freelansing in Seattle

OK, I said this was about “slow blogging,” but I never intended to be this slow. It’s been over 7 weeks since my last post. Just getting started and then I stopped. Pathetic. I blame Qwest.

Qwest Fail: I’d blocked out most of a week in between project deadlines in mid-October to catch up on blog writing & other personal projects. The first couple days of that week I had health problems. Then I had three days of Qwest-Hell problems. I’ll spare most of the gory details. But here are the basics: I had called Qwest to disconnect one of two phone lines in our house, the one nobody used. Instead they disconnected everything, including my personal land-line & voice mail (my only phone as I have no cell phone) as well as the Internet connection shared by five people in my household. It took 3 days to get (almost) everything restored. Initially talking on a borrowed phone, I spent a total of 5 hours on the phone with various customer disservice representatives getting them to execute the simple order, “Put everything back the way it was before you broke it.” It was only because I went out & personally swapped some wires at the connector-box-thingy outside the house that we had service restored within 3 days; otherwise we would have had to wait another week for a Qwest technician to come out. Various other problems continued long afterwards, including being without long-distance service & getting billed for a service call that never happened & other connection charges. (Being billed for reconnecting services that were erroneously disconnected was really pouring salt in the wound.)

By the time it was all over, I came to the conclusion that Qwest’s business model must involve making their customer’s heads to explode with frustration. Never having run a large corporation, it wasn’t clear to me how this was a sound practice, but I guess being a virtual monopoly makes things possible that are beyond my feeble imagination.

Danger of Election Fail: Following that ordeal I was preoccupied with paid project deadlines for the next couple weeks. So now I’m finally writing on election day, whereupon we will find out if Tim Eyman succeeds in crippling Washington state government, if Washington voters decide to roll back civil right in our state, and if Martin Luther King County, one of the largest & most liberal counties in the entire country, chooses a closet Right-wing, bible thumping, former TV personality for county exec (dubbed “our Sarah Palin” by a Washington Republican). Ah, the silly season!

Big Media Fail: So what did I miss mentioning this past month? Some inspiring citizen action around both climate change and health care, for one. On Oct. 24, people in 181 countries organized more than 5200 events in what some have called the most widespread day of political and environmental action ever (one event at the Seattle Center is pictured above). The day was organized by 350.org to call attention to the number that scientists deem the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere (which we’ve already well surpassed as we approach 390 parts per million). After seeing the extensive coverage major media devoted to handfuls of protesters at town hall meetings in August, I was excited to think about the prospect of nonstop, wall-to-wall coverage a globally coordinated day of events on this scale would get. Instead I heard the sound of crickets chirping: the NYT, for example, devoted less than 350 words to the topic. (Perhaps Times editors were confused & thought scientists had determined 350 words to be the safe upper limit for stories on climate change.)

In other related news, single-payer health care advocates have been stepping up their own actions, staging protests & civil disobedience at dozens of health insurances offices in recent weeks. Actions organized by Healthcare-NOW! have led to over 100 arrests in 18 cities so far, again largely to the sound of crickets chirping in the major media. (Note to climate and health care activists: It seems to help get media attention when you bring large guns to your events.)

Anyway, major news coverage or not, I’m very glad to see progressive citizen action on this kind of scale. It’s clear it will take all this and more if we’re going to get meaningful reform of either health care or climate and energy policy in DC. Without large-scale popular push-back against the corporate interests that mostly control our government, we’ve seen that we can’t expect elected officials to uphold the public interest against private interests. Recent months have been an ongoing civics lesson in this reality.

So, whether it’s Qwest, major media companies, or the corporate puppeteers in DC, I guess my main take-away from the month of October has been that large corporations suck. Huh. Who knew?