Christening Epizeuxis

Tonight with the installation of emacs, Epizeuxis was born.

Named in the grand literary-device tradition of Lila's electronics, Epizeuxis joins the family founded by Zeugma, and including Synechdoche, Chiasmus, Metonymy, Syllepsis, Irony, and Litotes. (Quine is the oddball in more than mere name.) Their common 'z' is not all that Zeugma and Epizeuxis share; they fill many of the same roles. And since Zeugma is on its second or third life (5+ years and still going -- huzzah for organ donors!), I am optimistic that Epizeuxis -- with its sturdier design -- will easily outlast its grandparent. (A moment of silence for our comrades Chiasmus and Metonymy, whose lives were brutish and short, and Synechdoche, suffering from a chronically dead battery.)

It should be noted that the installation of emacs was crucial. (SimCity alone did not suffice.) Not all of my electronics are worthy of naming; Epizeuxis jumped the queue, leaving three other nameless items cowering, abased in the electronics drawer.

[UPDATE: I am idly considering whether I should set up my swarm of electronics to Twitter. I don't know anyone who uses Twitter, and I don't have the right gadget to read it continuously, but I would be amused if my electronics sent updates "I am now reading a pdf file" to their other electronic friends.]


This post's theme word means "the repetition of a word with no others in between, for vehemence."

Customer service

I just had one excellent customer service interaction with Telus, and a series of terrible experiences with health insurance companies. Let us examine their differences:

good experience:

• listened to "on hold" music for < 60 seconds
  
• customer service guy was friendly, compassionate, understanding
• problem fixed by first person I talked to
• money refunded!
• future similar problems prevented by permanent changes to my account

bad experience:

• listened to interminable "on hold" music
• customer service guy 1 was confused, bounced me to someone else
• customer service guy 2 was more confused, esp. since I had no idea who he was or why "I" had called him
• problem still not fixed, or even isolated
• money not refunded, though it should be!
• end result: telling me to call someone outside the company, then "call back when you have figured it out"

I have worked in customer service, and I know how difficult some customers can be. I am not one of those, however; I am friendly, understanding, sympathetic to the customer service agent's powerless plight. I also use the should-be-patented M. approach to customer service, wherein we (not me vs. him) are working together to understand, and eventually fix, the problem. My fallback strategy is to weep inconsolably until the problem is fixed, but I have a feeling that that would not work as well on the phone as it has (demonstrably!) in person.

So for now, I have left several very clear messages in voicemail boxes across Canada, and I am giving them a day to respond before I increase my telephonically-transmitted vexation.


This post's theme word: babbitt, "a self-satisfied narrow-minded person who conforms to conventional ideals of business and material success."