Brand Ex:P

Hard to believe this week's halfway over. Even stranger it feels that way because Sunday was a thoroughly busy day. The past two and change have been just as full, but with more than the usual amount of work related aggravation and a bit from the outside world.  There are some good stories to share, though, which I'll get to after the assorted whining.

Monday began a week but ended a month. I was pleased to have gotten well ahead of financial requirements, enough that I've been sending out payments, not only before they were due, but before the bill was even received. I cut the check for the office August rent, and even made a sizable payment toward our current year income taxes. All was good, until it somehow wasn't:

This wonderful experience, from over a month and a half ago, returned to kill much of my buzz from the weekend. To recap from back then:

I had  received the replacement money orders for two of the three bounced checks from a week or so ago. Took them to a freestanding M&T ATM on the drive back to my office. It’s one of those newfangled ones that let you deposit checks directly without an envelope or deposit slip. The two money orders went in. “Sorry, one of your checks cannot be deposited.“

I could still get to a branch before closing time, so I opted to “return all items.” And Mr. Money said, “I’m sorry, Ray, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” It spat back my card with a non-receipt receipt but not the money orders themselves, which fortunately and anally I had made copies of. I got to the nearest branch just before closing time, and they said it could’ve just been a glitch in the machine, or it could have been that the "money orders," from the "post office," could’ve triggered anti-fraud programming in the machine that would not let them return the evidence.

They immediately credited the amount of the mystery deposit pending investigation, the client is sending me the post office receipt for the payments, and the item numbers on the documents should be easy enough to trace.

You would've thought so, right? I certainly did. I thought the bank did, too. Turned out, the next day, they did credit me for the smaller of the two deposited items, so when I got a notice a few days later that they were reversing the "provisional credit" for that one, I completely agreed with them that they should not have given me the money twice. Yet I did expect they would have eventually found the other, larger mangled money order in their machine and realized the provisional credit for it was correct.

I never got a formal notification to that effect. Big mistake. Because on July 21, they snailmailed me a letter that I didn't get for ten days, until Monday of this week:

After thorough investigation, we have concluded that we issued the credit in error and we're taking "our money" back on August 1st.

As in the next day. Which, after all those proud advance payments hit, would have brought my account negative.  I immediately dropped everything, returned home to gather all the paperwork from the previous round, and went to the branch I use the most. One of their longtime tellers there has now been promoted to a platform and a desk, and we are as close to being friends as you can get with someone at a bank you owe money to. I made sure, when opening our current mortgage account with M&T and then getting a new business credit card, that she got the referral credit for it. I showed her all the prior paperwork- which included copies of the client's receipts from the Post Office for the money orders in question and her payment for them- and Mary immediately reinstated the credit. She also went through my entire account from the day of the dreaded deposit to the present, to see if she could identify why they "concluded" as they did. Her best guess is that I had deposited another client's check, in coincidentally the same amount, a few days after the Attack of the Money Eating ATM, and they thought that was the same one. She annotated the record to tell them it was not, nor was any other deposit after that. So I'm good for now, and this time I'm going to try to keep a cushion of at least that amount in there until I get final written confirmation, Yes, Ray, You Were Right And We Were Wrong And "Our Money" Has Been "YOUR Money" All Along.

It was one of a few times recently that I've resorted to dealing with an issue through in-person contact that emails and calls just won't work for. Back on July 21, the same day the bank issued their stupid delayed letter, I filed a new case in Rochester. It's a state court case that we file through an Albany-based computer system, but the formal receipts of the documents and payments go through the local county clerks' offices. By late last week, I had not received signed papers back on it, and someone on the court end called to say, sorry, not our fault, the county clerk needs to do something first. I tried emailing a contact in the county clerk's office without response, and I knew calling them would get me stuck in an endless tree of voicemail messages and "our menu options have changed" crap, so I just took the extra 10 minutes to find the human being face to face, who instantly got done what we needed done.

Who knew technology wasn't as great as everybody thinks it is?

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Certainly Elon Musk hasn't figured that out.  He's been busy the past week or so doing more to damage his $44 billion toy than I would have thought imaginable.

There's this whole business of re-branding Twitter with his favorite letter, X.  It has replaced the blue bird on the site's main page and on its San Fran deadquarters (typo but I'm keeping it) building. He got in one speck of trouble with local authorities for removing the old logo without a permit, then pissed off half the state by putting a giant throbbing X atop the building, blinding neighbors in adjacent apartments.

It's been taken down, as has most of the company's advertising.

But the weirdest change?  The site's most lasting contribution to the world in its teenage life- turning "tweet" into a verb- has been removed. Tweets and Re-tweets are now plain old Posts and Re-Posts. It can take decades for a commercial product to get that level of acceptance into the common speakers of a language, but his own ego and obsessiveness with a logo is turning it all into

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Closer to home, we have another case of Brand Fail going on.

Several friends of mine work at the NPR/PBS stations based in Rochester. Their original WXXI-AM, FM and TV channels have been added to over the years, and the brand now also includes radio stations in Ithaca, Geneva and Houghton; ownership of the once-weekly alt news publication City Newpaper, now an online updated site with a monthly paper City Magazine; and the historic East End Little Theatre with its associated additional screens and cafe.  Some years ago, they also did a quasi-merger with the University of Rochester's radio station WRUR-FM, to expand their music offerings beyond the classical fare on their original WXXI-FM station.  They simulcast the two major NPR news shows, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, on WRUR, but until recently the rest of their broadcast day was music. From 9 a.m.'s opening chords of their local Open Tunings program, through NPR's World Cafe and other local and syndicated programming in the evenings and weekends, WRUR became my main source for listening in the car and at my desk through the magic of streaming via my phone.  The lineup changed a bit a few years ago when they began simulcasting Connections, a public affairs news show from their AM station, on WRUR at lunchtime, but you could switch to the Ithaca affiiate on the app to still hear music on The All-Weather Lunch until it was Cafe time at 2.

The music on WRUR-FM and WITH-FM were branded as "Different Radio," and it was. More eclectic than any commercial format, and minus the advertising  that would break into even the better choices on commercial Rochester and Buffalo stations I could get on my car radio.  There was also nothing like it coming out of the public radio choices closer to home: the PBS-branded WNED sold its AM station to a Jesus network, kept the FM for classical, and when it outright bought UB's public station WBFO, almost completely stripped music programming of any kind from it except a few off-hour programs.

Now, though, the dynamics are changing.  WNED brought in a new CEO recently, with a background in more modern music than the bluehair choices on Classical 94.5, and he launched a sub-channel of WBFO called "The Bridge," branded as "College Radio for Adults," that is slowly gaining my listening time. They play local artists including a number of friends; they've started a weekend show spotlighting local performers from Buffalo to Toronto; and their original pre-loaded content is now being supplemented with their first fulltime "air personality," a voice known among alt-music lovers from other local formats.

Back in Rochester, though, changes are also happening, and not necessarily for the better.   Back when we last lived there almost 30 years ago, we often listened to a station branded as "North Coast Radio." They played largely contemporary jazz music, but other genres weren't entirely off limits. A friend previously from other stations named Eric was their morning voice when we moved here; those days didn't have streaming radio, and the signal didn't carry, so we lost touch with WJZR after that.....

until recently, when their longtime owner decided to retire and, in a combined sale and donation, gave the license and the rest of the station's assets to the WXXI public radio conglomerate.  That set a number of changes in motion, which largely hit the transmitters, and the fans, earlier this week.

First to change was the official "call sign" of the classical FM station, their original frequency from the creation of the stations, WXXI-FM was now WXXO-FM.  That may not seem much to you, but it came as quite a shock to the blue-haired biddies listening to their Shostacovich down at midweek bingo. Combine that with the coincidentally timed retirement of their longtime midday classical host (and not-so-longtime friend of mine) Julia, and my there was a Whole Lotta Shakin Of Canes goin on!

The plan, as now implemented, was to move the WXXI-FM letters over to their newly acquired frequency on 105.9, where all the AM talk programs, from NPR and local origination, would be moved. Back on WRUR, the morning music would remain live and local as it had been from 9 to noon, World Cafe's prerecorded program would slide into the 12-2 hour, and then the rest of the afternoon where it and All Things Considered had been would now be a new music program hosted live by the station's new music director.

Morning Edition is remaining on the music station for now. Probably because if they changed too much at once, a crack in the earth would form and swallow everything.

I tuned in after Open Tunings ended Monday, to hear how this all was going. That's when I discovered that their longtime two-station music branding of "Different Radio" was no more. They were now calling it "The Root."

Mmmmmkay. I get it. SOME of what they play is referred to as "roots music." Might confuse people who think it's sports talk, but I'll go with it. Until I saw the actual description  of it on the app:



No, Ray, not the Root, the ROUTE!

Further research revealed what they're up to:




Never mind that there's no Interstate between Rochester and Ithaca (or between anywhere and Ithaca). Set aside the first rule of branding, which is, Don't use something people are going to misspell or misunderstand.  Go with it.

I'm ignoring it. From the comments on their Facebook, that's among the milder reactions. We'll see if they blink before Musk finally finishes sending his toy down the shitter completely.

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I did say I'd end with some happier things. Here's that, or those, if you consider schadenfreude to be happy;)

An East Meadow longtime friend, who I met through his Star Trek stories, has also been writing a series with a Western motif.  The second has now been published, and he'd told me that a mutual mentor of ours would be included in the book. It didn't take long to find him:

Later on, "Alberto Palazzo" makes an appearance in the novel itself as a traveling mystical magician.  I haven't gotten to that yet but am looking forward.

As for the other part, that's what the Germans would call Streisandschadenfreude. Streisand, as in the "effect" of that name, in which someone tries to prevent something from becoming popular or well-known and instead succeeds in making it more so.

For this, we go to the unfamiliar-to-me world of Christian-rock music.  Apparently there's a well known performer in that genre named Derek Webb. He recorded a song with a drag queen whose nom de draggue is "Flamy Grant."  The MAGAs weren't pleased. One of their loudest mouths called Webb out in a tweet, an X, whatever they are.  Christian America heard about it, asked "What Would Jesus Do?, and answered decisively:

After Feucht’s tweet, Flamy was determined to make the most of the situation and especially prove his follow-up assertion — that “hardly anyone listens or cares what you do” — wrong. So she headed to TikTok and encouraged fans to stream “Good Day.” If they could just crack the Apple Music Christian music charts, it’d be a success. They not only achieved that, but on July 27, “Good Day” and Bible Belt Baby both hit Number One on the Christian songs and albums charts, respectively. Bible Belt Baby even rose as high as Number 48 on Apple’s album chart for all genres last Thursday.

I guess someone IS still reading the shit on Twitter, huh.