service with a smile

The local, the English language daily or Germany, has an interesting forum on the question of customer service in the country, positing a definite retrograde motion, and highlights some crucial cultural expectations for native and foreign markets alike. I for one am hesitant to condemn any interaction or exchange as a bad experience (at least in the moment or without profuse excuses) because I feel that my grasp of the language, while capable of going beyond what is just a la carte or off the shelf, maybe is not articulate or flexible enough to be exacting with specifications.
Over the telephone, it is especially challenging from both ends and it’s an unreasonable expectation for service-personnel to anticipate one’s every desire—although I’ve also had some memorable and outstandingly patient assistance. There’s a whole spectrum between fawning and surly and there is a bit of both everywhere. A lot of different factors going into programming and policy when it comes to customer interaction and intervention, and I believe that there has been at least some acknowledgement of the competitive environment—that lack of choice and alternatives is a faltering defense, but maybe that realization is countered with another institution, that of a contractual lifespan—something usually tied to one’s residence and just as enduring. Just as moving is a hardship never to be executed without exhaustive planning, and despite whatever shortcomings and neighbourly problems that developed, the relationship with a grocer, mechanic, landlord, insurer or other provider of convenience or necessity is akin to a marriage and something or the long-haul. Shopping is generally a daily excursion and mostly intended for a stock that only lasts the day and perhaps does not invoke the same feeling of a long-term commitment but is still a bit of a chore that exacts daily maintenance that is not always reciprocal.

narrhalla u. prunksitz

I have experienced and even participated in quite a few Karnival or Faschings events over the years, dressing up and watching the parades in Würzburg and Köln. Rhenish traditions in western and northern Germany are distinct from the tenor and scope of the celebrations in Frankish Swabia and Bavaria but the party and pageantry are executed in the same spirit.

Customs in Mainz and the Rhein corridor were articulated in their present form in the nineteenth century, partially in protest to successive French and Prussian foreign rule, and the occupying governments were lampooned (the allegory was pretty transparent) with floats and monarchs of the Carnival court. The Free States did not have the same cause for gripes but have equally elaborate spectacles that invert everyday conventions—Narren are fools, jesters while Walhalla is the memorial honouring important figures of the German Sprachraum, especially in the week leading up to Lent. I don’t quite grasp, however, how this period becomes a Fifth Season. The party mood is not continuous—and I imagine would be hard to sustain, and is broken up by the solemn calendar days of Christmas. It just seems strange that the long celebration goes dormant and into hibernation, crossing the weave and warp of colder weather and other occasions, and then come back to life at the end, as Winter is dissipating. Maybe to wedge another season into the year enables that transition, relieved in restraint, once the long and dark season is showing signs of moving on.

ancien of days

French flea markets (car-boot sales, marché aux puces) have definitely been something to see for the local provenance and assizes.

Shopping at a distance under any cir- cumstances has its own imbalanace of peculiarities as well. Browsing offers from France, however—replete with the same descriptions and caveats translated by familiarity, becomes a very sophisticated venture. There are false friends and faux cognates that take on a buffering quality, especially to foreign ears. The rather gimmicky stock-phrases are politely abolished with a single vide poche or tres chic. One technique that is encountered quite often, rendered in English, is the “lost wax” casting method for bronzes. Whenever I read it, I want to ask if this forgotten art was practiced by extra-terrestrial flea-market-goers. Could it be ancient aliens? I am sure there’s the equivalent in other languages too but it’s refreshing to go about in ignorance and peace without such touts and taglines.

mona lisas and mad-hatters or meanwhile, back at the agora

The UNESCO world body has designated today, the third Thursday in November, as International Day of Philosophy to underscore the importance of dialogue and dialectic.

It is very much a part of the human condition to address the big questions with poise and perseverance, not wilting from discussion or collaboration, and while I think there has been some as sublimation and corralling in language and form, it has never left the public forum and the everyday. By degrees, I think, philosophy is the capacity for the curious reverence of life, from the astonishing to the stultifying, and there is still a healthy amount of assaying the fundamentals, the Forms. The initial and on-going courage and inquisitiveness to explore these ideas is the source of analytic and original ideas and is not easily consigned to pure academics. Rather, what the UN is inviting us (without being dogmatic or doctrinaire) is to be mindful of those big things that we take for granted and maybe forget to think about. Dogmas, in civic and political thought, came about because no one is able to hold the whole battery of a discipline in one’s head at once, which is good for membership and affiliation but maybe obscures (neglected) alternatives to certain givens.

duck, duck goose

Search engine dominance, with or without ancillary services or clutter, is generally a matter of reflex and preference and in microseconds reliably deliver search results.

Popularity and one’s own trail of breadcrumbs can skew or unearth obscure items but interpretation and adaptive scouring cannot serve up (yet) one’s made-to-order request or fabricate it on the spot. We probably wouldn’t like that sort of high-fidelity, wrinkle-free environment, where tangents and the unexpected become less and less likely and we’re only presented with exactly what we asked for. In any case, all pretty much have the same abilities and handicaps and progress as a block. One’s personal footprints and history can facilitate with retrieving information for private use, but one individual’s interrogative profile does not strengthen the integrity and usefulness of the internet as a whole. A lot of coalescing data is gleaned which may not form a very accurate or flattering picture in the end. One emerging search engine, basic and free from a lot of the common entanglements of others, called Duck-Duck-Go out of Pennsylvania with MIT minds behind it, makes the resolute pledge not to be nosy or mob its users. When something’s in the language, force of habit can be hard to change or break, but the choice to do so may prove worthwhile.

pseudoscience or bulls and bears

Unlike Math Bear here, being a numbers’ man in the bourses does not demand poise, genius or meditation. Solutions probably are not gained via reason or sudden intuition. King Consumer’s sentiment that underpins larger economic models is not rocket science either, and the thresholds and triggers that influence commerce cannot be rung up and down the totem pole to in a show of correspondence, neatness, predictability.

Investing is a calculated gamble but has as much to do with recklessness and risk than any de-natured economic principles or discipline. Yet the luck and hubris that is far from savant knowledge of the fundamental commodities for which money and monetary instruments is only an ethereal medium continues to be accorded with a level of respect and awe, assuredly with self-promotion and carefully crafted perception. The guesswork and gloss are even perpetuated against strong evidence to the contrary, put on horrid display over the past four years. The same dangerous configurations and unscrupulous behaviours are being vetted to continue the game, unbesmirched. All art and practice demand clarity and discipline and, regardless how particular and idiosyncratic and a framework of rules. Flexibility and responsiveness has created a drain on necessity, replaced with a codex of economic-relativism that allows one to dictate the rules as one goes along. While it is equally limiting to rely on false constructs, imagine what can still be done according to traditional arithmetic.

infinitive and aorist

Oxford American Dictionary recently announced its word of the year for those English-speakers across the pond, honouring the decades old graphics format developed by CompuServe yet seemingly reinvented, rediscovered GIF as a very superlative verb. A curious coincidentally too, I thought, having really just discovered the format myself. The internet has created a ready forum for such looping animation, and I’m thinking not just as illustrative but also as wish-fulfillment of three-dimensional newspapers and holographic emissaries as seen on film. Meanwhile, the UK Oxford Direction and German linguistic authorities went a different route with their (Un)words, demonstrating like-mindedness: crowning as the words of the year omnishambles and shit-storm, respectively.

spasmenagaliaphobia

Industrial designer and accomplished illustrator John Vassos, whose family immigrated from Greece to Istanbul before the outbreak of World War I and eventually came to Madison Avenue as an esteemed public-relations man, had a keen sense for fully limning a caption and left a visual legacy of concepts told in pictures. One series of sketches covers the abstract topic of clinical phobia, which was not a new designer-ailment, certainly, invented for the bourgeois and nouveau riche of the Roaring Twenties, but I think Vassos portrayed such insecurities in a thoroughly modern way, not shrill and gory but ominous and oppressive, slow and quietly suspicious fears, which started out as very useful reflexes in terms of survival and self-preservation, but viewed from the wrong end of the telescope, becoming abysmal contagions—a sort of hexing thinking that no one wants to catch.

There are new niches for phobias to occupy, wearing old grooves that are not easily to extract one’s thoughts from, but I think, nothing novel in the way of irrational fear. We’ve had the same old companions for a long time, like the basic inventory of seasonal ailments that accept treatment, prevention but no cure. Neo-Luddites and paranoia with the computer screen are not really new things, but I think maybe some manias over material have come and gone—possibly with the germ of sensitivities to come.

Though glass was already a ubiquitous substance for urbanites of the late Victorian Era and was not being used in new ways, a peculiar phobia spread like a virus especial in gentlemanly circles, whose sufferers were convinced that they had suddenly become fragile, like spun glass, and were in near constant vigilance against being handled too roughly or stumbling.

It was a very strange episode and inarticulate for a cause—perhaps it was never owing to the glass or brittleness but the rise of alternatives to the medium, rubber, gum and synthetics and the fear was subsumed, for the most part, with bodily harm or explanation.

I wonder if there might be yet undescribed crises of grace and dexterity when it comes to preferred methods of input and output.

To be paralyzed with terror is always a handicap but it seems even worse and more abstract (and hard to communicate through drawing) when phobias come out of environment, preference and personal comforts. That is beginning to sound more like a dozing dream or a nightmare rather than a primal fear.