Procrusteanization

Today's Title is Inspired By Yesterday's Title, via Verizon

I don't pretend Procrusteanization is a real word, but conceptually it's as big a problem as the original Greek guy* caused for his visitors. For the fourth time this week alone, I sustained an email from Verizon, one of my communications providers. (They used to be telephone companies.) The email inveighed against my "limited" phone "plan" and suggested that I needed an "Unlimited business plan." Missing from the email was personalization: What am I paying now, how much would I pay for removing the limits? There were ways to find out, but I would have to do research. The fact that they sent me four emails kind of hints that I didn't undertake any research tasks on receiving their previous exhortations.

No, I haven't forgotten that I've previously whined about Verizon's plans. And no, that's not what this blog is about, except in minor part and in inspiration. It's about—duh—Procrusteanization. Another—real—word would be quantization but that would preclude my neologization opportunity, and quantization is neither as much fun nor does it have the right connotation.

The Procrustean Plan

The telcos have been offering cellular plans since the technology became available, and, I'm sure, landline plans before that. They force the purchaser to make a decision without information or justification, and almost inevitably to their disadvantage. To oversimplify and make up some numbers, you can sign up for 1GB of data for $10 and $5 for each additional GB. But, if you exceed your ration, you have to pay $20 per GB. The company forces you to fit in the GigaBed, where you will either underuse your allotment, or overpay for any extra. (Or you could count your bytes, I suppose.) And if you pay for more than you actually use? Your bytes vanish at the end of a month, an artificial and meaningless boundary. Why they do this is obvious: greed. It would be trivial to fix in several ways, which I shall leave for an exercise to be avoided since, as I mentioned, that isn't what this blogitem is about.

It might as well be about

Gasoline and Orange Juice

I am a regular user of neither, but an occasional user** of both. Gasoline, purported killer of worlds, has no place in my electrified nirvana, but finds application propelling other vehicles, often just to an annual routine maintenance appointment. Orange juice is a specific against non-specific ailments with which I am occasionally afflicted. Gasoline is a non-Procrustean commodity. You can buy as much as you need at a fixed price per aliquot or fraction thereof. Over the life of a vehicle, which will eventually use thousands of gallons, the residue in the tank when you dispose of it is insignificant. Procrustean, however, is the orange juice. You are forced to buy a fixed quantity which may or may not be enough to outlast the ailment. You could buy a larger fixed amount with a greater possibility of waste or spoilage at a discount, but you don't, a priori, know which is the most economical choice. Sounds like a cellphone plan! If only we had orange juice hoses in our kitchens to solve this problem.

The 50-Foot Hose

If you put "the 50 foot hose" into a Google search, it's inimitably 'helpful' results include a "People also ask:" with these enlightening additions:

Is a 50 foot hose long enough?

Is a 100-foot hose too long?

Thank you, Google! You couldn't have illustrated Procrusteanization any better. Their answers, in order, are No and Yes. But, at least for the brand of hose we wanted, there was no 75-foot hose available. My next question to Google might by why the hyphen after 100 but not after 50.

What Google didn't note, however, is that there was a long-defunct band named Fifty Foot Hose from San Francisco in the psychedelic era. Dan Healy, later of the Grateful Dead, was involved. For Wikipedia to disgorge that nugget I had to disambiguate the phrase with the word 'band' in the inquiry. Bad Google.

Agavation

While I'm making up words, and I don't promise to stop, I have to report a nature observation. There is a trail on which I often galumph on trips to the food store. On either side of the cleared land is a panoply of natures, both sessile and mobile. The word "often" militates against careful observation, and I've reached the point of mostly ignoring the natures unless they dart out in front of me. (It currently seems to be lizard season.) However one day I noticed that one of the plentiful agaves had suddenly grown vastly taller! The agave, which normally presents as the bush at the bottom of the lighter-green flowers, is typically a foot or so high. But it seems that at the end of their 10 to 30 year life-span, they grow this interesting collection of flowers on the stalk in the middle, which seems to have appeared without any notification. Go, agave, go! (And, sadly, die soon.)

Waste

Tomorrow just happens to be Garbage Day. Being of the male persuasion, it falls to me to commit all garbage-related chores, culminating with The Taking Out. If I were of a disposition to scrutinize the excreta of the household, I would find any number of examples of Procrustean waste. Even bubble pack, a material of little value comprising mostly air, often represents a failure to correctly size a box in relation to its contents. Almost everything we buy, make, or do represents some compromise caused by our civilization's Procrustean burden of quantized material and time.

My dream of a baconizer, hidden behind a slot in the wall and capable of extruding rasher after rasher upon individual demand, is unlikely to be realized.

* Procrustes and his "Procrustean bed" was a Greek myth about making people lie in a fixed-length iron bed. If they were too tall, he cut off their legs. Too short? I guess he turned it into a rack. He was a son of the god Poseidon. The Greeks had great gods!
** As I explained in a previous blogitem, I'm a cheap date: I never go for the beverage. (Can you believe I found that? Last paragraph.)

Yesterday  |  Tomorrow