Daily Life

Ben Franklin’s Curse

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The House this week passed a measure, the Sunshine Protection Act, that would set America’s clocks to daylight saving time permanently once it clears the Senate and is signed into law by the President. The bill itself raises no ethics issues at all: it is the reactions to it and the reasons, real and alleged, for those reactions that ping ethics alarms.

The headline is tongue-in-cheek, incidentally. Most of my life I heard that Daylight Savings Time was Ben Franklin’s idea. Ben was an amazingly prolific innovator and out-of-the-box thinker, but he was not the originator of the practice, so we can neither blame him nor praise him. Another myth is that DST was implemented for the benefit of farmers. Actually, farmers have been one of the strongest opponents of DST because the factors that influence farming schedules, like dairy cattle’s readiness to be milked, are dictated by the sun, so clocks going back and forth just complicates things. In general, Retailers, sports, and tourism interests like daylight saving, while agricultural and evening-entertainment interests do not.

Personally, I just want one time in place all year, because the changeover is traumatic for me whenever it happens. I have a long list of screw-ups, missed deadlines and meetings on my record. I bet no year has ever passed without one.

Like so many policies, the Daylight Savings Time tradition has had and continues to have all manner of unintended consequences, and those are controversial too. There is some data that shows that crime and accidents are reduced by DST, but precise causation issues make such data inherently dubious. A 2017 analysis of 44 studies concluded that DST leads to electricity savings of 0.3%, but we now know, or should, we can’t trust studies because we can’t trust the reseachers who perform them. Ditto for a 2017 study in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics that estimated that “the transition into DST caused over 30 deaths at a social cost of $275 million annually,” primarily by increasing sleep deprivation. Another study claimed that hospitals see a 24% increase in heart attacks and a 6% increase in fatal crashes each year when the time changes.

President Trump has advocated permanent Daylight Savings Time, so that’s enough for the Axis of Unethical Conduct to oppose it. Predictably, the Washington Post rushed to publish “Why standard time is better for your health than daylight saving time: A proposed bill would make daylight saving time permanent. But standard time is actually better for your body, according to science.”

According to science! Even the Post’s readers tended to agree that this take was hooey. A typical reaction:

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An Old Friend Comes To Call…

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

I had a weird Independence Day weekend.

Six months ago an elementary and high school classmate whom I had not seen, spoken to or, frankly, thought about or missed in 50 years contacted me and said he and his family would be taking a cross-country road trip with his 86 foot long trailer in honor of the 250th Anniversary of our nation’s founding. For his D.C. stop, timed to take place on July Fourth, he was wondering if I could accommodate his monster vehicle. (He had checked my Alexandria home’s locale via Google satellite, and saw that there seemed to be a lot of space on my cul-de-sac.)

Let’s call him “Jeff.”

I said “Sure! It would be great to see you!” as a reflex, and promptly forgot about him as well as my commitment.

Well, Jeff arrived as planned after calling me for three days as he drove here. It was immediately clear that he expected me to be his family’s chauffeur, host and tour guide until they departed Monday afternoon. So I was. I took them to museums and D.C. area attractions. I accompanied them to restaurants. They left their trailer and knocked on my door early every morning—earlier than I would usually be up— assuming I was ready to start the day’s events.

This was a weird family. Jeff’s wife (his fourth, I learned) was an Armenian woman 25 years his junior who barely spoke English, and Jeff never indicated that he spoke her language. They had a delightful, happy four-year old boy (whom she dressed like a girl) whom the couple had adopted after his mother, Jeff’s wife’s niece, had been murdered by a serial killer.

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Life Competence Note To Spouses: Assume You Will Drop Dead Tomorrow

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I haven’t written much lately about my miserable existence since my wife of 43 years, Grace Elizabeth Bowen Marshall (who secretly commented here under the screen name “E2”) turned up dead Leap Year morning with no warning. Because I am at heart incompetent at anything other than the things that interest me and I am natively really good at, I am still struggling mightily with the wreckage of my life, home and business in the wake of her demise.

Just yesterday, I discovered an important task regarding legal obligations that I had completely forgotten about because it was in the category of “things Grace does so Jack can concentrate on other stuff.” I discovered it because a friend who is a talented operations whiz has been forcing me to go through files, papers, and accumulated memorabilia, especially in my office, something that I literally would never do without someone a) forcing me and b) telling me how to do it. This has been one of the most painful experiences of my life, because I don’t get enjoyment from nostalgia, only sadness, anger (at myself, mostly) and regrets.

The nasty surprises, especially from the financial side, have been arriving daily. (Sondheim’s “And Another Hundred People Just Got Off Of the Train” comes to mind). That important task I have completely whiffed on is typical of many: this was something Grace and I agreed would be her responsibility, and I happily left it in her usually capable hands for more than thirty years—never thought about it, in fact. Well, because of age, an illness that was worse than I knew and possibly other issues, she had just stopped taking care of this rather important matter for quite a while. Catching up now is going to be difficult, time consuming and expensive. I should have addressed this shortly after she died, but I was not exactly thinking clearly, and I didn’t know what I didn’t know, as Don Rumsfeld would say.

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The Kiss-Off

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

One reason I moved from a writing a website that had formal essays on ethics issues to a blog format is that I wanted my commentary to be more visceral and personal, even venturing into my personal relationships when it seemed appropriate, as when a situation I encounter is one that I believe is an enlightening part of the human experience.

I just had one of those. A woman I consider a close friend, one I have known for nearly 40 years, had a major change in her domestic arrangement and moved out to a more distant section of the Greater Washington area. I have always maintained periodic contact with her—lunch, dinner or drinks—but hadn’t seen her for over a year. I sent her an email inviting her to catch up.

I believe I am fair in saying I have played a substantial role in my friend’s life, beginning when I cast her in a major theatrical production I was directing at a time when she was lost, depressed and seeking a new course in her life. She had no experience but I saw talent: from a chorus part with no lines I encouraged her to take greater risks in theater and to expand her experience and abilities. Eventually she became a successful professional actress in regional theater.

Off the stage, she was one of my favorite people: funny, strong, gutsy. I do not believe we ever had a serious argument. When she needed my advice and intervention, I helped her cope with with a health crisis in her family; when she went through her divorce, I was supportive. (She had met her husband in that first show of mine that she auditioned for.)

Given this background, I was stunned when the answer to my friendly email arrived. It stated that her former life seemed far away now, and apparently I had been filed among “many of all the people” who were involved in theater with her in Northern Virginia. “I just don’t want to look back,” she said. “I wish all good things for you, Jack, I really do. And who knows? Perhaps our paths will cross again someday.”

Not if I see you first, bitch.

I must admit, I was hurt by this abrupt end to a long friendship. I have had the pleasure of making a positive difference in many people’s lives; I don’t expect flowers, demonstrations of ostentatious gratitude or testimonial dinners, but I don’t expect metaphorical kicks in the teeth either. The email was patronizing, and I have a low tolerance for that. It was cold, and I didn’t deserve that either. My response could easily have been “Bite me!” but instead I just expressed my amazement and disappointment. “I don’t reach out to people I’ve cared about out of nostalgia or to relive old times,” I wrote, ‘I reach out to people who I believe are special and who I would prefer to have in my life than not. I’m not sure what I did or didn’t do to warrant exile , but OK, I respect your choices and always have.”

To encapsulate the painful episode, someone I thought was a good friend and someone I know I had always been a good friend to summarily announced that she didn’t want to be friends any more. I find that gratuitously cruel, and cruelty is unethical. I have never done that to anyone, and I never would.

Has this ever happened to you? If so, how did you handle it?

I Played My Lawyer Card Today, and I Shouldn’t Have To

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

My father once told me that everyone should have a law degree to protect them from being cheated or scammed by other lawyers. He also said law school was the best way to be trained in rhetoric and logic as well as societal ethics, since the schools had abdicated those fields. As someone who seldom practiced law, Dad proved his claim that a law degree qualifies someone for lost of non legal jobs; for better or worse, people assume that lawyers are competent at management, negotiation, governing, and problem-solving. My experience has been the same as my father’s: I’ve been hired for lots of jobs requiring non-legal skills because I’m a lawyer.

This depressing episode, however, validated my father’s original endorsement of a law degree.

A couple of weeks ago, the News Mix channel on Direct TV suddenly disappeared. It was weird: first the message said I wasn’t subscribed, then it flipped to the message I get from the MLB channel when a Red Sox-Orioles game is blacked out, except instead of mentioning a baseball game, it said “News Mix” couldn’t be found, then said it was searching for another channel that had that “game.”

So I took a deep breath, knowing the horrors I would soon face, and called customer service. First the woman I finally reached after fighting with an AI bot gaslighted me and pretended that I was doing something wrong, because, she said, the channel was really there. Then she “checked” and said I wasn’t subscribed to the channel, which I knew was untrue: I have regularly checked it every morning to see how Fox News, CNN, MSNOW and BBC America were spinning the same stories, and what news each is deliberately ignoring or lying about. Channel 71 or 200 gave me access to those four stations and two weather channels. It’s part of my package. And it was gone. “Poof!”

After arguing with the agent, who had an indecipherable accent, she transferred me to a supervisor, who suspiciously sounded like the same person—could she have been pretending to be her own supervisor? But her clone was clearly smarter and spoke a bit clearer and slower. But this supervisor also tried to deny anything was wrong. After I argued with her for a while, she said, and I’m not kidding, “OK, I’m going to be honest with you: I received a complaint about NewsMix right before this call.”

OH! NOW you’re going to be honest and not pretend I’m making this up? Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!

Asshole.

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“The Unabomber Was Right”#10: DirecTV Proves It Can’t Be Trusted

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

They haven’t always been titled exactly that way. but the first “The Unabomber Was Right” post went up in 2017, and there have been nine since, with the most recent being here, in January. Today, however, I experienced an all-time classic.

Getting up earlier than usual, and waiting for my coffee to cool, I tuned in DirecTV channel 71 as I have been doing for, oh, 30 years or so. That channel is “News Mix”, which allows me to see sxi screens: CNN, Fox News, MSNow, BBC America, and two weather channels. To my surprise, the screen said the channel was not available, because I did not subscribe to it. Even more perplexing was the language of a second screen that popped up. “Newsmix is blocked. Our search for another channel does not indicate that your selection is available.”

Now that is the notice I get from DirecTV when a baseball game is blacked out because of regional restrictions. The news is blocked? Were we conquered by Iran overnight? I tried everything. Shutting down the TV. Disconnecting the satellite box. I kept getting those alternating screens.

So with a huge sigh of resignation, I realized that I was about to enter, once again, “The Customer Service Zone”:

“You unlock this door with a futile key of naive expectations. Beyond it is another dimension: a dimension of annoying AI bots, a dimension of infuriating repetition, a dimension of incompetence. You’re moving into a land of both impenetrable accents and ineptitude, of scripts, disconnections and ass-covering. You’ve just crossed over into… “The Customer Service Zone”!

DirecTV has a new, perky, sexy female voiced AI, but after I gave her all the information I asked for, she handed me over to the old AI, which asked me exactly the same questions I had just answered. I was told three times that the conversation might be recorded, so maybe someone will hear my shouts into the phone of “I already answered that!” and “And I answered that already too!”

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Memorial Event Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I just returned from the memorial event for a long-time friend and colleague who died, suddenly, two months ago. We were not very close, and I had not seen or spoken to him in in over a decade, but we had done a lot of projects together (he was a pianist), and as Yogi Berra said, “If you don’t go to your friends’ funerals, they won’t come to yours.” The deceased was a really lovely human being, unusually so, and I felt privileged to have known him. So I went.

As I expected, I knew almost no one there, just a couple of theater community members and another musician who had played with my friend in a production I directed. Do provide name tags for such events. If you don’t they begin with a lot of wandering around and anxiety.

Another missing element today: there was no pre-announced end time. There was a program, but without any set times and vague entries like “Remembrances and stories” an attendee faces the theoretical possibility that the event will go on forever. And indeed, as the afternoon dragged on, I found myself wondering, “Am I going to die here?”

Because there were many musicians among the celebrants, we were treated to five musical selections by 1) a professional baritone singing “The Impossible Dream,”2) a passable tenor singing a song from an unproduced musical written by the deceased’s common law ex-wife (and making it clear why the musical remains unproduced), 3) another song, this one a duet, from that same source, 4) a very long Polish Christmas carol sung by a very old soprano and accompanied by a violin played by an even older violinist, then 5) the very old soprano sang “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from “Carousel.”

The quality of the performances went down-hill from “The Impossible Dream,” but the main problem was that five unconnected musical performances is a revue, not a memorial service. This was the beginning of my fear that I was in an endless time loop. But there was more! A screen was pulled down and we were treated to an amateur video of my dead friend sight-reading an interminable medley of songs on the piano. This feature all by itself took more than a half an hour. Videos in such situations are like your grandfather showing home movies to dinner guests. If you have to include them at all, make them short and to the point. But no, after my friend’s shaky piano performance, complete with crude special effects like animated hearts leaping off the keys, the video shifted to an empty church with my friend accompanying a large baritone as he sang a fatuous musical prayer that may have been composed by Barney. (“I bless you, you bless me…”) The guy could sing, I’ll grant that, and he was at the memorial, so he could have sung live. I guess the idea was that the video had the loved one playing, but the video was also echo-y, in drab surroundings, of a drab song.

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Ethics Trivia, Horror Stories, and More…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The Rest of the Story: After picking up frozen entrees at Trader Joe’s yesterday, this afternoon I went to Harris Teeter’s for staples, like coffee and soft drinks. And guess what! The same woman who hit me up yesterday flashed her “I am poor with children and they are hungry…” card at me again, and a second woman, using what looked like the a copy of the same card, stopped me a bit later! I reported both of them and got them kicked out of the store. I should have told them, “The ice section is right over there…”

Also:

1. Memories! Last night I re-watched “Swing Time,” my favorite of the Fred & Ginger movie musicals (directed by George Stevens before filming the death camps in Europe during World War II convinced him that he didn’t want to make comedies any more) and was jarred into a reminiscence when Fred started doing his homage to Bill “Bojangles’ Robinson, one of his tap-dancing mentors. I remembered how in 2018 I wrote a serious ethics post about how Astaire’s blackface number “Bojangles of Broadway” was an example of using black make-up as simply make-up, and not as a racial slur. When I poste it on my Facebook page, Facebook banned Ethics Alarms, with any link to it causing a post to be taken down, for over two years. At the time, a lot of my views were coming from Facebook, and the censorship was harmful. So no, I don’t forget, and won’t forgive, Woke World for its suppression of speech, opinions and ideas as practiced by Big Tech and the social media giants through to the end of the Biden administration, and yes, that experience taught me that the “liberal” side of the ideological spectrum wasn’t liberal at all. Here’s that post.

Now watch me get banned again…

2. Some Democrats are really talking about impeaching President Trump because he said that he would wipe out Iran’s civilization. Why would anyone take this party seriously? I’ve been trying to think of what Trump’s variation on Teddy Roosevelt’s most famous quote, “Speak softly but carry a big stick” would be, not that TR always spoke softly by any means. “Speak like a madman and keep them guessing?”

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How Another Hour Of My Life Was Just Consumed By A Conspiracy of Incompetence…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I wonder if I can create a mass tort claim against the people responsible for episodes like this. Behold:

1. On March 28, I received a threatening letter from First Source, LLC, a debt collector. It alleged that I had an account with something called AfterPay U.S., which I have never heard of, for $750, that I never spent, for something that I still have no idea what it was. The letter also said that I now only owed $590.64, since I had paid $187.50, which I have not. My bank doesn’t thinks so either.

2. I called First Source, which …Hallelujah!…has an automated system that got me to a human being almost immediately. That human being was Rhea. She was cordial and professional, and did not constantly read from a script. She heard me out, and said that she would initiate a fraud investigation. I didn’t have to do anything more.

3. Yesterday I received two cheerful emails from AfterPay. Both involved alerting me that I had changed my email associated with my imaginary account. I hadn’t done anything regarding AfterPay, because I still don’t know what the hell it does other than charge people for stuff they never bought, and my email has been the same for 20 years. “Please log into your AfterPay account to view these changes. If this information is incorrect, please update so we have the most up to date information for you,” “Shiara” of Customer Support informed me. “Have a great day.”

Bite me, Shaira.

4. This morning I called FirstSource back to ask what’s going on. But instead of Rhea, I reached Michael, who appeared to be an idiot. As I tried to explain what had happened, he kept reading disclaimers and asking me for the same information I had already given to Rhea and that was already in my file, since it was repeated in the letter FirstSource had sent me. I told him, “I have a simple question you need to answer,” and he replied, “I can’t answer it because you keep interrupting me!” “No,” I said, “I keep asking you to stop reading a script that I have heard already, and to talk to me like a human being, and listen to what I am trying to tell you.” He hung up.

5. I called back and got Michael again. He acted as if we hadn’t just spoken second earlier. He read the same script, an asked me for the same information: my full name, my date of birth, my mailing address, and my “reference number.” It was literally de ja vu: a near exact replay of our previous conversation. This time, he said, “We have closed your account, so you will have to contact AfterPay.” Progress! He then gave me a phone number.

6. I called it. It didn’t work.

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Ethics Conflict at Trader Joe’s

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

It’s as if these situations seek me out.

Here I was at Trader Joe’s, doing a quick grocery run after a Zoom seminar, when a small, dark, middle-aged woman woman speaking some variation of English stops me. “Please, sir.” she says, and flashes a card with words written on it. “I am poor and hungry and have children,” it says.

That’s a first: a panhandler in a grocery store. I told her to wait a second and I dug in my wallet to find six bucks, which I gave to her. Then she showed me a basket of some kind of consumables. “Buy food?” she said. What, did she take credit cards?

I shook my head and left. But by the time I got to check-out, the scenario bothered me. Trader Joe’s has a hippie vibe, even a cultish vibe, so maybe panhandlers are welcome, but an in-store competitor seemed a bit over the line. I ultimately decided to blow the whistle on her, and told the store manager on duty that someone was peddling their own commodities in the store. My reasoning: if Trader Joe’s wants to allow that sort of thing out of fatal empathy, it’s their choice. But they at least should know about it.

I half expected the manager to say, “Oh, that’s just Gladys. She’s harmless.”

This ethics decision-making episode fell into my Golden Rule basket. If I was the store owner, I would want to know about Gladys, or whatever her real name was.

I’m still feeling guilty, however.