SFS Scorecard: 1-1. A loss and a win

or two wins, depending on how you look at it

Feb 02, 2024

Let's start with the bad news. Like I mentioned last post , part of my Screen Free Sunday plan is the children's book Look UP, Japan! I was all set for a road trip with the kids, where we'd get the storyboard, camera angles and framing all set up for the real shoots with local children. I knew my return date to the US was a bit uncertain, depending on developments here in Japan, so when I bought the ticket on Expedia, I just paid the extra fee and got a “no fee for ticket change” type ticket.

Well, that didn't pan out- they wouldn't let me change the ticket and extend my stay here in Japan. Sorry kids, road trip cancelled (or significantly abbreviated); sorry children's book; sorry SFS movement. I was briefly perturbed by this, but as father Spyridon Bailey would say, we should be wary of our thoughts and be cognizant of a false sense of anger or injustice. I didn’t want to get angry at the low-paid customer-service babu trying to help me (or sluff me off as per his job requirements).

And as Mr. Chapter and Verse, Pastor John would say, “Well, two things come to mind. Somebody read Romans 8:28. I just love Romans! Who has the verse?”

-And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good.

And then the pastor will say, “Thank you, Larry. Now who can read 1st Thessalonians, 6:18? No, 5:18. I’m pretty sure it’s 5:18.”

-Give thanks in all circumstances.

-Thank you, Ed.

Then pastor John scans the congregation and says, “Now, what does Paul say? In which circumstances should we give thanks?”

And if you are new to his church, you are thinking, “How am I supposed to answer this? The question is too easy. It must be rhetorical, or maybe he's looking for something beyond the obvious. Wait, maybe he said something beforehand that I should have picked up. (Darnit I should have been paying better attention and not wondering if it's snowing behind those venetian blinds and whether I'm going to have to scrape the windows again after church.) Then the nagging silence is broken and you are off the hook as one of the regulars in the congregation says, “All circumstances.” and then you say to yourself, “All circumstances? What..oh right, Give thanks in all circumstances.” Then you start thinking, “Why such an easy question? It's like saying, 'I'm going to play tennis in the afternoon. What am I going to do in the afternoon?' Huh? This is a question I would ask my beginner-level jr. high English students in Japan.”

Precisely! To make sure they are listening, thinking and learning! The congregation at Pastor Jim's church is no more off the hook when it comes to the requirement that they pay attention than my early-teen students. You might say, “But that's exhausting. Church isn't school. You're not supposed to participate, for goodness sakes; just sit there and pretend to listen!”

But The Good News Fellowship is interactive, and Pastor John is making sure your brain isn't away in La La Land, like the guy in that old Chick Publishing tract you were handed at the air show who fidgets in the pew on Sunday, thinking about the ball game, and his fate is in jeopardy!

The Pastor does a good job of mixing it up, though. Some questions are softballs like the one above, and some require a brain and a little (or a lot of) scriptural knowledge, but you can leave those to the pros among the congregation (and the Fellowship has plenty of 'em, heh).

So why didn't Expedia let me change my changeable-for-no-fee ticket?

It took me four+ hours of my morning yesterday to try to get to the bottom of that question.

Yes, four hours on a customer service merry-go-round from Hades with ChatBot, Kaori, Zul, ChatBot again, Marwan, Muskar and Stephenjohn. In summary, (and consider that each bullet point below averaged about an hour)

I went to the Expedia site to change the return date on my ticket. Stephenjohn (no, not Swedish) said call Japan airlines. I said are you sure it's JAL, 'cause this is a codeshare ticket with American.
After a geological era’s worth of Muzak, Kaori at JAL said you are booked with American Airlines so call them.
Zul at AA said I can't change my unchangeable, bargain ticket. I thanked him though, for using his real name.
Marwan back at Expedia said the ticket is unchangeable 'cause you already used a portion of it (the outbound flight). I say, “Marwan, is this unusual and am I the only traveler in the world to be confused by this, because it sure seemed I could change the date of the flight when I bought the ticket.” Marwan says it's not unusual, you’re not the only one, and it happens often. Very sorry for the confusion.
Muskan in the 'escalations' department repeats what Marwan said. I say fine, show me where it says I can't change the ticket. We go in circles for over an hour and he never shows me the rule, never quotes it, or cuts and pastes it, or links me to it. I give up.

The heck with it. I'll cut the road trip with kids short and come back the same day as previously planned. Whateva. God has a plan!

I might feel compelled later to go into detail with the insanity of my information-gathering efforts with the customer-service posse yesterday; there is some funny stuff, but I'll leave it for now.

The moral of this story, and herein lies the possible win, is that I'm going to stop using Expedia and to the extent I can afford it, get my tickets from a real person who speaks my language, or my wife's language at least. When I get Kyle's ticket to Seattle, I'm gonna go to the travel agency down at the station and sit across from a human, not talk to a bot or suffer through confusion with Winkin, Blinken and Achmad.

It's like my phone service down in the Bitterroot- I could set myself up on a website and activate auto-pay and save myself the trouble, but I choose to stop at the phone store once a month, walk in, greet the salesclerks and pay my bill in cash. I have a friend in Stevensville who never uses Amazon. “I know. It costs me more but dangit, stores are closing everywhere and anyway I want to buy from a person!”

The other day Kyle and I had to go to a public office to check on our money in the Japan retirement system. After about a half hour with pleasant Miss Miura, Kyle said, “That was about a thousand times better than trying to do this online.”

So this unpleasantness with the Expedia middle-eastern agents, whom incidentally I don't fault for working such a job, causes me to double my efforts to keep things real and try to fight back against the digitalization of life. Let's see what happens and hopefully we'll be calling it a win.

Yesterday evening the kids were lounging around after dinner, just shooting the breeze and I said, “Hey, anybody want to play cards?”

They all stopped and looked at each other. A tense moment for me. I needed four players for my ploy and there were three kids in the room; one “nahh” and all would be lost.

Lyndi said, “Yeah. I'll play.”

I looked at Andy. “Uhmmm. I guess.”

Then Kyle. Come on, Kyle! “Uhhhh. What are we gonna play?”

Do I start with something easy? A sugar-coated game of luck like hearts?

Lyndi said, “Let's play cribbage.”

“You can't play cribbage with four,” I said. Maybe you can but I've never heard of it, and I was angling toward something else.

“I thought we might play a little bridge.”

a little bridge. Heh. That's like saying, how 'bout a quick round of tournament cricket? You know, that Bri-ish game they play for 5 straight days under the Calcutta sun.

I got them all to agree to a game, grabbed a couple poker decks, the green mah-jong mat, four pencils and paper for everyone, and sat the kids down. I knew I had to play this deftly. I've been learning bridge the Thursday night at the senior center way: Methodically, extensively, comprehensively, covering all the aspects and spending plenty of time on each- this week we'll cover counting points, next week scoring, the following week opening bids, then bridge conventions, yada yada. It was all good stuff but hey, I've got two teens and two barely over twenty here; they're not going for that. I've got to cram it all into less than an hour and get to playing cards or I'll lose 'em. I'll have to rely on the ol' やれば分かるよう(yarebawakaruyo*- Hey just play it and you'll learn) approach.

[*but if you come here to my neck of the woods, try yarebawakaruraa, the Enshu-dialect version, and you'll turn a few heads.]

“It's a partner game. You team up against the other two.”

That piqued their interest. I would be South/North with Andy, and Lyndi E/W with Kyle. That arrangement made sense. Here's why:

Lyndi said, “Do you have to bluff in this game?”

I have taught them (no-money) poker and except for Andy, they are lukewarm at best toward that game. There's no getting around it, you are a sitting duck if you can't bluff in poker. If Andy's playing poker, he can't resist the bluff. Kind of like if he's playing hearts, you know he's gonna shoot the moon.

“No,” I said, “There's none of that in bridge; it's straight forward.”

“Good,” said Lyndi. “I don't like that part about poker. It's hard to lie about my cards!”

“In fact,” I said, “you can't misrepresent your hand at all in bridge. It's against the rules.”

-Good!

Kyle was also pleased it wasn't like poker. He's the one kid who will wait at an empty, quiet crosswalk for the walk light to turn green, and not a car in sight. And he'll let me know if I forgot to use the blinkers coming out of a parking lot. Then there's Roy, downstairs studying for his university exams. Incapable of the clever prevarication, he would also appreciate the straight-forward nature of bridge.

I-love-poker Andy, however, was less excited about this prim and proper aspect of the game. He shares with me the love of the bluff. The license to lie to siblings during a friendly game of cards is just irresistible to him. And come to think of it, there's another character trait he shares with me; Andy can put on the act and play the clown pretty easily. If I say, “OK everyone, goofy picture time!” Andy eschews the default stick-your-tongue-out haha face and has no trouble putting on a bizarre, where'd that come from mug that'll be a gut buster when everyone checks out the photo on the, ehem, smart phone. At least Lyndi and Kyle are able to manage the classic Shumway no-smile smile I taught them, but Roy, with so much Japanese in him, is the paragon of picture-posing discomfort if he's asked to be intentionally weird.

no-smile smile series

You think that’s good? You should see Andy’s no-smile smile. He has it down.

The kids were quick to learn point counting, scoring and the very basics of bidding and we played just one cards-face-up sample round before getting down to business. Of course -Murphy's law- I dealt myself a monster hand for the practice round.

Their Japanese-education-system minds all appreciated the rigorous adherence to certain bidding rules:

Open the bidding if you have a 13-point or better hand.
Respond to a partner's opening with 6 points or more.
Don't count distributional points if you're going for a no-trump bid.
etc.

I told them that Sandy, my teacher back in the Bitterroot, considered the bidding process even more important than actual play. “That's good for me,” I said, “because I can't remember cards that have been played. Not remembering cards in bridge is about as bad as not being able to bluff in poker.”

Kyle shook his head with a frown and said, “I can't remember either! How are you supposed to remember?”

-I always ask that question too, Kyle. And Sandy always “You'll get it!” She says, “You just have to build your bridge muscles.”

Kyle didn't looked convinced. I said, “I was skeptical too but then ol' Bob, the helper at our table, said, “Start with trump. Just keep a count of how many trumps have gone by, and then calculate how many are in your opponents’s hands.” He showed me how to do it and it was easy. One suit down, three to go!

-You gotta remember all the cards in each suit?!

-No, I'm kidding about the other suits. Only the hot shots, like 94-year old Carlotta at my mom's retirement home, can do that. But definitely most good bridge players know exactly how many trumps are left, and have a good idea of which quality cards have already been played.

I showed the kids how to keep track of trumps, and said, “For now, in addition to that just keep track of the aces that have been played. It won't be hard. Then you add kings. That'll really help. If you know the ace and king have been played, you can look at your queen and say, 'OK, my queen is good.'”

On one hand where I was declarer in a spade trump round Lyndi sees me lead a heart and everyone except me (because I stopped thinking) knows she's voided in hearts because two hands ago she had to play the QH and lose it to the ace on the board which means now she can just sluff (or ruff in bridge) a low trump spade against my precious king and take the trick. She looks at my card and doesn't even wonder if there's some slick angle to my lead; she knows it's just a typical ol' man Shumway brain fart. As she hesitates with a Pops, do you realize what you're doing? look on her face, I snap out of it and say, in Homer-Simpsonly fashion, “dow! You're gonna trump that king, aren't you!”

Now that question was definitely rhetorical and all three of my kids at the table busted up laughing at my dumb error. Lyndi smiled and shook her head.

-Hey, I never said I was a pro, here!

They kept laughing. “Kyle,” I said, “Who was the fastest 400 meter kid at your jr. high school?”

-Probably Hiroki Suzuki.

-Was he faster than the track coach?

-Oh yeah, easily.

That's my point, kids! The teacher doesn't have to run the fastest or be the best. My job here is to instruct. Got it?!

I guess that was rhetorical too as nobody answered.

Touche-I showed 'em!

I ought to write a bridge column. Maybe the audio version will be a regular feature of BBR.

Well, I'm not going to bore you with more table anecdotes from a round of rank-beginner's bridge, but suffice to say, the game was a success. Three hours of family fun without internet, phone calls, texts, TV in the background, or screens of any sort. And afterward Lyndi said, “I think I might start a bridge club at the university.”

Now that's a Screen-Free Sunday win!

DW Shumway

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