I wish I could at least get a post out of my miscommunications with the Customer Care folks at The New Yorker

This cartoon (click on it to enlarge) from the current New Yorker doesn't strike me as all that funny, but it does represent a sort of royal take on the idea of making lemonade when life gives you lemons, which is a subject of the post that follows.

by Ken

I like that old saying about how when life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade. I don't mean to say that it has often served as practical advice for me. It's just that I like lemonade (provided it's not too sweet), and thinking of this old saying gets me to thinking about lemonade (i'm extremely suggestible where food and drink are concerned) -- not figurative lemonade but the real kind, and I find it, even in its imaginary state, pleasurable to think about. It has been known more than once to get my mind off those figurative lemons I was thinking about, if only for a few seconds. Those few seconds are better than nothing.

In this spirit I thought there might be some public service renderable in my ongoing e-correspondence with the folks at the clearly misnamed Customer Care portal of newyorker.com, in a seemingly futile effort to get someone to grasp that, despite being a subscriber of, let's just say, many years, I have been unable to sign on for subscriber access the website since the erection of the new paywall following the summer-plus of free-for-all access.

I was unable to sign on for the most alarmingly blatant of reasons: On two different Macs, in both the Safari and Firefox browsers, when I clicked on either the supposed "Sign in" or "Link your subscription" links, nothing happened except that I lost the vertical scrollbar at the side of the window. As a result, the exhortations I eventually got from Customer Care to sign in using my same old e-mail-address log-in had a presumably unintended "rubbing it in" quality. If you don't have access to prompts asking for your log-in ID and password, being told what to use as your log-in ID takes on a tone of taunting. This effect was only heightened with the friendly encouragement at the end of each, er, communication:

If we can be of further assistance, please let us know. To ensure your future concerns are handled in a timely fashion, please include all previous e-mail correspondence.

Thank you for contacting The New Yorker.

Further assistance?

In the course of this unfruitful correspondence, I discovered that via Google Chrome, which I have installed on only one of the two computers in question (and can't easily get on the other), I actually could sign in. But I don't like Google Chrome, and use it on the one computer that has it only when I run into problems with both Safari and Firefox. (Hey, it happens.) And as I said, I don't and really can't have it on the other computer I regularly use. So I had mixed feelings when the last-received, er, response, included the following:

Please accept our sincere apologies.

We are constantly working to improve our digital products. Please know that we are currently working on this problem and we will be releasing a fix soon for the problem experienced with Safari.

In the mean time, we recommend that you use Google Chrome for access.

If we can be of further assistance, please let us know. To ensure your future concerns are handled in a timely fashion, please include all previous e-mail correspondence.

On the plus side, this actually did relate to my complaint, and if I had within me a spark of human gratitude, I should be over the moon. Also on the plus side, there was apparent acknowledgment of "the problem experienced with Safari," which apparently, it seems, was known! (Wasn't that, or wouldn't it have been, a key part of the response to my original complaint?)

On the minus side, well, perhaps you can figure that out for yourself.


HAVE WE READ JAMES THURBER'S 
"FILE AND FORGET" RECENTLY?

As I thought, in the spirit of making lemonade from these lemons, that there might be a post to be gotten out of all this which might be of some earthly use. No such luck.

Then I thought maybe I could get some sort of moderately humorous post from the epistolary back-and-forth, in the manner of two immortal James Thurber tales-of-futility, "File and Forget," about the author's attempt to deal with a host of miscommunications with his publisher, and "Joyeux Noël, Mr. Durning," about his protracted efforts to extract an impounded gift bottle of wine from U.S. Customs. That's not going to happen either, but I thought at least I could provide links to my "Thurber Tonight" prsentations of those pieces: "File and Forget" and "Joyeux Noël, Mr. Durning."

By the way, I have now discovered that when I click on the "Sign in" link in Safari and Firefox, something does happen. I get a whole page listing apparent places to go, and at the bottom, yes, actual prompts for user ID and password, which I can actually fill in! Of course, when I click on the "sign in" button, nothing happens, at least as far as I can tell.

Oh well.

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