Don’t leave a message at the sound of tone

Michael Arrington:

[A]n increasing number of people are just plain avoiding voicemail (for my impromptu and unscientific survey, see the comments here, which are predominantly anti-voicemail). It takes much longer to listen to a message than read it. And voicemail is usually outside of our typical workflow, making it hard to forward or reply to easily.

Typical voicemail messages today include things like “Please don’t leave me a voicemail, I rarely listen to them. Please just email me at xxxx@xxxx.com” Many people don’t bother setting up their voicemail accounts at all. Then there’s my favorite method, the one I use personally - let the message box get full and then don’t empty it. Caller ID still tells me who called, and I can simply call them back.

How many times have you called someone back and said “I saw that you called but didn’t listen to the voicemail yet, Is it anything urgent?”

Senders often feel guilty for leaving voicemails, too. And to make sure you get the message, quite often people will follow up with a text message - “Just left you a VM, it’s important” - just so you know it’s there.

Yeah, don’t bother. If you have to reach me, voicemail is about 17th on the list after email, IM’ing, texting, emailing my wife, smoke signals, a Facebook poke and skywriting.

In the ’80’s we thought voicemail, the kind of mainfraim version of telephone answering machines that were the text-messaging of our college years, was cool. That got old fast, though. I remember being impressed when I worked for super-lawyer Ted Wells and finding out his voicemail was disabled. If you wanted to leave a message, you could leave it with his secretary. Awesome. This was about 15 years ago, and email hadn’t even become part of corporate life, but I already knew no one with anything better to do sat down tapping his feet scribbling down a message out of voicemail.

I never was able to get such privileges, although I did get to a point where my secretary’s job was to check my voicemail regularly and turn the message into an email … which doesn’t mean that’s always what happens, just that that was her job. I will stare at, or perhaps more accurately ignore, that little red light a long, long time if I have any semblance of an idea of what the message might be. In contrast, with my BlackBerry cellphone permanently attached to my hip, you’re likely to get a work email back from me within minutes, if not seconds, unless I really, really want to avoid you.

(This is not the same thing as wanting to actually be called up on my cell phone.  I do not want you to call me on my cell phone.  Have I mentioned email?)

Until I get it completely ripped out, though, all I can do is count on our receptionist (no direct dial number! yay!) to offer to take a message, and to allow “VM” through only with a disclaimer: “He doesn’t really check it.” Because I live in a hierarchical world, however, as long as it’s out there, it’s hanging over my head. That’s what Ted knew: Once someone leaves you a message, you’re “it.”

Sometimes the person leaving that voicemail is a judge. And when he makes you “it,” you’d better be aware.

But everyone else, don’t leave me a voicemail. Not if it matters whether I hear it.

When “I don’t know” is heresy… and when it’s not

The brilliant Penn Jillette makes a living from being a skeptic. Skepticism, he reports in the LA Times, isn’t good enough for the “reality based community, however — not on matters central to the canon:

[S]omeone asked us about global warming, or climate change, or however they’re branding it now. Teller and I were both silent on stage for a bit too long, and then I said I didn’t know.

I elaborated on “I don’t know” quite a bit. I said that Al Gore was so annoying (that’s scientifically provable, right?) that I really wanted to doubt anything he was hyping, but I just didn’t know. I also emphasized that really smart friends, who knew a lot more than me, were convinced of global warming. I ended my long-winded rambling (I most often have a silent partner) very clearly with “I don’t know.” I did that because … I don’t know. . . .

The next day, I heard that one of the non-famous, non-groovy, non-scientist speakers had used me as an example of someone who let his emotions make him believe things that are wrong. . . . Later, I was asked about a Newsweek blog she wrote. . . . She ends with: “But here was Penn, a great friend to the skeptic community, basically saying, ‘Don’t bother me with scientific evidence, I’m going to make up my mind about global warming based on my disdain for Al Gore.’ … Which just goes to show, not even the most hard-nosed empiricists and skeptics are immune from the power of emotion to make us believe stupid things.”

Is there no ignorance allowed on this one subject? . . . You can’t turn on the TV without seeing someone hating ourselves for what we’ve done to the planet and preaching the end of the world. Maybe they’re right, but is there no room for “maybe”? There’s a lot of evidence, but global warming encompasses a lot of complicated points: Is it happening? Did we cause it? Is it bad? Can we fix it? Is government-forced conservation the only way to fix it? . . .

[T]he climate of the whole world is . . . complicated. I’m not a scientist, and I haven’t spent my life studying weather. I’m trying to learn what I can, and while I’m working on it, isn’t it OK to say “I don’t know”?

Skepticism has been turned on its head; doubt becomes a thought crime. What is it called when that happens, exactly? I have always liked this guy.

I can’t give Jillette all the credit in the world for this thinking, however. His skeptical principles of knowing when not to know only go so far. Perhaps it really does matter whose ox is being Gored, because when it comes to other important matters arguably at least as complicated as global warming, Jillette is bold in his ignorance when in, fact, being so makes him feel good.

Associated Press still gunning for America

The AP wants to make damned sure you get their point:

[T]alk turns to the state of the Union, and the Optimists become decidedly bleak.

They use words such as “terrified,” “disgusted” and “scary” to describe what one calls “this mess” we Americans find ourselves in. Then comes the list of problems constituting the mess: a protracted war, $4-a-gallon gas, soaring food prices, uncertainty about jobs, an erratic stock market, a tougher housing market, and so on and so forth.

One member’s son is serving his second tour in Iraq. Another speaks of a daughter who’s lost her job in the mortgage industry and a son in construction whose salary was slashed. Still another mentions a friend who can barely afford gas.

Joanne Kontak, 60, an elementary school lunch aide inducted just this day as an Optimist, sums things up like this: “There’s just entirely too much wrong right now.”

Happy birthday, America? This year, we’re not so sure.

What a scientific sampling! What a well developed, balanced argument! What rich perspective!

What a repeat of the smear job of just a couple of weeks ago!

Alternatively the AP is right. The four or five people they quote really are representative of “America” — of what writer Pauline Arrilaga calls “we,” Kimosabe. After all, there are those “wrong direction” polls! Perhaps this “news” item really is newsworthy.

In which case, here’s the news: What a bunch of miserable, whining ingrates America has become! And how lucky America is that there are millions in other countries willing literally to risk death to beg, sneak or sue their way in here, take their places and breath the fresh air of liberty and opportunity.

It’s odd that, of all people, Pauline Arrilaga missed that angle, considering that she “writes frequently about illegal immigrants crossing the border, and about the brutality of smuggling rings that exploit them.”

What makes these people submit to such brutality… just to go in “the wrong direction”? Considering that one such story she wrote was described by the AP itself (same link) as “based on meticulous reporting” … why didn’t she ask these immigrants that question?

But she could be right. I’d rather assume the far more intuitively obvious, and historically supportable, proposition: What a nasty self-hating outfit the Associated Press is.

Cross-posted on Right Wing News.

Bozo, RIP

Larry Harmon died.

He was not Bozo in New York, I think, so he wasn’t all Bozos to all men, yet as the AP story points out, “Larry Harmon wasn’t the original Bozo the Clown, but he was the real one.”

I was on the Bozo show in New York. Just in the gallery; you won’t remember me. (Unlike my turn on Birthday House, when I got my head stuck for a couple of seconds in that fence on the front step.) I did not achieve my dream of being “Butch” for that day (explained here; scroll down), but I had not let my hopes get that high; that sort of thing, I already knew, doesn’t happen to me.

But my brother did win a Marble Raceway. Yep, same episode.

Sad, how life can be. July 4th and we gained liberty, but lost Jefferson, Adams … and now, Bozo.

Cross-posted on Dean’s World.

Martindale and me. Ok, well, mostly me.

I only mention this here because we can talk. It’s just a few of us who read the blog, and by now we’re mostly pretty good friends and no one here is going to take this wrong way. I mean, the premise of most blogs, including this one, is some aspect of self-promotion, yeah, but that’s not my point here, right? By now it’s pretty much just us guys and we all know where we stand vis-à-vis each other. The post is pretty self indulgent, though, even for a blog, even for one of my blogs, but if you’re interested in kind of higher-end lawyer marketing thingies you might find it instructive.

A little while ago I kicked up a little lawyer-directory dust by axing the musical question, Why does upstart lawyer - ranking - promotion - and - directory service Avvo.com rank me so super high and all? This was meant as an entirely honest question in light of the fact that I know who the real killers are in this profession and I in all unsimulated modesty I wasn’t so so sure I was one of them.

Fine, I was sufficiently… humbled… on that point.

Now it turns out that (somewhat embattled) Martindale-Hubbell, the definitive (and remarkably costly, to firms) old-line law directory rapidly catching up to the Internet age, is showing me some cyber - law - marketin’ - lovin’ too. Tell me this isn’t kind of cool:

Ronald D. Coleman Lawyer Profile on Martindale.com
Visibility Rankings
#68 out of 53,913 lawyers in New York, New York
#862 out of 892,508 total lawyers Overall

Number 68 out of the whole New York City? Really? I must be very successful!

At something. Like getting people to look me up.

Isn’t attention useful when paying your electric bill? I know in Heaven that is one of the first question they ask at the pearly gates: “Coleman, Ronald, eh? Jewish name, Henech ben Yankiv. Hmmm…. mixed bag here I see but — hey, nice page view stats!”

I suppose 862 out of 892,508 nationwide is cool, too. Top one-tenth of 1%, right? But, er, you know how we New York types are. So, yeah, of course, that’s nice. But 68 out of almost 54,000 is such an incredible achievement….

Of getting looked up. Do I maybe get, I dunno, some coupons or something?

I also like how they’ve integrated LinkedIn.com, which is improving phenomenally as a grownup networking tool, into Martindale, though I don’t quite understand how they did that. I just see that my profile has a LinkedIn icon.

Whoa — ok! I just clicked the icon and it said, hey, you want to connect your LinkedIn profile to Martindale? Of course, natch, that’s the idea, right? Okay, so somehow it knew it was me in both places, but it didn’t know it was me reading the profile. Okay, that I like. So, fine, what happens now when you click the icon is it tells you how, once you’re identifed as a LinkedIn user yourself, how you’re already connected to the profile on Martindale you’re reading. Which in my case was easy, okay, but… wow. Pretty cool.

Another pleasant surprise: My AV rating kind of got upgraded, too. That’s a gooood rating. I actually was “awarded” this rating when I was an associate at the old Pitney Hardin law firm in New Jersey. I haven’t met anyone else who was rated AV as an associate (i.e., means of production) in a big firm, though I am sure there are other such people. But –

Humility break, kind of: That ranking didn’t mean Pitney Hardin even remotely considered me for partnership. In a firm where virtually no one without government service tries cases to juries, I had just tried and won a jury trial, got a “no judgment” verdict where the exposure was in the seven figures, on behalf of a fairly important firm client — Volvo Cars of North America. The firm’s response? They offered to transfer me to the corporate department!! Nice touch.

– my listing in New York always had this kind of asterisk on it next to the AV, because, really, I had “earned” it while practicing out of state. It was a way for Martindale to say, on the New York listing, “this guy is really good! For New Jersey, that is.” Evidently they’ve changed that somewhat; according to their FAQ, it now goes like this:

Martindale-Hubbell Peer Review Ratings are generally transferable within state boundaries. If a lawyer moves to a different state, his or her rating will appear in the Law Directory with the state abbreviation, indicating that it was established in another state or province.

Well, guess what? No abbreviation, dude! Looks like by virtue of the last few years having my mail sent to this side of the river, I is … legitimated!

They like me! They really, really like me!

If I can make it here, I can make it anywhere!

You… you could look it up!

UPDATE:  Maybe this is even easier than I thought — Monday, July 7th:

Visibility Rankings

#18 out of 53,806 lawyers in New York, New York

#344 out of 892,089 total lawyers Overall

“Authorities mull reasons for alleged killing spree”

Yes, that’s the AP’s headline:

Authorities mull reasons for alleged killing spree

Very wise, the “alleged” part.  What if the killing spree ends up being acquitted?

Massively cool, and right-wingy too

The AP reports great news from Colombia, where government forces have freed three longstanding US hostages, a kidnapped presidential candidate and eleven Colombian police and soldiers:

[It was] the most serious blow ever dealt to the 44-year-old Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, which considered the four hostages their most valuable bargaining chips. The FARC is already reeling from the deaths of key commanders and the loss of much of the territory it once held.

The Americans — Marc Gonsalves, Thomas Howes and Keith Stansell — were flying directly to the United States to reunite with their families, Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos said. They had been the longest-held American hostages in the world.

Santos said military intelligence agents infiltrated the guerrilla ranks and led the local commander in charge of the hostages, alias Cesar, to believe they were going to take them to Alfonso Cano, the guerrillas’ supreme leader.

The hostages, who had been divided in three groups, were taken to a rendezvous where two disguised helicopters piloted by Colombian military agents were waiting. Betancourt said her hands and feet were bound, which she called “humiliating.”

The pilots, she said, were posing as members of a relief organization, but “they were dressed like clowns,” wearing Che Guevara shirts, so she assumed they were rebels.

But when they were airborne, she looked behind her and saw Cesar, who had treated her so cruelly for so many years, lying on the floor blindfolded.

“The chief of the operation said, `We’re the national army. You’re free,’” she said. “The helicopter almost fell from the sky because we were jumping up and down, yelling, crying, hugging one another. We couldn’t believe it.”

The operation, Santos said, “will go into history for its audacity and effectiveness.”

I like audacity and effectiveness! They often make a great combination, as they did at Entebbe. I like it even better when they’re employed against commies. “U.S. President George W. Bush called his close ally Uribe to congratulate him, as did [French President Nicolas] Sarkozy,” continues the story. “Barack Obama issued a statement congratulating Uribe as well.”

Did Senator Obama know about the Che t-shirt part?  (UPDATE:  Heh.)

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds links to some cool analyses. “[A]nother embarrassment for the FARC terrorists,” he writes. Actually, isn’t it embarrassing enough to be called “FARC terrorists”?

Cooking lawyers alive

O’Connor federal courthouse

Originally uploaded by Ron Coleman

Yesterday I was here, in the stupidestly-designed courthouse on God’s brutally-baked brown desert earth — the Sandra Day O’Connor Courthouse in sunny Phoenix, Arizona. It is truly a marvel of arrogance. Imagine being so utterly uninterested in anything besides how you’d like your box of Erector Set pieces to look like at the award ceremony that you design a massive building, meant for human habitation, that is actually a gigantic greenhouse that grabs scorching-hot sunbeams from one of the hottest atmospheres on the continent and just plays them across a gigantic, uncoolable interior atrium.

This monster has an evil twin in my own neighborhood, named after the entirely more prosaic former U.S. Senator and ur-fixer Alfonse D’Amato, in his home turf in Long Island. The U.S. courthouse for the Eastern District of New York is every bit as soulless and unconnected to how people use built space. Like the Arizona torture chamber, this one features cold, ornament-free, angular hard white spaces, a soaring atrium and a complete denial of the human spirit. Both feature vast plazas requiring five minutes of walking from the curb to the front door that, when shown on the architect’s drawings, must have depicted lunchtime building workers gaily eating their lunches, taking in the sun, flirting and strumming guitars — a true communitarian dream in federal jurisprudential space, and far enough from any possible truck bomb to make those shared moments entirely carefree.

Neither one of these plazas ever has a single person relaxing in them, in reality. The one in Central Islip is too windblown to hang out in, the D’Amato tower truly epitomizing the concept of a white elephant as the only building of its scale for what must be 20 miles all around — a largely empty monument to federally funded megalomania. On almost any day the sun beats off the bright white surfaces so intensely that polarized lenses are de rigeur and blinded lawyers quickly scurry across the plaza through the revolving-door entrance and into the heartless, icy lobby. But this same formula truly amounts to a miniature Judicial Conference death valley in Phoenix.

Ain’t coming back

Chrysler reports that it’s shutting down minivan production. “Foreman said, ‘These jobs are goin’, boys, and they ain’t comin’ back … to your hometown.” Bruce was right then, and he’d be right to say it now, too, but not for the reasons he thinks.

It’s not because of free trade, or even because folks in other countries are willing to be exploited. It’s not because of gasoline prices or awful automotive design and engineering. It’s not because of a general economic decline.

Those jobs are going, boys, because the structure of American automobile labor arrangements is hopeless — even for the private equity boys who bought Chrysler. Or, maybe, precisely for the private equity boys, who watch dollars and understand what they do better than millions of public shareholders.

They’re watching dollars go into hopelessly out of date union seniority rules, health plans, pensions — the kind of benefits that few credentialed professionals can hope for, much less semi-skilled auto plant labor. And them dollars, boys, they ain’t coming back.

Gas prices will fall, and a lot, in the next year. American cars will continue to get better and better. American factories will continue to put out very good products in the industries in which they’re competitive.

But unless and until the United Auto Workers fundamentally changes itself into something that is culturally, historically and politically it never has been, is not, and probably never can be, they ain’t comin’ back.

Cross-posted on Right Wing News.

The last time, as parody

I don’t go to the movies. Long story; I don’t. And we don’t have a TV. So I don’t usually know what’s going on Hollywood wise until I travel on business. Then I put on the (free) TV while eating my peanut butter sandwiches in my hotel room and maybe catch up with a few pieces of some movies.

Long story short, I’m in Phoenix again in a nicely chilled room at the Hyatt, and there on HBO is a Elliott Gould, the subject of one of the first posts on this blog, doing the worst Borscht Belt version of a Mayer Lansky I have ever seen. “Reuben Tishkoff.” (In the pic at left he’s doing a Swifty Lazar turn. Groan.)

I am sure he was thinking it would be fun to go over the top with this, but need we be reminded that Elliott — as I was in that post — already pushed this with his appearances on “Friends”? Really, if Hollywood weren’t run by the Jews you could get Abe Foxman to put out a press release over group libel like this.

Just saying. This was painful, and Reuben’s vaudevillian heart attack right at the beginning turn left me pretty ambivalent. Didn’t exactly inspire me to stay up and watch the movie. It was late and I was three hours behind the game anyway. And don’t even mention Continental Airlines.

It wasn’t what I needed at 11 PM in Phoenix, you know, feeling like the only… “Easterner”… on the street.