Want Great Customer Service? Visit the Parking Authority

City employees are some of the most polite, cordial service workers I’ve dealt with in Philly. (Really!)

I often note—and sometimes write about—the lackluster quality of human interaction in this town, especially in service capacities. At a moment when service with a smile seems like a quaint vestige left over from those grand old times when people didn't whip out their phones in the middle of supper, I am generally satisfied if service comes with anything more than a grunt. People aren't trying to be rude or unfriendly, I don't think: They're simply not trying at all. There are, of course, exceptions to the new rule of less-is-more interaction, and the biggest surprise of all of these came to me recently, at jury duty. Obviously, I wasn't thrilled about fulfilling this particular civic duty—it's a pain to fall behind at work while you just sit (and sit and sit) waiting to be chosen or let go. I admit that when I got there, I was not trying to be my most courteous self, that I certainly did not walk in there with a smile. Nor did many of my fellow citizens. To my great surprise, though, every city employee—from the guy at the metal detector to the people handing out name tags to the woman who wrangled all us potential jurors into our appropriate courtrooms to the bailiff—was exceedingly polite to the unsmiling masses.

SXSW’s Homeless Hotspots Exploit Disenfranchised Americans

Marketing agency BBH claims altruistic reasons for using homeless people as wi-fi transmitters, but their cheeky T-shirts say otherwise.

South by Southwest's technology conference usually gets props as one of the cooler geek-fests in the country, but this year, most of the dispatches from Austin have been about been a marketing agency called BBH that decided to use homeless people as wireless transmitters. For $20 a day plus tips, each of the 13 “employees” carried Wi-Fi devices while wearing cheeky T-shirts: “I'm Christy, a 4G Hotspot.” The conference attendees, running around with their smartphones and tech toys would be encouraged to tip. Gross, right?

Beards Are Sexy (Especially When Jon Hamm Has One)

Science—yes, science!—says facial hair is unattractive. I beg to differ.

Yesterday, while preparing to write a blog about gun violence, I got distracted by this other very important headline: “Women REALLY Don't Like Beards”, which then led me to another link “Beards Get Respect, But Not Women, Study Finds.” Both articles referred to an experiment in which women shown pictures of men from New Zealand and Samoa with and without beards, and the women found the clean-shaven men “significantly more attractive”—no matter what their country. They did find, however, that beards lent a man a certain seriousness, an air of gravitas. “Good job focusing on important things, science,” one Gawker blogger commented. “This is why we don't have hover boards.”

America’s War on Women

Have politicians forgotten about the women’s rights movement?

I do not get all the vitriol aimed at women right now. Over the past couple months, I have fretted over the following things that, we have been assured, are not an attack on women: the idea that any religious institution thinks it should decide who can and cannot be insured when it comes to women’s birth control; the idea that Rick Santorum would like to stop insuring prenatal testing for women; the two state legislatures in this country that wanted to force women and their doctors into invasive and medically unnecessary procedures; the rabid attack on all of the many medical services Planned Parenthood provides; the United States Congressman who refused to allow even one woman to testify  in a Congressional hearing about birth control; and that Indiana legislator who insists that the Girl Scouts are a threat to American life as we know it.

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