Average Jane

Author: Average Jane

  • Average Jane on Weird Song Covers

    At breakfast yesterday with my husband (okay, I’ll admit it: we had “breakfast” at 12:30 p.m. and it was pizza), we were listening to the classic rock music pumped over the restaurant’s sound system and talking about songs that would be fun to play.

    We got on the topic of Rod Stewart and he brought up, “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy.” We agreed that neither of us would ever be able to hear it again without thinking of Mike Myers’ rendition of the song in “So I Married An Axe Murder,” complete with bagpipe solo.

    Which, of course, reminded me that I can no longer hear “Come Sail Away” by Styx without thinking of Eric Cartman from South Park singing it:

    So what songs can you think of that are inextricably linked in your mind to a silly version that came out later?

  • Average Jane Goes Trick-or-Treating

    Last night I walked with my sister as she accompanied my niece and nephew around the neighborhood gathering copious quantities of candy. It was my first trick-or-treating experience since the 1970s when I was the one getting the candy.

    Of course I forgot to bring my camera, but here's a Twitpic of the ghost and vampire:

    Trickortreat09 

    My nephew wore the mask for about two stops and then fobbed it off on my sister for the rest of the outing. I tried it on and it was rather nose-squashing, so I could see why he didn't like it.

    It was fun see all of the parents and kids mobbing the neighborhood. My sister would yell etiquette reminders to my nephew in particular (he's four), and we'd still hear his voice above the other kids' "Trick or treats" starting, "I want…I want…I want…" Sometimes he remembered to say "Thank you" at the door, but usually he shouted it over his shoulder from halfway back through the yard.

    Once we got home, the kids were allowed to eat pretty much all the candy they wanted, which always ends up being less than you'd think. My nephew spent a good twenty minutes of his sugar high spinning around in a circle.

    After both kids went to bed, my sister and I watched a movie, ate selected candy from both kids' stashes, and drank Kasteel Rouge. A very pleasant evening, I must say.

    I'm doing NaBloPoMo this month – year four! – so expect to see a post every day in November. I'm not guaranteeing anything in the way of fascinating content, but I'll do my best.

  • Average Jane Takes Her Business Elsewhere

    I consider credit cards a necessary evil. Really, if I didn't need one for traveling, I might not have one at all.

    Thus, I make a special point of paying off my entire balance every month. My latest Mastercard provider clearly was not on board with that plan because they recently sent me a letter to tell me that they were raising my interest rate to 29.99%. Say it with me: "Uh, hell no!"

    They obviously know that I don't carry a balance, but were evidently hoping I'd forget to make a payment sometime so they could score a nice bonus. I actually timed a payment wrong once last spring and I was forced to pay a ridiculous fee, plus interest, plus some kind of extra charge to make an emergency electronic payment while I was on my way out of town. So we were already at Strike One, and I wasn't intending to take the count up to three.

    Naturally I paid off my balance and called to close the account as soon as the payment went through. Their lame attempt to retain me as a customer was to offer to drop the interest rate to 24.99%. Pshaw. Then I did what I should have done in the first place, which was apply for a credit card through my trusty credit union. 8.99%, y'all.

    I cannot say enough good things about my credit union. If you have any possible eligibility to join one, you should immediately walk away from all of the nonsense that most banks are putting their customers through these days.

    I've belonged to my credit union since they loaned me the money to buy my first car, which I believe was about 20 years ago. They loaned me the money for my first computer (a used Mac SE/30) and laser printer. They even refund the fees if I have to use a non-network ATM a couple of times per month. 

    I almost never actually set foot in my credit union because my paychecks are transferred electronically and I pay my bills online. However, when I dropped by last week to deposit a check and apply for their Visa card, they were grilling hot dogs and hamburgers to give to their customers. How nice is that?

    So that's my recommendation to make your life a little less stressful. Feel free to use the comments to praise or complain about your financial service providers!

  • Average Jane Talks About Food

    One of the oft-heard criticisms of Twitter is that people tweet way too much about what they're having for lunch. As a fan of both Twitter and eating, I fail to see why anyone would consider that a problem.

    When I was growing up, I had relatives in South Dakota and we often wrote letters back and forth. My Great-Aunt Edith, who was a wonderful cook, would fill her letters with entire paragraphs about what meals they'd had recently. At the time, we'd joke about all of the food mentions, but I have absolutely no room to talk because I'm now doing the same thing, only electronically.

    As the big list of recipes to the right implies, I enjoy cooking and baking. I also like going out to eat. I think food is interesting and I like hearing what my Twitter buddies have to say about where they're going for lunch, what great new recipes they've found, and what kind of candy they're planning on buying for the trick-or-treaters this week.

    So if you find that your tweets tend to be about breakfast, lunch, happy hour hors d'oeuvres and dinner, that's just fine with me. Perhaps we'll have a tweetup somewhere delicious someday.

  • Average Jane Leaves the Lyrics Alone

    A couple weeks ago, one of the guys in my band had a couple of guests at practice. The first song we did while they were there was, "All Right Now" by Free. When the song ended, one of the visitors suggested, "You should change the words to, 'There he stood, in the street…'"

    Then we did "Cold Hard Bitch" by Jet and I told him, "Now you know why there's no point in my changing any lyrics."

    When you're a woman singing in a cover band, you quickly discover that you're spending a lot of time lyrically lusting after various fictional women. It's really impossible to avoid it. Like it or not, the majority of popular songs are written by men and a good percentage of them are laden with female pronouns.

    A long time ago, I decided that it's way more trouble than it's worth to torturously rewrite every song to try to make it clear that I'm a straight woman. In fact, I have a column I wrote for a rock 'zine in the mid-1980s that's about this very subject. I'd already made up my mind by then.

    Every song is written from the point of view of a character, and the singer's job is to embody that character for the 3-5 minutes that the song lasts. It shouldn't make any difference whether the character is a man, woman, animal or inanimate object.

    Then again, maybe I'm just lazy…

  • Average Jane Gets Personal

    Well, moreso than usual anyway.

    You probably know that October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. It also happens to be the month when I get my semi-annual mammograms, the second of which took place two days ago.

    Public Service Announcement Break:

    • Get your mammograms!
    • Do your self-exams and really pay attention!
    • Don't forget that men and younger women can get breast cancer, too!

    It's not an overstatement to say that my working life for the past half-decade has been steeped in breast cancer awareness. I've worked on two different clients whose sole focus was fundraising for breast cancer prevention, awareness, early detection and research. I have conducted personal interviews with breast cancer survivors in all stages of treatment, and met many more as they worked to do everything they could to help others fight the disease.

    However, none of that prepared me for the scare I had over the past two days. (Spoiler: I'm fine. Really.)

    My first mammogram two years ago was the traditional kind, but the imaging center had upgraded to a much higher resolution digital system in the meantime. After my scans this time, the technician mentioned a distinct spot on one side that she identified as a probable cyst. She asked if I wanted to see it, and of course I did.

    The image showed a large, white, perfectly round area that looked like a marble. On the much-blurrier baseline image it was harder to see, but there was still an evident white area in the same spot.

    The next day, my husband called to say that the imaging center had left a message to call them back. Uh oh. I told him I'd call him back as soon as I found out what they wanted.

    It turned out that they wanted to follow up with an ultrasound of what they described as a 3-cm cyst, just to make sure everything was okay. Fortunately, I was able to schedule it first thing this morning.

    I called my husband back and calmly told him I'd be having an ultrasound in the morning. I even breezily assured him I wasn't worried and that even if the worst case scenario were to occur, it would all be fine because breast cancer is so treatable. Tra-la-la. I even consulted Dr. Google and sent him a link to a reassuring article about how it was all perfectly routine.

    Then I got mad at myself for being such a giant liar. Truth is, I was definitely freaking out. 

    One of the things the woman said as I was scheduling my ultrasound is that she was sure I'd be able to feel the lump. She was right, I could definitely feel it. The question I kept asking myself was why hadn't I noticed it before?

    I thought was was being pretty conscientious about self-exams, but apparently I had no idea what I was supposed to be concerned about. In fact, that area has chronically been a bit sore for some time, but I'd chalked it up to an ill-fitting underwire.

    I didn't sleep well last night, even though all signs really did point to the lump being a cyst. On top of that, I started coming down with a cold, possibly due – at least in part – to the stress I was doing my best to suppress.

    The ultrasound was at 7:30 this morning. It occurred to me that going to the appointment by myself might be a mistake, but I did it anyway. After the ultrasound was finished, the technician told me to wait and she'd be back with the results right away. I'm sure I only waited about ten minutes, but it felt like hours as my mind raced through all of the possibilities and scenarios.

    It turned out that I have a lot of small cysts and one large one. That's all. They want to recheck me in six months, but for now I'm in the clear. Whew. Oh, and I could probably keep the pain down by staying away from caffeine. Bad timing for that, since I just re-caffeinated myself again.

    So that's my way-too-close-to-home breast cancer awareness story. I hope you'll all heed my public service announcement and follow the suggestions all year 'round.

  • Average Jane’s Thoughts on Customer Service

    The other day I was driving down a block that used to have two businesses that both represented bad customer service examples for me. I say "used to" because one of them is now out of business.

    The first was a pretty good restaurant that was across the street from both its own parking lot and another more popular restaurant. A man (the manager? owner?) used to stand by the restaurant door specifically to watch for people who might park in his restaurant's lot and go to the other restaurant instead. His Three Billy Goats Gruff approach to parking lot guarding obviously didn't help because the restaurant is now closed.

    It occurred to me that instead of balefully glaring at people parking in the restaurant lot, what if the same guy had stood at the entrance to the lot every weekday at lunchtime with a handful of flyers listing the daily specials? He could have been the outdoor greeter, meeting each group and welcoming them to his restaurant with helpful recommendations for a tasty lunch. If that had been his approach, maybe the restaurant might still be in business today.

    The other business is a coffee shop that's adjacent to several office buildings. Someone I know once walked to the coffee shop from his office, trailed by a co-worker who didn't wish to break off the conversation they'd been having. The first guy purchased a coffee and sat down, joined by his co-worker who had absentmindedly brought in the bottle of soda he'd been drinking at work. A coffee shop employee proceeded to loudly berate the guy with the soda for his gall at bringing in an outside drink. The whole experience was horrible and awkward, and not only have both customers stopped going there, they've told many friends (including me) who have also stopped patronizing the coffee shop. (To be honest, I didn't like them anyway because their coffee was pretty terrible.)

    Here's a thought: what if the woman at the coffee shop had instead said, "That bottle has to be getting warm. Here's a cup of ice." No upsell, no bitterness at not making a sale. Just a thoughtful gesture that might have changed the story from "I'll never go there again" to "I'm definitely coming back tomorrow."

    You'll notice that neither of my suggestions involved much in the way of cost. The primary change was in attitude.

    I imagine both negative experiences resulted from desperation on the part of the businesses in question. That's why customer service needs to be an integral part of a company's philosophy and culture from day one. I'm not saying that's an easy thing to achieve, but it's certainly a worthy goal to strive for.

    Service is one of my primary considerations when it comes to patronizing a particular business. Bad service has caused me to permanently remove certain places from my consideration list and great service has caused me to follow my favorite business owners, managers and waiters all over town.

    What do you think?

  • The Return of Average Jane

    So yeah, that was a longer break than I'd intended.

    Since my last post, I walked across this (both ways):

    IMGP1550
    I took well over 200 additional photos in San Francisco while on the job as part of the PR team for the Breast Cancer 3-Day walk. Even though I was working the entire time, I think it was my favorite trip to San Francisco to date because it really gave me a feel for why people love the city so much.

    On my airplane trips back and forth, I read all or part of three books:

    Frontsm

    Magic bus 

    Lostthings

    All very different, but each quite entertaining in its own way.

    When I got home I was beyond tired. I almost fell asleep in a post-work meeting on Wednesday after a day where everyone I encountered told me how horrible I looked. I think I'm finally caught back up on sleep.

    When I got back, I set about filling up my calendar to a ridiculous extent. I have three things to do today and five tomorrow. One of the things I'm doing tomorrow required me to sign a release form that says I won't blog about it. Sigh.

    Somehow it's already mid-October and I feel like I missed the better part of a month by jetting in and out of town so much. Fortunately I have a delightfully warm hat that I purchased in San Francisco to stave off the cold winds by the bay, so I'm ready for anything.

    NaBloPoMo is approaching and I am prepared to tackle it again rather than break my streak. As with previous years, I'll probably put together an editorial calendar so I'm not at a loss for topics when I'm facing each day's blank text box.

    Did I miss anything important? What's going on with you?

  • Average Jane and Bad Movies

    I saw on The Onion AV Club blog that movie review site Rotten Tomatoes has published a list of the 100 worst films of the last ten years. These days I'm busy enough that I don't get out to the movies much, so I'd managed to avoid almost every movie on the list. The four that I did see, I saw on video or DVD. But here's the thing: I didn't think they were that bad.

    • The Adventures of Pluto Nash – Sure, it's not Eddie Murphy's best movie, but I didn't think it was the crashing disaster that it's made out to be. I like science fiction and I like comedy – it's both.
    • Corky Romano – "Question? No. Question? No. Question? No. I should buy a boat!" It isn't a comic masterpiece, but it was definitely good for some laughs.
    • Dirty Love – I have seen this movie a half-dozen times and I love it without reservation. It's definitely a girl movie, though, so if the Rotten Tomatoes reviewers are mostly guys, that's probably why they didn't like it. 
    • The Whole Ten Yards – Okay, not exactly a timeless classic, but certainly entertaining enough. I'll agree that Bruce Willis and Matthew Perry weren't overly exerting themselves for this particular paycheck, but it had its moments. 

    How many of the movies on the list have you seen? Were they as bad as all that?

  • Average Jane’s Travel Adventures

    IMGP1387

    As I mentioned in an earlier post, I flew to Asheville, North Carolina last week and attended the Type A Mom Conference. It was great seeing so many bloggers I had met before and meeting new ones. The relatively small size of the conference reminded me of BlogHer in the early days.

    I was traveling with my colleague, @jdeatherage, and we were a bit pressed for time when we left the conference hotel on Saturday afternoon. After a quick stop at a FedEx/Kinko's store to drop off some packages, we made our way to the airport a little too close to our flight time for comfort.

    Fortunately, there was no security line and we got into the gate area quickly, only to discover this:

    Delta

    Twitpic by Jill Asher of Silicon Valley Moms Blog.

    After about an hour, the airline announced that they had an update for us: we'd be getting another update in an hour. That was all it took for us to decide to go back into the main part of the airport in search of some dinner.

    We'd ordered taco salads and were about eight bites in when there was an announcement over the airport loudspeaker that our flight was leaving in ONE MINUTE, and they began calling for us by name. You can imagine the chaos that ensued as we scrambled to pay for our mostly-uneaten food and dash back through security.

    The security personnel couldn't have been nicer as they got us through the scanners. We ended up sprinting through the terminal and tiptoeing across the open, extremely wet boarding ramp in our stocking feet, but we made it onto the plane.

    We were sure we'd missed our connecting flight in Atlanta (the airline had booked us a backup flight, just in case), but it turned out that all of the flights there were delayed, too. Delayed and delayed and delayed. Our erstwhile 7:20 p.m. flight was showing a 9:00 p.m. estimated takeoff time, so we made our way to TGIFriday's and continued our airport progressive dinner with some miscellaneous appetizers and a couple of chocolate martinis.

    We waited another hour or so at the gate and eventually got on the plane and made it to Kansas City right around midnight. Our original arrival time was supposed to be 8:00 p.m.

    I'm keeping my fingers crossed that my flights this Thursday and next Monday go much more smoothly!