It’s book club day! I’ve tossed around (mostly with my inside-my-head voice) the idea of trying to start up a book club for a few years now. I even helped get one going with a group of online friends, but that fell apart after exactly one book and a chat that I couldn’t even attend (I read the transcript).

So when Keri asked if I was interested in joining a new book club that was being put together, I said hell yeah, sign me up.

We’re on our third book, so it’s a functioning club! We meet at Starbucks. I’m not sure why, except this way no one has to clean their house and make sure the kids are stored away somewhere for a couple hours. I don’t know how Starbucks feels about us, we buy maybe 4 drinks and no snacks among the seven of us. I think I’ll buy a snack tonight. But we sit there for a couple hours, if we’re lucky we’re in the comfy chairs, and actually discuss the book.

See, my most recent idea for a book club was a book club in which the reading of the book was optional. It would be more of an excuse to go to each other’s homes and drink wine and complain about our kids and husbands and the school system. It was a stupid idea, of course. This is much better (and healthier for my brain.)

The first two books we read we all had similar gripes about. Which was fun. It seemed like in both cases the authors got a little lazy. They were both decent books, nothing I would have picked up myself, maybe a little lightweight, but certainly not bad. And, of course, they were best sellers so obviously I’m talking out my butt here.

Tonight we discuss The History of Love by Nicole Krauss. There are six pages of blurbs in the front of this book. I’m naturally cynical so that turned me off a bit. But I gotta say, this is an amazing book. Not an easy one to read if you have to read it in small spurts. Luckily I’d been warned of this, so I read it over two nights this past weekend. It can be confusing at first, but it pays off big time.

Tonight it’s my turn to pick a book (for our January meeting.) I have a couple here that I know I’d like to read, hopefully the others will be interested! I always think my taste in books is a little strange (the last two books I read before this club were Dog Days, the trashy novel by Ana Marie Cox which I thoroughly enjoyed, and The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris, which made my brain hurt.)

Tim and his friend Aaron are playing hide & seek. I just heard this exchange*:

A: I know, we can use our DS’s and tell each other if we’re hot or cold.

T: Sweeeeeet!

*You can chat with a Nintendo DS via some kind of wifi.

We need an area rug for our dining room. You would think it would be a pretty straightforward thing, but for me, nothing is simple. I’ve looked at every rug selling site there is. I’ve discovered that

1. They all sell the same rugs
2. The prices can vary by hundreds of dollars, and just because one site is cheaper than another for one rug, doesn’t mean it won’t be the opposite on the next
3. It’s impossible to tell what color the rug is online. The same rug looked magenta, black, and brick on three different sites.
4. Chances are vv high that if you find the perfect rug it either a) won’t come in the right size or b) is out of stock till January (and I need it now.)

Gah.

On a more cheerful note, I did find the perfect holiday gift if you’re wondering what to get for me- an inflatable 7′ tall black man.
Seriously, they’re at Target.

The AOL Customer Retention Manual is making the rounds today. Wow, I wish I had one of these back in the day! I worked for a now defunct cellular service, and it was part of my job to convince people not to cancel their lousy service and switch to someone else. Of course, back then there were only two services to choose from, so it wasn’t terribly difficult, but still, by the time a customer was speaking to me, he (almost always a he) was close to irate. We’d credit minutes (remember, back then you paid for each and every minute, inbound, outbound, PLUS the local and long distance land charges) & offer free months of service. Then when they still insisted on canceling- we made them send us the request in writing. If they were really freaking we’d say it was ok to fax the request, but they still had to follow it up in the mail. And we weren’t allowed to actually cancel the account until we had at least the faxed request in hand.

Man that part of the job sucked.

I remember one customer who had been through three reps before he got to me. His calls were constantly dropped- service was so intermittent back then, and he was calling to have the dropped calls credited. This was routine. The customer would call every month, request dropped call credit, and a customer service rep would manually review the account for calls to the same number within a minute or two- indicating that the customer had to redial a call that was dropped. We’d refund a minute of air and land changes for each one. Tedious, annoying, but in the interest of customer retention, a must. Anyway, the computers were down this day. The customer service rep told him so, and asked him to call back later. He asked for a supervisor, she told him the same, he asked for a manager. The call got bumped to my department (marketing) and one of my co-workers told him the same- sorry, the computers are down, please call back later. Now he was yelling, and she shrugged and handed me the phone (yeah, exactly… ). I apologized profusely, and again told him the computers were down, and that’s when he said, “what does that mean??” OK, remember, this was 1988. This was obviously an older executive who probably had never used a computer for any reason (only clerical workers used them- we didn’t even have PCs, just CRTs.) The poor man had never heard the phrase “the computers are down” and he just couldn’t understand what we were telling him. I explained it simply meant that the computer system wasn’t working, similar to a power outage, and it meant we were unable to access his account information. I promised to call him back when the system was working again (I avoided the term “back online”…) and offered to credit him a month’s service fee. Problem solved, he was a happy camper once again.

But, it was a cool time to be in the industry. When I started working there we were one office of about 65 people. That was the entire company. We provided cellular service for the NY met area. There was us and AT&T- every market had one “baby bell” and one private service (that was us). Our ownership changed a lot while I was there- shortly after I left the entire industry changed to a completely different, more competitive format. It had to, no way could it expand the way it needed to the way it was set up.

Shortly before I left we had 100 employees. Boy we had fun with that. Five of us were pregnant- hey, thats 5% of the company! Three were gay (at least out, anyway), 3%! Single moms? 10%! Hey, we were easily amused, what can I tell ya?

Andy had this huge smile on his face all night.

It’s been a crazy few days, wrapped around Andy’s HS graduation. All the time spent helping to put together Project Graduation seems to have paid off, but I’ll find out more later when he awakens from his recovery sleep.

I didn’t cry once during the ceremony, although a few times in the past few days I’ve come really close. I think it will all sink in when he heads to college in September.

I’m so proud of this kid.

The college search is over, Ramapo it is. And there was much rejoicing, followed by temporary stunned silence when a letter arrived from 2nd semi-finalist school offering an additional $1000 per year in scholarship funds beyond what they’d already offered (which, over 4 years, would save us about twenty-five thousand dollars over the costs at Ramapo :faint: .)

But we took deep breaths and remembered it’s not about the money, it’s about an education, and all of us are sure that Ramapo is the right place for Andy.

When he was 3 or 4 years old his aunt gave him this personalized towel. He chose the roadrunner theme.

Ramapo’s mascot is a roadrunner (in fact when I went there we just used the WB roadrunner on all the merchandise, but now they of course have their own little guy.)

Just when I was convinced that Andy was going to head to Ramapo in the fall… I just got the mail and there’s a fat (well, not that fat, but tall…) envelope from Andy’s reach school, TCNJ :woohoo:.

He won’t be home for an hour, I can’t wait to see his face- he has himself convinced he’s not getting admitted. Honestly, I really didn’t think he would, either, because it’s just a really tough school to get into.

For those of you who don’t know what TCNJ is, it’s the College of New Jersey, a state school. Rutgers is typically held up as the top public school in NJ, but TCNJ has a more elite feel to it. The campus is compact & suburban, they have small classes and no TA’s. It’s real Ivy feeling, which explains why it’s so hard to get into- the top students in the state, the ones who apply to the Ivies, often also apply to TCNJ, since it costs tens of thousands of dollars less to attend. So the competition is fierce. We were told by a number of people that for a kid from NJ the chances of getting into TCNJ are similar to getting into Princeton. I don’t know how exaggerated that might be, but the fact is- its tough.

So I guess a road trip is in order (a short one, the campus is about 30 minutes away.) And now the boy has a tough choice to make.

Glad I’m not him!