Asleep, Woke

There was a piece in the WSJ's Mansion section one recent Friday about Santa Fe as a great place to buy a house if you are "woke." I didn't read it, I never read that section, but gather it may well have been tongue in cheek about the term "woke." As well it should be.

"Woke" is a nice word for use by students who -- just venturing forth into the world -- must figure out who they are and find purchase in the big slippery world by establishing group affiliations: I am this, not that, etc. But its use by adults is not just silly, it's dangerous right about now. Right about 3 years ago we got our asses kicked by something that came at us out of the blue and was completely unexpected. Despite the fact that we had just seen it happen in the UK, and that we had seen nationalist-populism creeping forward in places like France for years. Far from being woke, we were asleep. And we still haven't actually woken up.

The problem is not that I disagree with those that like to use the word "woke" to complement themselves for their rectitude on matters of substance. Far from it. We are aligned on more issues than we are not, most likely.

But they/we still haven't figured out how to win, and we still haven't made a substantive and earnest effort on an individual basis to understand why we lost.

There was a humorous situation at our house on Saturday. I got home in the afternoon and found a Spectrum van in our driveway with its engine running. We've been planning to cut to cord and go internet only, and in the run up to that our phone was dead. I was also having trouble with the cable TV.

You don't need all the gory details, but we were pissed at Spectrum so we decided to have them send a service guy out to fix our phone and cable. So when I got there the guy made a joke about taking my parking space and I said I didn't care about that but that his engine was running. This was the day after the Climate March. He said he always left it running when it was hot. It was mid-80s and in the shade, so his van would not have gotten hot if he turned it off. But I held my tongue.

To fix our TV he grabbed the remote and turned it on. He said the TV and cable box both needed to be on. I frickin knew that, and had turned them both on. But it was mostly embarassing. But I don't really care because it's just not worth watching cable TV, or it's not worth the attention it takes to find something worth watching.

The phone -- after 45 minutes of head-scratching and trips to the van and back -- turned out to have been unplugged by the alarm company guy when he installed the cell phone alarm system we needed to have our alarm keep working once we cut the cord.

So there I was, pissed that his van was running, thinking about how Spectrum should have a policy about this, and it was all because stuff was either unplugged or I had been hitting the wrong button or just didn't care. If only Spectrum would prorate the bill for when we shut off, the issue would never have arisen.

But at a higher level, I didn't know this guy. It would have been great to have been able to have a real conversation and figure out why it was he really didn't think running his van mattered, or who had convinced him that climate change was bullshit. And the best way to have the conversation would have been really slowly, in a non-judgmental, friendly way. But I knew that if I did so, he'd just keep running his van for longer, that he was on the clock, and I really just wanted to move on with my day.

But I do hope somebody from Spectrum brand management catches this blog in their filter and they should have a policy, because at the end of the day it's costing them money. And the reason they don't care is because they have too few competitors to force them into disciplined cost control.