Lindbergh, Education and AT&T

This afternoon, I attempted to contact AT&T to cancel my aging father's Internet service that he quit using three months ago.  I needed to cancel it because payment is automatically deducted on his debit card.  While it might be simple to handle this on the AT&T site, my 89-year old father has difficulty remembering passwords, etc. and fails to write them down ... so I called AT&T after picking up a telephone number from the "contact us" page on their website.  After calling the number and selecting numerous options, I still had not spoken to a person after 15 non-productive minutes, nor had I come close to resolving the situation.  Remember, I'm calling AT&T, the source of all telephone communications since Ma Bell set up her first phone in Boston in 1877, and I can't even talk to a human being.  I ended up calling my trusted bank to resolve the issue, because AT&T clearly is not in the business of customer service and would not be bothered by a physical telephone call.

I held my boiling temper as I chatted with the young man at my dad's bank.  As I did, I recalled a statement by Charles Lindbergh who -- despairing at the effects of 'technological progress' that resulted from his solo, trans-Atlantic flight in 1927 -- reflected in 1964, "I realized if I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes."  Wanting to at least make a point with this young man on AT&T's technological failure, I asked, "How old are you?"

"I'm 28," he answered.

"Do you know who Charles Lindbergh was?"

"I think he was a President of the United States," he answered.

I finished my business and left the young man to his ignorant illusions and misguided education.  Does this country even educate any longer?

The Vitruvian Man Project

If you've come across this, my personal blog, I invite you to visit a project I call The Vitruvian Man.

www.thevitruvianman.org

The Guardian Angel from Carmina Gadelica

“Let me briefly describe the 'ceilidh' [a literary entertainment where stories and tales, poems and ballads, are rehearsed and recited, and songs are sung, conundrums are put, proverbs are quoted, and many other literary matters are related and discussed] as I have seen it.

“In a crofting townland there are several story-tellers who recite the oral literature of their predecessors. The story-tellers of the Highlands are as varied in their subjects as are literary men and women elsewhere. One is a historian narrating events simply and concisely; another is a historian with a bias, colouring his narrative according to his leanings. One is an inventor, building fiction upon fact, mingling his materials, and investing the whole with the charm of novelty and the halo of romance. Another is a reciter of heroic poems and ballads, bringing the different characters before the mind as clearly as the sculptor brings the figure before the eye. One gives the songs of the chief poets, with interesting accounts of their authors, while another, generally a woman, sings, to weird airs, beautiful old songs, some of them Arthurian. There are various other narrators, singers, and speakers, but I have never heard aught that should not be said nor sung.”

Alexander Carmichael