Tuesday, January 31, 2012

A quick "thank you"

This blog started on Jan. 3, and as of the last day of the month, we (we?) have received more than 600 page views. For a straightforward column blog that has more to do with 2002 than 2012, and that is more or less learned about on Facebook or by word-of-mouth, I think that's pretty good.
Also we (there's that 'we' again, what the hell?) have 11 followers. That's enough to start a gang.
So thanks to everyone who has been checking this thing out and to those of you who have signed up. There's 11 more months of 2012 to go, so hopefully (if the Mayans are wrong) this thing will continue to grow throughout the year and into the next. Thanks again.
Cheers,
Ben

Monday, January 30, 2012

Subaru update

Epilogue?
So, the Subaru has now cost us $1,100 in the past two months. Well, $1,1010.50 if you count what we had to pay the tow truck driver. Oh, and we just paid the lovely Kentucky annual car tax on it, so the grand total comes to $1,191.50. Since I've still got my Catholic connections, I'm planning an exorcism on the mechanical beast.

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Blasted Subaru, I'll kill you

I like Subaru. I really do. (And the rest of this will read like Dr. Seuss, too. Just kidding.)
They make dependable cars that are easy on the eyes and are way more powerful than they look.
When my wife got a Forester a few years back, I was actually excited.
It only had 50,000 miles on it, and was made before Subaru starting producing Foresters to look like actual SUVs.
I told her at the time that I wanted my next car to be an Imprezza, because I've always been, well, imprezzed with them (That was bad, ugh. OK, shake it off, move on.)
Now I'm not so sure.
As soon as we paid off the Subaru, Murphy's Law went into full effect.
The thing has become a mobile money pit.
New starters, ruptured all-wheel-drive joints, spark plugs, etc. You name it, we've had to replace it.
The last time the car was in the shop, they actually told my wife they had to "break a bolt" to get to the problem area to fix the car.
Break a bolt? I don't know much about cars, but that is a totally new one on me.
"Yeah, we're going to have to break your legs to work on those muscle spasms you've been having."
Are these people mechanics or some weird, post apocalyptic machine cult?
Anyway, when the car had to be healed through applying the medieval medical logic of breaking it first, it cost us around $700. That is insane.
But, as exclusive members of the ever-shrinking middle class, we had no choice really but to fix the thing.
So, we got through that.
That was last month.
New year, new problem.
My wife went to her car last night at about 11 p.m. to make the drive home from where we work.
She then re-appeared in the newsroom.
"Well, the car won't start."
We were sort of expecting this. The starter had been grinding and something was obviously amiss.
Still, I immediately began to wonder if this car had a soul, and, if so, how could I maim it?
Deep breath. Call AAA. That's why we signed up, right?
My wife gets redirected once, then again. Finally someone tells us a tow company will call us when they're five minutes away.
We get a call.
Turns out the guy is not five minutes away, he is still in bed, and wants to know if there's a good reason for him to come out.
Let's see, the car is in a metered space. We work at night. We don't live in the town that we work in. Parked cars are frequently broken into in the town that we work in. Any other questions?
The man, who signed up to be a 24-hour contractor with AAA, was completely belligerent. He screamed that he was on his way, and then hung up on my wife in the middle of her talking.
My wife and I are not complainers. But when we are treated like that because we are calling a service that we pay for, it strikes a nerve.
So, I had to go into a mode that I've never really been comfortable with, but have had to assume from time to time since entering the bonds of matrimony. That of the enforcer.  I know, I know, I'm laughing, too.
But there have been numerous times over the past seven years where I've had to step up and say "Look, fix the problem, and never talk to my wife like that again."
So I braced for the awkward moment as the guy was hooking the Subaru up to his flat-bed. I was a bit empowered by the fact that he had accidentally mooned me several times. Once you've seen some one's ass, you have all the leverage in the conversation.
So we talked. Not angrily. He understood.
"Look, if you want to call AAA and tell them I was a dickhead, it's OK with me," he said.
I didn't have the heart to tell him we already had.
When my wife returned to the car, he started becoming belligerent again. Then he dropped in it was his last day. Oh, we are so following you to the repair shop.
We got to bed at about 2 a.m.
While the tow driver diverted some of the focus from the actual problem, I have had it with this car.
I'm tempted to pull a Basil Fawlty, taking a switch down from a tree and thrashing the damn thing across the hood. But the neighbors would see and probably finally call the police. I've had it coming for a while now.
So, I'm trying to stay calm. There are, after all, bigger problems in the world and all that. Still, if this car had a neck, I might throttle it just a tad.

To see John Cleese as Basil Fawlty beating his car, check out this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8YFxuKrJBI

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Having "The Dream"

I was going to write about something else today, but then "The Dream" intervened last night.
I have to get this down while I can before the details dissipate into the ether.
I call it "The Dream" because it is seemingly universal. Almost everyone I know has some version of "The Dream."
Mine has a central core almost every time, though the details around it change. Last night was the strangest yet, but "The Dream" part of the dream was definitely there.
As best I can remember, "The Dream" began last night with me being back in college.
I was living with my college friend Jay, and the rest of my family moved in as well. This would have put the Jay I know out considerably, but he seemed indifferent when my eyes were moving rapidly behind closed lids.
Then I was in a store in a mall (I have no idea what mall) and, before too long, I was engaged in an all-out tank fight (we're talking Shermans and Panzers, here) in the mall parking lot. I may spend too much time playing video games.
Anyway, this is all sort of random, non sequitur dream stuff. Nothing to be alarmed about, except the incoming tank shell that I thought had killed me.
Turns out it didn't, and I emerged from the wreckage to go back to my apartment where my family was buzzing around tables and kitchen counter tops, having breakfast, and Jay was methodically preparing for his day.
I informed him of the tank fight, and how I thought myself dead, but was somehow alive.
Jay revealed to me that he had saved my life. He then produced cell phone video (a technology that didn't exist on the open market when we were in college. In fact, Jay had a pager) of a truck rolling down a mountain and exploding as evidence. It was a dream, so I accepted this as proof.
OK, nothing broken, not dead. Family in the kitchen. Time to go about my day.
And here is when "The Dream" hit.
I stared at the books strewn across my bed and knew that I was supposed to have read them, but I hadn't. In fact, I realized that it was quite late in the semester, and there was a class I knew I had but I hadn't gone to it at all. I didn't even know the building in which it was located.
In my version of "The Dream," it is always late in the semester, and I realize there is absolutely nothing I can do to save my hide.
In "The Dream," sometimes I go to the class and try to bluff my way through. Couldn't do that this time, as I didn't even know where the class was.
"The Dream" faded as I was making the decision between going to the registrar's office at the end of the semester and asking for a copy of my schedule, or just hefting up my L.L. Bean backpack (over one shoulder, of course) and making my way blindly around campus looking for the class.
That's when I woke up. Other variations have included me attending a final at a class I had never been to, but was on my schedule, or totally ignoring the consequences while moaning about the whole situation to my classmates all day. Fortunately, I do not have the version that I know at least one of my friends has where you show up to class in nothing but your underwear.
"The Dream" hasn't hit me in at least five or six years, so it was quite stressful. Add onto to it the prelude in which I thought myself dead and the stress meter doubles.
I awoke this morning to find my wife, not Jay, sleeping next to me, and my beagle, not my brother, draped across my feet.
Even upon realizing that it has just been "The Dream," it took me a bit to calm down.
After explaining the scenario to my groggy wife, she offered up a comforting "You still dream about college?"
"Well, yeah," I replied. "Don't you have something like that?"
"Not about college," she replied in her raspy morning voice. "I have dreams where we don't pay the mortgage and they take our house away."
"Did we pay the mortgage?"
"Yes, we paid it."
Shew.
I don't know what "The Dream" is trying to tell me. I only dropped one class ever in college, and, of the many boring core courses I had to take, I only skipped a few sessions here and there. From what I recall, that was always a good feeling. Class has been canceled today. By me.
All I can hope for is that it doesn't come back for another few years.
Oh, and Jay, I dream owe you for saving my life and letting my family move in. If I enter any of your dreams make sure you keep me to that. But check with me first, as I have some basic ground rules about what I will and will not do in dreams.

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Runny ink and other tales of injustice

Ah, the disgruntled phone call.
The right of any paying subscriber, or anyone, really, with access to a phone and too much time on their hands.
I've been in the newspaper business now for 13 years, and my acquaintance with the irate phone call goes all the way back to my first week on the job.
I was working at a paper in Ohio, and doing an update on a story where a man had been severely beaten in a bar and later died of his injuries. I can't even remember what I added that was new. Most of it was background from previous stories. The suspect in the case had already been tried and convicted. My name wasn't even on it.
But I learned that when an angry call comes in, your cohorts, who know it was you that cobbled the article together, will sell you out in a heartbeat. The call, when it came, got transferred to me.
"Yeah, are you the one who wrote that?" came the immediately hostile voice of the woman on the other end of the line.
"Yes."
"Well, when that guy was kicking the other guy in the head, he was wearing Georgia boots, not cowboy boots."
I made the rookie mistake of laughing. Was this person serious? Apparently so, because laughing was the wrong thing to do. The woman made it very clear, with proliferated swearing, that she was not joking around.
"He was wearing Georgia boots," she said again.
"I apologize," I said. "What does that mean?"
"Cowboy boots have tips. Georgia boots are rounded on the toe."
I realized that this woman, who was involved with the man incarcerated in the case, was trying to make the point that the repeated kicking to the head that caused a fatal hemorrhage was somehow less savage because of the type of boots involved.
"To be clear, he was kicked in the head repeatedly and died?" I asked.
She went on to claim that this was not the case. In fact, she said, the man died because he was on a lot of drugs, but they had railroaded her significant other (through lengthy due process) in the case.
Sigh.
"I'll look into it," I said.
This, I learned, would become a very valuable phrase.
The next call came a week later. I had done a story on the election to determine who was going to make sure the tractors ran on time in Podunk Township, Ohio. I asked both candidates the same questions from a standard questionnaire the newspaper had developed.
One of the men answered the questions very eloquently, and gave a detailed response to his main goals of what he wanted to accomplish if elected. His opponent gave a response I would hear frequently over the years and have since dubbed the "empty suit" or "I'm in over my head" reply.
"Well, I'll have to get in there before I can see what I can do," he said.
When you say that, you might as well wear a sandwich board that says "I'm in it for the money."
Anyway, candidate number two's wife called me incensed that I had intentionally and maliciously made her husband look stupid in print.
First off, your wife is calling me? Come on.
I tried to explain that I had asked both candidates the same questions and merely placed their responses in the story. That wasn't cutting it. Eventually the woman did what many angry callers do, she threatened to cancel her subscription. But that wasn't how she phrased it.
"I want to cancel my circulation," she said.
My mouth responded before my brain could stop it.
"All right, but you realize when your blood stops moving, you'll die?"
"You know what I meant!" she screamed.
Angry callers don't get to me anymore. Look, I've been in the same room as murderers, rapists and Republicans. Sometimes all at once. You can't intimidate me, and you don't scare me, so let's talk you down, and get to the issue.
I have become much more adept at customer service over the years. The calls haven't stopped, so I might as well try to help these people. And I genuinely do want to help. It's a big part of my job.
Sometimes it's best just to listen. Especially when a guy calls you claiming the Skull and Bones Society was responsible for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and he has proof, but is under heavy surveillance. There's a half-hour of my life I wish I had back.
Crazy calls are a delicate navigation. On one hand, you know the person is completely out of their gourd and might not even remember they called you. On the other, they have your phone number, know where you work and could mail you something that ticks.
It all depends on the context of the call.
I had someone call me up not too long ago and tell me that there were two moons in the sky that night. She had even gotten a picture.
"Uh, can you email that to me?" I asked.
"I don't think so," the woman replied. "But you should get a photo of it. I'm serious."
I assured the woman I would at least look at the sky. I then hung up and informed the newsroom of what I had been told.
"By the way," I added. "If there are two moons in the sky, it's because one of them is a comet and it is headed right for us."
I went to the nearest window and spotted the moon. Singular. I scanned the sky for any other large, luminescent objects. Nothing. My theories boiled down to three: there was something wrong with the woman's camera, she was given a wildly inaccurate pair of prescription glasses or she was tanked.
At least she was the nice kind of nuts.
Really, my least favorite type of call is the voicemail rant. Well, that's not entirely true. The voicemail rants I don't like are the ones that attack you, your company and your product and then leave no name or number. Brave, man, very brave.
Sometimes they can be rather entertaining. Make no mistake, if you call a newspaper and leave a voicemail rant, it is shared with everyone in the department. So, if any of you voicemailers out there are reading this, I just want you to know that after you took your angry stand of defiance about God knows what, you were laughed at. To a great extent.
A recent voicemail I got was from a person complaining about getting ink on their hands from the newspaper.
Ink and newspapers? What's next, mustard on hot dogs?
The person ended the voicemail with a pleading "Why are you doing this to me?"
Just so you know, I , who have nothing to do with the circulation or production of the newspaper, go down to the pressroom every night to conduct my evil schemes.
"Is that one going to 1000 Maple Drive, Bob? Yeah, extra ink on that one. Who am I? Let's just say I'm not the only one with too much time on their hands."

For more on some of the phone calls newspapers receive, check out this link:  http://www.facebook.com/#!/note.php?note_id=10150253016147344

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Another nugget from the past

I figure I'll put one of these up every once in a while. This was originally supposed to be called "Tale of the one-shoed bandit" but the headline got chopped. Hope you like it.

http://dailyindependent.com/columns/x1192747500/Ben-Fields-Tale-of-the-shoe-bandit-09-21-06

Thursday, January 5, 2012

Kicking some serious glass (regrets, I've had a few ...)

I don't snap.
I just don't.
I've been happy, angry, sad, sleepy -- basically any emotion or function you could place on one of the seven dwarves, or a smurf (except handy) -- I've been there.
But I've never snapped.
If anything, my emotions are typically muted based on some hard lessons I learned in my early 20s. No one to blame. Some regrettable emotional meltdowns. Didn't snap.
This is the story of the one time I did.
I was 30, which means I should have known better. I didn't.
My sister, my wife and I were on our way to visit some relatives in Lexington, Ky. Somewhere along the way, some miscommunication occured, and we accidentally sparked off a fight between this family. As a result of this, the plans for the trip were overhauled significantly.
Although I didn't think we had done anything wrong, both sides were blaming us, and it was weighing on me.
Strike one.
It was a cold, dreary winter day with a gray sky as we made our way down the Interstate. I was experiencing some heavy travel anxiety at the time, and my sister within the first few minutes of travel was expressing relatively negative emotions about the whole trip.
Strike two.
My wife was expressing dissappointment in both of us for the way we were behaving.
Strike -- ooh, check swing.
I asked if we could pull off at the next exit and stop at McDonald's. I was hungry, and also feeling like I needed to cool off. Calm down. Meditate over some french fries.
The stop was barely 20 minutes into our trip. There was protesting.
Just a bit outside. The count is at 2-2.
We stopped, and as we were making our way out with the food, my wife opened up with her frustration over the tension and attitudes that had been on display thus far.
Strike three. Caught the batter looking.
I, Ben Fields, who was once dubbed "Even Keel Fields" by an intern because of my reserved nature, lost it.
I snapped.
Snapping is a weird thing if you've never experienced it. Pure, uncontrollable rage is an odd sensation. But make no mistake it is pure, and uncontrollable. As is how you choose to express it.
In my case, I kicked the lower part of the glass door at the exit.
It shattered.
I was a bit surprised, to be quite honest.
Instantly the rage was gone, and I was left feeling rather, well, dopey.
Thirty-years-old, and I put my foot through a McDonald's door because, for whatever reason, the combination of elements surrounding my day were just right to make me snap.
My wife looked at me with both concern and horror.
"This trip is over," I said. There might have been an expletive in there somewhere.
I saw my wife's gaze shift to equal parts concern and amusement, because, if you've ever heard me talk, I am incapable of inflecting menace in my voice.
The last tingles of rage dissipated through the tips of my fingers, and my shoulders slumped. I knew what I had to do.
I turned around, went back to the counter and asked for a manager. Within a few seconds, she arrived.
"I broke your door, I need to pay for the damage," I said.
"Oh, did it slam or something?"
"No, I kicked it out, and I need to pay for it."
Her mood shifted from helpful to concerned, but not for the reason I expected.
"It wasn't anything we did, was it?"
I immediately felt so sorry for this woman. That she would jump to a conclusion that they had screwed up and it caused me kick out a door made me realize the types of problems she must have to deal with every day.
"I SAID NO PICKLES!" Splash. Hot coffee in the face.
"No, it didn't have anything to do with you."
"Well," she began. "It's happened before. We use Boyd Glass, and it costs around $108."
I actually gave her my business card.
"Send the bill here, give me a call, and I'll send in the check," I said.
The trip was, indeed, over.
I drove my sister back to my parent's house, and sat in the living room describing what I had done, like a 16-year-old.
"And what, exactly, did that accomplish, Benjamin?" asked my mom. Yep, full first name, definitely 16 all over again.
She then went on to explain how she and my father were friends with the people who owned that particular McDonald's. Of course they were.
Scratched from the lineup for the next game. "Family issues" cited to the media as the reason behind the manager's decision.
I paid the bill. Ironically, the door I paid for is now gone, as the family my parents know tore down that McDonald's to build a totally new one.
My wife points that out when we pass it on the Interstate.
And that, friends, is where snapping gets you.

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Some things to get you started

Here are some links to columns I've written for my previous newspaper. These are about four to five years old, which is why I decided I needed to start writing again. If you've already seen these on Facebook, read them again. They only get better after time, scouts honor.

http://dailyindependent.com/columns/x1192756054/Ben-Fields-Duck-Duck-SPLAT-052407/print

http://dailyindependent.com/columns/x1192756724/Ben-Fields-6-14-07-Drooping-drawers-It-s-a-crime/print

http://dailyindependent.com/columns/x1192758262/Ben-Fields-No-fortune-no-future-08-02-07

http://dailyindependent.com/columns/x1192757376/Ben-Fields-Find-your-way-back-07-05-07

http://dailyindependent.com/local/x1192752470/BEN-FIELDS-Brokeback-Benjamin-020807/print

http://dailyindependent.com/columns/x1192749020/BEN-FIELDS-I-m-a-danger-to-society

http://dailyindependent.com/local/x1192748268/Ben-Fields-A-date-with-Dateline

In the not too distant future ... next Sunday A.D.

Since I am no longer writing newspaper columns, I decided I needed a space to hurl my mental garbage at the universe. Some disagreed. They said it couldn't be done (or maybe it was shouldn't ... no, I'm going with couldn't). But thanks to Google, any idiot can set up a blog. This is how blogs sometimes get mistaken for news, by the way, but I am getting ahead of myself. In any case, I plan to restore my Thursday column in this space. That is my expressed purpose, but no doubt something shiny will distract me and I will stray. So check often, as other stuff is likely to get added that will be of great value to society as a whole. It is on its way. It cannot be stopped (watch this be the only post when someone stumbles across it in 2015). I am Ben Fields, and I am happy ... seriously.