It's in the mail

Following on my post about making candy for holiday presents, let me share with you an experience I’m decidedly not grateful for:

Dealing with the US Postal Service to mail nine packages, five to the UK.

I’d collected some flat-rate Priority Mail boxes from the Sunnyvale Fremont post office (where the guy behind the lobby window looked at me like I’d lost my mind when I asked for them), and had my nine boxes and envelopes in carry bags when I went to the Sunnyvale main station.

I even had Max Hastings’s All Hell Let Loose to read while in line. I figured the 450 pages I still had to go would keep me occupied while I waited.

Well, the adventure began when I pitched up at the counter and the woman informed me that I had the wrong boxes to send things to the UK, and also the wrong customs forms (which I’d filled out beforehand).

Now, I’ll be buggered if I can figure out exactly what the difference is between these two—except for a slight variation in size. But what the difference amounted to was about $20 per package. Plus redoing the customs form.

(Also, let me just say that if I ever come across the ass who designed those self-assembly boxes, I’m going to break all his fingers. You’re welcome.)

However—if all I did was wrap over the boxes, everything would be copacetic. Evidently it’s something to do with the pre-printed markings.

Although, as you understand—every damned one of them is official USPS kit, available for pickup without any explanation of appropriate use. And it made me wonder what the hell is the significance of all the boxes they print—and don’t explain to you until you hit the shipping counter.

I got a bit of a giggle out of her warning me that “You won’t get a tracking number” if I didn’t have…something, not sure what it was.

Because the USPS “tracking” system is pointless. I know for a fact—from multiple experiences as both a sender and recipient of packages they “track”—that their letter carriers often just dump parcels that won’t fit into mail boxes in public places like lobbies instead of hauling their lazy asses up to the actual office or residence. Once so dumped, they log them as “delivered”.

And once “delivered”, the USPS refuses all responsibility.

So, yeah—not worried about having your damned tracking number.

Well, so I went home and wrapped up the offending parcels. Then I took them to the Fremont station (again with All Hell Let Loose), where Mary actually gave me an injured look when she realize I had five packages to send to the UK. It was like I’d asked her to prove Fermat’s last theorem.

“It’s going to take time,” she intoned.

Whatever.

But—with Mary at the helm, it did indeed take time. Because she just couldn’t seem to grasp the whole notion of sending things outside the US. (And before you ask, Mary is not a twenty-something; she’s been around the block a few hundred times.)

She laboriously weighed each package (sighing with each), and painstakingly typed with two fingers something into a computer from the customs forms—are they now adding that sort of crap to the big data miasma? Every single one. She chided me for writing “confections”—what’s that? Candy? She scratched out “confections” and wrote in “candy”, apparently convinced that no one in either the USPS or Royal Mail would understand “confections”.

She also demanded, “How many?” How many what? Candy? What the hell does it matter? I made stuff up.

She was so concerned about that stuff she never once asked me whether my packages contained anything dangerous, flammable, alcohol, perfume, etc. I’d have thought that would have been more germane than how many candies were in each box. But I’d probably have to explain “germane” to her, if I brought it up.

The postage charged wasn’t what the woman at the main station had quoted—I’m guessing that you’d not get two workers across the USPS to come up with the same story.

In the 25 minutes or so I watched Mary go through her painful routine I got a bit of a laugh out of the worker at the next place on the counter—I swear, not one of the people who came to her got away without having to redo something. “You have the wrong form!” “Is this right?” “No!” She was the Queen of Denial, and boy, did she relish it.

Anyhow, eventually I paid a ridiculous amount of money and left. Mary was so dispirited she didn’t even ask if I wanted to buy anything else, which is the big USPS thing—they’re much more interested in upselling you than in doing the transaction you came there for.

One thing I’ll say for the Sunnyvale staff (at both locations) is they’re not as crabby as the Cupertino crowd. I swear—those people are the surliest humans outside a Dostoyevsky novella, even when they’re trying to get you to buy other stuff.

What I learned was that the USPS is still the bastion of the quintessential time-serving government worker, still giving the rest of the public sector a bad name for plodding, indifference and obstructionism. I suppose it’s good to know that there are some things that never change.

Feeling like a cabbage head

I belong to a couple of professional organizations, and joined three other women from one of them yesterday to sort food at Second Harvest Food Bank.

I had no idea what “sort food” meant—but in this case it meant packing five heads of cabbage into a carton (to make 16 pounds, roughly). Seems that in the Bay Area, they get produce pretty much all year round, so the hungry people they serve in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties don’t have to depend on canned goods.

Even though both the organization and SHFB were disappointed in our turnout (they were expecting more members to show up), in a little less than two hours we met the goal of packing 150 cartons (and I assembled about 120 of said cartons).

That’s more than a ton of cabbage, and my muscles are telling me about it.

So if you don’t mind, I’m going to slap some more pain patches on my shoulder and do some stretches.

Is it fraud prevention or is it spending analysis?

A while ago an email came into my queue purportedly from American Express, telling me that they’d noticed some unusual activity on my account and I should give them a shout.

Well, you always have to wonder about anything that suddenly pops up and requires action that could involve you giving someone Personally Identifiable Information (PII). So I went home and called the general AmEx customer service from my landline.

And it turns out that there had been two attempted transactions at a Bloomingdale’s somewhere, and AmEx’s algorithm had sent up flares.

The customer service guy transferred me to a woman in their fraud prevention division, who asked me the same security questions the first person had, and then she went to town. The Bloomies attempts (AmEx blocked them) were definitely not mine, and there were a couple of other odd things, which she flagged up. She deactivated my account instantaneously and sent me a new card by overnight.

This happened just as one of the people I follow on Twitter was whining that his (non-AmEx) credit card was suddenly declined at a bar for no apparent reason. He was stomping about metaphorically—I don’t know whether it’s his only card, or he was just chagrinned by the refusal. But it made me think about AmEx’s approach.

On one of my annual trips home to Virginia from the UK, I went to Tyson’s Corner mall, to Nordstrom. Then I went to Tower Records (yes—it was a while ago). By the time I got to the sporting goods store in Reston and was ready to buy new runners, the POS register flashed, “Get picture ID.” In less than a couple of hours, they’d spotted the anomalous behavior (or at least the location), and were ready to step in.

This time they probably rolled within a couple of hours, too. 

In contrast, NatWest, my UK bank, took almost two weeks to notify me (by snail mail to my US address, where they’d been sending my statements for more than two years) that they’d noticed more than £700 in charges to my debit card (all made in the London area), and had I by any chance made them. 

(Keep in mind that in the entire three years I'd resided there, I'd used the card a total of three times.)

Well, no, I hadn’t, and when I finally got one of their reps on the phone, you could just hear her squirming because they had to eat all those charges. (They wanted me to file a UK police report, but when I asked her whether it should be with Thames Valley Police, where NatWest were, or the Met, because I’d lived in London, she kind of petered out. Well, maybe they could waive the police report…)

(She also informed me that it was all but a sure-fire bet that the charges were made by Royal Mail employees—they’re apparently well known for filching credit and debit cards from the post; and a card going to a US address was practically screaming to be stolen. NatWest didn’t have any provision for activating your new card from a secure/known phone number; no, no—that might have cost them a bob or two.)

So I’m continually impressed by American Express’s professionalism and customer service, especially when reminded that not all credit card companies deliver like they do.

On the other hand, I do have a suspicion that they replace my card so quickly because they’re not sure thieves could spend as fast as I do.

Which is why this resonated with me:

Gratitude Monday: sweet rituals

I think it was some time back in the 90s that I decided that baking Christmas cookies was too labor-intensive for me. All that mixing, rolling out, cutting and decorating—honestly way too much work.

So I started making candy. One batch of fudge can be divvied up into eight or even more gift baskets, after all. And toffee turns out to be pretty easy to make (once you get your head around the fact that it goes up to 300°F and you shouldn’t try tasting it after that), and it was exceedingly popular.

Then I started adding in pralines (which were actually way fiddly—if you didn’t take the syrup mix off the heat at exactly the right moment, you got something either too soft or too crumbly). And then caramels—which were a pain in the neck when time came to cut them up and wrap them. A block of hazelnut caramels is extremely stiff to slice up, and wrapping involves cutting a gazillion cellophane squares and trying to twist them around something that’s basically solidified butter with some sugar and flavor.

(I was once talking with my sister while wrapping them, and I made the mistake of muttering about how slippery the damned things were. There was a pause before she chirped, “You can buy them already wrapped, you know.” Short call, that.)

Well, after that I went in for truffles; various varieties of truffles, which only upped the chocolate splatter all over my kitchen. And bark. And glass candy.

It got to the point where every December that whole part of the house crunched, and I regularly walked out of my socks because they stuck to the kitchen floor.

The thing is, though—people get fixated on that stuff. One year I gave things that didn’t involve me melting sugar, butter and chocolate in varying permutations. I gave beautiful things, thoughtful things. The comments I got were along the lines of, “Aren’t I getting candy this year?”

In Virginia, when I gave the gift package to one friend who lived in the Shenandoah Valley, the pralines didn’t make it past the Fairfax County line. For another friend, it was the caramels that never saw Prince William County. What are ya gonna do?

I realized that I’d completely lost the plot he year I had 17 kinds of candy to apportion out among 21 bags/boxes to be shipped all over the place. I had become my own worst enemy.

So I backed off.

Since then, there’ve been a couple of years when I didn’t make candy at all. But this year, I felt in the mood. Not for the full-bore insane double digit output, but to make a few batches of a few favorites and get them out to people before Epiphany, which deadline I’ve been known to miss.

Starting on Thanksgiving day, I did just a couple of batches a day, working my way through five pounds of butter, eight pounds of sugar and six pounds of chocolate. (Listen, for the toffee alone, 18 ounces of Trader Joe’s dark chocolate only covers two batches.) And between the routine and the music I put on to sing to, I realized that candymaking is kind of a Zen thing for me, something I’m truly grateful for.

First of all—there’s the pounding of the chocolate to break it up to melt. I used to chop it; then it occurred to me that I get a sore wrist every year from going through blocks of chocolate. But pounding it with a mallet both breaks it up just fine and is really kind of therapeutic.

Then there’s the chopping of the walnuts—using a food processor just makes them into a damp Baklava-like mush, so you have to keep manually chopping them very fine in small handfuls. Chop, chop, chop, chop. I’m singing along to “My Back Pages” and chopping my little heart out, the knife just rocking back and forth across the board.

When it comes to fudge, that’s where you have to pay attention. That mixture of evaporated milk and sugar will burn in a New York instant if you don’t keep stirring it constantly from the moment you set it on the heat. Which means standing at the stove for about twelve minutes stirring until it comes to a boil, and then another eight or so before it hits the soft-ball point on the candy thermometer.

(I’ve also developed an annual ritual: ten minutes finding the church key to open the evaporated milk, because that’s pretty much the only canned thing I ever have in my house, and I only ever use the opener for this purpose.)

You have to keep stirring it, but it still kind of spits up bits of syrup. I learned a long time ago that when you’re doing this, you wear long sleeves, no matter how warm the environment might be. You have to respect the syrup.

Because—sure enough—this time it poofed a little volcano of hot milk-and-sugar straight into my hair as I was leaning over the stove trying to wipe something up.

Same with the spiced pecans—you have to stir and stir them as the mixture gets more and more syrupy to coat them completely before you pop them into the oven. And then you’ve got the aroma of five-spices and garam masala throughout your house.

It’s a very good process to go through—lining up sugar, chocolate, butter, pecans, walnuts, pans and wooden spoons along the counter. Then steadily working through each routine. To tell you the truth, I’m sick of chocolate from about the second batch of toffee; and I don’t seem to be able to keep it from splattering around the place—not even after all these years—when I’m working with it and the Bain Marie.

But I’ve got four types of confections ready to give my friends (and a trip to the Post Office in my immediate future).

And so on Gratitude Monday I’m thankful that I can make something that people really love, and which they won’t receive from anyone else. And for the ritual that has become part of me over the Christmas seasons.

Thanks for your time

While we’re still on the Week of Thanksgiving, I’ll quickly give thanks for people who come up with loopy time-sucking websites that allow you—no, encourage you—to do things like…dress a turkey like a total douchebag and give it something to say.

Here’s how mine turned out:

It was a hard choice for me—I think you should have been allowed to attach up to five of the obnoxious utterances balloons. So just imagine this guy rotating through with a number of them.

Your turn.

Thanksgiving for the first responders

It’s 0755 on Thanksgiving morning, and from my vantage point half a block in either direction from Sunnyvale Fire Station No. 4 and El Camino Real, I can tell there’s some really big emergency. They rolled out of the fire station a couple of minutes ago, and since then there’ve been two more swarms of sirens going down El Camino.

It must be bad.

And since I was putting together my post-gym breakfast when I heard the first round—you know, just dawdling about in the lull between the cardio workout and getting going on all the holiday stuff—I was reminded of how grateful I am for first responders. The men and women who choose to put themselves in harm’s way year in and year out, days, nights, weekends, holidays—they’re there…

No, they’re here for us.

They turn out whether it’s a kid choking on a hot dog, a grease fire in a Thanksgiving kitchen or a blaze at a chemical factory.

I’m deeply grateful that they are here and do their job no matter which pols in municipal, state or federal governments take shots at the wages, health coverage and pensions they get. They show up every time, run into buildings that everyone else is fleeing and do their damndest to save us from the actions of bad guys, nature and ourselves.

I hope the crews from Sunnyvale FD and others around the country—hell, others around the world—have a truly uneventful day today, and that they return safely to their families after their shift is over. And that this is a happy Thanksgiving for everyone.

Helping without reason

Today I’m giving thanks for Good Samaritans, people who don’t particularly know you but still give their time, energy and expertise to help you out of a jam.

This has happened to me more than a few times, and on every single occasion I have been humbled by their generosity and kindness.

I try to hold this in mind, and to be one of those people. I have a tendency to think that what I know and what I can do aren’t of much use to other people, so I have to fight against that. You just never know, and it would be a shame not to try to help someone when you actually can.

For one thing, it’s good to share. For another—as Frank Cross so famously pointed out in Scrooged, it makes you feel so good.

Don't ditch the dogs

Carrying on the theme of giving thanks this week, especially for animals, I got involved in the #DontDitchTheDogs trend on Twitter yesterday. It seems that there’s a trend of a different sort in the UK, to cut funding for K9 units (as well as to police forces in general), and some of the various cops I follow started a campaign to raise awareness.

They actually made the number one UK trend during the period they had it going.

Anyhow, it got me thinking about service animals in general, and public-service dogs in particular. (Look, cats make excellent companions; none better. But training them to take on citizen-facing activities? Erm, not so much.)

Police dogs, drug dogs, rescue dogs, cadaver dogs, bomb sniffer dogs, military dogs, guard dogs--we owe them all a debt of gratitude.

Think about it: they do a hard and often dangerous job, going into harm’s way alongside serving officers. They go into gunfights, knife fights, riots, collapsed buildings, meth labs, war zones, scenes of terrible carnage. They face pissed-off protestors, hopped-up tweakers and crack heads, insurgents, unstable terrain, toxic substances, extremes of weather and every other kind of bad thing. Their human partners put their lives in their paws, relying on them completely; and they don’t let them down. They often are killed or wounded in the line of duty.

And they do it for love.

What the hell more could you ask from anyone?

Gratitude Monday: table graces

This is a big Gratitude Monday—the week of Thanksgiving, we should really be upping our game. So today let me express my heartfelt appreciation to everyone who contributes to our meals every single day.

Thanks to all the animals that provide us sustenance. Turkeys, chickens, geese, ducks, pigeons, sheep, cows, pigs, deer, goats, bison, rabbits, fish, shellfish and any others I’ve missed. For giving us bacon and chorizo, cottage pies and chops, eggs and kabobs, venison and bouillabaise. Thank you for Thanksgiving dinner with the family, Sunday brunch with friends, picnic sandwiches with a lover, chicken soup for a sore throat, fish ‘n chips on the pier, bangers and mash in a pub.

I pray that if you were raised for this purpose, you were safe, sheltered and healthy; that you had space to roam about when the fancy took you, and a warm place to spend the night. And that when the time came for slaughter, I hope you had no idea what was in store for you. Thank you for giving us your life to enrich ours.

If you were wild, my wish is that your death was a clean kill and that your herd or flock or school did not wonder where you’d got to. Thank you for your time on earth and for giving us our nourishment through your death.

I’m also grateful for the people who care for these animals—ranchers, wildlife conservationists, fisherfolk; and for those who grow and harvest the other things we have on our plates and in our glasses. Farmers, orchardists, vintners, brewers, distillers, bee keepers, pickers, packers, truckers—thank you for doing jobs that never end, that depend on the vagaries of nature, that are hurry-up-and-wait…and sometimes worry. Thank you for my mangos, my apples, my raspberries, my broccolini, my potatoes, my haricots verts, my pinots noir and gris, my cask ale, my Oban, my coffee beans and my decaf green tea.

I’ll even thank you for the Brussels sprouts, because there are some misguided people out there who like them. I guess I’m grateful to them, too, since with them eating those nasty things there are more roasted parsnips and steamed carrots for me.

I’m grateful for millers, bakers and pastry makers—especially those who show up at the local farmers markets. And for baristas who give me latte with a picture in the foam. And for counter people who recognize my face and remember my name. And for wait staff and bussers and dishwashers for the times when I want a meal without having to prepare, serve or clean up after it.

It has been said that is love. If so, then there ought to be a whole lotta that going around this week. Spare some of it for those who made it possible.

Ho, ho, what the hell?

I was…I don’t know, I was doing something the other day, and I had the TV on. As usual, unless it’s a foreign film or something that actually engages my interest (or something so gobsmackingly bad that I’m nailed in place, like the Father Brown series currently running on PBS), I wasn’t really paying attention.

Look, the TV for me is basically a talking lamp. It’s background noise for doing other things.

Anyhow, there I was, doing whatever it was, and I heard some Christmas song being  done entirely by little bells. So I glanced up, thinking it was the Hershey’s Kisses “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” commercial—you know, the one where the chocolate doing the “yeeeeaaarr!” note kind of goes bananas.

But no. It was not. It was a line of boxer-shorted guys shaking their stuff just like the kisses did. Only to “Jingle Bells”. And it ends with the guy on “sleigh” doing essentially what that Kiss does; with, so to speak, a flourish. Play it again, you’ll see what I mean.

Imagine my surprise—and my gobsmacking paralysis to see this: I mean, really—I kind of stood there, mouth agape, eyes blinking in disbelief. It was a huge change from my expectation of cheap little chocs—to cheap little…oh, never mind.

Then I realized it’s for Kmart. And not yo mama’s Kmart, apparently.

(Although, in fairness, when I went to look up the video, I couldn’t remember what the commercial was for—store, shorts, Chippendales, what. Which means it’s not the best possible ad—you’re supposed to lock into the product being sold. Or maybe it just means that I’m not a Kmart customer and there’s nothing that’s going to change that.)

And it’s generated some controversy, as you might imagine.

For me, the bells in a commercial is always going to mean Hershey’s kisses doing “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”, even though I don’t buy them or eat them. But I’m going to be a lot more careful when I look up the next time I hear those bells.

And it’ll be interesting to follow Kmart’s sales performance this season. And other, you know, performances.