Bowl o’ Cherriesbowl o’ cherries

A light’n'lively story in today’s New York Times describes the impact of Verizon Wireless’s installation of temporary “cell on wheels” towers on Martha’s Vineyard’s vacationers and locals. Wireless users’ cell phones start ringing when President Obama arrives on the island, known for its remoteness and beauty. These folks ordinarily forego cell coverage on The Vineyard. Most vacationers prefer life without cell interruptions but, as Times reporter Abby Goodnough notes, understand the administration’s need to link to the wider world.

Reading the story stirred up two sets of memories for me, one relatively recent, the other less so. Here forthwith:

MEMORY THE FIRST

I spent an exasperating week in July battling Verizon’s land line service to have DSL and telephone restored here in Brookline. In normal times, our internet service is painfully slow. To give you an idea, imagine having your bandwidth eaten for six to eight hours to upload a seven-minute radio piece.  (For reasons too complicated for even a modestly intelligent person to understand, we aren’t able to get cable.) In addition, the quality of our everyday telephone land line is compromised by a persistent, staticky crackle.  This is on a good day, mind you. In July, the crackle got so bad that conversations were almost impossible, plus the line would frequently go dead, dropping calls mid-conversation.  I put in a request to Verizon for repair.

A week and four separate visits from Verizon land line workers later, I was at my wits’ end. Repairmen would show up, check the antediluvian pole and line behind our garage on our neighbor’s property, tell me they had tapped us into a new “pair” of lines coming and going from the central switching station, and then leave. And still we’d have no phone service.

By the time the last worker arrived, I had lost faith and patience.  I was supposed to have had phone service, and he was supposed to be visiting to improve the DSL coverage. Given that the phone still wasn’t working, I’d called Verizon in advance of his visit to make sure the work order reflected the need to restore the line — not just to install a digital splitter for the DSL.  It took me over an hour to convince several different Verizon reps in call centers around the world to change the work order. Despite my attempts to give a heads up, this fourth worker arrived without a clue that he’d need to fix the actual phone line.  As I’d suspected, he balked at my request to bring back phone service, because his work order only told him to install the DSL splitter.  When we were done “discussing” the options, he agreed to take care of both issues.  He diagnosed the same problem with the land line as previous repairmen and  generated the same solution. He explained that one of the emails alerting the switching station to activate the new pair had gotten dropped earlier in the week, hence the lack of phone. All would now be well, he assured me. Either you fix it this time, I told the guy, or I’m canceling my service plan with Verizon. He told me he needed to leave the house to find a new pair and hook us up.  We agreed he would leave his laptop in my house as surety until the service was completely restored. He came back a good while later to let me know that he’d finished his job and would be leaving.  Nope, said I, I’m not giving you back your laptop until the phone works.

This guy was as fed up with me as I was with him. He told me that by contract he had to leave my property as soon as he notified the central office to activate the new pair.  I told him that by contract his company owed me phone service and that once the phone and internet were running, he could have his laptop back.  (My kids found this hilarious. I’d “Mommed” the poor guy.)  ”I want to speak with your supervisor,” I told the repairman. Like those who’d come before, he told me this wasn’t possible. I told him I didn’t care. It was take no prisoners time.

When this able worker realized that I really wasn’t going to let him have his laptop back until the phone worked, he went into the basement to talk with his supervisor in private. He returned several minutes later and handed me his cell phone. The supervisor — a guy in charge of land line coverage for my town — explained company policy.  I asked him how the policy made any sense, given that Verizon was hemorrhaging cash by sending four separate workers to fix a straightforward problem. How could this be cost-efficient, I wondered? If the phone didn’t work after the fourth guy had left, Verizon would have to send a fifth worker to start all over again. The supervisor finally agreed to leave his worker in place until the job was done.  But the worker couldn’t raise anyone in the central office. So he took off for an hour of lunch. When he returned and restored my land line and internet service to its crackly, slow, pre-repair state, he was free to leave. With his laptop. And I was grateful.

Talking with these four separate workers, I learned that each was frustrated with management, with repair policies, with the company in general. Each spoke of the company’s lack of commitment to land line service. Each told me that the company didn’t care if it lost land line customers to other service providers, that the company wanted to be left to its cellular business. Wireless workers aren’t unionized, they told me. Land line workers are. They complained about gigantic corporate earnings, insistence that there be employee give backs in upcoming contract negotiations (including health care coverage), and predicted they’d be out on strike come the first week of August.

The strike came to pass, with lowly workers attempting to bring Verizon management to its knees. You can read/watch a relatively pro-management piece as well as a relatively pro-labor piece explaining some of the bigger issues.  Where do I fall on this strike? I believe the workers when they say that the company is trying to grind them out of unionized existence. I also think they do a terrible , inefficient job installing and maintaining land lines.

What recourse did I have to register my dissatisfaction?  I could have cancelled our service, but all of my business cards and stationery list my email @verizon.net.  I know there are ways out of this, but they are complicated and even expensive for me.  Since I’d given the worker back his laptop I only had one other option. I am, in my way, part of “management.” I sold my stock in Verizon. I had quite a bit. Even if in the end I lose money because of my trade, I can fan the flames of my righteous indignation by refusing to profit from management’s awful motives and even awfuller policies. And I remove my capital from a pot that could potentially fund workers’ pensions and health insurance coverage. I don’t wanna profit from having a dog in this particular fight.

Did I bring them to their knees, or what?

MEMORY THE SECOND 

A few summers ago, I worked as a reporter for National Public Radio’s Cape and Island’s affiliate. One of the stories I was researching but didn’t get to produce featured the critical role internet connections play in year-round sustainability of families and businesses on Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket. I interviewed impassioned residents on the Outer Cape who were frustrated by their inability to get their businesses running because of lack of internet. Also spoke with young people who’d grown up on Cape but were moving away because they couldn’t support themselves. At present, families and young people are leaving the Cape in droves. Housing costs, lack of year-round employment, and iffy public transport make Cape Cod an undesirable place to put down permanent roots for all save the independently wealthy.

Last year, a hard-working non-profit organization, Open Cape, managed to midwife a deal harnessing federal money, local grants, and up-front investment from service provider RCN to provide increased internet coverage throughout Cape Cod.  You can read about the partnership, which is mandated to have finished its work by 2013, here.  The hope is that entrepreneurs and small business people who could live and work anywhere will choose to settle on Cape Cod for its spectacular beauty and quality of life IF they can get the first-rate internet access they’d expect on the mainland. [N.B.: See above for a sense of what that might actually look like.] With this class of people will come jobs, cash flow, and opportunity, enabling a wider spectrum of people to live year-round on the Cape. The best of capitalism and government intervention in tandem. At least in theory.

CONCLUSIONS

When I think about Verizon’s ability to throw up a coupla portable cell towers to provide coverage for President Obama — just like that! — I am struck by the power of independent corporations in this country. Their ability to choose “can do” is often inspirationally breath-taking (and phone-ringing). And their decisions to operate in “can’t do” mode is proportionately nauseating. Who benefits when the terms of engagement insist on bringing at least one party (repair guys? workers? corporations? customers?)  to its knees?

Two articles in this morning’s newspapers speak to one another — but they don’t know it.  

One is a fascinating piece in today’s Boston Globe focusing on the genetics of an aggressive form of colon cancer. 

Another in The New York Times’ Business section counsels readers how to get health insurance when they’re already dealing with pre-existing conditions.  

The Globe piece highlights genetic research linking descendants of one almost-Mayflower family who suffer from a deadly form of colon cancer.  Scientists combed genealogical archives to piece together the puzzle linking families in New York and Utah.  Now that they’ve isolated the genetic mutation giving carriers a 2 in 3 lifetime chance of developing the cancer, scientists can offer aggressive screening practices in hopes of helping carriers catch nascent tumors before they’ve spread.

The Times piece counsels readers how best to hang onto coverage when they have what insurers euphemistically call “pre-existing conditions,” or medical conditions that existed before application for health insurance.  The definition includes conditions for which patients have sought coverage in the previous six months.  Insurance companies in 44 states may either deny coverage or charge more to those deemed to have a “pre-existing condition” at the time they apply for health insurance.

Most insurance companies — but not all – can’t exclude based on the results of genetic testing. They can, however, deny coverage if applicants actually suffer from the disease for which they’ve been tested.  The thinking, apparently, is that insurance companies don’t want people waiting to sign up for policies after they’ve already become ill. That’s too expensive.  Instead, they want healthy people in their pools.  They are insuring against the potential for future illness.

I suppose some of this makes sense if you squint really hard.  Perhaps these kinds of rules would have been appropriate in the 1930s, when Blue Cross (hospital insurance) and Blue Shield (physicians’ services) were founded.  American health costs were relatively low.  There was no such thing as genetic medicine.  I’m not sure there even was such a thing as a pre-existing condition back then. (I don’t know when insurance companies formulated the concept of “pre-existing conditions” and couldn’t find a history on the web — would be grateful to learn more from those with answers.)

Without a doubt, though, the concept of “pre-existing conditions” makes no sense in the twenty-first century, when advances in genetics change our understanding of health. If, for instance, a person is battling invasive colon cancer, carries the colon cancer mutation identified in the Globe article, and has no health insurance, how is it possible to pinpoint a time when she or he would not have had a pre-existing condition?  The genetic abnormality was there, lying in wait, from the moment of conception. 

I guess this begs an epistemological question.  With many types of illness, knowing what we know about mutations and genetic predisposition, is it still possible to demarcate a before and after with certainty?  Is there just one, long, unbroken line of “condition” stretching back to the original mutant?  If so, how can insurers continue to craft policy based on the concept of “pre-existing” conditions?

For me, this isn’t just an exercise in hypothetical thinking.  I carry the BRCA-2 mutation, conferring about an 80% lifetime risk of developing breast cancer.  I’ve reduced my risk with surgery, but with three teenagers, my worry is not over.  It seems enough to worry about whether or not my kids will be carriers.  It is almost unbearable to have to worry if they will be able to get health insurance because of a genetic predisposition or pre-condition.  I want the Obama administration to bring insurance companies to their knees on this one: no more language about pre-existing conditions when it comes to coverage.  Of course, if we have universal coverage, none of us will need to worry about this concept again.  

I feel like a killjoy when I talk about possible career paths and jobs with my kids.  ”Whatever you pick,” I tell them, “just make sure it comes with health insurance.”  What a terrible way to talk with young people on the brink of hatching plans and dreaming dreams.

There hasn’t been much in the news of late to inspire hope, despite Barack Obama’s assumption of office.  He warned us in his inauguration speech.  He was right.  Unemployment continues to rise, there is still war in the Middle East, people in positions of power — no matter their political affiliation — still don’t seem to understand that, as the newly minted senator for Illinois warned us, “one day a peacock, the next a feather duster.”

And yet.  Three times this week men publicly did the unthinkable.  They apologized.  This gives me great hope.

Barack Obama led the way.  ”I screwed up,” he said over and over again.  He took full responsibility for having pushed nominees toward confirmation even after it was clear they had broken the president’s declaration that there would be no tolerance for even the appearance of impropriety in his administration.  Next thing I knew, Jehuda Reinharz, president of Brandeis University, was apologizing for deciding to sell off artworks in the campus’s Rose Art Museum.  ”I take full responsibility for causing pain and embarrassment in both of these matters.  To quote President Obama, ‘I screwed up.’”  Most astonishing of all, Elwin Wilson, a white man who reveled in his own supposed white supremacy, apologized to African American Congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis for having beaten him to a bloody pulp 48 years ago.  ”I just told him I was sorry,” Wilson told reporters this week

Just.

As if this were some small thing.

Any one of you lucky enough to parent knows how big a thing apology is.  ”Hard” doesn’t begin to describe the task of teaching children to “say sorry.”  They certainly do not emerge from the womb equipped to take responsibility for their actions and repair the emotional damage they leave in their wake.  Who hasn’t heard a small child mutter, “sorry,” chin tucked to chest, eyes darting side to side, torn between furious self-pity and a desire to please authority?  Who hasn’t watched teenagers threatened with the revocation of privileges shuffle from foot to foot as they coughed out the most insincere of “sorries?”  

Getting these wily ones to stand firm, meet a gaze, confess, and apologize is one of the hardest things I have labored to achieve in my life.  Maybe that’s because I came from a family that settled disputes by fist and fiat.  Since I didn’t know how to set things right when I married (and neither did Mark), we’ve both had to work on cultivating civility and extending apologies.  A good read: Douglas Stone, et. al., Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most (NY; Penguin Books, c1999).  Also helpful: the Buddhist concept of “right speech.”  Is it true?  Is it helpful?  If not, don’t say it.  I’m guessing that Barack Obama’s mother and grandmother didn’t need books.  They knew most of the stuff already – and it helped them do an exceptionally good job raising him.  Ditto Michelle Obama’s mom.  

The single most effective way to teach children to apologize is to do it ourselves.  When we say we goofed, when we deploy those powerful words of apology, when we move beyond facts into the realm of emotion and connect our actions to others’ feelings, we show our kids how to heal wounds we have inflicted.  We demonstrate that it’s possible to make really big mistakes and still love and be loved, introducing into children’s black and white certainty a mysterious shade of grey.  For Barack Obama, Yehuda Reinharz, and Elwin Wilson all to name their failures in public and “say sorry” shows a strength that fills me with hope. It is behavior that, as Dr. Aaron Lazare has written in On Apology (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004), requires “attitudes of honesty, generosity, humility, commitment, and courage” (263).  

Now to get Hillary Clinton, who surely has heard her share of apologies, to start practicing at the State Department.  I invoke John Lennon: Imagine!