Published: December 18, 2007 09:57 pm            

Stephanie Salter: Survivor socks, arrival and departure info and fake people

TERRE HAUTE — One of these days I’m going to think up a name for the kind of column this is. Maybe an “assorted mini-bites collection,” stocked with items that contain just enough information or opinion, I have to share.

The first bite is about how to use the surviving half of a pair torn asunder. You know, what you’re left with when you lose one glove, one sock, one earring, or you damage one shoe? You can’t bring yourself to throw away the entity remaining behind because — Why does it always happen this way? — you loved that pair of whatever it was you lost half of.

Really, think about it. When was the last time you discovered that a glove, mitten or earring was missing, or listened as the shoe repair person said, “Sorry, I can’t fix that one,” and you thought, “Oh, that’s OK. I didn’t really like that pair anyway”?

Never, right?

It’s always the earrings you wore every other day, the Italian gloves you got in Chicago for 70 percent off, the perfect, feel-good shoes that you repeatedly told people, “I should have bought six pairs of these in every color.”

Never, never do you lose half of an astoundingly ugly gift. Never can you say, “I’m just sick about it, but those darling faux pineapple earrings you gave me last year? I lost one.”

Because they disappear about as frequently as low-level Mafia thugs, socks are in their own category. Once in awhile you might lose half of a pair you love, but, more often, it’s just a big pain because the surviving sock doesn’t match any other pair (or single survivor sock) in your drawer. But you can’t throw away a nice sock.

I have a growing collection of these widowed things, and I suspect I am not alone. If we lived in a less homogenized culture, I’d suggest we all throw off the bonds of symmetrical slavery and just wear the survivors with half of an intact pair. But we’re not very bohemian here in the Midwest. Besides, a habit of that would cause uneven wear on the intact pair. So here’s my idea:

We dedicate one day a year to wearing halves of pairs. Blue socks would go with brown ones, hoop earrings with pearl clusters, down mittens with fur-lined, black suede gloves, cordovan loafers with red sneakers — as long as the heel height was about the same. We could even spark a 24-hour resurrection of cufflinks, mismatched of course.

The obvious day for this celebration is New Year’s: 01/01. Given the shape many people are in that day, the entire exercise might pass unnoticed, which would help the shy among us. But its proximity to New Year’s Eve also could encourage creativity and flair in those who are of a mind.

Best of all, we’d never again have to ask ourselves, “Why am I hanging onto one sock?”

Bite Two is a comment about the way one element of the airline industry has changed over the last decade or so: Trying to find out if a loved one’s plane has landed.

In the really old days of the early 1980s, the only way you found out that a flight was delayed was when you got to the airport and learned you would have to drive in circles for an hour. Now we have online as well as automated 800-numbers to call for flight status on all but the puniest of airlines.

Things slow a bit if we don’t happen to know a flight number. Online, it’s fairly straightforward unless you have a dial-up Internet provider or a computer from the Paleolithic era, as some of us do at home or our workplace. In that case, it’s a cyber-version of driving around the airport for an hour.

By the time you get into an airline’s flight status page, type in what you know and wait for the possibilities to appear, your loved one could have landed and rented a room to wait in at the airport Holiday Inn.

The phone can be even trickier. Once again, in a more recent period of the old days — into the early 1990s — you could call an airline and talk to a real person right away. You could tell him or her the relevant cities and general time of arrival and learn all you needed to know.

More than once, I recall, a customer service agent would inform you that your loved one must be on a different carrier because the agent’s airline didn’t fly that route. The agent then would be nice enough to check the OAG, compare arrival times and tell you which carrier you needed to call.

Believe it or not, for awhile during this simpler time, you actually could confirm with one of these real people whether your very own loved one made the connection in Des Moines or Las Vegas.

But automated customer service representatives replaced real people and security concerns turned all passengers into attachés with top-secret-only clearance. Now, if we’re forced to phone an airline for information, we must talk to fake people who say things like, “Let’s try that again,” or “I didn’t quite understand.”

Which brings me to Bite Three: Making use of those automated voices.

In a right and peaceful world none of us would need to yell at anybody, but we haven’t got that sort of world. Sometimes, you’ve just gotta vent. Instead of taking anger out on an innocent person who will only dump it on yet another person, we could aim our ire at the fake people who have no feelings.

We could call the 800 number of almost any giant company, wait for an automaton to say something like, “Remember, you can interrupt me at any time,” and we could let fly. We could swear, tell the robot-voice it is stupid, that its company is stupid, that we know it isn’t really “looking up” our account information, that we liked it better when real people answered the phone, and that we wished we were some oil-rich Middle Eastern sheik who never had to fly commercial, let alone make a call about it.

Why, we could even call one of the automatons and shout in its computer-programmed ear, “Give me back all the socks and earrings you stole or I’ll call the cops!”

Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

        

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