Listening - a skill so easy, yet so few possess

I have two phones in my office. One, which I use mainly, has a 2020 extension number. The other one is x2019. For the last two days, the 2019 number has been ringing off the hook. This is because, apart from re-carpeting my office, which has me suffocating in re-carpeting fumes, they apparently tinkered with my phones as well. Now anyone calling for 3002 gets directed to my office.

What strikes me is not necessarily the fact that there are so many calls to Outpatient Surgery (this is to be expected), but that no one listens when you first answer the phone.

I always answer my office phones with "Clinical Care Extenders, this is Cynthia." Between a very enthusiastic, "This is Rita!" (obviously assuming that I would know who "Rita" is), and "We don't have your schedule!" (what schedule?!), I've concluded that no one actually got the fact that this is the Clinical Care Extender Office. What part of "Clinical Care Extenders" sounds like "Outpatient Surgery"? I'm going to start answering the phones "Hello, if you're looking for Outpatient Surgery, we're not it, so stop thinking I have any idea what you're talking about."

I think the fumes are getting to my head.

Somebody forgot to take out the garbage

I ran across this youtube site through an acquaintance of mine. I was flabbergasted that such things still existed. Well, on second thought, I can't say I was surprised, but I guess living in a silo of people who are much more conscientious of propriety (and much better educated in these issues) lulls me into a false sense of security.

This was my response to this acquaintance:

"Just wondering if you and your company realize the second one is INCREDIBLY racist and offensive to the Asian and Asian American communities. It's horrifically politically incorrect and plays into harmful, negative, and inaccurate stereotypes of people of Asian descent. I obviously realize that filmmakers are entitled to their creative expression, but I'd appreciate if you might mention something to the filmmakers about my sentiments. This is ridiculous and tasteless in its derogatory content and utter lack of consciousness and cultural sensitivity."

Watch as much as you can of it (I took about 20 seconds of it before vomit threatened to happen and I shut it off), and feel free to vent with me.

Expired Coffee

A testimony to how occasionally my family drinks coffee is the fact that most of the coffee grinds and beans in our house are apparently expired.

D and I had just gotten back from a lunch with my folks, where we were fed into a stupor, and collapsed on the couch when we got home. And because D had a proposal to submit, my mom suggested we have some coffee.

She brought out a good 3 or 4 different kinds of coffee that we had laying around the house - and one sounded delicious - Chocolate Macademia Nut Coffee. There was an elusive number that said "63 101404". My interpretation, knowing nothing about the shelf life of coffee, was that it expired October 14th, 2004, or is good till April 14th, 2010. We erred on the side of caution and threw it away. My mom then went to Whole Foods and got us some new coffee. Some sort of House Blend. Those male strippers from the Five Sisters shoot would be so disappointed...

I'll post the male stripper story later.

Hallelujah! Title!!

I finally found the title field on my post! Why wasn't it there before? Wouldn't you think that they would put the title field here by default? And, Hallelujah is an amazing song - and even more amazing when Brandi Carlile covers it. Have you heard the original version? The original version is highly dubious. Jeff Buckley pioneered the *real* Hallelujah.

I'm acting CEO of COPE. Well, not really. That's the joke. Really, I'm babysitting the office while everyone is at Lake Arrowhead for COPE University. I was only acting CEO once - and that time I could say I was because I had COPE's "nuclear football" - all the passwords and keys and access to everything. You'd think it would come with a rush of thrill, but in actuality, it was really anti-climatic. I sat in a Pizza Hut for an hour waiting for our CEO to drop by on his way to the airport. The breadsticks were really good.

Traffic does not look promising. My office overlooks the 101 at the 101/10 interchange. It's gridlocked right now. Wonderful. The good news is, I have "Class Action" on Books on Tape (but it's not really on tape, it's on a CD). The other good news is my 8pm meeting in Ventura County was canceled. The bad news is, I have very little padding on my tush for long drives.

Have you ever thought about how self-centered a blog is? I mean, no one is probably ever going to read this but me, yet I'm still sitting here writing. Might be a product of boredom. Ok, I'm going to kick people out of the office now. And eat the rest of my left-over Fatburger.

Being mean to banks

I was going to write a rant about calling in for bank service. I wrote about a paragraph and realized that it was pretty mean. So I'm not going to post it.

An old published article...

Written March 2002 for Owen's online newsletter..... the website this was originally published on has gone defunct, and I didn't want to lose it. So, here it is.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The Academy made history the other night when African American actress Halle Berry was given the award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role at the annual Academy Awards in Southern California.

Further history was made when Denzel Washington clenched the title of Best Actor, beating out Australian Russell Crowe, star of Best Picture A Beautiful Mind.

Similarly, the night’s MC was Whoopi Goldberg, while Sidney Poitier received an Honorary Award “for his extraordinary performances and unique presence on the screen, and for representing the motion picture industry with dignity, style and intelligence throughout the world.”

As a matter of fact, the recipient of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, Arthur Hiller, was awarded for his perpetuation of diversity and equality in color, race, and religion in the industry. It’s no wonder Whoopi made mentions of how the doors are opening for minorities and people of color in the film industry. However, I have to ask – where is the yellow?

Sure, the success of the African American community is encouraging to the Asian Americans in the industry, but the fact still stands that Asian Americans, till this day, have still not been able to walk through this opening door. Asian Americans, especially at this last Oscars, are virtually invisible in Hollywood, and when they are, they are usually portrayed in a very stereotypical way. Very rarely, if ever, has an Asian American, especially Asian American men, been placed in a leading role in a movie that has nothing to do with Asian or Asian America.

However, there is hope, especially in the area of television.

Asian American actors like Garrett Wang and Lucy Liu have started to play parts that do not perpetuate Asian American stereotypes, speaking in perfect American English. Furthermore, Better Luck Tomorrow, a film by Justin Lin slated to open in mainstream theatres, portrays Asian American high school students in a different light than has been previously seen. This is a movie that is almost fully Asian American – Asian American cast, director, storyline…no more accents, no more Model Minority Myth, no more stereotypes, hopefully. Then hopefully, sometime in the near future, we will be able to see an Asian or Asian American actor or actress at the Oscars receiving an award for Best Performance.

And, if we’re lucky, Margaret Cho will undertake the daunting task of hosting the Academy Awards as well. Wouldn’t that be something?

A hoe is something you garden with.

With the madness of the election going on now, I wanted to add an anecdotal comment on something I saw. Facebook stalking some of my friends the other day, I ran across one of my friends, an Obama supporter, with this on his site:



I'm an Obama supporter, and would probably vote for a Republican before I vote for Hillary (well, maybe not - that's still up in the air), but I find that this is one of the very few, rare displays of offensiveness that I have seen from Obama supporters. One of the things that has struck me about this primary race is how nasty Hillary supporters tend to be (possibly reflected by how much mudslinging Hillary is doing in comparison to Obama), and how classy Obama supporters tend to be (again, that might be media spin media spin media spin, but in my personal experience in talking to people, Obama supporters tend to expound on how great Obama is, while Hillary supporters, rather than emphasizing how great Hillary is, tend to say negative things about Obama. It's a campaign built on bringing the opposition down, rather than building the candidate they want to support - Hillary - up).

But as a woman, frankly, I'm offended by the blatant sexism this sticker portrays, as well as the underlying racism the word "bro" evokes. The slang term "bro" traditionally means a black soldier. Interesting, no?

And don't get me started about the degrading term "Ho". I don't think that dignifies any explanation.