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In Which CVS Pharmacy Exercises Routine Torture Via Phone

I’ve been receiving periodic automated phone calls from CVS pharmacy. They come on weekday mornings when I’m at work. The “PRIVATE” display on the caller ID piques my interest. Of course, it’s calls from PRIVATE phone numbers that should never be answered, but I’m a sucker for mystery.

“Hello?” I’ll venture. A beat of silence. Then, “Hello, this is a courtesy call from CVS pharmacy. Your photo order is ready to be picked up at the CVS pharmacy at 200 Massachusetts Avenue…” At that point I’ll hang up and think, “Gee, I hope that’s the last one of those.” Because I already picked up my photos nearly two months ago.

Yet the automated calls persisted, so I realized that they are like an urinary tract infection — not gonna go away on their own — and decided to call CVS and complain. I was reluctant to do this. I have no qualms contacting companies or institutions with whom I have an ongoing financial affiliation, but CVS? Those are the people who sell me cough drops and deodorant. It seemed awkward to advance our relationship into the realm of telephony customer service.

I dialed the CVS toll-free number while sitting at my desk, watching a gigantic MS Word document convert to PDF. After picking my way through a series of voice menus with increasing irrelevance to my ultimate objective (“To change your prescription pick-up time…” “To reorder a CVS Extra Care card…”), a kindly robot voice instructed me to hang on the line for the next available representative. And then the On Hold music began.

CVS’s On Hold music is the impetus for this post, because it is the most auditorily disagreeable On Hold music ever: A computerized succession of twangy chords, repeated over and over again with no variation or dynamics, just a constant droning refrain specifically engineered to induce caller abandonment. Anything with a voice, melody, cadence would have been an improvement. Gimme Kenny G, Chicago, or Alvin and the Chipmucks instead. Even muzak at least would have had retro appeal. I tried holding the phone away from my ear, but then a recorded voice would interrupt to reassure me of the importance of my call, and I’d hastily draw the phone to my ear — “Hello?”– only to be serenaded with more vile On Hold music.

After 10 minutes (about when I convinced myself that I could live with the periodic automated calls reminding me to pick up my photos), a customer service rep came on the line. She was helpful enough. She said that she would put my phone number on some internal “do not call” list and apologized for any inconvenience that this ordeal has caused me. “Is there anything else I can help you with?” she said.

“Actually, I just wanted to make a comment,” I said. “Your On Hold music? The music that played while I was waiting to talk to you? It’s, like, really bad,” I said. I tried to sound congenial, but given what I was saying, my words dripped with snark.

She gave a short laugh. “Oh yeah? I’ve actually never heard it, myself.”

“Well, trust me, it’s really annoying, and I think you should tell someone to change it,” I said.

“We understand that –”

“Okay, then, thanks a lot, bye!” I said, losing my nerve to continue being priggish to a poor customer service rep and hanging up. I never would have done that while talking to Bank of America or American Express, but CVS? Eh, who cares.

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By Meredith – December 13, 2008

The Wrong Way to Eat a Peanut Butter Cup

I was regaling Mr. P with a story about an acquaintance. The story is not worth repeating in its entirety, except to say that it involved Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. “You know what a peanut butter cup is, yes?” I asked Mr. P, who shrugged. “Omigod, you don’t know what a peanut butter cup is!” Floored, I stopped telling my mundane story in order to meticulously elucidate the structure and usage of the peanut butter cup. Form follows function, deliciously.

Moments like these, when I realize that my husband and I have completely different frame of references through which we view the world, are not uncommon. I can live with his utter ignorance about Star Wars, The Wizard of Oz, This is Spinal Tap, The Facts of Life, Alf, early 90s Saturday Night Live characters, the board game Clue, Slip ‘N Slides, and Reagan-era politics. But peanut butter cups? To have never run your tongue along the crimped edges of the cup before nibbling the disk of milk chocolate and having an explosion of salty, sweet, and savory rock your tastebuds in perfect flavor harmony?

When Mr. P hears the words “peanut butter,” he reacts in typical continental European fashion: He grimaces and grips his stomach, as if the mere thought of peanut butter reeks havoc on his refined digestive system. I believe he tried peanut butter once and didn’t like the taste nor how it stuck to the insides of his mouth. I can picture him, totally defenseless against the sticky peanut paste clinging to his gums, as helpless as a kitten with a strip of duct tape across its back.

My national pride reared as I watched him go through these motions. I’m not a huge fan of peanut butter myself, but years as a pennywise vegetarian has bestowed a certain respect for the humble, nutritive, Earth-friendly stuff. “So, you find peanut butter to be hard on your stomach, but triple creme 75% fat cheese is just fine. Nutella is perfectly normal food. And spreadable meat paste made out of animal liver is just delightful. But a butter made of out ground peanuts? How revolting.”

I bought a package of Newman’s Own Organics Peanut Butter Cups, intent on inducting my husband into the cult of the peanut butter cup. He found them tasty enough, but the moment was not overwhelmed by any great outpouring of enthusiasm. In fact, as I bit into my peanut butter cup, I realized that it wasn’t really as great as I had been blabbering about. Perhaps a romanticism has been manufactured by fond childhood memories and stealthy television advertising. It’s chocolate and peanut butter, after all. It’s just candy.

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By Meredith – December 10, 2008

Adventures in Discount Acupuncture, Session #2

M. seems a tiny bit surprised to see me again. I believe I was flagrantly disoriented at the end of last week’s acupuncture session and did not display requisite enthusiasm to inspire confidence of my return. I have vague recollections of scheduling tonight’s appointment while fumbling socks onto my feet and gutting the contents of my purse in search of my wallet, all the while my body buzzed with the unblocked energy that soared through its meridans. “Yeah, yeah, next week sure…” I muttered, counting money for her payment. I felt as flaky as a hippie meditating in a granola factory.

By nature I’m a skeptic when it comes to alternative medicines. I do believe that positive thinking, stress reduction, and the power of the placebo can trump corporate-sponsored science, but there are limits. Hyponosis will never supplant immunization, and Zimbabwe’s cholera epidemic will not be stemmed with guided imagery. That being said, the results of my first treatment of acupuncture pleasantly surprised me. My major compliant saw some remedy, and the promised side benefits — better sleep, calmed mood — were evident, at least until the weekend.

So I returned again to roll up my sleeves, my shirt, and my pant legs, bearing my skin to M.’s needles. I believe she used 8 needles this week, although I cannot be sure because I still haven’t mustered the courage to look at the needles while they are in my body. As I lay on the table for 30 minutes to allow the needles to work, I did feel a little of the same foggy disorientation as last week. But not as much. This is significant, right? The acupuncture must be doing something if my body is affected differently from week to week. Right?

Still, I didn’t feel the sleepy relaxation that many practiced punctureers swear to. I lay on the table, vaguely energized and musing on the word “puncture,” which is one of those words that just gets me. It’s almost onomatopoeic, in that I can imagine hearing a needle make a little noise that sounds like “puncture” when it pierces the skin. The “acu” prefix does redeem it somewhat of its fright by implying that it’s accurate, precise, targeted puncture. Much more reassuring than “circumpuncture,” “pseudopuncture,” or “mispuncture.”

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By Meredith – December 9, 2008

Owls

A child asks me what my favorite bird is. It’s one of those wonderfully simple questions that only a child would ask. Though I’ve never considered it, I knew the answer immediately. “Owls are my favorite birds,” I say, “because they’re smart and powerful.” The child nods solemnly because I sound serious. So I add “I would love to be an owl for a night,” winking with my voice.

____________

“If the Owl Calls Again”

by John Haines

at dusk from the island in the river, and it’s not too cold, I’ll wait for the moon to rise, then take wing and glide to meet him. We will not speak, but hooded against the frost soar above the alder flats, searching with tawny eyes. And then we’ll sit in the shadowy spruce and pick the bones of careless mice, while the long moon drifts toward Asia and the river mutters in its icy bed. And when the morning climbs the limbs we’ll part without a sound, fulfilled, floating homeward as the cold world awakens.

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By Meredith – December 9, 2008

Frigidaire Weather

Even though the weather is an universal ice-breaker as well as the conversation topic of last resort, discussing it with too much portense or passion is viewed as mind-numbingly trite. But days like today are exceptions. When the temperature crests 25 degrees and 50-mile per hour wind blasts Canada in your face, everyone talks about the weather. It’s part therapy, part bragging, and part communal grousing.

The first chilly autumn days are a shock to the body. After 5 months of summer, a 50-degree day feels as painful as inching into a swimming pool. How I dread those first mornings of frost, when the sidewalk is carpeted with wet leaves that have stiffened and cars are left to idle in driveways amid plumes of exhaust. All day I am on the constant cusp of a shiver, as if my skin absorbed the cold and it sits just under the dermis, fighting against the surface warmth of the indoors. (I believe the medical term is “vasoconstriction,” when superficial blood vessels constrict in order to divert heat away from the surface to the center in order to conserve heat).

But gradually I’ll acclimate to the cold to the point where I can enjoy it. This morning I walked the 1.5 miles to the subway in 10-degree sunshine. Cocooned within my thickest winter coat, my longest scarf, my most garish ski hat, and with my stomach full of oatmeal and banana, the cold is as refreshing as a menthol cough drop. I scamper to the subway on the near-empty bikepath, imagining myself ripping and throttling through the snow-covered woods on my XC skis.

So all day I’ve been in love with the cold, and I want to defend against the gripers who act as if the cold has no place in Boston in December. Wusses. If you can’t take the cold, move to San Diego.

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By Meredith – December 8, 2008

48 Hours

My maniacal devotion as a blogger is such that I feel horrendous guilt for almost allowing 48 hours to pass without a post. So here’s what I’ve been so busy doing instead…. (I believe this accounts for all 48 hours, although I only did the math once so it’s probably wrong.)

18 hours of sleep and bed-dwelling.

8 hours of work-work. Have you ever been in a really long meeting, and your brain suddenly announces to itself “You are the smartest person in this room,” and some other, more humble zone of your brain retorts “That’s impossible, because you’re the lowest paid person in the room” and the bold brain zone says “So? I could run this company in my sleep, but who needs the stress, the responsibility, the ass-kissing?” and the humble brain zone replies “Shut-up and pay attention! Our jaw is slackening.”

4 hours of cooking and eating. This would usually be more except last night’s dinner was a pre-Symphony pizza grab.

3 hours of consulting work. I love consulting. So quick and efficient: Company emails task to consultant, consultant completes task while sitting on couch in sweatpants, consultant sends company bill. Such an uncomplicated relationship.

3 hours of walking in the cool December sunshine.

3 hours of newspaper reading, web surfing, email, journal writing, and writing this.

3 hours of commuting, which involves more walking in the cool December sunshine and more newspaper reading.

2 hours 30 minutes of Boston Symphony Orchestra. A special treat on last night’s program was conductor James Levine and renowned pianist Daniel Barenboim doing a duet on the piano — the same piano — of Schubert’s F Minor Fantasy for piano four-hands. We were sitting to the far left of the stage but in the very first row, so our view was of Levine and Barenboim’s backs, sitting next to each other in front of the obscured keyboard. The Fantasy layers textured melodies that are at times sweet, at times apprehensive, and it was fascinating to see these two old men’s sturdy backs swaying and buckling as they labored over the keyboard. Mr. P called our point of view “erotic,” but I think — nay, hope — he meant “voyeuristic” or some other non-sexual word.

90 minutes of hair salon. After my blondness is renewed, I ask for “just a trim.” My hairdresser grins and says, “Didn’t you say you were going to cut off your hair after the wedding?” I assure her, “I’m letting myself go in other ways.”

1 hour of bookstore browsing, during which I read 20 pages of Proust was a Neuroscientist before I declined to buy it.

1 hour of housework. Yes, damned house still hasn’t learned to clean up after itself.

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By Meredith – December 5, 2008

Auden’t

In the course of many centuries a few laborsaving devices have been introduced into the mental kitchen — alcohol, coffee, tobacco, Benzedrine, etc. — but these are very crude, constantly breaking down, and liable to injure the cook. Literary composition in the twentieth century A.D. is pretty much what it was in the twentieth century B.C.: nearly everything has still to be done by hand. – WH Auden

I must protest with WH. For I am sober as a Mormon, and tonight my hand is cold and unmoved to write much of anything. I truly believe that if I pounded a beer, chugged an expresso, sucked a Winston, and swallowed some bennies (a quaint amphetamine that beatniks used to harvest from asthma inhalers)… then I would have something more interesting to say than to riff on a quote by WH Auden, who himself relied on a variety of substances to churn out his prose and his poetry.

What would WH have thought about this prose generator? Granted the gibberish that is output hardly qualifies as literary composition, but is it really all that different from the theory put forth and the example exhibited in Kerouac’s treatise “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose”?

I’ve tried to write spontaneous prose before, as a way to unclog the stoppage of words that my hand refuses to issue. Somehow my spontaneous prose becomes a pile up of similes and adverbs, plus it’s impossible for me to write with “no periods separating sentence-structures already arbitrarily riddled by false colons and timid usually needless commas.” Obviously Kerouac was so hopped up on bennies that he had no patience for punctuation. One of many reasons to just say no, kids.

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By Meredith – December 3, 2008

Adventures in Discount Acupuncture, Session 1

Yeah, I know it sounds like a bad idea, but M. is a very esteemed acupuncturist who practices out of an alternative health hub in Cambridge, and she’s only discounted for 3 treatments because I was referred by another patient. “I tend to get whoozy in medical situations,” I admit to M. when we’re discussing my health history prior to the treatment. “And I’ve got a thing about needles.” It seems an absurd thing to say to the person who I’m paying to stick filiform stainless steel needles into my body, so I quip “Can acupuncture fix that?”

M. laughs, which is a good sign, because I really couldn’t cope with a stern acupuncturist. After 30 minutes of talking about my health, M. examined my tongue and took my pulse (two important diagnostics in Chinese medicine) and then eased me towards the table. I laid face-up and stared avidly at the ceiling. “Take a deep breath and I’ll insert when you exhale,” M. said. I didn’t feel the first ones go into my knees. She moved down to my feet, which stung a bit, and then my wrists, which were the most bothersome. After verifying I was okay, M. left me alone in the room.

The temptation to look at the needles that were sticking out of my body was overpowering, but I decided against it, at least for the first treatment. My body was tense, so I took deep breaths and thought about calming things. I thought about kneading bread, hiking mountains, laying in bed on a cold night with a book, the satisfaction of completing a particularly witty blog post. I thought about Mr. P mistakenly referring to his socks as his “sockets,” as in “I slept with my sockets on.”

Towards the end of the 30 minute treatment, I began to feel odd. I had expected to feel relaxed, maybe even sleepy, but instead my body and mind were blurrily buzzing. I felt half hyper, half foggy. I wondered if this was my vital energy, my qi, being brought into balance… or if it was my body producing endormorphins and other hormones to deal with the sudden appearace of these invasive objects. After M. removed the needles, I was overjoyed that I had finished my first acupuncture session without fainting. If acupuncture cures me of nothing else, at least it will assist with my belonephobia (fear of needles).

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By Meredith – December 2, 2008

Dead Sox

My virulent anti-Red Soxism has faded in the past few years, and I’ve become more tolerant of the passionate Red Sox fans who devote their lives to following, worshipping, and spreading the gospel of a baseball team. Maybe it’s them. They’ve twice secured their illusive World Series victory, thus destroying their self-identification as underdogs as well as the notion that they were somehow engaged in a spiritual or moral struggle akin to the Civil Rights movement. Or, maybe it’s me. Long gone are the days when my commute bisects Fenway Park, forcing me to endure the close company of sweaty, drunk Red Sox fans in a slow-moving trolley. Plus, over the years I’ve met a handful of fellow baseball anti-fans who commiserate with my belief that baseball is a boring, prolonged sport and that the Red Sox devotion is a diversion for uncreative sheeple… an opiate for the asses.

So I no longer audibly sigh when a meeting at work is delayed so co-workers can exchange inconsequential Red Sox-related banter. I no longer resent when the top story in the local news involves a baseball player trade. I no longer cluck disapprovingly when I see Red Sox fans indoctrinating their young children into the over-priced, over-rated experience that is a trip to Fenway Park.

I read in today’s Boston Globe about the officially licensed Red Sox casket. That’s right, now the most die-hard Red Sox fans can be buried in a coffin emblazoned with the Red Sox logo.

It’s tacky, it’s bizarre, it’s arguably blasphemous, it’s the first skid on a slippery slope to brand and advertisement-infused caskets, but honestly, I don’t care. If it makes someone feel better about death to know that they’ll be eternally tucked away in a Red Sox coffin, or if a doting family wants the deceased’s devotion to the Red Sox to be the talk of the funeral, then who am I to judge? Freaking crazies.

Posted in In the News, Massachusetts.

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By Meredith – December 1, 2008

Getting nutty for Christmas

O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times? — Jesus, Matthew 16:3

Americans are adroit at cloistering their collective conscience from the weighty issues of the day. Over the past few decades, we’ve trained our media to ignore any situation that requires knowledge of another countries’ history or mores, complex or abstract thinking, and a viable attention span. It’s not that we don’t care about wars, massacres, extreme poverty, human rights violations, and environmental catastrophe. Quite simply, it’s that we don’t understand.

Now the media is bandying buzzwords like financial crisis, mortgage meltdown, and credit crunch. Americans want to ignore the grave news about unemployment, stock market volatility, foreclosures, and bankruptcies, but the media is just being incessant with all this downer news about the economic apocalypse. Stark headlines like “Citigroup to cut 50000 jobs” really saps consumeristic desire.

So America vows to cutback on unnecessary spending, to hunker down and bring their epic credit-funded shopping spree to an end. The retail stores are nervous, cagey, desperate. Suddenly the American consumer has coyly refused to open her wallet for the retail stores to plunge into, like they have so many times in the past. And now, of all times, with the Christmas shopping season fast approaching!

But the retail stores are well-versed in the American mindset. Americans may no longer be able to spend money that they don’t have, but they can spend the money that they were planning to… wait, what’s that word? Oh yes, save. You know, for rainy days, for emergencies. Like… Blu-ray disc players for $120, GPS systems for $97, pearl necklaces for $49, George Foreman grilles for $30, and an Xbox 360 for $300. Prices like these are emergencies, because the prices could go back up at any moment.

Only American shoppers can ignore the myriad economic pressures, head en masse to the stores, and spend $10.6 billion, 3% more than last year. Only American shoppers can rationalize that, by spending money on non-essential crap, they’re actually saving money. Only American shoppers can stampede in a Wal-Mart. I underestimated you, America, but maybe it’s not that you don’t care about the financial crisis. It’s that you don’t understand.

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By Meredith – November 30, 2008