another pleasant valley sunday

I overslept today. Really overslept: till 11:30. But I still had time to get to Marche d'Aligres before it closed. So I ran down there to mingle with the crowd. I snuck a quick photo with my iPhone, which presumably is safely in Airplane Mode to protect me from outrageous roaming and data charges.

Paris is peaceful right now. A lot of Parisiens are on holiday. The people on the streets appear to be from out of town, but the crowds are smaller. After I went to the market, I cruised down rue de la Roquette...again, the most peaceful I have ever seen it to be...and to the used bookseller whom I know is open on Sundays. Inside his shop, he has stacks and stacks of bandes dessinées, for those who have the patience to wade through them. I have a thing for historical bandes dessinées, or those with social importance. So I look for these graphic stories amongst the stacks of action/adventure, sci-fi, etc. I found one today for 4 euros about a post World War II political figure in Europe.

Later, I walked to the Bastille and then through le Marais. I walked to the street that I hope to live on someday (but I'll settle for one of the streets near it)....and took a couple of photos. Then I came home and made myself a relatively healthy dinner, supplemented with wine.

speaking in other tongues

I'm back in Paris, jetlagged. My French is still awful, but I do pretty well with giving cabbies directions to "my" apartment. Luckily for me, French is usually a second language for them, too.

After a lunch of roquette and fromage de buffala with my friend Geneviève, I headed for Monoprix and other shops to stock up on the stuff I need in the apartment and that I miss when I'm not here, because it's either not available in the USA, or not the same, or so outrageously expensive that I can't justify buying it...like the raw sheep's milk cheese and the pimentes stuffed with goat cheese...and the coconut yogurt.

Then had to pop on the metro and off to the BHV to look at the fall clothes, while I was still ambulatory. I didn't last long...I'm too tired.

It's good to be back.

urban mobility, part deux

I've just read a local news article about how there's a ballot initiative in San Francisco for this November's election: one that will make voters choose between funding our public transit systems -- which are in dire need, with 700,000 passengers per day -- and funding more parking for cars, a measure backed by the Chamber of Commerce and initiated by the guy who founded The Gap, which presumably would sell more jeans and t-shirts if people had more places to park their SUVs.

Read about the initiative here .

Apparently, these are dueling ballot measures, and they're either/or bills... we'll either get funding for public transit, or we'll invest in cars and parking lots. This is why I cannot stand the ballot-initiative system in California. Ballot initiatives are like malware. You click on the wrong thing, and you destroy something that's important.

Apparently the president of the SF Board of Supervisors was quoted as saying, "This is about San Francisco's destiny. Voters will have to ask themselves, 'Do you want San Francisco to be more like Paris or Los Angeles?'"

That's a no-brainer for me. You know how I'm going to vote.

urban mobility

I have a car. But I live much of my life without using it. In fact, I only drive it to haul things or to go someplace that's impossible or unwise to reach with public transportation.

I don't think this is so strange -- I live in a city, and I grew up in New York. It seems completely normal to live my life, for the most part, without a car.

However, I live in the USA, and this is considered bizarre. Granted, there are many places where you absolutely MUST have a car and without one, you'd perish. But I don't want to live in those places. I can't stand driving in dense traffic, or looking endlessly for parking spaces that aren't in tow-away zones, or trying to get out of a parking lot without being hit by a bigger car. In general, I often feel like I'm in a horrible video game when I drive. It's not fun.

I won't get into a rant here about using non-renewable resources. I don't have to...you already know.

What I don't understand is the increasing number of people moving into my city with huge cars -- people who live next to a transit hub, but drive everywhere anyway. People who would rather drive four blocks than walk. People who drive to urban events with tens of thousands of other people, with no hope of parking.

I think that maybe it's because cars are basically mobile homes --once inside the car, people feel at "home" -- no matter where the car might take them. So much at home, in fact, that they often have no place to seat their passengers because of the toys, clothes, baby carriers, food, and entertainment items strewn everywhere. They feel "safe" in their car-home in unsafe times.

I'm of the belief system that the more people you have walking on the street, the safer the streets are to walk on. (With the exception of a few horrible mob scenes, that is.) So how do you get people out of their mobile homes and onto the sidewalks again?

long-overdue recognition

Lately I've been on the phone a lot, trying to straighten out the side effects of my social-security problem or dealing with tech-support issues with my gadgets. And in the process, I've discovered something very impressive: the quantum leaps in service from tech-support people who work the phones in India.

Remember when big companies first started outsourcing their service calls to India? A lot of people -- including me -- groaned and complained that the new workers didn't seem to know as much as their counterparts in the West, that they had limited scripts and tasks they could perform, that there were language barriers and difficult accents, and that their function often seemed to be as a "bouncer" who kept us from making contact with the people who actually knew how to solve our problems. Not anymore.

Most of the tech-support people I've talked to lately have been somewhere India, and the service has been great. They've been patient, attentive, friendly, professional, great on follow-through, and always resolved my troubles with little effort on my part. And I realized this has been going on for awhile: phone support has gotten good again -- if you get someone in India, that is.

It's not just because I read the Chetan Bhagat novel, "One Night at the Call Center," though I did feel empathy for the characters and the abusive treatment they sometimes got from their American callers. But I've realized that every time I make a support call and a person in India answers the phone, I get my problem solved pretty quickly....and when I make a phone call to a company in the USA and get a robot that makes a fake typing sound in the background, I DON'T get my problem solved.

So...here's a high-five to the tech-support workers in India... I hope that your employers start letting you use your real names instead of anglicized ones, because it's time for my culture to start recognizing where a lot of our tech talent is actually coming from.

HummerSpotting

Today I actually saw two Hummers in one day.

The first was a big yellow Hummer speeding down the carpool lane during rush hour. The driver had no passengers. Are you surprised?

The second sighting was later that evening. I saw a very short, humorless-looking guy -- he was clearly under 5'4" tall -- driving a big, black Hummer down Castro Street in San Francisco. I know what you're thinking... I thought it, too.

all you've got to do is talk naturally

Recently I've been paying closer attention to how skilled many people are at leaving voicemail messages. We've gotten pretty good at leaving clear, concise messages that actually convey useful information before the time-out beeper cuts us off.

Of course, I'm old enough to remember when some of my friends were intimidated by message machines and got clammy and stammered through a message....or worse, they got stage fright and hung up without leaving a message at all.

But those days are over. The next time you're in a public place, just listen. You'll hear people on cell phones everywhere, and many of these smooth talkers aren't having a two-way conversation -- they're just leaving messages. There's no human at the other end. They might even prefer it that way.

As a culture, we've mastered the art of sounding natural -- even downright warm, sincere, or even enthusiastic -- when we talk to machines. (And increasingly, machines are sounding more natural when they talk to us, too.)

How did we evolve to leaving these spontaneous soundbites for other people? Maybe it's trial by error, from being cut off by the beep too many times... but I also think we've finessed our intonation from listening to radio, cable news, and other media without really thinking about it...a modern instinct versus a primitive one.