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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
No, not you. Of course not you.
I’m talking about Amazon — or more specifically, the ‘Recommended for You’ bug prank ‘feature’ on their website. That nasty little bastard can go straight to hell, and I hope as many pitchforks as possible poke it right in the ass on the way.
“I thought from my previous experience that the worst thing Amazon could do is ignore me. I was wrong. So very, very wrong.”
Don’t get me wrong. I like Amazon; I shop there all the time. And I appreciate automagical systems that can figure out what I might like — when they actually work, that is. I only ask three things of a recommendation system — or for that matter, a friend, spouse, or government — and in the past week, Amazon has failed me on all three. Observe:
1. Pay attention to what I’m telling you.
A few days ago, I logged onto Amazon, looking for some CDs. Here’s the conversation (only slightly rephrased) that I had with the recommendation system:
Amazon: Hi, Charlie! Welcome back! Can I help you find a CD?
Me: Okay, sure.
Amazon: I bet you’d like Bridge. It’s by Blues Traveler!
Me: Oh. Um, yeah, I don’t think so.
Amazon: No problem! How about Save His Soul? It’s great!
Me: I dunno — who’s it by?
Amazon: Blues Traveler!
Me: You know, I’m really not a Blues Traveler fan.
Amazon: Say no more! I know of a great CD you’ll love!
Me: Fine. Just tell me it’s not by-
Amazon: The CD’s titled Blues Traveler!
Me: *sigh* Let me guess. It’s-
Amazon: That’s right! It’s by Blues Traveler!!! Gosh!
Me: Look, seriously. Not a Blues Traveler fan. I swear.
Amazon: But you said six months ago that you own Four.
Me: Yeah… I did. But-
Amazon: And that’s by Blues Traveler!
Me: I know. But it’s my wife’s, really. And I listed dozens of CDs I own.
Amazon: I know how you feel! Probably like buying Travelogue: Blues Traveler Classics. Right? Right?
Me: Dude. I gave Four two stars. Out of five. Two.
Amazon: That’s more than one! Bet you’d love Blues Traveler’s Greatest Hits. Betcha would!
Me: No. I wouldn’t. Look, see here? I’m telling you not to use Four to suggest music any more. Okay? I happen to own one disc, but that’s it. No more Blues Traveler, got it?
Amazon: Absolutely!
Me: No greatest hits, no tribute albums, no cover bands, nothing. Okay?
Amazon: You’re the boss!
Me: Great. So. Do you have any other recommendations?
Amazon: Sure! You’re gonna love this CD Zygote! It’s super!
Me: Okay, I’m game. What type of mu-
Amazon: It’s by John Popper!
Me: Wait. Isn’t he-
Amazon: He’s the lead singer… of Blues Traveler! Yippee!
Me: God, I hate you.
Amazon: How many copies should I put you down for?
Me: I absolutely fucking hate you.
Amazon: Don’t forget One-Click Checkout™! It’s the best!
I nearly strangled my monitor with the mouse cord. Evidently, I should stop being so fricking honest with Amazon about the music I technically own.
Lord help me if it ever finds out my wife has the entire Madonna catalog somewhere under our roof. Jesus.
2. Don’t throw ‘paying attention’ back in my face.
I thought from my previous experience that the worst thing Amazon could do is ignore me. I was wrong. So very, very wrong.
See, I’m a big British comedy fan. Mostly the older shows — Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, Kiss Me Kate, Keeping Up Appearances, just about anything. The subtle stuff, the bawdy stuff, the outlandish stuff, it doesn’t much matter. I once even managed to sit through nearly an entire episode of Are You Being Served?.
Just once. And I called in sick to work for the rest of the week. But you get the picture.
So, last night I was poking around Amazon again, trying to find a DVD with clips from the old Alas Smith and Jones show.
I’m not even going to bother trying to describe it, other than to call it ‘two-man sketch comedy’ and point you to the BBC’s take above. My wife walked in last night while I was cackling giddily over a Smith and Jones ‘Swiss News’ clip on YouTube, and — after I replayed it and made her watch it — all she said was:
‘It’s kind of cute. But not laugh-out-loud cute. You’re weird.‘
Probably. But that’s not important right now. The only important detail to note is that the show featured well-travelled Brit comedy stars Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones.
(Hence the name, you see. Clever ones, those British are.)
The astute film buffs among you may remember Mel Smith from his role as ‘the Albino’ in The Princess Bride, where he tended lovingly to the Pit…. of Despaaaaiiiir.
The less astute among you — including me — may not know that there’s also a Mel Smith (a different Mel Smith, presumably, what with her evidently being a woman and all) who writes gay cowboy erotica novels, and sells them via Amazon.
Astute or not, I’d like to believe that if my recent browsing history included the phrases ‘John Cleese’, ‘British comedy’ and ‘Blackadder’, but not — I can’t stress this enough, now, NOT — any phrases such as ‘burly cowhand’, ‘assless chaps’, or ‘rope my dogie, Tex’, then you would probably guess the context of the ‘Mel Smith’ search correctly.
As opposed to waiting until I logged in tonight and saying:
‘Hi! Welcome back! Can we recommend ‘To Love a Cowboy’ for you today? It’s a wild, steamy tale of a young boy and the older man he… no? Okay! How about ‘Twice the Cowboy, Twice the Ride’? You’ll lose yourself in… not interested? No problem! ‘Stallions on the Range’ it is!‘
A ‘Mel Smith’ search is one thing. But I still can’t see why Amazon loaded up so far on gay cowboy fare. Maybe Blues Traveler fans watch a lot of Brokeback Mountain. I dunno.
3. Make me feel cooler by taking your advice.
Following the Blues Traveler debacle above, I finally managed to straighten Amazon out regarding the kinds of music I like. And generally, those kinds fall into one big category — old.
I remember the days, back in the mid-to-late ’80s, when I would laugh — laugh! — at people listening to the Beatles, or the Doors, or early Rolling Stones. ‘Geez,‘ I’d say with a wrinkle-free sneer, ‘some of that crap is twenty years old. Get with the times, already!‘
I still listen to a lot of the same music I did back then. Which was, it turns out, just about twenty years ago. It seems the sneerer has become the sneeree. Ouch.
In my defense, at least I’m not listening to the drivel you probably cringe over when you think of ’80s music. I figure it’s pretty hard to point and laugh over somebody ‘still’ listening to a band, if you have no idea who the hell they were in the first place. I’d like to claim that was a carefully planned strategic decision; actually, it just turns out that I have weird tastes in music as well as comedy, apparently.
The point is, this is where I thought Amazon might actually be able to help me, for once. So while I whipped up an order for a few CDs (by the Broken Homes, Royal Court of China and Buckwheat Zydeco, from 1988, 1989, and 1987, respectively), I asked — nay, begged — Amazon to find me something hipper. Something I’d like, but could brag about to all the young whippersnappers at the parties with their droopy trousers and ball caps askew.
So I hit Amazon with my (ever so slightly) more modern preferences. I may have one foot in the auditory grave, but there are some bands I like that have seen the light of this millennium, if only barely. So I rated up my ‘cool’ bands, like Soul Coughing and the Propellerheads and the Crystal Method. Find me something like these, I told Amazon — something good that I’ve never heard of, and that all the cool kids are into these days.
The Recommendorator beeped and booped for a while, and finally spat out a name that wasn’t simply the ‘limited edition’ version of one of the albums I’d claimed. Nor the import issue of the same album. Nor some Blues Traveler shit. Instead, the name was: ‘Fluke‘.
Nice. I’d never heard of Fluke. The ratings looked good. I saw comparisons to Fatboy Slim, Chemical Brothers and the like — another positive sign in my book. So I amended my order to include the suggested disc from this hot new act, this ‘Fluke’ that was no doubt all the rage at the raves and clubs and raves and yes-I-know-I-already-said-raves and clubs and raves and I-just-have-no-freaking-clue-where-else-kids-hang-out-these-days and raves where the kids are hanging out these days. Smugly satisfied with my newly purchased street cred, I eagerly awaited delivery of my CDs.
They came today. Four CDs in total. The old stuff is great — just like I remembered, catchy and clever and steeped in nostalgia. Better yet, the Fluke CD is awfully good, too. After a couple of turns through the disc, there are only a couple of songs that I’m ‘enh‘ about, and three or four that really stand out as gems. As a newly-bought and never-heard disc, it’s really quite a catch.
And as a conversation piece and ticket to street cred, it’s a steaming pile of dingo shit.
Turns out this ‘new‘ band that’s all the rage with their new CD was, in fact, all the rage back in 1997. They released their first single back in 1988. And the Wikipedia blurb including the CD I bought is two full sections before ‘Current work’.
Damn it.
Fluke’s not new; I’m just old. And they happened to stay off my radar for, oh, twenty years or so. But I never would have realized the tragic depths of my unhipness, were it not for Amazon’s trusty ‘Recommendations’ system taunting me with decade-old CDs and laughing and pointing.
So thanks for zippo, Amazon. Take your ballad pop and your cowboy porn and your aging techno albums and shove them up your mail slot. Next time I want recommendations, I’m going to fricking Pandora.
(But I can still come back to buy CDs, right? That Super Shipper Saving™ is awesome!!!1!OMGeleventy!)
Permalink | 2 CommentsI’ve been pretty good recently about not cross-whoringposting my missives from Bugs & Cranks over here. The way I figure it, if you’re a baseball fan, you’re already over there, because the collective writing is primo top-notch. And if you’re a Braves fan, then the link to my area is on the sidebar for easy access, and maybe you’re already reading it.
“If you’re not a baseball fan, then nothing I could possibly write is going to make you give a flying badger turd about the career on-base percentage of Atlanta’s backup second baseman.”
If you’re not a baseball fan, then nothing I could possibly write is going to make you give a flying badger turd about the career on-base percentage of Atlanta’s backup second baseman. (For the record, it’s .330, over a scant 101 at bats in limited action — but now I’m just torturing you needlessly.)
The point is, I’m making an exception. My latest B&C post isn’t about the Braves at all. Mostly, it’s not even about baseball. It’s about a shirt — a really, really stupid shirt — that ESPN sent me for winning a fantasy baseball league on their site. Or, in other words, for wasting my summer and fall knowing useless things like Martin Prado’s career on-base percentage.
(Or rather, slightly less useless things, because if I spent any time during the fantasy season worrying about Martin Prado, then I surely wouldn’t have earned the shirt in the first place. He’s a nice guy, I’m sure, but not exactly the ore from which championships are forged.
Let’s just say that if Prado’s grandmama plays fantasy baseball, she ain’t drafting him, either. Ouch.)
At any rate, if stupid shirts float your boat — or oodles of sidelong Spinal Tap references, for that matter — then please have a gander at:
The Answer Is None. None More Dork.
It’s a lot more like the typical fodder here than anything baseball-related, I promise. I don’t bother bringing up things like on-base percentage at all in the article, so you know it’s entirely stat-free. But hopefully, it’ll tide you over until I can carve out some time to get something meatier done here. Play ball, kids.
Permalink | 1 CommentSo, I need a little help here.
As you may — or may not — recall, my dog has lymphoma.
That’s not the bit I need help with. I certainly don’t expect everyone reading this site to be practicing and expert veterinary oncologists.
This time.
Rather, I need a bit of advice on dealing with the staff at the local animal hospitorium. The front desk ladies, specifically, because they’re killing me. Which is their prerogative, I suppose, since they’re not committed to the well-being of human visitors. Just my luck to tangle with receptionists whose Hippocratic oath only applies to tabby cats and stray shih tzus. Super.
“Just my luck to tangle with receptionists whose Hippocratic oath only applies to tabby cats and stray shih tzus. Super.”
Anyway, the way they’re killing me is this: every week, for each of the last sixteen weeks, I’ve wrangled my plucky mutt to the animal clinic for some doggy chemo care. Every week, they ask for my name, which is reasonable. Every week, they ask for my pet’s name — which I suppose is necessary, should the crazy cat ladies around the neighborhood start hauling in new kitties every other Tuesday. So while it’s tedious to give them the same old boring name every time, they get a pass for asking.
But then, every single stupid week, at the beginning of every visit, they ask:
“And are you still at <my address for the past five years>. And is your phone number still <the only phone number I’ve had this millennium>?”
Mind you, there are only three or four ladies working the desk at this particular facility. It’s fairly large, by animal hospital standards, but it’s not that big. We’re not talking about the Meow-o Clinic here; I see these same women over and over and over, every trip. And I understand that they see an awful lot of under-the-weathered-animal owners — but they also ask the questions after they’ve pulled up my dog’s record.
So every week, they see ‘APPT. FOR WEEKLY CHEMO’ and ‘LAST VISIT: CHEMO LAST WEEK’ and ‘REMINDER: SCHEDULE NEXT APPT NEXT WEEK’. And still, they smile sweetly and stare at me and coo, “So, have you packed up your house and canceled your phone plan any time in the last hundred and twenty hours or so? No? Well, I’ll just update your record, then, thanks.”
It would be different if we hadn’t stepped paw in their lobby for a few months. Or if I were leaving the dog behind and needed to be notified, rather than waiting to take her back home when she’s done. Or — seriously, or — if all of the appointment reminders and notifications the hospital leaves weren’t sent via email, which the triage troupe never asks about. After a couple of months of “No, I haven’t freaking moved since last Tuesday,” I decided to have a little fun with them.
And that’s where I need the help. I’m starting to run out of smartass replies with which to entertain myself.
Oh, sure, the first couple of times were a larf. I said that, oh yes, indeed I had happened to move, and patiently recited back the hospital’s own address and phone number as my own. For most of the receptionists, the flicker of recognition (and administrative frown following) were near immediate. One lady only caught it in the middle of asking what zip code that is, and heeeeey, just what are you trying to pull, sir?
(That’s the nice thing about being a smartass at an animal hospital; it’s your dog or cat that’s being treated. They’re not going to take it out on you, like they might at a doctor’s office, or even a restaurant. What are they gonna do — spit in my dog’s chemo cocktail? Bichon, please.)
I lay low for a few weeks, hoping the desk staff would forget which guy was the jerkbag. Sure enough, they were back to asking me the old routine questions sans stinkeye before the month was out. I took the opportunity to tell one of them, “Oooh, I’m glad you reminded me!” I explained how I was just about to move — to Nome, Alaska, as a matter of fact, and there really isn’t much veterinary coverage up there, and I really like the care my dog is getting here, so… how much postage would she think it would be to overnight a Staffordshire terrier round-trip every Wednesday? And how many holes would she suggest punching in the box? And should I insure the package for just the value of the dog, or should I include the cost of the Snausage tub I’d have to include, so the pooch didn’t go hungry?
That was a couple of weeks before Christmas. Since then, when that woman sees me coming, she glares at me and puts her ‘Next Window’ sign up in a huff. I’m pretty sure I can’t go back to that particular well again.
Still, that leaves a few hopefully-still-unsuspecting rubes ready for a ruffling. I’m just not sure quite how I want to go about it yet. I’ve thought about welling up and pouting next time one of them asks my address, so I can explain that my wife kicked me out and all I have is the dog now, and I’m moving around a bit, but that if they want to reach me, they can always come knocking on my VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER!
That might be a bit much, though. Eventually somebody will sabotage my dog, just to get the hell rid of me. So I should probably find something more subtle, but still entertaining. And I only have until next Wednesday to do it. I was a good boy at the appointment today; when they asked about whether my various life details had suddenly changed, I just gritted my teeth and assured them, calmly but firmly, that they hadn’t.
But I can’t do it two weeks in a row. There’s only so much conforming to polite society that one smartass can bear. I just need to find an acceptable — yet still entertaining! — level of snark, and get it out of my system. I only hope such a thing exists.
You know, for the dog’s sake.
Permalink | 3 CommentsFor the past few years, I’ve been the ‘captain’ of our Thursday night volleyball team.
I put ‘captain’ in quotes because there’s really not a lot of captainosity involved. I pay the team fee to the league. And I send out emails every week to badger people to show up. That’s the full extent of my ‘captainly’ duties. Just once, you’d think I’d get to perform a civil marriage service or keelhaul a mutineer or something. I’d even settle for getting to wear the funny hat and drinking rum on the job. But no.
“Just once, you’d think I’d get to perform a civil marriage service or keelhaul a mutineer or something.”
The trickiest part of my responsibilities is getting the right number and proportion of people to play. It’s regulation volleyball, and a co-ed league, which means that ideally, we need six players — two or three women and three or four men — to field a full squad. Six people working as a team is what you call a ‘system‘ — the front left, middle and right and back left, middle and right positions have certain responsibilities, and each gets just enough space to cover that we can mostly do it without calling time outs for emergency CPR treatment.
Less than six people is what’s known in volleyball parlance as a ‘screaming bumblefuck‘. Does the rightish-back-middly person cover the corner on this play? Who comes over to block the middle when the setter’s playing double duty on the wing? Why the hell is our server curled up in a fetal ball on the ten-foot line chanting, ‘so many holes… so many holes…‘? And where do they keep the oxygen tank and Band-Aids around this damned gym, anyway?
Needless to say, I do my level best to ensure that six warm-to-tepid bodies show up every week. Mostly, that’s accomplished by keeping four hundred and thirteen people on the active roster, and begging for players several days in advance. But there’s still the question of the ratio of attendees, and — as is always the case in a life like mine — we can never seem to find enough women. If you’re sporting less than two in our league, your team is penalized a few points every game. Also, the refs say disparaging things to you. And the girls on the opposing team give you strange looks, like maybe you locked your team’s women in the trunk of your car, and they’re next. It can be awfully distracting, when all you’re trying to do is play your game and focus on teamwork and drown out the muffled sounds coming from the back of your Honda in the parking lot. Enough, already.
Which brings us to this afternoon, when one of the regular guys called to ask whether we needed him tonight. Some other obligation — a late night at the office or a pregnant wife or massive internal bleeding or something; I really wasn’t paying much attention — was vying for his time, but he said he’d try to swing by if we were going to be short-handed tonight.
So I tallied up the email replies I’d received for the week, and found only four definite ‘yes’ calls. Plus me is just five, so I let him know that we could absolutely use his services, once the project was finished or the baby popped out or his intestines were sewn back up, whatever. Since I was tearing him away from something he might deem ‘important’, I tried to soften the blow with a little humor.
“Definitely show up if you can. You know how we miss you when you’re not around.”
He chuckled politely, and probably thought that was the end of the conversation. Which it should have been. But I was busy doing math in my head, and realized that though we’d have six people with him, we still only had one girl showing up. Without bothering to explain this line of reasoning, I said:
“Although, you’d be more useful if you had boobs.”
Another chuckle — which I later realized was far more nervous than the first. At the time, though, I was drunk on the high of getting two laughs in a row. The jester in me took over, and I went for the hat trick:
“Of course, I’ve always said that about you.”
Silence. Probably of the stunned variety.
I said goodbye and hung up the phone, figuring I’d just bombed the joke. It wasn’t until I replayed the conversation in my head that I realized how batshit crazy it must have sounded. Now I wonder whether the guy will bother to show up tonight at all. Or ever, frankly.
If he does show up, it could get pretty awkward. And if he shows up wearing a padded bra, it’s going to get really awkward.
But hey — if he’s convincing enough, at least we’ll get the points back for the extra girl. Sometimes, even making an ass of myself has a silver lining.
Not often. Just sometimes.
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