Tag: books

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So I wanted to buy a book.

I avoid Amazon because I find Jeff Bezos business practices suspect, to say the least, but I needed to buy the book quickly and didn’t have it in me to try something new and Amazon is easy which is long way to go to say I had to buy a book from the horrible Jeff Bezos.

Somehow in the process of buying the Kindle book, I also bought the audio book. I didn’t want the audio book. I tried to return it. After about 15 minutes of fruitless reads of the “Help” pages. I surrendered. I would to talk to Customer Service. It took me a good few minutes to find the Customer Service phone number but I finally found the hidden icon. I was immediately informed that it would when be a half hour wait to actually talk to someone and they kindly informed that there were other avenues to get help for my problem. Do you really want to wait a half hour on hold when Chat can help you right now.

I tried Chat. I told Chat I wanted to return an audio book. Amazon had a drop down box for accidental purchase which means accidental purchases of audio books is a frequent problem. Now, I want to pause my rant to point out something this should be a red flag to whoever is in charge of their system that there is a problem with people accidentally purchasing audio books. If it happens so often that they have an actual drop down box for it means it happens a lot. But I am pretty sure that the accidental purchase of unwanted products is a benefit not a feature of their system. How much money does Amazon earn from accidental purchases from people who don’t realize they have accidentally purchases something. What a wonderful source of passive income for the company.

Anyway, I was cracking away with the Chat function when Chat told me I could only return an audio book if I paid with a credit card which was mystifying because I had paid with a credit card. Since Chat was convinced that Chat had resolved the problem Chat wouldn’t let me talk any longer about my problem. Whenever I tried to return to the subject of my accidental purchase, Chat reminded me that Chat couldn’t help because I needed to have purchased with a credit card. The matter was resolved as far as Chat was concerned. I am assuming Chat’s reluctance to discuss the matter any further was because Chat was an AI robot and not an actual person. I couldn’t change Chat’s mind because Chat didn’t have a mind to change.

I decided to wait for phone operator. It took about 20 minutes, so less than the half hour mentioned at the beginning of the call. I spoke to Mohamed who took all of one minute to resolve my problem. ONE MINUTE, I tell you. He also let me in on why I couldn’t get a refund from Chat because I needed to belong to some Audio Club to get the refund. This might explain why the system wouldn’t let me use the normal refund process. I wasn’t supposed to get one because I didn’t belong to the Audio Club. The system just lumped my accidental purchase under a general category of not buying with a credit card because that happened a lot more.

I was bothered that I shouldn’t get a refund for my accidental purchase. It was an accident after all. In a conversation that resembled a comedy show routine, Mohamed said that only club members could return audio materials but I reminded him that I accidentally purchased the audio item. Mohamed then said and that was why he was refunding my money. He just wanted me to know that, in the future, I couldn’t return audio materials. But what if I accidentally purchase it, well then Mohamed said he would refund. Which begs the question why not just use the regular Amazon return system instead of forcing me to call them and explain that I accidentally purchased an audio book.

Never mind, I am pretty sure that Mohamed didn’t understand the policy either. He was doing his job, and quite well I might add. Someone up the food chain wants customers to know that if they accidentally purchase an Audio book they aren’t supposed to get a refund unless they belong to the Audio Club. Mohamed ticked that box. He didn’t understand the policy any better than I did so he couldn’t explain the policy to me. He followed his company script and that was all that mattered.

There are several reasons for me to be irritated with this customer service encounter:

  1. A human being resolved my problem quickly and efficiently. The Chat robot and help pages were time consuming and utterly useless.
  2. Making it difficult to talk to an actual human being is unhelpful. The company is actively thwarting good customer service by giving a show of alternates that aren’t as good. I tried for a good 15 minutes to use the help pages and then tried for another 10 minutes with Chat. Neither could help me, a person could.
  3. I spent a good 45 minutes to get $5.44 back when a human being could have help me almost instantaneously. How is routing customers to ineffective tools and wasting your customer’s time helpful.
  4. I am starting to believe that this is all an intentional way for Amazon to get passive income. How many people give up trying to get a refund? Indeed I thought several times is this worth my time to get back a paltry $5.44. There were so many impediments in my way. First, I didn’t realize I had bought the audio book, then I couldn’t return it through normal return process, the “Help” pages were no help at all, Chat couldn’t help me and I had to wait 20 minutes to get a customer service agent. I am certain that there are people who would have given up and ka-ching and extra $5.44 in Jeff Bezos pockets.
  5. Why aren’t more human beings hired for customer service? Jeff Bezos is a billionaire numerous times over. Real live human beings are better customer service than all the self-help bull shit put in our way. They just are. So why not have the customer service phone prominently displayed on every page and properly staffed so a customer doesn’t have to wait long to get help.
  6. Also, and this over everything else think might matter to someone like Bezos, the whole process made me hate Amazon all the more. Yes, I will use Amazon under duress but I am willing to pay more to stop him from getting any more of money that is absolutely necessary.

Rant complete.

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My book club read Ernest Hemingways’ The Sun Also Rises this month. It was a book I loved when I was 20. The vivid descriptions of Paris and Spain, everyone drinking way too much and never seeming to work, it all seemed wonderful. It’s funny how 40 years later I see something that I missed on my first reading.

There is still much to like but I was only a few pages in when Hemingway’s casual bigotry began to grate on me. He uses the N word to describe a drummer in a jazz band. And not in using the N word was important for understanding the character way, but in trying to let you know that the drummer was black way.

Robert Cohn is a Jewish character. Hemingway uses a lot of Jewish stereotypes to convey his personality. Jake Barnes, the hero of his story, complains about the number of words he uses in a telegram in order to save money. Or how Cohn has this superior Jewish attitude. None of the other characters seem to like him. There are various reasons other than being Jewish that create this animus toward Cohn but an important and frequently mentioned problem for his friends was that Cohn was simply being Jewish.

Oh, you have to forgive Hemingway. He was just a man of his time. That is the way everyone talked back then. It doesn’t make him a bad person. No, it doesn’t but it certainly make him a racist. So then, it becomes an important factor in discussing his writing.

This is a big problem I have when examining history and literature before the Civil Rights Era. Modern readers are supposed to forgive racism as unimportant because everyone back then was racist. It is meaningless to the story. This is very much the attitude people take when an old person slips into making racist’s statements. They are old. They grew up before they knew it was wrong.

But, saying the N Word, has always been wrong. If Hemingway had used colored or Negro, I could forgive him because they were acceptable terms to describe Black people in the 1920’s. But the N word wasn’t supposed to be used in polite company even in the 1920’s. That Hemingway used it matters greatly.

He knew he could get away with it. His mostly White readers wouldn’t blink an eye when they saw it and, more importantly, they would form an opinion about that character based on the use of the racial slur. It also gave readers a look into Jake’s friend – Lady Brett who was friendly with the drummer. What kind of self-respecting White woman knows a Black Jazz drummer? It helps Hemingway’s characterization of Lady Brett as a promiscuous woman. Racial slurs, then, are not neutral even in the 1920’s.

Furthermore, it isn’t harmless because everyone is doing it. If everyone is doing it then it calls into question the entire White population who either use the word or dismiss it as inconsequential. Why is everybody using it? So, if you are talking about The Sun Also Rises, it is a relevant point of discussion.

This also points to a bigger problem with how we address racism when discussing our past. A lot of people want to say racism is irrelevant to present day America because nobody would do this today. I would argue differently but let’s give them this point.

We aren’t talking about 2025. We are talking about a book written a hundred years ago when a man like Hemingway could safely use racial slurs and still be considered one of the great American writers of the 20th century. Why is that and what does this say about America during this time?

You can’t explain what was going on back then by ignoring racism. The past was far from perfect. Not everything can be tied in to nice little bow. One of those lessons might be that racism was pervasive in 1920’s America and how did this racism affect literature written during this time. But it isn’t meaningless.