Countries Beginning with I

I recently ran across a reference to a forthcoming new book, “Getting Out: Your Guide to Leaving America,” by Mark Ehrman. Here’s the blurb for it from Amazon:

Had enough?

Whether you find the government oppressive, the economy spiraling out of control, or if you simply want adventure, you’re not alone. In increasing numbers, the idea is talked about openly: Expatriate.

Over three hundred thousand Americans emigrate each year, and more than a million go to foreign lands for lengthy stays.

…Getting Out shows you where you can most easily gain residence, citizenship, or work permits; where can you live for a fraction of the cost of where you’re living now; and what countries would be most compatible with your lifestyle, gender, age, or political beliefs.

So if you’ve had enough of what they’re selling here and want to take your life elsewhere – well, isn’t that the American way? At any rate, it’s not illegal. Not yet, anyway.

I have not and probably won’t read this book, so can’t vouch for its usefulness, accuracy, etc. But it’s highly interesting that it is being published (and marketed in this way), and I will be curious to see how well it sells.

Not surprisingly, many people write to me because they’ve found my website while searching for information about how to move to Italy. A largeish proportion of these, and others who share their goal, phrase it in exactly those terms: “I want to get out of America.”

You may think: “Who cares? They may be wanting to get out, but there are tens of millions of immigrants wanting to get IN.”

Yes, but… Those trying to get in are mostly economic migrants, for whom America is still the land of opportunity – or at least a lot more opportunity than where they came from. Even minimum wage and no health care at Wal-Mart looks better than starvation.

But the people looking to get OUT of America are most often liberal intellectuals, educated people who have much to give their country, but find themselves increasingly troubled by what America seems to be losing: freedom, dignity, tolerance, righteousness (as opposed to self-righteousness – got plenty o’ that).

I am already expatriated, but in the last few years, I’ve had several moments in which I thought of renouncing my American citizenship. Abu Ghraib was the first: an America that tortures is not the America I thought I knew. (And now: go ahead – it’s legal!) The second moment was Hurricane Katrina. An America that can leave thousands of its own people to die in squalor and think it’s doing a good job – that’s not the America I loved.

And now habeas corpus is effectively suspended. On any visit to America, my (non-citizen) husband could be thrown into prison on the government’s whim, for any or no reason, and held without trial, even tortured, indefinitely. It could even happen to me, a regular US citizen.

I could turn a blind eye – my family don’t have Muslim names or brown skins, surely we’re safe? But I have friends with both brown skins and Muslim names. What happens to them, happens to me. And what’s happening now should not happen to anybody. In civilized countries, even terrorists get trials. Hell, even in Iraq, Saddam bloody Hussein is having a trial with a lawyer for his defense. How can America – ostensibly bringing the fruits of democracy to Iraq – do less?

Something is seriously broken in America. No wonder that many “native Americans” are thinking about getting out.

Your thoughts?

Someone anonymous claiming to be an Apple employee launched a blog to discuss his/her thoughts on Apple’s communications with its customers. This was big news in the blogosphere, because Apple is notoriously secretive and uncommunicative.

The only Apple product I own is an iPod (I had a Mac SE 15 years ago, my first and last Macintosh), but I have read the few entries on this new blog, and the accompanying reader comments.

Many of the commenters decry the blogger’s anonymity, some saying that it proves that the blog is a fake perpetrated by Apple itself as a publicity stunt. Some blogs have recently come to light claiming to be produced by individuals who “just happen” to love a company or its products so much that they would dedicate time to blogging about it, but these blogs turned out to be funded by the companies in question (e.g., Wal-Mart). Such subterfuge cannot long remain hidden in the teeming online world: when thousands of minds attack a puzzle such as “who’s really behind this blog?”, it gets solved very quickly.

The Apple blogger him/herself points out, reasonably enough, that to be identified by the company could cause her to lose her job (most of the commenters seem to assume the “Masked Blogger” is a man, while I, for no particular reason, think she’s a woman).

The Masked Blogger’s avowed purpose is to start a conversation about what Apple could be doing to communicate better with its customers. She’s asking the right questions, and some of the answers are useful. It therefore doesn’t matter whether the blog is genuine, because Apple is reading it. Whether they read it to see how their PR experiment works out, or to try to identify their rogue employee, the conversation about conversation is taking place – and Apple, volente o nolente*, is listening.

Whether they will learn anything is another question. It surprises me that this conversation is still needed. All the “new wisdom” floating around the blogosphere about how companies should communicate with their customers (the current vogue, of course, is that they should use blogs) follows principles that I invented for myself over ten years ago, starting in CompuServe forums (yes, I am a geek antique).

You want to communicate with your customers online? It’s not rocket science.

The basic principles are:

1. Be honest. This doesn’t mean that you need to spill your guts and tell every company secret, but everything you do say must be absolutely true. And, when you know there’s a problem that affects customers, say so, especially if asked point-blank. Don’t imagine that you can pretend ignorance, or hide behind spin and subterfuge – you can’t.
2. Be real. Not every problem is going to get fixed quickly and not every customer is going to be happy, no matter what you do. If you explain what steps are being taken and how soon you (reasonably) expect them to take effect, customers are surprisingly forgiving. Just showing that you’re listening and trying to help is a huge first step that most customers will love you for. Sometimes you can’t fix a particular problem; not everything customers say they want is even possible. When I worked for Adaptec/Roxio, I frequently used the line: “Fast, cheap, or perfect – pick two.” Customers are not stupid; most understand that businesses have constraints, and cannot supply everything for nothing. If you can give a reasonable explanation for why you can’t do what they’re demanding, or can’t do it as fast as they would like, they get it. And they appreciate being spoken to like capable adults. Weasel-speak only shows contempt for your listener; no one likes that.
3. Be yourself. Perhaps because I started out “talking” to people personally in forums (and never wrote marketing copy for a living), it always came naturally to me to write in my own voice. I was surprised at how well people responded to this, telling me: “we, as customers of Roxio, like the feeling that we are dealing with a real person, not a machine producing corporate ‘happytalk’.” NB: This did not mean that they wanted to hear about my vacations or what I ate for lunch or my views on politics, nor did it mean that I could tell someone he was an idiot even when I thought so – I represented the company and, when you do that, you ALWAYS have to be polite. (I confess that I did on a very few occasions succumb to the temptation of a little sly sarcasm… This was a bad idea: sarcasm online usually backfires, and even mild irony gets over-interpreted.)
4. Be strong. It’s a hard job, representing a company online. You’re out there and highly visible: when the shit hits the fan, you’re the first to get spattered. Because people are accustomed to being treated badly by every other company they deal with, their default assumption is that you, too, are out to screw them, that your niceness is just a ploy, it’s all a PR stunt, etc.NB: OF COURSE it’s a PR stunt – everything that you do in the name of your company where a customer can “see” you is marketing and PR (whether you – or your company – realize it). Every employee in any company who ever has contact with a customer has a chance to make or break the company’s reputation – maybe just with that one customer, maybe with many who will hear by word of mouth how happy or unhappy that one customer was with how he was treated. What is that if not PR?Be prepared for suspicion and abuse (some of it personal). Just keep smiling, and nice them to death. The trolls get bored when they don’t succeed in eliciting a reaction, and they are a small minority, no matter how loud. The silent majority will respect your patience, good manners, and tolerance. In fact, if you hold out long enough, they will start leaping to defend you!
5. Believe. Being nice under duress does take a psychic toll, so you’d better be doing it for a company, product, or cause that you believe in. And it’s fine to defend your belief passionately: people respond to passion, even if they don’t necessarily agree with you on its target.

Okay, I’ve told you everything you need to know. Now get out there and talk to your customers!

Similar thoughts from the Scobleizer

This is often a low time of year for me. The days are getting shorter and colder; I wake up in darkness, leave the house in twilight, and by the time I get home it’s dark again. This is hard on my tropical psyche.

And October 25th is the birthday of Nancy, my ex-stepmother. She’ll be 54 this week – only ten years, one month, and three days older than I am. We even looked alike, with straight blonde hair and glasses, which used to confused people no end, especially because I referred to her proudly as my mother, when she barely looked old enough to be my sister. People would stare at us in shock and confusion. “She’s very well preserved for her age,” I would say haughtily.

Nancy officially became my stepmother when she married my dad in 1974. The ceremony included a part for me: we all vowed that we would stay together as a family, forever and ever. You believe stuff like that when you’re a kid, especially when you’ve lost your original family, and desperately need to believe that families can be rebuilt.

In spite of her youth and her own problems, Nancy was a good mother to me, and some parts of my character today clearly came from her. She had raw courage, bordering on recklessness, which probably helped me out of my childhood shyness. She was young at the height of the hippie era, and imbibed to the full that period’s attitudes towards sex. “Open” marriage in the long run didn’t work out for them, but, short of that extreme, sexual liberation was a good thing, and I’m glad I grew up believing that sex was natural and fun and good, not something dirty or shameful. (It’s odd to consider that, had Nancy had her own child, say around 1975, her attitude might have been different by the time that child reached puberty: neo-conservatism came into vogue in the early ‘80s, and AIDS was hitting the headlines by 1986.)

Indirectly, Nancy taught me how to cook. Her parents, who had immigrated from Czechoslovakia after WWII, ran a restaurant on Pittsburgh’s South Side, and Nancy, having learned from them, was an amazing cook. I never actually helped out in the kitchen (I don’t remember if she never asked or I never offered), but I sat on the counter and watched her for hours. She never consulted a cookbook; she just knew what went together, and somehow, by watching her, I learned as well.

Far less willingly, I also learned to clean house. I had my chores (washing dishes especially), but Nancy was a housecleaning fanatic. During one mercifully brief period when my father lost his job and Nancy had to work full-time at a delicatessen, it was my job to clean the house when I came home from school – this included vacuuming EVERY DAY. I still remember part of the instructions she wrote out for me: “Start dusting from the top and work your way down. If I have to explain why, I can’t teach you anything.”

Nancy trained as an English teacher, but I don’t remember her ever actually teaching after her teacher training. When we moved to Bangladesh in 1976, where my dad worked for Save the Children, she reinvented herself as a specialist in “appropriate technology,” and was able to continue working in that field in Thailand and Indonesia, following (and later leading) my dad’s job changes.

I last saw Nancy in early 1985, in my own apartment in Austin where she and my dad had come to visit and supposedly make a last-ditch effort to put their marriage back together. Yes, it was real fun having that going on in my house. And it didn’t work. Nancy left, and that was the last I ever saw of her, though at the time I had no inkling that that would be the case. Our relationship was already strained; she had withdrawn from me as she had withdrawn from my father.

Nancy went on to do a nine-month master’s in international development at the School for International Training in Vermont. I got a few brief, strange letters from her during this period, while I was on my own study abroad year in Benares.

By the time I was leaving Benares, she was working for the UN High Commission for Refugees in Peshawar, Pakistan. There was a grim irony in this: her parents had hated my father for taking her away to all those “dangerous” places (Bangladesh, Thailand and Indonesia). But it was Nancy who chose – entirely on her own – to go to Peshawar, then and now one of the most dangerous places on earth! (It was probably al Qaeda HQ back then, before anyone had ever heard of al Qaeda, and there were almost daily bombs in the marketplace.) I offered to visit her there on my way out of India, but she said it was too dangerous.

I never spoke to her again, either. My dad referred gossip from the international grapevine that she had married a Turk who was high up in the UNHCR, and possibly had converted to Islam (her parents – devout Catholics – would have loved that!). Once when I was visiting Enrico in New Haven I got a garbled phone message from my dad saying that Nancy was in Pittsburgh and I could call at so-and-so number. I was thrilled, thinking this meant that she had actually been looking for me. I called. Nancy’s dad answered and, clearly lying through his teeth, claimed that Nancy was not there and had not even visited recently. “Well,” I said brokenly, “whenever you hear from her, tell her I called.”

I assumed that Nancy’s new husband might not know she had previously been married and had a stepchild, or that at least she might not like to rub his nose in it. But I couldn’t understand why someone as brave as Nancy couldn’t find a way to communicate with me if she really wanted to.

Sometime in the mid-90s, Enrico, Rossella, and I visited Pittsburgh, on a whim – I hadn’t been there in years, and remembered the city fondly. We had dinner with old family friends who happened to live only a couple of blocks from the house where Nancy’s parents had retired.

“What do you hear from Nancy?” Roz asked me.

“I don’t hear from her. I haven’t heard from her in years,” I said.

“Well, that’s odd. She comes on home leave about once a year to visit her parents, and always drops by for tea with us. And she speaks very fondly of you.”

I must have gone white with shock. I felt as though someone had punched me in the stomach. I stumbled through the rest of the meal and conversation, then, when we went back to our hotel, I sat in the bathtub and cried. I was trying to run the water hard enough so that Rossella (then about five years old) wouldn’t hear me and get scared, but she heard, and was frightened and utterly bewildered as to what could have upset me so much. I couldn’t understand – and still can’t – how Nancy could remember me fondly and speak of me to others, but would not speak TO me.

The next morning I looked up her sister’s number in the phone book and called. The phone was answered by one of Elaine’s teenage daughers (whom I had never met).

“May I speak to Elaine?” I asked

“Yes, I’ll get her. May I tell her who’s calling?”

“Deirdré.”

There was a pause and a whispered conversation on the other end, then the girl came back on. “She’s busy right now, can she call you later?” I gave her the hotel number, though I knew it was useless. Elaine never called.

Rumor has it that Nancy has been living in Geneva for quite some time now, where her Turkish husband works at UNHCR headquarters. Geneva is not far from Milan, and, even before the advent of Google, Nancy could easily have found me. But she never has. I have a recurring fantasy that I’ll run into her in an airport somewhere, sometime. If that ever happened, I don’t know whether I would hug her or punch her.