Happy Thanksgiving.
The Chamber offices will be closed Thursday and Friday, November 28th and November 29th.
Here are a few turkeys (as appropriate to the season):
Beyond the turkeys in Washington (that is):
And one for our friends at JPL:
There are some trends that are simply TURKEYS in the very idea of it (thank you Jane Wells at CNBC):
Funeral 'selfies'? Yes, people actually do that
No moment in life is either too serious or too trivial to pass without someone providing a rapid, vapid response through social media.
"Love my hair today. Hate why I'm dressed up #funeral," reads the caption of a self-portrait snapped by a young woman dressed in black. Another photo of a blonde pouting in her pink bedroom with a "Keep Calm and Rock On" sign is titled, simply, "depressing funeral selfie."
Yes, that is depressing; we don't even know how to be depressed anymore. There is tedium in every social medium to the point where even death becomes boring.
A collection of strangely un-sad Instagrams, Tweets, and Facebook posts have been gathered together at a Tumblr blog (naturally) called "Selfies at Funerals."
"Killin the selfie game at pop's funeral," tweets a joyful young man mocking a piece of statuary. Pop's gotta be proud. So proud he may rise up from the dead and slap you. (I hope so!)
Harsh? Katy Waldman at Slate.com says I should calm down a little.
"Is it somehow more tasteful, even nobler, to keep grief private? If that's the case, the problem with Internet mourning far predates the Internet: People have been putting their sadness on display—wearing black, holding ceremonies—since the ancient Greeks first hired mourners to tear out their hair at funerals. Social media may make it easier to launch a stream of frown-y faces into the ether, but Mark Zuckerberg didn't invent the impulse to reach out when you're hurting."
(Read more: Who's viewing from your Instagram, and profiting?)
True, if you're hurting or if you're sad. But if you're just amazed at how much you're rockin' the outfit while Cousin Jamie is laid out in a coffin, well, that's not grief; it's a symptom of our collective cultural death wish, a bad case of Kardashianitis.
Believe me, I'm as guilty as anyone. I've posted selfies looking my absolute worst all done up in foil under a hair dryer at the salon. I tweeted a photo of all the functions available on a public toilet in Japan (though, technically, you don't see me in the photo, but you get the picture, if you know what I mean). I, like so many others, need to step away from the "send" and "share" buttons. But even I wouldn't snap a self-portrait inside a funeral home with Grandma visible in her open casket behind me. Someone else did that.
An article from New Zealand teaches us there are five places where you should not take selfies, including holocaust memorials, especially when you're smiling and giving a thumbs up.
One other suggestion: don't take a selfie dressed up as a robber before you go out and (allegedly) commit robbery, like these two teenage girls did.
Where's Darwin when you need him?
So what's next? What annoyingly self-absorbed Everest is left to climb? "Colonoscopy selfies," joked @jakejakeny
And one from Jane Wells that is not a turkey at all:
When's the last time you called, emailed, chatted with customer service and had an experience that was:
1) Helpful
2) Pleasant
3) Human
Companies take customer service seriously, and yet customers calling for help often feel like they're trying to sign up for Obamacare. It's not necessarily the customer service representative's fault. He or she often has to stick to a set policy. Going off script can get a person fired.
Maybe that's why the story of a Netflix user's encounter with a customer service rep is so refreshingly positive, it's become a big hit online.
Someone posted on Reddit what happened when he reached out to Netflix after having a problem watching an episode of "Parks and Recreation."
The online chat began with, "I have a problem to report."
The reply? "This is Capt. Mike of the good ship Netflix, which member of the crew am I speaking with today?"
Whoa.
What? Capt. Mike? Isn't it a little early for happy hour over there at Netflix HQ?
However, the Netflix representative's hilarious statement immediately changed the entire tenor of the conversation. It conveyed congeniality without downplaying the need for help. It also framed the dilemma in context—this is a problem with Netflix, not Sandra Bullock trying to reach mission control in "Gravity."
The customer responds in a similar vein, turning his frown upside down and writing, "Greetings, Captain. Lt. Norm here."
From there, the conversation gets increasingly geekier, and funnier.
Capt. Mike: "LT, what seems to be the problem?"
Lt. Norm: "Visual displays are erratic,sir. season 4, episode 13 of Parks and Recreation is behaving oddly."
The customer explains that at the same point in the episode, a three-second loop of video repeats over and over, which "Lt.Norm" jokingly refers to as "a temporal loop...our ships seem to be immune to the effect, as our lives are not actually repeating over and over."
Capt. Mike: "Oh, no. LT I told you no watching Netflix while we sail through the Bermuda Triangle. :)"
Lt. Norm: "Dammit, I'm an engineer, not a navigator."
About now I'm thinking, who cares if the problem is fixed? Reading the interchange is almost more fun than actually watching "Parks and Recreation." Capt. Mike even comments on the show—"Councilwoman Knope is such a worrier."
Where do such customer service people come from, and can we clone them?
"Just like everyone else at Netflix, our CS (customer service) folks are given the freedom and responsibility to be great at what they do and this is a wonderful example of it," Netflix's chief communications officer, Jonathan Friedland, told CNBC.
Such freedom carries potential downside. "There are obviously situations where joking around might be a big risk," writes Chris Morran at Consumerist. Most people contacting insurance companies would probably not know what to make of being greeted this way, according to Morran. "But companies make the mistake of confusing 'businesslike' and 'scripted.' "
In the end, I don't know if the streaming mystery was ever solved, but when Capt. Mike finished up the chat with the usual, "LT Norm, are there any other Netflix issues I could help you with today?" Lt. Norm replied, "I almost wish there were."
Read the entire conversation here:
