Morality lessons in telemarketing calls

The phone rings. It's early, but not so early that I shouldn't be up. It could be an important call, and I'd be really pathetic if I ignored it because I wanted to hit snooze into a second hour. So I stumble out of bed, searching for the phone. I hear the echo of my second phone and seem to know exactly where that one is, even if the location of the nearer one eludes me. I finally find it, right at my feet.

Caller ID isn't much help. Out of Area. It seems like I'm getting a lot of calls these days that are "out of area". If somebody doesn't want their name to appear on the Caller ID, do they move out of the metro area? Do they ask for an area code a little West of the city, in some land of the technologically impaired?

"Good Morning. Oh...this is Todd? Great."

Yeah, wonderful. "Who is this?"

"This is the Minneapolis Paralyzed Veterans"

"Put me on your do not call list".

There's a pause. The guy doesn't speak. I hang up. The guilt settles in.

The Minneapolis Paralyzed Veterans. Have I really become so hardened that I hang up on them? I picture a man who served in Korea or Vietnam. He's a quadriplegic. His office is majorily underfunded, so there's no headset to wear, and no automatic dialers to call people. So it's with great effort that he nudges the phone off the receiver to nose dial every number. And asking to be on the Do Not Call list? That probably means someone has to wheel over to the large tome and drag it across the office. Probably by their teeth.

Maybe video phones are the way to go after all. I can't help but think that if I had a full body shot of a quadriplegic in a wheel chair to look at, it would be quite sobering and I'd be a little more generous with my time and money when I got a telemarketing call.

I feel bad now.

But what am I going to do? They're "out of area". It's not like I can call them back.

DJ Bitch Slap (The Weasel part II)

The Weasel Bryce was not alone. Although weasels tend not to make a lot of friends, the Weasel Bryce formed a common bond with the residents of the 7th floor Tower's dormitory through his love of metal. Hard rock must have been frowned upon in the Weasel's home, so college became an excuse to crank it up. Metallica. Dokken. Bullet Boys. The Scorpions. You really haven't seen cheese until you've seen The Weasel adjust his Brewer's cap and say "this one's for the gipper" as he slips the latest Whitesnake CD into your stereo and turns it up to 11.

Before there was "alternative" rock or "indie" rock, there was College music. Back when I was really into classic rock and hard rock my friends and I used to marvel at the transformation that occurs to people's musical taste when they got to college. "I don't get it", my friend Mike said, "it's like you get to college and your taste turns to shit." A year later we'd be rolling in it. The Smiths. R.E.M. Husker Du. The Cure. It wasn't that your taste got worst, it's that you started to look for something a little more real. Morrissey singing about sexual identity or Michael Stipe taking on environmental issues seemed a lot more interesting that Warrant singing about Cherry Pie.

So imagine my surprise when I get to college. It's supposed to be a hotbed for this kind of music, but I'm surrounded by the hair metal bands of the 80's. Or at least their dorky listeners. True, the eighties had barely passed, but this was college, man. I thought I'd be turned on to tons of new bands, but instead the closest I got to musical commaraderie in my freshman year was the bonding I had with the deadhead at the end of the hall. Looking at his 100+ cassettes of dead shows was far more interesting than hearing the Weasel Bryce go on and on about how much he loves his baby's poundcake.

My school was pretty much a commuter college. One of the nice benefits of staying the weekend was usually that your roommate went home. This wasn't the case with the Weasel. College was liberating for him. He could finally act the way most other people acted during their sophmore year of high school. The Weasel had found his people. Maybe his high school wasn't too hip on Trixter, but those guys on the 7th floor, they loved it.

One particular Friday night rolls around and I have nothing to do. A group of people from our floor decide to go to Hardee's where a live broadcast is taking place with two disc jockey's from a Milwaukee radio station. The Weasel loved Lazer 103 because they played a lot of music he liked. And he thought the DJ was hot. They also played some decent classic rock and I was bored, so I decided to tag along.

The lines were ridiculous. You'd think we were waiting to get into some live show, but that sort of thing never happened in this town. Instead we loitered around people ordering Frisco burgers waiting to talk to Marilyn Mee and her sidekick. Or maybe she was the sidekick. I can't remember. Anyway, we finally get our turn to go up to them and shake their hands. I go up with the Weasel and his stereo cranking rival, Eric. I'm the last one of the three of us to talk to them. Marilyn seems pretty cool. I tell her I like the station. She asks if there isn't something cooler going on than this on a Friday night, to which I had to shrug my shoulders as if to say "this is Whitewater". Then she says "you seem pretty cool." I'm like, "oh, thanks." And then within ear shot of the Weasel Bryce and Stereo Crankin' Rival Eric she says "so why are you hanging around with these dorks?"

It was a minor victory. The Weasel turned bright red and headed for the door. He had been bitch slapped by Milwaukee's most well known DJ, and I felt vindicated. Of course, I couldn't help bring it up from time to time. It was a nice way to cap off the year. After enduring blown stereo speakers, stolen food, missing alcohol, three roommates and a Weasel posse, my freshman year was coming to end.

My sophmore year would be completely different. There'd be no more doing it "for the gipper". I'd lose touch with the Weasel and just about everybody else from the 7th floor. I'd get turned on to good music and interesting books, and I'd indulge in the excesses of college life. I'd find my people. And eventually the cops would find us. But that's another story.

The Home Office

So I'm hanging out at a coffee shop today minding my own business. I'm keeping a low profile, surfing the internet, and occasionally trying to get some real work done. The place is air conditioned and filled with people who seem to be doing the same exact thing. For some it seems like this place is an actual office. It's a sea of laptops. The Mac to PC ratio is especially high too. Most people are alone, but there are a few people who are sitting at a table together. I tend to think they're doing the same type of work I'm doing, but they look so stern. I try not to think of my work as being THAT serious.

IT guy is next to me. His cell phone startles him every twenty minutes with it's obnoxious ring and he digs for it in his dancing pants. He's far more flamboyant than any IT guy I've seen before. Mutton chops too. It's a real treat. And I'm listening to Morrissey. I swear you can't plan these coincidences.

No new emails yet. I have my gmail placed just underneath this page so I can see any developments that may occur in the inbox. In case I miss the action there, I have my gmail notifier at the top of my display. It's a sealed envelope right now, which is kind of a weird icon to have when you have no new mail. Maybe the empty mailbox is patented by AOL in every conceivable way.

It's a weird existence when you don't have to talk to someone everyday. You clear your throat to make sure you're capable of talking if the need shall arise. I get my practice with the counter girls too. "Just that?" they say, and I get my opportunity to answer back. "yeah, that'll be it. For now." I like that "for now" part. It means I'm not going anywhere.

I had another excuse to talk soon after I got here. I was rocking out and trying to write (yeah, this was before Morrissey) and this guy stands right in front of me. I ignore him. But he doesn't go away. He sort of motions for me to take off my earphones, and I'm thinking this guy really has balls if he's just going to ask me for money or something. I mean, I'm in a groove. Or at least as big of a groove as I'm able to get into this universal home office away from home. So I take off my earphones and what does he say? What are these words he exchanges with a guy who's had very few words with anyone all day long?

"Were you the one I was talking to about anxiety issues yesterday?"

Nope, that wasn't me. At least not yet.

Sketches Of Eddie

According to Tom Chase, a new age Christian writer who has used astrology and the bible to calculate when the antichrist will emerge, that date is today. 6/6/06. His emergence will be followed by an asteroid collision and a two year battle of Armageddon. The name of the antichrist? He says it's Vladimir Putin. Sort of reminds me of Star Wars and Emperor Palpatine, or whatever his name was.

Back in 1982, a different beastly event was unleashed on the world. It was the release of Iron Maiden's The Number of the Beast. By widening Iron Maiden's audience and helping to bring their brand of British metal to the US, it inspired a generation of metal fans to take up art.

Sure I'd drawn a Van Halen or Twisted Sister sign in sunday school or during a boring math lesson, but the intricate work involved in sketching Iron Maiden's mascot, Eddie, separated the novices from the die hards. I'd invent band names, album titles, tracklistings, and even complete bios and career trajectories of bands, but the cover art was always very rudimentary if it existed at all. Just like the Kiss logo before it, I knew that you had to use the right fonts when you wrote down a bands name, but actually drawing Eddie was far too complex for me.

I keep thinking of some of those metal kids. Long hair hanging over their faces and blocking their books in study hall so they could keep their head low and nobody can see what they were doing. Sometimes one of them would lift their head up at the end of the period and show you what they sketched. It was pretty amazing, if not a little disturbing. Eddie yielding an ax with Margaret Thatcher clutching at his leg. Eddie coming out of a grave and tearing off his clothes and howling at the stormy sky. Eddie with a chain around his neck, shackled to a prison wall.

They were nice kids. Just a little misunderstood, but weren't we all. They had a certain bond. They were united by metal and they showed it proudly with torn and frayed blue jeans, a black metal shirt with their favorite band on it, and a jean jacket to top it off. Sometimes they kept it simple with pins of their favorite bands on the front. Other times they went all out and put a huge patch of Metallica or Iron Maiden on the back of the jacket. It was a statement. It said "I do not like fake metal. In fact I hate it. Fuck Poison and Bon Jovi". It felt permanent, or as permanent as black metal got in suburbia. Tattoo parlors had yet to find their niche.

Eddie fed the imagination and illustrated Iron Maiden's music in much the same way that Stanley & Tchock's packaging colors Radiohead's music today. And it gave them an identity. As easy as it is to picture some of those kids in one of VH1's Fanatic shows with thousands of pictures of Eddie covering their walls and life size models of Eddie rising from coffins in their living room, the reality is they're probably just like you and me. Accountants, lawyers, dentists, truck drivers and cube occupants.

Although I'd like to think that at least a few of them took up art. I'd like to think that those long hours of sketching Eddie paid off in some way. Maybe I'll have to probe a little bit and ask the next graphic designer I meet what they were listening to when they grew up. If they could navigate through the hair bands in the 80's and find something with substance, they're probably doing it in their careers as well.

Or maybe if the fundamentalists are right about 6/6/06, we'll all be drawing pictures of Vladimir Putin come tomorrow.