Netflix shows us how it should be done

By Tom Walker

witsendmagazine 

 

I love Netflix.

According to company records, Linda and I have been Netflix subscribers for at least 11 years. I think it’s been even longer than that, maybe not too long after Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph founded the company in 1997. It didn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that getting DVDs in the mail was easier than renting one from a surly teenager at Blockbuster and returning it within two days.

Across the country -- and the world -- people were coming to the same conclusion. Hello, Netflix, goodbye Blockbuster. In April 2017, Netflix reported having over 98 million subscribers worldwide, including more than 50 million in the United States. Blockbuster, meanwhile, has a bunch of former

stores that got turned into Beyond Bread and other businesses.

We recently started subscribing to Netflix’s streaming media, which got us addicted to programs like “Bosch” with Titus Welliver and Glenn Close in “Damages.” But we still get the DVDs, which lets us see movies sooner than the streaming service.  We’ve recently seen some Academy Award winners and nominees that way, such as “Moonlight,” “La La Land,” “Fences” and “Hidden Figures.”

Through the years, we’ve never had a problem with any Netflix movie. Until now.

It wasn’t Netflix’s fault. We watched “Hidden Figures,” which we enjoyed a lot. I reviewed it on witsendmagazine.com recently.

And the next morning, we put it in our mailbox to send it back to Netflix. I had a doctor’s appointment that morning, and when I came back home I noticed that the mailbox was open and the Netflix envelope was gone. The plot thickened when, soon afterward, the mail  carrier arrived. No, he said, he hadn’t picked up our mail.

He gave us the phone number of the Postal Inspector to report the theft of our mail. Linda called it and after wading through a thicket of automated options, finally got hold of a human who took our report. Apparently that was the extent of what the U.S.  Postal Service could do for us.

So then I dialed the customer service number for Netflix, dreading what they were going to do to us for losing “Hidden Figures,” for which Octavia Spencer won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar. I’m not sure what Oscar-winning movies are going for these days, but I’m sure it isn’t cheap.

What happened next was surprising. No, not surprising. Astonishing.

First, there was no automated answering service. Instead, at the bottom of the “Help Center” page, there was message that gave a phone number and said, "For faster service, enter (a six number) code when prompted ..." 

I did that, and in less than a minute found myself talking to a real-life human being who listened attentively to my tale of woe. And when I had finished, virtually sobbing over my cruel fate, the Netflix guy said something to the effect of, “That’s all right, I’ll take that movie off your At Home list so you can get the next one in your queue.”

I had to ask, “That’s great – and how much is “Hidden Figures” going to cost me?”

“Nothing,” the Netflix man said. “It’s not your fault – you didn’t drop it or break it or anything. Someone took it out of your mailbox.”

At this point, I was virtually groveling at his telephonic feet. I told him we had reported the theft to the Postal Inspector, and he said that was good.

And we parted, friends forever. And I will be forever a fan of Netflix, for its movies, for its streaming service, for its programs like “House of Cards,” and whatever else it does in the future. And most of all, for its customer service, which seems a dying breed at most places but is alive and well at Netflix.

Thank you, Netflix, for showing us how successful business can be run.

Beyond the hidden figures

By Tom Walker

witsendmagazine 

 

My wife, Linda, and I don’t go to movie theaters very much anymore. It’s just so nice to pop in a Netflix movie, enjoy our own snacks and hit the pause button whenever we need to take a bathroom break.

The last multiplex movie we saw was “FlorenceFoster Jenkins,” which Linda liked but I hated. Just a no-talent, off-key wannabe singer with enough money to surround herself with a bunch of yes men. Sort of like the bilious-orange off-key wannabe dictator we have in the White House right now.

But that’s another story. What I want to write about now is “Hidden Figures,” the movie we finally saw, thanks to Netflix, a couple of nights ago.

We both enjoyed this film immensely. In the remote chance that you haven’t seen or heard of it, the movie is based on the true story of African American female mathematicians who helped NASA get its astronauts off the ground during the Space Race.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that I am about as much a mathematician as Florence Foster Jenkins was a singer. And yet, this movie grabbed me and wouldn’t let go, from beginning to end.

I especially liked Taraji P. Henson as Katherine Johnson, who calculated flight trajectories – where space capsules would go up and, most importantly, come down for Project Mercury and other missions.   

The year was 1961. The Russians had beaten America into space. And Jim Crow laws were firmly in place. Katherine becomes the first African American woman on the Space Task Group, and the first in the building, which has no bathrooms for non-white people.

This means that Katherine must dash about half a mile  to the nearest “Colored Bathroom,” taking an armload of books so she can keep up with her work while she does her business.

One day, after getting caught in a rainstorm during her bathroom run, she is confronted by her supervisor, Al Harrison, played by Kevin Costner. Harrison demands to know where she goes when she’s away from her desk, and Katherine, soaking wet from the rainstorm, angrily explains how far she has to go to use the colored people’s bathroom.

Harrison, totally oblivious of the bathroom restriction until now, abolishes the practice, using an ax to knock down the “Colored Bathroom” sign.

Octavia Spencer was nominated for an Oscar for her role as Dorothy Vaughan, and I suppose she deserved it. But if life were fair, Taraji P.  Henson would have gotten an Oscar nomination too. She deserved it more than Meryl Streep, a good singer in her own right who showed that she could sing off-key as Florence Foster Jenkins.

But if life were fair, we wouldn’t be saddled with an off-key president who seems hell-bent on destroying our republic. We desperately need some mathematicians to help us escape from this dangerous orbit we're in.

Or maybe, some brave congressmen who are willing to knock down the "Party First" sign for the sake of our nation.

Priming the pump

By Tom Walker

witsendmagazine 

 

R

ight off the top, I have to admit something: I know nothing about quantum mechanics. The mere mention of the term sends me cowering like a Neanderthal confronted for the first time with fire.

I only mention this because our president, Donald J. Trump, in an interview with The Economist magazine, claimed he coined the phrase, “prime the pump.” If true, this would be downright supernatural, since Merriam-Webster says the term has been around since the early 19^th century.

Priming the pump was something I did every day, working on my dad’s JV Bar Ranch in the desert hills north of Wickenburg, Ariz. Life was anything but easy on the JV Bar, where there was almost never enough feed or water to keep our scrawny herd of 350 mixed breed cattle alive.

Hand pump form of syphon

My job, from the time I was about 12, was to putter around the back roads of our ranch in our World War II vintage Jeep, pumping water from nearly dry wells for  our thirsty, bawling cows.

Some of those wells had gas-driven pumps on them. But a few worked the old-fashioned way, with syphons that had to be primed. I would lower a weighted bucket on a rope into the well, let it fill up with water, pull the bucket up and pour the water into a second bucket that emptied into a pipeline that ran a hundred yards or so downhill from the well into a trough.

And gravity did the rest. The flow from the pipeline created a vacuum that drew water out of the well and kept the life-giving stuff running to the cattle. Until the well ran dry, which it did often.

I

 bet Donald Trump has never driven a Jeep with no brakes or working starter  over ten miles of bumpy roads to prime the pump on a well that’s going to run dry before all his father’s cattle have had enough to drink. I’ll bet he doesn’t even know how to actually prime a pump.

But in a recent Washington Post story, Philip Bump sent me scurrying to Google with this nugget of a sentence: “President Trump’s conversations and statements and braggadocio,” he wrote, “all live in the same nebulous cloud encompassing all of those possibilities, a Schrödinger’s box in which the cat has no fixed state until you look inside — and even then you’re likely to be told that the very dead cat you’re holding is, in fact, alive.”

Wow. A real, maybe live, maybe dead Schrödinger’s cat inside a box. Whatever that is. But thanks to Google, I now know all about that box.

It is, in fact, not a box, but a thought experiment, sometimes described as a paradox. Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger devised it in 1935 to illustrate the problem of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics (Aaaeeeiiihhhh! Quantum mechanics!) applied to everyday objects. Schrödinger imagined a cat that may be simultaneously both alive and dead, a random subatomic event that may or may not occur.

All clear so far? Me neither.

Anyway, Schrödinger coined the term Verschränkung (entanglement) in the course of developing the thought experiment.

Trump probably won’t claim that he invented the term Verschränkung.  And now, with political winds whirling around him after the firing of FBI Director James Comey, he may be wishing  he’d never heard of the term  entanglement.

That’s OK, Mr. Trump. You can claim you invented the term “Presidential Pardon.”

I Trust Rachel Maddow

 I'm not a very trusting person.  It takes awhile for me to trust you, just so you know.  These days I'm more reluctant than ever to trust anyone and especially people who report the news even though our lives right now depend on the courage and honor of investigative reporters.  Since my brother, Tom Walker, retired from investigative reporting, there are two people I trust.  I trust Spencer Ackerman and I trust Rachel Maddow.  I might write more about Spencer later.  He is family.  Right now I want to write about Rachel Maddow and at the same time ask you to also trust her.  Why do I trust her?  For one reason she's smart and she's educated.  We desperately need people who are smart and educated.  Ms. Maddow received a bachelor’s degree in public policy from Stanford University. She earned her doctorate in political science at Oxford University, which she attended on a Rhodes Scholarship. She lives in New York City and Massachusetts with her partner, artist Susan Mikula.  Which brings me to a more personal reason of trust.  She is openly gay and that's not an easy thing to be when you are famous.  She also tells it like it is without a whole lot of bias or bull shit.  And she works hard.  Really hard.  We need the courage of investigative reporters.  We need their commitment to the story.  Let's not forget that the Nixon Presidency ended because of the courage of investigative reporters.  They, more than our elected folks, are our hope for this fragile republic.