Curmie Doesn’t Like Being Lied To

 

It would seem that prevarication has supplanted baseball as the national pastime.  Name a politician you’d trust to tell you the truth if a lie would be more convenient.  Curmie can’t, and if there’s one out there, it sure as hell isn’t one of the frontrunners in the next Presidential election.

Curmie has experienced two separate incidents over the past couple of weeks.  What they share is not simply that someone failed to provide a service they were obligated to provide, but that they lied about it and showed literally no remorse for having done so.

Incident #1: Although Curmie has retired from teaching, his university has a provision that emeritus faculty are entitled to an office if one is available, and one is.  Because I’m still doing some academic writing, I’m grateful for the workspace, the use of a computer, access to a printer and scanner, etc.  We’re now back in the building we occupied from the time I came here until the summer of 2020, when we were displaced to across campus while renovations and expansions were happening to our “home.”  (We were told we had to move out by the end of May 2020 or we couldn’t move back in the fall of 2021; we couldn’t move in at all until August of this year, and the building won’t really be ready for at least another few months.  But that’s a rant for another day.)

The problems are two-fold.  First, the new office is less than half as big as the one Curmie moved out of three years ago.  Second, it was designed by an idiot, or, more likely, a committee of idiots.  The desk, made of cheap but heavy material, is far too big for an office of that size.  There are permanently mounted cabinets above the desk, but no place for files.  Curmie could go on.  And on.  And on. The biggest annoyance is that the offices on my side of the hallway (the smaller ones, with windows offering a view of the convenience store across the street) got only a single bookcase.  Curmie seriously doubts that whoever decided that has ever as much as met a faculty member in the humanities, let alone listened to one.

Curmie was able to get a second bookcase, but they’re absurdly deep, so you can’t put a third one against the remaining space on the only available wall or you could never get past it to sit at that enormous L-shaped desk.  Despite donating over 1000 books to the new department library and taking a dozen boxes home since moving out of my former office, I still have far too many books to fit on the available shelves.  I’ll no doubt need to do another purge when I retire retire, but most of what remains are things I anticipate using in upcoming research projects, and many of these volumes aren’t in the university library.

The solution, obviously, was to buy another bookcase (the university sure as hell wouldn’t provide one) that will fit the available space.  So I did.  I found something on Amazon that met my purposes.  It would have been perfect instead of merely good if those stupid cabinets didn’t extend an inch or so past the desk, and I can’t move the desk (even if I had the strength) and still be able to open the door.  The new bookcase won’t solve the problem, but it will help.

It was to be delivered Friday the 1st.  At 10:37 that morning I got a message from Amazon that the USPS had tried unsuccessfully to deliver it.  This, of course, was a lie; they never bothered.  I was less than pleased.  Anyway, I found the tracking number and did a little investigating.  According to that information, the package was loaded onto a truck and was “out for delivery” at 6:20 a.m., but it wasn’t delivered because—get this—my mailbox was full!  This was both a lie and, of course, irrelevant even it were true.  Bookcases, even those requiring assembly, tend not to fit into mailboxes.

So Curmie called the USPS 800 number, and had a charming conversation with the robot voice.  Now, it became clear that the reason for non-delivery could have been that the package was “large.” Well, duh.  I was told I could pick up the package from the post office starting Saturday, or arrange to have it delivered that day.  I chose the latter, but, needless to say, the package didn’t show up on Saturday.

I’ll grant them Sunday and Monday (Labor Day).  Nothing Tuesday, either, of course, and the tracking now said the bookcase was being held at the post office.  (All the previous stuff about being loaded for delivery had conveniently vanished.)  In other words, it had been sitting in the back room there since Friday, and if they’d told me the truth I could have picked it up then and had the weekend to assemble it without disturbing my colleagues.  But apparently honesty is in short supply at the USPS.

So I went to the post office on Tuesday.  I asked why the tracking said it had been “out for delivery” early Friday morning but wasn’t delivered.  I was told that “No one was here that early.”  Then something about the timestamp being linked to when it got scanned in.  I decided not to bother to ask the obvious question of who scanned it in if there was no one there. 

Anyway, the woman who waited on me went into the back room and then re-appeared carrying the package.  It had “heavy” stickers on it in three or four places, but she managed it just fine.  In its unassembled state, the bookcase is about the size of a carry-on bag and weighs maybe 45 or 50 pounds.  I had no trouble getting it to my car or loading it into my trunk.  (I confess that I asked our tech director to borrow a hand truck to get it to my office since I couldn’t park anywhere near the elevator; he chose to carry it, instead.  This involved a trek of 50 yards or so and a set of stairs.)

OK, it’s hardly news that the USPS will avoid work whenever possible, and certainly the utterly false statements about “out for delivery” and the reason for non-delivery are all too typical.  But, Gentle Reader, as they say on the late-night infomercials, wait! There’s more!  Presumably they knew when they got the package from Amazon that they weren’t actually going to deliver it… or maybe it’s just the locals who decided that.  Either way, the USPS got paid to deliver the bookcase to me and failed to do so.

The only question is whether Amazon is responsible at all.  Other couriers are perfectly willing to deliver “heavy” packages (see below).  Why would Amazon choose the USPS?  Surely they’ve been around the block enough times to know that the postal service isn’t necessarily going to treat their (Amazon’s) customers right. 

Still, it’s easier to forgive a less than inspired business decision than outright prevarication.  But, alas, there’s not a lot an online customer can do to avoid the mendacious organization.  And it doesn’t help that it’s a government agency.

It’s not just those with ties to the government, though.  Private companies feel the need to get in on the act, too.  So let’s move on to Incident #2.

We’ve been in our current house a little over 22 years.  The garage door opener wasn’t new when we moved in.  A few days ago, the chain snapped.  So I went to the local Lowe’s, checked out the possibilities, came home and discussed the options with Beloved Spouse, and ordered a new opener online.  So far, so good. 

FedEx delivered it when they said they would, last Thursday.  (By the way, the box is essentially the same size and weight as that unassembled bookcase I mentioned last time, and FedEx delivered it, no problem.)  But whereas 20 years ago I would probably have done the installation myself, for a variety of reasons I decided to just have Lowe’s arrange for a professional installation.  That’s where the fun begins.

Lowe’s farms out this kind of job through Handy or their subsidiary Angi.  We’d had pretty good luck with Handy in the past; our experience with Angi was, shall we say, less pleasurable.  So we were apprehensive when it was Angi, not the parent company, that contacted me.

But I filled out the requested information, including that with a little notice I could be available at any time.  I was given three choices of when the work could be done, and chose late afternoon on Sunday.  The text messages urging me to be “excited” that the installation was soon to happen began on Friday.  Sorry, I come by my nom de plume honestly, and few curmudgeons get excited over garage door installations.  Relieved, perhaps.  Grateful, even.  Excited?  Nope.

So then came the message at 6:30 Sunday morning that “due to a last-minute issue with [my] pro,” they were going to re-schedule until Tuesday.  This led to more texts to get excited, and then another re-scheduling until Thursday.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  Well, not quite.  The 3:00 a.m. text that woke me up on Thursday declared that the installation was “cancelled unexpectedly.” 

“Cancelled,” as in “we’re washing our hands of this whole business”?  Really?  “Unexpectedly”?  So I called the local Lowe’s that morning.  Naturally, I got a robo-voice, but was able to get transferred to a different robo-voice, and then to someone in the installations department (I’m guessing she’s not located in my small town in East Texas, but I suppose she could be).

According to what she was seeing on her screen, the installation was still scheduled for 11 a.m. that day.  It was, in fact, never scheduled for 11 a.m.; the cancelled appointment was for 3 p.m.  I immediately had a flashback to the Firesign Theatre’s most famous line, “I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus.”  Somebody—Angi? Lowe’s?—was screwing up.  Big time.

Anyway, the Lowe’s rep “reached out” to Handy, and ultimately put someone from there on the phone with me.  This woman’s accent was often incomprehensible, but I did get that the cancellation was because this was the third delay of the same project, and that’s what they always do.  She acted totally befuddled that I didn’t accept company policy as a divinely inspired reason for jerking a customer around.  And she did confirm my initial suspicions that there never was anyone assigned to do the job, so all that crap about “last-minute issues with [my] pro” was simply a lie.  Like the woman at the post office described in my last post, she at least purported not to understand why I objected to being lied to.

This is when the woman from Lowe’s went into high dudgeon: “We pay you to provide this service to our customers.  Are you telling me you’re unable to do that?”  Well, yes.  But the Lowe’s rep pulled back a little when it became clear that my refund was already underway.  That still left me with a garage door opener still sitting in its box, where it is somewhat less useful than when professionally installed.  The Lowe’s woman asked me if I wanted to speak to an Angi manager.  Yes.  Yes, I did. 

A manager called me back a couple of hours later.  She mouthed all the right platitudes about how sorry they were for the inconvenience, but (predictably) showed no remorse for having lied to a customer.  “My pro” never existed.  There are only two possible choices: either Angi knew there weren’t enough contractors in this area to meet the demand or they didn’t.

If the former, then not only were their excuses to me a lie, but they had also, in effect, lied to Lowe’s, and made that company guilty of false advertising.  If the latter, then Hanlon’s Razor kicks in, and they’re just morons.  I’d told them I could be available as needed.  The logical thing to do is to put a call out to their workers in this area and say that they had a customer who could be available at any time but would like the job completed as quickly as possible, then let the people actually doing the job pick a date and time.  Nope.  They decided on an arbitrary time and expected both me and prospective installers to accommodate.

That is, there was no one available Sunday at 4:00, Tuesday at 4:00, or Thursday at 3:00… but there very well might have been on Friday or Saturday or Monday or Wednesday, or at a different time on Sunday, Tuesday, or Thursday.  I claim no expertise on running a business, but I do have list of a few things not to do.  This kind of scheduling incompetence is Exhibit A.  No… wait… it’s Exhibit B.  Lying to customers is exhibit A.

The good news is that I was able to follow a different course, and the guy showed up at my door less than 24 hours after initial contact.  The better news is that Angi got nary a nickel from this transaction.

As has sometimes been the case in the past, this post began as a guest post—well, actually as two guest posts—on Ethics Alarms.  You can find them here and here.  There has been a little more editing than normal, but, Gentle Reader, you will certainly recognize the content.  Curmie apologizes for taking so long to get this version posted.

 

 

Donald Trump Has No Convictions, But He Has No Convictions.

Curmie is currently in the process of moving into a new office which is far too small to accommodate his collection of books, even after he gave away over 1000 of them. One of the volumes he still hasn’t figured out what to do with is his Penguin paperback copy of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, purchased over 40 years ago for a course he took in grad school. 

Coming across that volume triggered a memory of struggling with one of that book’s most famous sections, the Stasis in Corcyra. It wasn’t that the passages in question were too confusing. Rather, it was that word “stasis”; no one would describe the civil war on the island of Corcyra in 427 BCE as static. 

A little digging (well, actually more than a little, as these were the days before the internet) revealed that virtually all English translations of those passages of Thucydides had simply adopted a cognate of the Greek word στάσις (stásis), meaning roughly “that which is stood up.” So something firmly placed and unchanging would be static, or in a state of stasis. But the word also carried the meaning of “standing up against,” in the sense of resisting authority. So the insurrection on Corcyra was, in fact, an act of stasis. 

These linguistic constructions, known as contranyms, auto-antonyms, or “Janus words” (among other locutions) are not uncommon. We all understand that a peer might be a member of the English nobility or an equal, or that “it’s all downhill from there” might mean that the system is in decline or that the hard part is over and we can coast to the finish line. 

I’m not sure if there’s a word for the variation on the theme that forms the title of this essay: the two meanings of the term are not in direct contradiction, but they lead to pretty close to opposite conclusions. What I find interesting is that both definitions can apply simultaneously. 

That is, “having no convictions” can mean lacking a system of guiding principles, especially one involving a moral compass or an ethical center. It can also mean that the subject has never been convicted of a crime. I’d argue that Donald Trump fits both descriptions rather well. 

Curmie doubts that even his staunchest defenders (the ones not a member of the cult, at least) would deny that Trump’s actions on innumerable occasions have been considerably less than honorable, or suggest that he’s anything but a narcissist. I note also, that, as was demonstrated in the episode of the old “Perry Mason” TV show I watched a couple nights ago, it is possible to frame the guilty. (In real life, there’s a really good chance that this is what happened in the OJ Simpson trial.) The fact that some (many? most?) of the criminal cases against Trump may well be politically motivated doesn’t mean he didn’t do what he’s accused of doing. 

On the flip side, even the most rabid of Trump’s political enemies, specifically the ones ululating about the 14th amendment, must agree that the man has not been convicted of anything. They might even grudgingly acknowledge that barring a conviction on certain specific charges relating directly to the events of January 6, it doesn’t really matter how many indictments there are. (Insert cliché about ham sandwiches here.) 

Rhetoric being what it is, there are, of course, two ways of reading the title of this piece. We could see Trump as an unethical person who has, however, not been found guilty of a relevant crime, and therefore should not be prevented from running for the presidency again. Or we could argue that the standard of conduct to assume the most important job in the country if not the world ought to be a little higher than never having been found guilty of what amounts to treason. ¿Por qué no los dos? 

Voting against someone despite the obvious problems with that candidate’s opponent is a time-honored tradition at Chez Curmie, and I would not deprive my fellow citizens of the right to do likewise. But voting for someone ought to require a belief that the candidate has something positive to offer, and is of at least average mental acuity and integrity. Neither front-runner meets those standards, nor, frankly, do I see any of the likely alternatives in either party doing so. Alas.

So we’re left with this, Gentle Reader: barring an intervening event, Donald Trump should be allowed to seek the presidency again, and no one should vote for him (or, at least for him). He has no convictions, but he has no convictions.

NOTE: This essay was written for the “Curmie’s Conjectures” series of guest posts on the Ethics Alarms blog.  It has been edited very slightly here.  Gentle Reader, you are welcome, of course, to join in the discussion there... you will find some masterful variations on whataboutism, if nothing else.