Book Review - Miracle at St. Anthony

  I just finished a book called ‘The Miracle of St. Anthony’, which I got for $1.49 at the Marshalltown Goodwill store. The book chronicles a year in the life of Jersey City’s St. Anthony Friars basketball team. The team is coached by one of the winningest high school basketball coaches of all time, Bob Hurley, who won over 20 New Jersey state basketball championships in his first 35 years on the job. The school is run by 2 Franciscan nuns, has an enrollment of around 250 students, is not funded by the church, and most of the students come from families below the poverty line. Hurley tirelessly appears at basketball coaching seminars and gives dinner speeches with all the proceeds going to St. Anthony’s. Hurley (a probation officer by day), his basketball team, and the notoriety their success brings to the school is likely the only reason the school is able to find the funding to avoid bankruptcy that is threatened on a yearly basis.

  The book portrays Hurley as a tough customer who constantly curses at his players and berates them for being lazy, not dedicated to basketball and school, and one step away from a life in the streets or in jail. And the team never loses a game. It also shows how former players of Hurley come back to praise his tough tactics (even though they didn’t like it at the time) and insist their kids play for him at St. Anthony. Hurley does manage to get scholarships for almost all of his players to play college basketball due to his connections and the reputation he has of churning disciplined players out of his basketball program.

  I wonder if Hurley was comfortable with author Adrian Wojnarowski’s using his voluminous tirades and profanity towards his players (I have the reviewer copy so perhaps a lot of the cursing and abusive behaviour I read didn't make it to the final edition). The player that was most under Hurley’s scrutiny was his own son, Bobby Hurley, who was a 2 time national champion at Duke and was on his way to a lengthy NBA career until it was cut short by a devastating car accident. The book mentions that some of Hurley’s rival coaches don’t curse nearly as much, but left unsaid is that they don’t win nearly as much either.

  Hurley’s methods seem to be an American version of the methods outlined in Amy Chua’s ‘Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother’ that I wrote about last year in a post called 'High Achievement' , in which Chua describes not allowing her daughter to go to the bathroom until her piano assignment was played to perfection and passing on the tradition of calling her daughter ‘garbage’ as she was called by her own mother when achievements do not live up to her lofty expectations.

  Wojnarowski’s book makes special mention of how revered Hurley is by college basketball people, but I wonder if he hasn’t also spawned a generation of wannabees just waiting for the chance to have a basketball team of their own to heap verbal abuse on in the name of ‘character building’. Greg McDermott had a successful run as the head basketball coach at the mid-major University of Northern Iowa. He bypassed bigger jobs to take the Iowa State basketball head coaching assignment because his wife had cancer and by staying in the state, she could keep the same doctors. As a coach in a BCS conference school, McDermott’s players kept transferring to other schools after a year or two, chafing under the same abrasive style that made the less talented UNI players run through walls for him. After 5 losing seasons with the Cyclones, McDermott landed on his feet by taking the head coaching job at another mid-major school, Omaha’s Creighton. He even got his son Doug (co-star of 2 Ames High School championship teams) released from his commitment to attend UNI in order to play for his father. Creighton had a good year last season, going 23-16, was ranked 12th this year and Doug McDermott became a candidate for Player of the Year. But Creighton hit a rough stretch and lost 3 straight games over the past 2 weeks, culminating in a 20 point loss to conference rival Wichita State during which McDermott had a very public meltdown with his son Doug the target of his rage. I can only imagine what happens behind closed doors at practices.

  If the Creighton Blue Jays can right their ship and make it to the NCAA tournament, McDermott’s meltdowns will likely be tolerated and he may even get a contract extension. But a disappointing season to go along with being an embarrassment to his school will probably lead to his dismissal as soon as his All-American son’s eligibility runs out. ‘Bully’ coaches are generally tolerated as long as they are winning but previously ignored grounds for dismissal take on new importance when the won-loss records take a turn for the worse. Kansas football coach Mark Mangino’s pattern of abuse towards his players and staff and penchant for NCAA violations were ignored as long as the perennially loser Jayhawk program was nationally ranked and going to bowls, but when they went 5-7 in 2009, an investigation into Mangino’s boorish and abusive behavior was launched and he was forced to resign in short order. A similar investigation in 2007 found no cause for dismissal, possibly due to the Jayhawks top 10 ranking and Orange Bowl victory.

  I’d like to think that a coach can succeed without launching curse laden tirades and humiliating their charges on a regular basis. Bill Walsh was a 3-time Super Bowl winning coach of the San Francisco 49ers. He was regarded as a cerebral coach, but he was an accomplished collegiate boxer and his teams were very physical despite their emphasis on the short passing game. I’ve read some of Walsh’s motivational writings and I am convinced that despite his ‘cerebral genius’ persona he was a killer in a competitive environment, yet there are few examples of Walsh belittling or abusing his players while coaching the 49ers or in his 2 stints as the head coach at Stanford University.

  I have no doubt that Hurley is a positive force on his basketball players, but the book disturbed me a lot and left me more depressed than inspired despite the successes of the team and players. I’m sure that there are millions of people making similar impact on people without the histrionics, but without the championship banners, there is no one to write books about them because no one will buy the books.

  I found myself waiting in line at the Subway in the Des Moines Skywalk today wondering if the workers were being yelled at and cursed at by some frustrated would-be basketball coach of a manager and if they weren't, would I get through the line quicker if they had one? I pulled out my trusty iPod and started taking video (which seemed to magically speed up the line). I knew that the manager wouldn’t be cursing and screaming at the employees in front of the customers, but since I didn’t see a manager around I asked a few of the employees. None of them admitted to it, but the lady taking my money got very defensive when she thought I was intimating she forgot to ask me if I wanted the combo meal. As soon as I turned off my iPod, I thought I heard someone screaming at me, yelling “DO YOU CALL THAT A @&^#%$ VIDEO. YOU HAD YOUR THUMB OVER THE LENS AT LEAST TWICE!!” I walked away as fast as I could and didn’t look back.

I'm sure glad no one's shooting video of me when I'm working!

Take a Note

The best of the initial week of scoresheets at chess club.
Not too shabby!

  One of the things that make chess one of the most popular of board games is the ability of the players to easily write down the moves of a game and play it over again. I’ve seen books on backgammon and poker tournaments, but documenting complete hands and games take too many pages to show more than a sampling of the action. Of all the other games I'm familiar with, only the Asian board game of Go and the card game of contract bridge easily allow their games to be recorded, although I’ve never seen a bridge player writing down their bids and opening hands.

  In most adult chess tournaments it is required to write down the moves of the games. Having the games written down helps the tournament director resolve any disputes that arise from a misplaced piece or an illegal move. When one player has less than 5 minutes left, neither player has to write down the moves. A sure sign that I’m starting to get tired at a chess tournament is when I miss writing down a move (making the moves for white in the column for the black moves and vice versa) or start writing down the wrong squares. When this starts happening, I try to get up and get a walk and drink of water.

  I’ve never insisted that players at my youth tournaments write down the moves. I do encourage it and have scoresheets available, but at the end of the day I’d rather the players concentrate on making good moves than writing down bad ones. At our chess camp last summer, I taught the players how to write down the moves and had them play a few games writing the moves down, but few of them have ever written their moves down at subsequent tournaments.

  Most chess teachers teach their students to write down chess moves exactly as they appear in books. Every square on the chessboard has a name based on a coordinate system. The vertical plane is 1 to 8 and the horizontal plane a to h, giving a range of 64 squares from a1 to h8. Every piece (except the pawn) has a letter (B=Bishop, Q=Queen, R=Rook, K=King, and N=Knight). So when the player moves a Rook to e4, they write down Re4. If that was all there was, it would be simple for kids to pick up. BUT there are a lot of buts. If 2 rooks can go to e4 the player needs to say which rook goes to e4 (R1e4 or Rge4, depending on which plane the rooks are lined up on). When castling, the player has to write down 0-0 or 0-0-0, depending on which side of the board they are castling. When a piece is capturing, an ‘x’ needs to be placed between the pieces and the square (Rxe4), only when a pawn captures there is no piece designation so the letter of the vertical plane it is on is used instead (dxe4). AND when a pawn gets to the other end of the board the piece it turns into is noted at the end of the move (dxe8=Q) Got all that? Great! Now try teaching that to a child in 45 minutes.

When a young player starts to write down the moves, their results may suffer in the short term, but they'll benefit in the long run by being able to have areas of improvement quickly identified at club or by a teacher.

  I teach a different method. Since each piece is moved from a square to a square, I just have the kids write down the square the piece was on, a dash, and the piece the square moved to. There are only 2 exceptions 1) when castling, only use the kings move and 2) when a pawn reaches the other end of the board add the piece it changed to (a1Q). When I compare notes with other teachers, they don’t like the method since it doesn’t help the student read a chess book. But I’m not trying to teach anyone to read a chess book, I'm just showing them how to write down the moves.

  At St. Francis where I teach chess on Fridays, our 50 to 60 players a week have dwindled down to a consistent 40 to 45 players. I still have the 8 to 10 kids that hang out at the round tables on one end of the room, socializing, trying to stack chess pieces as high as they can, and occasionally playing a game of chess. I have taken to calling them the ‘stackers’ because they are getting pretty good at finding new ways to stack the odd shaped chess pieces. They are happy to be at the chess club and I’m happy to have them since they don’t disrupt the more serious players.

  I also have 30+ players at the other end of the room playing in the ladder tournament on the square tables as far away from the ‘stackers’ as I possibly can get them. After only 5 months some of the younger kids in their first year of chess club are really getting it and can compete on equal or better terms with players 3 or 4 grades above them. This makes me feel great because not only are the younger kids learning they don’t have to take a backseat to older kids on the chessboard, the older kids are learning they have to bring their ‘A’ game against everyone and not judge a book by its cover. Many of the players are coming to my weekend tournaments and I have a core group of 8 to 10 that have gotten USCF memberships and are playing rated chess. At last month’s tournament, the St. Francis players had excellent results, but I was so busy running the tournament I had no time to see what was going on with their games AND they weren’t writing the moves down so I can’t see what they need to correct to improve their games.

  I don’t have time during club to monitor the games, so 3 weeks ago I told the ladder players that they would have to start writing down their moves in 2 weeks. I gave them the USCF handout which is the ‘teacher-approved’ way to record games, but I taught anyone who wanted to learn my method. I got a lot of takers once I told them my method only took 2 minutes.

I practice what I preach and write down the moves, but when I have 5 minutes left, I've learned to turn over my sheet so I'm not tempted to waste valuable time recording my moves for posterity!

  On Friday, most of the kids started writing down their games (I ran out of pens so some of them got a reprieve). Since they had 2 weeks warning they were prepared and I was encouraged by the results. The discomfiture they felt at having to write down their moves was more than matched by their delight at my being able to go over their games with them. I told the kids that I knew it wasn’t something they wanted to do, but if they stick with it, it’ll become second nature in a few weeks. I got to look over some of the games after club and see that most of the kids are beyond giving pieces away, but they try to play with only one or two pieces so that will be what I concentrate lessons on for the next few weeks. Yesterday, I travelled to Des Moines for a parochial school only tournament at Holy Trinity Church that some of the club members were playing in. I went over a player’s game that he had written down the day before. He lost in about 35 moves, but I was able to show him 3 or 4 opportunities he had to win a piece and also show him 3 or 4 similar chances that his opponent missed. He felt a lot better about his chess going over the game and even finished second in the tournament. I’d like to take some credit, but he made all the moves on his own. And he didn’t write down any of his tournament games either.

In the Land of the Blind...

  An expression I learned from my father is “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king”. Since I’ve never heard anyone else ever say it, I thought my dad thought of it himself, but when I researched the saying for this post it seems the saying goes back to at least the 1500’s. No matter where it came from, it’s a great all-purpose saying. I’ve used the phrase in a self-effacing way when complimented on being able to accomplish a task that seemed impossible but was easy for me because I possessed a tidbit of arcane trivial knowledge but I’ve also used it as a way to fend off someone who I think is trying to put down an accomplishment of mine by making a big deal out the obvious fact that knowing a little bit about something (and a little bit more than everyone else) does not make me an authority.

  I was the one-eyed man in the field of Electronic Data interchange (EDI) because 20 years ago I set up an EDI program so the coat manufacturing company I worked for could exchange purchase orders and invoices with their big customers like Sears, JC Penney, and Wal-Mart. EDI was one of the early attempts to standardize data exchange between companies. It was a set of vague standards that each company implemented differently. My company kept on hiring ‘experts’ who were really just one-eyed men who had managed pre-written EDI packages for small companies but floundered when trying to adapt their knowledge to a quarter billion dollar companies’ needs. I had left the company in 1990 but was hired back in 1993 to set up their program after 3 failed attempts by one-eyed men. Even though I knew nothing about EDI when I started, I knew all about the company’s other systems and was able to put together the entire program in a year. When I started writing retail software in Iowa, we were approached by Nike and New Balance to set up EDI programs between them and our customers. It was a task that a lot of bigger retail software vendors either couldn’t do or couldn’t do right or could do but had to charge a lot of money for, but I was able to set up a system where small mom and pop stores could send and receive orders and invoices with big companies easily. I wasn’t an EDI expert but since the other companies knew even less about it than I did, our company got lots of new customers because we were the only ones who could deliver a low-cost service. Thanks to the internet and E-Commerce, EDI has since gone the way of the dinosaurs, but I still get the occasional inquiry into my availability to apply for a job working on insurance or health-care companies’ legacy EDI systems thanks to being the one-eyed man.

  2 months ago, I received the latest copy of ‘The Chess Journalist’; the quarterly magazine of the Chess Journalists of America, which awarded this Broken Pawn their 2011 Best Chess Blog Award over the other self-nominated entry, making me a one-eyed man in the world of chess blogging. This issue had the CJA award winners listed, so I took a look inside to see if my blog and name was there. Not only was it listed among all the other award winners, there was even a picture of the broken pawn you see at the top of my blog. Having had my thirst for fame satisfied, I read the rest of the magazine and the first thing I noticed was an appeal from the editor Mark Taylor for contributors to the magazine.

  I’m more comfortable waiting for everyone else to refuse to help before I volunteer, but there was something about this appeal that spoke to me. I flashed back to when I had similar problems getting contributions for the church newsletter I put together for 8 years. I also thought that it would be fun to see some of my better posts in print, without resorting to publishing my own ‘Best Of’ book. The Chess Journalist goes out to the hundred or so members of the CJA, who would be a captive audience for my blog posts and since I have plenty of posts just sitting in the archives here at the Broken Pawn I picked out 2 of my favorites (On Any Given Thursday and A Winning Weekend), and sent an email to Mr. Taylor offering to polish them up for print so he could use them in the magazine.

  I received an email from Mark the next day thanking me for my offer but mentioning that while my posts were well written, they were likely too local for a national publication. Then Taylor asked me if I would be interested in writing a column in the magazine about chess blogging. I had to stop and think about that one. I enjoy writing about chess and other things but was I ready to be writing about writing? For writers? I’d be more like the blind leading the blind instead of the one-eyed man in the land of the blind. I don’t even have any philosophical musings about blogging to share since I just write what I feel like writing about.

  Despite all my misgivings and the nagging vision in my head of being ‘Dorf on Blogging’, I decided to take Mark up on his offer and write the CJA column. If I fall on my face it wouldn’t be the first time but some of the best things I’ve ever done were the result of doing things I felt unqualified for at the time but later grew into. I wrote my first column as an introductory piece trying to point out how easy blogging is, that the subject of the blog isn’t as important as the passion brought to the subject, and my own particular hang up of sticking to a consistent schedule. I gave Mark a choice of 2 titles ‘Your Inner Blogger’ and ‘The Blogger Within’ and he chose the latter. I got the magazine last week and there was my column on page 11 in a national publication. I thought it read well and Mark put a killer masthead on top of the column that is one of the cooler pictures of me I’ve ever seen.

The heading for my column in the Chess Journalist magazine. Others may find it pretentious, but I think it's pretty cool. I especially like the fact that unlike my book 'The Adventures of Bulldog Beagle' or the 'Best Chess Blog' award, I didn't have to pay for it.

  I’ve been thinking about ideas for my next column on the hour long drive back and forth to work this week and yesterday I got an email from blogger Tim Brennan of http://tacticstime.com. He told me he liked my column and offered some blogging tips that I could forward to my readers. He also mentioned I would get more of the feedback I had asked for in my article if I included my email address (DORF on Blogging!). I checked out his site and it is beyond slick and tightly focused towards helping players improve at chess by increasing their tactical skill. Tim looks to be a real heavyweight blogger and promoter with 3,000 twitter followers and his own Facebook page for his site. I felt great knowing a guy like this enjoyed my column and I feel a lot better thinking I’m heading into this new adventure being at least the one-eyed man and not totally blind.

Stuffed for Success

  The Thursday before last, I had the opportunity to eat lunch at the ‘Something Italian’ restaurant in the Des Moines Skywalk with a customer from work. On Thursdays, I get into work an hour early and only have a half hour lunch so I can leave at 3:30 to go to chess club, but a working lunch made It OK to spend an extra half hour eating on a Thursday.

Timeless decoratations in the classic 'Rocky' style.

  Like most restaurants in the Des Moines Skywalk, ‘Something Italian’ was a place I’d never been to, even though it is less than a mile away from work because my lunch is normally the apples and oranges I bring from home. And like most of the skywalk restaurants, it caters to the working class lunch crowd and is only open for weekday lunches, although they also do catering and parties. When I walked in the restaurant it looked like there was a real effort to be ‘Italian’. There were pictures of famous Italians on the walls and a few old pizza signs but what caught my eye was the assortment of Rocky ‘action figures’ on a couple of the shelves. Now, that’s Italian!

  There was a large amount of pizzas, pastas, and sandwiches available. I knew I was going to be playing chess later in the afternoon and didn’t want to get filled up, so I decided on having a ‘Sicilian’ sandwich of Ham, Coppicola, Salami, Pepperoni, and Mozzarella on a roll with some water. The customer (who runs half-marathons in his spare time) had the house special which was a turkey sandwich, also with some water.

On the left is the stomach-friendly turkey sandwich, while the gut-busting supreme 'Sicilian' is on the right.

  I figured the sandwich would be big and I wasn’t disappointed, but as I started to eat it, I was unprepared for how greasy the sandwich was. The cold cuts were heated up on a grill with peppers and were coated with grease and more of the grease ran into the crusty hoagie roll. As I was eating it, I started to feel like one of those hot dog eaters on TV when they look like they’ll vomit if they stuff one more wiener down their throat. I had to take a break from eating for a bit and eventually finished the sandwich, leaving most of the peppers and bread behind. My dining companion fared much better with his turkey sandwich, which wasn’t heated and probably wasn’t very greasy anyway. While I was waiting for my stomach to make room for more greasy cold cuts, I looked around and saw several people with napkins folded up a half-inch thick sopping up grease from their pizza and sandwiches. I’ll give this restaurant 5 stars for atmosphere, but zero stars for their food. Maybe their pasta is better, but I doubt I’ll give myself a chance to find out. It was a sluggish afternoon for me at work, and then I went home to relax for a half hour before chess club. Kathy had made me a salad, but I was too full to even think about eating any food.

  I have no idea what kind of nutrition is best for playing chess, but I’ll bet a gut busting greasy Italian style sandwich isn’t on the top of the list (Here is an article from ChessBase.com on the subject). I’ve always preferred to have a light meal like toast and fruit juice before a tournament and yogurt, apples, trail mix, and apple juice during the tournament, but that’s because I’ve always read about apple juice being so easily digestible that there was no blood diverted to the stomach, leaving more blood for the brain to play chess and always brought apple juice for my kids. Most of the younger players seem to have no problem sucking down Mountain Dew or Red Bull during a tournament, while Dave the barefoot chess player brings his own concoction of red caffeinated soda type stuff. I find that too much caffeine gets me so wired up that I can’t play good chess over an extended period of time but a small cup of coffee or 2 is great for our Thursday night hour long tournaments. In the 1978 world championship match between Anatoly Karpov and Victor Korchnoi, challenger Korchnoi accused Karpov of receiving assistance in the form of coded yogurt during the games. Presumably, the color of the yogurt was to convey to the champ what his seconds thought of his position and how he should proceed. I think it is laughable that the champ would take or even want this sort of advice during a game from lesser players, however the match arbiter ruled that Karpov could only have blueberry yogurt unless special permission was granted.

  Our Thursday night chess club has been very poorly attended lately. Scott and Zack have been absent, Jerry has been working, and Jon had some hospital time and has been recuperating at home for the last 2 weeks. Only Joe from Waterloo has been braving the winter weather to come in from out of town (Joe is from Michigan and has been sneering at this year’s Iowa winter). Even Chandler’s brother, Dalton has been missing because he hasn’t been doing his math homework and his parents won’t let him go to club until it’s done. On this Thursday only Joe, Jaleb, Chandler, and me and my grease stuffed belly were at the club at 6pm for the start of our blitz tournament. Since I was the 3rd rated player I got to play Joe. Joe fell into an opening trap and I managed to beat him in a tournament game for the first time in our 6 contests. I was ready to take on Jaleb round 2 when Dalton showed up, having finished his homework, and I resumed my role as house player and sat out the rest of the tournament. Maybe all my thoughts about nutrition and chess have been wrong for 30 years and if I only had been shoveling down pizza, fried chicken, and double bacon cheeseburgers I’d have been a master chess player years ago. Eager to try out this theory, I took Kathy out to lunch on Saturday to Taco Johns and had a Stuffed Grilled Taco with an order of French Fries and a Dr. Pepper. When I got home I played 3 minute chess for a couple of hours and the results were encouraging. You might say I was 'oozing' with confidence. Here is a sampling of my games.

  This past Thursday, I was sorely tempted to walk over to ‘Something Italian’ for another gut-busting, grease-laden, and possibly chess improving Sicilian sandwich but I was so busy trying to get a project done I didn’t have the time. We had the same four players for Blitz and I took on Joe again. I had a good position as White using the Boris and was a pawn up in a Bishop vs. Knight ending but then my grease-deprived body let me down and with less than half a minute on my clock I lost my bishop to Joe’s knight fork, leaving me with this position, 17 seconds, and the move.   If I just play Kg6, I drive away the knight from its defense of the h pawn and with Joe’s king so far away 2 connected passed pawns and the king easily win, but without the proper lubrication, my brain seized and I could only think about trading the last pawn off to secure the draw so I played g4 and g5. I managed to beat Chandler in the next round and was ready to raid the Salvation Army pantry for something greasy to shove down my throat or mainline directly into my bloodstream for my game with Jaleb when Dalton showed up again after finishing his homework.

  It really stung to give away a half a point just because my body wasn’t properly prepared, but at least I have a great idea for a best-selling chess/nutrition book. There are chess books titled ‘Boost Your Chess’, ‘Perfect Your Chess’, ‘Reassess Your Chess’,’Sharpen Your Chess’, ‘Test Your Chess’, ‘Improve Your Chess’; but they’ll have to make way on the shelves for ‘Grease Your Chess: How to Lubricate Your Game!’

Hanging on The Telephone

  When the National Do Not Call List was implemented , a lot of people I knew joined immediately as some sort of protest and a way to stop getting calls during their dinner, but I never did. Most of the unwanted calls I get come from people I know who call just as soon as I start to take a nap. I have no problem hanging up on a telemarketer if I don’t want to talk, but a friend or relative is a different story. I feel obligated to talk to them and even if I tell them I was taking a nap and they hang up, it’s problematic that I’ll get back to sleep anyway. I normally don’t mind calls from telemarketers because they provide me a constant source of amusement and now this blog post.

  When I was writing shoe store software for a small company, I got a lot of offers in the mail for free computer magazines and I’d put down ‘MIS Director’ as my title on the forms. This led to me getting a lot of calls for free subscriptions to other computer magazines. I’d patiently answer all the questions from the telemarketers and then right at the end of the call when all I needed to do to confirm my subscription was say YES, I’d ask for the braille version of the magazine. I could hear the jaw drop on the other end of the phone and then I’d casually mention that I was blind and needed the braille version of the magazine in order to be able to read it. When I was told that there was no braille version, I’d try my best to sound crestfallen and say I was sorry, but there was no way I could subscribe to the magazine. It probably wasn’t very nice, but it sure felt good at the time.

  I learned a long time ago that telemarketers and customer service reps of big companies are rarely allowed to hang up the phone unless the customer hangs up first. Once I took Matt (who was all of 2 or 3 at the time) to the supermarket and he wanted some Kraft Macaroni and Cheese where the macaroni was shaped like the characters from the X-Men cartoon show. When Kathy cooked it for us, there was barely any Macaroni and Cheese for us to eat. I looked at the box a lot closer than I did at the store and it was only 5.5 ounces (printed in hard to see white against the yellow mac & cheese on the box), while the same sized box of the regular Kraft variety was 7.5 ounces (printed in black in the same position on the box).

  Luckily for me, also on the box was a ‘Satisfaction Guaranteed or your money back’ pledge and a phone number to call. I called the number at work during my lunchtime one day and was greeted by a customer service rep who said he would be happy to help me. I explained my dissatisfaction with my 5.5 ounces of Mac & Cheese in a 7.5 ounce box and said I wanted my dollar back (I bought 2 boxes for 50 cents each) like the box guaranteed. The rep told me that he couldn’t give me my money back just because I was unhappy with the portion in the box. I read him the pledge on the box and noted that it did not say ‘Satisfaction Guaranteed unless you were dissatisfied with the small portion in the half-empty box’. This went on for a few minutes and the customer service rep finally told me there was nothing he could do for me and if there was nothing else he could help me with, I could hang up. That’s when I realized he couldn’t hang up on me! I said “I would like my dollar back, please.” and that’s all I said for the next 15 minutes of repeated attempts to get me to hang up and awkward silences until I was transferred to a lady who took my name and address and told me I would get my dollar in a few weeks. Luckily, I had a speaker phone! A few weeks later I received a check for a dollar in addition to a packet of coupons for fine Kraft products.

  I’ve used this technique of repeating a simple request over and over whenever I have a customer service complaint and I don’t think the rep is allowed to hang up on me. One time the GM card people deactivated my card when I tried to buy my two boys a membership to the Internet Chess Club. I didn’t know 2 online transactions for the same amount was such a red flag and didn’t pay much attention when I had to use a different card for the second membership. I didn’t find out about the deactivation until 2 weeks later when I tried to use my GM card in a GM dealership to pay for an oil change for my GM car. My GM card was rejected, the clerks treated me like a loser, and I had to use another card while the clerk called it in to make sure I wasn’t using a stolen card. When I got back to work, my wife called to tell me that the GM card people had just called to say they had put a hold on my card 2 weeks prior. I called the GM card company and read them the riot act for making me look like a GM deadbeat at a GM dealership. No one could give me a reasonable explanation as to why I wasn’t told my card had been put on hold and as soon as I realized the rep I was talking to didn’t have any answers, I’d say the magic words, “I’d like to speak to your supervisor, please.” The fourth supervisor put me on hold for 20 minutes, and then told me it was just a mistake and they were very sorry and then asked if there was anything else he could do for me. I told him “Yes, I’d like $50 for my trouble”. He told me over and over that they couldn’t give me $50, but at this point I knew he couldn’t hang up so I kept repeating myself. After 20 more minutes I got a $25 credit to my account because I was such a loyal customer (and I asked to be connected to the division where I could cancel my card). Of course, this was before GM went broke and couldn’t afford $25.

  My favorite telemarketing call came when my sister-in-law and her daughter were visiting from Missouri to see Matt graduate high school last May. The phone rang and I saw on the Caller Id that it was the National Rifle Association calling. I put the phone on speaker and when the telemarketer introduced himself and told me he was calling for the NRA, I said in my best ‘Borat’ voice “YES, I would like 2 rifles very much, thank you!!” The telemarketer told me he didn’t sell rifles and I asked him “And you are call for who?”, whereupon he said he was calling on behalf of the National Rifle Association and I would try to order the rifles again. This went on for about 5 minutes with me mixing in the occasional question about how many people I could shoot and how far away I had to be with NRA rifles until our guests started laughing too loudly and the telemarketer realized he was being pranked on and starting laughing along with us.

  A couple of weeks ago I got a call from Wells Fargo. It wasn’t really from Wells Fargo, just from a company they sold my number to. The representative was trying to sell me Accidental Death and Dismemberment insurance. I asked if I could get a special rate on the Dismemberment Insurance since both my legs had been amputated. The rep didn’t even have to think about it, but instead told me that the insurance was still a great deal and after all, I still had my arms, fingers, and toes that were eligible. I reminded her that my legs were amputated and that I had no toes, but there was still no discount. By this time, Kathy was giving me the evil eye and it was getting time to walk Daisy and Baxter so I played my final gambit to get a dismemberment discount from the rep. I told her I was scheduled to have surgery to have one of my arms removed and what kind of discount could I get then? There was still no discount so I sadly hung up and went for a walk with Kathy and the beagles.

  Someday the telemarketers will have their own ‘Do Not Call’ list and I’m sure I’ll be on it. I’ll probably never notice all the missed calls, but I’m sure I’ll miss the fun of getting even with the telemarketers and customer service reps of the world.