Pink Air

Fleurons. Beowulf. Borges.

ne of interestingness' most attractive features is its non-judgmental character. Anything can be interesting, as long as someone thinks that it is. Interestingness does not discriminate against any subject or format. Billboards and novels get an equal hearing.

But behind its impassive mask of laissez-faire tolerance, interestingness does harbour some tastes of its own. It secretly connotates. When it turns its disinterested, denotating gaze upon itself, it generates an implicit personality and set of values more or less like those of Montaigne. His ghost is raised by reflection.

The Montaignesque spirit of interestingness is fundamentally conservative, based in a self-conscious awareness that any single perspective (most significantly, one's own) is drastically limited, which leads to the search for other perspectives. (Montaigne was a voraciously observant traveler.) How do other beings in other places with other minds see things? What attitude should we take towards a world that we are largely ignorant of? To care about those questions has implications for everything from politics to typography. 

For example, interestingness likes fleurons: the squidgy little designs separating blocks of text in your fancier publications. A thoughtful deployment of fleurons is a good sign that the text will be interesting to those interested in interestingness. Fleurons are often used in the Ironic Victorian¹ style, familiar from the work of San Francisco² agencies from Goodby back to Riney and through the Gossage Timeflux to its pre-ironic, striving Victorian antecedents, pushing themselves forward in a cacophonony of type, charlatan illustration and folksy patter full of convincing, irrelevant detail.

But the noble fleuron can trace its lineage back even further, to the illuminated manuscripts of pre-Norman Britain, with their curiously florid yet laconic depictions of Biblical miracles and everyday peasant life, from Jerusulem to Norwich, all the elements of the known universe shrunk to fit precisely through the gaps and margins of the text.

That same dense weaving of words and imagery is mirrored in the distinctive, sonorous repetition-with-variation of Anglo-Saxon writing:

In the composition of Beowulf, scenes and episodes are similarly woven into a pattern of contrast and recapitulation so that the effect is of formal intricacy and immediacy rather than any linear development...   The interlace structure has thus been defined as expressing the meaning of coincidence, the recurrence of human behaviour, and the circularity of time as the thread of words crosses and recrosses itself in endless weaves and knots...If it is indeed a vision of the world, it is one which has no beginning and no end...only the endless recapitulation of patterns and the constant interplay of opposing forces.

Peter Ackroyd then goes on to trace England's fondness for meandering patterns from runic symbols to Northumbrian foliated capitals through Sir Thomas Browne's preoccupation with "the making of mosaic patterns with fragments of knowledge," Robert Burton's "false learning and concocted quotations designed to confuse or tease the reader" and Blake's "tense abstraction".  All follow the winding, sinuous serpentine that William Hogarth identified in 1753 as The Line of Beauty, a figure graved into the British landscape by countless ancient pathways and whose principles (fitness, variety, regularity, simplicity, intricacy, greatness) overlap and interweave with those of interestingness.

Interestingness, like Old English verse, is "constantly calling attention to the remarkably wrought quality of the things of this world." Both gain strength through "compound force and internal alliteration."³ Medieval Anglo-Saxons saw the densely detailed and interwoven patterns of the world as proof that it was all made by God. But the direction of that logic can be reversed, to work up rather than point down, and to find in the appreciation of intricate pattern an escape from the blinkered perspective of a solitary self in a single cell and a temporary elevation to the clear and infinite view from which God once saw the universal pattern whole.

Praised be the infinite
Mesh of effects and causes
Which, before it shews me the mirror
In which I shall see no-one or I shall see another,
Grants me now this contemplation pure
Of a language of the dawn.

1. Other aspects of the Ironic Victorian style include woodcut illustration or typography, a dry sense of humor, a shared wink over the inherent insincerity of commercial communication, focus on the links between minutia and consequent tendency to meander like a bemused grampa and lots of footnotes. These features are also characteristic of Borges, Aspergers, The New Yorker, and the hysterical realist school of writing.

2. Also home of the architectural Ironic Victorian.

3. Inventing English, Seth Lerer. "Wrought," "Tense Abstraction" and "Hysterical Realist" could all serve as titles for an Aspergian manifesto, an art film biography of Borges, a coffee table book survey of 'zine culture, a media studies thesis devoted to the semiotics of Ian Curtis' suicide, or a Wire tribute album.

Condolences

Dear C.,

I am very sorry to hear of your loss. Not the loss of office, but the loss of stability that you are currently suffering. You should know that you are not alone. It may seem as though we are all just moving on as if nothing had happened. In fact, it probably seems as though many of us are rejoicing in the destruction, profiting from it, and maybe even causing it.

But we miss stability too. Really. I know I do. It used to be much simpler. It wasn't easy, but you knew where to apply your effort and had faith that with enough effort applied to eternal truths, fair and reliable results would be achieved.

Today it seems that effort has nothing to do with results, doesn't it? It looks as though people have forgotten about the value of effort altogether, as if no one wants to take responsibility, no one sticks to it, no one has loyalty. It looks as though a bunch of lazy, irresponsible looters have burst into the factory, destroyed all the machinery, had a party in the wreckage, and now wonder why the factory doesn't work any more.

But here's the thing. Looters didn't destroy the factory. The owners did. Not because they're especially greedy or shortsighted, but because they're just about as greedy and shortsighted as you and me. The factory was built to self-destruct when a certain set of variables reached a certain level. No one knew exactly what the levels were or when they were reached, but in retrospect, it seems they led to a rapidly accelerated rate of change which, as we know from chemistry, is just another way of saying BOOM.

Now, some people look at an explosion and say, "Shit. Look at all that stuff we had that just got blown up." Other people say, "Awesome. Think of what we can do with all that empty space."  And a very few others think, "Excellent. I had the insurance policy on that." Then they all turn to each other and say, "Fuck you." But what we need, as with any great loss, is to grieve, retrieve and move on.

And here's the other thing. Your leaders have failed you. They are keeping you from taking the first step of grieving the loss of stability because they hold the insurance policy. And as long as you stay focused on denying your loss and pain and grief, that policy will pay and pay and pay. I'm not saying they're to blame. I'm just saying, they are interested in keeping you in an angry, blaming, crazy state. I say this as a friend: Snap out of it. We desperately need your help and you're not helping. This is not about blame, but the first move is all you. Look at the insanely contradictory, illogical things you're being asked to believe. You know that can't be right. But you won't be able to see it until you are willing to feel sad.

Believe it or not, I'm here for you. We don't share everything, but we do share a lot. Most importantly, we share this sense of loss and the place where it has happened, is happening, will continue to happen. It isn't going to stop. I know that your natural tendency is to conserve, but the thing you're trying to conserve is inherently unstable. You can't conserve small business and small government in a global, densely connected world. At least not the way things are currently set up. And you can't conserve economic freedom and religious uniformity. Their logic and consequences lead to deadlock because of those eternal, nice and not-so-nice truths about human beings that your older relatives were constantly going on about. They weren't wrong.

But your current leaders are not going to tell you that. And they're certainly not going to help you grieve so that you can shake your angry melancholia and see it for yourself.

C., this one is on you.

Yours in heartfelt sympathy,

L.

Avatar IMAX 3D

Most Awesome Bad Movie Ever.

I have to agree with the Pope on this one. Though his concern over nature worship seems a bit overblown coming from an organization currently paying out billions after covering up and continuing to minimize truly shameful, hypocritical, exploitative behavior for centuries. Maybe if the mote in his eye were 3D, he would notice it.

American

You've probably heard by now that Up In The Air is a very good*, thoughtful movie starring George Clooney as a man who fires people for a living and who mostly enjoys the muffled and disconnected life afforded by a life of constant travel and frequent flyer benefits. You may have also heard that American Airlines and Hilton Hotels are all over the movie, but provided only production services rather than a product placement fee. In general, the public response to the tie-up is that both American and Hilton got a great deal. I'm not so sure.

The heart of the story (originally written long before the current downturn) is about individual isolation versus connection. And I appreciated that the benefits of isolation were not simply dismissed as neurotic, sad and destructive. (At least not initially. This is Hollywood, after all, not Sweden.)

But the wintery setting of mass layoffs conducted with bland, technological efficiency by companies constantly chirping "We Value Your Loyalty!" is obviously not irrelevant. And it's here that I wonder what the PR people were thinking. Each of Clooney's business trips is tattooed by quick portraits of laid-off workers responding to the news of their firing. Some are angry. Some are tearful. Most are simply stunned. (And these are for the most part not actors, but real people who were recently laid-off, recounting their exit interviews. Their performances are astonishing.)

And between each of these moments of despair, the thread along which they are strung, is the word AMERICAN in big red letters: on the planes, on the nametags of desk clerks programmed to greet Mr. Clooney with "personalized" Platinum Club attention and on the flight lounge posters that also say (of course) "We Value Your Loyalty!" when loyalty is the Holy Ghost of the movie, present by its overwhelming absence. These moments were made possible by American Airlines.

There are a number of other digs in the movie (as when Clooney, moonlighting as a motivational speaker says, "Whether you own just a studio apartment or a two-bedroom home..." Ouch. Even the AMERICAN dream has been downsized.) But again, it's nothing new to see movies taking a shot at big business. What's interesting is that American didn't see that they're part of the target in this one. Reebok sued when Jerry Maguire made them look soulless. But maybe that's the best airlines can hope for at this point.

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*Though not everyone agrees. Here is an hilariously obtuse review from the conservative American Spectator.

Scary fairy

I cannot imagine a better title than There Once Lived A Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbor's Baby. Really, how could that not be interesting? The book leaped the synapse from shelf to hand with immediate, chemical certainty. And the stories inside live up to the title's promise.

Like Borges, Grimm and Chekov combined, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya compresses almost everything I like about art into morbid, hopeful, magical, bleak, gentle, ambiguous little fairy tales that catch the light of human character embedded in the grim slag of Soviet Russia. And while the stories are infused with Russian tone, history and specifics, the rock weight of suffering and alienation squeezing out scary sparks can be found everywhere.

I was looking for ways to fit in more gushing adjectives: exquisite, condensed, onyx, They-Might-Be-Giants-esque. But you get the idea.

Movement

In retrospect, I can see that it was too much to expect a Republican Joy Division. The Republican party is too far gone. It has become...get ready...a rabid, senile, sclerotic rat, backed into a corner by its own paranoid visions, simultaneously choking on and excited by the bloody froth in its mouth leftover from chewing off its own limbs.

But outside the Grand Old Guignol itself, a few reflective conservatives are gathering their thoughts. Distancing themselves from the abuse of power, corruption and lies of the party itself and to varying degrees willing to acknowledge the failures of, well, just about everything over the past eight years, this brotherhood (it is too small, too soon and too male to call it a movement) is groping its way back to first principles and in the process, rediscovering the idea that human frailty is not something to be ashamed of. It is the basis of reasonable politics.

David Brooks stumbles across this idea every twelve months or so, in last year's defense of institutions and this year's reminder that we can't be protected against everything. (Though he promptly forgets again, as in this week's description of the Tea Party movement as passionately "disgusted" by things they appear to be merely uninformed about and afraid of.)

But Andrew Sullivan gets right to the point in The Conservative Soul:

All conservatism begins with loss. If we never knew loss, we would never feel the need to conserve, which is the essence of any conservatism...these experiences teach us the fragility of the moment, and that fragility is what, in part, defines us.

He excoriates the Bush administration as incompetent fundamentalists who lost sight of classical conservatism's acceptance of loss, frailty and consequent politics of doubt. In doing so, he seems pretty darned close to Tony Wilson's description of Joy Division as the band who turned punk's "Fuck you" on itself in order to say "I'm fucked."

It may be that Sullivan's existential sense of fuckedness is reinforced by the fact that he is not just conservative, but Catholic, gay and HIV-positive as well. When the cultures you call home officially condemn you as a low-life, you might develop a complex. And though it could be a simple failure of rhetorical technique, there does seem to be a touch of Stockholm syndrome in his bizarre attributions of support for Saddam Hussein and anti-gay posturing to Democrats. (This is particularly puzzling coming from a former editor of The New Republic.)

I am a big fan of failure, so a Republican platform based on human frailty and the inevitability of loss could be engaging, interesting and even somewhat seductive. But while I'm waiting for the sirens' call of a more reasonable right, I'm not holding my breath.

Post-absurd

When I saw this ad, I immediately thought, "It's Happy Fun Ball!" (And the You Tube comments show that I wasn't the first to have that reaction.)

Then I began to wonder, what comes after reductio ad absurdum? The reduction has gone all the way through absurdity and shot out the other side in a shower of hilariously deadpan side effect shrapnel.

Maybe the pharmaceutical industry is banking on (and the banking industry is farming) a simple familiarity effect. We see something over and over again and the rough edges and qualifiers get sanded away. What remains is a general sense that what is familiar has social authority and must be credible.

This is similar to, though not identical with, the findings of Norbert Schwartz and his colleagues who have found that repeated exposure to claims leads us to remember them as true even if they are clearly identified as false when presented. This effect is especially strong among older people which may help explain why drug warnings don't have the alarming, self-defeating, absurd effect that they might.

So, in summary:

• Do not taunt Farmosilec
• Farmosilec may cause genital deformation, kidney failure, death and cannibalism (in that order)
• Farmosilec should not be handled by carbon-based life forms
• Farmosilec may cause disorientation and temporary blindness to patent(ed) absurdity
• Ask your doctor if Farmosilec is right for you

EVERYTHING MUST POST!!!

I'm surprised to see that I haven't posted anything in three months. Surprised because I write posts every day. I just don't finish most of them because I can't torture them into something interesting. So this is my year-end clearance of peevish, parochial, pooped ideas destined to remain half-baked:

• I've been trying to get through Gödel, Escher, Bach for the tenth time in thirty years and I think it's finally beginning to sink in. Isomorphism, metaknowledge and the insidious worm of self-reference are all regular elements of interestingness.

• It seems that all three energy (née gasoline) companies have decided that pastel graphics make the best camouflage. I wish that at least one of them would cut the oily "Let's all join hands to find a solution" crap and try to make a case for what they actually do rather than pretending that they've been into this alternative energy thing all along. Alternatively, they might at least reconsider funding the American Petroleum Institute's ham-handed efforts to discredit global warming and protect the industry from the market forces they claim to champion.

• The New York Times regularly trips over the inherent conflict in being the newspaper of rich liberals. The angry and uncomfortable response to a recent memoir on hiring a maternal surrogate is just one of the visible blossoms of a tension lying dormant in the regular juxtaposition of complaints about Bush's Iraq policy and the Hampton Jitney schedule.

• The muted response to Obama's Nobel speech reminds me that no one wants to hear gray and that the "wisdom of the American people" (or any large group with the right to vote) is largely a statistical phenomenon based on hindsight and the damping effect of averages.

• The animated film voiced by celebrities has become the workhorse of the Hollywood economy. Abraham Ravid at Rutgers has written a number of interesting papers on the relationship between stars, costs, ratings and profits. One of the big takeaways is that while studios make their reputations with star-driven R-rated movies, they make more money from PG and G films.

• I notice that TypePad has changed its welcome message to "Share what's interesting to you." As with Twitter, interestingness is the most compressed way to measure the worth of communication. I'd also like to discern an implicit shoutout to the easily derided and incredibly undervalued habit of navel gazing.

• Like all great religious texts, the Ikea catalog inspires both microscopic devotion to detail and telescopic contemplation of a well-ordered universe. Schismatics struggle over which version of text or typeface most accurately represents The Wørd, but most of us are just looking for a guide to lead us between the sins of poverty and tastelessness. I recently purchased the Ikean Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of three founding works of modern Swedish design. Published between 1899 and 1931 by a cross-generational network of feminist socialist art historian architects (more or less), they lay out the assumptions and objectives behind Ikea and Swedish design in general.

• Winning the Nobel Prize, like being a brain surgeon or a rocket scientist, is not so much an individual achievement as a categorical denomination. Whatever they may have been before, Nobel winners immediately become "Great" whatever they were befores, and as their work  becomes History rather than work, they gradually lose the vestigial tail of "chemist" or "writer" and become simply "Great" or even "The Great (insert name here)". But frankly, I don't care. The Nobel means about as much to me as the Grammy since the Nobel Politburo let Jorge Luis Borges die without a trip to Stockholm.

• You don't often see Dutch examples on those lists of mistranslations like Ladies are requested not to have children in bar and The flattening of underwear with pleasure is the job of the chambermaid. This poster outside de Bijenkorf department store is one of the rare English language errors I've seen in Dutch advertising. The lack of a "the" deflates the claim from "We have a lot of desirable brands" to "We have an indeterminate number of brands, each of which might be desirable."

• Walking through the mighty Powell's Books in Portland last week, I was reminded that browsing isn't always virtual. A great bookstore is an 3D, immersive interface for searching a universe of information and book covers are like small banner ads, each one using its  limited area to convince you that what's behind it is worth paying for and thinking about. Which makes bookstores a good place to think about interestingness and how to communicate it. I've noticed that different sections have different interestingness quotients.

Take horror. This is Waterstone's in Amsterdam. Nothing looks especially interesting because it all looks the same: black. If you peer into the darkness, what you see aren't individual books, but author franchise blocks: Barker, King, Hamilton, each with a common cover design, which gives the impression that all of any particular author's works are the same. Carrie, Christine and Cujo are just interchangeable King units.

The lack of differentiation makes the horror section look fairly uninteresting. It's difficult to find any attentional purchase on such a uniform surface. It also makes it seem that nothing new is happening in the field.You could say that genre fiction like horror or romance isn't really trying to interest anyone, but simply to meet the expectations of those already interested in the form.

• Trivia comes from Latin tri/three + via/road meaning the place where three roads meet, but the etymological route from "three way intersection" to "unimportant facts" isn't entirely clear. It could be that it came to mean vulgar and commonplace, literally "street." (as in "Damn, girl, those nasty hair extensions are so trivial!") It could also be based on the noticeboards at such intersections along the Roman road network where travelers could post notes and news tidbits. Or it could derive from the trivium, the three simpler elements of the liberal arts taught at medieval universities.

  They may be unimportant by definition, but trivia are often addictively interesting. And interest in the trivial can be appealing when expressed with a sense of humor and perspective. Perspective and humor indicate consciousness and consciousness is interesting. And the most reliable indicator I know is wit: contextual, non-literal humor.
  The problem for advertisers is, consciousness doesn't easily scale. Nor does wit (Stephen Fry's growing ubiquity and declining weight notwithstanding.) That's why wit is a sign of individuality. It is impossible for a committee to produce wit. And even harder (i.e. labor intensive) to produce it consistently and repeatedly. This is a problem that marketers should be interested in. Computers using filter combinations might be one approach. Neural networks another. In any case, the mass production goal of making one thing (one campaign idea, one product, one thought) over and over again in order to achieve consistency and economy of scale is less and less useful. Stock music, stock photos, stock anything is unconscious. It tells you: nobody home here.

• As Chuck Klosterman micro-famously noted, Billy Joel is an odd rock star because his greatness has nothing to do with coolness. Which means that you can like his music without wanting to be him. Joel's constant theme is loneliness: painfully sincere, grandiose, terribly uncool loneliness. I feel the same way about John Cougar Mellencamp. I don't identify with him. I don't wear denim. I don't think I'd ever even go to one of his concerts. But I think his bleak and hopeful songs are often magnificent. (Note to marketers: Stop showing me what you think I look like and start finding out what I'm interested in.)

• My official shortlist for the Pantheon of Interestingness. Not just people who were interesting, but champions, explicators, avatars and trailblazers of interestingness itself. We stand on their shoulders:
• • Montaigne. Navel-gazing leads to the invention of the meandering essay
  • Erasmus. Wit, perspective and gentleness in a time notably lacking in all three
  • Marcel Proust
  • Walter Benjamin
  • Brian Eno
  • Jorge Luis Borges
    

Eighties

I haven't read a newspaper in a month and I feel much more relaxed. When I was in the U.S. last summer, I read three papers a day and everything I read made me feel bitter in one way or another. But it's my own my fault. Nobody forced me to wallow in the nihilistic, know-nothing nincompoopery¹ of the theatrical troupe formerly known as the Republican party. Or to ask passing strangers, "But isn't it actually stupid or worse for a heavily armed public servant trained to defuse situations to arrest someone simply for being arrogant?"

When I feel bitter, incredulous, lazy and self-pitying all at once, I like to listen to Killing Joke. Which is not surprising given that their music is, not fascist, but proto-fascist. Their energetic dirges and invocations of millennial apocalypse to cleanse the earth of human soil would have been beer hall favorites if the electric tuba had existed in 1923. And what with Jaz Colman flying off to Iceland to await the Apocalypse and/or record Scandinavian Black Metal bands, his quizzical sympathy for the Germans of the Sudentenland, the musically and ethically spurious claim to be free of all nasty American influence including the Blues (um, about those electric guitars...) and just generally sounding like flaky assholes a lot of the time, it's not surprising that some have imputed actual fascism, but in fact they're just motivated by a common feeling of having been cheated by the people in charge:

You can apply the killing joke to everything. Imagine a soldier in the trenches in WW 1. He's just been told to run over and gain, say another 15ft of land and he knows he's going to die, and he suddenly thinks that there's some fat cunt back in Westminster controlling his life, and he feels a bit of a mug. That feeling is the killing joke.

An otherwise random WWI reference makes perfect sense from this perspective. As does their mystical kinship with Rammstein, the fantastical bog men spawned from the long buried guilts and resentments of the East, who are also regularly accused of fascism. Both bands are built from the same cultural and psychological stuff that fascists whipped into an unstable explosive: the revanchist "stabbed in the back" myth, neo-Pagan calls for cleansing destruction, the cult of anti-Reason, easy and equal contempt for democracy and communism. Variations on this recipe recur throughout history² and regularly blow up in their maker's hands because they aren't really sustainable political systems. They're anger management tools, like punk.

I suspect that both Killing Joke and Rammstein know this. Both have, with varying cogency, refuted accusations of fascism. But if you don't believe their words, I think exculpatory evidence can also be found in their musical behavior:

1. Their music is funkier, rockier, just much better than fascist art.
2. The leering chuckle of Geordie's vintage golden Gibson ES and leather pants (and pretty much everything about Rammstein) owes a lot more to the transvestite theater of Weimar than Nuremberg.
3. Both bands are familiar with the myth of Götterdämmerung
4. And maybe for that reason, they both exhibit a wistful sense of distance from the apocalypses they claim to welcome. They're not so much Armageddon's cheerleaders as its jesters.

And even if they were Nazi agitators, the audience of black t-shirted 40-somethings at last year's Pandemonium show, our nodding bald spots scattering the stage lights like stars, would be in no condition to answer The Call. Certainly not that late at night. Why can't they start these nostalgia concerts at a decent hour anyway?

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1. Source: Will-I-Am Safire, the nonpareil of noisome Nixonian nastiness.

2. I often imagine Killing Joke's "Eighties" applied to the 1380's and the Peasants Revolt³, another one of those times when people felt cheated by their leaders, except for the boy king Richard II who, inevitably, betrayed them. It might sound like this.

3. Chumbawamba (who else?) recorded The Cutty Wren, a folksong that actually has been attributed to the Revolt.

Bad service 2.0

Blogs are a dime a dozen. Bad customer service experiences are about the same. So blogging about bad customer service is worth (0.1/12)² or about 0.0000694 USD. But I'm going to run through my recent experience with Dell anyway because it was bad in an interesting way.

My Dell beamer smoked and died about two months ago. After ruling out lung cancer, I checked the lamp which seemed fine, but I replaced it anyway. Still nothing. The beamer was almost four years old, so out of warranty, but had been used for only about 60 hours, a small fraction of its estimated service life. I called Dell service and was told, "Out of warranty. Nothing we can do." I went to the Web for possible solutions, but found instead a number of people complaining about similar problems and similar Dell response.

So I sent Dell an email explaining that I knew the product was out of warranty, but that it seemed defective and given their recent efforts to improve their fairly abysmal service reputation, maybe they would have a look at it. Nope. Out of warranty. But "thank you for choosing Dell." Fair enough, I responded, but no, thank you, I will not be choosing Dell again.

Here's where the "service" kicked in. For the next month, I received a series of messages from Dell, seemingly desperate to get in contact with me. Emails and the occasional unannounced call bounced around between Amsterdam, Maryland and Bangalore, trying to find the best time and number to get in touch. Twice, I waited by the phone for scheduled calls that never came. Eventually, they tracked me down here in California and when we finally met, voice to voice, they said (wait for it): "Out of warranty. Nothing we can do."

But they wouldn't leave it at that. I explained again that I knew it was out of warranty and didn't claim any legal right of redress, but that I still didn't think happy thoughts about Dell. I was passed to a supervisor and then a manager who, with increasing levels of authority and solicitude, repeated the same thing: "Out of warranty."

There were some interesting digressions. Like when the supervisor tried to sell me an Epson beamer for $649.99 (Supervisor: "That's a great discount." Me: "Umm. No, it's not. I'm looking at it on Amazon for much less. And why are you trying to sell me something at this point anyway?" S: "I'm not trying to sell you anything.") And when the manager said, "If only it were less out of warranty."

I kept saying, "Look, you're saying it's out of warranty. I understand that. But I still don't like Dell and will not buy a Dell product again. That's just the way it is." This seemed intolerable to them, but marginally more tolerable than actually fixing the thing. Finally, the manager offered to "take this to the engineers." I doubted they would spend much time thinking about a discontinued product, but it seemed to make him happy.

After hanging up, I went back to the Fortune article on Dell's efforts to improve customer service and it's funny. They talk a lot about communicating via social networks and product co-creation and monitoring online chatter: Dis the company in a blog or a Facebook group, and someone from a crack response team may even chime in, if only to let everyone know that Dell cares. They seem to have confused communication with service. "We're listening. And calling. And emailing. And Twittering." They don't say anything about actually making better products and standing behind them. Bad service on Twitter is still bad service. That's my 0.007 cents worth. Thank you for your time.