july 28th 2008

two days before...

Dear Erica,

Thank you so much for contacting us about adopting Tommy.  You sound like a fantastic, experienced home for him!  He is so incredibly adorable, and has really come out of his shell since entering the rescue several weeks ago.  He had originally been crammed into a tiny cage with 3 other rabbits and left outside in the heat and thunderstorms without food, water, or shelter.  Thanks to a caring neighbor, who stepped in and demanded that something be done, they were turned over to a member of a local cat rescue group who immediately contacted us to take them in.  When he first came to us, he was very shy and afraid, and had multiple bite wounds from being housed in such close quarters with a more dominant male bunny.  Thankfully, his bite wounds have healed, and he is becomeingf a very curious and social little bun.  

"is there anything you can do?"

I'm not sure when exactly it happened but I think I've now finally become a fearless consumer.  

There's this girl I used to work with at the EPA who once told me stories where her sister went into Burlington Coat Factory, saw a pair of shoes she wanted sitting in the 35% off rack, took it to the register and didn't get the discount.  She made a fuss, requested the number for their corporate office.  She stood there in line and called the number, found out it was bogus, yelled at them and demanded the real number, and then they gave her the discount.  This story was told years ago, but whenever I psych myself up to talk to a manager, I think about my old coworker's sister and try to draw in the power of a black woman.  I feel like black women stand up for themselves the most out of every other race.  So I always try to be more like them when it comes to situations like this.

A couple of months ago during the big egg scare, I had gone into the grocery store to buy a carton of eggs because mine had expired a month earlier.  I went to the egg section, which was completely covered in flyers notifying customers that the eggs the store carried were completely safe.  I opened up a carton to check for any cracked ones, bought them and left.  As I was putting them away in the fridge, I looked at the expiry date to see how long they'd keep for and took a double take.  The eggs I just bought had already expired.  Two months ago.  Back in college, there had been an incident where I had bought moldy bagels and I never made it back to the store even though I had called the store to inquire what I should do with them.  It was just a couple of bucks, but it was the principle of it that still irks me even to this day.  So when this egg thing happened, I remembered that and was determined to make something happen.  I drove back to the store (which was only half a mile) and asked to speak to a manager.  As he approached, I took a deep breath, tried to draw in the power of a black woman and started my speech.  I started out by saying I was a frequent customer,  that with the big egg scare, this was pretty uncool .  I said that I don't usually check expiration dates on perishables because I expected things to be fresh, and that if I had to start doing that out of necessity because of incidents like this, I would start going to other stores for my groceries.  I said that I drove allll the way home, and then had to turn around and drive alllll the way back.  Ok, I fudged that last bit about the inconvenience of it all.  But I finished by asking if there was anything they could do to show me I was a valued customer.  They ended up giving me a $20 gift card and a new carton of eggs.  Score.

Recently, I went to the movie theatre and noticed that all the previews before the feature film seemed cut off at the top.  Sometimes the projector lens is slightly off kilter but it usually gets righted before the movie starts.  This time it didn't.  It was pretty obvious because there was a black bar at the bottom of the screen, and a bunch of headless actors walking around on the screen.  I leaned to my friend and whispered that I was going to demand my money back.  I was partly joking but mostly serious.  The movie I'd gone to watch was not supposed to be a comedy, and this was seriously preventing me from becoming absorbed in the movie.  It's like when someone gets botoxed up, I can never hear what they're saying.  I just stare at their lips mesmerized.  Anyway, pretty soon someone else gets up and brings the problem to an employee's attention and everyone breathes a sigh of relief once it gets corrected.  The movie's quite good and by the end of it, the good acting assuages my previous determination and I wonder if I'm actually going to go through with it.  Plus, I'm with a bunch of friends who don't seem to care as much about the situation to bring it up and I'm a bit self-conscious too.  I don't want to seem like I'm the type to gripe about every little mishap.  Or maybe it's too late.  But this seemed like a valid thing to bring up, and the worst thing they could say was no.  Well, a couple people in the party go to the restroom and I see my opportunity to slip away to the customer service counter before I'm missed.  Alas, the rest of the group is too observant and tag along which ends up providing great moral support.  I think I learned in high school psychology that one individual is less likely to disagree when faced with a group of individuals who all agree about the same thing.  I psych myself up, think about how I want to tackle this particular consumer-manager interaction, and decide on the charm/humor route.  Smile a lot, talk about headless actors, and ask if there was anything they could do.  We all end up getting a free movie pass, even the friends who had split to use the restroom- since they had returned right when the manager was handing them out.  I wrapped up the conversation with a little small talk (I don't even remember what it was about since my brain was already mentally done with the confrontation), said thanks, wished the man a good night, and led the group out.  It was awesome.  I think I'm going to use the pass on HP 7.2 - July 15th, 2011 is the date to wait for!

the "bystander problem"

At times, I would consider myself a hypocrite.  Like how I'm refusing to upgrade my current phone to a smart phone because I don't like the idea of paying for another internet source when I already pay for it at home and get it for free at work and because I don't feel the need to always be connected, but I absolutely love hanging out with people who are always plugged into the world wide web through their phone or iproduct.

Similarly, I love the idea of having public transportation available and using it versus driving just me, myself and I to the desired destination, but I very much dislike how sometimes I literally have to tack on 18 minutes to wait for the next train, 30 minutes if the metro suddenly decides to go "single track" (and two lines have to use the same track), and sometimes the trains jostle so much I get intensely queasy.  

However, today I decided to ride the metro into the city to meet up with a friend for brunch and I'm really glad I did because I happened to overhear a conversation between two people.  This 20-something woman was recollecting this incident to her friend where she was walking in DC and saw this 80-something year old man who had fallen and was lying on the sidewalk outside a public library.  He had a large gash on his head and was bleeding profusely, but none of the other pedestrians stopped to help.  They all just looked at him, and kept walking.  When she stopped to ask if he was ok and if he wanted her to call an ambulance, he responded in broken English that no no, he didn't have insurance and that he'd be ok.  She then went into the library to find a first aid kit, and saw that the library wall directly facing the sidewalk where the man had fallen actually comprised ceiling-to-floor windows where library patrons were using the computers and had seen the whole incident.  When she asked if anyone had any medical background, she was met with silence.  Not knowing what else to do, she went back outside, and started cleaning off the blood and bandaging the old man back up.  A small sparse crowd had gathered by then, watching her actions.  The man asked if she had a medical background, and she replied, "oh, no I don't, but apparently I'm the only one who has a heart!"  The man then asked what he should do when he got home, and she had no idea so made up some "reapply new bandages every 3 hours" instructions on the spot, emptied out the entire contents of the first aid kit, gave it to the man, and waited with him for his bus to take him home.  

A few days ago, I was blog stalking someone (I'm rather embarrassed to say I did this, so don't spread it around) and I read where this particular individual was road biking around a bend at a rather fast pace, his front tire hit a pothole, he catapulted in the air and landed face-first on the asphalt.  Obviously he had several abrasions but when he limped into the nearest Starbucks to use the restroom, not a single patron or barista asked if he was ok.  They just stared.  Apparently the only people who asked if he was alright was this black bus driver woman and a little black kid.  

My brunch friend and I debated about these two unrelated incidents- and he contributed his own experience as a cyclist.  When he crashed and tore himself up pretty badly, he said no one stopped to see if he was ok, if he needed medical help, if he wanted a ride somewhere.  Instead, he limped 2 miles back to his office where people who knew him from work helped him.  

We speculated why bystanders and witnesses don't feel compelled to help.  I thought maybe it was a northern thing.  We're both from the south and the north is seriously lacking in enough Bojangles sweet tea, Cookout milkshakes, and southern hospitality.  Surely if something like this happened in North Carolina, people would stop.  Or maybe it was an ethnic thing.  My friend is Asian.  The individual whose bike hit the pothole is also Asian.  And based on the way the woman on the metro was describing the 80 year old man's broken English, he probably was a minority too.  Maybe if all of them were of the majority ethnicity in the area, other majority ethnicity pedestrians would stop to help.  

I once watched a Punk'd episode where Ashton Kutcher played a prank on Mila Kunis (who is Ukrainian) by positioning an actor by a sewer grate where this actor was frantically asking for help to save his puppy who had fallen into the grate.  No one stopped to help partly because he was speaking entirely in Russian.  When Mila Kunis walked by, she stopped and started trying to help, calling out to other bystanders and translating the man's pleas.  It was all just material for a Punk'd episode, but it was in effect, a really interesting sociology experiment.  Maybe if you see someone of your same ethnicity, you would be more inclined to help.  

Or maybe it could be a gender thing.  There's this one time when I was biking to work and in minute 4 of my eight minute commute, the skies opened up and the flood of rain started.  It's always the most dangerous when it just starts raining.  All the oils from the cars since the last good rain rise above the water and don't have a chance to wash away into the sewers yet.  Needless to say, I completely wiped out when making a right turn.  I fell on my hip and it hurt a lot.  But being conditioned to get right back up after crashing onto east coast ice during snowboarding (really, I remember thinking to myself, "this fall is just like when you used to fall when you were learning how to snowboard.  You're fine.  Get back up!") I got up, grabbed my bike, and limped to the sidewalk.  I was, after all, in the middle of the street right at an intersection.  Only one bystander happened to be around, and did ask me if I was ok, but all the other cars waiting to turn right just did precisely that.  They waited.  I don't want to ever repeat that incident, but if I could redo the whole thing, I might have lied there in the street just a little bit longer to see if being a woman would bring people out of their cars into the pouring rain.  Just to see.  

The sidewalks in Taipei, Taiwan are different from the ones you see in the States especially the ones right outside storefronts where street vendors lay out their watches and fake jade bracelets.  They're not made of concrete, but are made of slabs of rock, almost like marble, and they look like they were all placed down at different times, so that there are tons of raised edges, the kind that you trip on and then quickly play it off like you never broke your walking pace.  It's especially dangerous if you're an old woman with really bad eyesight and peripheral vision.  I remember hearing about the time my grandmother fell on the sidewalk.  A bunch of people crowded around shouting, "Grandma, Grandma are you ok??" and pulling her back up on her feet.  My friend and I speculated about this.  Was it because she was an elderly woman?  Was it because she was surrounded by other Chinese people?  Or was it because it was Taiwan?  It wasn't a mistake they called her "Grandma".  In many if not all Asian countries, there's this respect mentality ingrained into our brains.  From a young age, we're trained to call our parents' friends Auntie and Uncle regardless of any lack of familial ties.  I'm now in my mid-late twenties and it's still instinctive for me to call complete strangers Auntie, Uncle, Grandma or Grandpa; the trigger being if they're Chinese, of course. 

So maybe it's a cultural thing.  In Taiwan, people might be more likely to feel compelled to help because they already have that Auntie/Uncle/Grandma/Grandpa respect connection.  In the States maybe not so much.  I've been reading "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell after the recommendation by a couple of friends.  It's a really interesting sociology book about different kinds of people and how they all connect together to spread an idea that would not have been contagious otherwise.  On pages 27-29, he touches on the idea of the "bystander problem".  In 1964, a woman named Kitty Genovese was chased by an assailant and attacked three times on the street as thirty-eight neighbors watched from their windows and did nothing.  It triggered rounds of self-recrimination in the neighbors.  The New York Times indicated in an article that maybe their apathy was a result of a conditioned reflex in New York as in other big cities.  "It is almost a matter of psychological survival, if one is surrounded and pressed by millions of people, to prevent them from constantly impinging on you, and the only way to do this is to ignore them as often as possible."  The book then goes on to discuss a study conducted by two NY universities, where they found out that a key factor in predicting whether or not helping behavior was triggered was how many witnesses there were to the event.  In the study, they discovered that when people are in a group, the responsibility for acting becomes diffused.  Each person will assume another will make the call, or assume that because no one else is acting, the apparent problem really isn't a problem.  

I guess no one can be 100% certain why no one helped the old man with the gash, or why all of those cycling accidents (I'm realizing that this entry makes it sound like road biking is extremely dangerous... it's really not.) rarely triggered any inquiries about each individual's well-being.  There are simply too many factors and maybe-it's-becauses to think about.  I guess this entry was more to just bring all these incidents to light as something to ponder about for however long people usually ponder about interesting things.  At least, I think it's interesting.  

traditions

There's something to be said about the warm squishy feelings traditions can provide.  

For instance, on every January 11th at 11:11am, the precise minute I was born, my mom and I always talk to each other.  When I used to live at home, my mom would always holler across the house, "ERICA!  It's 11:11am!" and now that I'm away, a phone call suffices if the date happens to fall on a weekday.  And every year she tells the story about how it snowed 3 feet that day in Connecticut, and how she had to tell the doctor, "we'll be driving to the hospital as soon as my husband shovels out the driveway!!"  I grin just imagining what was running through his head- first kid ever and the rest of its life depended on how fast he shoveled snow.  Awesome.

Then there are the times when my dad would go on business trips, and I guess I owe my sweet tooth to him, because he would always bring back half a stick of starburst in the outermost pocket of his carry-on and give it to me when he unpacked.  He'd offer it to me like it was no big deal at all, like he'd bought the pack for himself but didn't have time to eat it all on the plane, but he did it every time.  I think I told him about this years later when we happened to be standing in line for the register, and he immediately offered to buy me some.  He's cute like that, but I'd always rather have half a stick of leftover starburst from him than a brand new pack.  Of course, my mom still thinks it rots your teeth; this coming from someone who insists eating ice cream is a necessity because it's her main source of calcium!