Dear Verizon

July 27, 2006


To whom it may concern:


My mother, E--- W---, had a Verizon Wireless Account, # ****. She has been suffering from dementia for a few years. My brother was handling all her business for the past 2-3 years. (I have no idea why he did not cancel her account with you, since she has been unable to work mechanical devices for quite some time now, but that’s a moot point now.) My brother died in January and I took over my mother’s affairs. In early April I realized that this Verizon account was still active. After calling your customer service department, I was told to fax in a copy of the Power of Attorney that I hold for my mother. I did, and requested that the account be cancelled.

A few weeks ago I received a letter from you concerning this account. The letter claimed that the account had been canceled for non-payment, and that E W had better pay up before the account went into collections. It neglected to give the account number, and did not actually state what amount was due; as such it was just the sort of masterpiece of incompetence that I have come to expect from your company.

I called your company and talked to a customer service representative (who seemed somewhat on the ball, for a change) who told me that there was a note on the account that a fax had been received in early April, but that no other information about the fax was recorded. In other words, some brainless fool didn’t know what to do with it, and tossed it without recording that it was a POA giving me power to handle the account and that I requested that the account be closed. I was encouraged to fax this information again. I declined. I have better things to do than to continuously drive around town sending faxes for your incredibly incompetent employees to lose.

I am sending you the amount that my mother owed as of the day I asked you to cancel her account. You have placed the account in collections; I have written to notify the collection agency that I dispute the amount.

I have the printout that I received confirming that you did receive a fax from me in early April. I have the fax I sent. There is a note on her account stating that you received a fax. If you chose to pursue this further, you are even more ridiculous than I supposed.

I would love to tell you that I will never be your customer again because of your mishandling of this account; unfortunately I can’t, since I already swore to never have dealings with you again when you managed to screw up my home account for over a year in 2001-2002. You jokers are beyond belief.

This note might be rude, but then, so is harassing the bereaved. And I believe that after a certain point, incompetence that is always in Verizon’s favor—financially-- ceases to look like incompetence at all, and starts to look like a deliberate attempt to defraud. Think about that before you try to squeeze any more money out of my mother.

k____

Glasgow

The next day we finished touring museums, and then we took a train to Glasgow, which is a fairly short hop. We went there with a mission: see as much of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s work as was possible. The first night we found Glasgow’s Mussel Inn and had dinner and did a little recon, trying to figure out where the important things were. Got some sleep and in the morning, we started our tour with breakfast at one of the Willow Tea Rooms, then went to the Lighthouse, the Scotland Street School, the House for an Art Lover (wow), and the Glasgow School of Art (wow), followed by afternoon tea (wow) at another Willow Tea Room. We walked and rode the subway to get everywhere. Great subway; it just goes in a big circle so it’s not like you can get lost or anything.
After tea we pretty much gave out and started walking back to the hotel, but it was Friday going-home time, and there was a respectable reggae band playing outside on one of the plazas we walked through, so we sat down and people- watched for a while before heading back.
Glasgow is a modern city with a few old touches; it was more generic in a way than the other places we had been, in the sense that it could’ve been any post-industrial European city, but it had a funky edge that was cool. The best way to sum it up was the bagpipers. In Edinburgh we kept passing by people laying bagpipes, always in kilts with all the bells and whistles. In Glasgow we only passed by one bagpiper and he was a skinny rockstar/heavy-metal looking dude, all in tight black jeans and tee-shirt, with long hair down his back.
Anyway, by this point I was tired. That’s a lot of walking in a week. So I was glad to be entering the last leg of the journey. We took a train to Manchester.

Odds and ends

And let me take a break from vacation stories to sum up life since we got back:

Got an R&R from Poetics +1
Invited to present paper at another conference in East Anglia next year +1
Ate bad egg salad sandwich; stomach went just as electricity got knocked out in storm, taking running water with it -1
Electricity actually came back on this time +1
Dave's accidental death insurance claim denied -1 (yes, I'm appealing.)
Mom's Medicaid approved +1
Cat peed on heating pad; didn't notice til it heated up on the bed -1
Contract on David's house fell through due to seller financing gone south -1
Power company actually showed up to deal with Dave's downed power lines after a mere week of calls 0 (Lines went down in Hurricane Isobel. Yes, Isobel. 2003, for non-Virginians)
electrician on vacation 0
House inspectors suggest leaky oil tank. Vance and I think oil company spilled oil a few months ago. 0


To sum up: you win some, you lose some.


BTW Dave C: you should be able to comment without signing up, but you will have to go through the anti-spam thingy where you identify the letters.

More Edinburgh

In the morning, after another one of those huge breakfasts at the hotel, we went and saw the 3D Loch Ness Experience. The dazzling awesome 3D effects are mostly the narrator tossing things at the camera as he speaks, but it was still fun for 2 reasons: they explained why the water of the Loch Ness is so dark (peat bogs) and they had great footage showing how a boat wake on a calm day looks like a many-humped sea serpent. Very cool, although I know Nessie exists nonetheless. Then we stopped at a Christmas store, where I picked up a few ornaments for me and a few for Vance’s mom.
Then we toured the castle. It goes on and on and on. Great halls, smaller museums, chapels, the Crown Jewels, for pete’s sake. It was a misty day, cold and blowy, with a very low sky. All very Scotland. Beautiful. Afterwards we were hungry and tired. We had lunch plans; from 2 different people/sets of people (Jack and Myrna, and Dave) we had been told that lunch at the Royal Museum was a must-do because the food is surprisingly good, and because the castle is right outside the window. David even gave me a card so I would remember, which I of course took out of my wallet right before we got out of the plane, and left behind, so we had to fish around for a while to find the right museum. It didn’t help that the National Museum is blammo right next to the castle, and we thought maybe that was the place. But “Royal” finally came to us, and we went and yes, the lunch was good, and wow, the view.


Then we toured the museums until they closed. It hit me, while looking at treasures from the past--Napoleon’s tea set, and a pile of silver objects that belonged to some unknown Pict--how incredibly much stuff we have, compared to just about every other human that has ever lived. That Pict might have been wealthy in his/her day, but I could kick his/her ass in terms of possessions, and I'm so middle America.

Edinburgh, day one

In Edinburgh we finally changed the camera battery.
Edinburgh is amazing. In York the friendly museum guide told us that if you were king and got to create the perfect city, you would create Edinburgh, and I see what he meant. We got off the train and after some confusing moments trying to find our way out of the mall that’s attached to the station, we spilled out onto Princes Street, which is the major shopping street in Edinburgh. It’s part of the “new” section, which means it was created post-Dark Ages. Our hotel was just beyond the castle, so we walked to it.
The castle dominates the skyline. This was the view on the way to the hotel.

After we checked in, we went and had lunch or dinner at the Mussel Inn (enthusiastically recommended by the York museum guide). I had the famous kilo of mussels, of course, with the blue cheese sauce. My god they were good. Vance was cautious and got scallops, they being—so he tells me—the least risky thing on the menu for someone in his still delicate condition. After we ate we walked about the Royal Mile for a while. I noted the location of several Christmas stores. We went into St Giles Cathedral, and then we toured Mary King’s Close. Since the Royal Mile is at the top of a ridge, people used to live along alleys (or “closes”) that ran sharply down the hill from it. In 1753, when the city fathers decided to expand the Royal Exchange, they shaved the tops off of a bunch of these houses and used them as foundations for the new building. All the old buildings were forgotten for a while, but now there are tours. As with the exhibits at Jorvik, there was an emphasis in the tour of the Close on the lack of sanitation back in the day, with frequent reminders that if this was 1400, we’d be standing ankle deep in sewage. The guide assured us that that was why the flowers in the castle park gardens grow so large, even today.

York

York is awesome.
When the train arrived we walked to the Georgian House, where we were staying, which is cheap and convenient but seems to have service issues. We had to ring the bell forever before someone came to the door, and the next day we heard another arrival ringing for about half an hour before they were checked in, and on our last morning, someone from the staff banged on our door and told us that breakfast was about to end a good half an hour before it was supposed to. (Seeing as breakfast times were posted in each room, they were easily busted in their little lie, but we were actually standing by the door about to go down anyway, so it didn’t matter. But still…)
As a general observation, I think it is cool that in England you actually get what you pay for. I found some incredibly cheap rooms for this trip, but getting the cheapest room in the house translates to having the tiny room that’s up 4 flights of a spiral staircase, under the rafters. All very artist-starving-in-the-garret.
Anyway, after we checked in, we went right out again and walked on the city walls. They are so high that you get great views of York Minster and the city from them. We stopped at one of the old gates (called “bars”)—Monk Bar, which has a funny little museum to King Richard the 3rd in it (he of the nephews). Then we left the walls and cut back into town, and stumbled across a Mystery Play in progress. Very cool, there were people dressed as little demons running around, and music, and obviously we had just missed Adam and Eve, since the actors were still around in costume. It ended with the demons being swallowed by the mouth of hell, from what I could make out (we were pretty far back, couldn't hear that well) and then another wagon rolled up and started a play about Roman soldiers who were around at the Resurrection. We watched that for a while and then wandered on looking for dinner, having missed lunch. For dinner we went to an Indian restaurant close to the B&B. The owner claimed to be from Detroit. It was good, even if the staff vanished once the World Cup final started.

In the morning we went to the Jorvik Viking Center and The York Castle Museum. In the Viking Center, you get to go on a ride that takes you past dioramas of what the city looked like when it was run by Vikings, which is sort of early-Disneyesque, except that they have recreated the smells of the time too. Most of the ride smells like a barnyard, except for the part that smells like an outhouse. Pretty amusing, in an eye-watering way. After the ride you see tons of exhibits of Vikings things that have been dug up locally.
The castle museum is fantastic; I had no idea it would be that cool. It recreates English daily life for several centuries; we were there for hours looking at costumes and recreated city streets and storefronts and dungeons and kitchens and living rooms and infinite other exhibits. We talked for a while with a guide who explained the creation of Clifford’s Tower to us and then gave us good advice on things to do when we got the Edinburgh. Then Vance began to flag a bit so we made our way back to the B&B so he could lie down. I went back out for an hour to check on train schedules for the next day and find a curd tart, which the museum guide told us we should try while in York, and to get something for dinner, since Vance said he didn’t think he would make it back out, and to duck into a Christmas store for a minute, and when I got back Vance had developed a fever that was getting fairly high, so we were pretty spooked for a few hours until the Advil that he took knocked it back down. He said he would go to the doctor if it hit 103, and it crested at 102.8. Spooky, being sick in a foreign country, even if it is England. So anyway, that was it for that day; we stayed in and read and ate the pasties I had bought. (steak and stilton, pork and apple. Yum.)

In the morning his fever was gone, and we had breakfast and then went to York Minster, dragging our luggage with us. It is a beautiful cathedral; we didn’t have enough time to do it justice.

Then we got on the train to Edinburgh. The train runs by the coast for a while, north of Newcastle. Beautiful.

Norwich

So we took a train to Norwich. Slept most of the way, although I did wake up and peer out when they called the stop at Nottingham. Arrived at Norwich, took a cab to the Earlham Guest House, got settled in. Got a phone call from Angela, our realtor who is selling David’s house for us. A good offer came in the instant we left the US; she gave me some details. I said we’d call the next day. She needed me to find a fax machine to send me the contract. Ate dinner at a pub around the corner, went to bed, where I sat up for a good long while cutting my overlong paper by half and trying to give it some flow.

Friday we woke up to a proper English breakfast. Grilled tomatoes, mushrooms, baked beans, fried eggs, toast, jam and marmalade. Ate heavily, ironed my suit, ran through the paper again, went out to get the bus to the U of East Anglia, where the conference was being held. I ended up at the bus stop with the couple that had been at the next table at breakfast; turns out they were at the conference too. They were archeology grad students from the U of Glasgow, and he was giving a paper on mootscapes, after which they were going to another medieval conference in Leeds. And I thought I was booked up this summer. We muddled around the campus together and found the conference and checked in.


The conference—officially “Collective Memory and the Uses of the Past” –was interdisciplinary. Quite a few historians, some anthropologists and sociologists. And it was nicely international; the other person on my panel was a French guy doing work on myth-making about the Mayflower Compact. Here’s an older version of the program; some of the sessions were moved around (like mine) so the times are not right here. The first day I went to “Remembering the Crusades” and “Literature and Memory II” and then the session I was in from 5-630. The session went well; I had made exactly the right number of handouts, and we got interesting questions. It was funny; some of the European historians were amazed that in a country where Western history only goes back 400 years, that myth-making on this level could take place, and that it could exist at the academic level as well as in popular culture. I was glad to have a French historian on the panel with me; this kept the discussion in the realm of Americans as myth-makers, which was fruitful ground. A great time. Then the sessions knocked off and it was time for dinner, which was an catch-as-catch can affair at the campus eatery, where I had a chance to talk more to Lauric about our session and the World Cup, of course, it being 2 days before the final game. Then he showed me the most amazing thing—a field by the campus center where hundreds, literally hundreds of rabbits come out at dusk. During the day you can usually see twenty or so, but they swarm in the evening. Most amazing. Anyway, then I caught a cab back to the Guesthouse and Vance, who had been feeling weird all day and stayed in. We went walking around for a bit and bought drinks at the corner store, where the kid behind the counter regaled us with tales of his uncle, who hated Britain and moved to the US—Arizona, I think-- where he could have 4 Hummers sitting in his driveway. Found a phone booth, called Angela, said we’d take the offer.

The next day at beakfast, I realized that the two guys who had presented the papers on the crusades were also in our B&B. We shared a cab to campus; Vance went along to see where it was, and see rabbits. I went off to the conference. The conference was interspersed with me running over the campus trying to find a fax machine, which I finally did, so then at some point I called Angela with the fax number, and at some point Angela faxed me the contract, and at some point I signed it and faxed it back to her.
But mostly I was going to conference sessions. (Met some great people too, very friendly conference.) First there were opening remarks (new journal devoted to memory studies coming out!), and then a plenary on “Landscape and memory” which I think has sorted out some of my thinking on place and memory for my dissertation. It had been a sticking point. The I went to a session on History, Photography and memory—quite good—and then another plenary on “sociologies and memory” which was a bit disappointing because one of the speakers didn’t make it. Afterwards I went to a session on “What do we want history for?” and then I had had enough conferencing; I went back to Vance and we walked around Norwich.

He had located a promising looking tapas place for dinner but when we got there, an alarm was going off inside, so we wandered around more and finally went to a low-end French restaurant where we both got some tasty venison. Norwich has 2 cathedrals and at least 2 other churches that might as well be, and a castle, and some of them are made of this unusual flint, and there’s a bazaar that Vance had spent some time wandering through earlier, and we saw some cool lion statues—this is when we realized that the battery was dead in the camera, so we have no pics of Norwich or York, because although we brought spares, we didn’t actually get them in the camera until Edinburgh.

Anyway, that was Norwich. We took an earlyish train to York on Sunday.

Vacation

We are home from a long long trip. I suppose I am jet-lagged; mostly it feels like total bodily confusion. I am not sure if I am sleepy or not. I feel like I am moving—just a residual sensation from the trains, planes, and automobiles in the last few days. Weird.

It is good to be home. Betsy jumped up and down and cried, and Raphael followed me around singing, and Luigi hid in a corner of the attic and howled, and Ciao Ciao quit coughing for a moment to get petted, and Hank acted nice, briefly. This is why you have cats and dogs—because nobody else will ever, ever miss you so much when you are gone. The entire ground floor smells funny, but I choose to ignore that tonight. Tomorrow I will rent a steam cleaner.

July 1-5 : The trip began inauspiciously. We were leaving at 4 a.m. Saturday. I was covered with poison ivy. Vance looked healthy but he always gets sick on vacations. Friday at 5:30 I pulled something out of the mailbox that said that if I didn’t get certain documents in to social services within a few days, mom’s Medicaid application would be denied. This included things like her birth certificate (last I knew this was locked in a safe deposit box at the bank) and bank records going back far enough that the bank has to order them from the central office, and the like. It being the weekend before July 4, there was no way to get all of this before Wednesday, and that’s when my plane left Boston for a conference in England, and we were supposed to leave in a few hours to go to Maine for the 4th. On top of this, there was an offer pending on my brother’s house—it had been pending for 2 weeks, and we were fairly sure it was going to be completely lowball, but we still hadn’t heard word. And my conference paper was still really rough. But we started out as planned on Saturday at 4 a.m.

We were going to Maine to stay with Dick and Marti (Vance’s folks). Since we left on Sat. July 1st, we drove up 81 and the Taconic parkway because 95 is scary enough on a regular day, let alone the weekend before July 4th. Plus when you go up 81, you get to stop in Frackville PA at the Dutch Kitchen. It was a nice drive. Took forever though. We got to Maine really late and crashed. Woke up Sunday and there it was, Maine. Peaceful. Beautiful. The picture above is the view out of the living room window at Dick and Marti's place. And yes, you Massachusetts friends, we invited you along year after year, and THIS is what you blew off. (Except you Jesse.)


We were there for a few days. Sunday we hung around and relaxed. I went to an auction for a while with Marti but we didn’t see much we wanted. Dick’s brother Bill, his wife Sandy and his friend Marie came over for dinner. Conversation ---as usual with this family—went to politics and since Dick and Bill hold radically opposite views on politics, and the rest of us join in, it was lively. As usual.

Monday Vance and I went to Wiscasset for lobster roll at Red’s Eats. Best lobster roll on the planet. Stopped at Renny’s and bought raincoats. We dropped by Bill and Sandy’s afterward, to talk politics some more (the 5 of us are all in the same hemisphere, as far as that goes) and watch a little World Cup, Marie being really into the games. Hooked up with Dick and Marti and all ate dinner out.

Tuesday was the 4th, which in Round Pond Maine means PARADE. They have a funky, cool parade, very irreverent and idiosyncratic. Very crowded. Afterwards one of Dick and Marti’s neighbors had a little party on the dock. The weather had turned from lovely for the parade to—well, still nice, but different. It was windy and really chilly and a little rainy. The rain stopped before long, and I got to burn my sparklers (I bought boxes and boxes). Marti and Vance and I lit them all, handfuls at a time (ignoring the safety instructions on that one) and it was so entertaining for some reason that Dick is considering getting real fireworks for next year.

Wednesday was the 5th, aka plane time. Vance and I drove to Boston, where we were supposed to catch a plane to NY, where we were getting an overnight flight to Manchester. I was paranoid about traffic, so we got to the airport about 4 hours early, which is good, because bad weather was developing over NY, and the smaller shuttles were starting to be delayed. We managed to get on a much earlier shuttle—close call, we were on standby—and get in to NY. Lucky, since the plane we were supposed to take was delayed so much that we would’ve missed the connection.
Not much to say about the flight. The movie was weak, the turbulence was lengthy but mild, and we got in when we were supposed to. We landed in Manchester, walked to the other side of the airport, and got on a train to Norwich, where my conference was.

I’ll post more later.