Misc. comments 40

[redbird]

More saved comments, this time not entirely from LJ:

This one is from a Making Light open thread, where Jon Meltzer said that "everyone knows" that it's possible to bypass the gates on the Boston subway system (the T):

I infer that my friends are either out of the loop on this, extremely honest, or figure I'm extremely honest; certainly, my girlfriend and I are paying our T fares (at the moment, she's getting hers free with a monthly rail pass; I pay per ride when I visit). I don't mind paying the fare, I'm just wondering what subset of the total T-riding population counts as "everyone who rides the trains."

And yes, you've hit one of my pet peeves, an "everyone" that means "everyone like me" for values of "like me" that can be ethnicity (skin color, background, and/or native language), class, tech savvy, gender, political outlook, or "coolness" of the "everyone knows $pop_culture_fact."

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This is part of a comment I just posted on tor.com, in a thread Jo started after asking for book recommendations:

The great thing about libraries is that I'm not making a huge commitment when I decide to try a large hardcover book: if it doesn't work for me, I put it down, go do something else, and take the book back to the library. (And if it does work for me, I read it, enjoy it, maybe tell a friend about it, and take it back to the library. The library has lots of storage space.) If I do like the book, I may get more enjoyment because it's longer, but pleasure isn't a simple linear thing: reading a good book for six hours isn't necessarily twice as good as reading a shorter good book for three. It may be as good, or half as, or eight times as, depending on the book, and on my state of mind.

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cakmpls posted about a mystery series she got tired of, and I responded

When you start hoping the suspect will off the sleuth, it's time to stop reading.

Definitely. Especially in a series: if it's a single novel and you think that partway through, there's always a slim chance that they will, and the professionals will have to take over.

OK, there probably isn't, but it's a nice idea for a book someone should write.

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A friend of mine posted (locked) that staying in an unhappy relationship was martyrdom, and zie wasn't going to do that without the promise of a really good hagiography. Zie had written that in an IM conversation, and included the note that this felt like major progress. My response included

I get tired of the "love is sacrifice" idea, in part because it often means, not that you may have to do difficult things to help someone you love, but that you should ignore your own happiness and well-being. (In really bad cases, two people both sacrificing their own happiness for the sake of "the couple" or appearances or their belief that they're making the other happy.)

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In a discussion of people who follow routines with little variety, classics_cat compared her own attitude to new places with that of a fellow student who never strays from one bus line:

Maybe it's that you are prepared to admit, to yourself and other people, that you are afraid of new places. Someone who is afraid of that and afraid to say so may be a "just don't."

Yes, sometimes it's inertia, or lack of energy: there are times when work/gym/home/talk to the people I love doesn't leave much energy for exploring even on the level of "I could walk to the subway stop south of this and then get on my train home."

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A long comment to someone in customers_suck complaining about "disloyalty" because someone asked her employer to match another company's offered deal on phone service:

We've spent the last couple of decades being told, and shown, that corporations have no loyalty to individual people, including their employees. People will fight for their families, countries, or nations, not for their brand of cola or cell phone.

Sports teams can produce surprising amounts of loyalty, but that's partly the energy of competition, and partly the group identification: it's not because the Cubs or Yankees have a "loyalty office." Sports fans sometimes remain loyal after the team moves away, making clear that this was because they were team was able to get a better financial deal from a distant city, but there's still the community of fans, and the ability to watch the games. Phone companies and services don't build that sort of emotional connection: phone calls are a commodity, and a call placed using a Verizon account doesn't feel different from one placed via Sprint or Pioneer.

If an organization wants loyalty, it needs to do more than refer to the customer retention department as the loyalty team. People tend not to give their loyalty to people or groups that they know, or believe, don't care about them.

In this case, company policies make it clear that the customer they value is the brand-new customer: three months free for switching, rather than publicizing that rates drop after, say, two years of continuous service with your company, or every twelfth month free for life. You get what you reward, and what your company is rewarding is people who move around.

Comments

[brooksmoses]

The last comment there reminds me of when I went to change my cellphone contract to a different plan. I was happy with my current provider, I liked my phone, I didn't feel like thinking too hard about it, so I went in to their local office and said, "I'd like to switch from a per-month plan to a prepaid plan." And they said, "If you do that, you can't keep your phone or your phone number." So I said I'd think about it.

On my way out of the parking lot, I realized that (a) if I changed to a different provider, I could keep the number, and (b) if I had to get a new phone anyway, that was really the only reason I had for staying with them. So I stopped by one of their competitor's offices, and switched things over with far less hassle than it would have been to stay with the original company.

So, yeah. I found this completely absurd.

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

My cell service provider was like that up till earlier this year. As soon as they made it possible to switch from prepay to a per-month contract without changing my number, I did it. And this was after years of asking every few months when they were going to make the service available.

I've had the same cellphone number since 1999. I wasn't in any hurry to change, but I thought the policy was absurd and considered it worth letting them know that I was staying with them in spite of it, rather than because of it or being indifferent to it.

[fuzzygabby.livejournal.com]

When I moved a year ago, I fully intended to stay with AT&T (for my landline - I don't have or want a cell phone). But they kept me on hold for so long, multiple times, that I gave up in disgust and changed providers. It proved much faster to cancel their service, though then they asked me to reconsider. Too late!

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Re your first comment I'd like to note that "everyone knows" isn't automatically the same thing as " everyone's doing it". (Though not having read the original comment, I don't know whether he implied the latter too.) I'd like to think that a fair percentage of those who know you can cheat the T don't, either because it goes against their own moral code or because they realize that good public transit is one of the things they value about living in Boston and that it depends on fares being paid.

Obviously he's wrong about "everyone", and I appreciate your point about he word. But now that you know, you could investigate further and find out *how* to cheat the fare. Or you could decide that paying is the right thing to do and not change your behavior. I have a strong hunch which you'll choose.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

Not only did I not know how to bypass the gates on the MBTA subway system, but when I had a good reason to look for that information*, I could not find it.

*I had purchased a monthly commuter rail pass that was supposed to include a month of unlimited use of bus and subway. Unfortunately, getting rained on broke the subway functionality. Commuter rail conductors and bus drivers just looked at the pass and let me ride, but I couldn't use the subway unless I could find a subway worker [not all stations have them] and tell a convincing story. Or just pay for another ride, which really seemed unfair. Jon Meltzer's comment on Making Light was the first I had heard, in 10 years of living near Boston and regularly using the MBTA, that it was possible to bypass the subway gates (other than the way I'd been doing it--convince a sympathetic MBTA worker to just let you in.) I could not figure out how to do so without asking him, and I chose not to ask him.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

I feel like I should say something more eloquent than 'you are so sensible!' but really, you are so sensible. :)

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

I can think of one company that I have anything approaching loyalty to, which is my long distance company. That dates from the point where--not highlighted, just footnoted on the bill--they explained that they hadn't charged anyone for calls on 9/11 and the day after. They did the same thing for Katrina to and from the affected areas, and they're having free calls and texting on Tuesday so everyone can remind their friends to vote. (They also do the thing you mentioned above--contact you to let you know you've been with them for five years, and would you rather have a discount or a new phone, etc.)

Other than that, companies looking for "loyalty" freak me out. There was an ad campaign for a while comparing switching TV providers to being unfaithful to your spouse. Um, no. Ew.

"Everyone knows"

[janetmiles.livejournal.com]

I have a tendency to assume that if I know something, it's simple and patently obvious, and thus everyone else knows it too. This periodically leads to being vaguely surprised when someone else doesn't know it (whatever "it" might be; recently, it was the word "ramekin").