A flash flood warning has been issued for New York City and the surrounding areas:

Now the flood was on the earth long enough to be annoying. The waters increased and lifted up the refuse piled along the curb, and it rose high above the earth. The waters prevailed and greatly increased on the streets, and the garbage moved about on the surface of the waters. And the waters prevailed exceedingly on the earth, and all the high hills under the whole heaven were covered, except in parts of Brooklyn, where the hills are higher still. The waters prevailed fifteen cubits or whatever upward, and the sidewalks were covered. And all flesh died that moved on the earth: birds and cats and squirrels and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, except the rats and the pigeons. All in whose nostrils was the breath of the spirit of life, all that was on the dry land, died. So She destroyed all living things which were on the face of the ground: both man and cat, and every creeping thing except rats and pigeons. They were destroyed from the earth. Only Noelle and those who were with her in the mildly tourist-y brunch spot remained alive. And the waters prevailed on New York City for a whole day or two.

by Awl Sponsors

The English Gentleman is on Leave. We see him prepare for his trip visiting the tailors of Savile Row and commissioning the bespoke pieces he will need before heading to Rio. The five pieces he will need are: a multi-pocket and versatile wool travel jacket, a lightweight Cool Wool dinner suit, wide leg Cool Wool trousers in the season’s bright colours, a navy blazer and a cream suit with patch pockets.

Find out more at Merino.com and Savile Row London.

Reasons to Weep

“You know what makes me want to cry? I think whoever the next Facebook is, why would you ever start that company here in the United States?” — Heather Bresch, the daughter of West Virginia senator Joe Manchin, and C.E.O. of the Pennsylvania-based pharmaceutical giant Mylar, who is “reluctantly” acquiring Abbott Laboratories in order to re-incorporate in the Netherlands where it will pay an eventual tax rate in the “high teens,” rather than the 25 percent it pays now.

Young people, it seems, “have totally incoherent political views” that “don’t make any sense.” How very Millennial.

For instance, “something interesting happens when Millennials start making serious dough. They start getting much more squeamish about giving it away.” Like “69 percent think the government should guarantee health insurance… 55 percent are ‘unwilling to pay more for health insurance in order to help provide coverage to the uninsured.’” Not at all like other, presumably older people.

I mean, “you get the sense, reading the Reason Foundation and Pew studies, that a savvy pollster could trick a young person into supporting basically any economic policy in the world with the right combination of triggers.” Not at all like older people, who totally understand the economy.

It’s like, “Millennials don’t know what socialism is, but they think it sounds nice.” This is not at all like the widespread American disdain for “socialism” in spite of its wide, ongoing support for Social Security and Medicare — because you might think that people don’t realize those are socialist programs.

To be clear, this is all toxic share waste, engineered for Olds to post on Facebook to show how silly The Kids are. (And I suspect that at least one of the people who wrote these pieces knows it!) Millennials are no more or less incoherent about their political beliefs than any other relatively arbitrary generational grouping of Americans clustered together largely for marketing purposes. The fundamental American political right is not to vote, but to be willfully contradictory in your core belief systems, often in the same breath. At worst, this shows that Millennials, if they weren’t a myth, will grow up to be the thing that they, and every other young generation, supposedly fears most — their parents.

Photo

Above is eight solid minutes of empathic pain. It is a recording of a calm, polite caller, Ryan Block, attempting to cancel his Comcast service. The representative, by the time the recording starts, already sounds angry: He demands, again and again and again, to know why Block is leaving Comcast for a smaller provider, to know what it is that he — that Comcast — can’t supply that this other company, this obviously objectively inferior company, this loser company, can. Just tell him what he did wrong, he says. Just explain to him. Just make him understand this stupid mistake.

The rep sounds, when he demands to be convinced of something that is both his company’s fault and none of his company’s business, like an abusive partner; that is how I interpreted this call, anyway, the first time I heard it. Judging by Twitter, where people are sharing similar experiences, many others did too. (One of the last times I dealt with a cable company, Time Warner, it was to try to reinstate an account and associated email address that had been removed for days because a young rep insisted there was “no other way” to transfer the decades-old account from my deceased father to his spouse, my mother; a few weeks later, moving apartments in New York, I realized that here, as at my family home, as at my last apartment, I had no other option but Time Warner, who I then called and have been paying ever since. That’s why people hate monopolies.)

But overnight my sympathies shifted: If you understand this call as a desperate interaction between two people, rather than a business transaction between a customer and a company, the pain is mutual. The customer service rep is trapped in an impossible position, in which any cancellation, even one he can’t control, will reflect poorly on his performance. By the time news of this lost customer reaches his supervisor, it will be data — it will be the wrong data, and it will likely be factored into a score, or a record, that is either directly or indirectly tied to his compensation or continued employment. It’s bad, very bad, for this rep to record a cancellation with no reason, or with a reason the script should theoretically be able to answer (the initial reasons given for canceling were evidently judged, by the script, as invalid). There are only a few boxes he can tick to start with, and even fewer that let him off the hook as a salesman living at the foot of a towering org chart. The rep had no choice but to try his hardest, to not give up, to make it so irritating and seemingly impossible to leave that Block might just give up and stay. The only thing he didn’t account for was the possibility the call would be recorded. Now he’s an internet sensation. The rep always loses.

@ryan as someone who works in a similar company, while that rep was excessively aggressive, we’re trained and held accountable to do that

— Fabian Cruz (@aguilo) July 15, 2014

What the rep really wanted, and what Block could have provided, was an excuse. Lie! Mention something about leaving town. That would have saved everyone time and energy, and given the rep the escape he needed from this particular circle of service industry hell. Two people trapped in a shitty situation, acknowledging how shitty it is and escaping in the least costly, least painful way possible.

Of course, it’s absurd that a company like Comcast is able to force two humans into combat like this in the first place. If you don’t take the existence of a near-monopoly company like Comcast for granted — and why should we? — the situation is as clear as can be: The rep didn’t abuse Block, and Block didn’t torture the rep. Comcast, the organization, is tormenting them both.

Comcast and Time Warner are in the process of merging in a paper-swap worth somewhere north of $40 billion. They are doing this to consolidate power, to consolidate assets, and to make the relationships like the one they once had with Block not just deep, but permanent. Comcast’s call script could not account for the possibility that a customer might choose to switch to another company that isn’t “number one,” as the rep repeated, out of distaste. A merger might fix that: It brings these companies one step closer to making sure there’s no number two.

I hope this tape gets played in front of Congress.

Update: You! Under the bus, now.

We are very embarrassed by the way our employee spoke with Mr. Block and are contacting him to personally apologize. The way in which our representative communicated with him is unacceptable and not consistent with how we train our customer service representatives. We are investigating this situation and will take quick action. While the overwhelming majority of our employees work very hard to do the right thing every day, we are using this very unfortunate experience to reinforce how important it is to always treat our customers with the utmost respect.

Believe it.

★★★ Sun emerged, or part-emerged, and dried out the dampened gray morning. The shade was bearable, but the open areas were distressing. It was hard to guess who among the pedestrians had been out exercising and who was just walking around in exercise wear, glazed with sweat. Scrawny ears of corn were packed in ice outside the supermarket. The sun slipped all the way around the thin remaining clouds and struck full in the face like an insult. The clouds recovered; the sky darkened. Then it brightened again, and as it brightened the rain started falling, fine and dense, with pale floating bits in it like snowflakes. Shadows sharpened and reflective surfaces gleamed, while the rain still fell. If there was a rainbow, it stayed out of sight behind the buildings on Broadway as the shower finally subsided to splatting drips. Again the clouds came back, again the sun returned, just in time to play havoc with the contrast on a video call. Then the clouds once more, the sunset few patches of bleached pink. Something black — a bat? — flittered back and forth across the dimming sky outside the window. The night air was thick and unliberating. People arrayed themselves on the sidewalk to eat their sour treats from the chain frozen-yogurt shop. Lightning pulsed in the distance. At bedtime, the storm hit with a smashing sound of rain, louder than the air conditioner, followed by lightning too bright for the blinds. The wind drew sounds from outside and inside the building at once, like breaths on a monstrous low-pitched harmonica.

Gorgeous song, gorgeous video, familiar sound, unfamiliar name.

by Hallie Bateman

Hallie Bateman publishes art here and words here.

by Brendan O’Connor

This post is sponsored by Citi. Learn more about the Citi®/AAdvantage® MasterCard at Citi.com/citiaadvantage.

The line to get into the Justin Timberlake show at Hammerstein Ballroom on Thursday was around the block when I arrived at 7:30. Some folks had slept out overnight to be able to stand in the front row. One woman told Justin this during a period of banter with the crowd. “You slept out overnight? To see me?” he asked charmingly, incredulously. “That’s crazy.”

The crowd was overwhelmingly — I estimated at least seventy percent — women, who seemed mostly to be in their twenties and thirties, with a smattering of teens. There were a lot of black cocktail dresses, which fit in nicely with the Big Band Plus Laser Lights aesthetic of the show. The DJ, warming up the crowd before Justin came on, expressed admiration for all of the men in the audience, gamely tagging along with their wives and girlfriends, as if a straight man can’t appreciate an all-around entertainer like Justin Timberlake of his own accord. Hmm.

It really was a show, and not just a concert — more than anything the evening felt like a really big party. A few songs in, a woman threw her panties onstage. “She threw her panties on the stage!” Justin laughed, as if this sort of thing never happens, ha ha, what the heck. He handed the panties delicately to one of his male backup singers, who threw them at the percussionist. Everyone was laughing. (Was the woman who threw her panties onstage laughing? We may never know.) The man knows how to work a crowd

Because my companion and I were designated “VIP MEDIA” — lol okay! — we were permitted access to the VIP area. The VIP area at Hammerstein ballroom, for this show, consisted of the lowest balcony, looking out over the dancefloor. In the VIP area, if you stand in place for a few seconds, people start bringing you food. Over the course of the night, I ate three sliders, two spring rolls, two empanadas, one edamame dumpling, one piece of toast carrying something slightly mushy but still delicious, one half of a chicken popsicle (would not recommend the chicken popsicle), one mini reuben, one small chocolate chip cookie, one lemon pastry thing, one raspberry pastry thing and one cheesecake popsicle that I was worried might have been a chicken popsicle in disguise, but was not, thank goodness.

There were also some celebrities. Laverne Cox was there, for example. “I touched her arm,” Billfold co-founder Logan Sachon told me. “I touched… her arm.” Meredith Viera and Katie Couric were there too. Cox, for the record, is an excellent dancer.

(At one point I thought I saw my thirteen-year-old cousin, and I texted her asking if she was at the concert, and she said yes, but it quickly turned out that she was just kidding, and then she made fun of me for being at a Justin Timberlake concert, so it remains unclear how cool Justin Timberlake is with teens, but then again not only is she really into the Beatles right now but her favorite is Ringo, so maybe she’s a bit off anyway.)

When the show was over we exited the VIP area and were handed bags of stuff. The stuff included a Justin Timberlake poster, a certificate for one thousand American Airlines AAdvantage miles, a pretty decent pair of in-ear headphones, a one-day pass to the American Airlines Admirals Club, and a box of Dermalogica products. “They sell this at Sephora,” Logan said, which I think means that it is good and/or expensive.

We were also invited to make Dermalogica MicroZone treatment appointments; one of the treatments is for Men’s Skin Fitness. “Make shave problems history,” the invitation reads. I wonder, does Justin get razor burn on his neck, too?