Killing Batteries

I may or may not have snapped this morning after twice being the victim of an unnamed marketing firm’s arbitrary email spamming practices – once with the original spam, then again with a “follow-up” spam two days later inquiring if I still might be interested in the original spam, despite my reply, clearly asking them to remove me from their email list.

Then I may or may not have written the following reply, which I may or may not have sent to the Assistant Account Executive in question and copied her entire senior management team.

I may or may not be a little crabby.
………………………………………………………………….

Hi [redacted]!

Hope all is super well. Thanks for following up on your message from two days ago! :)

It appears there’s been a teensy email mix up here. My records show that I, in fact, responded to your achingly misdirected email regarding holiday travel with children at precisely 12:05pm on November 1st – roughly five minutes after it was received. Being that your firm negligently does not include an ‘unsubscribe’ link in your marketing spam emails, my only recourse was to reply to your email, change the subject line to “REMOVE” and, in case there was any confusion, include a short, kindly note asking you to please remove me from your distribution list. I’ll paste the message below:

“Please remove me from this distribution list.

Thank you,

Leif”

I did this, chiefly, because as any casual visitor to my blog will confirm – by ‘casual’, I’m referring to anyone that’s spent more than zero seconds perusing my blog (i.e. not you) – the only time I blog about travel with children is when they scream and cry and raise hell while sitting next to me on trans-Atlantic flights. And on those occasions, rather than, as you suggested, constructively offer ways the parents might have entertained their children so as not to disrupt 25 sleeping people, I usually fill this space by openly musing about the number of undiagnosed strokes and serious head injuries in the family’s recent ancestry.

I also did this because, in addition to your firm’s utter failure at the aforementioned lack of including an ‘unsubscribe’ link in your marketing spam (which, I shouldn’t have to explain to you, is all but mandatory these days), you seem to have failed/disregarded another base principle of marketing: targeting. See, if you take a little time to “target” your marketing spam email, not only will you likely get better results from your marketing spamming efforts, but you also won’t enrage and alienate the same bloggers you’re hoping will provide you with free exposure – and inspire them to fire off lengthy, sarcastic (yet oddly cathartic) missives after a hard night of drinking and election disappointment.

If you take the targeting step out of the marketing equation, you’re technically no longer marketing. You’re just sending random emails to tons of inappropriate people, historically known as “spamming”, much like I’m demonstrating with this message. Being that you apparently don’t read your incoming emails, I needed to find another avenue to make contact with your organization. Instead of taking a few moments to figure out who exactly in your organization should be receiving this rant, I’m just sending it to every email address I found on your website. So, using your interpretation of the concept, I am now also marketing, with, I can only assume, a similar degree of success.

In the future, I strongly recommend that you:
1.    Read your emails
2.    Carefully internalize the content of those emails
3.    Act accordingly
4.    Have lunch with a blogger and get informed about the basic dos and don’ts of sending inappropriate marketing spam to bloggers, before you burn anymore bridges

Let me know if you’re interested in having me further instruct you on the nuances of marketing to bloggers and/or hints at successfully utilizing email as communication tool.

Oh, and perhaps it bears repeating, please remove me from this distribution list.

Best,

Leif

I heartily recommend World Nomads travel insurance

Tim Cahill once said “In good travel writing, something on the trip always has to go wrong.” If this is true, then after my most recent Lonely Planet research trip in Romania and Moldova, I should have a book deal landing on my desk any second. At least I hope it’s a book deal. With the way my luck has been lately, it could just as easily be a talking, vampire gorilla.

This was easily the most calamity-ridden LP research trip I’ve ever had. While this cluster bomb of misfortune, this cyclone of discomfort, continuously assaulted me like starving Venetian pigeons, well-meaning bystanders kept on saying that, hey, this will probably all seem really funny six months from now. So, I’ve decided to write a letter to Future Me to see, in retrospect, how effing amusing he thinks everything was.

Dear February 2011 Leif,

How are you? Did you ever go see “Inception”? If so, what the tap dancing Buddha was that all about?

Oh, and I hope the over-night, lucrative book deal that should have arrived soon after I wrote this letter has gone well and that the film adaptation is progressing smoothly.

Anyhoo, I just wanted to recap that catastro-f*ck trip you took last summer. You know, now that you’ve had time to heal and get your lithium dosage just right so you aren’t drooling too much and your sphincter control has returned to socially acceptable levels, I thought we could reminisce a bit and see if maybe things weren’t as bad as we thought they were at the time.

As you may remember, when you first landed in Chisinau, Moldova, it was about 115 degrees in the shade. This, obviously, was uncomfortable, but since you were cross-eyed with jet lag, you managed to fall right to sleep in your rented apartment that first night.

When the phone rang at 2am, you were understandably confused. After all, you were in a strange place, brain damaged from exhaustion and the ring tone sounded like the hourly siren they use at the sleep deprivation cell block at Guantanamo Bay. When the pounding on the door and hollering in Russian started, including when they bafflingly started yelling your name, it’s understandable that, teetering on irreversible insanity, you scattered broken glass all over the entryway and tried to lock yourself in the refrigerator. We’ve all been there. Bangkok 1991, comes to mind. Anyway, that it later turned out to simply be downstairs neighbors, panicking over a leaky pipe in your bathroom that was flooding their apartment, and that you were able to manually close it and save the day was, in the grand scheme of things, a rather painless outcome.

Three boiling hot days later, during which time you perspired freely without pause, borderline dehydration really shouldn’t have come as a surprise, particularly when every muscle in your body cramped up, your gums receded and your eyeballs turned orange. Yes, I know you drank something like two liters of water every hour, so your deteriorating condition was a bit confusing at first, but dammit Future Leif, you have got to start salting your food in those conditions! How does a veteran world traveler not know this? You really are an idiot sometimes.

I bet after that unpleasantness, those first few days of cool rain in Bucharest came as a relief. Yeah, by the forth day it was a bit tedious. And on the ninth day, you can be forgiven for tearing apart your belongings to see if someone might have slipped a cursed idol into your backpack that makes every wish spectacularly backfire, like that enchanted monkey fist from The Simpsons. Incessant rain has been known to spark a delirium or two. Ask anyone in Seattle.

Then, there was that incident in Sinaia when, for the first time in 30 years of having a cash card, that Banca Românească ATM ate your card and it was still only the first week of the trip so you really needed to get it back, but it was a Saturday and the bank was closed and you had to drive all the way back to Sinaia from Brasov on Monday to retrieve it and the bank manager held your card right in front of you and said she couldn’t give it back until your bank at home faxed a formal request which, with the eight hour time difference and all, would have required you to drive back to Sinaia again two days later from, who knows, Sighişoara?, burning, in total, over two days of critical research time and so in desperation you deluged them with five kinds of identification, including your passport, LP business cards and the LP Romania book itself with your name and picture on the inside until their steadfast dedication to pointless bureaucratic nonsense wilted and you walked out of there triumphant, having only wasted a total of ½ a day.

Nicely done.

And remember two hours later when your car was towed away in eight minutes flat while you were checking prices inside a bus station? Keeping in mind that this is Romania, where, since the beginning of recorded history, parking one’s car has been a lawless, creative art, with sidewalks, parks, handicapped ramps and even the middle of the street being fair game. Do you think they were targeting you specifically because you’re so enviously handsome? Probably.

It was kind of amazing that, the odd food poisoning episode aside, in over 20 years of international travel you had never been extravagantly ill while on the road. So, really, you kinda had it coming when you were struck down with the Transylvanian Flu mere hours after arriving in Sibiu, where you thought that you might, finally, be able to relax a bit and enjoy yourself. Arguably, the 17 bed bug bites that you suffered that same evening, several of which were on your face, might have been just a teensy bit uncalled for.

Remember how 10 days later, just when those bed bug bites were finally fading, suffering six more bed bug bites seemed like a bizarre, but conceivable bit of bad luck?

And, being that our notes get a little frantic here, can you describe exactly how you felt when you were attacked again seven days later and it became rather obvious that the bed bugs were living in your backpack? Was it like a psychosis or closer to full-on hysteria?

On a scale of One to Hilarious, how funny were those last few days of the trip when, instead of unwinding and recovering from the baffling, unremitting torment of the previous five weeks, you spent that time boiling/scalding all of your possessions, scrubbing them with detergent, sun-baking them in black plastic bags, boiling/scalding everything again and generally suffering low-level, jittery paranoia day and night, believing that every itch, every tickle, every single form of exterior stimuli, was a bed bug that was preparing to repeatedly chomp you like a shark on a chum line?

Oh, that reminds me, how go the inquiries that you’ve been making that God may be specifically out to get you?

I think we’ve covered all the key incidents here. It’s difficult to be sure, since our final couple pages of notes have been rendered indecipherable due to the shredding, teeth marks and extensive fecal damage. So, if you could just get back to me with your thoughts on how funny this all seems from the safety and security of February 2011, that’d really help me out.

Sincerely,

Past Leif

As promised last week, I’m following up my post on the destructive culture of over-work here in the US with a little background on my personal research in the field of Slackerology. And when I say ‘field’, I’m largely referring to a desk, in a cubical, in a secured, windowless room, that was at times in an underground bunker. Yes, I’m speaking of my nine years working for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

Like fine wine or the Cohen Brothers film catalog, my Slacker Zen over the years has had exhilarating spikes and demoralizing dips. My time at the Fed started with the former and ended with the latter.

Now, I should start by saying that I am not at all bitter about my time at the Fed. All things considered, they treated me well, paid me a decent wage, offered excellent benefits and the opportunity to develop my career. Which I did. Eventually. But not after a fairly wonderful interval that I now refer to as the “Underachiever Years”.

The Fed was my first permanent job after university. Over the course of two backpacking trips in 1993 and 1994, I spent roughly six cumulative weeks in Spain, where I first got the crazy idea that your job shouldn’t dictate every facet of your life. Despite the long-suffering, stoic, Norwegian-Minnesotan gene pool from which I sprang, I acquired a rather immediate penchant for the Spanish lifestyle. And who wouldn’t? There’s a very good reason that American and English Spring Break revelers and retirees head to southern, Latin locales instead of Poland, Siberia and Winnipeg.

Obviously, six weeks of semi-sober backpacking didn’t exactly make me a sociological expert on the collective Spanish temperament, but it doesn’t take years of field research to note broad patterns. Namely, Spanish adults seemed to be better rested, more at ease and generally enjoying more idle time than most kindergarteners do in America. Even in such chaotic and seemingly demanding places as Barcelona and Madrid, I watched people amble to their jobs at a civilized hour, astonishingly wide awake and lively, where they would work diligently yet causally until noon. Then, on a silent, nationwide cue, all work promptly stopped so that everyone could return home to feast lavishly, hump the spouse (or sometimes the neighbor’s spouse) and take a nap. At 3-4pm everyone returned to work with a satisfied glow, working until 7-8pm, when it was time to rendezvous with the family for a group walk, a pleasant dinner and, God love ‘em, a televised sporting event.

When I returned to the US to reluctantly begin my career, in my youthful naivety, I decided that I would live as the Spanish lived. I would place priority on my personal life no matter the cost, and if that meant eliminating any trace of professional ambition and languishing in eternal mediocrity, well then that’s simply how my life would have to be.

Conveniently, with the dire state of the entry-level job market in 1994 and my hard-won Theatre Arts degree, I really didn’t have any choice but to embrace an impoverished, Euro-slacker lifestyle in the beginning. Indeed, I immediately landed one of those jobs specially reserved for people with my unique qualifications: switchboard operator.

This was a job that I’d performed handily during university. I could work a phone with the same technique and élan as a concert pianist, answering and transferring calls for hours without ever looking up from my book.

Having, I felt, ingeniously found a job that only required 5% of my brain processing capacity, there was little stopping me from staggering into work on two hours of sleep in the throes of a raging Rum-and-Cokeurism. Staying true to my inner-Spaniard, I would skulk off and nap during lunch. Since time and distance prevented me from returning home for my siesta, I had to sidle into one of the ‘resting rooms’ at the Bank, meant for sick people and lactating mothers.

This went on for two of the most carefree years of my adult life, before things like TV brainwashing, peer pressure and wretched envy finally got the better of me. Actually, more than anything, I’d had enough of watching people earning twice what I was earning who couldn’t even print out envelopes without assistance. I slowly let go of my pursuit of leisure, hobbies and rum and clawed my way up the ranks of the Federal Reserve, jockeying and leaping up the pay scale through five jobs in six years until I’d hit the big time. I was getting a comfortable check, I had my very own high-walled cubicle, and I was the proud owner of all the essential Bank-issued status symbols: a laptop, pager and cell phone.

At about the same time that I achieved what I’d coveted for years, I realized that I’d unintentionally smothered my inner-Spaniard. My career had taken control of my life and as a result I was the least content that I’d ever been. I was 32, divorced, overburdened with a house full of superfluous crap that I didn’t really need, working an occasionally insane on-call work schedule, dangerously dependent on caffeine and muttering darkly about life.

A series of hangover-driven moments-of-clarity occurred, making me realize that I was in serious danger of spending the rest of my life as an over-worked, media-programmed, mindless consumer. I needed to act fast or I would irrevocably descend into a lifestyle that no sane Spaniard would approve of. And act fast I did. In a frenzied six-week period, I implemented a critical mass of rash and irreversible decisions, quitting my job, selling my house, car and all earthly possessions, buying a laptop and flying to Europe with the intention of breaking and entering into the travel writing industry.

My Slacker Zen went supernova for a few years, until I succeeded in carving out my new freelancing career. Admittedly, as an ironic but important footnote, I now generally work harder than I ever did at the Fed – for far less compensation. Being my own boss turned me into an obsessive workaholic. Who would have guessed? Yet my overall contentment level is still notably higher than my final years at the Fed, so there’s that to consider. Also, I’m still dangerously dependent on caffeine.

To this day, the work-versus-contentment paradigm fascinates me. Obviously, it’s virtually impossible to avoid work, but does it always have to be a resolve-testing bummerfest? And what makes it that way? Is it the hours we work or the job we have or the attitude we carry? Even if we don’t live in Spain, can we live and work like they do? And why, for the love of Buddha, after working ourselves to the brink of mental and physical breakdowns, why do we spend our fleeting nights, weekends and vacations doing things like home improvement projects or running frantic errands? The cultural pressure to be constantly productive has invaded our homes and downtime.

I realize this is more autobiographical than informational (some of you may have noticed that I stole a lot of this text from this post), but trust me, I’m building to something. Next week, I go into absurd detail about the founding elements, as I see them, of Slackerology. I’ll also touch (read: rant) on the pattern of rash consumerism in the US that I refer to as ‘Common Senseless’ and how, with a little planning, one can live like a European in the US.

Agonizing over travel insurance? Maybe I can help…

The latest Expedia numbers about how few vacations days Americans receive (and subsequently use) have come out. While this annual survey is a fairly blatant tactic to encourage/enrage people into booking trips to Orlando and Hawaii, I always linger over the findings, as they are a key part of a larger fixation I’ve had for over 15 years about work time versus personal time trends. Indeed, I obsessed about this subject more or less constantly during the nine years that I worked an office job, but I actually started keeping a folder of information and news clippings last year when I suddenly realized that I’m an accidental global expert on work verses personal time trends. Having lived in or travel extensively through the hardest working countries (US, UK, Romania, Japan) and least hardest working countries (Italy, France, Denmark) in the world, it turns out I can speak about this topic at great length, like I intend to do right now.

If you’re like 112.96% of Americans (estimated 2009), you probably don’t love your job enough to voluntarily make it the hands-down, number one priority in your life. So, why is it then that our jobs are seemingly more pivotal to and time-consuming in our daily lives than our hobbies, loved ones, sex and even basic elements vital for our survival like food and sleep?

Though we Americans are far from the hardest working people in the world, we certainly aren’t resting on our laurels. Perversely, despite studies and surveys unanimously showing our wishes for the opposite, we’ve created a masochistic environment where long hours are respected, hair-whitening responsibility and indispensability are revered and skipping vacation is rewarded – usually with more work.

You know what happens when you subject yourself to that kind of day-to-day rigor over a long period of time? You go batshit crazy, that’s what. Which probably explains why our population is so replete with chronic fatigue, paranoia, hypochondria, obesity, road rage, and murder. Though our unfettered access to guns, junk food and Fox News probably isn’t helping.

Further to the above, I found a recent Integra Survey of US workers that revealed some unsettling, though hardly surprising findings:

•    65% of workers said that workplace stress had caused them difficulties (and 10% said the difficulties had major effects).
•    62% routinely had work-related neck pain at the end of the day.
•    44% reported stressed-out eyes.
•    38% had pain in their hands.
•    34% reported difficulty sleeping because of work-related stress.
•    Nearly one in four workers has cried over workplace stress, and 19% have quit a job because of it.
•    Over half of workers say they frequently skip lunch because of job demands.
•    29% have yelled at co-workers because of job stress
•    42% say that yelling and verbal abuse are common
•    2% have actually struck someone at work.

People literally working themselves to death isn’t just for the Japanese anymore, where, incidentally, they actually coined the term, ‘karoshi‘, to describe the phenomenon. We aren’t quite the South Koreans, who only abolished the mandatory six-day work week in 2004, but we have a long way to go before we threaten the French, perennial contenders for Highest Overall Contentment worldwide, who have a nationally mandated 35-hour work week – which I hear they’re trying to shorten yet again. (Kudos.)

I’ve been speaking out, mostly to whoever was stuck next to me in the line at the cafeteria, about the ridiculous state of how over-work in the US is affecting our heath and lifestyles for ages. In fact, I remember the exact moment that I had this epiphany: my first day of work at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis in 1994. Barely a month after returning from my second Europe backpacking trip in two years, where I spent copious time in Spain, the Siesta Capital of the World, both my jaw and child-like innocence hit the floor upon seeing the Fed’s vacation allotment schedule. I was starting with two weeks, would earn a third week after I’d been there five years and a generous fourth week after 15 years. This schedule is roughly the same today. Meanwhile, as the Wise Bread blog post “America Is the No Vacation Nation” reports, an entry level job in Australia affords the lucky bastard seven weeks of vacation. That’s just plain cruel, man.

Americans enjoy less cumulative vacation days and public holidays (roughly 25 days annually) than Japan (35 days), Morocco (39 days) and Finland (44 days). And that’s if we choose to take all of our vacation days. As shown in the Expedia survey, “On average, Americans reported receiving 13 vacation days in 2009, one day less than the previous three years.” How, with all the recent dialogue, is this situation actually getting worse?

I’ll take a break for now, but I’m not done. Tune in next week for more ranting in a blog post that I’m tentatively calling “The Thankless Work of a Pioneering Slacker – the Leif Pettersen Story.”

Agonizing over travel insurance? Maybe I can help…

Hey, this is just a friendly public service announcement for you travelers to stay cognizant of some of the older scams that are still alive and well all over Europe.

A friend of mine was just burned by the old menu switcheroo scam in Budapest last week, an art honed to perfection in my own love-to-hate Bucharest, and ended up being intimated by several goons into coughing up the equivalent of plane-fare for dinner and a few drinks.  This was a very experienced traveler, but exhaustion and a little too much drinking stripped away his defenses (as well as a few very attractive accomplices employed by the restaurant).  Alone and drunk should be avoided no matter where you are and what you’re doing, but even mostly sober groups can fall prey to this particular plot.

Essentially, you’re shown one menu when you sit down to dinner and are given another menu, with grossly inflated prices when the bill is delivered and you make a stink about the total. In some cases, no menu switch is made, but the menu fails to indicate that you are charged per 100 grams of whatever meat you’re ordering and you belatedly learn that 400 grams is the unspoken minimum.

Another wrinkle is when you order a bottle of wine and they uncork and pour the wine before apologetically telling you that the $8, 2002 bottle you ordered was out of stock, so they brought the same wine, but a different year, maybe 1989, which ‘lo and behold costs $120. They didn’t think you’d mind.

The bar version is the simplest. With the drink menu posted somewhere inconspicuous (say a drawer in the back office), the carefree traveler(s) orders a few rounds, usually buying for the new lady friends that they “spontaneously” met on the street and then it’s revealed that each Screwdriver costs something ludicrous like 200 euro.

Overly helpful taxi drivers and agreeably amorous women are usually the bait that brings guy(s) to these places, since crooked restaurants and clubs typically don’t buy ad space in the local weekly or get reviewed in tourist brochures.  Be wary of this kind of “assistance” no matter the source.  Persistent street hawkers are also to be avoided.  I’ve heard accounts of this type of thing happening in Bucharest, Budapest, Paris, Madrid, Warsaw and Athens, though it’s probably safe to assume that this element exists in just about any medium-sized city or better.  Sadly, it appears as if the local police are in on the scam and are no help.

Read the comments below for additional nuances in the set-up and execution of these scams, particularly the “Hungarian tourists with a map” and the telltale elevator-only entry/exit to the bar/restaurant.

The US Embassy in Budapest has posted a tourist advisory about this ongoing problem on their site.