ruth kaufman

True story

Preface: I am only going to do one pass through this, as it’s not worth re-reading. Heck, it’s probably not even worth reading once. So if you do plow through and see any poorly written lines, know that I did not edit them. (Sorta obvious, right?)

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This lady walked into the nail salon at 8:30 PM, about 10 minutes after me. The nail ladies (2 of them) seemed to hope I would be their last customer, as one worked on my feet, and the other on my hands. 

The new customer pronounced herself and insisted that one of the manicurists (that’s what they’re called, not nail ladies) shift from attending to my hands to at least give her a pedicure. Apparently she’s having problems with her legs and must get a pedicure tonight. At 8:30.

They finally worked out a schedule for the remainder of the evening (it was a little more complicated than just us two customers. A third customer in need of a full leg wax was also to be considered), and by whatever fortune, a new acquaintance of the demanding customer also stopped in at the salon. (She readily agreed to come back in the morning.)

With a willing listener here, the demanding customer, a 52-year old highly educated native West-sider, saw an opportunity to fill the entire salon with her presence and proceeded to tell a story of her troubles. Not that she was busy. “Busy is good. Troubles is troubles.” « Ain’t that the truth.

So what of her troubles? Well, it all started with her mother dying. Her mother is dying and is staying at their country estate because, you know, it’s nice and pleasant there. And she thought, with this dying person in her life, why not select a beautiful ringtone for her, so that when her mother calls, she can hear Brahms. Something nice. 

So one day, she’s on some sort of conference call that Ambassadors need to be on and that the president of the Holocaust Museum is on, and she’s on speakerphone, and her phone rings, and guess what song plays? Brahms? NOPE. Some gangsta rap jumped out the phone into her handbag, and shimmied its way into the space of this conference call. She shrieked! A black guy (her words) was saying these horrid things about cutting off a woman’s tits.WTF??? (my words). Boy was she embarrassed! 

She threw a little fit, and the guy from the museum suggested she go to the T-Mobile store, which would close in an hour, at 8PM. She should run down there. But she had her dogs with her and her legs were quite swollen from some allergy to some medication, and how could she run? Well, she did whatever shuffling was needed to get her bum down to that store by 7:46, andguess what? It closed at 7:00! Seven o’clock! 

Well, the next day she got on the phone with T-Mobile. She was put on hold, and guess what the hold music was? Rock ‘n Roll. She died a little inside when this happened. To be subjected to rock music was simply adding insult to injury.

Someone from technical support attempted to help her. She called her a receptionist and insisted on speaking with her manager, straight out of the gate. The technical support rep insisted she was not a receptionist and that she could help her, and so my lady insisted again that she was, in fact, a receptionist in order to impart the message that she was extremely unhappy and would stand for no corporate business processes or controls. Haha, see how that works? (side eye)

She finally got a manager on the phone, and I don’t know how he addressed her, but she let. him. know. that she was to be called Doctor or Ambassador and nothing else. Then she challenged the guy to a question. “Do I sound over thirty? No, don’t try to flatter me. I’m well over 30. I’m 52. And are you a high tech company?” “Well, we like to think we are.” “Well if you’re a high tech company, why would you have rock music as your hold music for someone over 30? Can’t you figure out a way to give people a choice for what they want to listen to? Some classical? Some jazz? Just some kind of music?” The tech support manager let her know, in apparently a very nice way, because she thought it was funny, that this assignment was worse then his tour at Guantanamo. 

I tuned out for about fine minutes and picked the story up again with this event underway: A new phone was shipped to her house, but she did not receive the phone. FedEx refused to tell her who signed for it. Somehow she got the impression that a Latino signed for it, but hark, there are no Latinos in her building. Not because it’s racist, “well, maybe it is,” …well, they actually do have one — the super. No, there is also one other person. Maybe three in all. And NO LATINO SIGNED FOR HER PACKAGE. She is sure of that. So it must have been a thief! She wondered how T-Mobile felt about allowing their phone to fall into the hands of a thief.

So now she has no phone because her old phone’s battery died, and how can one find a phone to charge it when one can’t hear it vibrate. And besides that, it won’t even take a charge. (This part of the story made no sense at all.)

I bet you’re wondering how this ends. 

In a nutshell, since she’s wealthy enough to make a lot of calls (paraphrasing), she expects to hear back from the president of T-Mobile. That’s right, the president. And she will be willing to speak to him before she switches over to Verizon. And she hates corporations, and she should know, because in her 15 years as an investment banker she saw what corporations do to people. What people said to her. The sex and the drugs. She hadn’t done any drugs since 1971. 

Oh, there were so many other threads to this story. Something about mothers’ irrational reactions to their teenagers traveling to Mexico. Something about her eyesight degrading with age. Something about a music genre taxonomy and how could gangsta rap possibly be a subcategory of classical, because that would be the only way she could have chosen it for her mother. Something about… oh, wait, I did mention her wealth.

She then made plans with her acquaintance to go to an art museum on Saturday. Meeting time would be 2:30, unless 2:45 is better — just that she should let her know, or they could set it for 2:45 right now. LADY, IT’S A 15 MINUTE DIFFERENCE. WHAT DOES IT MATTER?

She suggested that someone ought to make a movie out of her phone story. At least write a short story. I didn’t tell her, but at that moment, I committed to trying. I am pretty sure she’d be disappointed if she found out all she got was a Tumblr blog post, and nothing publishable, out of the whole ordeal. 

As I said my goodbyes to the nail ladies, I got the worst side eye I had ever gotten. 

Whatever, lady. You’re lucky I didn’t rip out my iPhone and blast some rap in yo’ face. Making you a prisoner of my musical taste, just as I’d been a prisoner of this saga, this un-saga. I know I don’t need to explain. 

Why is my online alias "mapkid"?

I've been asked this a few times. What's "mapkid" all about? Sometimes it's not phrased as a question, but presented as speculation.

The reason is simple. At the time I chose the name, I was a cartographer. I made maps. Actually, I held a very junior role in my company (was still finishing my senior year in college), so I was editing maps that the more seasoned cartographers created. In 1997 I worked at Hammond, which used to be a major map publishing house, along with Rand McNally, Hagstrom, Oxford University Press and National Geographic. Hammond was located in Maplewood, NJ. They were a family-run business, roughly 100 years old. Unfortunately, they ran into financial problems in about 1998 and were acquired by the German publisher Langensheid.

My job was to review digital maps (database-driven) in a CAD program for readability and geographic accuracy. This involved researching regions that were undergoing political transformations to find out if there were any resulting changes to place names or classification of land use, such as a wildlife refuge turning into a national park. I recall that one of our deadlines was being challenged by the turmoil in Congo, formerly known as Zaire. They hadn't settled on a name for their new country yet, and we were waiting patiently for them to do so.

I also neatened up text placements around rivers (pesky and arbitrarily curved lines) and urban centers. Names of suburbs inevitably crash into each other. The goal of this sort of work is to maintain as much data on the map as possible by re-aligning the names around the dots, but that only gets the cartographer so far. Sometimes towns simply need to be removed from the map. Start with the ones that have the smallest populations (even though their populations are probably greater than half the towns that end up remaining on the map -- the rural ones 100 miles from any city, whose names are free to roam in "empty space"). Once those are cleared, do some more re-arranging and look for the next round of cuts. It's okay to leave a small town in favor of a larger town if the larger town's name is particularly unwieldy and will continue to cause problems.

There is also a problem of editing blank parts of the map -- areas where there are few (human) inhabitants. People construct places and name them. We create these constructs in our imaginations, and they become part of our cultural and political fabric, even when we don't build them up as towns and cities. For example, we name mountains and valleys, deserts and shore lines. As a species, we seem to have an urge to circumscribe anything we perceive and slap names and labels on them.

There are some regions in the world that have not been plagued by place-ification. There may be places in these regions, but the places are not tessellated (that is, the places within them aren't contiguous; there is un-named territory between the places). This is the case with the Sahara Desert -- an obvious example. The knee-jerk editorial response is to add labels to this region on the map. Blank space seems to make us anxious. There must be something there. One of the maps I edited had all sorts of desert details labeled: sub-regions of the Sahara, geologic features formed by sand dunes and varying levels of the water table, and dried up river beds. I don't recall how many of these labels represented culturally relevant places versus geologic features, which were possibly not known or perceived by the inhabitants of the region, nomads or otherwise. It seemed to be an exercise of reducing anxiety over emptiness in an abstract representation of a space, rather than in representing anthropologically significant entities.

Anyway, this is what I was busy thinking about when I signed up for AOL one day in 1997 and had to choose a screen name. I tried all sorts of variations on "ruth," but nothing I came up with was available. I blurted out "mapkid," and it stuck. Even though I don't work with maps anymore, I like holding onto a remnant of that time in my life when I was passionate about cartography and encountered philosophical and ethical dilemmas in information design work as a young and inexperienced college grad.

Words for my grandfather's funeral

August 7, 2008

I want to share just a few words about Grandpa Nat with you.

It's incredible to take stock of how much a person can shape your world view by just being themselves.

This is my grandfather through my eyes.

This is a list of things that I associate with Grandpa Nat.

PEANUTS. Granpda loved peanuts in the shell. He always had a bowl of them around the house, and the bowl was in the shape of a peanut. Michelle told us last night that when she was wheeling him in the supermarket a few weeks ago, he nonchalantly grabbed some peanuts off the shelf and just started eating them right there.

TIC TACS. He always carried a pack of white Tic Tacs in his shirt pocket. He'd always offer me one and give me two.

NEOPOLITAN ICE CREAM. I don't know why he liked this so much. He seemed to appreciate the way it was laid out and the options it presented. He used to make a big production out of assembling an ice cream sundae for me. Recently, Grandpa ate ice cream even when he wouldn't eat anything else.

CARS. I think of my grandfather every time I think about cars. He subscribed to automotive magazines. He used to take me to the NY auto show, and he used to ask me how I liked his new car, every time I saw him, for the ten or so years that he owned it. Grandpa loved to drive, sometimes in a straight line.

CATS. The cat he had when i was very young was called Dummy. Then he had Cleo and Angel. His last cat was Lucy. Lucy would only sit on his lap, and she hid from everyone else. He loved her very much.

HABERDASHERY. Grandpa worked at Bonds, selling mens suits. He carried a measuring tape in his pocket until he stopped wearing pants.

TALL, LANKY PEOPLE

JAZZ STANDARDS. He knew every song and who sang it. More recently, Grandma and Grandpa have kept the standards & show tunes cable channel on for music, rather than playing CD's or the radio. He sang along to everything. He just loved music.

TAKING THINGS IN STRIDE

and BEING SILLY... Grandpa wanted to make people smile. He worked at it by flirting, telling stories, playing mind games, talking nonsense, making faces, and horsing around.

Grandpa Nat really loved being a grandfather, and I, and my sister Keren, and Michelle and Benny, were very lucky to have him for so many years -- well into our adult lives. I love him so much.

Motivation

Recently I’ve found that I have more to say to an audience of fellow digital design and technology professionals. Actually, I’ve found that I have more to say about lots of things to lots of people. I’ve been posting long comments on other peoples’ blogs, chewing my colleagues ears off, tweeting lots. I think it’s time to have a home for my musings.

My dispersed blog contributions can be found on The Greater IBM Connection blog:

• Is social computing biting the heels of the enterprise  (June, 2008)
• Searching for my civic life (January 2008)
• Career maintenance for a former IBMer (October, 2007)

...on Ed Brill’s blog post, Network World: Why freemail beats business e-mail (June 21, 2008)

...and on Len Devanna’s blog post, Social Software and CMS (July 2, 2008)

Back at the ranch, I started an affinity group focused on the post-sale customer experience, I’m also helping out with our mobile affinity group, am part of an emerging twitter sub-culture, and have been called a contrarian in our content strategy discipline. This will hopefully become clearer over time through my writing, but the umbrella business topic for me, I believe, is business culture and how we work.

Outside of work, I seem to have lots to say about this wondrous New York City, the blight of suburbia, citizenship, cats, garments, food, and fitness.

I drew inspiration for this blog from  Abagond, who writes five hundred words a day on whatever he wants. In times past, I would have needed a focus, but something changed recently, and I think I can attribute part of it to Twitter. The constraints of the medium have caused me (maybe us) to be focused our communications in a new way -- maybe not new to the universe, but new as a community. We tweet about a wide range of topics, but always within some range of acceptable boundaries. Whatever those boundaries are, they're different from conventional business communications. As with Twitter, I hope for this space to help me get a better sense of what is blendable, and how:

• personal and work life
• personal friends and contemporaries / employer / client / former employer / future employer audiences
• my workouts and business culture
• citizenship and twitter
• technophilia and fashion
• ...

I know that all of this blending is widespread in digital media -- perhaps your blog is a great example. My hope is simply to connect the dots that emerge in my own mind. I have trains of thought that tie these particular topics to each other in ways that I think are interesting, and I hope to be able to articulate them well enough here to make a meaningful contribution to the public conversation. In other words, I'm just another blogger. Welcome, and thanks for reading.