for a few minutes who tried to help, until she realized I needed help with electrical service. She worked for the gas company. So she transferred me to the electrical company.

I spoke to a second person who tried to help, until she realized my new house was in Western Massachusetts. She handled Cape Cod and Boston.

It took five different representatives before I was able to get to the right person, who could supposedly help with electrical service in Western Massachusetts. Except she couldn’t either. She transferred me to “customer service,” who might be able to help further. It was unclear how customer service differed from the woman I was already speaking with, but no matter. I learned a long time ago that it doesn’t really do any good to yell at the people on the phone or take out my frustration with the system on them. It’s not their fault that they aren’t empowered or trained to help resolve calls.

The “customer service” person was now the sixth person. She placed me on hold for a long time before telling me that she just kept getting some kind of error. I was told that she needed to investigate and would get back to me in 1-2 days! After already spending nearly 40 minutes on the phone with various agents.

All of this to simply open an account with the electrical company.

Contrast that with a call I made later in the day to the town offices to inquire about how trash service works. When I called, there was an automated operator that routed the calls. I didn’t hear an obvious choice for “solid waste,” so I tried talking to the tax collector’s office, who seems to be the one that processes waste fees.

The woman who answered the phone told me that the Public Works department was really the correct people to talk to, but then she went on to tell me everything that she knew about how trash and recycling services worked in town and answered my questions.

She knew how to answer questions, even if it wasn’t her department. She came from the same town that I now live in and she was being neighborly. She could’ve just hung up or transferred me, but she understood that I had a question and was ready to answer, even if it technically wasn’t her job or her responsibility.

I hate to generalize here and say smaller is always better, but man, there is nothing worse than calling some monolithic corporate bureaucracy and not getting your needs met.

Safety Can Be Fun, But Not Too Fun

I’ve been chronicling my trip to Hawai’i over the last several issues, and there was one last item that I thought was worth discussing.

As I mentioned, we flew on the longest flight in the United States, nonstop from Boston to Honolulu (and back again, though that flight was more than two hours shorter because of a strong tail wind). We flew on Hawaiian Airlines, which does a very good job at capturing the “spirit of Aloha” as soon as you step on board the plane.

One piece of the flight that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about is the preflight safety video, which is done using real Hawaiian Airlines flight attendants in physical locations around Hawai’i. Here it is on YouTube if you’re interested in watching:

I love how this video immediately sets the tone for a trip to Hawai’i (or provides reflection for the trip back to the Mainland), covers serious topics, yet does so with just enough fun.

It’s funny though, because the filmmaker side of me has me questioning the logic of this video way more than I should be. There are clearly times where it’s simply about demonstrating the safety features in the abstract, with the crew holding seatbelt props on a cliff above the ocean for example. There’s nothing that different about this and an in person briefing, except for the fact that the flight attendants happening to be standing in nature.

But there are other times where it’s unclear if the people speaking are physically on a plane but mentally in Hawai’i (are we watching their dream sequence maybe?) This seems especially pronounced when there’s a family a top a volcano who suddenly have oxygen masks drop down from overhead. If this were just an abstract demo like a live flight attendant might do, we would see the end of the mask and understand it was a prop. But the masks appear attached to… something?

Furthering that question of if this is reality or a dream sequence is the little girl who leads us down a wedding aisle lined with flowers, which suddenly transforms into the exit path lighting on a plane (and transitions us onto a real plane for demonstration of the exit door).

I am a fan of safety briefings (whether video or in person) that are clear about the instructions that could be life saving, but that can also have a fun vibe. I think Hawaiian pulls this off well. (British Airways has a similar tone but a very different execution).

I remember not liking the videos on the now defunct Virgin America when I used to fly them between Boston and LAX around 2010. The videos were cartoonish and largely dull (in the style of Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), but also at times sarcastic. It never quite committed to the sarcasm though, which made it unclear if it was meant to be thematic or not.

Hawaiian Airlines seems to do a fairly good job with their video, minus the question of whether it’s meant to be taken literally or is all some strange dream sequence or flashforward/flashback to vacation.

If you’re wondering whether the folks featured are real flight attendants or actors, you may enjoy watching the Hawaiian Airlines blooper reel too…

Other Wednesday Walks

Imported Aloha

Flying

If you’ve missed past issues of this newsletter, they are available to read here.