New phone, old problems

After a little over two years I finally have a new cell phone. My friend said the old one was starting to look like a two-way carcinogen. An overall fair assessment on her part.

But my disdain for Sprint PCS, which is well documented, has somehow increased over the last few days. I honestly think retarded apes run the place.

So here’s an abbreviated version of how I came to contemplate therapy last night.

My day started yesterday when I was given a Sprint LGX-180 phone as a birthday present. I followed the instructions that were enclosed in a huge yellow brochure with tiny black print to activate the curse. It said I needed to locate the ESN number, an eleven-digit number (according to the reading material that made about as much sense as Finnegan’s Wake) on the battery, and call 1-888 something.

Of course I did all that and got the same female automated voice used by almost every company. You know the woman because she’s probably on your voicemail. The voice sounds like the Whore of Babylon, but probably doesn’t put out at all. I hate her.

DA DING DONG: “Welcome to Sprint’s customer service line. Please listen carefully because our menu has changed. If you’re a Sprint PCS employee calling to check on the whereabouts of your soul, please press 1. If you’ve been experiencing problems with your Bluetooth-980 headset with dual antennas, please press 2. If you’d like to listen to slow jazz for the next 45 minutes, please 3. If you’re an overweight Mexican and can’t understand shit I am saying, please press cuatro. If you’d like to hear this menu repeated more slowly and condescending, please press 5. For all other inquires we’d advise you to hang up and go to our Web site, which is more than likely under repair. Message 181.” HANG UP.

“Ah, god dammit anyway,” I said to myself. I called back and figured out which number to push in order to get a real person. I think it was cuatro. A woman named Jeanine picked up, who happens to be both extremely polite and extremely dumb.

“Oh hello, sir, what can I be of assistance with today?” I gave the reason I was calling and asked if I could have all of my contacts in my old phone transferred over to the new LGX-180 as well. “Oh that shouldn’t be a problem,” she informed me.

The conversation took maybe five minutes at most. Jeanine gave a couple of simple commands and said to wait about two hours and the phone would be activated and that all my old contacts would show up in roughly four hours. “This is great,” I thought.

However, in typical fashion things didn’t quite go as planned. Four hours soon became seven hours and my phone was still not working. And what about my contacts? God only knows where they were. Probably out making new contacts: Those backstabbers.

When I called again I got a male voice. I don’t remember his name, but homeboy seemed to have the same gleefully moronic disposition as Jeanine. He asked for my social security number and went through all the jazz to confirm that I wasn’t somebody else trying to access my account. Who would try to call these people if they didn’t have to, I thought? And what could they rob from my cell phone carrier other than my nights and weekend plan?

Abruptly, he asked if he could put me on hold while he accessed my account in the computer. I said that was fine and prepared for the elevator music to be cued. But it wasn’t and something far worse was: A dial tone.

Now, generally I try to keep my profanity to a minimum. Only in rare cases will I let f-bombs drop in multitudes of expressive rage that generally end with a certain part of the male anatomy being sucked. However, this was certainly one of those times.

I called back and began trying to take note of every detail I could. The woman who answered this time was Gale. Gale was bar none the stupidest human being I’ve ever talked to. She repeated this question twice: “So you’re having problems with your phone, right?”

For the first time, I snapped. “Gale, do people ever call to tell you guys how well their phone is working?” Gale didn’t respond. Gale then had the nerve to ask me how the weather was. Honest to god, that’s what she asked next. Didn’t even bother asking where I lived. “The weather is absolutely lovely, Gale.”



My friend sensed that it was no longer a good idea for me to keep talking. Taking the phone from my ear, she hung up on Gale and told me to calm down. I laughed at her certitude and sense of purpose immediately. “Why did you just do that?” She didn’t answer and called Sprint from her phone, leaving me to open a beer.

I sat down and proceeded to watch her talk to two Sprint representatives in a span of 25 minutes. After that, my new phone rang for the first time. And it was like seeing my first child come out of the womb – even though I don’t have children and wombs frighten the hell out of me.

All in all, the process took nine hours, five customer service operators, two people and one newly anointed 25-year-old’s sanity for the Sprint LGX – 180 to be activated.

Oh yeah, and later I was informed that I'd have to find a Sprint store at “one of our many convenient locations” in order to get my contacts transferred. Which would cost $30. Also, because they updated my account I was obligated to sign a new two-year contract.

By the end, I was so angry I decided to count the digits on the ESN number. And it was 17 digits long.

Fucking. Cock. Suckers.

The MC that refuses to stop hammering

I went out of my way to see MC Hammer last night. Not that there was a whole lot on my schedule, but I planned an evening around the man born Stanley Kirk Burrell who happens to be credited with bringing “2 legit 2 quit” into the lexicon.

Yes, I realize how this sounds. It’s on par with searching out a foot willing to give your balls a kick.

And, frankly, the only thing that might be more pathetic than seeing MC Hammer is blogging about the experience of seeing MC Hammer. But this was something that needed to be done. For I didn’t know the emcee still performed

So I met a group of co-workers and we made our way to the metro, laughing. Most of us, myself certainly included, were hoping for only one thing from the Hammer Man: The pants. “God damn I hope he is wearing those Hammer pants.”

Nobody in our group could name more than three of Hammer’s songs, or knew if he had more than three songs. To tell you the truth, I think I was the only one who could name the third. I remember seeing him perform the “Addams Groove,” the featured song from the Addams Family motion picture, on Saturday Night Live. It was a reference that didn’t win many cool points I could tell. Maybe because I knew the song’s title.

Excitement had reached a fevered pitch, as if brewing tea were ready, when we detrained at the Federal Triangle metro stop. This was the venue Stanley Kirk Burrell had been reduced to (the stage was literally steps from the exit of the metro). And judging by the number of people there initially, it looked as if we’d have an excellent opportunity to touch the man who’d made a career out of telling people that that particular sense couldn’t be done.

Then I proceeded to get drunk, really drunk. Sobriety and MC Hammer didn’t sound appealing. Shit-faced and MC Hammer sounded fucking awesome.

Waiting at this uppity bar in plain view of the stage, I proceeded to listen to hands-down the worst R&B I’d ever heard in my life. Not that I’m a Rhythm and Blues connoisseur by any stretch, but these guys made R. Kelly sound messianic. The group was the first of two opening acts and they did mostly a cappella numbers, with one member even in charge of what seemed to be the horn section.

When the second act finally completed, the Master of Ceremonies waited for over 30 minutes to take the stage. The performer still knows how to toy with the crowd. He’s a hammerin’ puppet-master with a world full of adoring pawns. Or maybe that’s hyperbole.

Chants of “Hammer, Hammer, Hammer,” and “Hammer, don’t hurt em,” continued to rain down. With fits of laughter almost always following the yells. Which made me feel kind of sorry for the guy, because I wondered if he knew that the clown aspect of his alter ego was the reason he garnered an audience at all (even one that didn’t pay a dime).

When Hammer finally walked out, I realized there was a decent-sized crowd waiting for him. And people erupted. It was as if Barry Bonds had just shown up at a Human Growth Hormone testing lab. There was genuine excitement in the air and some disappointment that he was not wearing his trademark pants. Hammer’s pants were not Hammer pants. In fact, they kind of looked like Dockers.

He was dressed in all black with sunglasses and a bandana. He sang the few songs we knew, minus the Addams Groove. I can’t even tell you if Hammer’s a great performer or awful. Maybe somewhere in between. I mean the music was certainly awful, but the ensemble of dancers he had was downright nasty. They knew how to shake it.

The highlight of the evening had to be when a fellow emcee joined Hammer, who went by the name of Pleasure Ellis. Pleasure gave a speech, while rapping mind you, about the benefits of safe sex. He kept screeching, “If you’re going to have pleasure, oh pleasure, I say pleasure, it’s gotta be, yes girl, ya know it’s gotta be, chocolate girl it’s gotta-got to be, you know, safe.” Or something like that. The refrain might not be verbatim but it’s damn close. And then Pleasure endorsed Trojan as his prophylactic of choice.

This was all followed by Hammer telling the crowd he did not mean to have his last child with his wife.

Unbelievable.



So unbelievable that when I got home I had to check out a few things about Hammer’s life: “His rise, his fall, his redemption.” That line I stole from a Hammer tribute Web site.

The site chronicled how a dude with a net worth, at one point, of $33 million can go bankrupt. Hammer in his hey day owned two helicopters, invested over $1 million in Thoroughbred racehorses, paid his entourage of 200 people a total of $500, 000 a month, and leased a Boeing 727. And there are so many more accounting anomalies that it moves beyond ridiculous into a realm all its own.

My favorites have to be that he repeatedly bought platinum gold chains for his 4 pet Rottweilers and once had a dishwasher installed in his bedroom so that he could easily, “clean up after a midnight snack.”

If you want to hear from the man himself, check out his own blog at: http://mchammer.blogspot.com/

Whew, MC simply dropped the hammer last night. And it's made today awful thus far.

A not so gay week for the G.O.P.

In a city known for its gravity, with the ability to bring the haughtiest of the haughty back to earth, an amazing week passed in the world of politics. Not since a chubby intern sucked her way into the hearts of salacious journalists everywhere, was a story of one man’s love of fellatio so widely reported.

And the tapping sound coming from the stall belonging to Sen. Larry “I am not gay” Craig, a staunch conservative (especially on matters dealing with gays), came after an already brutal stretch for Republicans.

It started at the top when President Bush compared the Iraq War to the one conflict he’s tried for the better part of four years to distance the fiasco from: Vietnam.

The veteran of the mighty Texas Air National Guard told a Veterans of Foreign Wars group in Kansas City that "To withdraw without getting the job done would be devastating…..and unlike in Vietnam, if we were to withdraw before the job was done, this enemy would follow us home.”

Beyond the ridiculous premise that Sunni and Shiite insurgents are going to obtain U.S. passports and continue their civil war on our soil, lies an even more baffling argument the president is trying to make.

A consensus can be found in most analytical circles that, in terms of departure, our troops left Vietnam far too late, not early. And that our presence destabilized Cambodia and opened the door for Khmer Rouge, under the leadership of Pol Pot, to execute an estimated 1.5 million people.

This is why in the past the administration went to absurd lengths not to hint at any analogies between the two foreign campaigns. For a solid argument exists in each case that U.S. military escalations turned once functional societies into regional buffets of bloodletting and anarchy, with few of the desired objectives being realized.

The comparisons left most of the country scratching their heads – even the heads belonging to those dwindling few still in the president’s wheelhouse.

Army Gen. John Johns (a dude who clearly was without creative parents), a Vietnam veteran who spent 12 years specializing in counter-insurgency missions, told the Atlanta Journal Constitution that "What I learned in Vietnam is that U.S. combat forces could not effectively conduct counter-insurgency operations,” he said, “the longer we stay there, the worse it's going to get."

Then, the already bad week became worse as Bush headed to Crawford and the pesky brush that needed pulling back.

Sen. John Warner of Virginia, a leading voice for Republicans in terms of military strategy, said the U.S. should begin withdrawing small numbers of troops in Iraq by Christmas. His comments were followed by a report from the Government Accountability Office that determined only three of 18 benchmarks, set previously by lawmakers for security and political stability in Iraq, had been met.

Warner went ahead and did the tour de talk shows on Sunday, laying out coherent strategies on why the Iraqi government needs to be held to account and why allied commitments must not be open-ended.



With Monday, however, came an event that appeared would never happen: The resignation of Selective Amnesia Al. The attorney general had become a colorful piñata – the defining symbol of nepotism’s trump over knowledge within an administration more irrelevant by the day.

But the Gonzales resignation was drowned out by the Craig incident, a weird twist in a life of a man almost nobody had ever heard of. The G.O.P. quickly tried to makeup the black eye and demanded the three-term senator - whose explanation of the events is laughable (A guilty plea to a lewd act in a men’s room stall will make it go away?) - resign.

Craig caved to his party’s wishes the day before another White House official jumped ship. Press Secretary Tony Snow, the generally likable face of the administration, who also is fighting a resurgence of cancer, stepped down. Even though Snow recently said the Iraqi Parliament went on vacation simply because Baghdad is 135 degrees in August, missing the obvious irony that our troops spend their days outside, he did an admirable job under the circumstances.

And Karl Rove exited stage right on Friday – meaning the once mighty Republican vanguard had officially fallen victim to gravity’s downward tug.